New Genres

My Top 11 favourite new genres for Christmas 2010:

Gurgle-fi - The sound of an R&B compilation drowning; water filling up the crevices between the road and the Hummer; the slowed-down, slur of a waterboarded Usher, kept by the Moonies...

Ratchet (sometimes Asp, or Asperger's)- wiry, three-step, instrumental techno with a massive filtered sidesweep of massed Cdskip choirs and a 'Parmegianian' rhythmic reluctance. True Ratchet should begin with EQ'd mumblings and end with the Tin Man falling down concrete stairs.

urlingPop - the small 'u' is crucial. Otherwise, pop.

Faunrock - aggressive panpipes, a re-imagined Comus. Faunrock is normally acoustic, with volume crucial but dependent on singing bowl amplification or massed playing. Slightly fascist leanings, vigorously denied. "Faunrock is Panic. Faunrock is Hansel and Gretel. Faunrock opens the harts of the wuds. Faunrock smiles like a slashed face" (from The Faunrock Manifesto)

Relentless - Gabba techno played by string quartets. Increasingly popular at weddings. Began as a postmodern joke and quickly became popular. Social cryptoamnesia at work. Sometimes foul.

Smirk-hop - If beats could be insincere, they'd smirk.

Kohl - The soundtrack to self-harming rituals, guitarless, beatless, yet propulsive proto-shoegaze. Kohl tracks are generally ten minutes or more long with a gradually increasingly tempo, building up a head of oily black steam.

Sliphop - Anticon artists heard through a cardboard tube.

Cthulhop - Dark, unsettling, multi-tentacled, sample-heavy instrumental hiphop. Samples on samples. Depth is all. Only remotely comprehensible on headphones. Cthulhop albums generally have a complete list of (mostly uncleared) samples and literary/film references on the sleeves, often stretching to 5000 words or more.

Yellowbelly - Half-hearted attempts at defunct genres of all kinds, played for laughs. The Barron Knights take on Goth, Gangsta-rap, Punk, Postpunk, Electro etc. Music for people who hate music.

Krave - hardcore for people who have no clue of the score. Or even that there is a score. Or even that a score is a theoretical possibility.

People Who Live In Solar Houses (and what they say about them)

Found this in a Goodwill Store in Boston.



The subtitle is key here. Giving Solar dwellers an alien status, lost in time. What might these kind of people think? Are they like us? 1979 seems two worlds of 'what if?' away.

Adam Ant and Zodiac Mindwarp

Ok, this week was gonna be all about EBM but I've just found out about Adam Ant joining Zodiac onstage for Prime Mover and wondered how this could possibly have slipped by me.



I think I remember a friend playing this at a Yeovil College Battle of the Bands or something. There may well have been a band called Nasal Dread on the bill as well. It was a long time ago. Cider wasn't 10% more expensive. You could pick live drugs in the form of hallucinogenic snails off the sides of the road in Yeovil, back then. On rainy days you'd spent hours getting to the shops, trying not to trip out on the little fellahs as they slid like fractals across the pavement...

Aloha(tings) In Notting Hill

For some reason this picture has deeply unsettled me. I can't put my finger on it. I mean, it's obviously meant to be disturbing but there's something genuinely awful about it.



Maybe I glanced it once during one of my once mammoth record flipping searches in the depths of one of Notting Hill Gate's Record and Tape Exchanges - a glance that kills slowly, like a one-inch punch, worming through the system, undetected, waiting for someone to activate it by innocently posting the sleeve...

I don't even know why it reminds me of record flipping.

Or why it reminds me of Notting Hill (could this be the reason I don't like the film as well?). Could this be everyone else's reason too?

Maybe it's some kind of accidental post-hypnotic suggestion; the quick flicking of all those cut price records in those dimly lit basements acting like an accidental flip book, accidentally full of arcane commands... like the light flickering through lines of trees along the motorway, sending people crazy, sending drivers off into hallucinatory states, into dream sleep, messing with their alpha beats.... like Native Americans using their fingers to make dream machines out of the Sun...

...thinking about it, there was always an auditory element to the record flicking in the basement as well... the sounds of slapping record sleeves, making tiny micro-rhythms... the beginnings of Mille Plateux glitches? Slap slap slap... vaguely pornographic, easing the way into the unconscious... the nodding head symbolic of the nodding off into semi-consciousness - (Peter) Tripping into some vaguely altered state with no redeeming functionality....

anyone who's been in there, or an equivalent record store can recognise the symptoms, can see where dubstep came from...


...sometimes I used to flip two rows of LPs at a time, forcing one eye to watch each row (or rather forcing both eyes to separate, to obsessively monitor for bargains, to pan for Gold...)

(((((someone on here once tried to answer the question: what do you see if you pull out both eyes and face them towards each other...))))

... maybe something there caused that Henry Kaiser LP to slip into my barely conscious... maybe it combined with the seeping scum leeching out of the never-washed leather jackets of the people in there (Crass logos, black dyed hair that looked like it was melting), flicking alongside me as if they were humans too...

Or maybe I'm making too much of this because, on another level, this picture makes me feel weird too:

Meme Thing

Meme thing that's been doing the rounds, via Doppelganger and Kek and Gutter and Dom and everyone. 10 records that you don't want to admit are lurking at the back of your collection... or else at the lower end of your hard drive, obscured by deliberately incorrect MP3 tagging...

Most of these I've had Vinyl versions of, at one point or another and now retain in MP3 form at least. Irregular readers will know that many of my actual records disappeared or were scratched to pieces in a savage ex-girlfriend attack circa 1995.

1. David Essex - everything really, but especially Hold Me Close and the mighty Rock On.

2. Godley and Creme - Under My Thumb. The perfect single so far about a woman throwing herself out of a train. The electronic backing seethes with menance in a way that Nine Inch Nails never quite manage.

3. Iron Butterfly - In-A-Gadda-Vida. I'm just waiting for these guys to come back into fashion.

4. Paul McCartney - No More Lonely Nights. Because is reminds me of freezing my tits off waiting for a girl to finish her paper round. I had to jump out of a thirty foot tree because of this song.

5. Paul Young - Love Will Tear Us Apart. Not sacrilege at all. I prefer this to the original in almost every way. Lovely hair, put to music.

6. Natasha Bedingfield - Chasing Cars. The Snow Patrol cover that caught me in a loose moment and won't let go. Trust me, I've tried to shake it but the little fellah hangs on in there and keeps nagging at me. I find myself humming this on trains, sometimes with my eyes closed.

7. Mathew Wilder - Break My Stride. The sound of smug set to music. Later on, he became the voice of Ling in Mulan.

8. Marc Almond/Bronski Beat - I Feel Love. My first foray into the 10" maxi-single and the gayest record ever made, apparently. My second foray was a Gaye Bikers On Acid EP, which might be a semantic/linguistic trace for the Freudians / Lacanians out there to follow. My third 10" was Phorward, by The Shamen, which may or may not buck the trend. Actually, I still play this all the time, even when people are around so I'm not sure this really counts as a guilty pleasure. Still, like an 8 year old sitting on Kays catalogue underwear models, this feels vaguely wrong in a way I can't describe.

9. Divine - Walk Like A Man. See above. Triple it.

10. Phil Oakley and Georgio Moroder - Together In Electric Dreams. The first song I remembering being in love to. The girl looked a bit like Fallon, from Dynasty (the first one: see below) and never asked me to jump out of a tree once.



Records I didn't include because they were my parents': David Soul, Cat Stevens, Bread, Neil Diamond, Foreigner, Pilot (I love Magic too Gutter!).