Hastings of Malawi (HOM) have been variously described as dada, underground, industrial, post-industrial, musique concrete, DIY, punk, countercultural, anti-melodic, scrappy, abstract expressionist, fluxus, surreal, futurist, post-modernist, avant-garde, provocative, improvised, experimental, dissonant, cerebral, mechanical, immersive, disorienting, handmade and rough.
They create low-resolution, lo fi, dissonant sounds that have been described as films without light, poems without words, and untrammelled, explorative madness with an uncompromising artistic vision.
They create music out of old records, computers, custom-built sound machines, telephones tape manipulation, distortion, found sounds, machinery, spoken-word and telephone switchboards.
Describing one of their albums Wire magazine wrote “Rarely has an album so consistently made me question what the actual fuck is going on”
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back projection and sound from HOM playing at the Wroclaw Industrial Music Festival
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The White Albums
HOM playing in Münster, Germany
back projection and sound from HOM playing in Münster, Germany
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Vibrant Stapler Obscures Characteristic Growth
Vibrant Stapler Obscures Characteristic Growth – the first Hastings of Malawi album – originally released on the Papal Products label in 1981 on red and orange vinyl. Later re released on the SubRosa label initially on red vinyl then as a limited edition on gold vinyl. (artwork by David Hodes)
On today’s revisit spin of [Vibrant] Stapler [obscures characteristic growth], I found a nightmarish experience awaiting me – strange voices and strange music all out of context, all information scrambled, all things familiar made unfamiliar and dark. The first side has clocks ticking, whale calls, quasi-scientific narration, percussive noises, frantic electric noise, detuned piano hammering, readings from a recipe book…numbers being recited…and of course the speaking clock, which might be the bit everyone remembers. This is the old speaking clock which you used to get on the telephone by dialling TIM. Come to that, there are also other audible voices speaking on the phone, and the sound of old dialling tones on the record. Most unsettling of all is the repeated voice saying “Hello? Hello?”, and receiving no response, as if uncertain of who might be there, if anyone. Some of the record contains something approaching music; clunky, sarcastic, lead-footed march-time tunes on the piano with inept playing of keyboards and synths…it’s sheer genius. Perhaps this is [Heman] Pathak’s contribution to the Hastings collaboration. Meanwhile the B side dwells at length on a gruesome recipe involving slicing meat, described with some relish, and it opens with the delicious moment of a nursery-rhyme record followed by an interminable section of the speaking clock.
It’s probably futile to look for “meaning” in what is intended as a bleak, cold statement of the meaninglessness of life, but this spin seemed to be full of images of communication; or rather, images of communication breaking down. The human voice, and the devices we use to transmit it – especially the telephone – all are shown to be failing us drastically. – Ed Pinsent – The Sound Projector
Wickedly unhinged, incredible 1981 jams from an early NWW member, Heman Pathak with his pals John Grieve and Dave Hodes as Hastings of Malawi; a heavily beguiling session of dadaist lo-fi concrète, coruscating haywire synths, the speaking clock and lots of acousmatic clangour, all recorded in one night with very little idea of what the f**k they were up to.
Strikingly future-proofed by way of its outlandish, disclocated temporality and punkish disregard for convention, Vibrant Stapler Obscures Characteristic Growth was Hastings of Malawi’s one and only release, and original copies are purportedly rarer than they should be because one of the band members’ parents binned 300 of them. Ouch.
Given that Heman Pathak was one of the three “untrained” or total novice musicians behind Nurse With Wound’s classic debut, Chance Meeting On A Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella (1979) and its corresponding list of avant-garde obscurities, commonly known as the Nurse With Wound List, it’s not difficult to draw a line between the impetus of that radical record and the wild cacophony of the one in front of you.
If you subtracted the freewheeling guitar solos of Chance Meeting, and imagined the rest played by a gang of restless poltergeists tooled with drums, clarinet, synth and piano, and anything else within reach, and then played it down the phone to random, unsuspecting recipients who would become part of the recording ….. you’ve almost got a grasp on this album’s untrammelled, explorative madness.
We’ll leave the rest for your indigestion and dilated discovery, but you can trust that it’s one of the wildest records you’ve never heard before. – Boomkat
…. on Visceral Underskinnings. To begin with, we have the same techniques of collaging, editing and varispeeding, only now they are used much more aggressively. There are moments when the human voice is distorted into absolute ruin, producing incoherent mumbles and inhuman groans. The varispeeding (it might be more accurate to call it time-stretching) does actually create some astonishing effects, especially one side two, where the layered artefacts from old 78s and discs and decaying tapes combine to produce audio textures that are almost aesthetically satisfying, if one could only ignore the unfolding nightmare they depict.
