Oi! From South East London,
Hi! How are you all? Been a moment. We’ve been quiet shortly after promising a bunch of stuff and we have big news! None of that stuff happened. The UK continues to spin around the 20 seconds of sun it gets a day.
The main news is that our radio show’s home for the past three years, Balamii, recently moved to cease its continuous radio broadcast. We found out on what we can best describe as “short notice”, and the news fell basically as we expected to return in January – so we’ve had to spend the past few months working out how to keep on rocking in the free world. And so:
Help is at hand across that great wide ocean, and we are back on the air: our next show will be broadcasting this coming Thursday on Oakland, CA’s Lower Grand Radio, from 11am Pacific time and 6pm UK time. Click on lowergrandradio.com or listen to the show afterwards on Mixcloud and Soundcloud.
We’ve been fans of the station since it first sprung up (10 years ago!) - kindred spirits in both selections and typefaces all the way. They broadcast shows that cover all genres, help keep the Oakland’s musickers connected and train up the next gen by organising DJ workshops down the library, no sponsors in sight. We’re delighted to get two hours of rectangle music on their airwaves, so get tuning in.
You may well know the station’s founder Alex S from Marbled Eye and Unity; he also spun a guest mix for Repetitive Strain back in 2022 and will be in so-called Australia as I type this, playing true bucket list material weekend Jerkfest next weekend.
Expect the usual non-standard mixture with a little more room to breathe. Two hours of non-standard mixture, a few familiar tracks and current favourites amongst lost J-pop shoegaze, dub memories, typewriter strikes, defragmented summer smashes and a few nominal Punk Rockers. Get on the archive and reacquaint yourself.
Speaking of rockers:
SPIT # 1 – Dalston Superstore, London – 13/03/25
Most notably (if we’re going by Instagram notifications being ruined for 72 hours), I (Vic) finally fulfilled a years-long London dream and put on a punk show at Dalston Superstore with the help of two absolute freak dog pogo legends in E Roisin and Maggot Death. If you’re one of our international readers, this sentence might make slightly less sense, so essentially: picture your local and most in-touch queer bar with absolutely no backline, then picture putting a hardcore show on in that space.
SPIT ended up the series nom de plume, and its first iteration took place last week after a few months chipping away. Traidora were obvious headliners, and we ended up with a last-hour replacement of the truly incredible Moist Crevice alongside Rubber. I wouldn’t normally play a show either of us are running, but nepotism was built into this one slightly I’m afraid. I feel like basements really bake a specific energy into punk shows, and when it’s really cooking and full of bodies you can get that energy to a level that can be filed in the “euphoric yet also kind of maniacal psychedelics trip” category. Playing definitely had several points where I feared for my personal safety, so in other words a 10/10 hardcore punk limit experience.
When I returned to Regular Loud Night Programming after the lockdowns ceased here, things felt very in a Meat And Potatoes kind of zone. Love a bag of chips, but every day gets tiring, y’know? I struggled to work out where a lot of the pre-2020 dissonant weirdo end of punk had gone and if it was coming back at all. Duh obviously. Moist Crevice are a new height in this vibe, and while their recent EP is incredible, live they are real ascension shit.
I’ve seen them 3 or 4 times now, and I’m still not entirely sure where songs end and begin. Guitar seems to mostly exist as a wall of sonic taunt, bass as a roided Big Black punch in the face. Sometimes there’s 2 or 3 additional layers of noise happening via sample pads, pedals, contact mics – tonight slightly less? I think? They are fronted by a person who seems to teleport from some kind of alien fashion runway and speaks in a wall of dub delay. It is insane, divisive and perfect.
The band we’re in and post about every time played after this. If you live in London and frequent this sort of thing you know the deal. Idiot Rock gone bad. I handed out multiple bottles of high-strength poppers before we started, which I intended as light personal mischief ignoring a) no one had turned on the air conditioning for hours and b) it was a full hot room with a low ceiling. An unnamed associate drank from the bottle on sheer reflex seconds before the first drum hit. I later realised how many people were on mephedrone at this point. I had to mallet several items of my gear back into shape yesterday. I love playing psychosis-inducing guitar music.
Traidora are a band on the verge of being Something Transcendent with whatever their next record is, presumably not far off the mark. Live as a proposition it is physically dangerous, warp speed fast and completely terrible sounding incoherent noise interspersed with occasionally dropping the hardest riff you’ve ever heard. A good crust punk band should hit all three of these markers, most modern crust punk hit none of them. I expected this to be turnt, and it was several notches above that. Highlight of their set: Eva purposely holding her mic stand to the PA speakers and smiling widely at me as it produced a body-juddering and repulsive feedback.
