Sone Institute, the Radiophonic Workshop & Sea Devilling

Another remix of a Freq review....

This gives me the gargles. It reminds me a little of the tone behind James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual (it doesn’t sound much like it at all) in that it’s like Roman has found himself unable to distance himself from the music he’s riffing on. This seems respectable, seems right, seems like these aural artefacts (I’m talking about library music, mostly) ought to have a little bit more respect in themselves, rather than simply as cultural signifiers or soundpools for discerning (pillaging) Hauntological hordes and wraiths but.. then we’re faced with the slightly uncomfortable question: do these sounds by themselves really offer us that much?

This album is great in parts and then in parts it’s (mere) library music. Maybe the ‘mere’ is snobbery; maybe there’s gems to be found in unadulterated library music (“after all, Tod Dockstader…” etc) but if there are gems in library music per se, why listen to something that isn’t library music and is intended (perhaps) for something quite different? This is an album, this isn’t (I think) simply intended as something to be used, as something by definition incidental. 

To some extent (actually, to the whole extent) this crosses over with my feelings re: the redevelopment of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in that it seems doomed to failure because the new artists will be continually looking over their shoulder expecting their incidental music to be acclaimed as something other than incidental music and thus will make music that isn't incidental per se, is focused on listening rather than helping the visuals elaborate, is readied for the CD boxset rather than the programme itself... 

I mean, I'm a long sugffering Doctor Who fanboy and I have several of the BBC soundtrack cassettes from the 70s/80s and the music doesn't sound at all like music, isn't at all structured in a way that makes sense in the kitchen... it makes sense only when I add in the visuals (the emerging Sea Devils, the flutter of a Sontaran landing) and then it gives that sense that some people seem to hear without having the original programme in mind... 

 I say it wasn't intended as music but that is a speaker, right?

I could be being snotty here: assuming that the music doesn't stand on its own, doesn't have power in itself without the heavy load of culture and memory (I was there; you can't hear it like I can hear it) but... it really doesn't have that power. Someone like Ekoplekz is much loved because he adds a musical sensibility (albeit via Cabaret Voltaire, Robert Rental et al) to a set of sounds not usually associated with music. He adds a skewed, er, pop (he'll hate me saying this) mentality that helps us along, that helps us treat the music qua music.

I'm digressing. I like this album. I like Sone Institute. He's doing something unusually tangled; introverted and outro-orientated. There’s undoubtedly a lot of skill here and a lot of real playing (and often playfulness) and many of the tracks, especially in the latter half of the album, find their own bouncing frequency but then there’s often a scything, cheesy guitar /organ sound to derail you and send you back to thinking: what if this were library music? Could we tell that it wasn’t? For this reason, the tracks work better alongside words; the spoken/sung passages help to clarify, even if they in fact lend a gauzy surrealism that matches the beautiful sleeve. I like the words. They make sense of this album and elevate it.

Tone Vale

Not-Kek's perhaps non-canonical comment somewhere below made me think of here... I think I might do a tour of derelict insane asylums for next years holidays...

Actually, reading the comments below all the pictures reads like a slowly unfolding horror story and I feel a bit guilty about all the vicious jokes that used to roll around school about this place...

Still "E's gone up the Vale in e? Like a ship without a sail..."

Sunn O))) - B-Witch

Gola Trance (Screen Test Degradation) Redux

With [] to the likes of Kek, Doppel[], K-punk...
The secret of Hauntology lies in the corners, the liminal frames of the photographs. No, it's not what you're thinking; nothing remotely Ligotti or even The Dark Is Rising about it.

Nothing Green Knowe.

Memories from the Haunted Ballroom is a series of soft-focus delirial-oneiric versions of Twenties and Thirties tearoom pop tunes, the original numbers drenched in so much reverb that they have dissolved into a suggestive audio-fog, the songs all the more evocative now that they have been reduced to hints of themselves. Thus Al Bowlly's 'It's All Forgotten Now'

It's no surprise that[ ] hid at first because it's only [ ] you suddenly understand where they are coming from. The critics who argue that hauntology is nostalgic are missing the point entirely; this is not at all about looking back fondly but rather the desire to reanimate SOMETHING [ ]; a kind of rose tint in reverse.

