The Howling Plays Manchester's Rainy Heart Thursday 24 July

I am very pleased to announce that The Howling are performing in Manchester next Thursday, 24 July. This will not only be the first time The Howling visits Manchester, but it also the first time I have been in front of an audience there in over 15 years. I’m sure very little has changed. Many thanks to Graham Massey for inviting us to take part in such a fabulous spoken-word evening. Robin and I both looking forward to having a more meaningful contact with some of our favourite tongues.

 

Hosting us is the Rainy Heart Film Club – tickets and details are available here.

 

And here’s the press release for the longer version: Thursday 24th July

 - House of Tongues - An Evening of Spoken Word, Sound and Images guest curated by 808 States Graham Massey. Biting Tongues - the pioneering Manchester post-punk band who released music on New Hormones and Factory records was made up of members with expansive creative practices, who originally formed to record the soundtrack to a film. Graham Massey brings together various Biting Tongues members for an evening of performances that show the range of those creative practices; from art writing, to carousel slides to experimental sound work:

 

- The Howling - is a collaborative project by Ken Hollings and Robin The Fog. Ken Hollings is a writer and broadcaster who has been featured on BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4. His numerous books are all published by Strange Attractor/MIT Press with his latest book for them being The Trash Project Volume Three: Paradise. Robin The Fog is a sound designer and radio producer, who also creates recordings, performances and installations entirely from manipulating magnetic tape on a quartet of vintage tape machines. Described in The Wire as ‘the missing link between John Cage and Suicide’, The Howling serves up intense collisions of spoken word and pounding analogue tape effects. Collaboratively they have released 3 albums, with their latest LP, Be Quiet In This Church, due from The Tapeworm in summer 2025.

 

- I Looked Into Their Eyes And I Saw Only Pixels - A new performance work by Howard Walmsley. An filmmaker, artist and anthropologist living in Manchester, where for the last ten years in particular, there has been considerable redevelopment: an explosion of new buildings and reconfigured public space. These construction sites are surrounded by hoardings printed with giant illustrations of the proposed structure, complete with images of digital citizens inhabiting the space. Imagined people presented in yet-to-be places. This performance, made up of 35mm slide Carousel presentation, commentary and live soundscape takes the figures from these hoarding - known as entourage cutouts, which are printed onto acetate and dissected, corrupted, scalpel sliced and layered into the frames of 35mm glass slide mounts. In these slide collages, the figures overlap and collide, become framed in new relationships and chance meetings. Illuminated in a new world, they begin to reflect the chaos of the city.

 

- Meadow - an ongoing text based project by Flo Goodliffe, an artist and writer, previously published by: Worms, Spam, Travesties, Deleuzine. She is a graduate of the Royal College of Art Master’s Writing programme. This performance of Meadow samples sections of material from a longer work of writing-in-progress. The project relates to the imagined interiority of the character Meadow Soprano, of The Sopranos TV show, in fan-fic style. Meadow is reframed in this work as a protagonist. Her perspective is inter-sliced with a speculative account of the experience of actor Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who reckoned in secrecy with diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis during the filming of The Sopranos. Flo’s voice rounds out the cast participant in this heady work of auto-fiction and biography. The work describes experience of chronic illness and performance. Its choral narration projects yearning for community. Meadow probes thinking on narrative ownership, intellectual property and of capacity for perception, sharing and understanding. 

 

- Four Winds - Graham Massey presents an exploration of his bespoke woodwind collection in 4 parts:

WIND 1 - A 1950s Noblet Alto Clarinet with Jupiter 8 Synthesizer - I Chun Ling (traditional arr)

WIND 2 - A modified Selmar Clarinet with Maestro Woodwind System - Sweet Song Of Summer by Bee Gees 

WIND 3 - The Iguarglaphon -A homemade Chalumeau used on many recordings since the 70s - Norfolk Lightning

WIND 4 - The Reed Cornet -A Woodwind /Brass Hybrid - Tripolis from Kicked From The Stars

 

House of Tongues 

18.30 – 23:00

Thursday 24 July

Rainy Heart Film Club

The Bungalow

Kampus 

Aytoun Street

Manchester M1 3DA

Admission £6.50 – cheap

 

Pictured above

KH at the Horse Hospital by Rachel Hollings, Graham Massey IG post with details, Robin the Fog and The Howling in full effect at Café OTO by Beth Arzy 

 

 

New Biting Tongues Album: 'Clear Your Screens' From Your Friendly Tapeworm

No one heard us coming – no one saw us leave. 

