1. Mass Destruction (9.43)
2. Flying Saucer 88 (6.53)
3. X + Z = 0 (31.12)
4. Atomic Sound (5.17)

Beam me up, Scotty, there’s no foil on the Kit-Kats!

This music is genius. This Album of the Month may be eight years old, but sounds as though it was recorded yesterday, or in Ancient Sumer 5,000 years ago. And, for the artist himself, what a fuck of a long time it took in coming! Portentous as TWO THIRDS (Myers & Percy’s monumental 600-pages-long ‘Neolithic monuments are the works of Martians’ paperback), in other words full of sound and fury but deffo signifying something-though-possibly-not-what-the-original-creators-intended), Von LMO’s 1996 monster classic RED RESISTOR is as fucked up a piece of monolithic religion as ever was barfed out from below the Bo Tree by the Buddha. Riffs the size of moons batter lyrics the size of planets, whilst Titans and Frost Giants scatter before this man’s Jupiter-sized Humvee. His aristocratic band (a real Chernobylity) here on Earth is David Tamura on so-called guitar, Robert Lee Oliver II on seven league bass and multiman drummer Howard ‘Crash’ Valentine, who collectively manhandle rock’n’roll’s stinking rotten corpse into a darkened cell in Abu Ghraib prison, anally rape and torture it – on behalf of Freedom (natch) - whilst filming it on modern Super-8 as Von LMO alternately intones ‘Advance Yourself’ messages interspersed with ‘Be Afraid Be Very Afraid’ messages interspersed with his trademark speed-o-light guitar solos (or is that speed-o-sound? Whatever, same difference). The all new 9 minutes of ‘Mass Destruction’ is followed by 7 minutes of the all old ‘Flying Saucer 88’, which is a children’s playground-powered nya-nya-nyee-nya-nyah assault undermined still further by the half-an-hour-plus of ‘X + Z = 0’ (even throwing in some of 1977’s ‘We’re Not Crazy’ by Red Transistor at around 19 minutes in), all of the aforementioned being so clod-plodding that the 5-minute long LP closer ‘Atomic Sound’ is as positively streamlined as Neil Merryweather’s Space Rangers hommering James Gang’s ‘Funk 49’ in comparison.

In Von’s world where any colour is bad, the saxophone of ex-cohort Juno Saturn is long gone, as are any approximations of musical scales, as are the lyrical subtexts of the earlier works. Moreover, this entire band plays icky No Wave riffs mixed with anti-climb paint, that won’t wash off, that cause rashes, that float about in the ether and cause dead zones to rise up around them. And all the time, Von is screaming lyrics about our need to advance ourselves. Yup, ‘Advance Yourself!’ shrieks from every corner of every piece of artwork on each and every Von LMO’s record cover, as Von LMO advances upon us like Michael Ryan advancing down Hungerford High Street, backed up by a spectral army comprised of Mongolia’s Golden Horde. Surprising? Probably not, really. But, then again, how could we ever be that surprised by a guy whose debut LP opened with the barmiest libretto since Bobby the Calv plainsonged Hawkwind’s SPACE RITUAL into the record shops back in ‘72. Dammit, we gots to print in full those first-off LMO words from back in 1981 for the CinemasCoptic (sic) vision they conjure within the larger place of our minds:

‘6 million years ago today,
A message was seen travelling through space -
Transcending time,
Moving faster than the speed of light,
Breaking the sound barrier,
This message was known as the Future Language
And we are here to deliver this message to you… now.., (pause of the Gods)

LONG LIVE HEAVY METAL!!!’

Now I know what some of yooz thinking, punks… that this LMO (pronounced ‘Elmo’) druid’s just an uncultured yokel; a Daft Vader who considers breaking the sound barrier (740.5 miles per hour) and travelling faster than the speed of light (186,281 miles per second) are pretty much the same deal because all that stuff goes faster than his kid sister’s fixed-wheel tricycle. Me, I thunk the same thing for a few listens, until I heard LMO’s later 1990s albums and saw that this fucker had – over the course of two decades - bigged up his original trip 10,000 fold and brought it on to a whole new level of gunky ostentation up/down with the rest of we planet squatters. Now, listening to that first LP armed with the new knowledge of his ‘90s oeuvres makes that intro text seem damn kosher – indeed, it was possibly (to my way of thinking) intended as a Cosmic Curveball-to-hoodwink-the-unwary. And if you take the LMO’s complete canon of recorded work – 1972-96 – then it’s as violent and barbarian a piece of sonic football-hooliganism as ever stomped that single slab of granite that calls itself the Central European Plain (gotta be Von’s Transylvannian ur-Heimat fer shure), and CEO Von LMO is head locust and chief slasher-and-burner with a one string razor many of you will wish he’d left at home. And yet I find his wakeful barrage of incessant and staccato clod-hopping so tremendously invigorating that I’ve been listening to the 31-minutes of ‘X + Y = 0’ on heavy rotation for the past coupla weeks. O, the days just fly past.


