June 2025 - Listen Now 🅱️ Sweating, Atomising

Oi! from South East London,

We hope you're having a good month despite the Horrors. Our latest Voices show is now online to listen back to, and this time around it's sixty minutes of Pure Motlash to soundtrack summer kicking the door down. Vic's been on her holidays drinking banned beverages, but she'll be back before you know it!

B: Figured I'd play to accompany the surroundings - the liminal retail sheds that surround Voices HQ were buzzing, the weather was glorious, it had been a weekend of shorts and seeing mates so why not play a bit of jangle, a bit of dub and Half Man Half Biscuit? You can tell that Vic is the DJ-master from some of the track transitions, but there's a lot of gold in this episode.

Of note: played 'New Town Dub' by Neutrals, a brilliant example of ex-provincial post punk, who have put out some surrounding material from last year's New Town Dream LP. Has Voices ever had John Major's voice played on its stream? If you're a listener to the Three Bean Salad podcast it might have reminded you of the Thatcher Chill Zone, and perhaps that would also cause your nearest and dearest to wake up in a cold sweat too.

I've also been enjoying the Volcanic Tongue compilation, a reminder of the work put in by the distro nerds of the 2000s - I'd happily read an oral history of Blackest
Rainbow or, say, the Sorry State email newsletter sometime in the 2040s.

I also agree with Noel Gardner's review of Sublux. Great band, great tape, looking forward to seeing them in the countryside soon.

Uncredited song of the week is 'Boss Theme' by LouisF. One day I will beat the orange stake round.

01. Wavejumper - Drexciya
02. Reach For Love - Marcel King
03. Computer - The Microbes
04. Metropoline - ESP Kinetic
05. New Town Dub - Neutrals
06. Absolute Devotion - Living Dream
07. I Can Hear Music - U.S. Girls
08. Hang On To Your Ego - Frank Black
09. Front Left Speaker - deBasement
10. Hellfire - Q Lazzarus
11. Pirates' Anthem - Home T
12. In the Valley of the Wretched - Läbrys
13. Pendulum - Sublux
14. Puto Dinero - Tercer Mundo
15. California Girls - The Magnetic Fields
16. Record Store Day - Half Man Half Biscuit

You can hear the show on our Mixcloud and Soundcloud. Links to tracks available on Bandcamp can be found on our Buy Music Club.

We will be broadcasting live again on Voices Radio next month: DATE TBA! Keep ‘em peeled. There’s a chatroom, the studio is in King’s Cross, tune in, come on down.

Motlash Announces Long-Term Investment From Aldi’s Not Calippo (Ours Have Two Is) Range

B: I stepped back from making a zine every month in January, as you may have noticed, and in the meantime I have been helping out friends on a couple of projects - have fonts, will travel. Getting some paper ready and not needing to post on a Meta platform every day to show that you exist? Bliss. Two are in the works, so more on those in future newsletters, but one has already made its mark and you should get a copy in double time:

Controller/Revolt has been one such project and it has been well exciting to see just how well it's been received since issue one was published this month. It has been a pleasure to work with James Wright in arranging, spell checking and sending off to print this big bundle of radical video game thinking, crust punk shoot-em-ups, workers' rights and the legacy of the Untitled Goose.

The first run sold out bafflingly quickly but a second edition is out now - it's a dense bundle, lots of games you'll want to play and all the profits are going to the Palestinian Red Crescent. There is also a T-shirt that (I think successfully) makes the artwork for British oddity Chuckie Egg (ask your dad) look like the sort of thing that Nicky Rat would draw for a band called The Rotters - so please grab.

Otherwise? It's summer, you go to a wedding or the park, what else is there? Went to see Pulp at the O2 Arena and came out wanting to listen to a fair bit of 'We Love Life' and Jarvis’ family anthem 'Running the World', a song that evokes the peculiar mix of optimism and anxiety that was being alive in 2007. Of course the stage looked like a church hall hallucination, what else could it have been? There's a book about Sheffield as space-pop ground zero, and Vic keeps recommending me another book full of Heaven 17 anecdotes... it's been too long, should go up to the Pennines again, and see what on earth Delicious Clam is.

Similar introspection was in full display at the Vampire/Shove double header which took place at the Old Blue Last on the last day of May... how long had it been since anyone involved in DIY punk had gone up those stairs? Ten, twelve years? Why is the post-gig crowd getting so aggy so quickly? Why was the trendiest pub venue in London one where the stage was in a corner? Vampire at least ruled, big stomp music accompanied by Shove who evoked a particular chord of power violence that has also been missing for a fair bit. Glad to see everyone and to see that the spot I went to a lot half a lifetime ago still exists, surrounded by organised fun spots and SXSW wristbands as it is.

