thanks to the double foetus placing in the 80's poll, lets poll all (ok most) of the foetus/foetus related full length releases (yes compilations included)

you do realise i owe it to myself to hear all of these before actually voting

is this possible y/n

well the one from 2010 that slipped in there might be hard (oops)

have you heard the wiseblood stuff? or the steroid maximus?

there are a couple there that i hate, manorexia is a yawn and York is just a mess

nope! i want to though. this guy is straight-up one of *the* geniuses. did you see my reaction upon finally hearing thirlwell's 'shrunken man'? that one's on damp btw. and it's...oh glory be. actually, damp is very very good. really wanna hear 'gash' and 'thaw'.

xp

thaw is totally in line with nail and hole, gash was on sony and at least in the states is in like every used record shop ever for $1.99

oh and the liner notes for gash detail the GREATEST STUDIO BAND EVER btw:

TOD ASHLEY - Bass on tracks 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 11, 12

VINNIE SIGNORELLI - Drums on tracks 5, 9

MARC RIBOT - Guitar on tracks 3, 9, 12

MARCELLUS HALL - Harmonica on track 3

STEVE BERNSTEIN - Trumpet on tracks 2, 5, 6, 11, 12

THE HERESY HORNS on tracks 2, 4, 9

STEVE BERNSTEIN - Trumpt

ART BARRON - Trombone

PABLO CALOGERO - Baritone Sax

FRANK LONDON - Trumpet

gash has an 11-minute swing experiment, doesn't it? that alone is enticing. haha oh me and my foetus epic love. he should do an album called 'epic'. maybe. not.

(have been walking around say/singing 'higher and higher and higher and higher...shrunken maaaan' in the way he say/sings it all week pretty much)

anyway will give all the ones i can listen to a thorough going-over

video from gash:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsCrJZClGFQ

oh yeah the swing song is "Slung", and its one of my favorite foetus tracks actually

Gash is pretty weak, all up.

oh fuck, this is brilliant. foetus goes dance! sort of! well, obv dance and industrial = same thing, different amounts of eyeliner blah save it for another thread but this is so goddamn kinetic! and evil! i shall go to bed with a twisted smile upon my face. sweet video too.

my vote is currently with 'flow', i think, but it could EASILY change. 'hole' and 'love' are very close. soon 'nail' will sink in properly. bedtime.

eh idk, i have a still weak spot for gash, partially because i couldnt believe that a major took a (totally failed) shot at the dude who did clothes hoist. not by any means my favorite, but the good stuff is still good - haha and flow is my least favorite (outside of the stuff listed above that i actively dislike - fucking york), so there you go

it's hole vs nail

when nail came out it was one of those life changing moments for 15 year old me

hole is the better record overall but I dunno, nail's grandiosity is pretty grand

voted "[edit]"

...partially because i couldnt believe that a major took a (totally failed) shot at the dude who did clothes hoist...

I don't know how true this is but I remember reading back in the day that he'd turned down major deals around the time of Hole and Nail when he was on Some Bizzare (who'd engineered such deals for others like Cabaret Voltaire) on the grounds that a name change would have been required.

makes sense, around the time he got signed to a major the butthole surfers were getting top 40 airplay. a decade earlier you couldn't even say their name on MTV.

I remember colin quinn wearing a surfers shirt on mtv in the late 80s, which standards & practices kindly blurred out

wanna see what happens next time jj tries to type 'foetus' tbh

ooh this one a tuffie.

i love Nail more than most albums, but Thaw is just as fantastic.
however, one of the best songs he ever did was the 12" version of Someone Drowned in my pool - b-side to STUMBO
which thankfully was included as an extra on the cd version of the Wiseblood album (one my holy grails that i recently tracked down .. )
and ys, the whole Sony thing was weird.
didn;t the fact he had remixed RHCP/Prong/NIN etc, and was a presenter on MTV kind of swing things over to his side for a while - hence the major was basically trying to cash in on his esteemed status ?
interestingly, of all the questions i asked a couple of years ago, the only ones that were left unanswered was the one about EMF.
clearly there are corners of his catalogue that he refuses to let anyone know the inner detail on.

one things for sure, his auitobiography is going to be great should a thing ever happen !

