Zone Styx Travelcard

science fiction of the past

2012-01-27T13:01:00.005Z

'Everything seems to be aimed at making the viewer feel ill at ease, at giving him the impression that he is watching for the first time scenes from a life he never dreamed could have existed. Fellini has described his film as "science fiction of the past," as though the Romans of that decadent age were being observed by the astounded inhabitants of a flying saucer." Tullio Kezich

fragments on Shame

2012-01-20T09:20:00.003Z

In his review of Shame for Film Quarterly, k-punk mentions the music which dominates the first act or so of the film – Chic, Blondie, Tom Tom Club – and their temporal significance: 'they’re now as “classic” in their own way as the Bach that Brandon prefers to listen to as he jogs through the city.'

The point being that they represent through the flat chronology and ever-present past of the ipod playlist an erasure of time to match the erasure of location in the non-places (Marc Augé's concept) in which Brandon lives/works/fucks. What struck me about these selections was also spatial-temporal, but in a kind of reverse of this erasure, I thought it had to a very deliberate attempt on McQueen's part to summon the ghosts of a very particular time and place: the pre-AIDs Manhattan of the late 70s/early 80s, and the epic sexual hedonism of its nightlife.

The spectre of AIDs suggested to me a kind of ghost film which you could project onto Shame: in this film Brandon is gay, and not so much sex-addicted through compulsion as availability. I haven't thought through the idea of a coded, closeted Shame, to say the least, but it could at least complicate a reading of Brandon's visit to a gay club (which as Ryan Gilbey notes, in its presentation as an Inferno-esque descent into degradation on Brandon's part, is otherwise 'unworldly' - read homophobic), turning it into some kind of weird wormhole/pivot/confrontation.

----

On the other hand Voyou's observation that Shame parallels an Apatow film is uncannily accurate: almost every incident can be reimagined played for homosocial but always hetero dudes. Walking in on your sister in the shower (dude! gross!), your sister interrupting you masturbating (LOL bro!), your sister making out with your boss right next to you in a taxi then sleeping with him on the other side of a thin wall (dude, awkward), your boss confronting you about the porn on your work PC, etc. Nor is the film's crisis point exactly beyond Apatow's bounds, suicide, cancer and childbirth all furnishing moments of 'depth' and learning in his oeuvre. I'm reminded of an idea I once had watching a sitcom: one freakishly delusional/sociopathic narcissist, character A, was being stalked by an even more delusional devotee, character B. Character B was attempting to get into character A's flat; the slapstick, as B and A wrestled over the door and locks, was well directed, but the thought of seeing exactly the same actions replayed not for laughs but with a kind of documentary fidelity to the characters' unhappiness and desperation was chilling. Shame stands in a similar relation to Apatow and his affiliates.

England Made Me, III

2012-01-18T11:30:00.002Z

'It's our only chance,' Kate repeated. 'We haven't got a future away from here. This is the future.'
    'Oh come,' Anthony said, 'that's pitching it strong. After all, here we are foreigners.'
    'We're national. We're national,' Kate said, 'from the soles of our feet. But nationality's finished. Krogh doesn't think in frontiers. He's beaten unless he has the world.'
    'Minty was talking,' Anthony said, 'about short-term loans.'
    'That's temporary.'
    'You mean he's had to take them already?' Anthony asked. 'Is money so close? It looks bad. Do you think we are safe here? I'm all for rats. I don't believe in any Casabianca stuff.'
    'You don't imagine,' Kate said, 'that Krogh could be beaten by us. That's all that nationality is – it's we, the hangers-on, the little dusty offices I've worked in, Hammond, your pubs, your Edgware Road, your pick-ups in Hyde Park.' Deliberately she turned away from the thought that there had been a straightness about the poor national past which the international present did without. It hadn't been very grand, but in their class at any rate there had been gentleness and kindness once.
    'It's home,' Anthony said.
    He raised his lonely small boy's face. 'You don't understand, Kate. You've always liked this modern stuff, that fountain.'

onstage with a full-size guillotine

2012-01-17T11:30:00.001Z

'[In 1990] I was in and out of meetings with Russell and Lyor Cohen at Def Jam. Lyor would walk in, take off his jacket, remove his guns, and start popping pills with mineral water every other sentence. I was thinking "This guy's obviously off his head." He'd go: "Bullet, every time we drop '20 Seconds to Comply' it makes the hair on the back of our heads stand on end. We want you to be the rap version of Ozzy Osbourne. I see you coming onstage with a full-size guillotine, and a crow on your arm. We want you to cut sheep's heads off and chuck them into the front row...'

Silver Bullet, 2011

20 Seconds to Comply
Bring Forth The Guillotine

England Made Me, II

2012-01-16T11:31:00.003Z

Minty turned on her; his eyes were damp and burning. 'It's not his own money. He's a borrower, nothing more than a borrower. We can't borrow because we are not trusted. If they trusted us, we should be Kroghs ourselves. He's only one of us. He has no more roots than we have. But we, we have to live within our means; the banks won't trust us; we count our cigarettes, live where it's cheap, save on the laundry, pick up pocket-money by our wits. You're too young my dear,' he said, with open malice, 'to understand these things.' He didn't like girls, he couldn't have said it in words more plainly; tawdry little creatures, other people's sisters, their hats blocking the view at Lords.

Very Cellular Songs

2012-01-11T13:33:00.003Z

e.g.

Very Cellular Song
Day in the Life
Suite: Judy Blue Eyes
Carry On (half that CSN&Y record in fact)
Happiness is a Warm Gun
Band on the Run
Bohemian Rhapsody
Schizophrenia
B-Boy Bouillabaisse
Aerodynamic
Biology
No fit state

Off the top of my head. As many further examples as possible welcome.

EDIT: further examples

via Rockfort:
'Couple of v cellular songs for you - Arkansas Coal and The Game Plus several Pulp "long songs".'

via Tim Abrahams: Moss Covered Obelisk by Chrome Hoof.

plus some more in Alex Niven's comment below

EDIT 2: a few from The Impostume in comments plus some clarification of concept...

and EDIT 3: even more, from Phil Knight

(cellular album)

England Made Me, I

2012-01-10T11:48:00.003Z

'No, no,' Krogh said, 'we can't do that. What will the papers say? To have left the opera to go to Tivoli. They'll think I'm mad. What will happen to the market?'
'Forget it,' Anthony said.
'Forget the market,' Krogh said with astonishment; he began to laugh uneasily, guiltily. 'What a desperate fellow you are,' he repeated.

Intros I

2011-11-17T10:19:00.001Z

Is this intro

a reference to this intro?

solosolos

2011-03-07T13:23:00.004Z

oof, didn't realize Pere Lebrun had beaten me to it with 'Little Johnny Jewel' – he did post the studio version however, so at least that creates a little compare & contrast

'LJJ' is unusual in that the song begins with a solo. They almost always come a couple of minutes in at least. Can't think of many other noteworthy examples, although 'Cortez the Killer' is stunning:

Plenty of other Neil Young solos worth mentioning; I've always liked the intensity of 'Southern Man', where he sounds as if he's grinding the solo into the face of the song. Or the song into the face of the solo. (Skip to solo.)

Most solos describe an arc, or an ascent don't they? A movement that builds in intensity from circular water-testing towards some kind of epiphanic moment - see Blissblog discussion of 'Marquee Moon' here. I think the 70s killed off a certain kind of solo which was more of a textural block, a series of small explosive detonations: moments where the solo doesn't sound like an attempt to escape the gravity of the song but burn a hole through it... like The Rolling Stones' It's All Over Now (skip to solo) or The Kink's You Got Me (skip to solo). Didn't Jimmy Page actually play the solo on 'YGM'? Dom nominates the Page solo from 'Ten Years After' here (why so English Dom, why not solos of distinction?). I would go for 'Heartbreaker'. One thing I especially enjoy about 'Heartbreaker' is it's studded with little errors (2m25s), moments where Page's finger can't quite keep up. But he's left them in (skip to solo).

Jazz flute interlude... Sonny Sharrock led a double life, paying the bills for his free/radical output by playing in flute snooze merchant Herbie Mann's band. Although it was Mann's vanity imprint that put out Black Woman, so u da Mann, Herbie. There are lots of anecdotes about Sharrock being allowed one Sharrockout a night on their supper-club dinner jazz tours, I remember reading one about a gig in a marina, all people in evening dresses lounging on their yachts. As Sharrock ripped out his wailing sheets of sound, the marina quietly drifted into a state of emptiness. You can hear him doing it to 'Hold On I'm Comin' from 5m30s ish here, although for the full impact it's worth listening to the preceding minutes of standard issue smooth funk.

Folk backwater. Carl mentions solos in Pentangle. I remember lovely examples on When I Get Home, and Sally Free and Easy – nothing on Youtube though & can't double check the vinyl till later. I think John Renbourn played all the electric in Pentangle. Jansch really hated the electric and had a thing about Pentangle as a respite from taking star turns. He did play electric in a one-off slightly disastrous gig at a St John's Wood pub backing an old blues singer (will have to look up the name), I've often wondered if there's a bootleg anywhere.

One more classic rock slash folk throwback before I post about Back to the Future and the solo AP (After Punk)... Buffalo Springfield's 'Bluebird' has an acoustic guitar solo, a definite rarity. I love it because it sounds so genuinely improvised and off the cuff, but also because Stills plays it so hard against the grain, against the instrument's type. He punches out this almost slap-bass, super muscular sound.

skip to solo

One more just because it popped into my head: Bob Quine's skincrawling solo on Lou Reed's 'Waves of Fear', here.

solos

2011-03-05T21:46:00.002Z

Almost seems too obvious to post. I am a little obsessed with this version. Verlaine and Lloyd usually get all the props, but I think Billy Ficca and Fred Smith are incredible here.

Off the Page

2011-02-07T12:50:00.001Z

1/ OFF THE PAGE
Date: Friday 11 - Sunday 13 February 2011
Venue: The Playhouse, Whitstable, U.K.
Produced by: Sound and Music and The Wire

Sound and Music and The Wire present Off the Page, the UK’s first ever literary festival devoted to music criticism. Taking place at the Playhouse Theatre, Whitstable, on the South coast, this weekend-long event will feature a host of internationally-renowned critics, authors, musicians and artists discussing the current state of underground and experimental music in a programme of talks, presentations, panel discussions and workshops.

Schedule:

Friday 11 February, 7pm – 10.30pm
Presentation: Robert Wyatt on his favourite music
Short films hosted by BFI and introduced by Jonny Trunk: Tristram Cary on film

Saturday 12 February, 10am – 10.30pm
Talk: Ken Hollings on the post-Cageian universe
Talk: Rob Young and Matthew Herbert on the impact of musique concrète on contemporary sonic culture
Talk: Steve Beresford and John Kieffer in conversation
Talk: Kodwo Eshun on his favourite music writing
Talk: Dave Tompkins on the history of the vocoder, from its use in the Second World War to its role in the era of Auto Tune
Talk: Teal Triggs on Fanzines
Presentation: Christian Marclay
Short films hosted by Lux: Cage On Cable

Sunday 13 February: 11am – 5pm
Roundtable discussion: including Mark Fisher, Nina Power, and The Wire editors on the role of music criticism on print and the Web
Panel discussion: Salome Voegelin, David Toop, Daniela Cascella on the philosophy of listening
In conversation: Green Gartside with Mark Fisher discussing politics and cultural theory in pop culture and music
Performance lecture: Claudia Molitor, Jennifer Walshe, Sarah Nicholls on music notation

listening

2011-02-01T14:59:00.004Z

New Woebot album hit the doormat today. Chunks!

First impression, this is digging into guitar tradition again, but much earlier than Moanad's New Wave, late 70s/early 80s purview. It might even be Woebot's Groundhogs album. With some Grand Funk Railroad, Mountain and Bluesbreakers thrown in. Passing vision of cover art in which Matt, in mudstained bellbottoms and tight denim jacket, lounges in a farmyard. Three of him in fact, cloned to make a power trio. There's hours of sample-spotting here. But whatever the sources, there's a crispness of organization which transmutes it all into something new (shedding that Gutbucket feel on the way).

The physical edition of Blackest Ever Black's mix The Scold's Bridle. Great mix obviously, but the design - don't know how deliberate this is on their part, but it's very evocative for me of the 7" single's last days – the early to mid-90s before the internet came along & killed the market. Clear plastic sleeve, coloured paper insert folded, grimy photocopied insert. Makes me think of Trumans Water, early Drag City. In particular it reminds me of a Merzbow split 7" with some Midlands noise freak. Where did I put that?

Incomplete list of recent listening:

Æthenor's En Form for Blå - awesome gloomy improvisations that bring to mind doom and 70s Miles, with Steve Noble on drums, Daniel O'Sullivan on Rhodes, Stephen O'Malley on restrained lightning-fork-from-clouds guitar, Kristoffer Rygg from Ulver too

new Mamuthones - giallo fever

Yoko Ono/Ono Plastic Band, Between My Head and the Sky

Vangelis, Beauborg. One of Chris Cunningham's favourite records I recently found out. An excellent counterpart/point to the current synth fetish.

Isolée - all of it

Phil Manzanera - K-Scope

Incredible String Band - the unloved 70s stuff

Broadcast - for sad and obvious reasons

and Trish Keenan's Mindbending Motorway Mix

Natalie Beridze

that massive Nirvana boxset, With the Lights Out

Jad Fair - Best of TRIPLE cd. There's about 150 tracks on this and they couldn't be bothered to load the track info up to the iTunes Gracenote database. Bastards.

Bangs & Works Vol 1, (still)... try walking round the Westfield listening to that. You walk out looking for your flying saucer.

new Arnold Dreyblatt on Important - Turntable History - and lots of his previous stuff on Tzadik, Table of the Elements and elsewhere

plus pretty much everything by Plastikman

recent reading

2011-02-01T14:07:00.002Z

If you like And What Will Be Left of Them and its thoughts on the 1970s, you will also want to check out its two sequels: Faces On Posters on the 1980s and Up Close & Personal on the 1990s. Who knows, at some point I may even get organized enough to contribute myself. A regular contributor to AWWBLT blogs at Pere Le Brun.

And two Alexes: Alex Niven's The Fantastic Hope and Alex Andrews over here (on politics, though hoping one day AA will blog more about prog, bleeps and clangs)

North[-East London] by Darkstar

2010-11-05T10:00:00.001Z

Kode 9: How do you find living in London, being from the North?

James Young: It's tougher I think from a day to day view. Things creep up and you almost have to become good at living if that makes sense. It's unforgiving. I think that's what I'm trying to say. Obviously there's huge differences in the cost of things like rent and travel. It all adds up quickly and it took me a while to get on top of simple tasks like paying bills and then making tunes too. It's like scrapping for a time to be creative here, it's meant to be my priority but how often i get sidetracked is frustrating.

It has a huge influence on our sound being in London. I've built my own life and my world now revolves around this city. I've been here eight years now and I'm very much into the moment here. I like how vast the whole city feels. I like the choice and being able to really get hold of anything I need. That can't happen where I'm from. Even Liverpool and Manchester, both seem so much smaller having been here. Culturally and socially London is obviously far more diverse, from an immediate point of view where I live right now is very close to an Hasidic Jewish area. Within that area on Upper Clapton Road, estates and new developments sprawl off towards Stoke Newington and then in the opposite direction towards Walthamstow it's loud and busy. I pick up things from the Turkish shop below me, eat a lahmacun, sit on the roof with a beer in the evening and wish bus's didn't exist. I get cabs from the same Pakistani guy every time and in his side door compartment he has something called a Fanta twist. It's basically a vodka orange on the job. I watch Liverpool in an Arsenal pub and wish I was at home. I go for breakfast at a cafe at the top of Kingsland road where Micheal Watson eats his breakfast. Twice a week I sit two tables away from a guy that was almost killed in a boxing ring. I know the Chinese girl and her sister in Dans' Island on the roundabout. I know the Jamaican girl in Granny's. I know the fat dry cleaner on Lower Clapton road. The Indian builders who work in the yard behind the flat tip Aiden on working out. All these uneventful things in my day are part of me now. It's light years away from the the north.

James Young of Darkstar talking to Kode9 here.

I really wanted to love the Darkstar album. But it's one thing changing your production style, the way you pattern your drums, kick to snare to hi-hat to bass, or the modulation of your synth tones... If you're changing your style to 'songwriting', that's a different order of change - it's a different territory altogether. The mood of North does get to you, the album's bleakness does start to suck some of the light out of the room, like the unexpected early dark of autumn afternoons, but ultimately it's like you end up feeling sorry for Darkstar rather than yourself. It's detached. There's a patina on every sound: the keys and Buttery's vocals are all fractionally distorted, as if they were working on the assumption that that would character, backstory, fallible humanity to the sound. But what about the poignancy of cold machined perfection? They seemed to know what that was before.

I think the quote above in which Young talks about London is more moving than anything on the record. It's the affectless way he builds up the image, a succession of small but weighed details: it gets at the crowded loneliness of scraping a living among nine million other people too harried to make eye contact on public transport, or queue at bus stops. Pulled out of the interview it may not read that way, but it evokes something of living in London for me with Carveresque economy.

Galaxe

2010-11-02T21:30:00.000Z

'Galaxe', aired 18 July, 1974

'Cover Me'

2010-11-02T13:03:00.004Z

Who is reading Bettye Swann correctly here? Duffy or Blissblog?

My first thought, definitely Duffy. Innuendo has a long history in black American music by 1968, whether in blues, r'n'b, soul, or rock'n'roll. Led Zeppelin's 'Lemon Song' in 1969 - 'squeeze... till the juice runs down my leg' - dates back to Robert Johnson, 'Travellin Riverside Blues' (1937). And doesn't covering someone itself bear a strong sexual trace - isn't covering / being covered used as a euphemism in Elizabethan drama? Duffy's 21st century post-porn-boom reading suggests the money shot, which feels anachronistic, but then again, the withdrawal method of contraception didn't disappear overnight with the appearance of the pill.

And who's to say they're Swann's words anyway? Could be a songwriter sneaking something in under the singer's radar. And the sole credited composer is in fact not Swann but Marlin Greene. Greene produced and played guitar for Percy Sledge though – and it turns out that Sledge recorded 'Cover Me' before Swann... in 1967.

Duffy's reading is obviously available whatever the author's intentions, the text is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it. The song belongs to the public. Et cetera. One day I'll post my reading of Meat Loaf's 'I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)' and the unspeakable sexual practice to which it refers.

But I think we can be fairly sure the Duffy Interpretation *wasn't* the one uppermost in Percy Sledge's mind as he recorded it. Was it?

note: has to be the worst Youtube visual of all time? it's the directional flashing lights that clinch it. only vid I could find of the 1967 version though.

postscript - 'Umbrella' ?

The Apprentice: Unionize!

2010-10-06T15:04:00.007+01:00

I'm looking forward to the return of The Apprentice for its sixth series tonight, as I'm confident that this will be the year everything changes.

2010: the year a Tory-led government declared its intentions to lay off thousands of public sector workers, made war on the welfare state, and committed itself to cuts in spending that will hardly boost private sector employment. The year Boris Johnson proposed amending union legislation in such a way that, as he crowed to Jeremy Paxman, 'would stop nearly all strikes' from happening. Yes, 2010 will be the year in which the sixteen contestants smarten up and realize there is only one way to beat the system: unionize.

Picture the scene: the two teams are in the boardroom, and Sir Alan is beginning his inquest, inviting the team-leaders to point fingers and pin blame. But no! 'We believe in collective responsibility, Sir Alan,' comes the reply. And also collective bargaining. The contestants reveal their demands: the weekly redundancy round is to be scrapped, or everyone walks in Week 1 and there's no show. The full complement will progress through each week's task, and the prize at the end re-adjusted, so that instead of one uber-Apprentice earning £100,000 a year, instead four roles paying £25,000 a year will be created, each filled by four job-sharing Red Apprentices. That's not a proper job some might grumble, but the job-share leaves all the contestants with ample free time to pursue their real dream: turning their TV appearances into a full-time media career, with the prospect of a job on Channel 5 hovering luminescently before their eyes.

It'll never happen of course. Partly because by its very nature, The Apprentice attracts (and the producers select) not genuine entrepreneurial talent but a particular kind of sociopath and narcissist who, if they're not after that Channel 5 job, aspires instead to the safety-roped glamour of a massive corporate cocoon. Rather than embark on a genuine project of wealth-creating capitalism, they're after nothing more than a comfy perch in a huge managerial nexus.

But also because to take The Apprentice at face value, as the self-styled 'toughest job interview in the world' is mistaken. Sure, it looks like it's packed with all kinds of didactic tips not just for would-be Sugars but any feckless job-seeker. It looks like it's aimed at the upwardly-mobile aspirational go-getter.

