Personal
punk report for this month. Things are alright. I’m still a punk because punk
is still something real close to what I am. For more details continue reading.
It is fun to launch my mind on a late afternoon cruise among punk sounds, ideas and the result of how some ideas sound. Rakta played here a transcendental set, flavored with burning out smoke sticks and lots of reverb. Their sound was more of an idea than a recipe for manufacturing music. I really don’t like and neither believe when bands pretended that the music what they do is totally coincidental. If you like music you can and should know how your band sounds, at least you should tell how you wanted it to sound. It doesn’t mean that your music is not visceral. Preplanning not always ends up in being pretentious. I say this but Rakta makes music in unique and dreamy way that is more than an idea that could be scripted so easily. Their set was great and the whole event was filled with good vibes. Except for assholes who wanted to or successfully did sneak in at the door. Way to make a scene stop running, fucking posers.
This month the rambling continues because I realized that this is a punk fanzine in which my task is to write about the punk I experience and probably/hopefully this is what people are expecting from me to do. I started getting hooked on a Hungarian writer who says great things are more than what was put into them. Meaning a sentence is more than just an order of letters and a story is more than a structure of sentences. Just like punk music is so much more than amateurishly executed songs from frustrated kids to frustrated kids. It’s us and the way how we cope with reality.
It’s December and that really embarrassing period of the year starts again when I have to go through the whole year’s releases, searching more focused for non-usa/japan/spain/Scandinavia bands. Why? Because I believe that every year all the time amazing punk is happening and I wanna hear it, I don’t wanna lock myself out of it even if I had tons of fun this year with spending endless hours on listening to yugoslavian hardcore, italian raging filth punx and french ultra violent amphetamine-core. It’s still true that those bands are slightly better because they did not give a damn about making it, about being included in anyone’s YETT in MRR or being put on any blogs that is the channel of hype in the basement world. They were free, being cut loose and this is what I miss from most of the bands today. Contemporary punk is good, great, giving me what I want but today most of my browsing was spent on staring at pictures of skinheads posing on the front covers of hardcore records. I remember I said Oi! is great, stomping is fun but this is the end of the year when I have to focus on what was the best, greatest thing this year. Hardcore is more than music, it is communication, even if it’s dumb as fuck it has to say something unique, individual and interesting to me. Even in the most aggressive, catatonic noise there should be a levitating power that makes me feel as great as if I were encountering something utterly beautiful. But there is nothing in perfectly reproducing a recipe. In perfection there is no humanity, only mistakes are personal and punk is really personal because it’s based on glorifying mistakes. I want to hear the best mistakes because fuck you, punk is fucking sick and it’s the best entertainment.
It is fun to launch my mind on a late afternoon cruise among punk sounds, ideas and the result of how some ideas sound. Rakta played here a transcendental set, flavored with burning out smoke sticks and lots of reverb. Their sound was more of an idea than a recipe for manufacturing music. I really don’t like and neither believe when bands pretended that the music what they do is totally coincidental. If you like music you can and should know how your band sounds, at least you should tell how you wanted it to sound. It doesn’t mean that your music is not visceral. Preplanning not always ends up in being pretentious. I say this but Rakta makes music in unique and dreamy way that is more than an idea that could be scripted so easily. Their set was great and the whole event was filled with good vibes. Except for assholes who wanted to or successfully did sneak in at the door. Way to make a scene stop running, fucking posers.
This month the rambling continues because I realized that this is a punk fanzine in which my task is to write about the punk I experience and probably/hopefully this is what people are expecting from me to do. I started getting hooked on a Hungarian writer who says great things are more than what was put into them. Meaning a sentence is more than just an order of letters and a story is more than a structure of sentences. Just like punk music is so much more than amateurishly executed songs from frustrated kids to frustrated kids. It’s us and the way how we cope with reality.
