Dawn Ablutions
Moff Skellington's 96th release
Moving inexorably towards his centenary of releases Moff Skellington1 returns with a 22 track collection entitled “Dawn Ablutions” on May 8th.
Moff advises:
These recordings were a consequence of my renewed taste for the lovely sound textures of lo-fi. that noisy, unhygienic fug that seems equivalent to the work of my favourite painters: Dubuffet & Soutine.* ( hip, hip.. )
Lo-fi conveys a mood you can smell. I’d been listening to a podcast about The Premonitions Bureau, a forum hosted by The London Evening Standard in 1967, into which people gifted with precognition could write with their portents. The setting up of the bureau was prompted by the aftermath of the Aberfan disaster in which a number of individuals spoke out about the dark dreams and forebodings they had experienced prior to the tragedy. The Aberfan story is so powerfully haunting, I find, that it can stir up personal ghosts quite unconnected with its own narrative. My childhood recollections of the 1960’s in the midlands and the North of England are full of darkness, mystery and contradiction. My Dad told me about Aberfan in 1974, when I was ten. An immediate set of impressions took root in my mind, adding a pungent and infectious detail to my largely sunny memory map of the previous decade. Anyroad, suffice to say, memory plays a big part in this collection. A collection which obliquely reflects times past and is seasoned with a documentary helping of dream physics. Come and have a sniff.
* Soutine is there in Keith Levene’s guitar work on Metal Box
His work is, by its nature, unconventional. This collection is, if possible, more unconventional than what has gone previously. There is an overarching sense of freedom from norms across the whole set.
My initial thoughts on each track were:
Keff - excellent wordplay with entrancing minimalist backing including sweeps of sound. Extra points for the Clayderman reference
My Baggy Overture - Interlocking riffs and rhythms offers a free-eddodi perspective (the Abstercotian2 equivalent of free jazz?). Thelonious Monk like interplay.
Salvaged - Again freedom abounds - an undercoat of sadness pervades. Unique.
Shallow Ground - Dub-eddodi? Instantly more-ish? An echo of Swordfishtrombones era Waits.
Unster Chugg - a salad of Lembryonic3 wordplay - retains the walking gait of the previous - a tasty amuse bouche.
Holiday On Broken Feet - Scandinavian improvisers Supersilent come to mind - the abandonment of convention - it morphs into a conversation with a distressed sea creature.
Where The Water Makes Things Appear Closer - packs a lot in....you need to listen more than once
A Trellin Hut Where Stinks - fun! I would like to see Rod, Jane and Freddy4 covering this. Impressive use of voices and minimal percussion
Rain Station Tabernacle - excellent stripped back interplay between riff and rhythm
Getten Gittin Gone - Alan Bennett after a strong mushroom tea.....slightly scary....excellent
Faintly Torquise - Don Van Vliet is brought up in Heckmondwike and introduces the blues to the local sheep population....but also a science fiction tale?
Paperboy and Chelsea Bun - There’s a sense of the latter years of the 1950s across the whole album - Quatermass? Patrick McGoohan in Danger Man? Michael Caine emerging blinking through your black and white telly screen.
Sinister Box Puller - the use of mutated voice as rhythm is notable and the counterpoint of the accordion in this context....hypnotic interlocking elements.....more Beefheart vibes.
Unster Greel - wonderful - the Bee-Gees move to Abstercot.
Nannas Butter Guts Are Safe - complicated words with alien noises....given the density of the words the correct length.
Four Speed Knock Knock - the closest thing to a chart topper in the set.
Red Monkeys - Peter Woods - Phobia - Birthplace and Crikey - are a cheeseboard after a wonderful meal. A selection of rich wordplay items with differing flavours and textures.
Owlitz - the closer ties everything together
In conclusion a fascinating collection.
This release will be followed by the re-release of remastered versions of earlier Moff albums and four new releases coming in May and June….dates are still being finalised
Thorny Conduits (Remaster)
A Slapstick Life (Remaster)
Skegness (Remaster)
Scribnalls (Remaster)
Embers From The Rapid Eye (Remaster)
Eddodi (Remaster)
Comet Full Of Pigeons (Remaster)
A Slapstick Life (Remaster)
Floaters We Trophy Splendid Vol. 1
The Venlafaxine Trilogy
Derti Berlap
Floaters We Trophy Splendid Vol. 2
THE COMPLETE MOFF DISCOGRAPHY ON HALF EDGE RECORDS
Moff Skellington is an iconoclast blessed with a unique talent with words and music that defies convention and operates in a separate and quite distinct time continuum to the rest of the world of entertainment. His prolific and prodigious output, over ninety albums, vidoes and one DVD since 1999, offers some of the most exciting and challenging work you are ever likely to hear. Aside from his musical endeavours he is also a gifted and talented visual artist who has exhibited his unique painting and drawings in many different locations. He has recently moved into the world of video to create a fascinating marriage of his paintings and music.
The vast majority of the Moff Skellington albums are home recordings, on which he sings, talks and plays a variety of instruments, including accordion, melodica, harmonicas, whistles,guitar, huttyphone, stylophone, bodhran, jaw harp, kalimba, dulcimer, tenor horn, baritone euphonium, various percussion and elastic bands.. The results are then mixed and mastered to create amazing collections of songs and poems. Artifice is restricted to the occasional appearance of a drum machine or a Stylophone, as, having grown up in the seventies, such instruments are very much part of Moff’s personal tradition.
Moff’s manifesto is simple and quite direct
“The chosen musical form is that of Eddodi, a species of folk music which celebrates the very individual and often skewed perceptions of the world engendered by modern life. Eddodi is a balance of the tragic, the absurd and the wistfully ordinary and not just a crack round the head with a pig’s bladder. Eddodi provides a refreshing alternative to the prescriptions and formulas of mainstream and “alternative” folk music. Eddodi philosophy: nothing is arbitrary. Make it up as you go along, it’s bound to be authentic!”.
Abstercot is the fictional territory that underpins Moff Skellington’s Edoddi practice: an invented place used across his recordings, texts and artwork as the stable setting, cultural frame and narrative logic for the material, containing recurring characters, customs, bureaucracies and local details that give coherence to a catalogue of more than ninety releases; during the German Shepherd Records period it functioned as the unifying backdrop documented through the label’s output, and with GSR closed it is now carried forward and maintained through Half Edge Records, which effectively acts as the custodian of Abstercot’s ongoing continuity.
Moff says “The Lembryonic language doesn’t really function as a language. At least, not one you could buy a bag of chips with. It has no prepositions with which to end a sentence for a start. It is more like Scat talking but whereas scat in it’s sung form is a hymn to fertility, reproduction and conjugal stamina, scat talking, in the Lembryonic sense, is not. In fact, I can’t elaborate on it’s nature - it is as much a mystery to me as it is to you”.
The singing trio who appeared on UK children’s series “Rainbow”.