But it's not. It's a series of object lessons for the modern neo-liberal employer. For a start, the contestants are not out of work: they're on The Apprentice. They're given food, lodging, and jobs to do, for weeks on end. They don't get told their application was unsuccessful: they get Fired.

They exist instead in that strange precarious purgatory which will be familiar to millions for whom the concept of job security has become a joke. They are the temps, aware that they can be referred back to their agency at any time on the slightest whim, personal or professional. They are the contract workers, constantly aware that a clock is ticking down towards joblessness. They are the young graduates told they have to undertake, and be grateful for, a three-month unpaid internship to even dream of a career in journalism or TV. They are - even - the architects told that yes they should spend most of their time working towards competitions which only one practice can win, because 'Have you ever taken a run to prepare for a race? Was that also not fun? Thought can atrophy if you’re not careful.'

Instead The Apprentice is an extended lecture course for employers in keeping overheads down by maintaining a minimal, quiescent workforce. Lesson 1: divide and rule. The teams compete ferociously against each other. They are encouraged to turn on each other in the boardroom autopsy. They are repeatedly broken up and re-organized to prevent bonds of friendship and understanding developing. Lesson 2: outsource supervision. The effect of the constant division and competition means the apprentices regard each other as the enemy at all times, they become a weirdly self-policing cult of mutual hatred, a kind of private-sector Stasi, desperate to note, recall and regurgitate each others' petty errors and fibs. Lesson 3: prizes are the opium of the apprentice. Days at the races, massages, cocktail-mixing classes for winning a task? Yes, you too can distract your workforce easily by throwing them treats. They look generous: company outings! Christmas meals! Drinks on Friday! But they cost a pittance relative to little HR issues like pay-rises in line with inflation. Or proper benefits. Or not telling two people in the same job they will both have to re-interview as one role is being scrapped.

Because that is what you see in The Apprentice. Not the world's longest or toughest job interview, but a long, slow, horribly diverting process by which a department of sixteen is hoodwinked by redundancy rounds into becoming a department of one.

hauntological harbinger

2010-10-06T14:43:00.003+01:00

Michael Mayer talks about five records of personal significance here, one being Tipsy, and their 1997 record Triptease. A quick Youtube search brought up this:

Now, maybe I was slightly predisposed to think this by Position Normal featuring earlier on the list (1999's Goodly Time), but that sounds surprisingly Ghost-Boxy and hauntological to me. The rest of the album, from what I can make out, is closer to the spaceport departure lounge vibe that some Stereolab evokes: that impression of cosmonauts drinking cocktails by curved swimming pools with bossa nova on in the background. But even then it suggests a loop back through Broadcast, and Rojj's percussive touches... And it came out on Asphodel, same label as turntablists the X-ecutioners: the geist of found vinyl scraps.

2010-09-29T13:18:00.002+01:00

This Flying V ukelele is available in the kids department of Habitat.

It has no frets and the tuning pegs are for show. For some reason it makes me think of David and Samantha Cameron.

Buddy Holly and indie

2010-09-27T09:00:00.001+01:00

Long-time rock fans have always been bitterly divided about him. He wasn't a hardcore rocker, being too gentle and melodic, and this eccentricity can be construed either as backsliding or as progression.
[...]
Holly's breakthrough, in fact, was that he opened up alternatives to all-out hysteria. Not many white kids had the lungs or sheer hunger to copy Little Richard but Holly was easy. All you needed was tonsils. The beat was lukewarm, the range minimal – no acrobatics or rage or effort required. You just stood up straight and mumbled.
[...]
In this way, Buddy Holly was the patron saint of all the thousands of no-talent kids who ever tried to make a million dollars. He was the founder of a noble tradition.
Nik Cohn, Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom (1969), pp. 42–3

Yes, and though Nik Cohn couldn't know it writing in 1969, that tradition turned out to be indie.

The Honeycombs

2010-09-24T09:00:00.000+01:00

The sound of a caffeine overdose.

BYG Actuel on a budget

2010-09-22T09:00:00.003+01:00

As XTRA is to Folkways, so Affinity is to BYG Actuel and its heavyweight run of classic free jazz. That is to say, surprisingly unloved and affordable licensed represses. BYG Actuel, set up by Jean-Luc Young, Jean Georgakarakos and Ferand Buros, was short-lived. Affinity was an imprint of Charly, the reissue label which Young subsequently ran. Comparing the two labels to see which BYG releases Young went back for is intriguing; was he trying to rescue things he thought especially deserved re-release, or what he thought was commercially salvageable?

Again to a Record Collector reader the paltry sums these records have cost me are probably just list price, but a) the original pressings really aren't cheap, b) the more recent vinyl reissues feel a bit too much like buying fake antiques and c) I like the peculiar typography. The layout is, I guess, meant to be stark and austere. The rule goes:

given name
[pic] surname
album title

...and I can imagine the designer being vaguely pissed off that 'Lacy' was going to mess with the usual pattern.

There's also the mild buzz of finding entries from this list in charity shops – a list which on publication way back in prehistory seemed impossibly unobtainable, but can now all be downloaded from a single site.

Although this is my favourite Affinity find, with its not-exactly-common atonal twin harmonica attack (!) and some absolutely scything spoken word by Jeanne Lee. (Video below).

random Eno album generator

2010-09-21T13:11:00.003+01:00

I'm not entirely sure the new Brian Eno album isn't a hoax. Just read him talking about it here, it's hard to imagine a more predictably Eno Eno album. The evocative possibilities of the soundtrack, imagining a soundtrack to an unmade film. Reference to the olfactory – 'lingering perfume'. Use of improvisation (open to chance, derailing the standard model of songwriting etc). Investigation of 'place' and 'space'. Playing with background and foreground. Title that sounds like it could be a sexual euphemism you've never heard of.

The XXL

2010-09-15T09:00:00.000+01:00

Finally remembered who this Ultrasound band are that Dan Hancox has been tweeting about.

If I remember correctly – and I'd long since stopped reading the NME regularly by this stage (circa 1999?) – Ultrasound were generally written about through the lens of its frontman, Tiny. And as I recall, the tenor of even the most positive of the write-ups veered into a discourse in which you didn't so much enjoy the band directly as enjoy it mediated through the unlikely success of someone with such an unlikely pop body. That is, the triumph of Ultrasound was to be experienced almost Avatar-style, by placing oneself in Tiny's shoes and vicariously feeling the victory of the underdog.

There must be an article/essay/paper/MA thesis to be written here – essentially on how fat people in pop are written about – a kind of discourse analysis, perhaps in four parts, comparing features on Ultrasound with those on Beth Ditto, and outside indie, on Michelle McManus and Rik Waller. Maybe Adele too... I don't think anyone ever raises Ceee-Lo's weight in profiles or interviews.

But this all hangs on that initial IIRC. And maybe I Don't Recall Correctly.

Genres of the Future 2: Chillwave Metal

2010-09-09T12:50:00.001+01:00

The shoegaze aesthetic has returned as chillwave/glo-fi etc. Shoegaze metal has been around for a while – e.g. Justin Broadrick's Jesu. Logically therefore, we can expect chillwave metal to appear sooner or later.

In a way I can't believe it hasn't happened already: the requisite 80s signifiers are there in abundance, not to mention the arpeggios. It's just a question of looping, time-stretching, reverbing, delaying etc guitar shredders instead of synths.

XTRA XTRA

2010-06-18T09:26:00.013+01:00

Rob Young has started up a blog for Electric Eden, his forthcoming book on folk (and the visionary/esoteric in its 20C English tradition) for Faber – check it out. He mentions Dazzling Stranger, Colin Harper's book on Bert Jansch, in passing, which reminded me of one of its footnotes...

A random pull-out of some Folkways records:

Folkways can be expensive, particularly the folk-blues fountainhead bubbling away at the catalogue's heart. Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Big Bill Broonzy, Blind Willie Johnson, Leadbelly et al. The more self-consciously ethnographic, proto-'world' music stuff – largely recorded on the spot by a man with a mic (a man I always imagine wearing a short sleeved shirt and tie) – seems to come cheaper.

This one comes with a long essay booklet by Samuel Charters recounting his time on the islands, and his difficulties in tracking down (and recording) one of the islands' best singers of the traditional laments sung at wakes, an itinerant alcoholic called Frederick McQueen.

This one is just packed with crazy rhythms and textures. Side one is all solo demonstrations of local instruments, the shitende, the shivelan, the timbila. Side two is a 20-minute orchestral blast of the whole lot. And 5mins of zora drumming (booklet quote: 'The most popular Zora dancers tend to be very plump ladies who create a spectacular effect with rapid upper-torso gyrations in tempo to the drumming' - a more National Geographic sentence it's hard to imagine). For some reason I've never chanced on vols 1 or 2.

The other thing about Folkways is the sheer desirability of the objects: thick card sleeves generally, with wrap-around labels (see above, not very clear pic of spines). And Folkways' design, which was largely done by Ronald Clyne, is amazing – up there with the now wearily over-exposed Blue Note or Penguin catalogues. Clyne designed the two Guthries and the Bahamas above, Irwin Rosenhouse the Leadbelly. Part of me wonders why you don't see Folkways mugs and tote bags and deckchairs on sale. Part of me is too frightened to check the Folkways website in case they are. Will post more on Clyne when this book on him arrives through the post. Interesting to note he was once called a 'folk modernist'. Possible to imagine an American counterpart to the Ghost Box aesthetic which would begin with that socialist utopian vision of the early 60s, the pre-electric-Dylan-at-Newport and extrapolate it forward as a counterfactual, with Clyne's designs as a visual template.

Anyway. XTRA records generally aren't expensive. Here's a couple of mine:

XTRA was an imprint of Nat Joseph's Transatlantic Records (Jansch, Renbourn, Pentangle et al) which pressed Folkways albums for the UK market. I've bought these in charity shops, R&TE, always for peanuts. No doubt to a real collector those prices are right, they're not the Folkways originals. But I have a soft spot for the XTRA layouts even though they're often not-quite-right takes on Clyne's aesthetic. And in one sense, though cheap and unloved, they have a kind of curio value. According to Colin Harper (in that footnote I mentioned), Folkways has only ever licensed its recordings to be pressed and sold by another label once – to XTRA.

Minus the Shooting

2010-06-14T12:44:00.002+01:00

Together with k-punk, Giovanni Tiso, Graham Harman and Admiral Greyscale of Mordant Music (aka Gary Mills) and some other big names still tba, I will be keeping all World Cup thoughts off this blog, and over here. The name is obviously a reference to Orwell's famous essay on international football (readable here), though Orwell is by no means to be taken as the blog's patron saint... in fact I might give the essay a gentle fisking if I find the time over the month. So at some point it may be retitled as Vuvuzela Drone, or The Vuvuzela Syndicate as a nod to its Tony Conrad-ian soundtrack. But the url will remain, like Jamie Carragher, perfectly static; immobile.

blue sky thinking

2010-06-02T22:52:00.007+01:00

EDIT: Seb points out one I should've remembered:

written in the dark

2010-05-26T10:00:00.001+01:00

and then and then and then and then

ideas i'm never going to use, 1

2010-05-24T11:44:00.002+01:00

There was a rumour a while ago that Technics were about to cease production of the 1200 and 1210 - a rumour that seemed all too plausible at the time, even if it was subsequently proved false.

It reminded me of an idea I had years ago, and might as well admit to myself that I'm never going to carry out.

The idea was: produce two records in a gatefold sleeve, the content of which was to be designed to be played simultaneously on two turntables through a mixer.

The tones, the tempos, all would be based on the ratios inherent to the technology: the ratios of 33'/3 to 45 rpm, the facility for pitching playback speed up or down 8%. The listener would have four sides of music, giving the following combinations: side A with side C or D, and side B with C or D. Within those permutations would lie and endless field of adjustments that could be made according to the listeners whim by using different start points, different speeds, etc. Everything about the two discs' content would be made with the possibilities created by identity / contrast in mind.

I never quite worked out the question of difference vs doubling. ie, with two records, each having two sides, should sides A and C be sonically identical, enabling all the strange phasing effects that arise from minute variations of speed? Or should the doubling be limited to patches on each side? Or should side A, B, C, and D all be completely different? What about using locked grooves?

I also never resolved the major difficulty: that it would only have appealed (or at least been readily available as an experience) to those with two decks and a mixer... so essentially amateur/hobbyist/would-be/poseur DJs upwards. If anyone wants to actually do this, please send me a copy when it's done.

hiphop in the cold world

2010-05-20T10:00:00.001+01:00

This isn't so much a post as a home for a comment that kept getting swallowed by the form over at Poetix, where Dominic posted Cannibal Ox's 'Iron Galaxy', noting the 'cold world' sample.

Imagining a hiphop appendix to Cold World, you would have to start with the GZA. And there are innumerable references to ice as diamonds in the millennial burst of bling. But those, like Raekwon's 'Glaciers of Ice' and 'Ice Water', have nothing to do with the cold world as Dom discusses it. MOP are getting there. The first Company Flow album is Can Ox's obvious precursor, both produced by El-P, both radiating toxic coldness, sensibilities profoundly disturbed, not just out of tune, but at war with, mainstream normativity. The first two Mobb Deep albums have a brutalized sociopathic chill to them. I can sort of imagine Ulrike Meinhof nodding her head to them, despite the get-money mindset. And more recently (ish), two Clipse tracks have especially cold veins. Ride Around Shining:

...there's a highly synaesthetic (to me) overlap between the coin-scraped-over-piano-innards sample, 'ice' in the lyrics and the affectless chill of the delivery. It's about a certain joy, a certain exultation in success, but it articulates that pleasure through a sonic lip-curl: no fanfares, no choruses, no excess, just that refrigerated skeletal production. And equally, Mr Me Too I think screams materialist anhedonia and disenchantment:

The hauntological footballer

2010-05-17T14:21:00.003+01:00

Just found the time to digest Radon Brainstorm's 3000-word-plus cri de coeur on the subject of Joe Cole. One to add to BDR in the limited category of music-football crossover blogger. RB might not thank me for this, but you could argue that Joe Cole represents a kind of footballing hauntological: as a prodigy who's never been reckoned to have fulfilled his potential (lost futures!) but also in that the quality of his talent takes the average viewer back to their childhood. That is, his talent is the kind first recognized and most valued by the collective wisdom of the school playground: the sleight of foot, the jink that looks like an optical illusion. So to continue in this specialized path of dribbling and close control is unconsciously perceived by pundits/coaches to be a refusal to grow up, to mature into a cover-and-tackle drone (even when this might represent a neutering of talent and a weakening of the collective).

riffs, hooks, loops

2010-05-01T13:36:00.003+01:00

I wasn't going to get involved in this riff-off going on between Carl, Simon, Matt, Seb et al. The general 70s hairiness of its first few rounds was interesting though. I was trying to decide whether this was because of some kind of implicit set of rules which could never be spoken aloud or even acknowledged, like Mornington Crescent or something. If so, I propose that Rule 2 for this and any future outbreaks of Riff Swap should be that anyone using one of Led Zeppelin's is automatically disqualified.

Sticking to the hairy and pre-punk, I would nominate Creedence Clearwater Revival. I think Suzie Q is a pretty pure example of the form, simply because of the way the first three notes set up and demand the subsequent pay-off of the notes which follow. Born on the Bayou is just gloriously economical, the riff stripped down to these three notes hanging in a laconic lip-curl over the rest of the sound.

--------

Carl mentions hiphop here in the context of rap-rock crossovers. I'd been thinking about hiphop during an earlier round, because isn't it the case that hiphop, at least while sampling ruled the roost, was deeply implicated in the Riff economy? What else is a classic loop than the recognition, cutting and pasting of, a riff (on guitars or otherwise). I know this is stretching the term, a lot, but it's probably worth admitting that really the Riff is essentially just the Hook, renamed for the rockist palate. Acknowledging the close relationship between the Riff and hiphop fits with Matt's developing project on Dissensus and Cybore (in which he is becoming the Northrop Frye of music writing), as it allows hiphop to slot happily into the Rock genus. [I've got more to say about Matt's set of master genres when I get the time.]

Note also that hiphop is capable of maximizing the latent Riff potential in the flute, which, as noted in Simon's bit on Kraftwerk's Ruckzuck for The Wire's Riffs feature, is not easily Riffed upon.

You'd expect some flute within the backpack tendency, it does tend to connote mellow/jazzy/tasteful/yawn etc:

But you also find it at harsher grades:

Souls of Mischief (from 0:23)

Beatnuts

Pace Won

Big L

And there's a whole strain of hiphop flute which is just pure filth.

Braveheartz

Dre & Knocturnal

DJ Quik & Kurupt

P0rn flute! What's going on here? Something like the pimp logic of deploying 'effeminate' signifiers as an assertion of super alpha maledom perhaps.

feeling and really feeling

2010-04-28T12:20:00.002+01:00

I'm doing that fingersnap thing in acknowledgement of Simon Reynolds' hitherto-unknown MCing skills

----------

I think he's absolutely right to point out all those forerunners of what I'll (for the moment, reluctantly) call emotive dance music. And it is a little bonkers of Rouge's Foam to talk about the 'coldness of most jungle, garage and old dubstep'.

---------

But Simon knows, I'm sure, that it's not an imminent upsurge in Cure-style feet-planted, arm-swinging inna dance that Ikonika or Darkstar are on about. It's the good old trusty sublime. And aiming for it via the tearducts rather than delirious happiness is not only a long-established move (people were writing songs about it years ago), it can be the opposite of avant, and shamelessly commercial. And isn't it an equally long-established paradox that the coldest, iciest, most rigorously 'affectless' music can be all the more moving for having precisely an excess of those qualities? Haven't we all heard Kraftwerk by now?

----------

'Emotion, in the sense of stuff that comes from your life, does not honestly strike me as this music's strong suit.'

This is where it gets messy for me. First of all, 'stuff that comes from your life'... 'my son's DS'... A lot of the problem is right there. I have no time for the Reynolds-has-lost-it argument, it seems to mostly come from generational defensiveness in response to nothing crueller than faint praise, but the fact is, just as in much of hypnagogic pop, a particular set of references is being deployed in a lot of this New Music which, temps perdu style, will evoke in 18-30s an emotional response that it never could for Simon. Games console sonics, yacht rock from 80s films seen as a child: of course they have little emotional baggage for someone who didn't have them as a part of their childhood's fabric. This *is* stuff that comes from Ikonika's life: 'Abdel-Hamid says she grew up with games in one ear and garage in the other...' [link].

This works both ways though of course. Simon, Woebot et al are entirely within their rights to point out that this limits the music's address and isn't the most aggressively forward-thinking move. (I'm generalizing here, please don't swamp me with endless examples of how Demdike Stare or whoever has nothing to do with 80s films.)

Isn't there a sense in which the moment 'emotion' is deployed like this - ie as an element that can be quantified, and music judged according to the quantity found, and whether by Ikonika, Rouge's Foam, or Simon, actual discussion or debate effectively stops? It's almost a moment of aporia, an unresolvable tangle, except that I'm not sure it pays to keep tweaking and worrying at it... maybe it's more like a ne plus ultra. 'Emotion' is effectively working here as an assertion, one that need not be articulated and cannot be argued with. An attachment or engagement or understanding of the music that has become axiomatic. To put it another way, when someone says 'But it has so much emotion' of a record, they are implicitly saying 'I fucking love this... I get it. This is my thing.'

So discussion founders and the shouting begins: no-one wants to hear a bad word said about something they love, nor can they generally be argued out of it (at least not without fucking hating you for it afterwards).

It also stops because it doesn't tell us anything, it all but gives up on any kind of critical duty and defaults to basic fandom. It reminds me of when people say of, eg, Swells or Peel, 'He had so much passion'. But it's not the passion you actually valued! Passion's a fucking given. Try telling the average X Factor contestant or Camden toilet band they have no passion. Fundamentalists have passion. Passion alone neither redeems nor justifies anything. Any number of idiots like [...brief Google check...] Mark Beaumont can knock off a Swells-style rant which would register highly on some kind of notional Passionometer: intemperate, sweary, tick, tick, tick. But they're junk because they lack Swells' mastery of language, the inventiveness of his ranting. What people are almost invariably praising when they praise someone's passion, is their technique, their ability to deliver that passion.

