No Pain In Pop

Ballardry : sounds of sonic fiction

“Ultrasonic music, employing a vastly greater range of octaves, chords and chromatic scales than are audible by the human ear, provided a direct neural link between the sound stream and the auditory lobes, generating an apparently sourceless sensation of harmony, rhythm, cadence and melody uncontaminated by the noise and vibration of audible music.”

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Tags: audiogeography, burial, jg ballard

I shot Andy Warhol but I did not shoot Telepathe

Poor pun. It doesn’t even make sense. But sometimes things that make no sense can sound out clearer than those that do. So here’s a refix of Valerie Solanas beat between sentiment from gleefully naive no-wave youths… S.C.U.M.

Read On…

“Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore…”

London is becoming stale, stuck in monochrome. The scene fashioned by the Horrors but to whom ‘the Horrors’ is now a dirty word is caught up in its own inertia, dressing in its own clothes, trapped in black and white. Against this b(l)ackground, S.C.U.M play a no-wave garage psyche seemingly in with ‘the scene’ yet strangely detached. They stick out like a well dressed sore thumb as they have one special, special quality; in a time of affluence and boredom they are exciting.

“Males are emotional cripples…”

S.C.U.M. are self-confessed “sentimentalists and seditionaries”. Thomas is the frontman. Bradley plays machines, Samuel synth, Huw bass and Ruaridh drums. They’re all from South London, in their teens, and at that weird crossroad point where they carry both a clear conception of the music they want to create and the impudence to care not whether anyone else likes nor understands it.

They don’t really like anyone else but themselves. “Who do I believe in..? Myself, love, and darkness”, says Tom, speaking to the sky and then his feet. “And shoes”.

“It’s not ego satisfaction…”

Their live shows center on Tom throwing reverbed vocals and slow motion poses over a pounding wall of sound. They kind of sound like a live Suicide, but not as much as they sound like live self-harm.

Looking beautiful and acting up, some will no doubt dismiss them as fulfilling every Selfish Cunt cliché possible. Others will find them exhilarating; a mess of youth and machines running together, an elegance with industry.

“It’s organized noise, organized disorganization, controlled noise,” snots Sam, “but anyone who says its just noise obviously doesn’t understand the dynamics of how we make music”.

“The effect of fathers, in sum, has been to corrode the world…”

S.C.U.M. are musicians who claim no musical influence. Instead, they take inspiration from Vivienne Westwood, feedback and themselves. “We like reverb and delay”, says frontman Tom, “we like to get lost in sound rather than chord changes”.

“Eventually S.C.U.M. will take over the airwaves…”

Their plans for the next six months are to “creatively develop until the point of complete satisfaction”. Of course they mean self-satisfaction, but sometimes passion, pretense and poise can be worth more than product.

“The Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene, that is, it has an incomplete set of chromosomes. The male is an incomplete female… a walking abortion.”

Yes Valerie, maybe they do lack a chromosome each. But what they lack they more than make up for in bollocks…

S.C.U.M. Manifesto, Valerie Solanas, 1968.

http://www.myspace.com/scum1968

Written for the June edition of TANK magazine.

Tags: s.c.u.m