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...

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.

Orbital: Wonky, The Flash & Kant

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:



4) I mentioned it at the time - but nothing swept in to fill the void..

5) I love Shackleton but he tends to make me want to thrown commuters under trains...

6) (Actually, there's something reasonably joyous about Gentleforce but that's a different kind of joy)

7) Death to Emotional Bulimics!

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.

Carter Tutti Void Knob Breakfast Haniver

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.

Exotic Pylon @ The Vortex

Ship Canal, no longer shitting it

Well, (lovely to meet you Dan by the way) Ship Canal is shitting it; it's his first gig, his first play out (play seems very apt for this kind of gig; Ableton Live being the toy of choice, the machine of a thousand voices, the churning dreadnaut in software form, sending boys and girls into whirls and paroxyms...)

I meet him about two hours before he's due on, staring at wine, wishing it glugged, knowing it can't be... his set works really well, works great with the chugging visuals... this crowd is a good crowd, a benevolent mass of chin-strokers and music lovers... Everyone's telling him it'll be fine, it's fine... he opens the evening really well... interlacing loops and samples of the other artists on show tonight, sending heads nodding when the beats kick in... great stuff; keep playing, keep playing...

By the end he's smiling.

He doesn't stop smiling.



Kemper Norton's wheezes of sound

Kemper Norton is also looking a little scared though he's played before, just never in this big city, where things might smoke, where the worry (we all have this worry) is that the London crowd is over-used, over-indulged in weird sounds, doesn't have to go too far to look for new weird sounds, can just glance and then dismiss...

I meet him pre-set and he's looking at wires and wondering... attempting to get mini drunk, drunkette... I buy a few cocktails, just to wind him up... I volunteer some breakdancing, to help distract the crowd... I know he's gonna be great and he knows it too but... there's always doubt, especially since he's just confessed that he's going to, er, sing something tonight...

Sing? Jesus, Dave. You're going to sing?

Jonny Mugwump describes Kemper Norton's set as "like a weird cafe" and he's got that right... all the tables and the candles do make it seem like that, maybe that cafe you finally find at 4 AM in Glastonbury Festival, somewhere up beyondf the stones, in the odd streetlit back-alleys of Shangri-La... at times, it's a kind of odd, lilting Cabaret (Voltaire - in the Swiss Dada sense, in the writer sense... Kemper would make a great soundtrack to Candide). It's haphazard at times, and he sometimes looks at his instruments as if they are about to punish him for some terrible sin, but it's also unique and affecting...

I've talked about Kemper Norton's music many times on here before, though this set is decidedly more slurred and urfolky and less beat-driven than a lot of his stuff and, despite the fact that he interrupts his flow by stop-starting in the middle (some people stopped watching here, which seems to mean stopped listening), by the end of the set, people are captured again. He takes a while to build up towards the song but, when it comes, it's...

It's...

People are listening again.

The song. The song. The slightly broken voice that might be a part of the accompanying wheezing ghostbox harmonium (harmony and radium) comes out.. a gentle folk song, gender benderingly untouched by Kemper hands... love, loss, sex and maidenhood despoiled... you can hear breath; Kemper's, the audience.

An odd magic.



Next, Time Attendant starts fuzzing with Coil synth trails; beginning more or less beatless and building swarms... a little bit reminds me vaguely of the Time Machines Coil stuff... especially the Queens Of The Circulating Library clamshell disc... a little later he starts up beats, cranks them and we get brittle headbutts of sound... audience heads nod (this isn't the place to dance but, people could dance, if they had a head full of belladonna, if they'd forgotten how)

and then came Philip Jeck; dance(ette) music for the already half gone... Jeck is as close to truly religious music as most of these people ever get and he seemed almost ghostly, a presence at the back of the room, watching the other bands, sucking in their sounds and getting ready to regurgitate his own. Jeck is the master regurgitator, taking what's not his, stealing as genius (the quotes go on into eternal regression)... what he's stealing tonight is thunder, or attempting to... that seems to be the message here, the underlying narrative... here comes Philip Jeck to blow these lil fuckers out the water (I'm sure he doesn't think this but I overheard a few conversations); people are quite crazy excited about him playing...

