Return To The Source

Regular readers (Yeah, I know...) will understand that despite the overwhelmingly cool music that I mused to write about on here (and still will, someday)I've always had a terrible aesthetic hangover for the gloriously uncool genre of goa/psytrance that just won't shift, no matter how long and hard I stare at my jazz fingered, spastic-in-time dancing. With this in mind, I recently bought the Return to the Source DBL CD from the heady days of 1995.

The first CD is great moving boxes music and since I've recently moved house it's been on quite a bit.

The music, perhaps the whole genre, is like musical infantilism; resolutely uncool, totally unsophisticated and utterly naive. Just reading the utopian spin of the booklet makes you remember just how long ago 1995 was: people still believed that the whole Megadog / Shamanarchy / Fraser Clarke tangent might actually make the world a better place - contrast that with the thick, delirious bubbling from the dubstep scene (and the associated goddess worship of those proclaiming bassline house as an alternative) and you can see that the zeitgeist has shifted further in the last 15 years or so than anyone might have predicted: no wonder Throbbing Gristle are back on the scene, they must feel like they're returning home to the same issues as before - a full circle that deviated for just a second into a hyperdelic youth...

And now we're heading into recession. Of course, we are. Critics will no doubt suggest that the music is reflecting this change but I'm not so sure that it's not the opposite; that the music is in fact prefiguring the change. Without the dark recesses of dubstep's clattering, there would be no recession.

I heard that the Shackleton record made Ricardo Villalobos cry.

The french-inspired Super Discount spin on electro might save us a little - Daft Punk probably came a bit early - but I'm predicting a new Industrial renaissance so expect more nasty Buchenwald-themed minimalist albums and strangulated SPK samples for a few years yet. They're even releasing supercharged editions of Ramleh albums, for godsakes.

In the meantime, I'll be waving my hands in the air to Doof while putting up bunkbeds. Interesting times.

The Process

Just bought this for 99p at the Ebay mine. Love those old Panther covers. This kind of book was never good enough to merit a glossy cover but with the beaten generation of paperpacks it reads just fine. People seem to forget that the cover actually relates to the readability; must be loads of old Sci-Fi paperbacks I'd never even think of enjoying if they'd had nasty desk-topped covers.

The Ages of Ontological Musicology 2

Older readers may remember this, my run down of the ages of musical understanding. It ended with a heart-warming, energy-sapping descent into nostalgia and vaguely oedpipal murk that seemed destined to pre-determine future musical understanding and perhaps even further decline. Attention being redirected to other things (home improvements, promotions etc) allowed quasi-nostalgia (nostalgia for something we never had) to creep in, almost undetected. At the time of writing (Dec 2006) that seemed to be the end point, the last development but now I've had a re-think, things have changed and I think there's another stage...

13 The Post-Idealistic

This in some ways echoes my earlier sentiments on emotional bulimia, in that the stage is characterised by an acute understanding that emotional manipulation through music is happening but should not be rejected. Thus I've found that increasingly I'm listening to music which reflects my emotional state (at the moment this is dreamy techno minimalism or electro - The Field, Pan-Pot, Villalobos on the one hand and Simian Mobile Disco, CSS, Crystal Castles etc on the other) rather than music which allows me to experience emotions i'm not currently feeling - i.e. I find it difficult at the moment to engage with 'sad' music or 'angry' music. I find myself irritated by music that isn't (even cheesily) 'happy' music (which kinda kills off 3/4 of my collection).

I know the deep-seated psychodynamics of this situation are easy enough to spot for those that know me but it seems an improvment (though, of course, every stage seems like an improvement on the last) to drag myself away from urFolk miserablism or nasty twists or undanceable beatings in favour of, well, a softer surface to skid around on. I've even bought some Fabric CDs and play them all the time, happily jumping around the house until my calves pop.

The Idealistic is a clear return to the The Zeitgeist (see earlier Stages) and is perhaps motivated by much the same thing, with a spin that takes in The Forage and parts of The Inclusive and focuses primarily on affect: music as a tool of manipulation rather than emotional discovery. I'm entering the self-medication stage and it feels fine. The Idealistic stage presents an alternative reality, one that seems graspable, if improbable.

