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. 

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

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.  

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

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.

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

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".

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 this pretty instrumental 

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

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

January 16 1988

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

And who opined that "Supernaut" is the most physically dynamic and potent example of recorded rock

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

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 and 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 of Anglophilia - 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 it's 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. 

Spin, October 1998

VARIOUS ARTISTS

Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts From the British Empire & Beyond
Uncut, 2001

Lenny Kaye's 1972 anthology Nuggets was a rock archivist's masterstroke, a feat of canon rewriting that deposed the post-Sgt Pepper's aristocracy and elevated the forgotten garage punks of the mid-Sixties, from The Seeds to Chocolate Watchband. Rhino's 1998 four-CD update of Nuggets dramatically expanded the original double LP.

 Now this latest instalment extends the Nuggets premise beyond the USA to encompass the one-hit-wonders and never-wozzers of mid-Sixties Britain: that all-too-brief golden age of amphetamine-cranked R&B and mod-on-LSD that's roughly bookended by "My Generation" and Cream's Disraeli Gears. Just the names of these long-lost groups--Dantalion's Chariot, Wimple Winch, Rupert's People, The Idle Race--induces a contact high, before you even play the discs.

Back then, singles made their point and left. This short 'n' sweet succinctness allows the compilers to cram 109--that's one hundred and nine--tracks into four discs. Here's just a handful of gems.

Tintern Abbey's "Vacuum Cleaner", with the saintly-sounding David MacTavish singing a proto-Spacemen 3 love-as-drug/drug-as-God lyric ("fix me up with your sweet dose/now I'm feeling like a ghost"), splashy cymbals, and a billowing solo of controlled feedback. 

Them's "I Can Only Give You Everything": Van in I'm-A-Man mode, awesomely surly and swaggering. 

The Sorrows's "Take A Heart": a Brit-Diddley locked groove of tumbling tribal toms and spaced-out-for-intensified-effect guitar-riffs. 

The Eyes's "When The Night Falls" takes that drastic use of silence and suspense even further: powerchords like Damocles Swords, caveman tub-thumping, tongues-of-flame harmonica, and an insolent you-done-me-wrong/go-my-own-way vocal. 

Fire's "Father's Name Was Dad," a classic misunderstood teen anthem: society gets the blame and the kid surveys Squaresville from a lofty vantage, cries "I laugh at it all!"

One group stands out as a "why?-why?!?-were-they-never-MASSIVE?" mystery. 

Not The Creation, and not The Action--both had terrific songs but were a little characterless. 

No, I'm talking about John's Children's. Their two offerings here are astoundingly deranged, the monstrously engorged fuzzbass like staring into a furnace, the drums flailing and scything like Keith Moon at his most smashed-blocked. 

"Desdemona" features the then shocking chorus "lift up your skirt and fly", daft lines about Toulouse-Lautrec painting "some chick in the rude" plus the stutter-bleat of a young Bolan on backing vox. 

"A Midnight Summer's Scene" captures mod sulphate-mania on the cusp of mutating into flower power acid-bliss: it's a febrile fantasy of Dionysian mayhem in an after-dark park, maenad hippy-chicks with faces "disfigured by love", strewing "petals and flowers," prancing the rites of Pan.

John's Children's merger of cissy and psychotic highlights the major difference between American garage punk and British "freakbeat" (as reissue label Bam Caruso dubbed it for their illustrious Rubble compilation series). The Limey stuff is way fey compared with the Yanks. You can hear a proto-glam androgyny, a "soft boy" continuum that takes in Barrett and Bolan, obviously, but also the queeny-dandy aristocrat persona of Robert Plant. 

At the same time, because these bands were schooled in R&B and played live constantly, the music has a rhythmic urgency and aggressive thrust that gradually faded over subsequent decades from the psychedelic tradition (think of Spiritualized's drum-phobic ethereality). This, though, was music for dancing as much as wigging out.

Nuggets II isn't solid gold. There's a slight surfeit of boppy shindig-type rave-ups and sub-Yardbirds blues that just ain't bastardized enough. Personally I crave more tunes with truly over-the-top guitar effects, aberrant bass-heavy mixes, phased cymbals, drastic stereo separation, and other psych-era cliches. 

The "British Empire" part of the subtitle allows in Australia's The Easybeats (godstars for the duration of "Friday On My Mind") while the "Beyond" pulls in groovy Latin American acid-rockers Os Mutantes. 

But to be honest, a lot of the Commonwealth-and-beyond stuff just ain't that hot. And inevitably one could compile another 2-CDs out of heinous omissions. Forget the quibbles, though, this box is a treasure chest of vintage dementia.

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

Pointedly not reviewed: Nuggets 3, which was a selection of 80s-onwards garage revivalism. 

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 it made 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, he said, "I'm going to talk to my friends" and went over to a barstool and chatted to an old geezer with a dog. I went for a slash and then 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.

 "I'm not sure who was from upper class, but certainly we're all from very strong middle class families. My dad was a professor.  I had an academic upbringing and certainly an academic path was indicated. I was extremely bright, in the top one percent in my class."

 Presler also said that most of the people weren't actually musicians primarily, that they came to it from other areas, like art or writing. Did you ever toy with other art forms apart from music?

 "Nothing else particularly interested me. I was always interested in sound, and then shortly after that I became interested in rock music, and ever since I haven't been interested in doing anything else. Everything else is an inferior byproduct along the evolutionary path to rock music, which is the only true artform. We were all taken with the expressive capabilities of sound and rock music was the form that was making the most inventive and expressive use of that medium.

 Is it true that the first album you bought was Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart?

 "No--the first album I bought was Zappa's Uncle Meat, then I bought Hot Rats.  Then Trout Mask and Strictly Personal. All this was within about three weeks. The gang I hung around with in high school was really into Uncle Meat. "

 Beefheart was a protégé of Zappa's at that point?

 "In Zappa's version of history, yeah!  We liked Uncle Meat because we were in high school and in high school you're into Surrealism and Dadaism. Uncle Meat was making use of interesting sounds. Zappa never moved beyond that, his appeal was always directed at high school students. Absolutely Free was all that hippy stuff--we weren't particularly taken by that. Hippy was pretty passé even then. We were two or three years post-hippy, and that two or three years was pretty significant. We felt hippies were pretty useless as any sort of social happening."

 Zappa's always struck me as kinda cynical and sneery, whereas Beefheart seems more…  humanist, maybe. Not a misanthrope.

"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."

 So you didn't particularly like the term "New Wave"?

 "It's an Anglo-European obsession with being new. We knew we were different."

 Oh, so Ubu weren't motivated particularly by that proto-punk sort of disgust with what rock had degenerated into during the early Seventies?

 "Not at all. This is more or less an invention of the punk music press. The early Seventies was one of the highlight periods in rock music. There was more innovation between 1970 and 1974 than ever before. There wasn't this narrow vision that has come to characterize things since. The only frustration was that we couldn't get gigs. Only the copy bands were getting any jobs, the cover bands. But then after we stopped whining and moaning, we figured there are tons of bars, so there must be somewhere we could play. Then we got off our butts and found this wretched little sailor's dive in an industrial part of town, the Pirate's Cove. And started playing there.

 So what makes the early Seventies the peak of rock creativity as far as you're concerned?

 "Eno. Amon Duul and Neu!. Kevin Ayers, The Soft Machine. The Incredible String Band. The Stooges' Funhouse. John Cale. Things were beginning to move and accelerate. Maybe people didn't notice it underneath all the other stuff, but it was moving. Sabbath was too derivative of the blues. There's a real difference between Midwestern rock and that kind of heavy rock. It's really night and day. Midwestern rock is all based on a flowing riff pattern, not a ba-domp-ba-domp. We liked groove rock that had the minimum of changes in it. Tom Herman's famous defining line was that he judges guitar parts by how little he has to move his fingers. That's a pretty Midwestern concept.

 If the first half of the Seventies was so great, though, why was there a need for punk?

 "I may exaggerate because so many people dump on it."

 Cleveland was supposed to have extremely progressive taste--to have the largest concentration of adventurous listeners in between the East Coast and the West Coast. How come?

 "Marc Bolan was considered in Cleveland to be conceptual art, because of the sickness of his world view and the weird envelope of sound he was working with. All his teen girlie stuff seemed to be very conceptual because nobody in his right kind would do it seriously. There's always been a struggle in Cleveland, a dynamic between the Midwestern oriented people and the Anglophile people. West Siders are always Anglophile. They're all Eastern European immigrants, Lithuanian and Hungarian and Polish.  Cleveland was the largest Hungarian-speaking city outside of Budapest for decades. These Eastern European immigrants were, working class, white socks, accordions and so on, and that was of course considered to be the uncool side of town. And we were on the East Side where all the liberals and the blacks were. East Side was considered to be the coolest part of town, but of course as time went on I discovered that in fact the West Side was cooler!  I don't know what made them Anglophiles. It's not my problem! But the Kinks and Syd Barrett were just massive on the west side of Cleveland, and the Bowie stuff. The East Side tended to be more black people and English people. The black people were into black music and the whites tended toward Velvet Underground, MC5, and Zappa. The thing that bound the two sides of the city was The Velvet Underground--that was the current, the universal language. Everybody understood the Velvets, and we on the East Side were particularly Velvets orientated. The East Side was much harder."

 Was Cleveland as grim and industrial in those days as the legend has it?

 "I suppose so, but we didn't sit there saying, 'Gee, this is grim'. The river caught fire once--so?  It's a heavy industrial town. The mayor's hair caught fire in the Seventies but nobody ever tells you about that."

 So where did the bohemian, or nonconformist, or unusual people gather?

 "Cleveland was a town of record stores. That's why it was the birthplace of rock music in 1951. Alan Freed was in a record shop, the same shop that everyone in Ubu ended up working in at one time or another: Record Rendezvous. He noticed all these white kids getting off on 'race records' so he started doing hops. Everybody who was in a band worked at a record store and all the record stores competed against each other to have the most complete catalogues. To have everything of everything. There was a lot of specialized interest. That's why the worldwide  Syd Barrett Appreciation Society was in Cleveland. There were these strong cliques of people. It was a real hothouse environment. There was only 100 people—musicians, girlfriends, sound guys who were your friends—and everybody knew what you were doing. Everybody was competing to be the best. There weren't any places to play, so your reputation would be based on the five shows a year you could play somewhere. Which meant that everyone was very well-rehearsed. The Electric Eels, who everyone thought were totally anarchistic—well, they were indeed totally anarchistic, but they rehearsed too. Way more than any similar band would have. Everyone took it pretty seriously."

 The Drome--that was the hippest record store of all of them, right?

 "It was the store that picked up on the beginnings of the English punk stuff and the weird American stuff like the Residents and MX-80. John Thompson, who owned it, was extremely supportive of local bands. He'd have bands play in his store.. The other stores were owned by fifty year old men, so none of them had the same focus, or they were stuck in the hippy thing. Johnny was really into used car commercials and he'd build these television  gameshow sets—he was totally nuts. We lived together for a long time and the whole house was violent pink and festooned with gameshow sets and cut-out characters.. He had a very modern, American vision of things—that's where the concept of Datapanik came from. Johnny and I came up with that in 1976, this doctrine about Data Panic where all information had become a drug-like substance, in and of itself meaningless, and the only thing that mattered was data flow. I have to admit immodestly these ideas were far ahead of their time."

 So he was one of those catalyst figures, who don't make music themselves but they foster and direct the energy.

 "Robert Wheeler, who's our current synthesizer player, and is a generation younger than me, told me he went into Drome when he didn't know about anything and he picked up our single "30 Seconds Over Tokyo". This is just when it had first come out. And Johnny said, 'you can buy that for $1.50 but instead you could take that $1.50 and go see the band play tonight at the Pirate's Cove.' This was his attitude—and this bad commercial vision was the reason for the Drome's downfall a few years later. Johnny would rent this radio theater, the WHK auditorium--an old radio theater from the 1930s that had been abandoned and was on the edge of the ghetto. And this was where the first Disasterdromes took places--shows he'd put on with Ubu, Devo, Suicide, and other bands from other towns. He said the motto is, 'We call it disaster so nothing can go wrong'. Bums and winos would be coming in and lurking in the shadows. Somebody lit fire to the sofa. Stuff was always going wrong and people were always complaining to him. After the first one like that he decided to call it Disasterdrome, so you won't be disappointed. Free the consumer from the burden of anticipation. 'No, it's not going to be any good, it's going to be a disaster'. They were extremely popular."

 You were one of the few members of Pere Ubu who never lived in the Plaza, the building co-owned by Allen Ravenstine?

 "I lived with a girlfriend there--it was her place. Everybody who lived there was a writer, an artist or a musician. It was the red light street on the edge of the ghetto. The ghetto started one street over. It wasn't scary, but you had to be careful, you couldn't wander around blithely at night."

 Early on you went by the name of Crocus Behemoth!

 "I had a girlfriend who was in the Weathermen or the White Panthers or something. She was very much taken with the Detroit MC5 thing. All the people on the fringe of the political underground always had pseudonyms. At the time I was writing for a local paper, Scene, and I was writing a whole lot, so I had a bunch of pseudonyms., The way they'd come up with pseudonyms was they'd just open up a dictionary and put their finger on a word, so she opened a dictionary and put her finger on Crocus and then on Behemoth. That was the name for the writing I did that was most popular so I was sort of known by that."

 What kind of writing was it?

 "I was a rock critic. Endless bands, endless reviews. I didn't have any theories--some things I liked and some things I didn't like. Eventually I got to be thinking, if I'm so smart I can do this--music--better. And I did. I didn't have any dreams of being a rock critic--I became a writer because I'd dropped out of college and I knew this guy who'd been at the college paper who was the editor of Scene, so I got a job doing art layout. Then they needed somebody to copyedit. Soon I was rewriting so much of the stuff they said we can all save ourselves some time if you just review the stuff yourself. I had no particular desire. It was just a job I could get."

 Calling the band Pere Ubu… you were a big fan of Alfred Jarry?

 "Not a big fan. I'm aware of what he did. All that Dada and surrealist stuff is the stuff you do in high school. After high school it doesn't have much relevance to anything. Jarry's theatrical ideas and narrative devices interested me."

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."

 Wasn't there a kind of split down the middle of Ubu between the weirdo "head" elements (your voice and Ravenstine's synth), which were kind of un-rock, and the more straight-slamming physicality of what the guitar, bass and drums were doing, which rocked hard?

 "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."

 So you thought what you did would be embraced and you'd end up on Top Forty radio?

 "We thought we were the mainstream. That's not the same as being popular. What we were doing was mainstream, what the Rolling Stones and Toto were doing was weird and experimental—40 or 50 year old men going on about teenage girls. That's weird. What we were doing was aspiring to a mature fully-realized artistic form that spoke for ordinary people and their lives."

 Oh, so the idea of being deliberately esoteric or avant-garde had no interest, was redundant, as far as you were concerned?

 "We were making popular music. That's why we did singles. Whether people liked it or not was not our problem. In the pure, platonic meaning of the word, we were pop."

 Well, Ubu were pretty popular at one point, I guess.

 "Nah, nobody's ever liked us."

 But in the UK, around the first couple of albums and tours, you had droves of people coming to the shows. There was a big buzz about Ubu in 1978.

 "Only because of herd mentality. That's not cynical, it's realistic. We were on the edge of being popular but we were fundamentally incapable of being popular, because we were fundamentally perverse and uninterested. This is the strength of our upbringing. This is why all adventurous art is done by middle class people. Because middle class people don't care. 'I'm going to do what I want, because I can do anything else better and make more money than this'. If you sit down and make a list of the people you consider to be adventurous in pop music, I'd bet you lots that the vast majority of them are middle class."

 What about the Beatles? 

"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."

 Well I agree with you to the extent that the traditional slant of looking at rock as an essentially  working class thing… it's not total bunk, but it has been woefully exaggerated thing. Art students and university students have always played a big part in rock history. At least from 1963 onwards.

 "The notion of street credibility is a recent aberration. It's all designed to create commercial niche markets. Since punk this compartmentalization has been designed to aid advertising executives to target their products at the market. That's not what music and art is about."

 So presumably you had no time for the Clash going on about tower blocks and kids on the street.  

