Grammy.com (A Big Fuck-OFF)

I'm almost speechless at this, found via Blissblog (who's also almost speechless - unless he's saving his ire for a paid ranting).

Almost.

Actually, that's a lie.

I'm nowhere near speechless. I'm full of words. I'm suddenly thick with them; they are stuffing into my skull and more are coming. This has made me really angry.

That face when David Tennant's Doctor goes: 'What?!!? What?!!?' over and over again. Yeah, that face.


I know this isn't worthy of such vitriol. I know there's stuff everywhere more painful, more important. Of course, this kind of thing doesn't matter, not in the same way that those workers in Bangladesh getting compensation matters or even in the same way that Sophie Stewart's Matrix win matters. Except, it does because it's related. It's part of the problem. It is the problem. It just happens to be about post-rock.

I've never exactly understood the frantic, journalistic rush to name things or to create genres. It made sense to resist labels right from the off (my off, not your off): when punks rejected Punk, Goths rejected Goth and so on. Now, with these little micro-climates like the H words, even Grime (the 2.0 is revealing) we have similar causes and similar effects:

1)I need to CREATE
2)My CREATION (I prefer CREATURE) needs a label
3)I need a label to MARKET
4)I need a MARKET to MONETIZE
5)I need to MONETIZE to CREATE
6)After I've MONETIZED I need to RESIST labelling
7)Because to REALLY MONETIZE I need to BE a label


Maybe. Maybe not. It seems that way sometimes. Laughable watching bands adopt all the tropes of a scene and then pretend they haven't - and even to pretend that they're somehow distanced from that scene; developed independently, weren't using it as a springboard at all.

I guess it's also partly about journalists / theorists playing at Philosophy, trying to make signfiers out of signifieds, trying to be talking about something better, bigger, more eternal, more transcendental than music. About writers wanting to be writers rather than music writers. Writers ever-so-slightly ashamed of their genre non-fiction writing*. Wanting their understanding of life to be the key, rather than their love of music. I'm triple-guessing here and getting distracted but... A quick heads up guys: there isn't anything more eternal or transcendental. Music is that thing you're thinking of; you don't need to sublimate your musical vocabulary to an ethical one, or a political one or even a purely aesthetic one. You are already taking about those things - it's Sublime (in Burke's sense and in all other senses too) and it's ridiculous and you couldn't find a better description of Post-rock.

I digress...

Let's dig a little into that Grammy.com article. Rub it 'til it bleeds.

Over the past two decades, a curious musical insurgency has raged on the outermost fringes of the international music scene.

International = Multinational. Scumfuckers eating at the world, territory by territory. This Globablized game of Risk, leaving bust entrails and Globally-recognisable gloop everywhere.

Dubbed "post-rock," this burgeoning movement was pioneered by ambitious bands who largely discarded vocals and traditional verse-chorus structures in favor of euphoria-inducing song cycles.

Song-cycles? Hey let's look these guys up with the same peeps who bought those Gorecki CDs... let's invent a SubClassical genre; let's make Bliss itself something we can all share around a coffee table. Now, lets just take a little ROAD TRIP to see the members of these funny little bands, hand em a cheque, see how REVOLUTIONARY they really are...

Burgeoning? Burgeoned.

Now, eccentric outliers such as Canada's Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Scotland's Mogwai, Iceland's Sigur Rós, and Chicago-based Tortoise are increasingly being recognized as rock visionaries.

By people who matter. By Industrial people (cf. Industrial people). There's no particular reason why visionary ought to mean difficult, I've been to dinner parties with Godspeed / Sigur Ros et al and Trout Mask Replica / Bernard Parmegiani just doesn't allow for chatter, but here visionary seemed allocated to the ranks, just another subgenre of the Rock pantheon, an attempt at patronising ingratiation and assimilation. Just because these bands are visionary it doesn't mean you recognise why. You still don't know what you're looking for, you fuckwits.

This isn't just music; music is just a symptom. Consider how the Film Industry tries to understand and recreate the sleeper hits, the films that strike chords when the right chords haven't been struck. Consider the endless attempts to recreate (no, reproduce) hits like Trainspotting, Reservoir Dogs, even Four Weddings and The Full Monty. Consider all the failed attempts to distil their essence.

Having paid their dues performing in more intimate venues, many post-rock artists are now performing at international music festivals such as Coachella in Indio, Calif., Glastonbury in the UK and Spain's Primavera Sound, as well as at jazz festivals in several cities around the world. Sigur Rós' headline concert at the Hollywood Bowl in 2006 marked a watershed moment; a relatively obscure post-rock band performed on a historic stage often reserved for philharmonic orchestras and bebop ensembles.

Paid their dues? To whom. The Big Other? The Canon itself? The Hall of Fame?

Urgh.

And, Christ, just because a Festival is International (what the hell does that mean anyway?)... well, what does that mean? I mean I've seen hedgemonkey mates playing bin-lids and drainpipe didgeridoos at Glastonbury... away from the big corporatized / sponsored stages there's still plenty of scope for every kind of act (that's the whole fucking point of a Festival!) - don't confuse the high prices for Glastonbury (and I'm assuming Coachella et al) to mean that this is somehow a sanctified place, a residual of Capital-established worth.

