Speedranch
^ Jansky Noise Migrate
Label
: Planet Mu
Catalogue number : ZIQ071
Format : CD
Release
date : 2003
Speedranch Jansky Noise - Migrate
Poised for Noise
Adorned
with drawings of malevolent cartoon monsters and a shot of some toothless
geezer sucking on a forty ounce (of Crazy Horse, no less), Speedranch
and Jansky Noise’s Migrate record looks to have all the trappings
of a wicked metal showdown (with the clever song titles to boot). But
these two traffic strictly in the noise aesthetic; metal sonics that
sound as if conjured from spinning Sabbath records backwards in the
hope of finding messages from the Dark Lord. All the same, Migrate feels
more like a punishing hardcore record than most electronic improv sessions
tend to, trading off the hints and understatement for a generous helping
of broken distortion and throbbing white noise, but with a sort of light,
geeky humor immediately evident in the song titles: “Herve Villechaize
had metamorphosing rhino balls” (which has a vintage Incredible
Hulk sample to match).
So where exactly does that leave the music, you ask? The artists in
question have a natural talent for improvised skronk, make no mistake.
The refreshing thing here is that this is noise purely for the sake
of noise, so much so that track separations here tend to feel almost
like afterthoughts, as most of the proceedings segue effortlessly into
the next batch of aggressive and tightly focused bleats without even
flinching. “Stringfellow Hawke A56-7W (Classified)” whips
along with waves of undulating feedback and some eerie background radio
voices. “Every man is at least somewhat more complicated than
he appears” brings to mind someone dragging a metal file slowly
across a hard drive with sonar accompaniment. Track four (the title
of which has at least six symbols that I can’t find the keystroke
equivalent for) sounds like more “traditional” Planet Mu
beats, only run through a malfunctioning Ultimate Chopper and then left
out for too long. “Addicted to Violence since childhood”
is a batch claustrophobic static with bits and pieces of disembodied
voices and songs fighting for recognition.
Things switch up a bit with “There are questions we don’t
even know to ask of yet”, a relative exercise in restraint. The
feedback walls are still there, but they come in waves thus allowing
for patches of ominous quiet to work as well. “Chomping on Dog
Slaughter” fronts a piercing high-end drone with the pure white
noise coming in like whirring blades. And if you squint your eyes and
tilt your head, track thirteen (whose title is the entire theme song
from The Love Boat, natch) sounds, well, absolutely nothing like the
theme from the aforementioned staple of ’70s network promotional
kitsch. Which is fine, I say, as I’d much rather hear the queasy
digital abstractions in its place. “Amen! A neat, joint, anal
phase” is about as close to melodic beauty as Jansky and Speedranch
are likely to ever get, which works well with the digitally distorted
drawn out strains that this track plumes magnificently. And fittingly,
the whole record ends suddenly with a joke about aliens observing primitive
human consumption habits, courtesy of mashed potatoes.
As with a lot of noise, little distinguishes each track from the next.
A swath of feedback engulfs the speakers, giving way to hints of a destroyed
breakbeat or a clever mutilated sample. But then again, that’s
most likely the point. This is, after all, noise made purely for the
fuck of it, losing any bullshit artistic pretense in favor of just punishing
the hell out of your ears and/or stereo system. Anything that the tracks
here lose in subtlety or diversity is gained tenfold in sheer sonic
malevolence and an overarching sense of gleefulness. And that alone
makes it worthy.
By Michael Crumsho
Speedranch^Jansky
Noise - MI^GRATE
Quite apart from having the best track titles I've come across in a
long time ("Bring Me The Ear of Celion [sic] Dion" indeed),
including possibly the longest I've ever seen (number 13 and I won't
bother typing it all out), this is forty minutes of non-stop fun. Fun,
that is, if your idea of fun is having your ears slashed to bits with
B-movie soundtracks, trash metal, trashed metal, screams, squelches,
buzzes, rips, uncontrolled and uncontrollable digitized bowel movements
and all manner of cultural ejectamenta. Personally, after a boring day's
work in a hot office, this is just what you need on the trusty old Walkman
during rush hour to transform me into an axe-wielding homicidal maniac.
According to the press release Speedranch's real name is Paul Smith
- funny, I seem to remember it was Paul Richard (cf The Wire #176, October
1998 - who's right here?) - but I don't suppose it's the same Paul Smith
who makes those trendy suits. Shame, because a blast of "Mi^grate"
in the local haute couture boutique would work wonders for turnover.
This is great stuff. Specially recommended for people of a sensitive
nature who grew up watching "Trumpton". Look at the photo
of the bloke on the back cover and see what destiny awaits you. Rock
out.
