ASBO Oskorei

 Here's the new very occasional space for my writing:

ASBO Oskorei

Andrew Nolan Vs Whitehorse & The Body. Andrew Nolan Vs Harms Way

 

I'm on the Tartarus Records pressing of the Whitehorse & The Body record (two different pressings with different track lists)

Available here

CD and cassette version also available (I'm on both of those formats)

I don't think I posted about it but i did a second remix for Chicago titans Harms Way for the tenth anniversary edition of Isolation (the first one being for the PSTHMN 12"in 2019).

Available here, or here if European shipping is cheaper for you

Like Weeds/ Andrew Nolan

 I don't normally agree to preorders but the last few releases have sold out immediately so let's try it this time and see what happens.

Industrial Coast has my split with Tokyo's Like Weeds for sale, ships February 18th, find it here.

In a previous lifetime we did a split together in 1999

Digitally available on my bandcamp and all streaming services from Feb 18th 

Like Weeds brings excellent cold rhythmic electronic angst, if it went further one way it would be power electronics, if went further in another it would be contemporary electronic music.

My side is influenced by my interests in early experimental music, DIY music of the 70s and early 80s, dub, and hip hop. 

Lonely Water

 

New release, tape on Industrial Coast, digital on bandcamp and whatever streaming sites you use. Even Deezer! (i honestly don't know what Deezer is, i just smile everytime i get an e mail letting me know my release is on Deezer. Deezer Nutzerz?)

Eight songs about malevolent water spirits and drowned children, digital version has a remix by New York Digital Hardcore peeps Warcrimes.

My current approach to composing music is to fill every space with overlapping patterns and repeat for four minutes, then go in and ruthlessly edit sections out entirely, reprocess and resample everything and see what's left.

Lonely Water feels less chaotic than Black Creek - though the two are similar - and is born from the same influences; Radiophonic Workshop, hip hop (late 80s, mid 90s, & post 2015 eras), King Tubby/ Scientist/ Prince Jammy dub, Krautrock, late 70s industrial, and German power electronics.

More of this on the horizon.

Dymaxion

 

Dymaxion is out digitally and on vinyl April 26th, vocals by Garbageface, production by me.

Spent about a year going back and forth on this one, the basic idea was about the failures of technology and the myth of progress. Musical backdrop is equal parts sampling and non-sampling depending on the needs.

Here's Garbageface's description:

DYMAXION is an album about the future, seen through the eyes of a forever glitching past. The story starts when The Bomb drops and continues until The Towers fall. In between those two cataclysms, we watch as promises of progress pile up and pile up like newspaper headlines proclaiming victory over evil. 

DYMAXION sees garbageface join forces with Toronto's Wolfagram for a full-length collab — the Wolf's alternate universe boom bap provides a perfect netting to capture and cradle the face's paranoia-soaked pontifications and dot-connections. 

Black Creek

 

Black Creek cassette out now on Seith Communiti, physical here, if you pay for downloads you can buy it direct from Survivalist (embedded above). Or you can just stream it at the usual suspects.

 

This is how Aerin described it:

Following a series of solo releases for Canadian imprint Absurd Exposition, Toronto-based producer ANDREW NOLAN has constructed eight dizzying compositions that fuse elements of super-heavy dub, industrial hip hop and anxiety-ridden synth music into a brutal cosmopolitan synthesis. Black Creek is an attempt at assembling elements of the sonic psychogeography of 1980s Leeds, UK, and then reducing it down to what remains - "Radiophonic Workshop reimagined as a soundsystem," in the artists' own words. The tracks are tinged with a kind of subliminal horror and nauseous miasma, bleeding unwell energies from one track to the next, weaving coldly through uneasy dreamlike ambiance and intense peaks toward a somber epilogue.

Techniques are largely the same as previous releases under my own name -  Oneironautics is made entirely out of the sound of an electronic door locking system - the final form is just different from the three releases on Absurd Exposition.

Zeigarnik Effect is a kind of "this is how i made the recording".

A lot of remixes and collaborations have been done in the last few months. Both Intensive Care albums are complete, Antibodies is being released by Iron Lung and That We Be Made Worthy is being released by Closed Casket Activities.

A few hip hop records i produced should be out at various points through the year. Wait, i haven't posted about that side of my musical life over here have i? I talk about it on the Taker Wide podcast i did a year or two back.