"They're brilliant musicians," he says. "What they're doing is almost mathematical, or classical-based. It's not just simple chord progressions on a guitar. A lot of these musicians can play many, many different instruments, and they're knowledgeable in classical music and all types of jazz. What all these bands do is unique and fascinating."

Mr CEO, you are fucking killing Godspeed for me. Please, please don't reduce the Bliss (the Infantjoy) to musicality and skill. I work in FE, you mention 'upskilling' or 'skillset' one more fucking time and I'll write a very stern letter indeed.

They're also eclectic, Windish might add. So eclectic, in fact, that questions of what defines post-rock are constantly debated. Depending on whom you ask, post-rock is either a spinoff or a contemporized cousin of progressive rock. But such notions seem simplistic as post-rock artists such as Caspian, Explosions In The Sky and the Album Leaf also draw on influences from ambient, psychedelic rock and shoegazer, to jazz, space rock, minimalism, krautrock, classical, and noise punk.

Wow. Musicians influenced by... music? Just because we're used to the BEATLES - OASIS - PEACE axis of musical progression doesn't mean everyone uses it. It'd be foolish not to at least be a sum of your influences - it would require you to disregard them as influences - but, there can be many and the many can be non-compatible, they can be dissonant and from that the new can be formed.

While post-rock bands run the stylistic gamut, some elements are common to the subgenre, including effects-laden guitar, slow-building song arrangements, sampled sound bites, and judiciously applied strings. These and other ingredients combine to create sounds that can be both pastoral and almost hallucinogenic.

"When you listen to it, you are able to feel whatever you're feeling just a little bit extra," says post-rock fan Steven Anderson of Toronto, Ontario. "Drugs were in no way involved in me getting into this style of music. You can listen to this and feel like you're flying, no matter what mental state you're in."

But they help, Steven. They really do.

One of Anderson's favorite bands is the American Dollar, a Queens, N.Y., duo who is winning critical plaudits while demonstrating post-rock's commercial potential. Consisting of multi-instrumentalists Richard Cupolo and John Emanuele, the duo were just beginning to compose original material in 2004 when they posted one of their songs on Myspace.

"Literally the very next day we got a licensing request from a producer over at MTV," Emanuele recalls. "That request was pretty much one of the motivating factors for us continuing to make the first album. It was obvious that we have something here."

Some nine years later, Cupolo and Emanuele have licensed their music to movie trailers, TV shows such as "CSI: Miami" and advertising campaigns for global brands. Their music licensing venture has helped fund their independent record label, Yesh Records.

What makes the American Dollar's songs well-suited for TV and film is how the music conveys varying states of consciousness, as suggested by album titles such as The Technicolour Sleep, A Memory Stream and Awake In The City.

And there is the New Dream: maybe I could get used in a commercial and that would make me be commercial. I guess that is the dream - the best version has your track used in a film, the ultimate is that it's used in a film that you like - but to wish that dream out loud is another thing entirely, an extra sad bow. Don't let this be the guide, people. Don't let this guide your reasoning, your placement of sounds. The BBC were right, that Sigur Ros track worked wonderfully with some of their Wildlife programming but don't trap them into desiring that machine by making it seem like this is the thing to be desired, that this is the purpose of the music, it's pre-ordained intention.

Anyone can be trapped like this, don't make it seem like they're not being trapped.

"Nostalgia is a large part of the feeling that we try to emphasize," says Cupolo. "We try to create an organic sound that has both the modern and the more traditional instruments mixed together."

Empathy, Check. Nostalgia, Check. Organic, Check.

Far from the early '90s when bands such as Talk Talk and Slint were unwittingly laying the foundation of post-rock, the genre has since spawned a growing subculture. Similar to the psychedelic bands of the '60s, many post-rock performances are multimedia affairs during which artists play amid dim lighting and projected images. Chicago-based post-rock trio Russian Circles are known for their energetic live shows and are noted for being able to expand upon their recorded material through the use of sampling and an extensive array of effects and loop pedals.

The 'unwittingly' is key here, yet this seems almost anathema. It's anti-managerial, not at all on message. It's an impossible child.

Perhaps due to the music's radio-averse arrangements, post-rock artists often sign with well-regarded experimental rock labels such as Constellation Records, Kranky and Thrill Jockey Records.

"There are artists and audiences all over the world, but I think there's kind of a home for this music in parts of Europe like Germany, France and Scandinavia — countries where avant-garde jazz and jazz [are] more established, accepted and funded," says Windish.

Radio-friendly? Radio-friendly? Keep saying it over and over again and it will continue to mean something. Or maybe just stop saying it.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

And this tilt at the Europeans (oh, I see; avant-garde's written in foreign innit?) - what is this? 1920? Is Henry Miller about to head to Paris again? Is it the 50s? Is the Beat Hotel still open? Even the colonials do avant-garde now... this kind of headless subservience to the old European masters just isn't helpful at all... Hey, come to Britain and laugh along with the Arts Council trying to get anything funded that is an any way actually avant-garde.

And then:

While Europe and Canada may be the more fertile performing markets now, increasing awareness has led some to believe that post-rock's global breakthrough is imminent.

"It's definitely encouraging to see more and more of these bands playing around the world, and gaining lots of followers on different social media," says Emanuele. "We kind of feel that [popularity for the genre] is in the cards. Mostly, it's just a matter of time."