 "That's alien stuff. That's your problem. All this is nothing to do with rock music. It has to do with the aberrations of European social structures. To do with a guy wanting to sell clothes. From the beginning punk rock was designed as a commercial exercise to create a market. This is the reason why it's weird when it came to America, because what was going on in America was things like Television, Pere Ubu, The Residents, MX-80. It was operating  on a totally different level than the Sex Pistols. Our ambitions were considerably different than the Sex Pistols. Our ambitions were to take the art form and move it forward into ever more expressive and mature fields, with the goal of creating the true language of human consciousness. To create something worthy of William Faulkner and Herman Melville. What was the damn ambition of the Sex Pistols?"

 But don't you think a lot of rock music is about baseness and vulgarity?

 "It's about vulgarity if you think ordinary people are vulgar. I don't think so. I think the poetry of the ordinary man is great. If you believe that art forms or social progress must be frozen in aspic and maintained at its adolescent, easily manipulated stage, then sure you're right. But there are a lot of us who feel folk music should aspire and evolve to greater things. The best way of keeping something manipulable is keeping it at its adolescent stage. Because adolescents are the most gullible sons of bitches on the entire planet. You can get a kid to do anything.  So if you want marketing, yeah, let's keep it all about how blue jeans and spiky hair is going to make you different. If you want that kind of world—that's the world you got. Punk music won. But that's not what we were trying to do. We exist in a different place. One of us lives in a real world and one of us lives in a fantasy world. Well maybe you live in the real world and we live in a fantasy world, or maybe we live in the real world. It's a question of what you want and what you get.

 "There's all sorts of kinds of music and ways people appreciate music. To some people it's nothing more than a soundtrack to a mating ritual. To others it's a language of poetry and vision. Not everybody has to pursue poetry and vision through the same medium. Some understand things visually or conceptually. The world would be an unpleasant place if Pere Ubu was the only kind of music you could listen to, because frankly it's hard work sometimes and that's the way we make it, so that it's hard. I don't sit around listening to our music, it's impossible. Because it requires you to sit there and listen submit to it, and to be engaged in it. It doesn't make good background music." 

 I get the distinct sense that you don't much care for the English approach to rock, but at the same time Pere Ubu were much better received in the UK.

 "Only because of the size of the country. I think the English are the most civilized of all the Europeans. They're responsible for most good stuff.  But you wouldn't have this confusion if we were talking about reggae or Chinese folk music. Nobody would in their right mind argue an English band could play African tribal music as well as African tribal people. So where do you get this idea that English people can play rock music--the folk music of America-- in any authentic way? Some years ago a magazine paid me to go to Siberia to see what was going on and I met [Russian rock critic] Artemis Trotsky. He said, 'The most ordinary amateur garage band in America has more authenticity and fire and soul than the most adventurous band from England because they're playing the music of their blood.'"

 Hmmm, do you really think rock music is folk music? It's so heavily filtered through the mass media. Bands learn from recordings much more than from their geographical neighbours. It's mass culture, not community music. Folk music doesn't change that much or that fast, whereas look how insanely rapidly rock mutated and diversified in just a couple of decades.

 "Both your points are baloney. Folk music is passed from one generation to another. It doesn't matter if the medium of its passing is a record, the nature of it is that it's a passage. And involved in any folk music is a series of common themes and obsessions. Well that's certainly true of rock music, where people write songs that are continuations of other people's themes. Images are created---seminal things like Heartbreak Hotel. That image has possessed writers endlessly from the moment it was heard. I've written probably a dozen songs based on Heartbreak Hotel. Read Greil Marcus's Mystery Train, it's all about this passing on of communal images. The notion of being down by the river, the railroad, the worried man. The worried man stretches back hundreds of years. 'Worried Man Blues' by the Carter Family from  1920 probably has roots back in Babylonia. You're confused by the commercial exploitation of the medium, which has nothing to do with the reality of the its function. Because a folk music is of the people. In any bar you can find ordinary musicians playing rock music of such high quality that it puts to shame stuff  from other countries. That's because it's in their blood."

 Americans don't have a "blood"! The USA is an unsuccessful melted melting pot. 

 "Yes we do. Only recently since Oprah Winfrey and the doogooders have taken over has it been less successfully melted. I would argue that, compared to everybody else, it's totally melted. It has to do with the New World versus the Old World, disposing of the Old World's nationalistic and socialistic prejudices. This notion that you reject the past and throw yourself into the modern, into the future, is at the same time the strength and the weakness of America. Once Edison invented the phonograph, Elvis was only a matter of time. Edison invented rock music, he created the magnetic age in which we still live.   Robert Johnson wouldn't have been anything without a microphone--music became intimate, you could create quiet songs, the singer could be perceived as a mortal individual with hopes and dreams. All this is fundamental to the creation of rock music. Also fundamental is the American landscape. It's a music of perspective and space. That's why all rock has to do with the car. In Europe they had iambic pentameter, in America they had the automobile. All of sudden the ordinary man had a poetic vehicle."

 But wasn't there a period when Pere Ubu itself tried to break with rock'n'roll? Starting with New Picnic Time and intensifying with the Art of Walking and Song of the Bailing Man, it got pretty abstruse and un-rock.

 "We got abstract, but you're assuming that everything has to say exactly the same all the time. The road has no end. The road is a Moebius strip. We're obsessed with not repeating ourselves. One of our abstract albums might have been us looking at a glass from the bottom, but if you're going to know what a glass is then at some point you're going to have to look at it from that perspective. One album that everyone considers abstract —Art of Walking—was to create an image of water going down a drain. The idea was to define the meaning of the song by coloring in everything but the thing you're talking about. We're obsessed with always pushing it, looking at the bottom of the glass. But you don't want to look at the bottom of the glass if you want a pop career. Well we don't care. We're middle class. We don't care. We're free."

 There was a point in the later Pere Ubu where you imagery shifted from "industrial" to pastoral.

 "That's not Pere Ubu, that's my solo work. That was because people came along and said you write songs about cars. I'm a perverse sort of person so I'll say, 'Okay, I'll write a bunch of songs about pedestrians and call my band The Pedestrians'. I'm going to do whatever I want. I always look for the other side of the coin. Whatever everybody is saying is true is probably not. It's never let me down."

 On the Art of Walking, you have that line about "the birds are saying what I want to say". Have you ever listened to Oliver Messaien? He did all these symphonies based on his transcriptions of bird songs.

 "I don't pay attention to instrumental music. Music exists for the singer. The only exception is the instrumental in the middle of a show where the singer can get a drink and go to the bathroom. That's the sole purpose of instrumentals."

 That's bit of a limited view--I mean, oops, there goes most of jazz, nearly all classical, a fair bit of African music…

 "Yeah. Because those were inferior evolutionary forms. Since Thomas Edison invented rock the whole point of music is the singer…. I'm a contrarian, I'm going to stick to my own silly path."

 Have you never been interested in doing abstract stuff with your voice?  

 "I did that a lot in the beginning—that's why you can't hear anything I'm singing because I was totally obsessed with the abstract. I had all sorts of rules I would follow because I was obsessed with not ripping off black music. Like Brian Wilson, I wanted to create a white soul music. I had rules where I would refuse to bend a note or extend a syllable past one beat. Until I realized I'd made my point, and it was limiting to keep going. I like there to be words and meaning."

 I think you once said that Pere Ubu became obsessed with not repeating Dub Housing, the second album?

 "No, we're obsessed with not repeating ourselves in general. But this particular incident occurred after Dub Housing. Our manager was very successful, he had just signed up Def Leppard. And he said to us, 'All you have to do is repeat the same album two or three times and you'll be stars.'  And I said, 'What if we can't repeat it? What if we don't know what we did? What if we don't want to?'. And our big time manager said, 'As long as you make good albums you'll get signed. But you'll never be successful'. Our eyes all lit up and we said, 'That sounds pretty good!'"

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... 

Well, if the last few weeks in LA have not been traumatizing enough - and then we've had the  hideousness of the inauguration and unfolding horror of the first few days of Trump: The Return...  on top of all that, there's also been a flurry of sad-making deaths. 

Saddest for me was learning that the writer Geoff Nicholson had gone. I didn't know Geoff well - but he was a fellow Brit expat in Los Angeles and on the occasions we ran into each other socially, I really enjoyed talking with him. I have been meaning to pick up his tomes on walking and on suburbia - and now have the spur. 

The book of Geoff's I have read and returned to repeatedly over the years is Big Noises. One of his earliest books - his first non-fiction effort -  and I believe the only one he wrote about music. 

Here's something short I wrote about Big Noises for a side-bar to an interview I'd done for some magazine  or other (can't remember which, can't recall when). They asked me to enthuse about three music books  I loved but which were a bit  forgotten. Below that blurb is a longer piece in which Geoff and Big Noises pops up in the context of guitar solo excess.  

BIG NOISES by GEOFF NICHOLSON

Big Noises (1991) is a really enjoyable book about guitarists by the novelist Geoff Nicholson. It consists of 36 short "appreciations" of axemen (and they're all men; indeed, it's quite a male book but quite unembarrassed about that). These range from obvious greats/grates like Clapton/Beck/Page/Knopfler to quirkier choices like Adrian Belew, Henry Kaiser, and Derek Bailey. Nicholson writes in a breezy, deceptively down-to-earth style that nonetheless packs in a goodly number of penetrating insights. I just dug this out of my storage unit in London a couple of months ago and have been really enjoying dipping into it.

Flash of the Axe: Guitar Solos
from Excess All Areas issue on musical maximalism, The Wire, September 2019.

I can distinctly remember the first time I let myself enjoy a guitar solo.  1983, I'm at a party, "Purple Haze" comes on - I just went with Jimi, surrendered to the voluptuous excess.  There was a sense of crossing a boundary within myself, like sexual experimentation, or trying a food that normally disgusts you.

THE CURE 

Pulse, June 1992

by Simon Reynolds

Robert Smith sits alone at the office of Fiction, the U.K. label of the Cure, the band he formed at age 17 and has led for a decade and a half since. It's a rare opportunity to meet one-on-one with the group's vocalist, songwriter and sometimes-guitarist; determined to promote the idea that "The Cure Is A Band," all of Smith 's recent encounters have seen him flanked by his cohorts: drummer Boris Williams , guitarists Porl Thompson and Perry Bamonte , and longest serving Cure member, bassist Simon Gallup 

Tonight the ageless Smith , who's wearing eyeliner but no trace of lipstick, looks somewhat drained after a five hour session with his accountant, doubtless administering the lucre generated by the Stateside success of the Disintegration album and the "best of" compilation Standing on a Beach/Staring at the Sea. After years as a cult icon, the Cure is now a big band, but without the coarsening and adherence to formula that such mass popularity usually requires.

The Cure began in 1976 as the Easy Cure, then a trio, spurred into being by punk's do it yourself fervor. The groups 1979 debut, Three Imaginary Boys, lay somewhere between power pop and the edgy, art-punk-minimalism of Wire and Siouxsie and the Banshees, the latter of whom Chris Parry signed to Polydor before starting his Fiction label, with the Cure as its flagship. (With a few early singles tagged on, the debut is titled Boys Don't Cry in the US, where the groups albums are available on Elektra/Fiction, unless otherwise noted.) With Seventeen Seconds (1980) and Faith (1981), the Cure's tormented angst-rock garnered an intensely devout cult following. By Pornography (1982), the group's music had reached a peak of morbid introspection that many found impenetrable. After this high-point of alienation Smith veered toward pop with the vaguely dance-oriented Lets Go To Bed and The Walk singles. But it was only with 1983's Lovecats that the Cure really got a handle on the joie de vivre of pure pop. A singles collection, Japanese Whispers (Fiction/Sire in the US), marked the breakthrough.

Thereafter, the Cure's albums - The Top (1984), The Head on the Door (1985) and Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me (1987) - explored both life's dark side and its light-hearted aspects; stylistically, the group shed the oppressively homogenous sound of its angst era for a kaleidoscope of psychedelic, art-rock and mutant pop textures. Disintegration(1989) was a slight return to the morose Cure of the early 80's, but that didn't prevent the first single Love Song, from reaching number two on the US charts. By the end of the decade the Cure had sold over eight million records worldwide without ever having settled into a predictable career trajectory or losing its innate combustibility. As Smith once put it, If I didn't feel the Cure could fall apart any minute, it would be completely worthless.

Despite Smith and his group's contrary nature, much of the new album Wish , is surprisingly in sync with the British alternative state-of-art - not that Robert Smith 's ever been afraid to be affected by the pop climate (remember the New Order tribute/pastiche of Inbetween Days from Head On The Door ?). But on Wish it sounds like he's been listening closely to the British movement of "shoegazers" or "The Scene That Celebrates Itself", and in particular to Ride and My Bloody Valentine (both bands for which he professed admiration). You can hear it in the super saturated Husker Du meets Hendrix maelstrom of End, in the oceanic iridescence of From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea, and in the gilded, glazed guitar mosaics of High and To Wish Impossible Things, all of which vaguely resemble shoegazers like Slowdive and Lush. The Cure has made these kinds of noises before (indeed, a number of shoegazers have been influenced by Smith 's group and Siouxsie and The Banshees). But it hasn't made them for a while, and never in such a timely fashion.

"I definitely think it would have been a totally different record if we'd had the same songs but recorded them at the time of Disintegration," Robert Smith agrees. But he says it was actually recording the wah-wah tempest of Never Enough (the only new song on the group's 1990 remix album, Mixed Up) that made the Cure want to be a guitar band again.

According to Smith , when keyboard player Roger O'Donnell slipped out of the group after the Disintegration tour, the Cure decided to replace him with another guitarist, Perry Bamonte . "Porl Thompson 's always been very guitar oriented, he's got loads of old guitars and amps and he's always very worried about his sound. In the past he's probably been restrained by the group and by the way I've always liked things to be very minimal. But this times everyone's played out a bit more. Because we didn't have a keyboard player, no one was really bothered with working out keyboard parts. On Disintegration there were all these lush synthesizer arrangements, but this time we tried to do it mostly with guitars. We also had in mind the way it feels live, to play as a guitar band; its so much more exciting."

The new album is a stylistic mixed bag, whereas Disintegration was a more uniform, emotionally and musically: a steady wash of somber sound and mood. Wish spans a spectrum of feelings from giddy euphoria to deep melancholy, from bewilderment to idyllic nonchalance.

"Disintegration was less obviously varied as this album," says Smith , "but there were songs like Lullaby, Love Song, Fascination Street, that were nothing to do with the rest of the album. But overall there was a mood slightly...downered. Even on Lullaby there was a somber side to it. Whereas on this album there are some out-and-out jump in the air type songs."

Some of Wish's songs are fairly legible, like the poignant Apart, which deals with the desolation that comes when a gulf inexplicably opens up between lovers. Others are harder to fathom. "End beseeches, "please stop loving me, I am none of these things, but it's not clear if the plea's addressed to the Cure fans, Smith 's wife, to a friend...

"It's kind of a mixture", says Smith . "In one sense, its me addressing myself. It's about the persona I sometimes fall into. On another level, it's addressed to people who expect me to know things and have answers - fans, and on a personal level, certain individuals. And it has a broader idea, to do with the way you fall into a way of acting that isn't really true, but because it's the easy path, it just becomes habitual even though it's not really the way you want to be. Sometimes whole relationships are based on these habits. It goes beyond my circumstances as a star, because I think a lot of people put on an act. I think I had it at the back of my mind when I wrote the song that when it came to performing it live, it would remind me that I'm not reducible to what I am doing. I do need reminding, because it's got to the scale where I could quite happily fall into the rock star trip. It might seem like its quite late in the day for it to all go to my head, since we've been going so long, but the success has reached the magnitude where it's insistent and insidious.

On End, Smith also bemoans the fact that all my wishes have come true. It must be something that he's felt at several points in his career: been there, done that... so what now? .

"Any desires I have left unfulfilled," says Smith, "are so extreme that there's no chance of them ever happening. I would really love to go into space, I always have since I was little, but as I get older, it's less and less likely that I'd pass the medical! The only things that I wish for are the unattainable things. Apart from that, I don't really have strong desires, except on behalf of other people. Generally, peace and plenty. My wishes are more on a global level. To Wish Impossible Things Is specifically about relationships. The notion of Three Wishes, all though history, has this aspect where if you wish for selfish things, it backfires on the third wish. But wishes never seem to take in the notion of wishing for other people, general wishes, or wishes about interacting with other people. In all relationships, there's always aching holes, and that's where the impossible wishes come into it"

"Doing the Unstuck: seems to be about disconnecting from the hectic schedules from productive life, and drifting in innocent blissful indolence. It's something Smith wishes he could do more often.

