Considering how conceptual and one-of-a-kind Damien Roach's latest patten LP is — Mirage FM is the first album made from text-to-audio AI samples — it shouldn't come as a surprise that his Needle Exchange debut is a waking dream as well. We're talking a wide-ranging set that somehow connects the dots between everything from Jesus Piece and Roy Davis Jr. to Ariana Grande and Actress.

Here's what the London producer had to say about "TimeSwamp," the long-awaited sequel to his mind-altering Dummy mix from a decade ago:

The second of an open series started in 2013. The first one went out 10 years ago via Dummy Magazine. I'm into the idea of an osmosis between things distilled to the exact point of contact. Like the lightest but most precise & radically transformative touch possible. Beware, all those who enter the TimeSwamp.

Handsome Boy Modeling School have quietly released their first batch of new material in nearly two decades. Now streaming via your favorite DSP and featuring guest spots from Justin Warfield and Emi Meyer, "How Does It Feel?" and "Case Study" are taken from Music To Drink Martinis To, a long overdue mini-LP underwritten by the Louisville brand Ford's Gin.

No really; you can buy it alongside a bottle now.

To be honest, the pairing makes perfect sense. Prince Paul and Dan the Automator's tongue-in-cheek project has always had a man-about-town bent — a sound that was deeply sartorial years before men's fashion was democratized by style blogs, street photographers and Instagram.

Or as Prince Paul said in a rare interview a few years ago, "We were wearing Euro fitted suits back in the '90s, when everybody else was wearing baggy clothes. Now everybody's wearing fitted suits! That's why we're thinking of bringing the school back. People gotta get back to the basics of handsomeness."

Words + Mix PEDRO VIAN + MANA

Our mix reflects the same attitude we had during the recording of Cascades. We put our broad taste in music together in one constant flow of sensitiveness and melancholic hyperbole….

Pedro Vian and Mana recently dropped their first record on Modern Obscure Music / Lucia Dischi. Stream it in full below, and look out for a rare live appearance from the duo on March 23 in Berlin.

THE RESIDENTS RETRO-ACTIVE

THE RESIDENTS at THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

from the 2017 Pitchfork greatest-IDM-list (that ruffled a few feathers, that did, it was like negative catnip for nerds!  I had nothing to do with the selection, honest, apart from being one of many who sent their ballot in) 

Isolée: Rest (2000)

There was a moment, around the turn of the millennium, when IDM-aligned figures like Matthew Herbert started to embrace the slinky sensuality of the house template while weaving in glitches and clicks from the Oval/Fennesz world. The term "microhouse" was yet to be coined in 2000, but this is the undefined zone into which Rest slipped to wow the cognoscenti.

As the name hints, Isolée is a one-man-band, Rajko Müller. A German who spent much of his childhood in a French school in Algeria, his music is suitably cosmopolitan and border-crossing, connecting house and techno with '80s synthpop and discreet touches of hand-played world music, like the Afro-pop guitar figure that flutters intermittently through "Beau Mot Plage" like a darting-and-dipping hummingbird. Müller's sound works through the coexistence and interlacing of opposites: spartan and luxuriant, angular and lithe, crispy-dry and wet-look sleek, mechanistic and organic. Sensuous, ear-caressing textures juxtapose with abrasive tones as unyielding and chafing as a pair of Perspex underpants.

"Text," the absolute highlight, is mystifyingly only available on the original 2000 compact disc. It's an Op Art catacomb, a network of twisting tunnels, abrupt fissures, and pitch-shifted slopes that's deliriously disorienting but never loses its dance pulse. Other tracks offer an exquisite blend of delicacy and geometry, like origami made out of graph paper, or echo the Fourth World electro-exotica of Sylvian-Sakamoto and Thomas Leer. We Are Monster, Müller's 2005 follow-up, was excellent but a little too busy, losing the balance between minimal and maximal. So the debut remains Isolée's true claim to acclaim, laurels on which Müller could Rest forever. 

and my intro text

Party in My Mind: The Endless Half-Lives of IDM

At the outset, it needs to be said that "Intelligent Dance Music" is—ironically—kind of a stupid name. By this point, possibly even the folks who coined the term back in 1993—members of an online mailing list mainly consisting of Aphex Twin obsessives—have misgivings about it.

For as a guiding concept, IDM raises way more issues than it settles. What exactly is "intelligence" as manifested in music? Is it an inherent property of certain genres, or more about a mode of listening to any and all music? After all, it's possible to listen to and write about "stupid" forms of music with scintillating intellect. Equally, millions listen to "smart" sounds like jazz or classical in a mentally inert way, using it as a background ambience of sophistication or uplifting loftiness. Right from the start, IDM was freighted with some problematic assumptions. The equation of complexity with cleverness, for instance—what you might call the prog fallacy. And the notion that abandoning the functional, party-igniting aspect of dance somehow liberated the music and the listener: a privileging of head over body that reinforced biases ingrained from over 2,000 years of Western civilization, from Plato through St. Paul and Descartes to more recent cyber-utopians who dream of abandoning the "meat" and becoming pure spirit.

And yet, and yet... Dubious as the banner was (and is), under that aegis, some of the most fabulous electronic music of our era came into being. You could even dance to some of it! And while its peak has long since passed, IDM's half-lives echo on around us still, often in the unlikeliest of places: avant-R&B tunes like Travis Scott's "Goosebumps," tracks like "Real Friends" on The Life of Pablo, even moments on "The Young Pope" soundtrack.

You could say that the prehistory of IDM was the ambient chill-out fad of the first years of the '90s, along with certain ethereal and poignant tracks made by Detroit producers like Carl Craig. But really, it all kicks off in 1992 with Warp's first Artificial Intelligence compilation and its attendant concept of "electronic listening music," along with that same year's Aphex Twin album Selected Ambient Works 85-92 (released on Apollo, the ambient imprint of R&S Records). Warp swiftly followed up the compilation with the Artificial Intelligence series of long-players by Black Dog Productions, Autechre, Richard D. James (operating under his Polygon Window alias, rather than as Aphex), and others. Smaller labels contributed to the nascent network, such as Rephlex (co-founded by James) and GPR (which released records by The Black Dog, Plaid, Beaumont Hannant). But it was Warp that ultimately opened up the space—as a niche market as much as a zone of sonic endeavor—for electronic music that retained the formal features of track-oriented, rave floor-targeted dance but oriented itself towards albums and home listening. ELM, as Warp dubbed it—IDM, as it came to be known—was private and introspective, rather than public and collective.

Phase 2 of IDM came when other artists and labels rushed in to supply the demand, the taste market, that Warp had stirred into existence. Among the key labels of this second phase were Skam, Schematic, Mille Plateaux, Morr, and Planet Mu. The latter was the brainchild of Mike Paradinas, aka μ-Ziq— one of the original Big Four IDM artists, alongside Aphex, Autechre, and Black Dog. (Or the Big Six, if you count Squarepusher and Luke Vibert, aka Wagon Christ/Plug). Most of these artists knew each other socially and sometimes collaborated. All were British.

The two stages of IDM correlate roughly with a shift in mood. First-phase intelligent tended to be strong on melody, atmosphere, and emotion; the beats, while modeled on house and techno, lacked the "oomph" required by DJs, the physical force that would cause a raver to enthuse about a tune as bangin' or slammin'. Largely in response to the emergence of jungle, with its complex but physically coercive rhythmic innovations, Phase 2 IDM tended to be far more imposing and inventive with its drums; at the same time, the mood switched from misty-eyed reverie towards antic excess or whimsy. Often approaching a caricature of jungle, IDM tunes were still unlikely to get dropped in a main-room DJ's set. But by now, the genre had spawned its own circuit of "eclectronica" clubs on both sides of the Atlantic, while the biggest artists could tour as concert acts.

You could talk about a Phase 3 stage of IDM, when the music—not content with borrowing rhythmic tricks from post-rave styles like jungle—actually moved to assimilate the rudeboy spirit of rave itself: the original Stupid Dance Music whose cheesy 'n' mental fervor was the very thing that IDM defined itself again. This early 2000s phase resulted in styles like breakcore and glitchcore; these had an international following and, for the first time in IDM's history, a strong creative basis in the United States. Drawing on an array of street musics from gangsta to gabba, upstart mischief-makers like Kid606 and Lesser made fun of first-wave IDM's chronic Anglophilia, releasing tracks with titles like "Luke Vibert Can Kiss My Indie-Punk Whiteboy Ass" and "Markus Popp Can Kiss My Redneck Ass." Around this time, IDM pulled off its peak achievement of mainstream penetration when Radiohead released Kid A—an album for which Thom Yorke prepared by buying the entire Warp back catalog.

Seventeen years after that (albeit indirect) crossover triumph, the original IDM crew continues to release sporadically inspired work. Autechre's discography is quite the feat of immaculate sustain, Richard D. James unexpectedly returned to delightful relevance after a long silence, Boards of Canada remain a treasure. Label-wise, there's Planet Mu, who appear to be unstoppable, hurling out releases in a dozen different micro-styles. Overall, though, you'd have to say that IDM as a scene and a sound doesn't really exist anymore. But its spectral traces can be tracked all across contemporary music, from genius producers like Actress and Oneohtrix Point Never, to the abstruse end of post-dubstep, to Arca's smeared, gender-fluid texturology. Its reach goes way further: I'm constantly hearing IDM-like sounds on Power FM, the big commercial rap/R&B station here in L.A. At the end of the day, stupid name though it may be, IDM has given the world a stupefying immensity of fantastic music. And its reverberations have yet to dim.

Someone in Italy asked me questions about Selected Ambient Works 1985-1992 upon the occasion of its 30th Anniversary. This is what I said: 

There was this moment when some record labels astutely noticed that there was the beginnings of a demand for music that related to rave dancefloor sounds like techno but was designed for home listening - atmospheric, intricately textured, dreamy or pensive in mood. Artists had started to do tracks like that on the B-side of their dancefloor-target singles, or on the fourth track of an EP. Ambient interludes or stuff that had drums but wasn't as pounding and body- coercive as the kind of techno a DJ would play. The two main labels that really spotted this development and saw that it could be the basis of album-length works - and album-oriented careers - were Warp, in Sheffield, England, and R&S, in Belgium. It was R&S who put out the Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works 85-92 and then Richard D. James signed to Warp. He was also doing that kind of thing through the label he co-founded, Rephlex.

If the rave scene of the period was marked by ecstasy, what drug could be associated with IDM?

Cannabis - and for some LSD perhaps. It's also music that was associated with the after-party and the chill-out room - so music that fit the afterglow of MDMA but not so much the "I got dance like a maniac" phase. But overwhelming it's cannabis. That's why the robot on the front of Artificial Intelligence, the Warp compilation of Aphex-type music, is blowing smoke rings and puffing on a fat joint.

Why did IDM strike a chord with Silicon Valley geeks? And what effect did it have on ravers?

Electronic sound fits the aethetic of digital technology - and the musicians are using a lot of the same equipment as the Silicon Valley people. So there's an affinity there on both levels. Also I think Aphex Twin type music is ideal for people who are working at computers - it's hypnotic, it's rhythmic but not "get up dance NOW", there are patterns in it that are attractive to the ear but you can also tune out if you need to concentrate and it falls back very easily into being background music.

IDM didn't get a lot of play on the rave dancefloor, it might get some play in side-rooms where people want to chill out after frenzied dancing. But also there developed a scene of chill-out clubs, people sitting around and smoking while listening to ambient and floaty electronic music.

What memories do you have related to the release of the album?

It was probably my favorite album of that year and certainly the one I played the most. I must have played it about a hundred times at least. Because it was a CD I quickly reprogrammed it to my favorite five or six tunes. But the whole album is brilliant.

What are your favorite tracks on the tracklist? And why?

I can't be getting into reviewing the album, but my favorites are "Tha", "Pulsewidth", "We Are the Music Makers" and "Heliosphan". "Xtal" is really dreamy and conversely "Hedphelym" is a really scary bit of dark electronic music.

What was Aphex Twin trying to tell us with the quote from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, We Are The Music Makers?

Well, I think it's simply an honestly arrogant reflection of his self-belief - he knows he's a genius. So that's what he literally thinks musicians - the greatest musicians - do. They weave dreams.

In what elements does the album echo Brian Eno's ambient lesson?

Apart from "Xtal" and "Tha", it's not really an ambient album. It's only ambient in comparison to the hardcore techno, jungle and gabber of that time, which was breakneck fast. Most of the tracks have beats and some are pretty propulsive - "Pulsewidth". It's music that has a physical element and a relation to dance music, but it pulls at your body gently.

But you can use as background music, something to fill the air like fragrance, so in that sense it can be used like ambient music. It's a bit too insistent melodically and rhythmically to qualify as Eno's definition of ambient being "as ignorable as it is interesting".

What does it feel like to listen to the album again today thirty years later?

I haven't listened to it.

What distinguishes Aphex Twin from Autechre and Boards of Canada?

Aphex Twin versus Autechre - well, it's just much better music. It's not afraid to be beautiful and it connects to actual human emotions that are relatable. Autechre have interesting textures but I don't hear tunes like Richard D. James. Autechre have commanding rhythms but they're not groovy, whereas with Aphex Twin there's more of swing and feel - you can imagine dancing to them.

Aphex Twin versus Boards of Canada. Both are sublime melodists. But Aphex Twin has more interesting rhythms - again, you can imagine dancing to much of his music, whereas BoC is about the headnod. The way they use hip hop beats is very effective but as the brothers would admit, they have very little to do with club music. Aphex music is much more on the edge of rave.

Boards of Canada also have this consistently elegaic, nostalgic, wistful quality - the sense of childhood or a lost future. Aphex will go into that zone but generally sounds more aligned with the idea of the future or outer space, in that sense he's more of a techno artist. BoC are more like a shoegaze band that when into sampling and loops.

Are some elements of IDM present in the conceptronica today? Or in what music?

Where I hear the textures of IDM is actually in a lot of the last several years trap and mumble rap - Playboi Carti, Rich the Kid, Migos, Lil Uzi Vert, Travis Scott, Young Thug. You get the blurry, idyllic textures and the bittersweet melody-loops. Even the vocal presence, fed through the glittering and glitchy textures of Auto-Tune, sounds very IDM-compatible - dreamy, sparkly, passively swooning. That kind of trapadelic sound is almost the sole bastion of minimalism in modern popular music, which is otherwise overly dramatic and busy. 

Conceptronica has the thoughtfulness of certain kinds of IDM - like Oval or the label Mille Plateaux Fax - but it rarely has the kind of sheer melodic beauty of Aphex and Seefeel and Boards of Canada. Most of today's conceptual electronic artists are trying to reflect or deal with issues related to contemporary society - whether it's queer identity, racial injustice, rage against what's going on politically, or it's the stresses and distortions of personality caused by living on the internet and social media, that "always on" purgatory of today's existence. So the sounds they make are often not pretty and they are rarely relaxing in the way that Selected Ambient Works could be. They are often trying to put you through an extreme or challenging experience. Or they are trying to command your full attention. Either way it's not music - for me - that I can use in everyday life like I did the great Aphex Twin music.

introduction to Valerio Mattioli's book Exmachina: Storia musicale della nostra estinzione 1992 → which centers on Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Boards of Canada, and is a genius work that someone needs to translate into English

The idea that certain kinds of music have a special relationship with the Future has a long history and continues to make a potent appeal to our imaginations—as listeners and thinkers, and as music-makers too. 

In the early '90s, for instance, David Toop - a critic and a musician - wrote evocatively about a sensation of "nostalgia for the future" that wafted vaguely off the recordings of The Black Dog,  a British group associated with an emerging genre briefly identified as "electronic listening music" but later permanently rebranded as Intelligent Dance Music or IDM.  

The notion is not limited to professional analysts and champions of music. William Gibson, in his 1996 near-future novel Idoru, ventriloquizes his own insight through the character of Mr. Kuwayama, a Japanese entertainment executive, who observes that pop "is the test-bed of futurity".   Jacques Attali, in his classic 1977 treatise Noise: The Political Economy of Music, constructed an entire theory of music's evolution based around the belief that music is prophecy. But his argument is not so much about the formal properties of music (say, increased tolerance for dissonance, as the title Noise might suggest) as the structures and hierarchies that music engenders around itself. Attali's focus is on the modes of music making, distribution, and  consumption, which he sees as a preview of emerging forms of social organization. 

As someone who's dedicated his life to magnifying the power and significance of music, this kind of talk is very much to my taste: it stirs my patriotic feelings about music as an area of human existence. Through my personal history of listening and the accident of the era I was born in, I'm wired to seek out and recognize "the future" as it manifests in music, and equally primed to be entranced by arguments and narratives that present music as the herald of a world to come. 

So in many ways I'm an ideal reader for Valerio Mattioli's extraordinary book. It's a feat of hyper-interpretation that detects the flexing of the Zeitgeist within the discographies of just three operators, preeminent in a field that is relatively speaking a marginal sidestream of popular music, the aforementioned genre-not-genre known as IDM. To those who know them, Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Boards of Canada are gods, whose every last scrap of recorded work warrants decoding by the devotees. But even these cult believers will be taken aback by the intensity of Mattioli's scrutiny and the scale of the claims he makes. 

Exmachina is an archeology of the future embedded in music made a quarter-century or more ago; a future that is now our present. As with Attali's theory, that futurity is not so much in the surface trappings of the music - the coldness of synthesized sound, the domineering mechanistic rhythms - nor even in the imagery wrapped around it (often "futuristic" in a way that was even at the time fairly familiar and occasionally bordered on sci-fi kitsch). The futurism resides more in the deeper grammar of the music and the subjectivity that the music proposed, modeled, and elicited; a future that the music in some way trained the listener for, through the molding of perception and instilling of affect.  

Although the subject of Mattioli's book is the latent future in music some of which is 30 years old now, the future that has come true and is now our digital everyday, in other ways a big part of the pleasure of reading it for me is frankly nostalgic. Exmachina is a kind of time machine: it creates a delicious sensation of being plunged back into the  early '90s and immersed in all the wide-eyed excitement about the oncoming future that seemed to be manifesting itself through electronic dance and non-dance music, swept up once again in the fevered intellectual climate of that time. 

In 1992, computers had become widespread at work and in domestic spaces, but they didn't dominate our existence. Broadband was still many years away; dial-up was cumbersome and time-consuming, and when you got on the internet, there was hardly anything to see (which was just as well given how long it took a page to come up). Almost no one had email; mobile phones were still  in their infancy, in terms of widespread usage and the things you could do with them. None of the commonplace "superpowers" of today - wi-fi, search engines, Siri, social media, etc - existed, and some weren't even imagined. The digital realm existed in a cordoned-off zone of our existence. Yet precisely because of this, digital technology could then carry with it the scent of the future—an alluring or alarming aroma, depending on your inclinations. 

For most people, the places where you could get the most pungent advance whiff of how things were going to be were music and videogames. They offered the hardest hit of futurity that an ordinary person could access - and even more so if that person happened to make music themselves. As well as the Promethean rush and world-building buzz of grappling with machines and software that by today's standards are laughably rudimentary and clumsy, electronic musicians in the '90s were conceptually stimulated by emergent forms of technology outside of the sonic realm, including things that were then barely more than rumors or pipe dreams. Concepts like virtual reality and surveillance provided imagery for techno and jungle artists long before VR became commercially available or CCTV became omnipresent in some countries.

The polarities represented by VR and CCTV - the artificial pleasuredome  versus the Panopticon - relate to a curious bi-polar quality to the writing about digital culture during the 1990s. The naïve optimism and excessive dread were two sides of the same coin: a euphoria that flipped so easily into dysphoria. Reading theorists like Arthur Kroker, Paul Virilio, Donna Haraway, Sadie Plant, Erik Davis, Mark Dery, Jaron Lanier, Kodwo Eshun (and many of these names pop up in Mattioli's text), all it took was to tilt your angle of reading slightly and the exultation could be taken as denunciation. The fervor and fever of the prose would be the same in either the utopian or dystopian modalities. With some of these writers, it was never clear whether they were anticipating or flinching from the posthuman future. And some former evangelists have subsequently morphed into Jeremiahs, writing books with titles like You Are Not A Gadget or New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future.  

With music in particular, it was an exhilarating time to be a critic. For someone like myself or Kodwo Eshun or the young Mark Fisher and Steve Goodman (both then associated with the para-academic outfit Cybernetic Culture Research Unit), you rarely found yourself using reference points from history. You couldn't resort to coordinates based on existing earlier music because the new music was going right off the map.  The rapidly advancing and mutating tones and beats put pressure on you to generate new tropes and concepts. Hence the proliferation of  neologisms and invented genre terms. And the posthuman feeling of the music, its seeming absence of human touch, also seemed to demand a depersonalized analysis that attributed a purposive sentience to the way that individual tracks unfolded and that entire genres and scenes evolved.  Mattioli reinhabits this mindset, this ecstatically paranoid sense that the music is independent of human designs and has its own dark agenda. Humans didn't make the music; the music is remaking - and undoing - the human as a category. "We must change for the machines" and "human viewpoint redundant," as the video art / theory collective 0(rphan)d(rift>), put it in a 1995 book called Cyberpositive, a delirious collage-text infused with their experiences of going to techno clubs and being mangled mentally by the combination of loud music and hallucinogens, written in a tone of mystical masochism.   

Mattioli entered a similar kind of mind-state when writing Exmachina. But rather than reach it through immersion in the congested darkness of the rave space, it was the covid lockdown's enforced isolation that pushed him into a state of creative paranoia in which everything radiated significance and hitherto hidden patterns pulsated into visibility. Decades before wi-fi,  Baudrillard imagined the tele-connected citizen of the future as essentially living inside a satellite, a sealed pod in orbit around the void where society once was. Plugged into networks, this was a new kind of porous self, vibrating in a perpetual  "ecstasy of communication. All secrets, spaces and scenes abolished in a single dimension of information."  A desolated self "open to everything in spite of himself, living in the greatest confusion... He is now only a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence." That describes how many of us having been living during 2020 and 2021. Mattioli took the pandemic trauma and used it to create an adventure close to home. This is the story of where the music took his mind. 

One intriguing counterfactual in rock history is what would have happened if drummer Kenny Morris and guitarist John McKay had not quit Siouxsie and the Banshees at the start of a major tour - after an altercation at an LP  signing session in an Aberdeen record shop...

THE BLACK DOG, The Book of Dogma

Sleeve notes for In A Moment... (Ghost Box compilation, 2015)

Tell me what you see vanishing and I

Will tell you who you are

 W.S. Merwin, "For Now"

It's a moment that a music journalist dreads - when an acquaintance or recently acquired friend shyly pipes up, "Actually, I've been making some music myself...   would really like to know what you think of it...." 

When it happens, it always feels like no good can come of this.  It's almost guaranteed that you'll have to work up some sort of considered-seeming reaction that, despite your best efforts, will be transparently polite, the strain of finding something nice to say awfully evident.  And then the burgeoning friendship takes a big hit, because as much as people say they want your honest critical reaction...

Ten years ago or so, I got that familiar slightly sick feeling when Julian House - who I'd been chatting with via email for a while - offered to send me some music.  I dutifully listened, with zero expectations beyond the necessity of an awkward exchange in the near-future.  Little did I know that the recordings Julian sent - early sound-sketches by himself, as The Focus Group - followed shortly by the first EP from his accomplice Jim Jupp, as Belbury Poly - would end up being my favorite music of the past decade.  Or that their label - Ghost Box - would soon assume a talismanic significance in my mental landscape.

I suspect Julian got more than he'd bargained for as well...

There are those who like to imagine that the reason I love Ghost Box is because the music - in tandem with Julian's design ("packaging that's wrapped inside the music", to quote his own words about library records) and the scaffolding of concepts and allusions surrounding the project, makes for a superb screen upon which to project theories.  Certainly Ghost Box lends itself to that kind of speculative thinking, as the output of dozens of blogs and the profusion of magazine thinkpieces over the last decade testifies.  But the truth is simply that the music Julian & Jim have put out is what I listen to incessantly: for pleasure, for comfort, for strange delight.  Hardly any of the records I raved about or end-of-year-listed in 2005 are things I still play. But I have never stopped listening to Hey Let Loose Your Love or The Willows.   

I used the word "comfort" above. One of the things some people don't seem to get about Ghost Box - and perhaps they're thrown off by the name - is that this isn't meant to be some hair-raising, soul-harrowing trip into necromantic darkness.   It's much gentler than that, a twisting or tinting of the everyday. Softly spooky, sweetly creepy, Ghost Box enfolds the listener in a cosy unease. It's umheimlich you can live with, live inside. No, we are not dealing with Gothshit or pierced-dick second-wave industrial shlock here.  Yes, humour is involved: in the artwork, the song titles, the fabric of the sound itself, with its queer mix of solemn and jaunty.  A humour of a particular poker-face kind that reminds me of old dear comrades from long-ago campaigns of mischief and obfuscation. That's a personal resonance, but it illustrates a wider public fact: the existence of an Anglo-Surrealist continuum that crops up repeatedly across the generations, based each time around slightly different constellations of esoteric erudition and arcane research.

This is possibly the point at which to point out that Ghost Box aren't alone.  Before the label started, back in the Nineties, there were precursors:  Boards of Canada, Position Normal, Mount Vernon Arts Lab, Broadcast, Add N to (X), Pram, Plone, Stereolab. (A few of these are friends of Julian and Jim, and/or record cover design clients of Julian's).  When Ghost Box launched in 2005, it entered an emerging cultural field that had already started to bestow totemic stature on entities like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and bygone regions of sound like library music and DIY concrete /electronic (maverick composers like F.C. Judd, Basil Kirchin, Tristam Cary, Daphne Oram, Ron Geesin, and Desmond Leslie).   Ghost Box found itself in alignment with other operators who'd found their own way to similar sets of preoccupations: Mordant Music,  Moon Wiring Club,  James Kirby a/k/a The Caretaker,  English Heretic, Trunk Records, Cate Brooks of King of Woolworths and later the Café Kaput label. Within a few years Ghost Box were joined by new fellow travelers such as Pye Corner Audio, Burial, Woebot, Robin the Fog, Sarah Angliss, the West Country wyrdtronica / pastoral-industrial crew (Farmer Glitch, Kemper Norton, IX Tab),  West Norwood Cassette Library, Demdike Stare, Ekoplekz, and A Year In The Country.  There were even remote cousins overseas, from Andrew Pekler in Germany to Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, William Basinski, James Ferraro, and Oneohtrix Point Never in the United States. 

Even just focusing consideration to the U.K., the field is really quite crowded now, and I haven't mentioned certain blatantly indebted post-GB operatives, or all of the contributors to Ghost Box's Studies Series and Other Voices split 7-inch singles. Nor the seepage into other art forms *, notably the film Berberian Sound Studio.   Wikipedia may not accept it **, but have no doubt:  this is a definite "thing" we're talking about, an objectively existing zone. 

Ghost Box have remained central in whatever you want to call this "this" ***, and indeed - to my ears and eyes - they've operated at a slight elevation to most everybody else in the parish, their output characterized by consistency in both the "quality standards" and "thematic coherence" senses.  Their achievement partly entails a synthesis of existing tendencies, partly a broadening out into a richer frame of reference and resonance, but most of all, the sheer consummate-ness of how they've gone about things.  

From the start, the label's releases were designed - literally - to form a set, a format modelled on university course books or the classic grid cover template of Penguin / Pelican / Peregrine paperbacks.  The look of the releases made you want to own them all. But more than a mere design fetish, the packaging is the outward display of a continuity of sound and sensibility. When other artists - like Cate Brooks as The Advisory Circle, or Pye Corner Audio - have contributed to the label, they have sounded more Ghost Box-y compared to their regular output. And no slight intended to them or their other releases, they've done their best work for Ghost Box.  Something about the ideas-frame, the sense of occasion in joining that "set", perhaps even the name "Ghost Box" - like all great group or label names, it's a miniature poem, a condensed manifesto - seemed to make these talents raise their game. 

This isn't the time and place - nor is there the space - to explore thoroughly the huge inventory of themes and obsessions that make up the Ghost(Box)world: tales of cosmic horror and pastoral uncanny by gentlemen occultists like Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen;  the U.K.'s status as the country with the highest number of ghost sightings in the world and as the culture that invented the ghost story;  eccentric scholars of history and the occult like T.C. Lethbridge, M.B. Devot, and Ronald Hutton;  British horror movies of the Hammer and Tigon school, especially those with a bucolic-pagan tinge like The Wicker Man; the inappropriately disturbing - by today's sanitised standards -  children's television series of the 1970s involving the supernatural or apocalyptic, along with the era's excessively terrifying Public Information Films;  Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin's Smallfilms animations like Bagpuss and The Clangers;  the planning-for-tomorrow spirit of post-WW2 Britain that encompassed Brutalist architecture, the Open University, the polytechnics....  Treatises have been written on all of this (I've penned a few myself) and right now there are people beavering away at PhD's making all the right connections.

