Like I Was Shot With A Diamond... A Diamond Bullet

Those words, along with "...and Pat Stevens, who hates buttermilk, is going to..."*, echo about my addled skull more than any others in music**. On Wednesday night in a crammed basement bar in Frith St it was really ram(leh)med home to me, that aside from the reason below, that that sentence rings round my head so much "cos it sums up for me exactly what grabs me by the throat when I hear a guitarist who makes me go "Fuckkkk.....". Be it Peter Green or Helios Creed, John Cippolina or Matt Bower, Hubert Sumlin or Jim Plotkin, Sonny Sharrock or Debashish Battacharya or The Heads***, aside from the fact that they all have that unquantifiable thing "feel" in fucking spades. is a certain attention to the real extreme high-end of their respective sounds.

Those skull-ringing harmonics that most players roll off, deeming them too harsh or cutting, just too fucking much, are the essence of real sonic psychedelia for me, 'cos they're the frequencies which really disorientate and fool the ear, which change the sound so drastically when you move yr head an inch in any direction^, which make yr fillings rattle, make the top of yr skull vibrate like a coked-up throat singer whistling through their brainpan, make you feel ecstatic one moment, confused and agitated the the next. Especially with judicious use of phase effects, the treble is the key to yr unmind.

Have composers throughout history called for a bass or a baritone when they wanted to give a feeling of the other? Nope, they called on the services of the castrati, or (particularly in these more apparently enlightened times), the countertenor. At the other extreme, what instrument, in the soundtrack of an otherwise trite and tacky 50s B-movie, has ever provoked the feeling of cosmic unease like the high warbling glissandi of the theremin? Or listen to Hermann's score for Psycho, or Sala's trautonium on the soundtrack to The Birds, Hitchcock understood..

And so does Gary Mundy, to bring me back to the point of all this. Now I've expounded upon the delights of listening to Ramleh a number of times here, and they more often than not feature in my lists of what is currently annoying my neighbours, but the thing I haven't really gone into, and for which he never gets the credit that he deserves (along with Matt Bower, Phil Best, Neil Campbell, William Bennett, I could go on for hours), is what an astoundingly good musician he actually is. Anyone can make a racket (and get it released... the rise of Prurient^^ and the very existence of the Merzbox being two cases in point), but very little of what gets called noise these days is musically worth a shit. No dynamics, no understanding of how sound works, just a big fucking ego-driven drywank (copyright Julian Cope) wall of cock, sound and fury signifying nothing except the "artists'' desire to be noticed.

With Ramleh, there's none of that, just a pure burning distillation of what makes rock art, and art rock. There's no synth or electronics anymore, just the most basic elemental pulse, barely embellished, from the drums and bass - Martyn Watts fills Stuart Dennison's lead boots admirably, Andi DiFranco's (no relation - as far as I know...) monolithic fuzz bass as steadfast as ever in its pursuit of the none - building a solid foundation for that blues inflected, blazing crystal of a guitar sound to wind its labyrinthine way into your reptile mind, as bludgeoning as it is beautiful. And that's exactly what we got live, despite the appalling sound, the engineers inabilbity to balance anything and hs strange urge to make the sparse vocals (normally an important part of Ramleh's sound - you'd stop singing too if the engineer did what he did to Gary's vocals to yrs) eighteen times louder than everything else, a masterclass in psychedelic (in the proper sense of the word§) music, audial delerium and the western scale turned inside out, scything through yr head like a painfully benevolent laser, the guitar gleaming like a treble-heavy cut gem, every facet audible and perfectly set in the beautiful housing the rhythm section created for it.

Maybe I'm a curmudgeonly old cunt, but you don't get that very often these days. If you're looking for a guitar hero (and if y're over 15 you really shouldn't be, but if you are...) here's one to be going one with. Track down a copy of Homeless or Blind Alley and fucking LEARN.

*see here for why

**two different loops of those words, from a film or something I know but have never been able to fucking place 'cos of some weird quirk of memory, crop up on two seriously fine pieces of music; Diamond Bullet by Skullflower (from Obsidian Shaking Codex) and Loop's Shot With A Diamond (on A Gilded Eternity). If I could fucking remember where it comes from it probably wouldn't pop into my head so much...

***I could go on for fucking hours... Jorma Kaukonen, Michio Kurihara. Muddy Waters, Nocturno Culto, Kim Thayil, Wata... I'll shut up now.

^Along with pure sine waves of course...

^^Please, don't try and convince me that Dominic Fernow is doing anything new, or shocking, or extreme, or subversive. Having a picture of yr missus trussed up on the front cover of an album that you've recorded by dressing up as Alvin Stardust and waving a microphone in front of an amplifier is neither big nor clever, and it's certainly not original. Go and listen to some Whitehouse or Come Org, or fuck me, even TG, stuff that's getting on for 30 years old now and still makes you feel, still makes you think, still holds a mirror up to you. Noise is not "LOOK AT ME", it's "LOOK AT YOUR SELF"§§. One day, when you grow up, you might fucking get it.

§ From ancient greek - mind-expanding

§§ Or "The You" as William Bennett puts it. Rather nicely I think. Birds Of Delay and especially My Cat Is An Alien, this applies to you in JCB fucking bucketloads.

I'll get off my (admittedly slightly drunk) high horse now. But not for long.