Coffee-Table Notes

Here's a wheeze and a half: Guinness are/were a wonky pop duo with tentacles in various Edinburgh College of Art-sired bands, including Commie Cars and Edinburgh Leisure. Armed with John Shuttleworth-style toybox keyboards and wilfully rudimentary bass and de(con) structive guitar, throughout 2016 they produced deadpan absurdist vignettes, some of which were possessed with a tragicomic intent worthy of Tony Hancock. After seven months they decided to split up, figuring that was quite long enough for them to have done their bit, thank you very much. Their last gift to the world is this twelve-track album, released solely on YouTube, although there's a download link if you want one, and it really is pure genius. The opening instrumental title track somewhat appositely bumps and grinds its way across the dancefloor like very early Cabaret Voltaire, its primitive drum machine, motorik funk bass and wailing banshee guitar giving few clues to what follows. I'm A Zookeeper (

For a golden moment sometime around 1981, it seemed that pop music had been reborn as something primitive and pure. In a wilfully independent post-punk climate, anything and everything was up for grabs. Jazz, funk and all hybrids inbetween were de rigeur. In Glasgow, care of Alan Horne's Postcard Records, this took the form of a short-lived but world-changing musical response to the spit and sawdust, razor gang machismo of the city’s unreconstructed pub life. It looked to the past of the Velvet Underground's more sensitive side, lounge bar jazz and Radio 2 for comfort. Orange Juice may have added extra camp, Josef K more funk and Aztec Camera more class to the template, but it was left to Postcard second-wavers Jazzateers to add an essence that fell somewhere between shambolic and chic. With a name that conjured up a one-for-all, all-for-one coffee bar gang mentality, the original Jazzateers oeuvre was fragile, fey and overwhelmingly pretty. Led by guitarist Ian Burgoyne

Anyone who ever chanced upon Moon Hop , the occasional club co-run by members of Edinburgh-sired band FOUND, and which ran at Henry's Cellar Bar in Edinburgh throughout 2014 and 2015 will have stumbled into a late-night multi-cultural wonderland of musical riches. With the evening introduced by low-key live shows from the likes of The Sexual Objects, Withered Hand and ex Arab Strappers Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton playing separately, FOUND themselves could be seen in various solo guises and together . As wonderful as such uniquely styled outings were, Moon Hop 's heart was pulsed by the records spun before, inbetween and after the live shows. This came in the form of some of the wildest array of records you'd never heard, a euphoric melting pot of retro-futuristic psych soul funk disco eclectica spread out across the decades and culled from all four corners of the world. Here was a compilation album in waiting, something that could exist on a par with other crate-d

There was a time in the pre internet 1990s when some of Edinburgh city centre's darker Old Town thoroughfares were emblazoned with hastily-pasted posters heralding some of the capital's lesser sung future attractions. Around the Cowgate, one could occasionally spot samizdat crosses spray-painted onto walls in a way that suggested some kind of un-named insurgency was afoot even as it seemed to indicate an impending emergency. This graffiti tag was also part of a subliminal insurrection that announced The Male Nurse were in the area. A couple of decades on, a similarly styled blue cross on a white background now forms the Keith Farquhar-designed cover of this long overdue vinyl only compilation of one of pop's most wayward missing links. The Male Nurse evolved from a band called Lucid, which featured vocalist Keith Farquhar, guitarists Alan Crichton and Andrew Hobson plus Craig Gibson, Spencer Smith and Martin Wilson, who had been at Leith Academy with Farquhar. Having play

“Who doesn't/Emotionally Connect/To Music?” declaims Sandy Milroy in his observations of Daisy, a young woman who downloads the latest Adele album, midway through the nine minute epic that is It is Morning, the finger-jabbing slow-core centrepiece of the second cassette release by Milroy's Shareholder project as a full band. This follows on from Shareholder's previous band-based cassette, Jimmy Shan, that followed a slew of long out of print releases by Milroy in his solo Shareholder guise. As a member of sludge-noise auteurs Muscletusk as well as siring Shareholder, Milroy has long been a key figure of Edinburgh's cross-pollinating avant-noise underground. In the last couple of years, however, by introducing vocals to the power trio that Shareholder has become, there is a more focused intent to the guitar, bass and drum clatter that lets rip over seven tracks like the bombs released from the war plane on the cassette's front cover collage. With fellow trave