And the good good thing is that now I've returned to the club scene in some small ways (still can't handle a school night) I've discovered that loads of other people around my stage are returning too...

Audio.Outings

When I can be arsed - slumping like a burst spleen at the moment but getting there - I'm gonna have to start posting about my rediscovered love for all things techno but, until then, enjoy with me this site - full of MP3s of tracks that I used to have on vinyl but sold due to malnutrition and carnage and immediately wished I hadn't, if only so I could now do gutter style photo-shoots of my records looking pretty ("If you could just tip your...yessss...and then maybe the shoulder strap could...mmm")

Spiderman of the Rings

Boardroom, Maxwell House, midnight, 14 February 2007:

Geologist, Panda Bear, Avey Tare and Deakin are trapped on the boardroom table in large purple-glazed vases, just their heads and shoulders visible. Davis Bradley CEO, Roger (not that one) Daltrey and Erol Alkaloid are discussing the latest Animal Collective album. It can be heard from a stereo in the corner of the room.

Daltrey "I dunno... I just get this feeling that there's something, well, evil about this..."

Erol Alkaloid gives out a long audile sigh (later recorded and packaged by Touch records in a triple CD with fold out sleeve) "It's hardly a giant centipede, Rog..." He glances over to Davis, who has remained, eyes closed, in a meditation posture for the last seventeen minutes.

"I know, I know... but it's still a little spiky..."

"This coming from the guy who didn't even hear the first two albums"

Panda and Avey blink in sync. Deakin flexes his shoulders. He thinks he can detect a slight weakness.

Daltrey smiles, holds his hands up in the Masonic sign of distress that he only recently learned (cf Daltrey Does Diptheria). "I'm just saying that my guy might put up more of a fight. These guys, " he indicates the captured Collective "can come along if they wish... I like the chanting and the kids, kids are pretty zeitgeisty..."

"There's no children on-" begins Panda Bear before being silenced with a withering stare from Erol.

"Your guy? You mean Mr Deacon?"

"Dan, yeah. Has the same sort of Sesame Street vibe but, I dunno, smoother edges..."

Erol's head sneers so hard his neck almost snaps. "You're going to mention Kraftwerk again aren't you?"

"Kraftwerk, Cluster... yeah, why not? That 80s sound is very now."

The Animal Collective open and close their mouths like guppies.

Erol smiles. "Zeitgeisty."

Daltrey senses atipathy like bees sense hairspray. "Ok, how about Chris Carter, that track on TGs Third and Final report, AB/7A. Would you be happier with that reference?"

"You know I would," Any mention of Throbbing Gristle always sends Erol into minor paroxyms. He kissed his first living girl at a Throbbing Gristle gig and got no bite-backs whatsoever. "But I don't see how you think 12 minute songs are going to-"

Davis Bradley stands up, thumping his fist on the table (later, he'll recoil from this blow with coriander poultice and goat's milk enema but not now, not now.), "The figures coming in say the kids'll pay up for 12 mins quicker than they will for 3. Same price, quadruple the value... Download only. We're thinking of putting every song we do into this kind of format. Blow the competition out the water. Think of the market, gentlemen. Forces, gentlemen, forces."

Davis sits back down, resumes his meditation.

Roger senses there's an initiative to grab. "That's just it...song-cycles. Wham City is really three songs, ebbing and flowing, chasing each other's tails..."

Erol sits back. "We could give it a go, I suppose. Don't get me wrong, I like Mr Deacon it's just... well you don't think he could come up with a, mmm, groovier name?"

"His Mum won't be happy. Have you met her? Fierce lady. Nought to a hundred in three seconds."

Erol laughs, glances up at the Animal Collective boys. "What do you reckon guys? Fancy a sing along on this guys record?"

"We just want to go home."

"That's settled then. Roger, can you make the necessaries? I'll cancel the Tuvans. I want these two records coming out simultaneously, rough twins, like two drawing pins..."

Amanda Barrie, PA to Bradley emerges from under the table, still scribbling in shorthand. "Sorry, I've forgotten how to do vowels again. Could you repeat that last bit?"

"Eh?"