Daft, just daft. Encouraging - such a balmy word, such an Agent word. Markets - so warm, so comforting (we all live in a yellow shopping mall, a yellow shopping mall, a yellow shopping mall). And Fertile - fuck's sake, someone get a Freudian back on the case. It's great that lots of people are listening to stuff that they didn't always listen to - there is a marketplace, of ideas, of collaborations, of open-source ravaging - but don't reduce the listeners to the listenable.

I...

Speechless again.






*actually this is the reason I still can't stand bands playing in Art Galleries; it doesn't do either party any favours. It smacks of something... awful and sweet, that Orange Tango smell of a dead body. The power of, for instance, Throbbing Gristle come from them playing with/in the ordinary - in a Gallery setting it's not just preaching to the perverted, it's allowing them to accomodate you...

Collision-Detection Box Set (remix)

The inevitable remix of the article at Freq


There’s buckets of finely congealed empathy here, beautifully presented. Front And Follow is an unusual, old-fashioned label, not quite made for these times. And thank God for that.

This box set is a collection of 9 EPs from a host of incredible artists, all working within the confines of some strange call & response routine* which sees invited artists submit audio clips into a central pot, which is then distributed around the group for them to do with as they see fit. At least, that’s what this box set is supposed to be. In another reality this is Front and Follow’s collective phantasy, an arc of triumph. This is the illusion of a series of collected EPs, an illusion so pervasive/persuasive that even the artists and the label think that it’s true.

But this is a collaboration in more ways than one. This is a packaged ideal, a little bit of ideology. These artists don’t sound particularly similar and most of them don’t know each other but they are kin and this box set is a series of statements around a common belief in music per se.


I’m listening to this on shuffle, which isn’t really the right way** – I think there’s an awful lot more thought put into the sequencing than I’m allowing – but it has elicited a theme that might be hidden if these songs are taken as they were intended. Listened to in this way, there are some ugly transitions where The Lord keeps head-butting in, reminding me of the effect that Foetus had on Industrial compilations from the 80s* but even that seems somehow part of the kinship. They are friendly non-familiars. They are rubbing against each other to create sparks.


Sone Institute pops up in a kind of Carpenter-guise; like an axe has split an old 80s horror soundtrack's skull down the middle, and only slightly stretched apart the plates

This set ought to lie alongside ‘mythical’ (for many of the pre-CD reissue years) compilations like the Elephant Table album. It is era defining, even at a time when we’re beset with endless micro-genres and expected to simply accept that post-modernism has won and the grand narrative drives of music are gone, or have been subverted, or popularised. Well, bollocks. This shows that there is something bigger than the artists; there is still a functioning system of reason out there, people do still care about being in opposition.


Some of these artists dabble with song-forms (Kemper Norton pulls apart folk music, The Doomed Bird Of Providence tries to soundtrack a dying soldier’s lament for the Balkans****), some of them drift beautifully, like Zoviet France or something (Isnaj Dui, Blk Tag, Psychological Strategy Board), some of them even spin off into almost ‘Big’ Beat(s) (West Norwood Cassette Library stomps all over the place in exactly the right way) but really this album is a collective, a kind of multi-voiced howl of despair against stagnation. Even the methodology behind the choice of sounds is communist and utopian. The label sets their stall perfectly; I’ve got a bunch of MP3s and PDFs but I think I need the artefact as much as anything. So do you. This is exactly what we need right now: attention to detail, to For. Beauty regarded as a value. This shows real solidity in amongst the ruins of the (so-called) www-crushed music industry.


Front and Follow need to be here. These artists are necessary and more or less sufficient. This album will be one that people will talk about. At the very least the cynical among you have an opportunity to buy your future bragging rights now, before they are gone forever.


*this is the first symptom, an old route which seems to be returning. This is the scene and setting of this compilation, the framework that acts like a Dali crutch. You have to listen quite hard to hear this mechanism (it doesn't creak) but you can feel it.

**I feel just about okay doing this with this album; as a collaboration / compilation there ought to be alternative routes through the jungle but... I'm even annoying myself how much I'm reviewing via walking and listening, uploading three or four albums at a time sometimes into a playlist and then letting Shuffle speculate. I'm trying to stop this, especially since a lot of people I know spend a lot of effort sequencing things, only for monkeys like me to load and discard. Certainly, the IX Tab album was very considered in terms of the order since I wanted it to be an album rather than a collection of my least worse bits.

***I mean, of course, that often Foetus tracks (and to a lesser extent NWW) appeared like unholy cows, butting their way into the fold, working bad seams in finely woven tapestries of sound. I like the earnest, believed-in sound of their contempories but it was also wonderful at times (and supremely psychedelic) to puncture the moment with Batman themes or fairground music or odd Nurses laughing...

****that description doesn't do it justice; the odd thing about this is that this urfolk isn't ur at all, this is a pure approach; this sounds like its been recorded (beautifully) in situ, there's very little obvious processing... but yet it fits perfectly with all these monstrous machines.

IX Tab: A Manifesto of Sorts

Some tiny IX Tab bits in the wires fairly soon but otherwise nothing except this. The track will eventually-maybe be the song Prayer For The Head Of Alfredo Garcia on the second album but it won't sound much like this one and probably won't be called anything like that either. My own Ship of Theseus, yet again.