NB This is not an anti-passion, kick-emotion-out-of-music argument. I'm strictly talking about how we talk about music.

getting warmer

2010-04-08T11:29:00.002+01:00

Another great post on It's Her Factory, this time reading Hot Chip's 'Over and Over' through Lee Edelman's idea of the sinthomosexual. Briefly, politics for Edelman assumes a reproductive norm, a future predicated on the child, to which homosexuality presents a troubling and unassimilable negation: an apparent dead end. The sinthomosexual is the figure he believes queers (not necessarily to be understood in a strict sense of biological desire) should embrace and work to become, in place of ongoing attempts to falsely assimilate with heteronormativity: marriage, adoption, etc. IHF focusses in particular on Edelman's identification of 'stupid enjoyment', 'repetitive insistence', 'senseless compulsion', and a joy in machinic (machinic because inhuman, inorganic) repetition as aspects of the sinthomosexual aesthetic. (More detail in the post of course, and there's also a superb reading of Edelman to be found at Poetix.)

There's one interesting flaw in IHF's argument for me, when she argues that 'Over and Over'

rejects the humanist preference for musical authenticity, be it in “warmth” of sound, the use of “real people” playing “real instruments,” and humanism’s general tendency to equate electronic sounds with alienation (indeed, the “live video” takes place in a digital editing environment, as the close of the video makes explicitly clear);

The warm/cool binary in discussion of music is at once indispensible and completely unstable. Most people, even if they refuse to grasp the concept of synaesthesia, let alone its spelling, will acknowledge this axis of differentiation. Mapping it onto the human/inhuman and the analogue/digital, it becomes ever shakier, more contingent, schematic, but still a useful code through which to discuss the emotional resonance of timbre.

In the case of 'Over and Over', I just don't hear this rejection of warmth, of live instruments, of the fallibility (because minutely off-grid or off-key) of the recorded human body. The synths sound 'warm' to me, especially the clotted honk of bass in the refrain. The tinkling chimes at the start, the overdubbed cowbell and handclaps, all a little off, if not wonky then knocked off the milli-second accurate maps of a ProTools or Logic grid. The organ in the section IHF calls A1 (third time round), and the (fuzzy, warm) guitar line which comes in at C; these are obviously live overdubs, not machine-cut, sequenced, processed loops.

It also occurs to me that the video's play with green-screen performance, digital sound, the 'real', could be read from the other direction. Is it alienating the pop consumer's warm and fuzzy response (see Devo) or effecting a very different kind of alienation, something like Brecht's foregrounding of staging, so that the CGI rendering of the pop body into a hyperreal avatar is demystified?

This is not to say that IHF's use of Edelman is wrong. I just wonder if forcing it through a cold (wave) electro framework doesn't distort the original song. Presumably a very similar argument could instead be made using disco - warm, wet, embodied, yet surely as sinthomosexual as any music ever made. Not only delirious with repetition, but the source of endless repetitions and reiterations in sampling.

Could you extend this to argue for arch-hetero James Brown as sinthomosexual? To what extent has contraception, as the enabler of non-productive sex, made sinthomosexuals - at least in the site of popular music - of us all?

uh oh

2010-04-07T16:30:00.004+01:00

today's ghost editor

2010-03-26T10:36:00.003Z

2010-02-23T22:44:00.001Z

electroacoustic prose

2010-02-11T13:30:00.004Z

The subject was not exactly changed by anyone, but it drifted off to something else. Lilly remembered that she had brought an electronic record for them to hear. They played it while they had coffee. Eric chuckled and made comments. The few words, said in German by a female voice, were interspersed by eerie, owl-like moaning and screeching. Clarence's thoughts drifted. He saw a garden of metal flowers, then a dark tunnel, an airless hell in which anything could happen, or spring out. It was an unknown world, yet completely known, as one knew one's own dreams, and yet did not know them -- because one could not completely interpret them, but not because one did not know them and their peculiar atmosphere.
Patricia Highsmith, A Dog's Ransom (1972)

I love depictions like this, made in passing, of the avant garde. The more marginal they are, the more unguarded and interesting they become. This one is quite finely nuanced; one character resists, but the central character responds -- and sympathetically, despite the hellish atmosphere evoked. The record's modernity is not an issue, though it is described in a vocabulary which is doubly atavistic: it speaks to Clarence's violent subconscious, and itself reanimates a fin-de-siecle lyricism: flowers of evil, seasons in hell. What was the original of this fictionalized record? Maybe some scholar of Highsmith and/or Stockhausen can tell me.

Hand in Glove

2009-12-10T13:36:00.007Z

When in the summer i was thinking about Beyonce's single Sasha Fierce gauntlet as an homage to Michael Jackson's single white glove, I was really intrigued to discover their shared debt to Bob Fosse as a choreographer. This edit of Fosse's routine in The Little Prince is pretty extraordinary, a template for almost all of the moves and tics which we now consider to be characteristically MJ:

And then there's Beyonce's debt to, or rather deliberate homage to, Fosse in -- let me finish -- one the best videos of all time. I can't embed it but you can watch it here.

And this synchs up Fosse's original routine, devised for his wife Gwen Verdon, with Single Ladies:

The Fosse-MJ-Beyonce triangulation is so gloriously odd, the way it crosswires certain assumptions about gender and race, subverting projections like the idea that Jackson's performance of Billie Jean at Motown 25 'encapsulated a long tradition of African-American dance movements in one performance' (a view ascribed to Ian Inglis in the wiki for the moonwalk).

While I'm on the subject, I don't think I've ever linked from here to this post about Beyonce, the Sashe Fierce gauntlet as cyber-prosthesis and the etymological roots of cyborg in the concept of slavery.

This is how we walk on the moon

2009-12-08T14:23:00.009Z

MJ as classic child star -- identity fixed at moment of first success, unable to achieve a viable adult identity because unable to ever leave this persona as a) wunderkind and b) object of desire behind. Frozen in this pre-pubescent mindframe. This compounded by father's violence and philandering: horror of adult sexuality. Career produced then torn apart by the tension created by this as he ages. Androgyny and surgery as attempt to evade post-pubescence, to remain like a child: asexual and, as a universally worshipped image-vessel of pure potentiality, deracinated too. Surgery as refacialization, denial of his father's paternity and the genetic reiterations of repro-futurism. Billie Jean as apex of this -- rejection of paternity, of sex and its reproductive logic -- (see also Dirty Diana). Then the decline as age renders these contortions impossible to sustain. Atonement for the blasphemy against holy ideology of the child in Billie Jean etc... has children w/out sex, has sexless intercourse w/ children...

The moonwalk as attempt to reverse flow of time/space back towards 1969, year of the real moon walk and moonlanding, the year he debuted w/ J5 and was date-stamped, ID-stamped, Id-stamped irrevocably. A survey of the Jackson 5's records could work here too -- as a sort of lost future, an image of the child MJ could not continue to be.

An outline for a piece on Michael Jackson that remained unwritten. I'm glad I never fleshed it out, it was more a ground-clearing exercise in working out what I actually thought MJ was, before then writing something a little less obvious (and I do think a lot of it is obvious), or at least less pop-psychological. I still like the moonwalk idea though: the choreography of nostalgia, a literalization of a will-to-return, the longing to go backwards though time to a prelapsarian safety. Is the 1969 moon landing / J5 debut connection overstated? Maybe, but then why is it called the 'moonwalk'? It's not as if there's any similarity between Jackson's slip-slide reverse (both feet stuck like glue to the floor) and the big, slow-motion forward bounces which everyone knows low gravity imposes on the normal human gait. [The move, as is well-documented, was not invented by Jackson, but Jackson does seem to be responsible for the name by which it's now universally recognised.]

One (and not the only) way that this sketch is superfluous/redundant is that there already is a survey of the Jackson 5's discography by Barney Hoskyns in the latest volume from Zer0:

It also features Mark Fisher, Steven Shaviro, Dominic Fox, Owen Hatherley, Alex Williams, Reid Kane, Geeta Dayal, Charles Holland, Tom Ewing, Joshua Clover, Marcello Carlin, Ian Penman, David Stubbs, Mark Sinker and more. I shouldn't big it up personally as I'm in it, but in the Times Bob Stanley says it's 'one of the year’s best books' and has 'fresh, allegation-free perspectives on Jackson’s life.' Available to order here.

Beards per minute

2009-11-13T16:58:00.010Z

Given their closer orbit to his normal spheres of listening, I'm surprised Simon missed a whole rash of beards beyond the fuzzy folk types discussed in this Guardian piece (and in his blissblog follow-up).

For starters, minimal techno does not mean minimal facial hair.

Particularly for the acknowledged master of the field.

This minimal-techno-dubstep spectrum clearly needs to be extended as minimal-techno-dubstep-beards, looking at this Perlon new boy:

Then there's Sam Shackleton's former Skull Disco colleague:

There may be a West Country thing going on here . . . Bristol is a pretty beardy town, and Bristol's the connection for Appleblim and Bass Clef:

But that's not all re dubstep:

And Hyperdub connects to:

From which you can go hauntological:

Or stay electro/synth-pop (note the double points scored here for beard plus Shoreditch Slug):

From whom the beard's importance to the post-punk electro disco revival is a step away:

Before you even consider random strands like space disco:

And assorted French hipsters like Sebastian Tellier or Justice who I can't be bothered to picture.

I just hope these oversights don't blow up in Simon's face . . . It can only be a matter of time before Joe Muggs pens a heartfelt screed on the narrowness of his initial folk-orientated Face Fuzz Continuum . . . its pernicious effects as a kind of canon formation; how badly it reveals his ignorance of the openness of the modern beard-wearer to a huge variety of influences beyond the Incredible String Band; etc.

Crazy Rhythms

2009-11-03T17:12:00.007Z

If I’d known that The Feelies were capable of sounding like Richard Thompson jamming with Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother, I would have checked them out sooner. For years I had one unsourced phrase in my head in relation to the band: ‘Hoboken pop squirm’, although the core of the band actually grew up (and remained) in Haledon, New Jersey. I couldn’t even have told you what Hoboken pop squirm was; I assumed it meant weedy proto-indie, a kind of jangly forerunner of Weezer or They Might Be Giants, the wrong side of the river from the bare-knuckle sonic psychosis of post-No Wave downtown.

Crazy Rhythms (their first album) is totally wired though. The sound is like a featherweight boxer: not overpoweringly massive but practically quivering with tensile strength. Although the wiriness of the long-distance runner is probably a better comparison: according to this NY Rocker piece, the two guitarists, Glenn Mercer and Bill Millions would meet daily to go for 3-5 mile runs. Anton Fier, drummer for long enough to record this album but not much longer, must have been the real athlete though: some of these beats, especially ‘Forces at Work‘, the title track, ‘Moscow Nights’, ‘Loveless Love’, are so unerringly, unrelentingly propelled that the stories about him throwing up between songs, and bleeding from the mouth and ears (! flying and/or broken sticks presumably) are fully believable.

When Fier and the rest of the band are locked right in, punk becomes an inadequate reference point, and instead a kind of American motorik manifests itself, with the New Jersey Turnpike’s endless width -- 14 lanes at one point -- replacing the autobahn as the governing metaphor. (‘Forces at Work’: Haledon, Galledon.) That sense of flat width -- an inclination to the horizontal as an organizing principle -- follows through the whole record from the mixing and its separated stereo image to the cover image of the band, lined up from left to right against a pale blue ground. ‘Crazy Rhythms’ is so… flattened, with its beginning and end separated by a guitar-less instrumental break long enough to fit most punk songs into, but one that doesn’t attempt any shifts in dynamic range or solos, just a series of percussion bursts that come and go.

The whole record feels fascinatingly out of place: a Jersey band obsessed with Eno and Kraftwerk, playing on the downtown punk scene -- and released by a UK label (Stiff). Geographical dislocation recurs in the lyrics, from the unreliable out-of-body narration of ‘Boy with Perpetual Nervousness’ to ‘Moscow Nights’, a song arguably no less provocative to mainstream American culture than ‘God Save the Queen’ was to the UK, being a fantasy about defecting to Soviet Russia (on the cusp of the decade of Red October and Red Dawn):

When you smile and say,
‘I thought about it, it's the right time’
And I expect that
You're never returning to the USA
[…]
Well, I don't know
I think it's time for you to face it
You never felt right in our world
You never felt right about yourself
And I think about what it might be like
If I could go alone, if I could go at night
Would it be just like you know you said it would
Would it start the life aglow?

There’s also something oddly out of time about the record. It came out in 1980, making it more post-punk than punk, but the band were playing together downtown in 1976, when Terry Ork started to manage them, so the elements they share with Television (a paradoxical atmosphere: deadpan histrionics), Talking Heads (jittery, spasmodic, but plugged right in to the dancefloor), Jonathan Richman (the lightfooted AM pop of ‘Fa Ce La’) aren’t so much debts as parallel developments that went undocumented for four years.

It’s ahead of, as well as behind, its times. Their understanding of space, bass and percussion anticipates Liquid Liquid’s at points (that break on ‘Crazy Rhythms’, the slow-burn start of ‘Boy with Perpetual Nervousness’). They cut out crash cymbals to keep the to range of frequencies free for the guitars, then compensate with layers of extra shakers, woodblocks, etc that work as powerfully for being left out as when they’re in: dub’s positive use of negative space -- double hisses on the hi-hat that refuse to crowd every bar, rolling breaks on toms and cowbells. Listened to in conjunction with the massively underwhelming follow-up The Good Earth, you realize The Feelies pulled off the same uncommon trick as Pixies, making a first album which is better recorded, more intelligent, more developed, just better all round, than its successor, even down to the crisp, dry, force of the production, almost clinically clear and undistorted, where the second is mushier, messier, duller, more conventional. The Pixies had Steve Albini, The Feelies had their own ideas, developed in the long run-up to the sessions, which they then imposed on their engineer, Mark Abel. And also a certain amount of luck: unhappy with the sound of their amps, they tried plugging their guitars straight into the mixing desk, and then decided to stick with the unusually clean, cold sound that resulted. (Abel: 'That record was the culmination of four years of fantasizing about how they were going to record those songs... they couldn't understand anyone else's ideas... Frankly, I think they dug themselves into a hole, but that's the hole they want and they have a perfect right to sit in it.') It undercuts the garage-punk assumption that distortion equals sublime raging inferno. Glenn Mercer says ‘Stiff requested a demo for a second album. They didn't like it. We were doing a lot of home recording, even more in an Eno mode and less like a rock band.’ With Stiff’s misjudgment and Anton Fier leaving, I wonder if this second album that never happened is one of the great lost albums. The closest thing that exists to it is probably Sonic Youth’s debut EP from the following year, which shares some of that rigorously cool recording aesthetic, the chiming,* intertwined guitars and an accent on percussion. And, come to think of it, elements of the cover design.

* The Feelies are often described as ‘jangly’, but they’re not. They chime. Indie jangles; jingle bells jangle. Clocks, bells, Arvo Part and Steve Reich records chime. The Feelies chime.

Music and theory

2009-10-15T13:22:00.007+01:00

Very late on this, but Simon Reynolds on theory and music for Frieze is an excellent read (… and p.s. thanks to Dan Fox for the link to this in the comments)

Via that I found this dialogue (also from Frieze) between Simon R and Kodwo Eshun, from all the way back in 1999. Essential reading as a whole I think, but Kodwo’s first response caught my eye in particular. After that Nuum conference back in the spring, a lot of the Reynolds & nuum naysayers seemed very keen to approve of the presentation by Kode9 and Kodwo… sort of as ‘theory we can believe in’, a move to give them more leverage with which to bash k-punk and SR… if they approve of Kodwo and Kode9, it pre-empts the charge of being knee-jerk anti-theory philistines. But this quote from Kodwo shows the degree to which they’re trying to line up with someone who‘d repudiate much of their standpoint:

Music [has] changed so drastically that it was more pressing to analyse the widening gap between how music sounded and the terms we used to understand it. When I started writing in 1992, most dance writing was still at the level of ‘kicking’ and ‘banging’. There was a fiercely-held anti-intellectual drive that made writing about dance music more of a challenge. […] You get people writing things like ‘the music speaks for itself’ as if it’s the most admirable thing you could say - but it’s just a cop-out. There’s an idea that the writer’s aim is to empathise, to intuit, on the side of the producer against the world.

For me, it seems far more urgent to understand what computerisation is doing to rhythm than to understand that a particular musician was a bad boy who grew up in care and had a really hard time. […] 99% of writing is still socio-historical and my attempt to totally destroy that is probably doomed to failure, but it’s an experiment to show that it’s viable, using the particular example of black electronic dance music, machine music, computer music.

. . .

The Frieze Theory print issue was excellent too. But there's something about the entirety of, or the presumed possibility of, any debate about ‘Theory’, whether for or against... When you read some depressing ‘common sense’ reductive write-off of theory it’s (usually) impossible not to think a) there’s no engagement with the actual ideas in question going on, but instead a flat objection to complexity and/or abstraction in principle and in general, and b) even if you were presented with a compelling take-down of say, Paul de Man’s entire philosophical project from top to bottom, how does that impinge on Foucault? Theory is a sufficiently heterogenous body of critique and inquiry that any generic attack is going to struggle for traction. The flipside of this is that defending ‘Theory’ as a whole skirts dangerously close to being futile and/or reductive.
. . .

Reading around and about the theory debate over the last couple of months, the word ‘precisely’ seemed to leap off the page. It often seems to serve more of a rhetorical function than an author would probably like to admit, cropping up just at the point where two slippery concepts are being linked together, and the more counter-intuitive or unlikely the link, the more likely it is that ‘precisely’ will pop up. It suggests a residual anxiety about abstraction, a will-to-exactitude that kicks in when talking about the conceptual and the conceptualization of the conceptual; so ‘precisely’, with its connotations of incisive, surgical specificity, is often as much the writer assertively reassuring or reaffirming themselves as anything else.

Immaterialism

2009-09-09T09:09:00.001+01:00

It's a strange feeling, if you read a lot about the music industry and its impending death-by-downloads, to turn to this piece by Nicholson Baker and read about Jeff Bezos of Amazon and his determination to do the same for publishing.

Bezos and Amazon must believe that e-books, downloaded to a device like the Kindle, are inevitable and that they might as well get in first. They must believe that the earlier they're in, the better their chances of colonizing this new world, setting Amazon up to exploit the pilgrim hordes to come.

This depends on the assumption that technology will make the Kindle or similar e-reader so pleasurable and easy to use that it will supersede the book.

But the same assumption – that ingenuity will find a way – is surely what will prove fatal to them. The Kindle will only work if they can make its DRM work, and no DRM has ever remained uncracked once users reach a certain critical mass. Eventually, readers will have access to an infinite wealth of digital texts for free, and publishing will have exactly the same problem as the music industry: how do you make readers pay for something they can get for free?

Maybe there's a different psychological economy at work in the way people relate to and acquire books, and the way they relate to and acquire music. But it's quite a chance to take.

. . .

I sometimes try to imagine a culture without artefacts – the endpoint of digital in which no-one prints a book, buys a newspaper or magazine, presses a CD (let alone a record), and wonder when it will arrive. And how I will make a living.

Then I remember that in a hundred years' time, humanity will be reduced to small pockets of hunter-gatherer-fisher-farmers, scraping out an existence on small temperate islands, while the continents become uninhabitable scorched wastelands. Assuming the climate stabilizes and these surviving communities start to send out sorties to the old hubs of civilization (like Ballard's Drowned World), as they gather together relics from the old world there will presumably be a huge lacuna. The cultural fossil record will start to go blank from the turn of the century onwards, and with no internet, no electricity, the migration to digital will appear as a kind of universal amnesia. These survivor-explorer archaeologists from the future will find books, records, magazines, CDs, but they will be decreasing to a trickle as the years go by, while even they if manage to fire a computer up, there will be no distant Google server-farm to supply them.

Errata

2009-09-07T13:13:00.004+01:00

After this post, it has been pointed out to me that of course three (not two) of Hot Chip attended Elliott School. Forgot about Owen Clarke. Sorry Owen. Felix Martin did not, but he did go to Pimlico School, which unlike Elliott is out-and-out Brutalism (I’m not going to make much of the fact that Felix now stands at the back jabbing at drum machines). Or at least Pimlico was Brutalist. Also, the underground river nearby is in fact called the Wandle, not the Wendle. For this, I blame Michael de Larrabeiti. I’m going to write about de Larrabeiti sooner or later, but if I do it will probably be too long for this blog. I also have this from an Elliotonian correspondent:

it never gets mentioned anymore that some of So Solid also went to Elliott. One of them once mugged me in MacDonalds as a 14 year old. He got expelled for something else later on. Though he was always very friendly whenever I bumped into him later

With heart-warming happy endings like that, no wonder it was declared Britain’s friendliest school. Also some another small corroboration for Owen H’s suggested sympathy between brutalist architecture/grime sonics.

