the Ascension plan - LIVE @ the Minack

...AT LAST! it's HERE! First it leaked HERE, now it's HEAR! and Buoy, IS IT EPIC!

Review by Lucy Cooper
THE MINACK'S dramatic setting, open to the elements, with a jaw-dropping backdrop of sea and sky, provided the ideal launch pad for a night of epic and ethereal sounds from Penwith-based band The Ascension Plan and special guests.

On Friday, May 2, hundreds gathered on the cliffs at Porthcurno to witness the four-piece band join forces with New York singer Mimi Goese, of 1980s cult American band Hugo Largo, and Penzance choir the 50 Degrees.
The night marked what the band call, "the completion of a curious circle". The circle began back in the 1990s with Quietly Torn, the band started by The Cure's Porl Thompson when he moved to Zennor.
When Mimi Goese, the band's original singer, left – homeward bound for New York – Thompson recruited St Just guitarist and singer Martin Jackson, then 16 years old. On a May evening in 1998 Martin took to the Minack stage to play a memorable gig with Quietly Torn.
Martin went on to form The Ascension Plan with Quietly Torn drummer Nick McLeod, bassist Mungo Shoddy and former Bates Motel man Paul Adams on electric violin.
In 2012, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, Nick McLeod (who also plays with The Incredible String Band's Clive Palmer) and Mimi Goese began to hatch a plan.
This resulted in Mimi's collaboration with the band on a number of tracks, including Ascending, from their All Ways EP, and forthcoming singles Buoy and Life (You Are).
Ultimately, it led back to the Minack and the wild Cornish cliffs on a May evening in 2014, bringing Mimi and Martin together to share the stage for the first time.
The result was an evening that managed to pull off the feat of being both intimate and epic.
Axolotl set the tone with an introductory soundscape that melded with the waves and the wind. Building from womb-like gongs and elemental murmuring, The Ascension Plan's sound swelled into celestial flights of liquid violin melting into out of this world vocals, transporting the listener to realms at once familiar, strange and beguiling.
With years of collective musical experience under their belts, the band moved together effortlessly through the haunting waltzing chorus of Old Wings, via the alternating swing and raw power of Disengage (and Remain The Same), the ethereal Ascending and meditative All Ways. Mimi Goese brought her extraordinary and formidable vocals into the equation – which can also be heard on Moby's Into The Blue and When It's Cold I'd Like To Die – bringing theatrical flair and sparkle to the stage along with her trademark vocal acrobatics.

Adding the vocal harmonies of the 50 Degrees choir into the mix, under the skilled direction of Vicky Abbott, sent beautiful, fluid, yet precisely aligned harmonies rushing across the Cornish skies.
"The sky and sea stitched seamlessly," Mimi sings on the forthcoming single Life, (You Are). As the daylight faded, sea and sky vanished into one another and the stage was bathed in a dance of colours, courtesy of projections by renowned local artist Paul Lewin.
Sky, sea, music and light stitched seamlessly into a mesmerising fabric, entrancing the senses. The resulting frisson carried echoes of Sigur Ros at the Eden Sessions.
Maybe it's the tuning, the band tune their instruments to a pitch of 432HZ – said to be the natural universal frequency – rather than the standard concert pitch of 440HZ. Maybe it's the combined power of more than 50 voices. Or maybe it's just that special something that ignites when a plan comes together beautifully.
Whatever the secret, this will be remembered as a night when magic was made, when The Ascension Plan unfolded their wings and took flight with Mimi Goese and the 50 Degrees.
You can obtain the band's All Ways EP at theascensionplan1.bandcamp.com/album/all-ways-ep
Nicholas Pegg – author of the acclaimed Complete David Bowie series of books as well as a regular Dalek operator on Dr Who – was on holiday in the area and attended the concert. He tweeted: "One of the best gigs I've ever seen."

Killing Joke's 2012 Survival Guide

E. C. Hansen

If Americans in their thirties or forties ever heard a Killing Joke song, it was probably because "Eighties" was a standard at high-school dances for the latter half of that decade. The assistant principal never suspected that this was the band whom mothers and preachers ought to have been worrying about when they were breaking Elvis Presley and Black Sabbath records. Not only did the band write almost strictly about the end of capitalism and the world as we know it, but the members really were occult magicians who conferred with the spirits. The group even began with a ritual in 1979.

For those of us who blithely bopped to the spiritual descendants of Aleister Crowley and now drive mini-vans and fight the foreclosure of our homes, the band is still around. And they rock harder, heavier, and more beautiful than when any of us were young.