To understand, you need to look at the(ir) trainers.

The picture of [ ] (etc) in the June edition of The Wire [ ]; Gola trainers, even now partially hidden.

The Caretaker - what a world, what a life, what a love

Simple, classic styling with a nice bit of suede or canvas, possibly a gum sole here or there and you won't go far wrong. If they look like they've been stolen from a school gym circa 1979 then you've hit the jackpot. We've been campaigning for Gola to introduce some retro "heelies" but we don't think they're gonna deliver the goods. Bottlers.

Yeah, now they've found a way to be cool; even made a virtue of their [ ] (instead of the Adidas Littbarskis you were after). Everyone living in the hinterlands of the 70s and 80s, the upper reaches of the classic 'Ghost Box era' (from Gutterbreakz) will recognise The Gola trance, the slipped disc look [ ]. It's something that would have shaped most kids* around the classic [ ] Steel, Children Of The Stones, Screen Test era and it's not surprising that it's these sounds that find themselves worthy of excavation. By reclaiming these sounds, The Caretaker, The Ghost Box boys et al, can also reclaim the false consciousness that pretended that these [ ] were okay, had something about them, were somehow non-conformist.

((([ ] non-conformity didn't have the same allure then, did it?)))

And this angst runs deep; keeps wrecking dreams way after the individuals have come to terms with their own status, keeps haunting....

If the Anterograde sessions used Kubrick’s The Shining as their conceptual kick-off point, then the Death of Rave series occupies another sort of haunted ballroom. Kirby wiped rave music of its musical signifiers to create something that sounded hollowed-out and spectral, a sort of MDMA-depleted snapshot of a 1990 Leeds warehouse party. And, somewhere along the way, he managed to make ambient music sound cool again.

Cf; Burial - the lost spaces being the music. Burial hid like hell because of the Gola Trance he found himself remembering... you hardly need mdma-depletion...

And anyway ---- MDMA damage is neurologically aligned to STM rather than LTM i.e. the inability to create new memories rather than the loss of exisiting ones... a theme which was mentioned in the liner notes to The Caretaker's first collection but then gradually, ironically, degraded into a whole other beast...

A shame, because anterograde amnesia explain hauntology as a theory better than anything (of course people are looking at reinventing the past; they've forgotten that the present exists - a kind of awful reversal of that John Peel dictum:

"People ask me, ‘what was the best year for music?’ I always say, 'This year is the best year for music. Prior to that it was the previous year"

I also get a little twitchy re: the nuum(b)ness that seems to be pervading the blog hallways these days...

And as for (often the same) people wishing for the heady days of the early 1990s... when rave crossfired into jungle.... well, in my experience that's when music also started to reassert it's masculinity again; the early days of Jungle round these parts saw girls heading for the hills while the boys spasticked along to the beats in sweaty, disconcerting waves...

I'm not saying that these boys had difficulties with girls and were grateful when they all left and started listening to happy house and psytrance but...

;)

(((maybe not))) - i'm still stuttering; at the unfortunate My Generation stage of development; can't feel that the past needs to be better because i had Puma and, annoyingly, I still have Puma.... though once they were black and white and now they are pink and purple... the analysis of that shouldn't be too difficult...

Rave didn't die, perhaps?



Yeah, Sapphire and Steel was scary, for a zeitgeist [ ] hugging child [] slow for slow's sake []

We shouldn't be [ ] unknown here (((((((())))))))) isn't ontological, it's just logical; an extension of the way TV worked back then. S and S is creepy and unfinished, a real stare into the abyss... [ ] 3-2-1's arcane symbolic systems meant to be - Levi-Strauss would have struggled with Ted Roger's semiotic ((((())))))

The conceit of The Caretaker's Memories from the Haunted Ballroom has the simplicity of genius: a whole album's worth of songs that you might have heard playing in the Gold Room in The Shining's Overlook Hotel.