Finally, I think I was harsh on Bukem here. I liked Logical Progression (and recently got very into Woebot’s ambient jungle mix for Fact). But two moments for me stand out for me when I think about the decline of my initial interest in dnb. Owen Hatherley’s description of it: 'by 1998, a ponderous stonerstep for slovenly, unshaven UCL science students in expensive rainwear', here echoes my own experience almost exactly, with the nadir being a Goldie night in either late ’98 or early ’99, rammed with public schoolboys in body warmers. But a harbinger of that was listening to Earth 2 on one of those HMV listening posts and thinking, this sounds like a waiting room.

pic credit: Pimlico School, RIBA via Twentieth Century Society

(Brutalist) Boy from School

2009-08-29T13:31:00.009+01:00

I used to wonder how much the architecture of Oxford and Cambridge affected the mindset of its longterm employees. Living and working amongst those buildings, massive, monumental representations of the institutions’ age, status and venerability… How much might this condition you to think a little more complacently of yourself (as the present-day representative of this heritage) and to think about the world a little more conservatively, than you would otherwise? Similarly, if you went to Eton, then Oxford, then worked in Lincolns Inn Fields, how might such an unbroken succession of film-set dreaming spires subconsciously condition you?

I don’t know how this effect could be tested for or quantified. And anecdotally at least I’ve not found it to be borne out by experience. (My friend and sample-group-of-one in Lincolns Inn volunteered for Obama and runs a Palestinian campaign group.) But I happened to be thinking about it a week ago, when I read this Sophie Heawood piece on The xx. Understandably enough, it picks up on the angle about their school: Elliott, a comprehensive in Putney previously attended by Burial, Fridge (two of whom release solo records as Adem and Fourtet) and two-fifths of Hot Chip. And some Maccabees. (Though arguably the most successful Elliott product is this shredder). I should admit that I know some Elliott alumni very well and can report that Heawood’s description is pretty accurate. They do have a somewhat cult-like insularity: they’re reluctant to associate with outsiders, they wear flowing white robes, and they gather every summer solstice on Putney Heath to worship a huge flaming effigy of a deity they name Victor. But while Elliott has been the subject of plenty of articles already, it's the first I‘ve seen mention it as a built environment. Heawood says the band were affected by ‘the sense of space in the school itself — which itself was “weirdly massive”, according to Sim.’

From images found online (all at elliottonian.com), it looks like a kind of soft brutalism to me: modernist, exposed stairwells and functions, but with glass winning out over concrete expanse or massive bulk. Not quite a 'council estate prison’ as The xx's Madley Croft has it (whatever that would be). No doubt Fantastic Journal, Entschwindet und Vergeht and Sit Down Man can make more of it, tell me what I‘m missing etc. I like the sheer horizontal persistence of the main building and the gym / theatre (?) looks interesting.

In relation to the Elliott discography I can’t see/hear anything as striking as the connection made in Militant Modernism between brutalist social housing and the sonic brutalism of grime. None of the Elliott discography could be described as brutalist, though there are jagged outbreaks in Kieran Hebden’s duo sets with Steve Reid, and some gloriously maximalist aggro in Hot Chip tracks like Shake a Fist. It’s wrong to generalize, but if I had to I would say there’s a kind of collective urban pastoralism at work. Check out these two Fridge covers; Hot Chip are as influenced by the low-key lushness of Hall & Oates, Robert Wyatt and Will Oldham’s Appalachian modes as they are by post-Timbaland electro-futurism; Adem’s records are post-Pro Tools kitchen table Cloth Cuts pillow talk. The xx are obviously in love with the lo-fi pastoral of Young Marble Giants (another Putney connection there, because Domino, whose offices are in Putney, reissued YMG in 2007, when The xx would have been 16/17). The master image of Burial’s first album was London, submerged under a broken-barriered Thames (…and the Wendle, one of London‘s underground rivers, flows nearby). So maybe, if you had to (idiotically) generalize, you could detect a kind of quiet polemic, a naturalization of city life. Because if there is a kind of 'fields beneath’, under-the-pavement-the-beach dynamic, it’s not about alienated hippie anti-urbanism, but a rejection of that rejection. Nor is it situationist denaturalization, a making strange of the concrete city, but instead buried in the background hum of the music, a straightforward celebration of it.

Fear of Music (Again)

2009-08-22T13:50:00.006+01:00

Haven't you heard? Music is dead, a cadaver quivering coldly on the edge of the rave. Music writers, the poor dears, say nothing of note. In the hot, sweaty summer of 2009, this has been the concern of many heavyweight thinkers. Take Mark Fisher's requiem for dance music in the New Statesman, John Harris's elegy for music journalism in the Saturday Guardian, the Drowned in Sound series Music Journalism: RIP? or Simon Reynolds's criticisms of club culture in the Wire and on his own blog. Enough is enough. It is time to tackle these quibbles, look up, and take action.

Jude Rogers writing here. It’s possible that the entire thing is a prank: note the close proximity of the words ‘heavyweight thinker’ to the name John Harris.

I was far more depressed reading Rogers’ piece than I was when reading any of the quibblers she’s trying to call time on. Yoking together such a disparate body of opinion and writing it all off as moaning is absurd, but given the word count, I suppose straw men were necessary in order to get her own theory in. But it gets weirder. A David Byrne installation and some impromptu folk-singing session remind Rogers that

music is our tool to work with, and we can do with it what we wish, if we engage with it. Critics often forget this. They ignore the glimpses of light that the modern world offers, and prefer to bask in the nostalgia of their formative experiences.

There are all kinds of slippages going on here. Who is the ‘we‘? Critics? Listeners? Everyone? (A royal plural?) It seems to be in flux. This working and engaging, is it making one‘s own music or a different kind of criticism? . . . So far as it applies to the errant writers previously named and shamed, Rogers’ argument must be that if they just worked harder at liking things, they would find that they could like absolutely anything. Music being a simple ’tool’, you can make of it what you will (‘You only get out what you put in!’). And that would be better because it wouldn’t get Jude Rogers down so much.

Rogers has more to say about these critics wrongheaded enough to engage in critical thinking:

Just because they, like me, are no longer fearlessly young, and not experiencing movements and the draw of musicians for the first time, they shouldn't forget that other people are. What's more, they do little to get up and change things, and instead prefer to get themselves, and us, down.

What these writers actually ‘did’ was to word their critiques and publish them, unlike Rogers who has . . . written a critique and published it. Why the assumption that the aim of those pieces was not to inspire any action or change any minds but just to, you know, ruin people’s day?

You could put the complaints down to an unconscious animus against criticism. You know, the attitude that says music is music, do we have to talk/think about it? But these two words apply to very unstable categories and there’s a free exchange between them; music is implicitly an act of criticism, and critics can drive musical change, by feeding ideas back into that process, whether they’re Kode9 or Paul Morley. The true sentimentalization of the past happening here is the idea that we must side blindly with the kids, following the self-evidently false assumption that music is always in rude health, that those diagnosing it as palsied or amnesiac or sedated are just old people, and they’re ruining it for the yoot. All musical years are not equal; some are a lot fucking better than others. ('I’d be the first to say that DMZ is no Metalheadz! Or that I wish I’d been there for Bukem' as one buffoon empiricist, oddly, admits.) The thing being wished for here, is not some pure direct access to music as such, but simply the warm amniotic glow of feeling that everything is OK. It’s not just a fear of music that might be bad, and the burden of having to decide if it is, because that is inextricable from any experience of music. In its terror of actually having to think, critique and evaluate rather than apply fingers to ears and go lalala, and in its fear of finding out what music actually is, Rogers’ argument is not just a fear of criticism. It’s a fear of music itself.

This determination to think oneself into a state of deaf complacency is like a parody of critical engagement by way of positive-feedback techniques misappropriated from CBT. It's the kind of thing that leads you to swallow whatever you’re offered. The kind of thinking that leads you to realize, like Jude Rogers, only in 2009 that Blur and Britpop c. ’96 were over-rated, or that Tony Blair wasn’t the socially progressive messiah he presented himself as.

I don’t want to sleepwalk through the next fifteen years of music, culture and politics, and I don’t have to. Because critical thinking is our tool to work with, and we can get things done with it if we engage it. People often forget this. They ignore the glimpses of light that criticism offers, and prefer to bask in the safe sentimentality of their formative experiences.

Minimalism III

2009-08-18T13:00:00.001+01:00

From a profile of Apple's Steve Jobs, here:

Later, Jobs dropped out of college. Again, this seems to have been crucial. Alan Deutschman, author of The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, says his lack of a proper education in a world of highly educated people left him permanently insecure, especially in matters of taste. “I think his choice of a minimalist aesthetic comes from his fear of making the wrong aesthetic choice. He was someone who had great wealth from his early twenties. He was worried about not being seen as a brilliant sophisticate, so he had gurus to help him. There was this anxiety about being judged, combined with a natural instinct about the tremendous importance of design.”

It echoes, precisely, the connection made by Mark McGurl between Raymond Carver's reductionist aesthetic and his insecurities about his education and class. As discussed here in connection to minimal techno.

last thought

2009-08-17T20:29:00.004+01:00

...on Hyph Mngo. Interesting that Simon compares it unfavourably with MJ Cole's Sincere here. I've been listening to MJ Cole's recent mix for Fact a lot (which it looks like you can still d/l from their site), and Hyph Mngo doesn't come out out of it too well. This is mostly I think to do with technicalities to do with this specific mix: it's pitched too slow, losing its natural snap, it's a little quieter than the tracks around it, it doesn't get a build-up... But a couple of tracks later, a Nero remix of Sincere comes in and – put it down to MJ Cole framing his own offspring more carefully if you like, or perhaps the fact that it's just newer to my ears – tingles the spine in a way that Hyph fails to.

'Don't believe the Hyph'

2009-08-12T20:00:00.002+01:00

Simon Reynolds doesn’t like Hyph Mngo much.

Should this be a surprise? Well, the url is blissout.blogspot.com . . . isn't there more bliss washing about in Hyph Mngo than in Chainsaw Calligraphy?

Maybe the problem is the still standing in for a video on the YouTube clip that's getting linked to. I mean, check out the visuals on this Wax Doctor clip. Then are those LTJ Bukem sets that always seemed to be orbital shots of some metallic toned planet. Liquid drum’n’bass. Mmm. Liquid . . . like propafol. Plus isn't there a definite Mngo >>> mango >>> Goa >>> trance >>> snooze chain of suggestion going on? [Edit 26 August: for clarity, I'm not suggesting this is intended by JO, but something subconsciously affecting how Simon might hear it.]

Back to the post: the phrase ‘moist’n’milky minimalism’. Is Hyph Mngo really minimalist? Those synths are so saturated and saturating, the snap and kick of the rhythm so thoroughly . . . present. Whether or not the vocal is an enraptured hymning of a certain contemporary philosopher as Dominic Fox wondered ('BADIOU! . . . BADIOU!'), it's still enraptured by/ enamoured of something.

I'm not sure Chainsaw Calligraphy is strickly maximalist either. It’s stripped-down, nuts & bolts. Like (say) The Ramones, it's both maximalist and minimalist, depending on your angle of approach. Compared to close relatives – Talking Heads' uptight jerks and twitches, Patti Smith’s oneiric drifts – The Ramones were chainsaw calligraphers, demented wall-of-sound maximalists. They did end up working with Phil Spector after all. But compared to the prog and glam which preceded them, they were Roundhead iconoclasts, mowing down multinecked virtuosi and art-school peacocks alike. You use chainsaws to cut down trees, tall poppies, and in both 16 Bit and The Ramones there's a vein of purest avant-yob reductionism.

Ultimately, like Grievous Angel, I just don't see the need to choose between 16Bit and JO.* But if I had to, then yes, I would rather dance to Hyph Mngo.

*Just waiting now for this biographical morsel which makes JO the Son of Nuum to break. And the SR interview hopefully.

Derek Went Mad

2009-08-01T13:00:00.003+01:00

Somewhere in a shoebox at the bottom of cupboard I have a school-age tape of Dance Before the Police Come with – I think – a Blade album on the reverse. It didn't really leave much impression at the time, half of it being that British brand of post-Terror Squad aggro speed rap that already seemed out of date by '93. The other half, the inchoate breakbeat/hardcore stuff just didn't register, I didn't really have any context for it.

Playing the vinyl after a recent charity shop trawl, this track was a minor revelation. The Amen break, the disembodied vocal, the sense of psychological fragility; the singer's defiance undercut by the distracted tone, as if he's not even sure it's his own voice he hears singing. Looking back it connects dots between Burial, Gavin Bryars and the dread-drenched fevers of jungle records to come. It's a real omission from Soul Jazz's Rumble in the Jungle. Its sheer spookiness is only amplified by the video – burning crosses, wang chun exercises, and amphetamine dashes down institutional corridors.

Down with the programme

2009-07-30T13:00:00.000+01:00

Few American writers were able to make a living out of writing books. Somewhere in the 1950s some nut put together the bogus notion that you could haul in some bigwig writer like Ernest Hemingway or Samuel Beckett and get him to teach a bunch of some ten to fifteen young people how to write. [...] The concept of the creative writing program looked good on paper, but it was, in reality, a giant shuck, and the (mostly) poets who were on the lucrative gravy train in the early sixties were, for the most part, a bunch of wasted men who had helped popularize the craft during its glorious moment 1920–1950, when poets like W. H. Auden had the cachet rock stars would acquire in the second half of the century.

I came across this passage the other day while reading Victor Bockris's Lou Reed biography, Transformer, and it really struck me, not only because it was such a vehement opinion on the creative writing programme (previously discussed here), but because it is practically the only opinion Bockris offers on anything in the book's background detail. Elsewhere he maintains the studied neutrality of a dutiful biographer, reporting context without judging it. Bockris graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1971. I'd guess that it had a creative writing programme and one Bockris had a bad experience with. Wonder which wasted bigwig it was that taught it.

[Bockris photo via interview with Burroughs here]

Lo-phy Hyph Mngo

2009-07-28T12:25:00.005+01:00

Been playing this over and over. And over.

One monkey, one typewriter

2009-07-11T15:31:00.003+01:00

I was in Foyles to buy Me Cheeta by James Lever. Not finding it in fiction was a surprise, I guessed they'd sold out. When I asked I was directed to Actor's Biographies. I'd like to think shelving it there is a small joke on Foyles' part. James Lever might find it less funny.

Reading a borrowed copy of Me Cheeta in the wake of Michael Jackson's death it struck me that one posthumous explain-that piece I'd love to read would be Me Bubbles.

Foyled again

2009-07-11T15:26:00.002+01:00

Writing this from the cafe in Foyles on Charing Cross Rd after a dispiriting visit to Ray's Jazz. Its steady decline from its own shop on Shaftesbury Avenue, to a concession sharing space with the Foyles cafe on the first floor has continued with it being shunted up to the top floor. While there was something undignified about the way it felt shoehorned into the cafe, at least it must have got plenty of through-custom and at least there was a historical rightness to the combination of jazz and espresso bar in this marriage of convenience. Relegated upwards to the top of the building it now has more room, but far fewer customers. It's less an attic than a graveyard. One other customer wandered in and out while I flicked through secondhand racks full of things I remembered from my last visit a couple of months ago. Staff: one. Down in the cafe seven aproned art students eddied around behind the counter. I fully expect to return sooner or later and find that Ray's is now housed under some tarpaulin sheeting rigged up on the roof of the building. Paul Morley is walking down Charing Cross Rd below me.

World of Echoes (MJ)

2009-07-10T15:24:00.005+01:00

('Human Nature', Thriller)

('I Can't Help It', Off the Wall)

('The Girl is Mine', Thriller)

('I Want You Back', 1969 single)

('The Girl is Mine')

Several posts in the works, but in the meantime... Hollow Earth and The End Times writing at length on The Dirty Projectors' new album. If I can find the time I want to write about Bitte Orca myself.

Also, Fantastic Journal with a fascinating post on the subterranean rural militarism of the 'stay-behind' – sort of negative images of the Martello towers of the Napoleonic era.

FJ's Ballardian take on Michael Jackson is worth reading as is the one at Sit Down Man, where there's also a great post on the Wu Tang Clan spinning off a passing mention in this post. I've just been reading Simon Reynolds' Energy Flash for the first time [guilty shuffle] and there's a whole chunk about the apocalyptic, millenarian, paranoid, conspiracy-obsessed current in hiphop, which I'm hoping to return to in a Doomcore Pt III post.

And more hiphop: Mark Fisher in the New Statesman on the way its ruthless street Darwinism reflected the neoliberal ascendancy from the Reagan-Thatcher years onwards, becoming pure capitalist realism, invalidating all the utopian politics and aesthetics of black psychedelic counter-culture... I've mentioned my own projected piece on psychedelia in hiphop before, this will hopefully appear in a finished state at some point soon. Or at least this year.

Derek Jarman and Coil

2009-07-08T17:37:00.004+01:00

In late '98/early '99 Coil made a soundtrack to Derek Jarman's early Super-8 film Journey to Avebury (1971) as part of their series of downloads, Song of the Week. Above you can hear it synched up with the film. Gorgeously weird electronic rerouting of folk's pastoral drift. (Hat tip: Second Sight)

Loops out now

2009-07-02T15:59:00.001+01:00

Among others, Rob Young, Geeta Dayal, Matt Ingram, Anwyn Crawford, David Shrigley, Simon Reynolds and Maggoty Lamb. Site here, buy wherever.

A Boner In Brian Eno

2009-06-27T10:00:00.003+01:00

My great disappointment in the brief history of this blog so far was the non-response of a commenter on the 'I Hate: Brian Eno' post.

This commenter rather crushingly despatched Eno thus:

I went to the pictures with Brian,when I was at Art School.We saw The Ballard of Joe Hill (my choice).You have to admire how a small,ugly,chain smoking man managed to get it together through sheer ego.He had nothing else going for him.

Could be an impostor / fantasist of course, but the reality effect, the telling detail: the film and who chose it... Sadly no further details (popcorn or Revels, did Brian pay) were forthcoming.

Can't help but imagine the famously priapic Eno suggesting some extraordinarily refined and experimental perversion as a way of rounding off the evening. But what might it have been? 'Burning shame', 'warm jets' or another card plucked from his pornographic deck?*

What I really want to know: somewhere in his cupboard of old unreleased master tapes, is there a Music for Fucking?

The notion of porn film music has always bored me, simply because it's always discussed as part of that sniggering post-Boogie Nights C4 naughty-student discourse... moustaches bad accents such silly scenarios! plumber arrives clothes fall off girl teehee etc. In this context porn music is always sleazy, cheezy library muzak.

But what would Eno's Music for Fucking sound like? You know you want to hear it too.

Pornography is always opposed to 'art' because it seemingly has no transcendental aspirations, it only satisfies basic physical desires. Where art is considered to have failed, its failure is often given the name of porn, it's reclassified as 'mere' porn. Examples: to their critics, Michael Mann or James Cameron make weaponry porn, techno porn; Merchant Ivory is mere landscape or Victoriana porn; Bertolucci is just porn porn. Porn is trivial because it's instrumental, aspiring to nothing more than fulfilling a specific libidinal purpose.**

Instrumental has two meanings relevant here:

Music without vocals (in the context of popular music)

And, number one in the Oxford English Dictionary:

Adj.
1.a. Of the nature of an instrument (material or subservient); serving as an instrument or means; contributing to the accomplishment of a purpose or result.

Segueing out of his initial post-Roxy persona as a shadow Bowie, Eno's projects of course fit both these descriptions: the Ambient series, Discreet Music, Music for Films (all of which were continuations of the trajectory implied by No Pussyfooting, Evening Star), plus moments on Another Green World and Before and After Science.

So forget the notional Music for Fucking – has Eno been attempting the pornographization of music all along?

Susan Sontag's famous conclusion at the end of 'Against Interpretation' is this: 'In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.' ***

In other words, criticism should abandon the hopeless of aim of explicating the discursive 'content' of art, the assumption that all its significance can be clearly translated into language.

The section that builds to this conclusion is very Eno avant-la-lettre:

Once upon a time (say, for Dante), it must have been a revolutionary and creative move to design works of art so that they might be experienced on several levels. Now it is not. It reinforces the principle of redundancy that is the principal affliction of modern life.

Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there. This cannot be taken for granted, now. Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses. Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life - its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness - conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. And it is in the light of the condition of our senses, our capacities (rather than those of another age), that the task of the critic must be assessed.

What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.

Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.