I’m pleased to announce that Tapeworm are releasing a new Biting Tongues album on limited edition CD or digital download. Clear Your Screens is a ‘series of battle re-enactments from Manchester’s least celebrated post-punk groups’ according to Tapeworm’s Bandcamp page. More precisely, it is a collection of live moments, selected by me, recorded between 2003 and 2009 in performances that brought the original Biting Tongues line-up together for the first time in about twenty years. Graham Massey took the multichannel recordings and did an amazing job mixing and producing all of the selected material. He and I spent months swapping notes and ideas with each other, especially when it came to the sequencing of the random tapes we would traditionally have running in the background throughout each performance. We’d never know what was coming or when, so it was always a surprise when playing the rough mixes back afterwards. Graham has a fantastic ear – ‘we have to find where the track lives,’ he once advised me in an email. I’m not sure I completely understood what Graham meant to begin with and I’m not even sure I can explain it to you now either, but I think I get it now. Personally I think this is the best album this version of Biting Tongues has ever released. It’s essentially the same group that recorded Live It, the album that was reissued on vinyl by Finders Keepers at the end of last year. You can find out more about it  here . They even have a few tracks in common, most notably ‘Evening State’, ‘The Reflector’ and ‘Unhook That Boy’.

I wrote some sleeve notes for Clear Your Screens that were an attempt to explore the differences and continuities between then and now – what has changed and what remains the same. Listening to Clear Your Screens today it feels like we were writing material and creating ideas for our future selves – an active form of communication across time. Quite what our former selves would make of our more recent efforts, I will leave to them to express – if they ever get around to it.

You rarely get the chance to haunt yourself – to discover that you are slowly becoming a ghost from your own past. In 2003 the original Biting Tongues line-up came together for a one-off performance at the ICA in London – it was the first time we had played together in almost twenty years. Further opportunities presented themselves in the years that followed. More out of curiosity than anything else, we stuck with past material: tracks written and performed all those years ago. I welcomed the chance to return to it after so much time, experience and hindsight. The playing felt more assured than before – almost as if our performances had grown into each of these pieces, making them what they were meant to be. The live stage had always been our true recording studio, so far as I’m concerned – it was the laboratory where the best experiments happened. We left a lot of space for chance and the unexpected to move in and take over. At every performance there would be tapes running unattended in the background: interjecting voices from late-night TV and radio, scraps of news items and cheap sci-fi movies, field recordings, overheard conversations and shortwave signals. We just kept on playing.‘They may sound like an unorganized racket to some people,’ Graham Massey once remarked about these performances, ‘but they are very formal pieces. This formality provided a framework for all the random inputs in our work to take effect, making a drama out of the unintended. It was simply a matter of accepting the results. I’m glad they have been so carefully preserved. The live recordings we made between 2003 and 2009 are a reminder that the date and venue might vary but the stage remains the same. It’s a constant presence scattered across time and location, influencing the way you think and feel.The barbed tangles of sounds, the clusters of voices and rhythms – each of them establishes a connection with the past. Graham’s outstanding technical skills as producer may have brought them firmly into the present, but their origins will always lie elsewhere – most of the tapes heard running through these performances are digital copies of fragile 1980s originals. As for the person who initially composed the cut-up and heavily processed texts I found myself channeling onstage in the early years of twenty-first century: I’m not entirely sure where and when that individual slipped away. I had simply become an older mouthpiece for a much younger version of myself: just another ghost haunting my own body.

Biting Tongues
CD
Digital Album
Mastered by Stephan Mathieu at Schwebung Mastering
Buy it here.

‘Live It’ by Biting Tongues – Some Notes and Afterthoughts

Finally received my author’s copies of Live It in the morning mail. This is a collection of early Biting Tongues recordings released on vinyl for the first time by Finders Keepers. The core material for this album was drawn from a cassette-only release put out in the early 1980s by Manchester punk label New Hormones, also under the title Live It – six of the ten tracks in fact. The others are outtakes from the various Live It sessions, which actually sound so interesting that I wonder why they weren’t included in the original release.