"I was going to say that my biggest wish was not to have to get up in the morning, and that's not strictly true, but there are days when I feel like that. It's like watching models saying that they've got a glamorous life, and then you find out that they can't eat what they want, they can't drink, they have to get up at five in the morning and get to bed by nine at night, and the truth is that they don't do anything glamorous at all except walk up and down the catwalk and wander about in front of cameras. It's one of those myths that modeling is glamorous, because it looks like glamour. And sometimes I think to myself ,'I'm free, I don't have to get up', but that's not the case cos I'm always doing something. Sometimes there are days where I refuse to do my duties. And I think there should be moments in everyone's lives where they take that risk and say 'Oh fuck it, I'm not prepared to carry on functioning'. I suppose that's a feeling you would associate with being in the Cure. Unstuck is about throwing your hands in the air and saying, 'I'm off'. But then again there is a thread running through the Cure that's all about escapism."

In fact, a lot of what the Cure is about is a refusal, or at least a reluctance, to grow up, to desire to avoid all the things (responsibility, compromise, sobriety) that come with adulthood. Despite being a very big business, at the heart of the Cure is a spirit of play.

"I met some people recently," says Smith, "and I guessed really wildly and inaccurately about their age. I thought they were in their forties, but they were only two years older than me, in their mid-30's. They'd passed across the great divide. Some of it's to do with having children. I don't see why they can't continue being like a kid. Obviously you change as you grow old, you become more cynical, but there are people that manage to avoid that. I know a couple people that are still quite a bit older than me, but are still genuinely excited by things; they do things and really get caught up in them. Children can do that, get caught up in non-productive activity, but its harder and harder to do that as you get older. At least, not unless you take mind- altering substances, of course!"

Robert Smith grew up in Crawley, a quintessentially English suburb. And the Cure's following has always consisted of that handful of lost dreamers in every suburban small town, that together make up a vast legion of the unaffiliated and disillusioned, who dream of a vague "something more" from life but secretly deep down inside know they will probably never get it. The Cure has always had an escapist, magical mystery side to their music, but the other half of its repertoire has been mope rock, forlorn and mournful for the lost innocence of childhood, and the prematurely foregone possibilities of adolescence.

Smith himself, however, is not so sure that the Cure represents lost dreams for lost dreamers; he's reluctant to reduce Cure fans to a type.

"I think our audience has now got so diverse where it seems weird to talk in general terms about what we represent to them. The Cure is liked by some people that I don't even like! There's people who like us just because we do good pop singles like High. There's other people who'd die for the group. When it gets to that level, people who are really caught up in the band,it's frightening to be a part of it, because I know that we don't understand anything better than those people. We represent different things to different things to different people, even from country to country. Even to different sexes and to different age groups. Polygram commissioned a survey of Cure fans, because I've had this long running argument with record companies about what constitutes our audience. The companies believe the media representations of the Cure audience as all dressed in black, sitting alone in their bedrooms, being miserable. And they were shocked at the actual breadth of the Cure audience. I don't know what we represent to them. I don't even know what the Cure represents to me! If we hadn't had the good songs throughout our history, to back up our attitude, we wouldn't have gotten this far. All that stuff about what we mean to our fans is too muddled to unravel really. We are a very selfish group. We don't worry about what we represent."

But perhaps its this very self-indulgence that is part of the Cure's appeal. Most people are obliged to forego following their whims and fancies, are forced to be responsible and regular. Perhaps the Cure represents a life based on exploring your own thoughts, exploring sounds, being playful. Smith thinks this might be true of its hardcore audience, the people who like us past a certain age. But at heart, he's wary of dissecting the what is exactly it is that the Cure's following get out of the group, or why they're so devoutly loyal.

"Maybe too much emphasis is placed on our hardcore fans. I feel sometimes like I'm crusading on behalf of something, and that this is going to pin me down to something that I'd ultimately resent. I've been through that with Faith and Pornography, people wanting me and the Cure to stand for something." Smith 's referring to his early-80's status as Messiah for the overcoat-clad tribe of gloom and doomers. "All that nearly drove me round the bend and I don't need any encouragement."

Part of Robert Smith 's appeal, at least to the female half of the Cure following, has always been his little lost boy aura. Bright girls dream of a boy who does cry, who's vulnerable, sensitive, even though few find one. Even now he still seems more like a "boy" than a "man". (Smith has just turned 33, Wish was released on his birthday, April 21)

"I was faced by this dilemma with the lyrics of Wendy Time on the album. It's the first time I've used the word 'man' in relationship to myself in a song. So it is seeping through into music. Five years ago, the line in question would have been 'the last boy on earth.' I've always been worried about doing music past the age of 30, about how to retain a certain dignity. The vulnerable, lost little boy side of my image is gradually disappearing, if it isn't gone already. But the emotional side of the group will never disappear, I'm in the unusual position of having four very close male friends around me in this group; I don't feel the slightest bit of inhibition around them. I've got more intimate as I've got older."

Around the time of Disintegration, Robert Smith declared," I think we're still a punk band. It's an attitude more than anything". 

The history of the last 15 years of British rock has been a series of disagreements about what exactly that attitude was. Groups have gone on wildly different trajectories - from ABC to the Style Council to the Pogues to the KLF- in pursuit of their cherished version of what punk was all about.

"Living in Crawley, travelling up to London to see punk gigs in 1977", reminisces Smith, "what inspired me was the notion that you could do it yourself. The bands were so awful I really didn't think, 'if they're doin it, I can do it'. It was loud and fast and noisy, and I was at the right age for that. Because of not living in London or other big punk centers, it wasn't a stylistic thing for me. If you walked around Crawley with safety pins, you'd get beaten up. The risked involved didn't seem to make sense. So luckily there aren't any photos of me in bondage trousers. I thought punk was more a mental state.

"The very first time we played at our school hall, we bluffed our way in by saying we were gonna play jazz-fusion, then started playing loud fast music. And that made us a punk band, so everyone hated us and walked out, but we didn't care cuz we were doin what we wanted. I suppose that all punk means to me is: not compromising and not doing things that you don't want to do. And anyone who follows that is a punk, I guess. But then, that could make Phil Collins punk, if he's genuinely into what he does!"

The Cure was never a threat; its particular effect was more on the level of mischief or mystery. Groups who start out making grand confrontational gestures tend to buckle rather quickly and turn into transvestites. But the Cure has endured by being elusive, indeterminate, unpredictable. It's sold a lot of records but it has never pandered.

"We've never really been bothered with confronting people. We've gradually become more accepted, just 'cos we've been around for so long. We've upset a lot of people in the business 'cos we've shown that you can do things exactly how you want and be successful. Most confrontational gestures are so shallow that they're laughable. The KLF carrying machine guns at the British record industry awards - you just have to look at the front page of any newspaper to put that kind of gesture in proper perspective. There should be confrontation in pop, but I think the people doing it often believe they are achieving a lot more than they actually are. The premeditated, Malcolm McLaren idea of confrontation is lamentable. Things are only really threatening if someone does something for it's own sake and it happens to upset people. The only time we've come close to that is the Killing an Arab debacle."

That song was grossly misconstrued as racist by sections of the US media. In fact, it was inspired by Camus' novel The Stranger, the story of a nihilistic young man in French colonial Algeria, who, involved in an altercation with a native, chooses to pull the trigger out of sheer fatalistic indifference. Embroiled in unwanted controversy, Smith was obliged to defend himself, denouncing his accusers as Philistine bigots. "For a couple of days we made the national news in America. And it was the last thing in the world I wanted to get caught up in. Debating Camus on US cable television was totally surreal."

The Cure hasn't been subversive so much as topsy-turvy: by cultivating its capacity for caprice and perversity, it's managed to remain indefinable.

"It's very difficult, having been around so long; a persona builds up around you that's continually reinforced despite your attempts to break away from it. It's like trying to fight your way out of papier-mache; There's always people sticking bits of wet newspaper to you all the time. I conjure up in my mind figures like Jim Kerr [of Simple Minds] or Bono, and I always have an image of what they represent. It might be really far away from the truth, but they're trapped in it. I often hear people say or read things about me and the group and they are completely at odds with how I think about us. We do things from time to time that are mischievous, and in the videos we play around with caricatures of ourselves. But at other times, we're not really mischievous: That implies that we're doing things for nuisance value, and we never have. We can't win really: we're either considered a really doomy group that inspires suicides or a we're a bunch of whimsical wackos. We've never really been championed or considered hip, and so we've never been treated as a group that stands for something, like, say Neil Young or the Fall have. Which I'm glad about, but the downside is that we're dismissed as either suicidal or whimsical."

For all Smith 's belief that the "attitude" has been a constant, the Cure didn't really draw much from the punk, apart from the initial impetus to do-it-themselves. Punk's main influence on the Cure was minimalism, a distaste for sonic excess. Hence, the clipped crisp power pop of Boys Don't Cry, the terse, translucent, bleakly oblique Seventeen Seconds. When the Cure tried to develop musically, while still inhibited by punks less-is-more aesthetic, the result was the grey draze of Faith and the angst - ridden entropy of Pornography - some of the most dispirited and dehydrated music ever put to vinyl. But once the Cure stepped out of the fog of post-punk production and into the glossy light of Love Cats, it wasn't long before the group became what it always essentially was, an art-rock group, maximalist rather than minimalist, indulgent rather than austere. And then came the over-ripe, highly strung textures of The Top and Head on the Door, the sprawling art-pop explorations of Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, the lush luxurious desolation of Disintegration.

The truth is that punk rock was just a blip, a brief interruption, in the perennial tradition of English art-rock. Robert Smith was once described by the Aquarian Weekly as "the male Kate Bush", which is probably going way too far, but it does highlight the way the Cure enjoys the English art- rock blessing/curses of eccentricity, self-consciousness, stylization, preciousness. Above all, the Cure has always been a literate band. Smith is a voracious reader. Recent input includes Stendhal ("very trying"), Blaise Cendrars ("very peculiar"), the poems of Catullus ("very ribald"). And Nietszche. 

"I just read Ecce Homo, which he wrote at the end of his life, when he was going mad. It's Nietszche summing up his life and his work, and it's pretty disturbing, by the end he's majestically deluded. I also read a book about Nietszche and that era. I didn't realize that his sister founded New Germania in Paraguay. She took 82 perfect Aryan specimens and attempted to found the new super race. The colony is now virtually extinct, because there was so much inter-breeding over four generations.

"I try and combat this feeling that I'm missing out on something very fundamental to life that I should have by now realized, by reading ferociously. And I still come to books that have been recommended to me by people I consider wise, and I always wonder "have I missed the point, or is this something I knew anyway". I think it's really worrying, getting older and not really knowing anything more intellectually. I don't think I know any more than when I was 15, except on an experiential level. I only know things that I wish I didn't know. But I never really craved wisdom. I enjoy the discussions we have in the group. Everyone's well read. The discussions can soar sometimes".

Which leads on to another set of polarities that Robert Smith oscillates between. On one hand, he's arty and literate; on the other, he's very much 'an ordinary bloke', partial to beer, soccer, Indian food, soap operas.

"I don't think its two sides to my character; its all me. In the group we have quite intense emotional conversations about things. At the same time, we can go to the pub and get so drunk that I don't remember how I got home, but I don't feel bad about it later; I don't think it doesn't fit with how I'm supposed to be. Equally, I wouldn't feel embarrassed if someone asked me what I was reading at the studio, and I said Love by Stendhal. I never feel guilty about either end of the spectrum. I object to people who only exist to go down to the pub, or people who think 'oh no, you can't watch football, its just a pack of men kicking a ball 'round a field.' I would feel weird excluding one aspect 'cos I felt it wasn't appropriate. It's all me."

recycled as

The Cure: Robert Smith's Wish List

Christmas 1992 issue of Melody Maker (19 December 1992)  

by Simon Reynolds

Fifteen years on, The Cure are post-punk's hardy perennial. Of all their peers, they're virtually alone in making it to stadium level without pandering or becoming a grotesque self-parody. And 1992 was another great year for the band, with the mega-selling Wish album and a mammoth world tour. In a rare solo conversation, Robert Smith talks about 'Wish', about The Cure's following, about the pressures of being at the helm of a Post-Punk Institution, and his own status as an icon.

ON 'WISH' AND BEING INFLUENCED BY YOUNG BLOODS LIKE MBV AND RIDE

"I definitely think it would have been a totally different record record if we'd had the same songs but recorded them at the time of Disintegration. But it was actually doing 'Never Enough' for Mixed Up that made us want to be a guitar band again. Porl Thompson's always been very guitar-oriented, he's got loads of old guitars and amps, and in the past, he's probably been constrained by the way I've liked things to be very minimal. But for Wish everyone played out a bit more. We also had in mind the way it feels live to play as a guitar band, it's so much more exciting. The album does sound current in one way, but in another way it sounds timeless. Because a lot of the references are to earlier incarnations of The Cure. 'Friday I'm In Love' reminds me of 'Boys Don't Cry'. That old-fashioned Beatles craft of the perfect pop song."

ON 'END', AND THE LINE 'PLEASE STOP LOVING ME, I AM NONE OF THESE THINGS'

"In one sense, it's me addressing myself. It's about the personal sometimes fall into. On another level, it's addressed to people who expect me to know things and have answers - fans, and on a personal level, certain individuals. And it has a broader idea, to do with the way you fall into a path, it just becomes habitual even though it's not really the way you want to be. Sometimes, whole relationships are based on these habits. It goes beyond my circumstances as a star, because I think a lot of people put on an act. I think I had it in the back of my mind when I wrote the song that when came to performing it on the tour, it would remind me each night that I'm not reducible to what I'm doing. I do need reminding. Because it's got to the scale now where I could quite happily fall into the rock star trip. It might seem like it's quite late in the day for it to go to my head, since we've been going so long, but our success has reached the kind of magnitude where it's insistent and insidious."

ON 'TO WISH IMPOSSIBLE THINGS'

"I do sometimes wonder 'What is there left for me to do?' At the same time, I never really had the burning ambition to achieve what I supposedly achieved. So it's more of a general feeling that there only appears to be so much you can experience. And a feeling of wanting to have the courage to break away from what I'm doing, with which I'm comfortable. I think maybe I should do something I don't feel confident about, to try to get back that sense of danger. But then I wonder if I really miss that danger. Do I really want to sacrifice my happiness for the chance of experiencing more, when I've already jeopardised my entire life many times just for the sake of experiencing things?

"Any desires I have left unfulfilled are so extreme there's almost no chance of them happening. But I would really love to go into space, I always have since I was little, but as I get older, it's less and less likely I'd pass the medical! The only things I wish for are the unattainable things. Apart from that, I don't really have strong desires, except on behalf of other people. Generally, peace and plenty. My wishes are more on a global level. 'To Wish Impossible Things' is specifically about relationships. The notion of three wishes, all through history, has this aspect where, if you wish for selfish things, it backfires on the third wish. But wishes never seem to take in the notion of wishing for other people, general wishes or wishes about interacting with other people. In all relationships, there are always aching holes, and that's where the impossible wishes come into it."

ON 'DOING THE UNSTUCK'

"I was going to say that my biggest wish was not to have to get up in the morning, and that's not strictly true, but there are days when I feel like that. It's like watching models saying that they've got a really glamorous life, and then you find that they can't eat what they want, they can't drink, they have to get up at five in the morning and go to bed by nine at night, and the truth is that they don't do anything glamorous at all except walk up and down the catwalk and wander about in front of cameras. It's one of those myths, but modeling is glamorous, because it looks like glamour. And sometimes, I think to myself I'm free, I don't have to get up, but that's not the case cos I'm always doing something. Sometimes there are days when I refuse to do my duties. And I think there should be moments in everyone's lives where they take that risk and say 'Oh, fuck it, I'm not prepared to carry on functioning.' I suppose that's a feeling you wouldn't really associate with being in The Cure. But then again there is a thread running through The Cure that's all about escapism."

ON NOT WAITING TO GROW UP

"I met some people recently and I guessed really wildly and inaccurately at their age. I thought they were in their forties, but they were only two years older than me, in their mid-thirties. They'd passed across the great divide. Some of it's to do with having children. It has a very definite effect. A good effect, for some, but it does bring with it a sense of responsibility. I don't know what it is, but it's inherent in more people that it's not. People seem to want to grow up. And when they have children, they play with their kids, and it reminds them how it was to be young. But when they have to answer the door, they revert to being grown-up. I don't see whey they can't continue being like a kid. Obviously you change as you grow old, you become more cynical, but there are people who manage to avoid that. I know a couple of people who are quite a bit older than me, but they are still genuinely excited by things. They do things and really get caught up in them. Children can do that, get caught up I on-productive activity, but it's harder and harder to do that when you get older. At least, not unless you take mid-altering substance, of course!"

