Deliriously Dissecting Dada

Formed in the early 1980s, after the member's sonic dabbling’s on the early Nurse With Wound records, Hastings Of Malawi took a decidedly busy and detailed take on sonic dadaism. The project's first 1981 album Vibrant Stapler Obscures Characteristic Growth, has recently seen a CD reissued on Klanggalerie- and boy it’s one dense, virile, and often surprising ride of a record. The Hastings Of Malawi collective kindly answered my question below- moving from their formation, the creation of their debut album, later work, and beyond

M[m]: Please could you each discuss some of your early sonic memories/ music you enjoyed, and do any of these point towards your liking of the dada/ surreal side of things?

HOM We were listening to mostly rock/punk music – Can, The Residents, Pere Ubu, The Good Missionaries, The Door and the Window also Stockhausen and Messian (Livre D'orgue) we liked Pink Floyd’s Alan’s psychedelic breakfast and the sonic interludes between tracks on Frank Zappa’s We’re Only In It For the Money .

We used to go round to Steve Stapleton’s house (NWW united dairies) and spend evenings listening to records from his extensive collection. We would ask him to play the weirdest records that he had in his collection of obscure music. He introduced us to Alvin Lucier (Bird and Person Dying) Alvaro The Chilean with the Singing Nose (Drinkin My Own Sperm)

Steve also introduced us to Viennese actionism. Encountering the English endurance performance artist Stuart Brisley and seeing Throbbing Gristle at the Cryptic One Club were good memories.

 

M[m]: I believe all three of you worked on the first Nurse With Wound album 1979’s Chance Meeting On A Dissecting Table Of A Sewing Machine And An Umbrella. Please discuss how you each came to work on the record, and do you have any standout memories of the recording?

HOM We were all involved in what we think was the first NWW recording session that took place at the BMS recording studio in Soho London. We played synth, piano, guitar, clarinet and recorded pieces of metal being cut and filed. Steve returned to mix and process the sounds, so it is difficult to tell what if anything actually made it on to the record or whether some of the sounds were used on Chance Meeting and some on the second NWW album To The Quiet Men from a Tiny Girl. Jac Berocal turned up and played trumpet and Steve had gotten hold of an alto saxophone which he played with the mouthpiece upside down. Our recollection of the sessions are that Steve clearly knew what he wanted but wasn’t really able to articulate it so he just let us do whatever we wanted. John made the back cover for the To The Quiet Men album with the Battleship Potemkin heads.

 

M[m]: So how and when did you all first meet Mr Stapleton?

HOM Heman met Steve in a record shop in Soho London in the late 1970s Heman introduced John and Dave to Steve and we hung out together until around 1981 when Vibrant Stapler was produced - Steve was not impressed with the LP

 

M[m]: When and how did the Hastings Of Malawi project came about, and what’s the origin of its name?

HOM We had travelled with Steve Stapleton clutching boxes of the Chance Meeting album to Amsterdam where he sold them to the Boudisque record store. It seemed easy to make a record and sell it. Although ostensibly a musical project we realised that musicality in the traditional sense was not a prerequisite and we just had a go. We never considered ourselves to be a band. In some ways it was an exciting time to be in London - there was a do-it-yourself culture born out of punk. One of us had a Sex Pistols Pretty Vacant poster of two buses that had appropriated artwork by the short-lived Californian situationist group Point Blank – the destination boards on the front of the buses were Boredom and Nowhere – in a way this summed up the attitude of affected nihilism tinged with a romanticised banality that we had adopted and that informed the project.

Hastings of Malawi was a crossword clue in a newspaper – the answer is Banda – Hastings Banda was the first president of Malawi. (You can hear parts of an interview with Hastings Banda and the BBC’s Douglas Brown from 1962 on the Visceral Underskinnings album)

The vinyl mastering for Vibrant Stapler was done by the legendary George Peckham who worked out of IBC Studios in Portland Place London who has mastered thousands of albums from the Beatles to Whitehouse He would scratch messages into the run out – he put Porky. Ans. Banda on one side so we guess he was a crossword fan. (this is how to identify one of the very rare original pressings - he signed the run out groove on the other side with Porky Prime Cut).

