This is an updated transcription of a review first published on The Liminal: http://www.theliminal.co.uk/2012/05/never-say-when-broken-flags-30th-anniversary/. I'm reproducing it here, complete with some picures I took, which were too dark to be included in the initial version.
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| Gary Mundy in Ramleh |
30 years ago, a tiny record label run out of Croydon resident Gary
Mundy’s bedroom was launched on the world, alongside Mundy’s band
Ramleh. Although it would always remain an operation ensconced in the
underground of British music, it quietly helped shape the nature of that
underground and gradually grew in influence until it reached the
near-legendary status it holds today, some fifteen years after it was
laid to rest. That label, of course, was Broken Flag, and few have
defined the Power Electronics and noise scenes in this country more than
it did between 1982 and 1995. Broken Flag launched Ramleh, of course,
but also Consumer Electronics, The New Blockaders, Ethnic Acid and
Skullflower, and, for all its perennial association with Power
Electronics, its roster was remarkably diverse, bringing together
artists from around the world and across the various facets of noise and
electronic music. Listen to just about any modern
noise/electro/industrial artist or band operating today, and you can
hear something of Broken Flag’s influence amidst their drones, screes
and squalls. And what better way to celebrate this astonishing legacy
than by organising a three-day festival in a grungy venue in
rain-battered north London?
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| Skullflower |
Let’s get the negative stuff out of the way: it had been announced
that Prurient would be part of the bill, but he sadly dropped out. The
doors also opened an hour late on each day. The Dome, whilst a nice room
with decent enough sound, somewhat undermines itself due to unfriendly
staff and ridiculously over-zealous bouncers. But those were small
niggles over a weekend of simply phenomenal music. Any fears I had that
things would get a bit samey (we’re talking about 3 days of noise and
industrial music, after all) proved to be completely unfounded, and with
so many great, and I mean truly fucking great, acts on display, I very
much doubt anyone left feeling short-changed.
I have already hailed the event’s diversity of sound, but for all-out
Power Electronics fans, there were several acts that would have amply
satisfied their need for crackling tones and shouty vocals. Swedish duo Sewer Election and Treriksröset
had the perhaps unenviable task of opening the event, and proceeded to
deliver a brittle and short set full of hiss, fuzz and aggressive
arm-raising, taking the novel stance of performing in the midst of the
audience, hunched over their effects pedals and contact mics. Like
Saturday’s second act, Lettera 22, these two were a
younger act designed to showcase Broken Flag’s influence on recent
generations. Italy’s Lettera 22 also performed in the midst of the
audience, producing seething synth- and tape-based harsh noise that
shook the hall so much they caused a pair of amps to crash to the floor.
Their set was altogether more potent than Sewer Election and
Treriksröset’s, with the kind of sonic construction that has
characterised recent works by Mike Shiflet and Joe Colley, albeit with a
constant undercurrent of noisy drone (and perhaps less subtlety than
those greats). It did drag on a bit, but Lettera 22 showed that newer
acts are not scared to push the boundaries of what their illustrious
forbears pioneered.
Starting at 7pm (supposedly), Friday’s evening was the shortest, and it was dominated by stalwarts from Broken Flag’s past. Le Syndicat hail from France, and first appeared on the Morality
compilation way back in 1985. Their set, another excessively long one,
showed some exciting use of techno-ish beats and heavy bass (they’ve
obviously spent some time with ears to the drum ’n’ bass ground, and it
is good to highlight the sometimes unexpected lineage between early
industrial and d’n’b), but mostly lacked focus and direction. Con-Dom,
in contrast, was gruelling and confrontational, with Mike Dando
stripped to the waist as he hurled scabrous lyrics at the audience and
kicked over any beverages on the stage’s edge, backed by brittle old
skool power electronics and gruesome film footage. Very much a per se
Power Electronics gig, then, and one that showcased the genre’s uneasy
balance of pure menace and over-the-top silliness, something that was
also the case with the balaclava-clad Grunt, who were
beyond cliche with their ugly shouted vocals and stereotypical blasts of
uninspired greasy noise. Meanwhile, young Finn Tommi Keränen,
who appeared on Sunday, was more sedate, but failed to distinguish his
sound from every “pure Power Electronics” act that preceded him, his
scraped tones sounding like a carbon copy of Grey Wolves circa 1992.
