Interviews/reviews in GAJOOB 

 

 

This Window ‘Jude the Obscure’ released by M4tr

1989 30 minutes

 

Jude the Obscure" was released in May 1989 and is the second solo release by T/W on M4TR and is seen as a natural progression from the first tape 'Hope’, which was released twelve months before. The songs on Jude are more inventive and the recording style more experimental e.g., the use of different speeds, machines, tape types with and without noise reduction, the use of microphones (different types in various different rooms)at one point the whole house became the studio, the bathroom the live room, the bedroom the dead room, etc. The most important thing about JTO is that these diverse factors combine together to create a whole product in which traditional songs of melody and musical structure combine with experimentation to compliment each other and the bitch is raw in places The use of instruments on JTO creates a bizarre effect, one minute a crazy AXEMAN guitar will disappear into a didgeridoo droning underneath a flute and eastern drum and the next a floating female vocal will be echoed by a telephone answer machine. The whole experience was a great adventure.

 

The most important thing for me is: JUDE THE OBSCURE opened a lot of new doors for us and maybe even a couple of windows for us to jump through and create even bigger smashes.

       

GAJOOB: What makes this tape exceptional is This Window's effective use of the tape recorder as an instrument in itself; as part of the means towards the end result that is Jude the Obscure. Using things that are not normally musical and teaming them with normally musical things. I hear -- the construction of something tangible rather than throwing different things together and letting them lie to form their own construction in the listener's ears out of confusion. On Jude the Obscure singular sounds have a beauty you might not expect. A slashing distorted guitar and a bustling bar, both separate events brought together, comment on each other. It is that sort of interplay that reveals the wonder in this tape.

 

 

This Window ‘Extraction’ released by EEtapes

1989 40 minutes. chrome.

 

EXTRACTION…….now this is a really fine kettle of fish.

Q. What do four people do in a bathroom with copious quantities of fine French champagne?

A. They get very drunk, take all their clothes off and get into the over-filled bath, drink more shampoo and record a cassette for EE Tapes of Belgium.

 

That above statement is true for the tracks, 'The Works of William Shakespeare,' 'There's Not Enough Champagne; and "Salle de Bain" The rest of the C40 is This Window at its most serious and radical. Brutalism, no slick editing here (it is really hard to get a butchered edited feel without sounding as though the person in control is a DORK - the raw edges of Extraction took a lot of work.)

 

The main difference between this tape and the previous tapes is that we forgot most of our rock! folk/punk roots and got on with the problem of recording a new cassette.

 

Q. What do the four people involved in the decadent wet event do with the photographs?

A. Pretend it never really happened and that it was all a dream, but the negatives are for sale.... interested?

 

GAJOOB:Unlike Jude the Obscure, which mixes 'songs' with its concrete music imagery, Extraction is total imagery. It doesn't work nearly as well. There are titles for different pieces; but wherever these separate pieces might end and another one begin is unrecognisable. This is ultimately an outstanding sound collage tape, executed with artistry; but the interplay I loved so much on Jude the Obscure is not present here.

 

SOUND: good to excellent.