Had a massive thing for Pere Ubu when I was a teen... the Beefheartian chopping was my Prog (not especially garage, but avant), the only kind of Prog I could bear, even when all around me boys dabbled in various pathetic mysteries re: early Genesis and Yes albums (Red Crayola were my limiting factor - not Prog either of course, but alongside Henry Cow et al and Kevin Ayers a kind of dangerous entry point for little punks)...
Okay, I don't know what Prog is either but back then I knew the enemy and there really seemed to be one...
In fact, in retrospect, I think I just assumed that Pere Ubu might be suspiciously good at actually playing their instruments (they are extraordinarily tight for an ostensibly chaotic strand) and at the time I was a little contemptuous of musicality... it seemed an unnecessary conceit... and it was probably a problem I had with a lot of the, particularly American, New Wave bands, perhaps exemplified by the restless restraint shown by Talking Heads (who I liked, I think, but didn't like liking). I can remember Clint Ruin / Foetus talking about David Byrne's shiny shoes and... it just sent shivers down my young spine...
Where was I? Yeah, New Wave, Canterbury Scene and Prog are all the same thing, aren't they?
Anyway, Pere Ubu seemed like they were on the right side. Their music erupted from them and seemed a part of them. David Thomas wasn't right but he was utterly right. They made some beautifully odd angles (are still making some), they had their brief dalliance with some overground singles (Waiting. For. Ma-ry.) at some point and they always seemed a million miles away from their contemporaries.
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...
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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!
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.
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-
Well, this little slice of meek bile from Fact magazine got to me...
and it ended up in a mostly inconsistent rant about all kinds of things which I've decided against posting. I dunno, I've been busy and I didn't get round to posting it when I wrote it a few days ago and now... well, those kind of blogrants ony have currency when they are...of the moment...
Here's a few disconnected lowlights:
1) ... now most of the (FACT) features seem embarrassing/embarrassed, like those fitful days when every childrens' TV presenter clearly just wanted to be doing T4 or The News At Ten and just mentally squirmed whenever they had to do something genuinely child-like or child-centric*. The mixes stand alone.
2) ...they've done the hard work, broke the back... we still owe these fucking guys...
3) ...and Waving Not Drowning sort of predicted the poppier chunks of Ghost Box:
8) ...and the thing I've always loved is that Orbital never seemed remotely experimental; they seemed entirely, utterly mainstream but in a kind of only slightly alternate universe when the mainstream was a good place to be...
"In a recent FACT interview, the brothers revealed they laid out the LP as a wall plan before they started recording. The weakness of this approach to music making is apparent in the album’s structure, and it feels like they felt forced to crowbar in musical styles that sit uncomfortably with their own sound. So we have “the electro-house one” (‘Where Is It Going’), and “the dubstep ones” (‘Distraction’ and ‘Beezlebub’), all as cringe-inducing as you’d expect."
9) The first part is the weirdest criticism of an album I've heard: the idea that planning the album itself can be a weakness. The cult of spontaneity attempting a sucker punch.
***
...but the key thing is that I can't really hear a bad Orbital album, a bad Orbital track because they are one of those bands that just happened, just flashed at the right moment, with the right people, at the right time... hearing (unexpectedly) the Doctor Who theme at one of my first Orbital gigs is one of the greatest moments in my musical life... it suddenly seemed like I was right, that everyone I knew was right... that we'd won.
Everyone I knew owned the Brown album. And they were all right.
This new album is welcomed with open arms. My children will have to love it. My friends will have to love it. I can't see past it. It may have flaws but I'm playing the fuck out of them, making it as much a memory as the other ones. There's been loads of great stuff released this year but I'll play Wonky more than any of them.
When Kant thought that appreciation of art and culture ought to be at the non-emotional, disinterested, level, he couldn't have been more wrong.
Breath was baited at this, apparently, but not mine.
Not bated.
Hardly breath at all.
I mostly dislike collaborations, even when I try to like them, even when I love the collaborators.
