The Chiang Rai Alternative Hour #01 – 2nd September 2019

Music from Lifter Puller, Thinking Plague, Ozric Tentacles, Built To Spill, Unknown, Shellac, Parliament, Naked City, The Fall, fordamage, Boredoms, Pink Floyd and Dexys Midnight Runners.


14th Feb 2021 – Around this time things were getting very difficult for me with the school I was working at, which led to me leaving at the end of the semester – I forget exactly when perhaps late September or early October. I’ll write more about that at some point.

Anyway, with the stressful situation, I decided to adjust my focus to making a music podcast. I would often sit and marvel as my music library would be set to shuffle and so much great music just kept popping up, so I started keeping track and then making recordings of those songs. I eventually settled into a rhythm of doing one episode per week, often working 3 or 4 weeks in advance.

It was a really enjoyable habit, to focus 3 or 4 hours per weekend to put an episode together. It kept me sane until, of course, it drove me insane. As usual, I developed more ideas as I went along and refined and improved things (I think).

As with this blog, I only made the shows for my own pleasure and didn’t really care whether anyone listened or not and was happy when one or two listeners became comrades. Only after seeing that a million others were doing the same thing and not many people were listening to them either, I decided to bow out and not add any further to the noise of the internet for a while.

When I was in my mid-teens I would blast crazy music out of my bedroom window in the weird hope that people might be intrigued enough to come in and discover more about this mad world of music that I existed in. But living in rural Dorset with only the odd farmer and stray cow or dog passing by, no one ever came to enquire – or even to complain.

Now I can sit in rural Thailand and do the same.

Gravitsapa – Radio Free Vulgata – 10th January 2016

Cat #: 179TZM

Gravitsapa are the pioneers of the Ukrainian math-rock stage, performing among the most brightful experimental sounds.

The band has taken its name from the Soviet cult film Kin-Dza-Dza! – depicting a post-apocalyptic anti-Utopia. The major theme of the band’s work can be described in three words: mysticism, sci-fi and absurdness.

Loyalty to a one style is not an attitude to music for Gravitsapa. One successful experiment performed in a track is not to be repeated in the other seems to be the band’s motto. Only eternal escape from the cliche, emission of otherworldly atmosphere and attempts to create music as a tool to enter a trance.

At this stage the band is moving towards Shostakovich-rock and neo-neoshamanism.

This album collects their ‘Radio Free Taxipod’ and ‘Vulgata’ EPs.

– Sasha Jabovsky (Jabo) – guitar (also play in Drunk Diver sludge/grind band drunkdiver.bandcamp.com)
– Goatooth – guitar (also play in Nonsun drone/doom project nonsun.bandcamp.com)
– Vitalik – drums (ex Na Zlami Dnia)
– Adams – bass

– influences:
Jim Black, Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich, Igor Stravinsky, Georgy Sviridov, Robert Fripp, Tetragrammaton, Cybertron, Nietzsche, Blavatsky, John Cage, Bela Tarr

Snapline – Paper General – 3rd February 2015

Cat #: 173TZM

Welcome to the future! Snapline dusts off one from the vaults, a new two-song slammer with material from the pre-Phenomena (2012), pre-Future Eyes (2011) times, created in their hearts & minds ca. 1982 for a series of never-aired infomercials canonizing China’s proud martial might and technological prowess.

Yes, though the band’s members had only just been born, they were already on the vanguard. This is the sound of disaffected technical university dropouts graduates with honors. This is what’s been in the water. “Paper General” blasts it off at march speed, written for the happiest army in human history. Tens of thousands of men and women standing, smiling like the technicolor postcard you once saw in a kitsch shop. Operators Li Qing and Li Weisi stack the kosmische filter sweeps and pure analog noise generators with Snapline’s trademark loose cohesion. You can almost hear their fingers at the switches! While the picture adjusts (it never quite does), Chen Xi barks the orders. “Turn your radar ON!” His voice is almost lost in the static. Which is the signal and which is the noise? “It could be thousands of ways / to say a word in different tones.”

Next stop: “Wasteland.” The path forward seems infinite but your trip lasts just over seven minutes. Scientific progress sounds like a rickety synthesizer shuttling too close to the sun. Even the control melts. The rhythm is vaporized. It never mattered. Return to earth and you no longer recognize what you once called home. Spin it, flip it, repeat.