But here might be the time and the place to talk about... time and place, the two over-arching concepts that unify and permeate Ghost Box's output. Perhaps they are really just different sides of the same coin:  Great Britain during the period book-ended by the creation of the Welfare State and by Thatcher's electoral landslide, which inaugurated the post-socialist era in which we grimly find ourselves still.  Deeply imprinted memories of this bygone Britain are the source of the music's allure and its poignant charge. Taylor Parkes captures this when he writes that "anyone born between the early 60s and the early 70s is at risk from the past in some ways. Being the generation who were raised in one kind of Britain (a cosy-but-progressive social democracy, where the arts were valued and thought was encouraged) and then came of age in another, there's a sort of dissonance and suppressed fury there which makes our nostalgia deeper and more painful than it should be. That sense of an inheritance having been snatched away, of being a motherless child..... I always thought of the Ghost Box stuff, for instance, as a howl of separation anxiety."

Ghost Box struck a particularly plangent chord with me, not just because of the middle age I'd decisively arrived at circa 2005, but because I was an expatriate who had been living in America for a decade by that point.  That made me an exile in space and time.  Hearing records like Sketches and Spells and Hey Let Loose Your Love, Farmer's Angle and The Willows...   later The Advisory Circle's Mind How You Go and Other Channels...   I felt a sense of recognition and connection  -  self-recognition and self-reconnection - that's probably similar to say, how a migrant Jamaican feels listening to reggae:  an organic bond to music that sound-tracked everyday life going back as far as you can remember.  Ghost Box is "roots 'n culture" for me and for my kind. 

The label's releases have filled me with mournful wonder at the thought of the country I'd grown up in during the Sixties and Seventies, a country that has subsequently been very deliberately eroded away.   A time/place where/when a young mind could access all kinds of cultural riches and frissons through the local library (and the inter-library loan system), through a public broadcasting culture that was dedicated to challenging viewers and listeners with unsettling children's programs like The Changes, The Children of The Stones, and The Clifton House Mystery, peculiar plays like Stargazy on Zummerdown, radiophonic dramas and soundscapes like Inferno Revisited and Inventions for Radio.    

Which is not to say that Ghost Box only works for a particular generation of Britons, by working on the elegiac centers of the brain, trigging the memory-embedded cues of incidental music and bygone TV scores.  I've been surprised - reassured too - by the appeal of the label to much younger and wholly non-British fans and critics, like Stylus and Pitchfork writer Mike Powell, who memorably described The Focus Group sound as resembling "a museum come to life".

Still Ghost Box does seem to have a particularly potent effect on those entering that phase of life when memories flash into your consciousness unbidden, at once astonishingly vivid yet mundane and unremarkable, as if they are files that the brain is submitting for deletion.   An involuntary condition that Nina Power crystallizes with this rueful admission: "the thing I find strangest and most unsettling about getting older is the sheer weight of memory - unwanted, everyday, melancholic, heavy, strange, like limescale on a filament."

So does that mean this music is purely a delicious wallow in nostalgia? I don't think so (Ghost Box's contingent of younger fans surely proves that). At the same time, nostalgia itself is a complicated business, not something that can be instantly dismissed or scorned, rather an unavoidable aspect of the human condition.  I believe a distinction can be made between "good retro" and "bad retro" that's as crucial as the difference between good cholesterol and bad cholesterol. In what must have been the first published piece on Ghost Box outside the blog circuit, Matthew Ingram, reviewing Hey Let Loose Your Love for The Wire, characterised the music as "an archaeology of emotion, a philosophically-motivated exploration of the power not just of one's childhood memories, but of the collective unconscious. Memory in the work of The Focus Group...  is a theoretical portal to the phantasmal kingdom, not a trivial exercise in retro stylistics." 

Any person's make-up is necessarily 99 percent composed of the past.  As a matter of policy - reflecting a "be here now" stance or philosophical orientation towards The Future - you might shun nostalgia and resist revisiting the past as much as you're able to.  But sooner or later, the past will visit you.  Ultimately there is no escaping its visitations, its revenant apparitions.  This is the Ghost Box sensation: an alloy of intimacy and otherness, like a part of yourself you'd lost or forgotten, returned whether you want it or not. 

"The past is never dead," William Faulkner famously wrote. "It's not even past."  Ghost Box have expressed their appreciation of Boards of Canada's version of that idea: a compulsion to uncover "the past inside the present."  Jim Jupp speaks in interviews sometimes of Ghost Box's world as "a kind of an 'all at once' place where all of the popular culture from 1958 to 1978 is somehow happening at the same time."  Even more mystically, Jim has talked about the concept of  "eternalism",  suggesting that Ghost Box emanates from -  or at least proposes the existence of  -  "a world where time has no existence at all and contemporary sounds and references seem no more or less important than ones from the past or future.... Everything that has happened and will happen and all parallel world outcomes are superimposed in one block time."  This idea - that all moments in time are taking place at once - isn't as loopy as it sounds, or at least it has been seriously entertained by philosophers like J.W. Dunne, whose dream-research-influenced theories were popularized by J.B. Priestley amongst others in the mid-20th Century. Dunne's An Experiment With Time also inspired the 1970s ATV children's drama Timeslip.

The forward-moving, one-directional flow of Time might indeed be an illusion. But that's not much help to me, trapped inside that illusion as I am, with no access to a "time bubble" like the one that allows the Timeslip kids to travel back and forth across the decades.  I admire and envy the mystics and the supernaturalists; I would like to believe in magic more than I actually do.  Music is the closest I get to religion; it's the Force I can't explain. So I return to the point I began with: all these philosophical fancies and theoretical adventures that Ghost Box sets in motion would not count for anything if the music didn't (in)substantiate them.

It's the sheer musicality of Ghost Box that gets short shrifted in all the high-powered intellectual debates.  The shocking from-another-time beauty of "Sundial" and "Osprey" by The Advisory Circle. The macabre whimsy of Belbury Poly tunes like "The Willows" and "Insect Prospectus", banging nightclub tracks in that parallel world where Dr. Phibes and Jerry Cornelius really existed. The eldritch sound-contraptions collated on The Transactional Dharma of Roj.  The gorgeous electronic rhapsody that is "Almost There"  by John Foxx and The Belbury Circle, one of the best things that Foxx & Brooks have ever done, which is really saying something if you think about it. Above all, The Focus Group's miniatures like "Modern Harp,"  "Frumious Numinous" and "The Leaving" -  to my mind some of the most quietly radical, gently deranging music of the 21st Century, cascades-in-reverse whose oneiric flutter never fails to lift me away.  

In these and other moments, Ghost Box has abolished time for me, unlocked memory, transported me elsewhere and elsewhen. 

2025 Footnotes

*   the seepage into other art forms

Rather thin evidence presented here - surprisingly it slipped my mind about Mark Leckey's Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, which might be visual art's haunty masterpiece. 

There is also the phenomenon of re-enactment art, in particular the huge public artwork orchestrated by Jeremy Deller, 2016's We're Here Because We're Here,  that has an explicitly ghostly aspect: the apparition of First World War soldiers in public places like railway stations and shopping malls, each volunteer-actor having been assigned the identity of an actual combatant who died during the Somme. When a passer-by approached them to ask what's going on, the spectral soldier did not speak but shows them a card with the name of the slain man. However, at intervals, the troops do break into a chanted song: "We're Here Because We're Here". I can't recall if this was a bitter, fatalistic-at-the-futility ditty chanted by actual soldiers during the not-so-Great War.

I'm sure there are further latter day film examples that could be included (Strickland's In Fabric, notably) and the subject of  haunty TV comedy is not fully dealt with in this liner note but gets more of a reckoning here. 

** "Wikipedia may not accept" 

Below are the full, carefully preserved deliberations on whether or not to allow hauntology-the-music-genre to have an entry. 

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. Consensus is to delete -- PhantomSteve/talk|contribs\ 14:19, 8 March 2010 (UTC)

Hauntology (musical genre) (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | views) - (View log • AfD statistics)

(Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL)

Neologism made up by one reviewer. Ridernyc (talk) 04:50, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

• Delete hoax Shii (tock) 16:22, 1 March 2010 (UTC)
• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Music-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 01:08, 2 March 2010 (UTC)
• Delete - Hauntology is not commonly considered a musical genre. Therefor hauntology (musical genre) should be deleted and not (!) redirected. gidonb (talk) 21:34, 2 March 2010 (UTC)
• Merge and redirect to Ghost Box Records. Almost the whole thing could be comfortably placed in the "Aesthetics" section with little modification. — Gwalla | Talk 21:55, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Why would we take unsourced information from here to expand the unsourced information there? Ridernyc (talk) 23:14, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

• Comment From what I could find, the very existence of hauntology as a musical style is rejected by the relevant musical community. This community claims that what is described as hauntology is an effect at most. Between the strong "hoax" and light "unsourced", I think the term "fringe POV" covers hauntology (musical genre) best. In either case, the combination of hauntology with the words musical genre and the contents of this article are misleading and should be deleted. gidonb (talk) 00:38, 3 March 2010 (UTC)
• Delete Totally subjective and undefinable and unsourced term for another music sub genre. Guyonthesubway (talk) 19:09, 3 March 2010 (UTC)
• Delete. It definitely seems to lack notability. I looked at the fifth reference, and IT SOURCES WIKIPEDIA! Ha, what a joke for that to be cited on wikipedia. Backtable Speak to meconcerning my deeds. 00:49, 8 March 2010 (UTC)
• Delete The sources citated actually indicate pretty clearly that it is not a musical genre and that it is a neologism.--SabreBD (talk) 10:28, 8 March 2010 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

"Hoax", "fringe POV" - haha! The whole cabal discussion has a ludicrous yet faintly sinister air about it, it's like some phantasm from Foucault's brain. 

However I believe that there is nowadays a subsection on hauntology as music genre within the Wiki entry on hauntology

*** whatever you want to call this "this"

Note how deftly and considerately I avoid using the H-word throughout this sleeve note! 

Related Thoughts

This is from a conversation I had with Richard Lockley-Hobson

I think every country or nationality, let's say, has its own Hauntology. Potentially anyway. This sort of cultural or para-cultural substrate of common experience that you don't really notice until it's gone.

Certainly the cluster of music that, for better or worse, I've come to call Hauntology, is very British, and also generational, it resonates for people who were children in the 1960s/70s and a little bit 80s. But non Brits do seem to pick up on aspects that do something for them, a non specific evocative-ness and out-of-timey effect.

What further defines it as sensation is this odd alloy of intimacy and otherness... A part of yourself you'd lost or forgotten that's returned to yourself. A self othering. In that sense definite analogies with analysis in the Freudian sense. Which makes sense if one is talking about cultural unconscious, etc.

So it's not a totally othering, disorientating experience, as in mystical, paranormal, or hallucinatory, like drug experiences or going insane. It's gentler, a twisting, or tinting of the everyday. Rather than deranging, a sort of cosy mild unease or dissociative feeling. Reverie rather than Rapture, in the Saint Theresa sense.

The one thing that came through more clearly when doing the chapter in Retromania, was the extent to which my sense of Hauntology-as-music-genre, and my affection for it, is based around nationality. And I make this opposition between nationality and nationalism. Nationalism is political and it's an ideology of national greatness or exceptionality. Nationality is pre-political I think - it's the things I share with all other Britons including so many I have nothing in common with politically or in terms of chosen allegiances (musical, artistic, etc). Nationality in that sense is the pre-chosen, the given rather than what you consciously seek out or align yourself with. There's this term people use, I'm not sure of the provenance in terms of either who coined it or even what discipline it comes from (Sociology? Anthropology), but the term is "lifeworld" - and I guess it means the realm of customs, everyday life, accents, gestures, rituals, routines, habits, common sense, food etc. I suppose Antonio Gramsci would say this kind of stuff is actually ideological, it's part of hegemony (Roland Barthes also analysed this kind of thing under Mythologies). But to me it's more like the common inheritance of phrase and fable, idiom, and also, the arbitrary stylistic and design quirks of the typography used on everyday articles, the look of shops and public institutions, etc.

I was just in the UK last week and being an expatriate now I notice this stuff that I would not have noticed when I lived there and it was all I knew. Also I just learned to drive so I'm paying more attention, but you know, things like road signs - where my mum lives in west Hertfordshire, signs like "weak bridges" or "traffic calming area" (for a zone with bumps in the road to stop drivers going too fast and running over little kids, presumably!). It's in that kind of thing that the soul of a nation resides. That's where Hauntology does cross over into the realm of the hobbyist, which is frankly nostalgic and fetishistic of the bygone, musty, etcetera.

A lot of Hauntology taps into this kind of thing, and largely the elements of the nation-soul or lifeworld that are fading away. Although whenever I go to England I am quite amazed by how unchanged it is, indistinguishable, in large part, from the 1970s or 80s Britain, that I remember. Old people still look the same. The main differences between then and now seems to be mobile phones and coffee.

In an interview  recently I was asked if I missed London. And I said this:

I do miss London, and England, for loads of reasons, too many to list really. Beyond friends and family, just the fabric of daily life. The hedgerows and meadows and copses. The calm modulated tones of Radio Four. The weather - I actually miss things like rain, sudden showers, mist, fog, frost. There are about 20 different kinds of rain in the UK, whereas in LA, when it does rain - which is rarely - it's more like an on/off switch, like a shower. London specifically, obviously I miss the parks - Brockwell Park and Hampstead Heath, above all. I think they have idyllic connotations partly because I was born in London and lived there until the age of 4, so a place like Brockwell Park on a really nice day has a kind of dream-like quality to me. Quite a lot of things that I miss about the UK are actually gone or are going (like record shops, the weekly music press, the BBC). So the homesickness is about a country that doesn't even exist anymore. Yet conversely, whenever I go back, especially once I get outside London to places like the Tring/Berkhamstead area, where my parents live, or Durham and Swaledale in North Yorkshire, where my aunt and uncle live - I get a striking sense that the UK hasn't actually changed that much since I was a boy. Old people look more or less the same, the landscape is more or less the same, except that haystacks now get covered in black bin-liners. There's still allotments and canals, with brightly coloured barges and flooded fields beside them. Pubs and beer gardens. Village fetes, etc. Everyone has science fiction phones, people are dressing a bit sharper and flashier and punk rock is taught in middle school, as part of popular culture courses. But essentially, at heart, the country is the same. For better and worse.

Bonus Beats

Some clever and beautiful things other people have written about Ghost Box - including clever things somehow written about Ghost Box before Ghost Box even existed.

"Songs are like lopsided Victorian automata, instruments mismatch in incongruent tempos... and sequences frequently crumble into soft-edged bliss before one's ears. It is almost as if the very action of their exposure is the agent of their collapse. Stranger still, though plainly audible, occasionally the music seems to disappear from earshot, becoming proverbially invisible, sinking into the netherworld of the unconscious. Recurrent themes serve as mnemonics luring the listener's attention to the surface. Pieced together from the mustiest samples - children's exercise records, vintage BBC drama, clunky Brit jazz and (most pertinently) library records, this is an archaeology of emotion, a philosophically motivated exploration of the power of not just one's childhood memories, but of the collective unconscious. In the work of The Focus Group and House's partners Belbury Poly and Eric Zann... memory is a theoretical portal to the phantasmal kingdom, not a trivial exercise in retro stylistics" 

- Matthew Ingram, on Hey Let Loose Your Love for The Wire, 2005  

"Ghostbox artists deal in a very British style of sound manipulation; perhaps it could be called music-hall concrète.... Sketches and Spells by The Focus Group reveals them as non-idiomatic cratediggers searching for the bits other than the beats, for the reflective moments that the headz miss. This is music by and for shoppers who come home with dirt ingrained deep into their fingerprints from flipping through stacks of old books and records at jumble sales and charity shops. It is as refreshing as the cup of hot tea served by the church bric-a-brac stall where you've failed to find anything interesting among the Sven Hassel novels and stained flannel shirts. Sketches and Spells is as warm and strange as a clockwork sunrise accompanied by a dawn chorus of steam driven birds. Super-dry jazz hi-hat work mixes with offhand synth-bass and slivered chirrups of sound sliced thin enough to be just impossible to place. There's a lot of percussion but it's the click-clack sticks, spacious triangles and tentative, carefully considered woodblocks of primary school rather than the dense free-for-all of the hippie jam (you can almost smell the wood-shavings covering childish vomit.)" 

- Patrick McNally, Stylus, 2005 

"The affect produced by Ghost Box's releases (sound AND images, the latter absolutely integral) are the direct inverse of irritating PoMo citation-blitz. The mark of the postmodern is the extirpation of the uncanny, the replacing of the unheimlich tingle of unknowingness with a cocksure knowingness and hyper-awareness. Ghost Box, by contrast, is a conspiracy of the half-forgotten , the poorly remembered and the confabulated.... Ghost Box releases conjure a sense of artificial déjà vu, where you are dup

director's cut of piece in the The Guardian, roughly a year ago  - with the follow-up blog pieces below

I started blogging in 2002.  Prior to that I'd operated a website for around six years, but what grabbed me about blogging was the speed and the responsiveness - the way blogs picked up on what other blogs posted and responded almost in real time. I wanted to jump right into the midst of this crackling synergy between blogs. So I did.

The blogging circuit I joined was just one corner of an ever-growing blogosphere. Even within music,  my blog's primary focus, there was a whole other - and larger - network of MP3 blogs. Still, my particular neighbourhood was bustling all through the 2000s. Out of its fractious ferment emerged cult figures like K-punk, a.k.a Mark Fisher, one of the most widely read and revered left-wing thinkers of our time, and the prolific architecture critic and author Owen Hatherley. Then there were those like me who fit a different archetype: already a professional writer but who relished the freedom of style and tone offered by blogging.  

Today, there are still plenty of active music blogs. They encompass established critics like Richard Williams, anonymous unknowns unloading a lifetime's knowledge and passion such as Aloysius , K-punk-descended blogs like Xenogothic that move fluently between pop culture and theory, and the amiable anecdotes and keen observations of  musicians like Wreckless Eric. 

What's changed - what's gone - is inter-blog communication. The argumentative back-and-forth, the pass-the-baton discussions that rippled across the scene, the spats and the feuds - these are things of the past. If community persists, it's on the level of any individual blog's comment box.  I prize the unusual perspectives and weird erudition of my regular commenters, while wondering why so few of them operate their own blogs.

It's easy to pinpoint what caused the fall-off:  social media. On Facebook, once copious bloggers craft miniature essays to an invited audience only. Twitter - at least when it was good - supplied even more instant feedback for rapid-fire opinionators. There are other rival repositories of bloggy informality, like  podcasts. Just generally there's more news 'n' views bombarding us than ever. Now wonder the blogs have been shunted to the side.

I miss the interblog chatter of the 2000s but in truth, connectivity was only ever part of the appeal.  I'd do this even if no one read it. Blogging, for me, is the perfect format. No restrictions when it comes to length or brevity: a post can be a considered and meticulously composed  5000-word essay, or a spurted splat of speculation or whimsy.  No rules about structure or consistency of tone.  A blogpost can be half-baked and barely proved: I feel zero duty to "do my research" before pontificating. Purely for my own pleasure, I do often go deep. But it's nearer the truth to say that some posts are outcomes of rambles across the archives of the internet, byproducts of the odd information trawled up and the lateral connections created.   

"Ramble" is the right word.  Blogging, I can meander, take short cuts, and trespass into fields where I don't belong.  Because I'm not pitching an idea to a publication or presenting my credentials as an authority, I am able to tackle subjects outside my expertise. It's highly unlikely I could persuade a magazine to let me write an essay  comparing Bob Fosse and Lenny Bruce https://shockandawesimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2022/03/showbiz-against-showbiz-bob-lenny.html

 or find a thread connecting Fellini's Amarcord, Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch, and Tati's Playtime

https://retromaniabysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2022/05/decline-of-wes-or-three-movies-three.html

In recent months, I've  ruminated about Wiki-Fear and the sticky way that upsetting information attaches itself to favorite artists and their music, remembered the suggestive Flake commercials of my youth, https://hardlybaked2.blogspot.com/2023/10/flakeatio.html

looked at fame-as-royalty and royalty-as-celebrity via Dame Edna Everage and Clive James

https://shockandawesimonreynolds2.blogspot.com/2023/08/grotesque-with-gratitude-rip-edna-barry.html, and a dedicated a brief blog to a single scene in the film Charlie Bubbles involving Albert Finney protractedly masticating a bacon sandwich  https://hardlybaked2.blogspot.com/2023/06/chew-very-much.html

As those examples show, one of the great thing about blogging for a professional journalist is that you can write about topics that aren't topical. You are unshackled from release schedules. An old record or TV program you've stumbled upon, or simply remembered, is fair game. YouTube's arrival in 2005 brought a new dimension to blogging. The two go together so well because they are both handmaidens of 21st Century archive fever, instruments of the atemporal culture brought about by the internet, social media, and streaming.

The motto at the top of my primary outlet Blissblog https://blissout.blogspot.com/ twists Tricky lyric's "my brain thinks bomb-like". My brain thinks blog-like: the digressive rhythms, the lurching between tones, it's how my mind moves, when it's not behaving itself in print.  I realized that I had, if not a problem, then perhaps some kind of disorder, when I started to spin off satellite blogs, initially dedicated to specialized zones of my brain  (the books Energy Flash, Retromania, Shock and Awe) but soon splintering to encompass particular obsessions and modes. Probably the most enjoyable to write - maybe to read too, although I couldn't say - is Hardly Baked 2 https://hardlybaked2.blogspot.com/. Fragmented fumbles towards a thesis, sometimes based around ancient pop videos, occasionally entirely pictorial, these posts are, as the blog name makes clear, unfinished work. Often they're completed, or expanded beyond anything I could have dreamt, by the comments below. But at the moment of posting, I've no idea whether this one will spark a discussion or plop into the void.  

Freedom and doing it for free go together. I've resisted the idea of going the Substack or newsletter route. If I were to become conscious of having a subscriber base, I'd start trying to please them. And blogging should be the opposite of work.  But if it's not compelled, blogging is compulsive: an itch I have to scratch. And for every post published, there's five that never get beyond notepad scrawls or fumes in the back of my mind.

I can't imagine ever stopping blogging.  Perhaps eventually there'll just be a few of us still standing. But I'm heartened that some of the younger generation have caught the bug - including my own son Kieran Press-Reynolds, who operates his own outlet and contributes to the collective music blog No Bells

https://nobells.blog/babyxsosas-houseparty/

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The Guardian asked me to write about blogging. 

One thing I observe is that although the freedom and fun offered by the format endures, the inter-blog communication of the heyday has faded away.  At least, in this particular corner of the 'sphere. 

Blogging has become more of a solitary activity. A blogpost will be sparked by something "out there," or by something within, but rarely in response to another blog. 

This reminded me that the last time I did a bit of meta-blogging -  the 20th anniversary rumination of a year ago -  I'd intended to do a follow up: a tribute to the blogs of yesteryear, nodes in a network that once crackled like the synapses of an ever-growing mega-brain. Here, belatedly, is a sketch towards such a memorial. 

In the beginning... what sparked my interest was a bunch of blogs and blog-like entities whose existence I noticed around 2000 or so. There was Tom Ewing's outlets New York London Paris Munich and Freaky Trigger, Tim Finney's Skykicking,  Jess Harvell's blogs (Let's Build A Car, Technicolor, Rebellious Jukebox, others still?). Then there was Alastair Fitchett's webzine Tangents, featuring contributors like Kevin Pearce (under the name John Carney, for reasons unknown). And Robin Carmody's website Elidor (later on he blogged at House At World's End and Sea Songs and also here). 

All sorts of oddball characters sprouted up around then, offering skewed perspectives and obsessive accumulations of knowledge.  There was Josh Kortbein (who still maintains Joshblog). Scott of Somedisco.  David Howie aka I Have Zero Money. Others still. 

So the scene was bubbling before I jumped into the fray in October 2002. Still, it's fair to say that the launch of Blissblog had an accelerant effect. I must have been one of the first pros to start a music blog, although I'd had a website since 1996. 

Another accelerant was the excitement about grime - at that point such an emergent sound it wasn't even known as grime yet.  Wot-U-Call-It represented probably around 70% of the spur for me to start the blog - at the time I was largely taken out of journalistic commission by Rip It Up and Start Again and I desperately wanted to shout about this latest insurgency from the nuum zone. But I also just fancied having an opinions outlet - fancied joining in the arguments. Skiving off work while staying sat in front of the screen, in those first three years of blogging I generated probably a book's worth of text even while writing a not-short book on postpunk. 

Everyone knows about K-punk and Woebot (at the start known as That Was A Naughty Bit of Crap) (and which went away, then came back, then went away, came back and then went away yet again - but currently still exists). (And who remembers woebot.tv?)

There was also Luke Davis's heronbone (urgent dispatches from the frontlines of grime, but also poetry and psychogeography), Silverdollarcircle (similarly pirate radio focused),  Martin Clark's Blackdown, John Eden at Uncarved, Paul Meme's Grievous Angel....

(A precursor to this kind of nuum-oriented bloggige was turn-of-millennium webzine Hyperdub, launched by Kode9 well before the label of the same name, and a place where Mark Fisher did some of his earliest public writing about music (under the name Mark De' Rosario) alongside UKdance forum stalwart Bat, Kevin Martin,  Kodwo Eshun, and indeed myself. The Hyperdub archives used to be maintained by bloggish entity Riddim.ca, but have now sadly disappeared. A couple of the proto-K-punk's pieces can be found here, though.)

Adjacent to this cluster but pursuing his own obsessions (Cabaret Voltaire, bleep, etc) and probably more aligned with dubstep than grime, there was Nick Edwards's once-prolific, long-shuttered Gutterbreaks.   Then there was History Is Made At Night, an archaeology of rave and club lore - and the interface between dance culture and politics -  maintained by Neil Transpontine to this day. And the bashmentological analyses of scholar Wayne Marshall at Wayne & Wax.

Getting deeper into the 2000s, the sporadic but extensive posts of Leaving Earth, by the enigmatic Taninian, claimed treasure in underappreciated genres like wobble and skwee, reassessed The Rave LP, and lost me a little with the paeans to postdubstep-as-revolution.  Other electronic-music slanted blogs came and went - Acid Nouveaux, Mentasms, Sonic Truth, Mutant Technology, Drumtrip, Musings of a Socialist Japanologist, Tufluv, World of Stelfox, MNML SSGS - saying interesting things for a year or two before going silent. Probably the most impressive of the second wave of electronic music oriented blogz was Adam Harper's Rouge's Foam.

Rewind a bit: by the mid-2000s, the scene was cleaving between the grimy nuum end of things and the poptimistic cru, each represented by a forum, although neither was as monolithically committed in stance or subject matter as the other might like to make out.  Still, you could have good arguments about these kinds of issues with the likes of Zoilus (aka Carl Wilson), Utopian TurtleTop. Koganbot, Nick Southall's Auspicious Fish, Jane Dark's Sugarhigh. Less-good arguments with others.  

Anti-rockist (OG anti-rockist 4 life) but in an orbit of his own: Momus, elegant and incisive public essayist rather than blogger per se, but hosting a lot of action in the comments. The blog was once called Click Opera, I believe.

When grime faded as a conversation-starter and centripetal agent,  hauntology - for a while, for some -  provided a new focus....   

Now there was a bunch of blogs whose preexisting obsessions with retro design, vintage TV, bygone modernist aesthetics, and sundry musty esoterica placed them in proximity to the H-zone, among them Toys and Techniques, Feuilleton, Rockets and Rayguns, Dispokino, I Hate This Film, and The Sound of Eye.  Then there was collective blog Found Objects.

There was another and quite separate gaggle that included Kid Shirt  (aka Kek-W), An Idiot's Guide To Dreaming  (aka Loki aka Saxon Roach) and Farmer-Glitch  (aka Stephen Ives) who could be considered fellow-travelers, albeit approaching the H-zone from a different angle: that esoterrorist thread running from Coil-y industrial to the eldritch fringes of rave and UK techno (The Black Dog and that sort of thing).  Funnily enough, their very proximity made them sniffy about the H-word -  both as concept and in terms of the output getting bigged up. Some of this blog cluster generated its own wyrdtronic output, via alter-egos like IX-Tab, Hacker Farm, Kemper Norton.... 