Timely as ever, Killing Joke has just released an emotional remedy for the age, their fourteenth album, MMXII. The Joke, back with the original line-up, did not jump on the 2012 bandwagon. They are finally having their I-told-you-so moment.

Singer Jaz Coleman said in a recent interview that he believes this year may bring a "revolution of consciousness," not catastrophe. Still, the new album follows where the last decade's three albums took off-with full-throatle fury at environmental decay, capitalism, and the erosion of individual rights. The opening track of MMXII describes, in a surprisingly upbeat tone, a shift in the magnetic poles, as well as the polarization of values. The shift is "calling on all of us to restore the biosphere." Another number warns that FEMA camps could just as well house dissidents like us. This is political guitar rock like we haven't seen in years, if ever.

A good part of the band's power is that they stand so unapologetically in contrast to media meant to sell. Killing Joke is what William Blake's visions or C.G. Jung's Red Book would sound like if they were recast as modern music: intense, mystical, personal, and incapable of embarrassment.

Truth be told, one must always stew in KJ's new work a few days to find the beauty; at first listen, they convey a feeling as oppressive as the authorities they oppose. (The line "Out of the virus, immunity comes" is a refrain in the band's discography.) Yet under the surface is a sort of soundtrack to an alternative lifestyle built on permaculture, friendship, and spirituality. Every movement needs its Wagner, and Geordie Walker's guitars part the heavens just as well. Paul Ferguson's drumming is capable of rallying the tribe once everyone looks up from their smart-phones. (A 1982 song, "Chop Chop," has us down pat: "And the bodies go by, barely half awake/awaiting things to come again, nice things to come.") Finally, in spite of all of the reasons to feel anxious, Coleman's shouted choruses leave me feeling triumphant. Defiance at its most absolute, the jester would say, is celebration.

Here are five lessons gleaned from three decades of Killing Joke. They may be thought of as survival strategies for artists and visionaries from a band who knows how to persist, uncowed:

Lesson #1: It's time to practice spiritual syncretism. Coleman, whose mother's family comes from Indian Brahmins, is at once a long-time practitioner of magic as well as an ordained Anglican lay minister with a parish near his home in New Zealand. Geordie Walker, the guitarist, is a Kabbalist, and bassist Youth is a druid.

The timing couldn't be better to request all the help the world needs from any spiritual agency that is willing. The ultimate song on Killing Joke's MMXII, "On All Hallow's Eve," is a shuffle-stepping how-to manual for invoking the help of ancestors:

"Endless drumming,
rituals wake up the dead,
bring gifts and spirits:
good wine, just cheese and some bread,
incense of cigars and spices,
pleasures we shared,
light up the graveyards,
to show how much we all care."

How have we forgotten the dead? No wonder we grope blindly in the direction of cataclysm.

Lesson #2: Keep your core but invite the new. Killing Joke doesn't fit neatly into categories. Their music isn't exactly punk, metal, hardcore, synth pop, electronica, New Wave, death metal, dub, and definitely not reggae-though their sound refers to each genre. What have stayed the same are Coleman's mania, Walker's orchestral noise, and the pounding drums. Killing Joke survived break-ups, '80s hair, shirtless videos, reformations, publication problems, failed marriages, physical fights, and death, including that of their second, beloved bass guitarist, Paul Raven.

The band left their native UK and have skipped around between New Zealand, the US, Prague, Zurich, and Spain. Rock musicians, it seems, have no full-time residence, and the rest of us who have lost our homes follow suit. Coleman and Walker never parted, but for years the group stayed flexible and brought on drummers from Martin Atkins of PIL and Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters to a lad half their age before reuniting in 2008.

More than doom, the most common theme in later Killing Joke's oeuvre is friendship, the sharing of bread and wine. Their circle of friendship, uncommon in long-lasting bands, almost seems old-fashioned. They brawl and express fondness like Captain Aubrey and Stephen Maturin do in Patrick O'Brian's popular historical novels. We are encouraged to open up our "private space" -- that post-modern concept of a compartment where we can protect our stuff--and accept friends who will have flaws and the occasional stretch of lunacy. They are the better for their demons. Let them steal the salt shakers and break the glass coffee table if we may keep our camaraderie.

Lesson #3: Madness is a normal part of adult emotional life. A regular comment to appear beneath Killing Joke videos and interviews with Jaz Coleman is, in one form or another, recognition that he is mad.

