Down at the Black Sheep GHQ for more FIDO’S BLUES planning, film-maker Fido‑X inspects the brand new AK-47 shrine.

Hey Brothers’n’Sisters of Ye 21st Century,

Thought I’d hang fire with the January Drudion; I’ve always felt that you can’t be too sure with ancient cultures, so I back off making any rum comments just in case those Mayans had something up their sleeve. When I was 14, I lost my best schoolmate Duncan Grey to the Jehovah’s Witness soon-come-apocalypse when his family sold their Volvo and went off into the middle-of-nowhere. It was bad enough that his witless Witness parents banned us from seeing him, but our Subbuteo league suffered most as Duncan’s younger brother Martin was also banned. Anyway, with that 2012 palaver out of the way, if the Drudion’s a little late, it’s not the end of the world. Ka-boom!

GLABELLA ASTRALA by Pavementsaw

Okay, I wanna commence 2013’s Reviews Section with a proper look at GLABELLA ASTRALA, a huge and enthralling 40-minutes-plus piece of Kosmische Musik by Sweden’s Pavementsaw, that’s had me by the psychic goolies recently. Comprised of several slabs of musique concrète, a number of synthesizer-driven ‘live’ performances and then judiciously cross-faded and bookended by a rolling mix of considerable adeptness, GLABELLA ASTRALA is one of those rare musical poultices that shores up the ambience of your living space without once resorting to cliché. Why? Probably because the Pavementsaw ensemble is on this disc confident enough to deploy a number of such obvious (and pleasing) ‘stock’ Kosmische moves – the tweeting bird analogue synths, the Schultzean minor-key drones, the sub-T- Dream pulses for example – that listeners soon disengage their minds and give themselves also to the more out-there and disharmonious elements of this record. Search out your very own copy from astralaprod​.blogspot​.co​.uk, or contact these wonderful people at [email protected], and tell ‘em More-please-and-soon.

RETURN UNTO VOID by The Rainbow Body

Also worthy of extreme rotation is the fabulous cassette album RETURN UNTO VOID by The Rainbow Body, whose extraordinarily distressed and melancholic sounds pass briefly before listeners like some spectral Viking burial ship unexpectedly emerging momentarily into view from the haze of Scapa Flow before seeping back into its death-black night. Indeed, this too-brief 35-minute album is chock full o’tracks awaiting serious remixes, and it’s the brevity of each piece that’s forced this particular listener into periods of perma-rotation during this past festival month. Released on their own RBS Records, The Rainbow Body is led by one Matt Kattman, whose morose chordal deportment and choice of sound FX is guaranteed to ensnare anyone with a jones for that heat haze sound located within Takehisa Kosugi’s CATCH-WAVE, Klaus Schultze’s IRRLICHT and mucho mid-period Popol Vuh. So grab this cassette – even ye without the proper C90 tape facilities – for y’all shall also receive a ticket to the free download, and this compelling lickle babby is a must for these long early January days.

Self-titled by Mamiffer/Pyramids

As is Faith Coloccia’s superb Mamiffer/Pyramids project for Los Angeles’ Hydra Head Records. Aided and abetted by partner/cohort Aaron Turner, and available in a handsome white vinyl w/poster’n’free download, MAMIFFER/PYRAMIDS showcases three long drones of epic usefulness that disorientate and infiltrate your melting plastic minds. On Side One, Mamiffer’s exquisite opening gambit ‘Sophia’ is a Faith Coloccia solo piece of considerable beauty and loss, commencing like a particularly rural Overhang Party playing early Roxy at their most ambient, all dry e. piano offset by epiphanies of horizon-distant guitar wail and organ. Aaron Turner contributes FX and electronics to the equally enthralling ‘Tichá Noc’, whose ghostly antique sound conjures up some remote deserted English fair-at-the-end-of-the-pier in November, then proceeds to unleash El Nino over its unfortunate participants. Sweet. Over on the flipside, La Coloccia and A. Turner are joined by three new guests for the huge side-long ‘This Is One For Everyone’, which plots a sonic trajectory somewhat akin to Loki wading enchained whilst dragging the Marie Celeste, before tailing out into dying embers of male and female chorales that refuse to die, just keep coming back for more. Creaky is the best word for this superb package. Long may the Coloccia/Turner collaborations continue to wreak this righteous havoc. Right fucking on!