ON THE CURE'S FOLLOWING

"I think our experience has now got so diverse that it seems weird to talk in general terms about what we represent to them. The Cure are liked by some people I don't even like! There's people who like us just because we do good pop singles like 'High'. There's other people who'd die for the group. When it gets to that level, people who are really caught up in the band, it's frightening to be part of it, because I know that we don't understand life better than those people. We represent different things to different people, even from country to country. Even to different sexes and to different age groups. Polygram commissioned a survey of Cure fans, because I've had this long-running argument with record companies about what constitutes our audience. The companies believe the media representation of The Cure audience as all dressed in black, sitting alone in their bedrooms, being miserable. And they were shocked at the actual breadth of the Cure audience. I don't know what we represent to them. I don't even know what The Cure represents to me! If I considered us in those terms, what we stand for, I'd be very wary about putting a song like 'Friday I'm In Love' on the album. We are a very selfish group."

ON THE BURDEN OF BEING AN ICON

"I feel sometimes like I'm crusading on behalf of something, and that is going to pin me down to something that I'd ultimately resent. I've been through that with Faith and Pornography, people waiting for me and The Cure to stand for something. All that nearly drove me round the bend. And I don't need any encouragement.

ON HIS 'LITTLE BOY LOST' APPEAL, AND STILL FEELING MORE LIKE A BOY THAN A MAN, EVEN AT THE AGE OF 33

"'Wendy Time' is the first time I've used the word 'man' in relationship to myself in a song. So it is seeping through into the music. Five years ago, the line in question would have been 'the last boy on earth'. I've always been worried about doing music past the age of 30, about how to retain a certain dignity. The vulnerable, 'little boy lost' side of my image is gradually disappearing. I'm in the unusual position of having four very close male friends around me in this group, I don't feel the slightest bit of inhibition around them. I've got more intimate as I've got older."

ON HOW THE CURE ARE STILL A PUNK BAND

"Living in  Crawley, traveling up to London to see punk gigs in 1977, what inspired me was the notion that you could do it yourself. The bands were so awful I really did think 'If they're doing it, I can do it'. It was loud and fast and noisy, and I was at the right age for that. Because of not living in London or the other big punk centers, it wasn't a stylistic thing for me. If you walked around Crawley with safety pins you'd get beaten up. The risks involved didn't seem to make sense. So luckily there aren't any photos of me in bandage trousers. I thought punk was more a mental state.

"The first time we played in our school hall, we bluffed our way in by saying we are gonna play jazz-fusion, then started playing loud, fast music. And that made us a punk band, so everyone hated us and walked out, but we didn't care cos we were doing what we wanted. I suppose all that punk means to me is: not compromising and not doing things that you don't want to do. And anyone who follows that is a punk, I guess. But then, that could make Phil Collins punk, if he's genuinely into what he does!

"We've never really been bothered about confronting people. We've gradually become more accepted, just cos we've been around so long. We've upset a lot of people in the business cos we've shown that you can do things exactly how you want and be successful. Most confrontational gestures were so hollow that they're laughable. The KLF carrying machine guns at the British record industry awards - you just have to look at the front pages of any newspaper to put that kind of gesture in proper perspective.

There should be confrontation in pop, but I think people doing it often believe they're achieving a lot more than they actually are. The premeditated, Malcolm McLaren idea of confrontation is lamentable. Things are only really threatening if someone does something for its own sake and it happens to upset people. The only time we've even come close to that is the whole 'Killing An Arab' debacle. For a couple of days we made the national news in America. And it was the last thing in the world we wanted to get caught up in. Debating Camus on US cable television was totally surreal."

ON TRYING TO STAY AN ENIGMA

"It's very difficult, having been around for so long, a persona builds up around you that's continually reinforced despite your attempts to break away from it. It's like trying to fight you way out of paper mache, there's always people sticking bits of wet newspaper to you all the time. I conjure up in my mind figures like Jim Kerr or Bono, and I always have an image of what they represent. It might be really for away from the truth, but they're trapped in it. I often hear people say of write books about me and the group and they're completely at odds with how I think about us.

We do things from time to time that are mischievous, and in the videos we play around with caricatures of ourselves. But at other times, we're not really mischievous: that implies that we're doing things for nuisance value, and we never have. We can't win really: we're either considered a really doomy group that inspires suicides or we're a bunch of whimsical wackos. We've never really been championed or been hip, and so we've never really been treated as a group that stands for something, like say, Neil Young or The Fall have.

"It comes back to the idea that The Cure image is the non-image. We've been through every extreme, like the phase where we were sort of faceless in an archetypal early '80s way. Then four years later I was being slagged off for wearing too much make-up. Ultimately I can't take it too seriously. Through reading so many record reviews, I'm always staggered at the difference between what I'm listening to and what the critic thinks it's all about.

ON BEING A BOOKWORM

"I try and combat this feeling that I'm missing out on something very fundamental to that I should by now have realised, by reading ferociously. And I still come to the end of books that have been recommended to me by people I consider wise, and I always wonder 'Have I missed the point, or is this something that I knew anyway? I think it's really worrying, getting older, and not knowing anything more intellectually. I don't think I know anything more intellectually. I don't think I know anything more than when I was 15, except on experimental level. I only know things that I wish I didn't know. But I've never really craved wisdom. I enjoy the discussions we have in the group, everyone's well-read, the discussions can soar sometimes."

ON HIS SPLIT-PERSONA - HALF ART-ROCKER, HALF ORDINARY BLOKE

"I don't think it's two sides of my character, it's all of me. In the group, we have quite intense, emotional conversations about things. At the same time, we can go to the pub and get so drunk that I can remember how I got home. But I don't feel bad about it later, I don't think it doesn't fit with how I'm supposed to be. Equally, I wouldn't feel embarrassed if someone asked me what I'm reading at the studio, and I said Love by Stendhal.

I object to people who revel in either end of the spectrum and ignore the other aspect. People who only exist to go home the pub, of people who think 'Oh no, you can't watch football, it's just a pack of men kicking a ball around a field.' I would feel weird excluding one aspect cos felt it wasn't appropriate. It's all me."

A 2018 piece for Stanford Live on Bowie's death and the art of the eulogy.

The night that the news went out that David Bowie had died, I was just finishing a book in which he was the central figure. On January 10th 2016, I was literally on the last pages of my glam rock history Shock and Awe when Twitter told me that this towering pop figure had fallen.

A mixture of emotions muddied my mind. Having labored for three years on the book, I felt like I had an unusual intimacy with Bowie, as if I truly understood his motivations - specifically that ache of emptiness that drove him in search of a succession of cutting edges, a desperate hunger for new ideas to kindle the creative spark within him. At the same time, having reached the end of my book, I felt oddly detached, as if I had finished with Bowie, or even - in some superstitious way -  finished him off.

Born in Great Britain, but a resident of America since 1995, for me Bowie's passing was further entangled with growing feelings of nostalgia: he'd loomed over the Seventies, my childhood, just like the Beatles had dominated the Sixties. Bowie's songs were a perpetual presence on U.K. radio; his face appeared regularly on TV, especially on the weekly pop show Top of the Pops.  From the entrancing strangeness of "Space Oddity", through the homoerotic intimations of "John, I'm Only Dancing", to the cross-dressing subversions of the promo video for "Boys Keep Swinging", Bowie had not only always been there, he'd always been startling.  For many people across the world, but particularly for those who grew up in the U.K. during that era, Bowie's sudden non-existence felt like a part of the sky had suddenly vanished.

More ignoble thoughts intruded amid the grief. I did think, selfishly,  "damn, there's going to be a flood of Bowie-related books rush-written, to compete with my own tome, over which I've toiled so diligently and protractedly."  There was annoyance too, as it became clear that despite my exhaustion I would have to resume work immediately and write an extra closing essay to round off the book. 

Ending Shock and Awe with Bowie peeved me because one intention starting out had been to put the man in his place just a little: I aimed to contextualise Bowie, reconstruct the culture and the rock music discourse out of which he'd emerged, while also elevating other artists now semi-forgotten but who at the time were considered his contemporaries and artistic equals (as well as often selling many more records than him, in fact).  I hadn't wanted my history to become his story - but here was Bowie upstaging everyone again, insisting on being the last word, or at least the last subject for my words, in  the Book of Glam.

Talking about upstaging - Bowie's death coincided with the Golden Globes, which meant that he knocked all the winners off the front page worldwide, outshone the world's stars with his own supernova. Including Lady Gaga - the figure who'd done her darnedest to be the Bowie of the 21st Century,  and that night had won a trophy for her turn in American Horror Story.

As I returned reluctantly to my computer, I pondered how to approach the daunting task of summing up a man's life and work. All around, online and in print, teemed thousands of public tributes and private testimonials - a fiesta of remembrance,  in which professional writers and fans alike competed to find fresh perspectives and idiosyncratic angles. Especially because my essay would have a longer shelf life, it felt like I should attempt to speak not just for my own feelings but for the larger community of people who had been affected by Bowie's existence. There were many notes being sounded in those weeks immediately after his death, but a prominent leitmotif was gratitude, tinged with self-congratulation. A sentiment crystallized sharpest in the widely circulated statement, mistakenly attributed to the actor Simon Pegg: "if you're sad today, just remember the Earth is over four billion years old and you somehow managed to exist at the same time as David Bowie."  As is so often the case with the passing of a pop-culture icon - think of Prince - it felt like people were mourning themselves by proxy, coming to terms with the fading of their own time, and holding fast to the consoling belief that they lived through an exceptional era.

I decided to approach the essay as a eulogy, written on behalf of the gathered grieving, yet I would also try for something almost impossible: a honest eulogy. In other words, I would aim to be true to the insights about his character,  motivations, influence and legacy that had emerged through writing the book (a verdict  more ambivalent than you might expect) while still transmitting a sense of awe that someone so strange and ambitious could have moved within the humble domain of pop music.  A sense of how improbable it all was, really -  and how unlikely to happen again, despite the wishful efforts of figures like Gaga, or Kanye West, or Janelle Monae, to achieve something equivalent in terms of art-into-pop impact. 

The root meaning of the word eulogy in Ancient Greek is "speak well." The funeral oration is meant to be a song of praise, and that means it almost inevitably becomes a whitewash, a lick of paint covering over the cracks and fault-lines. The death of someone is not the best time for airing the whole truth about that someone. Instead, just like the cosmetically-enhanced face of the dearly departed at an open-casket funeral, you are trying to fix the final and lasting image of that person as seen in their very best light. The mortician and the eulogist are in the same business really.

Amid the collective outpouring of grief and gratitude for Bowie's sonic and style innovations, his personae shifts and image games and the sheer drama of a career played out on the stage of the mass media, there was understandably scant inclination for a close examination of less wholesome or impressive sides of his work. Like that alarming phase in the mid-Seventies during which Bowie talked in fascist terms of the need for a strong leader and called for an anti-permissive crackdown on liberal decadence. Or all those credulous and indiscriminate flirtations with magic and mysticism that ran through much of his life (again reaching an unsightly climax in the cocaine-crazed years circa 1974-76).  People likewise didn't dwell much on the long period during which Bowie's Midas touch failed him: the years of the "Blue Jean" mini-film, the Glass Spider tour, Labyrinth, Tin Machine and the beard…  A period that if you were being honestly harsh constituted (give or take the occasional quite cool single) an unbroken desert of inspiration and direction that lasted two whole decades: 1983 to 2013, from the last bars of Let's Dance to the first of The Next Day. I distinctively remember that through much of that time, Bowie dropped away not just as figure who frequented the pop charts or commanded attention, but even as a reference point, something that new bands would cite as a model or touchstone. 

It makes sense that the least compelling phases or most questionable aspects of Bowie's life wouldn't figure in the immediate post-mortem reckoning. Speaking ill of the recently dead is not a good look. But something of Bowie's complexity - his flaws and his follies- got written out with the concentrated focus on his genius achievements, personal charm, and acts of generosity. 

Maybe it's my age, but I'm sure I can't be alone in feeling that important pop cultural figures are dying off at an accelerated rate. Then again, perhaps this is an illusion created by the sheer overload of coverage triggered by each passing: the internet and social media create so much opportunity and space for remembrance, and the profusion of outlets fuels a competition to offer ever more forensically deep or differently angled takes on the departed artist. There seems to be a widespread compulsion felt by civilians as well as professional pundits to make an immediate public statement: the news goes out that an icon has gone and Facebook teems with oddly official-sounding bits of writing that often read like obituaries with a slight first-person twist.

Sometimes I've felt that people protest a little too much about their intense relationship with the extinguished star. Where did all these people come from with their lifelong and surprisingly deep acquaintance with the oeuvre of Tom Petty?  Who knew there were people who bothered with the three George Michael albums after 1990's Listen With Prejudice Vol.1? And surely I'm not the only one out there who - while fully cognizant and wholly respectful of the world-historical eminence of Aretha Franklin - only ever owned her Greatest Hits and - if I'm honest - really only ever craves to hear "I Say A Little Prayer"?

The truth of pop for most people, I suspect, is that we use the music to soundtrack our lives, but in a fairly fickle, personal-pleasure attuned way, and - apart from a few formative exceptions, the kind of teen infatuations that shape worldviews - we seldom engage with the totality of an artist's work and life. Tom Petty, for me, boils down rather brutally to the urge to turn up the volume when "Free Falling" and "Don't Come Around Here No More" come on the radio (in other words, he's on the same level as The Steve Miller Band and Bachman-Turner Overdrive). Unfair or not, George Michael reduces to a couple of nifty Wham! singles plus "Faith" and "Freedom! '90". A few moments of unreflective pleasure in the lives of millions of casual listeners is no small achievement, although it wouldn't have been enough for these guys, who craved to be Serious Artists on the level of those they venerated: Dylan and the Byrds, for Petty…  someone like Stevie Wonder or Prince, for Michael. No amount of earnest reassessment or auteurist reappraisal could persuade me to dig deep into their discographies for those lost gems tucked away on Side 2 of a late-phase album.

You'll get no argument from me about Bowie, of course: career doldrums and dodgy opinions aside, he's as major an artist as rock has produced, worthy of taking as seriously as anybody (which is why the fascist flirtations and the half-baked occultism are troubling, as opposed to something you'd laugh off in a lesser figure). And Bowie also did what almost no fatally ill or otherwise declining pop star has ever managed, which is to go out on an artistic high. Beyond their musical daring and desperate expressive intensity, Blackstar and the videos for "Lazarus" and the title track made for a fitting last statement because of the sheer care that went into them. This was so utterly characteristic of Bowie and the way he went about things. Who among us - facing the final curtain, sick in body and frail of spirit - could have summoned the  obsessive energy and psychic strength to meticulously craft their artistic farewell to the world?  Who, confronting oblivion, would have been so concerned about how they looked and sounded at the end? Only Bowie.

As I found writing Shock and Awe, the beginning of Bowie's public life was faltering, a series of false starts and fumbled career moves. It took Bowie eight years of dithering and stylistic switches to really become a star. In contrast, the closing of his career was immaculately executed. What some sceptics always regarded as his core flaws - cold calculation, excessive control - triumphed at the end.  Bowie organized a grand exit so elegant that it fixed forever our final image of him, rendering all eulogies superfluous. 

One of the odd things about the social media era is becoming "friends" with musical legends and cult figures that you've never met. Musicians you've interviewed and interacted with in real life - that's one thing, that makes sense.  But I get a little shiver when I see a name like Annette Peacock or Andy Ellison (of John's Children renown) pop up in my feed.  

One such Facebook friend that for the life of me I can't work out how I acquired was Shel Talmy, producer of a great number of classic singles of the 1960s, including works that I find impossibly exciting: the obvious anthems by  The Kinks and The Who, stuff by The Creation, and above all The Easybeats's "Friday On My Mind". I think of the sound Talmy shaped as quintessentially English, even though he was himself an American living in  Britain. (Much the same applies to Joe Boyd).  Most of the groups Talmy produced were British, I believe (or Australian, as with the Easybeats). Somehow Shel was able to tap into, activate, direct, and realise a uniquely English form of musical violence.  

I never actually interacted with Shel, which now seems like a shame. But I did enjoy the detailed accounts of producing particular tracks that he posted on Facebook, always titled "The Blueprint Of...". Over the years I have written about a bunch of things he worked on, but I don't think his name ever got mentioned therein - remiss of me perhaps - but at any rate here they are gathered below, a sort of belated reparations, or salute. 

