This summer delivers the second in the short series of reviews of no-label / self-released music. This collection is now around 20 months old, but that’s no reason not to call attention to it.

The Home Secretary: The White Hour | Soft Gamma Repeater | The Heliopause | The Maunder Minimum
EP streamed at http://www.myspace.com/thehomesecretary

Still from the film The Home Secretary in Séance at Perforated Concrete Disc

This is the third set of The Home Secretary’s tunes to come Clone Guilt’s way. In 2006, a selection culled from his first two CDs announced The Home Secretary’s presence online. Although since deleted from his website, it is worth presenting a brief reminder of the disorientating sound-world of some of these lost tracks.

Synth arc-lights induced the fear of patrolling private security firms in the abattoir ghost-drone of Lyman Ultra. He produced the aural trompe l’œil (trompe l’oreille?) of some very sharp ensemble playing in The Meridian; conjured a still and lovely pastoral interlude in The Conduction Band, and combined the Natural Elements through the use of drumnbass hi-hat and malfunctioning toy car rhythm, hymning a mer-ghost and a Megacity rooftop garden in The F Region. Spoliation, Part One was a track of purgatory jazz seemingly compiled from field recordings of a mutant band incorporating electric bean bag percussion, a choir of broken-mouthed IBM machines, a mutilated, out-of-work marching band with robot strings assembled tentatively around a poisoned well in Foreign Keyboard City, processed like turkey slices pressed into the shape of a bear. The gallows collapses, the electricity is malfunctioning; lethal injection it is.

In this delirium-state we come to The Home Secretary’s most recent music. The restlessness of The White Hour characterises the EP: harmonising ‘trumpet’ and ‘clarinet’ alternate with a walking bass which eventually takes over, and will not stop walking, symbolising the vacillation between the fuck-you yacht-jazz of The Maunder Minimum and the subterranean apocalypse-nostalgia of the two central tracks. Closing the EP, The Maunder Minimum presents the engine room: the below stairs look at the carnage described by the centrepieces. It deploys that typical Home Secretary topos – the becalming interlude – to evoke devastating ruin: here an ominous engine hum, with the Sirens practising their guitar on a distant island: this cuts in and out amid some crackling interference, their tantalising transmission lost as the track fades. We sail on, not even tied to our mast.

This follows The Heliopause and its brutal call-and-response: a processed guitar call; with heavy banging nautical spirits thumping their response through The Fog. The resounding guitar line heralds your doom with the genuine intent that all heavy music carries. In its own interlude, the ship appears to be talking: here is the indifferent captain, calmly offering us the overview, read from the Iranian twitterfeed on his iPad (anachronistic political reference reflects the age of the music under review), but we can still hear the chaos and carnage below. Any maritime theme to the EP is surely unintentional. Soft Gamma Repeater cracks open the mind of the CCTV: 1960s North East meets 1980s North West seen through a filter of corrupted MPEGs. Audibly, the camera drops through the earth: concrete and gravel filter through a post-apocalyptic space-dub version the tune’s opening section. ‘A piano plays in an empty room’, someone once sang under one-colour-tinted record sleeves. But this time the piano is played by Delia Derbyshire, magnetic tape trapped under the felted hammers. And here is The Home Secretary, with his supernatural disregard for private moments, recording this spectral melody – no notes redacted! – for your ears and mine to share.

New album from The Tenant: Sixty Miles Bad Faith. Click through for the lowdown.

Happy new year, reader: may 2010 bring the downfall of the record industry or something. And in that naive spirit – and reflecting on another quiet year for Clone Guilt – I open the new year with the first in a very short series of reviews of music that crossed my path in the last 12 months and which flourishes in corners where the grasping fingers of the industry cannot extinguish them.

Petomane: Top Trumps
Infinite Largesse CDR, ltd to 50 numbered copies, contact petomanepetomane [at] yahoo.co.uk or http://www.myspace.com/petomanesounds

At 34 minutes, Petomane’s Top Trumps is only five minutes longer than Slayer’s deathless 80s touchstone, Reign in Blood. Named for fin de siècle French fart performer Le Pétomane, the group records on the perpetual edge of eruption, threatening to evacuate a plenitude of puns and digital synths. The cover depicts a carney’s time tunnel on a desolate urban playing field promising ‘travel in the year 2000’, and indeed there is a sense that the album has been violently expelled from the middle-distant twentieth century. A 1980s flavour to synths may currently be fashionable, but the Petomane sound is long-established. Taking the album as a whole, the sensation is not one of its having been squeezed through the many sphincters of the past to fall stale in our lap; rather the album sucks the listener up into its dark inner carnival. The setting is something like this: a disco crowd all dolled up for a gig by the Thompson Twins circa 1984 drinking gins and tonics in the plush interior of a velveteen-seated cinema which projects the mid-70s documentary on the Kursaal Flyers trying to buy a pint of milk on tour, and the late-70s Patrick McGoohan medical detective vehicle Rafferty.

