Aficionado Presents: Land of Light

Larry's Lounge

Bar Moda

A Potted History Of The Crackle In Vinyl

A potted history of the crackle in vinyl, for those whose ipods do not fizz, crackle, pop or show any of that 'surface' matter, for that matter.
 

1117 – the first crackle is discovered in Ye Olde Worlde Plague house, Pudding Lane, London. Locals are heard to shout, ‘A pox on your crackles sir, a pox!!’ as the gravest form of insult, as well as 'ye smoothe faced cunt ye! Why were it no for my filthy pock marked, line strewn face sir, I would be taken for a child chimmney sweep.'
 

1324 – Dogs are invented
 

1476 – Megaphones are invented
 

1524 – Colonel Tobias Emary Snowball-Truss listens to his dog barking through a megaphone. The image hangs in the ether of human consciousness for centuries.
 

1901 – The eminent Victorian scientist, philanthropist and vendor of quack nostrums, Dr Harlequin Pluckrosefeltch rediscovers crackles by accident. Working late one evening on sound reproduction in his study, he accidentally spills some tincture of warthog sputum onto his beloved musical cylinder organ. The discomfort of crackles throughout his favourite songs causes him such anger that he becomes a Tibetan yak herder.
 

1948 – Columbia release the first ever vinyl album by a young Danny Tenaglia called New Yoik, New Yoik. Due to an unfortunate disagreement at the pressing plant due to a dispute over sauce rations on the hotdogs, the acetates are forever soiled with mustard, ketchup and over excited loin splash.
 

1951 – RCA launch the ill fated 4-inch 45rpm single.
 

1952 – RCA launch the more successful 7-inch 45rpm single. The extra 3 inches allows for more crackle potential but it is argued that 3 extra inches = jazz crackle!
 

1955 – Bill Haley and the Comets release, ‘Rock Around The Unbearably Static, Crackly, Popping Grandfather Clock’ an homage to Bill’s Father’s Father’s Vandergraff Generator-cum-timepiece. Sales of 4 inch plus 3’s (as they are known) rocket from the crypt.
 

1976 – Punk Rock spawns a newer more deadly form of crackle as pressing plant employees happily ‘gob’ on acetates in reverential acknowledgement of what is between the grooves, and their need to release self-inflicted 'grollies' of UHU filth.
 

1983 – The CD is launched. Crackles are added when people eat their dinner off them.
 

1988 – The rave generation think the fizzes crackles and pops in the grooves are ambient messages sent from planet Ozric and a Guy Called Gerald.
 

1992 – CD sales overtake 12 inch vinyl sales for the first time. Farmers use vinyl crackle to scare moles and crows.CD favouring farmers invent BSE.
 

1997 – Sales of Samplers and turntables outstrip conventional instruments. As a fightback, Dr Nobel Gas Krypton, the eminent German scientist, invents a guitar, which sends out crackles.
 

1998 – Vinyl is 50 years old. Crackles gatecrash the birthday party, kick the door in, drink all the booze and scratch the furniture.
 

2004 – Old samples are released with crackles in new work. Debate flares. Crackles get angry. Say ‘It’s our ball and we’re not playing!’ and immigrate to Nevada, where they open up a motel with shit static TV reception.

 

2009 - Radiohead release a limited polythene bag full of pork scratchings, which they charge nothing for. Farmers complain, suggesting pigs have died for this shit.

 

2010 - Vinyl begins a resurgence. 180gm Audiophile copies of records sell out within hours. Audiophiles weep into their Snap, Crackle and Pop cereal due to the perfection and the loss.

 

2012 - Bands begin to realise the provenance of the crackle and add it to their recording process. Small minded men in Switzerland complain that paper particles are invading their grooves and are somewhat ruining the ambience of their fumidor collection of rare Tame Impala.

 

2013 - Hipsters are buying more 7" records than downloads. Hush my baby baby don't you cry.

Bjork - Violently Harpy

 

Violently Harpy

Has anyone else scored a copy of that recent Bjork record? I don’t mean 'Bastards' , but the collection of unreleased session tracks, which got a Japanese only release at the same time. Strictly under the counter stuff, very limited and very expensive. Thankfully a good friend of mine has just returned from Tokyo and very kindly bought me back a copy.

