27.01.12 - 10:36pm
That restless C Joynes has been nice enough to include thee Um pop hit Evil in a mix for The Liminal. Presumably the first & last time anyone will mix my stuff with Burial. Haven’t listened to all of it but Joynes is a safe pair of hands with a mixtape, basically.
17.01.12 - 03:53pm
If I ever wrote for The Wire I like to think it would read a bit like a cross between Clive Bell and Byron Coley, the former for his warmth and lucidity and the latter because he’s fuckin’ Byron Coley, dude! But that’s just what I like to think. Anyway, Mr Coley wrote something about something I did ages ago, it occurs to me now, and Mr Bell has recently done me the honour too. I’m really pleased with this review, so thanks very much.
**************************************
Pete Um
Can’t Get Started
Grist 0005
It takes a while to enter Pete Um’s world: his songs are brief, dense and ramshackle; he revels in a reviewer’s dismissal of his live act as “grindingly awkward shithop”, and wears his self-doubt on his sleeve. Can’t Get Started is an ironic title, for Um is prolific across videos, blogs and music. But this 10″, a condensed Best Of, is a remarkable, coherent document, an excellent introduction to Um’s misfit creativity. Whoever compiled this, possibly associate Nochexxx, interviewed alongside Um for an article mapping the Alternative Cambridge music scene (The Wire 325) – has selected melancholy gems rather than eccentric freakouts. These 17 songs don’t waste your time, and repeated listenings underscore Um’s talent for crafting poetic vehicles carrying memories of Holger Czukay and Syd Barrett.
One of Barrett’s last songs was “Wolfpack”, and here is Um’s “Wolves”, in which the pursuing pack seems to be music itself. In spite of its howling and chanting, the song is delicate, a study of vulnerability. The subject recurs in “Built To Spill”, and “You Will Never Let Me Fall” has Syd-alike vocals, bathed in reverb and quivering guitar: “I’m a slow bomb, I’m a sad boy, but I will cure myself before you cure me.” Once you accept Um’s ad hoc working methods, realisation dawns that there isn’t a weak track here, and if there’s a fault, it’s that everything is too short. Um has an answer for that too: the sexual innuendo of “That’s Too Close”, in which a girl with sparkly lipstick chides him for not making his songs longer.
Clive Bell.
**************************************
Oh yeah, hopefully there’ll be some actual real-life online record stores carrying this effort soon too, which is partly why I’m writing this, but if it isn’t embarrassing to buy your emotional ruin porn direct and you use the evil that is paypal or have some other clever suggestion then leave a comment or pete[dot]um[at]ntlworld[dot]com or however you’re supposed to express that. It’s going to be roughly £8 before p&p if yr in the UK, & if you wanted to talk about deals on CD-Rs to go with it you will find me very amenable.
01.01.12 - 10:55am
Hey guys,
ha, floppy own-brand tortilla chips, peanuts and Lilt and vodka (just a very small medical dash for my damaged tropical child) for breakfast. Happy New Year. Can’t sleep so let my betters rest. A guitar string just pinged on the wall so I must be Accompanied.
I don’t know if you use Discogs but I do and I like it. I’m not one of those psychedelic revolutionaries that acts like a soul-smarm priest who’s pretending he hasn’t got anything in his underpants. I have baby, it’s here. I believe in the meta-fundamentals of the market. I believe in the Big Deal, it is holy to me. If a has it, and b wants it, then so be it and let’s haggle the fucker across. We are good creatures, don’t get me wrong, and people forget it and then get all pious when someone helps a brother out as if it isn’t written into us like hunger, violence and sorrow, but in that sense humans are alright and can’t help but help. Ants help ants, wolves howl for the chase, Biiiig Issue etc. Yeah, but fuck the Old Ways and Record Collector and that. My The Best Of Abba used to say £40 in the Book, but, uh, the internets is grease for human souls and the funny thing about capitalism, cos all human history is irony, is that which is finessed is also almost complete & thus over, man. What I mean is the web is The Final Auction, and that goes for eBay as much as Tahrir square or whatever. OK.
