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SMELL & QUIM - Cuntybubbles

Format: LP Label & Cat.Number: Cheeses International CI15 Release Year: 2020 Note: the strong return of UK's taboo breaking impro / industrial / performance noisers... - '40 odd minutes of new material venturing into unknown realms of absurdity, sex and folklore, yet still have the cohesion of the classic S&Q sound. These recordings were only finished in 2020 with the expert hand of Milovan Srdenovic and are now..' - lim. 320 copies, sexually explicit cover Price (incl. 19% VAT): €18.00 More Info "Coming away from a Smell & Quim album singing Bobby Shafto wasn’t what I was expecting but when the needle left the groove there I was: Bobby Shaftoe's gone to sea Silver buckles at his knee He'll come back and marry me Bonnie Bobby Shaftoe Its the last thing you hear on side two, Simon Morris singing an English folk song before the solemn clang of a church bell and the return of the stylus. And sing it he does, in a resonant, trembling voice like he’s auditioning for Steeleye Span. The result being the raising of the hairs on the nape of the neck and the recurrent thought that he’s not around anymore. A year has passed since he was put to rest and there’s still a big gap where he should be but performances such as this, on a record such as this are reminders not just of himself but of just how good a voice he had. I’m told that these were the last recordings he ever made and it seems apt that they should appear on a Smell & Quim record, a band that he was a major part of for what must have been twenty five years. Cuntybubbles arrives via the crazed locked down brain of Milovan Srdenovic who has been using his enforced time to create a Smell & Quim lockdown classic that will be seen as one their best. Surely a miracle of our times created out of the unlikely triumvirate of death, plague and pestilence. Let us all rejoice though for out of such darkness emanates a stone cold beauty. Then there’s the rebirth of Cheeses International, a label I’d long assumed defunct and with it the reappearance of the forgotten man of noise Steve Fricker. His website may be next to useless but there you go, thats yer man right there. As ever Milovan has crafted his sound using a connoisseurs eye, venturing to places where other bands are either fearful or sane enough not to tread. Dark places, Bobby Shaftoe places. Thus we have Stewart Keith reciting the story of the Wicker Thing [a wicker cock that is Smell & Quim’s take on The Wicker Man] his words delivered as if by a pungent Gandalf with deranged bagpipes and buggery as accompaniment, there are porn film climaxes, flapping flywheel belts that make a syncopated rhythm, military drums, snatches of live action as laid down in Birmingham and Leeds, theres Milovan intoning the words ‘mouth, crop, gullet, bladder, bowel, vagina’ over and over again and that these are the only words to this song makes perfect sense. We have pissing in a bucket because we must have, looped samples of an indeterminate nature wail away until stripped back to reveal further layers that may just be the man himself shaking that noise shaker thing, an instrument that looks like a purloined buddhist prayer wheel riven with nails, bottle tops and ribbon. Opening track ‘Cleopatra Frankenstein’ has a loop of Stewart reciting a story which settles on the words ‘a very beautiful maiden must hold the bough while a man from behind has anal intercourse with her’, ‘Old Spunker’s lengthy rhythm stride derives from sexually congressed thigh slaps and moans before dissolving into a military snare drums rattle, ‘Jimmy Savile - Timelord’ is a short clatter of samples; Tarzan yodeling, Milovan and Morris giving us Savile’s catchphrase ‘as it ‘appens’ and the word ‘nonce’ repeated with growing gusto. ‘The Quim Reaper’ has Morris singing the words ‘and now we’re gonna die’. This being probably the most profound track Smell & Quim have ever given us. Cuntybubbles is a built around the long track on side two, itself an amalgam of several shorter tracks; The Cuntybubble Variations contains ‘The Theme From Cuntybubbles’, ‘Pissy Tights’, ‘Cannibal Adderley Street’, the literal ‘Mouth, Crop, Gullet, Bladder, Bowel, Vagina’ and last but not least the pounding Wank Engine’ before Stewart Keith tells us all the story of the ‘The Wicker Thing’ and the beautiful town of Bell End and its deadly tradition." [Idwal Fisher]