"Starting from," she flicks through her notepad, "Ah yes 'hardly a giant centipede'"




Listen to Dan Deacon here or here or here or here or anywhere here

Wham City on the latest album is my favourite track of the moment; if I was young enough I'd giggle and wriggle but nowadays I just raise a single eyebrow in appreciation, close the curtains and try to remember how to do a headspin.

Crystal Castles on Skins

With music TV dead in the water, maybe this is the way forward. Get bands to play on your favourite TV shows or films. The best example of this must still be Nick Cave's on-stage thoughts during Wim Wenders Wings of Desire which ought to have opened some floodgates. How difficult could it be to slip the odd member of Hollyoaks or Eastenders into the back of an Ice Bird Spiral gig? I'd have thought that the Ice Birds keeling, blurred, unheimlich sound might work really well as a backdrop to the latest Ishereallygoingoutwithher? trauma on the Square and perhaps better still if they played, unmentioned, in the background as a disorientated, blood-drenched, soon-to-be-Casualtied stab victim lurched around in the foreground, knocking over drinks and grunting into a mobile phone...

The Summer Special could always have that dozy pair from Hollyoaks in the City lurching around some Wolf Eyes curated noizefest in Austin.

In other news, Kempernorton's first CD is out now in all good shops (actually, from just the one, less good shop), though the bugger hasn't got round to sending me one to review yet...

Crystal Castles - Magic Spells

Crystal Castles - Untrust Us

Blackbeard Dub

I go through phases with reggae. In recent months I've been listening to old Roots and Dub elpees almost exclusively for the purposes of home relaxation, or when 'chilling out', if you will. The rest of the family are somewhat ambivalent towards this, but at least there's no outright hostility this time. Occasionally the kids might pick-up on a tune, though usually for entirely the wrong reasons. The Congos' "La La Bam-Bam" proved popular for a while, but only because they thought the words were "what a yellow bum bum" resulting in much sniggering whenever dad was caught singing along to it whilst cooking the dinner.

Pretty much anything that went through the mixing desk at King Tubby's, Channel One or The Black Ark is fine with me, although I've been finding great comfort in music created closer to home, notably the work of UK-based dub meastro Dennis 'Blackbeard' Bovell, who some might be familiar with for his production work with post-punkers The Pop Group and The Slits, or his musical arrangements for Lynton Kwesi Johnson's dub poetry albums, or his pioneering development of the Lovers Rock style. But he was a master of the dub mix too, and occasionally got the opportunity to make a whole album to himself, such as "Strictly Dub Wize" (1978) and "I Wah Dub" (1980), featuring the kind of warm, fluid fluctuations of equalisation, reverb and echo that we take for granted from a Tubby's mix, yet offering a slightly gentler and more musically varied set of ideas, possibly owing to the fact that most of the riddim tracks were derived from the soulful, melodious arrangements associated with his Lovers Rock output.

One of Bovell's most successful productions was Janet Kaye's "Silly Games" (a UK #2 hit in the summer of '79), which I'm sure many people of a certain age will have fond memories of, particularly for those dangerously high notes Janet hits near the end of the song. Many years later I was surprised to discover an album called "Dub Dem Silly", which is basically Janet Kaye 'in dub'. It's a beautiful record, full of Bovell's rich dubwise invention, yet hearing "Silly Games" stripped down into "Silly Dub" with Kaye's vocals fractured and scattered across that disrupted riddimscape for the first time was a strangely moving experience. The spaces opened out by the dub mix seemed to mirror some inner feelings of loss. Nostalgic familiarity glimpsed through the shattered lens of uncertainty.

Dub can mess with the mind (even without herbal assistance).

Blackbeard - Ska-Be-Doo-Za

Winston Edwards & Blackbeard - Ronald Biggs The Great Train Robber

Janet Kaye/Dennis Bovell - Silly Dub

Hallam Foe / 2 Days In Paris

Finally got round to seeing this on DVD and I guess Hallam Foe is exactly like you probably imagine it will be, if you've seen any trailers or interviews or read anything about it. Not bad but not something I can be bothered to write about. Mice hat, which reminded me on an old Yeovil saying 'Badgers never let go'.

