Shackleton - Freezing Opening Thawing

Just in time for a mordant shot at the Easter Number 1, here comes Shackleton again; his last album was a work of necessarily flawed genius - or necessary and flawed or floored genius - it ought to have been everyone’s favourite album of the year but often got a little missed, as if it was just too singular, too far gone, too much. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Now, that album sort of skittered, drifting across lines, missing beats and breaks, losing itself in the mystery of moments. It was also taaalllkkkyyyyyy whereas this 12" is back to the slightly clipped, voices breaking through, approach of the previous incarnation.

It's less fluttery, more robust, a return to Form (as opposed to a return to form which would demean him and this and is, anyway, duckfuckingly wrong in all ways). This has a sheered off quality, like the inside of a chainsawed cow. It seems likely that in some other version there is more stuff (the other half) but these slices work just perfectly as they are; the small-scale, almost pretty, triangular motifs and lilts of “Silver Keys,” for example, would get lost in a denser soundworld; here they achieve a beautiful simplicity and work as a lovely counterpoint to the rapidly approaching Zulu drums.

You know they are coming, they always come. Here they come. Failing faster, to paraphrase Beckett.

I guess this would sit alongside those compilation albums he did in the midst of the first dubstep flush (Shackleton transcended those limitations as quickly as he emerged, holding down beats and bass but using tom toms like holding tanks) and many people will recognise the great thumping hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm that feeds the Shackleton heart. It’s a great sound, one that quickly gets under your skin and genuinely renders his tracks immediately recognisable. This wouldn’t be made by anyone else, which is different and better than couldn't be made by anyone else.

At times, this might even be an exotic lull in the middle of one of the more difficult Orbital albums (0h come on, don't be such a snob; there were diffIcult Orbital albums). I’d like to hear his take on Orbital’s Snivilisation, for instance. I can’t see how that could go wrong. and Someone make this happen, on a triple LP. Certainly, there are tracks (or rather, parts of tracks) that give off a welcome (updated) sniff of some of the other inhabitants of Planet Dog. If some transcendental God-thing managed to turn Eat Static inside out and found they could still play this would be the music it would hear.

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)

Ekoplekz – Dromilly Vale EP

A little sliver of electronic gargling from man of the moment, Ekoplekz. If you want to know which moment, you’ll perhaps have to remember that Dromilly Vale is Nick’s imaginary recording studio, a hybrid of King Tubby’s on Dromilly Ave, Kingston and the Radiophonic Workshop’s Maida Vale studio in London.

(there's an interview with Nick and an explanatory podcast here)

This is 1973 re-imagined uchronically; maybe Dick Mills and Lee Perry did hang out, swapping tape delays, pressing buttons that weren’t theirs; maybe John Baker just couldn’t stop putting some of his jazzy tangles all over Augustus Pablo’s melodica lines; maybe they swapped close-miked pocket protectors over Rum and Pineapple…

But if all that’s making you think this is just gonna lope along like a comedy walk then be prepared; this can get quite… noisy in places. “Jugglin' for Jesus” will frighten the cat inside your brain with its high pitches, sheer edges and aggressively gloopy style while “Dick Mills Blues” overdrives itself into trails and “Dromilly Vale” itself could easily have pitched up somewhere on Side 2 of Throbbing Gristle’s Second Annual Report.

Ekoplekz wears his influences on his table-top of wires and boxes but he’s got a singular vision and he’s tapped a rich seam. On this release, he’s attempting to find a groove in the heart of those Sea Devil whistles and he almost finds it. He’ll keep looking.

written for Freq



On Public Information Recordings though probably not anymore since I'm coming waaaay too late to the party here...