if i were a better man i would have done this as a ballot poll, because picking just one is kind of killing me - but i am lazy.

yeah also that stumbo remix is great. i have to go look at my stuff, because i swear that i have 2 different foetus/almond cds (with, weirdly, nearly identical covers but totally different songs), but wikipedia only listed one

oh, and the 11 minute Slung off GASH (not his best, but still damn good) is one of the best big band swing tracks you could ever wish to hear - if you like his vocal style of course ..

i think i am going to force myself to vote for something other than nail and hole (although honesty says nail is my long term favorite) just to keep the poll interesting

his vocal style is possibly in my top 5 vocal styles ever

Think I'm voting Thaw.

haha i didn't see 'edit' as an option. well what can one say? an appropriate length of word. maybe someone should tap mr thirlwell up

oh lol I already voted [edit], duh

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

oh fucksticks.
cant remember how i voted. oh well. what done is done.
[i think i went for Thaw in the end, just cos ...]

i really should have done this as a ballot poll, partially because i think that there might just be a whole bunch of 1 vote results and no clear winner

hahaha whole bunch obv meaning somewhere between 5 and 10 votes total

hole, without a moment's hesitation

hole, without a moment's hesitation

Ditto (xpost)

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

looks about right to me, I voted Hole as well but also rate Thaw and Rife and Sink and Nail really highly.

Glad Love got a vote, that was my way-in and shit is potent

Hole is righteous. Love how badly-recorded it is

Love how badly-recorded it is

when it came out i thought it was the best recorded record i'd ever heard.

"badly" by conventional standards, "amazingly" by real ones - sounds like JGT has made a single magnetic tape and put it in the washing machine before handing it to YOU ALONE

good result and one i totally agree with.
at the time i though Hole sounded truly magnificent.
have the recently released 'remasters' made any difference to the sound (i think Nail could sound truly mindblowing if given a full Beatles-esque makeover), or is it Stevo just trying to pay some bills ?

so wait is my copy of 'hole' just a corrupted one? i love the crackle and fuzz and DIY aesthetic but is that intended?

re hole : at the time ..

ie. in 1984

fuck me Hole is incredible

thats a quote that will haunt you

hahaha

I don't listen to this album straight through enough. Wow.

I'm sure it's been said before, by me anyway, but 84-87 run of Calamity Crush/Hole/Wash It All Off/Finely Honed Machine/Nail/Bedrock/Ramrod has got to be one of the most incredible acheivements by an independent artist ever. Every one of them is amazing, with high-end production and superb packaging and he was not even repeating himself. I sometimes wonder how he managed to bankroll the whole thing. Sales were pretty small, he didn't tour much and there was no merch around. Money from home?

Version of Hole I have has the Wash It Off and Finely Honed Machine singles tacked on the end, and while the album proper is a perfect, just-right experience, I'd feel much the poorer without the 4 extra tracks, the aforementioned two especially being quite ridiculously good. Finely Honed Machine is a vision of manic depravity that nobody came close to matching until JGT decided to write Kreibabe

Yep, those two tracks are both so much fun. Sick Minutes is a great track too, although not one that you'd want to hear all the time, especially in it's full length version - what is it, 8 minutes long or something? I've never been big on Today I Started Slogging Again. There's something missing from that track. The original album came with those tracks included on a seperate record so they have always been associated with the album in my mind anyway.

I should also have thrown in the Wiseblood stuff into that 84-87 glory period. The Motorslug single on it's own is probably the best thing that came out that year.

My version skips from Track 11 (Wash It Off) to Track 13 (Halo Flaming Lead) so I'm assuming Sick Minutes is in between? I've lost that track, somehow. But I'm now listening to Sick Mins (Ectopic Version) from Limb on Spotify, though...is this the one you mean?

Today I Started Slogging Again is pretty OK but not quite up to the standard of the rest, agreed.