Other bloggers stepped into the sonic fray: Gutterbreaks became Ekoplekz and half of eMMplekz, Woebot became a musical as well as textual entity, and K-punk created a bunch of audio essays/ sound artworks. 

While Mark Fisher was a pillar of our end of the scene, K-punk also played a central role in a separate circuit of renegade-academic and philosophy-politics blogs. Not a neighbourhood I frequented much, but Alex Williams at Splintering Bone Ashes had some things to say while Steven Shaviro still does The Pinocchio Theory. 

Quite a lot of people on this circuit became authors (and /or fulfilled other functions) within the Zer0 / Repeater empire: Xenogothic's Matt Colquhoun,  Robin James of  It's Her Factory, Dominic Fox of Poetix. 

Others came to  the imprints via different paths: Carl Neville aka the Impostume, Phil Knight with his mystifyingly closed-and-erased The Phil Zone and later ceased-but-not-deleted The Interregnum Navigation Service.  Owen Hatherley of Sit Down Man, You're a Bloody Tragedy and The Measures Taken, Alex Niven of The Fantastic Hope, Rhian E. Jones with Velvet Coalmine. There was a cluster of collective blogs oriented around decades - the '70s, '80s, '90s - that involved many of these people and lively places they were for a while.

And then there were those who pursued their own completely personal path into the scene (and out again), helped in some cases by geographical distance - operating in a completely different hemisphere. Anwen Crawford (another who mystifyingly deleted their back pages - in this case fangirl),  Sam Macklin a.k.a connect_icut with Bubblegum Cage III, Geeta Dayal with The Original Soundtrack (now she has a Patreon), Jon Dale with Worlds of Possibility and Attic Plan and  Astronauts Notepad, Sam Davies's Zone Styx Travelcard, Aaron Grossman's Airport Through the Trees, Graham Sanford's Our God Is Speed,  Tim 'Space' Debris's Cardrossmaniac2,  W. David Marx's Néojaponisme, Oliver Craner, Beyond the Implode, Baal at Erase the World, Tom May's Where Shingle Meets Raincoat, Seb's And You May Find Yourself... , Dan Barrow's porridge-free zones The End Times and A Scarlet Tracery....   

Some of these bloggers were already writing in "proper" publications; some started after blogging....

It was interesting to see who out of the already-renowned professionals jumped into the fray and those who stayed aloof. For a virtuoso ranter like Neil Kulkarni, blogging was a natural playpen.  Ian Penman seemed unleashed by the format, frothing torrentially at The Pill Box - until he stopped, abruptly, for "reasons unknown". Chuck Eddy is a copious blogger at Eliminated For Reasons of Space.  David Stubbs has blogged sporadically over the years;  Richard Williams does it more regularly at The Blue Moment. Both these Melody Maker legends, though, are more like online essayists; they don't display that driveling incontinence that is the hallmark of the born-to-blog. 

But there were other pros who seemed to disdain the thought of writing for free.  One or two seemed faintly t

There were various alternatives to blogs that went through vogues - livejournals and tumblrs  - but I never really cathected with  either of these mode-zones, couldn't see what they brought that was a bonus.

And today...  As I say in the column, there's still loads of blogs -  loads of specifically music blogs or mostly-music blogs. Some started relatively recently, like the sporadic but very interesting Aloysius,  the work of Dissensus bod Mvuent, and Infinite Speeds, a Substack by Vincent Jenewein exploring interfaces between philosophical concepts and the materialities of electronic sound + rhythm. Others, I'm unclear when they started but they have entered my ken only recently, like Lost Tempo (another Substack), the work of regular commenter Matt M.  And I see that ex-editor of The Wire Derek Walmsley, who used to have a blog back in the 2000s, recently started a new one: Slow Motion.

There are generation-or-two-below-me oriented entities somewhere between a one-person magazine and a collective blog. Like Joshua Minsoo Kim's Toneglow (another Substack). Like No Bells. To which my own flesh-and-blood contributes, while also operating his own KPRblog (currently surveying 2023 in music). 

So I wind to a close, with so many names unmentioned. 

Forgive me - it's almost certainly by accident. 

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Xenogothic with some thoughts on blogging.  

Among many other things, Matt talks about blogs operated by musicians, by the likes of Deerhunter and Phil Elverum, as a whole other field of bloggy action. I suppose Momus's Click Opera,  mentioned in the previous Blissblog post about blogs then and now, counts in this category. In an earlier longer version of the Guardian column, I did link to a currently active music-maker blog that I enjoy: Wreckless Eric's Ericland. 

I have been going back and adding more blogs and bloggers that I remembered from the olden days to that post. But there are still swathes of blogging that I didn't cover - even within the music blogging arena.

For instance, I don't talk about MP3 blogs. But then they were never something I got into. The free MP3s seemed as unenticing as the flexi singles attached to fanzines back in the day. And the textual element rarely seemed as interesting as the output of the blogs I considered my true neighbours.

There was a whole other phase of hyperactive blogging I clean forgot about - all the blogs associated with hypnagogic pop and that late 2000s / early 2010s emergence of largely-online DIY micro-genres like witch house and vaporwave.  Blogs such as 20 Jazz Funk Greats and Visitation Rites and Gorilla vs. Bear and Rose Quartz that would be shepherded for a while under the Pitchfork-hosted mantle of Altered Zones.  I tried to evoke its neophiliac fever in this piece:

On Altered Zones and its constellation of blogs, the flow is relentless: What matters is always the next new name, the latest micro-genre, another MP3 or MediaFire. Artist careers likewise are a continuous drip-drip-drip of releases, a dozen or more per year—there's no reason to edit or hold back, every reason to keep one's name out there. Stimuli streams in, largely via the Web; creativity streams out, largely via the Web. Today's musician is a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence.... This scene is about being engulfed and enthused, carried along by the currents of the new. Drifting not sifting. 

Another huge wave of blog energy - and one that had a huge effect on me, albeit not necessarily for the good - was the whole-album sharing blogs. Some of these didn't just offer an album cover image and a link to Rapidshare / Megaupload  / Mediafire, but had proper textual content: well-written and informative, if rarely polemical or argument-starting. Serious curatorial activity, as undertaken by the likes of Mutant Sounds, Continuo's, Twice Zonked!, A Closet of Curiosities... I wrote about that scene in this piece for The Wire on "sharity" blogs. Even interviewed a couple of figures behind blogs.  That scene is much declined from its height but there's sharity soljas out there still, digging strange shit up... 

Yet another still active sub-subculture of music blogging: the "imaginary albums" blogs. This overlaps with the sharity in so far as they sometimes - not always - share their recreation of the rumored but never released album. Some of these blogs generate an enormous amount of counterfactual text, as discussed in this essay of mine on alternative history and music: 

Fans for years have been creating unfinished or unreleased albums like Beach Boys's  Smile, Hendrix's First Rays of the New Rising Sun, The Beatles's  Get Back, the Who's Lifehouse - using bootlegs, demos, out-takes... Today there is a whole realm of blogs dedicated to this practice - Albums That Never Were, A Crazy Gift of Time, Albums That Should Exist, Albums I Wish Existed… Usually they create fake artwork for the counterfactual albums. 

Some of these blogs, such as Strawberry Peppers, don't stop at creating imaginary albums and record covers - they write incredibly detailed and extensive alternative histories of worlds where the Beatles didn't split up, or where David Bowie joined the Rolling Stones, or where the Soft Machine's Kevin Ayers, Robert Wyatt and Daevid Allen don't leave the band, or alternate timelines where Syd Barrett stayed in Pink Floyd.  A kind of counter-discographical mania erupts.  

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In addition to Xenogothic, there's been some other post-Guardian-piece posts -  a few from blogs I know well (like Feuilleton), most from blogs I'd never come across before:  Torpedo The Ark, Bhagpuss, The Sphinx. Somewhere amidst all that chatter I gleaned that there's been  unconnected blog talk going on too, at The Lazarus Corporation, at Velcro City Tourist Board, and in a piece about the internet getting weird again by Anil Dash for Rolling Stone.

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Culled from K-punk's blogroll in 2003, some other blogs I forgot were part of the whole thing: 

i feel love 

it's all in my mind 

erase the world 

emerald daze 

original soundtrack 

crumbling loaf 

taylor parkes' alternatives to suicide 

cozen 

mike smunk 

quarks and charms 

a time for fear 

zabriskie point 

no way jose 

troubled diva 

artful candor

clap clap blog 

shards, fragments and totems 

cnwb 

yes no interlude

uncarved 

johnson's rambler 

humour me 

auspicious fish

Danny Thompson worked with a host of people, including a stint in Pentangle, but for many of us he is inseparable from the name John Martyn  - and revered as the co-author of "Go Down Easy", "I'd Rather Be The Devil", "Solid Air", "Couldn't Love You More", "Glistening Glyndebourne"....

Here by way of indirect tribute are three pieces about Martyn in which Thompson flits into view here and there. Most prominently in the first one, a Blissblog recollection about about the only time I ever saw Martyn live - in New York, just months before he died, with Thompson by his side, the only other person on the small stage with him - which doubled as an obituary. The fond bond between the two was very evident that night.

There is also a short piece about "I'd Rather Be The Devil" and a longer piece about Solid Air as a Desert Island Disc written for the 2007 book Marooned (Phil Freeman's unofficial sequel to Stranded). 

John Martyn RIP

Blissblog, January 31st 2009

RIPs appear here quite regularly. Rock is long in the tooth; musicians you admire, whose music you've grown up with, seem to be popping their clogs with mounting frequency. Usually I feel sad for a bit, in a fairly removed sort of way... then life's petty urgencies resume. But this week's big one, I must admit, has hit me quite hard. It's cast a shadow over the last few days. It feels a lot more personal somehow.

It struck me that I might possibly have listened to John Martyn more than any but a handful of other musicians. Actually I can't think of who else I'd have listened to more, over such a sustained period. The Smiths? Love? But if you broke it down, it would be Solid Air and One World that accounted for 95 percent of that lifetime of Martyn listening. Those two albums have been such a large and constant presence. They keep coming back, or rather, they don't go away, whereas there's other central artists, deep deep favourites, where there are long periods of mutual leave-taking (Can, for instance--I seem to be taking a breather from them, for some reason just don't feel the urge, but I know the time will come again.) (Another example: postpunk, which dipped away for much of the Eighties and almost all of the Nineties). But John Martyn… it barely took me a minute to settle on Solid Air as my desert island disc when asked to contribute to Marooned. It was my first choice, and then to do it proper I thought up some other candidates (closest contender being Rock Bottom). But it was always going to be Solid Air, partly because the "desert island" scenario suggested it somehow, but also because of its inexhaustibility as a record.

Strangely, though, when I think of John Martyn's music, I don't think of personal memories particularly. Some records evoke times of your life: Head Over Heels and Sunburst and Snowblind, the debut Smiths album, those records remind me with incredible vividness of a student bedsit in north Oxford, the yearnings and miseries of that time; "Thieves Like Us" carries with it the flush of romance remembered; there's plenty more examples. But with most music, the memories carried are memories of the music itself, if that makes sense. When you're a music fiend, that function of commemoration or life-soundtracking or "our song" that perhaps remains prominent for the more casual listener, it really fades away. You might say that music's life eclipses your own, or it becomes one with it, or it fills in the holes. Music doesn't serve as a mirror for narcissistic identification so much as a means of leaving one's self behind. A favourite record, then, might be more like gazing at a landscape, the kind of place you'd revisit at different stages of your life. A perennial source of wonder. (This is why I'm not a huge fan of memoiristic criticism: oh, it can be done well, but even at its best it doesn't really tell you anything about the music; that one individual's memories adhere to a piece of music in a particular fashion doesn't have any relation to what I or anybody else might get out of the record or glom onto it, experientially. Although it's also true that the narcissistic projection towards a song/album/group that music arouses so potently can make it feel like those life-experiences somehow inhere to the music).

But back to John Martyn--another strange thing is that I'd never gone to see him perform live. This despite being a fan since 1985 (when I'd taped Solid Air off David Stubbs--cheers David!--having been intrigued by this Barney Hoskyns interview with Martyn that compared Solid Air to Astral Weeks--cheers Barney!). The opportunity just never presented itself , and I'd never felt tempted to seek it out. I guess the sense you got was that after the 1970s heyday Martyn onstage was likely to be... variable. He'd be playing with bands composed of younger musicians, a modern soft-rock/AOR-ish sound like on those post-Grace and Danger Eighties albums, you heard tell of the keyboard sound being thin and digital-synth nasty. It seemed to promise disappointment. Anyway, I've always been more of a records man; I just don't have that compulsion to witness everybody whose music I love perform live at least once.

But late last year I heard that John Martyn was playing in New York. (I have to thank Rob Tannenbaum for the tip off, I'd have completely missed it otherwise--cheers Rob!). October the 9th, at Joe's Pub--less than ten minutes away. And not only playing in New York, virtually round the corner, but playing with Danny Thompson. So I had to go, even though this was the night before we flew off to London for the annual see-the-folks-and-friends vacation, there was packing to be done that night, an early rise the next day.

I got there and found quite a long line to get in, which surprised me, as I'd always had the impression Martyn wasn't really known in this country. And nor was it the case that the line was entirely composed of British expats. I ran into a friend-of-a-friend, an experimental musician (of the academic kind) who I'd not have particularly expected to be a John Martyn fan. We positioned ourselves near the bar with good sight-lines of the stage.

Joe's Pub is not a pub at all, but a sort of nightclub/performance space attached to The Public Theater on Lafayette. It's the sort of place where you'd expect, oh, Norah Jones to play; it's got a bit of an acid jazz/downtempo/Giant Steps type vibe to it. The last thing I saw there was ages ago: Herbert and Dani Siciliano doing the full chanteusy-meets-clickhouse thing. Anyway, there was this small, scarlet curtain at the back of the stage, which just seemed like part of Joe's plush cabaret-ish décor. All of a sudden there's a ruffling with the curtain, the suggestion of struggle and kerfuffle behind it, almost a Tommy Cooper/Morecambe & Wise-esque effect. And then, with evident difficulty Big John and his wheelchair were maneuvered through the red fabric and onto the tiny stage. I might be misremembering it but I think they actually had to wheel him on backwards. At any rate, it wasn't a dignified entrance.

First impression was of a ruin of a man. Magnificent, maybe, but definitely a ruin. In fact what I couldn't help thinking of was the sketch in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life ... the monstrously obese diner who eats so much he explodes. Martyn's face had this sagging quality, it seemed to droop and merge into the sprawl of his torso.

They opened, I think, with "Big Muff". It was great, totally different from the One World recording naturally (no drummer, just John and Danny), loose and swinging. I can't remember the exact sequence of songs, but at some point early in the set, they did "Sweet Little Mystery", Martyn's voice this immense blubbery ache of sound, a beached whale of bluesiness, bedraggled and beseeching. But apart from "Mystery" from Grace and Danger and "Muff" from One World, everything else was from Solid Air: "Jelly Roll Blues", "May You Never" (which got a cheer), the shatteringly tender imploring of "Don't Want To Know", "Solid Air" itself, maybe another one or two I'm forgetting. It was almost a Don't Look Back, except the order was scrambled and they didn't do "Go Down Easy", to my chagrin. The friend-of-a-friend pointed out how different the guitar tunings on each song were from the recorded versions.

Indeed between the songs there was some tuning-tweaking going on. There was also banter. But Martyn's speaking voice was so slurred, plus he was sat slightly far back from the mic (fine for singing but not for stage patter) that it was all completely indecipherable. He told jokes but through his bleary, sodden mumble they became abstract jokes. You could pick up the cadence and the timing of joke-as-pure-form, almost to the point of getting the comedic pay-off when the punchline came. But the actual content was lost. I picked up one or two lines: one involved a man going into a bar, another one was about penguins. I think he might also have cracked his post-amputation standard about having promised the promoter not to get legless, boom boom.

But I did manage to catch it clear when he apologized for the set being below par--"that's just the way it goes sometimes". At which Danny Thompson leaned over and gave him a kiss on the top of his balding head, affectionate yet reverent. I also just about made out what Martyn said before they launched into what turned out to be the final song: something like "this is by a gentleman called Skip James, who doesn't deserve to have his song murdered." It was "I'd Rather Be the Devil" of course and it made me wonder what other examples there are of a great artist--a writer and performer of brilliant original material--whose absolute greatest recording and signature song in live performance is a cover of someone else's song. (From the rock era obviously; there's loads of examples from the era when singers did standards, didn't write their own songs, etc). Of course to call it a "cover" is to underplay the amount of reinvention imposed on the original (which must be why John changed the title from "Devil Got My Woman", a bit of justified arrogance there: took your song, made it my song, whatchu gauna dee aboot it, eh?). So "Devil", live at Joe's Pub: not as torrential and tectonic as Live At Leeds, not quite the exquisitely wrought aquamiasma of Solid Air. But I wasn't disappointed. Oh no. Stole my breath away it did.

And then they were off, John wheeled backwards through the red curtain with the same awkward strenuosity it had taken to get him onstage in the first place (apparently he'd reached 20 stone in his last year). Semi-apologising for the brevity of the set as they shuffled off, Danny Thompson explained that the gig was kind of impromptu: John was coming to New York to visit a hospital to get a new prosthesis fitted, and they thought "why not?".

So, my first and only John Martyn Live Experience. I walked home aglow, much earlier than I'd expected (just as well with the flight) but not dissatisfied, not in the least. I meant to blog it after we got back from London but the moment passed. Now the man has passed and the moment seems right.

^^^^^^^^

"I'd Rather Be The Devil" for The Wire's cover story on cover versions, November 2005

Oneohtrix Point Never

Village Voice, July 6, 2010

by Simon Reynolds

Daniel Lopatin, the young man behind the spacey and spacious mindscapes of Oneohtrix Point Never, operates out of a cramped bedroom in Bushwick. Most of it is taken up by vintage Eighties synthesizers, rhythm boxes, and assorted sound-processing gizmos, plus a gigantic computer monitor.  Every inch of surface area is covered with tsotchkes: a Tupac mug, little sculpted owls, John and Yoko kissing on the sleeve of "Just like Starting Over".  Besides the computer, a stack of tomes represent upcoming areas of research for the erudite, philosophy-minded Lopatin:  a guide to Alchemy & Mysticism, a lavish book on ECM Records, Ray Kurzweil on The Singularity.  Most intriguing, though, are the notes posted above his work-space:  maxims, self-devised or sampled from thinkers, that are midway between Eno's Oblique Strategies and  those embroidered homilies people once stuck on their kitchen walls.   

"Do More With Less (Ephemeralize)" is fairly self-explanatory. The more opaque "'Linear'  -- Kill Time vs. 'Sacred'" is clarified by Lopatin thusly: "People think killing time is bad, you should be productive --but when music is at its most sanctified, it's a total time kill."   There's something in Hebrew and Cyrillic that nods to Lopatin's Russian Jewish background.  Most revealing of these "little critical reminders" is "N.W.B.", which stands for "Noise Without Borders".  "Everything is noise," elaborates Lopatin, whose yellowish hair and reddish beard mesh pleasingly with his off-purple flannel shirt and kindly, dreamy green eyes. "Noise can be sculpted down to become pop; pop can be sculpted down into noise. But it's also to do with the idea of not having genre affiliations".

Oneohtrix Point Never emerged out of the noise underground, but for a long while Lopatin felt like an outcast among the outcasts. The ideas he was developing--bringing in euphonious influences from Seventies cosmic trance music and Eighties New Age, creating atmospheres of serenity tinged with desolation--went against the grain. "My shit wasn't popping off at all", he laughs. This was 2003-2005, when Wolf Eyes defined the scene with their rock 'n 'roll attitude.  Lopatin and a handful of kindred spirits such as Emeralds felt a growing "boredom with noise, a sense we'd done it: we get this emotion." Around 2006, the scene began to shift slowly in their direction. "We were all talking about Klaus Schulze," he recalls of the gig where he first bonded with Emeralds. He notes also the huge clouds of pot smoke pouring from vans outside the venue, Cambridge, MA's Twisted Village.  "Drugs!" is his answer when asked about how the noise scene reached its current ethereal 'n' tranquil state-of-art. "Noise, at the end of the day, is headspace music. Drugs are a big part of getting into that experience, from a playing side, and from a fan/listener perspective too."

A flurry of Oneohtrix releases plus collaborative side projects such as Infinity Window made Lopatin a name to watch. But it was last year's Rifts--a double CD for Carlos Giffoni's No Fun label pulling together a trilogy of hard-to-find earlier releases--that propelled him to underground star status. U.K. magazine The Wire anointed Rifts the #2 album of 2009. The CD also sold out its two thousand pressing, making it a blockbuster success in a scene where the majority of releases come out in small runs anywhere from 300 to 30 copies. Rifts was further disseminated widely on the web, talked about and listened to with an intensity that sales figures don't reflect. 

Another profile-raising "hit" for Lopatin was Sunsetcorp's "Nobody Here"-- a mash-up of Chris DeBurgh's putrid "The Lady in Red" and a vintage computer graphic called "Rainbow Road," that has so far received 30,000 YouTube hits.  Lopatins calls his audio-video collages "echo jams": they typically combine Eighties sources (a vocal loop from Mirage-era Fleetwood Mac, say, with a sequence from a Japanese or Soviet hi-fi commercial) and slow them down narcotically (an idea inspired by DJ Screw). Lopatin collated his best echo jams on the recent Memory Vague DVD.  His Eighties obsession also comes through with the MIDI-funk side project Games, a collaboration with Joel Ford from Brooklyn band Tiger City. (Ford also lives in a room at the other end of the Bushwick apartment).  Lopatin plays me a new Games track that sounds like it could be a Michael McDonald song off the Running Scared O/S/T and says "We want people to be playing this in cars."

In what is simultaneously a further step forward and another step sideways, the new Oneohtrix album Returnal is released this month on the highly respected experimental electronic label Mego.  Although Lopatin's preoccupations with memory are similar to the label's most renowned artist Fennesz, sonically Returnal has little in common with Mego's glitchy past.  Yet Returnal is a departure for Lopatin, too.  Several tracks adhere to the classic OPN template established by tunes like "Russian Mind' and "Physical Memory": rippling arpeggiations, sweet melody offset by sour dissonance, grid-like structures struggling with cloudy amorphousness. But the most exciting tunes are forays into completely other zones. 

Opening with the sculpted distortion-blast of "Nil Admirari" is a fuck you to those who have Lopatin pegged as "that Tangerine Dream guy". It's also a concept piece, a painting of a modern household, where the outside world's violence pours in through the cable lines, the domestic haven contaminated by toxic data: "The mom's sucked into CNN, freaking out about Code Orange terrorist shit, while the kid is in the other room playing Halo 3, inside that weird Mars environment killing some James Cameron-type predator."" At the opposite extreme, the title track is an exquisitely mournful ballad redolent of the early solo work of Japan's David Sylvian. Lopatin's vocals have featured occasionally before as Enya-esque texture-billow but never so songfully as on "Returnal" (qualities that emerge even more strongly on the forthcoming remix/cover voiced by Anthony Hegarty).

Finally, most astonishingly, is "‡Preyouandi∆", the closing track: a shatteringly alien terrain made largely out of glassy percussion sounds, densely clustered cascades fed through echo and delay. On first listen, I pictured an ice shelf disintegrating,  a beautiful, slow-motion catastrophe.  This "blues for global warming" interpretation turns out to be completely off-base, but "‡Preyouandi∆" is the sort of music that gets your mind's eye reeling with fantastical imagery.

Both "Returnal" and "‡Preyouandi∆" contain textural tints that explicitly echo the hyper-visual sounds and visionary concepts of Jon Hassell, who back in the 1980s explored what he called "4th World Music":  a polyglot sound mixing Western hi-tech and ethnic ritual musics.  "I wanted to make a world music record," says Lopatin. "But make it hyper-real, refracted through not really being in touch with the world.   Everything I know about the world is seen through Nova specials, Jacques Cousteau and National Geographic."   He explains that the stuff that indirectly influenced Returnal were things like the unnaturally vivid and stylized tableaus you might see in that kind of documentary or magazine article--a 100 Sufis praying in a field, say.  "So I'm painting these pictures, not of the actual world, but of us watching that world." 

Oneohtrix Point Never, Elizabeth Fraser

"Tales from the Trash Stratum"

[from Pitchfork end of year tracks blurbs 2021)

The original "Trash Stratum" on 2020's Magic Oneohtrix Point Never entwined distortion and euphony in fairly familiar Dan Lopatin fashion. This year's drastic reinvention lovingly collages '80s production motifs: pizzicato string-flutters as fragrant as Enya, blobs of reverb-smudged piano that evoke Harold Budd, high-toned pings of bass that could be The Blue Nile or Seventeen Seconds Cure. It's like Lopatin is a bowerbird building a glittering nest to attract a mate - and succeeds in reeling in the onetime Cocteau Twin.  Fraser's contributions -  ASMR-triggering wisps of sibilant breath, chirruping syllables from a disintegrated lullaby - are closer to a diva's warm-up exercises than an actual aria, and sometimes you long for her to take full-throated flight into song.  But it's lovely to hear the Goth goddess brought into the glitchy 21st Century. 

Queries + replies from / for Amanda Petrusich and her New Yorker profile of Lopatin

1.    Dan's work is really conceptual, but I'm also curious how it lands on you as MUSIC -- how you see it fitting in amongst his genre peers, and also his predecessors? My sense is that he's not the first artist to do some of these things, but there's something about his work that feels really special.

Dan is one of the pioneers and exemplars of what I call conceptronica. Sometimes with that not-quite-a-genre (it's more like a mode of operation) the framing can be a bit overbearing. Occasionally he's veered too far that way. But unlike many of those who operate like that (i.e. with a highly articulated rationale pitched to the audience and to critics) , at its best his music has an element of sheer beauty and emotional pull to it that transcends, or just bypasses, the verbalization. I'm thinking of pieces like "Physical Memory", which just aches with feeling.  

I'm not even sure I can pinpoint what the emotions are - often it's like strange new affects of the future.

But then something like his most famous eccojam, "Nobody Here" - the emotion here is human and relatable. He's said it's about his own loneliness in New York, having recently moved there. Which is not the emotion in the original song,  a romantic ballad. But somehow he was able to take that little vocal sliver and repurpose it, in combination with that early computer graphics animation in the video. I don't think there's any element in "Nobody Here" that sonically or visually was generated by him, it's all found material, but out of it he created something new and emotionally resonant. 

When he first came along he was identified with this scene that some called hypnagogic pop and then later chillwave was the term used for the more song-oriented stuff out of that area. So he would be bracketed with artists like James Ferraro and Emeralds - a lot of the emphasis was recycling Eighties mainstream pop or rehabilitating New Age music. When I tried to pinpoint what defined this wave of artists I came up with this idea that it was Pop Art meets psychedelia. So, reusing detritus from mass culture, but shot through with this hallucinatory quality.

In some ways, although he uses older musical material or references it, Dan's ancestors aren't so much in music but in the visual arts - the Appropriation Artists in particular, which is essentially Pop Art part 2..

2.    I'm super interested in an idea you write about a lot in "Retromania," that the Internet has left everything essentially untethered to space and time, and therefore we're moving laterally, and not backwards, when we recycle or reappropriate or repatriate or recontextualize ideas from the past. I'm curious what you think might be dangerous -- if anything! -- about this new way of consuming culture? 

I don't know if it's dangerous - it's disorienting for someone like me who grew up with ideas of progress and sort of construable linear evolution for music and culture, in which some things get definitively superseded and you move on to the next stage, ideally at exhilarating speed. That was my outlook and my expectation growing up, but it might already have been a somewhat old-fashioned sort of modernism even then - those ideas lingered far longer in popular music than they did in art and architecture.

Dan has some great quotes that I used in Retromania (from the original interview I did with him for Village Voice) to do with how we're living in  a time of reprocessing culture, this enormous junk heap of material left over from the 20th Century, it's an aftermath phase of salvage and tinkering and recycling.