Butm in truth, while the sounds he coaxes wax and wane and certainly pulse it's way through this crowd, his set doesn't blow the other, younger, bands away... (The Liminal seems to disagree), he's not coaxing truly unheard sounds from his decks... I might be drunk as buggery by the time he's on but he looks even a little...disinterested, despite the eager audience...

I'm being harsh. He is a master at what he does; his set spins together in a way it really shouldn't and I like a lot of his records and find the time to play them more than almost any other artist of this type but I felt this wasn't transportive enough tonight. I dunno, there'd been a lot of drone out there, maybe you can fill up on drone, maybe there's a fucking limit...

Still, this evening was wonderful. I met up with some lovely people I've only ever chatted to online before and met some old friends who I've missed a lot this past year. It was also cool to put a face to Andrew and Chris Bailiff and, of course lovely to see Jonny again...

The Vortex remains an unique event in an unique place (and outside The Vortex is like a little slice of London life that looks scripted by Richard Curtis; very surreal and very beautiful); if you haven't been yet (anyone who reads this not been yet?) you need to. People will be talking about these events, one day. You'll need to go once, just to pretend you've always been there.

Raica

Try to listen to lots of this kind of stuff but not very much gets my attention beyond a cursory quarter-listen, mostly because I'm normally struggling with some elliptical Philosophical half-theory but... this has a distinct whiff of Twin Peaks about it, which can only be a good thing.



More here.

Brain Drive / Soft Ballet

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Barbara Panther

sourced of sorts from the bare bones of Fredgeogblog, which will apparently turn into a horticulture/music blog: what is the best music for mulching?

BP is clearly syntactically/visually related to Bjork , a slicing and dicing of some of her best popbits, with maybe a smile of Lykke Li about the edges...

Lyrics seem Bjorkish too... oddly-hinged flights of fancy and a fascination with tropes/archetypes

She dances better , though.

Sonic Seasonings: NY booty

Found this on vinyl for 99cents. Even has the poster with it...



Haven't heard it yet since the record player is yet to come out of storage - moving house in about 30 mins! - but, really, who cares what it sounds like. Beautiful artefact.

BTW big thanks to all those twitterers who gave me advice on NY record shops - found most of them and lots of bargains.

Gold Blood go Italo

So, Gold Blood. Anyone?

There's the name, I suppose. Gold and Blood being the old, odd Alchymical Twins. And I don't want to judge these guys before I've heard anything by them but, consider this and wonder if someone hasn't just emptied the entire contents of their playlist onto the page...

“A darkly, self-consciously melodramatic and brilliantly OTT mix of Fantomas, Coil, Vex’d and Virgin Prunes.” Time Out

I mean, that would be good wouldn't it? Though it does also describe early Coil so perhaps the part will eat the (w)hole...

Not sure who wrote the Time Out review. Not even sure that it was written; smacks of robot logic, a Pandora Radio review, an amalgam of iTunes or Amazon page views.

“Sounds like White Zombie gone Italo – amazing!” Wanstead Flats

I can see it. Sort of. I think more things should go Italo. Thinking about putting together an Everything Goes Italo megamix...

I'll check them out. I'm curious.

The Roots Of Goa Trance: Uchronie

Well, I know people kick the hell out of me for keeping with the faith (and it's a bigger leap than Kierkegaard took; a bigger leap than Yves Klein ) re: dodgy India-Alien obsessed PsyTrance - see, for example, Goan Wurries - but reading this via Blissblog opens a few interesting sideswipes and alternate histories - imagine where we might have ended up with another combination of:

(from here)