Reigning Cement/ Raining Bullets

Jesse Draxler asked Intensive Care to contribute to his Reigning Cement project, it's up for preorder here

About the concept:

The concept behind the audio portion of Reigning Cement was inspired by an experiment that Draxler participated in a few years ago, in which a group of collage artists were each given the exact same packet of visual assets with which to create a piece. Similarly, Draxler provided each musician on Reigning Cement with the same 34 sonic elements—all recorded in the noisy industrial environment just outside his studio on the edge of Los Angeles. 

About our track:

Bloomer structured Jesse's recordings then I edited (very slightly), reprocessed, and mixed the track,

In keeping with the theme of field recordings we placed a cell phone on the floor of a room and yelled near it, I cut the audio up during mixing to fit.

In keeping with Intensive Care's general themes of voyeurism and the trauma of life in the city the song is about a shooting I was present at ("the only saving grace is we never made eye contact") in November 2019.

Two almost complete Intensive Care recordings are next, one of our standard bass and drums material, one focusing on our more electronic influences.

The pandemic slowed the completion of the first and sped up the impetus to complete the second.

Harm's Way remix

I was very excited to be asked to contribute a remix to Harm's Way - PSTHMN 12" on Closed Casket Activities


Post Human was easily my favourite Angry Guitar record of 2018 and i've been a fan of the band since Isolation was released in 2011.

My goal was to bring out some of the more buried influences in the band's sound to the forefront and create a cold and mechanized military-robots-moshing-in-zero-gravity feel.

Intensive Care new music and shirts

Split 7" with Incinerated is available on Nerve Altar now





and there's a three song flexi available from Holy Mountain Printing that's free when you buy a shirt.




The flexi will be on bandcamp in a month or two packaged with another new Intensive Care record when it's released.

We're currently writing an album for release towards the end of the year, because i'm an idiot i'm teaching myself to play piano because i've decided i want to write everything on piano first. Rest assured it will sound like the same old same old once i transfer it all to bass.

As mentioned above you can buy Intensive Care shirts from Holy Mountain, impress your friends, roll your eyes to the heavens as your co-workers ask uncomfortable questions. Available in colours other than black so you can say "NUH UH!" when your significant other accuses you of only owning one pair of black jeans and 567 black t shirts with bürtal skulls on them.

Do you want anecdotes about the new music?

I met Christoph from Incinerated 20 years ago when Shank toured Australia, they do an incredible cover of an old Shank song on their side of the split.

The Holy Mountain flexi was recorded on a four track cassette deck i found in my neighbours garbage when i was walking my dog about five years ago. All the songs are true tales of woe from my fun working life, PTSD is fun! (It isn't, not at all)

Tour this month

It's been five years since i played more than three shows in a row, let's see if i can still do this.

I had surgery a month ago and i'm not entirely convinced i'm able to do full vocals in the way i usually do, so if you're at a show and it seems a little more instrumental than you're expecting that's the reason.

In case it's not clear we aren't playing the Cambridge show.

A Removal to Elsewhere

New 5 song EP available now, on every digital platform i've ever heard of (except soundcloud) and a number i'm unaware of.

Tapes are available on tour this month and will end up with the usual suspects after we return.

Lyrically it's about the body outlasting the brain and the brain's awareness of its failings, inspired by family members with dementia and dementia type illness and decades of working in mental health.

Musically the process was different than our other releases; between family and employment responsibilities the ability to get in the same room with any regularity was hard to do for most of 2018, so we worked on materially together, took it away and worked on it individually, then reconvened to add more to the material as a duo and complete the tracks.

Full of Hell/ Intensive Care split 7"

A nod to the Bovine Records approach.

Diprivan was written after another shit day in Toronto's ongoing opiod crisis. Harm Reduction and Housing First forever.

Background Music

Available now on Absurd Exposition, 30 minute tape of recycled synths and field recordings, not entirely removed from the material in Intensive Care that isn't bass/ drums/ vocals.

Unfortunately i can't make this available for streaming/ download currently.

Everything has its Price

New Intensive Care record, available here, released on January 26th.

Art by Ashley Hohman.

Two songs, 300 copies, there was a conscious effort after Voyeurism to write a record that was a more  straight forward two guys playing music thing, this is sort of that.