Honey Hi / Tusk

Up until about two weeks ago, I knew nothing about this track, this album or even Fleetwood Mac. I remember the tall guy fucking up The Brits with Sam Fox and my Dad getting Tango In The Night for Christmas in 1987 and I can recall the sleeve of Rumours from years of 2nd hand record shop flicking but that was it. Fleetwood Mac were a group that just passed me, that slipped between cracks I had no real intention of looking in.

But then I heard this:


and it sounded so alone that I had to seek out the album. It's still my favourite track on Tusk but I'm working on it. I mean, this is really not my kind of thing, I'm very skeptical about this degree of musicality usually but this track and this album feels different than I expected it to and almost all my favourite albums are like that, in whatever genre. Growers get there in the end.

Sometimes, it's just a word, or the placement of a word in the mix; sometimes it's like a hypnotic suggestion and it just drags you into a new world (I understand that hypnosis isn't about unintentionality). I can't place what it is about Honey Hi. The drums are oddly recorded and the singing is fairly crisp but yet still sounds slurred and it seems to exude a beautiful kind of absence that really made me think that this song, this record even might be what drugs sound like when no one's trying to make a drug record.

It's not an acid record. The transitions between the tracks are the wrong kind of jarring, the moods are constant but clipped, like the songs were put in the wrong track order... deliberately. But opium would do it a service / it would do opium a service (I know, of course - I have the Internet - that really it's a cocaine album and that Honey Hi itsef is quite possibly mostly an alcohol song but I'm never one to be overly distracted by the awful truth when the impressions can light fires) because on more than a few of the songs on the album - it sort of sprawls but not in the way I'd have guessed when hearing that Fleetwood Mac made a double album at the height of Post-Punk - they sound like everyone's playing and singing just a fraction too slow; the slur comes from a genuine collapse in chronology rather than the usual druggie drawl.

The drums could have been recorded by Martin Hannett, they sound that bad.

Even the guitars sound like they're trying to catch up to something that's just out of their reach.

And the melodies, the hooks? Well, they sort of appear, here and there, but it's like they appear over the course of a number of tracks rather than within each of them so perhaps that's why the mood appears constant and jarring. I don't know, I might be hearing things (I am) but there is something about the simplicity of this album that makes it seem very complicated and, as such, it reminds me a little of Dennis Wilson's Pacific Ocean Blue.

So, anyway, I'm digging around a little bit (fans of this blog will know how meticulously researched it is) and there's people making a better fist of this than me (I'm writing this and I haven't even heard the whole album yet), including the ever-reliable Marcello at Then Play Long and even Simon Reynolds at his Retro (Mmm) site.

Actually, I'm just reading the Reynolds stuff now and he seems to dismiss Honey Hi entirely, the naughty boy...

Bicycle Day and the NOT 70th Birthday Of LSD

Some people will tell you that the 19th of this cruellest month is the 70th anniversary of Albert Hoffman's infamous bike ride and thus that LSD is 70 years old. They'd be wrong. It's nowhere near that old. LSD never really got a good innings, got curtailed and bludgeoned before it really got going - 70 years old implies a hell of a run up but that didn't happen and we should all take the blame for not having the confidence or the conviction to change our world to accommodate it. Aristotle was right in suggesting that beauty was a visitor from another world but he'd have been more convinced by acid. This is the visitor we sort of let in but then never really addressed. It's been 70 fucking years and... nothing. The world seems worse now. Not even a war film.


It's perhaps spectacularly idealistic and naive to think that this little molecule (or all those little molecules: the mushrooms, the spores, the rot) might actually have changed things, that we might actually have ceded to its influence but... Fuck it; I still kind of believe that we genuinely might have, that we only just missed the moment, that things might still be different.

This book, for instance, seems like one of quite a few that are... piping up. There is something in the air.

Perhaps.

Yeah, Leary was an messianic arse perhaps, Kesey lost in mostly bad music and a desire to lose, Cassady a hammer spinning emotional aggregate and misogynist... Yeah, maybe the McKenna brothers got a little too close to the Sun eventually, perhaps RAW just wasn't sure after all... Yeah perhaps there really hasn't been the advocates of late that could have visioned a future for acid and we ended with the subtly mystic Breaking Open The Head which sort of accidentally got commodified and coffee-tabled into something else...

In fact, we lost the eloquence of acid quite early, with the death of Aldous Huxley... we lost it to Americana or the Military or to silly hats and Ozric Tentacles...


In fact, you can see the slippage right on that page, on the noxious introduction to the Huxley video: "Did you know that Aldous Huxley died whilst frying balls on multiple massive injections of uncut ACID? Trippy..." that delicate turn of phrase, that implied machismo is where everything went wrong...

Oh...

I'm not about to rant about how LSD could have changed the world. I know how that'll sound in print, on screen, at a time when I should know better but there's smaller little bitches to make instead.

