The Chiang Rai Alternative Hour #70 – Dead End – 27th December 2020

Shut Down! Dead! Run out of town!  Sheltering over the border, we bring this one last episode before fleeing the despots.  One day we’ll be back!  Look out for DJ Donut Trump – he’ll bring you the future of rock ‘n’ roll.

This week there’s all sorts of music – weird, noisy, experimental, fucked up strangeness, straight-up punk and pop all delivered with no compromise.  Join our other 3 listeners to check out the end!

Incidentals taken from the Church of the Sub Genius Hour of Slack.

Listen right here or Mixcloud, Stitcher, Apple, Amazon…..all those cool places I guess.

https://www.facebook.com/The-Chiang-Rai-Alternative-Hour-107307097314670/

Gratitude Journal

I am so happy and grateful for all the students I have met since I started teaching. I have learned something from all of them.

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

Hot and Cold – Any Monkey Is Dangerous – 1st April 2011

Cat #: 052TZM

Hot & Cold was born in 2005 in New Delhi, India, the brainchild of Joshua and Simon Frank. Sparsely pairing lo-fi bass and megaphone vocals, the Frank brothers’ single Delhi performance incorporated a bedraggled Yamaha keyboard, and involved throwing candy at small children from above. 

In 2006, Joshua (20) and Simon (18) relocated to China’s chaotic, industrial capital – a city far better suited to their dirty robotic clangour. At the encouragement of internationally-acclaimed composer Shouwang, they began to accumulate an arsenal of effects pedals, quite literally launching themselves at Beijing audiences in frenzied 20-minute sets. 

Even in Beijing – one of the most exciting cities for new music today – Hot & Cold have proudly stuck out. Rather than gradually descending into chaos, their notoriously frenetic performances explode from the get- go. Their debut, Any Monkey is Dangerous captures the band’s shambolic grooves with all the vitality of their live performances. Hot & Cold channel their penchant for obliterating noise through a deep love for the fuzzy anthems of Pavement and Pixies. Their angular riffs and keyboard jabs have drawn comparison to New York no wave and Cabaret Voltaire, while lo-fi drums loops, rollicking basslines, and irreverent vocals evoke the Fall in both sound and attitude. Crystalline melodies emerge from their pulsing sonic chaos, and touches of yesteryear Bollywood hits pierce through the melee.