The first thing that struck me about the vinyl version of Live It was the insight displayed in the new cover design – it pointed me towards something I had not really noticed before. On the front of the regular edition you can see one of those standard band photos everybody does from time to time for promotional purposes. Biting Tongues never seemed to do that many photo sessions as a group in the early 1980s so there probably isn’t that much material to choose from – at least not from the time when these recordings were made. We were being photographed in the stairwell of some mall or arcade. I really don’t remember where it was – I was not living in Manchester at the time, although the rest of the band were. I used to commute between my home in London and theirs every other week or so for rehearsals, recording sessions, performances etc. 

As I said, I don’t recall the location of the tall high windows featured in the front-cover photograph – but what did strike me about them is how they neatly separated me from the other members of Biting Tongues, as if I had been set aside in a box on my own. I am similarly divided from the band on the back cover as well. Graham, Colin, Howard and Eddie had been photographed standing together in some murky alleyway – the print is high contrast and very post-punk. I appear alone in a photo insert sitting at a typewriter and a microphone, illuminated by a desk light. This time I do remember when and where this photograph was taken – it was during a performance Biting Tongues gave at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on the Mall in London. It was our first ever London gig. We would include all kinds of one-off performance elements in these early shows; and on this occasion it had been arranged that I would actually type up new portions of my text live onstage. Then I would deliver them from the desk while the rest of the band went on playing. 

Somehow the cover design for this release perfectly encapsulates my relationship with Biting Tongues during the time when I was a member. It comments on the different and separate processes at work within the band both within the studio and outside it. The rest of the band worked really hard on the music we recorded and performed. They worked collectively – on a regular basis. They also worked intuitively around very precise formal agreements. Meanwhile back in London, I worked on the texts alone and in isolation – I’d receive rehearsal tapes from the band in the post and use them to frame and shape what I was writing. I was more interested in textual collage, cut-ups, words coming from unknown or unforeseen sources – words overheard from a world you only ever glimpse from the corner of your eye. 

I would use all kinds of techniques at the time: take, for example, the texts for ‘42’ and ‘43’, which you will find on side one of Live It and which are also from the original audiocassette release. These were actually derived from one long mosaic-like text made up from laying random horizontal grids over the pages of existing books and noting down what the grids would either underline or strike through. I can’t remember all of the source material now, but listening to the full text on ‘43’ I know some of the fragments and phrases are from works by Antonin Artaud and Georges Bataille. Yeah – I know. Pretentious. The NME told me as much at the time, and so did just about everyone else. 

On side two, the track that interests me the most is ‘Read This’, the text for which was derived from a chain letter sent to me by someone who claimed that the government was trying to control their mind using microwaves. Their words were cut together with some short texts produced by my tuning through an FM radio dial late at night and transcribing the results. On the first two tracks on side two you can also hear me cutting into the words themselves, to produce abstract sounds. These proved too difficult to learn for live performances – your mind has nothing to grip on to. Instead I used to do readings from them at Richard Strange’s early Cabaret Futura nights rather than including them in any Biting Tongues performances. John Peel’s producer John Walters, recorded one of my Cabaret Futura readings and played some of it on his Radio 1 show, declaring that I was probably ‘the death of rock and roll’. 

If he was right, I don’t think I did a very good job of it. Looking back, I can see that I was always a writer working with a group of musicians – certainly not a singer or performer in any conventional sense of the word. One day I will write more about the few short years I was with Biting Tongues. It was a great time to be working with music, both live and in the studio – everything was up for grabs back then; and there was a real appetite for experimentation, however rough and raw the outcome might be. I think Graham Massey’s selection and editing of the tracks on Live It conveys all of this extremely well. It took over three decades to understand the full implications of all that, but it was worth the wait for these recordings to be available at long last in a vinyl edition. Today, looking back on them and having no choice in the matter, I now think of the texts and my delivery of them on this album as being my first published work. Sometimes the past has a way of telling you what you should already have known.

