So let me tell you how I came to write this piece: the only profile of ccru - Cybernetic Culture Research Unit - written during the group's lifetime.
In the 1990s, there was this cool American magazine called Lingua Franca that covered academia - rising figures, trends in theory, institutional politics, intellectual fashions. It wasn't a scholarly journal, though - it was far more readable and widely read, something you could pick up in trendy bookstores or the gift shop at an art museum.When emanations from ccru and its allies reached my eyes, I pitched Lingua Franca on the idea of a story about what I called "renegade academia". Not only did they agree, they flew me to England (this was late 1998, by which time I'd been living in New York for several years) and put me up in a hotel. The full-blown, fully-expensed, serious reporter deal.
So I went about it like a serious reporter: journeying to Leamington Spa to spend a day with ccru, meeting the unit's former founder Sadie Plant in Birmingham, interviewing fellow travelers like O[rphan] D[rift], Matthew Fuller, and Howard Slater in London. Secondary quotes too: I spoke with key figures in the story, got "background" from people who preferred to remain anonymous, even brought in an opposing view from a British academic who abhorred ccru's ideas.
But after I sent through my properly sourced, thoroughly researched article, Lingua Franca told me that they had decided not to run the piece: they felt uncertain about whether the ccru's outlandish activities constituted legitimate scholarship. They paid the fee, reimbursed the expenses, and eventually a much, much shorter version ran in the Austrian art magazine Springerin.
Still, you can imagine how pissed off I felt about the full-length in-depth piece never reaching the wide readership for which it was written.
But then, slowly but surely, came the balm of total vindication.
Mark Fisher, one of the prominent figures in the piece, became the most widely-read and influential Left-wing thinker of the last quarter-century. His debut book Capitalist Realism is an international best-seller: translated into a dozen languages, it is said to have sold a quarter of a million copies worldwide at this point. It has no doubt been read by many more through borrowing or unofficially circulated forms. And the book's ideas have disseminated even more widely as memes and slogans on social media.
Fisher's legend and inspirational force continues to grow with each year following his tragic early death in 2017. Documentaries like We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher (soon to become a biography) and books about - or jousting with - his work proliferate. A thousand PhD's and dissertations bloom...
Meanwhile, another key figure in this story, ccru co-founder Nick Land, has gone on to become a world-historical figure too, albeit in a troubling and deeply pernicious way.
ccru and its extensions have generated an array of scholarly and creative careers, each with substantial bodies of work to their name. Perhaps most spectacular has been Steve Goodman, a.k.a. the deejay and producer Kode9. While simultaneously pursuing his own academic career as a professor and author, Goodman founded Hyperdub: one of the most adventurous post-rave electronic music labels of the 21st Century, home to Burial, Zomby, Darkstar, and many other celebrated producers.
Finally, no less than three significant radical publishers - Urbanomic, Zer0, and the latter's breakawaysuccessor Repeater -- have been either directly born from ccru or from the network that gatheredaround Fisher and his blog K-punk in the immediate post-ccru years.
As for Lingua Franca… it went out of business in 2001.
RENEGADE ACADEMIA: Cybernetic Culture Research Unit
unpublished feature for Lingua Franca, 1999; short remix appeared in Springerin, 2000
by Simon Reynolds
Smack in the middle of the United Kingdom, Leamington Spa is like a less picturesque Bath--genteel, sedate, irredeemably English in a Masterpiece Theater sort of way. But the town has darker undercurrents: Aleister Crowley was born here in 1875, and today it's home to a mysterious entity called Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. Now in its third year of existence, CCRU's institutional status is, to say the least, disputed. Which is why its membership is currently holed up in an office on The Parade (Leamington's main street), rather than working c/o the Philosophy Department of Warwick University a few miles away, as was the case the last academic year.
Since my knowledge of CCRU stems from its disorientating textual output--the journal Abstract Culture--plus a few wilfully opaque email communiques, I've scant idea what I'll encounter after pressing the button marked 'Central Computer'. Inside CCRU's top-floor HQ above The Body Shop, I find three women and four men in their mid to late twenties, who all look reassuringly normal. The walls, though, are covered with peculiar diagrams and charts that hint at the breadth and bizareness of the unit's research.
But before I can enquire further, I'm entreated to sit in the middle of three ghetto blasters. CCRU have prepared a re-enactment of a performance-cum-reading given at their Virotechnics conference in October 1997. The first cassette-player issues a looped cycle of words that resembles an incantation or spell. From the second machine comes a text recited in a baleful deadpan by a female American voice--not a presentation but a sort of prose-poem, full of imagery of "swarmachines" and "strobing centipede flutters". The third ghetto blaster emits what could either be Stockhausen-style electroacoustic composition or the pizzicato, mandible-clicking music of the insect world. Later, I find out it's a human voice that's been synthetically processed, with all the vowels removed to leave just consonants and fricatives.
Even without the back-projected video-imagery that usually accompanies CCRU audio, the piece is an impressively mesmeric example of what the unit are aiming for--an ultra-vivid amalgam of text, sound, and visuals designed to "libidinise" that most juiceless of academic events, the lecture. CCRU try to pull off the same trick on the printed page. Their "theory-fiction" is studded with neologisms, delirious with dystopian cyberpunk imagery, and boasts an extravagantly high concentration of ideas per sentence. Bearing the same distillate relation to its sources (Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Paul Virilio,William Gibson) that crack does to cocaine, CCRU-text offers an almighty theory-rush.
What CCRU are striving to achieve is a kind of nomadic thought that--to use the Deleuzian term-- "deterritorializes" itself every which way: theory melded with fiction, philosophy cross-contaminated by natural sciences (neurology, bacteriology, thermodynamics, metallurgy, chaos and complexity theory, connectionism). It's a project of monstrous ambition. And that's before you take into account the the most daring deterritorialisation of all--crossing the thin line between reason and unreason. But as they say, later for that.
Founded in the 1960s, Warwick rapidly became the epitome of a modern university.
Through the early to mid Seventies, the university was rife with militancy--not just student unrest, but discontent amongst the staff (70 percent of whom at one point gave a vote of no confidence in the Vice Chancellor). Socialist historian E.P. Thompson was a "thorn in the side of the adminstiration", recalls one Warwick veteran, and eventually left because he wasn't given the Labour History Unit he was promised. At the same time, Warwick was ahead of its time in terms of seeking corporate funding, such that by the mid-Eighties Margaret Thatcher could describe it as her favourite university. "Warwick University Inc." (as E.P. Thompson titled a book) is financially buoyant compared with other British universities, and well prepared for any future withdrawal of government funding that may be up the current Labour administration's sleeve.
Warwick also has a very modern Philosophy Department. It is Britain's largest graduate school in philosophy outside Oxford, with about 120 postgraduate and masters students, and a similar number of undergraduates. The majority are lured by the department's reputation as the country's leading center for Continental Philosophy. Events like the October 1997 "DeleuzeGuattari and Matter" seminar and "Going Australian", a February 1988 conference devoted to the new school of Australian feminist philosophy, indicate the kind of work going on at Warwick. It is to this cutting edge Philosophy Department to which CCRU was linked in a fatally ambigous fashion.
In a typically gnomic e-mail, CCRU outlined its history. "Ccru retrochronically triggers itself from October 1995, where it uses Sadie Plant as a screen and Warwick University as a temporary habitat. ...Ccru feeds on graduate students + malfunctioning academic (Nick Land) + independent researchers +.... At degree-O Ccru is the name of a door in the Warwick University Philosphy Department. Here it is now officially said that Ccru does not, has not, and will never exist'. " CCRU sees itself as the academic equivalent of Kurtz, the general in Apocalypse Now who used unorthodox methods to achieve superior results than the tradition-bound US military. CCRU claim that its frenzied interdisciplinary activity embarrassed the Philosphy Dept, resulting in the termination of the unit. Just as Kurtz disappeared "up river" into the Vietnamese jungle, the CCRU have strategically withdrawn to their operational base above the Body Shop.
"There is no conspiracy, it's so pedestrian," insists Professor Andrew Benjamin, Director of Graduate Studies at Warwick's Philosophy Department. Benjamin is a well-respected post-structuralist scholar with numerous books to his name. As editor of the Warwick Studies in Philosophy (the best-selling Continental Philosophy series in the English language), he's responsible for anthologies like The Difference Engineer: Deleuze & Philosophy Audibly beaming with pride, the Australia-born Benjamin talks up Warwick as "an incredibly fabulous philosphy dept where Deleuzians lie down with Derrideans, and even lie down with analytic philosphers. Basically, there isn't any postmodern crap done here, it's quite rigorous stuff."
According to Benjamin, CCRU was originally set up for Dr Sadie Plant, freshly recruited from Birmingham University to be a Research Fellow attached to Warwick's Faculty of Social Science. But the unit--organised around her interests in cyber-theory and involving a number of postgraduate students she'd brought over from Birmingham--was initially tied to the Philosophy Department, owing to Plant's particular interests, like Deleuze & Guattari. The plan was for the unit to become an independent, freestanding entity, with the postgrads registered as CCRU rather than philosophy students. But Dr Plant unexpectedly quit her job March 1997, before the paperwork was completed. The university decided to wind CCRU down, with Plant's main ally at Warwick, Nick Land, taking over her role as Director for the unit's final year of official existence.
But when Benjamin elaborates on the procedural intricacies, it's easy to empathise with CCRU's paranoia. "See, there isn't such a thing as the CCRU," he insists. "Within the university system you can set up a thing called a center for research, then you take the planned center to various committees and put it through this system in whose terms that center would be legitimised, have an external committee overseeing standards, et cetera. Because Sadie left early, that procedure didn't happen. Officially, you would then have to say that CCRU didn't ever exist. There is, however, an office about 50 metres down the corridor from me with CCRU on the door, there's a group of students who meet there to have seminars, and to that extent, it it is a thriving entity. Informally, it did exist, still does, lots of things go on under its aegis. But that office will disappear at the end of the year. A number of students thought there was a conspiracy, there's a lot of gossip and carry-on, but the fact is--had Sadie decided to pursue an academic career, CCRU would have been a viable, ongoing entity."
Thin as rake in her brown leather jacket, dragging on a Camel Light, Sadie Plant looks every bit the cyberpunkette. Currently, she's the most famous "media academic" in Britain--writing for quality newspapers, pontificating on the famous BBC Radio programme "Start The Week" (a sort of highbrow Howard Stern) alongside Gore Vidal and Martin Amis. Plant's elevation to intellectual celebrity status began well before the late 1997 publication of her acclaimed Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + The New Technoculture. Although she's far from happy with the marketing of Zeros as a Nineties cyberfeminist equivalent to The Female Eunuch, there are striking parallels between Plant and Germaine Greer (who taught at Warwick's English department before quitting to write Eunuch). "When I went to see the Vice Chancellor about leaving, he said 'I don't believe it, Germaine Greer pulled this on us as well'", says Plant, flashing her buck-toothed smile.
We're in a cafe in Birmingham, the industrial Midlands metroplis where Plant grew up and where she returned after quitting Warwick.The way Sadie tells it, she never really wanted to be an academic in the first place, but just fell into a university career. After transforming her Manchester University philosophy PhD on Situationism into The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International In A Postmodern Age, Plant accepted a Lecturer's position at Birmingham University's Department of Cultural Studies. Back in the Seventies, when it was called Centre For Contemporary Cultural Studies, the department was a vibrant place, home of the "resistance through rituals" school of neo-Gramscian subcultural theory (Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, Stuart Hall, et al). But the CCCS spirit was long gone by the time Plant arrived. The only redeeming aspect was the undergraduate and graduate students, who shared Plant's enthusiasm for rave culture and digital technology.
Plant was on the verge of quitting academia for good, when the opportunity of a Research Fellowship at Warwick presented itself in 1995. Warwick was already a cyber-theory hotbed, what with its 1994 and '95 Virtual Futures conferences. There were strong alliances between like-minds at Birmingham and Warwick: the VF events had involved some of Plant's Birmingham proteges (who appeared at VF95 in their proto-CCRU incarnation Switch), while Plant and Nick Land had actually been creative-and-sexual partners for a couple of years and remained close. With the promise of her very own research center dangled before her, Plant decided to give academia one last shot, and brought many of her Birmingham students with her to form CCRU.
For the first year of its existence, 1995/1996, Cybernetic Culture Research Unit was characterised by "a frantic atmosphere" of interdisciplinary excitement, involving reading groups, lectures series, research-sharing sessions, seminars like 1996's Afro-Futures, and the confrontational journal ****Collapse. There was an exhilirating sense of being at the heart of something new. This first phase of the unit's life climaxed with Virtual Futures 96: Datableed, which was wholly organised by the CCRU (the first two VF's had been put together by postgraduates attached to Professor Benjamin's Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature). Advertised as "an antidisciplinary event" aiming "to explore the smearing of previously discrete cultural spheres", VF96 alternated DJ sessions with sound-and-vision enhanced talks by a diverse range of guests--theorist Manuel De Landa, journalists Steve Beard and Mark Sinker, SF writer Pat Cadigan, and cyberfeminist Linda Dement, to name just a handful.
By the second year of its existence, tensions emerged between the CCRU-virus and its host, the Philosophy Department. Warwick had expected something closer to traditional notions of cyberculture: Internet studies, basically. But what actually took shape reflected Plant and Land's interest in hooking up cybernetics in the original Norbert Wiener sense (information flows, dissolving the difference between living and non-living systems) to compatible elements of Deleuze & Guattari (schizo-analysis, machinic desire, the biomechanical continuum of material reality), plus chaos, complexity and connection theory. "Cyber", as CCRU conceived it, also connoted "cyberpunk": the theory-fiction goal of academic writing that rivalled the hallucinatory rush you got from Neuromancer and Blade Runner.
Warwick clearly got more than it bargained for. Benjamin admits to having "mixed feelings about what Sadie and Nick do", professes to be mystified by "the meaningless term" that is cyber-theory, and keenly stresses the fact that CCRU and the Philosophy Department "are quite separate things". One of Benjamin's administrative colleagues notes drily that "very little" CCRU work "was published in philosophy journals." For her part, Sadie Plant emphasises the practical problems caused by the CCRU students' interdisciplinary approach, like "the need for external examiners.... It would have suited us to be able to just sweep all that away, but it's not so easy."
CCRU are less diplomatic, railing against "disciplinary templates" that obstruct "real research". "You're not allowed to follow these things where they want to go," says Mark Fisher, a cleancut young man who speaks with an evangelical urgency and agitated hand gestures. "You're not allowed to find anything out.... Because who would mark it?!". He cites the example of the PhD work of CCRU's Suzanne Livingston, which was challenged by one Philosophy Department member on the grounds--"what's neurology got to do with capitalism?".
After Plant left, CCRU embarked upon a second phase of trying "to occupy the university" and create a "non-disciplinary" atmosphere by forging links with postgraduates in the Mathematics and Science departments. But this petered out "with no real engagement". The final breaking point came with the Fall '97 Virotechnics conference, which CCRU decided to hold off campus at a media conference center in Wolverhampton, 35 miles from Warwick. According to CCRU, Nick Land effectively had to resign his lecturer's job in order to attend Virotechnics. "Nick had to cancel a simultaneously scheduled seminar at the university, hastily set up as an opportunity for him to explain the increasingly perplexing direction of CCRU's research", explains CCRU's Steve Goodman. Every couple of years, the staff of university departments make an assessment of the publications the department has produced. Since the kind of work Land and his proteges were producing was not considered philosophy, and therefore not counted in any departmental assessment, Land felt obliged to resign, effective the end of the academic year.
Virotechnics was the culmination of the unit's second-phase attempt "to rigorise a kind of diagrammatic study programme in the university," says Land, referring to CCRU's alloy of science and philosphy. "That was really not acceptable, it's fair to say, to the Philosophy Department. So the third phase is take that programme outside the university." While CCRU members continue to finish their PhD's and teach, they regard these activities as " lower-order intensity"; the real action takes place at the Leamington HQ. "There's nothing more unproductive than engaging in this lifelong struggle to get intensity into the academy," says an exasperated Fisher. "It's hopeless and thankless." He maintains that the Philosophy Dept's attitude to CCRU ranges from "outright hostile" to "embarassment", but the general strategy "is to wait for it to die rather than to actively kill it."
Nick Land is the kind of "vortical machine" (to use a fave CCRU trope) around which swirl all manner of outlandish and possibly apocryphal stories. Didya hear about the phase Nick went through only talking in numbers? Or the time he was taken over by three distinct entities? True or not, there's no deying the fact that, as Lecturer in Continental Philosophy, Dr Land has been a "strange attractor" luring students to Warwick purely through his personal reputation. A colleague who sat in on Land classes in the early Nineties remembers both his "impressive pedagogic commitment" and his charisma. "Despite his diffident, tentative way of suggesting things, Nick had a real presence.... It was conspicuous that his gang of groupies did fall apart during his sabbatical term."
The Thirst For Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, Land's sole book-length publication to date, is a remarkable if deranged mix of prose-poem, spiritual autobiography and rigorous explication of the implications of Bataille's thought (if taken seriously, comparable to "syphilis of the mind"). Prefiguring CCRU's struggles with university bureaucracy, the book drips with anti-academic bile, occasionally spilling over into flagellating self-disgust. Philosophy itself is castigated as "the excruciation of libido". Thirst For Annihilation's polymathically perverse range of learning (thermodynamics, cyclone formation, the Menger sponge), and phrases like "vortex of vulvo-cosmic dissolution" that blend scientific language with darkside mysticism, anticipate the CCRU's work.
In the early Nineties, Land was wont to describe himself as a "professor of delirial engineering", recalls the colleague. He also went through a "glorious phase in which he offered millenial prophecies for the next global meltdown in world markets, a deduction based on past such cycles. It rather smacked of an infatuation with the power of numbers."
As much chaos magician as chaos theorist, Land is said to be thoroughly versed in the gamult of occult knowledge and parapsychology: the I Ching, Current 93 (Aleister Crowley's kundalini-like energy force), Kabbalist numerology, H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, and the eschatological cosmology of Terence McKenna (a neo-hippy evangelist for plant-based hallucinogens like psilocybin and DMT). Much of CCRU's thought seems to emanate from an uncanny interzone between science and superstition. (Both of which appeal to rigorous method, of course.)
After reading Thirst For Annihilation's valedictory salute to "the saints, shamans, werewolves, vampires, and lunatics with whom I have communed,", and his self-description in ***Collapse as "a palsied mantis constructed from black jumpers and secondhand Sega circuitry, stalking the crumbling corridors of academe systematically extirpating all humanism", I expected Land to be an emaciated and eldritch figure. Stick insect thin, he is. But Land's gentle voice and impishly twinkling eyes make him closer to a playgroup leader than a dark magus. He and the CCRU crew ply me with endless cups of tea while explaining the curious diagrams on the walls.
There's a chart that synthesises Kabbalah's Tree of Life with H.P. Lovecraft, and is related to a magickal system called tangential tantra. "Instead of summoning or invoking, you're setting up a magical event that will be cut across from the forces of the Outside, so unanticipated events will happen," explains Land. Another poster--influenced by J.G. Ballard's concept of "deep time" as outlined in his catastrophe novel The Drowned World--depicts a cross section of the human spine, with different vertebrae aligned to different phases of human prehistory. And there's a chart that divides human history into a series of periods--"the primitive socius, the despotic state, capitalism" --culminating in a post-human phase named "Unuttera", which I learn refers to "The Entity or polytendriled abomination" at the End of Time.
The most recent diagram represents the culmination of CCRU's forays into the occult numerological techniques of digital reduction and triangular numbering. A spiral bisected by a number scale that descends from 9 to one, the diagram looks rather ordinary. But as CCRU explain its implications to me at considerable length (something to do with allowing them to understand "concepts as number systems) it becomes clear they sincerely believe it contains something on a par with the secret of the universe. The 9-spiral mandala--the Barker Scale, they call it--is the end-product of CCRU's determination to abandon "the fuzziness of discursive articulation" (philosophy) and move into "a much crisper, more rigorous and productive diagrammatic style", says Land. ("Crisp and rigorous" is one of his favourite phrases, despite the stress it puts on his weak 'R').
The diagram was a gift from "Professor Barker". Inspired by Professor Challenger--the Conan-Doyle anti-hero reinvented by Deleuze & Guattari in "The Geology of Morals" section of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia--Barker appears to be a sort of imaginary mentor who hips the CCRU to various cosmic secrets. "But we'd be a bit reluctant to say 'imaginary' now, wouldn't we?," cautions Land with a mischievous glint in his eye. "We've learned as much--well, vastly more from Professor Barker --than supposedly 'real' pedagogues!". As CCRU's "avatar", Barker has revealed the "Geo-Cosmic Theory of Trauma". Following the materialist lead of Deleuze & Guattari, human culture is analysed as just another set of strata on a geocosmic continuum. From the chemistry of metals to the non-linear dynamics of the ocean, from the cycles of capitalism to the hyper-syncopated breakbeat rhythms of jungle, the cosmos is an "unfolding traumascape" governed by self-similar patterns and fundamental processes that recur on every scale.
Libidinising "flows" and investing them with an intrinsically subversive power,
Deleuze & Guattari have been criticised as incorrigible Romantics. CCRU develop this element of A Thousand Plateaus into a kind of mystic-materialism. Discussing what CCRU call "Gothic Materialism" ("ferro-vampiric" cultural activity which flirts with the inorganic and walks the "flatline" between life and death), Anna Greenspan talks about how "the core of the earth is made of iron, and blood contains iron", about how the goal is to "hook up with the Earth's metal plasma core, which is the Body-Without-Organs". Body-without-Organs (B-w-O) is the Deleuzian utopia, an inchoate flux of deterritorialised energy; Greenspan says they take the B-w-O as "an ethical injunction", a supreme goal.
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O[rphan] D[frift>] also talk about "metal in the body" and seeking the B-w-O. Another Land-influenced theory-fiction collective, O[rphan] D[frift>] are CRRU's prime allies: they performed at VF96 and are staging an event in collaboration with CCRU/Switch at London's Beaconsfield Arts Centre, October of this year. Maggie Roberts and Ranu Mukherjee, the core of OD, originally met as Fine Art students at the prestigious-but-conservative Royal College, where their ideas about creating a form of multimedia-based synaesthetic terrorism oriented around "schizoid thinking", pre-linguistic autistic states and man-machine interfaces proved way too radical. Formed in late 1994, OD was shaped by two mindblowing experiences: "experimentation with drugs and techno", and a 1993 encounter with Nick Land.
"Before CCRU started at Warwick, Nick latched onto us very intensively for a while," says Roberts. "We fed him image experience, tactile readings of the stuff he was buried in theoretically. He wanted his writing to kick in a much more experiential way. For us, there was something wonderful about having a man you could ring up and ask: 'what's radiation?', 'what's a black hole?'".
OD's collective debut was a multimedia installation at London's Cabinet Gallery. What began as a catalogue for the show escalated into an astonishing 437 page book, Cyberpositive. Like Plant's Zeros + Ones, Cyberpositive is a swarm-text of sampled writings that aren't attributed in the text. But where Plant offers footnotes; OD merely list the "asked" and "un-asked" contributors at the end. Published in 1995, Cyberpositive serves as a sort of canon-defining primer for the CCRU intellectual universe, placing SF and cyberpunk writers on the same level as post-structuralist theorists. "We treat Burroughs as clearly as important a thinker as any notional theorist," says Nick Land, "At the same time, every great philosopher is producing an important fiction. Marx is obviously a science fiction writer." For her part, Sadie Plant regards the Eighties cyberpunk novelists like Gibson and Cadigan as "more reliable witnesses", precisely because, unlike theorists, "they don't have an axe to grind".
The most highly-charged passages in Cyberpositive are the hefty chunks of Plant/Land writing and Roberts's and Mukherjee's evocations of the techno-rave-Ecstasy-LSD experience. "I used to write a lot in clubs, which probably looked really pretentious," recalls Roberts. "Tracing what's happening in all the different sound channels and what they're doing spatially and physically to you". The language veers from masochistic mortification of the flesh ("deep hurting techno", "the meat is learning to know loss") to imagery influenced by voodoo and shamanic possession ("white darkness", "the fog of absolute proximity", "psyclone", "beautiful fear"). "It's trying to process the dissassembling of the self," says Roberts. "Maybe what you're calling abject, we'd call melting. The violence of the sounds in techno, it's like you're being turned inside out, smeared, penetrated."
Despite her facial piercing and techno-pagan accoutrements, Roberts has a sort of burned-out, aristocratic air that suggests Marianne Faithfull circa 1969. A half-smile flickering on her lips, as if she's privy to some kosmik joke, Roberts speaks in a faded falter--as though some unutterably alien zone of posthuman consciousness hasn't quite relinquished its hold. Which may be a pretty accurate description of the state of play. If CCRU have something of a cultic air about them, OD go a lot further. Combining Mayan cosmology with ideas about Artificial Intelligence, they sem to believe that humanity will soon abandon the "meat" of incarnate existence and become pure spirit. Throughout Cyberpositive there's the recurrent exhortation "we must change for the machines"; while the book ends with the declaration--"human viewpoint redundant."
Not only do OD reckon Charles Manson had some good ideas, their East London HQ contains several cages of snakes--proof of their determination to get really serious about voodoo rites. The obsession was sparked by Gibson's Count Zero, in which cyberspace has spontaneously generated entities equivalent to the loa (the spirit-gods of voudun cosmology). Throughout the interview, a shaven-headed OD member called Rich sits with baby boa constrictors wrapped around his body. His other contribution to the evening is to make some sandwiches--daintily quartered, but containing peanut butter mixed with sardines. "Too radical for me", I confess after one nibble. Rich's eyes light up triumphantly: Mind-Game Over.
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"Cyberpositive" was originally the title of an essay by Sadie Plant and Nick Land. First aired at the 1992 drug culture symposium Pharmakon, "Cyberpositive" was a gauntlet thrown down at the Left-wing orthodoxies that still dominate British academia. The term "cyberpositive" was a twist on Norbert Wierner's ideas of "negative feedback" (homeostasis), and "positive feedback" (runaway tendencies, vicious circles). Where the conservative Wiener valorized "negative feedback", Plant/Land re-positivized positive feedback--specifically,: the tendency of market forces to generate disorder and destabilise control structures.
"It was pretty obvious that a theoretically Left-leaning critique could be maintained quite happily but it wasn't ever going to get anywhere," says Plant. "If there was going to be scope for any kind of....not 'resistance', but any kind of discrepancy in the global consensus, then it was going to have to come from somewhere else." That elsewhere was certain passages in A Thousand Plateaus where Deleuze & Guattari suggest that, in Plant's words, "you don't try and slow things down, you encourage them to go fast as possible. Which was interestingly connected to Marx's ideas about capitalism sweeping away the past. So we got into this stance of 'oh well, let it sweep away! Maybe it should sweep away faster'." Other crucial influences were neo-Deleuzian theorist Manuel De Landa's idea of "capitalism as the system of antimarkets", and, says Plant, historian-of-everyday-life Fernand Braudel's conception of capitalism as "an amalgam of would-be free market forces and state/ corporate/centralised control functions. So there isn't really any such thing called 'capitalism', it's just a coincidence of those two really extreme and opposed tendencies."
Plant and the CCRU enthuse about bottom-up, grass-roots, self-organising activity: street markets, "the frontier zones of capitalism", what De Landa calls "meshwork", as opposed to corporate, top-down capitalism. It all sounds quite jovial, the way they describe it now--a bustling bazaar culture of trade and "cutting deals". But "Cyberpositive" actually reads like a nihilistic paean to the "cyberpathology of markets", celebrating capitalism as "a viral contagion" and declaring "everything cyberpositive is an enemy of mankind". In Nick Land solo essays like "Machinic Desire" and "Meltdown", the tone of morbid glee is intensified to an apocalyptic pitch. There seems to be a perverse and literally anti-humanist identification with the "dark will" of capital and technology, as it "rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities". In "Meltdown", Land declares: "Man is something for it to overcome: a problem, drag".
This gloating delight in capital's deterritorialising virulence is the CCRU's reaction to the stuffy complacency of Left-wing academic thought; a sort of rubbing salt in the wounds (as when Land jibes at the "senile spectre" of Socialism, an allusion to The Communist Manifesto). "There's definitely a strong alliance in the academy between anti-market ideas and completely schleroticised, institutionalised thought," says Mark Fisher. "Marx has been outdated by cybernetic theory. It's obvious that capitalism isn't going to be brought down by its contradictions. Nothing ever died of contradictions!". Exulting in capitalism's permanent "crisis mode", CCRU believe in the strategic application of pressure to accelerate the tendencies towards chaos. The real struggle, says Fisher in fluent Deleuzian, is within capitalism and between "homogenisation processes and nomadic distribution.".
What feels from any everyday human perspective like catastrophic change is really anastrophe: not the past coming apart, but "the future coming together". Where Land gives this idea a millenial spin (he's described capitalism as "an invasion from the future", a virus retrochronically triggered by some kind of artificial intelligence to create the conditions for its own assembling--an idea that reads like it was spawned by watching Terminator on acid), Plant's attitude is more humanely ambivalent. In the mid-Eighties, for instance, she supported the Coal Miner's strike, a revolt against Thatcherite modernising policies and an attempt to preserve a traditional working class culture. Since then, she has come to believe that the privatisation and anti-welfare policies pursued by the Conservative goverment in the 1980s really did constitute "a revolution". She talks approvingly of the end of "the dependency culture", arguing that this helped catalyse the Nineties upsurge of British pop culture, fashion and art.
"Obviously it is painful for any particular community that ends up on the scrapheap of history", Plant says, looking appropriately pained. "But I've got a far more evolutionary view of history these days. Just as particular species or ecosystems flourish and die, so do human cultures". In the face of this "reality", she argues, the British Left is comparable with the Church of England: "Every so often it comes out and makes some moral statement about how terrible things are, but what's it going to do about it? Nothing."
Many Left-wing theorists would retaliate by arguing that the Plant/Land/CCRU pro-market stance is merely an intellectual accomodation to "realities" imposed by top-down corporate forces; that by mapping techniques appropriate for natural phenonema (chaos theory, non-linear dynamics) onto capitalism, they've effectively naturalized the free market, resulting in a kind of post-Deleuzian version of Social Darwinism. Judith Williamson--Professor of Cultural History at Middlesex University, and writer for the left-leaning newspaper The Guardian--accuses the CCRU of "inevitabilism".