A selection of the acts played by Laurent and others in Goa from 1983-1989

Acts Of Madmen, Alien Sex Fiend, A Split Second, Anne Clark, Android, Arthur Baker, Art Of Noise, BAD, Bappi Lahiri, Blancmange, Borghesia, Boytronic, Cabaret Voltaire, Carlos Peron, Cassandra Complex, CCCP, Chris & Cosey, Code 61, Cyber People, DAF, Decadance, Den Harrow, Depeche Mode, Devine, Dr Calculus, Ecstacy Club, Egyptian Lover, Electra, Fad Gadget, Fatal Attraction, Force Legato, Front Line Assembly, Front 242, FockeWulf 190, Giorgio Moroder, Hard Corps, Hashim, House Master Boys, Hypnosis, Icarus, Information Society, Ironic Remark, I Start Counting, James Ray and The Performance, Jellybean Benitez, Jean- Michel Jarre, John Carpenter, Karen Finley, Keith Leblanc, Koto, KLF, Kraftwerk, Krush, Lama, Laser Cowboys, Laser Dance, Liaisons Dangereuses, Man Parish, Manufacture, Mark Imperial, Mark Shreeve, Ministry, Mittageisen, Moev, Morton Sherman Bellucci, Moskwa TV, Neon, Neon Judgement, New Beat Express, New Order, Newcleus, Nitzer Ebb, N.O.I.A., Nux Nemo, Off, Orient Afair, Peter Richard, Poesie Noire, Portion Control, Public Relations, Psyche, Richard H. Kirk, Robotiko Rejekto, Sandy Marton, Severed Heads, Screaming Trees, Signal Aout 42, Simple Minds, Sisterhood, Skinny Puppy, Space Opera, Spectrum, Soft Cell, Syntech, Tackhead, Tangerine Dream, Tantra, Telex, The Maxx, Time Zone, Torsten Fenslau, Total, Tribantura, Two Of China, Vicious Pink, Voyou, Yello, Zwischenfall, 400 Blows, 4You, 16 Bit...

You can see the nucleus of some really interesting things here; something similar to the plate-spinning antics of Stevo in the early years of Some Bizarre, something that could have eaasily diverted into an altogether stranger, more tentacled (tentacular?) beast...

It reminds me of some of the alternate timelines for Acid House that I imagined a while back - here mostly and then here (Where Richard NOrris has his say) - ... so many missed opportunities, so mnay angles yet to be explored... who's for suggesting Uchronie as the latest new genre? Music that purposefully re-imagines alternate musical timelines... starts afresh, sends signals down the line that don't get interrupted...

The Search for Japanese EBM

You'd have thought there'd be more Japanese EBM bands, that this scene above all others might have taken off in a big way there, might have fit Japan like a leather glove...

I'm aware that I've never been to Japan, am seeing it instead through a terrible gauze of Occidental 'otherness', aware that even when I do go I'll probably still not be able to see things straight but... I'm still curious why I don't know much about the Japanese EBM scene; why it hasn't crossed over, made itself more obvious...

I mean, there's components there, a definite cultural imperative towards the kind of metal/leather fetishism, a definite body horror / man-ipulation vibe, right the way from Mishima to Tetsuo and then way beyond... EBM would soundtrack the Japan I think of well (Albeit the one I'm thinking of is perhaps a slightly attenuated Blade Runner)... and the likes of Merzbow and particularly Masonna have been churning the man-machine interface into pure noise for years now... it seems suprising that the beats have been less forthcoming, have mostly spun off into brighter tones, to techno, to house, to disco or trance or dub...

There must be a Japanese EBM scene...

You could start here, but it's hardly propulsive; doesn't seem like an organ of mass manipulation - doesn't seem like a big enough gateway - what have these bands got to hide?

A dark heart of Japan that they think shouldn't exist? Is EBM too obvious a move?

This place seems promising, but I'm struggling to find a leader of the pack; a Klinik or a Front 242. There's no one I can find that's willing to be Skinny Puppy and face the consequences.

That said, I like the look of these guys, though they're really a lot closer to Depeche Moded J-pop than you'd imagine by the company they keep:



and you can tell by their t-shirts that they are going for the kind of Emily Strange market rather than puff-powdered, ski-goggle wearing Neuro-Trashers:



Perhaps these guys are nearer the mark. I could get into this kind of stuff:



though I guess it's still more techno than EBM, more like a messier Prodigy than a tight-balled Front Line Assembly clone. Good stuff, but not EBM..

