Alternative China – 22nd March 2015

Alternative China tumblr

The World Underground, Nine Treasures, 330 Metal Fest, China Calling

22nd Mar 2023 – Looking back at this tumblr I can see that the last entry was 6 years ago and it would be interesting to try and pick it up again though I am very much out of the loop with what is happening there these days. The newer music I have heard hasn’t excited me as much but the fact that there is more and more of it visible means there must be many more bands hidden away doing something interesting that just aren’t being noticed. Kinda need to be there though. It’s been 15 years since I was in China last!

Primitive Calculators/Torturing Nurse – 16th March 2015

Cat #: 175TZM

Roland Barthes once said: “The ‘grain’ of the voice is not – or is not merely – its timbre; the signifiance it opens cannot better be defined, indeed, than by the very friction between the music and something else,” but who gives a shit? Torturing Nurse would sooner cough on you than speak to you, and they are most definitely not concerned with “music”, just the “some- thing else”. The “grain” here is the granular phlegm at the bottom of “vocalist” Junky’s throat, a choking, faltering reference to the body before the machine takes full control. For this music, you don’t need ears. You don’t even need a body, really. What would Barthes say about the grating grain of all voices at once? Music that’s been fed through the effect-chain meat grinder so many times it ceases to be readable as “music” and actually starts to sound like meat? Just GRIND, fine-ground, the last tiny pieces of humanity ebbing through the proverbial hourglass, grain by grain by grain. There’s no one left: just “Midnight, The Stars & You,” and the horrible, howling wind whipping rust particles through your pores until you’re more corroded metal than man.

Roland Barthes also said: “We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which…  more

PRIMITIVE CALCULATORS are
Frank Lovece – Vocals
Stuart Grant – Guitar / Vocals
Denise Hilton – Keyboards / Vocals
David Light – Bass
Andrea Blake – Rhythms / Vocals
additional vocals by Pocket Calculators featuring Grace, Velvet Sand (Siege-a & O-g-o), Fu and Stella Electrika

TORTURING NURSE is Junky – Noise