"All these excitingly eroticised ideas about the flows of capital absolve one from morality," she says. "Most of capitalism's flows are deeply pernicious." The trouble with inevitablism is that it removes human agency from the picture, complains Williamson. "But human will is not nothing -- there have been these huge acts of courage and altruism throughout history." As neo-Deleuzians devoutly committed to impersonality, agency is precisely what Plant and the CCRU demote. "Nothing takes the credit--or the blame--for either the runaway tendencies at work or the attempts to regulate them," argues Plant in Zeros + Ones. "Political struggles and ideologies have not been incidental to these shifts, but cultures and the changes they undergo are far too complex to be attributed to attempts to make them happen or hold them back".
Williamson is an old sparring partner with Plant, Land and CCRU, having had
several public fights with them at various academic events. The author of Consuming Passions: The Dynamics of Popular Culture, Williamson belongs to an earlier, Marx-influenced phase of British cultural theory, so the the clash between her and CCRU is partly generational. Recalling a famous spat in the bar of London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, she recalls finding it "spooky that Nick Land and all these people spoke as one. You could not get 20 of my postgrad students in a room and have them agree with me. I find that scary--that messianic quality, like they've got the message"...A lot of what they say reminds me of tripping experiences, where you have that feeling that everything coheres and makes sense."
Another Williamson accusation--that CCRU lift ideas from chaos and complexity that describe material process but "apply them in a metaphorical way... as if using a concrete thing for a metaphor makes it not be a metaphor"--would especiallly infuriate CCRU. Metaphor, figurative language, the whole realm of representation and ideology: these are the enemy, as far as CCRU are concerned. "Our analysis is materialist, rather than ideological," says Goodman, "Whether the scale is geological, oceanic, socio-cultural, there are parallels going on at every scale". Despite drawing a lot from post-structuralism's assault upon the sovereign ego, CCRU detest deconstruction, precisely because of its treatment of the text as a cosmology and everything as metaphor. "The only thing that's powerful about books--their ability to plug into other machines outside themselves-- is completely destroyed by treating them as this macro-interiority that spreads over everything," spits Fisher, co-author of the hilarious and coruscating Abstract Culture rant "Pomophobia".
Hungry for intellectual reasons-to-be-cheerful, CCRU simultaneously renounce postmodernism's wan fatalism (the idea that we're at the end of everything) and the guilt-wracked impotence of the Left (Fisher talks, cyborg-style, about the relief of having "the false memory-chip of Socialist authenticity" removed from his brain). In the process, they've jettisoned the concept of "alienation" in both its Marxist and Freudian senses. They speak approvingly of "surplus value", sublimation and commodity-fetishism as creative tendencies. Where "Cyberpositive" noted how how runaway capitalism had accessed "inconceivable alienations", CCRU's collective essay "Swarmachines" goes further and climaxes with the boast: "alienated and loving it".
The idea, says Fisher, comes from a mix-and-blend of Lyotard and Blade Runner--"the proletariat as this synthetic class, of a revolution that's on the side of the synthetic and artificial. The concept of 'alienation' depends on the notion that there's some authentic essence lost through the development of capitalism. But according to Barker's Geo-Cosmic theory of trauma, everything's already synthetic." If reality really is a bio-mechanical continuum, there's no reason to resist capitalism's escalating dynamic of anti-naturalism: addiction to hyper-stimulus, the creation of artificial desires.
Williamson condes that "if there's one thing that's quite endearing about CCRU, it's the search for a kind of optimism.... Today it's very hard to have those sort of Sixties feelings of 'oh God, things are exciting, things can get better, new things can happen'". The mania of CCRU's texts--a mood-blend of euphoric anticipatioin and dystopian dread that Mark Dery called "dysphoria"--is certainly contagious. "A lot of things are exciting, but is it true?," cautions Williamson. "Music is a good parallel--you don't think 'this music explains the universe' just because you finds it charges you up". Again, the CCRU would fervently disagree. "The musical model is really key to us," says Land. "It's absurd to say that music doesn't represent the real and therefore it's an empty metaphor. Every theorist who hasn't a real place for music ends up with one-dimensional melancholia."
Not only do the CCRU derive a lot of their energy from music--specifically, the British rave genre of jungle a/k/a drum & bass--but popular culture is where their ideas seem most persuasive. Right from its late Eighties beginnings, rave culture's motor has been anarcho-capitalist and entrepreneurial: from promoters throwing illegal parties in warehouses and fields, to drug dealing. Even after its co-optation by the record and clubbing industries, rave music's cutting edge comes from the grass-roots: small labels, cottage-industry producers with home studios, specialist record stores, pirate radio.
Sadie Plant attributes these bottom-up economic networks to the end of dependency culture, forcing people "to get real and find some ways of surviving" but also to invent "new forms of collectivity" (the micro-utopian communality of the rave).
As a postgraduate in Manchester, Plant was swept up in that city's legendary 1988-90 rave scene. Currently, she's co-running a jungle club in Birmingham called Kleptomania, for which she creates back-projections involving "video feedback", an "orgasmically beautiful" effect that makes "everything looks like it's come from another world". Plant is also writing about book about the interface between drugs and technology. CCRU has a musical sub-component, Ko-Labs, engaged in making jungle tracks. The unit's latest recruit is Jessica Edwards, a researcher who has no affiliation with Warwick University whatsoever, but who used to be a professional dancer at raves and recently completed an undergraduate thesis entitled "Mapping the Liminal- Pentecostalism, Shamanism and Drum & Bass".
Despite being rave theorists and "sub-bass materialists", CCRU are surprisingly cagey when the topic of drugs is introduced. Acknowledging the cyborgizing, viral usefulness of drugs--as anorganic elements that enter the nervous system and engineer precise changes in consciousness--Land nonetheless resists the "relapse into a biographical narrative". Anna Greenspan talks of the negative "crash-and-burn" syndrome caused by drug abuse, and says the CCRU are more interested in building sustained plateaus of intensity. One outcrop of this is Suzanne Livingston's research into "long term rewiring of perception"--techniques of flash and flicker that restructure the brain, as already used by advertising, MTV, and rave promoters (lights, lazers and strobes).
As well as being galvanised by music, the CCRU are also influenced by the theory-driven leading edge of music journalism. One of their associate members is Kodwo Eshun, contributor to magazines like iD and The Wire and author of the forthcoming More Brilliant Than The Sun, a study of "sonic fiction" in black music from Sun Ra to jungle. He was guest of honour at CCRU's Afro-Futures seminar and gave a talk at VF96. Eshun describes himself and the CCRU as "concept-engineers", as opposed to thinkers. Critique, he argues, is a rhetorical mode that puts the heavy burden of History on your shoulders, whereas the concept-engineer is into speculation. "Most theory contextualises, historicizes and cautions; the concept-engineer uses theory to excite and ignite," Eshun proclaims. Where "thinker" evokes an effete and impotent ivory-tower detachment, "engineer" suggests someone who gets down-and-dirty with the material word (in Deleuzian terms, someone who operates and maintains desiring machines). Like a DJ or jungle producer, the concept-engineer is "a sample-finder": s/he's free to suspend belief in the ultimate truth-value of a theory and simply use the bits that work, in the spirit of Deleuze & Guattari's offering up of A Thousand Plateaus as tool-kit rather than gospel.
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"Concept-engineer" is a good tag for the outerzone of "independent researchers" and amateur autodidacts to which CCRU is connected. Renegade theorists like Howard Slater, a Deleuze-freak whose techno-zine Break/Flow brilliantly analyses rave music in terms of "nonconceptual thought" and "impulsional exchanges", and celebrates the techno underground as a rhizomatic, insubordinate, post-media economy. And like Matthew Fuller, a media theorist/activist with a background in anarchist politics and links to the hacker underground. Fuller's CV of cultural dissidence includes flypostering, pirate radio, a non-Internet bulletin board called Fast Breeder, the scabrous freesheet Underground, and a series of anarcho-seminars like "Seizing The Media" dedicated to the theory and praxis of media terrorism. Fuller also put out the anthology Unnatural: Techno-Theory For A Contaminated Culture, which included Plant/Land's "Cyberpositive" and an essay by CCRU member Steve Metcalf.
Discussing his own cyber-theory writings, Fuller talks about dismantling traditional "modes of political address" and developing a sort of post-ideological realpolitik of resistance. A true concept-engineer, he believes in ransacking theory texts for task-specific ideas. "Publishers like Autonomedia and Semiotexte produce material that you don't have to be an academic to get into, so it circulates outside those milieux. When I give presentations at academic events, it's easy to see I'm in a more powerful position than the academics--I can steal all the advantages of their discipline, plus do something else with it that fucks it up totally."
Noting that Deleuze & Guattari are already being institutionalised into "the most dreary, saintly area of discourse", Fuller says he's dedicated to "cracking open those texts again, thinkers who originally opened stuff up to delirium and the irrational. I mix up different linguistic registers and narrative strategies so that the text writhes in the hands of the reader, so to speak. In that respect, there's a lot more to be learned from fiction than theory." Here Fuller chimes in with Sadie Plant, whose work-in-progress, Writing On Drugs, includes a fictional component. Plant says she hopes that subsequent books will become "pure fiction".
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"The most enjoyable aspect of CCRU is that they are a gang -- PhD students with attitude!," says Eshun. Loathing the "necrotic side of philosphy, the chewing-over of dead thinkers' entrails", and bored limp by the "delibidinising" atmosphere of seminars, CCRU used to attend academic events, claims Eshun, expressly "in order to disrupt, undermine and ridicule.... They'd get into pitched battles with Derrideans!". Enhancing this picture of intra-academic gang-warfare, two of CCRU's allies from another university once turned up to an event sporting "colors": they'd printed up T-Shirts that mimicked the logo of Dolce & Gabbana, but stood for Deleuze & Guattari!
Weary of such sports, Plant, Land and CCRU have all enthusiastically embraced the idea of escaping "institutional lockdown" by going freelance. In addition to her drugs book, Plant is working on a film screenplay and says she can't imagine ever returning to academia. The CCRU hope to become a kind of independent think-tank, selling "commodities" on the intellectual free market--like their strikingly designed Abstact Culture (each "swarm" consists of five separate monographs bundled together) and, in the future, CD's, CD-ROM's and books. "The whole saga of the first phase of the CCRU was to do with negotiating bureaucratic space," says Fisher. "But we quickly realised that the institution didn't depend on university space itself , but on the collectivity."
It seems unlikely, however, that Plant and her erstwhile cronies will rejoin forces once they're out in the freemarket wilderness. Some kind of ideological rift seems to have occurred. Plant says she couldn't really go along with the trip into numerical mysticism, not least because she didn't like finding herself "in the role of the sensible, conservative one --not a role I'm used to!". CCRU, for their part, seem to have resented her premature departure from Warwick. Perhaps CCRU's fervent emphasis on collectivity stems in part from what Kodwo Eshun characterises as "an adaption to this harsh feeling of abandonment by this person who they really admired and who they decided to devote three, four years of their lives around." Plant, meanwhile, says she felt uncomfortable with being a guru figure.
"Nick's hermetic, he wants acolytes", says Eshun. "Whereas Sadie's this total communicator. Zeros + Ones is the return of the grand narrative with a vengeance. I can't think of any other writer with the same ambition. Sadie wants the world and I think she'll get it. " CCRU, meanwhile, are toying with the idea of relocating wholesale to India.
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twinned in perpetuity
talking with others about Mark's impact on us and the world
my fully-grown-up disagreements with Mark, traits that were continuations of ccru
10 Jungle Classics - Mojo - April 1995 [ 04-Sep-26 8:04pm ]
Note how the copyeditor assumed that the 2 in "2 Bad Mice" was me having started and abandoned a numbering system but having forgotten to remove the 2 in front of the second entry - gah!
Also "gah!" - Mojo got someone else to do the big reported story on jungle and had me do the sidebar. Still I suppose, what with me by this point having already written about jungle for Vibe, The Observer, The Wire, and Melody Maker (twice!), and quite possibly some others I'm blanking on (Spin? Details?), they might quite reasonably have deemed it a good idea to get another voice in.
Note also the embryonic form of my coinage "rhythmic psychedelia" (yes you heard that right - my coinage) in the reference in the Dead Dred bit to "jungle's psychedelic approach to rhythm". Published in the April 95 issue, which came out March '95, so written February '95.
The first appearance of the fully-evolved term is in a March '95 piece on A Guy Called Gerald
"After "Voodoo", the logical thing for Gerald would have been to follow all the other Detroit buffs up the funkless cul de sac of 'electronic listening music'. Instead, after a frustrating period signed to major label Sony, Gerald discovered the glory of the breakbeat. Originated by James Brown and the Meters, sampled by hip hop producers, breakbeats are what enabled a generation of post-rave producers to move beyond the 4/4 monotony of house, into the multi-tiered, hyper-syncopated rhythmic psychedelia of drum & bass."
See, I know what pushed me towards the idea in the first place - the backwards psych-smeary drums on "Mystic Stepper (Feel Better)" by Omni Trio.
Also the way the drums get reversed on this
Things like "Wrinkles in Time" by 4 Hero also.
Of course you could say there was rhythmic psychedelia already going in actual psychedelia - the time / tempo dilation in this (which amazingly they used to do live - it's not a studio artifact, at least not originally, it came out of what they did in concert)
And a lot of the really pronounced phasing is heard on the drums in psychedelic rock - the way they billow at the drum roll in this
A Midsummer Night's Scene
(Bam Caruso)
Melody Maker, 1987
by Simon Reynolds
typos alert:
-- "echory" should be "echoey"
-- "proto-cutie change" should be "proto-cutie chant" #
Would you believe, I have actually written about ZZ Top? I reviewed their Greatest Hits along with a Lynyrd Skynyrd box set.
ZZ TOP, Greatest Hits
Melody Maker, 1993
Like 'funk', like 'raunch', boogie is one of those rock'n'roll concepts that are elemental and un-analysable. There's probably some Rockschool equations that could enable you to go through the motions, but musicology can't endow or explain "feel", or account for the continuum that links such disparate instances as Led Zep's "Black Dog", T. Rex' "Get It On", Budgie's "Whisky River", MBV's "Slow", the Stones' "Can Ya Hear Me Knocking", Soundgarden's "Outshined".
Anyways, there ain't a lot of it about these days, least of all this side of the Atlantic. Brit-rock today emits an astounding dearth of rhythmic heat. The drums in most Anglo-indie merely mark time, nobody knows how to groove. For all the calls in these pages for a return to Seventies perversity and caprice (nice rhetoric, I'll prick up when somebody makes a record as freaky and regal as Ritual de Lo Habitual) let's not forget that half of what made T.Rex was the bottom end. Without the love-muscle-quaking slip'n'slide, Bolan was mere tinsel and glitterdust.
When it comes to smokin' rhythmic interplay, Brit-rock whippersnappers could learn a few tricks and licks from ZZ Top: arch-conservatives maybe, but there's little they don't know about the science of friction. The best tracks on this variable compilation come from that period (1979's Deguello, 1981's El Loco) just before the Texans' commercial breakthrough with Eliminator. "Cheap Sunglasses" is just so doggone funky; these old farts are survivors of an era when heavy rock had more in common with James Brown and The Meters than it does with the frigid frenzy of today's metal. Cutting between a low-down, dirty bass-shuffle and eerie, fractured bridge passages that are almost Oriental, "Sunglasses" is dada-boogie worthy of Beefheart's Clear Spot). Filtered through New Wave minimalism, "Pearl Necklace" has an almost Zen geometrical perfection. And with "I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide", an ode to the pimp-rollin' pleasures of low-rider driving, ZZ lumber so limber.
The Eliminator stuff's just fine: is there anyone possessed of a booty who can resist the honeyed bludgeon of "Gimme All Your Lovin'"? Thereafter, with the lame Afterburner and Recycler, ZZ's bluesy raunch sat uneasily on top of programmed beats more appropriate to Janet Jackson. And even the deftest programmer can't get drum machines to elasticate time like a seasoned rhythm section....
Because I was reviewing the Greatest Hits, I wasn't able to squeeze in a mention of my absolute favorite ZZ Top track: Deguello's "Manic Mechanic". Which was a good showcase of Frank Beard's supple stickmanship...
Although it was the Eliminator hits that got me buying Deguello and El Loco, my ears had already pricked up a few years earlier when Tommy Vance played "Cheap Sunglasses" on his Radio One show. I was like, hmmm, this is pretty darn funky... like maybe they are better at this than Delta 5 and Gang of Four.
Strangely, although I bought "Gimme All Your Lovin'" as a single, I never got Eliminator and I'm not sure if I've ever listened to it all the way through.
Deguello is a stone classic, all killer no filler.
El Loco doesn't really stick in my memory except for "Pearl Necklace".
Being an innocent, pure-minded sort in those days, I had no idea how astonishingly dirty the song is.
"Pearl Necklace" is a classic Old Wavers go New Wave move... and a presentiment of what happened next.
Somewhere or other I read the fascinating story behind Eliminator. The impetus came from their studio engineer Joe Hardy. He made a scientific study of the radio, what hit and what didn't. And he discovered that there was an optimum tempo that could damn near guarantee commercial success and persuaded the band to record the whole album at that bpm. He regularized the rhythm with sequencing and did a sort of Butch Vig type job of burnishing the sound.
Which was already a wonderful combo of grit and slickness on Deguello.
I remember my old Melody Maker colleague Frank Owen, who later worked at Spin as an editor (we collaborated on some things there like we had at MM - a cover story on Jimi Hendrix, for instance)... despite being him your archetypal anti-rockist / only-into-black music tasseled-loafer wearing type, Frank found himself at a ZZ Top arena show in the early '90s. He came back blown away by the physical impact of the noise, the astonishing loudness. But probably being a lover of funk and hip hop, the groove aspect must have reached him subliminally too.
From the pre-Deguello era, this one stands out and is another Frank Beard skills showcase.
Used to hear it often on LA classic rock radio when we first moved here - but then that thing happened, the demographic centre of the classic rock listenership started to move forward through historical time. You stopped hearing ZZ Top and The Guess Who... more and more it was things like The Offspring and Sublime... and the last time I checked in it seemed like the centre was now in the early 2000s, The Killers and that kind of thing.
Hearing a ZZ Top song go into a Cars song on a classic rock station was a revelatory moment for me.... ah, the gap between Old Wave and New Wave starts to lose definition.... it's all rooted in the same kind of musicianship... just a slightly differently inflected idea of "tightness"
And then ZZ Top decided to go "New Wave" themselves, with the more mechanistic rhythm base but also with the videos - cleverly turning their fugliness into a visual brand.
Here are some quotes (via Andrew Parker) about the ZZ Top as hit machine era, including one from the guy who literally engineered this metamorph with a hybrid of real and unreal rhythm. Beard's adaption to the new pop regime is rather like Stephen Morris from New Order shift from being a great, original drummer to a skilful programmer of drum machines.
"That's why Eliminator can sound like Frank Beard playing drums inside a drum machine rather than either "real drums" or "a drum machine."
And the historical sources actually support this hybrid interpretation. One account says most of Beard's drumming was replaced by drum machine/Simmons electronic drums while retaining his acoustic tom fills and cymbal accents."
mixed by Jellybean Benitez
Texas guitar hero Joe Knight of Rangers writes to say that ZZ Top's "experimental album" is Tejas, from 1976 - the record before Deguello, and recommends we wrap our ears around this choice cut featuring Frank B shuffling it like "a southern fried Jaki Leibezeit"
The Face is no more - again.
Which is sad.
But they've also taken down their website, leaving no trace of pieces written in its second incarnation.
I think I only did the one - but it was one I thought was one of my best in recent years.
So here it is below: a piece about trap and its internationalization.
They didn't use the "Trap Internationale" headline, which is understandable but I did mourn the loss of the idea of this being a pan-global counter-revolutionary movement. Irresistible to listen to even if it manifested a "principle of hopelessness" (to twist Ernst Bloch's "principle of hope").
This is the true musical expression of everything that Mark Fisher critiqued in Capitalist Realism (did he not in fact say something like "hip hop is the problem" - or was that just on the blog?).
Well, Capitalist Realism does actually more or less kick off from 1996 comments of mine about the neo-Hobbesian ideology of realness and "the Real" in gangsta rap and the darker strains of jungle and drum 'n' bass (techstep etc).
"Principle of hope" is Bloch's term for a subcurrent of utopianism that informs a whole range of human expression, from literature and art to fairy tales to religion to music to... All of them contain some sense that the world could be different, better, re-enchanted...
Perhaps the word for trap is not counter-revolutionary but counter-utopian... although it finds a profane utopia in the privatized dream of fame, glory, luxury.... a pornofantasia of excess and dominance...
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Trap world: how the 808 beat dominated contemporary music
The Face, November 18, 2019.
"Cookin' up dope with a Uzi." Gangsta gritty yet cartoon-absurd, the image of stirring a crockpot of crack with the butt of a machine gun is just one of the memorable lines racing by in "Bad and Boujee", a song by the Atlanta trio Migos that reached #1 in Billboard in January 2017. The "boujee" celebrates a nouveau riche notion of high class: cash flashed on the most flagrant status symbol brands like Porsches and Pateks. But as Migos's Offset gloats at the start of the song, "We ain't really never had no old money/We got a whole lotta new money though." The video shows the group hanging at a fast food place, their girls laden with exquisite finery but dining on KFC and Pot Noodle. The track itself, produced by in-demand Atlanta producer Metro Boomin, sounds simultaneously street spartan and luxuriant. The voices - the loping, forward-tumbling flow that Migos patented - hypnotise and hook the listener. As addictive as the drugs they claim to sell, "Bad and Boujee" has now been streamed around 1.5 billion times on YouTube and Spotify.
The sound is called trap and it has dominated popular music all through the 2010s. Migos and their peers - rappers like Future, 21 Savage, Playboi Carti, 2 Chainz, and Cardi B and producers like Metro Boomin, Zaytoven, Southside, Mike WiLL Made-It - mostly come from either Atlanta or other Southern cities. But their beats and flows and production tricks have proliferated across the globe.
This decade trap has infiltrated pop music, from Katy Perry's baleful 2013 smash "Dark Horse" to songs on Miley Cyrus' Bangerz album (executively produced by Mike WiLL) and more recent hits by Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish. Trap has also inspired mutant underground and street forms, from the EDM substyle (also confusingly called trap) of slamming instrumentals like Baauer's 2012 viral monster "Harlem Shake", to entire subcultures like drill. The latter, a morose form of trap which peaked as violent crime increased in Chicago, went on to inspire a generation of UK drillers. Mediated by the hallucinatory hellscapes of Chicago drill as pioneered by Chief Keef, the UK version is essentially a South London chapter of trap. But the productions by beatmakers like Carns Hill have a British stamp, with trace elements of jungle and UK garage in the oozy bass and looped piano grandeur (interestingly, the London sound has inspired a burgeoning Brooklyn drill scene, with UK producer 808Melo producing most the tracks by breakout rapper Pop Smoke). The gangster nihilism has a local character too, with lyric after lyric fixated on knives and stabbings. Dripping and splashing in UK drill means blood on pavements, unlike in American trap where it signifies looking incandescent with money.
Trap is a sound, a worldview, a life-stance. But before all that it was a word: the name for the place where drugs are sold. Often an abandoned house, the trap typically has a single entrance/exit, making it a more secure fortress against attacks by rival gangs. "Trap", because it's a lure for addicts, but there's also the submerged implication that the lifestyle of dealing is itself a trap: money simply too good to quit, despite the cumulative costs of paranoia and the subliminal spectre of early death. Trap also sounds like the right name for this sound, its clipped, staccato feel resembling the snappy quality of the genre's sharp snare and hi-hat patterns.
The term was popularised in the 2000s by Atlanta rappers T.I., Young Jeezy and Gucci Mane - whose 2005 LP Trap House was the first of 13 albums and mixtapes by him to feature the word trap. Like those earlier Southern black sounds that took the world by storm - jazz and blues - it started as a lowdown sound with a disreputable aura: the soundtrack in strip clubs and other places where gangsters go to relax and squander their spoils.
As trap has risen to mainstream dominance, its emphasis has shifted away from "work hard" (the grind of drug selling and turf-protecting) to "play hard". According to Alex Tumay, a recording engineer who has worked closely with Metro Boomin and the freakily inventive rapper Young Thug, and was involved with Travis Scott's early music, this is just a different facet of trap's obsessive authenticity: "The topics in trap have a lot to do with honesty. The more successful they get, the more they rap about where they are right now" - the post-gig all-night hotel party, the top-shelf liquor and drugs and women, rather than the tense monotony of drug selling.
The sound of trap has evolved too: from the barebones bombast of the 2000s to the sinuous and slinky ooze that, in the hands of artists like Travis Scott, becomes almost a form of ambient music. The abiding cornerstone of trap is the beat. Its roots go far back, all the way to '80s electro and the Roland 808 drum machine. Where New York rap followed the path of sampled and looped breakbeats, the South stuck with programmed rhythms. When the party-oriented, shake-that-ass sounds of Miami bass and New Orleans bounce fused with gangsta rap lyrics, trap was born. You recognise trap as a sound, or an influence, from the hi-hats, which run at double-time (or even faster) to the 75-beats-per-minute of the hard-hitting kick drums. There's a coiled tension and snake-like hiss to those rapid, intricate hi-hat patterns, while rat-a-tat snares conjure a military, parade-ground feel. Today's trap producers don't use hardware drum machines anymore, but they create that same dead-and-dry grid-like sound within their computers. On the most fundamental level of function, the bass-boom, the ear-tickling hi-hats, and the louche swagger of the music make trap the go-to party sound of the 2010s.
The other crucial component of trap in the 2010s is the lush weave of Auto-Tuned vocals draped over the bass-booming groove. Pitch-correction technology like Auto-Tune has blurred the border between rapping and singing. "A lot of people who aren't inherently singers could explore different melodic patterns," says Tumay, whose engineering forte is vocal processing. "Auto-Tune gave them the confidence to do it. The technology has given us a lot of new melodies, new cadences." Instead of applying Auto-Tune to their vocals after the fact, MCs like Future use it in real-time; hearing their processed voices through headphones in the studio booth, they've learned how to push the effect to extremes. With Young Thug, Travis Scott and Migos's Quavo, the voice becomes like an instrument, spiralling into blissful trills and moans that sound as ornamented as Arabic music and oddly religious in feeling, at odds with the profane subject matter of the songs.
Although funny, outrageous images and contagious slang fills these songs, trap is not as oriented around narrative or sustained flights of lyricism as the more self-consciously literate forms of rap - the tradition that runs from Rakim to Kendrick Lamar. The crooning MCs of today are more about texture than text. Some old guard rappers and rap fans bemoan this as a decline from the glorious heights of yesteryear, but it's more the case that invention and personality have moved into a different area of expression. Take the ad lib, one of the most exciting features in trap. A sort of "backing rap", where a second MC repeats a keyword from each line, interjects a complementary catchphrase, or emits a sound effect or a noise suggestive of exertion or ecstasy, the ad lib has brought an almost choral quality to trap music, an interweaving of vocal parts that in the hands of a trio like Migos can be as swoon-inducing as classic doowop.
As the selling of drugs has dipped into the background of trap, the drugginess of the sound has come to the fore: hip-hop staples like weed and codeine-laced cough syrup have been joined by prescription drugs like Xanax and Percocet. All of these drugs, and others like Molly (MDMA) are endlessly namechecked by MCs but more crucially they shape the woozy glisten of the sound, whose rippling electronic motifs often recall IDM artists like Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada. As Tumay says, it's the birth of a new kind of psychedelia, but one that's far bleaker than its '60s predecessor: Xans and Perkys are pain-killing and anxiety-deadening drugs. Lil Uzi Vert's emo-trap hit "XO Tour Llif3" features the plaintive couplet "Xanny, help the pain, yeah /Please, Xanny, make it go away" and pivots on the catchy hook "all my friends are dead /push me to the edge". Trap is the supreme manifestation of what cultural theorist Mark Fisher called "depressive hedonism", that hollow feeling of numb ennui as you pour expensive liquor down your throat while sporting a mansion's worth of jewelry on your wrist. Having a spiritual void has become the ultimate status symbol in rap.
As if to seal trap's displacement of rock as this era's preeminent music of rebellion and dissolute excess, in the 2010s rappers hijacked the concept of "rockstar" and made it their own, and the fans moshed accordingly. Hence Post Malone's dirge-like Rockstar, the gloriously impudent Black Beatles by Rae Sremmurd and Future calling himself "Future Hendrix". This decade, rap fashion has referenced rock star aesthetics, with artists ditching baggy attire for leather jackets, skinny jeans and merch which features heavy metal graphics. Trap today supplies what the Stones and Led Zep once did: a fantasy of life without constraints. And millions of fans across the world can't get enough.
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"
Pull Up" is a trap tune that came out in 2018, a few years after Bad and Boujee. But it was made half the way across the globe from Atlanta by the Slovakian rapper Samey, with guest MCs Ego and Yzomandias (from the neighbouring Czech Republic). Released on the leading Central European trap label Fck Them, "Pull Up" has the trap sound down: it bounces irresistibly, and Samey's chorus hook is a potent earworm. But where American trap videos feature sleek sci-fi cars, flowing champagne, and scantily clad girls at poolside parties, Samey's video can't quite match its aspirations. They've got hold of a car with the requisite suicide doors, but the backdrop is a grey Bratislava cityscape of flatblocks and road beneath a freeway flyover. Despite gold teeth and chains and lots of ink, the crew's clothes don't reach Migos levels of futuristic flash."Yzo is the original /Yzo is not a remake" asserts the bouncing Czech MC Yzomandias. That is neither completely true nor completely false: the inspiration is overwhelming American and specifically Atlantan, from the flows to the slang (references to "guap" or money). Academics have an ugly word, "glocal," to describe this syndrome: globalised entertainment formats colliding with native cultures. Yet simply through the translation process, the cadences of the Slovakian and Czech languages, and the rappers' reserves of verve, it comes out different. Despite clear intent to emulate and a ravenous desire to pull it off, "Pull Up" is not quite the real thing - and all the better for it.
A few years ago, I went on a trip that passed through several different European nations, during which I met up with a series of old friends. The conversation invariably turned to our kids and what they were into musically. The answer, no matter the country, was always "trap!" And it was during these conversations that I learned that every single territory had its own local version.