That said, there are clearly plenty of new technological things happening that are creating new cultural forms or the potential for them. At the time of writing Retromania I didn't realise how much Auto-Tune would become a creative tool and lead to all this completely new-sounding music, particularly in hip hop but also on the experimental fringe. The voice became the field of action in terms of experimentation. (Dan's done quite a bit of stuff in that vein, whether it's things like "Sleep Dealer" or the vocal entity created for Garden of Delete)

And then there's AI.

So maybe that archival moment that was happening in music in the 2000s (and also in art  - reenactments, what Claire Bishop recently wrote about in terms of research based art), maybe that has passed. It was a temporary phase created by the way that the Internet, YouTube etc seemed to erupt into existence and suddenly we were all sitting amidst this enormous cultural junkheap, It was irresistible to explore and excavate. Overpowering in terms of its claims on our attention and how creative people's imaginations were affected. Indeed, there was a kind of helplessness to it, I think.

That is still going on, there's a lot of archival based work, revivalism, pastiche - but there are things that are happening, enabled with newer technology, that result in the genuinely unforeheard.

3.    This is kind of a weird one, but does it feel, to you, like Dan has invented something new, some new idiom or sound?

I think he has, in moments, particular tracks. There's a lot of referencing and recycling -  the whole hypergrunge idea was very clever.

But something like "‡PREYOUANDI∆" - I can hear faint echoes of earlier artists (like a bit of Jon Hassell maybe) but it's really like nothing I've heard.

Even "Physical Memory", while you might think vaguely of Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze, it doesn't really sound much like those groups. It's probably more inspired by an idea of the analogue synth epic, these very long electronic mindscapes that could sometimes take up the whole of one side of an LP. 

A lot of what has fascinated Dan is older futurisms - the pathos of new technology that gets obsolesced but also might contain dormant possibilities that were passed over too quickly at the time in the onrush of development. You can hear all these echoes or reactivations of 1980s early digital textures and effects. 

So the whole idea of the future and the new is sort of simultaneously jettisoned, or questioned, and yet still has this pull, still continues to have this hold on the imagination . 

Pete Shelley tribute

Pitchfork, December 8 2028

by Simon Reynolds

The first and only time I saw Buzzcocks play live was in 2012, at the Incubate festival in Holland. They seemed an incongruous choice for a festival otherwise dedicated to experimentalism and dark cutting-edge fare. Although I love the band's late-1970s output, I never would have actively sought out their live incarnation as a pop-punk legacy act; it was exactly the sort of nostalgia-appealing operation that would usually earn my stern disapproval. It was mild curiosity, really, that drew me into the big hall—only to be stunned by the power and glory of the noise wrought by the worse-for-wear-looking survivors on the stage.

Classic after classic smashed into the crowd's collective face like surf. I found myself doing something embarrassingly close to a pogo. It was wonderful, every bit of it—even a strange new mid-section to "Harmony In My Head" that involved Steve Diggle delivering a kind of quasi-insurrectionary rap. This appeared to bemuse Pete Shelley as much as the audience and prompted him to gasp into the mic, "What the fuck was that?". I had turned up expecting something rote and stale; instead I was jolted alive.

Whenever I listen to Buzzcocks' music, what always strikes me is how modern it still sounds. But that is actually how it works with true innovation. No matter how much time passes—decades during which a breakthrough is assimilated and worn out by repetition, whether by others or by the artist repeating themselves—something of that initial shock of the new rings out and cuts through. And if you think about it, nearly everything handed down to us as "classic" was, in its own time, a break with tradition.

Buzzcocks severed ties with the blues-rooted rock of the early '70s. No Chuck Berry chug for them: instead, Shelley cited Can's Michael Karoli as his favorite guitarist and said that his idea of a great solo was John Lennon's abstract noise eruptions on Yoko Ono's "Why." The name Buzzcocks could almost be onomatopoeia for the noise made by Shelley and rhythm guitarist Diggle: a serrated surge, at once coarse and sleek, with a hint of kinky mischief. Shelley and the band's original singer Howard Devoto found that name from the chance conjunction of words in a magazine headline about the buzz-worthy TV show "Rock Follies," rock-biz satire featuring a tough-girl singer who cheekily addresses everyone as "cock."

Although they were in the original core cluster of groups that invented UK punk, Buzzcocks would always be an anomaly within that movement—misfits among the misfits. There had never been words, a voice, a personality, like this in rock before. Shelley sang love songs when every other major punk vocalist rejected them as trivial next to political themes, or—if they did deal with desire and heartbreak—laced the words with spite and hostility. The aggression in Buzzcocks was all in the sound; the animating spirit was sensitive, open-hearted, vulnerable. There's a lovely clip of Shelley circulating on the internet, interviewed by a TV documentary crew in 1977 when punk gigs in Britain were getting banned by local councils and picketed by hordes of outraged citizenry. Twinkling and grinning adorably, the singer is incredulous at the idea that he could be deemed "vile and obscene."

When punk evolved into post-punk, Buzzcocks didn't fit there either. Although Shelley was well-read and philosophically searching, and although the group's graphic presentation was arty and stark, their tunes and riffs went straight for your pleasure centers; the words were direct, colloquial, accessible to all. Nor did Buzzcocks have much truck with the militancy or didacticism of the post-punk era. The band's politics were personal, verging on private—to do with radical honesty, the struggle to be an individual, to disentangle oneself from games and masks and role-play.  

"I think people need a new way of living—inside themselves," Shelley offered gently, when asked about the idea of a political movement by TV interviewer Tony Wilson. People generally assume that Peter McNeish renamed himself Shelley after the Romantic poet, but in that same TV mini-doc about Buzzcocks, Wilson says that Shelley was the name that his parents would have given Peter if he'd been a girl.  

That invocation of the she that he might have been connects to a genuine innovation that Shelley introduced to rock and that reflected his fluid sexuality: the deliberate use of gender non-specific pronouns in love songs, something that would hugely influence later lyricists like Morrissey. "There isn't any implied gender in our songs now because we think it's boring singing about one thing when it could apply to both sexes," Shelley told the music paper Sounds in 1977. "Our songs our bisexual."

This elasticity of gender and sexual attraction was one aspect of Shelley's desire to invent a new kind of love song. In a 1978 interview with NME, he described himself as "a modern romantic…  trying to find out what modern romance is..  I'm trying to find something new… All the old kinds of romance are self-destructive because they don't take account of realities." On the Buzzcocks' debut album, Another Music From A Different Kitchen, "Fiction Romance" was about the gap between the entrancing dreams propagated by movies and magazines and the aching mess of real-life desire: "I love this love story/That never seems to happen in my life."

Shelley's solution was a radical mundanity, using pained humor to sketch scenarios of humiliation, inadequacy and shortfall, coupled with melody that promised resolution or transcendence. Again, this tension between romance and reality points ahead to groups like Orange Juice and the Smiths. In the Buzzcocks' case, the delicate balancing act between beauty and bathos was never more (im)perfect than on the group's second and third singles: the perpetual unfulfillment of "What Do I Get?" (the answer: sleepless nights in an empty bed), the amorous asymmetry of "I Don't Mind" ("this pathetic clown''ll keep hangin' around, that's if you don't mind").  

Although "Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've)" continues the theme and is a fan favorite as well as Buzzcocks's biggest UK chart hit, this triptych of anti-romantic love songs is really completed by "You Say You Don't Love Me." The aim here is clarity achieved through a kind of positive disillusionment, serene acceptance of things as they are: "I don't want to live in a dream, I want something real… Though I've got this special feeling, I'd be wrong to call it love/For the word entails a few things that I would be well rid of." In interviews, Shelley talked of his new approach: starting out as friends and hoping romance would grow, rather than falling head over heels and then trying to turn that idealized half-figment of a person into a friend and companion.

In the punk and new wave era, people who would never have previously been considered to be pop star material—on account of their looks or their vocal inadequacies—became household names. Part of the shock of Buzzcocks was the sheer ordinariness of Pete Shelley materializing in the glitzy TV context of "Top of the Pops." With his open-neck button-shirts and slightly shaggy hair, he looked like neither a punk nor a pop star, but more like an office clerk on his lunch break. And he sang like one too.

Shelley might never have become the band's lead singer and lyricist if Howard Devoto had stayed in Buzzcocks. Like Bernard Sumner following the death of Ian Curtis, Shelley took on the frontman role because he and the other members of the band figured it would be easier for an insider to take over singing duties rather than accommodate a new person who might have his own ideas.

But Shelley would have already been a historically significant figure in British punk even if he'd never sung a single tune or written a line of lyric. It was he and Devoto who arranged for the Sex Pistols to play their debut Manchester gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall on June 4 1976: a much-mythologized event said to have seeded the city's entire punk scene, sparking the careers of Joy Division, the Fall, and Morrissey.

It was also Shelley who persuaded his dad to take out a loan for 250 pounds, the decisive investment in the recording and pressing of Buzzcocks' Spiral Scratch EP, which the band and manager Richard Boon put out on their own New Hormones label. Released in February 1977, Spiral Scratch would be the beacon that mobilized the DIY hordes of punk and post-punk Britain and beyond, inspiring outfits like Desperate Bicycles, Scritti Politti, and Swell Maps to demystify and democratize the means of musical production. Do-it-yourself and release-it-yourself was seen as a righteous war waged against the apathy and ennui so acutely anatomized by Devoto in his lyrics for "Boredom," Spiral Scratch's killer track.

By the time of the EP's release, though, Devoto was bored of punk itself and left the band, taking with him an epic guitar riff generously gifted him by Shelley that would eventually serve as the hook of "Shot By Both Sides," the debut single of his new group Magazine. Shelley and Buzzcocks, meanwhile, decided that persevering on their own regional independent label was not viable and they signed with the major United Artists. In swift succession, over just two compressed and hectic years, there followed the immaculate debut album Another Music in A Different Kitchen and its uneven but endearing follow-up Love Bites (both released in 1978), then the underrated third album A Different Kind of Tension the following year. The last of these was overlooked in its own time, as the rapidly evolving UK scene left Buzzcocks behind.

There was also a string of eight perfect singles, starting with "Orgasm Addict" (a hilarious masturbation anthem that was, in fact, construable as "vile and obscene"). Together these made up Singles Going Steady, the greatest "greatest hits" LP this side of the Supremes, even if most of the inclusions had barely been hits. I vividly remember the disbelief, aged 16, when the gorgeous melodic swirl of  "Everybody's Happy Nowadays" and the glittering chimes of "Harmony In My Head" both failed to pierce the Top 20.

In punk-pop perfection terms, Buzzcocks were rivalled only by the Undertones and there was a feeling, albeit a minority viewpoint, that they were the era's Beatles, or should have been. Each single deserved to go straight in at Number One. But there was more to Shelley than power pop, as was revealed on the second side of Singles Going Steady, dedicated to the group's B-sides. These grew steadily less straightforward, culminating in "Why Can't I Touch It," nearly seven minutes of loping almost-funk and radically stereo-separated guitar-slashes, and "Something's Gone Wrong Again," which resembles suspended-animation Stooges, glistening with a coat of frost. The entire second side of A Different Kind of Tension was a Shelley mini-concept album, permeated with existential doubts and askew with a disassociated feeling influenced by LSD. And 1980's "Are Everything," one of the first-phase Buzzcocks' last singles, was even more psychedelic: Shelley took acid for every stage of the process, from recording to mixing, hoping for the rush of revelation to overcome him.

But it wasn't a case of Buzzcocks getting weirder as Shelley expanded his horizons: he'd always  had an experimental streak.  A few years before punk, Shelley recorded several albums worth of abstract electronic music and some of this 1974 material saw belated release in 1980 as the album Sky Yen. Another 1980 side project was The Tiller Boys, in which Shelley partnered with a Manchester teenager called Eric Random to record the clangorous Neu!-like stampede "Big Noise From the Jungle", which became a favorite on John Peel's BBC radio show. Both Sky Yen and "Big Noise" bore a relationship to a pair of "theoretical groups"  Shelley had conceptualized in the years before Buzzcocks: a heavy, hypnotic Krautrock-inspired project called Smash and an electronic entity known as Sky.  Unlike Smash, Sky actually "became real… but consisted solely of me,"  Shelley recalled to Trouser Press in 1983. Made at home with hand-built oscillators and cheap-and-nasty organs, Sky's squalls of abstract electronic noise couldn't have been further from the prim precision and candied catchiness of  "Ever Fallen In Love" . Any Buzzcocks fans who splashed out for Shelley's solo album were likely mystified. 

When Shelley and Devoto first met it was actually through the Electronic Music Society at the Bolton Institute of Technology in Greater Manchester, where they both studied: Devoto was looking for someone to soundtrack a film he was making. "Peter was an electronics engineer and he was into computers even at that stage," Devoto told me in 2003. With this deep and long-established interest in electronic music and technology, it's hardly surprising that Shelley was quick to notice the potential of the affordable synths and drum machines that became available in the last few years of the '70s.

After the band split up exhausted in 1980, Shelley started working on a solo album with Martin Rushent, the producer who had crucially shaped the Buzzcocks' raw-but-glossy sound on record. The result was the pioneering synth-pop single "Homosapien," yet another in the long line of Shelley should-have-been-a-smash songs (although this time the problem was a BBC ban, on account of its impishly suggestive homo-erotic lyric), and a 1981 album of the same title that blended synths and drum machines with electric guitars. Another parallel universe / alternate history scenario tantalizes here: a world where Shelley pipped the Human League to the post (they also worked with Rushent, to massive success) or became a kind of one-man Pet Shop Boys. You could even imagine a Buzzcocks that didn't split but embraced electronics, gradually becoming a New Order-like force.

Instead, after a couple more unsuccessful electro-pop solo records, Shelley joined with the other ex-Buzzcocks to reform the group along their classic lines. They released their fourth album Trade Test Transmissions in 1993, the first in a series of half-a-dozen albums that were solid but never quite ignited the old spark. In 1994, at fanboy Kurt Cobain's invitation, they toured with Nirvana, a preview of the next 20 or so years of sustained live work.

In the days following Cobain's suicide in April 1994, Shelley—an early adopter of the internet—could be found on a bulletin board of the now-defunct Compuserve commiserating with fans and sharing his very recent memories of hanging out with Kurt. He cycled between self-reproach for not being able to help the troubled singer and deliberately irreverent comments intended to deflate overly pious laments for the fallen rock savior—attitudes he clearly felt missed the point of punk and of Cobain himself.  

Shelley's own aim was to be exactly the same size as life, and somehow put that across onstage or on record, despite the inherent artifice of being a performer. That was his interpretation of what punk represented—the artist as unheroic hero, on the same level as the fans. Approachable, unassuming, self-deprecating, Shelley lived out that ideal until the end.

A Split Second / A Taste of Sugar / Erotic Dissidents

Sin, London 

Melody Maker, January 21 1989

by Simon Reynolds

Melody Maker, November 18, 1989

April 15th 1989 - a swipe in a Melody Maker singles page

BLACK SABBATH

The Complete 70's Replica CD Collection 1970-78
(Sanctuary Records)
Uncut, 2001

by Simon Reynolds


The mystery of the riff--so crucial to rock, so oddly neglected by critics. Or perhaps not so strangely, given that riffs are almost impossible to write about: just try explaining why one monster-riff slays you where another one fails to incite. Riffs just seem to bypass the aesthetic faculties altogether and go straight to the gut. A killer riff is by definition simplistic--which is why self-consciously sophisticated rock tends to dispense with them altogether in favor of wispy subtleties. Riff-based music seems lowly, literally "mindless" because it connects with the lower "reptilian" part of the cerebral cortex which governs flight-or-flight responses, the primitive emotions of appetite, aversion, and aggression.

Talking of reptiles, Black Sabbath--perhaps the greatest riff factory in all of rock---irresistibly invite metaphors involving dinosaurs. For a group that wielded such brontosauran bulk, though, Sabbath were surprisingly nimble on their feet. Listening to this box-set, which comprises all eight albums of the classic Ozzy-fronted era, I was surprised how fast many of their songs were, given the Sabs' reputation as torpid dirgemeisters for the downered-and-out.

Even at their most manic, Sabbath always sound depressed, though. Rhythmically as much as lyrically, Sabbath songs dramatise scenarios of ordeal, entrapment, affliction, perseverance in the face of long odds and insuperable obstacles. Tony Iommi's down-tuned distorto-riffs--essentially the third element of the awesome rhythm section of Bill Ward and Geezer Butler--create sensations of impedance and drag, like you're struggling through hostile, slightly viscous terrain. Joe Carducci, Sabbath fiend and theorist supreme of rock 's "heavy" aesthetic, analyses about how bass, drums, and guitar converge to produce "powerfully articulated and textured tonal sensations of impact and motion that trigger hefty motor impulses in the listener." But let's not discount Ozzy's role: his piteous wail is one-dimensional, sure, but it sounds utterly righteous in this abject context. And he's effectively touching on forlornly pretty ballads like "Changes" too.

With a few exceptions (Lester Bangs, notably) the first rock-crit generation abhorred Sabbath. Criticism typically lags behind new art forms, appraising it using terminology and techniques more appropriate to earlier genres. So the first rock critics, being postgraduates in literature, philosophy, and politics, treated songs as mini-novels, as poetry or protest tracts with tasteful guitar accompaniment. Expecting rock to get ever more refined, they were hardly gonna embrace Sabbath's crude putsch on Cream, which stripped away all the blues-bore scholarship and revelled in the sheer dynamics of heaviosity. Riff-centered rock--Zep, Mountain, ZZ Top, Aerosmith---was received with incomprehension and condescension. 

But while Seventies critical faves like Little Feat and Jackson Browne have sired no legacy, over the long haul Sabbath's originality and fertility have been vindicated by the way their chromosones have popped up in US hardcore (Black Flag/Rollins were massively indebted), grunge (Nirvana = Beatles + Sabbath x Pixies), and virtually every key phase of metal from Metallica to Kyuss/Queens of the Stone Age to Korn. Sabbath are quite literally seminal.

Sabbath dressed like hippies: check the groovy kaftans and loon pants in the inner sleeve photos of these CDs, which are miniature simulacra of the original gatefold elpees. And they clearly hoped to contribute to the post-Sgt Pepper's progressive tendency: hence pseudo-pastoral interludes like the flute-draped "Solitude," an idyll amidst Master of Reality's sturm und drang. But critics deplored them as a sign of rock's post-Sixties regression , mere lumpen bombast fit only for the moronic inferno of the stadium circuit, and as a symptom of the long lingering death of countercultural dreams. In retrospect, with Sixties idealism seeming like a historical aberration, Sabbath's doom 'n' gloom seems more enduringly resonant, tapping into the perennial frustrations of youth with dead-end jobs from Coventry to New Jersey: headbanging riffs and narcotic noise as a cheap-and-nasty source of oblivion. Sabbath's no-future worldview always becomes extra relevant in times of recession, like the economic down-slope looming ahead of us right now. Looking back, the much-derided Satanist aspects seem relatively peripheral and low-key, especially compared with modern groups like Slipknot. In old TV footage of Sabbath, the group seem almost proto-punk, their sullen, slobby demeanour recalling The Saints on Top of the Pops. There's little theatrics, and the music is remarkably trim and flatulence-free.

But then no one really goes on about Iommi's solos, do they? The riffs are what it's all about, and Sabbath's productivity on that score is rivalled only by AC/DC. "Sweet Leaf", "Iron Man", "Paranoid", "Children of the Grave," "Wheels of Confusion", the list goes on. So we're back with the mystery.... just what is it that makes a great riff? Something to do with the use of silence and spacing, the hesitations that create suspense, a sense of tensed and flexed momentum, of force mass motion held then released. If I had to choose one definitive Sabbath riffscape, I'd be torn between the pummelling ballistic roil of "Supernaut" and "War Pigs", whose stop-start drums are like slow-motion breakbeats, Quaalude-sluggish but devastatingly funky. "War Pigs" is that rare thing, the protest song that doesn't totally suck. Indeed, it's 'Nam era plaint about "generals gathered... like witches at black masses" has a renewed topicality at a time when the military-industrial death-machine is once more flexing its might.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

This is my favorite 

I remember this came on the radio once when we were in the car.  I turned up the volume and started air-drumming to those great breakbeat-like rolls. And then - a second after Ozzy's voice came in, like it was the final straw - this indignant voice piped up from the back seat:   "This is the WORST music in the world!!!". Kieran, aged 11, sounding genuinely appalled. I drily replied, "no, this is in fact one of the most purely powerful pieces of recorded rock, actually". He wasn't having it.

Mind you, I would probably have felt the same at his age. 

Well, more to the point, I felt the same when I was about 18. Not based on any deep exposure. Passing hearing of "Paranoid". Mostly just postpunk indoctrination, high-minded disapproval of all things metal.

Then two things changed my mind: I read that Black Flag were fans of Black Sabbath, which explained the grueling dirge of "Damaged I"

And then my friend Chris Scott played me one of their albums - maybe the Greatest Hits. "Iron Man" was the one that turned my head around. 

And then "War Pigs".

Then within a few years you had the Beasties sampling Sabbath, there was Buttholes's with "Sweat Loaf", etc

Over time I've come to really like the dreamy hippie-ish side to Sabbath

What were they going for here? Santana? Something from the San Francisco scene? 

It actually reminds me a bit of "Maggot Brain" by Funkadelic 

And then there's this pretty instrumental 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The first time I paeaned Sabbath was indirectly, via the greatest of their epigones: Saint Vitus

January 16 1988

The album had actually been out at least a year, possibly two, when I reviewed it, but it came in a big box of STT albums mailed to MM, which I pounced on.

At that time I didn't realise "St. Vitus Dance" is a Sabbath song. 

Also discovered much later that  Born Too Late - which is not only epigonic but an analysis of the epigone mindstate - was produced by Joe Carducci. 

JC's analysis of "heavy" is unbeaten - check this piece, spun off Rock and the Pop Narcotic but not an extract, with some great probing into the Sabbath riff-and-rhythm engine.  

Carducci has opined that "Supernaut" is the most physically dynamic and potent example of recorded rock in existence

Now I could have sworn I spoke to one of Saint Vitus on the phone for a piece on STT and its late 80s splurge out into heavy, proggy, jammy-bandy expansiveness - but all I can find is this small patch of exaltation, quote-free. But yeah I distinctly recall a distant voice, a subdued mumble. 

Another Sabbath-related speck of writing is this piece on the unfortunately named 1000 Homo DJs aka Al Jourgensen who covered "Supernaut". He does address the isssue of the name in the conversation.

How weird to think I spoke to Mr Ministry on the phone!

I wonder what Mr Carducci would have made of this cover? I'm sure he would have disapproved of the inelastic rhythm section (a drum machine?) and diagnosed it as a typically top-heavy misunderstanding of rock music - taking it to be all about attitude rather than phatitude. Literally top-heavy:  all noise and distorted vox, no bottom. Fatally lite - devoid of heaviness. 

In that sense almost as bad as British things like The Cult and Grebo. 

He would further have diagnosed the Wax Trax thing as bound up with a fatal Chicago failing: Anglophilia - which he also diagnosed as a ruse of projecting to London to bypass New York. 

I have strayed far from Ozzy...  

Repeated exposure on the radio here in LA over the years has made me a fan of this, even though its clean frantic high-energy style is a million miles from the Sabbath dirge style. 

I'm sure Carducci thought this was a terrible waste of Ozzy's wail. 

LCD Soundsystem, live, a week ago, Bowery Ballroom…

… was more exciting than I'd thought. Came with minimal expectations really (a guy and a synth and a drum machine?) and was ambushed by the physical full-band force of it. The sheer rockfunk. Shades at times of the Contortions, Happy Mondays, even a hint of Stooges attack. An American Lo-Fidelity Allstars? As well as a fine flesh-and-blood drummer there was a percussionist (who knew a cowbell could be so exciting?) who doubled as a guitarist; another guitarist (or was it a bassist? ) plus a chick on synth/tech. The singer (is that the guy who used to front Six Finger Satellite? He's pudged out a bit) wore an Oxford University T-Shirt. But underneath the obligatory irony, the masking metacasm, something seemed to be burning, a real deal HOWL, a scorching sense of "we mean it man" (although what the meaning might actually consist of remained unclear--the yearning to mean itself against all the heavily stacked odds, the over-acculturation that is a generational curse?). Not a massive fan of "Losing My Edge" (the weakest moment here anyhow) I couldn't have been more surprised. In the end, I suppose I didn't really know what to make of it--the best possible outcome.

from Blissblog Friday, October 17, 2003

LCD Soundsystem

LCD Soundsystem

(DFA)

Blender, 2005

As co-founder of New York's painfully hip record label DFA, James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem specializes in fusing dance groove and punk attack.  The label's trademark raw-yet-slick sound first made waves in 2002 with the dancefloor success of The Rapture's "House of Jealous Lovers," which Murphy co-produced with DFA partner Tim Goldsworthy. Next came the first LCD single, "Losing My Edge," the hilarious lament of an aging hipster who feels eclipsed by youngsters with even more esoteric reference points.  Included here on a bonus CD that gathers up all three of the group's excellent early singles, "Losing" sets the emotional template for a good chunk of LCD's debut full-length. Several of the best tunes are inspired by Murphy's love-hate relationship with music: his struggle between wanting to be cool and feeling the very impulse is absurd and loathsome,  between his attachment to rock's heritage and his equally powerful urge to rip it all up and start again. Out of all these clashing emotions emerges a prime contender for Best Album of 2005.

Too omnivorously eclectic to operate as a period stylist, Murphy weaves together beats and sounds from the last 25 years of dance music. There's a heavy slant towards early Eighties mutant disco--spiky Gang of Four rhythm guitar, punkily funky basslines that aren't computer-programmed but played on an electric bass.  But there's also more recent flavors from house and hip hop. "Too Much Love," a brilliantly eerie song about overdoing the party potions and nightclubbing, pivots around a grating synth noise that whimpers like a burned-out brain, while the Suicide-like "Thrills" rides an utterly contemporary and boombastic groove inspired by Missy Elliott's "Get UR Freak On."

Sonically, LCD Soundsystem is near-immaculate, then. But what really pushes this record into the realm of genius is the double whammy of Murphy's witty lyrics and wonderfully tetchy vocals.  "On Repeat" expresses the ennui of the seasoned scenester who watches the new groups reshuffling the old poses, while "Movement" is a feedback-laced diatribe about modern music: "it's like a culture, without the effort, of all the culture/it's like a movement, without the bother, of all of the meaning." As for Murphy's singing, he's not got a big voice, but its dry, irritable texture suits the songs's themes of exhaustion and exasperation. He also does a cute David-Byrne-doing-Al-Green falsetto on "Disco Infiltrator"  and resurrects the choral serenity of Brian Eno's early solo albums on the closing "Great Release". 

Spotting the sources is bonus fun (for those whose brains are wired like that, anyway). But the glory of LCD Soundsystem is the way the music sounds like an entity not a collage, its manifold and disparate influences melding to form a seductive--if clearly deeply conflicted--self.  

DFA / LCD Sound System

Groove magazine, 2005

For the last three years, DFA has been on a mission to make New York City live up to its own legend--"to be what it should be," as  the label's co-founder James Murphy puts it.  DFA's spiritual ancestors are early Eighties Manhattan labels like ZE, 99 and Sleeping Bag, pioneers of sounds like "punk-funk" and "mutant disco" that mixed dance culture's groove power with absurdist wit, dark humor and rock'n'roll aggression. The DFA sound flashes back to times and places when NYC's party-hard hedonism seemed to have both an edge and a point--Mudd Club, Hurrah's, Danceteria, Paradise Garage--but it rarely feels like a mere exercise in retro-pastiche.

The label's initial batch of vinyl-only singles in 2002--most famously "House of Jealous Lovers" by The Rapture and "Losing My Edge" by LCD Soundsystem--resurrected the idea of dance music spiked with punk attitude. Before long everybody was clamoring for a dose of DFA cool. Murphy, 34, and his English-born partner Tim Goldsworthy, 32, were touted as Superproducers, indieland's equivalent to the Neptunes. "Yeah I was the punk-funk Pharrell Williams," laughs Murphy. "Which makes me Chad, I guess" adds Goldsworthy.

