Adam Cadell - Bush Songs COMING SOON

Hello,

Some self-promotion this time around. I have a new album - BUSH SONGS - coming soon on the excellent SOFT ABUSE records. It's a project that's been in the works for a few years now and I'll let you draw your own conclusions about it. Was recorded in the Con studios in Brisbane back in 2014 with Daniel Kassulke engineering.

Here's a preview of the brilliant art layout by Reuben A. Warburton (has done the layout for the last couple of Scrapes albums):

So head over to SOFT ABUSE and harass the fuck out of Chris for your copy. Limited edition cassette tape and mp3 in perpetuity.

There's more rumblings beneath the deck - including SCRAPES news - and they shall be announced when I'm good and ready.

Adam.

School of Underground Scrape

Key Recordings by Underground Violinists:

A guide to key recordings by visionary Underground Violinists:

• Takehisa Kosugi, Catch Wave, Sony/CBS (1975) 

Hands down one of the most important recordings in the underground history of fringe-dwelling fiddlers. Not entirely a violin-based album with one side dedicated to a strange echoing world of voices. The violin side however, 'Mano Dharma '74', is devastatingly brilliant. Dark and echoing, glissandoing unmistakably Asian delay-soaked violin bounces around your head. Julian Cope wrote brilliantly of it in his Japrocksampler so I won't even try to top that. I bought a delay pedal because I heard this and while it's not the centre of what I do, it's bled into The Scrapes and a lot of my own solo work ever since I heard it. Essential stuff.

• Tony Conrad, Outside the Dream Syndicate, Caroline (1973)

Tony Conrad's viciously monotonous (in a good way) collaboration with Krautrock legends Faust. One of the greatest slabs of drone ever conjured from the aether (in this case an aether heavy with weed smoke by all reports). Recorded during a visit to Germany by Conrad while he toured his wild structuralist films, and set up based on Conrad's reputation in proto-VU history, it appears to have not been a terribly memorable event for any of them - in part due to the weed, in part due to it not seeming very significant to all involved at the time - with Conrad apparently not even being aware of the album's release until a reissue was planned several years later. There are a few versions of this out there including an early 90s reissue with extra pieces that didn't make it to the two side-long monumental droneathons. Blood was allegedly shed to keep it that singular and monumental in tone, and I think you can hear it. If you don't get this, then don't bother reading any further.

• Henry Flynt, You Are My Everlovin’/Celestial Power (psychedelic version), (1981, Reissued on CD by Recorded Records, 2001)

This reissue of a previously obscure tape of Henry Flynt's violin and tape long-form pieces 'You Are My Everlovin' and 'Celestial Power' is one of the masterpieces of what I lump together (somewhat inappropriately, but rather conveniently) as underground violin music. The version of 'Celestial Power' on here was recorded by Henry while he experimented with an LSD-like substance. His long-form pieces are based around drones "like stop-lights in traffic" that allow for extended explorations of Henry's idiomatic licks and riffs. Rather than sprawling free-form improvisations - although improvisation is an important element and they do give off that sort of feel - these pieces are made up of motifs and lines drawn from Henry's beloved American vernacular musics and Indian Classical Music (both Hindustani and Carnatic traditions) and synthesised into his own unique and thoroughly singular approach to violin playing. 

Original tape cover from 1981 tape issue of You Are My Everlovin/Celestial Power

   

The Recorded CD reissue version from 2001

• Henry Flynt, Nova’Billy, Locust Records (1974, Released 2007)

By the mid-70s Henry Flynt was working in a full band format and trying to play gigs and land a recording contract. While having very little luck in this pursuit, Henry and Nova'Billy managed nonetheless to create a cult classic set of recordings that didn't become a cult classic until 30 odd years later when Locust Records was kind enough to finally release some of them. There's not much to say about this set other than that you should listen to it as soon as possible. Flynt blends all of the idiosyncratic elements of his "Avant-garde Hillbilly and Blues Music" - or "funky-country" as he sometimes seems to call it - into a "trucking and trancing" ride through an imagined America. Ride Henry's inner-byways and see if you come out the other end the same.

Cover from Locust Records' CD and LP release, 2007.

• Taj Mahal Travellers, Live Stockholm, July 1971, Drone Syndicate (United States: 2000)
• Taj Mahal Travellers, August 1974, Nippon Columbia (1975, reissued by P-Vine Records in 2001)
• Taj Mahal Travellers, July 15, 1972, CBS Japan (1972)

The recorded documents of Taj Mahal Travellers are some of the most extraordinary music in underground music history, all featuring the creaking echo-plexed violin of Takehisa Kosugi. These inner-travellers didn't even see it as necessary to play to audiences half the time, favouring open-air space hoedowns on beaches, mountain tops, and in forests. A film, following the band through a pilgrimige from Tokyo, through Europe, to the Taj Mahal itself, even depicts wonderfully a moment somewhere in Asia, where Kosugi set up with his violin, accompanying a man weaving a fishing net. This music is the sound of Earth's tectonic plates moving, trees in forests rubbing together, dazzling light on the river's surface, and sweat on the worker's back. Truly essential listening for anyone wishing to blast capitalist hegemony out of their craniums.

• Hawkwind, Doremi Fasol Latido, United Artists Records (United Kingdom: 1972)
• Hawkwind, Hall of the Mountain Grill, United Artists Records (United Kingdom: 1974)
• High Tide, Sea Shanties, Liberty/United Artists (United Kingdom: 1969)

The wild, uncivilised fiddle of Simon House is an aural pleasure for the adept. Particularly - or perhaps only really - in the context of Hawkwind, and the mighty - in its earliest incarnation that is - High Tide. Sea Shanties by High Tide is one of the great lost proto-Metal records, and featuring a distorted, wah-wahed lead fiddle no less. The Hawkwind albums should require no intro...so I won't intro them.

• Amon Düül II, Phallus Dei, Liberty (Germany: 1969)
• Amon Düül II, Yeti, Liberty (Germany: 1970)

The side-long piece 'Phallus Dei', on side two of Phallus Dei, with its swirling psychedelic fiddle parts driven by the acid drenched bow-arm of Chris Karrer, is perhaps one of the most sacred sites of Underground Violin lore. It surges and swirls in stoned abandon but this is no hippy hoedown, instead it's a dissonant dystopian noise like a mad fiddler on the roof of Ballard's High Rise. This is the kind of revolutionary fiddling that has inspired and informed my own approach to playing with band and has no doubt inspired many others when incorporating violin into such doom-laden explorations (Volür come to mind not to mention bands like My Dying Bride who dabbled in reverb-laden violin parts in past times). Yeti, released the following year, also contains similar wild unhinged fiddle histrionics to trip on 'til the next millenium comes round. If you need to get any two Amon Düül Zwei records, make it these Zwei.