In France, PNL are huge stars with their mournfully sonorous fusion of trap and variété. Reggaeton-trap fusions pervade Latin America. You can hear trap coming out of cars or bazaars from Morocco to the Indian subcontinent. But nowhere is trap stronger than in Central Europe. Poland's SB MAFFIJA label scored 137 million streams during the first six months of 2019 while the rapper Taco Hemingway partnered with pop singer Dawid Podsiadlo to fill the country's sixty-thousand-capacity National Stadium. Trap squads like MO฿฿YN and MCs like Szpaku Szpaku and Kaz Balagne bypass the radio and TV to reach hordes of fans direct through YouTube and Instagram.
In the Czech Republic, the leading label /trap collective is Milion+. According to music critic Miloš Hroch, their sound is "transnational in its nature and core, with no trace of the local in their music videos, just the language of luxury brands and antidepressant pills". Hroch points to the rural outfit Opak Dissu as an example of Czech rap that is rooted in lived realities rather than "straight outta Atlanta" fantasy. Opak's ASAP Jarda once told Hroch that he believes "copying America here is bizarre. Half of Czech rappers live at their mom's place and the second half is at the University. For me traplife is about going to the factory everyday and my roots in the village. We rob that [Atlanta] sound but we fill it with our stories."
T
here's also the Roma rapper Dollar Prync, whose lyrics deal with small-time crime - robbery, street scuffles between gangs - and life as a member of a minority treated with prejudice and discrimination. His song Okamura Skap disses the xenophobic Czech politician Tomio Okamura: "Gypsies, Russians, Vietnamese are sharpening their knives on you - Okamura, die", he spits, denouncing the stereotypes peddled by far-right politicians that immigrants are parasites sucking up social benefits. "Meanwhile you motherfuckers are fucking millions into your own pockets."In Italy, the outfit Dark Polo Gang became the vortex of a debate among rap fans and critics. Decried as a mindless decline from rap's glory days by some, they are celebrated ironically by others as simulation-trap given unexpected substance thanks to genuinely impressive beats by producer Sick Luke. Dark Polo Gang's videos for hits like "Cono Gelato" hover in a zone somewhere between mimicry and parody: a miasma of gold grills, SUVs, and hand guns stuck down the elasticated waist of swimming trunks.
Damir Ivic, a historian of Italian rap, says that his country's first wave of homegrown hip-hop rap in the '90s, known as the "Posse movement", had a more quirky native character. "It was quite different from the rest of Europe, encapsulating reggae, ska, and patchanka - for a few years we felt like there was a cohesive alternative scene." But he argues that the new breed of trap-inspired rappers like Dark Polo Gang, Sfera Ebbasta, and Young Signorino has "nearly zero Italian flavour" and consists of "tattooed youngsters moaning about success and/or drugs and/or being wasted" just like their emo-tinged, fashion conscious counterparts in Sweden like Yung Lean. As in some other countries, Italian trap has triggered mainstream media concern, especially following the death of six kids at a Sfera Ebbasta concert. Pickpockets used ammonia or other caustic sprays to create panic and make it easier to rob people. An emergency exit collapsed in the stampede. "Suddenly a connection between such a tragic accident and the 'evil-ish' soul of trap music has been made," observes Ivic wryly.
Euro-Trap also gets criticised by fans of conscious hip-hop who bemoan its apolitical hedonism, its sexism and materialism. A raw, non-ideological anti-authority stance can be found here and there: Austria's Yung Hurn's "Fick Die Polizei", which needs no translation, comes with a video woven out of hand-held footage of rioting anarchists, burning police cars, and tear gas. But Hurn has also put out more standard trap-themed tunes like "Ferrari", "Stoli", the salacious "Ponny" and "Skrt Skrt", the latter titled after Migos's famous "tires skidding" ad lib.
"We are speaking the language of today's youth," said Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican reggaeton-trap artist who featured in Cardi B's huge hit "I Like It". A genre born in black America embraced by young people across the world and a sound that indicates a rebellious attitude, trap has indeed become a kind of pop Esperanto. Esperanto translates as "one who hopes" - the language was invented in the hopes of fostering universal brotherhood.
Yet trap, beneath its brash self-confidence, is based on a disillusionment in which hope for collective advancement is not a form of audacity but delusion. Trap sees life as feral - something captured in "Bad and Boujee" when Offset describes his gang as "savage, ruthless". In this war of all against all, you're either a victor or a victim - and the social odds are stacked against you becoming one of the winning few rather than the "losing" many. As visions of life go, it's bleak and it's depoliticising. The fact that it resonates so strongly all across the world - particularly in the formerly Communist countries of Eastern Europe, those that have adjusted most harshly to American-style free market economics - is revealing.
If trap became the defining sound of the 2010s, it's because it captured the pathologies of our era - the glamour of money, the lure of fame as an individualistic escape route, the decadence of self-medicating hedonism - and welded them to the ultimate party soundtrack. It's fitting that the decade's dominant and most addictive sound should derive its name from the place where drugs are sold. The irrepressible and inexhaustible generation of new flows, fresh slanguage, and startling production tricks collides with a stock set of themes and a beat that is instantly recognisable. Trap as the changing same, as a music that keeps reinventing itself even as it serves the base function it always has, is a fitting metaphor for our times.
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That's the piece as originally run on the Face website. But there was a different harsher ending originally:
As Lil Uzi Vert, guesting on "Bad and Boujee", put it: "You know we winnin' / Yeah, we is not losin'". It's a grim, depoliticizing worldview, and by glamorizing it, trap is helping to make the rest of the world steadily more like America.
At the moment, trap - indisputably the sonic vanguard of mainstream pop - is locked in a vicious cycle: the desire of the underclass to become overlords. MCs could hardly be more explicit in their declaration of this deadly intent. In her #1 single "Bodak Yellow", Cardi B talks about leaving behind stripping for rapping just like her spouse Offset talks about leaving behind trapping for rapping: "I don't gotta dance, I make money move… I'm a boss, you a worker, bitch, I make bloody moves."
Listening to trap is paradoxical: immense creativity, flair, flamboyance, life-force, slamming right up against a deadening set of thematic constraints, somehow magically rewriting and re-rewriting the stale script into inexhaustible freshness. An absolute wealth of brilliance, an utter poverty of imagination. Rae Sremmurd may rap about being "Black Beatles", but we're a million miles from "All You Need Is Love" and "Imagine."
The politics of trap revealed themselves, unfortunately, on the earlier Sremmurd single "Up Like Trump", released in 2015. Swae Lee raps about reading Forbes like the Bible, Slim Jxmmi describes himself as a "money fiend," and in the video, a Donald mask-wearing figure parties with the duo on the open top of a bus riding through Times Square. Speaking to Complex magazine at the time, Lee declared, "Donald Trump is cool…. I'm like, 'That's a cool motherfucker.' He's rich as fuck." In a Guardian profile after their role model was elected, the duo defined Trumpism as "owning businesses, being bossed up" and seemed to have no regrets about making the song.
Rejecting party politics for apolitical partying, Jxmmi said that "young people wanna rage". Sremmurd and their fans are about "living lit" and banging "our heads against the wall". It's a fitting cap to the trap decade: a President whose taste runs to nouveau riche glitz, who runs the White House like a Mafioso.
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Around this time, I did three other pieces that summed up the 2010s - one on streaming, another on 'conceptronica', and a third on ambient and New Age. The latter had a paragraph in it about trap that got cut out and adds to the analysis here:
Beyond the boom in blissed-out soundscapes, the 2010s has seen a sort of ambient-izing of other genres - including some that would seem to be politically and philosophically about as distant from New Age values as imaginable, such as trap and its variants such as UK drill. Lyrically, it's toxic masculinity a-go-go: the same old shit of egomania, misogyny, commodity-fetishism, and violence. Yet the music has an ambient quality, draping glistening wooze over the hard beats-and-bass, with wistful melody-riffs looping endlessly in a way that recalls the more idyllic kinds of Nineties IDM. In many ways, trap is one of the last bastions of minimalism on the radio.
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On a different post about trap, the commenter Luke had some interesting thoughts about mumble rap and a new male subjectivity in hip hop:
Regarding the dichotomy between 'conscious' hip hop and mumble rap, it is a necessary distinction, but I like to think of mumble rap as 'unconscious' hip hop not because it is anti-woke or anti-progressive, but in the psychoanalytic sense. If conscious hip hop is superego music, and the majority of other hip hop ego music, mumble rap is id music. From all the non-verbal sounds, the adlibs, the mumbling and so on, to those problematic lyrics which often come across as more the product of free association than conscious boasting.
To which, I replied:
I like the idea about it being 'unconscious' rap, stream of unconsciousness, letting fantasy and the id come out to play. The ecstastic blurry moans and gurgles and the tourettic ad libs, they seem to release psycholibidinal energy in spurts and spasms, it's very much some Kristeva semiotic material being let loose, strings and blobs of jouissance.... the babyvoice Playboi Carti just makes the regressive tendency manifest
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The Caretaker
Everywhere at the End of Time
2019
History Always Favours The Winners
(part of Resident Advisor's 2000-2025 Best Albums)
Memories are ghosts inside your mind; samples are ghosts extracted from records and trapped in forever loops. Starting from these premises, The Caretaker takes snippets of maudlin balladry from pre-World War II crooners like Al Bowlly and subjects them to escalating levels of erosion, simulating the stages of dementia. These nostalgic wisps of decaying music gradually disintegrate until all that's left is a howling dust bowl where there once was a self. Conceptually immaculate, consummately executed and emotionally devastating, Everywhere at the End of Time is the ultimate work of hauntological electronic sound art.
- Simon Reynolds
The Caretaker
Everywhere at the end of timeEverywhere, an empty bliss
Baron Mordant
Mark of the MouldThe Wire, June 2019
by Simon Reynolds
It's twenty years now since the first stirrings of what came to be called hauntology: Boards of Canada's Music Has A Right to Children, Position Normal's Stop Your Nonsense, early releases by Mount Vernon Arts Lab and Broadcast… and The Caretaker's Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom. After eleven releases under that name, James Kirby is retiring his best-known alias. And with another leading figure in the genre-not-genre - Baron Mordant, a/k/a Ian Hicks, the man behind Mordant Music the group and the label - also calling time on his public self, it's tempting to see these career-closing releases as tombstones for the sound-sensibility. Is this the moment to give up the ghosts? Or will hauntology enjoy some kind of after-afterlife?
In hindsight, "memoradelia" - an alternative name proposed by Patrick McNally - might have been a better way to go, avoiding the Derridean cargo carried by the term hauntology. Decay, the attrition of aging, memory's uncanny persistence and terrifying frailty are at the maggoty core of Mark of the Mould and Everywhere at the end of time. A memory is a kind of ghost, sharing its queasy quality of ontological instability: a present absence, neither here nor there, now nor then. One psychoanalytical explanation - or explaining away - of the ghost (at least ghosts familiar to us, ghosts we recognize) is that they are symptoms of incomplete mourning: memories we're unable to let go.
Continuing the exploration of memory disorders in Theoretically pure anterograde amnesia and other earlier Caretaker releases, Everywhere at the end of time - a gargantuan project launched in 2016 and now closing with its the sixth installment, plus the free side-album Everywhere, an empty bliss - is Kirby's attempt to mirror in sound the stages of Alzheimer's. Identity, memory and a sense of temporality are interdependent. As the first two props of the self crumble, perception of time also erodes away. What ensues is - as far as we can tell - - a prolapse of consciousness, an undignified slide into a hellish limbo of non-time. That threshold is reached on the latest batch of Everywhere: where earlier tracks lasted three or four minutes each, the new pieces dilate monstrously, ranging from 21 to 23 minutes. Listening to these entropic epics models the ego-death of advanced senility: it's virtually impossible not to drift off into inattentive vacancy.
The first Caretaker record took its concept (and artist name) from the ballroom scene in The Shining: Jack Nicholson's writer turned hotel caretaker turned revenant psychopath hallucinating the sound of the 1930s light-jazz ballads that the Overlook's guests had decades earlier slow-danced to (specifically the songs of Al Bowlly, a British entertainer popular between the wars but now almost completely forgotten). Listening to the drawn-out death rattles of these final Caretaker pieces, you might think of another iconic Kubrick scene: the uncomprehending horror of HAL the rogue computer in 2001, A Space Odyssey, as his brain is dismantled bit by bit, the blanks in his consciousness getting bigger until all that is left is the steadily decelerating ditty "A Bicycle Made for Two".
The Caretaker could have renamed himself The Caregiver, for on this project he resembles a sonic nurse in a hospice for the terminally ill. Kirby is a custodian in another sense. For over two decades, he's collected thousands of dirt-cheap shellac 78 rpm discs of Bowlly-type music, from which he's lovingly sampled, looped, and filtered to create these tracks. The result is an alchemized archive of popular song: music whose original "people" are either dead or on the downward slope. For to be capable of remembering this music as a real-time, living culture, you'd have to be in your nineties now. What Kirby presents here could be heard as the faint, faded memory-fragments of once-beloved tunes as they waver on in atrophying minds.
It's a style of music that, as Kirby has noted, always already ached with nostalgia, oozing a woozy maudlin warmth as comforting as a mug of Ovaltine. His treatments layer an extra sepia-tint patina of Pathé pathos. Suffused with a kindly "golden hour" glow, the earlier instalments of the project loop sonorous horns, harp twinkles and piano ripples into cul de sacs of consciousness: the melodic equivalent of those mental glitches that Americans call "senior moments" (a self-deprecating, uneasily humorous term that shows you are still in command because you are able to identify them as aberrations). Now and then, there's a resemblance to the Gas albums, but replacing Alpine grandeur with fireside intimacy. The titles are heartbreaking ("I Still Feel As Though I Am Me") and often describe the music more effectively than the reviewer ever could ("Long term dusk glimpses," Internal unravel").
Across Everywhere's nearly seven hours duration, everything seems to wilt and yellow as the album progresses, or rather, regresses. Sound starts to reach our ears as though through a swaddling ball of fluff that's wrapped itself around the needle. Where before the rhythm of the pieces was a gently bobbing sway like the rise and fall of a merry-go-round horse, now it's an agonizingly protracted pestle-and-mortar grind, slowly pulverizing thought into sparkly dust. By the end - the 20-minute long pieces - there's no discernible motion, just a sandstorm standstill, eternity-as-abyss.
The Caretaker faces decay and death with serenely fatalistic acceptance, aestheticizing the inevitable extinction of personality. On Mark of the Mould Baron Mordant's subject is middle age and the response is different: he's not going down without a fight. There's a feeling of writhing struggle to this album, a man at war with the spores he's inhaled. Comprising fifteen tracks plus the bonus inclusion of their instrumental versions, Mould is the grand bouffe finale to a career, Hicks sicking up a feast of all his favorite riddim tics and danktronica textures.
Much of Mould resembles the vastly more compelling music that dubstep could have been. True, few things could be more boring in 2019 than manifesting a dub influence, but Mordant's idea of it descends more from Cabaret Voltaire than Lee Perry: it's a dead-aired, dessicated, deep-underground-silo version of dub, built around cold delays rather than misty-mystic reverb. Imagine Shackleton unshackled. Call it Middle-Aged Echo. Other portions of Mould supply a banging 'n' clanking update of early Nineties techno - "(It's A) MariMba (You Knob)" could be a great lost track from the sessions for DHS's "House of God" - that exploits the capacity for detail and dimension afforded by current software.
Elsewhere Mould overlaps with eMMplekz, Hicks's glorious collaboration with Ekoplekz's Nick Edwards, except that in this case the Baron is handling not just the verbals and lyrics but the backing tracks too. Being a genius word-wrangler means that the Baron is better equipped to describe what he's doing than me. Trying to tag his unique delivery and idiom - a Tourettic monologue riddled with floridly fetid imagery and gruesomely tortured puns - I toyed with formulations like "mental effluent," only to be outmatched by a passing reference to "spoken turd" on one track here. Likewise, hoping to pin down the particular tone of sour derision in Hicks voice, I realized eventually that le mot juste was in fact "mordant".
Peter Cook, or certain characters that the comedian played, could be a reference point for the vocal tone - gruffly classless, indeterminately Southern English, withering, withered, the sardonic sneer undercut by its own impotence - but doesn't capture the uniquely macabre brand of Anglo-surreal humour on offer. That voice and the encrypted private slanguage are maintained not just on record, but in press communiques, email correspondence and interviews, making you wonder if Hicks uses it in everyday life too, when shopping or making up bedtime stories for his kids.
As for what Hicks rants about, one ripe terrain is the sort of modern-day U.K. ugliness that inspires online forums like Shit London and Boring Dystopia. A Robert Macfarlane of built-up Britain, Hicks is an accomplished "visual noticer" with a keen eye for the unsightly and characterless. But he's equally observant when it comes to the unreal life of the Internet - the not-so-great indoors - especially the fatuities of today's music scene. Many lines here read like snippets from blog reviews or Boomkat blurbs. "The Internet Did It" points the finger obliquely at, well, all of us, probably: the crime is left undefined but could refer to the economic nonviability of the leftfield musician's life in the age of streaming, or to a creeping paralysis and hemorrhaging of meaning and momentum. Choice phrases fly by almost too fast to register: some near-abstract ("lichen 2-step", "are you being serf?", "Disneyhole") and others nearly too on-the-nose as parody or invective ("make an avant sound-design tune that drops into a chamber of grimy vox", "listen to these cunts waffle on about branding themselves").
But - and here's where midlife-crisis comes in - much of the time the target of the tongue lashing is Hicks himself. "Anything With a Pulse" self-berates with cries of "you're nothing nearly / there's just nothing coming through" that suggest a battle with creative block, and it's followed by "Somebody Wake Up Hicks" whose title makes it clear that the "you" in the previous song was really "me". Defying his own sense of abject futility - "there's thousands of LPs out there like this" goes one line -this album froths over with a last-stand surge and splurge of creativity. And, a vague affinity with Sleaford Mods aside, there's really nothing else out there in modern music that resembles the Baron's particular blend of sound and spiel.
Themes of deterioration, self-doubt, and declining powers pervade, even as the sounds and beats rattle and ping ferociously. "Blong" features a child-voice jeering "Dad is a dick". "Insane Note" has a line about being "persona non grata" and a grim, sinking-feeling chant "you know that / I know that," while its title could be read as one step further along from the "sick note" that gets you off school or work. "Percussive SuMMer" is a piss-stream of consciousness spraying into a latrine of sound: the lyric reads like a real-time vignette of Hicks musing to himself in a local tavern, supping a pint, roaming through random memories and rejoicing that a deferred jury summons will allow him a few days to make some tunes. "KFC's Toilets" might be an answer record to Burial's "In McDonalds." The little kid's voice - presumably Hicks Jnr - reappears on "Aldi Bin Bag" chanting something indecipherable ("Arseland, oh yeah"?).
All the verbal bile and brackish sound roil towards a clammy climax on "Only For Fun Game," the penultimate track. Framed with voice-shivers that lurch upwards in pitch, it's a lament for a life wasted onscreen. "There's a day out there I really should get to," goes the chorus. "A life under sky that's vented and Lenten…. These are the days you can't get back/ the melted clocks on Dali's back." After a flurry of lyric-shards ranging from abstract to uproarious - "turned on by budget sportwear", "senile stepovers", "reduce the risk of a fall while bathing," "no notifications are good notifications," "everyone's over-compensating for a Tavares deficiency" - Hicks signs off with "this is a gentle piss-take". It's the last decipherable utterance on the album - the closing track "Back in the US(S)B" fades out with mumbled vocal sounds - and perhaps the last words of a career.
On "MeMbrane" from 2016's "criminally overlooked" (a Mordant Music joke, that, but true) eMMplekz album Rook to TN34, Hicks described himself as "mildly embittered since the turn of the century", a reference to the very earliest Mordant emissions. Two decades on, hauntology remains a surprisingly bustling field, with records, books, events, conferences, still occurring regularly. Only last month, there was the unexpected appearance of a BBC Ideas Film titled 'What Is Hauntology? Why Is It All AroundUs?'. But as a "news item", it felt tardy not topical. For there is a definite sense of this region having being mapped out long ago, the footpaths worn bare by visitors.
Elsewhere on Rook to TN34, Hicks crooned mordantly: "Well, I should be moving on / Singing the same old song." Perhaps it is time to open the windows and clear away the soupy staleness with a ventilating blast of otherness and newness. A gust of youthful energy to chase away the ghosts for good.
JAMES KIRBY: V/VM AND THE CARETAKER.
"It's very Northern British, very working class," says James Kirby, about the sample-based music he made in Stockport during the late Nineties using the name V/Vm. "A lot of the material on those albums reminds me of being at a horrific family 40th birthday party where all of a sudden fights erupt because somebody owes somebody else cash or looked at their girlfriend in the wrong way. V/Vm is heard through drunken lager ears for sure."
The arc of Kirby's sampladelic career stretches from Plunderphonics/KLF-style vandalizing of mainstream pop through to some of the most consummate hauntological music made this side of Ghost Box. Early V/Vm releases like AuralOffalWaffle and The V/Vm Christmas Pudding seemed driven by a weird ecological recycling impulse, creating "new" music by digitally mutilating the records that nobody wanted anymore: chart-busting but now unsellable crap by middle of the road entertainers like Russ Abbott and Shakin' Stevens. Like John Oswald, Kirby focused on single artists and single tracks, rather than sampling and combining bits and bobs from all over. Technology had advanced by the late Nineties to the point where using some cracked software, he could feed whole tracks into the machine and subject the song/performer to cruel and unusual punishment. Indeed Kirby uses the term "butchering" : "It was all an experiment, to hack up what was considered the offal, the forgotten embarrassing output of the music industry."
But there was already a proto-hauntological aspect to V/Vm, later to flower with his alter-ego The Caretaker. Kirby was tomb-raiding pop's cemetery, defiling the corpses. He was "bringing dead pieces of audio back to life " as zombies condemned to some twilight zone version of the cabaret circuit, where they sang their greatest (s)hit night after night with clumps of pop-flesh falling off their bodies. Another pre-echo of Ghost Box, et al was V/Vm's focus on strictly British sources: the kind of massive-in-the-UK novelty singles and M.O.R. that never crossed over to America or Europe. Our unique national crud: the British equivalent to schlager, Germany's light entertainment and variety show fare.
Eventually Kirby wearied of spattering the post-rave electronic scene with V/Vm matter and shifted in a more atmospheric, pensive direction. The Caretaker's Selected Memories From the Haunted Ballroom (1999) drew inspiration from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, in which Jack Nicholson plays a hotel caretaker who succumbs to the supernatural malaise hanging over the place and ultimately reenacts the murders committed by an earlier caretaker, who went insane and butchered his family. Specifically, it was the "ballroom scenes which play out in Jack's head" that inspired the album and track titles like "Thronged With Ghosts". "He is having some kind of emotional breakdown and walks into the empty ballroom and then, right there in his own mind, the empty ballroom is full again and music is playing. " The project's main musical source was as British as V/Vm's raw material but from a couple of generations earlier: pre-World War Two British popular song and specifically the "tragic figure" of Al Bowlly. "He was the golden voice of his generation but he was killed by a parachute mine outside his London home. Bowlly always sang as if haunted, his voice is otherworldly. It's very strange music from this time between the two World Wars: optimistic but also very much about loss and longing, ghosts and torment. It seems haunted by the spirits of those who went to the trenches and never returned."
The "haunted ballroom" trilogy peaked with A Stairway to the Stars, which included the resonantly titled song "We Cannot Escape The Past". Kirby then shifted his focus to memory itself, and specifically memory disorders. Theoretically pure anterograde amnesia was about the absolute horror of escaping the past altogether. Disorienting in its scale and abstraction, this six-CD work was an attempt to imagine what it would be like to suffer from a rare form of amnesia in which sufferers are incapable of forming short-term memories and exist in a depersonalized void. Deleted scenes/forgotten dreams and Persistent Repetition of Phrases explored similar zones of queasy amorphousness.
Collective memory was the subject of the Death of Rave project, inspired by Kirby's participation in the Manchester club scene of the late Eighties and early Nineties. "The energy in clubs at this time was amazing. Nobody knew what to expect next." But by the middle of the 2000s, Kirby felt that when he visited dance clubs "the energy and adventure seemed completely lost. I just wanted to reflect that. I took old rave tracks and stripped them down, removing all their life." Spectral echoes of familiar rush-inducing riffs and anthemic refrains intermittently flicker through the dense smog of sound, but "the beat and drive have gone." Recalling the surge years of rave between 1988-1996, Kirby says "Everyone thought everything was possible on those long nights. The world was ours. Now I think this generation is very disillusioned. They saw a glimpse of light on the dancefloors but that light has gone out and the future seems grim and predictable."
Kirby's most recent work is the first music he's released under his own name, James Leyland Kirby. Sadly, The Future Is Not What It Was is a three-CD opus mingling his signature style of gaseous decayed sounds with Harold Budd/Erik Satie style piano (the first time that his own physical self, as a player of an instrument rather than a programmer, has been present in his music). "Maybe it was a year 2000 thing," Kirby mused in one interview. "2000 was always the future for us. We expected something significant from that year. When it came it was just the same as it ever was except we had no 2000 to look forward to anymore. It could be a psychological post-millenial hangover for us all which will take some time to pass for this generation."
A tribute to Robert Wyatt, written and recorded for remote participation in a 2025 birthday celebration for the Great Man, organized by Sukhdev Sandhu at NYU
Another great Englishman Mark E. Smith once said "I hated The Soft Machine and that kind of thing. Rock was ruined when the students took it over".
Having been a student once, and middle class through and through, it falls to me to mount a defence of the bourgeois contribution to rock
Let's start with Canterbury, in the south of England - where Soft Machine formed and where other groups directly related to them or influenced by them also hailed from, resulting in what was known as the Canterbury Scene or the Canterbury Sound - an incestuous cluster of post-psychedelic jazz rock outfits who were sometimes endearingly whimsical and sometimes forbiddingly abstruse and often both at the same time
With its superfluity of universities and colleges, Canterbury has the highest ratio of students to native residents of any town in the UK. Think of all the academia-related jobs and ancillary work that institutions like that support (book shops, theatres, cafes, etc) and how that changes the make-up and vibe of a place.
Now in talking of the middle class contribution to rock, I'm not really talking about bank managers or entrepreneurs, but a particular kind of non-business oriented bourgeoisie - the professions, public servants, non profits. People like Robert Wyatt's tolerant, encouraging mother, Honor Wyatt, a journalist and radio presenter - a free thinker sort- who made her home an open house for Wyatt and his friends. Later on, when she moved to South London, her small house was home to the entire Soft Machine and their girlfriends. "I don't how we all fitted in there," Wyatt told me. "But we did and we made our racket and my mum was fine about it."
What's striking about Soft Machine and the other Canterbury groups like Caravan and Hatfield and the North is their relationship to American black music. Unlike other British groups of the Sixties such as the Stones or Yardbirds, they're not trying to swagger like Muddy Waters and Howlin Wolf. Although Soft Machine were obsessed with jazz, they don't attempt to be supercool like Miles Davis.
Almost alone in the British sixties scene, they don't even sing in a fake American accent
Wyatt was one of the very first British singers of the rock era to sound English.
The other main ones are Kevin Ayers, also in Soft Machine, and Syd Barrett, from Pink Floyd, the band that Soft Machine played alongside at psychedelic clubs like UFO, and a band also spawned from another genteel university town, Cambridge.
Wyatt has described his style as "it sounded like me talking, only with notes."
So one thing I find endearing about the Canterbury groups is that they not pretending to be anything other than what they are: nice middle-class South of England boys, educated and well-brought-up. They fit a new archetype of masculinity that I call "soft male" - this is the first generation of British boys to be molded by permissive child-rearing practices (picking up the baby when it's crying rather letting the infant cry out). The first generation to grow up without the stiff upper lip implanted at birth - nor did they experience being toughened up by national service in the Army, that ended around 1961.
Their backgrounds might be genteel but they themselves tend to sound socially indeterminate - a syndrome I call middleclasslessness - if you listen to Robert Wyatt speak, it's mumbly and slightly faltering, softened by self-deprecation. In other words, it's evacuated of the confidence and entitlement that rings out clearly in the voices of the truly posh.
This late Sixties, early Seventies breed of English musician are not without faults, a self-indulgence, a reluctance to grow up - there might be the odd bit of sexism in the mix.
But these young men are finding ways to play the music they love (jazz, rhythm and blues, rock) but also be themselves. Hence the urge to complicate things with time signatures shifts and distorted textures ... but also the puerile humor, the Anglo-surrealist whimsy, elements that parallel the Goons and Monty Python. An odd combo of sophistication and regression.
Take a song by Hatfield and the North in which Robert Wyatt does guest vocals. It's called "Big Jobs No. 2 (By Poo and The Wee Wees)". You hear the singing and you think, ah there's Wyatt - but actually it's Hatfield's Richard Sinclair singing, but he sounds like a dead ringer for Robert - I call it Wyatt-ese, and it is the natural singing and speaking tone of many of these groups. A bit further into "Big Jobs" Wyatt does appear - but doing a little bit of guest scat. No pun intended. He's scat singing, sublimely.
This is one of Wyatt's great inventions - an instrumentalization of the voice. In Matching Mole, the group he formed after his acrimonious expulsion from Soft Machine, he does this the songs "Instant Kitty" and "Instant Pussy" - the titles are whimsical, perhaps even lewd, but the abstract vocalese is astonishing, comparable to things that singers like Tim Buckley was doing on Starsailor. Wyatt told me that he was inspired by Roland Kirk's playing.
On his solo tune "Muddy Mouse (c)/Muddy Mouth" Wyatt vocally mimics the sound of a muted trumpet to exquisite effect.
On the later song "Born Again Cretin" - a hilarious satire of right-wing thinking - the main Wyatt vocal is backed by a sort of bullfrog barbershop quartet of multi-tracked Wyatts wordlessly wheezing and gasping in rhythmic accompaniment. Like so much Wyatt music, it is simultaneously whimsically absurd yet utterly ecstatic.
For his regular singing, when he had a lyric, the model was Dionne Warwick - a very un-rock'n'roll model to have. He has said that he generally found women singers inspiring, they are who wanted to emulate.