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| Consumer Electronics |
Of course, the need to provoke and enrage has been intrinsic to a lot
of Power Electronics from the genre’s inception in the form of
Whitehouse. Whitehouse’s Phillip Best was a key player in the Broken
Flag story, as a member of Male Rape Group and Ramleh and as leader of
his own project,
Consumer Electronics, who headlined on
Saturday and who, like Con-Dom, embodied the spirit of shock noise.
This was the mosh-pit moment of the weekend, with Best (very much a
noise celebrity) striding around with his shirt open, kicking over beer
and spitting water as he screamed typically obscene lyrics (though, to
be honest, all I could hear was the word “fuck” – it could have been “I
fucking love everyone in the world”, in fairness, though I doubt it) and
rubbed his body, tongue protruding. Meanwhile, his girlfriend Sarah
Freilich and Gary Mundy produced screaming, overloaded machine noise and
Anthony diFranco pummeled his bass guitar, the whole lot building into
an ear-bashing wall of angry noise. Sure, the theatrics, which even
involved holding up pictures of what appeared to be murder victims, were
beyond camp, but like his erstwhile Whitehouse colleague William
Bennett, Best somehow manages to balance his silliness with an intense
aura of acute menace and fierce intelligence; and the music was simply
overpowering. The only thing that prevented the set from being a true
reincarnation of the mid-eighties Power Electronics scene at its height
was the fact that this audience was full of adoration for the people
onstage, rather than being on the brink of a riot.
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| Anthony diFranco in JFK |
As much as I enjoyed Consumer Electronics and even, somewhat against
my better judgment, Con-Dom, the most musically interesting acts on show
were often those who went beyond noise and industrial and explored
different styles. M.T.T., who appeared on Saturday, was
a good example, his grimy set featuring delicate interludes and some
subtle plucking of what looked like an electric dulcimer, with the
ensuing spaces bristling with poised tension and unexpected melodies. In
many ways, it reminded me of the recent works by Cindytalk or even BJ
Nilsen, who was, coincidentally, in the audience (yes, shameless
name-drop there). JFK, a side-project by Ethnic Acid
and Ramleh’s Anthony diFranco, featured twin bass and electric guitar,
bridging the gap between Broken Flag’s electro-noise origins and the
thunderous industrial metal of Godflesh or Ministry. The riffs were
heavy and sludgy, the basses rumbled like earthquakes, a drum machine
spat out mean beats, and for all of a moment it felt like Laibach and
Justin K Broadrick had joined in the fun, albeit drunkenly and with no
interest in any concept of song.
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| Kleistwahr |
Several artists resolutely anchored in noise also displayed a
fearlessness in taking things into new zones, not least of all Gary
Mundy’s solo project
Kleistwahr. Using basic loops and
his inimitable voice (I swear there are few in noise who can hold a
candle to him in terms of how he uses vocals), Mundy unleashed a
veritable storm of sonic nails, an avalanche of brittle, savage
electronic mess that seethed and surged rhythmically with the
inhalations and expirations of the breath from his lungs. Somewhere
inside the morass, Mundy expelled angry, anguished lyrics that seeped
into focus only to disappear as quickly as they appeared. It was a
short, fierce set that opened the Saturday in full force, eradicating
the hangover that clung to my brain more effectively than a hundred
aspirin pills. On Sunday,
Putrefier used a
mighty-looking modular synthesizer to craft intricate noisescapes in the
manner of Keith Fullerton Whitman, as individual sub-melodies were
seized upon, enhanced, exploded and then discarded with effortless,
near-scientific, skill. The resemblance to KFW is interesting: was this a
case of a veteran taking on new ideas, or a sign that Putrefier’s
influence has, like Broken Flag itself, transcended the ages?