I've recently discovered 2 Bullet and have more than a suspicion that they might be more fun than a bag of hungry cats and, judging from their influences, might be as close to a 'true' Japanese EBM band as I'm going to get. I'm certainly digging the paramilitary look:




And this kind of storms along like a very breathless robot:

2 Bullet - Human Kind

A little odder, trancier and still more Gothic is SawDUST in me which have a strange awkward sordidness about them, like a Balthus painting, come to life.

Well, a Balthus painting come to life in the middle of a seriously tranced out space-room:

sawDUST in me - Heaven

sawDUST in me - Thirteenth

On the same theme, they look like Strawberry Switchblade, modelled by Belmer:



But, again, there's nothing really BODY BEATING about this. It's pummelling without the body. And the machine fetshism isn't really fetishism at all; where Front 242 et al seemed to view machines as something to be wrestled with, and then commanded... the Japanese seem to take a friendlier tone; the machines are our natural extension, something to be kissed on the head rather than wrestled to the floor until they submit.

The search continues... where is the Tetsuo of Japanese EBM? It's a monster waiting to happen...

The Revolting Cocks as EBM Binge

Well, it started innocently enough, the root of all this was a Front 242 track that slipped into the Shuffle Mode a few weeks back and then coincidentally I got my first cease and desist notice about another Front 242 track I'd posted (alongside a cutting stolen from Gutter) and now, well, now I'm in the middle a of one of those periodic binges of re-listening to stuff I've long since discarded

...and this time it's perhaps the least cool and least salvageable (we'll see) of all genres - EBM, which is quite possibly still going very strong in all kinds of dark holes, which probably isn't called EBM (and never really was) and which, assuredly, isn't New Beat or anything like that (a more loved cousin genre which did get a little reinvention a few years back by that Dunlop-wearing Caretaker guy) although it's Belgian by inclination and there are times, in a dark room, with a badass PA system, where the two have been known to slide around in the mud together, like all good cousins...

Which brings me to Revolting Cocks.

I'll probably be chugging my way through the likes of a:GRUMH and A Split Second and FLA and the Klinik/Dive angle and maybe DAF which I loved since I heard Kebab Traume on the C81 tape (and which was perhaps a bigger gateway band for me than almost any other) but for now, this 12" single is as good a place to start as any...

Revolting Cocks - No Devotion

Leeched from here

I went to see them at The Astoria in 1990 and, while they were predictably fantastic and gross and stupid (i.e. ideal 18 year old brain fodder), they were probably already on a downward spiral... we were already slightly annoyed that they didn't bring the herd of cattle onto the stage (we were expecting something to rival the Frank Tovey, Blixa Bargeld, Genesis P-Orridge ICA smashing) and I think, even then, we knew that The Cocks would morph into RevCo (Ugh!)... Beers, Steers and Queers was about to become an indie disco anthem and they were going to get over-excited at all the attention... even old ice-cream head Douglas Hurd had a crack at them before the UK gigs after Teddy Taylor brought them to the attention of the House of Commons EBM select committee (love to have been at that gig, DJ TT in da house...)

But the first few albums were good - the live album was brilliant and No Devotion was off it's time and perfect; the way it starts all sludgy and industrial and then pulls a light cord and - WHAM- it's disco-spastic. It's a fine line and they found it a difficult one to tread. When they eventually covered Let's Get Physical and Do Ya Think I'm Sexy, it was already too obvious. If they'd done That's The Way (Aha Aha) I Like It then maybe things would have turned out differently (actually, I always thought Laibach would have done that well; the way i hear it is with Laibach or The Cocks singing along) but I lost interest soon after that gig and they picked up more guitars and got sloppy with the drum programming and, well, drifted off...

Still, watching a crowd of indie kids all singing the lyrics (and samples) of Beers, Steers and Queers remains a very fond memory... especially since this was the same time period that people would sit fucking down when Sit Down came on or go spazzmental to The Mission. Seriously, The Mission. Butterfly On A Goddamn Wheel.

Punishing times...

Hauntology and The Dead Genres

(Opening stabmental music of Battlestar Galactica)

Well, it started happening almost before it began...

It's had legs, creeped under The Wire (stomped on The Wire's face).

It was foretold.

And tried to reason with French Philosophy and

even Jodie Marsh had a little dig.