I'm sure it's been said before, by me anyway, but 84-87 run of Calamity Crush/Hole/Wash It All Off/Finely Honed Machine/Nail/Bedrock/Ramrod has got to be one of the most incredible acheivements by an independent artist ever. Every one of them is amazing, with high-end production and superb packaging and he was not even repeating himself. I sometimes wonder how he managed to bankroll the whole thing. Sales were pretty small, he didn't tour much and there was no merch around. Money from home?

agree completely about that run of records plus production and packaging!

it was all funded by stevo who had a fortune in the bank from soft cell and from taking wea and cbs to the cleaners when they signed PTV. for all the bad things i've head about some bizzare and their business practices, they funded some amazing records.

always wanted to have a blog called today I started blogging again

I rate 80s foetus records as the best spent capital of the time period

I once had a magazine with an article about thirwell's nyc studio, including photos and rundown of all his gear... wonder where that is

for all the bad things i've head about some bizzare and their business practices, they funded some amazing records

...which is all that most of us care about in the long run anyway. I mean, I feel bad if folks didn't get paid but Art is Art and business is business. These records are certainly art.

Re Sick Minutes - the version on the 12" single is 8 mins long and like most of the other tracks was brutally edited for inclusion on Sink. It suffered the most, losing about 5 minutes. Wash It All Off loses more than two minutes and Catastrophe Crunch about three mins. It must've been a tough compilation to put together since so many tracks had to get chopped. It should really get a release with all the tracks restored to their proper lengths.

To be honest, Sick Minutes works fine as a two minute track. The long version is one of his epic mindfucks, like Death Rape 2000 but not the sort of thing you want to sit through frequently.

i have to disagree. i don't think i've ever made it all the way through death rape 2000 but i could listen to sick minutes for hours. i remember a review at the time comparing it to philip glass (who i had never heard at that point) so i picked up some second hand philip glass album and was brutally disappointed.

ok sick minutes (full version) is pretty fucking brilliant

also sounds much more hi-fi than anything else from the Hole period

idk, hole etc are such a leap up production wise from deaf and ache that i never thought of them as lo-fi really

it's amazing production, don't get me wrong, but it sounds skeletal, clanky, whereas sick minutes is pretty smooth. 'hi-fi' was the wrong choice...'lush' maybe

yeah I gotta chime in here in defense of the long version of Sick Minutes, really great and not like a lot of his other stuff. recently he put out a mail-order-only CD of a lot of those early instrumental pieces, I still need to order that.

also all the edits on Sink kind of suck, imo these tracks are best heard in their original forms.

and y'all are neglecting to talk about the greatness of "Halo Flaming Lead", also on that extra EP included with PVC editions of Hole, but exclusive to that release (also compiled on Sink though).

also Motorslug fuckin' rules, played it on the radio a couple of weeks ago.

I've got 2 versions of hole on vinyl, the original some bizarre and the PVC one that came with the wash it all off 12"

"wash it all off" at 45RPM on vinyl is pretty awesome, was one of my favorite things to crank in the DJ booth

actually I think I have the PVC cassette version too man did I love that album

wait ok so you're supposed to listen to this record on HEADPHONES

ahahahahaha

also sounds much more hi-fi than anything else from the Hole period

and oddly was recorded alongside the "ache" sessions.

I'm sure it's been said before, by me anyway, but 84-87 run of Calamity Crush/Hole/Wash It All Off/Finely Honed Machine/Nail/Bedrock/Ramrod has got to be one of the most incredible acheivements by an independent artist ever.

Okay, I did not know that Hole was recorded at the same time as Ache. That's just weird. Skeletal and clanky is not how I would describe Hole. It's deliberately clattering, certainly, but I've always considered the sound to be really full and rich - especially stuff like Sick Man and Satan's Place. Maybe you need to try a different rip?

Halo Flaming Lead is cool and again, edited on Sink. It's pretty tragic about Sink. A great and essential compliation but the fact that they had to edit almost every track just sucks. Plus, tons of people have only heard those version of a lot of the songs since they are not easily available anywhere else.

Also, yes to headphones. Or really loud in a car.

Okay, I did not know that Hole was recorded at the same time as Ache.

yup. sick minutes, today i started slogging again, the 12" version of wash it all off and finely honed machine were all recorded around the time of ache and released post hole.