And yet, until I wrote that big Monoshock article last year, Von LMO meant no more to me than Nena’s ’99 Luftballons’ or that ‘Rock me, Amadeus’ Euro-hit dude with the jerky walk. Indeed, I’d dismissed this Von LMO as yet another late-70s sub-Lene Lovich sub-sub-Devo-alike with an unpronounceable name and a rent boy cohort called Juno Saturn on bad bad (terminally undergrad) sax. Too much of the FUTURE LANGUAGE LP had reminded me of Devo doing X-Ray Spex, and the interim years had been informed only by a very average single from ’94, which sat in the back of my 7” collection, sounding something like a very unsure COLLISION DRIVE-period Alan Vega doing Kimmy the Foul, displaying a so-called Industrial sound so weak that Nine Inch Nails wouldna wiped their senile granny’s arse with it. But as Grady Runyan, Ruben Fibreglass, Scott Derr and Aluminum Queen (collectively the very great Monoshock) had obviously made such an effort to collaborate with this Pyramid of Geezer (and failed miserably at it by their own admission), I figured the very least Von LMO warranted was a thorough aural excavation by my good self. So, when RED RESISTOR plopped through my postbox, I dutifully plugged in my headphones and depressed the stylus of my prototype Sony Sonic Pessary (‘Hey Pals – No Needle Sharing!’) and… whaddya know? This guy weren’t Stiff’s answer to James ‘Fat’ Chance & the Contortions after all! Sure, Von’s whole modus operandi was informed by the same poisoned-with-ROUND-UP withered branch of the anti-rock World Tree. But whereas Chance’s semi-formed NO NEW YORK-period ‘Flip Your Face’ gem wuz ultimately no more than 3 minutes of snack-o-smacky populist underachieverdom, dear old Von El the Mo copped several Fleet Air Armfuls of the same Afghani off-road dust, epoxied a Beatle wig on his balding noggin in a Kimmy the Fowl-stylee, and turned the whole Shitty Shitty She-bang bang into a third (and fourth and fifth) way to the stars (I knows it – I’ve test driven this sucker!). Which ain’t half bad considering he’s never had a moment’s earthbound success in all of his (un)natural. A loser in a losers’ scene, LMO even got dropped from that 1978 NO NEW YORK LP that Eno produced,¹ in favour of such deliteniks as DNA and Mars. While these irksome unhipsqueaks wuz getting two trouser-trax apiece, LMO was getting zip. Which is why I’m a little dubious when I read on one of Von LMO’s posters a quote about him from the New York Post:

‘Radical revolutionary music at extreme high volume intensity representing tomorrow’s generation’.

No way. I think he just made it up and attributed it to The Post. Claiming that the Muppets based their Elmo character on him is another of this Future Cave Dweller-Fella’s mantras, along with the assertion that Devo and Sonic Youth both studied his future language without his permission, after being clued in when copping a glimpse of his ‘International Transmitting Symbol For Universal Sounds ®’. According to the sleeve notes of the re-mastered FUTURE LANGUAGE album, he’s currently suing Bill Gates for stealing his inter-galactic peace logo – Go Von Go! And yet, after a series of stop-starts with a coupla decades in between, this prize-winning Intuitive Non-Career Mover has gradually built up a proper discography (of sorts) with which we can judge first his intentions, and then his achievements. This Album of the Month reveals the level of commitment that this guy has to the message. That he hasn’t ever felt the need to cloud the issue with tunes or instrumental variation is dedication to the point of vocation. However, as merely sustaining this level of Mung Worship since the late-70s requires a super-human determination, let’s first look back at the Von LMO that I so long ago dismissed as a peripheral NO NEW YORK dork excluded from his own scratch’n’sniff-o-thon.

‘Reverse Trappology’ or ‘What Do You Want From Life?’