It’s December and that really embarrassing period of the year starts again when I have to go through the whole year’s releases, searching more focused for non-usa/japan/spain/Scandinavia bands. Why? Because I believe that every year all the time amazing punk is happening and I wanna hear it, I don’t wanna lock myself out of it even if I had tons of fun this year with spending endless hours on listening to yugoslavian hardcore, italian raging filth punx and french ultra violent amphetamine-core. It’s still true that those bands are slightly better because they did not give a damn about making it, about being included in anyone’s YETT in MRR or being put on any blogs that is the channel of hype in the basement world. They were free, being cut loose and this is what I miss from most of the bands today. Contemporary punk is good, great, giving me what I want but today most of my browsing was spent on staring at pictures of skinheads posing on the front covers of hardcore records. I remember I said Oi! is great, stomping is fun but this is the end of the year when I have to focus on what was the best, greatest thing this year. Hardcore is more than music, it is communication, even if it’s dumb as fuck it has to say something unique, individual and interesting to me. Even in the most aggressive, catatonic noise there should be a levitating power that makes me feel as great as if I were encountering something utterly beautiful. But there is nothing in perfectly reproducing a recipe. In perfection there is no humanity, only mistakes are personal and punk is really personal because it’s based on glorifying mistakes. I want to hear the best mistakes because fuck you, punk is fucking sick and it’s the best entertainment.
People
around me say I make too much noise. My ex roommate usually laughed on me while
I was playing a record, listening to something on my laptop, watching a youtube
video and playing on my guitar all at the same time. More than anything this is
an experiment. It’s being stoned at a weekday night laying alone in my bed and
getting hooked again on hardcore. Starting from Underdog and ending up at the
Skullflowers, watching countries, eras, sounds blend together, missing
something all the time, always wanting more. I want everything from 2014.
One long sentence: Probably one of the best records this year is White Wards – Cigarette Burns, the name of the lp, the art, the sounds, all those little pieces coming together gently for making something aggressively disgusting, power house of universal noise, noise that is from everywhere while it is not deconstruction of sounds that are reconstructed in one band but all those feelings what triggered great scenes, sounds are present here as well. There are joints within Die Kreuzen and Mars and through these a hungry mind could travel really far. So good how here evidential parts are beyond the music and only the possibility exists because White Wards always uses some other ways to maintain this confusion. What made bands like Cold Sweat brilliant lives on in White Wards it’s the combination of confident, maniac pace that wildly flows into familiar disturbance let it be anything that is a ragtag company of deviated sounds. It’s total hardcore.
Another band that is total, meaning they pick their sounds from the full spectrum of music is Total Control. The more I listen to their second LP the deeper I’m sinking among the many layers of their music, and sometimes I start to wonder why it is called punk music, while there is no other definition that could fit their music better. It’s everything, it’s so full of ideas while the songs have a sort of simple form, but they sound as the band have listened to everything and from that experience they have created this. This peaks out from music while music backs it up, lifts it up to rise and shine. They merge feelings, they can do whatever they want it’s just perfect. They are silent about many things this is why this record carries a literature component as well because to write a novel is to be silent about many things, and while Total Control could be anything they have chosen to be just a perfect form, which is detailed, thought out and sort of controlled but within this overlooked platform they seem to have enough freedom from bright creativity.
There was Ivy there was Good Throb, guitar sounds that were flinging around in my brain all year merging cool filth from all over the basement universe, demonstrating the wonders of using that punk kick when both bands’ music is coming from a fragile nest and from this they build up a brave, reckless, cynical structure of notes. The careless execution of perfect punk is so vivid and unstoppable on these records that it makes me want to roll around in filth. I loved the confident, solid strength in Good Throbs music that thought that they were so sure about their voice which divides into the gut punching angst that is gathered up in a form of pure bile thanks to the nauseating side effects of living in today’s society and how the music is magically falling apart everywhere all the time. This state of tearing apart the noise makes their music be able to fit any state of mind, time of the day, or taste. It’s hardcore, sure, but then there is the elevating chorus of Psycho Disco that is some end state of guitar playing perfection for a punk, for broken ears and exhausted minds. It’s brilliant and fun, fun, fun. Just like Ivy with gathering together many bright minds to create this cultish band, no V is replacing any U, by cult I mean as a reflection of America’s craziness that was once perfectly captured by Saccharine Trust. They too sound as a sewer gang would got together to paint a sonic portrait of everything let it be everyday impotent or lurking around psychopaths, lurching serial killers, their operation is like scripting an underground pamphlet read by everyone since it reports the malformed reality. Their guitars are like a guitar robe which is slinging on the body priest on psychedelic drugs performing a black celebration. Helicopters above our heads, bugs in our phones, Ivy is living, it’s forming, it bursts out. They bring back the real filth of New York when hardcore was dangerous even when it was played by slim nerds.
The sad thing is you have all known this already. There’s got to be bands all around the world just as good as the ones above. Not better, more real or anything but just as good.
