Research Report: Ten Years of GLARC

Since 2016 the (fictional) Greater Lanarkshire Auricular Research Council have been surveying the music of the (also fictional) Greater Lanarkshire area and publishing their findings in elaborately packaged tape form. In reality GLARC have been a focal point for Glasgow’s experimental underground and in the process have become one of the UK's essential DIY labels. To mark their tenth anniversary we spotlight a few of their high points.

Still House Plants – Still House Plants

You really can do worse than having your first release be the debut of the best British band of the last decade. The label came flying out of the traps with Still House Plants' rickety vision of soulful slowcore; their first track, the rapturous one chord stutter of Warm in the Car, remains one of the best things they've ever done. One of many cases of GLARC being miles ahead of the rest. 

Horse Whisperer – The Fifth Season

Max Syedtollan’s debut more than any other feels like the tape that helped define GLARC, the first to walk the line between boundary-pushing experimentalism and a deeply silly spirit of fun. It really is fun as well; a giddy, playful bricolage spinning through the centuries and genres with joyful abandon. It was also the first release to adopt the idiosyncratic packaging that would become a label calling card, the tape run all coming in handmade clay covers by artist Bryony Rose.

Quinie – Buckie Prins

GLARC have always been essentially genre-averse, the majority of their releases falling firmly into unclassifiable, but the forms of traditional music are a throughline of their output. These folk song instincts were never more pronounced than on the brilliant second tape from Scots song unearther Quinie, which introduced instrumentation to her starkly sublime voice.

Able Noise – Recordings

Another case of the label getting there a good half-decade before the experimental establishment even vaguely cops on. The Athens/The Hague duo’s debut is a looser, more slippery take on the creaky unease they’ve since made their own. It marked GLARC’s increasingly international approach, moving beyond the Glasgow underground to go global in their search for left-of-centre eccentricity.

Supernormal Kids – Supernormal Kids Party

A selection of songs recorded by children as part of a workshop the label ran at Supernormal Festival 2022, this is about as purely joyful a record as you're likely to encounter. As you'd imagine, the tape has more natural oddness in one of its twenty-second tunes than a lot of very po-faced self-satisfied experimental labels' whole catalogues. It's a great compliment to GLARC that it fits like a glove into their discography.

soft tissue – gush

The third collaboration between Feronia Wennborg and Simon Weins, gush pushed further into their aural charting of some computerised morass, abstracting electronics into something bracingly distinctive. It operates in antiseptically clean tones of electronics, but pushes them until they seem to gurgle and twitch like they’re being jolted to life, like Wennborg and Weins are playing Frankenstein rather than making music.

Harry Gorski-Brown – Durt Dronemaker After Dreamboats

Something of a Glasgow underground Zelig (his playing is scattered throughout the GLARC discography) the multi-instrumentalist’s first at the helm shows him at his absolute best, a collection of oaky drones tumbling into unclassifiable folk-adjacent maelstroms. Its closing moments, a live recording of The Rubberbandits’ I Wanna Fight Your Father turning into a Peter Bellamy-style folkie screecher is astonishing, and the audience’s shift from 'This is daft’ to awe is one of the label’s finest moments.

Masa Nazzal & Ilyas Titaou – Slovenia Inshallah

Not generally a label that foregrounds politics in its recorded output (notwithstanding the ace knockabout satire of han’s The Institute of Ecoterrorism), Masa Nazzal & Ilyas Titaou's Slovenia Inshallah broke their mould in remarkable fashion. Using field recordings from across border camps in Croatia and Bosnia the pair work these recordings into a brilliant incisive record that sidesteps cliche and courses with imagination and possibility.

…and a couple of highlights from GLARC co-founders Gordon Bruce and Joel White

Le Diable Dégoûtant – Les Guillis du vide 

Le Diable Dégoûtant is the nom de plume of Pauline Marx and translates to the disgusting devil. To me, her music sounds like it’s been filtered through some demonic slimy bog. I don’t really know anything that sounds similar to it, with its stuttering rhythms and these melodies which waltz between sublimely beautiful lines and dissonant, grating noise. This track is particularly dizzying in the way it sputters out mulchy wet noises and I love it! [GB]

One decade-long highlight

Cheesy but true: it’s been one decade-long highlight getting to do cassettes and gigs with friends who also cling to a similar ethics of a DIY/underground music, even as life shifts around us. I think a lot about the tours: Still House Plants, Pussy Mothers, Groan Vessel and Luar Domatrix piling into a car for the first one in 2016; a photo of us all smiling in the Kashmir curry house in Bradford. I think of all the weird venues, sofa-beds, car-playlists and long chats; how precious, and silly, and how music is just one part of the interpersonal, expansive entanglements that make up GLARC. Thanks all! [JW]

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Celebrating their GLARCIVERSARY, GLARC are throwing events in Glasgow and beyond throughout March, details available at glarc.neocities.org