Gareth Williams of This Heat joined Mary Currie to record these tunes at home using common instruments, and rudimentary techniques. The music that resulted seems to be the blueprint for exactly what lo-fi DIY would be in the subsequent decades. Some numbers, like "Beguiling the Hours", are suprisingly melodic, while others, such as "It's Madness", are unsettling and unnerving. Throughout all of Flaming Tunes, one hears two restless minds taking absolute control of the process of making music, and coming up with inventive, haunting works.
"Restless Mind" straddles a lopsided beat, a faint echo of Indian tablas which makes sense given Williams' time in India prior to recording this tape, while "Breast Stroke" sounds a whole lot like what we ended up getting from Badly Drawn Boy some decades later. Williams and Currie were more interested in mood than melody at times, but the material here is rather more accessible than many might expect. Some of this made me think of very early Cabaret Voltaire offerings, but that might just be because the whole thing here has a faint buzz running through it. That quality, as if we're hearing this directly from an old homemade tape being played somewhere in the room, adds so much to the work of Williams and Currie that it's not surprising that the legacy of this tape is so great. A neat juxtaposition of folk rock, minimalism, and early industrial, Flaming Tunes is a timeless piece of work.
Flaming Tunes is out now via Superior Viaduct.
[Photo: Google]