Good bad Music for bad, bad Times!

The second last gig of my band FEAR OF GOD took place in the french speaking part of Switzerland. We shared the bill with Caspar Brötzmann, a jazz avantgardist. I barely remember anything from that show. It was a pretty big place, a lot of people, it had a lightshow and a professional mixer. The rest is blurry. Tensions in the band had become quite intense. Tschösi, the guitarist and founder of the seminal Thrash band MESSIAH had lost all interest in FEAR OF GOD, Dave seemed to follow him and Osi and I were trying to keep things together. In vain, as it soon showed. The band broke up.

What I like about this recording is the immense brutality. The band really worked as a whole here. No triggered drums, no vocals effects, no silly games, just pure and unfiltered aggression.
The following photos were taken from the final FEAR OF GOD gig in October 1988, when we played with Henry Rollins and were so disgusted by the rock star bullshit and the crap we started to attract, that I broke up the band during that gig on stage. These pix have never been released - they were new to me until yesterday. Funny to see what a bunch of kids we were twenty years ago:
These tracks originally apeared on “As Statues fell”, a Mini-LP first released in 1988 or 1989. Howerever, I’ve chosen to take them from a chinese Double-CD bootleg (”Zeitgeist”) that was released like two years ago. The guy who put it out actually tried to tell us it was a band-approved, official release, before deleting it. A handful copies were given to Dave and me. I really like the brutal sound on this boot.

The original mastertapes of both “As Statues fell” and the first selftitled 7″EP were recently offered on eBay. I first couldn’t believe my eyes. Dave & I had tried to locate these tapes for years and thought of them as lost. One of the persons we inquired about a possible posession of them was Thomas Mölch, with whom I had run OFF THE DISK records etc. back in the day. When we asked him about these tapes, he said he doesn’t have them. Well, the eBay auction was of course run by this treacherous spineless wanker. Notorious for ripping off bands (like INFEST) and others and then giving me the blame for many years now, this was the lowest point for this piece of shit. Not only did he lie to us and sell stolen property on eBay (we don’t know how he managed to get ahold of these tapes; I probably had lent them to him originally): He also tried to make money off our band’s work, possibly selling it to bootlegers. As soon as we realized what was going on, we kept an eye on the auctions, informing everybody who bid about what’s going on and in the end had to buy our own mastertapes back from this arsehole for 40$ each. What a cunt.

Pneumatic Slaughter.mp3
The Look behind the Veils.mp3
A Life in Rigorism.mp3

Limited time offer: Download all the 16 tracks in a .zip archive folder here. Link expired

Definite FEAR OF GOD CD collection coming. More news soon!

One of the finest moments of the NWOBHM era is, withouth the slightest doubt, this two tracker of Newcastle’s SATAN, the band with the ultimate metal band name. While “Kiss of Death” is heavily inspired by early Iron Maiden and the instant hit here, “Heads will roll” at first seems to be the weaker song. When you listen closely though, it’s turns out to be phantastic too, especially from the pianissimo break on. What I also like is the singer’s breaking voice when he’s trying to scream highly pitched. I love these little “imperfections” in great music. Another detail I love is the snotty fuck-you-tone you can notice on the backcover and the bits and pieces I can make out of the lyrics. This is really one pearl!
SATAN’s next release after this was (apart from the two massive tracks on guardian’s “Roxcalibur” comp. LP you can easily get on CD - do get it!) the incredible “Into the Fire” cassette. Especially the version of “Trial by Fire” with it’s opening lead and the third guitar track (which is missing on the slightly faster album version) leaves me breathless whenever I hear it. “Court in the Act”, the album from 1983, had BLITZKRIEG’s Brian Ross on the micro, one of my fave singers ever. This LP is one you must have. The weird style mixture of seemingly satanist imagery with lyrical themes you’d rather hear from a Punk band (the combination of the name Satan with the atomic mushroom is really bizarre). The music is so richly filled with melodies and power, it’s scary. I have never heard any of the later releases and I somehow doubt it’s necessary.

Another imperfection here is the fucked up printing job on the cover. I seriously wonder what the guy was thinking, seems like he printed the color black before red and the backside is a catastrophe too. I hope they got the covers for free at last.
This would be one new category in music: Records with covers fucked up at the printer’s. My old label’s first press of “Slave” by INFEST would be in this category too.

Kiss of Death.mp3
Heads will roll.mp3

And finally, here’s a video from the the band’s gig in Holland in 1983. The singer with his Freddy Mercury style has got to be seen to be believed. Too bad he’s so loud in the mix.