Speedranch / Jansky Noise - Migrate
Speedranch returns after his "making orange things" release with Venetian Snares, but this time Mr Jansky Noise joins him. Im sure "Migrate" is going to be one onslaught of a cd, especially with them two maniacs behind it. This review is gonna be a bit different to usual, because of the HUGE tracknames, (check out track 13). Ok in we dive :
"BRU TWO BRANDY AFEW CUTHBERT DRIBBLE PUB" A
scary tingly hissy bombdive into the mind of an evil childrens toy.
Watch in awe as it tracks its victims across the bedroom. Spooky.
"STRINGFELLOW HAWKE A56-7W (CLASSIFIED)" Scary one this. Seems to be live recordings from a nightmare of Stringfellow Hawke (remember he was the pilot in Airwolf), he must have had a few when he in 'nam. Reverby pipe samples and a hectic gassy bassline with just a touch of helicopter rotor. Wicked stuff.
"EVERY MAN IS AT LEAST SOMEWHAT MORE COMPLICATED THAN HE APPEARS" Thousands of screaming robots being sent to the processing plant, surrounded by electronic mammoth tigers that roar commands to them.Finally satans fairground pipes into action, only to be ceased by a powercut. Insanity.
"09-19-0—12VA@:}{_"
Chaos. Just imagine sitting aboard a huge trainrocket, bombdiving into the suns surface, u got this right here. Damn fine.
"I WAS MADE FOR LOVING YOU BABY" Trapped inside a huge radio, you battle against the tuning dial as it arcs beams of electric towards you. The only rest you have is when it finds a station. Metallic, echoey, booming, bassline, beepy craziness. Re e commended.
"THERE ARE QUESTIONS WE DON'T EVEN KNOW TO ASK OF YET" Floating under the surface of the water, take a peek at the alien landscape. Frogs made of static click away from the poolside, massive chords strike gaining volume, hissing into your mind. Volcanoes explode littering the ground with feedback, and bubbles of distortion explode. Listen.
"CHRIS SIEVY HAS A BIG PLASTIC OR CARDBOARD HEAD" Well, it seems that Chris Sievy is some kind of scarecrow or maybe a robot. If this is his theme tune, then I worry for his sanity. Imagine a gargantuan drill pressing against your face, then imagine bigger, as it pummels your face you grimace, but it keeps coming back for more. Distortion and feedback goodness. Check it.
Ok.....
" LOVE, EXCITING AND NEW COME ABOARD, WE'RE EXPECTING YOU. LOVE, LIFE'S SWEETEST REWARD. LET IT FLOW, IT FLOATS BACK TO YOU. THE LOVE BOAT WILL SOON BE MAKING ANOTHER RUN, THE LOVE BOAT PROMISES SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE, SET A COURSE FOR ADVENTURE, YOUR MIND ON A NEW ROMANCE. LOVE WON'T HURT ANYMORE, IT'S AN OPEN SMILE ON A FRIENDLY SHORE. YES LOVE! IT'S LOVE! THE LOVE BOAT SOON WILL BE MAKING ANOTHER RUN. THE LOVE BOAT PROMISES SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE, SET A COURSE FOR ADVENTURE, YOUR MIND ON A NEW ROMANCE. LOVE WON'T HURT ANYMORE, IT'S AN OPEN SMILE ON A FRIENDLY SHORE. IT'S LOVE! IT'S LOVE! IT'S LOVE! IT'S THE LOVE BOAT-AH! IT'S THE LOVE BOAT-AH! (RECORDED ONBOARD THE LOVE BOAT WITH THE KITCHEN STAFF)"
This track title has been put forward for a world record attempt. AHHh jesus my ears....something screams at you barking out orders, but its far too disorted to recognise. Shoirt track this, but worth it for the madness.
"THE
TRUTH ABOUT HUMAN POTATO MASHERS" "On
your last trip, did you discover what the earth people eat? [laughter]
"They eat a great many of these,[laughter] they peel them with
their metal knives [laughter] boil them for twenty of their minutes,
them they smash them all to bits [laughter][laughter] they are clearly
a most primitive people [laughter][laughter][laughter][laughter][laughter]
FOR MASH GET SMASH....... hehe
fuckin wicked.
Speedranch / Jansky Noise - Migrate is utter maniaccentrail, full of
distortion, feedback and manged samples. You may think chaos doesnt
work, but here it does, just make sure that the volume isnt to high
if you are listening via headphones, else it's liquid brain time.
Recommended
Sam
Of course we do not put links or post all the press we recieve on this website, if you wish to read more about this release try the following links for direct reviews:
Welcome To Execrate
Nme
All art begins with a question. So here are a few: is the current noise revolution the dawn of a brave new world of musical possibility? Or is it actually just a bunch of bored, balding men blowing sonic raspberries at one another? More specifically, is this record art? Or is it utter, utter arse?