Sigillum S,
meanwhile, delivered a remarkably elaborate set, melding synth patterns
over a persistent, throbbing bass drone in front of unnerving video
footage. With a density of sound almost akin to progressive rock and
enthusiastically menacing vocals, Sigillum S were almost “cinematic”, as
if they were soundtracking the grim imagery behind them rather than
just using it as a tool, again joining the dots with modern “horror”
acts like Raime or Failing Lights. They also highlighted modern noise’s
intrinsic link to the late-seventies and early-eighties industrial
scene, as incarnated by Throbbing Gristle and SPK. Equally close to
those highly conceptual roots was Italian legend
Giancarlo Toniutti,
who took the novel approach of performing next to the PA. His sound was
dominated by metallic rumbles, elastic vocal snippets and
claustrophobically compressed drone. Above all, like Sigillum S, a
relentless deep drone guided his sound, and Toniutti built his screes
and squalls around this immobile metronome, until the resulting chaos
came close to the implacable, all-consuming and monolithic beauty of
Harsh Wall Noise. What a way to connect the past and the present states
of noise.
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| Club Moral |
Belgian duo Club Moral equally mastered the old and new in their brutal take on what could literally be described as musique concrete.
They also were one of only a quartet of acts to feature a woman, and
noise’s domination by straight, white, men is something that both
intrigues and confuses me, and not just because I was almost certainly
the only gay person in the audience for the duration of the festival.
But that’s a consideration for another day, so back to Club Moral! From a
live stand-point, they were extraordinary: Danny Devos jumped into the
audience, rolled around on the floor and dunked his head into a
contact-miked bucket of water whilst Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven chucked out
80s-style electro bleeps and zaps and churned out moody, static noise.
Once again throwing back to the golden era of Throbbing Gristle, this
performance owed as much to performance art as it did to noise or Power
Electronics.
Taking a completely different approach were
Esplendor Geometrico,
a Spanish duo who made an only very brief appearance on Broken Flag
back in the day, and one that Gary Mundy highlighted as being very
different to the rest of what the label was putting out at the time.
This was their first ever live performance in the UK, so their set was
predictably long, and,
actually, very different from everything
else on show. Of course, there was the requisite harsh noise, complete
with grinding bass tones and hissing static, but every track was
dominated by insistent, driving beats, evidence that noise can quite
comfortably process techno and house without losing its darkened soul.
Coming on like Pete Swanson’s excellent
Man With Potential
album, only with more angst and aggression, Esplendor Geometrico’s set
felt like club music beamed in from the dystopian future of
Blade Runner.
Vortex Campaign,
meanwhile, combined pulsating, beat-driven noise with fuzzed-out riffs
on electric guitar. Dodging around the crackles and hiss generated from a
laptop, the guitarist toyed with staples of the blues and garage rock,
giving the entire performance the sort of rootsy edge of Wolf Eyes
offshoot Stare Case, emphasising Industrial music’s natural, but often
overlooked, roots in rock tradition.
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| Skullflower's Samantha Davies |
Such a diverse line-up was testament to both the good taste of the
organisers (again, massive thanks to the great people at Second Layer
records and Harbinger Sound) and the genre-pushing nature of Broken
Flag. But few bands could ever hope to encapsulate the spirit of the
label in the way that Skullflower and Ramleh
do. After all, they are probably the two bands that first spring to
mind when one evokes Broken Flag. Skullflower were the penultimate act
on the Friday, and with their dense clusters of extended guitar noise
over monolithic rhythm section pounding, they elevated proceedings into
new areas of sonic bliss. Matt Bower, the mainstay of Skullflower, has
long abstracted himself from the gristle and grind of basic noise,
focusing instead on hypnotic repetition and transcendent drone. His
guitar playing, allied to that of his partner Samantha Davies, owes as
much to LaMonte Young and Tony Conrad’s minimalist drone as it does to
anything linked to noise or even rock, and, to cop a phrase of his,
being caught up in the sound of Skullflower live is like sitting under a
waterfall. With so much of the weekend’s music focusing on machines and
electronics, it was a beautiful escape to be absorbed by the primeval
post-rock of Skullflower. On Saturday, Davies and Bower teamed up with
Gordon Sharpe, aka Cindytalk, as Black Sunroof!,
although what resulted felt more like Sharpe fronting Bower and Davies’
Voltigeurs than anything tied to the original Sunroof! Of course,
Sharpe’s presence was a stunning glitch in the uber-macho ambiance of
the weekend, the exquisite, ambiguous transgender singer contorting and
swaying as he belted out mournful, arresting singing over a blanket of
ear-shattering violin and guitar drone provided by Davies and Bower.
