Neil Campbell was a key player in the UK underground before anyone was dope enough to even posit its existence. Alongside friends and collaborators Richard Youngs and Matthew Bower, Campbell was one of the first players to intuit a post-punk/DIY aesthetic that drew on the primal/liberating modes of free jazz without so much as a trumpet in his gub or a concept in his brain, tacking drone-think, psychoactive minimalism and primitive sonic environs together in a way that felt so completely natural and directly related to the source that for a while he was one of the few UK players you could point to as evidence of any kind of indigenous rock tradition that hadn’t been pansied by UK pop/vaud schtick. These days there are legions of free/folk/drone/noise kids in the UK – and beyond – who have further streamlined and elucidated the kinda raunch alphabets that Campbell first invented as a solo musician, a member of The A-Band, Smell & Quim, Vibracathedral Orchestra and Astral Social Club and a collaborator with whoever you wanna dream up, but his music – not to say his constant boosting of new artists – remains a central, restlessly alive part of where modern underground rock is and is looking to go. So, hats off man. Here he is.




When I first thought about writing this, around the start of this year, I’d not heard many people blether on about what a great thing Karl Bauer's Axolotl band is. His underground peers were getting all the kudos, and you know I like them all just fine - The Skaters are the unfettered stormtroopers of 21st century soul music, D Yellow Swans throw super-gristle-ised slabs of tecto at the moon, Burning Star Core is kinda the new Faust, Wolf Eyes is kinda the new Venom, etc etc etc - but up until comparatively recently there has been something supremely humble and homely and quietly just "there" about Axolotl that maybe made it a little trickier for critics to wax hyperbolical about. Conveniently enough, now I've finally got my arse in gear to write this, Axolotl's recent recordings have been more confident and expansive than before, and more people than ever seem to have their ears open to them, so now's the time to dip in if you've ever wondered before.


So what's the deal? I first picked up on Axolotl with the first CD for Psych-o-path records - great stupid name for a label, axolotls are one of my favourite animals, and the press bumf suggested an affinity with Black Dice, so I was there. And I was not burned, as I so often have been before, by the hype. That CD opened up into a real heart-warming stew of electronic splat, violin rasp and cool tone-float - blissed, but edgy too. I was intrigued by the range of ideas on there and the way the thing had a weight without anything screaming in my face, but needed to know if it was a one-off or the start of something beautiful. The answer came in the form of the mighty slabs of tone-generator Kluster-fugged spin-cycle pandemonium on the Axolotl/D Yellow Swans/Gerritt collab CDR and, most especially, the "Oranur" CDR, a gorgeous 25 minute suite where rinky-dink kitchen percussion rattled off Karl's violin on the more forward-moving tracks and floating tone clouds salved my weary brain on the near-static moments. Genius moves, but releases both impossible to find now. Like so many right now, Axolotl moves fast, consorts widely and doesn't appear to have much interest in crafting "masterpieces". To catch him in full glory you've often got to snap up small-run CDRs and LPs before they disappear - yeah yeah yeah, I know everyone’s always trying to shift their crap quick with the limited edition schtick, but it’s worth grabbing everything you can with the Axolotl name on. For instance, the "Object phantom" CDR on Spirit of Orr is worth months of your time, ballooning huge and happy tones that massage the same part of the brain as Terry Riley, Harmonia, Sunroof!, Gas, you know the score. But... 100 copies? Jeez, who the hell is ever gonna find a copy of that for sale these days? Whatever, I've never heard Axolotl suck, so everything out of print is worth grabbing, whether eBay or soulseek is your bag.


If you were wanting a good place to start these days, I'd check the recent 12" on Gipsy Sphinx, "Chemical theatre" - it's the point all earlier Axolotl releases have been aiming for, and achieved fleetingly, stretched out to fill 2 long tracks that satisfy my deep-soak mind like not much else since Wolfgang Voigt disappeared a few years back. But even better, wilder, warmer, more human - like the best ecstatic music, it drags you in and takes you there, but there's the option some days of being able to stand back and admire how its feet are mired in the dirty floor crash pad struggle to pay the rent and get laid and get the portastudio to work properly. Maybe if Wolfgang had wandered not into Köln club scene oblivion, but instead into the German forest his Gas records alluded to, spent a few months eating acorns and hunkering down on a bunch of strange strings, refracting the results through a primitive stack of looping equipment, real boombox tape-saturation mindset, he might have been hitting some similar spots. The Voigt thing's pertinent, as I know Karl's a fan, and I've been smitten too. Top of my head, I'd say M:i:5's "mikrofon", Gas's "Pop" and All's "Alltag" are his apexes, but a few years ago the guy seemed to be effortlessly redefining music with almost every one of his many many releases. And if you can keep up with the Axolotl release schedule, you may be wondering if Karl isn't capable of working at the same level of easy invention. Different scene, but same balance between mundanity and quest for oblivion, same grace and speed of movement.

