Music And Words 3
- At grandparents / Hearing aid (2:10)
- Unpleasant discharge blues No 1 (0:43)
- The yellow rose of Zork (1:38)
- Brighton pt 1 (3:50)
- Bitumen sex (2:47)
- Brighton pt 2 (3:04)
- Scrum quarter (4:54)
- Brighton pt 3 (3:51)
- Dominic the dragonfly (3:22)
- Brighton pt 4 (2:49)
- Interruptions 2 (6:39)
- Brighton pt 5 (1:50)
- It's a grey day (1:25)
- Brighton pt 6 (2:21)
- Montague the toothbrush (1:41)
- At grandparents / Outdoor noises (1:40)
- Maggie May (2:12)
- Clacton-On-Sea pt 1 (2:55)
- Talkin' 'bout Manilow (again) (4:01)
- Clacton-On-Sea pt 2 (5:06)
- Melancholic alcoholic (1:45)
- Clacton-On-Sea pt 3 (6:01)
- Banjolele abstraction (4:12)
- Clacton-On-Sea pt 4 (4:11)
- Foster's champions (1:55)
Coming 8 years after Volume 2 and 23 years after the first installment, Volume 3 of Music And Words is the 4th solo release by Adam Bohman on Paradigm Discs. All 4 releases have focused on his earliest recordings, mostly from the 80s, mostly domestic and all using cassette recorders. There are 4 principle styles that are employed in this early phase of Adam’s work - most unexpectedly there are songs, often constructed with trumpet as the lead instrument, then more typically there are improvised experimental pieces using home made stringed instruments. Thirdly we have ‘pause pieces’ - consisting of rapid edit collages using found media (typically radio and bargain bin LPs), and the 4th element is Adam’s spoken word recordings. Anyone who has met Adam will have seen him recording his observations and thoughts onto a small tape recorder, documenting his way through life. In fact the Music And Words CD series is roughly 50% composed from these peripatetic ‘talking tapes’. On Music And Words 3 we hear him at the seaside in both Brighton and Clacton-On-Sea.
Overall the CD ranges widely over these various styles, and bursts with ideas and humour. In addition to the 4 solo releases on Paradigm Discs there is also a compilation track plus his contribution as a member of Morphogenesis on 3 further CDs. I’m proud to say that Adam is by far the most represented artist on the label.
Boomkat
Gonzo sound art spanners by persistent UK avant-gardist Adam Bohman, typically dipping into his tranche of observational ’80s “talking tapes”, but also sporting works dating to the ‘90s and ‘00s - RIYL Graham Lambkin, Mark Harwood, William S. Burroughs, Uri Katzenstein, V/Vm, Cosmic Dennis Greenidge, Trevor Wishart
A virtuoso example of locating poetry in the prosaic, ‘Music And Words 3’, like the preceding volumes, revolves armfuls of domestic DIY dictaphone recordings rubbing shoulders with janky songcraft, and butting against improvised instrumentals made on his custom-built sound objets. Each of the 24 works captures a curious energy or ephemeral line of thought in-the-moment, ranging from almost voyeuristic voice notes to droll descriptions of everyday ludicrousness and surreality, and hopping between hacked pause-button collages of found media(TV and charity shop/bargain bin vinyl) and documentarian jams of dadaist daftness extracted from life lived in England’s south east.
Not po-faced, there’s a palpable sense of a quintessentially english eccentric at work here, abundant between his feedback experiments with hearing aids or literal evocations of ‘Melancholic Alcoholic’, thru to lyrics about “Steve Davis sucking out your cum / you can have Fatima Whitbread sucking on your feet” like some errant V/Vm novelty session on the genuinely effed up and hilarious ‘Foster’s Champions’, or multiple parts describing days out, sights seen, in Brighton or Clacton-on-Sea. Aye, it’s properly wigged out, but in an understated, odd but charming bloke-next-door, rather than woah hark at me, style.
The Wire - (May 2023)
Released in 1999, the first volume of Adam Bohman's Music And Words was a kind of post-Residents surrealist churn-up whichrumbled in the intersection between the artist's idiosyncratic sense of humour and his eye/ear for the grotesque. A second volume was released in 2014 and it's followed now by a further instalment; all three collections document work created during the 1980s, but this third volume presents Bohman's tapeb creations at their most mangled and wild.
Music And Words 3 opens with "At Grandparents/Hearing Aid" and "Unpleasant Discharge Blues No 1", a scuttling slab of music concrete populated by detuned radio and half-tuned guitar, segueing into a trumpet riff which trembles as though it's on the edge of punching an obnoxious stranger. Bohman's trumpet props up many ofthe other pieces, the effect of which is to undercut the causticity of his experimentalism and further the warmth of his unique narrative voice, which comes across like a kind of audio version of film maker John Smith. On "Brighton Pt 1" Bohman describes the inside of a chip shop with the same heavy interest as he does the outside of a sex shop - like Smith he always pulls something incredible from the mundane.
These "talking tapes"- pieces constructed from cassette recorded monologues and aural detritus - recall the mangled theatricality of The Bohman Brothers, his duo with sibling Jonathan. However, they are interspersed by more garbled and wordless creations closer to the rough experimentalism of his work with The London Improvisers Orchestra, such as the glottal and louche "Bitumen Sex" which registers somewhere between vocal warm up and coital grunting.
The record closes with "Foster's Champions" which provides a perfect balance between the comical and the grotesque; various descriptions of lewd acts conducted by a variety of sports people ("You can have Alex Higgins, snookering your rim"} are laid across muzak trumpet, sounding like a cabbie talking bollocks while his radio plays an advert for a gentleman's outfitters. (Spenser Tomson)
