Here's My Card Records - 'Board Meeting'

These last few records have all been a bit nice. It’s time for some noise.

I am, of course, drawn, moth to flame, by the very idea of Here’s My Card records. They combine admirable kitchen table enterprise with a neat format. What they do is produce credit card sized CDs, home-burnt, in home-made covers, which they then sell on their website for not very much money. It’s an irresistible idea, which they justify with some knowingly pretentious twaddle about the pressures of modern living, the shortness of time and the over-availability of everything requiring a new formula of “quick and cheap”. A couple of quid via Pay Pal buys you 300 seconds of noisy fun. Because, you see, you can only fit about five minutes of music on a credit card sized CD. That makes them, as they’re proud to call themselves, the world’s smallest record label.

Of course it’s the sort of music you couldn’t listen to all day, but what isn’t? I’m always bewildered by sub-genres, so I don’t know what you’d call this. I’d take a stab at electronic noise.

Now, I don’t want to be forever banging on about how much I still miss John Peel, because in music I’ve always looked to the future instead of the past, but time was when I’d get to hear this sort of thing while listening to his show. I always felt I didn’t need too much e-noise in my life, and I got sufficient of this stupidly fast, ultra-repetitive and deliberately irritating music while Peeling, waiting to hear something else. Now it’s in danger of slipping from my musical palette. I can’t be sure of chancing on it. I have to seek it out.

To be fair, it was chance radio airplay that led me here. Huw Stephens on R1 the other week played a quite glorious manic cut and paste job by the Nailbomb Cults. It’s a name you tend to remember, and a bell rang, they having previously appeared on an interesting sample of music from Oxford, A Catholic Education. Their website was a gateway to the strange world of Here’s My Card records. By the way, go to the Nailbomb Cults’ website and download some of their supreme noise. It now seems my life was incomplete without Disneycore.

In a spirit of utter recklessness I lashed out £4.50 for two records. One, inevitably, was from Shitmat, long (to embrace cliché) Peel favourites. The other is an eight track compilation – eight different outfits, including Shitmat and the Nailbomb Cults, eight different tunes, all 45 seconds under, blended seamlessly. In the spirit of the thing my review of the eight tracks is as follows: 1 – squelchy; 2 – bang-bang; 3 – cheeky cut-up; 4 – shrieky; 5 – slidey; 6 – horsy; 7 – ferocious noise; 8 – post-noise.

It took me longer to write this paragraph than listen to it. Clearly, you need this in your life. Best buy two, for when you inevitably lose one.