Sun Araw Meets The Congos

Written for Freq

This seems both unlikely and likely. The kind of thing you look at initially and sort of ‘Huh?’ but then creeps up at you as you stop thinking about it and suddenly seems like an obvious decision (cf. the Julianna Barwick, Ikue Mori release on FRKWYS). Sun Araw can (almost) do no wrong in these parts but previously in collaborations I’ve always felt that the message is over-diluted. Sun Araw’s is a washed out sound, is woozy and indefinite and yet utterly singular and immersive – add others to the mix and the same sounds lose something, perhaps even seem a little forced. Sun Araw seems like it needs just the one centre, everything else needs to be fixed, like a beetle crawling in circles because it’s tied to a nail.

For this reason, I was apprehensive when Frkwys announced this was going to be their Volume 9. The Frkwys releases have been some of my favourites over the past year or so, in fact theirs are some of the only perhaps a handful of 12” records I’ve actually bought over the last year (my remaining wall-space can cope with albums, just about, but EPs and singles? Not for years). Each Frkwys release has been different but they’ve shared a core of frazzle and bliss that out-psychedelicizes (you know what I mean) almost anything else.

But this could have been a weak-point. This could have been an unlikely-likely collaboration too far. This could easily have been one of those good-intentioned, try hard attempts, a disaster which only The Congos would have walked away from with any degree of self-respect (and that’s just because The Congos seem like they could walk away from anything with their self-respect intact; they’d float away…)

It isn’t. It works. You can separate the pieces but they do fit together. It’s an alchemical adjustment. The Congos’ voices hovering above and (miraculously) within Sun Araw’s fuzzy angles (not sure which bits are M. Geddes Gangras). There’s not a great deal of variation within the tracks here but the tracks blend beautifully together. It’s hard to express how well this works; it’s felt, can’t really be conceptualised.

It’s what I imagined dub reggae might sound like before I’d actually heard any. Sometimes the whole is weirder than the parts.

MandelbroThailand Sets

"...curse these rotten [mobile broadbands], these ruptures; enough is enough!"

the blog is almost gone but perhaps about to be regenerated... i've lost consistency and everything is mulching, audio and all... even my watches, fresh from Thailand via Japan via Thailand, fail to give up any time.

--- that watch that Coil had, running backwards ---

I've seen faces this year that i haven't seen in years: people from the past are appearing in the midst...

Even taking a turn on Facebook, laughing so hard I've slewn another kidney...

Running, running...

In Thailand the taxis are pink and purple and shades of green that only get seen under the influence of Salvia Divinorum, which might be the right place and time for the likes of Stray Ghost and Erstlaub, two heavy drone CDs, beautifully packaged from the kind kind souls at Highpoint Lowlife... music that sucks you dry, that causes immersion - Salvia would make it make sense, would force it to be the only thing you could listen to...

-- it's non-music -- reminded me in all the best ways of what used to happen when my old fruityloops would spazz under the onslaught of echo and overdub, making the laptop strain and gurgle and finally finding form in Eno systems of endless, repeating, undulations, each one a paraphrase away from the next...

I arrived from Thailand with a package, stuffed with listening... Thailand itself seems to have arrived at music late, it's pop steeped in old drum machine sounds, it's had firmly in the...

Of course, Salvia might take me, right now and so I'll keep well away... the cadets out there, the Drones and the cassette hounds might want to give Stray Ghost and Erstlaub a try but the highlight in the package is undoubtedly the 4 ep compilation Magnetism, That Electricity which bends its way into some of the best dubstep I've heard -

--- accidental dubstep ---

accidental and resolutely occidental; this kind of blankness and Blakeness wouldn't spew from the East, there's nothing remotely sunkissed about it...

--- it's electric and could only be --- there's no analogue to this, no acoustic tremor that would come to these conclusions....

...the best stuff on here (Fisk Industries though this is from the first few listens, could change; will) is pure electricity forcing the fuse and realigning itself with a beat, a heart... lots of the music on Magnetism seems to arrive at many of the same places as the Shackleton system but I'm guessing that this guy hasn't heard the Soundboy Punishments on Skull Disco, have come to their own conclusions...