Upstairs we had E dog B2B with Wilma and then Jaye Ward close out. My long-term partner – and designer of a promotional Instagram reel that almost got the venue’s account deleted – had been tagged in to do some visual projections. Late in the evening at the bar, I heard a scream of horror near me. I looked upwards instinctively, and was met with a 9ft closeup of a skinhead being fucked with a baseball bat, causing me to burst out in maniacal laughter alone.
SPIT is on Instagram. Future events TBA.
Rationalism, Legal Pingers, Assume This Phone Is Tapped
V: I wrote out a huge thing about my current bugbear of Substack forcing a dearth of incurious sub-AI cultural writing onto our dashboard, but decided that this would be what we call in the professional wrestling business Working Yourself Into A Shoot. I refuse to become The Slop by Responding To The Slop.
In between the highs, lows, and mostly mundanity of studying I’ve been finding time to either be in a sauna or read (I sweat way too much to do both, unlike DX manages). I was completely upended by Hesse K.’s Pilot Press collection Disquiet Drive and difficult-to-put-on-a-bookshelf Resuscitator – graceful and elastic, grime-filled mad girl lit in the lineage of the greats. It unquestionably slaps.
Alongside that I’ve been struggling through Avital Ronell’s 1989 brick The Telephone Book, mostly impressive as a printed object of graphic design than anything she’s actually talking about. You can pretty much encapsulate a modern day version of this book with the Cher “I Need To Shoot My Phone.” tweet. I picked this up on a whim from a local Marxist anti-organisation hole in the wall before later discovering her fairly insane #MeToo semi-downfall. Psychoanalysis is a strange universe that I continue to remain mostly on the outside of, coincidentally where I will be taking some salacious New York intel about one Freud’s living relatives to my grave.
Erik Davis’s infamous Techgnosis book has been the good side of this coin of late, outlining deftly a turning point in late-90s tech futurism with enough skepticism to be predicting (some of) the terrible roads we are on now. It’s aged better than the flying cars stuff let me tell ya. Interesting aside is the 1999 appearance of Rationalism, a now-poisonous American Individualism offshoot you might have seen in the news occasionally lately. Davis has his own Substack, which is a worthwhile read.
On the internet: I’ve been enjoying Owen’s recent open-ended writing around the mainstream press success of The Tubs. Max Easton’s recent and infinitely unspooling interview with ultimo donny BB is The Shit I Ride For. Finally, I cannot put my hatred for the gutless middle managers and careerists that make up the modern Labour Party in this country, so in the interest of not writing something that gets my door punted in I recommend Jean’s writing on the proposed disability payment cuts.
Peace Eternal to Bill Fay, Yana Pavlova, Terror Danjah, Unk, Garth Hudson, Rick Buckler, Angie Stone, David Johansen, David Lynch, Roberta Flack, Brian James, Roy Ayers, and Mark Pawson.
B: 2025 has been a necessarily quiet one for me so far. Paused the listings and found that not having to engage with Instagram daily has reduced my resting heart rate, which is just as well as I subsequently became an Elvanse Fellow Traveller (I now label my emails and have muted a number of influencers; my Facebook feed is almost entirely updates from bus manufacturers as a result).
Cultural highlights: smoked a cigarette in the pouring rain to honour our Dave with The Nickel providing the matches and the gnarliest possible print of Eraserhead; had a ball at every Sunday School-affiliated event so far this year, their determination to keep the freak techno/punk alliance going strong is admirable and continues this Easter weekend. It has been reassuring to watch Deptford’s Piehouse venue reopen as a co-operative, affiliated with the How to Catch a Pig crew and Sister Midnight, and with a busy calendar of gigs and socials coming up. Give them your consideration when putting a night on, it’s a friendly, accessible spot.
Mark Pawson’s death has stuck with me. Not just because that I’m aware that I’ll not see his stall at a zine fair again - a constant presence, heaving with badges, stamp sheets and publications of all shapes and sizes - but it has made me reflect on how he kept it D-I-Y right up to the end. Subversive mail art, reprinting titles for decades, sometimes being the most affordable table in a room full of art freaks, a tireless advocate of making stuff for the sake of it, never throwing anything away ever.
I do hope that his collection is being looked after - and if anything, it has certainly reaffirmed my belief that making paper and music and whatever you’re into, outside of a commercial or careerist framework (or, just because you want to) is always worth it in the end. I just wish I had picked up those stamp sheets.
Oi! from South East London Ⓐ
BP and VSP play Non-Standard Music. Listen back to our archive of shows Mixcloud or Soundcloud. Subscribe to the RS Substack for one monthly email of sonic detritus.
Ⓐ Oi! from South London Ⓔ
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