Talmy is one of the prime architects of this syndrome I broach below (extracted from this longer piece on British Rock Greatness). Again, somewhat ironic given that he was a Yank

... by the early '60s, a difference had become audible — a contoured clarity to the riff structures hitherto only heard in Eddie Cochran (who produced his own records, and was much bigger in the U.K. than in America). "Shakin' All Over," by Johnny Kidd & the Pirates, is the first British rock 'n' roll record to match America while also sounding different. This stark, almost diagrammatic quality carries on through the Kinks and mod groups like the Eyes, on to Led Zeppelin, Free and the Groundhogs, and beyond them to Wire and Gang of Four. It almost feels like you see the music as much as hear it; compare this lucidity with the organic, live-sounding quality of so much American rock — the marauding murk of the Stooges on Fun House, for instance.  

Perhaps British rock feels less "organic" because we've never had an organic relationship with the music or its sources in blues and country. These sounds arrived like invasive visitations, and bear connections to indigenous forms like traditional folk or music hall that are chiefly musicological and twice-removed. It's as if this inherently distanced perspective on rock gave British artists a unique vantage point, and an advantage. Hearing rock 'n' roll primarily as recordings first and foremost, rather than as live music, made a difference. As their precursors had with jazz and blues imports, British rock 'n' roll fans studied the records, playing them over and over and isolating specific bits of performance. (This studious approach no doubt contributed to the remarkable lineage of British guitar heroism.) In the U.K., the record is the primary text, what a live performance is trying to realize and replicate; in America, it's the other way around. 

Thoughts on "Friday On My Mind" and "the blow out":

With the rave as working class blowout idea, I always come back to this 1966 song by The Easybeats, "Friday On My Mind",  a thrilling anatomy of the working-class weekender life cycle of drudgery, anticipation and explosive release. It's written from a Sixties mod perspective, the 60-hour weekend, but it foreshadows Northern Soul's speedfreak stylists, to disco's Saturday-night fever-dreams and jazz-funk's All Dayers and Soul Weekends, and onto rave and EDM. Every kind of dance culture in which pills are used to intensify leisure time to the utmost, but then it's back to the 9 to 5. 

 This is the key verse --

Do the five day grind once more

I know of nothin' else that bugs me

More than workin' for the rich man

Hey! I'll change that scene one day

Today I might be mad, tomorrow I'll be glad

'Cause I'll have Friday on my mind

And then there's the chorus 

Tonight I'll spend my bread, tonight

I'll lose my head, tonight

I've got to get to night

Monday I'll have Friday on my mind

Musically the verses have this sort of tick-tocking tension, like the treadmill of workaday time, as he waits for the big blowout of the weekend (the euphoric chorus). It's two different kinds of time:  chronos versus kairos

Lyrically the key line is "hey! I'll change that scene one day"  - I find it incredibly poignant - it could just mean "one day I'll get started on my career / start a business and I'll be the rich man / boss" or it could mean "one day me and the rest of the proletariat will organise at the site of the means of production and there'll be a revolutionary transformation in political economy, no more rich men, no more bosses"

But it's clear that he's so caught up in this nightlifestyle that he'll never get around to either the individual or collective escape route

I tend to see the essence of rave (and its precursors) as dissipatory 

But (like a lot of music in different ways) it points towards an unalienated life - one that it can't actually make real  in the outside world, but can only institute in the small areas of space and time it can command

Of course, the troubling thought is that the momentary release of the ecstatic all night dance is actively working against the total and permanent change he and everyone else should be working for (and which would necessarily involve more drudgery and deferment of gratification in favor of the long term goal - duty for the future being the essence of political involvement) 

The here-and-now utopia / TAZ is taking away the possibility of a soon-to-come PAZ (permanent autonomous zone)

Almost sixty years after "Friday On My Mind",  we're no nearer to overhauling the work/leisure structures of industrial society. Instead, all that rage and frustration is vented through going mental at the weekend ('Tonight, I'll spend my bread / Tonight, I'll lose my head'), helped along by a capsule or three of instant unearned euphoria.

Flowered Up's "Weekender" film is an update of this notion of the  blow out cycle as counter-revolutionary. It's totally mod - indeed directly influenced by Quadrophenia, the mod revival movie of 1979 - indeed there's a sample of the Phil Daniels character's rant about how they can take his office drone job and stick it up their arseholes. In Quadrophrenia, the key scene of disillusionment for the mod protagonist as played by Phil Daniels,  is when he comes across the scene's leading Face - the coolest of the cool  - in his civilian life, where he is a porter in a posh hotel, a flunky ordered around by rich men... 

Another song about the blow out - there's a verse about "going to the disco" in this otherwise gritty funk-blues song about how tough life is economically by the great Johnny 'Guitar' Watson, the king of "proletarian funk"

Got to go to a disco

Throw your troubles away

Dance to the music

That the DJ's play

And then the lights come on

Like you knew they would

Go home and face the music

That don't sound to good

Stuff on The Who and mod from an essay entitled "Buttoned Up" - about buttoned up shirt style, wouldyabelieve?

The violence of the Mods as they rampaged against the Rockers was on one level  simply righteous disgust for their abject opposite.  But mod style itself could be seen as having an inherent undercurrent of violence. First, there was the symbolic violence of dressing sharper than your social superiors ("powerful people -- businessmen in suits, take their clothes, retain your identity" as Ian Page of mod revival band Secret Affair put it). But also a kind of imploded violence: the neurotic fastidiousness of dress and grooming was a sort of voluntarily worn strait-jacket, a near-masochistic set of constraints and rules.   

This stringent regime, stoked and sharpened by amphetamines, virtually demanded some kind of release, a breaking free. That could take the form of mayhem (as with the war with the rockers) or through theatricalized disorder. Which is where the Who came in: a band designed by mod philosopher Pete Meaden, the group's manager in their early days.  Meaden deliberately shaped the Who to appeal to  the existing Mod subculture, which until then had been based not around following bands but dancing to records, imported soul and R&B.

Rock 'n' roll had triggered violence before (with the cinema seat slashing done by Teddy Boys driven into a frenzy of excitement by the first rock'n'roll movies to arrive in Britain). But it had never really represented violence musically or enacted it onstage.   The Who's sound was white R&B so amped-up and amphetamine-uptight it came apart at the seams: Keith Moon's free-flailing cymbal crashes and tom rolls, Pete Townshend's slashed and scything powerchords, John Entwhistle's bass-lunges.  A sound expressive not of sexual desire but of an unrest at once social and existential.  Mod was fundamentally asexual: as Pearce notes, mods "simply were not interested. They were.... too self-absorbed....  Mods were free, clear of emotional ties. They rejected peer pressure to pair off."  The boys dressed and danced to impress other boys, not to attract girls. Amphetamines  also had something to do with it, suppressing sex drive along with the other needs and appetites of the organism (such as food and sleep). Speed creating a sexless intensity, a plateau state of arrested orgasm that the mods, revealingly, called "blocked".

The pent-up pressure had to blow somehow, though, and mod's latent violence was dramatized by Moon and Townshend in their climactic orgies of instrument-smashing : supposedly inspired by art-school student Townsend's  encounter with Gustav Metzger's auto-destructive art, but really the orgasmic release that mod music, mod psychology, mod neurology urgently required. In the immediate aftermath of "My Generation", "I Can't Explain", "Anyway Anyhow Anywhere", and the other early Who singles,  young bands like The Eyes, The Creation and John's Children picked up on the band's loudness and distortion and recorded a  a series of 1966-67 singles that fans and collectors subsequently have come to call "freakbeat":  mod tipping into a jagged, edge-of-chaos frenzy under the influence of speed and LSD.  The strange blend of menace and feyness in songs like The Eyes's "When The Night Falls" and "My Degeneration",  John's Children's "A Midsummer Night's Scene"  and "Desdemona" simmered with a spontaneous combustibility that was uniquely English, rooted in the characteristic native psychology of neurotic uptightness and lashing-out rage. 

John Entwistle / The Who, "My Generation" (Brunswick single, 1965)

Rock 'n' roll had triggered violence before, but up until The Who it had never really represented violence musically* or enacted it onstage.  Think of words like "mayhem" and "destruction" in connection with that band and the first things that spring to mind are Keith Moon's free-flailing drums and Pete Townshend's scything powerchords.  (Not forgetting those climactic orgies of instrument-smashing).  But on "My Generation" John Entwistle supplies more than his fair share of the savagery. Often described as lead bassist to Townshend's  rhythm guitarist, on this late 1965 single, his is the loudest instrument (with the possible exception of Moon's cymbals). 

For the first minute "Thunderfingers", as his bandmates nicknamed him,  churns and grinds as relentlessly and remorselessly as a gigantic tunnel-boring drill. Then, outrageously, he takes the solo and slashes a rent in the song's fabric with a down-diving flurry of notes at once fluidly elegant and brutishly in-your-face.  This is generally regarded as the first bass solo in recorded rock, and as such, it's a mixed portent.  Entwistle would immediately attempt to reprise the shock effect on the Who's debut album with the bass-dominated instrumental "The Ox" and over the years he became an increasingly ostentatious player, peaking with the verging-on-Pastorius floridity of Quadrophenia's "The Real Me" (much admired in the technical guitar magazines). 

But in the immediate aftermath of "My Generation", young bands like The Eyes, The Creation and John's Children picked up not on the sophistication (beyond their capabilities, anyway) but the loudness, distortion, and menace.  Amping up the jagged, edge-of-chaos frenzy, they recorded a series of 1966-67 singles that fans and collectors today know as "freakbeat".  Mod, as a musical form as opposed to a subcultural style, represented a uniquely English contribution to rock: the sound of frustration and neurosis, tension and explosive release.  In their own way, for a moment there in the mid-Sixties the Who were as radical as the Velvet Underground. Certainly, as far as Britain is concerned, punk starts here. Entwistle can even be seen as a forefather of postpunk's  "lead bassists", or at least the  aggressive hard-rocking sort, such as Jean-Jacques Burnel and Peter Hook. Indeed Hooky actually bought some of the Ox's bass guitars in the estate sale after his 2002 death.

* Actually I would semi-retract that - Bo Diddley's sound, all rhythm and noise, is joyously violent. 

VARIOUS ARTISTS, Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts From the British Empire & Beyond

Lenny Kaye's 1972 anthology Nuggets was a rock archivist's masterstroke, a feat of canon rewriting that deposed the post-Sgt Pepper's aristocracy and elevated the forgotten garage punks of the mid-Sixties, from The Seeds to Chocolate Watchband. Rhino's 1998 four-CD update of Nuggets dramatically expanded the original double LP. Now this latest instalment extends the Nuggets premise beyond the USA to encompass the one-hit-wonders and never-wozzers of mid-Sixties Britain: that all-too-brief golden age of amphetamine-cranked R&B and mod-on-LSD that's roughly bookended by "My Generation" and Cream's Disraeli Gears. Just the names of these long-lost groups--Dantalion's Chariot, Wimple Winch, Rupert's People, The Idle Race--induces a contact high, before you even play the discs.

Back then, singles made their point and left. This short'n'sweet succinctness allows the compilers to cram 109--that's one hundred and nine--tracks into four discs. Here's just a handful of gems. Tintern Abbey's "Vacuum Cleaner", with the saintly-sounding David MacTavish singing a proto-Spacemen 3 love-as-drug/drug-as-God lyric ("fix me up with your sweet dose/now I'm feeling like a ghost"), splashy cymbals, and a billowing solo of controlled feedback. Them's "I Can Only Give You Everything": Van in I'm-A-Man mode, awesomely surly and swaggering. The Sorrows's "Take A Heart": a Brit-Diddley locked groove of tumbling tribal toms and spaced-out-for-intensified-effect guitar-riffs. The Eyes's "When The Night Falls" takes that drastic use of silence and suspense even further: powerchords like Damocles Swords, caveman tub-thumping, tongues-of-flame harmonica, and an insolent you-done-me-wrong/go-my-own-way vocal. Fire's "Father's Name Was Dad," a classic misunderstood teen anthem: society gets the blame and the kid surveys Squaresville from a lofty vantage, cries "I laugh at it all!"

One group stands out as a "why?-why?!?-were-they-never-MASSIVE?" mystery. Not The Creation, and not The Action--both had terrific songs but were a little characterless. No, I'm talking about John's Children's. Their two offerings here are astoundingly deranged, the monstrously engorged fuzzbass like staring into a furnace, the drums flailing and scything like Keith Moon at his most smashed-blocked. "Desdemona" features the then shocking chorus "lift up your skirt and fly", daft lines about Toulouse-Lautrec painting "some chick in the rude" plus the stutter-bleat of a young Bolan on backing vox. "A Midnight Summer's Scene" captures mod sulphate-mania on the cusp of mutating into flower power acid-bliss: it's a febrile fantasy of Dionysian mayhem in an after-dark park, maenad hippy-chicks with faces "disfigured by love", strewing "petals and flowers," prancing the rites of Pan.

John's Children's merger of cissy and psychotic highlights the major difference between American garage punk and British "freakbeat" (as reissue label Bam Caruso dubbed it for their illustrious Rubble compilation series). The Limey stuff is way fey compared with the Yanks. You can hear a proto-glam androgyny, a "soft boy" continuum that takes in Barrett and Bolan, obviously, but also the queeny-dandy aristocrat persona of Robert Plant. At the same time, because these bands were schooled in R&B and played live constantly, the music has a rhythmic urgency and aggressive thrust that gradually faded over subsequent decades from the psychedelic tradition (think of Spiritualized's drum-phobic ethereality). This, though, was music for dancing as much as wigging out.

Nuggets II isn't solid gold. There's a slight surfeit of boppy shindig-type rave-ups and sub-Yardbirds blues that just ain't bastardized enough. Personally I crave more tunes with truly over-the-top guitar effects, aberrant bass-heavy mixes, phased cymbals, drastic stereo separation, and other psych-era cliches. The "British Empire" part of the subtitle allows in Australia's The Easybeats (godstars for the duration of "Friday On My Mind") while the "Beyond" pulls in groovy Latin American acid-rockers Os Mutantes. But to be honest, a lot of the Commonwealth-and-beyond stuff just ain't that hot. And inevitably one could compile another 2-CDs out of heinous ommissions. Forget the quibbles, though, this box is a treasure chest of vintage dementia.

THE WHO

3O YEARS MAXIMUM R&B

 For a while there, it seemed that The Who had dipped out of rock memory, become a band that virtually no one even thought about. They seemed to have the same relation vis-a-vis the eternally cool and current Beatles & Stones that, say, Deep Purple have to Sabbath & Zep: massive then, monstrously uninfluential thereafter. In recent years, though, The Who have slowly seeped back as a reference point, what with Urge Overkill's "Live At Leeds" sharp-dressed rifferama and the mod iconography of groups at diverse as Flowered Up, These Animal Men, Blur, D-Generation, and Primal Scream (that ad for 'Rocks' featuring Keith Moon). 

     Personally, I find there's something resolutely unloveable about The Who, although why I'm not sure.  Pete Townshend's mid-life crisis and endless maudlin' musings on lost youth?  Roger Daltrey's voice, face, and fish-farm? Just the FACT (I haven't heard 'em) that John Entwhistle released FIVE solo LP's?  Perhaps the real reason is the boy-ness of The Who cult (and of their legacy, The Jam, Secret Affair etc).  Somehow it's obvious that way fewer women cared about The Who than The Stones, Beatles or even Led Zep. 

     Still, I love the mod-psych bands who never made it--The Eyes, John's Children, The Creation--so I can't logically refute the thrill of "I Can't Explain", "Anyway Anyhow Anywhere", "Substitute". At their 1965/66 height, The Who's white R&B is so amped-up and amphetamine-uptight it's coming apart at the seams.  "My Generation" remains as naffly irresistible as Steppenwolf's equally naive "Born To Be Wild"; Moon's ramshackle surf-drums, exploding everywhichway like Mitch Mitchell of the Experience, Townshend's slash-and-scald rhythm guitar, Entwhistle's bass-lunges and Daltrey's speed-freak stutter, all add up to an immaculately chaotic enactment of mod's "smashed, blocked" aggression, its rage-to-live and hunger for action.

     With the arrival of psychedelia, The Who toyed with the era's fashionable tropes of androgyny ("I'm A Boy"'s Frank Spencer scenario, where mummy won't admit he's not a girl), and regression (the fey "creepy-crawly" terrors of "Boris The Spider").  There were gems here (the effete all-wanked-out vocals of the masturbation ode "Pictures Of Lily"), but mostly The Who's acid-phase is unusually unappetising.  "I Can See For Miles" turns mod misogny into visionary paranoia, and the swooping phased guitars of "Armenia" thrill, but the pallid, fey vocals of this period are pretty pukey.

