The Batley noise band formed in 1987: freeform collage of feedback and mangled tape, wrapped in a scatological humour, and one of the longest-running fixtures of the British underground.
Smell & Quim is the British freeform noise band formed in Batley, West Yorkshire, in 1987 by Milovan Srdenovic and Paul Nonnen, and the Bureau files it at Tier II as one of the most durable and distinctive acts of the UK underground. The name is a parody of Mel & Kim, a chart pop duo of the day, and the joke is the key to the band: where most of the form guards its seriousness, Smell & Quim pairs genuinely abrasive noise with a scatological, deliberately puerile humour.
The debut, The English Method, appeared in 1988 on the band's own Stinky Horse Fuck label, the imprint Srdenovic has run ever since. The sound is freeform and improvised: feedback, loops, mangled tape editing, found voice and junk built into a shifting collage that is relentlessly harsh but rarely solemn. The covers and titles court taboo and the absurd in roughly equal measure, and the band has been called, with some affection, the most eccentric and vile noise act Britain has produced.
It has never been a fixed group so much as a revolving cast around Srdenovic. Paul Nonnen was there at the start; later members and guests include Stewart Keith, Michael Gillham of Drunk in Hell and Nihilist Assault Group, Kate Fear and the late Simon Morris of Ceramic Hobs. The band forms, dissolves and reconvenes as occasion demands, which suits a project built on collage and chance rather than a settled method.
For all the silliness on the surface, Smell & Quim sits inside a serious lineage. It belongs to the British strain of absurd and confrontational noise that runs through The New Blockaders and the cassette underground, and it has been thoroughly networked across four decades. Splits and joint works with MSBR, Black Leather Jesus and Richard Ramirez, EYE, The Haters and many others place it at the centre of the international tape trade rather than at its margins.
The catalogue is long and scattered across small labels. The Jissom Killers (1992) and the 1993 cassette Nativity Colostomy on Old Europa Cafe are among the better-known early documents, and later work has come through Cheeses International, L White Records and others. The releases vary wildly in form, from harsh wall to loose musique-concrète collage, which is part of why the band reads as a sustained experiment rather than a single repeated gesture.
The Bureau files Smell & Quim at Artists · Tier II as a stalwart of British noise: a band that has held a scatological, absurdist position for nearly forty years, and one of the connective acts of the underground this archive documents, proof that the form has always had room for the ridiculous alongside the grim.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the postwar · last revised c. the Anthropocene