The title Vibrant Stapler obscures characteristic growth may have come out of a William Burroughs type cut up technique or out of David’s head we don’t remember

 

 

M[m]: In 1981 you released your first, and for a while the one & only release Vibrant Stapler Obscures Characteristic Growth. I believe the idea of the album was to go in a create & record the album in one night- did you set out any kind of plan before recording? And in reality, how long did it take to record the album, and did you make any edits after the recording?

HOM Yes it was recorded and mixed in one go. Done at night because the studio was cheaper overnight. There was no plan, but we brought along a clarinet and a synth and bits of metal to “prepare” the studio piano and some records (South african nursery songs and whale sounds) The session ran through to the early hours. After some time, we started reciting from telephone directories and cookery books and started to phone people up at random playing them sounds and recording their reactions. The recording engineer fell asleep and we had to wake him up a few times.

 

M[m]: Vibrant Stapler Obscures Characteristic Growth is a wonderfully busy and unnerving- how was the album received by the press at the time?

HOM Making an LP seemed like a good idea at the time. The currently prevailing idea of an LP as a product that is publicised and marketed was not part of our thinking. Any silence or indifference from the press at the time came from our silence and indifference when it came to promotion. The nihilistic aesthetic that fed into the creation of the sounds also surrounded the record once it was pressed – we made it, take it or leave it, we just didn’t give a fuck.

 

M[m]: please could you discuss the album's cover artwork- it looks like in the background there is three armed Mexicans, is that correct, and if so what’s the meaning behind this?

HOM Yes, these are three armed Mexicans - a picture taken from a magazine placed on a textured toilet floor in North London and then rubbed over with black crayon. This is David’s artwork as are all the other albums to date.

In a review of the album in The Sound Projector Ed Pinsert wrote “It’s probably futile to look for “meaning” in what is intended as a bleak, cold statement of the meaninglessness of life” – we are not sure whether this was the intent but we would agree that a search for meaning in either the sounds or the artwork may be futile (or maybe not). The negation of meaning and encouraging audience bafflement were definitely among our goals.

 

M[m]: so, the legend goes that your production company Papal Products pressed a thousand vinyl copies of the album in both clear red and orange. One hundred twenty copies were solid by Rough Trade, but the remaining eight hundred were destroyed label United Dairies. Is this true, and if so, why?

HOM The Pope was due to visit the UK the following year so Papal Products was created to produce the record.

Yes, 120 copies were sold to Rough Trade and 80 or so to Virgin records. The remaining 800 were put into storage.

The Mechanical Copyright Protection Society contacted us to register ownership, but we didn’t bother. We had hoped to sell them to United Dairies but in the end they were destroyed by the parent company of Papal Products and by this time we had lost interest.

The vinyl on the original pressing varies from red to orange as this was the cheapest way to get 1000 copies done. Apparently, the vinyl pressing machines couldn’t just change colour from say red to orange, but had to be run so stock of red ran down while orange was introduced, and normally the pressings during that changeover period were simply discarded. For small pressing runs they were used on the basis that the client accepted colour variation, which in our case was a bonus. And hence the different hues of the original pressing.

 

M[m]: What was the press like for Vibrant Stapler obscures characteristic growth when it was first released?

HOM There was no press reaction because we did not seek any publicity. We saw the LP as cultural artefact but not as a product to be marketed

 

M[m]: After Vibrant Stapler Obscures Characteristic Growth had come out, and made its impact-where there any plans afoot in the 80’s to do a follow-up?

HOM No

 

M[m]: What mixing/post-production done on the album? And has the reissue been remastered in any way?