The music itself let LSD down... The fact that there still isn't anything that only makes sense on LSD (no variation on Chris Morris's Cake music) is a massive missed opportunity (yeah, perhaps I will... Just wait and see... Maybe that's a way for IX Tab to go, it needs somewhere to go) - Acid House doesn't count because it's really suitable for ecstasy rather than acid, even psy-trance and all that hippie trance ethnic-techno isn't perfectly aligned with the chemicals, it all makes perfect sense on speed and alcohol and E and Coke... It's not music that engages with the sensibility of LSD, just music that engages with the engagement of LSD, that is it complements acid but only in the way that all music sort of complements acid (people use Bach, Beach Boys, Burzum - ok, not many use Burzum). LSD needed a music that was its own but instead it got what was simply called psychedelia. The map is not the territory etc etc etc etc


When we were kids we made stuff that only made sense on LSD. I had a stereo that could play both tapes simultaneously and we'd experiment with different mixes: two different Shamen albums, bits of Jack The Tab and Coil, bits of Monty Python and Shamanarchy albums, Bach and Autechre, Front 242 on half speed and Philip Glass... Outside of those few hrs at the peak of the flash these primitive little mixes sounded terrible (of course they did) but inside new things were born and music stopped dominating and became dominated; we chose the mood and the music followed us. In the age old battle between drugged-out humans and music we won...

^^^^^^^^*^^^^^^^^^
If you don't know about this battle then you haven't been on drugs. Everyone I know knows about the battle. You take enough drugs and the music nearly always wins... You see the people lurching from microspace to miniplace at Festivals, unable to take, to stand what they're hearing, needing to find a place where the music wins but in a good way... The music nearly always defeats people, bends them to it's will, takes them on and off... the battle between the drugs and the music, with people as the battleground, are what Festivals are

^^^^^^^^*^^^^^^^^^
But... In 70 years, we haven't really got much further (back and faster) than The Grateful Dead / Pink Floyd axis... And they're not even particularly good at being LSD music... They work (again, everything works) and they are functional (even The Grateful Dead who I've tried and tried to understand but just can't) but that is all... They are just music... They are for something else, like Techno and Trance are for dancing, like Autechre et al are for curing headaches (unaccompanied, Autechre et al makes no sense on acid because it makes sense on acid, becomes plodding and empty, becomes about the lost beats that are suddenly found - no, Autechre's mysticism is about thinking things through while perfectly straight, they are a crossword puzzle and you should keep them the hell away from LSD).

Even the trippiest, trickiest music of the spheres (Parmegiani, I'm looking at you) is just...not...quite.


At the time, we often talked about this as if it were a synaesthetic problem; with bendy, circular, rhizomatic music (those Mille Plateux Deleuze and Guattari albums were NOT remotely rhizomatic, even if they thought they were) being the music of choice (we all got Coil, got stuff with phasing, got some of the Psychic TV stuff, understood where the pre Mr C Shamen were coming from) but I'm not sure even that way of looking at things was truly appropriate; I suspect there was better stuff around the corner and always suspected it.




There wasn't. It never happened. Acid House really let us down, at a time when it didn't need to. It punked / Punked out. I still remember the MAARS single coming out and seeming like a throw in the right direction (us geeky guys had been trying variations of those cut ups with old Derek and Clive and New Beat records for ages). It wasn't quite right but with AR Kane involved it was almost right - and the idea of dream-pop sounded like it might be the right idea (ie music that could only make sense in a dream) but...

No. That didn't happen. Another missed opportunity. Instead dream-pop became the ultimately disappointing (mostly execrable) shoegaze, whose very genre name (laughable that some bands are deliberately adopting that as a signifier, as stupid as the Tories adopting that "I'm in love with Margaret Thatcher" song) gave up the ghost, the dream and conceded without ever throwing a single limp-wristed punch (that punch might have been You Made Me Realise, played live but it really wasn't Loveless, whatever you think)

There was Spacemen 3 back then but we knew that was just our Grateful Dead and even at their most abstracted and dissolute, the music was just so damned listenable in any circumstances. My kids love Suicide. Everybody loved Spacemen 3, whether they were LSD'd or not. And, to be fair, the boys were perhaps thinking of other, more appropriate, fuzzes.


There's been plenty of other false dawns and lots and lots of music that worked well with whatever. Christ, this blog used to be full of it back in the earlier days. Here, for instance, where I rhapsodied about Kahimi Karie (Still love this version):


Yeah, this. Whatever. I haven't linked to it in a while. I still worry about this kind of thing.

So, what I meant to say is that its sad that we've already had LSD for 70 years and haven't really done anything about it. In fact, its a spectacularly unpopular and uncool drug; one that barely registers as anything other than some faintly ironic plod towards nostalgia, towards the dreaded hippies... The arch capitalist wow of Cocaine has taken over, people still suck on Es, try variations of Plantfood & animal tranquillisers - anything to avoid the sheer hard work and effort required for a decent acid binge. No one seems to know what to do with that amount of time anymore. To concentrate on all those utterly prosaic things for 12 hrs or whatever seems almost unthinkable and maybe even slightly ridiculous and deceitful (what might anyone be looking for, when all the world is here?) and indulgent...

LSD was always indulgent, is indulgence, always brings to mind the fin-de-siècle guys and girls, who would have loved the arse off of it and maybe actually changed the world because of it. Moorcock (Did he just mention fucking Moorcock? What next? Hawkwind?) knew it - Dancers At The End Of Time, for fuck's sake - and you can sense in that book how he misses that future. Are The Focus Group gonna spin off into that missed opportunity?

****Update: in the comments this great little mix has appeared, so i thought I'd stick it in... Cheers for that!


Lord, can you hear me?

Anyone?

I'm off to make something that I can't listen to.

Here's to the next 70 years!

