Filed under: MP3
I was quite intrigued to find out (probably much later than everyone else, for shame) that Appleblim (who does make some of the best ‘dubstep’ around, I think) was a member of The Monsoon Bassoon, who I remember as a kind of sub-Cardiacs / Org fanzine load of nonsense. An even weirder discovery than that D&B geezer Klute was drummer for the Stupids…
Which led me to thinking: not living in Hackney, or Croydon, and not being fully up to speed on the chapter and verse of the Ardkore Continuum and the like, I probably quite often like dubstep for odd reasons. I love Digital Mystikz precisely because they do sound like early 90s digidub, and I do like a lot of the wonkier stuff because it has a similarly skullfucked mood to a lot of the more messy bands I liked in the late 80s, even though the sounds are obviously coming from somewhere completely different, and from people who’ve never taken a brown microdot.
All of which led, as these things do, to Terminal Cheesecake. Terminal Cheesecake were just wrong. Not explicitly, joyfully, in your face wrong like the Butthole Surfers (who absolutely rocked Kentish Town Forum on Saturday, despite the ropey sound). But a more creepy, unsettling, ‘what the fuck are these people UP TO?’ kind of wrong. Then – for the first time in a long time – I remembered Bud Alzir, a digidub (ish) outfit that sprang up after TC split but with several TC members. The Bud Alzir album was a truly wonderful thing – UK digidub drenched in acid and remodelled in a very Terminal Cheesecake way. I got it out this morning and recalled how much I loved it, and how often I’d play the track below (which I have on a strangely water-damaged 12″) whenever I was doing some kind of digidub set at free parties and the like.
Bud Alzir – Zone 1 (Hansome Records 1995)
So, what I want (what I really, really want) is to find out that Bud Alzir or Gary Boniface or anyone from Terminal Cheesecake is now making some kind of dubstep somewhere. Imagine how wonky that would be, how much that sense of stoned menace present in dubstep would be taken to another level of anxiety?
A boy can dream, can’t he?
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Speakers Push Air 
Yeah that would be wicked! Tried to tap boniface up for an interview via his myspace to talk about this sort of thing. He seemed a bit bemused that the UK digidub scene was still in rude health (he’d heard this from a friend, not me) so I doubt he is on a dubstep tip.
But you are right, he should be! TC were part of that weird current of people who manage to “wonk up” all sorts of things and slip effortlessly between genres rather than being hidebound by them. Kevin Martin is another good example I guess (see the link the guardian piece from my blog about his relationship with Justin Broadrick etc)
Great post!
Comment by John Eden July 30, 2008 @ 10:59 amCheers – fast reaction time too.
Apparently Justin lived in Mosely (according to my ‘sources’), in a really nice bit too, so his Birmingham inner city dread stuff might be a little idealised 😉
Great article though!
Comment by dubversion July 30, 2008 @ 11:01 am[…] on the squat-psych dubstep crossover, with a nod to the excellent Terminal Cheesecake. Category: misc […]
Pingback by uncarved.org blog » Blog Archive » genre wonk July 30, 2008 @ 11:02 amYeah, but come on – a “nice bit” of Moseley? 😉
Comment by John Eden July 30, 2008 @ 11:26 amexcellent stuff… just inspired me to dig out angels in pigtaails again… wrong is exactly right for TC… even the name meant they didn’t fit neatly into the brief Pathological scene… an album was maybe too much but it used to be fun playing a few tracks to the metallers at Uni… to think of the alopecia caused by all that head scratching…and i’m now going to check out that bud alzir album…
Comment by loki August 7, 2008 @ 8:23 pmTerminal Cheesecake were great (as were The Vibes and Purple Things before them): Russell always delivered a monster acid-damged guitar attack…
I was lucky enough to see them play live quite a few times (as I regularly travelled down to the gigs organised by Kevin Martin of God in Brixton, the Oval and so on). I also played a couple of concerts on the same bill as them in the early 90’s…
Regarding some of the comments above: Justin Broadrick lived in Moseley in a rented house while claiming the dole much as many other people did at that time…I know because I lived there for a time as well…
He was born and grew up in Shard End which is as far from ‘nice’ as you can get…
A quirky fact: Justin’s mother (and stepfather) were in the ‘Punk’ band Antisocial (who released the ‘Traffic Lights’ single), famed for advertising that someone would commit suicide at one of the ir gigs and for being one of the records kept in John Peel’s singles box under the bed…
Comment by Nic November 11, 2008 @ 12:20 pm