-- 0re let the electricity, the magnetism, come to it's own end --

So far, there's no octopus in the artwork... the art is black on black, defying a quick call... but there should be.... I see an octopus, a metal one

the octopus is playing the music, like it did on Scatology, with Maldoror...

our hotel in Bangkok was psychedelic as hell, all colours exploded, a Sony Bravia advert rendered in stone and brick and paper and paint...

--- the outside nightclubs at Ko Phangan keep glowing and glowing, little raves that could be from the heady days (you remember, you EDDSON crews, you Mutoids) only with an all too healthy

DOSE

of

blue electricity and UV.



Mine eyes sparkle, as they used to say in The Duchess of Malfi.

This might serve as a tiny moment of losing the Loki, or coming out of the anonymity, peering from behind the blogosphere... a memetical, it seems, already blown through the wintry wonderlands of doppelganger and kidshirt and cloudboy and countless others...

more faces, more midst...

The rain, when it comes, hammers down... the people stop for a second, just a beat, and then continue... dancing like dogs to what I'm guessing is mostly German techno

-- I've only seen the Love Parade on TV but --

Back to trance, to psytrance, to ACID house at one point... no glitches here, no spins on a theme, nothing mottled or crabby... people want to jump; it's hot, it's never going to get cold, there's really no need for any of that nonsense...

-- these are the friendliest people on the planet --

Bangkok is like Japan on the cheap in all the best ways... everyone looks healthy and attractive and happily serene... the safest city I've ever walked through in the dead of night... all around there's Thais playing at being Dylan or The Beatles or Oasis...

MOJO MOJO MOJO

loved it: made me aware that holiday is about holiday from everything... the music on my ipod could never fit into such a large space... could only serve to disconnect from the clapping happiers...

Highpointlowlife could make no sense at all in a place like that.

But back here, with the rain and the reign... and Obama and Hilary snuggling up and with the tiny whorls of househunters, cleaving the roads at night...

God, the UK... scatter!

Those feet never touched the ground, in ancient times or other..

Still, this might be because, in Thailand, on the islands, in the cities, everywhere

you

can

HEAR

the electricity

-- the whole network is bubbling, you're very aware of the idea of electrical POWER --

perhaps they can't bear to hear anymore, need to keep their edges smooth, don't want to be reminded of the sudden shock of shock

I wish I'd recorded the lines, Lamb style... I could swear that the electricity was leaking all over the road, getting into the minds of the Mangirls that cued our pool balls, sending everyone into too muchness...

Running, running...

Paris, nexus.

Next.

Basic Channels

More thoughts on moving into a new house...

Didn't really get any of the Basic Channel releases first time around (bought some, but never found the right time to listen to them). They seemed like there was nowhere near enough going on, they missed the beats of my brain, caused too little synapse-snapping... but in an old and almost empty house, shorn of the inverted snobbery and pretensions and FACT-ish grandeur that lined up the Basic Channel operation against the waytoomuch humanity of the other, non-minimalist labels I found something quite deliberate and spooky about these, a flutter at the edge of consciousness...

I didn't realise there was anything playing for a little while, thought my computer had died and then, integrated with clockticks and staircreaks and the soft scuffing of cardboard boxes dragged across the floor, a resonance started to creep through the house, playing against the ecological sounds, eating them, forming new patterns. Things I'd found uneccessarily metallic tasting now seemed decidely amorphous, like they needed their own space to really set things into motion.

More importantly, they need other sounds to mingle with, the reverse of everything I've read about the label, with most reviewers suggesting they become meaningless without full attention or autistic listening skills. The music is skeletal but that's because it needs something to wrap around it, a skin of extra colour, a few new splashes...

I might not listen again, anytime soon - certainly makes no sense at all to listen with someone - but I'm glad these little pieces have found their place...

Quadrant Dub 1 Edit

Presence Edit

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