A few tracks from the soundtrack here



2 Days in Paris on the other hand was tremendously unsettling since it seemed to be an only slightly skewed transposition of conversations I've just had onto the screen in a film which lopes around like it's been made by Woody Allen's younger cousin. I can't honestly tell you if this film was good or bad (and why would you care?) but it made us giggle like drains, even if I'm guessing that for almost everyone else on the planet it could be a little annoying.

Like my own life, this definitely would be improved by some zombies and cheerleaders.

Juno

I'm normally a kind of miserable person to go to the cinema with. I've probably seen about ten films where I haven't been distracted / depressed by some flaw or absence or gentle intrusion. Normally, I come out and say things like: "It was really good until..." or "If only they'd not bottled the ending..." or "Maybe if they'd added some zombies or cheerleaders...". But I went to see Juno and I have to say it's more or less perfect. Every character is likeable and more or less believable, every performance a little lesson in how to kook-out without turning into an emetic. It's what I want to think all Americans are like.

It's exactly the kind of thing I like in music and film; something that gets so close to utterly rubbish that you can almost feel the tension between the characters - one false move, one missed cue and this is the kind of thing that might make me queasy, in the same way that Orbital sometimes got so close to Jean Michel Jarre it could be frightening listening to an album for the first time. Even the soundtrack works with the characters rather than against them - it's fey as hell but it fits perfectly with the gentle rolls of the film, bouncing along with Juno in neat little quantum Converse jumps.

It's never annoying, even when I wanted it to be. It ends like you'd want it to end, not like other people think you'd want it to end and it deals with the potentially tricky problem of teenage pregnancy with a delicacy and charm that gives another perspective entirely on a woman's right to choose. I'm not even sure if it'd be improved by extra zombies and cheerleaders.

The Moldy Peaches - Anyone Else But You

Ribcage

I've always been annoyed that more artists don't try to be good once they get fame and fortune, as if the lure of commercialism contaminates them to the extent that their memory fails, refuses to let them return to a time when they were genuinely entranced by the possibilities of music, of experimentalism, of pushing boundaries (though personally I've always preferred it when boundaries are shifted just a little sideways). I guess Radiohead had a good go - though they still gave off a whiff of trying too hard to be hard, of relying too much on fans buying things regardless. And then there's all the contract-breakers, like Metal Machine Music (I know the jury's still out on that one but I'm coming down on the side of those who think Lou couldn't resist a final, petulant gesture - like that footballer who said he was going to score an own goal during some tricky contract negotiations). Same probably goes for Neil Young, who may well have lost a Neil Young look-a-like competition around the time of Trans and maybe even Aphex Twin, who clearly got colder feet than most after the first album.

But, anyway, it's always annoyed me that bands never really opened up after they'd got their success - The Shamen got to hit the pop charts and then sort of died a slow, merepop death (okay, there was the Terence McKenna track that might have messed with a few minds and I guess the Hempton Manor album but that just seemed like they'd run out of ideas). Seems to me there are worlds of opportunity missed out there:

Westlife's recreation of classic Routes From The Jungle breakbeat vibe - if their producers can make them that smooth, they can make them clanky and brittle and exhuasting.

Girls Aloud covers album - you remember this, right? I still think they should do a whole album of The The covers even though I'm off medication now...

Rachel Stevens fronting Neubauten - she's be sexier than Lydia Lunch and her soft, robotic personality would suit the boys well, I think.

David Bowie - actually, don't try anything David, you can be the excception; you have children now and it's always kinda embarassing for everyone.

Cascada offering up a Shackleton remix album (not so unlikely since legend has it that the guy behind Burial is also the guy behind Cascada who's also the guy behind most of the Belgian New Beat records of the late 80s/ early 90s)

Newton Faulkner releasing a minimal tech-house album on 4 one-sided heavyweight 12"s in a black velvet case with an octopus eating fried eggs embossed on it.

And why didn't Robbie Williams just release an album of instrumental doom-sludge-Earth-y metal?