Being in a Gola Trance [ ] those savage Green Flashes a while back [ ]

You go round to Ghost Box HQ and look at their trainers, you know what you'll find.

*[]

Albert Ayler's Photoghsts

... every piece like the inside of a Ghost Box sleeve, the people of Belbury at birthdays in the middle of laughter and cakes.

Then the ads, which perhaps lose power in going too far gone but.

Albert Ayler - Spirits

Albert Ayler - Ghosts (First Variation)

I like the way he often sounds like he's losing control of himself, that everything's almost getting away from him; his breath, the brass. I don't often do jazz but there's something in Albert Ayler that's missing from the other noodlers. The cymbals on Ghosts seem like twigs snapping as you're chased through the woods or perhaps burning bracken. I normally hate cymbals; it takes a lot for me to understand what they're for.

Moon Wiring Club

Losing slowtime to Moon Wiring Club, the best dressed sleeves in town. Imagine Stuart Maconie's Freakzone show on 6 Music, compressed and slightly de-boned, de-clawed from the occasional lapses of jazzspunk and run through with some Quatermass imaginings (i.e. what people like me who have never seen Quatermass imagine it's like). It's a world which ground to a halt sometime during the 3 day week.

A world of teeth grinding and blank colours. A world definitely, definitively pre-punk and proud.

Obviously, there's now a whole scheme to fit this kind of thing into and I guess this sits most neatly alongside the Mordant Music take on the H word rather than the TV noodles of Belbury Poly (whose latest I'm just not sure about - in part, their best work, in part their worst). I guess MM's Dead Air is the most obvious reference point - though this is smoother and less hurried, less frenetic, less needing to lurch towards the next surreality or soundbite. Moon Wiring Club have a grainier soundfield and this is reflected by their League of Extraordinary Gentlemen-like cover (contrast with Dead Air's angularities and dead spaces)...

It's also the closet any of the Hauntological clan have come to Hip Hop; some of the longer tracks could easily be an alternate universe take on the kind of sludgy instrumental hip hop that DJ Spooky saw off back in the late 90s, just this time the samples are the kind that sound like a just-dead Johnny Morris, sending a thought-shiver to Valerie Singleton.

This is the kind of thing that Ian Penman heard in Tricky's Maximquaye.

Picking up on the DJ Spooky, Olive axis, Illbient works better for theseguys. There's a woozy illness to lots of Moon Wiring Club's music, a sort of benevolent disease, one which sees you under the covers, watching the taught surface-tension struggle between Calpol and air, hooping coughs into the air and waiting for them rebound off the walls.

Jo Meek's Initial Moustache

There are only existing pictures of the artist / celebrant Joe Meek with a moustache, all of them now safely hidden in the archives of Coventry Cathedral (the Devil looking down, the angel looking up) or thereabouts. You have to wonder what he had to hide then that he didn't later (cf pictures of senior politicians as students in the 70s, trying to outdo June Whitfield for hair, cf Psychbloke, cf me).

Mrs Thatcher liked Telstar and played it while Dennis was egg boiling. Little Mark Thatcher, soon to be deadheaded like a fragile Daffodil ('wandered lonely with a cow' etc), grated his teeth and thunk for England.

The great thing about The Blue Men is that they still sound like a skiffle group. Debased perhaps or based but still resolutely earthly amongst all the space that Joe Meek opens up. It's otherwordly I suppose but it's closer to the attenuated mnemonica of the Ghost Box people - or else it's less like life on other planets than it is life on ours, seen from other planets. Which was maybe the point.

Still, if anyone has any of those pictures of Joe Meek with a moustache then let me know. I'm thinking of starting a collection.

Rod Freeman and The Blue Men - I Hear A New World

A Yousendit Thatcherati C-House Selloff