These are the dilemmas that experimental DJ Speedranch and sound terrorist Jansky Noise quite literally throw up in your face with every blast of their 68-minute long-player. There are no songs here as such, just 22 tracks of punishing sound collages that sample, loop, and generally fuck with music as we know it. They steal liberally from other people's records and films, without apology. They set bagpipes against death metal, 'Land Of Hope And Glory' against hydraulic hiss, 2,000 puny years of human culture against the clank of malevolent machinery. It's pure punk rock: confrontational, apoplectic, revolutionary. But it's prog rock, too: fundamentally self-indulgent, convoluted, conceptual, man. Sometimes, though, S&JN stop throwing their toys out the pram long enough to be sad: on track ten, stately strings grind against sputtering, failing circuits, like a requiem for Robocop..
You can tell this album was a lot of fun to make; the techno equivalent
of smashing up guitars. Yet the pleasure of its consumption is fraught
with contradictions. You glory in its subversiveness. But you will never
listen to it again. Use once and DESTROY!!!
Rating: 7
The Wire magazine:
"The Wasteland opens up: Earth collapses, folding in on itself. Explosions of digital noise. A continous ambush of ultra-abrasive intensities. Glass shards and splinters of burning steel rrrrip through the mix. Predatory machines stalk through the detritus. FX are suddenly deployed. Speeds are pitched and slurred insanely in a lurching, head-melting mess."
"Constructed through a process that reboots the role of the DJ, Speedranch and Jansky Noise merge the use of turntables and CDj with the staggering sonics and processing capabilities of the laptop computer. With no defineable start or end points, Execrates 22 tracks are instead feverishly folded together in one long, gruelling mess-thetic."
"Based on a mix of self-generated matter, environmental sampling and reworked commissions, instead of a series of hip names to feed off, the duo look instead to friends and ideological allies in an extended support network that crosses from hardcore, industrial, turntablism and techno to electronix, illbient and avant-garde noise. Otomo Yoshihide, James Plotkin, WE's DJ Olive, 2nd Gen, MixMaster Mike, Faultline, David Shea, and Vomit Lunch are each dragged into the mix at varying stages. Stock,Hausen & Walkman and V/Vm's presence is felt under various pseudonymed guises. Donated tracks become source material, pure malleable sonic matter to be scrawled over, ripped apart and reshaped."
"Eclipsing Bomb 20's blipvert detonations, the execrate mix emerges as densely textured and massively detailed. Recalling the shattered, ruptured syntax of Marinetti's trench poetry, its fractured flow derails the senses in an explosive, lunatic flow, a slurry of film/TV voices; blips & glitches; radio interference; riot frequencies; scratches; wailing sirens; rapid bursts of laser noise; cavernous thuds and bowel quaking sub bass detonations. Beats are jarred, go amiss. Glitch loops and chunks of locked groove noise emerge and recede, there are blatant steals from Star Wars, Scooby Doo, The Simpsons, porno/horror flicks."
"Inevitabley flawed at times the mix gets too dense and industrial, too murky and overloaded to bear. Cave Control and Hardware are the most ineffective, Foil is wrecked by clumsy over use of vocal samples. Running to a testing 68 minutes, there should be room for more pauses and spatial digressions. However, warts and all, the mix offers a far better experience than the recent, dissapointing Tool 12"
"A protracted essay in the art of sonic terrorism and the malleable, everything up for grabs aesthetic of turntablism (coming complete with a set of DJ loops, the album becomes a tool in itself), execrate hacks out its own space somewhere between the riot zones of DHR, the digital fractures of Mego, and the turntablism of Marclay or Yoshihide. Massively visceral, seriously intense, execrate forms an invigorating energy-rush, an endurance test for the shock troops of hardcore futurism."
top tunes: Speedranch ^ Jansky Noise 'botanical mattress with fleas in a midnight toker'
The palin chorus 'glory,glory gloria estafan bazoomas'
the veilgudd brothers ' annual gift man who comes from the moon at halloween
bill oddie vs chris packham 'hawaii'
4/5 antonio petronzio
Speedranch/Jansky Noise, Welcome to execrate (Leaf) CD and Various, Where the f**k is Mr. Million? (Trash) LP
It's a corny old cornfed cornball cliche that's trotted out periodically by reviewers like myself when confronted by something a bit wide of the norm: writing about music is like dancing about architecture and, like all cliches, it's hackneyed but contains some truth; it truly is hard to describe music with collections of letters. But what happens when you haven't even got music to write about? What do you do when the sound is so alien that even if words outlandish enough to describe it existed, the accompanying dictionaries would barely fit through your front door? Forget dancing about architecture, writing about some records is like etch-a-sketching about topless darts...However, in the interests of completeness, here we go: Consisting of around 20 tracks blurred into one lengthy mix, "Execrate" is half the work of Speedranch and Jansky Noise and half compilation. On the comp side we have Stock, Hausen and Walkman, 2nd Gen, Mix Master Mike, Faultline and others but it's difficult to distinguish them from the bespoke material as all those chosen offer, or are treated with, ambience/noise of some description (or no description---see above). The kind of noises that Cabaret Voltaire might have made had they not lived in post-industrial Sheffield but in a haunted metal graveyard infested by ants with heavy boots...and Autechre."