Well, porn is only addressed to one 'level' of experience, as are the palliative Ambient records. What is Discreet Music if not a project designed to take the listener out of a modern world whose plenitude 'dulls our sensory faculties', and by resting the senses, aims to make them 'hear more'? 'Against Interpretation' argues for a libidinal sensory phenomenology to take its rightful place over incidental semantic 'content'. Take Eno's lyrics, which he happily admits are nonsense composed only with an ear for their phonetic, acoustic properties: this is precisely Sontag's plea coming to fruition (oo-er etc).

Category error alert: Eno isn't a critic, he's a musician? Keep up. All art is a form of critique. Every record is a critique of previous records, directly or indirectly. Opposing art and criticism is as false as divorcing form and content. That's not to level down artists or valorize the critic, but the two practices are not as easily separable as popular convention would still have it. Eno's eroticization of sound is also an eroticization of process, of systematization – and of criticism.

Me so horny!

* Afterthought, on Oblique Strategies. This quote from the Chrissie Hynde NME piece: 'It's a burning shame that most people want to keep pornography under cover when it's such a highly developed art form - which is one of the reasons that I started collecting pornographic playing cards.' So forget the I-Ching, Eno clearly came up with the idea of Oblique Strategies while shuffling a deck of pornographic cards in bed, trying to decide what to do next. Conversely, try reading some of the Strategies with your 'larger brain'... 'State the problem in words as clearly as possible'. (Talk dirty). And so on: 'Repetition is a form of change' (Don't stop) – I leave it to the reader to paraphrase these... 'Honor thy error as a hidden intention' – 'What would your closest friend do?' – 'Are there sections? Consider transitions.'

** Of course, there's nothing so deceptively simple and endlessly problematic as desire and the ways in which it's constructed. (For starters, see Dominic Fox here, here and here).

*** Sontag's essay can be read in full here.

Link-death served four ways

2009-06-26T10:00:00.001+01:00

Here are four...

of the most frustrating...

things you can read...

on the net.

Link-death is one of the main reasons why I actually want to keep YouTube embeds down to a minimum. A post built around YouTube is at the whim of copyright claims and fickle uploaders.

[Request: does anyone have archives of Heronbone? And where did Aloof From Inspiration go?]

The New Dance Show

2009-06-25T10:00:00.003+01:00

So this is The New Dance Show, the subject of discussion in yesterday's screenshot trailer. Basically Soul Train for local Detroit TV, it ran late '80s to mid '90s. I stumbled over it while digging for doomcore stuff on YouTube. One of Marc Arcadipane's many aliases was Cyborg Unknown, and his Year 2001 sounds amazing here (wait for the shift at 3:30).

Cyborg Unknown – Year 2001

Guy Called Gerald – Blow Your House

Again, the lo-res digital transfer seems to suit the track. A Guy Called Gerald all the way from Manchester to the home of his beloved Juan Atkins and Derrick May. Great anecdote in the comments from someone who must have been a runner or something at the time:

It's weird how this mix came about. Jesse wasn't in the studio that day and we had to come up with some music to play on the show. I had a CASSETTE in my car and gave it to the producer to play so we could have some music. I mixed these 2 songs together in my basement! No Bull.

Dan Bell – Elextric Shock

Detroit local and old Richie Hawtin connection through Plus 8 Records...

Channel X – Yeah, I'm Freaky

Some ridiculous booty music.

What I like about these videos is the sense of almost archaeological distance. These are relics from another epistemology, an era before the moving image and recorded sound became uber-digitized and endlessly distributable and reiterable. It feels like there's a naivety, a lack of self-consciousness, a willing jokiness to the dancers which seems so... enviable somehow. It's not that they thought no-one was watching – obviously the whole thing was an exercise in display. It's more that, despite the intense futurism of the music, the idea of the internet, let alone YouTube, is so unimagined, unimaginable, to the people you're watching. So while there was an audience present in the dancers' heads, the fact that for them it only extended to Detroit and the not-too-distant vicinity is rendered almost antique, vintage, by its appearance on YouTube, available to millions in dozens of countries.

next up

2009-06-24T10:00:00.005+01:00

One Year Nothing Made Sense

2009-06-21T13:00:00.000+01:00

'The Light' is pretty much the only Common tune I've ever cared for and such was my antipathy for the rapper that for a long while I considered the track a kind of sample-delivery machine: you wait patiently through the verses for the gorgeous, glistening [sampled] chorus...

Simon Reynolds over here in a blog about J-Dilla.

Fingers twitching spasmodically while reading... Dilla important to backpackers but never a backpacker... RZA was 'unquantized' well before Dilla... other... pedantic... unnecessary... observations... [swallow – gasp]

But as the first in a series of shameless fanboy 'I Love _____' posts, I want to make a case for Common, justify his existence a little bit, after Simon’s critical-beatdown-in-passing. Specifically, I want to make the case for his ’97 album One Day It'll All Make Sense.

This record came out in the autumn of that year – a year that hardly compares release-wise to the riches of '92-'94, but is properly significant in hiphop history. Consider the following three records.

Late spring, Puff Daddy's ‘I'll Be Missing You’. The inauguration of hiphop as commercially supreme musical force. Took a hiphop subgenre which was already tragically prevalent – the elegy to a fallen friend – and Hallmarked it, made even the funerary oration an excuse for the prominent display of superbikes, and a messianic all-white dress code. Sold itself to a massive crossover audience using a sample of The Police: a black impresario (Coombs) re-digesting a band which was already a re-digestion by three white guys of black Jamaican culture. The logical product of this kind of no-added-value cannibalism was the career of Jennifer Lopez (Sean Coombs’ later girlfriend), in which classic hiphop beats (Craig Mack's ‘Flava in Ya Ear’, The Beatnuts' ‘Watch Out Now’), already works of sampling, were sampled again, double-filtered for maximum pop slick. I could go on.

Late summer: The anti Puff Daddy, Company Flow's Funcrusher Plus. An album full of dazzlingly horrible ideas; beats like bruises, rhymes bipolarized into hyperactive thought and catatonic depression. Difficult, malevolent, serrated, a record as fiercely anti corporate culture as anything by Ian Mackaye or Steve Albini. But one that, as good as it was, had a pernicious effect: it validated an entire subsequent anti-mainstream subculture, indie hiphop, art hiphop, that succumbed to the logic of the purist’s ghetto, in which miniscule sales became a proof of quality / credibility. An example of the classic as uncopyable, a cul-de-sac.

Late summer: Wu Forever, the record which, if you believed the RZA’s hype, would be the Rosetta Stone for music’s next millennia, the blueprint for its past, present and future – don’t you see the letters RZA in Mozart? he would ask interviewers at the time – a bringing together of the arcing solo-career vectors of Meth, ODB, the GZA, RZA, Ghost, Rae et al into something that would transcend even the sum of those colossal parts. Turns out, like a bad marriage ‘forever’ meant '93-'97... Well, I do think there's a good single album struggling to get out of Forever's labyrinthine immensity. And Supreme Clientele and N**** Please were still to come. But still, as Owen observes, from this point on the Wu were in decline.

So, the end of a good era, the start of a bad, and a subnarrative that looked like a new beginning but was really more of a culmination.

This is the scene into which One Day It’ll All Makes Sense issues, so it’s not surprising if it got lost a little in the fuss. But it’s a record that reflects those growing pain convulsions, all the eddying tensions of cash, cool, credibility, cartoon violence or complexity; it amounts to an argument over what hiphop is, should or can be. There are tracks that just thump with that offhand steadiness of peak-era Evil Dee, Premier or ATCQ: ‘Invocation’, ‘Real Nigga Quotes’, ‘Hungry’, ‘Stolen Moments Pt II’. But there are also moments where Common tries to push things forward, ask messy existential questions in a way that could lead him into (potentially) tediously ‘mature’ pastures. This is an album that addresses something Matt Ingram used to write about, the opposition between beatnik and avant-yob. Common is trying to find a position where he’s not mindlessly commercial (Puffy), not creating a falsely criminal self narrative (Biggie), but nor is he disappearing into coffee-shop radical-chic irrelevance. The Stakes are High, and the album is in part a continuation of De La’s debate on that album; the aim is the rendering of reality in all its strange sepias, instead of the bare monochromes of Sin City caricature. The crises pile up: religion on ‘G.O.D.’… city life on ‘My City’ (a Malik Yusuf guest rap*)… And ‘Real Nigga Quotes’ is quickly over and into the agonized walk-through of an abortion on ‘Retrospect for Life’.

‘Retrospect for Life’ sums up what Common wants to do on this record: the re-enchantment of the everyday and its difficulties, or at least the de-mystification of the gangsta pathology. It’s practically Shakespearean in its dramatization of thought: what first promises to be an anti-abortion screed becomes a finely nuanced stream of agonized argument in which Common, almost from line to line, sways between regret and bullish pro-choice radicalism.

I'm sorry for takin your first breath, first step, and first cry
But I wasn't prepared mentally nor financially
Havin a child shouldn't have to bring out the man in me
Plus I wanted you to be raised within a family
I don't wanna, go through the drama of havin a baby's momma
Weekend visits and buyin j's ain't gonna make me a father

The whole thing is soaked in human fallibility; but it's never a question of preaching:

Happy deep down but not joyed enough to have it
But even that's a lie in less than two weeks, we was back at it

The track was produced by James Poyser: Poyser was part of the Soulquarians (as was Erykah Badu who appears on 'All Night Long'), and it was this connection that brought Common to work subsequently with another Soulquarian, Jay Dee (as Dilla was then known), and it's this wider web of collaborations that keeps both Dilla and Common away from the backpacker wastes. The Soulquarians were essentially soul futurists, and even if they didn't make all that many great records in the end, you can't tar them as curatorial classicists.

Not sold? Try this then: Kanye West's College Dropout is patterned on One Day. Common's album gave Kanye if not the entire architecture of his debut, then definitely the blueprint.

Kanye's mentor as a producer was No ID, who made most of One Day’s tracks, and Kanye's first studio time was spent working on this album (though he's uncredited and was probably just the one sent out for Chinese). Look at some of the formal features of the two records. One Day features a track in which Common (with Cee-Lo Green) confronts his anxieties and doubts over religious belief. College Drop-out has ‘Jesus Walks’, in which Kanye (with Rhymefest) confronts his anxieties and doubts over religious belief. College Dropout ends with ‘Late Call’, not a track but an outro: a musical bed over which Kanye rambles in conversational prose. One Day ends the same way, though the genial reminiscences come from Common's father rather than the star himself. Kanye doesn’t have a troubled meditation on abortion and incipient fatherhood, but tracks like 'Through the Wire' and 'All Fall Down' (with its famous line 'Couldn't afford a car so she named her daughter Alexus') do a similar thing in daring to talk about the quotidian, and – crucially – exposing some of the false consciousness in the rap-star model. Both Kanye and Common stage the same ideological battle, wavering between hiphop's tough guy stance and something less theatrical: many-sided, conflicted, something that understands the distance between appearance and reality.

Plus, look at the cover of One Day again, the colour, the image, and compare it to:

OK, so Kanye a) has a giant bear mascot head on and b) is wearing a blazer, but these are the twists he’s putting on a convention, a basic pattern, represented by Common. Take the head (Kanye’s pop-surrealist chipmunk choruses) and the blazer (his deliberate anti-gangsta provocation as middle-class student) away and you’re left with what? Another commemorative image: one for the family album, like Common with his mother at a Jamaican airport, Nas’s ghostly passport photo, Shyheim’s portait with its stock-school-photo background… These four covers amount to a mini-genre of their own. They're all about that disparity between bravado and honesty, and that's a narrative that's crucial to rap history. History may not record One Day It'll All Make Sense as epochal, even if it was released into an epochal year, but someone took it as a ruff draft, and made good on the promise in that title.

---------------------
* Digression: there's a convention which (I think) is unique to hiphop whereby an artist might have song on his album on which he doesn't feature at all. In other words, a guest rapper delivers an entire track, with the rapper to whom the record is credited not appearing at all. Off the top of my head: 'Wisdom Body' by Ghostface on Raekwon's Only Built for Cuban Linx... 'The Faster Blade' (all Raekwon) on Ghostface's Ironman, 'BIBLE' by Killah Priest on GZA's Liquid Swords...

** Some circumstantial connections: Common appears on The College Dropout, No ID has just produced ‘Death of Autotune’ for Jay Z and Malik Yusuf has just had a Kanye-produced record out on an imprint run by the producer.

More gloom and doom

2009-06-18T16:28:00.005+01:00

At the end of this post in my round-up of apocalyptic/millenarian popular music, I completely forgot about dubstep's hazier edges. The first Burial album of course: London flooded by global warming. Shackleton's stuff is absolutely soaked in future-dread, and Villalobos's remix of his 'Blood on my Hands' was subtitled 'Apocalypso Now'. I think Sam has cited DMZ & Loefah's 'Horror Show' as the track that got him into dubstep. Worth checking its very doomcore klaxon-squeal and background shrieks. entschwindet und vergeht reckons this stuff needs a name of its own: 'What to call it? "Despondant-Techno"? "Mournful Minimal"?, perhaps it should be known as "Haunted House" (arf arf!)' ... Doomstep surely!

Simon Reynolds also linked to an article of his on doomcore/gloomcore over at Blissblog. Faaaar more historical background and detail than my effort and some great descriptions:

PCP's punisher-beats are cunningly inflected, alternating between saturated intensity and stripped-down severity. Above all, creativity comes into play with the timbral density of the kick itself: how thick, how wide, how voluptuously concussive each cranium-denting impact can be.

Voluptuously concussive! These quotes from The Mover also grabbed me:

'Mover is dark because it's set in the phuture of mankind. I can't possibly justify seeing a happy end to this stupid human drama. Darkness is not mystical, it's your everyday reality.'

'Imagine surveying earth after nuclear destruction and enjoying what you see, that's how it feels when you listen to it.'

...Because they sound like Malefic from Xasthur interviewed here:

Genocide is the ultimate goal, the ultimate dream as is the most fair and deserving thing to solve all the problems and hypocrisies of this world. We are all asking for it, whether we know it or not! This is one way that you might consider it to be subliminal. Behavior is contagious, death is contagious, suicide is contagious, therefore genocide is contagious-- if you really open your eyes and take notice. Destructiveness and negativity is hidden in all of our words, actions (or lack there of), thoughts, and sentences. We help each other fail, none of us are doing anything to rehabilitate this planet, so therefore we are shaping its end. We are all fulfilling a prophecy, once again, whether we know it or not! Hopelessness is the key to the domino effect and it begins here, going beyond good or evil. There is only chaos.

Finally, does anyone know of black / death / doom metallers who have listened to gloomcore – and vice versa? Does the Mover dig Burzum?

The minimal workshop

2009-06-17T10:00:00.000+01:00

There's a great piece by Louis Menand in the latest New Yorker, a review of The Program Era by Mark McGurl. The Program Era examines the rise of the creative writing programme in American universities and its effect on the literature of the past few decades. It's interesting enough as it is, but I think a couple of the points made are relevant to minimal – minimal techno, microhouse etc – that it perhaps locates an anxiety buried deep in the form...

The creative writing programme, Menand explains, is premissed on the idea that the production of literary fiction can be taught, and its main tool is the workshop. In the workshop, a group of students share and discuss each other's work, led by a tutor (ie a published author), with the theoretical result being that submitting to this group-crit will improve each writer's work. (There's a longer explanatory quote at the end of the post).

Example: Raymond Carver is a product of these workshops. His career, Menand writes, 'constitutes a virtual tour d’horizon of the creative-writing scene.' (See end quote 2).

Did the workshops have an effect on Carver's writing? Yes, says Menand, and McGurl's argument in The Program Era is that Carver's writing can be understood not as something 'honed' in a generalized way by group-crit, but... as a style specifically tailored to survive the scene of the workshop. Menand:

The form of a Carver short story—ostentatiously brief, emotionally hyper-defended—expresses something. McGurl thinks that the style represents the “aestheticization of shame, a mode of self-retraction.” Literary minimalism like Carver’s—McGurl calls it “lower-middle-class modernism”—is a means of reducing the risk of embarrassing oneself, and is one way that students from working-class backgrounds, like Carver (he was from Oregon, where his father was a sawmill worker), deal with the highbrow world of the academy.

So Carver's minimalism was an evasion strategy as much as anything. As a response to the workshop experience and its pack of benign pedants, misreaders, projectionists, Carver develops a style which offers the smallest possible target for his fellow workshoppers. (Of course what looks like an absence of style or an 'anti-'style is no less a style itself, but this is something people often find hard to grasp... the idea that style and content are separable has a limpet-like tenacity, 'style' continues to be characterized as excess and so Carver, by stealth, could slip through the net of nitpicking methodological critique).

This is a long set-up.

So if that's one way of understanding Carver's minimalism, isn't it possible that minimal techno and microhouse might not reflect a similar pressure... Filesharing, MP3 blogs, blog aggregators, a subgenre called 'bloghouse'... I listen to this stuff as a refuge from the 21C sensory overload of signs, sounds, texts, images, but given the intensity, speed and bandwidth at which critical response and feedback can be exchanged in the utopian uplands of Web 2.0, is someone like Villalobos (or whoever), even if only subconsciously, producing tracks engineered, like a car in a windtunnel, to be streamlined enough to slide past the critical listener?

end quote 1:

Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem. The fruit of the theory is the writing workshop, a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy where aspiring writers offer their views of the efforts of other aspiring writers. People who take creative-writing workshops get course credit and can, ultimately, receive an academic degree in the subject; but a workshop is not a course in the normal sense—a scene of instruction in which some body of knowledge is transmitted by means of a curricular script. The workshop is a process, an unscripted performance space, a regime for forcing people to do two things that are fundamentally contrary to human nature: actually write stuff (as opposed to planning to write stuff very, very soon), and then sit there while strangers tear it apart. There is one person in the room, the instructor, who has (usually) published a poem. But workshop protocol requires the instructor to shepherd the discussion, not to lead it, and in any case the instructor is either a product of the same process—a person with an academic degree in creative writing—or a successful writer who has had no training as a teacher of anything, and who is probably grimly or jovially skeptical of the premise on which the whole enterprise is based: that creative writing is something that can be taught.

end quote 2:

[Carver's] career constitutes a virtual tour d’horizon of the creative-writing scene. Carver started as a correspondence student in an outfit known as the Palmer Institute of Authorship. He took classes at Chico State, in California, with the novelist John Gardner; at Humboldt State College, with the short-story writer Richard Cortez Day; at Sacramento State College, with the poet Dennis Schmitz; and at Stanford, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow; and he taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with John Cheever. His second marriage was to another creative-writing professional, the poet Tess Gallagher, and he ended up as a professor at Oates’s alma mater, Syracuse, where Jay McInerney was his student.

Bosch Bosch Bosch Bosch

2009-06-14T01:20:00.004+01:00

Reign Fucking Evil Gates of Hell Apocalypse Astral Demons Last Dawn Burning Universe Slaves Dark Forces Inferno Spheres of Light Symphonies of Steel Living Death Doomed Immortal Skeletons Witch Trial Legion

Party time. The above looks like a cut-up of a random selection of black metal or doom metal but it's in fact all taken from various techno 12s from the late-90s doomcore / terrorcore scenes. Black metal, or at least, the idea of black metal has acquired such a heavy importance now, I've ended trawling through this stuff again, trying to work out what, if anything to make of its overlapping obsession with the terminal points of the hellish apocalyptic sublime.

I find it more interesting than black metal, because there's such a weird tension between its maximalized nihilative death-drive, right up in your face, while in the background are its roots in Acid culture and its ecstatic spaces, shared utopia. I guess it's a logical unfolding of a very ancient theory of hedonism: the Dionysian or Bacchic frenzy in which unhinged orgiastic revelry ends in the madness of the Maenads tearing victims limb from limb. Plus a dose of the good old Gothic sublime, the pain-pleasure nub/rub, from the Summer of Love to the God of Hellfire, souls writhing in the abyss, The Dance of Death, four-to-the-floor conceived as Hieronymous Bosch-Bosch-Bosch-Bosch.

But that makes these records sound figuratively 'hotter' than they are. They're cold sounds for a post-human cybernetic world: arctic reverbs, icy hi-hats, riffs that are like blocks of binary bled dry of any of r'n'b's libidinal pentatonic juice. This chimes with the Arctic atmospheres of Xasthur, KTL or Burial Hex, just as those holocaust synth sweeps, dredged-up, stygian basslines, and, at the higher end of the tempos, the pummeling kick-drums, as flattening as tank treads, start to recall the flattened blur of extreme metal's blast beats.* [see footnotes at end of post]

The difference, very broadly, is the direction the two face culturally. Black metal is all about unspeakable mythopoeic atavisms. It looks back into legend for its vision of the world and its end. Doomcore faces forwards into dystopia, to death-by-machine. It's the music for a Cyberdyne staff party, the music that would play in a bombed-out warehouse shell, carpeted with human skulls for ten thousand stripped-steel Terminators on R&R to get off their CPUs to.