Once, it even started to decay, right before our eyes...

But

Now

It's

Coming

To

An End.

This is what the Mayans meant. Hauntology's just the beginning. All genres will start to crumble, a Musical Eschatology is being born, ready for the end. The Genres have been tearing apart for a long time and the consequent creation of new ones has been escalating, trying to keep pace.

Too late.

No New New Age Advanced Ambient Motor Musik Machine.

No Gola Trance.

How fitting that Hypnagogic Pop wasn't especially hypnagogic or pop.

Never liked the End of History argument but...

Simon, seems to have a cackle in his post though. He saw it coming. Played the game and will continue to play the game right to the end. My suspicion is that he was done with the genre a while back and was already looking for a some kind of fix.

And now little Wikipedia, that bastion of Peer Reviewed mulch, is kicking off..

There may be life yet, of course. Hauntologies. And a resurrection can't be impossible in a genre like this... when every turn of every timbre may cause some thud of awakening - yeah, right now it's Open University programming, old Doctor Who, Children Of The Stones but tomorrow the New Haunts might be evoking Timbaland or Jam and fucking Spoon (I hope it goes the way of LSD Nikon, loved that track) or...

yeah...

C'mon!

A rebirth of

Clonk!

(Honestly, back in the day; we all thought this was gonna be huge, didn't we?)

Sweet Exorcist?

Hmmmmmmmm

Sweet Exorcist - Test Four

Sourced from Harpski.com

Dead Music (or Jello does Jazz Hands)

Jello Does Jazz Hands

...watching the Synth Britannia at the BBC thing on Saturday in a slightly hypnafug, itchy-eyed, drowned state and Bryan Ferry kept morphing into Jello Biafra... watch again, they've got the same drawl with only a slightly different accent, the same head movements ( Ferry is 1/3 of the pace, is less frenetic), they dance the same.

When Jello gets all croony, like on:

The Dead Kennedys - Saturday Night Holocaust

the spirit of Ferry takes him, makes him an awkward, flip-haired, jazz lounge ghoul... it's where Jello should have gone; gone some way inbetween the spazz chords of The DKs and his spoken-word pops of the later years (I love them but they're not keepers... or at least they don't get much play)... maybe something like the Steven Jessie Bernstein album, with more singing... more eruptions (The SJB album has it's moments but it meanders rather than propulses).

Yeah, I know he did stuff with Country dudes and HipHoppers (the Coldcut stuff was excellent, I thought) and dabbled with the WaxTrax boys but his singing didn't really go too many places and I thought that voice of his, that Ferry Ghost, could have pulled us all along into some odd places...

Benders & Alveoli Inc.

Well, I wonder whether eBay'll eventually become a new trove of unspeakable treasures; the old synths seem to be going very cheaply these days, compared to a few years ago, but the modified, cyber-synths are still clinging on...

Like the added video, too... Maybe the future of all selling on eBay: "here's a video of me enjoying the Satin Chickens double 7" in the comfort of my own home. Please don't mind the mess, only my friends were staying over and some of them haven't got autistic spectrum disorders."

That was surely the future of music selling circa 2009/10? The niche, the personalised, the soup-chucked, egg-stained pre-release CD, with added polaroids of the tour bus?

Where next? I want DNA... I want a coughed-up bit of lung inbetween the covers. let's keep people going into record shops on the off-chance that a new bit of alveoli has crept onto the market alongside the re-born 12" ers.

Ekoplekz

Well, expect a full review a little later when I've digested and molested but for now I'd just like to say a massive thank you for letting this little fellah drop // through my door /into my pigeon hole/ :



Actually, while I'm hear/here and it's actually ON...

I'l just say that so far (I'm 3 tracks down; not listening in order, nowhere near - I'm sensing this can be double-dipped) I've heard:

1) the Chris Carter end of TG, the stuff a little in awe of Disco but tangled up in wires...

2) a definite Cabaret Voltaire about the eyes of some of the tracks, bits of the live bass, bits of the way the drums seep into the sides of the tracks....

