hobbies include: indulging in pursuits that are a constant drain on money

Yeah. I bought another pedal today. ‘Tis the yellow Boss ODB-3 on the left. Mint condition, with box and all the literature, for below RM200. Which I think is a pretty good price.

Haven’t had time to seriously put it through its paces in a noise setting (aside from recording a short demo of  a contact mic being run through it for a friend) but I did try it out with guitar and it sounded pretty good. A bit hard to find a nice balance between too little bass and BASS OVERLOAD, though. And, hey, if it’s good enough for King Buzzo…

Speaking of noise, I’m planning to start a small label to release Jerk Kerouac material (splits too) and, perhaps, stuff from other noise/noisy/wierd/lofi/harsh/heavy projects that pique my interest. Mainly going to be CDrs early on, although I’m not ruling out venturing into tapes somewhere down the road.

I’ve kinda figured out the direction the artwork will take, too. Minimal, with simple graphics (stills from films ala early Godflesh, drawings, image manipulation, etc) and regular, readable fonts (again, Godflesh-esque). Going to avoid anything particularly gory or violent or disturbing, though, as I feel it’s a bit overdone, which will probably lead to a bit of dissonance between the artwork and the musical content of the CDrs.

Imagine getting a CDr with a cover like this in the mail:

Yet have some harsshh noissszz blast out of your speakers when you play the CDr.

Yeah, I guess I’m a fan of contrasts.

Also, I still need a name for the label.

jxkx / mati gabah jasus split

“Mati Gabah Jasus/Jerk Kerouac Split Mini-CD (Mati Gabah Jasus play brutal harsh noise with a screeching and annoying vocal from Indonesian, Jerk Kerouac shout from Malaysia, play 17 minutes of torturing harshness noise that can make your ear blow) Mini Cd-r printed in glossy paper. released by New Wife Records.”

Six copies of the split are on their way to me. Three of those six have already been accounted for, though, so if you want a copy you’d better be quick!

noice

Needless to say, I’m quite pleased. Out on SUBliminalRECordings. Or, at least, I think it’s out. I think my tracks are quite solid, and the first one is probably one of the best I’ve done so far. Noise Mortanna’s tracks are great, too. Contact the label if you’re interested (you should be, I think it’s a good release overall) or wait until I get my artist copies.

i will lay down my bones among the rocks and roots

For my money, one of the best black metal (and, yes, I am using the term somewhat loosely) bands extant. Black Cascade is particularly immense, but all their albums thus far have been very good.

Best of all: no unholier-than-thou and “kvlt as fvck” pretensions here!

splitter!

The Jerk Kerouac noise machine is rumbling along… there’s going to be a split release with Mati Gabah Jasus from Indonesia most probably coming out sometime in the near future, and I’m quite excited about that. Going to be coming out on CD, so, yes, you guys might probably have to pay for your noise fix. Of course, if it gets into the right hands (something which I have a feeling will not happen) then expect to see it posted on the usual blogs before you know it.

Regardless of the prospect of ending up with 20 or so copies of a split that I can’t sell at all, it’s still going to be nifty to have an actual CD of my own “musical” material that wasn’t burned/released by myself in a small edition of 20 with paper covers and very thin stickers covering off-brand CDrs.

There might be another split somewhere in the pipeline too, but I won’t be saying anything about that until the other guy confirms that it’s on. An offer was made, and I accepted, but no word beyond that. Not a problem, though. It’s not like I’m in any sort of rush.

I’ve also been looking at various pedals as possible additions to my set-up. I’ve mostly been looking at distortions/fuzzes like the Blue Box (which I alternate between WANT-ing and NOT WANT-ing due to the AC power, bleed-through and volume drop), EHX Metal Muff, Digitech/DOD Grunge and Behringer UM300 (which, surprisingly, has gotten some significantly good reviews on noiseguide) to add some tonal variation (have two distortions on at all times, occasionally have all three going) to my shaker box/contact mic abuse. But then I’ve also been thinking of some sort of modulation or filter or reverb or something.

Maybe I’ll get a Boss LS-2 and that Behringer (still cheaper than, say, a Metal Muff or Blue Box, probably) and maybe Crank’s Il Crudo mic and rock two signals of… well, near-similar noise. Hm.

jerk kerouac – first (2009)

Download (in multiple formats)/stream HERE.

