tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-63881605847397936792024-03-19T01:48:32.411-07:00ReynoldsRetro"there are immaturities, but there are immensities" - Bright Star (dir. Jane Campion)>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
"the fear of being wrong can keep you from being anything at all" - Nayland Blake >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> "It may be foolish to be foolish, but, somehow, even more so, to not be" - Airport Through The TreesSIMON REYNOLDShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01282478701882900354noreply@blogger.comBlogger756125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6388160584739793679.post-22090196470580177162024-03-12T17:39:00.000-07:002024-03-12T17:47:27.185-07:00 Libération Q et A<p> (2016?)</p><p><br /></p><p><b>What is the first record you bought in your youth with your own money ?</b></p><p>Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Do It Yourself, 1979</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><b>Your favorite way for listening to music ? (MP3, CD, vinyl, radio for example) ?</b></p><p>Radio – London pirate stations in the 1990s, listening to rap or classic rock in the car in Los Angeles today.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>The last record you bought?</b></p><p><br /></p><p>Last vinyl was <i>Some British Accents and Dialects</i> (BBC, 1971) [listen<a href="https://youtu.be/oyOiZos1vig?si=1TTIfCpd9x9k2iwf" target="_blank"> here </a>and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5DgfmBOWRM" target="_blank">here</a>]. </p><p>Last digital was Beatriz Ferreyra, Echos+ (Room40, 2020). </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><b>Where do you prefer to be when you are listening to music?</b></p><p><br /></p><p> I like to be doing something that occupies me physically but leaves me mentally open to the music – in the kitchen, cooking, is ideal.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>A mascot/favorite record to start the day with ?</b></p><p>Sacred, “Do It Together (London Massive)”, 1992</p><p><br /></p><p><b>Do you need music for work or do you prefer silence ?</b></p><p>Usually I’m listening to what I’m writing about, but for pure acceleration as the deadline approaches, hardcore rave and jungle tapes that I made off pirate radio in the early Nineties maintain my pace and sustain my spirits. </p><p><br /></p><p><b>The song you feel a bit ashamed to listen to with pleasure ?</b></p><p>I don’t feel shame about liking anything, because – through solipsistic logic – I conclude that if I like it, it must be good. But if pushed, I would admit that enjoying “Rock You Like A Hurricane” by the Scorpions feels slightly embarrassing.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>The record that everybody likes and that you despise ?</b></p><p>I can’t think of a record that everybody likes – there’s always a contrarian these days who’ll say “this is overrated”. I’m actually struggling to think of a record I despise. Panic! At The Disco’s “High Hopes” is fairly horrific, but I’m sure many would actually agree with me.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>The records you need to survive on desert island ?</b></p><p><br /></p><p>I made it records plural because it’s too hard to pick just one. Miles Davis, In A Silent Way. Joni Mitchell, The Hissing of Summer Lawns. John Martyn, Solid Air.</p><p><br /></p><p><b> What cover art would you frame at home like a piece of art ?</b></p><p>Electronic Panorama, a Prospective 21e Siecle series box set released by Philips in 1970. I don’t have it framed but the silver metallic box is displayed on a shelf in our living room.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>Your best memory of a concert ?</b></p><p><b><br /></b></p><p>Daft Punk making their US debut at the Even Furthur rave in the wilds of Wisconsin, 1996.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>Do you go in a club to dance, listen to music on a big sound system, to chat up… Or you never go in the clubs ?</b></p><p>I used to go to clubs and raves all the time. But now hardly ever. When I went, it was to dance and to do certain other things people at raves do. But also increasingly I went as a participant-observer, the use the anthropologist’s term. To read the living text of the crowd, decode the rituals. </p><p><br /></p><p><b>What is the record you share with your significant other in your live ?</b></p><p>Too many, but among the core shared favorites are Pixies, Cocteau Twins, Aphex Twin, A.R. Kane, Fleetwood Mac, Saint Etienne, Omni Trio, Orbital, Ultramarine.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>The track that makes you mad with rage ?</b></p><p>I cannot think of one at the moment. There are tracks that make me <i>rage with madness</i>, in a good way, i.e. Dionysian frenzy – The Stooges’s “TV Eye”, Beltram’s “Energy Flash”, Future’s “Fuck Up These Commas”.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>The last record you listened to over and over again ?</b></p><p>Thin Lizzy, “My Sarah”.