Clicktracking // Back and forth /

<<<<<>>>>>> (this as sound)

3) Dr Who soundtracks circa The Silurians / Sea Devils - episodes just a little before my time: John Pertwee? Nothing especially Delia'd so far but...

EDIT: I've just noticed there's a track called Malcolm Clarke (i wasn't referring to that one but he's in there, definitely) - this must be a freaky auto-suggestion or perhaps just a bit of subliminal reading... either way.... The Sea Devil's are ROCKING this place...

I'm 4 tracks, I'm 5...

4) An Anti-Group record that I swear I used to have but can now find no mention of anywhere*

*I know what you're thinking but you're wrong... it is out there....it's just slipped through... as all the other Anti-Group records were supposed to but never quite managed

5) It smells of a Copy Cat tape loop (you either know the smell or you don't, I'm nowehere near talented enough to even attempt a decent description) but I don't know if he's got one.

It's all <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< cheap as CHIPs (or as expensive as CHIPs once were).

Or maybe He's just reminded of those crusty old machines, of the little catches and loops,

There's lots of little drum machines through fuzz or wah (through both). There's

Casio in there, I'd swear; a calculator wanting to play with the bigger boys...

6) At times, of Cosey Fanni Tutti's 'solo' track Hometime comes to mind. Not the voices, just the background ebbs and flows. They're following the same pace...

I'm 6ing and 7ing...

7) Nocturnal Emissions are in there, somewhere...

8) Screen Test, especially the bit where they showed award-winning kids animations about eating eyes.



9) The intro to B%^ B*@£ tracks before they get to the crappy bits.

10) What OMD thought they sounded like...

11) A TV show where giant chess pieces battle it out on a map-rendered 3D blanket, while Richard Stilgoe look-a-like competitors pick fights with glass-eyed child/snake hybrids...

12) The sound of Too Much Golden Nuggets**, of transistor radio music heard from inside concrete playing apparatus (tubes, coils, mounds)

**cereal sounds, a West Country Cluster...

13) Actually the Krautrocking Cluster isn't far off the mark... the shady bits of Harmonia...

Great stuff....

The Kek quote is priceless and very apposite.

Inspiring stuff from a guy let loose.

More later..

Disc(l)ocations

I don't choose music these days. It chooses me. I'm temporarily without CD or Record player. Trapped in a room with just a little black box* and a big iPod on shuffle. I load it up and it chooses the mood, decides on which kind of day it is. I'm learning to live with it, learning not to press on through the tracks, learning to believe that, if I've put it on there, it must be worth listening to all the way through.

Mostly, there's a tangle of sounds. Mostly, there's no rhyme nor reason - The Chesterfields to Ramleh to Fourt Tet to the soundtrack to Barry Lydon - but occasionally it gets a feel for things. Sometimes, there's something in the air. Yesterday, shuffle had an odd liking for the new Kempernorton EP (and in some Jungian synchronicity / complete coincidence, I found the Iron John book in a Glastonbury second-hand shop the same day) and various Pantha Du Prince tracks (of more in a later post perhaps; I've come to this guy late but it's stirring, interesting stuff) and today, apropos of nothing (so far), it's got a disco head on.

It's quite relentless.

There's been the odd bit of Patrick Cowley, some Ze stuff and, especially, Giorgio Moroder. In fact, out of the tens of thousands** of tracks it could choose, more or less all of them have a disco twist (over 15 songs played so far today, all but three have been disco). I can't get a fix on it. There's clearly disco in the air, the tranciest kind. The kind that keeps going. The day doesn't feel disco but I can't escape the sense that maybe it'll become so. There's a few hours left. It's out there, trying to get in. It's insistent music at the best of times. It's trying to get into my bones.

Giorgio Moroder - The Chase

Giorgio Moroder - First Hand Experience In Second Hand Love




*I might mean this. I can't be sure. Wasn't this in Rapid Eye or something?

**Maybe the iPod is trying to comment on the obscenity of having this much music on your person at any one time, maybe it's making a comment about the implied self-denial of Free Will, maybe something's just missing a time when the best bit of any journey was deciding which tapes to take with you...


UPDATE - I think this may be responsible. I'm looking into it.

