Technova - Delta

I normally post this kind of thing around the start of Summer, awaiting a fresh burst of unwanted enthusiasm for ethnic techno and psytrance - like here, for example - but this seems appropriate for the end of Summer, somehow and Technova was almost enigmatic in this dayglo world; kinda feted at the time, I think but then swiftly brushed under the carpet and, I dunno, accused of having no bass or something. This one does seem very trebly. There was in truth plenty of stuff like this - a bit later, there was chuggs of it blocking up the racks in Record and Tape Exchanges, mostly on white labels, mostly unloved - but Technova (this isn't their best track) found some odd ways of making things obvious.

Ponycore/Broniecore

Late as ever to the party but...

Yeah. A My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic based continuuuuum. Eating all, spitting them out in multi-coloured goo; replace acid with skittles and here's your audio toxin, a Brasseye slab of cake...

In fact, simply add skittles (& maybe a sprinkle of magic dust) to acid and then start fucking around on Fruity Loops... this is the music FL was designed for; this is the music in FL's bad bones...

You have to love humans. This is perhaps another meta-genre /non-genre, a mere s(l)ideshow and circus, but I like that the collective can just take something and run with it, vomiting all the way. The lightning quick, feeble-minded stew of 4chan is brilliant at this kind of thing; inspiring bad trips and lost hours in bedrooms all over the world. It strikes me that the producers responsible for these minorly brilliant atrocities will have super-short half lives and the names will disappear almost as quickly as they've arrived (as Zizek says, it seems harder to image a ponycore revival in 2023 than the end of capitalism) but this is it's prime strength... the imagination run wild, stuffed with bad tidings and loosely tied ends.

This is, I guess, analogous to the kids' TV sampling debacles of the late 80s, early 90s (Sesame Treet, Charly, Roobarb) but with an elan and an elasticity that seems less cynical and more, well, if there's a internet meme-based definition of polymorphously perverse....

And yeah, you'll hear a lot of Rustie in there too if you're as old as me...

But oddpop exists...

It's mostly dubstep, 8bit, techno-popping, electronica of course, but the genre is elastic enough to include death metal as well:

These are not necessarily exemplars but there's ome demented mixtapes here, for starters. Tread carefully. As Lautreamont said, at the beginning of Maldoror:

"This is not for you."

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.

Rene Hell Flicker + Moonlighting

It gets better...

Keep with it...

Rene Hell "{e.s. des Grauens in fifths}"

Also, some accidental moonlighting at Blissblog, as part of the rock-kissed gitttttarrrrrr solos/quirkings that's been going on for a little while over there... though clearly I missed that The Buttholes kicked the whole thing off...

Africa Hitech

Well, never too sure about some of my old mate Mark's Africa Hitech stuff... the futurenowspeedgarage thing has never been my sack... but this one pushes some good buttons. It's a little Shangaan, I think...



Found via Slutty's Fringeings

Psychic Ills

Old news now perhaps but absolutely loving this motorfed, spazzling of an EP...

Faustbits sounds half good again (people keep telling me about this album or that track but Faust often seem pointless and directionless and old-fashioned these days), whole-good, immense and kraut, depth-defying - more like this please.

Gibby Haynes reworks like The Jack Officers never stopped happening (in fact, like they ought to have sounded and didn't). This makes to completely spazz but remains restrained, Jet Li in Unleashed, just before the shit is about to hit the fan... That said, restraint is Butthole-based; it's not the restraint of most people... Someone get Gibby some more time on the remix desk. Someone send him some Panda Bear tracks...

Juan Atkins does something I'd listen to again despite not being club-bound. Model 500 always bawed me; fundamentally impressive but thin, groovey but not relentless enough... But this... this is what I want him to sound like.

This clubs similar remix projects over the head, sucks the life out of them... Psychic Ills never sounded so good...

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 Spice Has Stopped Flowing

Ian Loveday AKA Eon, one of the early Rave superstars (i.e. before there were rave superstars - are there rave superstars - etc) has died.

Had some fun times with Eon; out here in the wilds, hearing him through bucket bins hidden in the trees, through tinny car stereos, where the bass couldn't flow and you were just left with the samples and the tunes and the bleeps.