So, if you’re still with me, or ever were, then here is a racing tip for the lowest common denominator written on a peice of internet paper. Our pal Si, you shall know him by his name up there, has got at least one copy of Tripel 004 going at £2. Now I don’t cast aspersions on Simon, because of what I’ve said above, and because he is someone who both likes to live simply and also used to run an online shop, and since the two are incompatible the former will inevitably win out over the latter, thank goodness fror his sake. Tripel 004?, I hear you ask in your unripe foolishness, like dogs questioning the unlikely appearance of the Ace in the great fucking help of the sleight of hand! Well, way back when when there was no history of that to make a mad old man tell it like this now, yer Dave, my fucking Dave, in his Gold-souled wish for something more meaningful than what’s measured in money, stumped up for the Split. A thousand fucking pounds. Mastered by the fucking Faroe Goodiepal on a reel-to-reel (he says) according to his special specifications. Dubplates & Mastering. A picture disc. Designed by Animals On Wheels. Me half-cut in an amusment arcade in Padstow throwing it down like a Maori warrior or some PNG shit. It’s all fucking grist. Two Thousand & Five, Dave on the concrete tip, the audio derive through the raw tripped-out beauty of sound, where even TV cookshows can get souffled into something just-so that the absence of words leaves your dumb face in a squinch whilst your mind races for HELP. You know James Ferraro? Well, it’s not like that music-wise but it isn’t just the chefs. I feel this strongly. There’s a blankness, an overloadedness of symbols, that was in the recipe. Play the records side by side. Mix them together perhaps. And yeah, it’s half a giraffe of probably the best thing I ever did or will. I’m on Discogs, and you can buy the CD-R off me for not-a-penny-less than 5 quid, and it might be the complete thing, but that record is All Gold, solid fucking gold, and the only reason you don’t know it is because nobody told you, but I’m telling you now.
So, what I’m asking you to do, is please buy the record off Simon. I think the market value is more like £4.50, at least, so you’d be getting a good deal. We still live under a capitalist system, but this is a time of renewal, traditionally. Why not make it your first symbolic purchase of 2012? Please.
Thankyou,
Pete
19.12.11 - 10:57pm
Looking forward to heading west to catch up with the man Ergo Phizmiz to play this thing. Also going to catch up with The Trickster, which is always a pleasure. I remember at college he was the only person I’d ever met who knew how to cook food.
19.12.11 - 10:55pm
Some rare thing of me I didn’t upload myself. Seems to be a bit big, the beginning’s fluffed and I forget the words at one point but there is a stupid hat and some local celebs so I have archived it here.
17.12.11 - 10:02pm
Bless my favourite Shirt for writing nice things about the new record and the general daft gesamtkunstwerk.
8< 8< 8< 8<
PETE UM: "CAN'T GET STARTED"
Can't get started.
Where to start?
Don't get me started.
Magic; let's talk about magic. Pete Um as magician; a Pocket Gin-and-tonic Conjurer. A man for all seasons, a mobile intelligent one-man unit. A bag of ice in his pocket, his heart on his sleeve. A good magician never reveals the secrets that sit beneath their tricks; but the best magicians reveal theirs as part of the trick - they pretend to show you the hidden infrastructural underpinnings - and still make you gasp. And so it is that UM presents us with a series of seemingly normal objects - items for us to examine - does this thing with his imaginary songwriter's hand - a gesture that's the musician's equivalent of the white-gloved observe! - the preamble, the pre-reveal, the precursor to behold!, the bit where they invite an audience-member up on stage to acknowledge there is nothing odd or different or out-of-the-ordinary about this hat / pair of handcuffs / length of rope - how could their be?- "look how normal it seems" (Now, nod and agree. Thank you.) - and Pete, when he prepares to sing (or when one of his tracks sits there patiently on a platter of vinyl, a layer of ferrous tape, a reflective surface, waiting to be played; about to be played), kinda does the same: he seems to shrug, hestitate, luxuriate in his own seeming insouciance and say "look at how short, how superficially simple these things - these songs - appear to be. How ordinary, how normal - are we not all agreed then that there is nothing special about them? Nothing supernatural?"
But then he starts - the song starts - and the magic floods out. A minute-and-a-bit later, it finishes and we realise we've been tricked. Hoodwinked. "But that's..."
It's magic!
Next time, we swear, we won't be fooled. We'll watch more carefully. This is easy; I've got it now; just pay attention and we'll spot how he did it. No probs. You won't get us this time.
