Milovan Srdenovic's Batley imprint, founded in 1988: the home of Smell & Quim and the Annual Jissom comps, and a small node of the British home-taping underground.
Stinky Horse Fuck is the British noise label founded in Batley, West Yorkshire, in 1988 by Milovan Srdenovic, also known as Davy Walklett, and the Bureau files it as the home imprint of the British absurd-noise underground that grew up around Smell & Quim. Srdenovic launched it alongside the first Smell & Quim cassettes, in what he has described as the busiest stretch of his life, when the label, the band and a run of solo projects all started at once.
It is, first and foremost, the home of Smell & Quim, and the two are hard to separate: the band's debut The English Method opened the catalogue in 1988, and the imprint has carried its records, on and off, ever since. But Stinky Horse Fuck was never only that. Its Annual Jissom compilation cassettes, issued 1988 to 1990, are the most approachable corner of the catalogue, gathering the Smell & Quim circle, Swing Jugend, the Bubbleheads, the GTOG alias, alongside outsiders such as Klimperei's toy-piano miniatures. An early Mlehst tape and assorted home-taping experiments fill out the list.
The aesthetic is of a piece with the band: scatological, absurd and built to offend, with sleeves and titles that earned the records their reputation. This is the home-made, anti-professional end of British noise rather than a curated imprint with a house sound, and that is precisely its value as a document, a snapshot of how the UK cassette underground actually operated.
For all its insularity the label was networked. A Stinky Horse Fuck Production turns up across the international scene, most notably the 1996 Smell & Quim and Expose Your Eyes tape made for Marco Corbelli's Slaughter Productions, tying Batley to the Italian death-industrial circle around Atrax Morgue. In later years larger labels have returned to the catalogue: Hospital Productions reissued the 1995 Smell & Quim tape Cosmic Bandage, and others have followed.
The Bureau files Stinky Horse Fuck as a small but genuine label: in practice Srdenovic's own, the base of Smell & Quim and the Annual Jissom comps, and one of the modest imprints through which the British home-taping underground left a record of itself.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the postwar · last revised c. the Anthropocene