Coleman toyed with madness just as he courted the occult. An encyclopedia of rock music hidden in the reference section of my high-school library contained an entry on Killing Joke with a picture of Coleman holding a tribal spear and implements for conducting rituals. He explains the band began with a ceremony; he and Paul Ferguson offered a prayer to find their soul-brothers and in a few weeks, the other two arrived.

A clip in an upcoming and long-awaited documentary on the band's history, The Death and Resurrection Show, has Jimmy Page, the Led Zeppelin legend, saying of Coleman, "He's either playing with magic, or magic is playing with him." One may wonder if, like a character from Tolkien, he may have delved too deeply into the dark arts. In his interviews, he rants and circles his tail. His punctuation is maniacal laughter. (Admittedly, he can also be subdued and is almost always friendly.)

Shortly after recording MMXII, bassist Youth described with a sliver of humor how the singer spent a good deal of production alternating between depression and paranoia. In the new album's mildest, sweetest song, "In Cythera," Coleman begs his friends' forgiveness for having "lost the plot"; he goes on to invite them to meet on Aphrodite's island. He also has said that when he wears clown make-up and jester gear in concerts, mercurial energy is conjured, and the "masks" must be put away after a show, promptly.

One might also observe Coleman has lived a fuller, richer life than those of us who putt around in a mini-van. The late archetypal psychologist James Hillman wrote that periods of madness are probably normal in the emotional lives of healthy adults, but we cannot know for sure while the majority of psychological studies are performed on undergraduates. Killing Joke's example, on the contrary, begs the question whether we lost something in our inheritance of the Western tradition. Why did the Greek gods embody pathology? What if in our short lives we are wiser to seek the greatest range of experience and emotion, though we appear "unbalanced"? When is intensity, not merely going with the flow, the best gift?

Lesson #4: Intensity and paying the bills require mild side gigs. Killing Joke's guitarist happens to be an architect. Youth produced albums by Paul McCartney (the two collaborated as The Fireman), Dido, The Verve, and many others. Paul Ferguson restores art for the Rockefeller family. Coleman composes and conducts for orchestras including the Prague Symphony Orchestra. Classical music is where he says he places the Romantic impulse. Altering one's mode invites a larger and healthier range of expression. If Killing Joke is right, and the oil economy collapses, each of us will need to become jacks-of-all-trades.

Lesson #5: Get tougher with age, not softer. The biggest irony is that Killing Joke has lasted longer than many of the countless bands they initially influenced, including bands who went platinum. Killing Joke is the most important band almost nobody has heard of.

Kurt Cobain certainly was inspired by the band; they nearly sued him for copying riffs from "Eighties" in his hit "Come As You Are." But Cobain died first, a victim of the short-lived-artist myth. Killing Joke defies that myth. The puer aerternus, it turns out, does not last long. Their music is more ferocious and menacing as its members have entered their 50s. Coleman's voice, after decades of smoking, is capable of an unmatched, if not unearthly scream. Those of us who grew up hearing Killing Joke at prom are never allowed to shout like Coleman does, save at a bad accident. The neighbors would call a SWAT team. But Killing Joke - this group of shamans -- steps over boundaries on our behalf. They are waiting for us to pull up at the bonfire and dance.

Pitchfork 500 - the ALBUM

...EXCLUSIVE CARPMEISTER COMPILATION!!!...
...In The Pitchfork 500: Our Guide to the Greatest Songs from Punk to the Present, Pitchfork offers up their take on the 500 best songs of the past three decades. Focusing on indie rock (Arcade Fire, the Shins), hip-hop (Public Enemy, Jay-Z), electronic (Daft Punk, Boards of Canada), pop (Madonna, Justin Timberlake), metal (Metallica, Boris), and experimental underground music (Suicide, Boredoms), The Pitchfork 500 features all-new essays and reviews written with the sharp wit and insight for which the site is known...
...inspired by such a fine book, the carpmeister decides to embark upon a journey through blood, sweat and tears to bring you the album that they couldn't release if they wanted, (not enough of these stars are dead enough for the MAN to collect such a dizzying array of musical history together in one place) just check out the tracklist HERE, soo many flashbacks man.
PLEASE NOTE - these are not yer regular 192k and under mp3's as found elsewhere, THESE ARE LOSSLESS files culled from many personal collections, and NOT AVAILABLE ANYWHERE ELSE...

