Bela Spit: sings/sobs
Nika Ticciatti Record Club
Out Feb 10th
DL | CD | Cassette (merch store only)
Available to order HERE
A group of maximum, sensory ambush by harnessing a new field of lo-fi minimalism, Bela Spit, for all intents and purposes, a Leeds post-punk group, are about to release their second album via Nika Ticciatti Record Club on February 10th. Interview and Review by Ryan-Lewis Walker.
A fist of mud grows inside the mouth, opens each finger at a time, and squashes your brain to a fistful of cold spaghetti. Liquids are secreted and smeared across your face. You’re prepared on a plinth by being embalmed in caustic snarls of feedback, sacrificed and engulfed in the hum from within.
A new noise, a politicised jab-in-the-eye, a weaponised art of limitation of the sharpest calibre bent into the will of those who wield it…or, the sound of hanging out, apparently, there’s nothing special to be seen here. It’s just the sound of a few friends that found each other along the way, the sound of a room and the people in it, playing against and into the other, casting tribal silhouettes against collapsing walls with their warbling whirlpools of frenetic, post-punk ricochets.
In that sense – there’s everything to analyse here. And everything to adore. It’s new. It came out of nowhere. A virus chanting from between the crooked propeller blades of a scum-stuck fan.
Therefore, anything analysed can accused of missing the point, a heap of garbage, a stack of silly things. Yet it’s just as well such overestimated, and overegged investigations into the musical, and social landscape of Bela Spit, is immediately decimated into nothing except a chorus of wet dream of smug words and sterile ideas. Words and ideas from this writer, who at first glance, almost gave up on the idea that Bela Spit actually wanted to be interviewed at all – a waning interest in the hopeful chance that the feedback symbolised something more than merely feedback, that their history was important, that silence stood for just as much as the music, that the tracks were about fucking identity.
Some of which, could well be true. But we’ll never know for certain. I was proved wrong. The reaponses taut and hitting targets previously unable to imagine. And in that emerges the enigma of Bela Spit, a self-labelled ‘post-pussy anarchic cabaret’, playing, and seemingly beating, everyone at their own trite games. A welcome retaliation against how deeper levels are stagnant pies of journalistic shite dying on cold trays of equally flawed perspectives, that there is no enigma, and it’s entirely, always…them.
On the subjectively portentous moment when Bela Spit, composed of Iris Casling (Vocals) Beth Veasey (Bass) Scarlett Baxter (Guitar) and Nika Ticciati (Drums) played at Wax in Leeds at a book event to celebrate the nail to punk’s surviving being slammed into the wood just as the movement turned fifty, and how witnessing such a moment seemed to confirm the book’s message, whilst seeing to it that all the pages are fittingly burned – that punk’s receptacle is a shapeshifting collision of ideas; a car crash of traumas, an action painting of intent. Yet, the essence of the explosion retains its original power; it’s abstruse and lodged into all kids of shattered light.
Bela Spit flicked a switch. They dance at the feet of punk’s burning effigy as its bones turn to ash and evolve into something, somewhere new. But how they arrived in the room is a mystery. They slipped in from under the carpet, announced themselves from out of the cupboard, some bizarre improv troupe called Tincel that swerved round a sharp corner, and emerged from the cracks in the walls. They give little away. Which inevitably, intensifies the fascination. Frustratingly so.
AA”We were and remain a Christmas band. We had some things to say about Christmas, and we said it… Again and again. We didn’t want to offend involuntarily celibate boys.”
French Kissing, a kick in the teeth with steel-toe caps that opens sings/sobs, but then leans in one action extra and forces you to swallow the fucking things. Canines before molars, an entry through the ear and out the arse, from here, the mise-en-scéne of Bela Spit, although attacking from all angles, is firmly established as one primed to occupy and dominate any given space they nestle into, uprooting it according to their raw, primal gang-fanged, and discord-pronged attack.
Next, Single Sports Nappy utilises a guitar riff that any self-righteous Fall purist would accuse Bela Spit of ripping from the palms of Craig Scanlon, or Poison Ivy’s Nashville Junior instrument of bodily destruction and panel beats the corpse of the song into a spare-of-the-moment Factrix cover, only to be wrested back from the decaying crates of cheap larger and meek bleats of an antique electric heater everyone huddles around in their rehearsal room in the name of keeping the innately northern survival instinct intact.
There’s the ear-bending clap – a percussive pellet gun of a pattern, all naked rhythms wrenching attention into the centre of where the band have strewn their equipment. There’s the bombastic stabs of guitars and cranky tantrums of drums that do exactly the same thing at the same time, but then slip out of the shared stream and bulldoze away oblivious to bum notes and fluffed pseudo-solos. A primal rush.
On the themes of Bela Spit – testaments to trans activity, sexual emancipation, the identity of an outsider, a manifesto of rebellion, addiction/illness, technology, body image, the general day-to-day routines of the cyber-spunking masses, or am I way off what should be glaringly obvious? Am I way off what isn’t even a valid enough point to be a bloody point?
AA”Philosophy for dum-dums. Hegel for Chimps. None of the songs are about identity. This is just the sound of us hanging out.”
On the caustic washes of feedback that features (or doesn’t feature?) throughout the album as an instrumental device. An off, ambient amp hiss is kept included, that feels ominous and raw and horrible. A semi-conscious decision to include what others might eliminate as a sonic stain, keeping in the warts and blotches/botches, it’s a deterrent, an inescapable magnet, some naked lightbulb dangling from the core of a desolate room; forcing us to succumb to its eternal, interrogative gaze: the sound of hanging out, right? The sound of hanging.
AA”There’s feedback on the album?! Remove the botch… and what do you have left?”