Janet Jackson phoned DFA and suggested collaborating, saying she wanted to do something "raw and funky" like "Losing My Edge." Amazingly, DFA sorta kinda forgot to follow up the call. Duran Duran were also interested in getting DFA's magic touch. Most surreally, Goldsworthy and Murphy spent an afternoon in the studio with Britney Spears. "That was weird," says Goldsworthy. "Won't do that again. No offence to her--she's lovely. Got a foul mouth, though!"  The brief session came to nothing, through lack of common musical ground. "When we work with people, we hang out, listen to records, share stuff," says Murphy. "But with Britney we soon discovered we had absolutely no way of communicating. She didn't know anything that we knew. I was excited when the idea was first broached, because I thought maybe there's something Britney wants to do, and it's fucking burning a hole in her, and we can find out what it is. And the collaboration could be embarrassing, a failure, but that's fine. But I think she's someone that's very divorced from what she wants to do, there's been a set of performance requirements on her for such a long time, such that how would she even know what she wanted to do? And we never had time to found out anyway, because it was like, 'she's available for four hours on Wednesday, write a song'. There's no way you can kid yourself you can make something real in those circumstances."

After these lost encounters with "the big time", DFA consciously backed away from the opportunities being thrust their way. "You stop returning phone calls, people get bored of you real quickly!" laughs Murphy. Instead, they concentrated on building up their own operation. The stance is bearing fruit now, with a freshly-inked global distribution deal between DFA and EMI. The first release under this new arrangement was the recent and highly impressive three-CD collection of DFA works so far, Compilation #2. It's now followed by the brilliant debut album from LCD Soundsystem, which is James Murphy's own group.

Murphy and Goldsworthy originally met in inauspicious circumstances, as hired help for Irish deejay/producer/soundtrack composer David Holmes, who was making his Bow Down To The Exit Sign album in Manhattan.  Murphy did the engineering, Goldsworthy did the programming. The location was Murphy's West Village of Manhattan recording studio (now DFA's basement sound-lab). It didn't take long for the two technicians to suspect they were making most of the creative decisions. "Tim and I were forced to create a dialogue about how to make sounds, because there was just this vague cloud of ideas coming from Holmes," says Murphy, gesturing to the back of the studio, where Holmes sat during the recording process. "Tim and I found we could talk about the most subtle sonic things. Say, with Suicide, we could talk about the space between the two different organ sounds, or the lag between the organ playing and the drum machine beat, the way the two instruments don't lock together. Or we could talk about how earnest Alan Vega's Elvis-like vocal performance is, and how could we get that same quality out of the bass--a feeling that's earnest and embarrassing but saved by being actually totally for real."

Taking breaks from the recording grind, Goldsworthy and Murphy bonded further during Saturday night missions of full-on clubbing. Which is when Murphy, hitherto a typical indie-rock guy, had his dance music E-piphany. "Yeah, it's an unheard of story, isn't it?" he laughs. "A person who only listens to rock goes off, does a mountain of Ecstasy, and gets converted to dance music".

The same thing had happened to Goldsworthy over a decade earlier, as an indiepop fan who got swept up in the UK's Ecstasy-fueled acid house revolution circa 1988. "I went from wearing an anorak and National Health spectacles into shaving my head and dancing in a field for eight hours!" In the Nineties, Goldsworthy, like a lot of people, followed a vibe shift towards more chilled-out drugs (heavy weed) and moody, downtempo sounds, picking up especially on the music coming out of the early Nineties Bristol scene (very near where he grew up in the West of England). With his schoolfriend James Lavelle, Goldsworthy co-founded the trip hop label Mo Wax, whose whole aesthetic owed a huge amount to Massive Attack's epochal 1991 album Blue Lines. Goldsworthy and Lavelle also made atmospheric and increasingly over-ambitious music as the pivotal core of UNKLE, a sort of post-trip hop supergroup that called upon diverse array of collaborators (ranging from DJ Shadow to Radiohead's Thom Yorke) on albums like Psyence Fiction. It's this background in "soundtrack for a non-existent movie" music that led to Goldsworthy becoming the programming foil for David Holmes. Which ultimately led to him coming to Manhattan and meeting Murphy.

Goldsworthy had been through the whole dance culture experience and, like a lot of people, grown sick and tired of it. Murphy, a die-hard indie-rock/punk-rock guy, had always "loathed dance music. I thought it was all disco or C& C Music Factory. I didn't know anything about it and didn't want to know anything about it. I'd really come up through the Pixies, the Fall, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, and all the Chicago noise punk stuff like Big Black." And in truth, when the two of them went out clubbing in New York while working on the Holmes record, there wasn't much going on in dance culture to counter either Goldsworthy's disillusion or Murphy's prejudice. The Manhattan scene was moribund. Goldsworthy had come to New York, a city that loomed large in his imagination because of hip hop and house, with high expectations and was very disappointed. "I was shocked, it was so bad. You couldn't dance anywhere," he says, referring to Mayor Bloomberg's crackdown on bars that had DJs spinning but didn't have the expensive "cabaret  license" that nightclubs need to get to make it permissible for their patrons to wiggle their butts in time to the music. "It was fucking awful."

Beyond the specific malaise of Manhattan clubland, dance music at the close of the Nineties was going through a not very compelling phase. It was neither pushing fearlessly forward into the future with huge leaps of innovation like it had done for most of the Nineties, nor did it have that edge-of-anarchy madness that characterized the rave scene in its early days. The superclubs were slick and soul-less. And technique-obsessed and genre-purist DJs had squeezed out an awful lot of vibe. By the start of the new millennium, the new generation of hipster youth in New York and London had little interest in club culture, which seemed safe, passe and altogether lacking in cutting-edge glamour. These young cool kids were looking to guitar bands again, groups with stage moves and charismatic hair, from the Strokes to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Murphy and Goldsworthy decided to rescue dance music from "McDepth--that McDonald's version of 'deep', where there's nothing there", Murphy explains. The duo cite everything from glitchy laptop musicians  to Tortoise-style post-rock to post-Blue Lines Massive Attack as examples of bogus profundity, chin-stroking pretentiousness, and terminal boredom. Revealingly, Murphy's MDMA revelation didn't occur listening to whatever passed for an Ecstasy anthem in those days (Rolando's "Jaguar," say). No, the DJ dropped The Beatles'  "Tomorrow Never Knows"--one of his all-time favorite tunes--at exactly the point "when the drug was peaking" in his nervous system. And that gave Murphy the idea of  "throwing parties and playing better music--like "Loose" by the Stooges--than what dance culture was offering at that time". Taking the name DFA--short for Death From Above, and originally the tag under which Murphy did infamously loud sound mixing for rock bands--they started throwing irregular parties in New York, based around the notion of bridging the considerable gap between Donna Summer and The Stooges. Soon, tired of endlessly playing their staple fare like Can and Liquid Liquid, the duo decided to make their own "dance-punk" tracks to spin.

"House Of Jealous Lovers" was their first stab. Dance distributors picked up the single purely for the house remix by Morgan Geist from cognoscenti-approved outfit Metro Area. "We'd heard his track 'Atmosphreak' and thought it was amazing," recalls Murphy. "One of the Rapture's friends, Dan, was room mates with Morgan, and so we asked if he'd do a remix and he very kindly did one really cheap. It was only because of Morgan's remix that anyone took it--the dance distributors would often identify it in their orders as being by Morgan Geist." Ironically, and fatefully, it was DFA's original discopunk version that eventually took off.

"House of Jealous Lovers" arrived with perfect timing to catch the breaking wave of dancefloor taste shift towards edgy angularity--not just the rediscovery of Eighties groups like ESG and A Certain Ratio, but the emergence of neo-postpunk bands like !!!, Liars, Erase Errata, and Radio Four (whom DFA also produced). But while The Rapture's slashing guitar and slightly-constipated, white-boys-getting-down funk bass flash you back to 1979 and UK agit-funk outfits like Gang of Four and Delta 5, Murphy & Goldsworthy's production supplied the kind of pumping, monolithic regularity that made the track fully contemporary. "There were indie bands already coming through doing that kind of rickety, Delta 5-style punk-funk, but we wanted to make records that house DJs would actually play," says Murphy. "We had a big talk with The Rapture about that Mr Oizo track 'Flat Beat', the bassline in that tune. In 2000, when we were making 'House of Jealous Lovers', 'Flat Beat' was just about the only dance track around that was memorable. It was a tune you could remember, it fucked killed on the dancefloor, and it had incredible low end. So our attitude was, 'Jealous Lovers' has to compete in that context. So we filtered the bass a lot, did a couple of layers of hi-hats and reversed them, took the drummer's playing and chopped it up." The drummer himself came up with the cowbell, which eventually became a kind of DFA trademark. "House of Jealous Lovers" became a huge success on all kinds of different dancefloors. Some commentators regard it as the best single of the decade so far. It's certainly one of the most significant.

DFA's signature sound mixes Goldsworthy's computer wizardry and Murphy's background of engineering and playing in rock bands (DFA's remixes typically feature his drumming, bass, and sometimes guitar). Two different kinds of knowledge mesh perfectly: Murphy's expertise at getting great drum sounds and capturing live "feel", Goldsworthy's digital editing skills and vast sample-hound's knowledge of recorded music acquired during his Mo Wax days. Both guys look their respective parts. Slender, softspoken, and diffidently English in a way that often, he says, gets him mistaken for gay, Goldsworthy seems like someone at home with delicate, intricate work--a century ago, you might have assumed from his intent, bespectacled gaze and fastidious manner that he was an engraver or watch-maker. Wearing a Taos ski resort T-shirt and brown corduroy pants, the slightly pudgy and much more boisterous Murphy looks like your archetypal American indie-rock studio rat.

After a low-key spell in late 2003/early 2004--a steady flow of fine but not exactly throat-grabbing releases, from The Juan Maclean, Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom, and Black Dice--DFA came back strong in the last few months of 2004 with two of their most exciting singles yet.  Pixeltan's  "Get Up/Say What"  is classic DFA discopunk, simultaneously raw and slick, while "Sunplus"  by J.O.Y.--a Japanese outfit helmed by K.U.D.O, Goldsworthy's Tim 's former partner in UNKLE, and featuring guest vocals from Yoshimi P-We of the Boredoms--beautifully updates the thorny, fractured postpunk funk of LiLiPUT and The Slits. Like most DFA releases, these tracks came out as vinyl 12 inches. But don't fret if you've got no turntable--you can also find them on Compilation #2. Attractively packaged with the label's trademark minimal design, the box set pulls together everything that wasn't on their first, not wholly satisfactory compilation, throws in a terrific bonus mix CD executed by Tim Goldsworthy and Tim Sweeney, and altogether showcases a formidable body of work.  Two highlights are Liquid Liquid's "Bellhead," a brand-new DFA recording of an old song by one of their Eighties postpunk heroes, formerly on the legendary 99 Records label, and the 15 minute disco-delic journey-into-sound that is "Casual Friday" by Black Leotard Front (an alter ego for Gonzalez and Russom).

And now there's the second release under the global distribution deal with EMI, the debut album from LCD Soundsystem, which people are already talking about as a contender for best album of 2005. In the studio, LCD is basically a James Murphy solo project with occasional help from friends who drop by, and some spiritual guidance from Goldsworthy. Live, though, LCD swells into a proper band, and a surprisingly powerful one, its sheer rock-funk force bringing to mind at various points Happy Mondays, the Lo-Fidelity Allstars, and The Stooges gone disco. 

Released not long after "House Of Jealous Lovers", LCD's  debut single "Losing My Edge" was the first indication that DFA weren't just a pair of capable remixers, but that there was in fact a whole sensibility, aesthetic, and ethos behind the label, as well as a groovy retro-nuevo sound.  Sung by Murphy, the song is the plaint of a cool hunter type--a musician, or DJ, or record store clerk, or possibly all three--who's agonizingly aware that he's slipping, as younger kids outdo his esoteric knowledge with even more obscure reference points. "I'm losing my edge to the Internet seekers who can tell me every member of every good group from 1962 to 1978," the character whines. "To the art-school Brooklynites in little jackets and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties".  The aging hipster's claims of priority and having been first-on-the-block get more and more absurd: "I was there in 1974 at the first Suicide practices in a loft in New York City/I was working on the organ sounds with much patience…  I was the first guy playing Daft Punk to the rock kids/I played it at CBGB's… I was there in the Paradise Garage DJ booth with Larry Levan/I was there in Jamaica during the great sound clashes/I woke up naked on the beach in Ibiza in 1988."  

As well as being a hilarious auto-critique of hipsterism, "Losing My Edge" obliquely captured something of the pathos of the modern era. All this massive ever-accumulating knowledge about music history, the huge array of arcane influences and sources available thanks to the reissue industry and peer-to-peer filesharing, all the advantages we have today in terms of technology and how to get good sounds, have resulted in a kind of a kind of crisis of "well made" music, where producers are scholars of production, know how to get a great period feel, yet it seems harder and harder to make music that actually matters, in the way that the music that inspired them mattered in its own day. "Record collection rock" is my term for this syndrome, although the malaise is just as prevalent in dance culture (look at the perennial return of the 303 acid bass, each time sounding more exhausted and unsurprising). 

"Losing My Edge" was very funny, but also poignant. Murphy agrees. "It's incredibly sad. It took people a while to pick up on that. At first they were like, 'ha! You got 'em', like it was just a satire on hipsters. What's truly sad, though, is that the initial inspiration for it was from my deejaying in the early days of DFA, playing postpunk and an eclectic mix of dance and rock. And suddenly everybody started playing that kind of mixture, and I thought 'fuck, now it's a genre and I'm fucked, I'm not going to get hired'. My response was, "I was doing this first," and then I realized that was pathetic, that I was this 31 year old hipster douchebag. So at the end of "Losing My Edge," that's why there's the long list of bands-- Pere Ubu, Todd Terry, PIL, the Fania All-Stars, the Bar-Kays, Heldon, Gentle Giant,  the Human League, Roy Harper, Sun Ra, on and on--'cos in the end that's what my attitude reduced to, just running around trying to yell the names of cool bands before anybody else!". He says that a big part of DFA's attitude is that "we definitely try to shoot holes in our own cool as fast as we can, because being cool is one of the worst things for music." He cites DFA's disco-flavored remix of Le Tigre's "Deceptacon" as an example, its softness representing a deliberate swerve from the obvious punk-funk sound that DFA were known for.

"Beat Connection", the even more impressive flipside to "Losing," was also a meta-music statement, with Murphy accusing everyone on the dancefloor of colluding in lameness. "Everybody here needs a shove/Everybody here is afraid of fun/It's the saddest night out in the USA/Nobody's coming undone." He explains that this was inspired by his and Goldsworthy's experience of the "really uptight" New York club scene at the tail-end of the Nineties.  When Murphy compares his lyrical approach to The Stooges--"really simple, repetitive, quite stupid"--he hits it on the nail. "Beat Connection" is dance culture's counterpart to The Stooges 1969 classic "No Fun."  Which was probably the very first punk song--indeed the Sex Pistols did a brilliant cover version of it. 

When people talk about LCD Soundsystem and DFA, though, the word that comes up isn't punk rock so much as postpunk--Public Image Ltd (the band John Lydon formed after the Pistols broke up), Gang of Four, Liquid Liquid, etc. Murphy originally got into this era of music when he was working as sound engineer and live sound mixer for Six Finger Satellite, an abrasive mid-Nineties band who were precocious--indeed premature--in referencing the postpunk period well before it became hip again circa 2001. In a 1995 interview with me, Six Finger Satellite were already namedropping late Seventies outfits like Chrome and This Heat. They also recorded an all-synth and heavily Devo-influenced mini-album, Machine Cuisine, as a sideline from their more guitar-oriented, Big Black-like albums. "Going on tour with Six Finger Satellite was one of those super fertile times in my life in terms of finding out about music," recalls Murphy. "They were like 'do you know about Deutsche Amerikanishce Freundschaft? Do you know about Suicide?', and they dumped all this knowledge on me while we were driving around the country from gig to gig. This was a few years before I met Tim, which was itself another very fertile and immersive period in terms of new music."  The Six Finger Satellite connection endures. DFA act The Juan Maclean is actually Six Finger guitarist John Maclean, making Kraftwerk-like electronica. 

"Losing My Edge" b/w  "Beat Connection" was followed by two more excellent LCD singles, "Give It Up" b/w "Tired" and "Yeah" (which came in a "Crass version" and a "Pretentious Version" and managed to make the 303 acid-bass sound quite exciting, against all the odds). These six early single tracks are collected on the bonus disc that comes with the debut LCD Soundsystem album. Running through a lot of the CD--particularly songs like "Movement" and "On Repeat"-- is that same meta-musical rage you heard in "Losing" and "Beat": a poisoned blend of a desire for music to be revolutionary and dangerous, along with a defeatist, crippled-by-irony awareness that the age of musical revolution may be long past. "Movement," the single, fuses the sentiments of "Losing My Edge" and "Beat Connection", with Murphy surveying the music scene and pointing the finger--"it's like a culture, without the effort, of all the culture/it's like a movement, without the bother, of all of the meaning"--and then confessing to being "tapped", meaning exhausted, sapped of energy and inspiration. Although the sentiment could apply just as equally to dance culture, Murphy says the song is specifically a reaction to all the talk of guitar rock making a comeback, "all the inanity that gets bandied about as rock journalism. It's a complete rip of fashion journalism--'the high waisted pant is BACK'.  Like that's supposed to mean something.  I mean, I hope you don't go around hearing 'abstract expressionism is BACK!  and HOTTER than EVER!' in art mags."

"On Repeat" is yet another LCD song about the ennui that comes when you're been into music for a long time: the awareness of  the cycles repeating, the eternal return of the same personae and poses, archetypes and attitudes, reshuffled with slight variations. "That attitude is where I'm coming from all of the time," says Murphy. "The lyric referring to 'the new stylish creep'--that's me! The song is  about hating what you are, and that giving you strength to hate everything else.  It's weird.  I love music so much that I want to drown it forever.  Destroy everything."

You can hear these conflicted emotions in Murphy's singing voice. It has a weird tetchy texture that evokes a mixture of exasperation and fatigue, sounds at once spirited and dispirited. Murphy says that's an accurate reflection of how he feels when he's recording vocals. "It murders me.  I hate hearing my own stupid voice in the headphones, with all the singerly bits and false poses.  I sometimes have to sing things over and over until I hate the song, until there's no posy vocal bits in there that make me cringe.  That song, 'On Repeat,' in particular was hell to do. But in the end I like it.  Or at least I feel like I can stand behind it". In terms of that frayed, worn-out quality to LCD vocals, Murphy says "I usually compress the shit out of the vocal with a VCA compressor, which is really brutal.  And I try to mix them so that the frequencies are like "Mother of Pearl" by Roxy Music or "Poptones" by PiL". 

Yet for all the lyrical and vocal notes of disillusionment and frustration running through LCD Soundsystem, the music itself is full of exuberance and playfulness, a delight in the sheer pleasures and possibilities of sound. "Too Much Love," which seems to be a song about drug burn-out and excessive nocturnal socializing, features an awesome grating synth-whine that makes me think of a serotonin-depleted brain whimpering on the Tuesday after a wild weekend.  Another standout track, "Disco Infiltrator" nods to Kraftwerk with its imitation of the eerie synth-riff from 1980's "Home Computer." It's not a sample but a recreation, says Murphy. "It just an ascending chromatic scale, really.  It's not rocket science!" The track also features some sweet semi-falsetto singing from Murphy that sounds like David Byrne circa Talking Heads' Remain In Light. "It's just my shitty soul voice," laughs Murphy. "Al Green has a beautiful soul, so that's what you hear coming through in his voice.  My soul is absolute rubbish, so that's what comes out!"

The closing "Great Release" seems like a homage to Brian Eno's song-based albums like Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy and Another Green World. "Actually, it's Here Comes the Warm Jets-era Eno," laughs Murphy. "It's not a homage, though--I hate that word. No, I just like the type of energy that some Eno/Bowie stuff got, and some of the space of Lou Reed stuff, like 'Satellite of Love'. Some journalist got kind of stroppy with me about that song, and all I could think was, 'is there seriously some problem with there being too many songs that use sonic spaces similar to early Eno solo work?  I mean, is this really something we need to talk about before it gets out of control?!?'". I WISH I had that problem.  Or is the problem just me--that I'm not being original enough?  Because if it is, then let's just dump rock in the fucking ocean and call it a day, because I'm doing the best I can for the moment!"

Best of all is "Thrills," in which Murphy comes off like Iggy Pop singing over a track that fuses The Normal's "Warm Leatherette" with Suicide's "Dance," over a fat bassline not a million miles from Timo Maas. Actually, Murphy says, the inspiration for the bass-and-percussion groove is Missy Elliott's "Get Yr Freak On". "I made the original version of 'Thrills' right when that came out.  I loved that era of mainstream hip hop, it was a free-for-all.  And just the bass of it."

Of course, all these comparisons and reference points only underscore the point I earlier made in reference to "Losing My Edge": the poignancy of living in a "late" era of culture, the insurmountable-seeming challenge of competing with the accumulated brilliance of the past and creating any kind of sensation of new-ness.  "Yeah, that is kind of tattooed on my stomach," says Murphy, referring to this pained awareness of belatedness. He acknowledges that "great influences do not a great record make".  And yet despite all the odds, the LCD album is a great record.

When I mention the American literary critic Harold Bloom's concept of "anxiety of influence"--which argues that "strong" artists suffer from an acute sense of anguish that everything has been done before, and that makes them struggle against their predecessors in a desperate Oedipal attempt to achieve originality--Murphy flips out. "It's hilarious that you say this--I mention Bloom's anxiety theory pretty regularly in interviews!  This is the shit I've been screaming about for years.  Learning and progress has always been based on learning from the past.  Real originality never comes from trying to defeat the past right out of the gate.  It's a spark of an individual idea caused by the love/hate relationship between a "listener" and the "sound".  I love music, and it inspired me at first to copy it, then to be ashamed of copying it, then to make music in "modes" (genres) while trying to  pretend they were original, then finally making music with a purpose--which for me was dance music.  It made people dance. It was no longer just music to make you look cool and feel like you were part of something you admire. 

"I don't feel like I'm in any danger of making 'retro' music, but at the same time, there are things about the ways various people who've come before me did things that I prefer greatly to the way 'modern' things are done.  I use a computer.  I edit and do all sorts of modern shit, but there are things I consciously do that were done in songs I love from before me." 

As much as love, though, it's hate that inspires LCD Soundsystem in equal measure. "I hate the way bands stand on stage, the gear they use, the crew they hire to tune their tedious guitars,  the love they have for their special 'guitar amp, the belief in their fragile, phoney little singer who's a fucking sham.  They are not and will never be Iggy Pop.  Neither will I, or my band, but we know it, and we're trying our fucking best to be the LCD Soundsystem.  Complete with its laundry list of influences, failures and idiocies. At least you go onstage knowing that, good or bad, no one is like you."

* * * * *

Many labels never survive the initial hype storm of being hip. Murphy recalls a peculiar, uncomfortable phase when "we kept seeing magazines with profiles of DFA, but we weren't really releasing anything at the time." Now, though, he's thankful that "we're not ascendant anymore. At this point we're kind of cruising along. And it's nice. It doesn't feel like it's out of our control anymore."

And what about New York, the city whose mythos is so central to DFA? Is it living up to its own reputation at the moment? "It's a great city, but people get lazy here," says Murphy. "So we and a few other people we think of as allies, we go into phases of trying to punch the city into being interesting, Then we go home for a couple of months and hang out with our wives and cook. And then it's like, 'okay, time to go out punching again'. And it's getting to be about that time again. For a while, we were like 'oh fuck them, let them live in their filth of terrible parties, shitty DJs, just doing the same thing'. See I can't go to these parties where people play records that are sent to them by promoters 'cos they're genre djs, part of a genre. I've always loathed that. And then I found myself in that situation again," Murphy sighs, referring to the way DFA gets lumped together with Black Strobe and Trevor Jackson of Playgroup/Output, the way genre-crossing becomes its own kind of genre. "That's not what I signed up for, you know?  I didn't leave indie rock to end up back in indie rock!"

House of Zealous Rockers: DFA

by 

Simon Reynolds

Village Voice October 26, 2004

When was the last time we had a great New York indie record label? Think about it. Not just a company that happens to be based here, but one with a roster of local artists, one whose whole vibe 'n' vision is bound up with the mythos of New York City. You'd probably have to go back to the early '80s, the era of punk-funk and mutant-disco imprints like ZE, 99, and Sleeping Bag. Today's only real contender is DFA. For the last three years, DFA has been on a mission to make this city live up to its own legend—"to be what it should be," as DFA co-founder James Murphy puts it. The DFA sound flashes back to places and times when NYC's party-hard hedonism seemed to have both an edge and a point—Mudd Club, Paradise Garage—but never feels like an exercise in retro pastiche.

The label's initial batch of vinyl-only singles in 2002—most famously "House of Jealous Lovers" by the Rapture—resurrected the idea of dance music spiked with punk attitude. Before long, everybody was clamoring for a dose of DFA cool. Murphy and his English-born partner, Tim Goldsworthy, were touted as superproducers, indieland's equivalent to the Neptunes. Janet Jackson phoned them and suggested collaborating (amazingly, DFA kinda sorta forgot to follow up the call.) Most surreally, they spent an afternoon in the studio with Britney Spears. "That was weird," says Goldsworthy. "Won't do that again. No offense to her—she's lovely. Got a foul mouth, though!" The brief session came to nothing, through lack of common musical ground. "When we work with people, we hang out, listen to records, share stuff," says Murphy. "But with Britney we had absolutely no way of communicating. She didn't know anything that we knew."

After this lost encounter with "the big time," DFA consciously backed away from the opportunities being thrust its way. "You stop returning phone calls, people get bored of you real quick!" laughs Murphy. Instead they concentrated on building up their own operation. The stance is bearing fruit in the last months of 2004, with a freshly inked global-minus-America distribution deal with EMI and an impressive three-CD collection of DFA works so far, Compilation #2, out this week. Early next year the second release under this new arrangement will be the debut album from Murphy's own group LCD Soundsystem.

Murphy and Goldsworthy originally met in inauspicious circumstances, as hired help for DJ-producer David Holmes, who was making one of his "soundtrack for a nonexistent movie"-type albums in Manhattan. Murphy did the engineering, Goldsworthy did the programming. The location was Murphy's West 13th Street recording studio (now DFA's sound lab). It didn't take long for the two technicians to suspect they were making most of the creative decisions. "Tim and I were forced to create a dialogue about how to make sounds, because there was just this vague cloud of ideas coming from Holmes," says Murphy, gesturing to the back of the studio.

Taking breaks from the recording grind, the two sound boys bonded further during Saturday-night missions of full-on clubbing. Which is when Murphy, hitherto a typical indie-rock discophobe, had his dance music E-piphany. "Yeah, it's an unheard of story, isn't it?" he laughs. "A person who only listens to rock goes off, does a mountain of E, and gets converted to dance music." Revealingly, though, it was hearing the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" at exactly the point "when the drug was peaking" that gave Murphy the idea of "throwing parties and playing better music—like 'Loose' by the Stooges—than what dance culture was offering at that time."

At the close of the '90s, technique-obsessed and genre-purist DJs were squeezing all the vibe out of club culture, in the process driving the next generation of hipster kids back to rock bands with stage moves and charismatic hair. Murphy and Goldsworthy decided to rescue dance music from "McDepth—that McDonald's version of 'deep,' where there's nothing there," Murphy explains, citing everything from glitchy laptop musicians to Tortoise-style post-rock as culpable. Taking the name DFA—short for Death From Above, and originally the tag under which Murphy did infamously loud sound mixing for bands like Six Finger Satellite—they started throwing irregular parties based around the notion of bridging the considerable gap between Donna Summer and the Stooges. Soon, tired of endlessly playing their staple fare like Can and Liquid Liquid, the duo decided to make their own "dance-punk" tracks to spin.

"House of Jealous Lovers" was their first real stab. Dance distributors picked up the single purely for the house remix by Morgan Geist (from cognoscenti-approved outfit Metro Area). But it was DFA's original disco-punk version that eventually took off, timed perfectly for the dancefloor taste shift toward edgy angularity (not just the rediscovery of '80s groups like ESG and A Certain Ratio, but the emergence of neo-post-punk bands like !!! and Radio 4). But while the Rapture's slashing guitar and slightly constipated, white-boys-getting-down funk bass flash you back to Gang of Four and Delta 5, Murphy and Goldsworthy's production supplied a pumping, monolithic regularity that made the track fully contemporary. "There were indie bands already coming through doing that kind of rickety punk-funk, but we wanted to make records that house DJs would actually play," says Murphy. "So we filtered the bass a lot, did a couple of layers of hi-hats and reversed them, took the drummer's playing and chopped it up."