Hacker Farm - Precog

Well, you knew it was coming:

Doctor In Distress: when Ultravox met Bucks Fizz

Didn't know this existed and now it feels like its been thrust retrospectively into the timeline, a sneer, a in-joke and a commentary on where Doctor Who went wrong (and where it might still go wrong). It's impossible to like or dislike. It doesn't even feel real, its like a James Ferraro take on a Doctor Who Charity single. In not a good way.

But still, the Colin Backer inchoate howl of 'Exterminate' is a thing of great beauty and wonder.


And Ultravox meeting Bucks Fizz is just Bananarama meeting Fun Boy Three in another dimension, isn't it?

Ubu Roi

A mate has just given a glowing recommendation for the latest Cheek By Jowel production of Ubu Roi and it seems perfect timing; a mad old lady dead, a blustering insane King with equally carnivorous / cadaverous servants and nobles; an uncommon disregard for the commoners and the surreality within this damned little country of ours which causes it to erupt into vicious apathy at the first sign of trouble... By all accounts, Cheek By Jowel do the work a great justice (I've seen it straight and for laughs, this seems to understand that straight is for laughs, even if the laughter is very much in the dark. I say all this but I haven't seen it and probably won't get up to London to see it before it ends but I have seen ( I think ) a Cheek By Jowel production of the Duchess Of Malfi and that was one of the only versions I'd seen (I watched a lot standing in for the Drama dept for a term a long long time ago) that nailed the Lycanthropy exactly and got the Duchess just right, the madness just mad; got everything perfectly...

So, I'm recommending this without seeing it, a terrible sin perhaps but surely, if you ever thinking of going to see this play, now is the time?

Dillon

There's a Dadblogger sad-eyedness to my liking for this kind of Tumblr thing but it doesn't give up - it's Unnamable "You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on" - and Dillon here should get extra credit from diverting from the tried and true path (the plucky acoustic yearning morphing into the chilled-out cosmic in the remix) and the bierkeller tuba-parping backdrop (part Tom Waits circa Rain Dogs and part Ubu Roir) to this track separates it from the fold:


Or I'm hearing things again.

Momus, Retromania & Wormholes

Well, it seems like I fell into a wormhole in January and missed this:


But, as a result of the wormhole, and now partly inspired by that cover and partly by a throwaway comment here about musical thievery not being chronological, I've been settling on an idea to cover songs not yet written by the artists...

You heard.

I know that, perhaps, this has been done already (for instance, this is how the new My Bloody Valentine album sounds to me) and will (obviously) be done again but I feel it needs to be done with more intent and the proactive interference made more explicit. In fact, while Retromania covers some of this kind of interference from the past, I reckon Simon missed a trick by focusing mostly on the conscious aspects of this appropriation, more on the Present looking back than the Past looking forward which seems to me the dominant thread in music... Yeah, it's a Burroughsian 'future leaking through' shtick but it's my Burroughsian 'future leaking through' shtick.

You'll have guessed by now I have absolutely no idea where I'm going with this (but that sort of fits, doesn't it?); this is just writing (what Beckett would call plumbing), the theory itself is a long way off... but it is there, tinkling around my skullshape, itching like that guy with the flies in The Wasp Factory (so sad about Iain Banks but he's going out wonderfully).

Right now, with this sleep-deprived melatonin deficiency I've got going almost anything could happen... Ivor The Engine, for example, is playing right now and a 2 year old is locked to the screen in his own Retromaniac Maze of sound and vision. He's even playing with a (AHEM) 'vintage' Fisher Price USA School Bus (which wasn't right even when it was made).

So...

The next IX Tab album will probably be a selection of cover versions that haven't yet been written. The first one contained at least three. Some of you clearly spotted the Coil and Cluster reunion singles (answers on a postcard).

I need sleep.

Pulses.

An episode of Sapphire and Steel where Sapphire and steel are actually elements.

Owlfood

also, Owlfood

dendrite

Liking this from dendrite, his first album. It's similar to lots of this kind of thing (these bedstuffed industrialists, these mad acid Averys) but definitely has something about it. This track, in particular, is softly intense, dead-eyed and lost. Odd and scratchy, like wearing someone else's face.

Katie Gately

Well, there's not much here yet but I'm really liking the arbitrariness of Katie Gately, it's almost as if she doesn't know what she's doing...

She does pop in a degraded, hopeful kind of way. In her own words this track "is what happens when you realize you cannot be justin timberlake so you decide to destroy your own work over the course of a sleepless evening in the dirtiest city in the world" and it does sound like this, not Prince dirty but like James Ferraro used to sound like before he got cleaned up by Mumma Dolby (her son, Thomas, looks on, wondering...)



It seems utterly unpretentious too. Like a doodle on a phone pad that somehow comes to life (I think this might have been a Doctor Who Story at some point)


She also does this kind of thing that sounds more like a less well-prepared Lee Gamble (I mean this to be a compliment) and then flutters away and loses sight of itself in little moments of unreasoned noise (actually, disquiet has it right when they suggest 'synth pop turned inside out')



I think I might send her some IX Tab tracks to remix...

Drift Of Signifieds

This is a woozy, slurred, drugged up/out slice of unsettling gothic dub ( I reject the hauntological tag; it's haunting, yes). I like the way it seems to slow down the more you listen to it (maybe it does), like someone ever-so-slowly lapsing into a coma (maybe it is). Reminds me a bit of that David Tibet / Steven Stapleton thing where =wheezy hospital sounds sort of ache against the song, rubbing its bones. The video reminds me of a collapse of the William Hartnell / Tom Baker Doctor Who credits too, which is absolutely right.