For more than thirty years now, Johny Brown's Band of Holy Joy have been the conscience of a divided nation. Hailing from North Shields in Tyneside but having formed his original troupe of street-punk vaudevillians in New Cross in London, Brown's heart-on-sleeve social-realist vignettes have been infrequent dispatches from the frontline of broken Britain. Combined with his more hauntologically inclined sonic experiments on online art radio station Resonance FM, Brown's ongoing canon is a righteous address from the margins. With the most recent Band of Holy Joy album, The Land of Holy Joy , released in 2015 on the Edinburgh-based Stereogram label, this self-released two-CDr set is the third of four aural scrapbooks published in a limited edition of just seventy, and, following on from the previous two, An Atlas of Spatial Perceptions and Custom and Crime in Savage Society , is probably already pretty hard to come by. A fourth collection, Fruits and Flowers for Particula

For twenty-odd years (some of them very odd) Benedict R Wallers, aka The Rebel, has been reeling out a deadpan and wilfully singular take on spindly DIY adult nursery rhymes for terminal nihilists. As if to illustrate, this twenty-one track cassette of 4-track recordings begins with a sneeze and a spoken word rendition of the second verse of Prince's Sign O The Times, With roots in Edinburgh avant-provocateurs The Male Nurse before honing his stetson-headed schtick fronting the Country Teasers, Wallers' output as The Rebel has been prodigious, and this third part of his Poems With Water trilogy released on the Austin, Texas-based Monofonus Press label allows full vent to his polymathic tendencies. If reading Prince lyrics is a good way to start, the rest of Can I Pass? - the track it forms part of - is as straightforward as it gets over the next hour. The brief reading from Flann O'Brien's experimental novel, At Swim Two Birds , in Pegasus , is a telling pointer t

On December 21 st 1988, Pan Am flight 103, a Boeing 747 named Clipper Maid of the Seas, which was making a regular trip from Frankfurt to Detroit via London, fell from the air over the small Scottish town of Lockerbie, in Dumfries and Galloway. The aeroplane's 243 passengers and sixteen crew members were killed by a bomb placed inside a suitcase stored onboard the aircraft. As the plane careered into residential areas of Lockerbie, eleven people on the ground were also killed. Passengers on the flight included Paul Jeffreys, onetime bass player with Steve Harley's Cockney Rebel, and poet Joanna Walton, a former girlfriend of Robert Fripp who had written lyrics for Fripp's 1979 album, Exposure, and who had coined the term Frippertronics to define Fripp's tape-looping techniques. The subsequent arrest and imprisonment of Libyan national Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, followed by his release from Greenock Prison by the Scottish Government in 2009 on compassionate

When Robert King auditioned to be vocalist for Scars, the Edinburgh band formed on the back of punk, he was reputedly so scary in his performance that the other auditionee watching left the room, never to be seen again. This story is one of many about Scars that pops up in Big Gold Dream – The Sound of Young Scotland 1977-1985, Grant McPhee's meticulously researched documentary excavation of a much unsung era. As Creeping Bent record boss Douglas MacIntyre also makes clear in Big Gold Dream, it wasn't Orange Juice's first single, Blue Boy, that was Scotland's equivalent of Anarchy in the UK by the Sex Pistols, as some maintain. It was actually Scars' ferocious debut, Horrorshow / Adult/Ery, released on Fast Product records in 1979, that sent shockwaves around a younger generation in search of something beyond a one-chord thrashabout. Thirty-seven years on from Scars debut, and thirty-five after the band's solitary album, Author! Author!, with time as an emi

It's only too fitting that the debut release from the newly constituted VoidoidARCHIVErecords comes in a silver plastic bag. There are few artists other than the label's founder, artist Jim Lambie, after all, who have taken the Warhollian pop-art dream and used it for his own ends quite so convincingly. The label was born of activities in Lambie's Glasgow-based Poetry Club over the last three years, which has seen several generations of underground movers and shakers perform there ever since he opened it to host a show by Richard Hell in 2012. The likes of Factory superstar Gerard Malanga, poetry evangelist John Giorno and Patti Smith have all performed inside The Poetry Club's bijou confines, as have Felt frontman Lawrence, Primal Scream, Young Fathers and Teen Canteen. This double 7'' limited edition of 100 was released last month to coincide with the Club's multi-media night, Paraphernalia. Elara Caluna are the Glasgow-based duo of Benedict Salter a