After Argument – This Is Not Your Game – 4th January 2015

Cat #: 165TZM

Following in the footsteps of their critically acclaimed 2013 debut LP Furs of Time [Share the Obstacles], After Argument continue further down an even more refined sonic path, combining avant-garde experimentalism and post punk sensibilities that hint at the gut-level thrust, heft and swing of Television as much as the restless, hook laden fury of early Fugazi, Slint and Mexican psych band Los Dug Dug’s. The band, comprised of legendary P.K.14 vocalist/poet Yang Haisong and Beijing musical luminary Zaza [Eyes Behind] have quickly established themselves as one of China’s foremost punk rooted explorers, filling venues of all shapes and sizes throughout the PRC with a sound, arguably unrivaled and most certainly celebrated by their peers behind the Bamboo Curtain and beyond.

This Is Not Your Game, After Argument’s debut full length for Genjing Records, finds the duo capturing the explosive rush and emotional power of their live shows, where they range from mathy arpeggious interludes through headlong, thunderous charges. Recorded and produced by Yang Haisong at Psychic Kong Studios deep in the heart of the Chinese capital, This Is Not Your Game is an immediate, visceral record. On it, After Argument use riff, repetition, incremental layerings of distortion, bursts of noise and sudden changes in pace and volume – all shot through with a strong sense of poetic melody to provide new ways of seeing and feeling guitar-based rock.

But, more importantly than all that, After Argument manage to infuse emotionally complicated music with a sense of fun. What they offer and the source of their appeal is more a full-bore sensory thrill-ride than anything else. After Argument want to take you to faraway places and show you exciting things through musical algorithms both foreign and familiar to the listener. And This Is Not Your Game is just the key you’ll need to get started on that adventure. So, buckle up, strap on some headphones and enjoy the ride – it’s a one of a kind. 

All songs written by After Argument
Recorded at Psychic Kong, Beijing
Mastered by Garrett Haines at Treelady Studio, Pittsburgh, PA, United States

After Argument are:
Zaza and Yang Haisong

Visit them at www.afterargument.com, and also at storecords.bandcamp.com

Cover photo taken by Tanara Stuermer in Tavares Bastos, Rio, Brazil
www.tanarastuermer.com

Artwork by NOHOHONO

P.K.14 – 1984 – 3rd December 2013

Cat #: 151TZM

“1984” is P.K.14’s follow-up to “City Weather Sailing” and comes after a five-year hiatus. The name of the album was inspired by “1984”, the dystopian political fable and the final novel by English writer George Orwell (1903-1950). Most of Orwell’s works have a vitality that has only grown stronger over time. Likewise, P.K.14’s music also has an astonishing, enduring vitality that prompts the listener to think and come to his or her senses.

The band’s fifth studio album, “1984” was recorded in October 2012 at Electrical Audio in Chicago with the help of legendary American producer Steve Albini, whose previous collaborations include Nirvana, The Pixies, Cheap Trick and P.J. Harvey. All tracks were mixed in Sweden by producer Henrik Oja, who also worked on P.K.14’s first three albums.

In a departure from their usual recording process, for this album, the band first went to Sweden to rehearse for a week with Oja, who worked a lot on the guitar and organ. Together they put the final touches to the beautifully crafted sound that has now become P.K.14’s trademark.

As with Orwell’s novel, “1984” is a spotlight in the dark, with songwriter Yang Haisong’s haunting and subtly satirical lyrics speaking of harsh reality.

“You and me walked a long, long road / You and me once left the world behind us / You and me once heard their jeering laughs / They welcomed us to the world of being controlled” (You and Me)

“I’ve already forgotten everything that’s happened / I live in a world without truth / I’ve already forgotten everything that’s happened / That which is miraculous couldn’t be more miraculous / That which is dead couldn’t be more dead” (Crazed Woman)

Yang Haisong’s powerful and poetic texts – and subtexts – hold a mirror up to the world and warn of a life lived in “1984”, where just having a thought can be a very dangerous thing. If that day arrives, at least we know “the Public Kingdom For Teen” will be in our corner, singing a war cry. 

Narrow Lands – Popular Music That Will Live Forever – 20th November 2013

Cat #: 148TZM

Once known to jangle, Sydney band Narrow Lands have turned their hands to rumbling. Since adding a baritone guitar to their mix, their music has become heavier, darker, weirder and, well, simply better.

On their debut LP, the guys from Narrow Lands mix the sweet grittiness of punk with a thundering mess of noise/feedback, in the spirit of bands like Swans or Dead China Doll.

Recorded in two days in mid-winter, in a shed behind Alan’s parents’ place on a little farm west of Bathurst, Narrow Lands aimed to keep the LP sounding as fresh, authentic and ferocious as possible.

Each ridiculous sound you might hear here is an experiment with the potential of an instrument, a way of allowing things to ‘freak out’ without forcing the issue. The result hits you like a friendly punch in the guts.

A co-operative release between tenzenmen and Octopus Pi (www.facebook.com/Octopuspi)