Drift Of Signifieds

The Drift of Signifieds remix of the IX Tab track In The Blake Midwinter is here (it's quiet, but it's good)

Senator Bobby

I heard this on a compilation tape someone gave me and for years I thought it was genuine. It's not exactly uncanny but it just seemed an absurd (and too brilliantly scripted) thing to exist in the world. It seemed more likely that it was genuine.

It's not, but it is funny.

OH/EX/OH

Found via Darkfloor who are right in that there is a touch of Global Communications around the eyes of this release (and perhaps reminds me of this release, which I've been listening to a lot again recently) by OH/EX/OH. It's that universal benevolence thing again and should be thoroughly welcomed as such.

Suzanne Ciani & The Problem Of Primary Teaching

Available via the ever reliable Finders Keepers. Almost everything they've released is worth a look and they do cheapo compilations too.

Because I've been listening to the inspired lunacy of Music Minus Music (great title, great music for bouncing on a bed with a two year old, great music for shuffling to work, waiting for your morning body to unfold) which is almost exactly half silly / half sublime (and each part of the silliness is sublime and so on...) I've been re-investigating Suzanne Ciani.

Now, I've heard of her and heard her before, she's someone I've been (The) Wired to listen to before but never really got - I think I heard the wrong things, went scurrying down the wrong holes because the stuff I heard only made sense in a retro awe kinda way (cf lots of the Radiophonic Workshop stuff, of course) rather than because of any actual Form or content it might have had. It sounded like the kind of thing I might want to like, especially if it was done by an, er, lady... and she had nice bouncy hair like Delia Derbyshire and...

...the joke is not a joke; the presence of female electronic composers (or any composers beyond the go-girls-go rattle of The Runaways and their descendents) is an unsettlingly dense issue - people still continually comment if girls are even at the kind of gigs I tend to go to, as if as Plato rapped: 'beauty was a visitor from another world' (I doubt he was talking about girls) but then almost immediately feel bad about making those kind of comments, as if there's a new form of sexist rubicon to cross (there is but I'm guessing no one really knows where it is)

Electronic music is laughingly still in a similar, but opposite, position to Primary Teaching, which is even more laughingly in the same position its always been in: we need desperately some vague sense that a gender balance could be maintained in the real world , as a simple matter of fact as opposed to merely being temporarily addressed by dabblers and dilettantes - I tried to be a Primary Teacher years ago, lasted about a year, scurried to the warm arms of FE teaching.

Trying is key, I think... and, though the electronic world doesn't seem particularly macho in it's current manifestation - I've yet to meet the Henry Rollins of Post Radiophonic Electro-drone Gristle, of Hauntology, of Chill Wave et al - there's still that sense, more or less palpable, that girls are somehow different (not girls?) if they happen along with this geeky thing (it almost requires those little hats with flaps - we've all got them! - and beards and jackets with badges and unkempt hair and... well, you see my point...) or else they are appendages and afterthoughts, inspired by their artful boyfriends (and this kinda crap been going on forever), or else they are simply suffering all these ridiculous and undanceable bleeps and drones and whooshes because they are lovely people and maybe later one of these guys will actually take them dancing or remember to come off the modular synthesiser and start playing with them...

I'm not sure where I'm going with this (not sure where that modular synth metaphor was going, seemed like it was heading to some dark dark places). I'm glad I'm not a proper writer, can simply derail this... I'm not sure I'm being at all consistent here, or even that I want to be... I think those NLP patches I bought are starting to bleed into my brain.

I think the point I'm trying to make is exemplified by this piece of video, that I pilfered from here (which also has some other great Suzanne Ciani clips). Peter Ustinov's opening line is fantastic too. In fact, it's all fantastic:



So I bought some Suzanne Ciani stuff and it's really good... like a Raymond Scott where you can't see the joins. And she's hotter than Daphne-

No.

Keef Fullertron Whitman & Tom Bugs @ The Arnolfini

An evening of modular synth mayhem at the Arnolfini in Bristol, last night.

Analogue hardware is BACK in a big way, as everyone ditches their VSTs for Monotribes and Minibrutes (and how many of you out there saving up for one of those new Korg Mini MS-20s, eh?) but if you wanna get closer to the edge, modular is the way to go.

First we had local synth guru Tom Bugs providing sturdy support. Tom makes some sort of precarious living as a one-man cottage industry synth designer and builder, trading under the name Bugbrand, operating from a little room above the offices of Qu Junctions, just off Stokes Croft.

Did I say 'one-man'? Actually he employs one assistant: the notorious noise artist Mark Durgan (aka Putrifier) toils away by day soldering and stuffing circuit boards into small metal boxes, probably for below minimum wages. No wonder he always looks miserable.  But I digress...

Tom occasionally drags his inventions out for a spin in public, and usually treats the audience to an unscripted, slightly rambling verbal introduction. Last night was no exception, but at least he didn't get heckled this time. His modular synth is always unpatched to begin with. A blank canvas, as it were. He then sets about poking his 'banana' cords into small holes, which makes the various modules talk to each other. Gradually, from a low ominous drone, something vaguely rhythmic will begin to emerge, then after about 10 minutes of furious patching and twiddling, something really quite beautifully strange and enchanting begins to develop. Radiophonic blips and squawks entwining with undulating melodic patterns. Usually finishing with some kind of cathartic strum und drang blow-out. Here's some edited highlights...