The group sent me a document to accompany the music and steer me away from ‘damaging opinions’ on each song. Having cross referenced my notes with theirs, I can confirm that damage will be done: you’ve sent it out into the world now John, nothing can protect your beauties from my brain violence. Besides, coincidence sees their notes inadvertently stealing my best television production company-based pun, so my fidelity is weakened.

‘The Plumber’ lays down the dateline: Climate of Hunter, Blancmange, Peter York, the Cold War – the 1980s are inescapable; yet when the dance beat is halted by furry-hatted Cossacks they bring harmony and the ageless spirit of music rises throughout. ‘Theme from Yellow Glove’ invokes Pan in kino: his marigolds squelching in the fairy liquid, rinsing off the noise and distortion that Clone Guilt is used to and projecting the melody, not in retina-searing digital HD, but the warm tones of Super 8. Breton’s Nadja has a glove like that: I saw it under glass in Tate Modern in 2001 and even in its prophylactic case it was more tactile than the tips of Holger Czukay’s snooker ref mitts. Unlike most pop music, Petomane’s eroticism is well out of the toilet: it has leaked out of the window and into the world – a noble influence on our nation’s children.

Too close to their creation to see its Alpine splendour, the esteem in which Petomane’s admirers hold ‘The Dark Night of David Soul’ mystifies the group. ‘You were awful in that German TV thing’ it sings as the music is layered like the overlapping episodes of a lucid dream: the dreamer unwittingly struggling to impose coherence – oh! the moribundity of rationalism. But our insane master Sleep always wins! And it wins with this album: not in its soporific qualities, but in its enclosing the listener in the warm fragrant air of the woozy aftermath of a little too much good food, good wine, the conversation taking a bewildering direction at 4am.

New CDR: The Ideal Form: Fake Mildmay Folk Memory

Some very smart songs recovered from the boxes of tapes left by this old group. This release has haunted Clone Guilt since the beginning: I tried to cancel it, but it would not be exorcised. Finally I have trapped it on the nasty digital format and offer it to the world. To celebrate my ridding myself of this burden, I have sent forth a sampling of songs to the Clone Guilt myspace page to remain there for a while.

I write now from the city of London, city of our Lord Plexiglass. There it is: the uplifting skyline, the gentle tarmac. And there is wild Nature reaching up to greet it. Hello wilderness!

After my previous, morally ambivalent message to you, my doctor, Dragan David Dabic, has posted me some herbs and a stone to calm my sick chi. As a side effect I suffer terrible nightmares of arrogance and self-deception. Perhaps it is only my guilt speaking to me, but as anyone who has poisoned an ants' nest will know, genocide conjures mixed emotions, not all completely upsetting. Maybe we just need to know where to draw the line; as my doctor said, 'Don't kill the bees. Bees are blessed, living beings and deserve to be saved.' A noble sentiment. Perhaps I am too corrupt for his alternative techniques. I gave them up after one last disturbing reverie.

At the age of sixteen, in my school's computer room, I was accused of setting my sights on turning the key in the lock that kept the power for all the school's primitive computers on. My sight was indeed fixed on the key, but – being English and middle class – I would never do such a thing. I learnt very soon in life that I would literally rather die than draw attention to myself (an attitude that leads to some interesting manoeuvres on the cycle path). However, the end of the world is clearly like a kind of drunkenness where no embarrassment can fix itself to me, so in the server room at Cern I pulled a plug, willing an end to the power behind the black hole and the desacrilisation of life's mysteries.

The underground tunnel from Cern into France took some peculiar turns and the humming, metallic curving route gradually gave way to a more organic, less well lit passageway. Despite having no conception of day or night – the Las Vegas lighting of Cern faded to a dim mossy glow with an odour that predated the Air Wick plug in – I felt as though I walked for days. In the end it was only the light from my digital watch that illuminated the markings on the cavern wall: the bull, the horse, the armed men. From Cern to Lascaux is hundreds of miles and thousands of years, but they both feed on the same energies under the European soil. Man's enquiry into Nature has ever been – and continues – hidden from plain view: dangerous and on an awesome scale. Whatever its funding, The Large Hadron Collider draws its energy directly from the Lascaux bull. Awake now in London-upon-Plexiglass, it is clear that whether the black holes swallow us or not, the Cern bull is not one to remain concealed.