For example local Hungarian high school kids choose to spend a fraction of their free time in rehearsal rooms rather than just hang out. They have recorded and put out a kick ass demo. They are called Youth Sucks and they rip. If Hungarian kids are capable to create raging, fractured, loud, distorted music everyone else could. It isn’t banned in any country to learn some notes on guitar, listen to music through the internet or anything. At some countries it is but I guess most of MRR readers are in a luckier position. Yes the infrastructure is not always accessible but Nervous Breakdown was recorded through an amp that did not need distortion because it was already there. And since there is no excuse for bands to be not good there shouldn’t be excuse for those who write history to cover the stories of every band everywhere. There is no scientific reason why is some countries are better in producing music than other ones it’s just those scenes got the cover. This makes other countries want the cover for themselves too badly they start to reproduce the hyped sounds. This leads into some terrible shit if you are not from Japan. Then it will be the best, next level, another universe mutant sound, But Japan is just a little island so far away from almost anything. Still they were able to gain fame. We know everything that is written by someone else, we use channels, scientists, report. MRR is one of them and the bizarre thing is that even I know lesser about the whole punk universe than anyone else who lives in SF and could hang at the compound, browse through the archive anytime they want. Thus the responsibility is on all of us who have this surface and this is why I’m having half fun half work to go through this years punk. While doing that I should say that I got two killer released in Berlin from this really nice guy called Asaf. One is his release called VVhile from either/or/both Serbia/Macedonia. They mix together shoegaze dreaminess with late era Dischord post everything. If I remember right they have some kind of connection to Bernay’s Propaganda who I say last year and played an amazing set of mutant disco punk. It’s not just quality music but the cover art is sick too. A bit too tidy for my filth loving ear but after all it’s original and fun.
The other material I got is his band called Shifka Chiefs, hailing from Israel. It’s knife sharp guitars mixed together with intentional dumbness and lots of pure energy. It’s nerdy garage music focused more on being creative in playing the guitar than in mixing drugs and booze in yourself. Again I’m with the falling apart sounds so if everybody says you should tune in your guitar please record your set and send it to me one way or another. As it happened today when a band called American Hate messaged me because they want to play here. They are from Oklahoma and play the classic total craziness of the mid-west, locked out-locked in acid drinking bad vision fest. Guitars are going off crazy, drums are unstoppable, the singer chants like a fucking maniac, they cover a Devo song, there is feedback, this could fit into a genre but would stand out from there, because there is something else to their sound, maybe it’s a calm state to know they won’t be recognized thus they could blow out their sound anyway they want it, this feels like sweating for nothing, going to sleep while hungry or wanting to barf after overeating yourself. It’s too less and too much, and I have never ever heard of this fucking band. Now use your fucking fingers and write me about the best nightmares guitar pop bands from Italy, about total hardcore attack from Latvian about anything from anywhere.
One long sentence: Probably one of the best records this year is White Wards – Cigarette Burns, the name of the lp, the art, the sounds, all those little pieces coming together gently for making something aggressively disgusting, power house of universal noise, noise that is from everywhere while it is not deconstruction of sounds that are reconstructed in one band but all those feelings what triggered great scenes, sounds are present here as well. There are joints within Die Kreuzen and Mars and through these a hungry mind could travel really far. So good how here evidential parts are beyond the music and only the possibility exists because White Wards always uses some other ways to maintain this confusion. What made bands like Cold Sweat brilliant lives on in White Wards it’s the combination of confident, maniac pace that wildly flows into familiar disturbance let it be anything that is a ragtag company of deviated sounds. It’s total hardcore.
Another band that is total, meaning they pick their sounds from the full spectrum of music is Total Control. The more I listen to their second LP the deeper I’m sinking among the many layers of their music, and sometimes I start to wonder why it is called punk music, while there is no other definition that could fit their music better. It’s everything, it’s so full of ideas while the songs have a sort of simple form, but they sound as the band have listened to everything and from that experience they have created this. This peaks out from music while music backs it up, lifts it up to rise and shine. They merge feelings, they can do whatever they want it’s just perfect. They are silent about many things this is why this record carries a literature component as well because to write a novel is to be silent about many things, and while Total Control could be anything they have chosen to be just a perfect form, which is detailed, thought out and sort of controlled but within this overlooked platform they seem to have enough freedom from bright creativity.
