Friday, May 29, 2015

Avant-Funk - A Certain Ratio and 23 Skidoo

A CERTAIN RATIO
The Graveyard and the Ballroom
To Each...
Sextet
The Old and The New

reviewed for The Wire, circa 1995

A CERTAIN RATIO were one of those bands who seem monstrously significant at the time, but then fade away, leaving little in the way of legacy and nary a trace in the folk-memory. There was a lot of it about in the post-punk 'anti-rockist' era (see also The Pop Group, Gang Of Four, Magazine). All this makes it both touching and puzzling that Creation, that most rockist of labels, was sufficiently fond of ACR to reissue their Factory oeuvre.

Perhaps one indicator of the sheer speed with which ACR's moment was eclipsed (after New Pop, their angst-funk seemed like no fun) is the fact that the only thing of theirs I ever acquired is 1979's "The Graveyard and The Ballroom". Originally a cassette-only release in a nifty translucent green plastic pouch, it's still the most appealing document of ACR's peculiar project: draining all the joy, sexuality and
ecstatic release out of black dance pop, transforming funk into a grimly addictive rhythmic metaphor for control and obsession. Factory's house producer Martin Hannett lent his deathly-dry touch to the 'Graveyard' tracks, his trademark vaulted sound turning the discotheque into a mausoleum. It's perfect for ACR's skeletal garage funk (on the sick-joke 'Crippled Child' they actually sound like a sub-'Nuggets' '60s punk band). Musically primitivist, maybe, but ACR were far from ignorant: "Do The Du" refers to Isidore Ducasse, a.k.a. Lautreamont, author of the awesome proto-surrealist prose-poem "Maldoror".

The live "Ballroom" side sounds more full-bodied and texturally brimming (despite the lo-fi, virtually hand-held sound quality, which makes a mockery of the CD reissue format). On "The Fox", "Oceans" and "The Choir", the miasma of echoed falsetto, background whispers and sub-Miles trumpet-in-fog is nicely mesmeric, kinda like Joy Division getting on the good foot. (Mid-song Simon Topping piss-takes Ian Curtis with a burst of "I was waiting for a guy to come and take me by the hand").

"Ballroom" was probably as good as ACR got. Perhaps if they'd hooked up with Grace Jones to cover Talking Heads' "Houses In Motion", as was once mooted, they'd have injected some soul or at least personality into their ghost-funk. As it is, the official studio debut "To Each..." (1981) is as obtuse and intransitive as its title. Hannett shrouds every instrument with gauzy condensation, so that only the superior rhythm section (dig Donald Johnson's restless hi-hat and crisp snare-cracks!) keeps the fog of avant-funk anemia moving. "Sextet" (1981) is marginally less muffled-sounding, but this is still disco for dead souls. Bustling drum and bass grooves are wreathed in wisps of Martha Tilson's affectless vocal alienation, while the horns sound winded and wan, like an existentialist Beggar & Co. Still "Knife Slits Water" is dankly compelling, urgent slap-bass slicing through aqueous ambience.

"The Old and The New", a 1985 compilation that swept up some 12 inch semi-precious gems, is probably your second-best bet after "Graveyard". The cold-fever fatback shuffle and lunar gyrations of "Flight", with its distant jazz-funk whistles (ghosts of Caister weekenders?) still sounds fab, as does the dessicated cover of "Shack Up". And "Thin Boys", a Hannett-produced early track,is a dirge-in-a-catacomb worthy of US hardcore band Flipper, with comically grave lines like "clinging to each other like magnetised leeches". Tres 1979.

By the 1983 Simon Topping had departed (to study Latin percussion in New York, if memory serves), resurfacing at decade's end as a mainstay of house group T-Coy and the De-Construction label, just at the point when avant-funk ideas were filtering into popular consciousness via acid house. With Donald Johnson at the helm, ACR honed their jazz-funk chops and turned into Level 42.


