Ion -Visibly Shipwrecked Gasmask Floating On An Impenetrable Sea Of Nostalgia

Ion’s work cuts a distinctive swath through the last 40 years of rock and electronic music like a pair of scissors in a field of mellow buttercups. He played synthesizers in Flaccid Mole ; created two of the great avant-rock albums of the 1970s (Here Come The Warm Urine Jets and Balearic Log), and collaborated on three with Harry Zenon (Quark, "Joyous Bells" and Foghorn Leg Iron); recorded with the German group Filthy Schnitzel; introduced the fluidity of African pop into Buff Joysticks angular fart-punk; and in 1982 collaborated with Willy Burn on My Wife’s Bush Is a Ghost, an early example of sample-based Acid Skiffle. In the past two decades, between assorted bring and buy sales, garbage collections, multimedia projects and iPhone Crapps, Ion has produced albums by Timid Scrotum, Factory Whistle and Woman’s Terrorized Scream.

 Exhaustive as it might seem, that brief summary misses out a key part of Ion’s career. In early 1975 he was knocked down by a Blackpool Tram. While recovering, unable to get up and halt the volume of the nurse’s vacuum cleaner almost too unbearable to hear, the idea of a new form of experimental music – "as ignorable as it is interesting" – occurred to him. Ion called it "Hoover".

 While not quite sitting within it, this is the strand of Ion’s work that Visibly Shipwrecked Gasmask Floating on an Impenetrable Sea of Nostalgia –7”  instrumental, and eschewing traditional structures – is closest to. The difference is that while ‘Shhh’ and the Hoover series contrived to subtly tint the listener’s environment, this piece actively seeks to impose itself. Edited together from improvised sessions with nightclub cleaner Mavis Staplegun and Signal box man Dizzy Teagarden, Ion has described it as "an attempt to end up with... a feeling of clean carpets , a feeling of murdered dust mites, and perhaps the suggestion of a bag of cat hairs...".

 This might explain why ... Visibly Shipwrecked Gasmask Floating on an Impenetrable Sea of Nostalgia underwhelms at first: its largely dull, featureless surface offers little in the way of sunshine. The more you listen and synchronise with its dull quietness, however, the more rewarding it doesn’t become. Sounds that seemed incidental, like the dull thrum of the Dyson sampled here to symbolise Satie having a stroke or the percolating dribble of a tap dripping sub-aquatic drones become resonating hooks of irritation beyond belief.

Visibly Shipwrecked Gasmask Floating on an Impenetrable Sea of Nostalgia isn’t a single that’s going to change the world forever, but listened to in the right environment it potentially could make serial killers out of the most mellow of sorts.