Everyone Loves Werneck-Wretchmond

"This is Not For You."

Or

"Only a few will be able to savour this bitter fruit with impunity."

Where to go with this slice of slurr?

It makes no human sense; the machine sense is there and cows are just food is right: these aren't angry machines, not machines wanting to destroy or Merzbow the place into submission...



Instead, this is the sound of bored, neglected machines playing, the humchatter of unrecyclable machine-fuzz, miniDisc mutterings, the machine equivalent of jump-rope songs, pitter pattercakes, handclapping games...

If there's moaning, it's soft moaning. It's a machine's irritation at it's own limitations. It's the sound of an old wordprocesser chip, laughing at it's own green screen.

There's nothing human which isn't unusual, I guess - remember Stakker? - but this lack of humanity comes with a different slant; there's the intervention of listening in these manipulations and this brings it closer to these ears to the chargings of ElPH, a cross-reference with Ice Bird Spiral that I heard way back at The Croft...



Kek's trying to hear these little machines, they are calling to him. He doesn't want to control them, he wants to help; you can hear the love and attention in every little wave of sound, it's ridiculously personal, almost intrusive... this is how he hears the world... and this makes this a different kind of thing to other stuff that's on the surface similar; you'll find manipulated field recordings all over the place but they won't have this attention to detail, this attention-surplus disorder...

They won't understand the tyranny of attenuation that means many of these sounds are sucked out of the world or bypassed with mp3 players or uneccessary phone conversations

...

Dig deeper and you'll find some excellent field recordings out there but they won't mean the same thing at all and they won't come packed with little postcards of Butterflies or Jean Dubuffetish Art Brut crayon covers or blotter paper CDs...

They won't come with the meaning or the feeling for the plight of these abandoned, forgotten twitchings...

You probably need to spend a little time over here before any of these songs make sense. The Open University is the visual equivalent to these catechism-calls; there's a sadness to both projects that makes you wish you hadn't pulped all those broken-backed machines, all those hiccuppertronical potentialities.

A final image: imagine Europe After The Rain with the fluid earthshapes replaced by old Atari boxes, Burroughs adding machines and Dragon computer piles...

This is Not For You.

10 - 20: Neurobashment

...it's about placement: the 10-20 stuff passed through the circuitry from Thorsten at Highpoint Lowlife (cheers!) is finding a way into my skull; the songs I've heard so far appear slightly ragged and loose-limbed and it's only during a very close listen that you recognise the patterns and the placement are rather more considered than that...


...at first, this reminded me a little of a dubbier, steppier Nurse With Wound (I'm thinking especially the proto-junglist tinbox percussive NWW of the Automating Vol 2 compilation, esp. The Strange Play of the Mouth... but then, then, the structure sort of creeps out at you, leaves that kind of automation (writing, scribing, channelling) behind, replacing it with a more mechanistic, lurching robot, signature that does seem to have order...



<<<<<....placement of electrodes on the scalp; sending beams in and recievers switching themes and blocking patterns and shooting shards of pure energy into the brain. The intent was never to free the patient, more to entrap them in a device of our making...>>>>>

From: Tripwires and Tangents: the misuse of others by Dr. G. A. Solomon

...and it's then that a lot of what I said about previous Highpoint Lowlife releases starts to take hold - again, this seems like accidental dubstep, leaking electricity, currents running through everything... the beats are considered in the sense that they follow the paths of electricity itself, the sounds come in waves because, well, they are already travelling in waves...

<<<<<...we'll turn them, inside and out; that was the whole point of everything I argued for...>>>>>

From: A Bird's Eye Of The Brain by D. A. Robertson

and then it makes me think that 10-20 as a human is just there to press pause at appropriate moments; is there primarily to observe, to consider when the circuits should be switched... this music might be as endless as all the audio gunk from that early Eno software... the human simply cuts in and out... music as flint knapping...

Neurobashment.

Highpoint Lowlife are putting together an impressively coherent roster... they are due some attention...

Of course, if the 10-20 relates to something entirely different then I'm going to re-evaluate, re-listen and re-hear - if there's one pair of ears I have no problem mistrusting then it's my own...