Von LMO ‘was born in the black light dimension in 1924. In 1925, at the age of three, he began his musical studies on electronic violin, sixteenth level piano…’ before bringing his musical career to ‘an abrupt halt’ experimenting with the building of rudimentary space ships. ‘It was in one of these self-constructed ships that he left Earth to explore the universe. He crash landed on Saturn, where he met and studied orchestration with the late Sun Ra.’ From here, Von LMO travelled to the planet Strazar, before returning to earth, where he was influenced by the Glenn Miller Big Band to ‘wed his message to the big beat… Sixties encounters with unidentified forces, UFOs and positive force fields convinced him to BECOME the big beat; so he became a reverse trappologist.’²

LMO formed Funeral of Art in 1970, and flew to London to no success at all (what I’ve heard is spacey and alien but also corny as hell). He spent a coupla years creating the infant karma of Pumpo, whose musicians were all first timers in rubber suits banging on chainsaws and powersaws. Their sole 1974 LP did shit, at which point he formed Why You… Murder Me? and began to lose his hair. Coming simultaneously out of New York’s Brooklyn suburbs, yet influenced by the wilds of Planet Strazar (which is entirely composed of Meteorites with a Caffe Latte core) was always a chore for Von to reconcile, as Strazarians are all gay and love graffiti the way the English love their gardens, and not screwing around is a jailable offence there. So, ever the refusenik, Von LMO married a beautiful Afghan Hound on Venus and innocently returned to Earth, where he honeymooned in Mecca, thinking nostalgically that he’d show his newly beloved that piece of sacred Meteorite in the middle of the Kaaba. Of course, Islam is a princely religion with roots neither in farming nor pastoralism, so dogs to them are useless and, therefore, perceived as extremely unclean animals. So when Von, in a fit of rebellion, was busted for graffiti’ing ‘Allah is not gay’ on the Kaaba walls, the Islamic patriarchs broke the neck of his brand new Ibanez Iceman guitar, shoved his new canine wife’s pooper-scooper up his arse as punishment, and deported her to the restaurants of Korea with ‘Allah is one hungry Motherfucker’ tatooed on her shaven butt. Heaping this series of indignities on top of Von’s discovery that baldness is considered unattractive on Earth (he sacked his Venusian manager for allowing him to have appeared bald on his first LP FUTURE LANGUAGE) was almost too much for him – which is why he nowadays combines his Utopianism with Wanton Scaremongering. Indeed, so Zelig-like has Von become in the past two decades (claiming regularly to be in suspended animation in order to explain his disappearances, and allow his movements to become un-traceable) that the disparate strands of Amerika’s ‘Axis of Evil’ – Korea, Afghanistan and Iraq – are now thought by the CIA to have been too bizarre to have been conceived of in The White House, being instead a Von LMOnian concoction to pay the world back for having been so thoroughly dissed. Indeed, Von himself is now under suspicion as being a genuine Cosmic Trickster of Lokian proportions, and perhaps one who knows well enough the rends in the cosmic fabric to come and go at will, and who possibly created Tin Machine whilst inhabiting one of David Bowie’s more solipsistic dreams in retaliation for The Thin White Duke’s unwarranted continuing success on Planet Earth. Von has also come under fire from the occult community for reducing author Stan Gooch to a burned-out shell living in a Swansea trailer park, and making it impossible for J.K. Rowling to write anything decent under 700 pages. Personally, I think there’s still enough evidence to prove that Von LMO is one of the good guys. His best album to date being this magnificent RED RESISTOR suggests that it was informed by his (albeit unsuccessful) collaboration with Monoshock³ from the previous year, so – his plastic wig and perpetual shades aside – he’s clearly still very much informed by the good people of earth, and (most especially) the most grungey mung worshipping people of earth at that. We can but await his next move with excitement, and I’m planning to visit Amerika next year, for the first time since early 1998CE. Hopefully, I can seek this guy out and we can together search out a few of that continent’s more hidden ancient portals. Until that time, brothers and sisters – ADVANCE YOURSELF with all the Von-informed music you can ingest. And if this write-up jerks Von’s turkey enough to bring him after me, well, I’ll keep y’all posted…

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Singles Discography

(w/Red Transistor) ‘Not Bite’/’We’re Not Crazy’ (Ecstatic Peace rec 1977/ released 1990)
‘Cosmic Interception’/’Ultraviolet Light’ b/w ‘Inside Shadowland’ (Variant 1994)

Album Discography

FUTURE LANGUAGE (Strazar 1981)
COSMIC INTERCEPTION (Variant 1994)
RED RESISTOR (Variant 1996)
TRANCEFORMER 1978-82 (Munster 2001)
MAX’S KANSAS CITY, 9/11/81 (Seidr 2004)