Maybe this is just the beginning; the old MDMA soaked ravers starting to bow out as their neurons twist and their bodies strain... an old school pandemic, gradually tearing them apart...

Perhaps more of this to come: Altern8 crumbling in front of our eyes on the Thursday night at Pilton, falling apart from the inside out,leaving just their boiler suits and enviro-masks discarded like a Joseph Beuys sculpture, or a Christo coast....

Graveyards of dummies and Vicks inhalers, day-glo whistles sticking out of the ground like swollen arms in the aftermud of the Somme...

Malfunctioning LCD t-shirts from Cyberdog, left in piles to blink out blank, cut-up, neuroded messages...

Everyone listening to the death of rave...

Eon - Inner Mind

Eon - Spice

R.I.P. Eon...

Psytrance / Goan Wurries

...I can feel it coming; the Sun... I'm as cursed as a werewolf...

The Sun is rising; there's nothing I can do. Soon, i'll hear the drumming, the squiggles, the flipping 303s, the Terence McKenna samples, the spaaaace noises...

Hallucinogen - Shamanix

<<<<<<>>>>>>>
My Mind Is Going
<<<<<<>>>>>>>

With the Sun comes Psytrance, comes Goa... putting my Shame in Shamanic...

Here they come; faster now, crawling over the sunlit hills, through the woods, dragging everything out of the shadows, making everything gleam...

I'm gasping for breath just thinking about it, almost in tears as the Sun outside starts to burn, starts to drag the light from my computer monitor...

I'm listening to dubstep, honestly - that Spatial, great stuff, love it, degraded cybermen, Maldoror rising, sine wave speech, surbanity, profanity; a Burial for Rave, a requiem Mass... i'm there, as Catholic as the rest of them; stretching all the way from Delia Derbyshire (fuck that, from Pierre Henry, from John Cage) to Astral Social Club (actually, it's not that far), to The Caretaker (still not that far...), to...

Shpongle - And The Day...

I've tried the usual deprogramming techniques, tried the methadone programme of woozy, wonky post-everything Rave: stuff The Wire says is okay, even dipped all eleven toes into the mechanics of Zomby, trying to get a fix before it's too late.

Sublime Frequencies? Hell yeah... proper TRANCE innit? And I can see the linearity between, like, Tinawiren and Tuung, course I can, I'm Duchamping at the bit... it all makes perfect sense, slots together, makes new connections and drives things forward...



But...

I can hear the drums, the rising synths, the breakdowns over the Blackdowns...

I can hear the samples calling:

From 2001, Blow, Star Trek, The Matrix, Excalibur, Merlin, Blade Runner...

Shpongle - A New Way to Say Hooray

The Sun is opening up another badly mistimed third eye. I want to resist. I want to.

(I've seen Eat Static more than I've seen any other band)

<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>
I've never paid. I've never seen them deliberately. <<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>


It's more abduction than capitalism; forced exposure, intimate haggling with my neurochemistry, a Burroughsian brain rape...



It's happened before and will always happen.

My reptile brain is churning.

Those female vocals...

Orbital - One Perfect Sunrise

The Sun comes out and my finely honed winter musical earbone get cracked. I'm gonna be blissed out with Psytrance and Goa; it's gonna happen. The more I resist the more I find myself in a field, confused, disorientated and drawn towards the tent with the little animated mushrooms... it doesn't matter what Festival I end up at, it's always the same - Marquee as Alien Abduction; the light will tear me apart.

Soon, I will be unrecognisable; dancing like a spastic in time, making my own Masonic Distres signals, a bag of elbows and pointy fingers...

1200 Mics - Salvia Divinorum

Glastonbury

...tiny cidersplash sparkles are already decorating my clothes - Owlwoman made a return, for those in the know - by tea-time on Friday and the mud is threatening, preparing for mayhem, for a recreation of some Chapmanesque Hell... Jimmy Cliff is on the Jazz World stage, belting classics to a crowd of people who all previously thought they were too old to come (later, they might be right): they suck in pear cider, close their eyes and sing along to I Can See Clearly Now

(The Rain Has Gone)- yes, blown away, the Sun will be scorching everything by daybreak

and Vietnam and You Can Get It If You Really Want and, especially Wild World, which pleases the Skins-frazzled teenagers who have been brought along by their parents with the express direction that they must LOVE Jimmy CLiff before going off to get mashed on Ketamine at The Glade....