DFA's signature sound mixes Goldsworthy's computer wizardry with Murphy's background of engineering and playing in rock bands (DFA's remixes typically feature his drumming, bass, and sometimes guitar). Two different kinds of knowledge mesh perfectly: Murphy's expertise at getting great drum sounds and capturing live "feel," Goldsworthy's digital editing skills and vast sample-hound knowledge of recorded music (acquired during his trip-hop days as co-founder of Mo Wax and member of that label's supergroup UNKLE). Both guys look their respective parts. Slender, soft-spoken, and diffidently English in a way that often, he says, gets him mistaken for gay, Goldsworthy seems like someone at home with delicate, intricate work—a century ago, you might have assumed from his intent, bespectacled gaze and fastidious manner that he was an engraver or watchmaker. Wearing a Taos ski resort T-shirt and brown cords, the slightly pudgy and much more boisterous Murphy looks like your archetypal Amerindie studio rat.

After a low-key spell—a steady flow of fine but not exactly throat-grabbing releases, from the Juan Maclean, Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom, and Black Dice—DFA has come back strong this fall with two of its most exciting singles yet. Pixeltan's "Get Up/Say What" is classic DFA disco-punk, simultaneously raw and slick, while "Sunplus" by J.O.Y.—a Japanese outfit helmed by K.U.D.O, Goldsworthy's former partner in UNKLE, and featuring guest vocals from Yoshimi P-We of the Boredoms—beautifully updates the thorny, fractured funk of LiLiPUT and the Slits. Like most DFA releases, these tracks came out as vinyl 12-inches. But don't fret if you've got no turntable—you can also find them on Compilation #2. The box set pulls together everything that wasn't on the first, not wholly satisfactory anthology, throws in a bonus mix CD, and altogether showcases a formidable body of work. One previously unavailable highlight is Liquid Liquid's "Bellhead," a brand-new recording of an old song by one of DFA's '80s post-punk heroes.

Many labels never survive the initial hype storm of being hip. Murphy recalls a peculiar, uncomfortable phase when "we kept seeing magazines with profiles of DFA, but we weren't really releasing anything at the time." Now, though, he's thankful that "we're not ascendant anymore. At this point we're kind of cruising along. And it's nice. It doesn't feel like it's out of our control anymore."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Strangely I've never been able to get into the later LCD albums, which people from the generation just below mine swear by. "All My Friends" and all that.  Perhaps because the disparate influences are more successfully emulsified? So that it sounds like fully achieved atemporality rather than a collage on the edge of congealing?

This all feels so far back in time, long long ago, even more long ago than the original postpunk era ....  twas strange to learn recently that my youngest, unborn at the time of writing these pieces, is a fan of LCD Soundsystem and actually saw them live not so long ago.,,,, 

Melody Maker, June 18 1986

David Thomas at the first Carrot Festival, Warsaw, Poland - Melody Maker April 18 1987

Pere Ubu at the second Carrot festival in Budapest, Hungary

Finally, in 2002, I got to meet the great man. I was in the U.K.  for the summer to research Rip It Up and Start Again - after various unsuccessful efforts, I got a call rather peremptorily summoning me to Brighton the next day. Bird in hand, I thought - I hastened down there with some hastily prepared questions. The encounter was one of the more cantankerous interviews I've done - but in some ways that made it more interesting than a straightforward "here's how we formed, then we made our first record" type data-dollop. We got into debating the history and philosophy of rock - class dynamics - America versus England. A rather bristly, frictional dialogue. We were in a pub near the sea front and at a certain point, Thomas said, "I'm going to talk to my friends" and went over to a barstool and chatted to an old geezer with a dog. Rude! I sat there for a bit and then packed up my tape recorder. Went for a slash and on the way back, I thought, "Shall I say goodbye? Nah!". Caught the train back. 

So not the most cordial of encounters, but I'm glad I did it. And whoever said visionary geniuses had to be sufferable? 

Below is the tided-up Q and A of our chat. 

I read this memoiristic essay by Charlotte Presler about Cleveland in the Seventies and she said that everybody in the scene was from an upper middle class background. Or even upper class.

"Beefheart was certainly much more angular. We liked hard music. Or at least I did. I was more Midwestern oriented--I liked MC5, Stooges, and all that Sixties garage stuff like Question Mark and The Music Machine. Beefheart is very close to that sort of approach.. At that time if you were looking for electronic sounds there was Terry Riley, Beaver & Krause, Silver Apples, and all the German stuff. All of that was a component of bands like MC5. There's always been a relationship between hard Midwest groove rock and pure sound. So it was natural for us to do that."

So is that the genesis of "avant-garage" as a concept? The Stooges started out doing abstract noise stuff with a Fluxus/Dada edge, using vacuum cleaners and the like. Then they turned into a primal hard rock band. They got less experimental as they went along.

"Avant garage was much later. We got tired of not having a pigeonhole so in 1979, one of our friends was doing an art exhibition at Cleveland Stadium of garages--literally a collection of fronts of garages. I don't know how he got them. He might have even called it the Avant-Garage Exhibition.  . We thought that was a good name so we stole it, but only because we got tired of all the silly labels. This thing of pigeonholing and calling things by generic names is in rock terms a fairly recent event. In our formative years nobody did that, which is why nobody thought it was that weird that Jimmy Hendrix opened for the Monkees.  The last time I saw the Stooges they were opening for Slade. This notion of the latest trend was always a fabrication of the English punk movement. When our parents or friends would ask what kind of music we played we'd say, 'we're kind of underground'. Which mean only that we couldn't play and nobody came to see us. And then everybody was also into film, so in early 1977 somebody started talking about it as New Wave. But we always saw ourselves in the mainstream tradition of rock music."

Didn't you have this thing called  the Theory of Spontaneous Similitude that was related to Pataphysics?

"Maybe. Spontaneous Similitude just grew out of a joke, although I suppose it has a serious core. You could complete the phrase, "I am like…" with the first thing that comes into your head and it still makes sense. Which is not much of an idea but it has a certain relationship to the Surrealists and Dadaists. For human beings there's no alternative to meaning. That's the serious point of it: there is no such thing as non-meaning for humans, so if you say "I am like…" and fill it in with anything, a listener will make some sense out of it because there is no alternative. That's clearly the foundational element of sound as an artistic force. Any sound you hear, there is no alternative but to figure it out."

 "Why is there a split? You want there to be a split but there isn't one. How many minutes ago did we talk about the genesis of the Midwestern sound? That it's a combination of pure sound elements and hard rock. We don't see that they're separate. This is a corollary of the inability of most foreigners to understand the nature of rock music. You want this separation of what you would call pop versus what you would call serious art. There wasn't a separation as far as we were concerned. We liked Marc Bolan as much as we liked Lou Reed,. One wasn't intrinsically more serious than the other.  This idea of pop versus art was alien to us."

"Do you really think The Beatles were working class? Really? The Beatles were not working class. The Rolling Stones…. Sit down and make a list."

The Feelies / Died Pretty

ULU, London

Melody Maker, November 29 1986

The Feelies

The Good Earth

Melody Maker, September 27 1986

And the answer is.... no.

Until today, in fact. 

Crazy Rhythms, I like rather more. But it's a pretty pared-down pleasure. 

The self-effacing austerity of this kind of thing - its un-Iggyness - is why I never really got with the college rock program. 

Songs from Crazy Rhythms are used well in this cool cult film Smithereens though

In particular, the tentative, slowly-accelerating intro instrumental part of "Loveless Love" becomes a recurring mood-setting leitmotif of the whole picture

Heard in this context, I'm Feelies-ing it more and more... 

that's some folk-memory persistence

some contiNUUMity

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Ooh a UKG refix of what on some days is my absolute favoritest jungle tune of all-est time. 

This looks to have been not made during the height of speed garage but much later... 

It is admittedly not great but...  

It's the thought that counts!

Let's hear the original

I mean, how could tunes this glorious this not birth an ongoing and sustained cultural movement, I ask you! 

No wonder subsequent phase-stages felt compelled to honor and reactivate

Interesting piece at Split Infinities on a band that is getting talked about at the moment but written before all the are-they-or-aren't-they buzz 

"Amid the mid-morning lull between morning cartoons and the much preferable after-school block, sick-at-home American schoolchildren of the late 20th century had one reliable standby to keep them company while their parents were at work: PBS, the United States' Public Broadcasting Service. For us in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, in the shadow of Bethlehem Steel, PBS was broadcast on channel eight—and the amber glow of an uprighted infinity symbol on the Zenith signaled the opening of a narrow passage: a reprieve from illness, from the cacophony of regular TV, and from the low static of domestic anxiety. What would become a personal, if not a faintly secretive, convalescent ritual, I would later discover was an experience quietly shared by many of us.

For those of us abandoned to our sick beds, afternoon hours spent with the dial locked on PBS piled up: Sesame Street.... Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, The Electric Company, Vegetable Soup, 3-2-1 Contact, Reading Rainbow, stodgy imported BBC programming, reheated documentary series from the early 70s like Civilisation (1969) and The Ascent of Man (1973), campy prepubescent passion plays fit for school assemblies, and avant-garde short films repurposed as children's entertainment. Among the latter, none better exemplifies the category than "Geometry of Circles" (1979)—animator Cathryn Aison's hypnotic series of shifting, rainbow-colored geometric forms set to a pulsing minimalist score by Philip Glass, originally commissioned for Sesame Street as a vehicle for teaching spatial logic." 

"... The atmosphere of PBS's 70s and 80s heyday had its material correlate in corduroy's contemporaneous rise. Worn soft with use and democratic in appeal—cutting across class, age, and social register without representing any of them—corduroy was the fabric of the reading rug, of fort building, puddle stomping, and world exploring. PBS offered a similarly unglamorous intimacy, an experience that sat close to the skin"

If the concept of "PBS Unconscious" doesn't clue you in then maybe these pix will 

So a mere 80 years after it was first published there is finally a movie version of Enid Blyton's The Magic Faraway Tree - the favourite book of my childhood. Having got too much to say about the film at this stage, I enjoyed its quite rightly modernised take and it certainly renders a very good tree. But does it fully explore the anarchist/communist tension of the  Land of Do-as-you-Please vs  the Land of Take-What-You-Want?! Luckily for you (!) I wrote 5000 words on the Enchanted Wood series of books  as part of a 'children's literature and cultural diversity' module at Goldsmiths a few years ago, exploring among things its counter cultural influence and its utopian dimensions. This is the slightly edited text from 2013.

Enid Blyton was the best selling British children's author of the 20th century and nearly 50 years after her death remains in the top twenty most-borrowed children's authors in British libraries (British Library, 2013). Nevertheless, her reputation has been controversial, with her work frequently criticised for its perceived lack of literary quality and later for its archaic treatment of class, gender and race (discussed in Ray, 1982, and Rudd, 2000).

This essay focuses on a series of Blyton's fantasy novels known as the  'Enchanted Wood' or 'Faraway Tree' trilogy. Having established their popularity and influence, I will draw upon critical literature on fairy tales and children's fantasy literature to explore whether these works can be dismissed as vehicles for socialising children into the dominant ideology or whether they provide scope for more utopian readings. 

In the course of a writing career spanning almost fifty years, Blyton (1897-1968) covered most of the genres of children's literature, including detective stories, holiday adventures and school stories. In an overview of Blyton's work, Ray (1982) identifies another thread as being her 'Fantasy World' stories, starting with 'Adventures of the Wishing Chair' in 1937, in which two children travel to magical lands via a special chair. This was followed by the trilogy of 'The Enchanted Wood' (Blyton, 1939), 'The Magic Faraway Tree' (Blyton, 1943) and 'The Folk of the Faraway Tree' (Blyton, 1946).

In the 'Enchanted Wood' trilogy, a group of children who have recently moved from the city to the countryside discover a mysterious wood at the centre of which is 'the oldest and most magic tree in the world' (Blyton, 1939, p.16). This 'Magic Faraway Tree' is populated by various fairy tale-like characters and is the gateway to different lands which can be accessed from its upper branches as they pass by like clouds. Journeying into these worlds, the children have numerous adventures accompanied by Moon-face (a benevolent magician who lives at the top of the tree), his fairy neighbour Silky and the cookware-clad Saucepan Man.  

The series does not tend to feature in the canon of children's fantasy literature conventionally taken to run from 'Alice in Wonderland' via the 'Chronicles of Narnia' on to Ursula K Le Guin's 'Earthsea' series and beyond. There is no mention of Blyton in Goldthwaite's 'The Natural History of Make-Believe' (1996) - a 'history of the world's imaginative literature for children' - or in Deborah O'Keefe's 'Readers in Wonderland:  the liberating worlds of fantasy fiction' (2004).

Conversely, the books tend to be somewhat overlooked in works which focus on the life and writings of Blyton. They are mentioned only in passing in Duncan McLaren's 'Looking for Enid' (2007) and Barbara Stoney's standard biography of the author (Stoney, 2006). David Rudd's 'Enid Blyton and the Mystery of Children's Literature' (2000), which seeks to positively reconsider Blyton's oeuvre, focuses primarily on the Famous Five, Noddy and Malory Towers books. 

Nevertheless the Enchanted Wood novels have remained in print continuously and have had an enduring impact on the memories and imaginations of generations of readers. In 2003 for instance, The Magic Faraway Tree was the only one of Blyton's books to feature in the UK Top 100 Best-Loved Books selected in the BBC's Big Read survey (BBC, 2004).  Recent spin-offs have included a 2000 audio book featuring the actress Kate Winslett, a 2004 animated TV series and a 2012 BBC radio adaption.  The books featured prominently in a major exhibition in 2013, 'Mystery, Magic and Midnight Feasts - The Many Adventures of Enid Blyton' held at Seven Stories: the National Centre for Children's Books. In the same year the national 'Storytelling Superstar' competition to mark World Book Day was won by somebody reading from 'The Folk of the Faraway Tree' (Bayne, 2013).

In his history of the fairy tale, Jack Zipes (2012. p.x) distinguishes between  the oral storytelling of anonymous folk tales passed down through generations, and 'literary fairy tales, which emanated from the oral traditions through the medium of manuscripts and print'  from the 16th century onwards.  These literary tales were rarely if ever straightforward renderings of oral folklore, but involved the reworking and adapting of traditional material by named authors for diverse purposes. The classic rewriting of older folk tales developed into a wider genre in which new stories were, and continue to be invented along similar lines featuring characters, tropes, and situations from older stories combined with additional elements.

Fairy tales were at the heart of Enid Blyton's early writing, including her own versions of classic stories such as Cinderella and the Sleeping Beauty in 'Fairy tales for the Little Ones' (1924) and new stories composed by Blyton herself in 'Enid Blyton's Book of Fairies' (1924). She wrote numerous fairy-themed and fantasy stories for the 'Sunny Stories' magazine that she edited, and in which 'The Enchanted Wood' was first serialised in 1938.

Notwithstanding Rudd's characterisation of Blyton's style as closer to oral storytelling than the literary tradition (Rudd, 1997), the Faraway Tree novels can certainly be considered as literary fairy tales, as they are written texts within which Blyton blends folkloric and traditional fairy tale elements with the products of her own imagination to create new stories.  In a manner which Hunt  (2000) characterises as Blyton's 'pot pourri' approach and  Rudd (2008, p.263) interprets more generously as her 'diffuse and extended' intertextuality, we find traditional supernatural creatures such as fairies, gnomes and pixies; animal helpers and magical tools; and nursery rhyme characters such as the Old Woman who Lived in a Shoe. Perhaps most striking is the Faraway Tree itself - with its roots in the earth and its branches in the sky it recalls 'Yggdrasil, the norse World Tree', perhaps derived from Blyton's childhood love of Norse mythology (Ray 1982, p.141). The novels also feature episodes and characters familiar from other literary fairy tales. For example McLaren (2007, p.274-277) suggests that the malevolent goblins in the stories may have been inspired by the book that Blyton declared was her favourite as a child - George MacDonald's 'The Princess and the Goblin'.  

For Zipes (2012), literary fairy tales are used 'either to bring about conformity or to question conformity to the dominant civilizing process of a society' (xi); they may 'reconcile us to our social conventions and religious beliefs' or 'project alternatives to the status quo' (xii).  Zipes argues that many of the classic literary fairy tales written by the likes of the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault and Hans Christian Anderson 'function as part of the bourgeois socialization process'  (p.69) and 'reinforce dominant religious and patriarchal attitudes about gender, mating, law and order' (p.xi). On the other hand he identifies a body of 'provocative counter-cultural fairy tales' from the likes of Oscar Wilde, George MacDonald and L.Frank Baum which criticise social mores and aim at 'inverting and subverting the world with hope' (p.103). Alison Lurie (1990, pp.x-xi)  likewise celebrates what she terms 'subversive works of children's literature', loosely defined as texts that 'mock current assumptions and express the imaginative, unconventional, non-commercial view of the world'.

Before moving on to consider where the Faraway Tree trilogy should be placed in relation to Zipes' socialisation/subversion dichotomy, I have to acknowledge that much of what follows is based on adult reader reactions to the texts, and of course I too am approaching the subject as an adult. In fact over the course of my life I have read the Faraway Tree trilogy from several different subject positions - as a child reader, when these were among my favourite books; as a parent reading these books to my own children; and now from an academic perspective. In practice it is difficult to disentangle childhood and parental memories, nostalgia and apparently theoretically grounded interpretations.  As Jacqueline Rose (1984, p.12) argues, part of what she terms 'the impossibility of children's fiction' is that childhood 'is never simply left behind' but 'persists as something which we endlessly rework in our attempt to build an image of our own history'.  In reflecting on how Blyton's work appeals to children, I recognise that I cannot avoid approaching the subject through the filter of my adult self with its own investment in my childhood and those of others.

Radical critics of Blyton from the 1970s onwards saw her work as situated firmly within the camp of reactionary socialization. Blyton was one of the main authors taken to task in Bob Dixon's 'Catching them young', which sought to critique racism, sexism and class bias in children's fiction.  For Dixon (1977b), 'What overwhelmingly pervades every aspect of Blyton's work… is the insistence on conformity to the most, narrow, establishment-type beliefs, practices and values' (p.68), the converse of which is 'a fear of what is different or unusual… a fear of anything that's new and threatens change' (p.79).

Dixon (1977a, p.100) finds evidence of 'gratuitous racism' in Blyton's Noddy books and elsewhere, with their golliwogs and their association of 'fear with black faces'. He also argues that Blyton's works feature 'culturally-conditioned "masculine" and "feminine" roles'' (1977b p.66) and the presentation of 'the middle-class English' as the 'assumed norm' (p.68-9). 

Dixon  mainly draws his examples from Blyton's Famous Five books. While it may be legitimate to criticise the author on the basis of this major series, it may also be true that not all texts in Blyton's huge body of work treat race, gender and class in exactly the same way. I would argue that Dixon's critique is not entirely accurate in relation to the Faraway Tree novels.

Firstly racism does not really feature in these stories, if only because the exotic otherness which Blyton and other authors of her time may have routinely projected on to 'foreigners' is supplied instead by supernatural and fairy tale creatures who do not seem to relate to any particular racial or national stereotypes.  

In terms of gender stereotypes, there is a clear gender-based division of labour in the children's household. 'Mother' looks after the house while the barely-mentioned Father goes out to some undefined job. As for the children, the very first paragraph of The Magic Faraway Tree tells us that 'The girls had to help their mother in the house, and Jo help his father in the garden' (Blyton, 1943, p.5).

Jo, the older brother of the siblings, tends to take the lead in the action and tell his sisters what to do. But the girl characters are hardly passive. They participate fully in most adventures, climbing the tree and sometimes initiating action. For instance, when Jo is taken prisoner by The Magic Snowman it is his sisters who come to his rescue, taking part in the giant snowball fight of the Battle of the Bears (Blyton, 1939, p.62).

We should also bear in mind that in writing stories in which girls and boys participated in adventures together, Blyton was amongst the authors breaking new ground in this period.  Ray (1982, p.18) observes that  'Before 1930, books about everyday life had tended to be about boys for boys or about girls for girls' whereas subsequently 'there was a definite trend towards writing books that would appeal to both boys and girls'.

If class snobbery is a feature of some of Blyton's fictional worlds, it is less so in the Enchanted Wood trilogy.  In the opening chapter of the series it is made clear that the children are from a relatively poor family whose 'Mother hoped there would be some one to give her washing to do, then she would make enough money to buy a few hens' (Blyton, 1939, p.8). While in other Blyton stories the main characters may sometimes seem to look down on children of a lower social class, in these stories it is the children themselves who are the subject of condescension. When their 'stuck up' cousin Connie comes to stay she looks down on them and their 'country' clothes (Blyton, 1946, Chapter One).

It is undoubtedly true that Blyton intended her work to put across a message about how she believed children should behave and to promote certain values. Blyton 'often builds the narrator into the text as an intrusive persona, by turns 'jolly' and insistently moralizing' (Hunt, 1994, p.38)  and there are many examples in these stories of  characters variously castigated as 'naughty' or 'spoilt', while unhappy outcomes sometimes 'serve them right'. 

In a 1949 article  Blyton wrote that she was 'not only out to tell stories' but to 'inculcate decent thinking, loyalty, honesty, kindliness, and all the things that children should be taught' (cited in Stoney, 2006, p.195). While Blyton may have believed these were solid 'British' values, they are relatively politically neutral. The Enchanted Wood novels lack the explicit appeals to Empire, Queen and Country found in the fiction of some of her contemporaries, a fact that may explain the global success of many of her books in translation. 

Moreover these 'decent' values do not always equate simply with 'narrow, establishment'  ideology (Dixon, 1977b, p.68). When basic fairness is violated for instance, Blyton sanctions her characters' disobedience and rebellion against authority. Unjustly incarcerated in 'Dame Slap's School' with its regime of arbitrary violence and impossible to answer questions, the children throw down their pencils in protest at the 'silly nonsense' and escape (Blyton, 1939, p.127).  

In any event, as Sarland (2005, p.46) notes, the notion that children's fiction simply 'constructs readers in specific ideological formations and thus enculturates them into the dominant discourse of capitalism' has been challenged by a greater emphasis on the different ways texts are actually read and interpreted, with readers 'not simply determined by what they read'.  Judging by the reminiscences of adult writers, the Faraway Tree series is certainly not recalled as a narrow, conformist morality tale. New Zealand poet Bill Manhire (2000, p.56), choosing 'The Magic Faraway Tree' as the special book of his childhood, argues that the author's  'imaginative power... makes the usual criticism of Enid Blyton - as stylist and moralist - irrelevant'. These stories were also amongst those children's writer Susan Hill (2009, p.24-5) had in mind when she wrote that 'Enid Blyton excited us, took us into worlds of mystery, magic, adventure and fun'.

V for Vendetta - Evie gets a bedtime story from the Magic Faraway Tree

Intriguingly the Faraway Tree stories have achieved a particular cachet in British alternative political and cultural milieus.  The Magic Faraway Tree is referenced in Alan Moore and David Lloyd's cult graphic novel 'V for Vendetta' for instance, a copy of the book being left as a gift by the anarchist main character who later refers in a speech to the Land of Do-as-you-Please and Land of Take-What-You-Want (Moore and Lloyd, 1990, p.195). Other examples include A Faraway Tree festival held in Suffolk in 2012 &13 and an Irish folk music collective, The Magickal Folk of the Faraway Tree (formed in 2002).

The novels also supplied imagery to the opponents of the Government's road building programme in the 1990s who established direct action protest camps.  A participant recalled that The Enchanted  Wood was  'One of the most  popular books at Skyward camp at Newbury…  At Fairmile in Devon, protesters referred to themselves as "Fairies." At the centre of the camp stood one large oak tree, complete with four tree houses,  which, for protesters, came to resemble the magic faraway tree' (Letcher, 2001,p.150).

With all this mind, I will now consider the extent to which the Faraway Tree books can be read as offering potentially utopian visions and to embody 'the liberating potential of the fantastic' that Jack Zipes (2012,p.168) identifies in some children's stories. 

At the heart of the Faraway Tree series is the possibility of escape from the everyday into other lands, some benign, some less so. Alternative dimensions directly accessible to children are a feature of popular fantasy literature, from the Narnia chronicles to the 'differing space of multiple worlds' (Cantrell, 2010, p.303) in Pulman's His Dark Materials. Typically, the portal into these worlds is something relatively mundane - a wardrobe (C.S. Lewis), a knife (Pulman) or in Blyton's case, a tree a short distance from the house. 

The Enchanted Wood is a liminal space, reached by crossing a boundary - leaping over a ditch - and in which the rules of the everyday world are partially suspended. But as Manhire (2000, p.56) suggests, its appeal is partially that 'Faraway is quite close by', with Blyton overriding 'our habitual distinctions between what is real and what is fantastic. If children can climb a ladder into other lands, the people of those lands can as easily descend to ours'. 

This proximity carries with it the dream of escape. In Jacqueline Wilson's novel Best Friends  (2004, p.74), the troubled narrator hides a letter 'between the pages of my best-ever book, The Enchanted Wood' and wishes that she 'could find the Enchanted Wood, climb up the Faraway Tree, and clamber up the ladder into the land above, and never ever come back' (p.74) [Wilson herself wrote 'The Magic Faraway Tree: a new adventure' in 2022]. Similarly, in her transgender memoir, Lo (2007, p.19) recalls a Singapore childhood reading Blyton on a balcony overlooking a forest: 'I imagined that Moon-face and the Saucepan man were tucked away somewhere in the trees. I longed to find the Faraway Tree whose branches pierced the sky'. 

If escapism is intrinsic to the pleasure of children's fantasy literature, it is 'not so much an escape from something as a liberation into something, into openness and possibility' (O'Keefe, 2003, p.11).  The Enchanted Wood is both a fantasy world of possibility in its own right, and a place from which the children can journey on to the other lands that pass by the top of the Faraway Tree.  Some of these lands could be described as dystopian spaces where children are potentially in peril, such as the The Land of Tempers or The Land of Dame Slap. But many more of them are places where children's wishes come true: there are Lands of Marvels, of Presents, Treats and Birthdays. 

To what extent can this assemblage of lands be termed utopian?  Bradford at al  (2007, p.2-3) have sketched out what they term as 'transformative utopianism' in children's literature, characterised as 'fictional imaginings of transformed world orders… which propose new social and political arrangements' but they also describe utopias more broadly as visions that  'imagine a better world than the one that readers/audiences currently know' (p.4)..  In his 'Utopia and Science Fiction' (1978) Raymond Williams likewise distinguishes between the 'systematic utopia' of new social structures and a looser 'heuristic utopia' in which 'the substance of new values and relations is projected, with comparatively little attention to institutions'.

In these stories, Blyton certainly does not propose a new political and social order as any kind of systematic/transformative utopia. In fact one feature of the Faraway Tree worlds is that it is not burdened by an over-arching cosmology or hierarchy. In some Lands there may be soldiers, policemen or wizards (easily befuddled by children where necessary), but it is unclear who, if anybody, is in charge in this parallel universe. In this respect, Blyton's work is akin to the children's literature of Victorian and Edwardian England which O'Keefe (2003, p.14) describes as featuring 'loosely organised worlds where characters wandered through episodic adventures'.

The utopian aspects of the Faraway Tree books are more 'heuristic', for while Blyton does not delineate new social structures she does invite the reader to dream. If nothing else the multiplicity of different lands implies that other worlds organised on a variety of principles are imaginable and indeed in some cases desirable.  As Fanny exclaims in The Magic Faraway Tree, it's 'so queer being awake and having dreams' (Blyton, 1943, p.76).

Blyton's utopian lands can be seen as part of a wider tradition of imagined worlds of abundance and license, perhaps best summed up in the names of two of the most vividly imagined lands at the top of the tree - The Land of Take-What-You- Want and The Land of Do-As-You-Please. In the former, as Moon-Face describes it, visitors can 'take whatever you want for yourselves without paying a penny' (Blyton, 1939, p.112), while in the latter the children are told 'Just think of all the things you want to do - you can do them all in the Land of Do-As-You-Please' (Blyton, 1943,  p.80).

This 'utopia of free consumption', to use Raymond Williams' term (1978) has echoes of Rabelais' 16th century fictional Abbey of Theleme with its one Rule of 'Do what thou wilt' and its abundance of fine food, clothes and other pleasures (Rabelais, 2006, p.367-373). Echoes too of the Medieval trope of Cockaigne as the land of plenty,  'a realm of miraculous abundance' in a 'World Turned Upside Down' where food and drink of every kind are freely to be had (Minton, 1991, p.39).