Pictured above: Biting Tongues: Live It – standard edition; Biting Tongues: Live It – limited deluxe edition; sleeve note insert from the standard edition and one of the facsimile club flyers from the deluxe edition. 

Photographed by @lahollings

Order details for Live It from Finders Keepers can be found here.

 Now buy it. 

Biting Tongues – Still On Hawaiian Time #TTW#93

I have another audiocassette available from Tapeworm, the label that brought you my ‘Works For Magnetic Tape’. Graham Massey and I were asked if there was any unreleased Biting Tongues material that might be suited to an audiocassette format. Biting Tongues was one of my earliest writing projects, composing and performing texts over the (as one music journalist called it) ‘post-punk, avant-funk’ racket created by this Manchester-based group. I was living in London at the time, so the relationship that developed between us was an unusual one, but it did result in some interesting one-off performances. Graham and I spent part of the summer going through some of the recordings made in the early 80s, and selected a couple of particularly interesting ones.

‘Still On Hawaiian Time’ captures two Biting Tongues performances from this later period. The Library Theatre in the centre of Manchester was a large seated venue with an even larger stage, meaning that the group members could spread out more and incorporate additional percussion, tapes and electronic devices. It also shows Biting Tongues cutting up and rearranging themes from different recordings, allowing for the free play of existing material – the performance also anticipates their work on ‘Feverhouse’: their full-length experimental feature film released in 1984 by Factory Records’ video offshoot IKON, together with a soundtrack album as FAC 105.

‘Feverhouse’ had its first London screening at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith as part of Factory’s residency there in the summer of 1984. Biting Tongues had played the same venue three years previously at a time when they were beginning to expand and broaden their sound. The improved facilities available in a theatre venue, including greater space, better acoustics and more time for a sound check, meant that Biting Tongues could concentrate on the performance, producing some of their most aggressive and demanding work.

During the early 1980s Biting Tongues excelled as a live band, always seeking to challenge both themselves and their audiences. These two recordings are fascinating documents that convey some of the immediacy and commitment of their performances – something that can still be felt in these old tapes some thirty years after they were first recorded.

You can hear a segment from the Library Theatre performance as part of this Tapeworm mix created for Katie Gibbons’ show on 10 Twenty Radio.

I am particularly pleased with the cover art for this cassette, probably the best that a Biting Tongues release has ever had: ‘Monstergod’ is by Alma McMillan, and she can be seen holding a copy of the finished product at the top of this post. Seriously, this is worth buying for the artwork alone. You can order a copy online from the Touch Shop - it’s in an unrepeatable limited edition and fabulously cheap.

Pictured above: the pack shot, the artist (by kind permission of the artist's father), Graham Massey's Walkman, fully loaded.

Ray Scott Vs ‘Hollingsville’

Graham Massey, the official Hollingsville composer in residence, has sent me details of a recent event that took place in Manchester celebrating  Ray Scott, founder of Manhattan Research Inc and the man who took Twinkies into Outer Space during the early 1960s. As well as a screening of Stan Warnow’s Ray Scott documentary Deconstructing Dad offering an intimate portrait of his father’s life and work, after which Warnow took part in a Q&A session with the audience, Graham and associates served up some tracks either recorded in, or inspired by, the Manhattan Research Inc studio. As the set list featured above indicates, the performance included live renditions of pieces already familiar to Hollingsville listeners. We remain, as always, on the cutting edge of the past.

Pictured above: the Manhattan Research Transfer Project set list and scenes from the performance, photographs supplied by Graham Massey

Read This (You Need Us)

Biting Tongues at Relentless studio Ancoats MCR 02/08/1981, produced by Stuart James, engineer: Tony Roberts. Previously unreleased track from the ‘Live It’ sessions recorded directly onto two-track tape through an eight-channel desk. Film by Howard Walmsley. Part of the text is derived from a xerox form letter sent out by an unnamed individual describing mind-control experiments he claimed were being carried out on him via microwave signals – the ‘read this’ instruction was reproduced at the foot of each photocopied page.

Biting Tongues Live Gallery # 5

The above images come courtesy of the charming Peter Staessens. Taken during the recent Biting Tongues performance as part of Factory Night at Plan K in Brussels.