...pt1 1977-79 download HERE...
...pt2 1980-82 download HERE...
...pt3 1983-86 download HERE...
...pt4 1987-90 download HERE...
...pt5 1991-93 download HERE...
...pt6 1994-96 download HERE...
...pt7 1997-99 download HERE...
...pt8 2000-2 download HERE...
...pt9 2003-6 download HERE...

...message from the carpmeister - ive had the list on random on my hifi whilst ive been putting the whole thing together and it's a cracking list of music, i do recommend the book if you haven't got it. Anyway enjoy the list and play LOUD!!!!!!

...i had it on random for a while, but i've bitten the bullet and cleared the schedule and i'm goin chronological!...
...wow, this playlist is 40 hrs plus!, i'm a couple of hours in and we're still in '78! but what a trip, songs so ingrained in my brain that eno's 17 minutes felt like 3 and lou reeds street hassle makes me wonder what kind of uncles THIS 9 year old boy had...
...such an evocative selection, ANY list is subject to criticism on taste alone, on paper it's easy to say NO WAY!, why THIS? why not THAT? - BUT in the listening, it really comes alive as genres skip and merge in interesting ways such as the way the donna summer groove morphs thru chic and camp anthems and the splendid parliament before returning via public image to a new wave spiky disco punk of gang of four...
...had to go and borrow the book off the good carpmeister himself to check a few facts regarding the order and now i'm hooked - it REALLY IS a good read, but with the ALBUM as well this is HEAVEN...
...i'm into 1980 now and my dna is so synchronous to the damn thing i've turned into that 12 year old brat, i just wanna get a guitar and punish my parents for bringin me into this whole charade, i storm out to the strains of joy division, fight with my girl, drink too much, bug my friends - NO-ONE UNDERSTANDS ME!!!...
...well, kiddies, i haven't been on a trip like this since some friends and i sat and watched the whole of the Beatles Anthology documentary series (Special Edition Directors Cut extra footage version) in ONE SITTING! something like 15 hrs that was, IN ONE DAY...by the end of it we were distraught at the litigation and broken dreams etc and wanted to just like RING people up and TELL 'em the Beatles just split up man, heavy trip. But that was NOTHIN'...
...JEEZ! this is better than therapy, it should be available on the national health, a binaural regression therapy session, 40 HOURS and no dollar down!!! (although i heartily recommend buying the book) ...anyhoo, i'm outta school now, burnt my first guitar and bought my first drum box, the music is WITH me and WITHIN me, protectin me from the paranoia of the cold war years i got Run DMC i got KRS-1 and i got NEW ORDER! i got the Pixies, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, i got Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, the WEDDOES ferchrissakes! this list is UNCANNY, they've got this list from my HEAD, from my RECORD BOX...i can see it now, battered and worn, and stolen many years ago, stolen by PITCHFORK it seems, a crime at the time i blamed on local scuzzballs, solved, after all these years...

...by Pancho Be Gubbins...

...anotherQUATILYproduct...

Dark Night of the Soul

...is the new album you can't buy for love nor money by Dangermouse and Sparklehorse, shelved in their infinite wisdom by EMI (probably 'cos the guestlist on this one is too expensive to license) but available for FREE download HERE on rfsMojofilter. You CAN buy the packaging for this which is a photobook by David Lynch and a blank cd to "use as you will" HERE but HEY, what's REALLY goin on here? - "official" story HERE...
...we all know Dangermouse burst on to the scene with the greatest rock n roll crime of the century, a cute and clever mashup of the litigious beatles and omnipresent jay-z, the GREY album available HERE, which led to both big dollar jobs for the Gorillaz and scientologist Beck and undoubtably helped sales of his many solo and collaboratory projects, and now we're supposed to believe the man's best album since his first (it Is that good) Is NOT gonna get an official release... but don't fret boys and girls 'cos radio station NPR is conveniently streaming the whole 13 tracks in their entirety HERE, and you can download it virtually anywhere by now via a viral marketing campaign that LOOKS like piracy but feels a little sleazy...sounds like a whole load of hocus pocus to sell a fifty dollar photobook or a ten dollar poster (with blank cd lest we forget).
Having got that off my chest, let me just repeat, this album is GOOD, not good like in gnarls barkley good, but good as in may actually be GREAT...just LOOK at this rolecall - Wayne Coyne - Gruff Rhys - Julian Casablancas - Black Francis - Iggy Pop - Nina Persson - VIC CHESNUTT fer chrissakes!...
...download it rip it stream it buy the book buy the poster see the installation smell the glove whatever...

...by Pancho Be Gubbins...