Giraffe by Pete Um

MORE PETE UM VINYL: GRIST0009: GIRAFFE

Reissue time on Grist again as 2004's supposed meisterwerk Giraffe gets a deluxe rebirth on wax, remastered and with a proper full colour cover and labels and everything, although the homemade inserts are keeping it real obviously. 250 copies, so a limited run - but not to the extent that The New Album and Babysitting The Apocalypse were (100 each). All Um records are compilations, apparently, but this is more of a discrete piece of work than most and is perhaps the better for it. It has been described as the zenith of Um's gnostic electronic rock. There's a piece of text to go with this edition written by Matt “Woebot” Ingram attached, and also a great review of the original CD-R lifted from the Kid Shirt blog. If anyone can help get this record heard, on sale or sold please contact Pete Um any way you can.

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WOEBOT NOTES:

I can just imagine Pete flicking through his old MiniDiscs: “Nah that’s too early to be from the Giraffe sessions”, or “Too late, that will never do…” Like Brian Wilson must have been sifting through tracks for the SMiLE reissue project. “Yeah well, y’see, technically speaking that belongs to Wild Honey…” Because that’s the way the way Pete works. Constantly making stuff. Stuff it seems he isn’t quite sure what to do with. Mere mortals set out to start and finish an LP but real creativity doesn’t work that way. Pete’s friend Dave Nochexx agrees to put together a compilation of his friend’s work but throws in the towel in a fit of exhaustion and rage. How to deal with the torrent of DMT-addled DATs? How the hell to marshal Pete Um? Um.

However there is something about “Giraffe”; something that deserves to be conceived as a discrete artistic object. The album is unostentatiously special. In a creative life it can happen once or twice, when the stars align and when what an artist is doing gains an unexpected cosmic resonance. Sometimes the world notices. “Giraffe” came out first in 2004. Looking back, sheesh, that was a bad year for LPs. Only Joanna Newsom’s “Milk-Eyed Mender” and Kanye West’s “The College Dropout” seem to have stood the test of time. It’s a shame then that “Giraffe” didn’t register on the landscape. It’s one of those historic travesties, like why no one clocked S.Y.P.H’s “4LP”, The Numbers Band’s “Jimmy Bell’s Still In Town” or The Monks “Black Monk Time”. It is a stone-cold classic.

Um displays here a knack for minute-long pop perfection. They have the vestige of verse, chorus and bridge but does that mean these songs should repeat each thrice? Fizzing with witty, daft, hilarious, goofy, drunk, stoned, gloomy but always self-deprecating lyrics; sonic ideas bounce off the walls. Never dreaming to outstay its welcome "Giraffe" is a universe unto itself. At its centre is the beguiling Um – the racehorse that won’t run.



Matthew Ingram

March 2013

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KID SHIRT WORDS:

Welcome to UmWorld.

This CD makes me think of sheds for some reason. Tool-boxes rather than Roland Grooveboxes. Rusting scythes, the smell of WD-40, those little scraper things that you use to de-ice windscreens in winter. (Computer) Music for Shepherds.

Um.

“I think I just caught myself out”.

Tracks. Lots of them. Lots of tracks. Logic stacked laterally. Illogical longing.

Words are shifted around to make new sentences, new meanings; a Rubic Cube of words. Sometimes it’s something that’s a little bit like poetry, but not quite – synonymic and phonetic shifts – almost puns – other/times it’s like he’s talking to himself, chatting to dead air, open-mic over Rustic Crunk, joshing imaginary friends, drinking, playfully critiquing himself or getting annoyed by something that might (or might not) have happened earlier that day; it’s like a series of entries in a diary – blogsplatter n scribbled memos-to-self – sometimes talk-songs, sometimes soulful n semi-funky: observations, moans, pronouncements… all accompanied by an array of ratcheting samples and clicky-hissy percussives, a bass-gtr or back-parlour Electro.

(Some of the songs are instrumentals.)

“A male entity announces his name,” says an anonymous snippet of voice plucked from the air. I love things that arrive devoid of context; that force you to guess, to make up a story.

Sometimes he’s tongue-in-cheek; sometimes tongue n groove.

Later, on another song, a weary, downpitched voice says, “No, I really do feel awful” and makes me think of a half-dead cartoon horse. A plodding drum-beat and forlorn-sounding series of bass-strums trudge their way across a seemingly-endless field of mud – a Flanders of the Soul – singing: “I feel so depressed / when I get dressed”. I’m feelin’ it, mate; I’m really feelin’ it.

UmMusic wears its drum-machine on its sleeve for everyone to see.

On “Too Old For Sports” he comes on like a Beck of the Flatlands, a dissolute songwriter exiled out in the reeds and bullrushes w/ a sleeping-bag and his 4-track: “EQ my soul (my piss-up)…I’m on a hidin’ to nuthin’…” / “Scaring myself with the power of a biro…” / etc.

Elsewhere, he’s like a one-man boombox version of The Residents (“Curse The Calm before The Storm”)…fractured riddims n half-melodies rubbin’ themselves against a chair-leg like a randy flea-bitten Spaniel: “I’m gonna drink a lot of Guinness / and get real fat / I’m gonna get no pussy / and stink of cat / And not give a fuck / About this and that…”

Occasionally, he lists his gear or explains how he’s mixing/tweaking the music; I loove it when Process reveals itself and, instead of demystifying the act of creation – the glamour of sound-art – it folds back in on itself adding another layer of complexity. Revelatory auto-critique as a backing vocalist, yeah!

32 tracks! – not everyone’s gonna be a winner; but there’s no shit either; nothing bores or outlasts its welcome – this is like a quiet idea-storm: a procession of thoughts, camera-angles, memories, rambles, rumbles, micro-anthems, marching songs, drinking games, broken raps, Pop-monologues, miniatures, chamberwerks, salon songs, an orchestra of shed.

But the best pieces are very fucking good indeed.

“You make sweet milk with your guitar / it’s the way you are / a black-hole star.”

I think this is 5 years old, so I’m kinda ashamed Pete only came on my radar recently. On the sleeve-notes it says: THERE IS AH WHOLEHEAP AH TALENT IN THE GHETTO THAT IS GOING UNOTICED BY THE MAINSTREAM. DON’T GIVE UP I BREDRENS AND SISTRENS, THE STONE THAT THE BUILDER REFUSED SHALL BE THE HEAD CORNERSTONE.

Kid Shirt seconds that.

“Deep within my DNA is space for a missing gene…”

Comes with some really cool drawings and a list of giraffe facts.

"A master of the miniature electro-acoustic song-poem, a form he has more or less invented and crystallised himself, his work displays a sardonic wit combined with a healthy misanthropy, in marvellous micro-collages of voice, instruments, samples, and electronics."

-Ergo Phizmiz

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