Both modes are heard on what might be his great single work, "Sea Song", the opening track of his 1974 masterpiece Rock Bottom - which starts as an eerie serenade to a mermaid, then spirals off into mystical flights of wordless falsetto
Rock Bottom came out after the break-up of Matching Mole. Wyatt had started to form a new group involving Francis Monkman of Curved Air and various Canterbury-aligned musicians, and Virgin Record wanted to sign the group. But then, during a party at the mansion-block flat of socialite and Virgin recording artist Lady June, Wyatt tumbled out of the window of the bathroom. The accident left him paralyzed below the waist, unable to play drums again or participate in a touring rock band. So instead of signing the planned Canterbury supergroup, Virgin released a solo album by Wyatt: Rock Bottom, a heartbreakingly poignant allegory of Wyatt's emotional regression and gradual self-rebuilding during his recovery from the accident, couched in a blurry oceanic sound that recalls Miles Davis's In A Silent Way and Jimi Hendrix's "1983... (A Merman I Should Turn To Be)."
Rock Bottom is dealing with some heavy, heavy stuff but it still has the trademark Wyatt whimsy.
Even Wyatt's lovesongs are skewered by irony. In the wonderfully sentimental 'O Caroline', Wyatt warns his sweetheart "if you call this sentimental crap you'll make me mad", while 'Calyx' is full of oddly phrased praise: "close inspection reveals you're in perfect nick".
On the follow up to Rock Bottom, titled Ruth is Stranger Than Richard, 'Soup Song' is sung from the point of view of one of its reluctant ingredients, a slice of bacon.
Another Canterbury Scene hallmark that Wyatt probably invented is the meta-song, a song that addresses its own circumstances of recording or composition, or talks about the lifestyle of the musician.
In a version of Soft Machine's 'Moon In June', Wyatt extemporises about the joys of doing a radio session for the BBC's Top Gear show.
The opening line of the first verse of Matching Mole's "Signed Curtain" is
"This is the first verse"
And in fact it's also the second, third, fourth and fifth line of that first verse.
The next line?
"This is the chorus / Or perhaps it's a bridge"
It closes with the lines "It only means that I lost faith in this song / 'Cause it won't help me reach you"
"O Caroline" similarly starts not with the lover but with the action in the studio - David on piano, Robert on the drums, "we try to make the music /We'll try to have some fun". Then it gets romantic :"But I just can't help thinking that if you were / Here with me /I'd get all my thoughts in focus and play /More excitingly"
There is the story of how Robert Wyatt had a small pop hit with a cover of "I'm A Believer" by the Monkees and appeared on Top of the Pops. Apparently the idea originated with Richard Branson and it became an obsession - Branson would ask other groups, later on, to cover Monkees songs.
But after that there was a lull, Wyatt stopped making music for several years. And a strange thing happened - his earlier music had been resolutely apolitical but strangely he did become a believer - a born again Communist, a dedicated reader of the Morning Star newspaper. And when he was coaxed back into the studio to record a series of singles for the label Rough Trade, many of them expressed his newly hardline beliefs and commitment.
He did the song "Trade Union" with Dishari Shilpee Gosth - a Bangladeshi band of musicians from the East End of London; he covered the World War 2 pro-Soviet song "Stalin Wasn't Stalling"; he brought out a political subtext to the Chic ballad "At Last I Am Free".
He sang "Strange Fruit" and "Guantanamera" and Violeta Parra's "Arauco".
Best of all though was his version of the black humorously anti-authoritarian ditty by his friend Ivor Cutler, "Grass", plays the role of guru imparting wisdom to an acolyte, the power relation underlined by lines like "while we talk I'll hit your head with a nail to make you understand me / I have something important to say."
Around this time he also recorded a moody instrumental soundtrack to The Animals Film, a documentary about human exploitation and cruelty towards animals, with narration by his friend Julie Christie.
Not long after the Rough Trade singles series ended, Clive Langer and Elvis Costello wrote the song "Shipbuilding", an oblique protest against the Falkland War, and invited Wyatt to record it. That gave him his second hit single.
Wyatt has said that his attraction to Communism was its internationalism - which is why he found the imperialist nostalgia of Thatcher's escapade in the South Atlantic deplorable.
He describes himself as a xenophile - someone who resists the British suspicion of Johnny Foreigner.
I'm sure he was aghast at Brexit and is horrified about the nativism and authoritarian nationalism resurgent all across the globe.
He's the kind of singer that people in the UK call a national treasure - but he'd probably hate that partly because he'd rather be an international treasure, but mainly because he is self-effacing and genuinely humble.
Me and the Great Man (and Alfie) at the Hay Festival 2007, where I did an onstage interview with.
What a lovely man.
(a talk I gave at Harvard in 2012 at a conference on Art + Rock)
"When 'art' walks through the door, it's got 15 suitcases full of very smelly washing (ideas of 'geniuses', 'creativity', 'individualism', and the rest of it)...which as far as we're concerned is the kind of crap that just clutters up your back garden, and gets in the way when you want to go out…. There is an art-based conversation that is swamping our neighbourhood, right? It's detrimental to our practice…. [It's] high-culturally derived hogwash, and it's dragging us down… Half the groups that are around at the moment are ex-art-college groups… You are on board a sinking ship--you're one hulk of a rotting carcass, whose language...y'know... don't chuck it over us, chum, because it's redolent of all things tedious, repressive and slimy."
- art school graduate Green Gartside, speaking to the art journal Primary Sources on the International Performing Arts, 1979
"Iggy pretty much changed my life. I saw him in 1969, when I had been fooling around a bit with electronic music, but I was still basically a visual artist.... Out walks this androgynous figure, no shirt on, muscled. He was walking out telling everybody to go fuck themselves and he had this look in his eye, and this amazing body. It kicked into "I Wanna Be Your Dog," then "1969," and suddenly Iggy's flying into the audience. Then he's back onstage and cutting himself up with drumsticks and bleeding. The bass player is humping the guitar player with his bass. The whole set lasted 20 minutes maybe. Usually at rock shows they put on some rock'n'roll between the bands' sets, but right after the the Stooges finished, whoever was in the sound booth put on one of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos. It was perfect, because what we had just seen was great art, and the person in the booth understood that.... I realized that, as a [visual] artist, I could either carry on down this road and be dishonest, or I had to make some moves. Whatever I was doing as an artist was insignificant at this point. That's what got me moving in the direction of the music thing more intensely—because it was a vehicle for doing something more environmental than painting."
- Alan Vega, painter / light-sculptor and member of a New York artists collective
Lester Bangs, in conversation with Jim De Rogatis, 1982
LB: "Rolling Stone's Jon Landau was saying things at the time like every Glenn Campbell album, every Jerry Vale album, every Helen Reddy album, every Ann Murray album was a distinct piece of art which should not be looked at as a piece of product.
JdR: That's definitely against your theory, right? Rock is not art.
LB: Oh, I don't know. I double back on myself so much. There's the trash aesthetic and all that. The way I've written about the Velvet Underground and Van Morrison, of course it's art.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Rock has never quite made its mind up about "art"
Is the status of "art" something to aspire towards, to claim and to seize in defiance of those who would judge rock'n'roll as so low it's beneath consideration?
Or is "art" precisely, for those same reasons, something to recoil from -- should the onset of artiness be feared as the point at which a vital lowliness begins to fade, the confinement or castration of an energy that is properly plebeian, out in the world in a radically democratic way?
In the rock'n'roll world, art often has negative connotations - suggestive a deficit of the visceral, effete conceptualism, dry detachment -- it suggests institutionalization, politeness...
Acceptance is equated with acceptability
Art is improving, it's associated with education - whereas rock'n'roll should be closer to truancy, delinquency, the un-edifying.
In "What A Waste", Ian Dury lists all the socially valuable careers he could have pursued but instead he chose to be a singer in a band, the Blockheads: "what a waste what a waste... rock'n'roll don't mind" -
Yet Ian Dury studied at the Royal Court of Art, actually taught at various art colleges...
He's just one of numerous literally art-schooled people in rock who've acted out an ambivalence towards art - John Lennon, Pete Townsend are others who have done many arty, pretentious things with rock, but also have at other times argued that the art discourse contaminates rock, weakens it, makes it pompous, addles it with self-consciousness
This distrust of art can be traced far back in the history of rock - almost to the moment at which rock acquired self-consciousness and aspired to being art.
There was a point at which rock'n'roll shed the "'n roll" - people now talked of rock -and Dury and Lennon would come to see this shift as a tragic development.
Dury was obsessed with 50s rock'n'roll, worshipped Gene Vincent, hated hippies --- Lennon was totally the long haired hippy and then he decided psychedelia had been a huge mistake - he would revert back to rock'n'roll, a stylized recreation of 50s music in its purity and innocence.
The lost or shed "n'roll" signified a teenage orientation, as lack of adult sophistication lyrically and musically,
It refers back to when rock'n'roll in the Fifties sense was at once rawer and more showbiz -- the pre-Beatles rock'n'rollers carried themselves on TV and radio in a well-behaved way, said "sir" to the hosts, whereas Lennon was ironic, informal, surly - a bohemian,
As raw and rootsy as early rock'n'roll was, it was still largely entwined in the discourse of showbiz -- as the career of Elvis shows, the rebels collapse very rapidly into middle of the road entertainment.
Your typical 50s rock'n'roller didn't see himself as an Artist but as an Artiste. The 'e' on the end is very significant. They saw themselves as entertainers, the groups wore stage outfits. Few of them were artistically autonomous in the way the Sixties rock era artists became: mostly they didn't write their own material and their managers pushed them towards light entertainment as soon as they could, becoming an all-round entertainer.
The move to "rock" in the mid-60s is an aspiration towards thematic maturity, a conception of lyrics as being a form of poetry or literature. But it's also about being artistically independent, in control. The band as an artist that is growing, evolving, questing -- whereas entertainers basically have a shtick that they stick with. An act.
This mid-Sixties art-ification was described scornfully by The Fall's Mark E Smith, speaking to NME in 1981: "when the students got hold of rock'n'roll, that's when it started going downhill"
Prior to Beatlemania, middle class youth, even those who had loved rock'n'roll as teenagers believed that rock'n'roll was a fad that had faded away. When they went up to university in the early Sixties, they were either folkies or they were into jazz - these were the mature options
But then through the Beatles and the Stones and the electric Dylan, rock'n'roll returns in new improved form: the sound as raw as ever, but the attitude and content even more appealing through its poetic and arty qualities.
From approximately 1965 onwards, largely unchallenged until 1976, there followed an unbroken period in which there was a broad consensus that rock could be and should be Art -- the long reign of progressive rock, art rock, singer-songwriter and sophisto rock - steely dan, little feat, joni Mitchell, ry cooder, randy newman - even in something as seemingly lumpen as heavy metal you had the experimentations of led zeppelin, deep purple recording with a symphony orchestra -- the interpretations of what art was ranged from jethro tull to brian eno and all points in between, but the overall consensus was that rock was art, potentially at least.
But you had a tiny sect of dissidents - musicians as high profile as Lennon and barely known as Flamin Groovies. You had heretical critics.
The first pop writer to express a profound ambivalence about pop-as-art was Nik Cohn in Awopboloopbop abopbamboom, published in 1969 - but written in 1968, placing him ahead of the pack, although there had been a handful of dissenters from the acclaim for Sgt Pepper's.
It's The Beatles and Dylan above all that Cohn is most suspicious of . In his book he sounds regular notes of disquiet. Dylan, he concedes "has grown pop up, he has given it brains" but he pointedly declares that "in my own life the Monotones have meant more in one line of 'book of love' than Dylan did in the whole of Blonde on Blonde"
Revolver was a "a big step forward in ingenuity" but a "big step back in guts" and " because everyone copied the Beatles, 'that's why there's no more good fierce rock'n'roll music no more honest trash". The posh Sunday newspapers—" say they're Art... but after all, what's so great about Art? What does it have on Superpop?"
Superpop is Cohn's superlative for everything from Little Richard to Phil Spector to his personal pet artist PJ Proby. In the final short chapter of Awopbop he contrasts Superpop with rock after its shed the 'n roll
"What I've written about has been the rise and Fall of Superpop, the noise machine, and the image, hype and beautiful flash of rock'n'roll music. ... Superpop? It hasn't been much, it's been simple always, silly and vulgar and fake, and it has been a noise, that's all. ... Superpop, it's been like a continuing Western, it's had that classic simplicity, the same power to turn cliché into myth. It's had no mind of its own. All it's ever done has been to catch currents, moods, teen obsessions, and freeze them in images. ... made giant caricatures of lust, violence, romance and revolt... it's finished now, the first mindless explosion, and the second stage has begun..... Pop has split itself into factions. Part of it has a mind now, makes fine music. The other part is purely industrial, a bored and boring business like any other. "
This huge gulf that's opened up within pop is a chasm between lowbrow and highbrow. It has reproduced within a once unified Superpop, aka rock'n'roll, the very division between high and low that had once consigned all of rock'n'roll to the category of junk, trash, mindless pabulum from the culture industry. The market now, he says, is 80 percent manufactured teenpop for AM radio and 20 percent progressive music for FM rock - semipopular music, in terms of its sales.
Cohn: " In ten years, they'll probably be called by another name entirely, electric music or something, and they'll relate to pop the way that art movies relate to Hollywood...., you'll have pop composers writing formal works for pop choirs, pop orchestras; you'll have pop concerts held in halls and the audience all sat in rows, no screaming or stamping but applauding politely with their hands; you'll have sounds and visuals combined, records that are played on something like a gramophone and TV set knocked intot one, the music creating picture and patterns; you'll have cleverness of every kind imaginable. Myself, though, I'm not interested. Not that I have anything much against masterworks in principle but I'm hooked on image, on heroics. It's like films - the best in art movies have no doubt been the most sensitive, brilliant and meaningful works of art, and where have I been? In the back row of the Roxy, of course, gawking at Hollywood. The art movie carries the quality and Hollywood carries the myth."
So here Cohn aligns Superpop - in his view, true pop - with blockbuster movies, pulp entertainment made by the Hollywood system.
Cohn offers here a very early form of what is now known as poptimism or popism: a belief in the de facto superiority of "good honest pop product", a trust in the major labels, who like the Hollywood system, to keep on churning out great entertainment precisely because they only care about money. Their output is sublimely uncontaminated with artistic intent, it aims only to thrill and distract - and get your dollar.
This is one of two ways that the art-ification of rock has been resisted.
The first, the Cohn stance, is basically pro-capitalist, it folds pop and rock back into showbiz, sees records as units of commodified pleasure, the performance as a spectacle. Performers and producers alike are seen as highly skilled professionals. There is a kind of cynical-realist integrity to this factory-line production of good honest commodified entertainment. You can consume without illusions about it being meaningful or the harbinger of revolution. A sort of almost gustatory honesty in the way the consumer consumes, enjoys, and then forgets. Pop is disposable.
The other anti-art view comes from a completely different, anti-capitalist angle: it is folk-ist. Authentic music emerges from the people organically, reflects the worldview and concerns of that community. It then gets co-opted and commodified and eventually weakened. Just as bad as selling out is when it gets gentrified. "Folk" ideology here is not necessarily tied to the formal properties of traditional music, to acoustic guitars and such. Folk-ism includes urban conceptions of the folk culture: notions like the streets, the ghetto, as represented in rap or certain kinds of dance music.
Around the same time as Cohn published Awopbopalop, a different dissenting view about rock-as-art was being formulated in America, not Superpop and if anything leaning to the folk view in so far as it valued a certain primal rawness. Lester Bangs was the major prophet here although there were others such as Greg Shaw whose Who Put the Bomp magazine was one of Bangs main outlets, the other being Creem magazine.
Creem dubbed itself "America's Only Rock'n'Roll Magazine" --a jibe at Rolling Stone -- while Who Put the Bomp!'s had the slogan "rock & roll, all rock & roll, and nothing but rock & roll" .
So that's the reinstatement of the 'n roll right there.
This vision of a return to rock'n roll doesn't have Nik Cohn's mythic Hollywood Western pulp quality but it's very teenage. Its a stylized, idealized version of adolescence, the inarticulate brutish juvenile delinquent - and a rejection of the introspective sensitivity of singer-songwriters such as James Taylor in favor of the two-dimensional cartoon of boredom and lust and aggression offered by The Stooges.
Celebrating Iggy Pop and his band, Bangs insisted that true rock'n'roll was "essentially adolescent music… it can't grow up"; he retrospectively celebrates the sixties garage bands he once despised and says that the bands he admired then, like the Yardbirds and the Who " got 'good' and arty with subtle eccentric songs and fine philosophy..." This pales next to the Stooges debut LP and Funhouse whose raw power is "supermodern, though nothing near to Art".
"Nothing near to Art" - like "art" is cooties, something to recoil from... a contaminant, a debilitator
For heretics like Bangs and Cohn, Sgt Pepper's was the sacred cow they aimed to slaughter. But ironically Lennon at the exact same time was moving in the same direction -- distancing himself from bourgie art and reinstating the 'n'roll.
In the famous 1970 Rolling Stone interview, Lennon equates Fifties rock'n'roll with reality, a raw truth that cut through both socialized pretence and artistic pretension. He asserts that nothing since has been better than simple 50s rock'n'roll and further, that the best Beatles stuff was in that vein: it was the music they made before they ever entered the recording studio - their live performances in Hamburg,
Lennon: "The best stuff is primitive and has no bullshit… It's not perverted or thought about."
What followed seemed to echo Hamlet's mother exasperated suggestion to the verbose Polonius - "more matter, with less art". So, the primal venting of the Plastic Ono band album, then a different form of plain speech, Some Time In New York City, lyrically blunt lyrics addressing sexism, racism, injustice, Northern Ireland, over gutbucket rock with no frills. Lennon here makes a folk ist argument for rock as the people's music,anticipating the sloganeering side of punk that included Tom Robinson Band or CRASS.
Of course while he was going back to art-less rock'n'roll Lennon was up to all kind of arty shenanigans with Yoko both on record and in the public eye. And these hopelessly unresolved feelings about whether rock could or should be art anticipated a kind of vital identity crisis at the heart of punk - a movement containing a high proportion of art school people, manifesting artiness everywhere from the clothes to the graphic art of flyers and record covers to- yet often prone to anti-art and anti-intellectual rhetoric.
Malcolm McLaren is a good case study - a product of the British art school system, attending three different colleges during the 1960s, he talked retrospectively of punk and the Pistols as a gigantic art piece bearing his signature.
"Rather than just while away my time painting, I decided to use people, just the way a sculptor uses clay," he declared, airily.
Epating the bourgeoisie via the mass media was good art.
Yet when Johnny Rotten formed Public Image Ltd, its overt experimentalism was for McLaren a relapse into bad-art: 1970s-style progressive post-psychedelic music, which he loathed. Like Lennon and Ian Dury, he adored 50s rock'n'roll, Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran. Postpunk was music for students.
Of PiL's Metal Box, McLaren sneered "He's asking you to take a course in music before you understand it."
Rock and roll, he said was "only a bloody Mickey Mouse medium really." that was what was good about - its larger than life cartoon quality. An echo of Cohn's Superpop vision.
McLaren would argue with increasing vehemence in years to come that Rotten had always been a closet hippy, an aesthete, and that the true Pistol was Steve Jones, working class, a petty criminal who stole the band's gear by breaking into the backstage area of a Bowie concert -wonderfully symbolizing the McLaren idea of punk as the working class's revenge against art rock
And also Sid Vicious, who had the ability to lose himself in a cartoon persona, become this mythic scale anti-hero,
Lydon himself was totally conflicted on the subject of art. In a 1978 interview he spat: "I hate art. I can't stand it". This despite having studied a course in art at a Further Education college. In the Pistols documentary The Filth and the Fury, Steve Jones described Lydon as "an intellectual" but he often mocked those who "intellectualized" things ( like Greil Marcus with his analysis of punk in Lipstick Traces). Lydon dismissed Situationism as "mind games for the muddled classes", a jibe not just at Marcus but at McLaren, fingered as the arty poseur trying to intrude fancy French theories into visceral rock'n'roll, and perhaps Pistols designer Jamie Reid, another art school product who probably professed to hate art.
The confusion comes I think from Lydon's social background - working class, but encouraged by his mother to read from an early age, he was widely read, enjoyed taking exams, at the Further College Education college enjoyed talking to the teachers in the pub about Shakespeare. But at the same time a great wariness about becoming bourgeois, an exaggerated loyalty to one's roots.
A similar kind of ambivalence is detectable in The Fall's Mark E. Smith - both Smith and Lydon came from this abiding stratum in British society, this liminal zone where upper working class bleeds into lower middle class, a precarious zone but the source of so much of the exciting energy in British pop culture, the social bedrock of mod, glam, punk
So Smith, like Lydon is a supersharp autodidact, a bookworm , who never went to university. He left school to get a low level white collar clerical job as a clerk. Throughout the Fall's career there's on the one hand a self-taught artiness (Smiths' lyrical influences include Wyndham Lewis, the band would collaborate with the avant-garde ballet dancer Michael Clark) and on the other perpetual sneering at their art school peers in postpunk, at music paper critics who over-intellectualise the band.
Early on The Fall actually had a song "Hey Student' jeering at all the undergraduates in Manchester -- as well as typical working class contempt for freeloading students with generous grants it was a music taste based enmity. I read before the quote about "when the students got hold of rock'n'roll, that's when it started going downhill" . Smith then pointed particularly towards the Soft Machine and their Canterbury scene cohorts. These were mainstays of the early Seventies college gig circuit; Canterbury itself is the British city with the densest number of colleges in the country.
However when Smith realized that most of the Falls fans were students he changed "Hey Student" to "Hey Racist" to fit the Rock Against Racism issues of the time. It was never recorded at the time of writing, but much later, for 1994's Middle Class Revolt, "Hey Student" was resurrected: the old lyrics sneering at the students's "long hair" were updated with references to Pearl Jam.
What concerns Smith here is the eternal reopening of a social divide within rock - something that first rock'n'roll and then early-to-mid Sixties British beat music and mod, and then again punk had managed to bridge.
When this social divide opens up again it is invariably accompanied with the return of art discourse -- a classic instance is the split in mod between psychedelic artiness and the skinheads, who loved Jamaican ska, Northern Soul.
Psychedelia and progressive rock, then postpunk, and then in the 80s and 90s indie and alternative rock and shoegaze: this is the eternal breaking off a semi-popular, bourgeois form of rock. Exactly the same split that bothered Nik Cohn, although less in these social-political terms and more because the music he loved became enfeebled
As early as 1978, Mark E. Smith bemoaned an emerging chasm in the New Wave between arty intellectual bands (like Magazine) and "your headbanger bands for ordinary people." A few years later, he argued that heavy metal was a healthier subculture than post-punk: metal kids didn't spend all their time thinking about music. Attempting a kind of one-band reunification of the split halves of rock, Smiths' vision for The Fall was a primitivist-modernism: they started drawing on rockabilly influences, talked of themselves as "a very retrogressive band in a lot of ways", anything to short circuit there being enfolded in the progressive discourse of postpunk. "The band was attracting a lot of elitists, a lot of Eno-orientated crapheads", Smith complained in one interview. Then there is the lyric that says "the experimental is now conventional".
Smith, like Lydon, was working class and, unlike Lydon, hadn't dabbled in further education at all. But so powerful was the punk mythos of a reuniting of the classes through a stylized, dialectical reversion to rock'n'roll, that it had a powerful and enduring influence even on people who passed through the university system. Such as Greil Marcus, who wrote a whole essay called Against Art, launching off from a sneering stage comment by Penelope Houston of San Francisco punk band The Avengers after they've come on following the avant-garde percussion performer Zev has finished - " what do you call that anyway? I guess it was Aaaart"
Yet Houston was the daughter of an artist, she was studying at the San Francisco art institute. Marcus himself trained to be a professor and is no stranger to museums and exhibitions and symposiums. Nonetheless in "Against Art" Marcus talks approvingly about "the instinctive distrust of art by pop music " which is rooted in "the perception that very little art has actually added anything to pop music". The only exception he can think of is Andy Warhol's Double and Triple Elvises
A similar idea is expressed by Bill Drummond, active in the postpunk era as a musician, record label runner, and manager- a former art school student himself,. In 1971 his mind was blown by a Warhol exhibition - but then he changed his mind and the last essay he wrote at art college before dropping out was 'Why Andy Warhol is shite and the Beatles are fab'. If you got a single by the Beatles, your single was as good as anybody else's. 'Nobody's copy is more original than your copy'. But Warhol was only painting the pictures of the Coca Cola bottles, whereas the Beatles are being the Coca Cola bottles. "
Warhol in the end was just the same as any artist, making singular artworks that then became collectable and valuable in the art market - pop music was radically democratic, mass production art. Warhol celebrated that -he once said "the idea of America is so wonderful because the more equal something is, the more American it is"—but cannily bottled it in a form that could play in high art and high society terms. In a sense Warhol made America play in European terms.
This antipathy to Art endured for Drummond - his late 80s/early 90s outfit The KLF had a run of huge chart success with various pranksterish and absurdist singles - then in the 1992 they quit and then mutated into the K Foundation, one of whose initiatives was to stage a parody of the Turner Prize for Art in Britain. In 1993 they presented a shortlist for their award for the worst piece of art, the shortlist being identical for the Turner's shortlist for best work of art - and when Rachel Whiteread won her 20 thousand prize, the K Foundation gave her 40 thousand, drawn from the royalties of hits like "Justified and Ancient"
The KLF's big Nineties hits were in a style they called "stadium house", inspired by Drummond's encounter with rave culture, in the UK was a youthquake on a par with punk or indeed early rock'n'roll. When I interviewed him in 1991 he talked of it in terms of a mass quasi-religious experience. But it was mass in another sense: for a moment there between 1988 and 1992, a music that united youth across class lines.
Although quite a bit younger than Drummond, my thinking is similarly shaped by punk, and my own baptismal immersion in rave culture, in 91 and 92, had a similar social-utopian dimension - the transcendence of class and race divisions in a new music that echoed the impact of rock'n'roll, mod, punk.... And the way it played out in terms of my subsequent critical writing on post-rave electronic dance music involved this same old strange dance around the idea of art.
Even as I joined the party, rave was starting to fragment, the split between headbanger beats for the proles and fancy music with arty aspirations that Mark E Smith complained about in the late 70s, that was reconstituting itself - despite my class and education, just through circumstances as a late arrival I found myself on the right side of the tracks, which is to say the wrong side of the tracks - captivated by the most lumpen, druggily hedonistic forms of rave - hardcore as it was known then
Discerning folk deemed it a debased mutant of true techno -- but I, semi-consciously following in the footsteps of Cohn and Bangs, celebrated hardcore with a mixture of defiance and doubt in my own taste. "Trash but I luvvit" is the phrase I used in the first substantial piece on ardkore I wrote, in The Wire, late 1992.
The idea was familiar: this impure, sub-music could access barbarian powers that surpassed the more accomplished forms of techno then emerging . But because of my knowledge of critical history I was totally aware that this was a Lester Bangs move - in some other writings I would invoke garage punk as an example of a once despised music that was subsequently vindicated as more prophetic of music's future.
Nonetheless it was hard, so hard, to resist reaching for the Art word, for there was a deranged twisted complexity to the breakbeat editing and sinister atmospheres emerging in the music as it developed, It demanded recognition as an avant-garde.
The way around this fix for me was to imagine it as a street vanguard, ignorant of its own status as an avant-garde and all the better for that, more potent.
So I used the word avant-lumpen. For a while I used the term "artcore", punning on hardcore.
Bbut then within a year, as the outside world partly thanks to this kind of rhetoric by me and a few others, accepted and indeed hailed the music - now known as jungle or drum'n'bass -- a self-conscious deepness and musicality began to change the music. I reversed on that move and looked again for the most lumpen, dancefloor functional, druggy sectors of the music -- soon I was using the word "art techno" as a mildly disdainful word for a kind of album oriented home listening designed electronic music that drew on some of the hardcore/jungle innovations but presented them in palatable or annoyingly quirky form.
In Energy Flash I have a chapter on that zone, called Fuck Dance Let's Art, a reversal of the customary expression, about my ambivalent feelings about art techno, what would later be called Intelligent Dance Music.
I was hopelessly trying to arrest the development of the music, which to me felt like a weakening, vital rudeness turned to devitalized politeness - vibrant tastelessness reduced to inspid tastefulness. I was equally trying to shore up or recover a lost moment of unity that cut across class lines, also in the UK very much crossing racial divisions too.
I had found myself almost by accident inside a moment that was like punk, like the Beatles-Stones-Who moment, like rock'n'roll. "Art" was at once the accolade this music deserved, even the most trashy and ephemeral forms of it ( like chaotic pirate radio transmissions I taped and which I described in my rave history Energy Flash as among my absolute most precious and venerated cultural artifacts of the 20th Century) and yet art was also the downfall, the betrayal, a terrible branding burden.
"Art" then as we've seen has this peculiar reversible status.
It seems to fit the profile of what Frank Kogan calls Superwords
Kogan I should say is a classic example of the critic whose worldview is shaped by punk and is unable to resolve his feelings about art, on the one hand railing against what he calls the PBS-ification of rock, a creeping gentility, which led him to celebrate all kinds of teenpop and most recently the ultraplastic pop of South Korea. On the other hand he has compared the lyrics of Ashlee Simpson to the poetry of Dylan and Patti Smith.
The 'superword', explains Kogan is "a word that causes controversies, that gets fought over, that sometimes runs on ahead of its embodiments; a word that seems to jettison adherents"
Punk is a good example, a prize everyone is seeking to claim and define as they see it.
But "art" , in the rock context, is even more fraught than a superword
There is an attraction-repulsion syndrome that surrounds the term, in the rock discourse. Art is a birthright that you've been cheated of and that you chase, right up until the point it is acquired, when it is immediately renounced, it becomes toxic, repugnant.
Another way of looking at the role the word art plays in rock discourse is supplied by Donald Kuspit's book The Dialectic of Decadence
According to Kuspit, "in modernity, every novel art is at first taken to be non-art, but once it is finally accepted as art - which it would not have been had it not been novel and uncanny enough to seem like non-art - it is understood to have failed or fallen short of Art as such, and is dismissed into art history" -
Decadence is a state of debility, the depletion of instinctual energy, and its replacement by irony, detachment, an over-developed sense of history. Hence the never-ending need for an influx of barbarian energy from "outside"
Art looks to non-art for renewal - as Warhol did with the images and trademarks of mass production and commerce.
In the beginning, all of rock'n'roll was on the right, which is to say, wrong side of the boundary - the non-art side -- trash, noise, jungle music, all rhythm- at once savage and industrial, raw like folk and manufactured like showbiz.