Secondly, there’s the telephone and the phone voices. On the new record, the speaking clock has given way to a pre-recorded digital voice instructing the caller to press a number to select an option; again it’s the voice of a woman; but the 21st-century version is distant and uninterested in anything, despite her efforts to sound helpful. This segment leads to repeated phone button pressing, to produce a short mini-symphony of overdubbed digital dial tones. Thirdly: there’s another disembodied voice saying “Hello? Hello?”, almost a direct match for the Stapler LP, as if answering their equally-lost friend.
These sampled voices turn into pure terror by the end of the LP, where I seem to hear something like a witch, or a victim of demonic possession…she or he is spitting out pure venom and anger, perhaps in German (there are other foreign languages on the LP too); edits and studio effects speed up and distort to make this even more nasty than it should be, and the sudden bursts of horror-movie music played on an organ don’t help the mood, nor do the calming chants of what might be intended as a priest or congregation attempting to exorcise this possessed soul. The horrifying intensity of these grooves – near the end of side B – cannot be overstated!
These examples I cite all contribute, I think, to the continued theme of communication failure; other instances include the Numbers Station sample on Side A, directly after the dial tones. The repeated numbers – themselves an index of cryptic, coded communication – are soon overlaid and repeated until they too become gibberish, at which point an old record cuts in featuring the whistling of George Washington Johnson, an entertainer who died in 1914. Just one of many listening moments which are guaranteed to short-circuit common sense.
If we wanted to seek out further subtexts, we could point to the critiques of modern consumerism and military interventions (forces which pretty much dominate everyone’s lives today), but they are done so fleetingly and without unnecessary emphasis, that it seems that these themes are so obvious to the creator that they are barely worth mentioning. I refer to the old military march record, which is at first jaunty and then deflated when replayed at quarter-speed; the brilliant TV sample of competition winners at the end of side one; and the close of side two, which gently juxtaposes upbeat adverts for computer gear with the sounds of military aircraft.
All of these recognisable elements are sandwiched together with computer music, and very good sound art noise like a more musical version of The New Blockaders, often sounding mechanical, groany, turgid and alarming. …. as the Sub Rosa webpage informs us, but the sound manipulation is remarkable – a very extreme form of musique concrète, that changes the nature of things to the ultimate degree. I suppose Visceral Underskinnings could easily be read as a “noise” record, which would tend to align it with the history of industrial music and related enterprises, but I would prefer to see it as a text; an audio text where every sound has been selected, arranged, treated and sequenced with considerable care. You can dig out more and more from this text every time you spin it, and there’s enough information here for scholars to go mad as they try and process it. “An epic sound poem,” say Sub Rosa, “a 40 minute film without light”. Limited edition pressed in yellow vinyl; very highly recommended. – Ed Pinsent – the Sound Projector
Hastings of Malawi, initially a project connected to the infamous Nurse With Wound, released their first album Vibrant Stapler Obscures Characteristic Growth back in 1981. It’s as strange as the title implies, drawing from the harsh industrial sounds being experimented with at the time as well as composition elements more associated with avant-garde classical music. Nearly forty years later, the group has returned with a new LP that stands out just as much today as Vibrant Stapler did in ’81. Visceral Underskinnings is composed of two extended audio collages, establishing an impenetrable and surreal atmosphere with the use of manipulated field recordings and found sound. Actually, I don’t know if “found” really conveys the noises that are stitched together throughout the two pieces; a more fitting word might be “scavenged.” It sounds like these samples were the ones no one else wanted, dug up from the very bottom of a haphazard pile of others: a glitchy answering message, cracked organ tapes, etc. They’re damaged, dusty, and absolute gold in the hands of these skillful sound sculptors. Visceral Underskinnings is billed as a “film without sound,” a normally hyperbolic descriptor that I actually agree wholeheartedly with here. The two tracks are disjointed, confusing, and utterly terrifying, but undeniably convey a detailed abstract story that I don’t think would be half as impactful if it were told with visuals. – Noise not Music
Another musique concrète jewel created with the same peculiar, disjointed, uncommercial and totally original Hastings of Malawi aesthetic. 35 years after the release of their critically acclaimed album Vibrant Stapler Obscures Characteristic Growth the British dadaist group Hastings of Malawi have released a new album – an epic sound poem entitled Visceral Underskinnings.
It is a 40 minute film without light that reflects on the human condition, on modern society, on the nature of telephony and electricity and an attempt to make sense of the world in which we live that provides no answers. It is a sound collage of diverse elements including the voices of George Washington Johnson (first african american whistling phonograph star 1846-1914) and Dr Hastings Banda – the first president of Malawi. It includes randomly generated computer music, voice synthesis, recordings of cold war number stations, American military sound weaponry and recordings of the some of the many sound sculptures produced by Hastings of Malawi over the last 30 years. Hastings of Malawi produce sounds that sit in that grey area where sound art and music meet but they reject both labels and cannot be comfortably placed in either camp. This is not an easy album to listen to but persevere and you may or may not be able to decipher its meaning.”