“If you can put a little bit of yourself into the work....” So says Collette Robertson on the first track of Ali Robertson & His Conversations, the latest sonic missive from one of the brains behind the Giant Tank cottage industry, which has rattled the mainstream's bag for more than a decade now with an ever expanding series of gonzoid dispatches. Both this newish record and the fourth edition of the GT in-house zine continue an assault on culture which d ates back to the pummelling sludge-core of Giant Tank the band in the late 1990s. Since they split, the Robertson-run Giant Tank label has been based primarily around the activities of Robertson and cartoonist Malcy Duff. As Usurper, this double act of absurdist provocateurs have become key players in an outsider weirdo network that is both related to and is the antithesis of a now widespread Noise scene. Utilising a toybox of 'disabled' instruments – marbles, loose change, old springs and other detritus – alon

Norwegian guitarist Haftor Medboe has been a low-key fixture of Edinburgh's jazz scene for some years now, having released seven albums in various guises and with different collaborators over the last decade. These include Places and Spaces, recorded in 2012 with a quartet that included Anneke Kampman, vocalist with spectral electronicists, Conquering Animal Sound. This latest outing sees Medboe lead a trio of pianist Espen Eriksen and trumpeter Gunnar Halle. Both of Medboe's countrymen come with an impressive international pedigree as both band-leaders and side-men on a host of recordings. This makes for a crisp and starkly melodic alliance for a set of seven original pieces. Composed by Medboe with the distance exile brings with it, each one taps into his Nordic roots with an ornate chamber jazz that leaves plenty of space to contemplate the view. Recorded the day after the trio's live appearance at the 2015 Edinburgh Jazz Festival , the album ebbs and flows from th

When Golden Teacher played an Edinburgh show on General Election night this year, it felt like the 1980s in more ways than one. While the big screen relaying live TV coverage in the bar area of the city's Mash House venue kept freezing, even technical gremlins couldn't hold off the Conservative Party's inexplicable majority which might just have doomed us to austerity forever after. In stark contrast, the live room next door was awash to a darkly joyous stew of percussion-heavy psych voodoo club sounds that proved to be irresistible to dance-floor revellers seeking sanctuary from the gloom. As fractured as the times, Golden Teacher live seemed to be tugging in several directions at once. It was as if Giorgio Moroder and Brian Eno had moulded a back-drop of fourth world funk and deep-set techno libation into an increasingly euphoric mix that ushered in the rhythmic tease of Grace Jones circa 1981 and mid 1980s Cabaret Voltaire. In light of the disaster that was being pl

In 1570, when Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis wrote his astonishing forty-voice motet, Spem in Alium (Hope in any other), , he probably didn't foresee the piece's transcendent propensities being co-opted by novelist E.L. James for her best-selling twenty-first century 'erotic romance', Fifty Shades of Grey. While such mass acceptance mercifully failed to dim the composition's splendour in the way Ravel's Bolero was kitschified following its use in Blake Edwards' 1979 rom-com, 10, it nevertheless saw recordings of Spem in Alium shoot to the top of the classical charts. If Tallis was turning in his grave during the Fifty Shades hoo-har, he can rest more than easy regarding Michael Begg's infinitely more seasonal sounding 'arrangement and erosion' of an already majestic work. Rather than use voices, Begg utilises slowed-down strings and sepulchral sounding drones for a treatment that enhances the beauty of Tallis' original, even as it s

In the absence of younger artists willing to become the nation's conscience in the face of ongoing austerity culture, The Pop Group returned in 2010 to reclaim their oppositionist mantle. During the five years since, the Bristol-sired post-punk incendiarists have co-opted PledgeMusic to fund both a reissue of their explosive 1980 compilation album, We Are Time, as well as this year's Citizen Zombie, the first new Pop Group recordings in thirty-five years. Now the quartet of sooth-saying vocalist Mark Stewart, guitarist Gareth Sager, bassist Dan Catsis and drummer Bruce Smith resurface with another campaign for the first ever CD release of their provocatively named 1980 album, their second, For How Much Longer Must We Tolerate Mass Murder? This is accompanied by a separate limited edition release of their equally in-yer-face 1979 single, We Are All Prostitutes. With the album's urgent dispatches such as Forces of Oppression, There Are No Spectators and Rob A Bank lob