Looking forward to playing music in a field - the house band is playing at Supernormal Festival in August, so no doubt I'll have downloaded half the lineup in time for the next show. Excited to be part of something valued and small, a field full of freaks and no need for a valued brand partner. Reminded me of a great conversation on the first episode of the Critical Listening podcast, where Greg Saunier from Deerhoof was defending the concept of 'enough' when making art - enough to enjoy yourself, enough to maybe tour a little and put out your music without becoming ensnared by the industry or a passively listened to playlist.

He tied it into Mood Machine and its laying out of how the streamers instill this mindset in every tier of artist who engages with it (while paying them literally nothing in return in many cases), and it also reminded me of this wave of people realising just how the ‘get the bag’ model embraced by festivals, distributors, radio and streaming alike has lead to growth mindsets and lucrative partnerships that have turned out to be built on bones. Too bad we’re all too skint or reliant on debt to build up anything else, but hey, something’s stirring out there and I’m all ears.

In the meantime, we should embrace that idea of enough. A key reason in why I hit pause on Another Subculture’s listings was because I didn’t like the increasing pressure that came with the numbers going up - the platforms get at you, the PR emails get tedious and you remember that it’s supposed to be a hobby. (I did get diagnosed with ADHD the month after but that’s by-the-by. Quelle surprise, and so on, and expect some different paper at some point, I promise.) This radio show (and our band, for that matter), on the other hand - it’s still fun, it’s gratifying to be able to share what’s blowing our minds, we’re learning new skills and making new friends, and that’s more than enough to keep doing what we.

Enjoy your summer, Let’s Celebrate and Vapourise 🆙

Here Comes The Hardcore Life

I would consider myself truly free of “Britpop” and its attachments, but have you ever heard Pulp’s This Is Hardcore? It’s probably their best song. Deeply evil Scott Walkerisms, stained sticky velvet, Jarvis Cocker at the hottest point of his powder addiction. Great karaoke choice.

I bring this up as I’ve been reading Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised on the repeated print recommendation of DX, realising I’d accidentally brought it literally to France to read, like when weebs go to Japan. Both song and tome create a horrible little enclosed world of spiritual emptiness and death-fear. Houellebecq does not resemble 1998 Jarvis Cocker and looks like he has melted in the sun. DISTORT is a flawless long-running zine spanning all things grim and electric, and we both get granular on Yukio Mishima’s repressed gay bodybuilder phase, so I figured I’d pull the trigger on this.

Not sure how large ol’ H-Dog (as I’m sure his friends call him) looms in literature’s consciousness currently — I have to admit I pretty much solely knew of him as an archetype of French man celebrity (weird horny creep, obsessive and imbalanced rage about Islam, constant rallying against “le Wokeisme”).

I definitely highlighted several sections, but also regularly felt like my skin had some kind of sentient slime covering it. The slime whispered “remember your early 20s Bukowski period” at me. Like any woman I love some misogynist art (Dizzee Rascal’s ‘Jezebel’, Country Teasers’ ’Spiderman In The Flesh’, The L Word Generation Q), but too much tips the balance and it starts to lose its je ne se quois artistic appeal. 400 pages of sex pest grot and “hey everyone you love will crumble and die” is not quite the lean ballad version above. Like eating a whole box of donuts.

Anyway, if a book operating from some kind of third space outside of “good” or “bad” where Kurt Vonnegut plays a eugenicist presenting Eurotrash appeals, maybe go wild. If you’re under 35, spare your brain looking that last thing up (I just did and discovered it was a French idea btw). Reading Houellebecq in public reminds me a lot of the foreword of fellow Ausrocker Max Easton’s Nothing Pleases I Like Country Teasers, where his friend describes hearing Destroy All Human Life in a bar. A thing that should stay indoors.

One way I do enjoy reminders everyone I love will suffer from inevitable disease and death is watching the immortal Iron Lung, the thinking woman’s “single issue” hardcore band. The last time I saw them play was 2008 where – admittedly fuelled on Red Stripe – I almost punched through the plaster of the Old Blue Last when they played Sexless // No Sex (a horrible lurching constant I can get behind).

I decided to repeat this iterative process sans alcool with the stage of New River Studios for no particular reason other than the pure rush. Humans are very stupid beings. H-Dog would get it. This show opened a fest’s worth of bands playing over five days, which caps with the unmissable Hez and Total Nada on Sunday. If you missed Iron Lung, I’ll see you in ten years. Cya next month!

Iron Lung’s new LP Adapting // Crawling is out now. It is good.

Max Easton’s Nothing Pleases I Like Country Teasers was collected into the anthology BARELY HUMAN: DISPATCHES FROM AN UNDERGROUND MUSIC ANTI-HISTORY (2014-2024).

DX, 20 bands aside, has published DISTORT MAGAZINE and its variety of connected projects since 2003.

Ⓐ Oi! from South London Ⓔ

Repetitive Strain is free every month, both in audio and writing. However, supporting helps us along with radio fees, technical stuff, non-alcoholic beers. Feel free to throw us a little if you wish.

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