Then, in a triumph that is simultaneously a defeat, artistic value was conferred on it -- and so the ever-recurring need is to get beyond that pale again. Which is also to rejoin the real world, to get out there, away from the white walled rooms, and to merge with and transform everyday life - become plebeian.
Rock and pop still seem to figure as a repository of raw power in at least one place: the imagination of a number of contemporary artists, where it serves as the non-art reservoir that revitalizes their practice and staves off decadence.
For Retromania I interviewed the British reenactment duo Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard.
Their work includes restagings of rock gigs like the final Ziggy Stardust concerts, a Cramps gig at a mental asylum in California - Forsyth and Pollard were at pains to convey that they didn't get inspiration from art but from music - they got into reenactments simply because they wanted to create an art work that had the visceral excitement of indie rock gigs - for them the rock gig is something like the situation as it figures in Situationist theory: not a passive spectacle but participatory, an event. To amp that up they were drawn to reenact the most event-like events, such as Bowie's final concerts as Ziggy Stardust.
So why not form their own band, if rock has the power that art doesn't? Well interestingly they said that they felt the art world had less strictures than the music industry, which is where they earn their living, working for a record label.
Another British artist expressing similar feelings is Elizabeth Price -- unlike Forsyth and Pollard she's a former musician, but now she's artist whose video installations borrow from advertising and pop sources like the Shangri Las, an influence on her own band Talulah Gosh. This recent video work was a reaction against boredom with her own work in installation and sculpture - she told The Wire magazine, "I was interested in doing something that had a less academic and polite address" . Most modern art is "cool, measured, it's outside of things... it has no relation with the actual social lives we exist in" whereas a rock gig is "loud, it's hot, you can smell other people's bodies, you feel the bass in an embodied way... exactly the things that had been evacuated from art"
Price, Pollard, Forsyth, are all old enough to have come up through indie rock when it was still shaped by punk's recent memory and its inherited value system - their idea of rock's social power comes from a similar place to Frank Kogan's or Greil Marcus's or Bill Drummond's.
But it is noticeable that as the folk memory of punk and of the mid-Sixties and rock'n'roll, has faded, so too is that distrust of art that Marcus wrote about approvingly, that Drummond enacted, that Bangs took for granted...
Gradually there has been a growing resignation towards the very thing that Nik Cohn found intolerable - the division between industrialised chartpop, brainless if entertaining trash, and a separate zone of "fine music", which is totally comfortable with seeing itself as art.
One index of this shift has been the rise in the last decade of the term "curator" within left-field rock, I write about this in Retromania, how activities like selecting a compilation, or booking a festival, are now described as curation - in the underground you also have what I've called the ETSY-ification of rock, a micro-culture of limited edition releases with handcrafted packages, elitist both by necessity and by choice -- music that lies somewhere between art and the artisanal.
And then less obscurantist but still very much aimed at a discerning minority there has been the rise of NPR rock.
Kogan complained about the PBS-ification of rock, but NPR has become a huge force in alternative music, they are actually a driver of sales, they have preview streams of major Pitchfork-type albums on their website.
One of the NPR stations in LA, KCRW invented a programming template they called Morning Becomes Eclectic that has been super influential - the mix is alternative music, but not the noisy types --nearly always well produced, tasteful, and yes eclectic, made by new breed of band who draw on a whole wide world of influences and also all across music history - so they are both cosmopolitan and they have a rich sense of the music as heritage -- -- the presenters of the shows speak with calm, almost hushed tones, like the news program hosts on other NPR sentences.
When I listen to it I feel vaguely catered for, precisely targeted as a demographic -- and there's a discomfort, similar to the feeling I'd get at art-techno events in the late 90s. I missed the vibe of raves but mainly I would feel restless because the last place I want to be is where I'm surrounded by people who are just like me
I can take about 30 minutes of KCRW and then I turn to the pop stations, the banging brainless club music that rules the top 40 and then when I start getting Adorno-like feelings about that ... I turn to the classic rock stations, where you can get music that at its best seems to like fragments of a lost unity -- but only because it is old music, very old music in some cases.
But the most interesting music of today seems to totally comfortable with seeing itself as art and as minority interest - along with "curation" as a model for music-making, there has been the rise of the concept-musician - not completely analogous to the conceptual artist, but there are certainly similarities - musicians like James Ferraro, Onehotrix Point Never, John Maus, artists on the Ghost Box label, invariably there's a spiel accompanying each new release -- framing of the project is increasingly essential -- you'll even get a group now and then that actually has a manifesto -- Prince Rama, a female duo who have this concept "ghost modernism" and composed a text entitled The Now Age: Meditations on Sound and the Architecture of Utopia
Another figure getting a lot of attention at the moment is Julia Holter, a CalArts raduate, whose electronic pop on albums like Tragedy and Ekstasis is informed by her interest in Greek tragedy and Medieval icons. Tragedy included a song called "Try to Make Yourself a Work of Art" while on her website she used to offer something she called HANDMADE THING, a CD-R and a sculpture for 25 dollars.
Increasingly with these zones of music, where micro-genres terms float by fleetingly such as chillwave and witch house - I can't help thinking of Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word... there's a sense that we're heading into a place where the music can't actually be enjoyed or even felt without the intervention of a concept. A certain kind of music-journalist and blogger loves this kind of thing, it gives them something to riff on and riff off - read some of the blogs and webzines that specialize in this area of music, like Tiny Mix Tapes and it reads a lot like prime period October.
Sometimes I'm one of those music journalist / bloggers and other times I feel a disquiet about where all this is going....
It's an easy thing to fall into a mutual admiration mirror image syndrome --the new breed of concept musicians think like critics, you see -- Amanda Brown, who records as LA Vampires told me, "when I make music, I'm only interested in thematics. I think, "What do I want to present? I'm trying to make a certain statement. And that takes it out of emotionality and more into a cerebral place. 'Meaningful' becomes more of an adjective than 'soulful'. " Brown actually describes herself as "not a musician" but an "audio artist".
This sensibility is all the more striking because it's emerged out of indie rock culture, which always leaned towards a shambolic lo-fi slacker aesthetic -- towards a vague populism, or at least "beautiful loser"-ism.
But the self-image of the audio artist appeals I think for a number of reasons. Doing this kind of music is almost never a livelihood these days - even putting out a large number of limited edition releases per year doesn't generate much revenue
But the work gets a much wider listenership and critical and blog response through its being illegally shared and downloaded. So the prestige of being taken extremely seriously and widely talked about in some way compensates for the fact that is not a means of making a living.
Certain albums, like James Ferraro's recent album Far Side Virtuality get discussed and talked about and regarded as momentous in a way that far out-stripped the record's actual sales. Circulating through the blogosphere, it becomes almost like a virtual exhibition - something everyone has to have heard, in the same way that Christian Marclay's The Clock has to be seen, if just for an hour or two, so you can participate in the cultural conversation.
But Marclay, operating properly in the art world, has actually monetized his art. The concept musicians I'm talking about are a long way from being able to do that - and at the same time, these artists have largely opted out of the traditional routes for rock bands to claw their way towards financial viability, the gig circuit.
The logic that you should expand your audience, that you should move from semipopular to real popularity, was once an ethical imperative, especially in the years following punk when the consequentiality of rock was restored, the sense that it had the power to change the world
That logic of out-reach was what seemed to push Sonic Youth, against their bohemian nature and their innate artiness, towards signing with Geffen - getting themselves onto MTV and playing bigger venues and rock festivals.
The modern day equivalents to Sonic Youth - these concept musicians and audio artists --seem reconciled to the idea of semi-popularity, culthood.
All those hang-ups about art have faded away.
The 'n'roll has long gone, and the rock is evaporating pretty fast too.
THE RESIDENTS RETRO-ACTIVE
Melody Maker, 1989? 1990?by Simon Reynolds
From the start, The Residents had a parasitical relationto the pop culture that surrounded them. The sleevenotes to"Meet The Residents", their 1973 debut, describes how theyspent the Sixties scavenging together a collection of sonicdetritus: "cassettes of soldiers in Vietnam singing songswith impromptu instrumentation... reels from second handshops... sound effects and bird call collections from garagesales ... even a few bootleg tapes of well-known pop artistsgoing avant-garde between takes". They were samplers longbefore the invention of the Sampler.
The early Seventies were a time when pop culture hadbecome so pervasive, so totalitarian, that its myths andprotocols began to replace 'real life' as pop's subjectmatter. Glam was one version of this meta-pop practice(whether self-consciously articulated, as with Ziggy Stardustand Roxy Music, or brutally vacant as with Glitter). Theavant-garde vandalism of The Residents was another. "Meet TheResidents", with its grotequely defaced Beatles cover, wasthe birth of what has since become practically a genre ofplagiarism and misappropriation (Culturcide, Pussy Calore,Laibach etc). Musically, "Meet The Residents" makes me thinkof The Band, of all people: a polyglot commingling ofAmerican traditional musics (R&B, proto-funk, New Orleansjazz). But in The Residents' case, it's as though thispoly-rhythmic bouillabaise is being played on inventedinstruments, or has been adapted to non-Western scales withonly partial success.
"Third Reich 'N' Roll" (1976) develops The Residentsidea of the totalitarian nature of pop's rise to the level ofthis planet's Esperanto of desire. It turns Sixties pop intothe soundtrack for Hitler's Blitzkrieg. "Swastikas On Parade"is a segue of bubblegum classics like "Psychotic Reaction","The Letter", "Land Of 1000 Dances", competing withdivebombing Stukas, sirens, and machine gun fire, plus freejazz gibberish and giddy constellations of Sun Ra synth."Hitler Was A Vegetarian" is a more downered trek throughsongs like "96 Tears", "It's My Party", "Pushing Too Hard"and "Gloria". Imagine The Clangers aspiring to the poignancytof Erik Satie. "Third Reich 'N' Roll' is probably TheResidents' masterpiece. As an added bonus, the CD includestheir hell-spawn (per)version of "Satisfaction", and "BeyondThe Valley Of A Day In The Life", in which "samples" of theBeatles' wiggier moments are reconstructed into a wholly newwork.
"Fingerprince" (also from 1976) is re-issued for thefirst time in its full length. Along with the Hawaian guitarpastiche "You yesyesyes" and the hilarious "Godsong" ("allthat God wanted to be/Just a normal deity"), there's twopieces of particular interest. "Jealous Westinghouse" ,described as a mini-opera, consists of electro pulsationslike Acid House at 16 rpm and doggerel dialogue in a Muppethillybilly twang. "Six Things To A Cycle" (a ballet) is anatypically tropical suite of of crazy percussion andCreatures campanology.
"Duck Stab" (1977) is another fine collection of25th Century nursery rhymes, conceived in the spirit of Dadaand Alfred Jarry. It's accompanied by "Goosembump", aproject undertaken with Snakefinger, whose aim was to bringto the fore the macabre overtones latent in kindergartenditties. All the sounds were produced from childrens' toys,but were drastically peculiarised by "adult studio toys". Theresult is a suite of nauseatingly rubberised nursery rhymes,that at times ("Three Blind Mice") are creepy almostbeyond endurance.
Even more unsettling is "Eskimo", The Residents' 1979elegy for the extinct Inoit culture of the now-thorouglyAmericanised Eskimo. While their liberal tolerance for Inoitrituals (e.g. bathing in urine, exterminating all superfluousnewborn girls) is a tad dubious, the album is a superb sonicevocation of the irreconcilably alien Arctic lifestyle(walrus hunts conducted in conditions ofdisorientating white-out, 'arctic hysteria' induced by thesensory deprivation of the long winter darkness).
"Not Available" was actually recorded in '74, inaccordance with N. Senada's "theory of obscurity": the ideathat creating music in the understanding that it is never tobe heard, is the only way to avoid subconsiously pandering toan audience. But Ralph Records slipped it out surreptitiouslyin '78, when The Residents were falling behind their deadlinefor "Eskimo". It's not that radical, actually: its cheapo,pre-programmed beats making it a distant, Dadaist cousin toshopping mall or funeral parlour muzak.
"The Commercial Album" (1980) is probably the bestintroduction to The Residents. It consists of 40 pieces eachexactly one minute long. The idea is that, since most popsongs contain a verse and chorus repeated three times withinthree minutes, if you condense that span down to one minute(the length of most commericals) you get the kernel of thesong without the extraneous matter. Here, the result is acollection of 'jingles' as intricate and succint as a haikupoem (one of the prettiest is called "Japanese Watercolour")and a sound somewhere between the Human League circa"Reproduction" and the Suicide of "Dance".
After "The Commercial Album", The Residents seemed tolose their way. "The Mole Trilogy" and its sequels "Tunes ofTwo Cities" and "The Big Bubble" amount to an impenetrableallegory of something-or-other. Only the most dedicated fancould be bothered to slog through through the dank, drabtextures of "The Mole Trilogy" to reach enlightenment. Thenthere's the flaccid "God In Three Persons", a couple of livealbums, and a fine collection of material by Snakefinger(their favourite collaborator, the now deceased guitaristPhilip Lithman).
The "American Composers Series" (TheResidents 20 year project of tributes) has brought back ameasure of rejuvenation to their sound. It seems we canapprehend more clearly the nature of their alien-ating methodwhen they bring their warp factor to bear on something weknow already. The mystery continues...
THE RESIDENTS at THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
Art Review, 2006by Simon Reynolds
From the start, The Residents saw themselves as a sound and vision entity. Way ahead of punk's indie label revolution, the San Francisco group set up not just their own record company, Ralph, but a do-it-all-yourself production facility, which included, alongside studios for recording music and graphic design, a huge sound-stage for making films.
Before they'd even released their debut album, 1973's Meet the Residents, the band had embarked on a movie, Vileness Fats, intended to be the world's first fourteen-hour musical-comedy-romance set in a world of one-armed midgets. The project was pursued fitfully for four years only to be abandoned in 1976. But the warehouse HQ on Grove Street did spew out a stream of innovative and derangingly strange music videos and short films, and these, along with footage from the aborted Vileness, are now being honored with a MOMA retrospective.
Mixed-media performance and audio-visual malarkey were the norm in San Francisco's postpunk scene. Tuxedomoon, an electronic cabaret outfit who recorded for Ralph,came out of Sixties underground theater, with one member having belonged to thelegendary all-gay troupe Angels of Light,, while SF industrial band Factrix staged mind-bending spectacles in collaboration with local performance artists like Monte Cazazza and Mark Pauline (the robot-builder and pyrotechnician behind Survival Research Laboratories). Punk certainly opened things up and created a new climate in which bands like the Residents and Devo could find an audience. But in truth the Residents were post-psychedelic rather than post-punk: the group had been in existence since the late Sixties and had arrived in San Francisco from their native Louisianajust as the high tide of acid rock was ebbing. According to Residents' spokesman Hardy Fox (the group itself shuns interviews and has preserved its anonymity for over thirty years), the band "sprang from the fact that psychedelia dead-ended. The people who were doing experiments in that direction stopped when they had barely scratched the surface." Those "people" included the Beatles, Frank Zappa, and Captain Beefheart. Undeterred by the fact that they could barely play instruments, The Residents wanted to pick up where their freak heroes had left off. And, whether onstage or in their videos, they wanted imagery as weird and wigged-out as their sounds.
The visual work does indeed closely mirror the arc of the Residents music, (de)evolving from a lo-fi yet genuinely uncanny neo-Dada to a high-tech but increasingly sterile kookiness. The early "promos"--scare quotes because when they were made in the late Seventies there were hardly any places on American TV that showed videos and nobody, except maybe the cable TV fringe, would dare to show the Residents films--have a macabre whimsy and gorgeous grotesqueness that at various points brings to mind the Quay Bros, Eraserhead (a late-night movie-house fave with the San Francisco postpunk set) and the Anglo-surrealist children's animations made by Postgate Films (The Clangers, Bagpuss, Pogle's Wood). In Third Reich'n'Roll (1976) the Residents cavort in Ku Klux Klan-like head-dresses made from newspaper, pounding percussion as their mutant cover of Wilson Pickett's "Land of a Thousand Dances" plays.
The four One-Minute Movies for the sixty-second tracks off 1980's Commercial Album are visual haikus as exquisitely eerie as the tunes, full of images that linger in the memory: a female corpse cocooned in cob-webs, a rheumy-eyed geezer watching TV on a bare mattress who suddenly levitates to the ceiling, a dead pig with roman candles stuck between its trotters. In several of these micro-movies, The Residents appear in their famous Fred Astaire meets Un Chien Andalou image: the elegance of top-hats, tails, and canes disrupted by the gigantic, veiny eyeballs that completely replace their heads. A fractured tale about a mis-shapen misfit with Zelig-like traits of recurrence and ubiquity, Hello Skinny (1980) pays homage to Chris Marker's La Jetée with its black-and-white stills, the collaging of photographic and drawn material further recalling Terry Gilliam's animations for Monty Python.
The Residents had a parasitical-cum-parodic relationship with mainstream pop culture, which they regarded as a new form of totalitarianism, evil because of its banality. Hence the love/hate for the Fab Four expressed in the cover of their debut album, a defacement of Meet the Beatles's famous cover; hence Third Reich 'n'Roll's transformation of the entirety of Sixties pop into the soundtrack for Hitler's Blitzkrieg. By the mid-Eighties, the group launched a massive project, the American Composers Series, 20 albums across 20 years that would honor-through-vandalisation the work of figures like George Gershwin and Hank Williams. (In the event, the series sputtered to a halt after just two records). It's as this point that things start to go awry with the Residents output, sonically and visually: the irritatingly goofy cover of James Brown's "It's a Man's World" is out-dulled only by the uninspired animations that accompany it, while The Residents' video for their take on John Philip Sousa "Stars and Stripes" is a smug and clunky exercise in anti-militarism (World War III rendered as an amusement arcade shooting gallery designed by Lari Pitman and Disney: clown-face bombs, rabbits riding on top of intercontinental missles, and so forth).
What the later Residents work, like the flat and strangely static 2000 video for "Constantinople", shows is that 98 times out of 100, analog trumps digital. Computers can create the most superficially "fanstastical" images, but because you literally can't believe your eyes, there's no sense of the unheimlich, none of that "dreamed" quality possessed by the Residents' early work, made when the group had to get by with hand-made props, stage sets, and costumes, with lighting and camera-work, and above all with their own bodies.
from a guide to parody and pastiche in pop and rock, Pitchfork 2016
The Residents: The Third Reich 'N Roll (1976)
The Residents started out spoofing Meet the Beatles! with their own debut album Meet the Residents. As the grotesquely defaced cover art indicated, theirs was a love-hate relationship with the Fab Four and their entire era. The Third Reich 'N Roll was a through-the-looking-glass replay of the previous decade, like some parallel reality where World War II and the '60s temporally coincided; Wilson Pickett's "Land of 1000 Dances" and Count Five's "Psychotic Reaction" compete with the din of diving Stuka bombers and MG15 machine guns.
That same year, the Residents released a cover of the Stones' "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" even more mangled than Devo's. Then, in 1977, they put out The Beatles Play the Residents and the Residents Play the Beatles. The A-side "Beyond the Valley of a Day in the Life" wove together samples of the Beatles and interview soundbites in which Lennon appears to apologize to the fans: "Please everybody if we haven't done what we could have done, we've tried." After several albums of all-original, gloriously peculiar music, the Residents returned to the perverted cover version concept with The American Composers Series, attempting ambiguous tributes to 20 musical greats. This petered out after just four twisted homages across two albums, to George Gershwin, James Brown, Hank Williams, and John Philip Sousa. By this point in the mid-'80s, the Residents had spawned a mini-genre of vandalistic plagiarism which we'll encounter later, whose exponents include John Oswald, Negativland, and Culturcide.
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...
McKay & Morris broke their silence about their seemingly impulsive decision to leave a few months later, in December '79
In the counterfactual scenario, Morris & McKay stick around - and Budgie and John McGeoch do not join as their replacements...
And while you wouldn't want to have missed all the amazing music that the new line-up created - "Happy House", "Christine", all of Juju, all of A Kiss in the Dreamhouse, "Fireworks" etc - I wouldn't have minded an album or two more in the Scream / Join Hands mode.
The difference is like the switch between monochrome and Technicolor.
In "Concrete Pop", a 1986 piece written for Monitor, Chris Scott - who vastly preferred the first-phase Banshees - argued for the higher powers of the non-virtuoso and the untrained:
"Now: the archetypal goth band, drone drone drone, texture texture texture, the sound of the sea. Then: the sound of people doing things to objects. Being a punk Siouxsie treated even her voice as an object, and more spectacularly than Rotten or Poly Styrene. The music was not just an atmosphere: it kept us aware of the presence of the instrument, the object and of the presence of the people manipulating the objects, communicating with us because we were kept aware that someone had made these noises for us. Each sound itself was like an object put there for our consideration. Buying that first LP was like finding a huge rusting metal thing in the street, bringing it home and putting it in the middle of your bedroom just because it looked so good. Buying a Banshees album today is like buying a settee. Or a carpet."
He also made an invidious contrast between the two drummers: Kenny Morris's "epochal battering" versus Budgie getting "his drumsticks specially made 200 at a time - rockstars are dead, eh""
When I interviewed Steve Severin he made some points compatible with the Chris Scott viewpoint:
"When you listen to The Scream, you can hear the fingers on the strings, the effort that's actually going into it. You get to the end of a track and you can hear Kenny breathing."
The sound-style emerged out of the combo of the performer's limitations and their active aversions. Severin again:
"It was a case of us knowing what we didn't want, throwing out every cliché. Never having a guitar solo, never ending a song with a loud drum smash. At one point, Siouxsie just took away the hi-hat from Kenny Morris's drum kit."
Here's a bit on Morris's approach to drumming from an interview done only a few years ago by Ellie O'Byrne:
His unorthodox, self-taught drumming style used almost no cymbals: he would turn his sticks round the better to belt his drum kit as hard as he possibly could. Siouxsie said he was like a marionette seated at his kit.
"I was really physical on the drums," he says. "When I eventually got my own kit, it had to be practically specially built. I think it was '78 before I even got that."
"I had a Pearl Drum Kit with a special indestructible pedal. When most drummers use a ride cymbal, I didn't want a ride. I'd have my high hat and a crash and an upside down Chinese cymbal. I would play time on the side drum, not the ride. When I got a riser, I made chalk marks where they had to drill holes and attach metal clasps to secure the cymbal stands."
Still, as severe as the first-phase Banshees could be, the single were pop punchy.
Things like this flange-ferocious beauty - a medium-size hit single
The earlier Banshees also had a better, more coherent look as a band - McKay's beauty, Kenny Morris's pallor, contributed as much as Siouxsie and Severin.
High-contrast black-and-white - the look mirrors the sound of The Scream and Join Hands.
One wonders if the first-phase was selected as much for appearance as ability (since none of them had it or sought it, then).
Whereas the second-phase new recruits were picked for their musical accomplishment and the way that would enable the Banshees to expand and evolve.
I pose that counterfactual query about John and Kenny not leaving at the end of this review of a Deluxe Reissue of The Scream
Siouxsie and the Banshees
The Scream
Uncut, 2005
Knowing Siouxsie as Godmother of Goth, it's easy to forget that the Banshees were originally regarded as exemplary postpunk vanguardists. Laceratingly angular, The Scream reminds you what an inclement listen the group was at the start. Sure, there's a couple of Scream tunes as catchy as "Hong Kong Garden" (which appears twice here on the alternate-versions-crammed second disc of BBC session and demos). "Mirage" is a cousin to "Public Image," while the buzzsaw chord-drive of "Nicotine Stain" faintly resembles The Undertones, of all people.
But one's first and lasting impression of Scream is shaped by the album's being book-ended by its least conventional tunes. Glinting and fractured, the opener "Pure" is an "instrumental" in the sense that Siouxsie's voice is just an abstract, sculpted texture swooping across the stereo-field. Switching between serrated starkness and sax-laced grandeur, the final track "Switch" is closer to a song but as structurally unorthodox as Roxy Music's "If There Is Something".
Glam's an obvious reference point for the Banshees, but The Scream also draws from the moment when psychedelia turned dark: "Helter Skelter" is covered (surely as much for the Manson connection as for Beatles-love), guitarist John McKay's flange resembles a Cold Wave update of 1967-style phasing, and the stringent stridency of Siouxsie's singing channels Grace Slick. In songs like the autism-inspired "Jigsaw Feeling," there's even a vibe of mental disintegration that recalls bad trippy Jefferson Airplane tunes like "Two Heads."
Another crack-up song, "Suburban Relapse" always makes me think of that middle-aged housewife in every neighbourhood with badly applied make-up and a scary lost look in her eyes. Siouxsie's suspicion not just of domesticity but of that other female cage, the body, comes through in the fear-of-flesh anthem "Metal Postcard," whose exaltation of the inorganic and indestructible ("metal is tough, metal will sheen… metal will rule in my master-scheme") seems at odds with the song's inspiration, the anti-fascist collage artist John Heartfield.
Scream is another Banshees altogether from the lush seductions of Kaleidoscope and Dreamhouse. McKay and drummer Kenny Morris infamously quit the group on the eve of the band's first headlining tour, and their replacements--John McGeoch and Budgie--were far more musically proficient. Yet The Scream, along with early singles such as 'Staircase Mystery" and the best bits of Join Hands, does momentarily make you wonder about the alternate-universe path the original Banshees might have pursued if they'd stayed together and stayed monochrome 'n' minimal.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
From the O'Byrne interview, Morris's account of the breakup at the Aberdeen record shop LP signing session:
"When we left the record shop, we went outside and went, 'what are we going to do?' So we went back to the hotel. Margaret Thatcher was staying there too, so security was everywhere: guys talking into their sleeves."
They booked a taxi but, fearful of the rest of the band catching up with them, lied to the receptionist and said they were going to the train station when in fact they were headed to the airport.
The band did arrive, just as they were leaving.
"[Banshees manager] Nils came up to the taxi and reached in through the window, and started trying to strangle me," Kenny says. "So I wound the window up on his arm. He fell to the floor and he was going, 'I'll see you never work again. I've invested 45,000 in this tour!' and John was going, 'have you? Whose money? Is that our money, Polydor's money?' Things had gotten that bad that we didn't know."
A film made by Kenny Morris, said to be an allegorical account of the break-up
Kenny Morris interviewed by John Robb, who - nothing if not direct and to the point - immediately, bluntly, asks him, "so, what have you been doing for the last 30 years?"
Ooh, a weird loop - in Chris Scott's "Concrete Pop" article, Robb's group the Membranes are considered exemplars (as was The Rox, Robb's zine, in Chris's earlier Monitor article celebrating fanzines for their aesthetic of anti-professionalism).
Of course, I'm a big fan of atmosphere, "the sound of the sea". A nice-looking settee, an attractive carpet - what's the problem?
I also like a nicely laid out page.
Here is Matt's lovely tribute to the Black Dog from a few years ago
Here's my own writing about the group:
THE BLACK DOG, The Book of Dogma
emusic, 2007A legend in techno circles, The Black Dog's music is like the missing link between Coil's eldritch electronica and Carl Craig's exquisitely-textured elegance. Although the British group--originally the trio of Ken Downie, Ed Handley, and Andy Turner--became widely heard as part of Warp Records' "electronic listening music" initiative of the early 90s, the bedrock of their cult is their hard-to-find first three EPs,
Did I say hard? Damn near impossible actually, when it comes to The Virtual EP, Age of Slack EP, and The Black Dog EP, vinyl-only 1989-90 releases long out-of-print and each worth a small fortune. Now at long overdue last they are available in their entirety as the first disc of this double-CD retrospective.
Tracks like "Virtual," "The Weight" and "Tactile" distil the essence of Detroit techno into an etherealized machine-funk so translucent and refined it feels like you should store it in crystal vials rather than a lowly CD case or hard drive. "Age of Slack" and "Ambience with Teeth" use hip hop breakbeats in ways that parallel early jungle, but there's a balletic poise and delicacy to the way Black Dog deploy their crisp and rattling drum loops.
This is rave sublimated into a mind-dance, the shimmying-and-sashaying thought-shapes of some advanced alien species who get together and party via telepathy.
This set's second disc, consisting of tracks from three EPS recorded for the GPR label in the early 90s, is also excellent, looking ahead to the Warp-era albums Bytes and Spanners.
But it's disc one that captures The Black Dog at their magickal and mysterious best.
[from the liner notes to Artificial Intelligence]
The Black Dog's contribution, done as an alter-ego, for AI
^^^^^^^^^^^^
The Black Dog (and Balil and Plaid) from Energy Flash
The Black Dog - the trio of Ed Handley, Andy Turner and Ken Downie - were almost as hermetic as Autechre, but more committed to traditional art notions of 'expression'. They once defined their project as the quest for 'a computer soul', while Ken Downie told Eternity that The Black Dog started in order to fill 'a hole in music. Acid house had been "squashed" by the police and rinky-dinky Italian house music was getting played everywhere. Emotion had left via the window.'
The musical emotions in The Black Dog (and alter egos Plaid and Balil) aren't the straightforward, run-of-the-mill, everyday sort, but rather more elusive: subtle, indefinable shades of mood, ambiguous and evanescent feelings for which even an oxymoron like 'bittersweet' seems rather crude. Eschewing live appearances and seldom doing interviews, The Black Dog nonetheless created a cult aura around their often hard-to-find discography. One of their chosen mediums was cyberspace: long before the current craze for techno websites, The Black Dog established a computer bulletin board called Black Dog Towers. Visitors could gawp at artwork and learn more about the Dog's interest in arcane knowledges, such as paganism, out-of-body experiences, UFOs, Kabbalah and 'aeonics' (mass shifts in consciousness). Ken Downie - the principal esoterrorist in the band - has described himself as a magician. One of The Black Dog's earliest tracks, 'Virtual (Gods in Space)', features a sample - 'make the events occur that you want to occur' - which gives a magickal spin to the punk DIY ethos.
Although far from the euphoric fervour of rave, The Black Dog's early 1990-2 material is remarkably similar to the breakbeat hardcore of the day. Like Hyper-On Experience, DJ Trax, et al., the mode of construction is basically the Mantronix collage aesthetic updated for the rave era: incongruous samples + looped breakbeats + oscillator riffs. But the mood of 'Seers + Sages', 'Apt', 'Chiba' and 'Age of Slack' is quirky Dada absurdism rather than Loony Toons zany. The crisp, echoed breakbeat and keyboard vamp on 'Seers + Sages' recalls 2 Bad Mice classics like 'Waremouse', except that the riff sounds like it's played on a church organ, so the effect is eldritch rather than E-lated. On 1991's 'Chiba', the Morse-code riff has a glancing lightness of inflection that anticipates the Detroit breakbeat of Innerzone Orchestra's 'Bug in the Bassbin'.