Today, on my way home, I thought to myself: “You ought to post a decent Punk record today, you just have to do it!” When I was home, I stood in front of my records, torturing myself. “Punk, c’mon, you have some Punk records, I can’t be that hard!” I ended up playing DK’s “Give me Convenience of give me Death” album. “Great album, the DK’s are one of these bands that will always sound better than you thought they would, after the zillions of hours you’ve spent with playing their catalogue back and forth.” Yeah, clever, still - no Punk record in sight to post. So I started to randomly flip thru the 7″ boxes (”too tired for a full album rip”). Punk, you know. The rich kid’s alternative to Heavy Metal. Music for the socially aware and junkies likewise. Junkies? I went to my books, grabbed some Burroughs books, hoping for inspiration. Nothing. Turned on the telly, tried to watch an episode of “Two and a half Men”. How awful. Don’t ask me why, but in the end, I stood there, with the RUPTURE / SCROUNGERS split 7″ in my hands and here it is. RUPTURE tear it up as always. Fantastic it was to see this band deconstructing itself. THE SCROUNGERS - fuck, I wish there was more music like this. Don’t know anything about this band, except for it was a one man thing (right?).

Although from the 90s, music’s most horrible decade so far, this one just suits me perfectly, so here you go, getting the same vibe hopefully. Surf with me, Baby. Play, hate, destroy. Whatever.

Rupture
Your Hand is on your Rod.mp3
It’s not my Fault I was born.mp3
Does the Soul to the one armed Man flow within?.mp3
Reality of Shit.mp3
Oh Taboo Tug Trauma.mp3

The Scroungers
Prison Clampdown.mp3
Domestic Uprising.mp3

Jesse Pintado (who died in 2006) and I had been penpals for some time, when he sent me his bands TERRORIZER final demo tape. It was this split cassette with L.A.’s NAUSEA. Even though I loved the previous tapes (like the legendary “mixer rehearsal” from August 22, 1987), this one blew me out of the window. We were discussing the possibility for a release on my label, but things never worked out.
Some call this Grindcore, which it is of course not. It’s Death Metal of the most savage sort. I guess almost everybody into this type of music will have met at least once in their lives somebody who said “I love TERRORIZER, but I hate Metal”, haha. Everything is perfect on this tape and whenever the 2nd guitar comes in, my heartbeat stops for a second. Fantastic. Forget the LP (”World Downfall”) - it’s much too clean. To me, this is what TERRORIZER were all about. Raw, dirty, brutal yet listenable thanks to the great riffs.
NAUSEA are catchy, very ENT influenced. I like the speedy parts and Oscars vocals.

Here is the complete booklet of the tape with some interesting historical details.
All the bootlegs of this I’ve heard sounded like shit. Now you can hear the demo (almost) as it originally sounded, encoded in wonderful 320kbit/sec.

Terrorizer Side:
Corporation pull in.mp3
Human Prey.mp3
Infestation.mp3
Ripped to Shreds.mp3
Strategic Warheads.mp3
After World Obliteration.mp3

Nausea Side:
Why judge others.mp3
Think for yourself.mp3
World Chaos.mp3
Starving Nations.mp3
Will it ever end?.mp3
World Downfall.mp3
Condemned System.mp3
Starving Nations (1st Mix).mp3
The End.mp3

On February 19th, 1980, Bon Scott’s body was found dead in the back of a car.
Read more about my passion for AC/DC & other fun stuff here.

And here’s [well, was] a phenomenal collection of various AC/DC live recordings from the year of 1977, including the first version of the song “(She’s got) The Jack” with the “Gonorrhea” intro and the unrated lyrics with plenty of good old adultery. Wonderful! This was first released as “Live 77″ in 1981 (if memory serves), as one of four bootleg albums, on red vinyl, numbered to 500 copies each.

The band with probably the dumbest name, ever. But - check this demo out! Full in your face Thrashcore at it’s very finest! Nobody has ever done this better. Everything here is perfect, a killer singer, memorable riffs and some of the earliest blastbeat-drumming ever, including the world’s second shortest song, “E” (my band had one that is even shorter; it was just everybody stamping the feet on the stage simultaneously, haha).

WEHRMACHT came from Portland, OR and the band’s first official output was the infamous 22 song livetape from January 1986, released in Switzerland by Robi Zollinger from the killer «Speed Airplay» team.  I don’t remember the howabouts that lead to the release of this tape, but I do remember how excited everybody was about it. This demo here was recorded on April, 8th 1986 (!) and was soon followed by an LP.