Hello reader, I am writing to you, my peers of forty years hence, from the tumultuous May days of 1968. I came here direct from City Hall on the evening of the London Mayoral elections of 2008 in an attempt to travel to the London of 1666. My plan was simple: meet Pepys, hang out with him while taking some Polaroids of The Great Fire, turn him on to Aleister Crowley and Adam Smith, and make a killing from those lucrative post-fire plague-free construction projects in the City. I rejected out of hand the tired trick of setting up a bank account in 1666 and withdrawing the interest in 1996 – even if only to give The Male Nurse a decent record contract (no offence to Guided Missile) and invent Google. What I couldn't work out with this time-travel-drama-chestnut is firstly, how I would be able to convince the bank of my identity upon withdrawal, and secondly, how to safeguard against the bank's closing of my account and seizing of the funds sometime around 1789 when the account holder would quite reasonably be considered deceased. I had initially hoped to visit the fifth century BC (or BCE, if you must), if only to rip off some ideas from the lost tragedies of Aeschylus, but my grasp of conversational Attic Greek is even worse than my mid-20th century French, so I opted for the 1600s – a century to which I already owe a great debt, thanks to its bestowing of such great success on the recorded venture which took its name (see my update of February 2007). How exactly I would be repaying such a debt in attempting to make a necromancing property developer out of Samuel Pepys is a secret I will take to the grave. For now anyway.

Well reader, at least one of you has complained to me of the lamentable infrequency of my musical bulletins on these pages. Why indeed go to the trouble of creating a website that can be viewed anywhere in the world only to let it stagnate? To which I respond:– "Jesus! haven't you seen the internet? it's still stuck in 1996 with its solipsistic anally retentive pages and pages of NOTHING! Why pick on me?!" It is true though: Clone Guilt's promises of almost a year ago have not borne fruit; the child-muses that possess The Seventeenth Century have been quiet. In the meantime I have been conducting experiments in the correct combination of notes that will summon the ancient palace of lights that serves as my portal to the very real past. The terrible chords and clusters that are made in the process are too awe-full to notate: there are sounds that should not be, and I fear the written score would summon them permanently into existence. Consequently, I have been struck by an unshakable fear of committing my music to tape – and of recorded music in general. The spirits I summon tell me that our individual legacies will not last; they shriek at me: "HOMER WAS NOT ONE MAN!"

So for the time being I am stranded in 1968. I left your century with my heart full of optimism at the certainty that the London Mayoral elections had been won decisively by the Green Party, birthing with the coming dawn a new golden age of Natural wonder, but just as I was departing I heard a voice cry "nah mate, they'll only get seven thousand six hundred and sixty-three more votes than the BNP", and with that I struck a jarring note on my lute which took me three hundred and two years ahead of my intended destination.

Reader, I ache to tell you of the sights I see first-hand, uncoloured by the false memories and hindsights of soixante-huitard commentators, of the palpable feeling of self-possession and mastery of the collective destiny, of a world where a return to the pre-existing hierarchies is not considered inevitable. Unfortunately I materialised in Berwick-Upon-Tweed and am geographically as far from the action as I felt temporally in 2008. If I hadn't stuffed my pockets with seventeenth century currency, I might have been able to catch a ferry to the continent; instead, I sit and plot the reclamation of Berwick by Scotland until my musical spell is broken and I wake up with a diabolic hangover and my hair caught up in the spools of my four-track.

The Tenant compiled an album. He has not bothered to publicise it.

cloneguilt.co.uk established.

For its free music hosting, http://www.myspace.com/cloneguilt now exists.

The Tenant's Sick Cure for Bomber's Scapegoat EP completed. Click link for details.

The Beale's session for the Kosmische show on Resonance FM available for download (now hosted by thebeale.co.uk).

First release: a ninety minute cassette album containing twenty-two songs written between 1996 and 2000 and recorded between 1997 and 2001. Tape mixed and mastered June 2003 as a necessary kathartic measure against the horrors of nostalgia.

Top of page

Contact Clone Guilt:
email: perkyn [at] cloneguilt.co.uk

If every epoch creates the art it deserves, then stop worrying and put that Best of Indie Blanket record back on while you get your glittery face ready for the 30th anniversary reunion tour of The Palm Vipers performing their seminal third album from 1984, Mould Silo, because there is nothing you can do about it.

Time moves on and encases us in a coffin of redundant technology. Only a fool would attempt to record online radio on to cassette tape. Reader! I was that fool! Clone Guilt is carrying on regardless. In the book world these releases would be regarded as vanity publishing, in the music world it is DIY.


Escape Routes:

Clone Guilt at 'myspace'

The Home Secretary
He makes the act of putting on his dressing gown appear as a gesture of defiance!

The Beale

Red Atlas

Signals Magazine
Contemporary poetry. No advertising, no Arts Council funding, no lapse in quality control, no sell out.