Label: United Dairies – UDT10 Format: Cassette, Album, Reissue, C60 Country: UK Released: 1987 Genre: Electronic Style: Industrial, Experimental
Enigmatic one-off release via Nurse With Wound’s United Diaries label, Musique Concret is the alter ego of obscure London duo Jim Friedman and Michael Mullen, neither of whom have left any sort of trace online.It’s a dense, hypnotic sound collage of queasy tape manipulations and buried found sound, all congealed together into a rich if slightly nauseating psychoactive slurry.One of the lesser mentioned and unfairly overlooked riddles left within the UD / NWW related sprawl.(NM - OG tape)
Devious UK electronic / collage works from ephemeral and enigmatic duo Musique Concret on Nurse With Wound’s United Dairies label.
Steven Stapleton’s NWW project and by extension the UD label has been the torch-bearer for unsettlingly psychedelic sound-design and perturbing collage works directly designed to inflict disarray on the senses. Musique Concret was the joint project of UK duo Jim Friedman and Michael Mullen, who have left little trace of their existence online other than this sole deeply unsettling LP from 1981. The cover alone is enough of a warning - an innocent baby’s image distorted from the perspective of a swelling acid trip that’s going fully in the wrong direction. The A-side is comprised of the four-part Incidents In Rural Places. Queasy, delay-soaked tape music hovers amongst distant gargled voices and echoed guitar chords, before everything starts to dilate and take a turn for the worse. There’s a lot of much that’s meant to distort the listeners perception of reality, most of it highly ineffective, but here when the mangled children’s voices creep in it’s cruelly effective bordering on disturbing. B-side is more searing synth and clattered sonic debris, rhythm box and toy instruments, landing somewhere between Anne Gillis, Amnon Raviv, Hans Krusi or some of Christoph Heemann’s anarchic collage works. Truly one of the most deranged records we’ve ever in encountered, which would probably be better known if it wasn’t so illusive