The songs on this record deal with the anxieties created by living in modern cities.

Our Earth's Blood

New release on Survivalist, available here. 

Pro-recorded and mastered 90 minute Bastard Noise tape with side long collaborations with Hiroshi Hasegawa (Astro, C.C.C.C.) and Facialmess.

It came out pretty great if i do say so myself.

Cheap shipping options available.

Seek the Way Amidst the Ruins

I recently did a remix for Toronto guitar drone ensemble Gates.

My approach was to take elements from the original track and rebuild it with new processing, layering newly filtered elements, keeping a repeated refrain from the original piece to anchor it.

The layering was loosely inspired by various early 70s recordings involving Klaus Schultz and Conrad Schnitzler.

Wolves of Heaven Vs Full of Hell

Earlier this year Full of Hell asked me to record guest vocals on a song on their new album (i sing the middle part of the song Ashen Mesh) and to submit a remix of the title track for the Japanese pressing of the album (released by Daymare)

I just put my version of Trumpeting Ecstasy up on SoundCloud, rather than giving them the noise drenched everything in the red mix i suspect they wanted i pulled most of the elements out and gave the song some more space than it originally had.

This track is not a dub track by any stretch of the imagination, but the techniques i used all came from  my interest in and reverence for dub music. I've long felt that anyone with an interest in experimental music who does not investigate what was happening in Jamaica in the 70s and 80s or doesn't spend some time really immersing themselves in production techniques of late 80s hip hop - particularly The Bomb Squad's work from roughly 1988-1991, is seriously missing out on some phenomenal music and approaches to composition and recording that were not being done by anyone else at the time.

I love rubbish tape hiss noise and stuffy old academics from Europe as the next guy blogging in a bootleg Throbbing Gristle shirt (as i am right now), but the work of people like King Tubby, Scientist, Adrian Sherwood, Hank Shocklee, Eric Sadler, Keith Shocklee, and Chuck D is as vital to my understanding of sound as anything by Pierre Henri, Pauline Oliveros, Lustmord, Einstürzende Neubauten, Macronympha, Faust, or Delia Derbyshire is.

Recommended reading:

Michael E Veal (2007) - Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae
Christopher Partridge (2010) - Dub in Babylon: The Emergence and Influence of Dub Reggae in Jamaica and Britain from King Tubby to Post Punk
Brian Coleman's three books on hip hop (Check the Technique volumes 1 & 2, and Rakim Told Me)

Recommended listening:

Augustus Pablo - King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown (1976)
Scientist - Best Dub Album in the World (1980)
African Headcharge - Environmental Studies (1982)
Public Enemy - It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back (1988)
Ice Cube - Amerikka's Most Wanted (1990)

Voyeurism

Voyeurism 12" available now from Anthems of the Undesirable and Divergent Series.

There are two broad thrusts to this release, the first is that art that attempts to depict an honest social reality through suffering and poverty is exploitation, no different from any other type of exploitation, and in attempting to portray a version of truth the artist only obscures their motivations of capitalizing on other's existences.

The second aspect is that artists whose alienation is realized through lazy nihilism do not have any great insight into the human condition and would do well to remember that their gaze is returned.

As a society we demand the poor and oppressed display their humanity and shame for us in order to be redeemed through pity, distanced socially conscious art is one mechanism that supports this way of thinking.

Opinions are like assholes, as always I remain open to discussion of the nuances and grey areas via e mail.



Sublimation is our track on the Iron Lung Mix Tape Volume 3, i think we decided we wouldn't rerecord it for anything else. You can have our song for free if you like.

Ghost Ship

It's been a while since I've been motivated to write anything that wasn't "I play on this release, please buy it"

When three members of The Exploding Hearts lost their lives when their van crashed driving home from a show in July 2003 many of my peers could relate. We’d all been there; long drives late at night, desperate to get home to our own beds, going back to work on two hours sleep after returning from tour, pushing ourselves to physical limits.

With the news of the fire at Ghost Ship in Oakland and the – at time of writing – death of 36 people in the space there is not one of my friends, be they producer or consumer of culture, that doesn’t understand the tragedy that’s occurred and hasn’t recast their own personal involvement in DIY culture with new endless “what if…” and “it could have been any of us”.