Ah. Thanks. This is from the liner notes of Limb:

Sick Minutes was originally recorded in 1982 at Lavender Sound, an eight track studio in South London where I recorded my first two albums, DEAF and ACHE, with Harlan Cockburn engineering. It’s working title was “Six Minutes”, as I conceived it as two three minute sections, but I was very ill the day that I was recording it and it got re-christened “Sick Minutes”. The percussion is toy wooden marimbas, aerosol cans played with small mallets, prepared piano. You can also detect a tin whistle. I later took it to Wave studios in Hoxton Square where I revamped it and added the vocal loops which pushed it well beyond six minutes.

The revamping session happened when I was recording the Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel album HOLE. I had created a lot of vocal tape loops by multi tracking my voice on 24 track. We then mixed these on to 1/4″ tape in major and minor chords. We stretched the tape loop then I would “play” the tape machine as an instrument, pitching it with varispeed , and re-record that back onto the 24 track. I would mark the varispeed knob with a grease pencil to indicate the key notes that worked with the key of the song. Then those tape loop performances were submixed and bounced into an arrangement. This is the same method I used for creating the voices on “I’ll Meet You In Poland Baby”, like a mellotron without the mellotron.

The phrase “unmutual” that is sung at the end comes from an episode of the TV show The Prisoner, where Number Six is branded unmutual for being uncooperative. I seem to remember a part where the villagers converge on him chanting this. This piece also features acoustic guitars at the end, in one of the only times I have ever used them. It was released as the b-side of a limited edition twelve inch under the name Foetus Uber Frisco.

And he later mentions that he was going through an period of being obsessed with Phillip Glass at the time which is where the "Phillip and His Foetus Vibrations" and "Foetus on the Beach" names came from (after Glass's "Einstein on the Beach".

Skeletal and clanky is not how I would describe Hole. It's deliberately clattering, certainly, but I've always considered the sound to be really full and rich - especially stuff like Sick Man and Satan's Place. Maybe you need to try a different rip?

I phrased it badly. I meant that while the percussion was clanky and while there was lots of space in the mix, and indeed while everything can be heard clearly (hence skeletal), there are indeed moments of blindingly forthright and beautifully full sound. I guess it's so well-recorded that it never falls into a mush; even when organs blister and bass rumbles (those two tracks are more or less my favourite two on the album, FWIW) there's still a spaciousness and a closeness to the sound; the percussion sounds like it's being built rather than played, in the best possible way

also on headphones this is absolutely incredible-sounding

for instance, headphones have turned I'll Meet You In Poland, Baby into something awe-inspiring. but they'd already done that to the first two tracks. and now the percussion panning on Hot Horse. oh god. GOD.

sorry I'll shut up about this album now but it's one of those that's better every time you hear it for every reason imaginable

...but Sick Man...

fuck

ok nuff

By all means keep going on about it. It's probably my most listened to album ever, for what it's worth, and I've never grown tired of a single track.

I'd actually never listened to it straight through until today. A few months ago 'Satan Place' came on my iPod Shuffle and I was all 'what the fuck is this actual awesomeness', then 'Finely Honed Machine' decided brilliantly to become one of those tracks that always gets shuffle-listed but my knowledge of the album was patchy until tonight. I knew what the tracks roughly sounded like, but...but...

oh and Cold Day In Hell is flaming ENORMOUS, and that's before a headphones listen. This is rapidly threatening my 80's top 5.

Satan's Place was the track that made me fall for Foetus HARD. I already had the 12" of Calamity Crush and thought it was pretty cool but then I heard Satan's Place at a party and I was totally floored by it. I was like "uh, could you play that again....and again...and just one more time please?" After that I basically scoured every record store for everything with the word Foetus on it.

When I have cash, I'm probably going to do that. Actually there's nothing I want more in my fantasy-world than a vinyl-player and a £2,000 budget

1) Cardiacs - On Land And In The Sea
2) Talk Talk - Spirit of Eden
3) The Cure - Pornography
4) Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel - Hole
5) Duran Duran - Rio
6) The Fall - Perverted By Language
7) Magazine - The Correct Use of Soap
8) The Fall - Hex Enduction Hour
9) XTC - English Settlement
10) The The - Infected

is probably how I break down my 80's top 10 in the light of today's wondrous findings

the top 5 is my kinda 'wow shit these records are fucking perfect shit shit shit never going without ever' selection, so as you can see Foetus has done rather well

perverted by lang is def something you wanna check out on vinyl, it's never sounded right on cd imo

like the vhs vs dvd thread, the grime is what's good

hahaha man so many revealings in store - can well imagine PBL being ever fuller that massive mystical sly beast of import I know it to be - and yeah it's way too guttural and earthy a record for its textures to be flattened into compliance - its primal foulness is half its charm

currently rocking Rio as I felt guilty for knocking it out of 3rd spot. yeah it's brilliant.