[Above: Let's Dance]

Dominic Fox's excellent discussion of misanthropy and modernism is relevant here:

Here we find the means to distinguish between two modernisms. The first, which is avant-gardist, seeks a new body beyond the law and assembles its cadre according to a novel and enigmatic chording of affinities. The second, which is aristocratic and reactionary, wishes to “affirm the hierarchies”, to maintain (or recover from obscurity) an eternal principle of separation between the values of the elite and those of the levelling, democratic “mass” culture.

I would say doomcore tends to the former, black metal to the latter. There is a lot more to be said about the politics of this stuff, but for now...

A note

After the hip-house post, I don't want this blog to become a YouTube lens, but I've done it again with this one, not only so that anyone unfamiliar can check some of this stuff easily, but because having a whole stack of tunes turns the post into a kind of aleatory make-your-own-Merzbow machine. Set any number of them playing in any combination and you get an un-Holy mess that's equal parts power-electronics : techno : metal. I'd submit that it provides a soundtrack to Splintering Bone Ashes' recent posts, a soundtrack which one commenter there requested.**

Biochip C - Fucking Evil

The quote at the start is from Hellraiser III: 'There is a secret song at the centre of the world, and its sound is like razors through flesh. Oh come, you can hear its faint echo right now. I'm here to turn up the volume. To press the stinking face of humanity into the dark blood of its own secret heart.' Which I guess is the keynote for all doomcore from this track on Force Inc in 1993, though the track itself is full of a juicy acid squelch later doomcore would strip out.

Mescalinum Utd - Symphonies of Steel 1

The clang of the future! On Planet Core Productions in 1993,

Mover and Rave Creator - Astral Demons

From 1994 on Cold Rush, probably the most important label along with PCP.

Freez-E-Style - Enter The Gates Of Darkness (Stay Strong, Raise The Flag And Spread The Spheres Of Light)

Also on Cold Rush in 1994. That title: pure doom. Were they listening to early Earth?

Negative Burn - Gates of Hell

Renegade Legion - Dark Forces

Both on Dance Ecstasy from 1996.

Reign - Skeletons March

Searching for Reign on YouTube threw up Slayer (Skeletons of Society) which just goes to show...

Pilldriver - Apocalypse Never

One of history's great kickdrums? Cold Rush again, 1997.

Auteur section:

Zekt - Nuclear Indicator - 1994

Zekt - Sound & Vision - 1997

Not a Bowie cover in case you were wondering.

Zekt - Last Dawn

On Drop Bass Network in 1995. This track features the Lord of Darkness on the mic: "I require the solace of the shadows and the dark of the night!"... from Legend, a film from my childhood which only seems to get weirder as I get older. The involvement of Bryan Ferry... Tim Curry's big red phallic chin... Tom Cruise in a miniskirt, touching a unicorn's horn...

The Horrorist -- Flesh is the Fever - 1997

Terrorcore made the metal aesthetic of doomcore rather thunkingly explicit, through actual interpolations of metal sonics

Jack Lucifer -- I am Living Death -- Kotzaak 1995

Kotzaak was the big label for this stuff. Something very straight-to-video about it for me.

If nothing else, this stuff should make you hear Justice differently.

No doubt original doomcore types scoff at this stuff the way blacker-than-black metallers deride Sunn O))) as latte metal. Well, DANCE is unforgiveable, but the doom-electro of Waters of Nazareth has definitely got something.

---------------------------
NOTES

* The obsession with apocalypse, the end of history... it crops up in techno and metal, but also in roots reggae, and you get some millennial moments in hiphop: Wu Tang Forever, Nastradamus and especially on the eschatological Killah Priest album. (Of course in roots & hiphop it comes from rasta and Baptist pre-occupations with Revelation Time, rather than the atavistic return of modernism's will-to-decimate described above.) Then there's apocalyptic folk: the millenarian visions collated by Harry Smith, Greenwich Village Armageddon blues, and later Current 93 and Coil. Postpunk scorched Earths like The Pop Group. My Life in The Bush of Ghosts as 'millenarian manifesto'. Not to forget Time Zone's World Destruction. And what you could call Apopalypse: moments in Michael Jackson, Billy Joel, REM...

** Not convinced by the vision put forward by Alex in these two posts at all. The second advocates (and references) a position which Dominic, here, is only describing:

'Pure misanthropy…not self-pity”: in order to be pure, misanthropy must be purified of any attachment to the human self that would fall within its remit. A world of the dead that despises and rejects that of the living: such is the allegiance of the misanthropist without reserve.'

... But the politics of black metal, the spectre of politics as applied black metal, are another post altogether. K-Punk's latest prose-poem meanwhile is as scorched-earth as ever, and in its devious re-casting of critical response as Troll-like or Vampirical, leaves no room for any but the most intemperate dissent. It can only logically be replied to with the (k)punker-than-punk move of an 'I Hate... K-Punk' post. (Not Mark of course, just K-Punk). But I'd rather suggest that (since Alex regards the 'I Hate...' posts as exercises in bad faith) Mark's rallying cry for all fans to gloriously own up to their fandom be answered. Time for a round of 'I Love...' posts I think...

'Noise is over'

2009-06-14T00:28:00.003+01:00

Or at least, 'Noise, as a creatively accelerated period of flux, is pretty much over'. That's David Keenan's verdict on the latest No Fun Fest, as he perfectly skewers the recent tedium of all too much of the Noise scene, especially for its reliance on certain entrenched techniques and 'trangressions'. A sort of avant-conservatism, similar to that outlined in K-Punk's recent posts.

Credit and Credibility

2009-06-09T15:32:00.003+01:00

Fascinated to read about Ian Svenonius' theory about the similarity between the role of DJ and the role of stockbroker, via And You May Find Yourself...:

The DJ-as-artist echoes the new role of the bourgeois as stockbroker/trader; designator of worth and handler of commodities. With the exportation of industrialism the third world and the new role of the imperialist as loan shark/investor, the grooming of the DJ as high priest/star-artist of the culture is a necessary part of ensuring the culture's aggrandization of the broker and the subsequent denigration of the actual manufacturer.

Got The Psychic Soviet on order now. It makes perfect sense: both DJ and broker as tastemaker, their acts of selection creating a kind of cachet, desirability, credibility, value, even when there's little of worth (be it a viable longterm business model or a decent track). The flaw in market economics has always been that it takes insufficient account of consciousness: if people were atoms unconscious of those around them, the market would work reliably, but because they're the opposite, hyper-conscious agents, the markets will always be fundamentally irrational. Brokers will lump in on stocks simply because other brokers are doing so, and offload them simply because other brokers are, producing exaggerated yo-yos in market worth that destroy businesses and economic stability. In this sense, the movement of the market is essentially a register of cool, with brokers gnawing fingernails about whether what they're buying is the hip thing or not. The digger-DJ, the kind who trawls crates and bins to find that unexpected, counter-intuitive, notionally uncool gem, knowing that in the right context, its very uncoolness will provide him with the maximum pay-off of crowd appreciation, is essentially playing the same game as those brokers who seek out apparently dud stocks that they reckon to be simply under-priced.

Svenonius effectively compares the music producer's lot to that of outsourced sweatshop labour in EPZs, which is a little off, even if not many producers make the same money as a Tiesto. Don't know about that use of the word 'necessary' either... It implies that the god-like status of the broker in the system of finance has required the DJ's rise as a kind of prop and propaganda... I don't think there's a causal chain, nor that the DJ-as-artist is essential to the hypnologic of broker-as-god. But there are a world of echoes...

Hip House postscript

2009-06-04T15:51:00.009+01:00

Further proof of my last post's lateness. Sasha Frere Jones discusses hip-house and its resurgence in passing here, linking to this great piece in the Chicago Reader, which features this fascinating portrait of a hip-house scene confidently expecting a blow up that never comes:

Struck me also that Ghostface's Cherchez La Ghost from 2000 could be considered a kind of curdled hip-house; the disco sample, diva vocal, the walking bassline... It's a strange track, the raps being almost a secondary element in terms of track-time, the refrain lifted from Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band sung into a kind of echo-chamber over a kick drum and little else; the sound is scooped out, the effect ghostly. The video does everything it can to reverse this disembodied atmosphere, to create a kind of orgiastic embodiedness through spectacularly lecherous slo-mo... Andrea Dworkin, do not press play:

Un Hip House

2009-06-03T02:40:00.010+01:00

Last summer there was a debate over what to call Wiley's Wearing My Rolex and some of the records that followed (Rolex Sweep, Tinchy Stryder's tranced-out effort etc). They were all unusual in that grime MCs were rhyming over what was basically a four-to-the-floor beat. 'Electro-grime' won the vote I suppose, but for me that didn't really do justice to what was going on. It didn't convey what was significant about the rhythms these MCs were using, the fact they sounded more like house than anything from the grime spectrum, or from hiphop, the obvious first stop for a grime MC looking to branch out.

It all sounded, to me, deep down, like a 2008 resurrection of hip-house. If I'd had a blog then I would have said as much, but I didn't, and now that I do... I'm far too late! Because I was reminded of this by Simon Reynolds' blog-post over at The Guardian where he makes the same point in passing. And there's also a great Top 20 of Hip House in Fact from last month, put together by Alex Waldron from Greco-Roman.

And while rappers from the UK grime scene are migrating towards these beats, a kind of housing of hiphop is also taking place. A-Trak's recent mixes are as much electro, disco, go-go and house as they are hiphop; Kanye West is flirting with house. Why are rappers gravitating towards this rhythm? Boredom with hiphop's current state of atrophy / entropy? Boredom with what feels like its complete disappearance, which has been brought about (in the US) by its total commercial ubiquity?

The Re-Press of the Repressed

All of the above I'd say, but I think there's also a huge transgressive pleasure in play, a thrill at breaking a taboo. Hip-house's return is like the return of the repressed. Hip-house has a strange kind of shame attached to it, a perversity even. Last summer at the very moment that it topped the charts, it was the genre that could not speak its name... this stuff was not allowed to be identified as hip-house.

Because hip-house has been uncool for nearly 20 years: as two genres closely related by birth, hiphop and house, developed and became fully-formed adult identities, a point was reached where to bring the two together was almost like an act of incestuous union: they were related, sure, but that only meant that never the 'twain should meet, that they could not procreate. And this state of affairs didn't happen in spite of its popularity, its popularity only made it less cool. That is, with two 'fully-grown' genres, the purists within each movement formed a kind of ideological team which policed the borders of each.

There was a point in the late 80s when hip-house had a possible future ahead, with records like Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock:

and, of course, the Jungle Bros' I'll House You, the one hiphouse record everyone remembers, as Alex Waldron rather ruefully points out in his Top 20

By 1991, there's a very different view from the Native Tongues. De La's 'Kicked Out The House' is introduced with 'In no way are we trying to disrespect any sort of house or club music, but we're just glad that we're not doing it...' The verse/chorus goes roughly:

Kicked out the house, you got
Kicked out the house, hip house
Kicked out the house for good
(I can't be your lover)

(With your wrinkled pussy)
(I can't be your lover)
(With your wrinkled oh, oh oh)
(I can't be your lover)

As you can see, no disrespect there at all.

So what we have is a case of a 'lost future'. Why? I'd guess because, as argued above, the two genres have grown away from their common ancestry (one example: think about how massive Kraftwerk were for Afrika Bambaataa and other early hiphoppers...). Partly it must be to due to the fondness of Eurocheese club producers for a rap: 2Unlimited, Snap. 'The Power' is an interesting case study. Initially it was put together as a track with an a cappella laid over the top from Chill Rob G's 'Let The Words Flow'. Chill Rob G made was responsible for some of Wild Pitch's finest moments – my favourite being 'Court is Now in Session':

The lines that always stuck out for me being:

It's a pity the way the city treats the poor
I got congressmen, councilmen, tell me what are they for?
I write letters, or better, I even give them a call
But they kick back, cool out in my City Hall

...It's the fact that he remembers it's *his* City Hall that I've always liked.

Now, Chill Rob G's album already featured this hiphouse excursion before Snap appeared on the scene:

...But Snap, when it came to release the single, ended up using not Chill Rob but an unknown rapper called Turbo B (presumably to economize & avoid paying Chill Rob). Another curious historical detail: Nomad's I Wanna Give You Devotion, another hip-house hit from '91, was based on a sax riff sampled from the original instrumental of 'Let The Words Flow'...

Chill Rob digression over.

Release Yo 'Delf?

So around the turn of the 90s hiphop and house were sundered, although their mutant offspring manages to hide in plain sight in the charts, in tracks like Jason Nevins' remix of Run DMC's 'It's Like That' (is this the purest hip-house record of all time? And if Daft Punk had been the remixers what would have happened next?)

The main point of division though I think is this... House is predicated on a sensual logic which demands surrender, release, ecstacy, Ecstacy, rapture. Now hiphop is about many things, and is capable of its own kind of sublime, but one thing it is definitely is about keeping one's cool. A glance at the trad canon of rap greatness shows you that the great rappers either had a past as a drug dealer or pretended they did, or pretended they still were (Biggie, 50 Cent, Jay Z). The blatantly drug-damaged rapper is a rare thing indeed... There's ODB. RA the Rugged Man? Other than that the extent of it tends to be heavy smokers/snorters... Until that brief burst around '01 when Missy and P Diddy were dropping pills. But I think that's the crux: chemically-induced or otherwise, hiphop culture was too reluctant to lose its cool; too hip for hip-house. It's all part of hiphop's long resistance to lysergic culture (with some exceptions). I think there's a lot to be said about psychedelic hiphop, or the problems with such an idea, a kind of survey of the many attempts to get it off the ground as a direction...

That's it. A Bit Patchy I know (does the provenance of the sample alone practically make this hip-house, rap or no rap?). Most of the above applies to US hiphop in relation to house, whereas in the UK, as much as it may bother the NME-reading section of Dizzee's fanbase, the grime MC has always been closer to the rave than their US counterparts (grime having grown out the trusty old hardcore 'nuum). And probably there's a Woebot dissertation on hiphouse floating around which will show these disconnected ramblings up badly. But there it is.

Yorkshire dégueulade

2009-06-02T19:57:00.006+01:00

I'd like to be able to attend the David Peace symposium taking place at the University of Brighton tomorrow (3 June), but I can't. In fact, noting that Dr Daniel Lea was still 'tbc', I even considered submitting a proposal of my own, just in case...

My proposal wouldn't have resembled Dr Lea's at all, but his title – 'David Peace and Yorkshire Masculinity' – relates to something that struck me often in reading the Red Riding Quartet.

If you think of the rhetoric of the Quartet, its style, its tone, in all its compulsive, hysterical mania, its shrill banshee-wailing, its death-driven lyricism, its delirious need to disclose... If you think of that extraordinary dégueuelade of BJ's at the end of 1983... (a dégueulade is a stomach-emptying vomit)... If you think of 1983 as the process by which John Pigott arrives at a point at which he can disclose a crucial element of his past to the reader... If you think of Nietzsche: 'Only the bravest of us only rarely has the courage for what he actually knows...' And if you think of Peace himself, getting into fight after fight as an adolescent punk (who dressed like a punk) in Leeds pubs...

Then think of the stereotypical laconic-going-on-taciturn-going-on-monosyllabic Yorkshireman. Think of the deadening sarcasm, the emotional autism of machismo, the ruthless way in which a particular blunt commonsense exerts itself to cut down and exterminate any kind of deviation or departure from its own monoculture... You know the type: only comfortable thinking as a pack, only capable of speaking to mock what someone else says.

Peace's entire style can be understood as a protest against the deadening silence of this kind of masculinity.

What I can't decide is whether that leaves Peace vulnerable to a certain kind of bathos.

White Lines: Don't Do It (Yourself)

2009-05-29T12:56:00.009+01:00

Someone has already beaten Simon to the idea of reimagining/reversioning the 'You're gonna wake up one morning and know which side of the bed you've been lying on' t-shirt designed by McLaren/Westwood/Rhodes in '74. They even printed them up and sold them.

It was some amateur retrograde curatorial outfit called Sonic Yo–, sorry, The British Library* – though the actual content, the new names on each side of the line, were apparently produced by someone with Clash 'associations'. Photographic evidence (click on the pic for maximum legibility):

As you can see the passage of time has blurred this Clash associate's vision... 'White trainers' beyond the pale. Class fear alert! Bet donk would've been on there if they were putting it together in '09 instead of spring '08. And DIY is a BAD THING too? Right... 'Home improvement' or 'Adding value' maybe... I guess no DIY means no more homemade 'I Hate [insert anyone but Pink Floyd here]' t-shirts. Oh, and Peter Doherty on the side of good? Peter Ackroyd? Trilbys? Nice to see The Clash made the cut though. Must've been close.

* Wow, I was going to put this (presumably non-existent) URL in as a joke, but it's real! Someone sign them up.

The Fear Factory

2009-05-29T01:40:00.011+01:00

K-Punk, in full-on concept-factory mode, taking down Tim Abrahams on blogs as 'nostalgic', and then later (he can't help it!) giving the weary limbs of Sonic Youth one more kick... Killer quote:

simply comparing the present unfavourably with the past is not nostalgic in any culpable way. It is the tendency to falsely overestimate the past that makes nostalgia egregious: [...] Conversely, we are induced - by ubiquitous PR, whose blank, joyless positivity has a crushingly depressing effect, even though (or rather precisely because) no-one believes it at the level of content - into falsely overestimating the present.

This is true – but (and this is something I often forget myself), nostalgia needs to be separated from sentimentality. Nostalgia is the longing for home (nostos = returning home, algos = pain). Nostalgia is a sickness – it haunts you despite your best efforts. Nostalgia has a long tradition: Joyce and Dublin. Wordsworth and his spots of time. Ulysses and Ithaca. Adam and Eve evicted from Eden. Sentimentalizing the past is the sin, the deliberate wallowing in a kitsch-en sink of schmaltz. When Mark writes about a 'false overestimate' of the past, what is a false overestimate but an idealization? What is an idealization if not a fantasy? And what does a fantasy do but comfort and sedate? (I've got a post planned on this subject in relation to Ashes to Ashes). This distinction still works for Mark's defence of hauntology though, because what is (an unsentimental) nostalgia for one's youth if not a mourning for lost futures?

Mark describes a culture industry which produces complacency, another false overestimate, but this time a false estimate of the present, something like a version of the 'end of history' for consumers, in which nothing will ever be at stake anymore, because we have reached the finish line and history can go away now. This is the trivializing blather of the complicitariat, in which reviews sound like press releases which sound like ad copy (...which try to sound like something someone cool would say (...in a world where the cool person works out they ought to like Grizzly Bear because the right reviews website tells them it's ok (which sounds like…)))))). This is the perpetually 'light, upbeat, irreverent' tone – that haunts colour supplements, culture sections, arts TV, radio. E4ification. The eroticization of shallow insincerity. The eroticization of glib. It's glibidinal!

But for me this misses something, or at least puts the accent in the wrong place. 'Light, upbeat, irreverent'. Permanent irreverence is not the same as complacency – it's a pose, a parrotting of the rhetoric of the complacent or confident. The mass media's perpetual irreverence is pure defense mechanism. There's an aggression in that kind of humour: gags that trivialize and belittle, that preserve the joker from commitment, deferring honesty and engagement by enabling an arms-length smirk (which should not be lazily equated with irony – irony is a weapon and a warning).

The irreverence encrypts pure fear. It's The Fear. Lily Allen is the pop star this country deserves, with her piss-poor strings of one-liners parading as lyrics, and her shabby facsimiles of whatever genre her producer thinks is timely that month. But Allen is right here. The real contemporary sickness is not complacency but fear and anxiety. The logic of the news bulletin is wholesale fear production. People crave and idealize the past partly because the present is (and always has been) confusing, overwhelming, uncertain – while the past can be demarcated, read and rationalized. So the past is consumed as an antidote to the present. But while Mark complains about the compulsive, cancerous commodification of the past, isn’t the selling of the future a bigger, more prevalent problem – the infinitely repeated promise that if you buy X you will become New You, Better You.

The selling of the future overlaps with the selling of fear. One of the most depressing aspects of New Labour (and the Bush/neocon era) has been government by management consultancy, and with it a whole new approach to managing voter expectations. Managing expectation is an art. You keep people 'happy' with your performance through constant alarmism, so that any small success acquires disproportionate cachet. Imagine you're a government responding to a terrorist incident or a flu epidemic. Rather than (as seemed to be the response in every disaster movie I ever watched as a child) appealing for calm, you do everything you can to scare the shit out of people. (My mother, a district nurse, was solemnly informed by a senior PCT exec last month that she would unquestionably lose friends and family to swine flu). It's a win-win. Disaster? Told you so. No disaster? We saved you!