"You know I've seen a lot of what the world can do
And it's breakin' my heart in two
Because I never wanna see you a sad girl
Don't be a bad girl
But if you wanna leave, take good care
I hope you make a lot of nice friends out there
But just remember there's a lot of bad and beware"
Jimmy Cliff is about as transcendent as a 60 year old man with a backwards cap on can be - no mean feat.



then off on the usual 9 mile hike to find whatever's still noisy... with people's sense of vision already impaired and their sense of smell switched off at the cortex through necessity and mouth-breathing it's sound that drags everyone onwards, towards morning... people attracted up endless Auschwitz style leafy lanes towards the dull thud of dance music, which takes over everything by nightfall and just spins off in different directions... accordian house, dubstep, disco, bagpipe Style, eastern mangling techno, Buddhabeats, fuzzed out takes on old Anita Harris tunes in abandoned Diners...

Sleep is almost there but then the Sun is coming up and there's just enough time for a three foot long hot dog...

Saturday and the Sun has put its hat on, hip hip hip hooray

Well K is dead in the (no) water in the morning so ended up watching deranged mini Moby singing for Autokratz and then The Teenagers, those Parisian pottymouths who try maybe a little too hard to win over the non-teenagers in the crowd (who know all the filthy words and would jump to car alarms ) - the sound isn't really loud enough until the middle of the set by which time they've already invited a bunch of teenage girls to invade the stage and belt out the lyrics to Homecoming, an act that more or less saved The Teenagers from drowning in canvas...



people are high-fiving all over the place, Glastonbury is a beating heart of slightly soiled palms...

...The Imagined Village collective are on , Billy Bragg seems to be everywhere, along with various McCarthy's and Sheila Chandra and some Afro-Celts... over to The Park next for MGMT (underwhelming, as expected) and then descending into the 20 min Battles take on Atlas... they noodle their way into it and then back out but Atlas itself is a crazed nitrous oxide shock to the system (the guys with NO2 balloons are sucking everything in, even the warmth), forcing a few at the front into some speculative Cosack dancing...

"This is so weird
Am I sleeping? Is this a dream? ... No!
Am I a Mouse?
Am I an elephant?
And I had just sliced your tongue

So tell me he-he-he-he-he-he-he-he-hey:
Do you wanna drink some alcohol?
I'm just a boy (girl) but I have a very strong punch
And I had just broken your nose..."
a guy with an LCD for a face can't stop winking

CSS come on and blast out the hits, silver wigs, balloons...music becomes their hot hot sex... their enthusiasm infects everything, even the slower numbers are played with such joy, even the crap numbers... everything is slightly smaller than real life, more child-like, ecstatic, immature in all the right ways... they'll play better and louder but it's the playful kick in the pants that's needed before

... the trek to Shangri-La begins all over again and the Diner erupts into old soul disco classics, The Prodigy, The Clapping Song and, er, The Police's Roxanne

(you have to wonder why people don't always Rave to Roxanne - maybe they do)

"3, 6, 9, The goose drank wine
The monkey chew tobacco on the streetcar line
The line broke, the monkey got choked
And they all went to
heaven in
a little rowboat"
ever-presents Babyhead next in a packed tent, masquerading as a Freak Show... it's basically Madness, downdated (no bad thing), with a lead singer who looks like a compressed member of King Kurt, dressed for an interview at the bank and bounces around the stage, wrestling with his clothes and the outsize Trombone guy (the guy, not the trombone) like an oddly quiffed Machine Elf...

people happy themselves awake...

It's 3.30 AM but people are still everywhere... can't face the Titled Disco or the lunatic stylings of the Drag Queen house in Trash City...



tea, yes, tea... God, yes.

Sunday begins slow, The Cave Singers lamenting some awful past, documenting the slow coming of the final acts...

