Listening
to this for the first time in quite some time, I'm struck afresh by
how masterful it is – a very complete and focused body of work
which has more than stood the test of time since its original
creation in 1987. A friend lent me the LP sometime around 88/90 –
hard to remember precisely at this remove – which I made a tape
copy of. I wonder where he got it ? No Dublin record shops at the
time would have had anything like this. I would normally pick up this
kind of stuff whilst working summer jobs in London, between years in
artschool in the 1980s. Perhaps he got it second hand in Freebird,
back when it used to be in a cramped basement on Eden quay – the
only arena for the occasional glimpses of the outer reaches of
exploratory music, along with Base X (Basement Record & Tape
Exchange), further along the quays, on Bachelors Walk (LPs were
slipped into a plain brown bag with the BASE X stamp) . With a lot of
trawling, I had gotten a few things like this over the years, and
generally it would be priced lower, as they would've thought there
was less chance of selling it, I guess. I remember my surprise
coming across a copy of a Lovens/Lytton LP (“Was It Me ?”) circa
1985, a little bit ahead of the time I seriously got into improv, so
it remained an oddity for a while (I still have it). I think I paid
about 3 quid for it.
Anyway,
this tape copy of Shouting At The Ground became a much treasured item
until I got my own CD copy in Staalplaat in Amsterdam in the early
90s. These chronological reference points are important because all
music is not only located within it's own time of production, but
also within our own initial time of exposure, with all the attendant
social, cultural and emotional reference points that gradually bleed
into it. These aspects imprint themselves into and are threaded
through the music like DNA, such that the experience of music is the
closest we come to time travel. Our brain is temporarily reconfigured
to those co-ordinates set down years ago. Though it's not like we go
back in time to the exclusion of the present, because we experience
the music in the present too, so the two times interweave, along with
our two senses of self, in a somewhat out-of-register overlay.
I think
I first came across :zoviet*france: in the Rough Trade shop in Talbot
Road in Notting Hill, summer of 1984. I was immediately drawn to the
inventive design and packaging. Their LPs came in roofing felt,
aluminium foil and string-bound hardboard sheets. This highly
individual approach mirrored their sonic modus operandi. Their music
was like nothing I had previously heard. There were no reference
points. They created their own world with a very hands-on lo-fi
methodology involving simple stringed instruments, percussion and FX
pedals. The punk spirit of DIY and experimentation was very much in
evidence. By the time Shouting At The Ground came out, they were
several years down the road, and had reached a new level of
sophistication and musical intelligence, still with the simplest of
means.
Part of
the :z*f: world, something that lent another layer of intrigue (they
worked anonymously for years), was the titling, some of which looked
like an invented language, or parts of another language cross-hatched
with nonsense. It was a complete package – you entered their world,
and it was like a road movie for the ears. Far from conventional
narrative of any sort of course, it was a drift through strange
lands. Each time I hear the opening track of this LP, Smocking Erde,
there is a sense of excitement, of anticipation, as looped over-blown
flute-like sounds usher us into a slowly unfolding landscape
underscored with a subtly shifting, dusty, low hum. It occupies the
space as a kind of gauzy, foggy, wintery presence.
The
winter associations are probably not unconnected with the fact that
was where my strongest listening memories are – late '89, in a flat
on my own in Mountjoy Square, in a poorly heated, sparsely furnished
Georgian room, with a second room as a studio space. The trade-off
for this was that it was cheap – really cheap. Brace yourselves,
but I paid the princely sum of 6 pounds a week for those two sizeable
ground floor rooms (well, for one room, but I was given the second
room at no extra cost). It was more of a caretaking rent really, at
that rate, but who's complaining ? Life on the dole, you're not going
to pass it up, are you ? This was thanks to the landlord, the late
Uinseann MacEoin, an old school republican who liked to see himself
as a benefactor of the arts, with properties in Mountjoy Square and
Henrietta Street (two of the top addresses in Dublin before they
became tenements) occupied by artists for low rents since the early
70s.