Another fine example to illustrate how things change in history. You know, there’s an endless quest to find out who came up with Punk first, who with ultrafast drumming etc. These quests lead nowhere. You must think of these phenomenons similiar to what the french philosopher and historian Michel Foucault called “discourse”: The idea of what music is and could be has no center, no maker – it’s a discourse that shapes and eventually alters the forms of music through a whole set of aesthetics, all connected one to another. Musicians are not mere inventors of music, they’re part of that discourse. It’s not so important and it doesn’t tell a thing, which recording was the first which [insert the disposition here]. What counts is to make visibile (or audible) how and when these changes came to be; you will soon realize that something “was in the air” and different groups articulated it differently. To me, it remains unclear where things changed: Was it in 1977 (Punk), was it 1980 (explosion of Hardcore), was it between 1983 and 1985 (fast Hardcore and Metal going together) or was it 1986/87 (Grindcore)? With WEHRMACHT, I think, we have another piece in the mosaic, or better yet - in the transformation that began to totally alter a certain form of musical expression. This history remains to be unwritten. Somebody will have to sit down for a couple of years one day and start collecting all these pieces.

I currently can’t find the original demo cover, so here’s only a cheap scan found somewhere in the internet.
Greetings go out to the drummer Brian who was a penpal of mine in these days.

The Wehrmacht.mp3
Suck my Dick.mp3
Night of Pain.mp3
E.mp3
Gore Flicks.mp3
Termination.mp3
Beermacht.mp3

Before there was RUDIMENTARY PENI, there was the MAGITS. Little seems to be known about them and the the two main sources I’m using here for this little text are Glasper’s “The Day the Country died” (London 2006) and Nick Blinko’s autobiographical “The primal Screamer” (London 1995), from which we seem to learn that it was mainly the later Rudimentary Peni bassist Greg who turned Nick (keyboarder in MAGITS; guitarist, singer and artist in Peni) onto Hardcore Punk, well, at least by assuming the character Nat in “Primal Screamer” is Nick’s literary alter ego. Nat, is says there, went to many Punk shows in his teen years, but “Greg is educating him with regard to recent developments, or regressions in the genre. They rarely go out for the evenig, but instead listen incessantly to Greg’s comprehensive collection of punk records. They also study “fanzines”, the literature of the subcult [p.64]“, the narrator (a psychiatrist) reports ironically. This would be the moment of birth for Rudimentary Peni in 1980.

Formed in 1978 by art school student Nick Blinko and Martin Cooper, the band was originally called the Magit Turds, before shortening the name to The Magits. The band practiced at Jon Greville’s parents house (he who later became the drummer of Peni and is probably the photographer of the MAGITS bandphoto on the sleeve). The minimalistic, amateurish “Fully coherent” 7″EP was recorded in late 1979. A second 7″, “Pawn in their Game” was recorded but never released and if my sources are reliable, this material will never see the light of day (including this first 7″) in form of a posthumous release. The Peni’s don’t seem to be interested in making this available again, the saying goes, but what are blogs like this one here for anyway. My sources report that there were only 300 copies made of this 7″ and indeed, it pops up quite rarely. Back in the old days, I have never seen it anywhere, nor had I know anybody who had heard it. I had always suspected this to be Punk but wasn’t disapointed at all when I got a tape copy from probably Rob of Amebix (if memory serves).

Most people don’t really seem to enjoy this four tracker and the attention it gets, it’s getting because of the Peni connection. Fair enough, but still I must insist. This is a great piece of minimal art! The amateurish, unfinished character of the whole production, the apparent spontaneity make these four songs very special and just like in Peni, they’re clocking in in under a minute mostly. As much pain and despair as you will find on any of the Peni releases from 1981 up to now, you will find on “Fully coherent”, although in a fragmented, embryonic state. Just listen closely and you will hear that although this is far from Rudimentary Peni at first glance, it comes already very close. Maybe these quality rips will help in revisiting THE MAGITS to those who already downloaded the crappy sounding rips that were on some blogs in the past two years.

A new Rudimentary Peni EP, tentatively entitled “No more Pain” is scheduled for release in early 2008 and after the monstrous, gigantic, overwhelming “Archaic” 10″ from a couple years ago, I can’t wait for it!

Two things before I leave you alone with the music: 1. If Jon, Nick or Greg is reading this, I would appreciate it very much if you’d drop me a line. I’ve been trying to get in touch with you a few times through Southern Studios over the past 25 years (!no kidding!), asking for an interview – with no results at all. And secondly, if Nat Blackspear (Mike) is reading this, could he please return the “Cacaphony” presskit I sent him a few years ago to make copies? I’d be chuffed.

