long lost music

After years combing the pestilential slums of South-East London, ethnomusicologist Wolf Dietrich finally located blind, misanthropic Mean Streaks guitarist David Mitchell in the windowless council flat where he has obsessive-compulsively produced and hoarded astonishing recordings and drawings like these since his expulsion from New Zealand a decade ago for failure to participate in circle jerks at record industry barbecues. Dietrich wrote: Mitchell's guitar sounds like it's strung with human nerves and sinews; the four tracks of the tape machine are strands of the hangman's rope. The terrible damage, he might have added, is done without resort to things like amplification, chords, band, etc. Heartbroke-as-in-bankrupt songs and Zeibeiko-blade instrumentation are purged of the healthy meat and potatoes that make rock music grow big and stupid, so that every time a string squirms it hurts. Plus the late Jeffrey Lee Pierce is made to hand back Death Party, a song he borrowed on the astral plane some time around 1982. There ain't no music / your body's on the floor.