A bad place to start would be the Mouthus/Axolotl collab LP, perhaps my least favourite of Karl’s releases, recorded a couple of years ago on Christmas Day. Ferkristzake! Didn’t these guys have a party or families to go to? But even this jam really gets going on the second side, when the churning dunderhead sludge and alien insect electronics morph into a real boss swirl. It pretty great actually, but just feels to me like it's more Mouthus than Axolotl, so you'd be missing out on the full Bauer bang, assuming that's what you're after. And if that’s not what you’re after, what the hell are you after?

And the Skaters/Axolotl split LP seems to have disappeared as soon as it was released - my original idea was to use its existence to blether about all things Axolotl here, but what's the point in waxing long on long-gone wax? In a just world Catsup Plate would go for a repress, but there are only so many hours in Rob Carmichael's day, so give him a break. But is it any good? Does a bear shit in the woods? OF COURSE it's good. Great, in fact. The Axolotl side is right up there with his best work, an elevated and excessive loop splurge in three parts that upgrades the more delicate earlier sound with his new boisterous energy vibration, and works for me regardless of time of day, season, playback medium, mood, whatever. I first had a dub of it last winter, when I spent much time on the graveyard shift with our new baby. In the middle of one night I threw it on while feeding young Magnus, nearly dozing on the settee, with our cat also sat on my lap, all three of us huddled primordially to keep warm. My sleep-deprived brain couldn't work out if the sound seemingly percolating under the second track was the cat purring or the music - it all fitted so perfectly. Turns out it was the music, which points to the kind of humble genius at play here. Crank up the same side armed with whatever stimulants float your boat and it's a skullfucking rollercoaster yawp of homebrewed psychedelic intensity, a flaming freewheeling brain-juggernaut, a real trip and all that, but it works its head-spinning magic equally well at middle-of-the-night no-volume. I'll tell you again: it's really really great. And The Skaters take it to another level with the casio toy piano on the flip, as you may imagine (and you’ll have to imagine it if you haven’t grabbed a copy by now), but you don't wanna hear another 40-year old British guy cop a feel of James and Spencer's collective arse here, do you?

So, praise the lord that Psych-o-path has just dropped "Way blank", another full-length, and fairly widely available Axolotl CD on the world. The scope here is wider than the recent vinyl, with more disparate approaches on show. Sure, there's the obvious invigorating monochord bliss of the opening track, "Pneuma", which is based around what sounds like a skipping CD, wallpapering the glitches with ever-escalating loops and loops and looping wordless chanting loops before abruptly pulling the plug after 5 minutes. Amazing. A lesser soul might have kept it steadier and kept it going as a full-side jam, but Karl's keeping it focussed here. And, sure, it's maybe only a skipping CD, but it's skipping around on the maximum-pleasure fifth harmonic, creating a big warm power-chord. Like I said earlier, it's the Axolotl transmogrification of the rickety broken down quotidian into something vast and elevated that really does it for me - "musica mundana" is the old term for Harmony of the Spheres, but could just as easily be translated as Mundane Music, y'know? The purring cat story isn't just my imagination, I'm sure - Bauer has a wide open ear to the sea surge of sound out there, and a staggeringly intuitive grasp of how to drop that sound onto you, there, in the comfort of your home, now. Yeah. Elsewhere the churchy shimmer of the title track and the freaked fourth-world thrum of the closing track “There are sometimes miracles” hit all the beauty spots that you'd expect an Axolotl recording to hit, but Karl boils the tonality up into some pretty ear-cleaning and unexpected noise in between that really keeps your brain on its toes. It's real top-end joy that, like the best of Bower's work, reclaims power electronics and new age from the posers who blight both musics, open and smiling and trashing the chasm between them, no tightrope, no sweat. Can you get to that? C'mon hippy, c'mon macho man, throw off your shackles! Get with the modern sound!

OK, OK, I've ranted long enough. I love these records. You should all give 'em a whirl. Karl's a great guy too. Buy him a beer if you ever run into him. But what we need now is a whole new set of Axolotl releases. If you've seen him play recently you'll know he's been driving his set using these tiny and beautifully-tuned dulcimers, rippling through the usual barrage of loops and electronics, and I've heard nothing in the way of documentation of this set-up. So, give it a few months and the blast of "Way blank" may seem as antiquated as the first Axolotl CD does when played alongside his newer recordings. Karl's muse is still moving fast, his soul is heavy, ancient, but his brain is a twenty-first century one. And to paraphrase one of the great minds of last century, you better lookout, honey, because he's using technology. No time to make no apology. Yeah!

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