Ok, that tears it, I must own "Hole", it's been on my list for ages.

I'm curious about "Male", though - is it a critical entry in the Foetus canon? Or is it another one of those live albums you'll play a few times and file away.

you really don't need "male" in your life.

I kind of hate male. Rife is infinitely superior IMO.

^^^ this

Acoleuthic, to me your top ten list represents some kind of equation to demonstrate how the 80s created Blur.

dude I got a lot of love for Blur but if they were spawned by that lot they'd have been roughly seventy times better than they were. we're talking about my ex-favourite band here btw

like, add Melvins, Slayer, Buttholes and Big Black and there's maybe a recipe for Mr Bungle in there, or perhaps take it forward a few more years, blend that lot and hey presto late-period Ulver but nothing really follows from combining them. Actually, Blood Inside isn't the worst shout...

http://foetus.org/content/wp-content/uploads/wpsc/product_images/2010.png

HIDE features ten new compositions by JG Thirlwell, who describes it as a “neo-symphonic avant-psychedelic concept album informed by the culture of fear”. Kicking off with a nine minute operatic opus featuring the guest vocal talents of opera singer Abby Fischer, HIDE is an immersive album infused with strands of progressive and contemporary classical, as well as Thirlwell’s twisting cinematic journeys, bombast and sombre interludes.

Thirlwell produced the album and performs most of the music.
Also guesting on the album are long time collaborator Steven Bernstein on trumpet and Leyna Marika Papach from Thirlwell’s Manorexia ensemble on violin. In addition Elliot Hoffman of Carbomb plays drums on a track, and there are appearances from Ed Pastorini, Jeff Davidson and Christian Gibbs (Lucinda Blackbear).

More Details
01. Cosmetics
02. Paper Slippers
03. Stood Ups
04. Here Comes The Rains
05. Oilfields
06. Concretes
07. The Ballad of Sisyphus T. Joness
08. Fortitudine Vincimuss
09. You’re Trying To Break Mes
10. O Putrid Suns

the samples sound fucking fantastic.

* Venture Brothers Soundtrack (2009) J. G. Thirlwell

available to non-US'rs now, and so currently getting a neighbour troubling airing.

according to john zorn : "this is great music"

he is of course, OTFM

today i gained new neighbours.

today i am in a bad mood.

today 'thaw' sounded perfect.

hello new neighbours, welcome.

i will of course go round over the weekend and say hello and intro myself.

however, they are v. young/beautiful/hipster looking, so rather jealous/scared of them.

i hate the whole new neighbour groove.

my next conquest. two songs into Hole and it's covered quite a lot of ground musically.

"Lust for Death" like industrial/rockabilly plus the clever parody title.

also it namedrops me, Neanderthal.

Nail is queued up after.

loving these revives, enjoy! Hole is my fave but I've never heard a bad one

"Street Of Shame" is my fave jam from Hole

a lyrical tour-de-force as well, just endlessly quotable lines throughout the whole thing

thanks! i don't even remember what sent me down this rabbit hole, other than having gone through a heavy but brief EBM/industrial phase that wasn't fully realized back in my late 20s, where I only got to scratch some surface-level itch. maybe it was the Cosey Fanni Tutti thread bump the other day. probably that.

back to this album, now we have blues-industro pastiche in "Sick Man". lord, so many genres touched on. how does one man have all this power?

omg the "ooma mow wow" Bird is the Word send-up on "Satan Place"...

I listened to Foetus religiously during my late teens/early 20s, still kind of enjoy it when I hear it, and had NEVER picked up on the fact that Lust For Death is a parody title of Lust For Life. Now I've been set straight!

Hole is fantastic. I don't really get Nail but it's worth hearing. Then you can skip the 90s and head straight for 00's Foetus, which is pretty much all good stuff all the time