     Then the bombast begins in earnest.  Daltrey quickly swells into the least likeable white R&B singer this side of Joe Cocker, while Townshend's songs bloat up like houses with too many extensions. The Who's progressive aspirations are all on the level of structure rather than playing or texture (which remained coarse R&B); the result is a horrid fusion of prog-rock and pub rock.  So, apart from "Tommy"'s one genuinely hymnal aria ("See Me Feel Me") and the just-about-takeable epic-ness of their post-counterculture allegory "Won't Get Fooled Again", a long blank void ensues--one whose continuance seemed increasingly mercenary as the Seventies proceed.  Even at their most haggard, The Stones could re- ignite with the lubricious raunch of a "Start Me Up".  The Who's equivalent twilight hit is "You Better You Bet", a song with only one fan in the entire world, Taylor Parkes, and only then for the most perverse, "it's so bad, it's.... really MINDBOGGLINGLY bad" of reasons.

     "30 Years Maximum R & B"? Break that down, and it works out at roughly 4 and a half years of adolescent intensity and two and a half decades of graceless middle-age.                                   

A little souvenir of a terrible year...  something I wrote about doomscrolling for Sasha Frere-Jones end-of-year writer round-up, looking back over 2023 and looking ahead to 2024, which has been even more "how can this be reality?!?" than I could have imagined.

Hoping for some hopescrolling come Tuesday night....

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

 It was a year of doomscrolling. Like the year before. And like next year.

Sometimes, when trying to explain affect theory to my students, I use doomscrolling as an example of a uniquely contemporary affect. It didn't exist - and then it did.

For sure, there's always been bad news. But it arrived in defined chunks and at punctual intervals - TV news, radio at the top of the hour. Only a massive crisis like 9/11 or Katrina would result in rolling round the clock coverage - and even then, you could walk away from that.

To get the doomscroll effect in the past, you'd have to take a load of newspapers and chop them up and stick on some kind of homemade carousel rigged up out of chicken wire and spindles. And even then it would not approach the inexhaustible, endless-onwardness of the doomscroll,

The chyron, that Times Square tickertape at the bottom of the news channel screen, was a foretaste, an augury of doomscrolling. But it was easier to ignore, and it didn't have the personalized, algo-attuned quality of doomscroll, the way it learns what detains your gaze and churns up choice items tailor-made to agitate you.

Think about how this timesuck lifefuck invention affects your breathing rhythms, your posture (hunched, clenched), your endocrinal system - and how that builds up as neurological wear and tear, a stress load.

But think also about how those on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum from where you sit  - on any issue, any conflict currently raging - are also being pumped full of this shit nonstop, forcefed fear and tension.  It explains a lot.

For sure, now and then there'll be a spate of hopescrolling - unexpectedly positive developments, better than expected election results. But mostly the mode is doomscroll - feeding your inexplicable craving for the alarming, the upsetting, the enlargement of feelings of impotence and despair.

Feeding you the illusion of keeping on top of things when actually you're sinking deeper and deeper.

2023 was the year of doomscrolling. Same as last year. 2024 will be worse - worse beyond the wildest nightmares.

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

Follow up on the blog about Bob Dylan as the Original Doomscroller

 Never became a Deadhead, but there's the odd moment on the records, and then there's "Dark Star"

There's also the electro-acoustic side project Seastones, the creation of Ned Lagin, but Lesh's contribution and encouragement clearly crucial.

Below is 

a/ bit on the Dead from an essay on psychedelia for a Liverpool exhibition

b/ a bit on Grateful Dead and Deadhead culture from Retromania

c/ my interview with John Oswald about his Grayfolded project based on 100s of different live versions of "Dark Star"

Ethan Hein does close analysis of "Dark Star" and recommends some great versions 

Here's a playlist of "Dark Star" renditions I made on Tidal

I rather like this ridiculously non-singular studio version they put out as a single

Call me soft in the head but I've always rather liked this other single - an actual hit, Top 10 Billboard!

Grateful Dead and the SF Sound

Unlike the British psychedelic groups, the SF bands had gone straight from folk to acid-rock without any intervening period playing rock'n'roll or R&B. As a consequence, the feelgood groove that the UK groups retained through all the studio malarkey was absent. Yet despite its lack of grounding in R&B, the SF acid-rock bands uniformly emphasized the importance of dancing. It's no coincidence that the scene was born in former ballrooms like the Fillmore and the Avalon. This was a particular form of dance--unpaired and asexual, a sacred frenzy of undulant gestures. This freeform dance matched The Grateful Dead's "search for the form that follows chaos," as guitarist Jerry Garcia characterized it. 

Capturing the fugitive "magic" of their live jamming in the studio would prove an abiding problem for the Grateful Dead. Shortly before making their first album, Garcia warned, "We're not a recording band. We're a dance band." After a disappointing debut, the Dead veered to the opposite extreme and embraced the sound-sculpting potential of the studio. Painstakingly stitching together live tapes with studio experimentation, 1968's Anthem of the Sun drew heavily on the avant-classical training of bassist Phil Lesh and pianist Tom Constanten, both of whom had studied under Luciano Berio at Mills College in Oakland, California. "We were making a collage," recalled Garcia. "It had to do with an approach that's more like electronic music or concrete  music, where  you are actually assembling bits and pieces towards an enhanced non-realistic representation."  Compared with the phonographic feats of the Beatles or Hendrix, though, Anthem is a pretty mild experience, with an "organic" quality that mostly feels like a plausible real-time musical event (unlike the Beatles' "A Day In The Life." say). The Dead quickly reverted to their original go-with-the-flow improvisational model, as documented on an endless series of live albums.  Jefferson Airplane, likewise, made a couple of gestures at musique concrete--the freak-out track "A Small Package of Value Will Come To You, Shortly," the electronic foray "Curinga"--but their records generally closely replicated their live sound.  

.... Paralleling the Deadhead subculture that surrounded the Grateful Dead all through the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, the rave scene created a sense of ecstatic tribalistic community. Like Dead shows, each rave constructed a "temporary autonomous zone" in which drugs could be experienced in the most audio-visually conducive environment imaginable. The acid house played at the raves couldn't have sounded further from the Dead's meandering country-rock, but it had exactly the same function. As journalist Burton H. Wolfe put it in the 1960s, this was music designed "to blow the mind and provide action sound for dancing." 

DEADHEADS

THE LIVING DEAD

On the face of it, it's difficult to think of anything more distant from Mod and Northern Soul than the Deadheads, that tie dye tribe who followed the Grateful Dead on their arena tours all through the Seventies, Eighties and early Nineties.   The turn to psychedelia in the mid-Sixties was precisely what turned off many mods and led to Northern Soul.  It's easy to imagine a Northern Soul or Secret Affair fan's disgust at the Deadhead's sense of "style": the long straggly hair and face-fuzz, the cut-off-shorts and loose flowing garments with their unappetizing mix of garish colors and Whole Earth-y shades of brown.  The Dead's music--all meandering guitar solos, rootsy grooves, weak whitebread harmonies--could hardly have been more offensive to the mod sensibility.  

 Still, there are a surprising number of parallels between Northern Soul and the Deadhead scene. Both are style tribes whose members travelled on pilgrimages to particular clubs or one-off events, "temples of sound" where they congregated to create an ecstatic ritual space.  At the Dead's long arena shows and the Northern Soul all-nighters loud music and drugs meshed to overwhelm listeners and transport them to a collective high. Dead shows were famous for the ripples that traversed the crowd-body in response to certain shifts in the music.  As journalist Burton H. Wolfe observed, the Dead's music was "action sound for dancing" just as much as it was head music designed to "blow the mind". A different kind of dancing, for sure, to the fastidious steps and acrobatic twirls on display at Northern nights. Freeform and fluid, Deadhead dancing was the continuation of the "freaking-out" style that emerged in 1960s San Francisco at former ballrooms like the Fillmore and the Avalon as well as at the Be-Ins and similar triptastic happenings.   Orgiastic yet asexual, this sacred frenzy of undulant gestures matched The Grateful Dead's "search for the form that follows chaos," as guitarist Jerry Garcia characterized it. But like Northern Soul, the Dead's concert audience was mostly on its feet, moving and grooving.  

The main thing that the Deadheads and Northern Soul have in common is their fixation on a particular moment in the Sixties, keeping it alive in defiance of the passage of pop historical time.  Neither scene was really retro, but rather an example of subcultural persistence.  "Keeping the faith" is the central principle in both fan cultures. So too is an emphasis on community--a sense of togetherness defined against the mainstream, that unlucky majority who aren't in the know.  As the Dead's Tom Constanten put it, "Back in the sixties, there was a great sense of community, and I think a lot of the energy and the steam, the wind in the sails of the Grateful Dead phenomenon is from that community."  There are even parallels between Northern Soul and the Deadheads in terms of the way a rhetoric of anti-commercialism was combined with a bustling entrepreneurial activity, as with the markets for handcrafted goods (hemp bracelets, jewelry, tie-dyed clothes) and Dead memorabilia  that sprang up in the parking lots outside the arenas where the Dead  played, which aren't that far removed from the record dealers selling and swapping rare soul singles at the Northern Soul all-nighters. In both scenes there was also a bustling illegal trade going on rather less openly:  amphetamines and barbituarates with Northern, and at Deadhead shows, marijuana, "doses" ( LSD), and other psychedelics like peyote, mushrooms and MDMA. 

All this parking lot activity was as much part of the total experience of a Dead show as the band's performance.  These outdoor bazaars,  teeming with  backpack-lugging peddlers and gaudily daubed, Merry Prankster-style micro-buses and vans, offered a kind of nomadic surrogate for Haight-Ashbury circa 1967-69. And they had the same upsides and downsides. Familiar faces that you'd see at every show, people passing around the pipe and sharing stuff with strangers, an atmosphere of trust and tranquility…. But also rip-off deals, scam artists, hardcore drug casualties, kids flipping out on bad trips.   

Deborah J.  Baiano-Berman, who's both an academic and a Deadhead,  characterizes the band's following  as a "moral community" and argues that Dead's concerts allow their fans "to live out their interpretation of a hippie-like communal value system, based primarily on freedom, experimentation, solidarity, peace, and spontaneity."  Inside the auditorium, the crowd created the atmosphere as much as the band or the lighting crew.  The emphasis on tie-dye and clashing colours, the painted faces and beads, turned the whole shimmying, swaying audience into a paisley ocean, a spin-art kaleidoscope.  Baiano-Berman points out that almost nobody sits at their assigned seats in the concert hall: they move out into the aisles and dance, drift around the auditorium, settling in different places, creating an effect of "incessant movement and circulation". To an audience sensitized on drugs like LSD, which intensifies peripheral vision, to be in the midst of this flickering multitude is entrancing and magical.

Another aspect of Deadhead culture that's about communality and circulation is tape trading. From very early on Deadheads started recording shows, a practice that was first tolerated by the band and then encouraged, with the Grateful Dead making provisions for a special area at each of their shows for tapers.  There was a huge demand for cassette recordings of the band's shows, in part because the Grateful Dead's official studio albums were airless affairs that failed to capture the electricity of the band in full improvisational flow.   Deadhead culture's communal ethos meant that if anyone requested a tape, the taper had to make them a copy. Tapers also got into trading recordings with other tapers in different parts of the country.  All that resulting excessive documentation and redundancy anticipated aspects of today's retro culture, like the multiple clips of the same gig videoed on cellphones and uploaded to YouTube. 

The taping phenomenon has a paradoxical aspect.  The angle on the Dead has always been that you really had to see them live to "get it": you needed to experience the flow of the moment, the pure quicksilver magic of Garcia's soloing as it rippled out into the cosmos.  Taping the shows attempts to capture that evanescent beauty but in the process goes against the "be here now" spirit of psychedelia.   Indeed the tapers became obsessed with recording quality. Instead of dancing and getting lost in music, they would spend the show crouched beside their tape recording equipment, constantly adjusting the recording levels (sometimes listening to the show through headphones plugged into the machine) or repositioning the microphones.  They'd admonish dancing Deadheads for bumping into the equipment or chatting too loudly on the periphery of the taper's sections.  Like the dad with a videocamera welded into his eye socket at his kid's birthday party, the tapers were not fully present; they missed, partially at any rate,  the very event  they were attempting to save for eternity.  

The fact that obsessively stockpiling audio documentation of the live Dead is so central to the Deadhead subculture seems to resonate with its deepest impulse: to freeze-frame History and artificially keep alive an entire era, the late Sixties.  The Deadhead scene is a preservation society.  Or perhaps it was actually a reservation, a zone of cultural territory set aside for an outcast tribe.  The gentle frenzy of the Deadheads is a ghost dance: an endangered, out-of-time people willing a lost world back into existence.

JOHN OSWALD 

The Wire, 1995

 by Simon Reynolds

     There are two different schools of sampling. For some (A Guy Called Gerald, The Young Gods, Techno-Animal), there's a fierce conviction (50 percent aesthetic, 50 percent legal anxiety) that all samples must be masked, all sources rendered unrecognisable.  This is the modernist school of sampladelia: digital technology as a crucible for sonic alchemy, musique concrete made easy as pie.  I have a lot of sympathy for this ethos, but there's a sense in which this approach reduces the sampler to a synthesiser, and thereby misses what is truly idiomatic to the machine: taking the known and making it strange, yet still retaining an uncanny, half-recognisable trace of the original's aura.

     Canadian musician/producer John Oswald falls into the second, postmodern camp. Sampling, or as he prefers to term it, "electroquoting", is a highly self-conscious practice that allows him to interrogate notions of originality, copyright, signature and 'the death of the author'.  Long before the sampler became available, he was using more cumbersome, time-consuming techniques of tape cut'n'splice to create his famous if seldom heard Mystery Lab cassettes.  But he really made a name for himself in 1989 with the Plunderphonics CD, which caused a major ruckus, sonically and institutionally, with its digital vivisections of songs by The Beatles, Elvis, Dolly Parton, Michael Jackson, Glenn Gould etc.  Despite the fact that 'Plunderphonics' was distributed on a non-commercial, non-profit basis, the Canadian Recording Industry Association, acting on behalf of its clients CBS and Michael Jackson, threatened Oswald with litigation.  He was forced to destroy the master-tapes and all remaining CD's.  700 remain in circulation, while the intrigued can get bootleg copies from a number of Copyright Violation Squads (see end-note).

     Since then Oswald has mostly confined his plunderphonic escapades to cases where his reworkings have been solicited, like his de- and re-constructions of songs by The Doors and Metallica, amongst others, for a limited release CD celebrating the 25th Annivesary of Elektra Records. An exception was "Plexure" (released on John Zorn's Avant label), where Oswald cannibalised the entire audiorama of contemporary pop'n'rock in one fell swoop. The result--5000 songs 'composited' into a 20 minute frenzy of crescendos, choruses, screams, powerchords, etc--is a bit like Napalm Death with samplers.

     Last year, at the invitation of the Grateful Dead, Oswald plunderphonized that band's most famous and far-out song "Dark Star", producing the double-CD "Grayfolded".  The first disc, "Transitive Axis" came out last year; now the second half, "Mirror Ashes" has been added, and the whole 'Grayfolded' package is being made widely available, following the unexpectedly warm reception 'Transitive' received from the Deadhead community (50,000 copies sold!). 

     Entering the Dead's legendary vaults, where recordings of virtually every performance they ever made are stacked, Oswald spent 21 days listening to 100 versions of 'Dark Star', and extracted 40 hours of improvisatory material.  The original plan was to create just one disc, but Oswald soon realised he had enough good stuff for two.  'Transitive' and 'Mirror' each took three months of painstaking digital labour to construct. The results are astonishing. Whereas the iconoclasm (literally idol-smashing) of 'Plunderphonics' was patently audible, 'Grayfolded' is true to the spirit of the Dead:  the nine tracks of 'Transitive', in particular, form one seamless, fluent monster-jam, and sounds almost like a plausible real-time event with the Dead in unusually kosmik form.  Although Oswald's techniques allow Garcia, Weir, Lesh et al to jam  with their own doppelgangers across a 25 years timespan, the digital methodology doesn't really draw attention to itself on the first disc (it gets a bit more outre on "Mirror Ashes", though).