PS: Oh yes, this came with an insert, the “Magitzine”. I’m still missing it, but should hopefully be receiving it soon. If anybody wants to provide scans in the meantime, that’d be of a rather nifty nature. 

Fragmented.mp3
Disconnected.mp3
Disjointed.mp3
Detached.mp3

I’m a bit late, as it seems, but just a few minutes ago I learned of’ Sean Finnegan’s death.
Sean was the drummer in DC’s VOID, one of the most important Hardcore bands ever and, personally spoken, of the greatest influence on my life. It may sound pathetic, but this makes me feel real sad although I’ve never had the pleasure to meet anybody from this band personally, but as I said, VOID were, are and always will be a part of me.
Enjoy this hard to get (?) bootleg live 7″EP that was released a few years ago by a friend of mine from very northern America. As you can hear, this is an excellent live recording, fast (!) raw and obnoxious, with a killer sound. amazing how the band switches from structure into chaos, loses control just to get back on track again. Essential! This was Hardcore! It was recorded almost exactly 25 years ago - can you believe this, hearing how fresh it sounds?!

Read more on Joe’s Last Days of Man blog.
Here’s a guestbook.

VOID: Live at 9:30 Club, DC, Feb 13th 1983 Side A.mp3
VOID: Live at 9:30 Club, DC, Feb 13th 1983 Side B.mp3
Check scans for more details.

Somebody asked me to post this, because the official CD-reissues all seem to have a different, less noisy & dynamic sound, probably due to the current trend of pushing all levels to the max in the mastering process. So here we go, although I’m pretty sure, everybody reading this blog has heard these songs.
To me, this is the best of the early BAD RELIGION records. I like the first LP, but the musical formula works best for an EP and the “Back from the Unknown” 12″EP has too weak a sound and is seemingly too much of a “we’re sorry for the hippie-LP, please like us again”-record. To be honest, the following three BR albums always were the shit for me: “Suffer” and the maybe equally godly “No Control”, plus the melancholic “Against the Grain”. Up to this day, I enjoyed almost everything they put out, on major labels or not, with or without Brian Baker. Guess it’s Greg Graffin’s voice that I got hooked on; if you ever heard the accoustic “Suffer” demo tapes, you’ll know what I mean (or you don’t).

All six tracks on this first 7″ blast with anger and passion, just a little bit more sophisticated than your average South-Cali band. The theme song is maybe the one that I like the least and “Drastic Actions” the best.
There are two original pressings of this 7″ (and a bunch of bootlgs), plus the 12″ reissue and a freebie version that came with the first 5000 of “No Control” in Europe. The very first press had a thick cardboard gatefold sleeve and the 2nd press had a heavy stock paper foldout sleeve and a different mastering job (that’s the one I’ve got).
Three of the songs also appeared on the classic “Public Service” comp. LP on Smoke Seven. These version are faster, wilder and sound like a live recording with overdubbed vocals. Anybody knows the story behind the RF7’s “Jesus loves you” (on “The Weight ofthe World” LP) – it seems to be directed against BAD RELIGION and being the nosey character that I am, I’d like to know more about this.
I’ve only had one personal encounter with the band, that was when I helped out a little on their first swiss gig during the phenomenal “Suffer” Tour. They were all nice lads and the concert was simply one of the most amazing shows I’ve ever seen. Like a well tempered steamroller, BAD RELIGION ripped through a set with not one second to miss. Expect the live tape soon!

Bad Religion.mp3
Politics.mp3
Sensory Overload.mp3
Slaves.mp3
Drastic Actions.mp3
World War.mp3

APPENDIX were one of the first popular european HC bands that were adored by young Metalheads like myself. Playing this 7″ (which is often going by the name of “Huora”, the title of the first track, actually), it’s no wonder: A no holds barred powerhouse, thick production and relentless power in your fucking face piece of plastic! All four songs shred equally here! The band’s ability of “sounding fast” reminds me of GAUZE’s “Fuckheads” 12″.
The bands first LP, recorded in the same session as this EP, came in two different version. After the original finish release, the cover and title was altered and it was rereleased as under the english title of “Money is not my Currency” on the notorious german Rock-o-Rama label. Although this LP still blasts, it’s kind of a drag. APPENDIX to me were a typical 7″-band!
This slab too came in two versions - 2 covers, actually. This is the rare first press cover with the “Berlin Squat” picture on front. Enjoy!

You can buy official APPENDIX reissues at http://www.propaganda-records.com/

Huora.mp3
Eliittipiiri.mp3
Painajainen.mp3
Tää on mun oma sota.mp3