Ah...damn. He did it again.
And again.
"My shelving collapses from records I chase."
In the same way that a stage-magician pulls you in - makes you look where he wants you to look - we're wrong-footed, we don't get what we expected. He pretends to apologise, to stumble, be unsure - he's like bloody Tommy Cooper or something - but that's just stage-craft, see? That's magic - Ooops! What's this? - an ironing-board, pulled out of a hat, a ping-pong-ball pops out from a nostril. Oh! It's...it's a play on words, a sour observation, a moment I can never have back. You think he can't possibly surprise you any more - you think you've got his measure now, but - behold! - ah, no...that's, uh...
Each song is a world in miniature, a slice of his life (and yours), a mood, a series of micro-observations, little letters hand-written in biro on a letter from the heart. The voice, the words, the delivery...they draw you in, like the magician's white-gloved hand: the voice, close-mic'd / densely compressed / often multi-tracked - the listener is in the singer's throat now - inhabiting the song / the moment / the feeling - and it's like living inside a cavern, the uvula like some monstrous stalactite, a sculpture - and we are drawn do-o-o-own into each tiny sound-world, gasping when we emerge, breathless, on the other side. We blink in the sunlight, sit and exhale on the little bit of vinyl that sits, unscored, between tracks. "Huh? What..what just happened then?" But while we're in there, while we're in the midst of things - while we're being hypnotised - we grin, gurn and cringe with pleasure and not-quite-pleasure with each, uh...at the recognition of emotional states we can't quite put a name to - that maybe we don't want to - we laugh at our own recognition of the ordinary, at how it's been refurnished and sold back to us - we shudder at his bravery, at his nerve, his openness, his willingness to entertain at his own expense. We applaud ourselves for listening. It's like...being dragged through a word-hedge backwards, then forwards, then back again, each time a different view, different sensations, different soft and scratchy bits...at the end of it all, our skin itches, our faces are flushed, we laugh with exhilaration. And relief.
It's magic!
How did he do that?
Ten inches. An auto-compiled Greatest Hits, kind of. It's a long story, one partially related in typical Um round-the-houses fashion.
"My fatal flaw."
Sounds...tumble out, sometimes in a superfically haphazzard (is that one 'z' or two?) way, but just as our brains have caught the flow - figured it out (a process that takes approximately 1.19 minutes) - the song has ended, leaving us with the afterglow of recognition - of having figured out the puzzle just as the next one begins. And I think Pete knows this too on some preternatural level and maybe this explains his preferred song-length, except for when he does something different.
And, so...
Queasy, sea-sick existential shanties, sax-blart, ring-tone Casio pings for punctuation, lurching comic-macabre waltzes, a quiet, 'broody' sense of unease, random animal noises, Brechtian interior Nano-Soap-Opera set to groovebox beats and blarps, shuffling vintage drum-machine puhh-chuuft...puh-chffft...lurching Residential riddims, pre-sets reset to a default of Wrong, the one-minute masterpieces of Commercial Album stripped of their shrill hysterical pseudo-Fudd-isms and extended outwards by 25%, 'Anglised' and made new and whole, the vocals replaced by That Voice - that densely dry / wry / I wanna-cry mock-Hancockian world-view, sometimes plaintive, sometimes aggreived, sometimes resigned, sometimes stoned - That Voice which sometimes seems to come from so far Within, yet is equally capable of splaying outwards, of multiplying itself, folding and twisting and warbling its way through modulators and envelopes, helium-chirruping and down-pitching an escape-route out into some impossible, barely imagined Outside: a world - worlds - without end. A shed, a box-room, a lean-to, a spare-room, a bed-sit concertinas ow-ow-ow-ow-outwards, xeroxes itself, becomes crazed permutations and false copies of itself, becomes different, special...
The ordinary is transformed into something...else. The ordinary becomes tender. It's exposed - left hung out to dry - revealed in the cold light of day as...something else.
Behold!
"It's all Grist," he'd say and pull a daft face.
Which is his way of saying, "Give me something - anything - a hankerchief, a ring, a notepad, a bag of ice, some gin - yes, you, sir! - empty out your pockets...give me anything you like, anything you fancy - the first thing you find - and I'll turn it into something...amazing. Something that'll surprise you. I'll turn it into a song."