There was Ivy there was Good Throb, guitar sounds that were flinging around in my brain all year merging cool filth from all over the basement universe, demonstrating the wonders of using that punk kick when both bands’ music is coming from a fragile nest and from this they build up a brave, reckless, cynical structure of notes. The careless execution of perfect punk is so vivid and unstoppable on these records that it makes me want to roll around in filth. I loved the confident, solid strength in Good Throbs music that thought that they were so sure about their voice which divides into the gut punching angst that is gathered up in a form of pure bile thanks to the nauseating side effects of living in today’s society and how the music is magically falling apart everywhere all the time. This state of tearing apart the noise makes their music be able to fit any state of mind, time of the day, or taste. It’s hardcore, sure, but then there is the elevating chorus of Psycho Disco that is some end state of guitar playing perfection for a punk, for broken ears and exhausted minds. It’s brilliant and fun, fun, fun. Just like Ivy with gathering together many bright minds to create this cultish band, no V is replacing any U, by cult I mean as a reflection of America’s craziness that was once perfectly captured by Saccharine Trust. They too sound as a sewer gang would got together to paint a sonic portrait of everything let it be everyday impotent or lurking around psychopaths, lurching serial killers, their operation is like scripting an underground pamphlet read by everyone since it reports the malformed reality. Their guitars are like a guitar robe which is slinging on the body priest on psychedelic drugs performing a black celebration. Helicopters above our heads, bugs in our phones, Ivy is living, it’s forming, it bursts out. They bring back the real filth of New York when hardcore was dangerous even when it was played by slim nerds.
The sad thing is you have all known this already. There’s got to be bands all around the world just as good as the ones above. Not better, more real or anything but just as good.
For example local Hungarian high school kids choose to spend a fraction of their free time in rehearsal rooms rather than just hang out. They have recorded and put out a kick ass demo. They are called Youth Sucks and they rip. If Hungarian kids are capable to create raging, fractured, loud, distorted music everyone else could. It isn’t banned in any country to learn some notes on guitar, listen to music through the internet or anything. At some countries it is but I guess most of MRR readers are in a luckier position. Yes the infrastructure is not always accessible but Nervous Breakdown was recorded through an amp that did not need distortion because it was already there. And since there is no excuse for bands to be not good there shouldn’t be excuse for those who write history to cover the stories of every band everywhere. There is no scientific reason why is some countries are better in producing music than other ones it’s just those scenes got the cover. This makes other countries want the cover for themselves too badly they start to reproduce the hyped sounds. This leads into some terrible shit if you are not from Japan. Then it will be the best, next level, another universe mutant sound, But Japan is just a little island so far away from almost anything. Still they were able to gain fame. We know everything that is written by someone else, we use channels, scientists, report. MRR is one of them and the bizarre thing is that even I know lesser about the whole punk universe than anyone else who lives in SF and could hang at the compound, browse through the archive anytime they want. Thus the responsibility is on all of us who have this surface and this is why I’m having half fun half work to go through this years punk. While doing that I should say that I got two killer released in Berlin from this really nice guy called Asaf. One is his release called VVhile from either/or/both Serbia/Macedonia. They mix together shoegaze dreaminess with late era Dischord post everything. If I remember right they have some kind of connection to Bernay’s Propaganda who I say last year and played an amazing set of mutant disco punk. It’s not just quality music but the cover art is sick too. A bit too tidy for my filth loving ear but after all it’s original and fun.
The other material I got is his band called Shifka Chiefs, hailing from Israel. It’s knife sharp guitars mixed together with intentional dumbness and lots of pure energy. It’s nerdy garage music focused more on being creative in playing the guitar than in mixing drugs and booze in yourself. Again I’m with the falling apart sounds so if everybody says you should tune in your guitar please record your set and send it to me one way or another. As it happened today when a band called American Hate messaged me because they want to play here. They are from Oklahoma and play the classic total craziness of the mid-west, locked out-locked in acid drinking bad vision fest. Guitars are going off crazy, drums are unstoppable, the singer chants like a fucking maniac, they cover a Devo song, there is feedback, this could fit into a genre but would stand out from there, because there is something else to their sound, maybe it’s a calm state to know they won’t be recognized thus they could blow out their sound anyway they want it, this feels like sweating for nothing, going to sleep while hungry or wanting to barf after overeating yourself. It’s too less and too much, and I have never ever heard of this fucking band. Now use your fucking fingers and write me about the best nightmares guitar pop bands from Italy, about total hardcore attack from Latvian about anything from anywhere.
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