HOM All mixing was done during the recording session - it was originally remastered for vinyl as previously explained. The original tapes were lost so remastering for SubRosa re-release was taken from a recording of the original LP

 

M[m]: In 2018 you regrouped to record your follow-up release Visceral Underskinnings- please discuss how you started work together after such a long gap? And how do you feel your creation/ approach to the project has changed in the long gap?

HOM It is possible that a brief mention in David Keenan’s book Englands Hidden Reverse led to a slight increase in interest in Hastings of Malawi – several record companies approached us wanting to re-release Vibrant Stapler. We felt that there was perhaps unfinished business so we set about recording another album in the style of Hastings of Malawi. It was through doing this that we started to understand what Hastings of Malawi was and realised that there was more that needed to be said. The original LP had been an entirely analog affair recorded to magnetic tape and there were not that many treatments/effects available to us. All subsequent recordings have been digital and we have access to a wider library of source material. There is perhaps now a clearer narrative and maybe intentions/aims are better understood.

 

 

M[m]: two years later you recorded your third release Axial Incidents (The X-Mas Album)…which appears to be a Christmas album- how/ why did this come about?

HOM It was David’s wife who suggested that it should be a Xmas album and this led to the Xmas imagery– coincidentally the timing was such that we were heading for a Xmas release so we decided that this seemed right. In the end it was released on Xmas eve. Only time will tell but it should become a Xmas classic – it is definitely the strangest, most anti-Xmas and most interesting Xmas album that exists so far.

 

 

M[m]: have you ever played live as Hastings Of Malawi, and if not would be something you’d like to do?

HOM We only played live once in Reading in the UK around 1985 - we had a super 8 film loop that we had made projected behind us and in front of the band was a mannequin with the head removed and replaced by a real pigs head – we had a bucket of fake blood attached to a tube running into the pigs mouth so that blood dribbled out of its mouth and onto the stage.– we managed to reduce an audience from around 150 people to none in a very short time as they all walked out. We want to play live again particularly in Japan but money has been a barrier so far.

 

M[m]: Are they any pictures/ footage of your live performance, and do you think you’ll ever like to do again?

HOM A super8 film and some photos did exist but are lost - yes as explained before we want to play live in Japan but might consider other countries.

 

M[m]: Any new material been worked on/ lined up for the project?

HOM There are two new albums in the pipeline the next (fourth) one is called Choreological Exchanges and it should be released by the end of the year but there have been delays created by a global vinyl shortage and production problems. The fifth album will be a handmade lathe cut very limited edition.

 

M[m]: Please discuss some of the things that have been impactful over the last year be it sound, music, literature, or art? Do you think there are any modern/ recent projects that are carrying on the sonic dada torch?

HOM What is dada - is it more than a nonsense word? Is it possible to make art that is anti-art? What is art? What is meaning? There are definitely interesting things happening but you have to look beneath the onslaught of tedious culture pushed at us by the money machine. Fortunately, there are many creative people around who see beyond the concept of culture as commodity and the relentless pursuit of likes and clicks. Everything is seen in terms of money now. If you have no money and you are producing non-commercial sounds on vinyl or CD you will lose money. Online spaces still exist that fulfill the internet’s early promise where people can make their sounds available to the world, but it has to be discovered amongst the tsunami of sound produced for money and clicks.

These are very different times to 1981 when we made Vibrant Stapler – that was roughly when the neoliberal project that has led us to this point started. We are not fans of the neoliberal project but we like Leyland Kirby’s caretaker project, Romain Perrot’s Vomir project Vicky Bennets’s People Like Us project and we like Hildergard Westercamp who has reacted to the world sonically in a different way but over a similar time frame to us.

M[m]: Other than Hasting Of Malawi & NWW- have you been involved in any other sonic projects?

HOM Check out https://www.johngrieve.org

Thanks to Hasting Of Malawi for their time & effort with the interview. The projects bandcamp can be found here https://hastingsofmalawi.bandcamp.com/, and the CD reissue of Vibrant Stapler Obscures Characteristic Growth can be purchased direct from https://www.klanggalerie.com/gg405