Then, after a short intermission, the main event. Keith Fullerton Whitman. You know, the American dude with the long beard.

His modular is always pre-patched with a bewildering thicket of cords. One wonders how he can possibly see what he's doing.

With no stage area, the two artists had set-up their kit on tables in the middle of the room, with the audience surrounding them in a circle. The PA system was quadraphonic, which Keith exploited to the ultimate, his bewildering hyper-concrète barrage zapping around the auditorium and coming at us from all angles. It was like a post-drill 'n bass Schaeffer and Cage tribute, startling in its abstract intensity.

At times it seemed like the machine played Keith, rather than the other way around. Cycling around in some semi-chaotic system, the modular would occasionally pause for breath, and Keith would step back and do the same. Then it would hurtle into another frenzied burst of activity, jolting Keith's limbs back into action - the human marionette dancing to its electronic master's tune. Or so it seemed at times. Check this clip and tell me I'm wrong...



Gear-slut and fanboy that I am, I hung around afterwards, chatting with the lads as they packed-up, and captured this charming moment as Keith inspected Tom's creation...

Caption competition, anyone...?

The Philips Pavilion

Image via here

I dreamed the Philips Pavilion survived and appeared at the roadside, deepest Somerset. It was just there, an anti-Shard. Inside, all kinds of electronic mangles and sprayed sound - the sound sprayer (yes, literally) was shaped like one of those Russolo machines, only sort of crossed with an umbrella (the operator called it Mary Poppinson) and wouldn't let anyone else play it. Things got sort of mixed up with the opening of Jamie and the Magic Torch:



and, after that, all I remember is me and Kek and Steve (you'll know 'em as Hacker Farm) and 2ndFade trying to get at the instruments before the thing was demolished again by guys in diggers and dumper trucks.

I wish Xenakis was there, he'd have sorted the fuckers. I reckon Xenakis was pretty hard.

Hacker Farm - UHF

You know I know Hacker Farm; they are comrades without arms; part of the body... you know I'll like UHF, see things reflected in its mirrors... you know I'll get it because it is part of where I am and these fine people are part of an accidental conglomerate (IX Tab is subsumed by Hacker Farm, which is now not just Hacker Farm and, post-Wire interview, indivisible from the hole).

I also know that Hacker Farm aren't for everyone. To paraphrase Lautreamont: not everyone can savour this bitter fruit with impunity.

And that's the point.

Which is why I feel the need to take an issue with Rob Young's review of UHF in the recent edition of The Wire which, perhaps accidentally, savagely misses the oppositional stance of Hacker Farm even when, more or less, mentioning it as part of his review.

I think he likes it but that's not relevant. In some ways it would be better to dislike it - UHF courts dislike, expects it - because that final passage, where Rob sort of offers advice to the boys, comes across as not merely patronising but also as a political assault, an attempt to codify what Hacker Farm do in terms of the accepted. Now I realise that suggesting the (great) work of Raime and Emptyset might somehow be regarded as the status quo is absurd; they are clearly plowing their own furrow but still, in those slim lines that suggest Hacker Farm adopt the 'abyssal dynamics' of those two it's difficult not to read 'If Hacker Farm weren't Hacker Farm then people could embrace them more easily, some space could help us digest; there's just too much information...'

Which misses the point because that is what they are about. I'd imagine this recording, if anything, is cleaner and more spatial than they'd originally intended; it's likely to get more noisy (noise is information, information is noise) in the future, not less... they are really not going to adopt those dynamics because they are, at least in part, about opposing those dynamics (I know for a fact that they are fans of Raime but that doesn't mean they are the same as Raime, or can be slotted in beside them neatly).

I don't know... I'm ranting; it was a throwaway comment, it means nothing; they probably don't care but I do because it seems like a generalising move, an attempt to reconfigure something from here to there; they live in different worlds to lots of the music they can ostensibly be compared to (they live in different worlds to my music and I've seen the same places they've seen, our timelines are more or less homogenous).

For what it's worth, there's no reason anyone should get Hacker Farm - I'm sort of amazed at the response to their work (not as much as I'm amazed as the response to mine!) - I'm not even sure I get them most of the time (UHF can be exhaustingly dense; I was listening to it in the snow the other day and it felt like all the snow at once) but it does stand alone, it is singular, it does not have the dynamics you'd expect (and sometimes it doesn't have the dynamics you need).

But...

Rant over.

Holy shit...

...Spindle & The Bregnut Tree got into the Pontone best albums list aka the list I go to first when I'm looking for new things to buy... This makes me unbelievably chuffed in ways that shouldn't be shared...

And lots of mates are also in there... it's been a funny old year. Many unicorns.

The West is coming...

Drums for Simon R (1)

Since Simon kicked this off and before the solo hounds descend, eager to bite long and bite hard... Well, I had to start with this little fellah:


And then there's the Blixa-ribcage drum, of course:


And I almost forgot about Ze'v:

stuttgarter-strasse

Yeah. Kraftwerk via Wales. The Kraut-Cymrubicon has been crossed. Nothing not to like here. Please move on.