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>The band you wish you have joined ?</b></p><p>Often the bands that do great things that I’d have been thrilled to be involved in creating also have nasty internal struggles and a long periods of misery and decline. So I will say the Wilson Sisters, a very short-lived conceptual outfit started by friends of mine, with whom I did the Oxford pop journal Monitor. But I had moved to London so missed their one and only recording session.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>The piece of music that makes you cry ?</b></p><p>The Smiths, “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out”. Runner up: Kraftwerk, “Neon Lights”.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>Do you know what drone metal is ?</b></p><p>Sunn O))) ?</p><p><b><br /></b></p><p><b>Quote the lyrics of a song you know by heart ?</b></p><p><br /></p><p>The whole lyric? I’m not sure I know every last word in this, but I know most of it. This is just one bit: “<i>Why in the world are we here? Surely not to live in pain and fear. Why on earth are you there? When you're everywhere, come and get your share. But we all shine on, Like the moon and the stars and the sun, And we all shine on. On and on and on and on.</i>” (“Instant Karma”, John Lennon)</p><p><br /></p><p><b>Name three of your favorite songs ? </b></p><p><br /></p><p>Sly and the Family Stone “Everyday People”, Foul Play “Open Your Mind (Foul Play Remix)”, The Sweet “Ballroom Blitz”.</p>SIMON REYNOLDShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01282478701882900354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6388160584739793679.post-89514218625649135202024-02-20T18:37:00.000-08:002024-02-20T18:37:50.990-08:00Grindcrusher - March 23 1991<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrrZQevpdZuiXGxIrcRHtEKdvbuY8Nd9aTq_HpTWSKDe4-82yzB8YOnMoyaH5jbYO_D2cFNVovrIYZNMe0Sq-A2uqLXtUhGUTUuC-VNTc2mLUBYssGxLkJQ1J0D7JIGI1YUUc_YCc7d9HNa-_JPUydgetqoE936EhfPtlMAdkwTaozJXOpje8u690/s1991/simon%20reynolds%20grindcrusher%20earache%20comp%20MM%20march%2023%2091.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1991" data-original-width="526" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrrZQevpdZuiXGxIrcRHtEKdvbuY8Nd9aTq_HpTWSKDe4-82yzB8YOnMoyaH5jbYO_D2cFNVovrIYZNMe0Sq-A2uqLXtUhGUTUuC-VNTc2mLUBYssGxLkJQ1J0D7JIGI1YUUc_YCc7d9HNa-_JPUydgetqoE936EhfPtlMAdkwTaozJXOpje8u690/s16000/simon%20reynolds%20grindcrusher%20earache%20comp%20MM%20march%2023%2091.jpg" /></a></div><br /> <p></p>SIMON REYNOLDShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01282478701882900354noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6388160584739793679.post-2732253048762962172024-02-05T10:45:00.000-08:002024-02-05T11:09:03.006-08:00Cruel World 2023: Siouxsie, Iggy Pop, Human League, Billy Idol, Gang of Four, Gary Numan, Love and Rockets<p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">CRUEL WORLD 2023</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">director's cut,<i> <a href="https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2023-05-22/cruel-world-siouxsie-iggy-pop-festival" target="_blank">Los Angeles Times</a>, </i>May 22, 2023</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">by Simon Reynolds</span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">The day before Cruel World, the
promoters tweeted out a weather advisory: “mostly sunny, high of 79, 100%
chance of angst and despair. See you there.” </span></p><p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">In the event, the weather had
other ideas. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">But on Saturday a horde of mope-rockers and Goths clad in
sun-absorbing black descended upon Brookside at the Rosebowl, Pasadena. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Quite
possibly this was the densest concentration of fishnet in human history.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">For many, the main draw was headliner
Siouxsie, the Godmother of Goth, playing her first American concert in fifteen
years. Indeed, Siouxsie merch was completely sold out by 4pm.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Other attractions for the dark-clad and
doom-minded included Love and Rockets, an offshoot of Bauhaus (Goth godfathers
and a highlight of 2022’s inaugural Cruel World) and Echo and the Bunnymen, who
were originally lined up to play last year. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Cruel World has fun with the idea of
misery as a shared alt-rock worldview. The festival’s three stages are named Outsiders,
Sad Girls, and Lost Boys. There’s also a dance area, deejayed by someone called
Club Doom Dave. Then there’s the name itself, derived from the suicidal kiss-off<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“goodbye, cruel world”. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">In Goth, the cruelty of the world
doesn’t have a political dimension: it’s not a reference to economic inequality
or the literally hateful policies being enacted all around this country.