Which brings me to todays track:

Dubfire - Ribcage

This guy used to be in the ultra-popular Deep Dish (and probably still is) but in his solo guise he's pushing different buttons and this is pleasantly rumbling, broken, machine-funk reminiscent of other, more 'arty' and credible minimalist producers and not unlike the Neubauten / Lydia Lunch track Thirsty Animal alluded to above. Okay, maybe a stretch too far but the bass sounds like I imagined the bass would sound before I'd heard the Neubauten track and heard it was a ribcage being pummelled. I'd be surprised if there was no link between the two tracks, even one that was largely unconscious.

The name - Dubfire - is a little crap but credit should be given for returning; wonder who else'll give it a go?

Notes on The Animal War

Based on a once recurring dream I had that has now re-recurred:

Notes on The Animal War.
Chapter 2: A bender in the making.

It didn't take long for the cats to work out thermonuclear weapons. It was guessed that way: Professor Cranberry, of the Bio-labs, set the idea down way back in the 70s.

'Y'see, there's something peculiar about the feline neurology. Something seems to be missing here. From the records. The computer's creaking, of course, but that doesn't cover all the blips. The records have been altered, I'm sure of it, and the only things I can think who would possibly have anything to gain are the cats themselves...'



Cranberry got called a crank and had to call it a day. The Bio-labs gave him a generous pension; told him it'd be better all round if he just turned a blind eye. He gave up on cats, went quite mad.

They Louis Wained him, cut him loose, hurled abuse at him in a rain of paws and catnip calls. By the end, the fruitcakes from the Ministry of Health got him carted and then pumped full of drugs. He claimed by the end of the first round of medication he 'could hardly breathe.' Paranoia, they said (they actually said it was furballs) and dumped him in the secure unit with people who thought they were Elvis.

And later, at Cwmdonkin Park in Swansea, some small glue-sniffed boys looked up at a sign that used to say:

No Dogs Allowed

But had been altered to read:

Only Dogs Allowed

Everyone thought it better not to mention it; to blame the kids from the Valleys. No one suspected that there was a militant band of canine maniacs already plotting against the dominant species...

And here we are now, with the cats getting the edge over the rest, as Professor Cranberry had perviously suggested. Anybody who's anybody has their nose in his book 'Feline Neuropsychology and the Garage Disease' trying to figure out a plan. The cats had taken several minor cities by Sunday the 19th and Chief of Staff McGovern was quoted yesterday as saying: 'The cats themselves, led we think by James Crawley, are increasingly looking like they will eventually use either bacterial warfare - possibly anthrax - or thermonuclear technology. Either way, we have two major decisions to make: do we attempt a swift counter-attack right now or do we send more of our, let's say it, fairly pitiful negotiators to their doom. Personally, I don't see how it makes anything any better to receive lungs through the mail. These cats are disturbed, there's no doubt. We should attack without further delay.'

James Crawley was a sly tabby, known since the very early days of the Doolittling because of a live TV appearance when he swore at Bamber Gasgoine. 'Bamber, you're a fuckanine,' he said on a day time TV show. James was thought to have an IQ 'somewhere in the mid 260s' - Govt. Animal Intelligence Dept. - and was also known to have something of a bad attitude to women in particular and humans in general. James ran for Feline Parliament initially and then dropped out to work behind the scenes as something of a political agitator. Commentators at the time suggested he was 'mid way between Abbie Hoffman and Hodgkinson's disease' - The Sunday Times. Despite thorough psychoanalysis during James' brief prison sentence (for aiding and abetting the abuse of alcohol by minors), the source of James's malcontent with regard to humans was as yet unmarked, though Dr. Carny suggested that perhaps 'there was a minor complex evolved from losing his right eye in a gardening accident'. To this day, James' thoughts on gardening have remained unclear.


Cat Stevens - Peace Train

Cat Stevens - Wild World

Which is obviously partly a ridiculous / obvious failure to make a conceptual link but also included because it was used in the final scenes of Skins which is coming back soon...

3D Death Chase

"When, suddenly and without warning, 2D was not enough..."

Meme Thing

Meme thing that's been doing the rounds, via Doppelganger and Kek and Gutter and Dom and everyone. 10 records that you don't want to admit are lurking at the back of your collection... or else at the lower end of your hard drive, obscured by deliberately incorrect MP3 tagging...

