Released on Panurus Productions as a run of 35 C30s
Sausage Chain is yet more fresh, amorphous meat drippings from the Territorial Gobbing mechanical reproduction unit. The most disappointing member of Thank gives up on music, instead smearing tape up the wall, wailing into a dictaphone all while gnawing on a skip-salvaged record player.
Bodyless body horror. Idiot-savant-garde. Daft ambience. Sausage Chain tries and fails to keeps it together, unravelling and scattering across the stereo field over its anxious run until only trace sausage grease remains.
credits
released July 13, 2019
Recorded, Mixed and Master by Theo Gowans
Art by Theo Gowans
"A cassette by Territorial Gobbing has not long slithered out on Panurus, James from Möbius’ microlabel. This is a solo alias of Theo Gowans from Leeds, for when he heeds the call of the no-audience underground – you might still be able to get hard copies of his releases on Liquid Library and Luxury Bucket. Here, meanwhile, is five tracks of dictaphone improv, caveman turntablism and pocket-dialled found sound titled Sausage Chain. Gowans certainly has, what’s the word, technique: a dub selector’s zeal for panning, echo and delay, albeit undertaken with rather less delicacy, on ‘Machine Learning To Scowl’. ‘Painted Teeth’ gibbers and feeds back for 121 exciting seconds, the tape’s one proper dalliance with Angry Young Man type noise, while ‘Unusual Achievements In Human Rights’ is nearly twelve minutes of fizzing bin juice and concrète backwash, enlivened at certain times by someone screaming unintelligibly within the mix. Angered or anguished? You may well ask yourself the same." - Noel Gardner, The Quietus
"When I lived in Glasgow, I was perplexed by the use of the word ‘links’ to refer to sausages for quite some time. Being from Lincolnshire by birth, I assumed (erroneously) that they were saying ‘Lincs’, but at the same time was aware that there was a certain logic gap in my thinking. It wasn’t until after about a year I discovered that ‘links’ were actually just what anyone else would call sausages, and the term was used to differentiate these from the ‘square’ sausages, or Lorne sausages, used in breakfast baps north of the border.
I hadn’t thought about this in years: after all, I left Glasgow in September 2004, and being vegetarian, never tried any square sausage – or delicacies like deep-fried back or white pudding as served by my local chippy, which also had deep-fried pizza, Mars Bars, and Crème Eggs on the menu. But despite the fact that unlike this album, it didn’t offer deep fried cash, the title of Territorial Gobbings’ latest reminded me.
The liner notes state that ‘Sausage Chain is yet more fresh, amorphous meat drippings from the Territorial Gobbing mechanical reproduction unit. The most disappointing member of Thank gives up on music, instead smearing tape up the wall, wailing into a dictaphone all while gnawing on a skip-salvaged record player… Bodyless body horror. Idiot-savant-garde. Daft ambience. Sausage Chain tries and fails to keeps it together, unravelling and scattering across the stereo field over its anxious run until only trace sausage grease remains.’
It’s a fair summary and sets reasonable expectations for the discordant hash of sound that the album contains, its five pieces not so much compositions or even sound collages, as a semi-random assemblage tossed together to create maximum disorientation and discomfort. Assuming that’s the objective, it succeeds.
‘Machine Learning to Scowl’ is as irreverent as the title suggests, and at the same time is a mess of bleeps, crackles, fizzes, tweets, and twitters before it bleeds into the primitively-captured scrape of mic feedback and distortion that is ‘Painted Teeth’. It’s only a couple of minutes long, but it’s a howling racket of the highest order, making no pretence of structure or anything other than being a noise for the sake of being a noise.
‘Caressed to Smithereens’, with six minutes of haphazard pings and thunks provides a more than adequate build-up to the album’s feature track, the eleven-minute ‘Unusual Achievements in Human Rights’, which fizzes and crackles in a grizzling hum of sparking electrodes and swampy circuitry meltdowns.
It’s a welcome addition to the rapidly-expanding catalogues of both the prolific TG (and yes, this set definitely contains as much gristle as it does meat, and probably a fair amount of rusk and fat) and the eclectic tape label Panurus Productions – and this is reason enough, surely, to check out their York show at the Fulford Arms on Thursday…" - Aural Aggravation
Leeds based experimental music venture from one brain under one roof (other brains will be specified). Harsh cutup, tape collage, drone, pop songs, minimalist piano workouts. Free Music