“Cruel” is a more timeless existentialist accusation about a sadness inherent
to life itself. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The connection between the bands and their fans was forged
during adolescence, that time when sensitive souls start having deep thoughts.
Yet most of this largely middle-aged crowd must surely now be well-adjusted and
comfortable in their skin (not to mention comfortably off, given ticket prices
that range from $159 to $799). Many even brought morose, awkward teenagers of
their own.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The key to Goth’s transgenerational
appeal is its odd blend of glum and glam. Before the term Goth settled into
place, the emerging movement was briefly known as “positive punk.” That might
seem an odd adjective given the dark worldview, but the positive part is the
element of dress-up and cos-play, the sheer effort that goes into
self-beautification. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">It’s a perennially seductive style whose sepulchral glamor
appeals as an alternative to mainstream ideals of blondeness and tanned health—especially
in SoCal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The leather caps and steel
chains, the heavy black eyeliner and whiteface make-up, the holey fishnets and
ratted hair – these also serve as a beacon to fellow misfits, a way off finding
your tribe while scaring off the normals. It’s a forbidding look that also
suggests the forbidden –<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a taste for sin
and kink, with a hint of demonic cruelty. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Yet despite the ungodly appearance, it’s
probably the most gentle of youth subcultures: visually, a kick in the eye, but
in truth, it’s Goths and their emo descendants who are often victims of
violence rather than the other way round. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Ironically, my favorite garment at
Cruel World was a simple T-shirt bearing the slogan “No, I Don’t Want To Hear
the New Stuff.” The wearer told me he’d printed it up in a special
edition-of-one.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgniQWlru5AEX1ozK_Bq8BUkUKb1G_kVxBZ5iYB8N3poXh7ETu4FKqPX1DQwzD-TrMs8EGJL4Eqfj_ODKnEL6xW4beMBwlGespo2dn1R1jBwxT13YNHZ4EOGN1cOHdG_pFuUEgOHCjUcvVyZ-Lp-KhXF5y6Bnwb0FL2SiH7YJFRUVYee5EPDxhKlj-azw/s2475/new%20stuff.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2475" data-original-width="2045" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgniQWlru5AEX1ozK_Bq8BUkUKb1G_kVxBZ5iYB8N3poXh7ETu4FKqPX1DQwzD-TrMs8EGJL4Eqfj_ODKnEL6xW4beMBwlGespo2dn1R1jBwxT13YNHZ4EOGN1cOHdG_pFuUEgOHCjUcvVyZ-Lp-KhXF5y6Bnwb0FL2SiH7YJFRUVYee5EPDxhKlj-azw/w528-h640/new%20stuff.jpg" width="528" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">The T-shirt speaks to the expectations of the fans who attends festivals
like these that are full of legacy acts.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">
</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Our beloved artists like to believe they’ve only got better with age and still
have new things to say. But we just want to hear the favorites that remind us
of our youth.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><b>Gary Numan </b>didn’t seem to have gotten
the memo. Despite making his name with doomy dystopian electropop, he stubbornly
treated the audience to a heaping portion of late period stuff: grinding
industrial rock from a phase when he appeared to be following the lead of Nine
Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson. Ironically, his earliest work as Tubeway Army
featured much better guitar riffs. Numan did play his classic “Cars.” And you
have to appreciate<a href="https://metro.co.uk/2022/08/09/gary-numan-jokes-hes-lost-count-of-facelifts-and-hair-transplants-17152512/" target="_blank"> the effort</a> he’s putting into looking the same as he did in his