Most of these I've had Vinyl versions of, at one point or another and now retain in MP3 form at least. Irregular readers will know that many of my actual records disappeared or were scratched to pieces in a savage ex-girlfriend attack circa 1995.

1. David Essex - everything really, but especially Hold Me Close and the mighty Rock On.

2. Godley and Creme - Under My Thumb. The perfect single so far about a woman throwing herself out of a train. The electronic backing seethes with menance in a way that Nine Inch Nails never quite manage.

3. Iron Butterfly - In-A-Gadda-Vida. I'm just waiting for these guys to come back into fashion.

4. Paul McCartney - No More Lonely Nights. Because is reminds me of freezing my tits off waiting for a girl to finish her paper round. I had to jump out of a thirty foot tree because of this song.

5. Paul Young - Love Will Tear Us Apart. Not sacrilege at all. I prefer this to the original in almost every way. Lovely hair, put to music.

6. Natasha Bedingfield - Chasing Cars. The Snow Patrol cover that caught me in a loose moment and won't let go. Trust me, I've tried to shake it but the little fellah hangs on in there and keeps nagging at me. I find myself humming this on trains, sometimes with my eyes closed.

7. Mathew Wilder - Break My Stride. The sound of smug set to music. Later on, he became the voice of Ling in Mulan.

8. Marc Almond/Bronski Beat - I Feel Love. My first foray into the 10" maxi-single and the gayest record ever made, apparently. My second foray was a Gaye Bikers On Acid EP, which might be a semantic/linguistic trace for the Freudians / Lacanians out there to follow. My third 10" was Phorward, by The Shamen, which may or may not buck the trend. Actually, I still play this all the time, even when people are around so I'm not sure this really counts as a guilty pleasure. Still, like an 8 year old sitting on Kays catalogue underwear models, this feels vaguely wrong in a way I can't describe.

9. Divine - Walk Like A Man. See above. Triple it.

10. Phil Oakley and Georgio Moroder - Together In Electric Dreams. The first song I remembering being in love to. The girl looked a bit like Fallon, from Dynasty (the first one: see below) and never asked me to jump out of a tree once.



Records I didn't include because they were my parents': David Soul, Cat Stevens, Bread, Neil Diamond, Foreigner, Pilot (I love Magic too Gutter!).

Gown - For the Maples

Many thanks to the great Three Lobed Recordings for sending me a preview copy of Gown's latest grammaphone record, For The Maples . It's pretty impressive stuff, with Gown tag teaming up with the Sunburned Hand Of The Man girls and boys to create an album that lurches seamlessly (is that even possible? perhaps lurching negates seamlessness...) from almost pastoral guitar textures to roaring Raccoo-oo-oon rumbles. At times, this sounds like a better recorded early Sonic Youth but it's a little more far-reaching than this, makes more sense played straight through; letting the air fizz, letting the guitars breathe.

Worth checking out the rest of the Three Lobed Catalogue, I think; it seems like they have a real style and, well, ethic about them. This release comes in chunky vinyl with a glass mastered CD (okay, no idea what glass mastered might mean) and a silkscreened cover. I have a few of their releases, including the excellent l'un marquer contre la moissonneuse by wooden wand and the vanishing voice, which I think Kek gave me as well as my favourite Sunburned release The Mylar Tantrum. If you have any, give these people some money; these kind of labels ought to make you feel warm inside and, one day, your post-angular psycheDelia derbyguitar scrawl might find it's way to their door, begging for entry (and begging for etching)onto one of their slabs. Or else, if you're that way inclined, pretty much all these mostly limited releases are destined to shed tears on eBay a few years from now when people just like you suddently come into money and start scrabbling for a little piece of early 21st century history.

Here's a preview of For The Maples:

"Taylor's Jam"

Woofers, Tweeters, Raptures

Spent a good deal of last night puzzling over this key question / Spinal Tap conundrum: what do the numbers on a stereo volume button represent? My new stereo goes up to 30 (which is really loud) but I'm not sure what that means. It can't be some absolute measure of loudness - each number can't relate to a particular decibel level because even at the same number different CDs are louder or quieter, as always. So if there is no absolute relationship between the numbers on my stereo and actual loudness is there instead a relative relationship? Does 10 relate to 10 more than the original level on the CD?