(or else being unneccesarily cognicent of the hell that is leaving this place)

I'm intending to try and catch Leonard Cohen but know I never will, it's not really the place to see things, unless by accident - you always end up where you need to be, rather than where you'd intended...

saw an old friend from Yeovil, JF, looking blonde and pink and well and with a tatoo of Neubauten that matches mine (and Henry Rollins) ... time lines converging, JF is working as security, yelling out

KEEP LEFT

to the travelling hordes of weekend refugees.

It occurs to me that almost no one here knows where they're going at any given time...

somehow we make a slow, lysergic past Goldfrapp (wish you were here, Kek!) on the main stage towards Crystal Castles who suffer a little from the John Peel Stage's soft sound but try hard to break through regardless, with Alice Glass attempting to climb to the top of the lighting rig and nearly getting the show stopped by anxious Health and Safety executives.... they play at most 5 songs and then implode in static: good, but you sense this was a little big for their intimate 8bit take on showdown power-electronics...

to end, old timers Tristan and Eat Static at The Glade... must have seen Eat Static about 20 times over the years but they just fit so well at Glastonbury:

aliens landing? whatever.

Plants mushrooming up through the cracks in the floor? whatever.

people raise the roof, stumble over themselves, find a million little grooves to wind themselves into... the DJ looks like one of the futurekind from Doctor Who, snarlingly beneficent, shaggily ecstatic... Eat Static are the comfy shoe you can slip into and wave your hands in the air like you just don't care...

you will care later, at work on Monday, with your knees busted at the seams and your legs feeling like they've been subject to a 24hr Charity deadlegging and your arms a good 20 cms longer than they should be...

I'm pleased to announce that after my fairly anaemic last visit, back in 2004 or something, Glastonbury gained Sun and a new, chaotic heart...

the man i saw became a bird....

Audio.Outings

When I can be arsed - slumping like a burst spleen at the moment but getting there - I'm gonna have to start posting about my rediscovered love for all things techno but, until then, enjoy with me this site - full of MP3s of tracks that I used to have on vinyl but sold due to malnutrition and carnage and immediately wished I hadn't, if only so I could now do gutter style photo-shoots of my records looking pretty ("If you could just tip your...yessss...and then maybe the shoulder strap could...mmm")

Rave Etiquette

Interesting musings on rave 'etiquette' by Simon and Derek, especially because they seem utterly at odds with my own experiences of rave culture - this in turn reminded me of a recent conversation about why people used to face the front in raves, why there seemed such lines of demarcation, why there seemed such clear clustering...

what was everyone looking at?

My own experience of raves is probably not typical - around 1988/89 in the West Country they'd already descended into the vaguely Mutoid Eat Staticisms that later became the Planet Dog empire; they were always resolutely impractical and utterly handmade, there was always a fuck-off tree in the middle of your line of sight, a tree-stump to dash your feet from your freaky dancin' - the kind of Neo Nazi / Jane Fonda workout rituals that I came across when I moved to the city (any city - one thing organised / paid-for rave seemed to relish was homogenity) just weren't possible in the bowels of the country

... and the drugs were different too; we took 'acid house' rather too literally, I think, always preferring mushrooms and acid to the creeping tardiness of E - E was pretty much a dirty word back then, a drug that seemed a little too adult for our tastes, a little too wired into the workers' release spectrum, a stress reliever that seemed unecessary to us little sparkly acid kids who just wanted to dance like spazzes and watch hippy girls in bikinis, cowboy hats and DM boots (the posh ones had those see-through Red or Dead Spacebaby docs).... it was only a few years later that we started to really get into E and by then we were all probably 19 or so and the stressors of the world were starting to catch up...

Acid seemed so much more childish, something inner rather than outer, something that didn't give in easily to the lure of sponsored events and copied dance moves... we never knew what the fuck we were trying to do, a point made clear while watching my friends from a balcony move their way through the neat lines and arcs of a rave crowd in Swansea, they were going this way and that, failing to gel, spastics in time-signature...

Perhaps it was related to the different way that we heard music out in the sticks but an etiquette never emerged, or went unnoticed... there may have been some tree hugging, digeridoo blowing equivalent but I seem to remember it being far more akin to a Bacchanalia or a scene from Milton's Comus than the mad marching bands of the M25 raves...