There's a darkness at the heart of Saint Jack , the second album by The Nectarine No 9, Davy Henderson's skewed ensemble take on rock and roll following his adventures with Edinburgh post-punk primitivists Fire Engines and the major label pop entryist gloss of Win. Originally released in 1995 on Alan Horne's briefly reignited Postcard label, Heavenly's twentieth anniversary reissue goes some way to unearthing the missing link between those early deconstructions and Henderson's current guise leading the equally conceptualist Sexual Objects, who this year auctioned the sole copy of their second album, Marshmallow , on eBay for a cool £4,213. Having 'regrouped' once already last year and with dates pending in London and Glasgow to play Saint Jack in full, The Nectarine No 9 might just have found their time. With the band named after a Japanese love hotel, the title of this follow up to their loose-knit debut, A Sea And Three Stars (or C*** , if you will

Four stars Don't be fooled by the troubadourish mediaevalisms of the jaunty guitar flourish that opens the third and much belated opus by the wildest junkyard auteurs to ever embark on a galloping collision course of surrealist lyrical fantasms and stumblebum musical fury. There may be church bells and rivers flowing inbetween the ten manic vignettes contained therein, but it's open all hours in this food-stuff-based quasi concept album co-released through King Creosote's new micro-label, and which can't help but inspire words like 'opus' and 'therein' as they tap into Vickers' wilfully archaic fairytale-kingdom sooth-saying. Within seconds, Vickers is phlegmatically regaling us with the poignant tale of 'My Trifle' with the guttural urgency of Kevin Coyne accompanied by the three-pronged assault of The Leg's Dan Mutch on guitar, Pete Harvey on cello and Alun Thomas on drums. Nothing more is to be taken as lightly, from the dera

Three stars D. Gwalia has cut a shadowy figure around the unsung sidelines of Edinburgh's myriad of low-key music scenes. Originally from Wales before taking a peripatetic path to Oxford, Gwalia's cracked folk and strung-out gothica was first heard on his 2010 debut, 'In Puget Sound.' This follow-up digital-only release charts even starker terrain in a bleak compendium of scratched-out song collages and apocalyptic portents which conjure up the strung-out ghosts of post Pink Floyd Syd Barrett at his most insular, all whimsy lost. This is most evident on the opening 'A Day Out', in which a sparse but insistent electric guitar pattern is eked out behind a Mogadon choir-boy vocal. 'Vamp', which follows, is Bauhaus' 'Dark Entries' rewritten for the troubadour age. A martial drum-beat adds to the mood of 'Annihilation Pair' before ushering in the muffled spoken-word narration of the album's title track, which sounds like free-as

Three stars Like a little army of trolls marching out of the shadows, this latest opus from the Jean Herve Peron/Zappi Diermaier version of Germany's veteran kosmische hippy Dadaists creeps up on you slowly. Peron's looming bass and Diermaier's martial drums set a moody tone before exploding into the extended guitar wig-out of the album's opening assault, 'Gerubelt'. After more than forty years in the saddle, Peron and Diermaier have styled this new release as jUSt, a set of twelve semi-improvised bare-bones rhythm-driven sound sculptures designed to be rebuilt by anyone who fancies a bash at adding their own touches to it. Whether the end result will find Krautrock copycats indulging in fantasy-wish-fulfilment hero-worship or inspire something more interesting remains to be seen. What's left in the meantime is a group of miniatures far less formless than mere backing tracks. Stripped back to basics, the same rush of primal physicality best captured in Faust

Three stars Matthew Collings has become a quietly ubiquitous presence in Edinburgh's off-piste electronische live diaspora over the last couple of years. This latest release in the composer and sound artist's Sketches for Albinos guise was forged and recorded during snatched moments during time spent in Iceland, and comes on 12” vinyl with a photographic book. The seven tracks make for a curiously domestic-sounding affair, with the treated guitar and breathy, just-out-of-bed vocal of the opening 'I Have So Many Things I've Always Wanted' seemingly pulsed along by trolls playing a toy orchestra. The crudely cut-n'-pasted drum clatter of 'I Think We Grew Again' comes on like a lo-fi John Barry and a frosty rather than chilled take on The Orb's 'Little Fluffy Clouds' Beyond the drone, snatches of conversations dip in and out of view, A woman describes herself opening the door and stepping into the sunshine. Toddlers sing some