I know, I know... but it's been a long week and the sad thing is someone out there will actually know the answer to this.

The first track I played? This one:

Shackleton - Blood on my hands (villalobos mix)

pilfered from here

Twin Infinitives

Songs that come as twins. Both of these conceptually the same. Different spins on the same template. Both sluggish, Loploping, frazzled. The female voices running in, with and against the beats, the slurred delivery reflecting shellshocked Nicaraguans or drunken South Bank forays. Villalobos and Coil stretching parameters and humanising music that can be unsettlingly alien (Coil generally masquerading as black elves, Villalobos letting a robotic sheen drift over him). Actually, that's not quite true. These tracks take care to humanise music that is already human - neither of these artists ever fully embrace(d) the machine-ethic of techno, there's always a radical, spinning, error-strewn basis to their music and these tracks simply emphasise this to people who don't listen too hard.

Coil - Things Happen

A Yousendit shellshocker

Ricardo Villalobos + Andrew Gillings - Andruic and Japan

A zShare gurning

In case you were wondering.

Dark Day

"The nudes were in the forest waiting for the big barge. Then came the siphon under the tree. There was a still life with an arm by the red statuette. And two women with a bird. One of them was Big Julie. The two girls took to their bicycles. They went to see the snowman. With Duck Alice and the Drum Kitten. Automatic Irene and Willy Nilly nearly caught the hook and ladder before the crow began to budge. They knew it wouldn't take the bait."

Dark Day - Nudes In The Forest

A Yousendit steaming

Willy Nilly is an underrated lyric in casio-driven steam-techno from the early 80s. As far as I can see, Dark Day is still out there somewhere, must check out what he's doing now. In another life, Soft Cell became isolate and insecure while Dark Day ravaged the charts and got this covered by Leona Lewis.

Big Black Face

more sleeve-faces here

Big Black peel session here

There are only really 3 or 4 bands that I wanted to see live and never got to. Big Black were one of them. After Albini ditched the drum machine, I sort of lost interest so never saw the short-lived Rapeman or even Shellac.

The drum machine was my favourite bit.

Accordian House

Conversation overheard today, boy talking to a nonplussed girl:

"Course, you can't buy a trombone off ebay..."

"?"

"Brass off ebay? You're kidding me... Think of the postman. Post-person, whatever."

"_"

"Bought an accordian off there once; completely empty inside..."

"You or-"

"The case. Jesus..."

Which reminded me of my favourite accordian house anthemn of 2007.

Samim - Heater

Que Belle Epoque 2006

This is supposed to be an Mp3 blog after all. Here's Mr Villalobos doing his warm and fuzzy thing, from the Que Belle Epoque Ep.

Ricardo Villalobos - Que Belle Epoque 2006

NYE Amsterdam

Spent New Year in Amsterdam and ended up at the above, dancing like a bag of spastic elbows all night at the mysterious Ruigoord, an old hippie commune / hangout about 22km outside Amsterdam (that 22km seems a long way at 5 in the morning on freezing New Year's day). A great barnstar venue, in a village full of fog and fireworks and odd sculptures and old hippy buses and an old church that they've turned into some kind of psychedelic temple, complete with a DJ mixing dutch folk with tribal techno and oddly affecting Snow Patrol covers. Reminded me a lot of the old Megatripolis nights at Heaven, with any number of people who could be Frazer Clarke's progeny bouncing around like machine elves, tossing firecrackers and generally grinning themselves an injury.

The music was good too: none of yer poncy dubstep or minimal here, just balls-to-the-wall techno and trance - I'm as headnoddingly awed as the next man to the lure of a Villalobos remix (that Fabric 36 album is a killer, isn't it?: constantly skidding along the divide between pretension and genius / delirium and death-eating) - but sometimes (and NYE is one of those times) you just want sound to be energy, you want to feel the drums in your eyes and you want multi-coloured hippy girls dancing around you like their beads depend on it...

I buggered my leg with so much dancing...

NOTE TO SELF: adopt less frantic, less bouncy dance style for next year.