     One of the ironies of "Grayfolded" is that Oswald wasn't exactly a Deadhead when he embarked on the project. "I enjoyed 1969's 'Live/Dead', especially 'Dark Star', and might have heard the odd C&W song or 'Truckin'', but I basically didn't listen to them for twenty five years," he admits over the phone from his Toronto office. "But I found what I expected in the vaults--all kinds of great things were happening in concert.  I also went to two Dead shows.  The first was in Oakland, their home town, and I thought 'well, this is not great improvising', but it was fascinating sociologically, in so far as there's this relationship between an extremely active, fertile audience and a very untheatrical musical experience onstage.  A year later I went to another show in New York, and found that musically it was quite satisfying, almost like a completely different band. So I started to respect the idea that an audience would follow this band looking for these good concerts. I had got one out of two, a good ratio."

     In the lysergic daze of late '60s acid-rock, the Dead did weird studio-as-instrument stuff on early albums like 'Anthem of the Sun' and 'Aoxomoa', But today one associates the Dead with a keep-it-live, jam-a-long mess-thetic, possibly because their legacy is godawful American neo- tie-dye bands like Blues Traveller, Phish, etc. Was there a sense in which Oswald was making a case for digital music as the new psychedelia, and making up for the Dead's abandonment of the studio's possibilities?

     Actually, no. "The technique of this record--using computers, digital transfers and stuff--is really incidental to the illusion I'm trying to present.  People would tell me to stop listening to the tapes and go to a concert, 'cos live it's a totally different thing.  And I thought what constitutes this other 'thing'? It's obviously not in the band itself, cos there's no theatricality. Maybe it's 'cos there's so much drugs in the air! What I found at the concerts is there's a give and take between the audience and band, there are audience surges triggered by certain things the band do, or by the lighting, which is very subtle and directs the visual attention back onto the audience every so often. I thought 'well, we're not going to soak the CD cover in acid, so how can I achieve what I think everybody desires--a record that captures this feeling that Dead concerts are magic?'  So I did things that are unnatural, like have a young Jerry Garcia sing with an old Jerry, or have an orchestra of multiple Dead musicians, all in order to pump up the sonic experience so that at certain points you think: 'What's happening? Have the drugs kicked in?'".

     These paradoxical sensations--a real-time, flow-motion band suddenly transfigured and  transcendentalized--were created via an array of intensely artificial and finickety techniques. Like 'folding', whereby Oswald took similar material from different concerts and layered them up, achieving a density similar to the effect Phil Spector got from having several pianos playing the same chords. "For instance, on "Transitive Axis" I took a really nice 12 minute duet between Phil Lesh and Jerry Garcia, trimmed out redundant ideas and folded it down to three minutes. Yet it still feels like a duet. Using a computer, it's easy to take something from later in a musical sequence and slide it in earlier, superimposing it on a different track of the mix. I used to do that in my earlier analog days but it was much harder to do it accurately. With computers, I can move things by a millisecond 'til they fit exactly in the rhythmic pocket, so you still have the 'feel' of a band. 

     "After the first disc, Lesh said he would have liked to hear even more folding, and in response I took the entirety of 'Transitive Axis' and folded it 14 times. This created 16, 384 layers and squeezed 60 minutes into 2 seconds! It sounds like a feedback rush or a jet engine, and I slipped it into "Cease Tone Beam" on the second disc. It's a bit like that JG Ballard idea that in the future people will listen to  Wagner operas that have been compressed from four hours to a few seconds, but still have the flavour, like a whiff of perfume."

     "Cease Tone Beam" itself is Oswald's plunderphonia at its most extreme. From the ' drumspace' sections of Dead shows, which often segue into 'Dark Star', Oswald took a minute and a half fragment of ultralow-end percussion timbre, generated on Mickey Hart's custom-made aluminum beam. Oswald slowed it down 16 times into a protracted sub-aural seism, over which he layered progressively shorter, less-slowed down swatches of percussion that went up in ratios (2, 4, 8) that generated a simple  armonic relationship.  The result, at once ethereal and chthonic, other- and under-wordly, is the missing link between avant-grunge unit The Melvins and Eno's "On Land".

     Oswald doesn't really know how the Grateful Dead feel about "Grayfolded". Ex-keyboard player Tom Constanten did send him a thank-you note, but the death of Jerry Garcia left the rest of the guys "pretty preoccupied".  Diehard Deadheads responded extremely well to "Transitive Axis", but the more anti-naturalistic "Mirror Ashes" has stirred the first charges of 'heresy!'.  Oswald's favourite reaction is "from a guy on the Internet who wrote that Grayfolded makes him cry, because it encapsulates 25 years of Garcia, and it's unreal in a way that gave him a very visceral sensation of it being a ghost."

Garcia's death does shine a peculiar light on the whole project, in so far as it suggests that a kind of involuntary immortality for artists may soon become widespread. Oswald has shown that a sympathetic ear can 'play' another artist's aesthetic like an instrument. (Of course Luddites like Lenny Kravitz and  Oasis have effectively already done the same thing, vis-a-vis Hendrix and Lennon/McCartney, by writing new songs in another's old style).  But what's to stop an unsympathetic, money-motivated ear doing the same thing?  In the future, will artists copyright their 'soul-signature' and then sell it to the highest bidder to be exploited after their demise? Fond of visual and filmic analogies, Oswald mentions that the movie business has been trying to devise ways of taking dead stars and creating simulations of them to play new parts. The mind boggles....

     In addition to plunderphonic activity, Oswald works as a producer, where he deploys unique  ecording techniques like his Orbital Microphone Navigational Imaging Via Echotronic Radio Stereo Eccentricity, aka OMNIVERSE (a mic' with the aural equivalent of a zoom lens, enabling it to do a 'tracking shot' down the entire length of a piano string).  He also writes pieces for orchestra, and, as we speak, is putting the finishing touches to a stage production involving 22 choreographers "none of whom know what the others are doing". Finally, and strictly as a hobby, he plays sax in a quintet confusingly called The Double Wind Cello Trio.  On the plunderphonic front, Oswald has a backlog of classical music related stuff to release, and he's about to embark on a massive opus that will somehow "encapsulate this first century of music recording history that is about to come to an end".

Luke Owen of Death Is Not The End just recently put out a really interesting release: Making Records: Home Recordings c. 1890​-​1920 -  a collection of DIY home recordings, transferred from blank and repurposed brown and black wax cylinders, dating back to the early years of widespread phonographic technology, from the late 1890s and first couple of decades of 20th Century. In the words of David Giovannoni, whose collection is the source of this material: "For the first time in human history we could take sonic selfies, audio snapshots with friends, and aural portraits of loved ones. Our phonographs captured the sounds of everyday life, both silly and serious: the baby's squalling, Johnny's naughty joke, Grandma's favorite hymn as only she could sing it, our letters to loved ones in foreign lands...."

In honor of yet another fascinating Death Is Not The End release, here's my piece on an earlier archival triumph - Pirate Radio Adverts 1984-1993 Vol. 1  .... followed by my liner note for Pause for the Cause, aka Vol. 2 of the Pirate Radio Adverts compilation series....  followed by my interview with Luke about the project as previously Q-and-A'd at Blissblog.... followed by a bonus piece about my cherished pirate radio tapes originally done for The Wire.   

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

 Save and Rave! How A Compilation of Pirate Radio Adverts Captures a Lost Britain

director's cut, The Guardian, Feb 16 2021

"Have you got that record that goes ah-woo-ooo-ooh-yeah-yeah?"  It's a scene familiar to anyone who spent time in a hardcore rave record shop in the 1990s - a punter asking for a tune they've heard on pirate radio or at a rave but they don't know the title, so they mimic the riff or sample-hook hoping that someone behind the counter can recognise it.  A relic of pre-Shazam life,  the ritual is preserved in an advert for Music Power Records aired on the pirate station Pulse FM in 1992. Nick Power, owner of the Harringay, North London shop, recalls that no matter how mangled the customer's rendition, "nearly always, you'd be able to identify the exact record they were looking for."

In the advert, Power himself plays the roles of both sales assistant and punter (pinching his nose to alter his voice). Now, almost 40 years later, the comic skit commercial has been resurrected on London Pirate Radio Adverts 1984-1993 Vol. 1, the first of a pair of compilations pulled together by audio archivist Luke Owen. 

Released via his label Death Is Not The End, Vol. 1 is available digitally at a name-your-price rate and for £7.50 as a limited-edition cassette tape - a cute echo of the format on which pirate listeners captured transmissions of hardcore and jungle.  Back then,  most fans pressed 'pause' when the ad break started, which means that surviving documents of the form are relatively scarce. But what once seemed ephemeral and irritating have subsequently acquired period charm and - for some - collectability.

Owen started Death Is Not The End in 2014 as a label and NTS radio show that trawled much further back in the 20th Century to scoop up early gospel and obscure blues. But early last year, he put out Bristol Pirates, tapping his own teenage memories of that city's 1990s radioscape. The adverts loomed in his nostalgic reveries with particular vividness: "they were infectious and endearingly DIY…  some of them memorable to the point of fever loops. I can still remember one or two word for word".  Owen sees "pirate radio broadcasts" in general as  "archival folk music" that fits perfectly logically alongside the field recordings and Jamaican doowop he'd earlier reissued. "They are raw, impromptu and communal musical experiences." 

Pirate MCs and DJs often described an upcoming ad break as "a pause for the cause" - an annoying but necessary interruption, because the revenue funded the station's operation. But the ads were useful to listeners, alerting them to raves and club nights. Promoters likewise depended on the pirates as the primary means of reaching their market, along with flyers left in record shops. 

Author of London's Pirate Pioneers, Stephen Hebditch says that pirate radio - once a middle-class hobby - had by the late Eighties become "urban enterprise for the people most excluded from the legitimate media system… London reggae labels in particular put a lot of money into the pirates. Then when acid house came along promoters were splashing out a fortune on the stations linked to the rave scene". Some of this revenue covered the costs of replacing radio equipment seized by the authorities. But larger pirate operations could "make back the cost of losing a transmitter in just a few hours of broadcasting". 

Although demonized by the government and news media as gangsters of the airwaves,  the pirates were genuine community stations, playing music marginalized by mainstream broadcasters. The pirates represented minority populations - most obviously Black British, but other ethnicities too,  like Greek-Cypriot Londoners.  That's Nick Power's background, so he was tickled to hear a Greek-language ad for a Willesden Green beauty salon on London Pirate Radio Adverts Vol. 1.   On Vol.2,  out in early February, a similar one for a Harrow Road kebab house sits alongside ads for the Peckham jungle club Innersense at the Lazerdrome and for Chillin' FM's ravers dating service.

Death Is Not The End's  compilations could be seen as a haunted audio cartography of a disappearing London. But that sounds a bit ghostly and elegiac: more crucially, these pirate adverts are joyous mementos of enterprising fun, young people grabbing good times at the outer edge of the law.

Sleevenote for Pause for the Cause: London Rave Adverts 1991​​​-​​​1996, Vol. 2

2022

Back in the early '90s, whenever the pirate radio MC announced "a pause for the cause", I usually pressed pause on my cassette recorder. That's something I would regret years later, when ad breaks had become cherished mementos of the hardcore rave era. Luckily, back in the day I often left the tape running while I went off to do something else. So a fair number of ad breaks got captured accidentally for my later delectation. Not nearly enough, though. So in recent years I started combing through the immense number of pirate radio sets archived on the internet. Sometimes the tracklists would note "ad break" or "ads", helping to narrow the search. But often I'd just stumble on a bunch in the middle of a pirate show preserved on YouTube or an oldskool blog. A few of my original unintended "saves" and latterday "finds" are included in this wonderful collection by audio archaeologist Luke Owen. It's the latest in his series of compilations of UK pirate radio advertisements, with this volume focusing on the audio equivalent of the rave flyer: MCs breathlessly hyping a club night or upcoming rave, listing the lineup of deejays and MCs, boasting about hi-tech attractions like lasers and projections, mentioning prices and nearest landmarks to the venue, and occasionally promising "clean toilets" and "tight but polite security" ("sensible security" is another variation). Some of these ads are etched into my brain as lividly as the classic hardcore and jungle tunes of that time. (Most rave ads incorporate snippets of current music, of course - big anthems and obscure "mystery tracks" alike). Names of deejays ring out like mythological figures: who were Shaggy & Breeze, Kieran the Herbalist, Tinrib, Food Junkie? Putting on my serious hat for a moment, I think these ads are valuable deposits of sociocultural data, capturing the hustling energy of an underground micro-economy in which promoters, deejays and MCs competed for a larger slice of the dancing audience. But mostly, they are hard hits of pure nostalgic pleasure, amusing and thrilling through their blend of period charm, endearing amateurism, and contagiously manic excitement about rave music's forward-surge into an unknown future. The best of these ads give me a memory-rush to rival the top tunes and MC routines of the era.

— Simon Reynolds, author of Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture. 

Chat with audio archivist Luke Owen about the Pirate Radio Adverts project:

 How did you get interested in pirate radio in general and in pirate radio adverts in particular?

I began tuning in to pirate radio from my early teens in Bristol in the late 90s - there was a lot of action on the dial back then and I was sucked in. It was a portal into the drum and bass/Full Cycle stuff happening in the city when I was too young for the clubs, and it also nurtured my love of reggae, dub and Bollywood soundtracks at a relatively young age. The ads were often infectious and endearingly DIY, and some were memorable to the point of fever loops, I can still remember one or two word for word. 

I came upon the Pirate Radio Archive website a couple of years back, and there I found a trove of recordings from across the 80s and 90s through which I could transport myself back in time to some of those broadcasts I had been brought up on. I had been running Death Is Not The End since 2014 as a record label and NTS radio show focused mostly on "deep digs" into early gospel/blues/folk, field recordings and various archival finds. Coming across these recordings I was immediately stuck by the desire to do something with them, and put together a mixtape for the Blowing Up The Workshop mixblog and subsequently released it on DINTE as a cassette. It was a bit of a left-turn for the label perhaps, but being both archival and field recordings I thought it fit. I'm interested in "folk music" having a broader contemporary remit, and what it can mean in context. To me, recordings like these pirate radio broadcasts can represent archival folk music of sorts - they are raw, impromptu and communal musical experiences. 

For me, the appeal of them is multi-leveled - there's nostalgia, there's period charm, there's the amateur nature of them, some of the comedy ones are genuinely funny…   But I also think they provide a valuable and historically important archive of subculture and British 'lifeworlds', especially minority populations (e.g. you have the Greek salon ad on Vol 1 ).

Yes, a lot are hilarious and some to the point of being genuinely a bit unhinged in places... A big part of the uniqueness of pirate radio is in the ads I think - it reflects the alternative culture through the lens of local business and events in a way that often contrasts with the staleness of "commercial" radio as much as the music itself. The whole thing often just seems to thrive on amping up the madness a bit, because they can. The London Pirate Radio Adverts collection was also intriguing from a local history perspective. I've always been interested in the changing landscape of areas, the previous lives of buildings, music venues, long gone record shops etc. By chance a lot of the adverts I collected for this happen to be for clubs and bars in places in South East London and East London that I've come to know quite well since moving here in the mid-noughties so that's another facet of it for me. Also, Immigrant communities making use of pirate radio as a means to supply an essential community service is an inherent element to pirate radio as a whole I think.

I like also the range. You have the slick-aspiring ads (with a tiny bit of Smashy + Nicey about the patter,  quite common with pirate deejays before '92 when it got a lot more ruffneck and hooligan in vibe -  or they'll hire that voiceover guy that also appeared in cinema adverts, the one with the incredibly deep voice,  he pops up a few times on your tapes). And then the much more amateurish efforts.  

Redd Pepper? I'm never quite sure whether it's him or an imitator... He sure must have gotten a lot of work around this time regardless. There's another guy who seems to have been the voiceover guy for a large portion of reggae & dancehall/soundclash events in the past couple decades (this is him @ 5.40 on Side A) and is still going strong. I'm going to do my best to track him down, I think I might have a friend of a friend who hired him for an ad once.

I think there's sometimes a conscious effort to get someone with a posh accent (or affecting one) for some of the dances that are billing themselves as classy & exclusive affairs. Then you've got some hilariously oddball voices, and a really bad Scouse impression that I have no idea what it's trying to achieve! I think pirate radio in general is prone to jokes and reference points that only the small group of listeners (or more likely mates of the station and the DJs) are "in" on, and this can bleed through to the ads as much as the chatter.

They often seem to like putting FX on the voice.

