Bark Psychosis - SCUM (2023 Remastered) '2023

Tracks list

One of the most low key influential and brilliant records of the 1990’s
finally available in an officially sanctioned edition, remastered at Abbey Road
Studios by Miles Showell with the help of frontman Graham Sutton. 

A historic side of music, ‘Scum' was released in 1992 with a razorblade on
the cover and a b side etched with angry knife cuts. It features the most
beautiful, seething music you’ll likely ever come across, harnessing a
universe of sound across its 21:21 running time that’s impossibly
intricate, slow-moving and patient - still revealing new layers of detail three
decades later. 

‘Scum’ was famously recorded in the vault beneath St. John's Church
in East London, with an open mic capturing not only the spontaneous, improvised
recording session, but also the building's strange acoustics and the echoes of
life outside; traffic passing by, ambient noise, unexpected reverberations, a
pentecostal meeting going on in the back room of the same building, The song
itself; achingly slow to unfold - the first 3 minutes just the sound captured by
ambient mics left up in the church, then with barely-there guitar, a wheezing
melodica, a slow bassline in dub, into distant, scattered percussion, then
samples, what sounds like a clarinet, found sounds and electronics, winding
around the dissociated vocals of Sutton, who unwittingly found himself in the
role of frontman. 

Simon Reynolds coined the term post-rock to describe the band's debut album
‘Hex’, but ‘Scum’, which preceded that album by a
couple of years, was a different beast. In its aggressive avoidance of clapped
ideas and cultural memes, it was better described as "anti-rock”,
capturing the grey gloom of the Thatcher-to-Major turnover. The sounds; alien
and unique, brutal - then shimmering, quiet then loud (before that was a thing)
- all faithful to Sutton's dedication to the recording process and a storied
obsession with Miles Davis, conjuring a sonic template that few have managed to
fathom, let alone replicate, in the years since.

Music produced with this kind of obsessive attention to detail rarely engages on
an emotional level, but ‘Scum’ is the complete opposite - endlessly
deep, revealing myriad contours of ancient, urban, decrepit beauty - a sort of
spiritual successor to Talk Talk’s’ similarly inebriated and
deliriously hushed ‘Laughing Stock’, which was released a year
earlier, and which - in contrast - had a huge cast of players and the budget to
go with it. 

Ambient, dream pop, jazz, dub, punk rock - it's all in there somewhere, shrouded
beneath the shattered dreams of a rag-tag group of squatters in pre-gentrified
East London who somehow managed to record one of the most inspiring and
brilliant records of the 90’s.

Tracklist:
1.01 - Bark Psychosis - SCUM (21:22)
1.02 - Bark Psychosis - MUCS (21:22)

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