Carl Craig, the producer behind Innerzone Orchestra, clearly recognized The Black Dog as kindred spirits in sonic watercolours; in 1992, his Planet E label released their classic Balil track 'Nort Route'. Strangely redolent of the early eighties - the Sinophile phunk of Sylvian and Sakomoto's 'Bamboo Music', the phuturistic panache of Thomas Leer - 'Nort Route' daubs synth-goo into an exquisite calligraphic melody-shape over an off-kilter breakbeat. The track trembles and brims with a peculiar emotion, a euphoric melancholy that David Toop came closest to capturing with the phrase 'nostalgia for the future'.
What The Black Dog/Balil/Plaid tracks most resembled was a sort of digital update of fifties exotica. But instead of imitating remote alien cultures, as the original exotica did, it was like The Black Dog were somehow giving us advance glimpses of the hybrid musics of the next millennium: the Hispanic-Polynesian dance crazes of the Pacific Rim, or music for discotheques and wine bars in Chiba City and The Sprawl (the megalopolises in William Gibson's Neuromancer and Count Zero).
While some of the Dog's later work - on albums like Bytes, Parallel, The Temple of Transparent Balls and Spanners - crosses the thin line between mood-music and muzak, it's still marked by a rhythmic inventiveness that's unusual in the electronic listening field. With its percussive density and discombobulated time signatures, The Black Dog's music often feels like it's designed for the asymmetrical dancing of creatures with an odd number of limbs - not bipeds, but quintupeds or nonopeds.
The Black Dog's mix of bleep n bass for FACT
Stuff on The Black Dog in this Redbull story about London Techno
Here's a January 1995 iD piece by the great Tony Marcus, which is at this excellent repository of old Face iD Jockey Slut Mixmag etc etc pieces known as Test Pressing. And whatdyaknow, the person wot sent it in them ... is Matt Ingram!
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)- 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/
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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
hreatened by the blogs, the jabbering panoply of amateurs crowding out the main signal.There were various alternatives to blogs that went through vogues - livejournals and tumblrs - but I never really cathected with either of these mode-zones, couldn't see what they brought that was a bonus.
And today... As I say in the column, there's still loads of blogs - loads of specifically music blogs or mostly-music blogs. Some started relatively recently, like the sporadic but very interesting Aloysius, the work of Dissensus bod Mvuent, and Infinite Speeds, a Substack by Vincent Jenewein exploring interfaces between philosophical concepts and the materialities of electronic sound + rhythm. Others, I'm unclear when they started but they have entered my ken only recently, like Lost Tempo (another Substack), the work of regular commenter Matt M. And I see that ex-editor of The Wire Derek Walmsley, who used to have a blog back in the 2000s, recently started a new one: Slow Motion.
There are generation-or-two-below-me oriented entities somewhere between a one-person magazine and a collective blog. Like Joshua Minsoo Kim's Toneglow (another Substack). Like No Bells. To which my own flesh-and-blood contributes, while also operating his own KPRblog (currently surveying 2023 in music).
So I wind to a close, with so many names unmentioned.
Forgive me - it's almost certainly by accident.
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Xenogothic with some thoughts on blogging.
Among many other things, Matt talks about blogs operated by musicians, by the likes of Deerhunter and Phil Elverum, as a whole other field of bloggy action. I suppose Momus's Click Opera, mentioned in the previous Blissblog post about blogs then and now, counts in this category. In an earlier longer version of the Guardian column, I did link to a currently active music-maker blog that I enjoy: Wreckless Eric's Ericland.
I have been going back and adding more blogs and bloggers that I remembered from the olden days to that post. But there are still swathes of blogging that I didn't cover - even within the music blogging arena.
For instance, I don't talk about MP3 blogs. But then they were never something I got into. The free MP3s seemed as unenticing as the flexi singles attached to fanzines back in the day. And the textual element rarely seemed as interesting as the output of the blogs I considered my true neighbours.
There was a whole other phase of hyperactive blogging I clean forgot about - all the blogs associated with hypnagogic pop and that late 2000s / early 2010s emergence of largely-online DIY micro-genres like witch house and vaporwave. Blogs such as 20 Jazz Funk Greats and Visitation Rites and Gorilla vs. Bear and Rose Quartz that would be shepherded for a while under the Pitchfork-hosted mantle of Altered Zones. I tried to evoke its neophiliac fever in this piece:
On Altered Zones and its constellation of blogs, the flow is relentless: What matters is always the next new name, the latest micro-genre, another MP3 or MediaFire. Artist careers likewise are a continuous drip-drip-drip of releases, a dozen or more per year—there's no reason to edit or hold back, every reason to keep one's name out there. Stimuli streams in, largely via the Web; creativity streams out, largely via the Web. Today's musician is a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence.... This scene is about being engulfed and enthused, carried along by the currents of the new. Drifting not sifting.
Another huge wave of blog energy - and one that had a huge effect on me, albeit not necessarily for the good - was the whole-album sharing blogs. Some of these didn't just offer an album cover image and a link to Rapidshare / Megaupload / Mediafire, but had proper textual content: well-written and informative, if rarely polemical or argument-starting. Serious curatorial activity, as undertaken by the likes of Mutant Sounds, Continuo's, Twice Zonked!, A Closet of Curiosities... I wrote about that scene in this piece for The Wire on "sharity" blogs. Even interviewed a couple of figures behind blogs. That scene is much declined from its height but there's sharity soljas out there still, digging strange shit up...
Yet another still active sub-subculture of music blogging: the "imaginary albums" blogs. This overlaps with the sharity in so far as they sometimes - not always - share their recreation of the rumored but never released album. Some of these blogs generate an enormous amount of counterfactual text, as discussed in this essay of mine on alternative history and music:
Fans for years have been creating unfinished or unreleased albums like Beach Boys's Smile, Hendrix's First Rays of the New Rising Sun, The Beatles's Get Back, the Who's Lifehouse - using bootlegs, demos, out-takes... Today there is a whole realm of blogs dedicated to this practice - Albums That Never Were, A Crazy Gift of Time, Albums That Should Exist, Albums I Wish Existed… Usually they create fake artwork for the counterfactual albums.
Some of these blogs, such as Strawberry Peppers, don't stop at creating imaginary albums and record covers - they write incredibly detailed and extensive alternative histories of worlds where the Beatles didn't split up, or where David Bowie joined the Rolling Stones, or where the Soft Machine's Kevin Ayers, Robert Wyatt and Daevid Allen don't leave the band, or alternate timelines where Syd Barrett stayed in Pink Floyd. A kind of counter-discographical mania erupts.
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In addition to Xenogothic, there's been some other post-Guardian-piece posts - a few from blogs I know well (like Feuilleton), most from blogs I'd never come across before: Torpedo The Ark, Bhagpuss, The Sphinx. Somewhere amidst all that chatter I gleaned that there's been unconnected blog talk going on too, at The Lazarus Corporation, at Velcro City Tourist Board, and in a piece about the internet getting weird again by Anil Dash for Rolling Stone.
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Culled from K-punk's blogroll in 2003, some other blogs I forgot were part of the whole thing:
i feel love
it's all in my mind
erase the world
emerald daze
original soundtrack
crumbling loaf
taylor parkes' alternatives to suicide
cozen
mike smunk
quarks and charms
a time for fear
zabriskie point
no way jose
troubled diva
artful candor
clap clap blog
shards, fragments and totems
cnwb
yes no interlude
uncarved
johnson's rambler
humour me
auspicious fish
Danny Thompson worked with a host of people, including a stint in Pentangle, but for many of us he is inseparable from the name John Martyn - and revered as the co-author of "Go Down Easy", "I'd Rather Be The Devil", "Solid Air", "Couldn't Love You More", "Glistening Glyndebourne"....
Here by way of indirect tribute are three pieces about Martyn in which Thompson flits into view here and there. Most prominently in the first one, a Blissblog recollection about about the only time I ever saw Martyn live - in New York, just months before he died, with Thompson by his side, the only other person on the small stage with him - which doubled as an obituary. The fond bond between the two was very evident that night.
There is also a short piece about "I'd Rather Be The Devil" and a longer piece about Solid Air as a Desert Island Disc written for the 2007 book Marooned (Phil Freeman's unofficial sequel to Stranded).
John Martyn RIP
Blissblog, January 31st 2009
RIPs appear here quite regularly. Rock is long in the tooth; musicians you admire, whose music you've grown up with, seem to be popping their clogs with mounting frequency. Usually I feel sad for a bit, in a fairly removed sort of way... then life's petty urgencies resume. But this week's big one, I must admit, has hit me quite hard. It's cast a shadow over the last few days. It feels a lot more personal somehow.
It struck me that I might possibly have listened to John Martyn more than any but a handful of other musicians. Actually I can't think of who else I'd have listened to more, over such a sustained period. The Smiths? Love? But if you broke it down, it would be Solid Air and One World that accounted for 95 percent of that lifetime of Martyn listening. Those two albums have been such a large and constant presence. They keep coming back, or rather, they don't go away, whereas there's other central artists, deep deep favourites, where there are long periods of mutual leave-taking (Can, for instance--I seem to be taking a breather from them, for some reason just don't feel the urge, but I know the time will come again.) (Another example: postpunk, which dipped away for much of the Eighties and almost all of the Nineties). But John Martyn… it barely took me a minute to settle on Solid Air as my desert island disc when asked to contribute to Marooned. It was my first choice, and then to do it proper I thought up some other candidates (closest contender being Rock Bottom). But it was always going to be Solid Air, partly because the "desert island" scenario suggested it somehow, but also because of its inexhaustibility as a record.
Strangely, though, when I think of John Martyn's music, I don't think of personal memories particularly. Some records evoke times of your life: Head Over Heels and Sunburst and Snowblind, the debut Smiths album, those records remind me with incredible vividness of a student bedsit in north Oxford, the yearnings and miseries of that time; "Thieves Like Us" carries with it the flush of romance remembered; there's plenty more examples. But with most music, the memories carried are memories of the music itself, if that makes sense. When you're a music fiend, that function of commemoration or life-soundtracking or "our song" that perhaps remains prominent for the more casual listener, it really fades away. You might say that music's life eclipses your own, or it becomes one with it, or it fills in the holes. Music doesn't serve as a mirror for narcissistic identification so much as a means of leaving one's self behind. A favourite record, then, might be more like gazing at a landscape, the kind of place you'd revisit at different stages of your life. A perennial source of wonder. (This is why I'm not a huge fan of memoiristic criticism: oh, it can be done well, but even at its best it doesn't really tell you anything about the music; that one individual's memories adhere to a piece of music in a particular fashion doesn't have any relation to what I or anybody else might get out of the record or glom onto it, experientially. Although it's also true that the narcissistic projection towards a song/album/group that music arouses so potently can make it feel like those life-experiences somehow inhere to the music).
But back to John Martyn--another strange thing is that I'd never gone to see him perform live. This despite being a fan since 1985 (when I'd taped Solid Air off David Stubbs--cheers David!--having been intrigued by this Barney Hoskyns interview with Martyn that compared Solid Air to Astral Weeks--cheers Barney!). The opportunity just never presented itself , and I'd never felt tempted to seek it out. I guess the sense you got was that after the 1970s heyday Martyn onstage was likely to be... variable. He'd be playing with bands composed of younger musicians, a modern soft-rock/AOR-ish sound like on those post-Grace and Danger Eighties albums, you heard tell of the keyboard sound being thin and digital-synth nasty. It seemed to promise disappointment. Anyway, I've always been more of a records man; I just don't have that compulsion to witness everybody whose music I love perform live at least once.
But late last year I heard that John Martyn was playing in New York. (I have to thank Rob Tannenbaum for the tip off, I'd have completely missed it otherwise--cheers Rob!). October the 9th, at Joe's Pub--less than ten minutes away. And not only playing in New York, virtually round the corner, but playing with Danny Thompson. So I had to go, even though this was the night before we flew off to London for the annual see-the-folks-and-friends vacation, there was packing to be done that night, an early rise the next day.
I got there and found quite a long line to get in, which surprised me, as I'd always had the impression Martyn wasn't really known in this country. And nor was it the case that the line was entirely composed of British expats. I ran into a friend-of-a-friend, an experimental musician (of the academic kind) who I'd not have particularly expected to be a John Martyn fan. We positioned ourselves near the bar with good sight-lines of the stage.
Joe's Pub is not a pub at all, but a sort of nightclub/performance space attached to The Public Theater on Lafayette. It's the sort of place where you'd expect, oh, Norah Jones to play; it's got a bit of an acid jazz/downtempo/Giant Steps type vibe to it. The last thing I saw there was ages ago: Herbert and Dani Siciliano doing the full chanteusy-meets-clickhouse thing. Anyway, there was this small, scarlet curtain at the back of the stage, which just seemed like part of Joe's plush cabaret-ish décor. All of a sudden there's a ruffling with the curtain, the suggestion of struggle and kerfuffle behind it, almost a Tommy Cooper/Morecambe & Wise-esque effect. And then, with evident difficulty Big John and his wheelchair were maneuvered through the red fabric and onto the tiny stage. I might be misremembering it but I think they actually had to wheel him on backwards. At any rate, it wasn't a dignified entrance.
First impression was of a ruin of a man. Magnificent, maybe, but definitely a ruin. In fact what I couldn't help thinking of was the sketch in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life ... the monstrously obese diner who eats so much he explodes. Martyn's face had this sagging quality, it seemed to droop and merge into the sprawl of his torso.
They opened, I think, with "Big Muff". It was great, totally different from the One World recording naturally (no drummer, just John and Danny), loose and swinging. I can't remember the exact sequence of songs, but at some point early in the set, they did "Sweet Little Mystery", Martyn's voice this immense blubbery ache of sound, a beached whale of bluesiness, bedraggled and beseeching. But apart from "Mystery" from Grace and Danger and "Muff" from One World, everything else was from Solid Air: "Jelly Roll Blues", "May You Never" (which got a cheer), the shatteringly tender imploring of "Don't Want To Know", "Solid Air" itself, maybe another one or two I'm forgetting. It was almost a Don't Look Back, except the order was scrambled and they didn't do "Go Down Easy", to my chagrin. The friend-of-a-friend pointed out how different the guitar tunings on each song were from the recorded versions.
Indeed between the songs there was some tuning-tweaking going on. There was also banter. But Martyn's speaking voice was so slurred, plus he was sat slightly far back from the mic (fine for singing but not for stage patter) that it was all completely indecipherable. He told jokes but through his bleary, sodden mumble they became abstract jokes. You could pick up the cadence and the timing of joke-as-pure-form, almost to the point of getting the comedic pay-off when the punchline came. But the actual content was lost. I picked up one or two lines: one involved a man going into a bar, another one was about penguins. I think he might also have cracked his post-amputation standard about having promised the promoter not to get legless, boom boom.
But I did manage to catch it clear when he apologized for the set being below par--"that's just the way it goes sometimes". At which Danny Thompson leaned over and gave him a kiss on the top of his balding head, affectionate yet reverent. I also just about made out what Martyn said before they launched into what turned out to be the final song: something like "this is by a gentleman called Skip James, who doesn't deserve to have his song murdered." It was "I'd Rather Be the Devil" of course and it made me wonder what other examples there are of a great artist--a writer and performer of brilliant original material--whose absolute greatest recording and signature song in live performance is a cover of someone else's song. (From the rock era obviously; there's loads of examples from the era when singers did standards, didn't write their own songs, etc). Of course to call it a "cover" is to underplay the amount of reinvention imposed on the original (which must be why John changed the title from "Devil Got My Woman", a bit of justified arrogance there: took your song, made it my song, whatchu gauna dee aboot it, eh?). So "Devil", live at Joe's Pub: not as torrential and tectonic as Live At Leeds, not quite the exquisitely wrought aquamiasma of Solid Air. But I wasn't disappointed. Oh no. Stole my breath away it did.
And then they were off, John wheeled backwards through the red curtain with the same awkward strenuosity it had taken to get him onstage in the first place (apparently he'd reached 20 stone in his last year). Semi-apologising for the brevity of the set as they shuffled off, Danny Thompson explained that the gig was kind of impromptu: John was coming to New York to visit a hospital to get a new prosthesis fitted, and they thought "why not?".
So, my first and only John Martyn Live Experience. I walked home aglow, much earlier than I'd expected (just as well with the flight) but not dissatisfied, not in the least. I meant to blog it after we got back from London but the moment passed. Now the man has passed and the moment seems right.
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Picking my favorite record of all time, identifying the album that means the most to me, singling out the one I could least bear to never, ever hear again - such a task would surely make my head explode. But the desert island scenario (and I'm curious: who came up with this conceit first, historically?) actually makes narrowing things down much easier. Something with a very particular bundle of attributes would be required, a tricky-to-find combination of consoling familiarity and resilient strangeness. You'd need a record that could retain the capacity to surprise and stimulate, to keep on revealing new details and depths despite endless repetition. But it couldn't be too out-there, too much of an avant-challenge, because solace would after all be its primary purpose. Which in turn would mean that the selection would have to feature the human voice, as a source of comfort and surrogate company - a criterion that sifts out many all-time favorites that happen to be all-instrumental (Aphex Twin's two Selected Ambient Works albums, Eno records like On Land and his collaboration with Harold Budd The Plateaux of Mirror). But, equally, songs alone couldn't sustain me on the island - I'd need some element of the soundscape, the synesthetically textured...food for the mind's eye...something to take me out and away.
Four albums sprang to mind based around a framework of songs-plus-space (or songs-in-space, or maybe even songs versus space). (Actually, there's a fifth album in this vicinity, but Lester Bangs bagged it last time around: Astral Weeks). All are from roughly the same period in rock history - the early Seventies - and all can be characterized as post-psychedelic music in some sense. Tim Buckley's Starsailor is just too wild, too derangingly strange; its restlessness would stir me to rage against the limits of confinement, rather than adopt a sensible stoicism, and its eroticism would be no help at all. Robert Wyatt's Rock Bottom is rich and lovely, but the album's emotionally harrowing arc (it was made shortly after the fall that left him paralyzed from the waist down) might be too wearing for someone in such dire straits; even its ecstasy is on the shattering side. Stormcock is brilliant and beautiful, but Roy Harper's diatribes wouldn't warm my lonely soul, and besides, it only consists of four long tracks, all pretty much chipped from the same block of sound.
So my choice is John Martyn's Solid Air. There's something about this album that suggests "island music." And I don't just mean that it came out on Island - probably the most highly-regarded record label on Earth at that point, a haven for the visionary, the esoteric, the not-obviously-commercial. The other day I was searching through my stuff for a review I wrote a long time ago of the reissue of another John Martyn record (1977's One World, which is hard on the heels of Solid Air as much-loved album/potential D.I.D.), only to be pleasantly ambushed by the opening lines:
John Martyn was a castaway on the same hazy archipelago of jazzy-folky-funky-blues as other burnt-out hippy visionaries of the Seventies (V. Morrison, J. Mitchell, etc.)
Ha! That list should have included T. Buckley, R. Wyatt, N. Drake (a close friend of Martyn's and the inspiration/addressee of Solid Air's title track), and probably quite a few others too. "Archipelago" still seems like the right metaphor. These artists didn't belong to a genre, each of them had their own distinct sound, but there's enough proximity in terms of their sources, approaches, and vibe, to warrant thinking of them as separate-but-adjacent, a necklace of maverick visionaries sharing a common climate.
The cover of Solid Air invites aqueous reverie. A hand passing through sea-green water leaving an after-trail of iridescent purple ripples, the effect is idyllic on first glance. But then you notice that the image is a circle of color on a black background, introducing the possibility that we're inside a submarine looking through a porthole, and the hand's owner is outside, drowning. Solid Air's title track, we'll see, is about someone who's figuratively drowning, unable to resist the downward currents of terminal depression. One of the best songs is called "Dreams By The Sea," which might resonate for a homesick castaway, except these are "bad dreams by the sea."
Water flows through the entire John Martyn songbook, from "The Ocean" to his delightful cover of "Singin' in the Rain," while two of his post-Solid Air album covers feature images of the sea. 1975's Sunday's Child shows the bearded bard standing in front of crashing surf, while One World's cover is a painting of a mermaid diving up out of the waves and curving back into the ocean, her arched body trailing a glittering arc of sea-spray and flying fish. In that review, I dubbed the album "a Let's Get it On for the Great Barrier Reef," a comparison inspired mainly by the reverb-rippling aquafunk of "Big Muff" and "Dealer," two songs that mingle the language of sex and drugs such that you're not sure what brand of addiction they're really about. One World's final track, the nearly nine minutes of almost-ambient entitled "Small Hours," was recorded outdoors beside a lake.
Solid Air, though, has just one song that actively sounds aquatic, "I'd Rather Be The Devil," a cover of Skip James' "Devil Got My Woman." After almost 15 years of loving Martyn's version, I finally heard the original "Devil" in the movie Ghost World, where this out-of-time specter of a song harrows the teenage soul of heroine Enid. Most songwriters would have flinched from attempting such an unheimlich tune, but Martyn's cover is so drastic it fleshes this skeletal blues into virtually a brand-new composition: imagine the clavinet-driven funk of Stevie Wonder's "Superstition," if it actually sounded superstitious, witless and twitchy with dread. "I'd Rather Be The Devil" starts as a sickening plunge, a dive into seductive but treacherous waters. Roiling with congas and clavinet, the glutinously thick groove rivals anything contemporaneous by Sly Stone or Parliament-Funkadelic. Martyn moves through the music like a shark. Lyric shards come in and out of focus: "my mind starts a-rambling like a wild geese from the west," "stole her from my best friend...know he'll get lucky, steal her back." But mostly Martyn's murky rasp fills your head like a black gas of amorphous malevolence. The song part of "Devil" gives way to a descent-into-the-maelstrom churn, a deadly undertow of bitches-brew turbulence. Then that too abruptly dissipates, as though we've made it through the ocean's killing floor and reached a coral-cocooned haven. Danny Thompson's alternately bowed and plucked double bass injects pure intravenous calm; John Bundrick's keys flicker and undulate like anemones and starfish; Martyn's needlepoint fingerpicking, refracted through a delay device, spirals around your head in repeat-echoed loops of rising rapture. This oceanic arcadia is something music had touched previously only on Jimi Hendrix's Electric Ladyland with the proto-ambient sound-painting of "1983...(A Merman I Should Turn To Be)/Moon, Turn The Tides...Gently Gently Away."
Listening to this split-personality song - glowering storm-sky of dark-blue(s) funk/shimmering aquamarine utopia - it's hard to believe that only a few years earlier John Martyn had been a beardless naïf with an acoustic guitar, plucking out Donovan-esque ditties like "Fairytale Lullaby" and "Sing a Song of Summer." What the hell - more precisely, what kind of hell - happened in between?
Arriving in London from his native Scotland in the mid-Sixties, John Martyn hung out at the city's folk cellars, learning guitar technique by sitting near the front and closely watching the fingers of Davy Graham and Bert Jansch. Soon he was performing at spaces like Les Cousins and Bunjie's himself. He signed to Island (one of the first non-Jamaicans on the label) and in October 1967, aged nineteen, released his debut album London Conversation - fetching but jejune Brit-folk. Like many of his contemporaries, he gradually fell under the spell of jazz, especially John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders. He later described Impulse as the only truly pure label in the world. The Tumbler, from 1968, featured the flautist and saxophonist Harold McNair, while The Road To Ruin, his second collaboration with wife Beverley, involved jazz players Ray Warleigh, Lyn Dobson and Dudu Pukwana. But neither of these records really transcended an additive, this-plus-that approach; they fell short of a true amalgam of folk and jazz. It's not known if Martyn learned and drew encouragement from, or even heard at all, the voyages of Tim Buckley, who was on a very similar trajectory from pure-toned folk troubadour to zero-gravity vocal acrobat deploying the voice-as-instrument. But Martyn did talk in interviews about digging Weather Report (particularly the colorized electronic keyboards of band leader Joe Zawinul) and Alice Coltrane (he called her "my desert island disc" but didn't specify which particular disc of hers he had in mind!). A less-likely influence was The Band's Music From Big Pink, especially the Hammond organ sound, which he mistook for electric guitar, and described as "the first time I heard electric music using very soft textures, panels of sound, pastel sounds". He and Beverley Martyn made one album, Stormbringer, in Woodstock and New York City, with some members of The Band playing. But that was something of an aberration in the general drift of his music towards a jazzed fluidity. The ideal of a "one world" music possessed the imagination of many at this time - Can and Traffic, Miles Davis and Don Cherry - and throughout this period, at the cusp between the Sixties and the Seventies, Martyn was also listening to Indian classical, high-life, and Celtic music. (He would later record an electric version of the Gaelic air "Eibhli Ghail Chiun Chearbhail.") This all-gates-open receptivity was part of Martyn's refusal, or more likely inability to tolerate divisions, his compulsive attraction to thresholds and in-between states. And it would culminate in the untaggable and indivisible alloy of folk and jazz, acoustic and electric, live and studio, songform and space, achieved on Solid Air. "I think that what's going to happen is that there are going to be basically songs with a lot of looseness behind them," he told Melody Maker at the end of 1971, less than a year before recording the album.
As jazz entered Martyn's musical bloodstream, it affected not just his songwriting and approach to instrumentation, but his singing too. The clear diction of folk gave way to slurring that turned his voice into a fog bank of sensuality tinged with menace. Folk privileged words because of the importance it placed on messages and story-telling, but Martyn had come to believe that "there's a place between words and music, and my voice lives right there." One characteristic Martyn mannerism - intense sibilance - can be heard emerging in his cover of "Singin' In the Rain" (on 1971's Bless the Weather, the immediate precursor to Solid Air), where "clouds" comes out as "cloudzzzzzzz," a drunken bumble bee bumping against your earhole.
If Martyn's music grew woozy "under the influence" of jazz, during this period he was equally intoxicated by...well, intoxicants. The ever more smeared haziness of his voice and sound owed as much to the drugs and drink entering his biological bloodstream; dissolution and the dissolving of song-form went hand in hand. Martyn had always felt the bohemian impulse (he'd gone to art school in Glasgow looking for that lifestyle, only to leave after a few months, disappointed) and on his debut album he sang the traditional folk tune "Cocain." But with its jaunty lyrics about "Cocaine Lill and Morphine Sue," the song sounds like it was recorded under the effect of nothing more potent than cups of tea. Bless the Weather, again, is the moment at which the music first really seems to come from inside the drug experience. "Go Easy" depicts Martyn's lifestyle - "raving all night, sleeping away the day...spending my time, making it shine...look at the ways to vent and amaze my mind" - but it's "Glistening Glyndebourne" that hurls you into the psychedelic tumult of sense impressions. The title sounds like it's about a river, and the music scintillates with dashes and dots of dancing light just like a moving body of water, but it's actually inspired, bizarrely, by an opera festival in a stately home near where Martyn then lived; the suited formality of the upper class crowds provoked him to reimagine the scene.
"Glistening Glyndebourne" was also the track that first captured what had become the signature of Martyn's live performances, his guitar playing through an Echoplex. It seems likely that he was, unconsciously or not, looking for a method of recreating sonically the sense of the dilated "now" granted by drugs. Martyn initially turned to the machine thinking it could provide sustain (a quest that had previously and briefly led him to attempt to learn to play a jazz horn). He quickly realized that the Echoplex wasn't particularly suited to that task, but that he could apply it to even more impressive and fertile ends. Set to variable degrees of repeat-echo, the machine fed the guitar signal onto a tape loop that recorded sound-on-sound; the resulting wake of sonic after-images enabled Martyn to play with and against a cascading recession of ghosts-of-himself, chopping cross-rhythms in and out of the rippling flow. The Echoplex appeared in discreet, barely-discernible form on Stormbringer's ""Would You Believe Me," but "Glistening Glyndbourne" was something else altogether. Its juddering rush of tumbling drums and Echoplexed rhythm guitar was the dry run for "I'd Rather Be The Devil."
Solid Air starts with "Solid Air," twinkles of electric piano and vibes winding around Martyn's close-miked acoustic guitar and bleary fug of voice. For most of my years of loving this album I never knew the song was about, and for, Nick Drake, and I almost wish I could un-know that fact (especially as I've always secretly felt that Martyn deserved the mega-cult following that his friend and Island label-mate has, as opposed to his own loyal but medium-sized cult). But the phrase "solid air" still retains its mystery. Listening to it just now it suddenly flashed on me that "solid air" sounds like "solitaire," raising the possibility that it's a punning image of the lonely planet inhabited by the melancholy Drake, cut-off from human fellowship as surely as any desert island castaway. More likely, though, is that lines like "moving through solid air" attempt to evoke what depression feels like, suggesting both the character in Talking Heads' "Air" who's so sensitive he can't even handle contact with the atmosphere, and someone trying to make their way through a world that seems to have turned viscous. The song, written over a year before Drake committed suicide, is at once an offer of help, an entreaty, and a benediction: "I know you, I love you...I could follow you - anywhere/Even through solid air." Sung with a sublime mixture of maudlin heaviness and honeyed grace, it's a huge bear-hug to someone in terrible pain. But, with the advantage of hindsight, it also feels like a lullaby - rest in peace, friend.
There's a symmetry to the way Solid Air is constructed. Side Two starts like the first side, with a soft, slow whisper of a tune gently propelled by Danny Thompson's languid but huge-sounding double-bass pulse. In texture, tone and tempo, "Go Down Easy" is very much a sister-song to "Solid Air," but this time the air is thick not with melancholy but with a humid sexuality that's oddly narcotic and ever so slightly oppressive. It's a kind of erotic lullaby: the title/chorus seems logical enough, the kind of thing lovers might say, until you actually contemplate it, and then it sounds more appropriate to an agitated animal being quelled or a child being calmed down at bed time. "You curl around me like a fern in the spring/Lie down here and let me sing the things that you bring," croons Martyn, drawing out the chorus "go down easy" into a kind of yawn of yearning, as he draws his lover into a space where breath becomes tactile and intimacy almost asphyxiating.
