Saturday, March 02, 2013

Sindre Berge/Andrew Perry/King Rib/Deadwood






Sindre Berga - Songs of Failure
WGGFDTB CDR

Dead Wood - Forest
WGGFDTB CDR

King Rib/Andrew Perry - Split
WGGFDTB CDR



Flimsy bits of plastic and paper, flimsy bits of plastic and paper … but isn’t that what you get when you buy an album? Yes, but the paper’s a bit stiffer, lets call it card, and a bit bigger and heavier and the plastic, lets call it vinyl, is pressed by a stamper that carries a groove that allows you to trail a stylus through it thereby generating a signal that you can amplify into a glorious sound [if you’ve put the right record on that is].

The last time I got sent CDR’s as shoddy as this was when the Australian label Smell The Stench used to send me recycled beer cartons full of them. I must have listened to dozens of them and do you know where they are now? No, and neither do I. But before I go down the shoddy packaging route again let us console ourselves with the fact that for a some time now CDR has been the undisputed king of cheap formats. You can find CDR’s on just about any street corner these days, huge spindles full of them as churned out by some poor bugger in a sterile factory in China just so that you can take them home to burn something on to them so that one day someone like me can chuck them in the bin or, as in this case, pass them on to Mark Ritchie at Hiroshima Yeah! so that he can see what I have to put up with, I mean enjoy.

As is my way with plain CDR’s I scribble on them with green marker so as not to mix them up. Thereby the Sindre Berge release has ‘Sindre Berger’ written on it and the Deadwood release has ‘hideous guitar scraping noise’ on it. The King Rib/ Andrew Perry release I let loose on the hi-fi and from a distance it sounded great, until I got to the Andrew Perry track. The King Rib portion reminded me of Aphex Twin’s ‘Selected Ambient Work’s Volume II’ and I played it several times to much slowed down head nodding accompaniment. Andrew Perry’s half of the effort consists of a single track containing various oddments which I took to be the soundtrack to the life of someone who has trouble concentrating on one thing for more than thirty seconds [straight lifts from a Talk Sport phone in anyone], there were some ominous deep bass sounds emanating from within at certain times but to say I was less than enthused may be understating things here. At least Sindre Berge’s lifted me from my cups. His two tracks of crepuscular drone with added tinkling passed the time of day quite nicely thank you very much even if the two tracks did sound a tad similar. And you know already what I think of Deadwood.

WGGFDTB actually stands for We’re Gonna Get Fucking Delerium Tremens Bollocks and its as daft a name for a label as I’ve ever come across [this is actually a lie and the acronym translates as We’re Gonna Get Fuckin’ Drunk Tonights Boys but my point is made].  I’m assuming that the person who runs this label [take a bow Andrew Perry] is either a very busy person or prefers the bare bones approach to label production, for these three pieces of paper and plain CDR’s come with the ‘get em done and out there’ stamp of authenticity that only a no audience label could aspire to.


Talking of which, Rob Hayler at over RFM does this thing much better than me.



Contact: WGGFDTB

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