Boat Of - Forbidden Mourning Practice (C-46)
https://www.discogs.com/release/11921956If you're anything like me, you love the sound of a cassette tape being eaten. It's a wonderful sound,
isn't it? That unstable glorp is all over this collection of Boat Of's live and rehearsal tracks from 1980
to 1982. "Forbidden Mourning Practice" is of particular interest to me as a fan of Tom Smith's later
work with To Live and Shave in LA and Peach of Immortality. Even if you haven't followed Smith's
subsequent hyper-dense tape-collage and glam-adjacent rock-like noise explosions, this feral
teenage weirdness might still be of interest. The slowly stretched cocktail-jazz warp of "If You'd
Like to Nominate Your Boss (Part 5)" is some appreciably woozy ambience. That hors d'oeuvre is
followed by chopped-up radio advertisements and pop songs pummeled with stimulant-fueled
percussion and hysteresis punctuation on "Worthy of the Lamb"... though once the audience starts
clapping at the end of the song (and the band introduces themselves as Ultravox... Smith's sense
of humor was recognizable even then) it's clear that the almost-40-year-old recording was
changing speed the entire time. "Take Us For Gangsters" is a relatively subdued rumble for
shortwave radio before the best track of the album: a live performance of "Miracles of Seed-Faith"
showcases Smith's "self-rigged faulty recorder", which lurches violently in tape-speed for the
song's duration, as jazz-improv-lineage drums furiously attempt to hold the thing together. More
evidence of the age of these source tapes is gloriously apparent on "Bore the Entreaty", in which
drums (played by David Gamble of the Method Actors) and Dominique Amet's wordless operatic
vocals are coating with a nasty veneer of distortion. The album concludes with what seems to be
Tom Smith solo, a live-on-the-radio collage of organ, records and tapes that sounds like inside-
out easy-listening music that nicely revisits the light-jazz looping ambience first heard at the
beginning of the album. (Reviewed by Howard Stelzer from Vital Weekly 1142)
Price - 1,200 JPY
Postage - 240 JPY (Shipping to worldwide)
Write first for availability - seven3wassix6 at gmail dot com
Sorry, No trades