23 SKIDOO
Seven Songs
(Ronin)
Uncut, 2001

by Simon Reynolds


Shame there's no good genre term sufficiently evocative and open-ended for the kind of music 23 Skidoo made. "Avant-funk" is too ugly, "death disco"  is melodramatic and PiL-specific, "industrial"'s been tarnished by its latterday exponents.  Whatever.  Skidoo were prime explorers of a sonic terrain that opened up in punk's aftermath, when people were looking for a forward path to take them as far from the reek of rock's corpse as possible. Funk, it was decided, was the new music of danger. Based on a quite small range of instances---the madness latent in James Brown's most frenzied polyrhythms, the voodoo grooves of  Tago Mago and Davis's On The Corner, Sly Stone's darker moments, Fela Kuti (Africa's JB), Last Poets--the idea of funk as a sinister energy emerged: rhythm as enslavement, as addiction, as possession. Mix in ideas borrowed from vanguard sci-fi authors Ballard & Burrough (sounds like a confectioners!) and paranoid vibes from Seventies auteur movies like Pakula's Klute and Coppolla's The Conversation, and voila, you've got the future. 

Proteges of Genesis P. Orridge (who let them rehearse at his Death Factory space), 23 Skidoo bridged avant-funk's first-wave (Pop Group, Cabs, A Certain Ratio) and lesser second-wave (Hula, Chakk, Shriekback, 400 Blows). Their records have been out-of-print for years, but Skidoo have enjoyed a spectral presence in dance culture: the bassline to their  single "Coup" was copied note-for-note by The Chemicals on "Block Rockin' Beats"; early darkside jungle circa 1993 was often bizarrely Skidoo-like, despite the absence of any direct lineage; the group's ethnological forgeries and tape-looped exotica pre-echoed the world music samplings of your Loop Gurus.

This sort of talk--precursors, legacies, inheritors, ahead-of-their-time, etc--is pretty academic, though: the real question is, why listen now? Because 1981's Seven Songs especially still sounds bloodcurdlingly intense. A malevolent tumble of hand-percussion, guitar feedback, and gutteral chants, opener "Kundalini" is as much Birthday Party as Gap Band, while the seething slap-bass and brittle-nerved rhythm guitar of "Vegas El Bandito" is offset by a lugubrious wail of lost-in-endless-fog trumpet. The track immediately cuts into "Mary's Operation", dropping everything but the dank, ailing Miles-like trumpet,  multi-tracked and mingled with tape-loop drones. This resulting gloomscape of wilted, billowing sound in turn devolves into  "Lockgroove", a roiling cosmic cistern. "New Testament" is dying machinery, a drum track massively slowed down and elongated, its rapid percussive events blossoming into pendulous cymbal-smashes and smeared snares. "IY" showcases Skidoo's strength (percussion) and  weakness (vocals), but "Porno Bass" is just ill: booming bassdrones reverberate in a cavernous murk, while Hitler fan Unity Mitford, plucked from some radio interview, rails against  pop music for displacing "manly" activities like athletics, sexually hyperstimulating da youth, and generally being "the sign of a degenerating race". When the rancid old nutcase opines that young people's  "ears become degraded by wrong style and senseless reiteration", Skidoo mischievously double-loop the word "reiteration". 

Seven Songs's closer "Quiet Pillage" references exotica king Martin Denny (whose Polynesian-flavored  "Quiet Village" was a massive Fifties hit) but evokes an Apocalypse Now: The Day After vibe of humid disquiet. The track's plinky metallic chimes look ahead to  1984's Urban Gamelan,  made after an expedition to Indonesia.  "GIFU" is basically an alternate mix of "Coup", Skidoo's  most straightforwardly funky single, with a Viet-Cong war-cry "G.I., fuck you" added for anti-imperialist edge, but most of the album is precisely what the title promises: gamelan-influenced drumstrumentals, all tuned percussion, hand-cymbals, and gongs. bals, gongs, and woodblocks. Well-produced compared with the hastily executed debut, Urban Gamelan often teeters on the thin line between minimal and underwritten. Its gently ominous atmosphere--space age bachelor padded cell music--grows on you, but it lacks the turbulence and sheer de-civilising ferocity of Seven Songs.

                                                                                                                               

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