It could have been any of us.

We’ve all been at the dangerously overcrowded post-fest show in the local DIY space, unable to even go to the bathroom, suffering varying degrees of anxiety attacks in our hard won inches of space, we’ve all been to a venue that was a concrete underground bunker with one wooden staircase to enter, those of us in bands have all loaded gear up the rusty fire escape – the only way in or out – into the third floor apartment over the bike repair store, and those of us not in bands have all been to that space, carefully edging our way past smokers in Discharge shirts hanging out on that one rusty fire escape we all have to use.

It could have been any of us.

But it wasn’t and let’s not take that away from the members of our community that lost their lives in the tragedy last weekend in Oakland.

I’ve talked about this before, but as I get older my interests in music and culture rarely lie strictly within genre lines anymore, they lie within the methods we create, perform, reproduce, or consume culture. My interests over the last few years have taken a sharp turn towards the spatial, an aspect of culture I was always involved in, but went by largely unnoticed or uncommented to me. It was a natural progression; how else do I explain my continued interest in how culture is produced, whilst being frequently disappointed with many of the cultural products that are produced? How do I find ways to understand the necessity of punk when most punk means little to me now? How do I frame the politics of punk when they’re barely present in lyric sheets, when bands are regularly being called out, and when the digital era makes the means of production and distribution something that everyone does regardless of intent? Is there even any point in framing a politics of punk in 2016?

To me the politics of punk that are consistent are the politics of space, the politics of producing space, the politics of producing culture within our spaces. These politics are not new and they are definitely not exclusive to punk, they’re a facet of all cultures that are outside the field of large-scale production, from Sound Systems that have their roots in Jamaica in the 1950s, to late 80s UK Acid House culture, to the huge network of squats and autonomous venues of Europe, to the warehouse scene of the Bay Area and much more beyond these examples. Culture requires space, culture modifies the space it is created within, space modifies how culture is created and consumed, how culture is shared and participated.

So frankly, I don’t give a fuck if you don’t like the music that was playing at Ghost Ship on December 2^nd 2016, it’s not relevant; these people were doing the same shit we do. They were regulars in our world too; in 2016 there is significant overlap between cultural fields, that strict separation is long gone. These are our people, our community, our politics, our strategies, our tactics.

In times when cities promote competition and economic entrepreneurship, and make decisions based on cost-benefit analysis and not social need, when gentrification means barely anyone can afford to live in cities, when development means there is a rental crisis, and our spaces to do anything beyond drink expensive cocktails, buy refurbished driftwood coffee tables, or line up to buy artisanal bread at the farmer’s market are gone how we create and experience culture matters. How we work towards collaboration over competition, how we work towards collective interests and not towards reinforcing the same atomized individual experiences, how we pursue politics that don’t commodify individual identities, these all matter. How we produce knowledge and culture matters. How we promote alternative economic and social practices matters.

What is happening in Oakland is a tragedy on multiple levels, this isn’t kids dying at a rave, this is not carefree hedonistic millennials perpetually in search of the next high-risk, low responsibility thrill.

This is one hundred fucking percent not that.

This is Exactly Who You Are

Intensive Care's debut 7" is available now on Iron Lung Records - you can buy it here - a slight shift from the material on the Pay Pig cassette from a few months earlier.

Both releases are on Bandcamp as pay what you want downloads; don't pay less than $2 if you pay anything, most of that money goes to PayPal and Bandcamp in those cases.

Thematically this record bridges the gap between Pay Pig and the next release, Voyeurism, recorded and due out sometime before the universe under goes heat death. Pay Pig is ostensibly informed by anti-work politics, as found in the work of people such as Kathi Weeks, and tempered with a shit-headed power electronics berating. Voyeurism centres on the idea that in order to earn merit and be granted humanity the suffering masses of the world must display their shame and pain; see any frankly vomit inducing artist (usually a photographer) trying to show truth and honesty, usually through pictures of starving children, economically dispossessed drug users, or homeless people. A similar example would be when politicians, actors, and various CEOs camp outside to raise awareness of homelessness.

Anyway, This is Exactly Who You Are connects those two releases.

Final show of the year is at Not Dead Yet in Toronto with Barcelona, The Lowest Form, Private Room, Pedestrian and others.

We are currently writing an LP.