Unune - "S.K.U.M. (1976/1986)" (private release)

Unune is a household name in the Industrial world? Is it not? No? This is a shit answer, because this music/non-music is some of the best real estate in this much abused brown field site. It relies on power, not by beaming unlistenable noise in your direction for too long, but by hanging the noise in space, allowing it to breathe. Doesn’t try to shock for the sake of SHOCK value, inhabiting the much neglected no-mans land of hopelessness and mental illness,ness. A kind of early SPK without the please notice me angle.A slow tumbling noise, like a relentless mudslide of reality, a sodden slagheap crumbling towards a school,a sound-scrape of a disenfranchised population trapped in a derelict sink estate. Its that good?

S.K.U.M is a collection of the first ten years of Stephen Surreal's long career of sonic abuse,from 1976 to 1986. And he's still doing it today! (check out “Despondence”, on Year Zero Records).

I'll let Mr Surreal give you the backdrop to the SKUM story in his own poetic words:

"'S.K.U.M' came about around 1979,I indicate that,as although only 15,I found it enjoyable standing on a stage making strange noises & screaming at people (nobody else had even dared do anything akin in the far reaches of the Scottish West Highlands,to the extent - at the age 16,visiting,then living in Oban,the overbearing mainly catholic & still prominent God squad would 'show the sign of the cross' then take a detour to avoid me in the street) - highly amusing.
Built my first 'synthesizer' aged 12,using an early electronics kit & things scavenged from the local dump,slowly starting making things like distortion boxes from old valve amps,microphones from inverted speakers & possibly the only thing I still have 'pride' for - getting hold of 4 recordable 8 track cartridge players,inserting a single loop into each cartridge,recording sound and using all the track buttons as a rather difficult keyboard.
Phew ...
So - around '78 I had started using 2 old stereo cassette recorders in the Cabs fashion to 'create' albeit badly sounding multi layered tracks - there were no 'official' releases - just given to friends etc,until moving back down to England in '87 - although that's when the reversion to my 'agony for pleasure' thing,that I'd tagged my little releases with previously, became the name,due to finding the albeit brief 'skum genre' had similar attributes to what I was doing. END!"

DOWNLOAD this classic scum HERE!