------------

My final thoughts on Sonic Youth. I still find Mark's SY critique inconsistent, or at least incomplete. Its the temporality that's awry for me. In an earlier post Swans are used as a stick to beat SY with, to break their collective arm presumably. But Swans v Sonic Youth: Whose Year is Zero-er? is a disaster for Mark's argument. Swans repeated themselves over and over as if Year Zero meant annual recording-studio amnesia: terminal stasis. Swans' leader Michael Gira then gave up, gave up the very post-human severity which Mark lauds (and ended up by '04 putting out… Devendra fucking Banhart. Oh how the mighty, etc.) In the same period of the '80s, SY put out six very different records: from the debut EP to Daydream Nation. They moved on (...and this is why their current stasis is disappointing). It was SY, not Swans, who restlessly moved forward into new futures. But this is the crux of Year Zero. How can you make it look like Year Zero without summoning by negation whatever history you want to shed? Put another way, if you want to escape repeating history, you must define yourself by what you are not, and your negative aesthetic space ends up describing Year Minus One. You can only reject it by holding it very clearly in your mind. As Modernist battle-crys, don't 'make it new' and 'remake/remodel' avoid this trap? How does one go about being a good Modernist, erasing the traces and declaring Year Zero, while digging hauntology? Lots of traces there... traces all the way down...

[NB - I've edited out a para here which I didn't really agree with – but might return to]

One final thought: referring to Starbucks' SY comp, for me, is a palpable hit by Mark. I was shocked they did it... But isn't K-Punk against ideology's shifting of the ethical burden onto the subject away from social structure, the dogmatic insistence on the individual as the dutiful citizen-recycler, as the ethical shopper? If it's missing the point to refuse to drink Starbucks, because you thereby acquiesce in ideology's passing of the buck onto the subject, then why shouldn't Sonic Youth accept the offer of a compilation CD? You could insist they live to a higher standard than their fans, but isn't that, like... rockist? Artist as heroic Romantic martyr?

-------------------

next up (maybe): the unbearable quantity of the past, post-human cultural memory, generational disconnect, the Struldbruggs, natural resources

How far does it go back in here?

2009-05-29T01:02:00.009+01:00

Tim Abrahams has had plenty of responses already, at Sit Down Man and Infinite Thought for example. My take is this: Abrahams is simply lost in space; it's online agoraphobia. He's suffering from the strange formless depth of the internet. That is, as a discursive space, the internet is not only vastly too large to ever fully absorb, it lacks the familiar topology of the bookshop or library. He has no compass of preconceptions, no tangible printed certainty. In WHSmiths you walk in, you see a discrete, delimited collection of magazines or periodicals. You make your choice, you buy it and leave, confident in what you have bought based on your past experience. He's like a man in one of those restaurants where people eat in the dark, stumbling around worried about knocking into people he might not like, and even if he likes their conversation, how does he know he'd like them in real life, and how can he even tell whether he *does* like them, without all those reliable reassuring things like logos, back issues, names and reputations (it must be good it's in the fucking New Yorker). Whereas online, until you've swallowed this anxiety down and actually plunged in to read in quantity, you have to exercise your own judgement (I don't know if it's good... if it's good why isn't it in The New Yorker?)

Perhaps I'm being unfair – Abrahams drops hints that he reads a lot of blogs. But when he talks vaguely of how blogging's link-structure creates a "search for consensus" and "a general atmosphere of nostalgia" you wonder exactly how many he's checked out. Consensus? If the defacialization of the internet has unleashed only two things, they are 1) a colossal appetite for pornography, and 2) an even greater enthusiasm for ignoring the decorous rules of Enlightenment debate in the form of the flame and the troll.

He also makes a glaring category error. "The internet isn’t the real world." I suppose not, in empirical terms, it's "virtual". But he's not comparing online criticism to the real world, he's meant to be comparing it to print criticism. So, how is the discourse of print journalism any more "in the real world"? It isn't. It takes place in print, in small-run journals, magazines, academic departments – exactly the kind of places that middlebrows like to castigate for not being part of "the real world." Online criticism is no less "real" intellectually for being dematerialized.

Imperialism

2009-05-28T22:59:00.002+01:00

When Imperial Records shut it was the best record shop in Bristol. Now – what recession? – they're re-opening... in Inverness(!?)

Thanks to Ralph Cumbers for the tip-off.

Genres of the Future (1)

2009-05-27T12:34:00.009+01:00

Ten-tone. What you get when you subtract the ska element from the Vienna school.

The Shopping News

2009-05-24T22:14:00.004+01:00

Alex James from Blur writes a regular column called 'Foodie Boy' in the Observer Food Monthly, and this is how it concludes today.

But you don't have to be a rock star to have it all [...] The exhilaration of being able to afford anything in the supermarket is not something we ever get over. It's true. Very exciting. Anyone can afford to eat well. In fact you can have absolutely whatever you want. Remember that next time you're getting the groceries in.

Yeah, remember that.

Anyone can afford to eat well.

You can have absolutely whatever you want.

Remember that.

No Eno Wave

2009-05-21T09:41:00.012+01:00

Over at Blissblog, Simon has flagged up a few new posts on the Sonic Youth debate (the unexpected good news being that Matt Ingram, having detached Woebot from the blogosphere to launch it into the sphere of the blogged-about, has made a quiet return to blogging here).

Picking up on a comment at Airport Through the Trees, Simon mentions John Lydon's notoriously detourned Pink Floyd t-shirt, the one on which he scrawled 'I hate...' (perhaps the definitive punk gesture in the way it hijacks a readymade, defacing and desecrating a complacently commodified consensus?) . . . the challenge being, what would you graffiti 'I hate' onto in 2009?

I considered free jazz. As much as I love and listen to Ayler, Shepp, Silva, the whole BYG catalogue, some terrible things are done in its name / its honour by swathes of the free/weird/folk/noise/drone spectrum who know how to ape the sound of chaos, but not actually create any. Not barefoot in the head, even if they're barefoot on the analog delay pedal. And hiphop was another candidate. I used to love H.E.R. as Common put it, but it's getting harder every year to recuperate what was once so radical and intoxicating about it. Perversely I think this long decline has made me think about hiphop more than I ever used to, when its vitality could be taken for granted. But the winner:

'I HATE . . .'
Brian Eno. Again, I don't hate the historic Eno, the Eno of Roxy Music, the '70s solo records, the Ambient series, No New York, Talking Heads, is practically peerless, and even after that there are plenty of fascinating ideas at work. But isn't there something very odd about the perception of Eno, whereby he gets a free pass for his last 20-odd years spent producing U2, James (!) and now Coldplay. (And James!) The strangest thing about this period (JAMES!) is that in theory it really could be good. You would think that if you applied the oblique strategies of Another Green World, Taking Tiger Mountain etc to music as boldly unadventurous, as warm-water-bottle, as Coldplay, you might end up with that rare thing, a mainstream pop record articulated through genuinely forward-thinking sonics; that Coldplay might come up with, if not a Kid A, then something close. But instead it's like those U2 and Coldplay records inadvertently became the unacknowledged apotheoses of the (failed) Music for Airports project: rock windtunnelled into a frictionless form of non-denominational spiritual succour (to be pronounced sucker), emotional affirmation to be taken like travel sickness pills, packaged with a smooth pharmaceutical blandness. One day I'd like to listen through all those productions and write a long post about them from the perspective of Eno's earlier art-experiment incarnation – round up these big critical blindspots in the Eno discography into a kind of secret history (albeit of course it's a secret history hidden in plain sight, 'hidden' only from the point of view of say, a Wire subscriber).

'He's just trying to tell a vision'

2009-05-19T16:52:00.008+01:00

This post is about David Peace, and offers a kind of (patchwork) secret history of secret history.

Secret or occult history is how Peace often describes his work. The Red Riding series discloses a sickness at the heart of Yorkshire between 1974–1983, Tokyo Year Zero attempts a pathology of postwar Japan. 'It is time to reveal the true essence of the nation.' . . . The essence, not the contingent, messy, pedantic, historically-verifiable particularity. 'I want to read fictions torn from facts that use those fictions to illuminate the truth,' Peace writes. Setting aside the ethical/epistemological debate for the moment, we have another example of Borges's theory of retroactively created precursors.* In this case, Peace's precursors include Werner Herzog, William Godwin and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

I've always postulated, not just in documentaries but in my feature films as well, that reality is a superficial layer and what we should be looking out for is a deep strata of truth. I've always been after what I call an ecstatic truth.

. . . Werner Herzog in this interview . . . in which the interviewer at one point asks 'Can you think of a moment that is ecstatic truth? Is it like seeing your favourite football team score a goal?' – bathetic, but nicely synchronous for a discussion of David Peace.

The origin of Herzog's 'ecstatic truth' meme can be found in his 'Minnesota Declaration' from 1999:

4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.

5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.

'Ecstacy', with all its connotations of bliss in anglophone usage, may seem out of place applied to Peace's writing, but ecstacy is simply an experience so powerful that you feel out of your head, your body, taken beyond yourself, literally 'ex stasis', out of place. So the kind of delirious horror which Peace achieves is just as much an experience of ecstacy as one of Stephen Daedalus's epiphanies.

An older forebear: William Godwin. In his 'Essay of History and Romance', Godwin argues that history can be studied in two ways: by looking at mankind en masse, or at the lives of individuals. The first is dauntingly abstract, a question of statistical quantification; the second is 'of highest importance.' Godwin then sets up his paradox: the empirical documentary history of facts and dates is 'nearest the truth', but this is 'in reality, no history'. It is lifeless without the vigour imparted by biographical study. The best history uses facts merely as raw material for an inventive tapestry that Godwin chooses to call 'historical romance.' So novels (Godwin's historical romances) in fact are really a branch of history-writing, and not only that, a 'nobler species of composition' than plain history. They are the subset that transcends the set itself, the subgenre that supersedes the master-genre to achieve its apotheosis.

It is deluded after all, he argues, to simply assume that history conveys factual truth. It is a form of fiction. So: 'Dismiss me from the falsehood and impossibility of history, and deliver me over to the reality of romance.' Furthermore: 'The writer of romance then is to be considered as the writer of real history.' Historians are simply romance writers 'without the sublime licence of imagination.'

Godwin wrote the piece in 1797 while his essay collection The Enquirer was going to press, anticipating the possibility of a sequel. But the demand never materialized, and the essay was not published in his lifetime (which suggests a crisis of confidence in the argument on Godwin's part).

One more. The following description of Rousseau from Isaiah Berlin isn't quite a perfect match for the kind of fiction-as-transcendent-history that Peace, Herzog and Godwin advocate, but it's close, and if the procedures are different the effect - or affect - is the same:

In theory Rousseau speaks like any other eighteenth-century philosophe, and says: 'We must employ our reason.' He uses deductive reasoning, sometimes very cogent, very lucid and extremely well-expressed, for reaching his conclusions. But in reality what happens is that this deductive reasoning is like a strait-jacket of logic which he claps upon the inner, burning, almost lunatic vision within the cold, rigorous strait-jacket of a kind of Calvinistic logic which really gives his prose its powerful enchantment and its hypnotic effect. You appear to be reading logical argument which distinguishes between concepts and draws conclusions in a valid manner from premisses, when all the time something very violent is being said to you. A vision is being imposed upon you; somebody is trying to dominate you by means of a very coherent, although often very deranged vision of life, to bind a spell, not to argue, despite the cool and collected way in which he appears to be talking.

in Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Liberty (London: Pimlico, 2003), p. 43.

Like Rousseau, Godwin was raised as a devout Calvinist; makes you wonder what denomination were those 'religious books' belonging to his mother that Peace read growing up.

* Three critiques of Peace's version of historical truth, of history understood as an unmasking of ecstatic horrors, can be read here, here, and here. Another post.

Die Terroristen, Der Regisseur: Die Hard

2009-05-15T00:30:00.008+01:00

PART ONE

Not many people would have Die Hard down as a cinematic roman à clef. But how else to explain its arch-villains? And their peculiar resemblances to certain figures in German cinema?

Two Germans: one is tall with hangdog features. Cerebral, organizing, hands-off, the director of events, rather than a performer. The other is shorter with long wispy blonde hair and carries out the orders of the other (though with a distinct undertone of insubordination). Effectively the id to the senior partner's ego, he exists on the physical level of performance, action, electricity, violence, consummation, death.

So here we see, on the set of Die Hard, Alan Rickman, as 'Hans', the German mastermind of an audacious terrorist strike at the corporate heart of downtown LA:

And here, Alexander Godunov, resting between takes at Fox Plaza, who plays Hans' righthand man and enforcer, 'Karl':

And here we see Werner Herzog, German director with radical associations:

And his favourite familiar, favourite fiend, collaborator-in-chief, the actor who brings physical form to his imaginings, Klaus Kinski:

The vast seething ideological unconscious of the Hollywood 'dream' factory, channelling through the conduits of director John McTiernan or casting director Jackie Burch, has dreamt into a being a world in which Herzog and Kinski are recast as terrorist mastermind and terrorist goon.

Comparing filmmakers with terrorists isn't difficult: both tend to work in small cell-like units, going round shooting things. They both work to create the spectacular and are keen on pyrotechnics, shock, awe, the disruption of the everyday. But it is the idea of spectacle – Debord's Spectacle – which shows us how, fundamentally, they work to entirely opposing effect. The filmmaker, no matter how socially radical their intentions, faces perhaps the greatest struggle in any artistic field not to simply reproduce and reaffirm the dominant mainstream discourse. Everything about film's production process militates against: it's expensive to shoot, edit, print, distribute and advertise. No other aesthetic activity - writing, music, painting - requires that you must first convince Big Capital to invest in you in before you can even make the art; the filmmaker must become the client of cash-rich patrons (studios, producers, investors, wealthy dilettantes looking for a tax-break or some cultural kudos) who can afford to buy them a seat at the table. No other artform forces the auteur to submit to such a commercially-minded battery of ideological pre-approval. Filmmakers, with the possible exception of their TV counterparts, are the most deeply implicated in the social-financial-political web which constitutes Debord's 'spectacle'.

The terrorist - left, right, religious - wants to disrupt and destroy the Spectacle's matrix.

This animus against Herzog is encoded, unconscious, and doubly irrational because while his ultra-low budget techniques threaten to tell truths beyond the boundaries of the circumscribed ideological horizons of moneyed Hollywood, they represent little direct professional threat to Die Hard's makers as filmmakers. But then this smear-by-association, which aligns and elides German radical cinema with German leftwing radical terrorism works in two directions. It seems almost quaint now to imagine German terrorists but in 1988 Hans and Karl invoke for audiences real-life counterparts from the recent past such as the Red Army Faktion (the Baader-Meinhof Group). A minor plot 'twist' (more of a tweak) comes when hero cop John McLean discovers that the terrorists are in fact merely thieves, only there to steal a fortune in bearer bonds. McTiernan deliberately introduced this script change to (in theory) depoliticise the terrorist element and smooth the commercial passage of the film, but rather than ideologically neutralizing Hans, Karl et al, it simply creates a more damning (and politically desirable) implication, that terrorists at heart are secretly motivated only by raw greed rather than idealism (just as socialists don't really want a fairer society, but use this claim as a cover to steal from the deserving rich). The terrorists have to be foreign because in the history of America which Hollywood tells itself, domestic terrorism does not exist (pace Mark Pellington's Arlington Road in '93). This despite the fact that the Red Army Faktion's raids on banks were directly inspired by attacks on property in the 1965 Watts Riots -- and that the Symbionese Liberation Army (the captors of Patty Hearst) where busy robbing banks throughout the early '70s. But as part of this political neutering of the terrorists, the Hans-Herzog, Karl-Kinski pair-off finds its double meaning, as it implies that Hans and Karl, in their dollar-driven daze, are not the revolutionary radicals they pretend to be, but, like McTiernan, are mere traders in big bangs and colourful lights, distraction, display, prestidigitation, dazzle, smoke and flames: dealers in the bloody spectacular, not overturning its table in the marketplace, but complicit in its machinations.

in Part II: Citizen McClain vs McLean, VA; the Unabomber onscreen
in Part III: Kubrick, Stockhausen and Die Hard's demolitional sublime

Strange Days Here We Come?

2009-05-11T11:19:00.004+01:00

A reader writes:

"The Smiths were deeply retrograde"

in the sleeve art and Morrisey's rigid kitchen sink reference points...but How Soon Is Now retrograde?

come on.........

musically i don't think they were retrograde at all especially cf JAMC / C86......nearly all of their uk contemporaries.....bunnymen / jd / teadrop & also blancmange / culture club / duran ad nauseam

retro kicked in withe the first cds - 84 / 85 RETRO as we know it today kicked in wholesale withe the velvets's another view release & south bank show 85 i think

in both these streams the smiths were ahead in their own juniverse and wildly cutting edge in their own terms i.e. they wanted to be on and got on TOTP

morrissey daffs nhs glasses no mic bare chest was THE last totp intervention cf bowie starman everything else -- especially the turgid streams of one week only pisshappy appearances of sleeper bluetone britplop et al which the music papers gave as the sine qua non of britpop's success cf ringing up record companies asking 'what's your midweek?" -- is just marketing from the majors

they refused to make videos during the mid 80s MTV anglocentric boom

but got derek jarman to make short polemic films instead

they are very much in my vanguard

I was thinking of their aversion to early-80s synth futurism and postpunk's dancefloor connections in particular. They're absolutely not avant-garde scorched-earthers; but no, 'deeply retrograde' isn't fair. There's a level of disenchantment, a fundamental setting of their faces against the world, that's akin to the maladjustment, the refusal of the reality principle, that k-punk blasts Sonic Youth for not having in his reply to this [may have one more brief response]. They haven't reformed for a start. Not so much a vision of the future as a new, polemic vision of the past. Their raw material is kitchen-sink familiar but Morrissey wants to take the quotidian and apply a turn which (subtly) defamiliarizes it, that sees it afresh: for a start, radically retuning the connotations of the superbland name Smith. 'It's time that the ordinary folk of the world showed their faces.' There's a modernist echo deep in there.

too young to buy, too old to live

2009-05-09T10:06:00.005+01:00

Above: a retirement home in Hollywood

A major contributing factor to what's happened over the last 4/5 years, with the grotesque blossoming of the rock-pop heritage industry, awash with reissues, reunions, nostalgia package tours, must be the fact that U-20s don't buy music. So if you want to make money out of music you have to pitch to an ageing demographic that grew up paying for music. Reselling that group its adolescence (especially the over-30s with money in their pockets) has always been a lucrative sideline (usually pursued through the invention of 'essential' new formats like CD); it's now one of the only available options for the bigger, risk-averse operators.

On the beach

2009-05-09T09:38:00.004+01:00

Late thought on Sonic Youth as the great unacknowledged Californian group (as argued below): that characteristic technique of theirs, that intense micro-thrash on one or two strings that blurs into a drone – the other place you hear it is, of course, surf rock: Dick Dale et al.

You can read Marcello Carlin's take on SY here.

Thurston Moore and his precursors

2009-05-07T13:09:00.009+01:00

If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. This second fact is the more significant. In each of these texts we find Kafka's idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had never written a line, we would not perceive this quality; in other words, it would not exist. The poem, 'Fears and Scruples' by Browning foretells Kafka's work, but our reading of Kafka perceptibly sharpens and deflects our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we do now. In the critics' vocabulary, the word 'precursor' is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotation of polemics or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. In this correlation the identity or plurality of the men involved is unimportant. The early Kafka of Betrachtung is less a precursor of the Kafka of somber myths and atrocious institutions than is Browning or Lord Dunsany.

This quote is from ‘Kafka and His Precursors’ by Jorge Luis Borges. The entire essay is less than a thousand words and can be read online here. The conceit is that while the idea of the ‘precursor’ conventionally suggests ‘progenitor’, suggests a lineage, a progression in which cultural ancestors beget new artists teleologically, the process is better understood in reverse. We read a writer, we listen to a band, we are reminded of disparate but similar work (Zeno, Kierkegaard, Browning say, … or Sun Ra, Patti Smith, The Velvet Underground, Glenn Branca) and then – only then – are these artists grouped together into a recognizable set: Kafka’s Precursors, Sonic Youth’s Precursors. The present creates it own past.