The night ended when we managed to catch a lift back to Amsterdam with some decidely dodgy, bourbon quoffing homeboy ravers in a car that seemed somehow whittled.

Anyway, the pics come courtesy of Rob Triskele's site (most of my pictures look like they've been to the cleaners). I'm in there somewhere!

Dr Edward Moolenbeek

First heard of this guy via the Hafler Trio part of the book of interviews Tape Delay and assumed he was a fiction until he turned up at my place of work three days ago, taking a seminar in the archaeology of sound. Didn't get to hear his lecture (there was a minor student explosion in the Senior Boys Common Room which required more or less instant attention) but I did get to speak to him in the car-park afterwards and we discussed his work with the Hafler Trio or "Half-wits," as he affectionately calls them (something about the royalties for a recording of an turtle synapse). They sound like a wild bunch; Chris Watson recording the precise moment (the mathematics went beyond me after the first graph, drawn in the air with a frazzled claw) that he became addicted to parmesan ("a parmesan addict is the perfect metaphor for control"), Andrew McKenzie catching himself lost in music while taping the silences off daytime tv, all three of them catching a temporary strain of marburg while fishing for crabs in a Creech St Michael pond...

He smiled as he told these stories but he seemed a little bitter at how things had worked out. The Hafler Trio became a multi-million selling band only after he left (no real surprise; sadly he's not a poster boy) and he blinked a little too much when I mentioned the impending Hafler's Big Tops greatest hits release, soon to be ripping through the Christmas album charts.

Still, he warmed a little when he talked about his work with the Blank Workshop and I said I'd help spread the word.

Some Hafler albums (Ed said you should download everything you can because they deserve it - I, of course, couldn't possibly comment except to say that, with these big boys, the music and the packaging are a seamless whole):

((((((Links Gone)))))

Don't want the Halfer Trio to become another GutterGate.

The Cranes Across The Sky (Burial)

Had the Burial album for awhile but hadn't really got round to listening to it - as background music it doesn't work because it is background music, not wallpaper or Eno but literally the music of the background.

(Insert here a mix of the following: half-heard, calpol drips, dopplereffect car sounds, soliloquy for the M25 raves, rain-drenched taxi ranks, light pollution, soul-munching beats etc)

All true, of course and it's almost impossible to believe a kind of music that is less responsive to ambiguity in its reading: it is all those things above and intended to be and seems utterly resistant to any further understanding or philosophy. No interpretation necessary, not even when you consider that, in interview, Burial gives up that much of the input and images stem from meta-memory, that he never personally experienced the rave culture he's memorialising. This makes perfect sense; the vocal snatches are like the end product of Chinese Whispers; old e-soaked ravers on a permanent comedown, awaiting the results of longitudinal studies and neurological tests into how ecstacy effects their memory.

There's the Tricky comparisons, of course but in tracks like this

Burial - endorphin

A Younsdenit DrownedSoundWorlding

I keep hearing Cranes, especially Cranes as heard under hash and bio-yogurt; Cranes as de Clerambault syndrome. The same smeared vocals, child-like echoes, the sound of calpol sliding onto a spoon in the middle of the night...

Which then led me to the image of the cranes flying overhead at the beginning of Lautreamont's Maldoror - Burial inhabits the same kind of world as Maldoror; half-real, half-imagined, schematic and partly skewed, sidereal. The same world transposed to a resolutely urban environment (one thing with Burial, it's impossible to imagine greenery when listening to it, the colours that are synaesthically beamed in are almost all shades of blue and grey and black - like some vaguely Ballardian motorway junction or conference centre that never ends).

No trees, no lakes except those caused by ruptures in concrete, no leaves, no grass.

But mostly, the greatest impression I get with Burial is that this is music that allows interruptions and absences - you can easily imagine the tracks skipping slightly or stopping and starting midway through and it wouldn't destroy the atmosophere of the track. There isn't much music that doesn't depend to a certain extent on flow but for this watery album flow could be absent entirely and I doubt anyone would notice. A bad mp3 rip might even enhance the spaciousness because Burial seems to be about holes, about absence. A few seconds of silence as an i-pod struggles and whirrs seems to me apt for this album and I'm sure I'm hearing more gaps than there are.