Blyton was certainly well-read enough to have been familiar with these antecedents, but the fantasy of plenty is one that might be expected to spontaneously arise wherever people are hungry and in this respect the period in which the books were written is surely significant. The Enchanted Wood was first serialised in the late 1930s, towards the end of a period of high unemployment and economic depression. The second two books were written during and immediately after the Second World War, when food shortages and rationing were a feature of everyday life. Before setting off to the The-Land-of-Take-What-You-Want we are told that 'money was very scarce, and the children did not have as much to eat as they would have liked' (Blyton, 1939, p.35). For children living through the austerity of this period the abundance of food in these books must have been tantalising, but even in relatively more affluent times the fantasy of an instant gratification of bodily appetites has a strong appeal. The books are filled with feasting featuring both familiar and fantasy foodstuffs, such as exploding 'Toffee Shock' sweets,  'Pop Biscuits' and sherbet-filled 'Google Buns'.

Many children's stories seemingly offer this kind of wish fulfilment only to teach a lesson that children cannot always have what they want, and must learn to control their appetites. In his Freudian account 'The Uses of Enchantment' (1976), Bruno Bettelheim argues that teaching such lessons is precisely the function of fairy tales - children are taught to temper the Pleasure Principle with the Reality Principle. Hansel and Gretel for instance forces 'children to recognise the dangers of unrestrained oral greed', with their eating of the gingerbread house provoking the witch as 'personification of the destructive aspects of orality' (p.162).

Blyton however allows her child characters to have their cake and eat it too. While they get into some scrapes in the The-Land-of-Take-What-You-Want they are able to return home with the goat and chickens that their mother had wished for to supply them with eggs and milk. And no harm comes to Bessie in the Land of Birthdays when her wishes are granted with 'an enormous dish of strawberries' and 'jugs of all kinds of delicious drinks, and cakes and jellies and fruit' (Blyton, 1939, p.182).

We can see parallels between the centrality of food in The Faraway Tree and the ubiquity of 'banquet images - food, drink, swallowing' that Mikhail Bakhtin (1984, p. 278) identified in the work of Rabelais and more broadly in carnivalesque popular-festive culture. For Bakhtin, 'The feast means liberation' and 'is a temporary transfer to the utopian world' (p. 276).  Oittinen (2006, p. 86-7)  argues that  'carnivalism (folk culture) and children's culture have many... things in common' (p.86) and sees Blyton's focus on feasting as exemplifying a recognition of children's culture, intrinsic to which is the fact that  'tastes are part of the child's world of experience, part of his/her emotional life' (p.87).

Other aspects of the 'carnivalesque' also feature in Blyton's novels, perhaps helping to explain part of their appeal to children. The nonsense rhymes of the Saucepan Man and his humorous mishearing of other people's remarks  are 'comic verbal compositions' (Bakhtin, p.5) which play with language and laughter, and the adventures in many of the lands are essentially festive episodes of play and license where children can take-what-they-want/do-as-they-please  in a carnivalesque 'suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions' (Bakhtin, 1984,p.10).

Fred Inglis (1997, p.131) remarks that Blyton's work often features 'a harmony of free, mutual life' and we can identify this as a further utopian element in these texts. There is a harmonious relationship between humans and nature, with the children encountering various animal helpers, such as the rabbits that join the fight to save the faraway tree from destruction (Blyton, 1946, p.157). These relationships are an extension of those that exist between the children, who despite occasional bickering look after each other in unfamiliar situations away from adult supervision, and between the inhabitants of the Faraway Tree. The latter, including Moon-face, Silky the fairy, the Saucepan Man,  the Angry Pixie and Dame Washalot, form a kind of alternative non-familial household of relative equals. 

Writing about Blyton's beloved 'Princess and the Goblin' by George MacDonald, Zipes (2012, p.111) notes that 'There is never one hero, rather there are always male and female protagonists, who learn to follow their deep inclinations, respect each other's needs and talents, and share each other's visions'. Much the same could be said of Blyton's approach of having a group of friends and/or siblings as a kind of collective hero in these and many of her books, providing too multiple points of potential identification for child readers of different ages and genders.

One of the 'regressive' aspects that Zipes (2012, p.176) identifies in classical fairy tales is that the 'happy end' is usually dependent upon 'arbitrary authority (generally in the form of monarchs or monarchs in the making)' whose 'Raw power is used to right wrongs'.  Blyton departs from this convention - when the future of the Faraway Tree is threatened by Trolls mining for jewels at its roots, it is the children and their animal and tree-dwelling friends who defeat them and save the tree without any recourse to external powers (Blyton, 1946, pp.138-157).

The woodland setting for such imaginings has a long history in English culture, including in the work of Shakespeare who sets his suspension of social norms in comedies such as 'As You Like It' and 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' in  enchanted forests of his own. Northrop Frye's influential interpretation of this as the 'drama of the Green World' can also be applied to Blyton's  Enchanted Wood, an 'ideal world of innocence and romance' away from the confines of 'the normal world' which is also linked 'to the dream world that we create out of own desires' (Frye, 1957, p.182-3). If in Shakespearean comedy the desires unblocked in the Green World are sexual ones, Blyton attends to the desires of young children - for endless treats, fairground rides, sweets and presents. 

In fairy and fantasy stories there is typically a tension between what Tolkien (2006) termed the 'primary' world of the everyday and the imagined 'secondary world' of adventure and mystery which the characters slip into.  The latter can be a frightening place, but Blyton always manages this tension in a way that ultimately reassures her young readers. 

Within the various Lands the children visit, the main dangers are those faced by children everywhere - separation (as the Lands move on) and the unpredictable outbursts and occasional violence of beings larger than themselves. There is little sense of danger to life itself, and the supernatural creatures encountered tends to be mostly benign (brownies and elves), mischievous or disruptive (the 'red goblins') rather than terrifying or evil.  Blyton's fairies are of the whimsical kind criticised by the folklorist Katherine Briggs (1967), who noted the gradual diminution of literary fairies from the 19th century compared with their fearsome traditional counterparts. 

To use one of Blyton's own chapter headings in The Magic Faraway Tree, it is always the case that 'Everything Comes Right'. However wild the adventures, there is always the comforting order of home where there is nothing more to worry about than helping out with chores - in the eternal holiday of these books, even school is never mentioned. As with many of the best children's fantasy books 'readers immerse themselves in the journey of characters… in doing so, they experience the same movement away from and back to daily life, and the same exciting interval in between, in a brave new place' (O'Keefe, p.33)

When Jack Zipes  writes about subversive/counter-cultural children's literary fairy tales, the examples he gives are from writers who have 'expressly tried to make their tales more emancipatory and critical' (2012,p.170). As I have argued above there is ample material in the Faraway Tree books to enable utopian readings, but this does not mean that the author had any deliberate subversive intent. Blyton seems to have been commercially ambitious (and of course successful) and to have held fairly conservative views on matters such as Royalty, capital punishment and the family (Stoney, 2006).  There was though at least one area where Blyton does seems to have had a broadly progressive intent - in relation to child development and the natural world.

Enid Blyton completed a National Froebel Union kindergarten teaching course in 1918 and long before she became a children's novelist had achieved national recognition for her columns in 'Teachers World' magazine and other education writings. Frederick Froebel's 'belief in the importance of understanding nature' and learning 'through spending time in gardens and forest' (Bruce, 2012, p.15) clearly influenced Blyton who designed nature lessons with the aim of arousing in the child 'something that will stay with him and delight him all his life - a lasting love for Nature with its many beauties and wonders' (Blyton cited in Cadogan, 1997, p.105). The wonder at the natural world certainly shines through in the Faraway Tree books.

Beyond this, a Froebelian influence can perhaps be discerned in Blyton's child-centred approach to writing. Blyton famously listened to children's feedback about her stories, and took inspiration for her work from her observations of and interactions with children. (Stoney, 2006). This market research may have been sound business sense, but it also reflected a belief that children were worth paying attention to. As Blyton wrote in an early Teachers World column, 'A child's mind is wonderful in its simplicity, directness and sensitiveness' and 'as Froebel knew, a child is always seeking to express himself' (Blyton, 1923, cited in Stoney, 2006, p.186).

It would be oversimplifying matters to say that this perspective enabled Blyton to directly address children in a manner unmediated by ideology, in particular the social constructions of childhood prevalent at the time. As Nodelman (2008, p.5) observes, since adults usually buy children's books, the writer must make judgments based 'not on what they believe will appeal to children but rather on what they believe adult consumers believe they know will appeal to children'. However it is clear that for the most part Blyton's implied reader is the child not the parent.  She 'writes uncompromisingly for a single audience, not winking over the children's heads at other adults for approbation' (Hunt, 2000, p.38).  In doing so, Blyton sometimes breaks the rule 'which demands that the narrator be adult or child, one or the other' (Rose ,1984, p.69). While generally she takes the narrative position of an adult, at times she appears to slip into sharing a child's language and view of the world.  Blyton was criticised in this respect for 'her irrationality as a child' (Walter Hildick, cited in Rose, p.69), but this narrative device was perhaps a deliberate strategy to involve the child reader in a literary simulation of a peer-to-peer conversation.  The final line of the trilogy is a striking example of this. After Connie wishes that she could live by the Wood and 'go up the Faraway Tree whenever you like' the narrator concludes: 'So do I, don't you?' (Blyton, 1946, p.185).

Enid Blyton's Faraway Tree novels do not fit neatly into a typology which neatly divides children's literary fairy stories  into either conformist morality tales or subversive utopias. Blyton has a clear agenda of promoting children's behaviours she approved of, and the novels reflect then-contemporary values in regard to gender even if the racist and class-biased attitudes critics have identified in some of her works are largely absent in these.  On the other hand, she grants her child characters agency to act autonomously in utopian settings of companionship, abundance and freedom.  While Blyton may not have had a subversive intent, if latter day eco-protestors, graphic novelists and others of a radical persuasion can draw positively on their childhood memories of these books it is not as a result of a wilful misreading of the texts.  Blyton's early Froebelian training and personal inclination led her to positively promote wonder at nature and to be attentive to children's culture with its carnivalesque fantasies, and these found full expression in the worlds of the Faraway Tree.

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In honour of the new RHCP doc, which is focused on Hillel Slovak, their tragically-died-young guitarist, and in further honour of Flea's jazz album, here are some writhings about the band. 

Whose second album Freaky Styley I bought with faint hope after reading about them (slim pickings that year) only to be insufficiently whelmed. 

They were apparently huge postpunk fans (something shown by the footage in the doc of their precursor bands, who are very Anglophile). 

Green Gartside told me that at some music biz award ceremony, they came up to him burbling about the early Scritti stuff (I imagine what turned them on were the funky-slinky "PAs' and the other 4 A-Sides tunes rather than "OPEC-Immac).... 

Keith Levene claimed that Flea auditioned to be in PiL after he, Levene, left, and was most disappointed that Levene was no longer in the band, since that was the prime reason he wanted to join.... and he did in fact contribute to Keith Levene's Violent Opposition, if I recall right ...  

And obviously they got Andy Gill to produce their debut. 

Which I have never thought to listen to until seeing this doc. 

Although more voluminous than I remembered, the below are not the complete collation of my writhings about Red Hot Chilli Peppers.... on some other occasion, I did opine that the wordless vocalese in the middle of "Under the Bridge" were the most unpleasant recorded sounds emitted by a human throat in the entire 1990s. 

I will say, Flea does seem like a a truly sweet geezer.  But yeah... if the group did start with postpunk,  you would have to say that not every pathway from a golden origin is a fruitful one.

The Red Hot Chilli Peppers

The Clarendon, Hammersmith, London

Melody Maker, March 5 1988

So the Clarendon faces closure, and yes it's a sad day for rock, another step in the drawn-out death of the London gig circuit, and where will the Buttholes and Bad Brains of this world play - but, here, tonight, sauna-sweltering in this rank sty of Grebo flesh, this post-punk meets pre-punk sewer, such a closure can only feel like an elementary and overdue sanitary measure.

This is The Red Hot Chilli Peppers' constituency, for sure. The Red Hot Chilli Peppers read like a good idea: an alliance of funk and metal, the best of both worlds, a doubling of pleasures (what drug experts call "potentiation"). But then look what happens when you mix funk and jazz - separately two of the finest things in life. Each undermines the other, mutes and dampens their respective effects.

The problem for the Chilli Peppers is that funk and metal are further away than ever, much further than in the age of funkadelia they hark back to. Metal has become monolithic, no longer beastly but cruelly hygienic, the proverbial sonic abattoir. And funk - who plays funk, these days? Modern black dance is assembled in the studio. This Organic Anti-Beatbox Band inevitably comes over a little dated.

The giveaway is their overbearing penchant for ye olde slap-bass. Once, around 1981, the sound of slap-bass was for me and all the other white-dopes-on-funk the very definition of ecstasy. Now slap-bass strikes me as lost, Claptonesque craft that should be allowed to slip quietly into disuse. After all, few black musicians play in that style anymore...

The Red Hot Chilli Peppers come across as a kind of National Lampoon's Gang Of Four. Body paint making them look like fluorescent salamanders, they have that generic hardcore look, neanderthal features combined with Bullworker-bodies, and they see their lame buffoonery as a major service to us and to the world. Like so many of these "wackeee" US bands, they combine sexism with a fervent loathing for racism. (All of them seem to have written at least one song about the genocide of the Red Indians.)

At their best, they're like a lumpen, sub-virtuoso approximation of Hendrix, funk fluency combined with rock's serrated edges. At their worst, they're like late Zappa, or a yob version of Firehose. This "funk" is too clenched, too trammeled by hardcore dynamics to approach maggot-brain diuretic gross-out.

There are some fab moments, like the great nervous tic of a chorus in 'Me And My Friends', rising up to buffet you in the face like surf. And the forthcoming LP is extremely fine*. Live, though, The Red Hot Chilli Peppers are too curvaceous and wriggly to be speed-metal, but too hasty and hamfisted to shimmy and wiggle like funk. They are neither carnal nor apocalyptic, neither swagger nor hurtle. It feels forced, albeit at times almost interestingly wrong.

* Is it though? Was it, though? 

"And yet here we are, lurching toward a new version of a familiar catastrophe, suffering from some national form of neurotic repetition compulsion. "This is like the horrible, lame-dad cover band version of the worst of American foreign policy," said Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy."

Reading Charlie Warzel's piece at  The Atlantic about "monitoring the situation" - and specifically about a website that turns your screen into a situation room, with multiple ever-changing data feeds on the war and its economic repercussions  - I thought of two prophetic bits of writing:

Baudrillard, in "The Ecstasy of Communication", 1982,  on how the modern domestic space is effectively a kind of orbital satellite plugged into telematic streams of data:

Bravo, and Jean B probably could have - should have? - retired after writing this essay, everything that later came is just embellishment.

But even more amazingly prophetic is this short story by Borges from 1949, "The Aleph"

"I picture him in his study, as though in the watchtower of a great city, surrounded by telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, the latest in radio-telephone and motion-picture and magic-lantern equipment, and glossaries and calendars and timetables and bulletins… This twentieth century of ours had upended the fable of Muhammad and the mountain--mountains nowadays did in fact come to the modern Muhammad"

"The Aleph" culminates in the character's access to an experience of absolute data-saturation and overwhelming omniscience, what another initiate describes as "the only place on earth where all places are — seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending." 

Today's plugged-in consciousness seems to be trending towards a paradoxical state that fuses total anxiety and total boredom - instability and inertia.. 

You might wonder, as Warzel does in his own very-well-worth reading piece, if it is deliberately designed to paralyse - the besieged attention just gives up... the phrase he uses is "attentional death". 

Indeed it's a kind of saturation bombing in itself.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The Warzel piece is titled: One Situation After Another

The dek goes as follows: Doomscrolling is over. Now, everyone is "monitoring the situation."

The piece starts: 

"From the comfort of my desk, I can see it all. A series of webcam feeds show me the sun setting over Tel Aviv and southern Lebanon. A map of the world, flecked with red dots, indicates that most of Europe and the Middle East are on "high alert." I toggle a button on the map's control panel, and the globe is instantly latticed with the locations of undersea fiber-optic cables. Below the map, a live feed of Bloomberg TV is running with the chyron Oil Extends Rout on Stockpile Talks. I scroll down and am greeted by walls of headlines, grouped into categories such as "World News" and "Intel Feed." A "country instability" meter clocks Iran at 100 percent, while a different widget informs me that the world's "strategic risk overview" remains "stable" at 50, whatever that means.

"I am looking at World Monitor, a website that turns any browser into a makeshift situation room, and I love it. Built to look like a cross between a Bloomberg terminal and a big screen at U.S. Strategic Command, the site aims to display as much information about world events as possible in an assortment of real-time feeds. This is information overload presented as intelligence.

"World Monitor was built over a single weekend in January by Elie Habib, an engineer based in the United Arab Emirates whose day job is as CEO of Anghami, one of the Middle East's largest music-streaming services. "I wanted to extract the signal from the noise," he told me recently. But what he really built, by his own admission, is a noise machine. Right now, the site pulls in more than 100 different streams of data, including stock prices, prediction markets, satellite movements, weather alerts, major-airport flight data, fire outbreaks, and the operational status of cloud services such as Cloudflare and AWS. The information is all real, but what exactly a person ought to do with it is unclear."

Warzel writes about the swarm of memes about World Monitor and the phrase "monitoring the situation":

"Ours is a culture that has developed an insatiable need for instant information on all things at all times. Of course, we all live in saturated information environments, powered by constant connectivity and on-demand-answer services—Google, Wikipedia, chatbots. But I've also come to see all of this as a defense mechanism in an era of real chaos, when overlapping crises and technologies make the world feel unknowable and hyperreal.

"The abiding feeling of 2026 is that too many consequential things are happening too fast for most people to follow, let alone understand....  Monitoring is a reasonable response to all of this: It seems to offer a sense of agency....  

Paradoxically, though - 

"The effect is not necessarily that you feel more informed; if you're anything like me, you probably feel alienated, if not worse. Those who have chosen to try to keep up with the news cycle in 2026 are awareing themselves to death, as the writer Geoff George put it.

"The situation brings to mind yet another grotesque online phenomenon: "gooning." For the blessedly unaware, gooning is when maladjusted young men consume immense, overstimulating amounts of pornography and masturbate for hours on end to reach some kind of transcendent release.... 

The pay-off

"Total bombardment is partly a surrender to the internet and its logic and algorithms—a kind of attentional death in which a person is no longer overwhelmed because they have given up. You could also see it as an attempt to hold their footing as the zone floods with shit. Because everything is happening too much, too fast. More.

There is a cost to all of this—a flattening of every event, feeling, and piece of art, commerce, joy, and suffering into the same atomic unit of attention, all of them easily replaced by what comes next. The worst, most shameless people in the world already understand this and use that cold logic to their advantage. You do not need to justify a war if you believe that, ultimately, people will lose interest in it and move on to the next outrage.

I have suggested in the past that our information ecosystem is broken. But I now suspect that's wrong: This is how it is meant to work. These online products sustain themselves by making us dependent on the content that makes us feel powerless and miserable. Where does this all lead? To further exploitation? To some kind of informational oblivion? Or will there be a breaking point, a moment when the addled masses reject the logic and speed of our information environment? I can't say—but I'm monitoring the situation."

Or as Baudrillard himself climaxes: 

In Baudrillard's schema, the stage (scene of drama, passion, selfhood) is opposed to the screen (which is ob-scene, a cold space of infinite loss, infinite contamination) 

Perhaps then the metaphors that I track at the other place, obsessively, to do with political theater.... our punditocracy's endless tropes of anti-theatricality (showbiz, spectacle, TV reruns, etc)... these are in fact out of date...   they don't really have a purchase on reality, which is now reels-ality (if you'll forgive me). 

Reality - politics, war, deportation enforcement, etc - is just feed for the reels, the demonic engine of attention-enthrallment and remorseless erosion of the capacity for linear-thinking  

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Borges on his protagonist's encounter with the Aleph itself:

How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass? Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols: to signify the godhead, one Persian speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds; Alanus de Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere; Ezekiel, of a four-faced angel who at one and the same time moves east and west, north and south. (Not in vain do I recall these inconceivable analogies; they bear some relation to the Aleph.) Perhaps the gods might grant me a similar metaphor, but then this account would become contaminated by literature, by fiction. Really, what I want to do is impossible, for any listing of an endless series is doomed to be infinitesimal. In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency...

On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny — Philemon Holland's — and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon - the unimaginable universe.

I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity.

Out on the street, going down the stairways inside Constitution Station, riding the subway, every one of the faces seemed familiar to me. I was afraid that not a single thing on earth would ever again surprise me; I was afraid I would never again be free of all I had seen. Happily, after a few sleepless nights, I was visited once more by oblivion.

Everyone knows about Moving Shadow coming from Stevenage

But I hadn't realized that Ruff Kut! Records was from there

As in The Good 2Bad & Hugly 

Like The Criminal Minds, the ruff-cut origins are in Britrap

Those are all from Ruff Kut!'s debut release from 1991, which wasn't a single but an album - a sort of scene sampler, mixing MC tracks, street soul, fast breakbeat instrumentals that aren't quite jungle yet, and some bleepy acid-y tunes

On Discogs it says the LP came out of a youth project - "thanks to Prince of Wales Trust"!

Now I think about it - actually I did know Ruff Kut! was from Stevenage. Because that's the label that put out Gappa G and Hyper Hypa's "The Information Centre" - and I discovered not so long ago that GG and HH played on a Hertfordshire pirate, Perception FM, whose existence I couldn't have imagined back in the day (on visits to my hometown to see the family,  it would never occurred to me turn on the radio).  But then again Stevenage was an London overflow town, like Hemel and Hatfield - and in that sense a kind of outpost of nuum demographics. In fact it was the U.K.'s very first New Town - albeit having existed in much smaller form for centuries before it. 

However I hadn't realized that Good 2 Bad Hugly was the main driving force behind the label

At a certain point Good 2Bad Hugly reactivated and has been churning out nu-jungle releases including New Town Sound Boy, Vol. 1. 

That record features the track "Never Give In"

https://good2badandhugly.bandcamp.com/track/never-give-in

on which the man behind the alias - Jimmy  Ryan -  muses on what jungle meant to him back in the day... 

Also powerful is "Brush Dem Off" 

Never give in, never give up, indeed - still hurling out EPs, with New Town Sound Boy, Vol 3 out  just this January 

There's also been a bunch of reissues, including Ruff Kut Reissue, Vol. 3, whose cover shows a famous pair of modernist landmarks in Stevenage - the Joyride statue and Clock Tower in the town centre. 

There's some similar but not quite as impressive statues in the New Hemel bit of Hemel Hempstead as it happens

Previous posts on the Hertscore Continuum

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Back in the day

G2BH did a track called "Wuthering Heights', sampling you-guessed-it the twittertastic vocals of Home Counties girl Katy B

Well in recent years G2BH went back to the Bush source for "Running Up The Road"

Enjoy this forensic analysis by Michaelangelo Matos of a classic pirate radio set. 

Presented yesterday at the EMP conference, it's titled "We Can Be Free": The Pirate Radio Explosion of Ezee D on Don FM (February 20, 1993) and can be enjoyed in script form at MM's Beat Connection Substack.

Enjoy also the set itself at Soundcloud 

I once gave a talk titled "Just 4 U London" at EMP, back when it took place in Seattle every year - I can't remember if I played any pirate radio snippets, though.... 

Picking up on the "mean review" thing, as with the Tin Machine II beat-down...  it struck me that music journalism is much closer to real-life fan (or anti-fan) chat than it is to literary criticism or other forms of arts reviewing.  (Not that these are completely devoid of no-holds-barred, personally insulting take-downs). 

But rock writing is closer to vernacular shit-shooting of the kind that goes on in pubs, living rooms,  bedrooms, or any place where friends gather and talk about the things they are mutually into. And this kind of discourse - whether it's about music, or sports, or movies - is not particularly fair-minded. It's prone to overstatement and it rather often strays into ad hominem abuse. 

Think about the way you discuss performances and performers with your pals, or your partner, or in the family situation.  The commentary is not measured or fair-minded - precisely because you are looking to extract amusement out of the subject.  

This kind of talk has drifted into the public sphere with internet forums, social media, etc. 

But rather than point to any of the millions of forum threads and tweets out there, my evidence for this is a subgenre of music journalism: the singles review column done by a guest pop star or indie cult figure.  

It's amazing how bitchy and dismissive the comments can get. 

Sometimes they are written up and other times they are transcribed from a chat hosted by a journalist from the paper. Usually the magazine is Smash Hits or Record Mirror, although there was a period in the early 1980s when Melody Maker would get guests in to do the singles. Sounds had famous guests do it in the mid-1970s, including Eno. And back in the 1960s you might see George Harrison or Paul Macartney or Scott Walker doing the singles now and then. 

(For some reason, NME - at least after it stopped being a pop paper for teens - kept the singles review column as the preserve of the professional critic, with just one or two exceptions).

Amazing how nasty the musician-on-musician swipes can be. Surprising too, because after all these musicians surely knew that it was quite likely they'd run into some of the people they'd slagged-off  eventually, backstage at Top of the Pops, or at some record industry event. And people have long memories for bad reviews, let me tell you. 

Knowing how hard it is to make a record, the work that goes into writing and recording a song, you might imagine the musicians would be less dismissive... Is there any compunction, any allowances made? Not at all. And nor should there be.... any more than I should pull my punches when reviewing a book, given my inside knowledge of the amount of effort it takes to bring a book into existence. 

The critic - like the consumer - responds to the finished object, whether it's a meal at a restaurant or a movie on the screen. 

Here below are an enormous number of singles review columns done by musicians. I've frontloaded it with the bitchier examples. It's no surprise to see Morrissey appear multiple times here - although his warm feelings expressed for a Duran Duran single might widen your eyes.... Also unsurprising how caustic are the comments of Paddy Macaloon and the Prefabs and Green from Scritti, given how defined  and refined their aesthetics are, and how they've a way with words. 

Later on in this selection, it gets to be a bit more kindly and even-handed.  Strangely gentle are the verdicts of Kevin Rowland, who you'd reckon to be scathing and scowling. Ian Dury is not as prone to taking the piss as you'd expect.  

Sometimes the magazines seem to be scraping a bit with their guest reviewers. For instance there's an inordinate number of ones done by members of the Bluebells, and one by a Commotion rather than a Cole. 

The Eighties started out looking like they were going to be the Bowie Decade, both in its terms of his own full-spectrum dominance (album sales and tours, but also starring film roles like Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence and acclaimed Broadway roles like The Elephant Man) and his influence being legion. But by the mid-decade point, it all went very wrong: Tonight, the Live Aid "Dancing In the Street" video team-up with Jagger, the  preposterously overblown Glass Spider tour, Never Let Me Down, the flop Jim Henson movie Labyrinth.... Bowie later recalled being unhappy and directionless for much of the late Eighties, while his friend Julien Temple spoke of the singer's struggle with the "grueling nature of reinvention... the huge creative surge required to do that again and again. It takes its toll, psychically."

Bowie-ism itself has gone out of style, with a shift towards underground rock and anti-glamour. Bowie's antennae, sharp as ever, detect this. Although he has sometimes mocked the notion of himself as a chameleon - pointing out that the lizard changes colour to be inconspicuous, to not stand out from their surroundings: hardly Bowie's M/O or desire! -  "chameleonic" fits what he does when he forms Tin Machine. Influenced by alt-rock groups like Pixies and Sonic Youth, who'd been developing the template for what would later reach the mainstream as grunge, Bowie subsumes himself for the first time within the band format.  Tin Machine, at least in theory, is a democracy:  on the self-titled debut's front, Bowie appears as just one bloke among four equals. The album is recorded live, with no overdubs,  a raw blast of guitar, bass, drums and voice, that is intended - says guitarist Reeves Gabrels - as a two-finger gesture to all that dance crap on the radio. Tin Machine songs are "screaming at the world", adds Gabrels  - and note how the interviews pointedly involve the entire band, not just the star frontman. In another first, Bowie grows a beard - a sign of the coming times, anticipating the facial hair soon to be rife among alt-rock and grunge bands.

I seem to remember one of my colleagues getting the chance to interview Bowie for the first time off the back of that first Tin Machine album. Finally a chance to meet the hero of his youth!  And then, he told us  bitterly, he was ushered into the record company room and found Bowie flanked by the other three members of Tin Machine. His heart sank! He had dreamed of a tête-à-tête with the most fascinating man in all of rock. Instead, there was he was, sat on one side of  a conference table, Bowie deferentially letting his colleagues speak, Reeves Gabrels expatiating about guitar sounds... 