"'Where the f**k is Mr. Million?' comes from a similar mindset (Speedranch ^ Jansky Noise actually contribute a track) it's raison d'etre being that "trashiness comes...when the very idea of tuneful thoughtful constructed sound makes you want to vomit." This philosophy manifests itself in the form of a double vinyl trawl through breakbeaten-up distortion and overloaded samples, sprawling ambience, disaffected starkness and feedback, pounding intensity and gabba-meets-jungle beatfest. Christ knows what they put in the water in Brighton, but it's leading to some superb experimentation. Album highlights include Milky Boy parading his (small) collection of profanities in a track that might've been called "Born lippy" but was instead christened "Fucking ass'oles"; "Wanted in 13 states" by the splendidly-named Chuck Shite and Carlos Ortiz which is metal beating'n'bass with peripheral dub undertones and the really quite sick fart-turns-solid radio phone-in set to a shifty, troubled jerk/funk called "Prunes" by Duff Paddy. It's what Ninja Tunes might sound like if Coldcut were Mike Paradinas and Salvador Dali. "
Melody Maker
"not in my bedroom, sonny" 1/10 Ben Clancy
Surgeon/Speedranch ^ Jansky Noise 12" split fat cat
"another of the limited series of split 12" from fatcat.This release sees the sombre guitar reworkings of Andrew Read treated and mixed by Child, pitted against the disembodied breaks and distortion of Speedranch ^ Jansky Noise...Speedranch ^ Jansky Noise combine to bring industrial strength hiphop, and computer assisted beat juggling onto 'abandon, eliminate...'; whilst 'riding high..' clinches it, providing the trademark Speedranch ^ Jansky Noise intensity."
"Buck Rogers in a wormhole, with no brakes. I declare Speedranch ^ Jansky Noise the winners." 3/5 Found Sound
"This is ace: virtually every record Speedranch ^ Jansky Noise play is an unlistenable fucking racket. not unlistenable like steps are unlistenable, or epic house is unlistenable, but unlistenable in that they all go SK-EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE---AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-RRRRR-KCHHHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAfor about six minutes. fantastic."
"packed with ear-splitting high frequencies and bowel-churning low-end noise, its the music your brain makes when you're really pissed and about to throw up, and is guaranteed to clear your living room of unwanted casualties on a comedown. apparently, people frequently chuck stuff at them and demand a refund when Speedranch ^ Jansky Noise 'play out'. what more recommendation do you need?"
"Trash2 ………..
the best bits are: Disastronaut 'plaster kidneys' which whittles down scratchadelic turntablizm to an almost tribal slog, and Speedranch ^ Jansky Noises magnificently titled 'fuckin' harmonikaz and the bastad sickofantz who follow their paths to glory'…. which rings a loop of 'once upon a time in the west' through the electronic mangle to disturbing effect."
"'Welcome to Execrate': The Speedranch ^ Jansky Noise disc comes with tales of riot strewn DJ sets in its wake, which as any devotee of Stravinsky or the Sex Pistols will tell you, immediately establishes its revolutionary credentials. The set list reveals points of contact with eruptive electro terrorists across the globe. There are contributions from north america (David Shea, DJ Olive, Mixmaster Mike, James Plotkin, Byzar) and japan (Otomo Yoshihide,), as well as the homegrown ( V/Vm, Stock Hausen & Walkman). Nonetheless, the whole is much more important than its elements. There may be crunching beats, sludge metal riffing and weird bagpipe refrains, but there is always distortion. Speedranch ^ Jansky Noise create a kind of freezing fog of fuzz noise, which at crucial moments clears to expose some strange shape. Speedranch ^ Jansky Noise are remorseless trash merchants out to destroy hierarchies. They're not just picking through the junk to find 'gems' like arcane archivists and fetishers of retro cool, but demanding that we experience the lot in all its bizarre interconnectedness. An essential disc."
I would definately not recommend the DJ SPEEDRANCH v. THE JANSKY NOISE CD or 12" for a melodic music lover -- this is pure noise of divine inspiration." nick curtis @ brainwashed
from robots & electronic brains
"