FRANK KNOWS

Tales From The Street? No Organgrinding Here? What’s in a title anyway? Run out of milk again, and the man was knocking on the door earlier, not the milkman, the snapping reptile faced man wanting his bag of blood.  It wasn’t that bad after all was it? All that Organgrinding I mean.  The non-stop grinding all finally came to one last final full-stop of a halt a year ago this week – twenty-four years of grinding that thankless task that was the damn Organ monster.  Started chewing it over earlier while conjuring up that first much needed milk-free strong black-as-black-can-be instant coffee (and avoiding that man and his blood-lust) . It really did take up a lot of time, not the coffee or the blood-lust, the time-eating, life-chewing thing was the Organ, was it worth it? Probably not.

ORGAN issue 151

When it was in full flow, The Organ was mostly about some driving need to create, to do, to make – doing rather than just consuming. At the start it was about all those things that you couldn’t read about anywhere else (there was no internet then, just broken typewriters and soaped stamps, oh and John Peel). There were many reasons for the Organ, many reasons for sticking at it, grinding on against the odds, for more than twenty bloody-minded years. It was a beast of it’s time. We kind of let it die a natural death, a quiet passing after an often very noisy lifetime…

Almost a whole year of not HAVING to listen to endless demanding mountains (of often very average) new music, of listening without having to instantly form another set of words that make for some sort of review or other – signposts really – hey, there’s this good band, they’re over there, they’re a bit like this and that, send them a postal-order and they’ll send you a cassette, Paypal them some money and they’ll send you a download… hey, there’s this artist you should check or this gallery you should be taking note of or this good gig happening or….I think we ended up with about 80 printed versions of Organ and who knows, probably another 250 or so weekly versions on line, thousands of thousands of reviews, interviews, links, mailorder addresses,

Feel like actually share some new music with you today then…

Quadrilles, Inuit, the new eight track EP

Well some new music from a band that were covered a little bit back in the final daze of Organ, played on the radio too… Radio show is on a summer break at the moment, we’ll be back on air at Resonance FM in the Autumn and there’s a billion ways to keep the milk warm, but if it’s all the same we can put the kettle on, there’s a million names all being said here, but if it’s all the same why don’t we disappear?  QUADRILLES are kind of polite, they’re nice, in a good way though, not using ‘nice’ as some kind of back-handing insult here. Sometimes ‘nice’ is good, and this rather positively enjoyable London band make easy-on-the-ear, harmlessly-uplifting, indie-flavoured, mild-mannered post/math rock.  Intelligently light and breezy, no showing off technique, no beard-growing tedium here, Quadriiles are more about feeling, about bright colours, uplifting cups of tea and Gong! Hey! Fat! Choi!  They don’t need to show off, they’re don;t need to tell us how clever they are, they’’ve got a rather breezy eight track EP out right now.

YOUR CALL 2: SUMMER IN THE STREET…

The new Quadrilles EP is called Inuit.  The EP is nothing revolutionary, nothing groundbreaking different, Quadrilles aren’t vital (but then who are these days? Extra Life? Deathgripz? No, Quadrilles aren’t going to change your life, they’re not going to make you want to shout their names from the roof tops, they’re just a really fine, really uplifting, really rather pleasant band with a rather cleverly simple, less-is-more set of enjoyable tunes and a new EP that’s made with feeling, that’s presented with a spirit of pure enjoyment. Quadrilles are a quiet band, an unassuming band, a band that could easily slip by without you really noticing. Don’t let them slip by, they’re a band it really is impossible not to enjoy, especially if breezy post rock flavoured things be your thing of choice.  Quadrilles have this little touch of simple magic to them, their latest EP was released yesterday, you can pay whatever you want for the download version via their Bandcamp page should you feel like it…

Not that that was a little bit of Organgrinding or anything just then. Off to deal with the snapping reptile faced man wanting his bag of blood, that and Your Call 2 and Cultivate’s Greatest Hits and….