On Solid Air, John Martyn is a hippie with a heart of dark, equally prone to brawling and balladeering, his voice constantly hovering between sweet croon and belligerent growl. In an interview, he talked about wanting to be "a scholar-gentleman...I'm interested in spiritual grace," and this side of Martyn - the idealist, albeit one whose ideals his all-too-human self tended to fail - comes through in songs like "May You Never" and "Don't Want to Know." The former (his most well-known song, widely covered, mostly famously by Eric Clapton) is a good will message or blessing to a friend; that empty social formality ("best wishes") fleshed out with specifics, bad things to be warded off ("may you never lay your head down without a hand to hold," "may you never lose your woman overnight"). An anti-hex, if you will. Lines like "you're just like a great big sister to me" and "you're just like a great big brother to me" show that this song's domain is agape as opposed to the eros of "Go Down Easy." Eros, in Martyn's world, is the danger emotion, the destabiliser, source of addiction and division (stealing your best friend's woman in "I'd Rather Be The Devil").
If Martyn had only ever recorded delicately pretty, heartfelt songs like "May You Never" and "Don't Want To Know", he might have been as big as, oh, Cat Stevens or James Taylor (although his thumpingly physical and rhythmic acoustic guitar playing always put him several cuts above the singer-songwriter norm). "Don't Want to Know" is an even more desperate attempt to ward off malevolent forces with a willed withdrawal into blissful ignorance: Martyn says he doesn't "want to know one thing about evil/I only want to know about love." It's a kind of shout-down-Babylon song (even though his voice is at its softest), with a strange apocalyptic verse about how he's waiting for planes to fall out of the sky and cities to crumble, and lines about how the glimmer of gold has got us all "hypnotized". Martyn often talked about wanting to leave "the paper chase" behind, move out to the country, live a purer lifestyle. But if this song envisages corruption as an external contaminant that you can escape by putting distance between yourself and it, "I'd Rather Be The Devil" and its own sister-song "Dreams By The Sea" treat evil as an intimate. In "Devil," it's inside his lover, his best friend, and most of all himself ("so much evil," moans Martyn midway through the song), while in "Dreams", a song fetid with sexual paranoia, he goes from imagining there's "a killer in your eyes" to a "killer in my eyes." The track is tight, strutting funk, Martyn's "Shaft"-like wah-wah coiling like a rattlesnake. At the end, it's like the fever of jealousy and doubt ("Nah no nah no/It can't be true...Nah no nah no/It's not the way you are") breaks, and the track unwinds into a lovely, forgiving coda of calm and reconciliation, laced with trickling raindrops of electric piano. There's one more pair of songs on Solid Air, and in these Martyn figures as incorrigible rogue rather than demon-lover. Side One's "Over The Hill" is deceptively spring-heeled and joyous, its fluttery prettiness (mandolin solo courtesy Richard Thompson) disguising the fact that Martyn here appears as a prodigal rolling-stone returning in disgrace. "Got nothing in my favor," he blithely admits, while flashing back to Cocain Lil with a line that confesses "can't get enough of sweet cocaine." Babylon's own powder, coke is a drug that stimulates desire for all the other vices, from sex to booze. "The Man In The Station," on the opposite side of the album, catches the roving minstrel once again wending his way back to the family hearth, but this time he seems less cocksure and more foot-sore, ready to catch "the next train home." These two coming-home songs would sound especially right on the island, where I'd need music that both acknowledged the fact of isolation while offering consolation for it. The album ends with "The Easy Blues," really two songs in one: "Jellyroll Baker," a cover of a tune by acoustic blues great Lonnie Johnson and a Martyn concert favorite whose blackface bawling is the only bit of Solid Air I could happily dispense with, and then the light cantering "My Gentle Blues" which almost instantly flips into a sweetly aching slow fade, draped with a poignant (if dated) synth solo played by Martyn himself.
I've sometimes argued in the past that rock's true essence is juvenile, a teenage rampage or energy flash of the spirit that burns brightest in seemingly artless sounds like '60s garage punk or '90s rave. Solid Air, though, is definitely adult music. Crucially, it's made by an adult who hasn't settled down, who's still figuring stuff out; his music shows that growing pains never stop.
This aspect of Solid Air also owes a lot to its historical moment: Martyn as open-hearted hippie emerging from the Sixties adventure to confront the costs of freedom (the problem of being in a couple but remaining fancy-free; drugs as life-quickening versus drugs as "false energy" or numbing tranquiliser).
Solid Air is post-psychedelic also in the sense I mentioned earlier. These are songs, like the self that sings them, blurring at the edges and melting into something larger. This expanse was designated "space" by the cosmic rock bands of the era, but Martyn's utopian image of healing boundlessness was "the ocean." In "Don't Want To Know," the vengeful verse about cities a-crumbling ends with the wistful yet mysterious line "waiting till the sea a-grow": a mystical image of world destruction as world salvation, perhaps, as though unity will only come when the continents (gigantic islands, if you think about it) drown in the sea of love.
The oceanic, "only connect" impulses of Sixties rock were political and musical at the same time. In the Seventies, these twin dreams collided with political reality and with a music industry that was becoming more market-segmented, and less of an anything-goes possibility space. By the end of the Seventies, Island's Chris Blackwell would inform Martyn that his meandering muse had driven him into a niche marked "jazz," a pigeonhole that every fiber in the singer's artistic being revolted against.
Only a few years earlier, in happier times, Blackwell produced Martyn's #2 masterpiece, One World, its title track a disillusioned hippie's plea as plaintively poignant and ardently apolitical (because seeking to abolish politics?) as Lennon's "Imagine" or "One Love" by Martyn's labelmate Bob Marley. But the track's sentiment is also a musical ideal, the call for a "one world" music being made by many at the time (see Miles Davis' Pangaea, named after the original supercontinent that existed some 300 million year ago).
Martyn had already reached it on Solid Air: a body music that feeds the head, a sound woven from the becoming-jazz of folk, the becoming-electric of jazz, the becoming-acoustic of funk (not that Martyn, an earthy fellow, would ever use such Deleuzian jargon). The schizo-song of "I'd Rather Be The Devil" is where it all comes together, while coming apart. Sonically traversing the distance from the Mississippi levee work-camps in which the young Skip James toiled to Miles Davis' In a Silent Way, "Devil" captures the ambivalence of "blue": the color of orphan-in-this-world desolation, but also of back-to-the-womb bliss. The two halves of "Devil", like the play of shadow and light across the whole of Solid Air, correspond to a battle in John Martyn's soul - between sea monster and water baby,danger and grace.
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"I'd Rather Be The Devil" for The Wire's cover story on cover versions, November 2005
"Devil Got My Woman" (Skip James, rec. 1931)
Blues might be the most worn-out (through over-use and abuse), hard-to-hear-fresh music on the planet, but James' original "Devil" --just his piteous keening voice and acoustic guitar--still cuts right through to chill your marrow. The lyric surpasses "Love Like Anthrax" with its anti-romantic imagery of love as toxic affliction, a dis-ease of the spirit (James tries to rest, to switch off his lovesick thoughts for a while, but "my mind starts a-rambling like a wild geese from the west"). Most singers would flinch from taking on this unheimlich tune. But John Martyn, reworking (and renaming) it as "I'd Rather Be The Devil" on Solid Air (Island, 1973) not only equals the original's intensity but enriches and expands the song, stretching its form to the limit. It starts as a sickening plunge, a dive into seductive but treacherous waters. Roiling with congas and clavinet, the band's surging aquafunk rivals anything contemporaneous by Sly Stone or P-Funk; Martyn moves through the music like a shark. Lyric shards come into focus now and then--"so much evil", "stole her from my best friend… know he'll get lucky, steal her back"--but mostly Martyn's murky rasp fills your head like this black gas of amorphous malevolence. Then suddenly the bitches-brew turbulence dissipates; ocean-as-killing-floor transforms into a barrier reef-cocooned idyll. Danny Thompson's bass injects pure intravenous calm, keyboards flicker and undulate like anemones, Martyn's needlepoint fingerpicking spirals in Echoplexed loops of rising rapture. Sonically traversing the distance from the Mississippi levee work-camps in which the young James toiled to Miles Davis' In a Silent Way, "I'd Rather Be The Devil" captures the ambivalence of "blue": the colour of orphan-in-this-world desolation, but also of back-to-the-womb bliss. The two halves of Martyn's drastic remake also correspond to a battle in the singer's soul--between monster and water baby, danger and grace.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Oneohtrix Point Never
Village Voice, July 6, 2010
by Simon Reynolds
Daniel Lopatin, the young man behind the spacey and spacious mindscapes of Oneohtrix Point Never, operates out of a cramped bedroom in Bushwick. Most of it is taken up by vintage Eighties synthesizers, rhythm boxes, and assorted sound-processing gizmos, plus a gigantic computer monitor. Every inch of surface area is covered with tsotchkes: a Tupac mug, little sculpted owls, John and Yoko kissing on the sleeve of "Just like Starting Over". Besides the computer, a stack of tomes represent upcoming areas of research for the erudite, philosophy-minded Lopatin: a guide to Alchemy & Mysticism, a lavish book on ECM Records, Ray Kurzweil on The Singularity. Most intriguing, though, are the notes posted above his work-space: maxims, self-devised or sampled from thinkers, that are midway between Eno's Oblique Strategies and those embroidered homilies people once stuck on their kitchen walls.
"Do More With Less (Ephemeralize)" is fairly self-explanatory. The more opaque "'Linear' -- Kill Time vs. 'Sacred'" is clarified by Lopatin thusly: "People think killing time is bad, you should be productive --but when music is at its most sanctified, it's a total time kill." There's something in Hebrew and Cyrillic that nods to Lopatin's Russian Jewish background. Most revealing of these "little critical reminders" is "N.W.B.", which stands for "Noise Without Borders". "Everything is noise," elaborates Lopatin, whose yellowish hair and reddish beard mesh pleasingly with his off-purple flannel shirt and kindly, dreamy green eyes. "Noise can be sculpted down to become pop; pop can be sculpted down into noise. But it's also to do with the idea of not having genre affiliations".
Oneohtrix Point Never emerged out of the noise underground, but for a long while Lopatin felt like an outcast among the outcasts. The ideas he was developing--bringing in euphonious influences from Seventies cosmic trance music and Eighties New Age, creating atmospheres of serenity tinged with desolation--went against the grain. "My shit wasn't popping off at all", he laughs. This was 2003-2005, when Wolf Eyes defined the scene with their rock 'n 'roll attitude. Lopatin and a handful of kindred spirits such as Emeralds felt a growing "boredom with noise, a sense we'd done it: we get this emotion." Around 2006, the scene began to shift slowly in their direction. "We were all talking about Klaus Schulze," he recalls of the gig where he first bonded with Emeralds. He notes also the huge clouds of pot smoke pouring from vans outside the venue, Cambridge, MA's Twisted Village. "Drugs!" is his answer when asked about how the noise scene reached its current ethereal 'n' tranquil state-of-art. "Noise, at the end of the day, is headspace music. Drugs are a big part of getting into that experience, from a playing side, and from a fan/listener perspective too."
A flurry of Oneohtrix releases plus collaborative side projects such as Infinity Window made Lopatin a name to watch. But it was last year's Rifts--a double CD for Carlos Giffoni's No Fun label pulling together a trilogy of hard-to-find earlier releases--that propelled him to underground star status. U.K. magazine The Wire anointed Rifts the #2 album of 2009. The CD also sold out its two thousand pressing, making it a blockbuster success in a scene where the majority of releases come out in small runs anywhere from 300 to 30 copies. Rifts was further disseminated widely on the web, talked about and listened to with an intensity that sales figures don't reflect.
Another profile-raising "hit" for Lopatin was Sunsetcorp's "Nobody Here"-- a mash-up of Chris DeBurgh's putrid "The Lady in Red" and a vintage computer graphic called "Rainbow Road," that has so far received 30,000 YouTube hits. Lopatins calls his audio-video collages "echo jams": they typically combine Eighties sources (a vocal loop from Mirage-era Fleetwood Mac, say, with a sequence from a Japanese or Soviet hi-fi commercial) and slow them down narcotically (an idea inspired by DJ Screw). Lopatin collated his best echo jams on the recent Memory Vague DVD. His Eighties obsession also comes through with the MIDI-funk side project Games, a collaboration with Joel Ford from Brooklyn band Tiger City. (Ford also lives in a room at the other end of the Bushwick apartment). Lopatin plays me a new Games track that sounds like it could be a Michael McDonald song off the Running Scared O/S/T and says "We want people to be playing this in cars."
In what is simultaneously a further step forward and another step sideways, the new Oneohtrix album Returnal is released this month on the highly respected experimental electronic label Mego. Although Lopatin's preoccupations with memory are similar to the label's most renowned artist Fennesz, sonically Returnal has little in common with Mego's glitchy past. Yet Returnal is a departure for Lopatin, too. Several tracks adhere to the classic OPN template established by tunes like "Russian Mind' and "Physical Memory": rippling arpeggiations, sweet melody offset by sour dissonance, grid-like structures struggling with cloudy amorphousness. But the most exciting tunes are forays into completely other zones.
Opening with the sculpted distortion-blast of "Nil Admirari" is a fuck you to those who have Lopatin pegged as "that Tangerine Dream guy". It's also a concept piece, a painting of a modern household, where the outside world's violence pours in through the cable lines, the domestic haven contaminated by toxic data: "The mom's sucked into CNN, freaking out about Code Orange terrorist shit, while the kid is in the other room playing Halo 3, inside that weird Mars environment killing some James Cameron-type predator."" At the opposite extreme, the title track is an exquisitely mournful ballad redolent of the early solo work of Japan's David Sylvian. Lopatin's vocals have featured occasionally before as Enya-esque texture-billow but never so songfully as on "Returnal" (qualities that emerge even more strongly on the forthcoming remix/cover voiced by Anthony Hegarty).
Finally, most astonishingly, is "‡Preyouandi∆", the closing track: a shatteringly alien terrain made largely out of glassy percussion sounds, densely clustered cascades fed through echo and delay. On first listen, I pictured an ice shelf disintegrating, a beautiful, slow-motion catastrophe. This "blues for global warming" interpretation turns out to be completely off-base, but "‡Preyouandi∆" is the sort of music that gets your mind's eye reeling with fantastical imagery.
Both "Returnal" and "‡Preyouandi∆" contain textural tints that explicitly echo the hyper-visual sounds and visionary concepts of Jon Hassell, who back in the 1980s explored what he called "4th World Music": a polyglot sound mixing Western hi-tech and ethnic ritual musics. "I wanted to make a world music record," says Lopatin. "But make it hyper-real, refracted through not really being in touch with the world. Everything I know about the world is seen through Nova specials, Jacques Cousteau and National Geographic." He explains that the stuff that indirectly influenced Returnal were things like the unnaturally vivid and stylized tableaus you might see in that kind of documentary or magazine article--a 100 Sufis praying in a field, say. "So I'm painting these pictures, not of the actual world, but of us watching that world."
Oneohtrix Point Never, Elizabeth Fraser
"Tales from the Trash Stratum"
[from Pitchfork end of year tracks blurbs 2021)
The original "Trash Stratum" on 2020's Magic Oneohtrix Point Never entwined distortion and euphony in fairly familiar Dan Lopatin fashion. This year's drastic reinvention lovingly collages '80s production motifs: pizzicato string-flutters as fragrant as Enya, blobs of reverb-smudged piano that evoke Harold Budd, high-toned pings of bass that could be The Blue Nile or Seventeen Seconds Cure. It's like Lopatin is a bowerbird building a glittering nest to attract a mate - and succeeds in reeling in the onetime Cocteau Twin. Fraser's contributions - ASMR-triggering wisps of sibilant breath, chirruping syllables from a disintegrated lullaby - are closer to a diva's warm-up exercises than an actual aria, and sometimes you long for her to take full-throated flight into song. But it's lovely to hear the Goth goddess brought into the glitchy 21st Century.
Queries + replies from / for Amanda Petrusich and her New Yorker profile of Lopatin
1. Dan's work is really conceptual, but I'm also curious how it lands on you as MUSIC -- how you see it fitting in amongst his genre peers, and also his predecessors? My sense is that he's not the first artist to do some of these things, but there's something about his work that feels really special.
Dan is one of the pioneers and exemplars of what I call conceptronica. Sometimes with that not-quite-a-genre (it's more like a mode of operation) the framing can be a bit overbearing. Occasionally he's veered too far that way. But unlike many of those who operate like that (i.e. with a highly articulated rationale pitched to the audience and to critics) , at its best his music has an element of sheer beauty and emotional pull to it that transcends, or just bypasses, the verbalization. I'm thinking of pieces like "Physical Memory", which just aches with feeling.
I'm not even sure I can pinpoint what the emotions are - often it's like strange new affects of the future.
But then something like his most famous eccojam, "Nobody Here" - the emotion here is human and relatable. He's said it's about his own loneliness in New York, having recently moved there. Which is not the emotion in the original song, a romantic ballad. But somehow he was able to take that little vocal sliver and repurpose it, in combination with that early computer graphics animation in the video. I don't think there's any element in "Nobody Here" that sonically or visually was generated by him, it's all found material, but out of it he created something new and emotionally resonant.
When he first came along he was identified with this scene that some called hypnagogic pop and then later chillwave was the term used for the more song-oriented stuff out of that area. So he would be bracketed with artists like James Ferraro and Emeralds - a lot of the emphasis was recycling Eighties mainstream pop or rehabilitating New Age music. When I tried to pinpoint what defined this wave of artists I came up with this idea that it was Pop Art meets psychedelia. So, reusing detritus from mass culture, but shot through with this hallucinatory quality.
In some ways, although he uses older musical material or references it, Dan's ancestors aren't so much in music but in the visual arts - the Appropriation Artists in particular, which is essentially Pop Art part 2..
2. I'm super interested in an idea you write about a lot in "Retromania," that the Internet has left everything essentially untethered to space and time, and therefore we're moving laterally, and not backwards, when we recycle or reappropriate or repatriate or recontextualize ideas from the past. I'm curious what you think might be dangerous -- if anything! -- about this new way of consuming culture?
I don't know if it's dangerous - it's disorienting for someone like me who grew up with ideas of progress and sort of construable linear evolution for music and culture, in which some things get definitively superseded and you move on to the next stage, ideally at exhilarating speed. That was my outlook and my expectation growing up, but it might already have been a somewhat old-fashioned sort of modernism even then - those ideas lingered far longer in popular music than they did in art and architecture.
Dan has some great quotes that I used in Retromania (from the original interview I did with him for Village Voice) to do with how we're living in a time of reprocessing culture, this enormous junk heap of material left over from the 20th Century, it's an aftermath phase of salvage and tinkering and recycling.
That said, there are clearly plenty of new technological things happening that are creating new cultural forms or the potential for them. At the time of writing Retromania I didn't realise how much Auto-Tune would become a creative tool and lead to all this completely new-sounding music, particularly in hip hop but also on the experimental fringe. The voice became the field of action in terms of experimentation. (Dan's done quite a bit of stuff in that vein, whether it's things like "Sleep Dealer" or the vocal entity created for Garden of Delete)
And then there's AI.
So maybe that archival moment that was happening in music in the 2000s (and also in art - reenactments, what Claire Bishop recently wrote about in terms of research based art), maybe that has passed. It was a temporary phase created by the way that the Internet, YouTube etc seemed to erupt into existence and suddenly we were all sitting amidst this enormous cultural junkheap, It was irresistible to explore and excavate. Overpowering in terms of its claims on our attention and how creative people's imaginations were affected. Indeed, there was a kind of helplessness to it, I think.
That is still going on, there's a lot of archival based work, revivalism, pastiche - but there are things that are happening, enabled with newer technology, that result in the genuinely unforeheard.
3. This is kind of a weird one, but does it feel, to you, like Dan has invented something new, some new idiom or sound?
I think he has, in moments, particular tracks. There's a lot of referencing and recycling - the whole hypergrunge idea was very clever.
But something like "‡PREYOUANDI∆" - I can hear faint echoes of earlier artists (like a bit of Jon Hassell maybe) but it's really like nothing I've heard.
Even "Physical Memory", while you might think vaguely of Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze, it doesn't really sound much like those groups. It's probably more inspired by an idea of the analogue synth epic, these very long electronic mindscapes that could sometimes take up the whole of one side of an LP.
A lot of what has fascinated Dan is older futurisms - the pathos of new technology that gets obsolesced but also might contain dormant possibilities that were passed over too quickly at the time in the onrush of development. You can hear all these echoes or reactivations of 1980s early digital textures and effects.
So the whole idea of the future and the new is sort of simultaneously jettisoned, or questioned, and yet still has this pull, still continues to have this hold on the imagination .
Pete Shelley tribute
Pitchfork, December 8 2028
by Simon Reynolds
The first and only time I saw Buzzcocks play live was in 2012, at the Incubate festival in Holland. They seemed an incongruous choice for a festival otherwise dedicated to experimentalism and dark cutting-edge fare. Although I love the band's late-1970s output, I never would have actively sought out their live incarnation as a pop-punk legacy act; it was exactly the sort of nostalgia-appealing operation that would usually earn my stern disapproval. It was mild curiosity, really, that drew me into the big hall—only to be stunned by the power and glory of the noise wrought by the worse-for-wear-looking survivors on the stage.
Classic after classic smashed into the crowd's collective face like surf. I found myself doing something embarrassingly close to a pogo. It was wonderful, every bit of it—even a strange new mid-section to "Harmony In My Head" that involved Steve Diggle delivering a kind of quasi-insurrectionary rap. This appeared to bemuse Pete Shelley as much as the audience and prompted him to gasp into the mic, "What the fuck was that?". I had turned up expecting something rote and stale; instead I was jolted alive.
Whenever I listen to Buzzcocks' music, what always strikes me is how modern it still sounds. But that is actually how it works with true innovation. No matter how much time passes—decades during which a breakthrough is assimilated and worn out by repetition, whether by others or by the artist repeating themselves—something of that initial shock of the new rings out and cuts through. And if you think about it, nearly everything handed down to us as "classic" was, in its own time, a break with tradition.
Buzzcocks severed ties with the blues-rooted rock of the early '70s. No Chuck Berry chug for them: instead, Shelley cited Can's Michael Karoli as his favorite guitarist and said that his idea of a great solo was John Lennon's abstract noise eruptions on Yoko Ono's "Why." The name Buzzcocks could almost be onomatopoeia for the noise made by Shelley and rhythm guitarist Diggle: a serrated surge, at once coarse and sleek, with a hint of kinky mischief. Shelley and the band's original singer Howard Devoto found that name from the chance conjunction of words in a magazine headline about the buzz-worthy TV show "Rock Follies," rock-biz satire featuring a tough-girl singer who cheekily addresses everyone as "cock."
Although they were in the original core cluster of groups that invented UK punk, Buzzcocks would always be an anomaly within that movement—misfits among the misfits. There had never been words, a voice, a personality, like this in rock before. Shelley sang love songs when every other major punk vocalist rejected them as trivial next to political themes, or—if they did deal with desire and heartbreak—laced the words with spite and hostility. The aggression in Buzzcocks was all in the sound; the animating spirit was sensitive, open-hearted, vulnerable. There's a lovely clip of Shelley circulating on the internet, interviewed by a TV documentary crew in 1977 when punk gigs in Britain were getting banned by local councils and picketed by hordes of outraged citizenry. Twinkling and grinning adorably, the singer is incredulous at the idea that he could be deemed "vile and obscene."
When punk evolved into post-punk, Buzzcocks didn't fit there either. Although Shelley was well-read and philosophically searching, and although the group's graphic presentation was arty and stark, their tunes and riffs went straight for your pleasure centers; the words were direct, colloquial, accessible to all. Nor did Buzzcocks have much truck with the militancy or didacticism of the post-punk era. The band's politics were personal, verging on private—to do with radical honesty, the struggle to be an individual, to disentangle oneself from games and masks and role-play.
"I think people need a new way of living—inside themselves," Shelley offered gently, when asked about the idea of a political movement by TV interviewer Tony Wilson. People generally assume that Peter McNeish renamed himself Shelley after the Romantic poet, but in that same TV mini-doc about Buzzcocks, Wilson says that Shelley was the name that his parents would have given Peter if he'd been a girl.
That invocation of the she that he might have been connects to a genuine innovation that Shelley introduced to rock and that reflected his fluid sexuality: the deliberate use of gender non-specific pronouns in love songs, something that would hugely influence later lyricists like Morrissey. "There isn't any implied gender in our songs now because we think it's boring singing about one thing when it could apply to both sexes," Shelley told the music paper Sounds in 1977. "Our songs our bisexual."
This elasticity of gender and sexual attraction was one aspect of Shelley's desire to invent a new kind of love song. In a 1978 interview with NME, he described himself as "a modern romantic… trying to find out what modern romance is.. I'm trying to find something new… All the old kinds of romance are self-destructive because they don't take account of realities." On the Buzzcocks' debut album, Another Music From A Different Kitchen, "Fiction Romance" was about the gap between the entrancing dreams propagated by movies and magazines and the aching mess of real-life desire: "I love this love story/That never seems to happen in my life."
Shelley's solution was a radical mundanity, using pained humor to sketch scenarios of humiliation, inadequacy and shortfall, coupled with melody that promised resolution or transcendence. Again, this tension between romance and reality points ahead to groups like Orange Juice and the Smiths. In the Buzzcocks' case, the delicate balancing act between beauty and bathos was never more (im)perfect than on the group's second and third singles: the perpetual unfulfillment of "What Do I Get?" (the answer: sleepless nights in an empty bed), the amorous asymmetry of "I Don't Mind" ("this pathetic clown''ll keep hangin' around, that's if you don't mind").
Although "Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've)" continues the theme and is a fan favorite as well as Buzzcocks's biggest UK chart hit, this triptych of anti-romantic love songs is really completed by "You Say You Don't Love Me." The aim here is clarity achieved through a kind of positive disillusionment, serene acceptance of things as they are: "I don't want to live in a dream, I want something real… Though I've got this special feeling, I'd be wrong to call it love/For the word entails a few things that I would be well rid of." In interviews, Shelley talked of his new approach: starting out as friends and hoping romance would grow, rather than falling head over heels and then trying to turn that idealized half-figment of a person into a friend and companion.
In the punk and new wave era, people who would never have previously been considered to be pop star material—on account of their looks or their vocal inadequacies—became household names. Part of the shock of Buzzcocks was the sheer ordinariness of Pete Shelley materializing in the glitzy TV context of "Top of the Pops." With his open-neck button-shirts and slightly shaggy hair, he looked like neither a punk nor a pop star, but more like an office clerk on his lunch break. And he sang like one too.
Shelley might never have become the band's lead singer and lyricist if Howard Devoto had stayed in Buzzcocks. Like Bernard Sumner following the death of Ian Curtis, Shelley took on the frontman role because he and the other members of the band figured it would be easier for an insider to take over singing duties rather than accommodate a new person who might have his own ideas.
But Shelley would have already been a historically significant figure in British punk even if he'd never sung a single tune or written a line of lyric. It was he and Devoto who arranged for the Sex Pistols to play their debut Manchester gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall on June 4 1976: a much-mythologized event said to have seeded the city's entire punk scene, sparking the careers of Joy Division, the Fall, and Morrissey.
It was also Shelley who persuaded his dad to take out a loan for 250 pounds, the decisive investment in the recording and pressing of Buzzcocks' Spiral Scratch EP, which the band and manager Richard Boon put out on their own New Hormones label. Released in February 1977, Spiral Scratch would be the beacon that mobilized the DIY hordes of punk and post-punk Britain and beyond, inspiring outfits like Desperate Bicycles, Scritti Politti, and Swell Maps to demystify and democratize the means of musical production. Do-it-yourself and release-it-yourself was seen as a righteous war waged against the apathy and ennui so acutely anatomized by Devoto in his lyrics for "Boredom," Spiral Scratch's killer track.
By the time of the EP's release, though, Devoto was bored of punk itself and left the band, taking with him an epic guitar riff generously gifted him by Shelley that would eventually serve as the hook of "Shot By Both Sides," the debut single of his new group Magazine. Shelley and Buzzcocks, meanwhile, decided that persevering on their own regional independent label was not viable and they signed with the major United Artists. In swift succession, over just two compressed and hectic years, there followed the immaculate debut album Another Music in A Different Kitchen and its uneven but endearing follow-up Love Bites (both released in 1978), then the underrated third album A Different Kind of Tension the following year. The last of these was overlooked in its own time, as the rapidly evolving UK scene left Buzzcocks behind.
There was also a string of eight perfect singles, starting with "Orgasm Addict" (a hilarious masturbation anthem that was, in fact, construable as "vile and obscene"). Together these made up Singles Going Steady, the greatest "greatest hits" LP this side of the Supremes, even if most of the inclusions had barely been hits. I vividly remember the disbelief, aged 16, when the gorgeous melodic swirl of "Everybody's Happy Nowadays" and the glittering chimes of "Harmony In My Head" both failed to pierce the Top 20.
In punk-pop perfection terms, Buzzcocks were rivalled only by the Undertones and there was a feeling, albeit a minority viewpoint, that they were the era's Beatles, or should have been. Each single deserved to go straight in at Number One. But there was more to Shelley than power pop, as was revealed on the second side of Singles Going Steady, dedicated to the group's B-sides. These grew steadily less straightforward, culminating in "Why Can't I Touch It," nearly seven minutes of loping almost-funk and radically stereo-separated guitar-slashes, and "Something's Gone Wrong Again," which resembles suspended-animation Stooges, glistening with a coat of frost. The entire second side of A Different Kind of Tension was a Shelley mini-concept album, permeated with existential doubts and askew with a disassociated feeling influenced by LSD. And 1980's "Are Everything," one of the first-phase Buzzcocks' last singles, was even more psychedelic: Shelley took acid for every stage of the process, from recording to mixing, hoping for the rush of revelation to overcome him.
But it wasn't a case of Buzzcocks getting weirder as Shelley expanded his horizons: he'd always had an experimental streak. A few years before punk, Shelley recorded several albums worth of abstract electronic music and some of this 1974 material saw belated release in 1980 as the album Sky Yen. Another 1980 side project was The Tiller Boys, in which Shelley partnered with a Manchester teenager called Eric Random to record the clangorous Neu!-like stampede "Big Noise From the Jungle", which became a favorite on John Peel's BBC radio show. Both Sky Yen and "Big Noise" bore a relationship to a pair of "theoretical groups" Shelley had conceptualized in the years before Buzzcocks: a heavy, hypnotic Krautrock-inspired project called Smash and an electronic entity known as Sky. Unlike Smash, Sky actually "became real… but consisted solely of me," Shelley recalled to Trouser Press in 1983. Made at home with hand-built oscillators and cheap-and-nasty organs, Sky's squalls of abstract electronic noise couldn't have been further from the prim precision and candied catchiness of "Ever Fallen In Love" . Any Buzzcocks fans who splashed out for Shelley's solo album were likely mystified.
