Read an article in wired about how blogs are not really interactive, and the writers never respond to comments. Almost all the blogs I go to, the writers answer questions or respond to comments.

We put a set list up, as requested by many readers, and someone complained about the bouncing bear suggesting cats are cooler, so we put some cats up.

Interaction does exist! Just to test who is reading this stuff we have put a hidden track in the comments today.

Bergheim 34 – Oscillations

I got this ep on Bergheim records in 2000 called How To Sell Out When No One Is Buying.

I bought it for the cover of the Silver Apples song Oscillations, by an artist called Pekler.

At first I thought this was a rubbish cover of one of my favorite Silver Apples songs, but then I figured out I had the bass turned off, and when I stuck it on – oh my god! I was suddenly trapped staring blankly, mouth open wide with a huge slow strobe blinding me with each energy flash.

It is an experience I would recommend. I think it gave me a flashback.

They manage to take the Oscillations into an evil electronic place of hypnotic proportions that could be the new Dr.Who theme, if Add N to X will not reform to do it with Jason and Sonic…

Pekler is actually a member of the group of artists known as Bergheim 34 who hail from Heidelberg, and this track is also on the album “It’s not for you as it is for us” which came out on Klang Elektronik in 2003.

I have also been wondering around for days randomly singing the track Random Access Memory by Bergheim 34 which you should probably get too.

It’s not as gratuitously hypnotic or psychedelic – but then it’s not a Silver Apples cover is it..

At this point I could go on about the Silver Apples for a few days, but I’m gonna leave it for when I post one of there songs. Any requests?

BUY Bergheim 34

The Hunches – Jakob’s Voices

Lester Bangs once said that Lou Reed used the noise of Metal Machine Music

as a metaphor for the workings of his circulatory system. Old Lester was the

master because he sounded as if he was making stuff up, still everything he

said was true in a mythological sense, and a mythology is what we look for

in Rock and Roll.wait, and what about punk, the demolition of barriers

between performer and public etc.? well, an anti-mythology is also a

mythology, and wasn’t Sid Vicious the biggest myth ever??

Well, whatever, I was talking about noise. And maybe Sid Vicious was nothing

but a caricature.going back to the point, people use noise in music for many

reasons, it can be a metaphor, a political act (MC5), a surgical tool (Pan

Sonic), some people are simply noise (Merzbow), and yeah, noise can also be

(or become) a cliche… I’m talking about distortion, the bread and butter

of rock and roll, or at least of what we call “underground rock and roll”,

which encompasses many things, some good, some evil, some good and

evil.Distortion is the accepted, cool looking brother of noise, one to which

people have got used, one that doesn’t scare anyone, he is always there,

actually, when he isn’t, some feel scared, they miss him.

But it wasn’t always like this, at the beginning distortion was a

declaration of war against many things, against harmony and melody, it was a

point made, Satan himself summoned by some punk kids in a garage.and they

brought him, yeah, the Yardbirds and “She Really Got me” and the Sonics, The

Sonics, The Sonics.he came to stay, but maybe he ended up becoming a bit

complacent, he turned into that boring guy sitting on top of the record

collection, going “yeah, I’m rock and roll, yeah, y’know, turn it to eleven

yadayada”.of course sometimes he keeps surprising us from time to time, what

about the Velvets and the Stooges and Brian Eno and No Wave and PIL and

early Sonic Youth and Husker Du’s aural assault and Big Black and Royal

Trux?? Yeah, those are all gods (mythology again) because they harnessed

that distortion we know so well and used it to give us a good shock, a.new

kinda shock, as Lux Interior would put it.

But how long has it been since a band has shrieked its way into your soul,

scratching your brain with badly bitten nails and maybe a used picktooth,

making you suffer and turning you into a believer?? I ask myself a question

and I think of The Hunches. Ok, the Hunches. I’m not going to put them in

the same league as the guys above, although I’ve read some people say that

they are they are the most underrated rock and roll band these days. The

Hunches eat the same meat as the Electric Eels, and they drink the same

blood, and they use the same rusty lawnmower to prune their sound, to get

rid of any pointless production tricks and shrink wrapped vintage sounds, to

chop the guitar solos in two so they are all broken and when they scratch

your ear it burns, to crank out bass lines (check out the subsonic

burp at the end of this song) which are pure satanic bad-ass terror, to take

it back to the garage in its purest, most primitive sense. Yeah, the Hunches

use noise to cover up, suffocate and maim pretty melodies, and then they

release them into your imagination where they become nightmares or, god

forbid, inspiration. The song here is called Jakob’s Voices and it is a

nasty racket, a good jolt of old dangerous distortion going down the wrong

way, which happens to be the good one.

BUY The Hunches