"Give me a piece of your heart and I'll give you a piece of mine."
********
So, it wasn't just because I was performing with Ergo Phizmiz that I packed my Fez for Bridport lol.
01.12.11 - 11:41am
Precious little point looking for a new Eden when there’s good old John niceing up the webz inna blog style since the FIRST WAVE of classic 2003 UK blogging. Sorry, just being a bit silly cos I warm to John because he has the decency to be taller than me and because to me he represents what Britain is really all about i.e. reggae, Socialism and Psychic TV. Anyway he gave me a sort of double Pete Um live/Can’t Get Started review and I’m grateful. I will quote the Pete Um bit here for my own obsessive archival compulsions but do click the above link so you can read about the don Mark Fell and the carpets and so on.
Pete UM – Can’t Get Started (GRIST 10″)
Another recent gig was the Cambridge Freakz/Exotic Pylon lash up, and bloody great it was too. Pete UM has been around Dissensus for yonks but I’d not really checked his stuff out. So it was very nice of him to travel to a few bus stops away from my new flat and perform for me with a bunch of his mates.
UM does odd little poems/songs/spoken word pieces over electronic backing. They are all short and not like anything else I am aware of. Very “characterful” (I’m resisting saying “quirky” because it’s all very deadpan rather than [ugh!] wacky – and quite right too). Live, he seems very accomplished and at home with his material, whilst being completely ill at ease with the rest of the world. I like that.
I got this 17 track 10″ EP off him at the end of the gig. There was an awkward moment where he wanted to hand it over and I wanted to give him some money. But neither of us is loaded, so what we really wanted was tainted by capitalist relations. Don’t you hate it when that happens?
This is a lovely DIY release with lots of inserts including pink one which describes the unfortunate tale of the project’s creation. Even after that woeful episode had been completed, half of the pressing was lost by the courier en route to UM Towers.
On the pink insert it says “Don’t buy vinyl to support the industry, or the artist. Buy it because you fucking love it”. That’s almost what happened between us that night at The Vortex.
Pete is all over the net but I have yet to find any clue as to how you would get hold of this record. Maybe start here.
When he says here he means here innit.
24.11.11 - 06:06pm
Did some press for a Kubin-related release on Meeuw Muzak. Like shitting blood out of a stone or something.
It sez:
out now
Meeuw Muzak 039
Max Goldt / Felix Kubin / Mark Boombastik: Fog Frog
b/w Max Goldt: Ladies Ladies
7″ single
“The future is female”, announces the well-known homosexual ironist Max Goldt here (on Ladies Ladies) speaking in 1983, long before getting married to a woman and thereby exhibiting a confounding yet admirable internal consistency. This finely-tuned sense of amibiguity will be familiar to those who have followed Goldt’s work as a musician and then an author since the late 70s. He is of course also a noted columnist in the German-speaking world. Here on this record his lyrics and vocals are filleted from the historical timeline for a reconstitution involving the various talents of Mr Kubin and Mr. Boombastik.
Mark Boombastik: musician, singer, DJ and human beatboxer par excellence – giving the frogs something to hop to here on Fog Frog.
Felix Kubin: Ubiquitous celebrity in an alternative universe, but in ours a nebulous presence in the musical underground since the heyday of the Neue Deutsche Welle. A self-professed dadaist, one shouldn’t try and linger too long on a definition for Felix.
He is, however, the wicked svengali whose tendrils traverse time and space to tickle this record into existence, because Side B’s Ladies Ladies, as previously mentioned, is actually a post-feminist pre-ejaculation from way back when, here recently gently re-agitated in the Kubin studio. The 2003 “too-Neubauten” mix (involving electric heater percussion) of Fog Frog has been updated to a more judiciously organized final version, whilst still retaining the original tipsy-sounding recording of the famously discerning Mr Goldt in his hotel room. Aged like a fine wine, perhaps. Indeed the thin pining sounds come from a Fellini-inspired choir of wine-filled glasses. So, the old ladies meet the new frog princes and off they go. Here is the transformation. (Pete Um)
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -
Strongly advise you to check out the first (at least) Max Goldt record on Gagarin.
