Aroundabout

written and recorded 2001 first released on The Bugs Are Back EP by Storm Bugs (Klanggalerie gg57, 2002)

photo: Tintern Road, St Helier Estate, Terry Ball c1950 and the chair is by the table and the table’s in the room and the room is in the house and the house is in a yard the yard is in a terrace and the terrace on the street the street leads to a road the road’s on the estate and all the roads will meet at an enormous roundabout and the yard is by the hedge and the hedge by the pavement and the pavement by the grass and the grass is on the verge the verge becomes the gutter and the gutter’s in the street the street it has a name the name’s on the estate and all the names will meet at an enormous roundabout and the net is in the goal and the goal posts on the grass and the grass is on the pitch and the pitch is in a park the park is on a footpath that leads out to the street the street it is a game the game of the estate and all the games will meet at an enormous roundabout and the road runs past the park and beside the roundabout the swing is on the concrete and the concrete on the grass the grass is in the playground and the playground in the park the estate is a park the park is an estate and all the estates meet at an enormous roundabout and a bottle’s on the table and the table’s in the drive and the drive’s beside the house and the house beside the drive and the driving roundabout and the terror on the street the street leads to a road the roads on the estate and all the roads will meet at an enormous roundabout and the chair is by the table and the table’s in the room and the room is in the house and the house is in a yard the yard is in a terrace and the terrace on the street the street leads to a road the road’s on the estate and all the roads will meet at an enormous roundabout

Storm Bugs - Table Matters (1980)

Table Matters is a super 8 film made in 1980 to accompany the Storm Bugs EP record of the same name. For many years it was presumed lost, but resurfaced recently and has since been digitally restored with a 4K scan by nanolab (https://www.nanolab.com.au), and reunited with its original soundtrack. The film, shot on location in Chatham, Kent, in early 1980, echoes the themes of grimy mundane consumerism explored on the EP through songs such as Eat Good Beans, Window Shopping, and Make Customers Matter.

Storm Bugs dingles 2016

January

February

Storm Bugs and Film of the Same Name along The Wire

The Wire 380, Oct 2015, pp12 - 13

read it here

genre vagrancy

from The Wire, April 2015
 
Steven Ball

Collected Local Songs

Bandcamp DL

Steven Ball is one half of Storm Bugs, a South East London duo who played a key role in the late 1970s/early 1980s cassette movement. Bending circuits, scratching vinyl, mutilating melody: they created a strangely liberated form of proto-industrial arte povera that, rediscovered and reissued over the last decade, has held up remarkably well. Loosely affiliated with that period’s DIY groups, Storm Bugs still feel uncaptured. Ball’s subsequent activities, moving across spoken word, video and installation, testify to his restless energy and genre vagrancy.

Collected Local Songs, while quieter in register, is equally intriguing. It's a drifting, sometimes aleatory assemblage of signs and signals encountered in South London's Deptford and New Cross. Ball sees the city as plunderphonic terrain, and this music is built up from layers of centifugal texts: ghost signs, ringtones, viral marketing skywriting, fragments of overheard speech. "Cloud Of Dreams" comes across like an old blues song written by conceptual architects Metahaven: "Woke up one morning/Singing phrases from a dream/Into his mobile phone".

There's drift and ambulation here. Memories, fragmented and not always lucid, act as bulwarks against capitalism's amnesia. The city is battered but not down for the count. It recalls the cussed melancholy of Jem Cohen’s films, or Stephen Dwoskin's Jesus Blood, the South London film best known for its Gavin Bryars score. Sometimes Ball’s vocals are a touch too measured, making "Deptford Flea Market lnterlude" - comprised of found sounds such as junglist beats and street stall patter - all the more potent. Collected Local Songs may be a discographic side swerve for him, but it's a resonant and very effective one.

Sukhdev Sandhu

Collected Local Songs

thanks to dubdog 

No Nothingness

A wave front is advancing, sweeping across the plain…
 
No Nothingness, the first new Storm Bugs record for ten years, featuring the song No Nothingness c/w extended instrumental mix Triangulation, is available now exclusively for download at Bandcamp

Storm Bugs live

The second Storm Bugs live performance this year, and therefore the second since the late '70s/early '80s, took place at Abject Bloc, Limehouse Town Hall this past Saturday 7 July. Here is the first half of the set.

a slice of live by Storm Bugs

Storm Bugs at Rammel Weekender

blogged at Brut Smog
reviewed at:
Muhmur
Idwl Fisher

The Blood Donor Skin Donor

Hisstorical Release

MESSTHETICS GREATEST HISS CD (#110) An introduction to the D.I.Y. cassette scene 1979-84.

This is D.I.Y. at its most liberated. The U.K.'s initial outburst of "cassette culture" produced sounds of incredible freshness, directness, and even occasional sophistication, which poured out of hundreds of bedrooms filled with found- and improvised percussion, Woolworths guitars, home-made electronics (and soldering fumes!) came at least a thousand tapes, mostly circulated through the mail for free or at cost (and usually in editions of 100 or fewer. The 'Greatest Hiss' series samples the cassette-scene's more, er, melodic material (sorry, there's no 'ambient' or 'industrial' - and everything's under 4 minutes!).

Just released, features 25 acts, including Storm Bugs, plus bonus mp3s.

More info at Hyped to Death

Chatham, 1979

In his review of the recent Storm Bugs's vinyl compilation Supplementary Benefit in the new Sound Projector magazine, Ed Pinsent writes:

"...they have rendered unique visions of the psychic underside of England, visions as palpable as the monochromatic photograph (by Ball) on the back cover which celebrates the horrors of suburbia with an enquiring eye."

While I think that "horrors" might be overstating it ("quotidian monochromatic melancholia" might be closer), I think that Pinsent has identified a zeitgeist that resonates in the Storm Bugs tracks and the black and white slides I took as a young art student living in a rented bedroom on a grim housing estate on the edge of Chatham. Here is that photograph and others from the same roll, more or less as they came off the slide scanner, with their speckled patina of decay and age.

Storm Bugs - Neither There Nor Here

1st September, Foundry, Shoreditch

Live for the first time in 25 years, Storm Bugs present an all-new show of audio-visual navigational circuit bending and dis-orienteering. All around the roundabout, up and down Shoreditch High Street, in and out the Foundry, where are you going and how did you get there? Eschewing expectations, not to mention glitchy abstraction or the hedonistic thrill of the feedback rush, Storm Bugs turn their attention to the here and the now-ness, the there and the then-ness, collapsing distance, time, direction and location into a question, a riddle, a conundrum.

Car Situations

Car Situations (Steven Ball/Philip Sanderson), 3:20, 1981
by Storm Bugs
7.7Mb QuickTime movie
From the new compilation LP 'Supplementary Benefit' on Vinyl on Demand Records. View the entire record and get more information at www.stormbugs.co.uk

Suspended Sentence