Collaborations regress towards the mean, like motionless wrestling or mutual strangulations in the back of army trucks (a personal joke, one intended only for my future self to smirk about; sorry). I blame everyone:
1) Mike Paradinas and Richard James as Mike and Rich on the “Expert Knob Twiddlers” LP. The clue’s in the title,if you substitute ‘expert’ with ‘half-arsed’ - lovely cover though, which simultaneously transcends and drags back your expectations and then makes you feel somehow violated by the shitty bleeps and bounces of the music;
2) the recent Burial and Four Tet releases: Two singular visions transposed into some death-dull murk. There is something sad about this release, like the slightly dull ache I got at the end of The Breakfast Club where the sharp individualists and world - weary teens get safely commodified and re-coded into some homogenous gloop, where all the careful territory they establish over the course of the film is finally eroded*;
3) Whitehouse with Nurse With Wound, in all incarnations where they join their heads, turning even more singular and hair-brained visionary material into the smugly bad, the worst of both worlds, the personification of 'Look Ma! He's bleeding!' power electronic showboating. Again though, I like the cover. It's obvious perhaps but not that obvious, with enough sidestepping to make it seem surreal and Bellmeresque rather than just purely shocking.
I won’t go on, you can insert your unfaves here. The list is not endless but it's surely eminently listable; get yer nerd heads on, shove a list up for all to see. Really not at all hard to see the vapid and the prosaic emerge from even the greatest potentialities.
There are inevitable exceptions but, mostly, the whole is less than the sum of its parts (see also supergroups, see especially supergroups)
Carter Tutti Void's recent release, Transverse, is a little different. The parts don’t seem like parts at all. The fit between Factory Floor’s Nik Void and Chris and Cosey doesn’t seem at all forced and doesn’t diminish any of the participants. No one comes away degraded, no one comes away soiled.
And there was potential. A whole load of cross tangents: generational, instrumental (the two guitars could have just ho-hummed tobgether, whereas actually they play off one another like some old Jazz guys).
Throughout this shortish set, it seems like a genuine joint vision has emerged; one that sounds, if anything, a little better and more singular than any of their recent individual work. This is a genuinely new beast rather than a hastily assembled Jenny Haniver.
And the beauty of this release is that it’s as if we’re seeing the monstrous birth as it happened. Of course, we know that, really, this live performance, this pulse, has been carefully considered and worked out way before they come out on stage but the illusion of the birth is right there (fans of Throbbing Gristle will remember the anecdotes swotting back and forth about the genesis of Discipline) and very compulsive.
The four ‘movements’ (hate that phrase but it’s hardly ever been more apt) on display here show not just intentionality and purpose but a kind of hive mind (not Hive Mind) approach that works incredibly well. No one steps on anyone’s toes; instead they miraculously circle one another, adding splashes of colour or extra beats or extra drones or degraded vocals (I assume that’s Cosey). This is a really brilliant release in all senses of the word. It shines. It pulses.
*it seems fairly amazing that The Breakfast Club hasn't been remade in the slew of other 80s remakes. It fits the creeping horror genre better than the other teen movies of the time and seems ideal as a sort of commentary on the sense of loss (abandonment) felt by people of my age as the old divisions (student/nonstudent, Goth/Punk, Hippy/Raver etc) disappeared and were replaced (maybe post Nirvana?) with what people then called (incorrectly) Postmodernism but which is actually just a slow drift towards a reassuring similarity. The Breakfast Clubs is the tribes coming together without the expected (in the 60s) sense of wonder and shared understanding/ aesthetic / ethic but with an increased sense of a deathly hollow.
See also: (the supposed) voter apathy, the loss of a genuine Left, the creeping of neoliberalism as the only viable option for all the major political parties in the UK (though, perhaps, this has been overstated in the sense that the 'true' divisions were never perhaps true.
I...
Oh, and did I mention it's a great album? Everyone should like it.
Just found some of this guys stuff again. Shinjuku Thief seemed a little under-appreciated in the day... no way for this kind of stuff to get out into the light much, aside from the MFTEQ angle and the odd other fanzine you picked up from Berwick Street or wherever...
But this sounds like it really fits into the Boomkat now...
Gonna have to start digging again into the archives...