Black Sunroof! brought a touch of the sensual, the elegiac and -dare I
say it?- the queer to proceedings, and were one of the most unexpected
acts on display all weekend.
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| Black Sunroof! |
Ramleh, as befits the band that, essentially, made it all, played two
sets: one “Power Electronics” version (although I prefer to think of it
as “noise drone”) and one full rock band. The former concluded the
Friday night, and showcased the intense sound Gary Mundy and Anthony
diFranco perfected on their superlative
Valediction album:
intense, all-encompassing machine noise that enveloped the audience,
creating a drifting platform for Mundy to howl, moan and growl into the
microphone, his distorted voice (and I’ll say it again – man, what a
voice!) lifting what would be intensely beautiful, but near-static,
noise into blissful heavens of transformative drone. diFranco did hit
the bass at one point, but it only served to add an extra layer to the
impregnable wall of sound. On Sunday, they were joined by drummer Martyn
Watts and Phillip Best on vocals, although the latter surrendered much
of the singing to Mundy, and quite rightly so. Best’s presence seemed to
serve as a bit of nostalgia (he was a driving force behind Ramleh from
the mid-eighties until the late nineties, and crucial to great albums
such as
Be Careful What You Wish For), but with Mundy
unleashing earthy, ragged guitar solos over diFranco’s hallucinatory
bass (I’ve previously compared him to Jack Casady and Billy Talbot), the
set felt like a flight of fancy over and away from pure noise and into
the sort of realms most notably explored by Neil Young and Crazy Horse,
Butthole Surfers, Black Sabbath or the Stooges. Of course, as on the
Friday, this was loud, mean and noisy, but it was just as potently
psychedelic, and truly dominated by Mundy and diFranco’s intense
conception of “song”. In a recent interview I did with diFranco and
Mundy, they talked at length about how they like to take a melody
(normally such an unused word at a noise event!), build it up and then
destroy it, only to build it back up… and destroy it all over again.
That was evident on their Power Electronics set, but even more so in the
heart of their rock maelstrom on Sunday.
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| The New Blockaders |
And so, after Ramleh’s ecstatic second set, it was left to everyone’s favourite crass noise band,
The New Blockaders,
to conclude what had been an exhilarating weekend that took noise back
in time before projecting it into the future. Fittingly, it was a
conclusion of pure noise, a tidal wave of nasty, enervated saturation
delivered by three weirdos in balaclavas. With the way they bang tin
drums and other weird objects, The New Blockaders go beyond pure noise
and into something approaching, but resolutely sneering at, the avant
garde. The best moment was when one of them suddenly materialised in the
audience, banging his slab of metal as he marched through the mass of
people. Ultimately, with their ferocity and nihilism, the New Blockaders
brought matters full circle, back to the roots of Broken Flag’s
underground spirit, but without ever dispelling the magic that had gone
before, as Ramleh, Kleistwahr, Skullflower, JFK, Club Moral, Esplendor
Geometrico and all those others had transcended noise in ways I wouldn’t
have thought possible and remained lodged in my mind even as The New
Blockaders went about their madcap theatrics. What a weekend. What a
fantastic thirty years. What a label. Thank you Broken Flag!
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| Ramleh |
