Snowy Red

Further to my previous post...



This could be featuring on Altered Zones, coming out of Brooklyn etc. And might be. I'm not sure i trust anything of the internet now. The shock of Milli Vanilli runs deep. And now...

This is laid back to the point of falling, the machines keeping time but only just... Not heard Snowy Red mentioned too often as a reference/source for the new minimal (chill) wavists but...

I like the dancing on the video too, though it reminds me of a (to be unnamed) mate dancing to The Mission's Butterfly On A Wheel circa 1990...

Led Er Est

Led Er Est - PS 18 (Mannequin MNQ 012 split Ancien Régime)

It's getting harder to distinguish the original early 80s synth poppers from the newbies; the odd fatter drum, slightly elongated synth-tail, a micro-squelsh off centre...and now the old synthwavers are getting reissued (I'm assuming blogs like >Mutant Sounds< are generally responsible - wonder if any credit gets shoved their way?) it's gonna get even more messy:

"Is this new? Don't look like that...New new, I mean... i can see it's still in the packaging but... No, I know it's Futurist but... For fuck's sake: I'm just asking if the band are around now... Yeah... No, not reformed, actually around... it's a simple enough question... I mean is it Retro? I mean... Eh? Don't fucking raise your eyebrows to me... I know it's Futurist, but that isn't what I was asking..."

Somnipathy

Martin great on the best music to fall asleep to. There was a number of years when I could only fall asleep to music so I must have done my own accidental experiments. Though this makes it sound like a Humphrey Davy laughing gas party when I guess it was more the sound of elongated (Damon and Naomi) sigh and the occasional winsome (NWW) creak. I think I tried a lot of the same things as Martin - this was the only time I listened to Soliloquy For Lilith; I found it an excellent tool for sleep and dreams - but I understand what he means about Time Machines; it's too invasive. I can barely listen to it when wrapping presents (tried this recently, with spectacular results not dissimilar to Christo's wrapping of the Reichstag).

Time Machines (Coil) - Everything Keeps Dissolving

The best music was music that dribbled. Music in dots. The first two Aphex Twin albums were always good. Anything produced by Peter Namlook, of course, was more or less intended for people to lie down and start counting as were various Divination albums, a few of the Mixmaster Morris I Think Therefore I Ambient albums, later on I guess I found sleep attracted to Fennesz and a lot of the Touch stuff, including the odd freakish turn towards Chris Watson's recordings of swallowing cranes or wading hippos. At some point I tried to make my way into stuff like Ligeti or even the dronier side of Xenakis but there were too many odd angles and surprises in there for a true sleep-dip and...............

(read Martin's stuff, I'm getting all sludgy just thinking about this)

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

The Ages of Ontological Musicology 2

Older readers may remember this, my run down of the ages of musical understanding. It ended with a heart-warming, energy-sapping descent into nostalgia and vaguely oedpipal murk that seemed destined to pre-determine future musical understanding and perhaps even further decline. Attention being redirected to other things (home improvements, promotions etc) allowed quasi-nostalgia (nostalgia for something we never had) to creep in, almost undetected. At the time of writing (Dec 2006) that seemed to be the end point, the last development but now I've had a re-think, things have changed and I think there's another stage...

13 The Post-Idealistic

This in some ways echoes my earlier sentiments on emotional bulimia, in that the stage is characterised by an acute understanding that emotional manipulation through music is happening but should not be rejected. Thus I've found that increasingly I'm listening to music which reflects my emotional state (at the moment this is dreamy techno minimalism or electro - The Field, Pan-Pot, Villalobos on the one hand and Simian Mobile Disco, CSS, Crystal Castles etc on the other) rather than music which allows me to experience emotions i'm not currently feeling - i.e. I find it difficult at the moment to engage with 'sad' music or 'angry' music. I find myself irritated by music that isn't (even cheesily) 'happy' music (which kinda kills off 3/4 of my collection).