heavy-rotation MTV days.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoCDahRf2Mzv44sX-52q62L9NoWTgi8Y2UdU_cgQHk23FWKo7dEBTbR2I22vSUePWPoAM3jODjonD2H-i2X-l9cgLvK4kEA-xXicOKxJVTHZalZtnQnRdwYbGhwbbxU9Cai0rNZqZ7YNTmw0jdnKqHP4OqEAd7a7pJJmNZQWmOiEUmIs45AFpwKcnL8Q/s900/FwrKZjHaMAE0-Ro.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="721" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoCDahRf2Mzv44sX-52q62L9NoWTgi8Y2UdU_cgQHk23FWKo7dEBTbR2I22vSUePWPoAM3jODjonD2H-i2X-l9cgLvK4kEA-xXicOKxJVTHZalZtnQnRdwYbGhwbbxU9Cai0rNZqZ7YNTmw0jdnKqHP4OqEAd7a7pJJmNZQWmOiEUmIs45AFpwKcnL8Q/w512-h640/FwrKZjHaMAE0-Ro.jpg" width="512" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Not everyone attending Cruel World was
a Goth and angst wasn’t the only thing on the menu. <b>Squeeze</b> (a last minute
replacement for Adam Ant) sounded as cheery and ebullient as ever. Still
boyish-looking at 65, Glenn Tilbrook sang the group’s post-Beatles classics
like “Pulling Mussels From A Shell” with ageless sweetness.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><b>Billy Idol</b> is
looking a little craggy these days and the rebel-sneer lip doesn’t curl up like
it used to. But he was in fine voice and roused the second-stage crowd with
hits like “Dancing By Myself” and “Rebel Yell,” interspersed with consummate
showman patter. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><b>ABC </b>and <b>The Human League</b>
also come from that early MTV moment of the Second British Invasion, what
people in the UK called New Pop: postpunk artists who glossed up and crossed
over. Both hail from Sheffield in the north east of England,</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">an original bastion of Goth, but have no
truck with miserabilism, writing songs </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">(“Tears
Are Not Enough” and “Blind Youth” respectively) that are militantly optimistic. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Then there’s <b>Gang of Four</b>, whose bleakness, inspired by the ravages of
capitalism, is quite different from Goth’s, and who offset it with a grim
resoluteness. They were as powerful a live band as ever, with singer Jon King
exerting himself so vigorously he had to sit on the monitor at the front of
stage between songs to catch his breath.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Drifting nearer the dark side, <b>Echo
and the Bunnymen</b> have songs about death (“The Cutter”) and despair (“All My
Colours”). But they are delivered with such drive and dazzle, the effect is uplifting.
On songs like “Rescue,” Ian McCulloch’s sonorous baritone recalls Jim Morrison
at his most majestic. Most of the Bunnymen’s songs traffic in windswept
romanticism full of elemental imagery (titles like “Seven Seas” and<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“The Killing Moon” – the latter prefaced with
typical McCulloch swagger as “the greatest song ever written”). But politics
figured briefly with “Never Stop,” a song of defiance originally released as a
single at the height of Thatcherism. At Cruel World, this was prefaced by
caustic comments from McCulloch about the late Conservative Prime Minister and
her heartless proposal of a policy of “managed decline” for his once bustling
hometown of Liverpool.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Bunnymen
didn’t go in much for stage craft:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>there
were some thin wisps of dry ice but the video screens were off and there were no
back projections; McCulloch stood stock still throughout. But the songs and
the singing were more than enough. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Among the songs the Bunnymen played was “Lips Like Sugar”, the nearest the band ever
came to a hit in America. It’s always struck me as a killer chorus looking for
a verse and pre-chorus. <b> </b><b>Love and Rockets</b>
likewise similarly feel like a great guitarist looking for a matching rhythm
section and some decent tunes. As at last
year’s Cruel World Bauhaus performance, Daniel Ash’s gnarly but intricately
textured racket was a highlight. But
singers Ash and bassist Daniel J, lack the commanding presence of Peter Murphy.
