Sunday 29 May 2011

Diagram



I found this while trying to find a back door into the Trojan Goat website. I think it might be a diagram for a new Samekhmem number... Possibly called Matter and Memory. Watch this space

Friday 27 May 2011

Samekhmem - Redcar Church of Glue, 44th June, Year Gamma

You have to wonder if unsuspecting punters arriving at Samekhmem’s live shows should have warnings from the Government Health Sphere beamed into their skullplexes before entering the show. Any number of vital organs seem to come under threat during their 25-timeblock set and, possibly due to rumoured connections with important personnel within The Eternal Coalition, nobody seems to have tried to stop them.
Those present might come out wiser, weaker people, but this still turns out to be a unique experience which, at points, makes the son et lumiere eye-poppingness of Katie Price’s 130th birthday celebrations look like a tacky firework display in comparison.
The enigmatic trio’s avowed intention is to force fans to listen to the music rather than focus on their physical forms by obscuring them with dazzlingly bright light-suits which induce pain in the naked eye if gazed upon directly.
“It’s quite hot in the suits,” Drone 1 Sam said in a rare interview with Technocore fanzine Killerwatt recently. “But it helps create an atmosphere of anxiety and discomfort on stage, to match the emotions we wish to create with our music. We want people to feel pleasure, but with an edge of unease. Like tripping on a cocktail of Glee and Snore tablets, perhaps, where you always feel you could tip over into a comedown of paranoia and cold sweats at any moment."
The cognoscenti turn up wearing power-goggles and pale, light deflecting suits, but when the Sam, Ekh and Mem materialize, hovering a few feet above the stage, there is still a palpable sense of apprehension in this mid-sized venue.

They play only one, 25-timeblock track tonight – they play a different single track at each show – and it is simply entitled 'Pink Sigh'. Initially, it tickles our cochleas with lush, glossy major chords sliding blissfully around on a soft featherbed of somnambulant nonsense chanting. The gentle rumble of Burundi drums suggests distant danger and, just as we are getting comfortable, we detect beneath the surface melody a repetitious, hypnotic sequence of three whistles, a pink noise mantra reminiscent of the semi- discordant whistling moog riff that underpins the ancient Maceo & The Macks classic Cross The Tracks. Gradually that becomes more prominent within the sonic maelstrom, before another layer of emotion is released. Bursting out of the mix, we hear a sample of a child’s cry – culled, I can exclusively reveal, from Ekh’s two-year-old when she had a spork confiscated this morning. There is a pause after that initial cry of dismay, as the child catches her breath, which causes us to calm once more, before we are startled by the second, guttural tsunami of anguish. Each time it repeats, the unbearable tension builds again, yet the release of energy following it is impossibly cathartic.
Increasingly, at around the 15-timeblock mark, some members of the audience complain of feeling unwell, and veterans of previous Samekhmem shows offer reassurance, urging them to ‘embrace the fear’. Finally, the central mantra is played in an upwardly changing key, causing a feeling of rising tension until, as the higher registers are reached, people gasp for breath and their limbs tingle and shake with orgasmic intensity. There is no encore. How could there be? Physically, mentally and emotionally, we are all spent.
Anybody who, since the Eternal Coalition’s ban on procreation, has been deprived of that much-mythologised feeling of what sex is like, well, just open your orifices and enjoy.

Arts Appreciation Facilitator BS3588 J Sharp

Wednesday 25 May 2011

'Found' Diagram




I found this old diagram in the Tools and Principles filing cabinet. I grabbed it off the stage at Samekhmem's last year's woodland gig in the Forest of Dean. I'm not entirely sure how to read it, but I think it might be the stage notes or score for 'Light of the secret fire', but I cannot confirm that for sure.

Monday 23 May 2011

Oouroboros VII

My defining memory of seeing Samekhmem perform was the second time I saw them; I had some idea of what to expect but nothing prepared me for their rendition of the track which I was later to discover was titled Ouroboros VII.
Starting with a subliminal pulsing drone the room shook and trembled. Gradually a piercing fuzz became audible, whipping around the room and in and out of focus. Something like a Shepard tone seemed to rise and fall at the same time, infinitely. People all around me in the crowd were sinking to their knees, clutching their ears or clawing at their faces. I stood transfixed, brain reeling, the dimensions of the room indefinable and changing. Suddenly spastic rhythms collapsed into the space, relentless and slippery, the floor felt to be rising and pulsing. Almost silence, then a sudden Leviathan scream, disembodied agonised voices.
I don't remember how I got out, how I got home. Rumours that the air had been spiked ran in the underground press. I've had a skin condition ever since.

Sunday 22 May 2011

Shape of Things to Come

Despite their name spelling the Hebrew word for ‘drug’ (‘sam’), Samechmem cannot be described according to the journalistic paradigm that posits band x on drug y as the future sound of anything. Drugs would be too disorientating to allow for the kind of technical rhythms they insist on producing manually, despite having at their disposal the technology to make them digitally. At the end of the industrial age, Throbbing Gristle suggested that we needed to find a way to dance to the Tesco Disco. Samechmem continue the post industrial project by drawing their drones not from a mystical beyond, but from the inaudible hum of mobile phone masts and fibre optic cables. Rumours of the elaborate diagrams they employ in their lengthy composition sessions have abounded. But there is nothing spurious about the way in which their sound transcribes pictorial forms into tonal frequencies, borrowing from the Brechtian structures of Baptist hape note singing, which designates the names of notes as they are being emitted. That the religion to which Samechmem’s music corresponds has yet to congregate should by no means be an obstacle to total devotion.

Saturday 21 May 2011

Goatdaw

Saturday 14 May 2011

Goatspew

Friday 13 May 2011

Cloaked Mem