I know the deep-seated psychodynamics of this situation are easy enough to spot for those that know me but it seems an improvment (though, of course, every stage seems like an improvement on the last) to drag myself away from urFolk miserablism or nasty twists or undanceable beatings in favour of, well, a softer surface to skid around on. I've even bought some Fabric CDs and play them all the time, happily jumping around the house until my calves pop.

The Idealistic is a clear return to the The Zeitgeist (see earlier Stages) and is perhaps motivated by much the same thing, with a spin that takes in The Forage and parts of The Inclusive and focuses primarily on affect: music as a tool of manipulation rather than emotional discovery. I'm entering the self-medication stage and it feels fine. The Idealistic stage presents an alternative reality, one that seems graspable, if improbable.

And the good good thing is that now I've returned to the club scene in some small ways (still can't handle a school night) I've discovered that loads of other people around my stage are returning too...

Woofers, Tweeters, Raptures

Spent a good deal of last night puzzling over this key question / Spinal Tap conundrum: what do the numbers on a stereo volume button represent? My new stereo goes up to 30 (which is really loud) but I'm not sure what that means. It can't be some absolute measure of loudness - each number can't relate to a particular decibel level because even at the same number different CDs are louder or quieter, as always. So if there is no absolute relationship between the numbers on my stereo and actual loudness is there instead a relative relationship? Does 10 relate to 10 more than the original level on the CD?

I know, I know... but it's been a long week and the sad thing is someone out there will actually know the answer to this.

The first track I played? This one:

Shackleton - Blood on my hands (villalobos mix)

pilfered from here

Dark Day

"The nudes were in the forest waiting for the big barge. Then came the siphon under the tree. There was a still life with an arm by the red statuette. And two women with a bird. One of them was Big Julie. The two girls took to their bicycles. They went to see the snowman. With Duck Alice and the Drum Kitten. Automatic Irene and Willy Nilly nearly caught the hook and ladder before the crow began to budge. They knew it wouldn't take the bait."

Dark Day - Nudes In The Forest

A Yousendit steaming

Willy Nilly is an underrated lyric in casio-driven steam-techno from the early 80s. As far as I can see, Dark Day is still out there somewhere, must check out what he's doing now. In another life, Soft Cell became isolate and insecure while Dark Day ravaged the charts and got this covered by Leona Lewis.

Que Belle Epoque 2006

This is supposed to be an Mp3 blog after all. Here's Mr Villalobos doing his warm and fuzzy thing, from the Que Belle Epoque Ep.

Ricardo Villalobos - Que Belle Epoque 2006

Techno Tuesday

If you'd told me a couple of years ago that I'd be buying austere Techno twelve inchers again, I would've almost certainly laughed in your face saying "that sooo mid-nineties, maaan". But somehow it happened, and frankly I can't get enough of the stuff. The kind of techno I'm focusing on here is the minimal, frequency-obsessed variety, so faceless in it's presentation that I can't even think of a suitable image to accompany this post. Perhaps I should've just added a bit of random eye-candy for all the sad thirty/forty-somethings out there who maybe liked a bit of Hawtin or Dave Clarke a decade ago, but nowadays listen to Radiohead, Coldplay or whatever it is their kids have got stored on their iPod Nanos and fantasise about shagging that fit Irish bint from Girls Aloud. C'mon people, get a grip. It's not too late to get obsessed about mindless pulsating blips, squirts and swooshes again. And where better to start than Berlin. Christ, I love them Germans. From Cluster 'n' Kraftwerk via Monoton, Holger Hiller and a bit of Neubauton, through to Basic Channel, Chain Reaction and the whole Hard Wax axis, my appetite for electronics with a dash of sour kraut seems to flare-up at irregular intervals. Some freshly digitised vinyl nuggets, for your consideration..

Sleeparchive - Null Sekunden

Marcel Dettmann - Getaway

Substance & Vainqueur - Reverberate