Bio: UNUNE relies on power, not by beaming unlistenable noise in your direction for too long, but by hanging the noise in space, allowing it to breathe. Inhabiting the much neglected no-mans land of hopelessness and mental illness, it doesn’t try to shock for the sake of shock value. A slow tumbling noise, like a relentless mudslide of reality, a sodden slagheap crumbling towards a school, a sound-scrape of a disenfranchised population trapped in a derelict sink estate.
S.K.U.M is a collection of the first ten years of Stephen Surreal's long career of sonic abuse from 1976 to 1986 and he's still doing it today! S.K.U.M came about around 1979, I indicate that as although only 15I found it enjoyable standing on a stage making strange noises & screaming at people (nobody else had even dared do anything akin in the far reaches of the Scottish West Highlands, to the extent - at the age 16, visiting, then living in Oban, the overbearing mainly Catholic & still prominent God squad would 'show the sign of the cross' then take a detour to avoid me in the street) - highly amusing. I built my first 'synthesizer' at age 12 using an early electronics kit & things scavenged from the local dump, slowly starting making things like distortion boxes from old valve amps, microphones from inverted speakers & possibly the only thing I still have 'pride' for - getting hold of 4 recordable 8 track cartridge players, inserting a single loop into each cartridge, recording sound and using all the track buttons as a rather difficult keyboard. So - around '78 I had started using 2 old stereo cassette recorders in the Cabs fashion to 'create' albeit badly sounding multi layered tracks - there were no 'official' releases - just given to friends etc, until moving back down to England in '87 - although that's when the reversion to my 'agony for pleasure' thing, that I'd tagged my little releases with previously, became the name, due to finding the albeit brief 'skum genre' had similar attributes to what I was doing." [above is an edit from an earlier interview with Jonny Zhivago of Die or D.I.Y.?] "Heard their first musings (of Throbbing Gristle0 on the John Peel Show on Radio one & although at that point in time I 'stuck' to a more cohesive type sound in essence, the rawness was something I felt should never depart from the 'Industrial Music Scene' so as far as my own work was/is concerned, it hasn't ! The obsession of their sound later developed into being a member of TOPY & witnessing Psychic TV at their best." Year now 2016, work continues with a more 'adventurous' attribute with the idealist additions of those met and worked with in the three years of moving back to my hometown of Nottingham. These include a more punk orientated sound with a reversion to 'the Obnoxious Cretins' & a return to past & forgotten sounds. |
Soylent Bound Angst Punk Versus The Berlin Wall |