When Shelley and Devoto first met it was actually through the Electronic Music Society at the Bolton Institute of Technology in Greater Manchester, where they both studied: Devoto was looking for someone to soundtrack a film he was making. "Peter was an electronics engineer and he was into computers even at that stage," Devoto told me in 2003. With this deep and long-established interest in electronic music and technology, it's hardly surprising that Shelley was quick to notice the potential of the affordable synths and drum machines that became available in the last few years of the '70s.
After the band split up exhausted in 1980, Shelley started working on a solo album with Martin Rushent, the producer who had crucially shaped the Buzzcocks' raw-but-glossy sound on record. The result was the pioneering synth-pop single "Homosapien," yet another in the long line of Shelley should-have-been-a-smash songs (although this time the problem was a BBC ban, on account of its impishly suggestive homo-erotic lyric), and a 1981 album of the same title that blended synths and drum machines with electric guitars. Another parallel universe / alternate history scenario tantalizes here: a world where Shelley pipped the Human League to the post (they also worked with Rushent, to massive success) or became a kind of one-man Pet Shop Boys. You could even imagine a Buzzcocks that didn't split but embraced electronics, gradually becoming a New Order-like force.
Instead, after a couple more unsuccessful electro-pop solo records, Shelley joined with the other ex-Buzzcocks to reform the group along their classic lines. They released their fourth album Trade Test Transmissions in 1993, the first in a series of half-a-dozen albums that were solid but never quite ignited the old spark. In 1994, at fanboy Kurt Cobain's invitation, they toured with Nirvana, a preview of the next 20 or so years of sustained live work.
In the days following Cobain's suicide in April 1994, Shelley—an early adopter of the internet—could be found on a bulletin board of the now-defunct Compuserve commiserating with fans and sharing his very recent memories of hanging out with Kurt. He cycled between self-reproach for not being able to help the troubled singer and deliberately irreverent comments intended to deflate overly pious laments for the fallen rock savior—attitudes he clearly felt missed the point of punk and of Cobain himself.
Shelley's own aim was to be exactly the same size as life, and somehow put that across onstage or on record, despite the inherent artifice of being a performer. That was his interpretation of what punk represented—the artist as unheroic hero, on the same level as the fans. Approachable, unassuming, self-deprecating, Shelley lived out that ideal until the end.
A Split Second / A Taste of Sugar / Erotic Dissidents
Sin, London
Melody Maker, January 21 1989
by Simon Reynolds
Melody Maker, November 18, 1989
April 15th 1989 - a swipe in a Melody Maker singles page
BLACK SABBATH
The Complete 70's Replica CD Collection 1970-78
(Sanctuary Records)
Uncut, 2001
by Simon Reynolds
The mystery of the riff--so crucial to rock, so oddly neglected by critics. Or perhaps not so strangely, given that riffs are almost impossible to write about: just try explaining why one monster-riff slays you where another one fails to incite. Riffs just seem to bypass the aesthetic faculties altogether and go straight to the gut. A killer riff is by definition simplistic--which is why self-consciously sophisticated rock tends to dispense with them altogether in favor of wispy subtleties. Riff-based music seems lowly, literally "mindless" because it connects with the lower "reptilian" part of the cerebral cortex which governs flight-or-flight responses, the primitive emotions of appetite, aversion, and aggression.
Talking of reptiles, Black Sabbath--perhaps the greatest riff factory in all of rock---irresistibly invite metaphors involving dinosaurs. For a group that wielded such brontosauran bulk, though, Sabbath were surprisingly nimble on their feet. Listening to this box-set, which comprises all eight albums of the classic Ozzy-fronted era, I was surprised how fast many of their songs were, given the Sabs' reputation as torpid dirgemeisters for the downered-and-out.
Even at their most manic, Sabbath always sound depressed, though. Rhythmically as much as lyrically, Sabbath songs dramatise scenarios of ordeal, entrapment, affliction, perseverance in the face of long odds and insuperable obstacles. Tony Iommi's down-tuned distorto-riffs--essentially the third element of the awesome rhythm section of Bill Ward and Geezer Butler--create sensations of impedance and drag, like you're struggling through hostile, slightly viscous terrain. Joe Carducci, Sabbath fiend and theorist supreme of rock 's "heavy" aesthetic, analyses about how bass, drums, and guitar converge to produce "powerfully articulated and textured tonal sensations of impact and motion that trigger hefty motor impulses in the listener." But let's not discount Ozzy's role: his piteous wail is one-dimensional, sure, but it sounds utterly righteous in this abject context. And he's effectively touching on forlornly pretty ballads like "Changes" too.
With a few exceptions (Lester Bangs, notably) the first rock-crit generation abhorred Sabbath. Criticism typically lags behind new art forms, appraising it using terminology and techniques more appropriate to earlier genres. So the first rock critics, being postgraduates in literature, philosophy, and politics, treated songs as mini-novels, as poetry or protest tracts with tasteful guitar accompaniment. Expecting rock to get ever more refined, they were hardly gonna embrace Sabbath's crude putsch on Cream, which stripped away all the blues-bore scholarship and revelled in the sheer dynamics of heaviosity. Riff-centered rock--Zep, Mountain, ZZ Top, Aerosmith---was received with incomprehension and condescension.
Not original in real-time Rolling Stones reviews but written in the 1980s for the Rolling Stone Albums Guide - when the legacy would have already been becoming apparent -
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.
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This is my favorite
I remember this came on the radio once when we were in the car. I turned up the volume and started air-drumming to those great breakbeat-like rolls. And then - a second after Ozzy's voice came in, like it was the final straw - this indignant voice piped up from the back seat: "This is the WORST music in the world!!!". Kieran, aged 11, sounding genuinely appalled. I drily replied, "no, this is in fact one of the most purely powerful pieces of recorded rock, actually". He wasn't having it.
Mind you, I would probably have felt the same at his age.
Well, more to the point, I felt the same when I was about 18. Not based on any deep exposure. Passing hearing of "Paranoid". Mostly just postpunk indoctrination, high-minded disapproval of all things metal.
Then two things changed my mind: I read that Black Flag were fans of Black Sabbath, which explained the grueling dirge of "Damaged I"
And then my friend Chris Scott played me one of their albums - maybe the Greatest Hits. "Iron Man" was the one that turned my head around.
And then "War Pigs".
Then within a few years you had the Beasties sampling Sabbath, there was Buttholes's with "Sweat Loaf", etc
Over time I've come to really like the dreamy hippie-ish side to Sabbath
What were they going for here? Santana? Something from the San Francisco scene?
It actually reminds me a bit of "Maggot Brain" by Funkadelic
And then there's this pretty instrumental
And this is a beautiful ballad
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The first time I paeaned Sabbath was indirectly, via the greatest of their epigones: Saint Vitus
January 16 1988
The album had actually been out at least a year, possibly two, when I reviewed it, but it came in a big box of STT albums mailed to MM, which I pounced on.
At that time I didn't realise "St. Vitus Dance" is a Sabbath song.
Also discovered much later that Born Too Late - which is not only epigonic but an analysis of the epigone mindstate - was produced by Joe Carducci.
JC's analysis of "heavy" is unbeaten - check this piece, spun off Rock and the Pop Narcotic but not an extract, with some great probing into the Sabbath riff-and-rhythm engine.
Carducci has opined that "Supernaut" is the most physically dynamic and potent example of recorded rock in existence
Now I could have sworn I spoke to one of Saint Vitus on the phone for a piece on STT and its late 80s splurge out into heavy, proggy, jammy-bandy expansiveness - but all I can find is this small patch of exaltation, quote-free. But yeah I distinctly recall a distant voice, a subdued mumble.
Another Sabbath-related speck of writing is this piece on the unfortunately named 1000 Homo DJs aka Al Jourgensen who covered "Supernaut". He does address the isssue of the name in the conversation.
How weird to think I spoke to Mr Ministry on the phone!
I wonder what Mr Carducci would have made of this cover? I'm sure he would have disapproved of the inelastic rhythm section (a drum machine?) and diagnosed it as a typically top-heavy misunderstanding of rock music - taking it to be all about attitude rather than phatitude. Literally top-heavy: all noise and distorted vox, no bottom. Fatally lite - devoid of heaviness.
In that sense almost as bad as British things like The Cult and Grebo.
He would further have diagnosed the Wax Trax thing as bound up with a fatal Chicago failing: Anglophilia - which he also diagnosed as a ruse of projecting to London to bypass New York.
I have strayed far from Ozzy...
Repeated exposure on the radio here in LA over the years has made me a fan of this, even though its clean frantic high-energy style is a million miles from the Sabbath dirge style.
I'm sure Carducci thought this was a terrible waste of Ozzy's wail.
When I wrote this snide review of the dirty old man's memoir I'd clean forgotten that if nothing else he had made the best Stone-involved record of the last - well now it would 3 and a half decades - but in 1990 just a decade.
This and "Start Me Up", the last great actual Rolling Stones record, were released the same year.
Belated RIP... there's been a lot going on...
You have to wonder about these two great Californians, Sly Stone and Brian Wilson, dying the week that troops are sent into LA. "I've seen enough... I'm outta here".
Today, it's the government that's rioting...
At the bottom you will find my circa 1990 review of the first-time-on-CD reissue of There's A Riot Goin' On, rather in the shadow of the Greil Marcus reading in Mystery Train
It remains a fantastic album, but I must say the stuff that means the most to me these days is the classic run of uplifting smash singles: "Dance To the Music", "Everyday People", "Stand!", "Everybody Is a Star", "Hot Fun in the Summertime", "Thank You Falettinmebe Mice 'Elf Agin"....
Sly and the Family figure in a class I teach on the cartoon continuum.
See, rather than Staggerlee, what I think of when I hear "Everyday People" is Sesame Street.
I did some research into whether the "scooby dooby doo" in "Everyday People" predates Scooby-Doo the kids cartoon show but it turns out the catchphrase goes back a decade-plus earlier (some say Sinatra came up with it).
Given what's going on in this country (the Confederacy winning a stealth war), it's really painful to listen to this stuff - the hopefulness hurts!
Then there is this - an ecstasy of anguish, bitter but still reaching for a transcendence of division...
Future blues (is he putting the guitar through a talk box)
This must be one of the most sonically radical Number 1 singles ever
Another favorite, wonderfully covered by S'Express
SLY & THE FAMILY STONE
There's A Riot Goin' On
(Edsel CD reissue)
Melody Maker, 1990?
The definitive reading of There's A Riot Goin' On is to be found in Greil Marcus' Mystery Train. Marcus invokes the folkloric figure of Staggerlee as the prototype of the superfly guy for whom criminality signifies total possibility. Breaking all the rules, Staggerlee escapes the fate (servitude, anonymity, death) assigned blacks by a white supremacist society, and wins it all -women, wealth, drugs, a court of sycophantic hangers-on. Staggerlee is the cultural archetype that connects Robert Johnson to Jimi Hendrix to Sly to the gangster rappers of today.
Smashing racial boundaries with an image and sound that merged bad-ass funk and hippy freak-out, Sly Stone triumphed with a secular gospel of affirmation, expressed in songs like "Everybody Is A Star", "Stand!", "Thank You Falettinme Be Mice 'Elf Agin". In 1970, like Staggerlee, Sly had it all. But suddenly, at the height of his fame, the euphoria soured; Sly disappeared into a miasma of drug
excess, unreliability and paranoia. It was from this mire that There's A Riot Goin' On emerged in late 1971.
Although the title alluded to the bitter racial conflict of the time, Riot was really about an interior apocalypse. The utopian hunger that fired Sly's music ultimately had to choose between two options: insurrection or oblivion. As Marianne Faithful once put it: "drugs kept me from being a terrorist... either I was going to have to explode out into violence or implode." Death or dope are ultimately Staggerlee's only destinations. According to Marcus, Riot defines "the world of the Staggerlee who does not get away...who has been trapped by limits whose existence he once would not even admit to, let alone respect".
Riot turns the Sly Stone persona inside out, inverts all the life-affirming properties of the Family's music. The sound of Riot is deathly dry, drained of all the joy and confidence that once fueled its fervour. This is funk-as-prison: locked grooves that simulate the impasses and dead ends faced by Afro-Americans. To get into this music requires, in Marcus' words "a preternatural sharpening of the senses". Submit to the sensory deprivation, and you come alive to the psychotic detail, the electrifying nuances of the playing and the vocal harmonies.
This totally wired sound has everything to do with the conditions under which "Riot" was recorded: a coked-out frightmare,with Sly and co staying up 4 nights at a time, the air thick with paranoia, everyone carrying guns. Being strung-out has a lot to do with Sly's vivid-yet-cryptic imagery and unearthly vocals: the sound of a soul in tatters, teetering on the edge of the void. The slurred, ragged rasp of "Africa Talks To You", the decrepit yodel of "Spaced Cowboy", are unnerving enough. But try the disintegrated death throes of "Thank You For Talkin' To Me Africa" for a glimpse of someone at the threshold of the human condition. A rewrite of "Thank You Falettinmebe Mice 'Elf Agin", this song turns the original's upful swagger into agonised intertia: the sound of going nowhere slow. Sly spits out the chorus with bitter, exhausted irony. The self-expression incarnated by Sly's persona is exposed as an act, a role he can no longer sustain, but a pantomime in which his audience would gladly cage Sly so that he might continue to live out their fantasies. The allusion to "Africa" hints that the fight for blacks to feel at home in America has succumbed to despair. Sly dreams of fleeing to the safe arms of the mother(land).
Riot set the agenda for early Seventies black pop, inspiring the ghetto-conscious soul of "Papa Was A Rolling Stone" et al. Sly, meanwhile, was all burnt-out, unable either to resurrect his pre-Riot poptimism or continue to dwell on the negative. For how can you turn eternal exile into a home? But Riot still burns, cold as ice.
Taking the cartoon continuum thing into consideration, I find this comical now rather than harrowing
On The Corner is surely a reply, a nod of the hat, almost imitation
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
Melody Maker, April 2 1988
Finally, in 2002, I got to meet the great man. I was in the U.K. for the summer to research Rip It Up and Start Again - after various unsuccessful efforts, I got a call rather peremptorily summoning me to Brighton the next day. Bird in hand, I thought - I hastened down there with some hastily prepared questions. The encounter was one of the more cantankerous interviews I've done - but in some ways that made it more interesting than a straightforward "here's how we formed, then we made our first record" type data-dollop. We got into debating the history and philosophy of rock - class dynamics - America versus England. A rather bristly, frictional dialogue. We were in a pub near the sea front and at a certain point, Thomas said, "I'm going to talk to my friends" and went over to a barstool and chatted to an old geezer with a dog. Rude! I sat there for a bit and then packed up my tape recorder. Went for a slash and on the way back, I thought, "Shall I say goodbye? Nah!". Caught the train back.
So not the most cordial of encounters, but I'm glad I did it. And whoever said visionary geniuses had to be sufferable?
Below is the tided-up Q and A of our chat.
I read this memoiristic essay by Charlotte Presler about Cleveland in the Seventies and she said that everybody in the scene was from an upper middle class background. Or even upper class.
"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 unsuccessfully 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...
In honour of the new RHCP doc, which is focused on Hillel Slovak, their tragically-died-young guitarist, and in further honour of Flea's jazz album, here are some writhings about the band.
Whose second album Freaky Styley I bought with faint hope after reading about them (slim pickings that year) only to be insufficiently whelmed.
They were apparently huge postpunk fans (something shown by the footage in the doc of their precursor bands, who are very Anglophile).
Green Gartside told me that at some music biz award ceremony, they came up to him burbling about the early Scritti stuff (I imagine what turned them on were the funky-slinky "PAs' and the other 4 A-Sides tunes rather than "OPEC-Immac)....
Keith Levene claimed that Flea auditioned to be in PiL after he, Levene, left, and was most disappointed that Levene was no longer in the band, since that was the prime reason he wanted to join.... and he did in fact contribute to Keith Levene's Violent Opposition, if I recall right ...
And obviously they got Andy Gill to produce their debut.
Which I have never thought to listen to until seeing this doc.
Although more voluminous than I remembered, the below are not the complete collation of my writhings about Red Hot Chilli Peppers.... on some other occasion, I did opine that the wordless vocalese in the middle of "Under the Bridge" were the most unpleasant recorded sounds emitted by a human throat in the entire 1990s.
I will say, Flea does seem like a a truly sweet geezer. But yeah... if the group did start with postpunk, you would have to say that not every pathway from a golden origin is a fruitful one.
The Red Hot Chilli Peppers
The Clarendon, Hammersmith, London
Melody Maker, March 5 1988
So the Clarendon faces closure, and yes it's a sad day for rock, another step in the drawn-out death of the London gig circuit, and where will the Buttholes and Bad Brains of this world play - but, here, tonight, sauna-sweltering in this rank sty of Grebo flesh, this post-punk meets pre-punk sewer, such a closure can only feel like an elementary and overdue sanitary measure.
This is The Red Hot Chilli Peppers' constituency, for sure. The Red Hot Chilli Peppers read like a good idea: an alliance of funk and metal, the best of both worlds, a doubling of pleasures (what drug experts call "potentiation"). But then look what happens when you mix funk and jazz - separately two of the finest things in life. Each undermines the other, mutes and dampens their respective effects.
The problem for the Chilli Peppers is that funk and metal are further away than ever, much further than in the age of funkadelia they hark back to. Metal has become monolithic, no longer beastly but cruelly hygienic, the proverbial sonic abattoir. And funk - who plays funk, these days? Modern black dance is assembled in the studio. This Organic Anti-Beatbox Band inevitably comes over a little dated.
The giveaway is their overbearing penchant for ye olde slap-bass. Once, around 1981, the sound of slap-bass was for me and all the other white-dopes-on-funk the very definition of ecstasy. Now slap-bass strikes me as lost, Claptonesque craft that should be allowed to slip quietly into disuse. After all, few black musicians play in that style anymore...
The Red Hot Chilli Peppers come across as a kind of National Lampoon's Gang Of Four. Body paint making them look like fluorescent salamanders, they have that generic hardcore look, neanderthal features combined with Bullworker-bodies, and they see their lame buffoonery as a major service to us and to the world. Like so many of these "wackeee" US bands, they combine sexism with a fervent loathing for racism. (All of them seem to have written at least one song about the genocide of the Red Indians.)
At their best, they're like a lumpen, sub-virtuoso approximation of Hendrix, funk fluency combined with rock's serrated edges. At their worst, they're like late Zappa, or a yob version of Firehose. This "funk" is too clenched, too trammeled by hardcore dynamics to approach maggot-brain diuretic gross-out.
There are some fab moments, like the great nervous tic of a chorus in 'Me And My Friends', rising up to buffet you in the face like surf. And the forthcoming LP is extremely fine*. Live, though, The Red Hot Chilli Peppers are too curvaceous and wriggly to be speed-metal, but too hasty and hamfisted to shimmy and wiggle like funk. They are neither carnal nor apocalyptic, neither swagger nor hurtle. It feels forced, albeit at times almost interestingly wrong.
* Is it though? Was it, though?
"Whoopee!", I exclaimed, on being presented "PSYCHEDELIC SEXFUNK LIVE FROM HEAVEN" (Picture Music International, œˆ9-99), "a chance to relive the third worst night of my life!". This was back in 1988 when the intolerably zany Red Hot Chili Peppers played the intolerably humid Clarendon (now deceased, doubtless as a sanitary precaution). This video is thankfully not a document of that hellish night, but consists of live excerpts from a gig at Long Beach Arena, intercut with "behind the scenes mayhem". The press release claims that these are so untamed and licentious that the video was awarded a 15 certificate, but the grainy shots of dressing room antics, Chad taking a shit, the drummer putting an Elastoplast on his chafed thumb, and the band gathering in a circle for a pre-match pow-wow session, hardly qualify as "Hammer Of The Gods" material. But then the Peppers are clean-cut, cleaned-up sorts these days. Music for them is a kind of sporting activity, a "healthy release of energy", and underneath the wacky hairdos they look like GI's. Onstage, they present a spectacle of taut, glistening musculature and relentless hyperactivity. Red Hot Chilli Peppers version of funk allows no scope for languor or "lazy carnality". If it's seldom flagrantly sexist "Stone Cold Bush", with its "she blows more than my mind" refrain is a notable exception), the Peppers' athletic sexuality is totally masculine, all thrust and pummel, exertion and "performance". The music too is all prowess and overkill, a sub-Hendrix muso-flash blur of slap-bass and finickity riffs. The unfavourable comparisons with Hendrix are compounded by their spoof trumpet version of "The Star Spangled Banner" - only twenty years too late.Village Voice has a good term for the Chilli Peppers/Faith No More/Urban Dance Squad/Electric Boys blend of rock and funk that neither grooves nor slams: "runk". It sounds like an unpleasant residue left behind by food processing. This video only confirms what I've known ever since that night at The Clarendon: runk is rank. METAL BREAKDOWN: The Funk-Metal phenomenon
20/20, 1990
by Simon Reynolds
When it comes to the USA's current birth explosion of funk-metal groups, all paternity suits should be filed with the Red Hot Chili Peppers: a "seminal" band in all senses of the word. Five years ago this Los Angeles group's Freaky Styley LP coined a sound, an attitude and an onstage dementia that has since inspired an entire genre.
First there was Faith No More from Northern California, with their torrid, overwrought fusion of metal, rap and funk, and their morbid fixation on the darker side of life. Faith No More rapidly overtook the Chili Peppers, and last year cracked the MTV mainstream with their Top Ten hit "Epic", an anthem-like encapsulation of their cartoon Nietzsche world-view.
In 1990, the funk-metal floodgates opened. Most of the time, the names tell you everything you need to know: Psychofunkapus, Scatterbrain, Limbomaniacs, Mindfunk, Sprawl, Sweet Lizard Illtet, Moneyspank, Electric Boys, Spin Doctors. All these bands are loosely aligned to the P-funk creed originally formulated by George Clinton and Bootsy Collins ("a creative nuisance… the recognition of stupidity as a positive force") as reactivated and reinterpreted by the Chili Peppers with their combination of zany antics, horny-like-a-mutha lyrics and elasticated funk-rock.
How is it that a generation of metalheads reared on Black Sabbath, Led Zep and Aerosmith have suddenly become turned on to Funkadelic, James Brown and Sly Stone? One reason for the shift towards funk was a reaction against the sterile impasse that metal had reached by the late Eighties. Heavy metal had undergone a striking regeneration during the Eighties, reforming its worst abuses and trimming off its flabby excesses. It even achieved a degree of raised consciousness with the apocalyptic protest of groups like Metallica and Anthrax.
But the thrash/speedmetal boom rapidly hit a dead end. With its high-velocity blur and self-flagellating S/M aesthetic, thrash was about as sexless and ungroovy as rock music can get. Light years from rock's R&B roots, thrash was the ultimate Aryan sublimation of metal. It was almost inevitable there would be a call for a reinfusion of 'blackness', a return to syncopation. Even mainstream metal groups have been lubricating their sound with a bit of funk fluency (Poison's "Unskinny Bop", Extreme's "Get the Funk out").
Another factor was the influence of rap: hip hop has set the agenda for US pop in much the same way that house has completely overhauled British chart pop. In particular, it was Def Jam's rap/metal phase (Run DMC, Beastie Boys, LL Cool J) that opened a lot of headbangers' ears. Also part of the 'crosstown traffic' of the late Eighties was the rise of black rock. Groups like Living Colour, 24-7 Spyz and Fishbone, coming from the opposite direction, have run head-first into the funk-metallers.
This connects with another reason for the rise of funk-metal: musicians' tendency to get bored easily. Mixing genres allows the muso to show off. Once upon a time, it was the blues solo that provided the pretext for exhibitionist feats of dexterity: with the funk-metallers, it's slap bass. In both cases, white musicians colonized a style that its black originators had almost unanimously left for dead. Contemporary black dance (house, swingbeat, rap) is technophile, happy to engage with state-of-the-art equipment. Funk-metal generally displays a Luddite techno-fear, following the Chili Peppers' "organic anti-beatbox" creed, which declares that audience pleasure is in direct ratio to the amount of flailing energy expended by the band.
Body-awareness is at the core of funk-metal. In part this is a reaction against the chaste, fleshless aura of most metal. Death metal, for instance, is carnographic rather than pornographic. Its histrionic crescendos are more nuclear detonations than orgasms. And partly it's that George Clinton's lewd and lubricious bad-ass persona somehow seems a more acceptable role model for the male libido than trad metal's penile dementia.
But funk-metal comprehends a range of contradictory attitudes to the body. On one hand, there's the West Coast's health-and-efficiency ethos--muscle-bound athleticism and the hardcore punk philosophy of straight-edge (no drink or drugs). Sweet Lizard Illtet sing of positive energy, rail against "merry-go round thrills" and aspire to the "honest bodily togetherness" of Afro-American culture. Other groups aspire to the debauchery and excess of a different West Coast culture. There's the apocalyptic aura of decadence entwined around Jane's Addiction, whose art-rock inflected brand of heavy metal brilliantly melds influences from funk, dub reggae and Eastern music. Or there's Moneyspank's pagan/voodoo vibes and sex-and-death lyrics. The Red Hot Chili Peppers' career has included body worshipping (they invariably perform with their shirts off to showcase their muscled physiques) and desecrating their body-temples: guitarist Hillel Slovak died of a drug overdose, while singer Antwan aka Anthony Kiedis cleaned up his act and exchanged over-indulgence for New Age eco-platitudes.
All funk-metal groups agree that one form of self-abuse is still legitimate: moshing, stage-diving and other forms of lemming-like behaviour are de rigeur. Funk-metal gigs seethe with sweaty male bonding. This is the genre's biggest defect--it's a boy's own affair. Not one of the score or more funk-metal bands includes a female musician. Admittedly, examples of outright sexism are surprisingly rare (one exception being Limbomaniacs whose Stinky Grooves LP includes songs like "Butt Funkin'" and "Porno"). But it's also true that the representation of sex in funk-metal is totally masculine--thrust-orientated, with no place for languor or tenderness. In many ways, it's an aggregation of the most phallocratic tendencies in the white rock and black funk traditions: Rick James meets Robert Plant.
Still, funk-metal earns a Brownie point for its anti-racist tendencies. Implicit in the musical miscegenation, these are often explicitly articulated in lyrics and interviews. The Chili Peppers even started a fashion for songs about the plight of the Native American with their "American Ghost Dance". That said, the pro-integration sentiments don't seem to have had much effect on the racial composition of the audiences or indeed of the bands themselves, who remain almost exclusively "white dopes on funk".
Red Hot Chili Peppersinterview
The Observer, September 29, 1991
One of the most hyperactive rock scenes in the United States is a genre called 'funk-metal' or 'funk 'n' roll'. Groups like Faith No More, Fishbone and Living Color have broken into the charts; scores of funk-metal bands, with names like Scatterbrain and Primus are waiting in the wings. But the pioneers of funk-metal (a fusion of hard rock aggression and Seventies funk swagger) are the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Back in early Eighties Los Angeles, only they (and the all-black Fishbone) were exploring this currently overcrowded terrain. The core of the Chili Peppers, Anthony Kiedis and Flea Balzary, were hanging out in the vaguely bohemian milieu around Hollywood Boulevard. Kiedis was a 'nomadic poet'; Balzary played bass for a hardcore punk band called Fear. The duo first turned on to black music when they encountered the 'punk-funk' outfit Defunkt. But Kiedis only considered getting involved in music himself after hearing rap. After forming the Chili Peppers, he developed a drawled vocal style between rap and singing. "When we started fusing funk and rock, we never intended to spearhead a movement," recalls Kiedis. "It's not as though we're the first to mix funk and rock. Long before us there was Sly Stone and Parliament/Funkadelic. At the early shows, people used to say, 'you guys are really into P-Funk, right?' "At that point, we hadn't heard that stuff. But then we really got into it, and eventually we got George Clinton to produce the second album, Freakey Stylee." The album's title captured the flavour of the Chili Peppers' zany on-stage antics, notably their penchant for performing naked (except for socks pulled over their genitals). By 1987 and their third album. The Uplift Mojo Party Plan, the Chili Peppers were calling themselves the Organic Anti-Beatbox Band, a dig at Eighties black dance genres such as rap and house which rely on hi-tech samplers and sequencers. Pitting themselves against the studio-based, producer-dominated dance pop of the day, the Chili Peppers complained about its sterility, and called for a return to 'dirty' Seventies funk. In interviews, they came over more than a little Luddite. "We're not against music that depends on technology," clarifies Kiedis. "It's just that we prefer to be an all-live, hands-on band. But my favourite band is Public Enemy and they use samplers and drum machines. There's a lot of rap music that's ridiculously funky. What I don't like is house music - it's the most blasphemous, soulless, cold-blooded noise I ever heard." With their creed of sweaty exertion, the Chili Peppers inspired heavy metal's rediscovery of 'groove' after the late Eighties, during which metal had become increasingly sclerotic as it lost touch with its roots in R & B, and reached its apotheosis with the sadomasochistic thrills of thrash metal. "That kind of ferocity is one-dimensional," says Kiedis. "It's very male music, but without any sexual energy." The Chili Peppers' vibe is far from chaste. They once declared that "we want our music to give you an erection." On their fifth album. Blood Sugar Sex Magik, they propound a hazy philosophy in which lusty hedonism and New Age spirituality are conflated. Their back-to-nature rhetoric carries through to an interest in tribalism and an admiration for Native American folkways. "The album title is an eloquent but abstract description of how we feel," says Kiedis. "We live in a world packed with desensitising forces, that strip the world of magic. And music can help restore a sense of magic. The world is full of negativity, but we fight back with positivity. We're inspired by oceans, forests, animals, Marx Brothers films. We can't help but project uplifting vibrations, because we love each other so much and get off on playing together."
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^This Kiedis interview done on the phone and I remember him being not exactly friendly. Around this time I interviewed Metallica for The Observer, also on the phone (and the drummer I think), although for reasons I can't recollect, this never ran. And yet another Observer piece, this time done in person, but with not-the-singer but someone else, was Faith No More. Jane's Addiction were also interviewed around this time, for The New York Times, pegged around Lollapalooza. I was really doing a sort of run-through a certain type of big-on-MTV but just before grunge type band, I guess.