Now k-punk (in his response to my earlier post) is absolutely right about the current nostalgia circuit. (As Marx put it, rock history repeats itself first as deluxe CD reissues, then as inglorious reunion tours. Then as deluxe DVDs of the reunion tours.) And he’s right of course about the vacuousness of the allegedly ‘alternative’ music which prevails commercially; it’s unsurrectionary mallternative rock. But should Sonic Youth really have to carry the can for this stuff just because some elements within it hail them as precursors? Proverbially the sins of the father are visited upon the son. In cultural history though, the sins of the offspring are all too often visited upon the parents, as Nietzsche’s ghost would attest. The street finds its own use for things, and the same thing happens to music once it’s released; as Ian Curtis would no doubt realize were he around to suffer The Editors.

Sonic Youth may have ended up sounding terminally like themselves, but they are formally innovative, which even in the 80s is some achievement. And while they are unashamedly fans of other bands, writers and painters, as well as being musicians themselves, it’s not at all clear to me that they were the first to be so, nor the group who made it acceptable. They formed from the ashes of No Wave, an aggressively Year Zero project, but No Wave was such an extreme standpoint that it imploded almost as soon as it had begun – it was a scene that lasted barely months so stringent and un-livable was its own fragile logic. Punk, the real touchstone for SY (and No Wave), was rhetorically a tabula rasa, but surely everyone knows by now that punk was no Year Zero: it created its own precursors for you wholesale: Jonathan Richman, the VU, The Stooges, the mods whose drainpipe jeans and skinny ties Blondie would hunt down in thrift stores, The Who, covered by Patti Smith (in a b-side which pretty much invented, explored and foreclosed upon the entire musical ground of 90s riot grrl). And who compiled Nuggets? Patti Smith’s guitar player, Lenny Kaye. Now That’s What I Call Curatorial. I think SY’s undisguised fandom is something they carry over from punk, a demolition of the fourth wall of the stage of performance which is designed to have a liberatory, anti-hierarchical effect, putting the band down among the audience.

As an act of archaeology, to dig back to Bad Moon Rising, to find that brief sonic mirage of The Stooges’ ‘Not Right’ – revenant, disembodied, distorted, not right – and make it the onlie begetter of the necromantic rock heritage culture which summoned up and put on The Stooges circa ’07, is hideously clever. It’s a stretch though, and I would argue it’s only available as a claim because SY kept going and in a winners-write-the-history way, can be credited with exerting a gravitational effect on the subsequent musical continuum. There are swathes of SY’s 80s contemporaries who fell by the wayside and thereby escape k-punk’s censure, their demise saving them from being on the scene of the heritage-industry’s crimes in ’09. As Simon Reynolds points out in his response to Mark, The Jesus and Mary Chain were far more retro-necro: they took the Velvet Underground, added an 80s drum sound and some hairspray. The Smiths were deeply retrograde, and Morissey’s lovelorn desolation is equal parts starstruck fandom as it is interpersonal angst. Unrequited love is unrequited love, whether it’s for the person sat next to you in a darkened underpass or for a sordidly glamorous dream of a band or Sandie Shaw. Fandom is written into rock at the deepest level, with The Stones as blues scholars, Dylan recycling lyrics from Harry Smith’s (profoundly curatorial) Anthology of American Folk Music, McGuinn copping moves from Africa/Brass and Lennon’s dreams of being Little Richard. (I point this out not to excuse subsequent retro idolatry, but to erase any simple assumptions that, it was All Better in the Sixties; ‘Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive…’)

But let’s grant that Sonic Youth went too far when they ran that Stooges tape through their Marshall stacks. If that’s so, then what kind of crepuscular Pandora’s Box – forget Pandora, it’s Miss Havisham that’s needed here – has Burial opened, has Fennesz opened, has Joker opened? “Rock is necessarily tied up with a romanticism of youth (whereas electronic music isn't, in part because of its 'cerebral' nature, as Mike Banks observed when I interviewed him)” writes Mark. Up to the bracket, entirely accurate. Rock is the sound of teenage lust, teenage kicks, teenage riots, and the fact that the form is dominated by non-teenagers recalling the hormonal intensity of teenage experience only heightens the excruciating sense of elegiac belatedness. But what will the consequences be when hauntology’s second generation hits? Electronic music has been doomed to the same process ever since ’87 got branded as the second Summer of Love… ( ‘Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive,/but to be young was very heaven!’) And the current crisis over the ’nuum is simply the inevitable function of its age, as producers struggle to handle the ever-increasing weight of dancefloor history on their shoulders, to try and make sense of its proliferating off-shoots. Do they destroy in order to rebuild, declaring Year Zero and looking to build on scorched earth? Or do they remake/remodel and renovate? To return to taste, isn’t it the case that hauntology can be dangerously implicated here… doesn’t hauntology threaten to become an exercise in good taste, in the right kind of nostalgia?

A penultimate point. It’s interesting to me that Mark presents the band as essentially record-collecting dilettantes, who know good music when they hear it, and are handy enough musically to knock off a reasonable simulacrum for their own releases, because it implies a certain sympathy with their taste and sensibility. Good taste has many meanings. Sonic Youth are banished from ‘mainstream’ taste forever: Kim Gordon in growl mode, the abstract-expressionist noise breaks, performance artists Bob Flanagan and Sherry Rose wiping their arses with stuffed toys on Dirty's artwork … And Thurston Moore’s taste is distinctly unreliable: look at the dreadful bands he helped sign to Geffen. And the postpunk ‘crystalline ascesis’ Mark refers to, the ruling certain bands beyond the pale… SY have always been despised by many precisely for being elitist snobs who look down on those who like the wrong bands, bands insufficiently weird or difficult. It’s actually this aspect which I’d like to emphasize. Having tried to put their ‘retro’ in a different context, I’ve come dangerously close to describing a po-mo mise-en-abyme in which everyone is freefalling into perpetual referentiality. I’d rather insist on their similarity to some of the postpunk ideologues, in that while their personal canon might have been different, they were equally insistent upon policing its edges.

So ... we have k-punk and Sonic Youth, sharing an admiration for whole swathes of postpunk, pop, and modernism low and high (Burroughs, P. K. Dick, William Gibson, Joyce, The Carpenters etc), a k-punk who objects to Sonic Youth because they have good taste, a k-punk bored moreover by Sonic Youth because the band’s aesthetic manoeuvres are so ‘easily verbally explicable’ ... their every move almost precognitively understood and decodable by him … Could it be ... that k-punk is repelled from Sonic Youth, so instinctively against them, not because they’re so egregiously wrong, but because he understands them all too well? That some of it is too close to heim? Could it be … that stalking k-punk through the halls and corridors of musical history is a Manhattanite double he dare not acknowledge, a double named S---- Y----?

the escape to work

2009-05-06T23:23:00.012+01:00

There's a particular phenomenon that recurs in escapist literature – the tendency to reinscribe in the text whatever the writer would like to escape from. So Andrew Marvell's 'Upon Appleton House', ostensibly a pastoral revel in the arcadian delights of a country retreat, ends up deploying a figural language which refers to the civil war beyond the confines of the estate, drawing in all the civic strife that the genre of the country house poem would apparently seek to exclude. Virgil's Georgics are, on the surface, a guidebook to agricultural husbandry, a celebration of a simple life far from the vicissitudes of politics. But they end up articulating a political allegory which still eludes full interpretation today. The refuge only restages what the writer wants to suppress.

The Junior Boys latest album is called Begone Dull Care. As a title this immediately undercuts the music, which draws on electro, house, disco and various electronica patches that crosswire these zones. Begone Dull Care is like a self-defeating version of the hedonist's battle cry of Let's Have It. It sounds like hedonist escapism, but the title reinscribes exactly what it wants to escape (Dull Care), demanding Begone – get away from me (the opposite of Come Together). Put another way, while 'begone dull care' looks superficially like a phrase that's semantically the equivalent of 'be happy', isn't it in fact crucially different? It looks to negate, not posit: to confound dull care, not insist on and construct any kind of tangible pleasure. It says 'begone', and in doing so begins (or maintains) a conversation with that which it wants rid off.

If that seems like a lot to build on what is only a title, it is at least a claim borne out by the music, which takes those sonic templates of electro, house, disco etc only to reverse the polarities of their emotional charge, from ecstatic affirmation and positivity to negative chill factor.

But isn't there a sense in which all genres of club music reinscribe what they wish to escape from? . . . Or rather, what does the fundamental hedonism of club culture in its wider sense, reinscribe? If the rave, the club, the discotheque, the party, are all essentially the same form of escape from the 9-5 world of work, isn't it the case that that accursed world reappears, is re-performed? With the club as a place of work and physical exertion (...'Work It' ... 'Work it Out'...), a place where everyone co-ordinates to the same rigidly ordered beat-continuum, submitting to the direction of a line-manager DJ...

sartor resartus

2009-05-05T16:53:00.010+01:00

I didn't realize socks could be such a problem. Jeans I think are differently but equally problematic. There was a time when to wear jeans meant something, implied a kind of radicalism, a time when to wear jeans meant you read Kerouac, hitchhiked to Morocco, listened to folk, smoked kif etc etc . . . they carried a hint of blue-collar proletarian danger. But that was a long time ago. What happens next? The counterculture goes boom and as the dust settles, the commodification begins, the garden of forking consumer paths. As Zizek argues, late capital atomizes, consumer choice proliferating culture into a menu of increasingly fine distinctions.

Now that everyone wears jeans, what do they mean? When I'm on the tube, I sometimes do a quick tally of what people around me are wearing - 9 out of 10 times, if they're not in a suit, they're wearing jeans. The 'meaning' of jeans resides entirely in the subgenre - microgenre - of jeans you're wearing.

Bootcut, pre-distressed
- mainstream chain-pub Stella swilling 20s-30s male

Skinny
- the emo, the art-student, the hipster

Stonewashed, straight leg, worn on the waist rather than the hips
- middle-aged man, Jeremy Clarkson

Selvedge raw denim, slim
- a kind of via media taken by those who don't want to look like they drink in Wetherspoons but do want some blood to reach their toes. And Japanese kids.

'Twisted'/'engineered'
- twat

Bankers wear this stuff on their day off. Everyone wears this stuff. In that sense they have a restful anonymity. But wearing plain anonymous suits surely now carries more subversive potential. The business suit is ripe for detournement. Adopting suits as a sartorial rule can say, we have no illusions about an item of clothing whose semantic connotations have been emptied of all original meaning. Maybe it's time to dress not so that your clothes want to say 'I am not a straight, I am not a company man' but so that you threaten to blend in, invasion of the bodysnatchers-style. Maybe wearing suits says, we mean business too.

k-punk strikes back

2009-05-05T15:57:00.002+01:00

How irritating/enjoyable to defend something and then, in response, get the most convincing prosecution you've yet read of what you're defending... I side with Mark against the false 'alternative' culture he attacks; but I'd like to separate Sonic Youth from some of the cultural uses to which their legacy has been put... more on this to follow

LA Plays Itself (II)

2009-05-05T13:49:00.003+01:00

Los Angeles Plays Itself is still unavailable on DVD, presumably due to the sheer weight of permissions needed to use the excerpts which constitute the film. The unillustrated essay can be read here though.

London Plays Itself

2009-04-30T13:42:00.011+01:00

Speaking of Los Angeles [see previous post] ... with inevitable logic for the home of the film industry, in 2003 it starred in its own film: the superb Los Angeles Plays Itself.

The film is generally called a documentary, but it's really an authentic example of a rare genre: the visual essay. It is edited together entirely from other films, and these quotes are the illustrations and evidence for Thom Andersen's eponymous essay which is narrated over the clips.

Andersen analyzes the uses to which L.A.'s built environment has been put in film, and, with particular brilliance, the way certain strands of its architecture have been characterized by these uses. As in this clip, where he unpacks the anti-modernist subtext that can be found in the tendency for all L.A.-based villains to live in landmark modernist homes:

The amoral antihumanist swine! Pretty Hatherleyesque. Perhaps the author of Militant Modernism and co-curator of Kino Fist could look into making a London Plays Itself...

Chthonic Use

2009-04-29T15:21:00.015+01:00

Mark Fisher on the abominable tribute compilation Brand Neu! in this month's issue of The Wire (303):

Foals, Holy Fuck and LCD Soundsystem [. . .] only establish that there is no 'today' for rock. They are secondhand vampires, skulking round graves that were robbed long before any of them picked up a plectrum or clicked on a drum machine.
. . .
Sonic Youth, Primal Scream and Oasis all played their part in making this kind of retro-necro acceptable. As the most ostensibly credible of the bunch, Sonic Youth should arguably bear the most blame (indeed, if one were to locate the point at which rock modernism lapsed into curatorial postmodern pastiche, you could do worse than cite something like Bad Moon Rising.)

The elision of Sonic Youth with Primal Scream and Oasis is both boldly counter-intuitive and funny – though coming from Mark, undoubtedly no joke. It's unfair of course. I don't want to enumerate all the ways in which Sonic Youth are not Primal Scream or Oasis. But put it this way: if Bobby Gillespie's ultimate and explicit aspiration is to be some kind of golem made out of assorted body parts from Jagger/Richards, and Noel Gallagher's is to be the same but using the corpse of Lennon/Noddy Holder, you'd have to say Thurston Moore, if anything, aspires to being Patti Smith, which is at least more forward-thinking - not to mention transgendered.

I think Mark's accusation has some traction, but the time and topos aren't quite accurate. If Sonic Youth are guilty of postmodern curatorial pastiche, it's not from '85 onwards with 'rock' history as their palette, it's over the last decade, and the palette is their own back catalogue. The trajectory from the debut EP to Confusion is Sex, Bad Moon Rising, Evol, Sister and Daydream Nation is astonishingly inventive. From that point on the boundaries of their sound are largely fixed, and from Goo to A Thousand Leaves, they're essentially combining and recombining previously-deployed moves into technically 'new' but very familiar shapes. All these albums have high points which match the late 80s output, but also plenty of rote filler, Youth-by-numbers. At this stage in their careers (2009), they are afflicted by a kind of irrelevance which any band of their age and standing can hardly transcend – like The Fall, the unconscious operations of the PR machine sees every album willed into a return to form, only to be retrospectively nailed as mediocre by the time of the next album's review cycle. Sonic Youth in 2009 seems to be more of a side-project for its members than the nominal side-projects, a costume into which all four climb when it's time to pay the bills. (I think as well – and this is perhaps another post – that Thurston Moore has a definite idea about song-writing as a mode - one that declares allegiance to the impulse, and a fidelity to the instant, informed by improv and automatic writing, and as such, would probably disavow any concept of 'progress' or development, or duty to anything other than sounding like Sonic Youth has always sounded.)

But what I really want to talk about is this idea that from Bad Moon Rising on, Sonic Youth might be 'curatorial postmodern pastiche' . . . Presumably Mark has the referential/reverential aspect of the band in mind here. Because they certainly don't sound like nostalgic pastiche at that stage. In fact they sound extraordinarily new. BMR is the point at which their tunings, atonal and droning, blossom into dazzling synaesthetic iridescences. They sound, literally, uncanny – with strings tuned to the same note but fractionally apart, they create their own doubles, an unheimlich shadow sound, like a transparent overlay just out of position. Playing Stoogoid riffery in a harmonic template borrowed from free jazz and serialism, one that smashes the overdetermined limits of the pentatonic, they make discord sensual in previously unheard ways. Alex Ross may take issue with this, but I think BMR is the point where Sonic Youth in effect reconnect discord with the body, restoring to it a libidinal force which you hear in The Rites of Spring, but which the cold geometries of Schoenberg and Webern subsequently evacuated.

As for the re(v/f)erential fandom. It's too easy to cite 'Kill Yr Idols' (released shortly before BMR) as a reproof to Mark's accusation. So I won't – not least because it can probably be counter-cited as a subconscious act of projection, read against the grain so that Thurston Moore is lambasting not his hidebound retro peers but himself.

I'd guess that Mark would point to the band's fascination with pop culture and its operations, rules, secret dynamics as evidence for pomo pap churn: Bad Moon Rising is a title borrowed from Creedence Clearwater Revival; 'Death Valley '69' dwells on the Manson Family mythology; by EVOL the following year there's 'Starpower' and its meditations on Joan Jett, 'Expressway to Yr Skull' (also titled as 'Madonna, Sean and Me' or 'The Crucifixion of Sean Penn') and the disposable kitsch of the Kim Fowley cover, 'Bubblegum'. The Ciccone Youth side project repeats the deadpan Madonna adoration with 'Into the Groove(y)'.

For me there's no sense that that's all there is – secondhand, end-of-history, arms-length sifting through pop-junk detritus, the position of the aesthete ever ready to cry 'but I don't really mean it', believing that the glib smirking mask of nihilist irony can be passed off as the silver laugh of wisdom. As a title, Bad Moon Rising alludes to the Creedence Clearwater Revival song, but without depending on it for content – anymore than do Joy Division with the Ballard-borrowed 'The Atrocity Exhibition'. The point is not to tick a box for discerning record collectors or critics, nor to demonstrate good meta-aesthetic judgement by suggesting that perhaps, like all revolutions, the Year Zero of American hardcore has ultimately impoverished itself (by ruling out as untouchable any music predating firstwave punk, or indeed the first Bad Brains record). Instead it uses John Fogerty's title as a conduit through which to signpost and channel a version of American gothic, a means to reimagine, rewrite and make strange the surface environment of American life, unafraid of referencing pulp forms like horror and SF to tell a psychic truth glossed over by the smooth sedations of mass media, built over by the glossy tiles and sparkling water of the mall, the pulverizing singularity of the freeway. 'Ghost Bitch' -- which it's hard to foresee Primal Scream or Oasis covering any time soon -- is an uncanny revenant voicing, a spectral banshee wail which, like Stephen King's Indian-burial-ground devices, stages an encounter between massacred (Native American) and massacring (colonist). 'I'm Insane', 'Society is a Hole', 'Justice is Might'; these are postcards from the urban apocalypse of the Lower Eastside, a zone abandoned by local government and police alike.

Which brings me to David Peace... (whom Mark is certainly a fan of). Peace presents the Red Riding quartet as a kind of psychopathology of place -- not so much psychogeography as geographic psychosis, articulated through pulp modernism. The books map a site-specific horror, an internalized sickness unique to the books' Yorkshire setting. For Peace, Peter Sutcliffe is, could only be, the Yorkshire Ripper.

Mid-80s Sonic Youth does something very similar, but for California. They tend to be labelled as an archetypally 'New York' band, but from BMR through to Sister ('PCH' = Pacific Coast Highway, 'Hotwire My Heart' is a cover of a Bay Area punk band, Crime; 'Schizophrenia' and 'Stereo Sanctity' both reference Philip K. Dick), the West Coast exerts a weird fascination for them, as a terminal place, a utopia turned dystopia, spatially, temporally, psychically, culturally the End of the West, in which hippie eloi are feasted upon by Manson Family morlocks, and Laurel Canyon acoustic bliss-out is defaced by the return of the repressed (punk) and the unmasking of its own sexual logic (read Atomized and watch the documentary Mayor of the Sunset Strip in which Kim Fowley, svengali of The Runaways, features and reveals himself as a shameless sexual predator). 'Death Valley '69' is the obvious example of this kind of oneiric horror manifesting itself, but it's present too in 'Expressway to Yr Skull' - in which The Beach Boys are evoked lyrically ('We're going to kill the California girls...') before being detourned, reimagined as a death-drive sex-cult ('...We're going to fire the exploding load in the milkmaid maidenhead'), over an oceanic roll of a rhythm, which explodes into an orgiastic apocalypse before once more subsiding into waves of bass and underwater guitar. There are material connections too: the 'Halloween' 12" was recorded in Venice Beach, the band recorded a soundtrack for the film Made in America in LA in 1986, and from 86-87 were signed to Long Beach label SST, with Mike Watt (from San Pedro) making a cameo on EVOL and forming part of Ciccone Youth.

Ballard could perhaps be brought in here, to discuss the car-crash in 'In the Kingdom #19', as well as LA as a terminal site and the psychosexual dynamics of celebrity iconography – but I think he's more relevant to the persistent charge that's hung around Sonic Youth for not being junkie fuck-ups. Isn't it the case (not thinking of Mark here) that a wider critical subtext exists in which Sonic Youth are considered somehow inauthentic, for making weird, out-there music while not being weird or out-there in person? It seems like a lot of music writers assume that the biography betrays the music, that there's an obligation to live up to the sublime savagery of the music and be suicidally chemically dependent. Again, not ascribing this position to Mark, but there's an implication that because they aren't complete headcases, they don't mean it, man . . . And must therefore be idle dilettantes. But this is as absurd as objecting to Ballard's quiet domestic set-up in Shepperton; like Ballard, Sonic Youth are following the Flaubertian injunction to be serious and bourgeois in life, in order to be violently radical in your art.