This
track has another connection for me, and, though slight, is very
specific to Dublin. Toward the end of the track, there is a part of
the fading drone that sounds just like the engine sound of Dublin Bus
at the time, those Van Hool engines that were ever present in my time
in Mountjoy Square, as one of the depots was in the south east corner
of the square, so I'd hear them returning there late at night. It's
uncanny. It's an absolute sonic doppelganger. Listening to it today
transported me back there (with a shiver). This short track prepares
the ground for Palace Of Ignitions, using hammered dulcimer sounds,
punctuated by a percussive tatoo, with gated reverb used to great
effect, creates a kind of skewed orientalism. This then makes way for
a longer exploration in Come To The Edge, a slowly cascading series
of looped melodic fragments, animated like wind-blown banners. It
creates an otherwordly vortex which really draws you in. It's
underscored by a billowing hum that rises and falls, with a wind-like
dynamic.
The next
brace of tracks – Revenue Of Fire, Dybbuk, Camino Real, Stocc
Blawers, Fickle Whistle, Hand Over Your Ears – work through a
series of textures and themes they return to over the course of the
LP: sounds like dying fireworks, plucking, skittering sounds, soft
wind instruments and whistles, looped and treated. Then there's the
dynamic shifts and sudden harsh melodic loops that hover, floating,
encircling, motifs reworked in multiple variations. Carole The
Breebate throws down a tangled clutch of melodic scraps, only to be
interrupted by sudden insistent, speed-up looped alien voices, which
dissappear just as suddenly.
Marrch
Dynamic offers a slight, quiet echo of the second track with a
different dynamic. Wind Thief is a last short report, using whistles
and gated reverb like a second instrument before the development of
the last two long-form tracks, which total about 35 minutes. Shamanay
Enfluence rolls out a back-masked loop with heavier use of delay and
reverb which has a particularly landscape-like feel with a strong
sense of distance. There is the ever present drone, which is more
like wind than some rancid new-age trope – capricious, unstable.
Occassional watery textures issue through the landscape, along with
warped, slowed vocal fragments. There is a sense of drift and of
slowing down, like a breathing exercise. The final track, The Death
Of Trees, layers a thicket of loops with echoes of previous motifs,
with drawn-out etiolated sounds, stretched to exhaustion, decaying,
ending, dissappearing. Gradual unfolding of rhythms and
counter-rhythms generated by multiple delays – all reels out
increasingly slowly, degenerating into a river of rhythms uncoiling
and disarticulating to be subsumed in a sonic swell, a tide pull to
oblivion.
The
album title comes from a quote by Lamargi: “Shouting at the ground
won't enable it to hear any better” The only other piec of text
serves to further skew the pitch: elsewhere on the artwork are the
words WE ARE GREEN. Dispensing with the more unusual stock for
covers, this one has a regular printed cover, with an image which,
again, adds to the intrigue of the :z*f: world – a field of cut
straw against a cloudy grey sky, with a curious pair of dark grey
half disc-like shapes overlaid in the foreground. They might
originally have been monoprints, who knows, but it's figuration and
abstraction in the same frame. Rural surrealism. Which seems to tie
in with the description of their music as 'Industrial Folk'. What's
interesting about this album for me is the move away from a previous
approach involving the use of media clips and news fragments that
located it in a strongly cold war hunted/haunted landscape. Shouting
At The Ground moved into a purer sense of landscape, which was
continued in the excellent 1991 release, Shadow, Thief Of The Sun. In
between the two releases was Look Into Me (1990), which took an
interesting swerve into a more cut-up musique concrete territory.
Shouting.. and Shadow.. represent the pinnacle of the :z*f:
achievement in my book, the heights of which they failed to scale
since. But that's just my opinion, to be taken lightly. So, well done guys, you created something of lasting value which continues to
resonate with me.