On Bela Spit, as a flexible muscle and tightly interlocking unit, as a unit fully in possession of a feral mesh of scraping elements, in control of convulsive sockets of limitation in what they conjure up, making the sound even more explosive. And the notion of deliberately swapping instruments to keep things uncomfortable, on the edge and ‘foreign’.
AA”Ouija board. The first idea that comes to our heads, and if there isn’t one: Ouija board. Well, Iris has a grade 8 (with merit) in singing. Scarlett has grade 7 singing (with merit). Nika really wanted to play drums, and she made the band. Beth is the most musically gifted mind we’ve ever met.”
A nauseating blur of the solitary amp trying to keep warm, a swarm of molten heat bubbles in a moving mass of porridge, sentient in its plastic bowl imprisonment, I’m So Hyper comes kicking into the room with gurgling rumbles of disembowelling bass grooves, counterpointed to random knocks of sizzling guitar shrieks and clatters of trapdoor drums – everything synchronised in one mean glide, psychic spaces created then caved in via chaotic splatters of wonky, garage noise. Pleas, confessions, warnings, spells – gasping, in between it all by Iris Casling’s torn dress/ripped skin hellish yelps.
Now, for Habitual Fucking: a heatwave of paint-stripper noise. Things cue other things to come into the equation and thus, create new things of incredible stamina and dynamism. But sooner or later, in the midst of this split-second-disguised-as-a-two-minute caterwauling – things are kicked away, cancelled out: disorderly hexes of one pile of chords offset by a seething spree of others, frenzied belts of battle-born drums, intense needles of unknown notes beaten bloody, atonal yet rattle, radiate, and chime like a bullet hitting a belly of steel, only to collapse under the climax of everything surging forward along the same line.
Pre-op or Post-op projects an agitated guitar line licking hardcore knuckles. It suddenly shapeshifts from a tooth-taking, muscle-mangling warpath of amphetamine skank to a lovely, nonsensical trip of shit-brilliant guitar solo, indie doom and teenage dirge.
AAWith addictive rhythms contorted like a troupe of brass instruments double-dosed and melted into a microwave until they become plastic miniatures, I’m worried i’m too crude is a splendid disaster of a song. The regurgitating squawk of anti-chords and crackling spatters of guitars. It’s one and half minutes of a soundtrack to a child’s morning television show about a medieval knight cursed to stink for an eternity, encased armour that cannot be removed and thus, the body below within a chance of being cleaned is squashed between the palms of Casling’s moist microphone recitations.
On the supposed symmetry (pragmatism) between spit/swallow and sing/sobs, your LP from last year. ”We wrote the new album so we had something to play before the first album at our first album launch gig.”
On the sense of abrasive mischief and chaotic theatricality inherent in what Bela Spit do – everything is short, punctuated by madness and then silence:
”Scene 1.
(Three monkeys sit on a rock scratching their heads)
Monkey 1 (the bravest monkey): We do what we want!
Monkey 2 (the wisest monkey): (see footnotes)
Monkey 3 (the cheekiest monkey): freaky moves, creepy grooves
Nika exits
Dedicated to Samuel Beckett.”
On the importance of space in Bela Spit’s work.
AAAAAA”[AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA]”
Next up, and venturing into slower waters, yet no less powerful in its approach, Get Well Soon Pope (For Francis) is a somnambulistic groove carried on a gasoline sea. Its spittle-on-rhinestone guitar motif slides into positions and strokes notes that prefer to remain hidden in the safety of the damp shadows – it’s spiderweb melody, it’s traumatic, lost-in-a-lullaby effervescence, it’s wounded, wild animal magic – what shoegaze would sound like if they had one pedal and played barefoot rather than an armada of delays.
AAChristmas In Australia comes up behind it, a sonic approximation of Japanese alt-rock heroes Friction fucking with a handful of chords they found on the floor earlier and, in a flight of fancy, decide to cover the Honey Bane. A link is all you need, and in between one breath and another, our bones are decomposed into stagnant piles of mulch.
Doggy Dog World digs in deep with scalpel-sharp sandblasts of guitar, bass and drums, unified at the edges but occasionally scolded by the fire in the centre of the circle they walk on – drums surge and spew and combust, clamorous orgasms of everything at once, in the wrong order, at the right time, occasionally harmonise to create something unparalleled in it’s madness.
AAKill Me bleeds the whites of the eyes until some colour is forcedly revealed, the pupils twisted to the side – it’s as straight as the band ever is – some cranky power pop chords cutting their fingers to pieces, shrapnel-swallowing bass forever bunching above, and below the belt – harmonic disarray and gut-hooking drums sprawl on top of it all.
On their favourite tunes from the albums and why.
AA‘‘Come into my office – tribute to Les Diaboliques,” says Iris.
AA”Doggy-Dog World – I think Iris is clever,” says Scarlett.
AA”I’m so Hyper,’’ says Beth. ”Coping mechanism for all the sick I have to deal with at work.”
Aa”Jesus, Born in Bethlehem,’’ says Nika. “Brought me back from the brink.”
On influences.
AA“Beth Anderson, Maggie Nicols, Palberta, Kathy Acker. Dogs’ Trust.”
Any more things to say about Christmas? Again and again and again…one only hopes.
Check out the video for Sports Nappy below:
~
Bela Spit | Bandcamp | Instagram
Bela Spit live dates:
Feb 10 – Wharf Chambers, Leeds
Feb 13 – The Holloway, Norwich
Feb 15 – Aatma, Manchester
Feb 18 – The George Tavern, London
Feb 20 – Gut Level, Sheffield
Feb 27 – Little Buildings, Newcastle
Album Artwork | Sam Dallamore Hynd
Photograph | Emily J Tonge ©
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