37 minutes of HARSH NOISE-ness. Check it out!

so it’s official: i have a solo noise project

And it’s called Jerk Kerouac, fuckers!

bohren & der club of gore – black earth

Imagine lounge-ish jazz being played at doom metal tempos (tempi?), complete with doom metal’s somewhat characteristic love of bass and generally dark moods. Or just download this instead. Slow, (sometimes) heavy, mysterious, minimal, noir-ish and, yes, very good. Bohren & der Club of Gore craft the sort of music perfect for dark city streets, steamy sewer gates and lonely nights, anchored mainly by the massive-sounding double bass of Robin Rodenberg. Don’t be fooled by the mention of “lounge-ish jazz,” though: music to accompany the alluring femme fatales this ain’t. This is easily the sort of jazz album you’d imagine your average, METAL-RULES metalhead—and, really, quite nearly everyone else possessing a decent amount of musical taste—could really get into.

DOWNLOAD

No, I’m not going to be turning this into a music-sharing blog or something, but I just thought I’d share.

weekly sonic report

Bruised knees? Check. Sore thighs? Check. Back pain? Check. A slight loss of hearing? Most probably.

I was at Tuesday’s Weekly Sonic with my arsenal of pedals, contact mic, shaker box and a drum stick and man, was it ever glorious. It was a much more freeform improv-oriented setup early on, with two pedal setups (one noise setup and one delay/reverb-laden setup) along with a keyboard, a drumkit and a xylophone being played somewhere. I started out on my setup, of course, with my friend Aniz (haha, famous dah ko lepas ni!) on a borrowed pedal setup, Goh Lee Kwang on the keyboard, Tey Beng Tze on drums and someone plinking and plonking on that xylophone somewhere to my right.

The racket we put out was quite, quite deafening. Very, very noisy early on, total noise assault, with shades of maybe Hair Police and Hetero Skeleton here and there. Just a bit. I eventually moved over to my friend’s setup and got all Pocahaunted on everyone’s asses, and things slowly reduced in intensity from there, but not without, of course, a few more bursts of noise (either from me during my returns to my setup or from the others who tried my setup out).

Keat (of, well, Silent Keat) arrived a bit later with his bass and then everything got a bit more structured as everyone fell in along with the bass. Kind of like last week, I guess, except with less vocal histrionics. Might have just been me, but we even hit a bit of that krautrock-esque vibe. Again, just a bit, though.

I know, this is a crummy event report so far, and I don’t think it’s going to improve. I was a part of it and wasn’t in a particularly objective mood that night… and neither am I in such a mood now.

I very much enjoyed performing that night, which isn’t really surprising, is it? But it was made all the more enjoyable by the fact that it was my first time performing noise in public. I’d like to think I put on quite a show, to be honest: I tried to get a bit of a Masonna vibe in my performance, albeit a relatively very restrained Masonna (no jumping up and down and bleeding, sadly). Tuesday night was when I really de-stressed after a heavy short semester, and it felt glorious on that level. Hopefully, for the others in attendance, it was a glorious performance as well. Hopefully. The only real negative was that since we were all plugged into a mixer (save for the drums), the whole mix didn’t sound as good as if we’d been going through our own separate PAs/speakers/amps. My walls of noise are quite frequency-intensive and they often dominated my friend’s somewhat more subdued cosmic delayed vocal-isms. My friend and I managed to jam here in Kelana Jaya beforehand, where we played through separate amps, and I have to say that our combination sounded better in the studio.

We may just start a band/project, y’know, my friend and I. I know I’d be down/up for it.

I wanted to talk abit more about my Head-Direct RE2s—which I have, for the record, quite nearly totally fallen for—but then I realised I’d rather write about Tuesday night first. Maybe later. Not that anyone cares, really.

me aping yamatanka eye or something

From Tuesday’s show at Findars. It was supposed to be a performance by Tham Kar Mun, but he was “sick” or something, so Goh Lee Kwang (and, presumably, the gang) decided to turn it into a free improv jam session. He handed me a microphone and, well… there you have it.

I don’t really contribute much in the first couple of minutes, as I honestly didn’t know how to go about it. Once they kicked things up a notch and got much more noisy, however…

The sound isn’t great, but you can hear my contributions to the mix. Oh, and I was on drums for the last minute or so in the vid. It’s a nice summing-up of the jam, but yeah, we jammed for about an hour or so (maybe more?) and the vid’s only 10 minutes so there’s a lot missing, particularly some nice interplay between the three of us during that noisy middle section.

It’s happening again this Tuesday at the usual time of 8.30. I’ll be there with my pedals and my contact mic and god knows what else. I will admit, I’m not sure how well my walls of noise will go down with the others but, hey, that’s part of the fun of improvisation!