The album, ‘Icelandic Pixie Ring of Sprite Juice’, is quite incredible; it makes Yoko Ono’s Avant-Garde warblings sound like Celine Dion, and just needs to be heard by more than a few elite Japanese business men and Wire journalists. I’m happy to share my thoughts with those of you who are contemplating the expensive punt.

The album kicks off in grand style with the tune, ‘Black Pearl Piercing Parlour’, for this Bjork sampled the grunts and groans of Five Sumo wrestlers as they had the letters of her name tattooed onto their buttocks. Over this she sings of her love of sportsmen in nappies and talc, in Mauritian.

Song two, ‘Battysea Dogs Home’, is a work of abstract genius. Bjork is accompanied by the the sea bat canine inmates of Battersea dogs home all woofing and a’ barking as she meows in a weird and slightly disturbing way. This of course sets the dogs off and they reach new highs of barking joy.

She continues to push the Avant-Garde boundaries on the album’s third track, ‘Dental Gasthaus 57’. Fifty Seven dentist drills are suspended from a Tyrolean cottage, screeching away whilst the world famous nose and throat singer, Janice Cher-Dubarry gargles the Star Spangled Banner with Listerine.

‘Syringe Balloon Rabbit Warren’ follows. An instrumental consisting of balloons being popped by big rabbits with syringes, it’s her most challenging work yet.

‘Doppelzimmer Samaritan Purse Cake’ is just Bjork’s rumbling stomach sampled through an 808 and then dropped into a charity shop letterbox. (In the background it’s possible to hear, ‘Yes Dear, that’s nice, but it’s not exactly, Des O’Connor now is it?’

‘Jumpin Jack Cow, It’s a Gas Gas Gas’ samples 25 Indian Holy cows as they break wind into a turbine engine with Bollywood’s best known Mick Jagger impersonator, ‘Talvin Sings the Blues’, scatting with a clothes peg on his nose with rampant abound.

The album closes with an amazing duet between Bjork and Burkin Fatso, the world famous opera singer and fat twat. He sings in deep gutteral tones about his love of spam fritters and she sings rhetorical questions such as, ‘Why do all Spanish people wear red cord jeans and rugby shirts?’

If anybody wants me to burn then a copy….tough, I like being an elitist snob with records no one else owns.

Jottings From The Jazz Rig

‘What did you do back in the early days of the internet wars Daddy?’

‘Well son, it was all a lot different back then?’

‘How so?’

‘Well son, we never had the luxury of all the hardware and software you have these days. All these easily downloadable things you take for granted today. The ‘iMind-Puff’, the ‘Smell-Prod App’, the ‘Toolstation’, the ‘Freetard MP3 Tune Dumps’, the ’Ping-Bong My Face’, the ‘Ear-Wax Movie-Probe’, the ‘Footie-Hoolie Kindle’, and the ‘Hormonally-Charged Tracker Twat’ – they never existed back then.’

‘How did you ever survive such technical poverty?’

‘Well my ocularly distinguished young ankle biter, we stayed up until ten o’clock each night on a creaky rickety old BBC Message Board writing about Sun Ra slippers in the most coded language imaginable, lest we be ‘Whacked’ by a ‘Mod’ or ruthlessly barracked by a ‘Lurker’. After 10 it all got shut down, so we all migrated to ‘another board’ belonging to a certain 'Farmer Jay’, where we could all carry on discussing A Flock of Seagulls B-Sides and impending ‘hook-ups’ in subterranean London bars with strangers we’d ‘met’ off the internet. Occasionally 'Farmer Jay', would chase us off his property with a pitchfork (constructed from the handlebars of a chopper) and mutter, ‘Insects!’ as he checked under rocks and cookies. But we would all slowly sneak back again, and once a week, switch on our collective wirelesses, and continue with the coded networking as GP or ‘the teacher’, would ‘drop bombs’ over our heads’.

‘Ha ha ha ha ha ha! What a load of rubbish! You just made all that up didn’t you, Daddy?’