Yes, the use of delay on pirate radio station voiceover and adverts seems to be a point of reference that's bled in from sound system culture. I think it also helps the adverts "pop" and the feedback has the handy effect of papering over cracks where they may often sound too muddy and amateurish otherwise. I've also added tape delay here and there to aid with the transitions from one track to the next - the idea was initially for this to have the flow of a mixtape as much as possible.

Most of the ads on pirates were for raves, clubs, records shops, occasionally a compilation or a 12 inch release … But  it's interesting that quite a few of them are for non-music-related businesses -  there's one I came across for a bakers, you'll get ones for hairdressers or a restaurant.  Or on Vol. 1 the shop fittings ad for Trade Equip  and the one for Fidel's Menswear.

In a way I find the non-music related ads as some of the most intriguing and charming. It shows that the stations were often genuinely part of a thriving localised economy, and not just for soundheads. It seems a bit mad to think of a small high-street business advertising on the radio these days, and I suppose with the advent of social media marketing we're probably seeing the last of small businesses in print advertising to a large degree - it's just not attractive as you don't get to monitor the traffic it's generating and target your audience down to the minutiae, but it leaves a document of that business that can be preserved from a local history perspective (whereas when a business folds their online presence will likely disappear with it).

Even on the music history level alone, though, they are  valuable - there's a sort of established history of rave where certain legendary clubs get mentioned  over and over (Rage, Labrynth, Innersense) and the same applies to the raves, labels, record shops. But these ads capture just how many clubs, raves etc there were, in all different parts of London or UK… many that have been forgotten or only ran for a short while. And there are addresses, times, prices mentioned.

Yes, the provision of full addresses, and often bus routes and the general specifics for the clubs and venues always gives me a pang of nerdy excitement. The addition of local landmarks, "under this flyover", "next to Tescos" etc. gives me extra info with which I can go sleuthing on Streetview and look at the ghost of the club mentioned in the advert (and for extra nerdery I can swipe backward in time on street view to see it's former guises too).

The raver's dateline courtesy Chillin FM advert is very interesting and surprising!

Yes I was surprised to come across so many ravers datelines! I wonder if this is something you had come across before? Hooking up and meeting potential partners never struck me as a priority to pilled-up ravers but I must be mistaken... It was relatively before my time, and I suppose it's easy to be swayed by the dominant narrative of early rave being a drug-fuelled oasis away from meat-market bars & clubs, but there was clearly a market for it! I can't help being reminded of Father Ted's priest chatback line whenever I hear it, also.

I think you mentioned in that Crack interview how most people paused the tape when the ads came on…   so there's a limited number of ad breaks that have survived intact.

Yeah I guess it makes sense that the music is what the majority of the listeners are there for, and the ads can do one - or indeed be edited out later. The sources I had were pretty much all online, so I suppose you could say that a portion of those who have ripped/digitized their tapes didn't stop their recordings when the ads came on, and rather they have cropped them out in the process. But in general it's the same principle as to when you would record a TV show on VHS - a waste of valuable magnetic tape space. 

What number did you accumulate before you started winnowing them down?

Maybe 100 total? It's been a bit of a blur to be honest. At some point I think I was losing it a bit.

It's good that you have ads that aren't just rave / hardcore / jungle, but others kind of music that were big then - like mellow house and progressive house etc.

It's easy to imagine pirate radio as exclusively a place for jungle, hardcore, reggae and dancehall etc. but yes it's refreshing. I particularly am interested in the popularity of rare groove and how that fits into the mix. The Under 18s Disco advert strikes me for it's mix up of styles - 'ragga, house, rap & swing'.

What is your favorite ad out of all the ones on the two cassettes?  Or top 2 or 3.

I think probably the Videobox rental shop is up there, it's the faux dialogue that just makes me smile. The Rolls Royce & A Big House in 89 is just fantastic for the list of celebrities who have "been invited", and that you simply need to go into your local hairdresser for £1 tickets.

PIRATES OF THE AIRWAVES

The Wire, 2008

By Simon Reynolds

 Easily the most precious sonic artifacts in my possession are the tapes I made of London pirate radio shows in the early Nineties. Everything else is replaceable,  albeit in some cases at considerable effort and expense.  But these ardkore rave and early jungle tapes are almost certainly irrecoverable: given the large number of stations active then,  the sheer tonnage of 24 hours/Friday-Saturday-Sunday broadcasting, and the drug-messy  non-professionalism of the DJ-and-MC crews of those days, it's highly likely my recording is the only documentation extant of any given show.

In which case, if only I'd used higher quality cassettes!  Before I got wise, I'd tape over unwanted advance tapes from record labels: since the radio signal could often be poor, buying chrome blanks seemed a waste .  Plus, in those early days, I wasn't doing it out of some archival preservationist impulse.  Like a lot of ravers I was just taping to get hold of the music, something hard to do otherwise because deejays rarely  identified tunes. Later I'd discover that many were dubplates that wouldn't be in the shops for months anyway; in some cases, they were test pressing experiments that never got released at all.  I was taping simply to have the music to play through the week when the pirates mostly dropped off the airwaves, and in 1993, when I spent large chunks of the year in New York, I took the tapes with me to keep the rave flame burning during my exile.

These relics of UK rave's heyday are editions-of-one because they're mutilated by my spontaneous  editing decisions: switching between stations repeatedly when a pirate show's energy dimmed, or the DJ dropped  a run of tracks I'd taped several times already; cutting off arbitrarily when I couldn't stay awake any longer, or dwindling into lameness because I'd left the tape running and went off to do something else.  In the early days I often  pressed  'pause' when the commercial breaks came on, something I now regret because those that survived  are among my absolute favourite bits. With their   goofy, made-on-the-fly quality,  the ads for the big raves and the pirate station jingles contribute heavily to the dense layering of socio-cultural data and period vibes that make these tapes so valuable.

The crucial added element to these tapes,  something you don't get from the original vinyl 12 inches  played in isolation or even from the official DJ mix-tapes and mix-CDs of the era, is life.   In two senses:  the autobiographical imprint of my personal  early Nineties, someone hurled disoriented into the vortex of the UK rave scene and still figuring it out, but also the live-and-direct messiness of deejays mixing on the fly and using whatever new tunes were in the shops that week, of MCs  randomizing further with their gritty and witty patter.  The tapes are capsules of a living culture.  Something about the mode of transmission itself seems to intensify the music,  with radio's compression effect exaggerating hardcore's already imbalanced frequency spectrum of  treble-sparkly high end and sub-bass rumblizm. Pirate deejays, typically mid-level jocks or amateurs, also took more risks than big-name DJs crowd-pleasing at the mega-raves. Playing to a home-listening or car-driving audience, the DJs mixed with an edge-of-chaos looseness and squeezed  in some of the scene's odder output rather than just sticking to floor-filling anthems.

Oh, they're not all pure gold, these tapes. Many shows stayed stuck at "decent" or slumped outright into "tepid". But the ones that ignited…  ooh gosh!  The vital alchemical catalyst was invariably the MC. On some sessions, it's like a flash-of-the- spirit has possessed  the rapper,  as electrifying to the ears as a first-class Pentecostal preacher or  demagogue;  you sense the  MC and the decktician spurring each other to higher heights.  It tends to be the lesser knowns that thrill me most: not  the famous big-rave jungle  toasters like Moose or Five-O but forgotten figures like OC and Ryme Tyme, who forged unique styles that  melded  the commanding cadences and gruff rootsiness of U-Roy-style deejay talkover with the chirpy hyperkinesis of  nutty rave, or collided  barrow boy argy-bargy with  B-boy human beatboxing. Some of these tapes I know so well that the tracks are inseparable from the chants and the chatter entwined around the drops and melody-riffs; years later when I finally worked out what the mystery tunes were and bought them, they sounded flat without that extra layer of rhythmatized speech thickening the breakbeat broth. 

1992 to 1994, ardkore to darkcore to jungle, is the prime period for me. I seldom revisit the drum and bass years, when things got serious; things pick up again with the poptastic re-efflorescence of UK garage and 2step, when the number of London pirates resurged to its highest level. Grime is an odd one:  I've got masses of tapes, and there's masses more to be found archived on the web, but the emergence of the MC as a capital A artist strikes me as a mixed blessing. With one eye on their career prospects (an album deal) the MCs increasingly came in with pre-written verses, reams of carefully crafted verbiage dropped with little regard to how it fit the groove.  Pirate MCs always had an arsenal of signature catchphrases and mouth-music gimmicks, but with grime a vital element of ad-libbing improvisation got severely diminished.  So excepting some  2002 tapes from grime's protozoan dawn,  I've not got the same attachment or affection as I do for the classic rave sets.

Oddly, I've rarely found people who shared my obsession to anything like the same degree: a  handful of collector-traders, and a guy called DJ Wrongspeed, whose fantastic  Pirate Flava CD collaged the best bits from his now defunct Resonance FM series based around re-presenting pirate radio broadcasts. Often I've come across people who'll talk enthusiastically about recording  the pirates "back in the day," only to reveal they'd long since taped over the cassettes,  left them in the car to curdle in the heat, or just lost them. Aaaaargh!

But as a quick web search reveals, pirate tape fiends are out there lurking, and not just ones obsessed with the London-centric hardcore continuum:  there's online archives and merchants for the original pirate radio of the 1960s (stations anchored in international waters or occupying abandoned offshore military forts) and sites dedicated to the land-based pirates of the Seventies and Eighties and to the Eighties hip hop mix-shows broadcast by London's pre-rave pirates.  In terms of my particular addiction, you can find ardkore, jungle and UK garage sets archived at old skool sites, or offered for trade or sale; on various  rave, drum'n'bass and dubstep message boards you'll come across individuals sharing huge caches of  vintage transmissions.  The pirate penchant seems to be a minority taste within the larger niche market for DJ mix-tapes of the sort recorded through the sound board at the big commercial raves  and then sold commercially through specialist record stores. People have been selling or swapping dupes of these sets for a dozen years at least (nostalgia for 1990-92 set in as early as 1996!). Today, an original Top Buzz mix-tape circa 1992, say, might fetch sixty pounds on Ebay.  Strangely, from my point of view anyway, old skool fanatics generally prefer the slickly-mixed official releases to the vibe-rich but erratic pirate tapes; a lot of people just don't like MCs, it seems.  But if, like me, you dig the brink-of-bedlam atmosphere of the pirate set, or are just curious to cop an in-the-raw feel of what it was like in those crazed days, seek out these online deposits of delirium: 

http://www.hardscore.com/radiosets.htm

A sizeable cache of 1989-97 shows, mostly from the London area.

http://www.londonpirates.co.uk/TouchdownAudio.htm   http://www.londonpirates.co.uk/DonAudio.htm 

Sets from two of my favourite stations of the 1992-93 "golden age"

http://www.yorkshirejunkies.co.uk/music-pirate-radio-recordings.php

Massive archive of  broadcasts from Sheffield, Leeds,  Bradford, York, Huddersfield, Hull and other North of England stations, 1992 - 2006

http://www.tapesgalore.co.uk/prtapes.htm 

Huge selection of pirate tapes, albeit for sale rather than download.

 The grand old man of Marxisty critique made it to 90.

Here below: a review of  Jameson's magnum opus Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism that the Observer let me do when I was barely more than a baby.

Postmodernism is a thick, dense slab of a book. My favorite Jamesons are the slimmer efforts: A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present and Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist As Fascist (literally light reading compared to Postmodernism and benefiting from its monographic focus on a single figure).  Archaeologies of The Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions really ought to be right up my street but despite a couple of attempts I always come to a half halfway through. It is amazing how widely and deeply read Jameson was in s.f.  - not just its New Wave or respectably literary exponents, but swathes of the hard-science and early 20th Century pulp stuff too. Evidence of a misspent youth?

FREDRIC JAMESON

Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
The Observer, 1991

by Simon Reynolds

With this book Fredric Jameson sets himself a daunting task. His aim is to define the postmodern Zeitgeist - arguably a contradiction in terms, since one defining characteristic of the "postmodern condition" is its lack of a sense of itself as 'zeitgeist' or 'era'. Jameson manfully seizes these and other contradictions with both hands: his project is to root a rootless culture in its economic context, to systematise a condition that is hostile to systems, and to historicise a phenomenon whose main effect is the waning of historical consciousness. But then, as a Marxist, Jameson retains an oldfashioned commitment to lucidity and overview. "Closure" (coming to conclusions, actually saying something) holds no special terror for him.

What Jameson has to say is of an analytical rather than judgemental nature. He doesn't take sides because he doesn't see postmodernism as an option, a fad or genre to affirm or repudiate. Rather, it's the unavoidable condition of late Twentieth Century existence, the cultural air that we breathe. In Marxist terms, postmodernism is the "superstructure" generated by the economic base of "late capitalism," (multinational corporations, mass media, information technology). Modernism was the "emergent" culture of an age when modernisation was still incomplete, and there remained a backdrop of peasant simplicity and aristocratic decadence against which a cultural vanguard could dramatise itself, with its idea of the artist as prophet and the work of art as a monument to the future. Postmodernism arose when the modernisation process was complete, and nature was superceded by the media. The new no longer seems that new; a sort of nostalgia without anguish (inconceivable to modernism) becomes possible, as exemplified by the rapid turnover of period revivals in film, fashion and pop music.

For Jameson, postmodernism represents a seismic shift in our very concepts of space, time and self. Modernism was the expression of the bourgeois subject (the grand auteur, the angst-ridden individual). Postmodernism creates a new kind of decentered subject, "a mere switching center for all the networks of influence" (Baudrillard). The media's "endless barrage of immediacy" destroys perspective, invades our consciousness and erodes the individual's ability to formulate a point of view. In art, modernism's themes of authenticity and meaning give way to pastiche and a fascination for the surface image; emotional affect is superceded by freefloating euphoria and sublime vacancy. Van Gogh is replaced by Warhol.

Jameson's provocative argument is that this new decentered subjectivity is a kind of schizophrenia. Unencumbered by past memory or future projects, the schizo inhabits a perpetual present that is intensified to an unbearable degree. The experience of space and of the vivid materiality of the world is enhanced at the expense of temporal consciousness. This heightened sense of here-and-now has been long the goal of the mystic or drug fiend, but for those who can't return to focused, productive consciousness (the schizophrenic and, increasingly, postmodern man), the experience is one of ego-shattering disorientation.

But this postmodern "hyperspace" is, argues Jameson, precisely the emergent terrain of late capitalism, with its fax machines, cable TV, satellite link-ups and data networks. To apprehend our place in this new totality of global capitalism, we need to evolve a new kind of consciousness, which he likens to that of the alien in The Man Who Fell To Earth, who can watch 50 TV channels at once, or SF writer William Gibson's cyberpunks, who inhabit a computer-generated "virtual reality". Despite his guarded enthusiasm about much of postmodernism's cultural output (video installations with their flow of images that resist being reduced to a single meaning, buildings like Los Angeles' Westin Bonaventure hotel), Jameson sheds Marxist tears for some of the casualties of postmodern theory. In particular, he mourns the postmodern rejection of "totalizing" theories, and of the notion of a "lost totality" (the alienation-free existence which Utopian politics seeks to recover). Advocates of postmodernism claim that these concepts lead ineluctably to totalitarianism (the Gulag, Pol Pot, the hubris of social engineering). But Jameson clings to the conviction that without totalizing concepts, the individual cannot understand his relationship to the system of late capitalism, and thus loses any political agency.

Jameson's solutions are suggestive if somewhat sketchy. He deftly turns the TV addict's practice of "channel-switching" into a metaphor for what he calls "transcoding". A sort of postmodern version of the dialectic, this involves pick-n-mixing world views and combining their partial glimpses of the Big Picture. Jameson also calls for a new science of "cognitive mapping", whose task is to plot the disorientating globalism of late capitalism (financial speculation in Tokyo or London can wreak havoc on peasant life in Paraguay), and coordinate local struggles against it. In other words, before you can do anything, you must first get your bearings. Postmodernism might be a calamity for oldstyle revolutionary politics, but Jameson concludes that the globalisation of capitalism will spawn a new international proletariat with forms of resistance we can scarcely imagine.

This "light at the end of the tunnel" is tentative and hard-won. Throughout Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic Of Late Capitalism, Jameson painstakingly follows every lead and takes on every conceivable objection to his ideas. He really works for the few glimmers of hope that he allows himself. Oscillating between the intoxication of the latest postmodern theories and the sobriety of the Marxist tradition, Jameson confirms my belief that the most lucid and productive analyses of postmodernism have come from those who are hostile or at least deeply ambivalent about its implications.