QUIET ROOMS by Deison

Next up, check out if you will the wonderfully ambulant music of QUIET ROOMS by Italian artist Deison. Featuring just four studies of domestic appliance hum and extraneous guest noise from hotels in Barcelona, New York, Venice and Los Angeles, I’ll wager that this music would serve as a perfect psychic poultice for shattered nerves, should you have been unfortunate enough to check into Stoke Travelodge the same night as Millwall lost away to Tranmere. Oops. Yup, these four tracks work best in constant rotation, indeed, the brevity of the first three tracks is this album’s single failing. That said, the 18-minute album closer ‘Air Conditioning’ has been seemingly endlessly rotated in our house for all manner of uses: exercise, Kundalini yoga, meditation, seer drunken cuntedness, etc. Released on Aagoo Records, this album should enjoy massive remixes that push the tracks out to 30-minutes-plus. But until that time, check out www​.deison​.net and dig the sheer size of their Ventaxia.

CROSSROADS OF SABBATH by Rob Horrocks

Now, all of you who’ve seen the massive Black Sabbath Vinyl Box and shrieked at the current size of our Ur-heroes’ kapitalist altar should most serpently search out the magnificent CROSSROADS OF SABBATH, Rob Horrocks’ two-colour A5 fanzine-styled 20-page guide to those roughneck streets of Aston, Perry Barr, Newtown and Witton on which the Gazer & Co. cut their teeth, promenaded their purple split-knee loons and suffered the kind of skinhead beatings that yielded such sentiments as ‘Fairies Wear Boots’. Sub-titled ‘A 90-Minute Walking Tour’ and published on his own Crossroads of Sabbath imprint, Rob Horrocks herein shows us where Sabbath went to school, where they drank, where they rehearsed, and all illustrated with ‘Earth’ and early Sabbath flyers, plus detailed itineraries with directions. Even better, like my own THE MODERN ANTIQUARIAN, it attempts to show you a good time without annoying the locals. In the introductions, the author argues that his walking tour will still be of interest in 100 years time. I concur sir, and with ruddy well knobs on! Bra-fucking-vo!

Self-titled by How Much Wood Would A Woodchuck Chuck If A Woodchuck Could Chuck Wood?

Also, for Vinyl of the Month, please make sure you get yourselves a copy of the fabulous self-titled horror-rock debut LP from Italy’s ludicrously named How Much Wood Would A Woodchuck Chuck If A Woodchuck Could Chuck Wood? Beautiful, moving, tragic and always crazy, this dark fölk epic sounds like it’s acting out some heathen love tragedy on one of the more remote Danish islands, a Western equivalent of one of JA Caesar’s suicidal love triangle LPs perhaps. Empty is the main musical motif within… empty and the threat of something very nasty, and all delivered by a black-clad hunchback rock’n’roller at the crossroads, with Hank B. Marvin’s clear-as-a-bell Stratocaster guitar and the worst vocal PA in the latitude. Sheesh, brothers’n’sisters, this is almost where Palaeolithic Cave Holler meets hiccupping greaseball rock, where Skip Spence’s OAR meets Roky’s Halloween nightmares, where Springheel Jack gets his own record deal. Yup, like Sorc’henn’s timeless ‘Dodsdansen, Life of an Island Lad’, this LP is Creepy-as-fuck and most serpently compelling enough to purchase. This vinyl sucker is available from the almost always excellent Boring Machines label and is a big fucking treat.

COPENDIUM 3CD boxed set

Finally, what’s going on with that COPENDIUM 3CD box set? I hear you cry. Well, kiddies, there was an almighty fuck-up that caused the original release to get recalled on account of its artwork not having being passed by yours truly AND the result looking like Off-the-programme Kack. Anyway, it’s been recalled and wonderfully re-designed by the Black Sheep’s Common Era (see pack shot), and will be back in the shops pronto, Tonto. I should furthermore like to inform y’all that all three CDs have been treated with utmost sonic care both by Faber & Faber AND myself. No sonic tweaking has occurred between delivery of the tapes from each artist on its way to release in sumptuous deluxe packaging. On the contrary, we’ve been Alan Lomaxian about the whole affair, and the master engineers are all of them still muttering and sulking down the hall. For that reason, each song sounds as the artist requested and listeners’ adjustment of volume might occasionally be required. 

Okay, Brothers’n’Sisters, that’s my matter-of-fact way of commencing this profound and wonderfuel New Age. 2013 is the 21st Century’s rising of consciousness, for the leap from twelve to thirteen is the time when good pupils go bad, when school football stars start smoking and sagging off, when the words of authority begin to sound feeble and invented. So let’s act like thirteen-year-olds in 2013, kiddies. It can’t be any more deluded than all those be-suited grey capitalists who think they run the world. 

Motherfuckers!

Love Ya Madly,

JULIAN (Lord Yatesbury)