 

Indeed the world of Technological evolution moves whip fast these days; it’s now been over a decade since ‘Jottings from the Jazz Rig’ first hit the streets (well furtively handed out like a Watchtower pamphlet in subterranean speakeasies) and nowadays the very concept of publishing a paper version of anything is somewhat akin to dressing in hessian sackcloth and remarking that helicopters are the work of witchcraft!

 

 Jottings from the Jazz Rig made it to 10 issues before it was burnt down to the ground (well sea) and I began practicing as a Gestalt therapist, peddling temporary relief from permanent problems.

 

Described in some quarters as, 'a Shoreditch Twat’ for the post Acid-House Bohemian Jazz Raver' , and in other parts, 'like reading Jason and the Argonauts whilst listening to Joseph’s Amazing Technicoloured Dream Coat in a giant wig.', Jottings From The Jazz Rig was the Xeroxed fanzine to be seen with at all the right clubs. A portmanteau of post punk and post card ideology, an academic dissemination of cultural mores and the in house publication at Puffy Fetlock towers. In fact P Fetlock (as he now likes to be known) once remarked of Jazzrig, ‘Yo, I was proud of working 18 hours a day and sleeping three hours a night. But it's something that turned into a problem for me: not being able to sleep... having insomnia. Not now though, I just turn to my latest copy of JazzRig and within minutes I’m out like a light.’

 

All the ace faces on the ‘scenes’ would ‘accidently’ leave their copies on the tube, before crying out theatrically, ‘Jeez man! I nearly left my copy of ‘Jazz Rig’ on the train. Thus successfully instilling envy throughout the carriage and beyond. Nowadays the equivalent of that would be photographing your Kraftwerk concert ticket staple-gunned to your forehead, and tagging all your ‘friends’ on Facebook. 1274 friends eh? You want to have a barbeque mate, see how many turn up. Or indeed uploading to your Twitter feed a picture of yourself drinking White Russians and smoking incense sticks in a Basel tree house, whilst singing, ‘We’re all crowing on our summer holiday.’

 

One critic even went as far as describing it as a ‘Snifin' Glue’ for Pod’s and Munk’s' (Punk Mods or Mod Punks if you will). Paul Morely wrote, ‘Is accompanying Nan Goldin's savagely evocative visual diary slide show The Ballad of Sexual Dependency at the Tate Modern, and his ecstatic, mystical Englishness collided/connected with and regenerated her degenerate, exposed New York-ness, the abstract relationship between his tribe, and hers, between those travelling through a certain intense, occult Lower East Side and those finding themselves in a secret night time London as if the two nervy cities are next door to each other in time and space.’ But that pile of pretentious guff wasn’t about JftJR so just never mind.

 

It was many things to many people. A manual of recognition for vinyl OCD obsessives. A self-help guide for technicians of spaceship Dada, an Exchange and Mart for Bermuda Dansette buyers and a Moog madness therapy group for Glove compartment collectors. Moreover It was a sartorial knackers yard of stylish shite, and a Sixth Form common room staple; a Free Porko Shrivel benefit moneyspinner and a proud supporter of the Radiohead Crown of Self Loathing: for their argument was that nuclear family conjugal relationships were becoming symmetrical. They believed that a symmetrical arrangement would become more common.

 

Scarce copies surface only very occasionally and it is not uncommon for the early issues to command three figure sums. Allegedly Sotherby’s recently sold an early signed copy for £500, but that did include the super rare cut out and keep Bathysphere, which was still intact and untainted. It is also said that sealed knot collector societies meet in secluded warehouses and swap copies in masonic style secrecy. Microscopes are not uncommon at these gatherings, used to check authenticity, condition and free gifts.

 

Recently a gang of Polish printers have tried to flood the market with counterfeit copies of ‘Jazz Rig’, and to the untrained eye, these are incredibly realistic. But to the serious collector they can be spotted a mile off  by their lack of the Sun Ra watermark.

 

For those late to the party and those who were still using domestic phones when all this shizz was going down, here we have all 10 copies of Jazzrig in all their Swedish Svecia screen printed glory.

 

 

 

 

The Submerged Forest Returns