Post-KLF, it’s been Bill Drummond who’s mostly maintained his – albeit low – profile with a succession of suitably obscure projects, in addition to a number of book works, notably 45, $20,000 and The 17, the latter of which was a spin-off from a choral musical project.
Jimmy Cauty has focused primarily on visual art, although recently, he has come together with Pogues founder member Jem Finer, who’s recently made the hurdy-gurdy the focus of his playing, and the pair have, as the bio outlines, ‘founded a new band, The Standing Stones. Their first release sees them joined by the extraordinary Scottish folk singer, Alasdair Roberts, to record a version of the age-old ballad ‘Twa Brothers’. It goes on to detail how ‘clocking in at just over 10 minutes, ‘Twa Brothers’ collides traditional Scottish folk singing with hip hop 808s and sirens, police radio traffic and NYC radio news broadcasts to create a hyper-quantised dystopio-folk-horror soundscape, blurring the temporal zones of the songs’ ancient origins with the near future.’
Cauty’s credentials as a master of the mash-up are key in making ‘Twa Brothers’ what it is. In a way, it very much connects with the audacious sample-collaged mashups of the JAMS and threads a continuity which links with The Timelords’ ‘Doctorin’ the Tardis’. Anything goes, and nothing is too incongruous. Lest we forget, ‘It’s Grim Up North’ melded together a banging techno tune which listed towns in the North of England by way of its lyrical content, with a bombastic rendition of ‘Jerusalem’.
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Stretching out beyond ten minutes, ‘Twa Brothers’ is melodic, mellow, bewildering, and hard to process. There is just so much going on, and a lot of it simply doesn’t mesh. But oddly, it works, because Cauty has an ear for this kind of thing. He’s not only been doing it for a long time, but was one of the first to go all-out on crazy sampling and lobbing anything and everything together, and with such brazen audacity. And so it is that ‘Twa Brothers’ is another work of crackers, off-the-wall, genius.
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