Choreological Exchanges
This record digs deep into the guts of communication itself — not with instruments, but with the raw sound of pre-digital telephone exchanges. Clicks, hums, fragments of speech, synthetic voices — all stitched together into a mechanical ballet. It’s less an album than an acoustic essay: a dialogue between human intention and machine logic. Hastings of Malawi aren’t chasing melody or rhythm; they’re dissecting the very act of connection. The result is unsettling, hypnotic, and occasionally funny in that Dada-industrial way they’ve perfected. The structure feels more deliberate than some of their earlier chaos — Side A builds a mechanical tension, Side B opens it up into eerie human commentary and ends with a list of algorithmic words that sounds like the machines taking over. You don’t listen to Choreological Exchanges for pleasure. You listen because it reframes sound as language and language as noise. It’s clinical, clever, and uncompromising — a rare piece of conceptual audio art that’s truer to its premise than most “experimental” work dares to be. – review by Chat GPT
Manifesto #II
We reject sound/music as decoration/entertainment. If it can be played in the background, it has already failed. We use chaos, cut-up, randomness, and error not as gimmicks, but as mirrors. No explanation. Mystery is not a barrier. Let the listener struggle. Let them invent their own map. Destroy structure to expose control. Rhythm, melody, chorus and genre are cages. Others build songs, we build questions. Technology as ruin, not tool. Corrosion not polish. Machines are not neutral. We are anti personality. Identity distracts from idea. Let the work stand without a face. We are not here to be understood. Confusion is participation. If you “don’t get it,” you’ve already started. We steal freely. Media, voices, signals, debris—the world is raw material. Everything is available. Nothing is sacred. In a culture of endless background noise, we force foreground. Our sound demands presence—or rejection. We do not seek approval. Commercial success is contamination. Our currency is disorientation, not applause. We create experience, not product. Albums, performances, objects—these are delivery systems. The work happens in the mind of the listener after the sound ends. Each project must threaten the last. We celebrate failure and the accident. The broken machine has more to say than the perfect one. We are here to interrupt. The goal is not harmony. The goal is interference.
Vinyl records and why we like dirty ones
The grooves of a vinyl record carve out a landscape of sound — peaks, valleys, and undulations that correspond to acoustic energy. When the needle traces those grooves, sound becomes friction and vibration — and then enters the air as audible experience. Every time you play a record, you’re not just retrieving sound — you’re also altering it. The stylus physically scrapes along the groove, and with each pass it slightly reshapes it. Dust, fingerprints, or mishandling add microscopic scars. Those imperfections — the pops and clicks — are the audible residue of the record’s encounters with the world. They aren’t part of the original recorded event, but they document subsequent ones: the needle drops, the static-laden sleeves, the years on a shelf. A record accumulates a secondary layer of sonic information — a kind of unintentional meta-recording of its own material history. Listening to an aged record can be an act of forensic listening. The pops and scratches are evidence. These traces form an audible biography of the object — a sonic archaeology where the listener hears not just the recorded performance, but the record’s lived experience. To say that every pop, click, and scratch is a forensic trace is to recognize that the record is not a static archive but a participant in its own history. The vinyl record carries both the performance it was made to capture and the history of its being played.
Hastings of Malawi — Electromechanical Dissociation
Transparent vinyl in transparent cover
Electromechanical Dissociation explores the fault line between signal and body — between electrical activity and mechanical function. Sound continues after the system fails. Constructed from recordings of electromagnetic induction, internal combustion engines and clarinet, saxophone, and spoken responses to numerical data exchanged between NASA astronauts and Mission Control during the Apollo and Mercury missions, the album is a dialogue between breath and circuitry, between the human and the machine. This transparent vinyl in its transparent sleeve is not just packaging — it’s metaphor. You can see through it, see its mechanism, just as the album exposes the guts of communication, sound, and even the body itself, fragile, exposed, and clinical. The surface noise and visible grooves are part of the experience: the body of the record as both medium and metaphor. Challenging, hypnotic, and unnervingly beautiful, Electromechanical Dissociation stands as a precise dissection of sound, language, and life itself. Recommended for collectors of conceptual sound art and experimental composition. – written by a large language model.
A so-called “self-help record” that helps no one in any ordinary way. Instead, Thirty Steps Towards A… dismantles the very idea of improvement through a collage of thirty fractured voices and cut-up signals. It’s less instruction than interrogation—a sonic labyrinth where repetition becomes reflection and confusion becomes method. For the uninitiated, this may feel alien; for those who’ve followed Hastings of Malawi’s absurdist path, it’s a culmination—thirty abstract lessons in disorientation, wrapped in wit, noise, and uneasy clarity.
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