On the cover, not only is it not just Bowie's face on the front  - as it was with all his previous album covers - but he is the smallest and furthest back figure.  The suits and ties don't look very alt-rock admittedly.  But the Julien Temple megamix promo film above does show "audience members" jumping onstage and diving off again at one point, which does seem like an attempt to reposition DB with the young thing. Also struck by the fact that Tin Machine played Town and Country Club - i.e. the sort of venue the likes of Pixies and Loop would play - and much smaller than the kind of venue Bowie could command normally. 

I suppose the parallel work at that time to Tin Machine / Tin Machine II -  elders trying to get with the young thing - would be Achtung Baby.  After the debacle (not commercially but in terms of credibility as well as quality) that was Rattle and Hum, U2 had a major rethink and an aesthetic refueling / reorientation. And apparently what they listened to was things like The Young Gods and My Bloody Valentine  - i.e. the Maker canon.   

In fact, here is an Eno quote about the self-induced transvaluation U2 underwent:

"Buzzwords on this record were trashy, throwaway, dark, sexy, and industrial (all good) and earnest, polite, sweet, righteous, rockist and linear (all bad). It was good if a song took you on a journey or made you think your hifi was broken, bad if it reminded you of recording studios or U2. Sly Stone, T. Rex, Scott Walker, My Bloody Valentine, KMFDM, the Young Gods, Alan Vega, Al Green, and Insekt were all in favour. And Berlin ... became a conceptual backdrop for the record. The Berlin of the Thirties—decadent, sexual and dark—resonating against the Berlin of the Nineties—reborn, chaotic and optimistic ..."

Now, who the fuck were Insekt? I have always wondered that and have never thought to find out!

Also "rockist" as a no-no? You can't get more rockist - in the sense of exulting-in-guitar than MBV or The Young Gods (albeit in their case done through sampling punk and metal riffs)... Alan Vega is pure rock'n'roll: Elvis filtered thru Iggy..  T. Rex is the eternal spirit of rock'n'roll.,, 

But I get what Eno means - U2 were rejecting a certain kind of rockism prevalent in the compact-disc Eighties: that godawful Robbie Robertson album (that now I think about it he made with Daniel Lanois), the comeback of John Fogerty, Dire Straits's Brothers In Arms...  with Achtung, they were jettisoning all that rootsy, bluesy, Memphis-invoking bollocks that infused Rattle.

But U2 being much more rockers (and rockist) at core than Bowie ever was, on Achtung they managed to pull it off handsomely. 

I wonder if it was galling for DB to see U2 scoring hits and plaudits having done such a similar move to what he'd attempted on the two Tin Machines...

This lot had a Top 10 hit with a song that is basically about an intra-scene war - the nu garage rappists (Oxide + Neutrino, So Solid) versus the old guard. Represented here by the sour faced, jowly, paunching-out a bit deejays who get their comeuppance thanks to a G-Force rippling blast of noise. 

Portion of the lyric

The garage scene well it's really fucked up

Certain guys can't, won't keep their mouths shut

All they do is talk about we

Something about we're novelty cheesy

Smelling your top lip stop the jealousy

What, 'cos we didn't start from 1983

Oh, I was in my nappy

Did I mention we're only 18

Carnival '99 DJs put up a list telling other

DJs not to play this

But when I asked a certain DJ why

He gave me a shit of a reply

If I recall right, there was actually something - called maybe The Council - , that was formed or mooted to ensure that UKG was run correctly, in terms of media coverage, who got to represent the scene etc

An echo of the Committee (I believe that was the name) formed during jungle over the whole General Levy fracas...

Maybe the jungle era one was The Council, and the garage one was the Committee

Videos from this era of UKG (see also Truesteppers) have a cheap-and-nasty digi-quality (obviously age and wear have worsened it in this case, making it look really los-res - like an ancient 128kps mp3). Feels like it was clumsily processed to have a sub-Hype Williams gleam to it. Actually what it looks like is a Nathan Barley episode. 

Mark Fisher thought "Up Middle Finger" was the spirit of punk reincarnated as UKG.

Here is a piece he wrote for Hyperdub when it was a website rather than a label, under the name Mark De'Rosario

Hyperpulp: It's All the Rage 2001 

by Mark De'Rosario 

Oxide and Neutrino's Up Middle Finger is as important for 01 as the Pistols' Anarchy in the UK was in 76. Like Anarchy, Up Middle Finger is both a call to arms and an darkly exuberant gesture of joyful defiance. Alongside Ms. Dynamite's Booo! (an instant classic, surely the biggest tune in the last year), Up Middle Finger demonstrates that UK garage's efforts to ethnically cleanse the genre of all impure' elements has failed, big style. Everything exiled from the snooty, purocentric higher echelons of UK garage - jump-up ragga-chat, abstract numanoid electronix, frenzy-inducing MCing, deep darkcore bass, film samples, kiddiecore refrains - has returned to terminate its former masters. With extreme prejudice. 

Up Middle Finger captures a mood, a growing undercurrent of rage in the country about the discrepancy between the sunny vistas projected by managerialist PRopoganda and the webs of corrruption and incompetence that are lived everyday reality. Neutrino's fury will resonate with anyone who has the misfortune to have tangled with Style London's sad coterie of promoters, PR zombies and A and R people. But, more generally, his invective also speaks to and for anyone who has been blocked and patronized by the complacency and arrogance of all the bullet-pointed, empty-headed drones who officiate in the blurry liar lair of Blair's Britain. Neutrino brings back an edge, an aggression, that has been lacking for too long in a British culture that has seemed to pride itself on its tolerance of mediocrity. 

Whilst totally contemporary, Up Middle Finger (and the Execute album from which it hails) sound like a return to the vibe - if not exactly the sound - of jungle in its earliest, most fissile and molten phase, when the sonic contours of the new genre were first becoming audible. 

Effectively, O and N have rejected everything 'progressive' that's happened since then - they have rescinded the supposedly inevitable maturation process which proceeds from bolted-together, frankenstein-monster cyborgianism towards the smooth and seamless surfaces of the painstakingly simulated organically 'pure' sound that has enjoyed dominance lately. Listening to O and N, you're reminded of the cargo-culting, skip-scavenging exuberance of Rufige Kru, Tango and Ratty, even the early Prodigy. You're taken back to that vertiginously exciting moment, or series of moments, when rave's synthetic hyper-energy was swept up into the sorcerous vortex of timestretched breakbeats and hyperdub bass. 

Ms. Dynamite and O and N are being sold as 'garage', but as their interviews on this site show, they are themselves uneasy about the classification. The currents passing through them belong to ragga, rave and hip hop as much as to garage. Essentially, like early jungle, they are hyperpulp. Hyperpulp is a mode of hyperdub, but defined by a particular relation to mass culture; it is a cybernetic monster that feeds on pop culture and trans- [or de-] forms it into a blobby, seething multiplicity. 

Hyperpulp culture finds its model not in the club scene, with its cult of the DJ, but the Jamaican soundclash, with its ruff and rugged indifference to smooth mixing, and the pivotal role it accords to the MC. Oxide and Neutrino - the DJ and MC team - re-effectuate this abstract machine. For those schooled in a white European post-romantic tradition, MCing sounds like something supplemtary to the 'primary text' of the music itself. But in hyperpulp, there is of course no primary text, only an intense multiplexed libidinal experience, which includes and is intensified by the MC's chatting on the mic. The MC's melting of dominant english into the lyrical flow of patois sloganeering functions as an excitation-heightener for those who want to get hyper. 

Like NYC hip hop in its early days, Jamaican dancehall culture is fuelled by the antagonistic energy of competing crews. (It's no accident, of course, that Oxide and Neutrino are part of the So Solid posse.) Whilst the intense competition between collective groups is sometimes transected by hard war gangsta/ yardie territorialized violence, it is essentially a soft war - a gift exchange in which no-one loses, and the pressure to outdo the other crew produces a spiralling intensity of experience for da massive. 

Da massive is crucial in all hyperdub genres, but it is especially important in hyperpulp, which feeds on and amplifies hype-waves. Witness Oxide and Neutrino's sampling of 100,000 Scottish ravers on Up Middle Finger. The sheer size of the collective body is used as an audio-weapon targeted against the closed-system entropy of scenes which pride themselves on their disdain for popularity, as much as it is directed against the dismal tastefulness of overground popculture. O and D's use of samples of the Casualty TV theme and of dialogue Lock, Stock... are acts of audio-abduction or sonic viracy, in which existing mass cultural associations are radically deterritorialized and minoritized; the certainties of spectacular culture are de-faced, contaminated with traces of rogue semiotic virus. 

Where pop tends to interpellate the lone consumer, the solitary spectator, hyperpulp dissloves private subjectivity in the oceanic bassdrome of collective delirium. In overground capitalist popular culture, maturity is signalled by the move from impersonal collective pulp-out into privatized, facialized emotion. Goldie's career offers an exemplary map of this dreary trajectory. Beginning with Rufige Kru and Metalheadz, in which he anonymized/ pseudononymized himself into the collective while simulating the synthetic POV of the terminator and the replicant, he ends up sold as a 'solo' artist, hangs around with saddoes like Noel Gallagher, and devotes much of his last album to baring his soul. 

Soul and soulfulness are of course crucial terms for the anti-pulp purists. It's worth remembering here Foucault's remarks in Discipline and Punish on the production of the modern soul. The soul, Foucault tells us, does not precede modernity's disciplinary institutions: it is precisely constructed by schools, prisons, and factories, all of which act to extract an individual subject from the dangerous, teeming multiplicity of 'compact masses.' Baudrillard's arguments in Symbolic Exchange and Death take Foucault's position further. According to Baudrillard, the arrival of the immortal soul marks the imperialistic triumph of monotheism over primitive cultures, which transforms its swarming pantheon of warring entities into 'demons.' 

The tyrannical domination of Dance's SS - the Style and Soul gestapo - has kept the demons out, but they are everywhere in hyperpulp. (Even Goldie, never fully seduced by the soul paradigm, was still invoking Demons on Saturnz Return.) Hyperpulp trades in sonic fiction, and as such feeds upon pulp modes effectuated in other media, especially Horror and SF video. Video samples, once so conspicuous in jungle and speed garage, have been noticably absent in the re-musicalised, soul-dominated phase of garage. 

Over the years, there has been a remarkable consistency in the sonic textures of the various reactive, boracratic genres Style London has tried to foist on the rest of us. From rare groove through to acid jazz, from 'intelligent' drum and bass through to soulful garage, the same sonic traits are always evident : there's a preference for melody over rhythm, for 'real' instrumentation over the synthetic and the samploid, for personalised emotion over dehumanised abstraction. Naturally, these are reinforced by snooty social codes based on snobbery and exclusivity, which are diseminated by the scene's lapdogs in the depressingly hedonistic dance music media and in the style press - all of whom are dissed, hilariously, by Neutrino on Up Middle Finger. 

The so-called garage wars are nothing new, and in fact date back at least as far as the emergence of jungle. Jungle, don't forget, was so named as an insult. Devotees of the original US garage sound - that finessed-to-the-point-of-body-numbing-tedium 'lush' production identified most closely with that high priest of sonic bureaucrats, David Morales - decried the use of breakbeats, essentially for exactly the same reasons that Style London's current hipoisie are cussing Oxide and Neutrino - lack of purity. 

Purity is no more real in music than in ethnicity, and no more desirable. It is only ever a retrospective simulation, something hallucinated after the fact by a group of control freaks resentfully anxious about its fading status. Inevitably, purity has no positive features of its own, but is defined negatively, by what it excludes. What purocrats hate about hyperpulp is its ruffness, its refusal to close down into a well-formed aesthetic object. But this is precisely what is exciting about hyperpulp - its dubtractive removal of all that we thought we knew about identity, genre, about where sonicultures had come from and where they are going. Subtract identity, contaminate 'purity', and potential is produced. Now that Soul and Style are losing their grip on garage, something new can be heard emerging. 

Hyperpulp has come back to corrupt its illegitimate offspring. Celebrate its return. 

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Up Middle Finger Written by Oxide/Neutrino 

(Up middle finger I show dem) 

Didn't wanna back we

Now they beg friend

Up middle finger I show them

Back in the day, they didn't wanna know

They wanna dis bound 4 da reload

They wanna talk to Neutrino, no no no

They wanna dis so solid so, no no no

Didn't wanna back we

Now they beg friend

Up middle finger I show them

Back in the day, they didn't wanna know

They wanna dis bound 4 da reload

They wanna talk to Oxide no, no no no

They wanna dis so solid so, no no no

The garage scene well it's really fucked up

Certain guys can't, won't keep their mouths shut

All they do is talk about we

Something about we're novelty cheesy

Smelling your top lip stop the jealousy

What, 'cos we didn't start from 1983

Oh, I was in my nappy

Did I mention we're only 18

Carnival '99 DJs put up a list telling other

DJs not to play this

But when I asked a certain DJ why

He gave me a shit of a reply

Later a bitch said to me

We'll never make it with Casualty

Ha ha ha, he he he

Now the silly bitch wants to try and hire we

Didn't wanna back we

Now they beg friend

Up middle finger I show them

Back in the day, they didn't wanna know

They wanna dis bound 4 da reload

They wanna talk to Neutrino, no no no

They wanna dis so solid so, no no no

Didn't wanna back we

Now they beg friend

Up middle finger I show them

Back in the day, they didn't wanna know

They wanna dis bound 4 da reload

They wanna talk to Oxide no, no no no

They wanna dis so solid so, no no no

Certain guys can't face the fact of

What we've done

Sold over a quarter of a million Casualty went

Straight into No 1

And they still wanna cuss come on

Oh yeah about the Casualty theme

Well no one controls the scene

So you do what you want

And you do what like

And you do what you please

Yeah, guys want to cuss our tunes, say it's shit

Think other people don't like it

But boy we don't care

And we got something for you

This is DJ Oxide playing in front of about a hundred thousand people

Listen to this

When I say you say we say they say make some noise

When I say you say we say they say make some noise

When I say you say we say they say make some noise

When I say you say we say they say make some noise

Didn't wanna back we

Now they beg friend

Up middle finger I show them

Back in the day, they didn't wanna know

They wanna dis bound 4 da reload

They wanna talk to Neutrino, no no no

They wanna dis so solid so, no no no

Didn't wanna back we

Now they beg friend

Up middle finger I show them

Back in the day, they didn't wanna know

They wanna dis bound 4 da reload

They wanna talk to Oxide no, no no no

They wanna dis so solid so, no no no 

After presenting a recording from Salvatore Mercatante on our Bandcamp last year, I wanted to try and keep up this approach on the label by surfacing live sets from our artists wherever possible. I knew as soon as I was immersed in WNDFRM's live set last year, that it would make a great live release and would be enjoyed by anyone who picked up his WVLT release.

~

WNDFRM has long occupied a parallel lane, equal parts reductionist and tactile. His studio output, including his 2025 release on ASIP, WVLT, is often about what isn't there, carving space with restraint and a patient sense of pacing. But in this rare live recording from his appearance at Seattle's Nonseq series in late 2025, we're reminded how those same principles can hum with immediacy, weight, and physicality.

Tim's live set leans even deeper into the tactileness hinted at on WVLT. Over 37 minutes, WNDFRM builds a slow-motion tension through dub-damaged rhythms, brittle textures, and dissolving sequences. Familiar elements, saturated pads, clipped delay lines, off-grid percussion, surface and vanish without resolution. A gradual unravelling from a sound designer in his element.

A huge thanks to Steve Peters, Chloe Harris and the Nonsequitur community for the evening.

Available now as name your price on Bandcamp.

2025 is probably our first year without a proper ambient release, with this year's annual compilation reflecting how diverse our catalog has grown.

KILN and Monoparts presented music this year that pushed expectations, with KILN's music pretty much in a world of its own anyway, and Monoparts bringing a vocal-heavy trip-hop record to the lineup - two records that would stand on their own on any label, irrespective of genre classifications.

Christian Kleine's second Lost World volume spoke to our true IDM roots of past, and Mikkel Rev's Journey Beyond, to the future perhaps, with a subtle wink to Trance music running through our blood.

A new signing in WNDFRM presented a landscape of micro-rhythmic IDM, as did returning artist Salvatore Mercatante, through a live set that traversed a spectrum of bass-heavy atmospheres.

Tying this all together in one mix has become todos' annual challenge, and he would be the first to admit this one was his most challenging yet. While I would never force this concept on him, if it didn't work, todos has the permission to edit, layer, chop and re-work where he needs to, just like a live set. In turn, his magic becomes a completely new way to absorb the releases from our past year, and an enjoyable way to spot moments you missed.

Available on Bandcamp

Thank you to everyone who has supported the label and the artists included here this year.

todos - Continuous mix tracklist

01. Mikkel Rev - 'Fragile' (edit) / WNDFRM - 'WVLT 021' (edit) / Monoparts - 'Abandoned Woods' (edit) / KILN - 'Moon Ratchet' (edit)
02. KILN - 'Ptarmigan'
03. KILN - 'Moon Ratchet' / Christian Kleine - 'Beyond Repair' (edit)
04. Mikkel Rev - 'Transmit' (edit) / KILN - 'Solarsystem Breathing'
05. Christian Kleine - 'Slow' / KILN - 'Cadmium Lounge' (edit)
06. Salvatore Mercatante - Extract from 'Live at Public Records'
07. Mikkel Rev - 'LM8182'
08. Monoparts - 'Abandoned Woods'
09. WNDFRM - 'WVLT 021' / Salvatore Mercatante - Extract from 'Live at Public Records' (edit)
10. Christian Kleine - 'Closer'
11. Monoparts - 'Abandoned Woods' (ASC Remix)

As with all my previous 'Reflection' year-end mixes, I begin with a collection of albums, EPs, and compilations that resonated with me over the past year. From there, I curate tracks to build the mix - a process that's as much about omission as inclusion. Inevitably, many of my favorite tracks and albums don't make the final cut, simply because they don't fit the flow of the mix or get lost along the way. There are plenty of albums I played on repeat that aren't included here, but I enjoy this process much more than creating lists.

As I remind myself each year, this isn't meant to be a definitive "best-of" list. Instead, it's a snapshot of some of my favorite music from the year, distilled into one cohesive and listenable format. Compiling these mixes under self-imposed restrictions is my way of revisiting and celebrating the music I've loved critically, while sharing it with you in a way that's both meaningful and accessible. For me, listening back to these mixes is like flipping through an audio photograph, capturing the essence of my year in music and invoking memories from special moments.

I encourage you to use this mix as a jumping-off point—dive into each artist, explore their albums in full, and check out the labels behind the music. You can find a Buy Music Club list linked below to help you dig deeper. If you're curious about the broader scope of music I've supported this year, my Bandcamp collection is always up to date. And for the ASIP year-end label compilation, that's coming very soon…

~

2025 was nearly the year of breaking point with my time and effort spent on the label. A new job, a third child, and… well that's enough to do it I guess. So as the year-end drew closer, the idea of completing this mix became laughable in its scope and I thought it might be the first year in over a decade I haven't completed one.

It's helped that I haven't done many mixes this year, so approaching it pulled on some much needed creativity, but even when looking back at what music I had supported on Bandcamp and the records on my shelves, it took me a long time to organize, make sure I had it downloaded, and even pull the trigger on items in my wishlist (my wishlist often revolves around vinyl I've picked up with no BC download code offered - gripe). Those who go through this obsessive process know how much time it can take up.

Looking back at the mix now it's complete, I've managed to include around 80% of what was in high rotation for me this year (there's always some that don't make it into mix form) and the styles are on point as usual in reflecting my taste over the year. We're starting with the deep ambient cuts, moving into more IDM and techno, and moving through a lot more energetic tracks towards the end - from Jungle to Trance…

One of the only live gigs I got to emerge from my family life to see was WNDFRM and Patricia Wolf in Seattle, so of course, Patricia's newest installment on Balmat (who also had another epic year as a label) is included. Related to that event, organizer Raica (Chloe Harris) made a return with two albums this year I believe - both worthy of praise, but her piece for (another relentless outpost) Quiet Details was the stand out. A regular on these reflection mixes, MPU101 on Ilian Tape gets another nod- a BoC-vibe regular who always manages to tickle the right part of my ears. Alex Kassian had about three tracks or remixes in my original shortlist (including the lush remix of Spooky) so I had to do my best to not over-indulge - his remix of a classic Pianoman melody will bring back the Global Communication / Tangerine Dream vibes. Skee Mask is still releasing archive material that defies expectations. In one of the most welcome moves of the year, finding All Possible Worlds on Bandcamp made many people ecstatic, not least because of the full release of Irini's odyssey, or the random track found on their profile. Light of Cacti got my Schnauss tastebuds tingling. Anushka Chkheidze has been on my radar for a long time now, so it was a treat to see her collabing with the much respected Robert Lippok across a very interesting record. OPN landed late in 2025, but arguably released one of his more welcomed albums by die-hard fans, hooking me right back into his unique worlds. Simon Littaeur came into my feed through his Instagram videos (normally something that doesn't always result in a quality album) but his production lived up to the visual hype. The album by jp on emerging label Theory Therapy was full of big tracks, and I did my best to make sure one was included on here. Talking of big, Djrum's latest didnt dissapoint, and he'll continue to be classed as an innovator with output like this years. I nearly stopped at the Barker track, as it doesn't get much bigger than that euphoric high, but something told me to bring it back down a little bit more, so into a slight trance we went with a superb debut by Alvar (Teo Bachs) and of course, the masters of hypnotizing techno, Voices from The Lake making a much needed return. The ending comes from vinyl selector Chee Shimizu, a unique piece of music that would bring the sun down on any horizon and one of two great tracks included in the mix from the ESP LA fundraiser.

Listen on Soundcloud the ASIP Podcast or the 9128.live iOS and Android app

Download

Tracklist (Artist - Title - Album - Label)

1 - HARZ - 0647 - (polychromatic) [Empty Space]
2 - Roméo Poirier - Picobello - (Off the Record) [Faitiche]
3 - Florian TM Zeisig - Earth Loop - (A New Life) [Stroom]
4 - Patricia Wolf - I'll Take Care of You - (Hrafnamynd) [Balmat]
5 - Saapato - Active Decay (feat. Patricia Wolf) - (Decomposition: Fox on a Highway) [Constellation Tatsu]
6 - Pianeti Sintetici - Part One - (Space Opera) [Astral Industries]
7 - Heavenchord, Infinity Dots - Entering Landscapes - (Landscapes Of The Soul) [Secret Domain]
8 - placa - cityzen - (in trance it) [Non-transparent]
9 - Area 3 - Grass Turns To Sponge - (View) [Khotin Industries]
10 - Cahl Sel - Leaf - (Traces) [Reflective Records]
11 - Raica - Not There Though, Dive - (The Absence of Being) [Quiet Details]
12 - MPU101 - 3100beta2 - (MPU106) [Ilian Tape]
13 - Jo Johnson - Variance Remnants 3 (field recording) - (Variance - Remnants (Alterations)) [Self]
14 - Pentagrams Of Discordia - < - (Triskaidekaphobia Extd.) [Self]
15 - Alex Kassian - Lost in Hanoi - (ESP Institute XV) [ESP]
16 - all possible worlds - untitled - [all possible worlds]
17 - Skee Mask - 32Crescent - (E) [Self]
18 - Rod Modell - Snowstorm in Naubinway - (Northern Michigan Snowstorms) [Silentes]
19 - Strategy - Earthling - (A Cooler World) [Constellation Tatsu]
20 - µ-Ziq - Peppermint Aero - (Manzana) [Balmat]
21 - Lord Of The Isles - Opalescent - (Signals Aligned) [Self]
22 - Plant43 - Skyway Shadow - (Luminous Machines) [Self]
23 - Xenia Reaper - Drift__ - (Nept Polarisation) [Delsin]
24 - Lord Of The Isles - United Wire - (Signals Aligned) [Self]
25 - Martinou - The Last Hour - (The Glow That Lingers) [FauxPas]
26 - Coatshek - Eternal Lovers - (Sound Bath) [Dark Entries]
27 - Light of Cacti - Washed Away In Pink Skies On Brighton Shores - (Neverland is a State of Mind) [Tonights Dream]
28 - Pianoman - Pasion (Alex Kassian's Mandarine Dream Mix) - (Pasion) [Planet Strange Love]
29 - Anushka Chkheidze + Robert Lippok - Uncontrollable Thoughts - (Uncontrollable Thoughts) [Morr Music]
30 - Oneohtrix Point Never - Measuring Ruins - (Tranquilizer) [Warp]
31 - Simon Littauer - Phicet - (Modular) [Katharsis]
32 - arcologies - asleep and dreaming - (PARTICLE SHIFT) [Rabbithole Club]
33 - E.L Heath and Karen Vogt - This Is Spirit - (This Is Spirit) [Plenty Wenlock]
34 - Aural Imbalance - Thermal Isolation - (Edge Of Space) [Auxiliary]
35 - jp - planes - (we're here all the time) [Theory Therapy]
36 - Vivian Koch - September (Gold) - (Colors of September) [Self]
37 - Courtney Bailey - Under The Water - (In Dream) [Music From Memory]
38 - Djrum - Waxcap - (Under Tangled Silence) [Houndstooth]
39 - Roméo Poirier - 12 - Steve A. - (Off the Record) [Faitiche]
40 - Barker - Reframing - (Stochastic Drift) [Smalltown Supersound]
41 - Alvar - Meg og sola - (The Mist LP) [Peak Experience]
42 - irini - The Higher (Lost In Dreams) [all possible worlds]
43 - Voices From The Lake - Aquateo (II) [Spazio Disponibile]
44 - Chee Shimizu - Zeze (ESP Institute XV) [ESP]

Buy Music Club

Last December, we were fortunate to host one of our largest label nights to date at Public Records, New York, one of the most renowned venues in the world for sound system quality. One year later, we present to you one of the recordings from the evening, by Brooklyn's own Salvatore Mercatante.

Live at Public Records captures Salvatore Mercatante at his most unguarded and instinctual, set free from the polish of post-production, delivered to a room of people who gave themselves over to the quiet pull of tension, decay, and harmonic dissonance on one of the best sound systems in the world.

Performed as part of a curated label night inside Public Records' intimate Sound Room, Salvatore's set was equal parts sculpture and erosion. Working with a minimalist setup that belied the richness of the result, Salvatore traced an arc through fractured rhythms, bent tones, and fogged-out signal paths, drawing on his 2024 album 'Ø' and a trove of unreleased and WIP material.

Following a DJ-set by Aspetuck and preceding a live set by OKRAA as part of the label's biggest showcase to date, Salvatore's set was the perfect middle-ground, with signature low-end blooms and crisp drum patterns, reconstituted in real time and massaged by the custom four-point sound system.

Live at Public Records was recorded on December 6th, 2024 in Brooklyn NY, mastered by Antony Ryan at RedRedPaw Mastering. Artwork and video taken from photography by Daniel Salemi.

Available as name your price on Bandcamp

Join us for the listening party at 2pm PST Friday

Photos by Daniel Salemi

Photos by Daniel Salemi

Photos by Daniel Salemi

WVLT is the newest sonic addition from WNDFRM (Portland-based, Tim Westcott), an album of eight distinct explorations of micro-rhythmic IDM.

Tim Westcott's practice is rooted in an acute, nearly forensic attention to sound. Subtle tones, sculpted drones, and lean percussive gestures, always pursued with a patient ear and obsession with sound design. 

With previous releases on Prologue, Home Normal, and Dragon's Eye Recordings, and several live performances at Mutek, a new album from Tim is a rare yet welcome occurrence. The conceptual approach for WVLT began in 2021, mixing synths with drum machines and granular processing. Lightly arced structures slip between gates of rhythm, shifting pulses, translucent washes, and disquieting residue. There's a precision to the hesitation and an insistence in the space between notes, a deft balance of raw improvisation and sculpted quietude.

An exercise in immediacy and response, each track builds and unspools, like form in fleeting motion, driven by the moment's tonal contrasts, micro‑rhythmic interplay, and slight gestures that alter entire planes of listening. It's minimal without sparsity, intense without density.

Available digitally and on limited transparent dark blue 12"  vinyl on September 26th 2025. Mastered by Taylor Deupree @12k Mastering and featuring artwork by Noah M / Keep Adding.

Release page