Their T.Rex aping MTV hit “So Alive”
retains its slight charm, but the cover
of The Temptations’s “Ball of Confusion”
remains perplexingly surplus to requirements. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/eSaVfZe6JZw" width="320" youtube-src-id="eSaVfZe6JZw"></iframe></div><br /><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">And then came the promised angst and
despair – Cruel Nature struck. Midway through a taut and joyous set by <b>The
Human League</b> on one stage and Iggy Pop’s middle-schooler grandson doing a funny little
dance during “The Passenger” on another, the show came to an abrupt halt. The
audience was instructed to leave the festival site and seek shelter because of
an approaching lightning storm. Those nearest the main exit dispersed in
orderly fashion and relative good humor, but for those deeper into the
Brookside grounds, getting out was a more frustrating and protracted process. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">And then the even crueler twist: the
threatened bolts of lightning, the thunder, rain and pea-sized hailstones,
never reached Pasadena. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwoSieWgfCBeALF_kBMVuPHA1PPQ5HRVIBRNqpBk9RgJU2vboZDIdeS-YDx08X04t6Sbt3gTfuGLkplWAqNcn-uL4plMBCtDx88CUpicGXmWGalSaxKU477KTmqinBZ7V7og4s_LCpRDRQ8v6X8fRLi_IQoASd5HpFMr1258fosg-1wsfP5JDs665MWQ/s639/inclement.JPG" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="639" data-original-width="478" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwoSieWgfCBeALF_kBMVuPHA1PPQ5HRVIBRNqpBk9RgJU2vboZDIdeS-YDx08X04t6Sbt3gTfuGLkplWAqNcn-uL4plMBCtDx88CUpicGXmWGalSaxKU477KTmqinBZ7V7og4s_LCpRDRQ8v6X8fRLi_IQoASd5HpFMr1258fosg-1wsfP5JDs665MWQ/w478-h640/inclement.JPG" width="478" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">To their and the artists's credit, Cruel World managed to reschedule the
performances of <b>Iggy Pop</b> and Siouxsie for the following night. But this was
scant consolation for those already flying or driving long distance journeys
back to their hometowns across the country. Indeed, the fact that Siouxsie and
Iggy would now be able to play longer sets arguably just added salt to the
wound. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Déjà vu, baby!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Iggy’s dazed-and-amazed greeting to the crowd
acknowledged the <i>Groundhog Day </i>vibe of us all reassembling at the same
place the next day. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">I first saw Iggy live in 1988 and he seemed
venerable even then, a rock’n’roll survivor, albeit with implausibly limitless reserves
of energy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>35 years later, he’s still
ridiculously dynamic for a 76-year-old. Bounding around the stage with a
disconcerting lope that suggests something’s off with his hip, he
simultaneously owns his ancientness and defies it. His shirtless physique is
fascinating in its combination of muscle and wrinkle. The skin looks like a
topographical map of the Rockies. It’s like Iggy’s been carved into rock’s
equivalent of Rushmore – and then broke loose to keep on marauding stages
across the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGUdosBq7rydbajBn56ZUbD3KnsH8l9jI-ZGWvYZPhzmnTjO_3Ib3HPPnEnews0VDP4SeTRVEJ7sgrfgh8-w1aqDHHBHtheLC9bT8n2uQsaVVoxLGs4Q_NeDKbyP8nvAQTB3NzcACW-lEg44ZhN8Cq252pjKVPlppYspKNyvVxJLPVt6ytYUGOXUarXQ/s639/iggy%20close%20up.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="639" data-original-width="582" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGUdosBq7rydbajBn56ZUbD3KnsH8l9jI-ZGWvYZPhzmnTjO_3Ib3HPPnEnews0VDP4SeTRVEJ7sgrfgh8-w1aqDHHBHtheLC9bT8n2uQsaVVoxLGs4Q_NeDKbyP8nvAQTB3NzcACW-lEg44ZhN8Cq252pjKVPlppYspKNyvVxJLPVt6ytYUGOXUarXQ/w582-h640/iggy%20close%20up.jpg" width="582" /></a></div><br /><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">It’s clear that he’s
not doing it for the money, but for the sheer joy of it. Iggy also understands
the strength of his own material, sticking largely to Stooges and early solo
highpoints.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0oHZWWZv8EJxGpF2S_5pMJns5J-4nLbn7KNbxMElNji-l3ezvwuCrkkTsSeHrxTOBq6dtOnydD_zQyTrTs3Hr70dqMiTWgqsIuLTDbneE4MgYlolWiEGPxzDNmUgIJX64XLwJrvaZI5xZMAGOwTh6xGxLGy3xGYt42GuBeNrGtm8fruwldFoK6bEDbg/s2696/shirtless%20idol%20and%20fan.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1962" data-original-width="2696" height="291" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0oHZWWZv8EJxGpF2S_5pMJns5J-4nLbn7KNbxMElNji-l3ezvwuCrkkTsSeHrxTOBq6dtOnydD_zQyTrTs3Hr70dqMiTWgqsIuLTDbneE4MgYlolWiEGPxzDNmUgIJX64XLwJrvaZI5xZMAGOwTh6xGxLGy3xGYt42GuBeNrGtm8fruwldFoK6bEDbg/w400-h291/shirtless%20idol%20and%20fan.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">He can’t quite summon the
lung-power for the cyclone-howl that splits apart the original “TV Eye”, so during
that section sticks the microphone into his waistband where it pokes out suggestively.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/K-5M_cHQrLE" width="320" youtube-src-id="K-5M_cHQrLE"></iframe></span></div><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">But
for the most part, ably supported by his band, Iggy powers through deathless
classics like “Raw Power,”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Gimme
Danger” , “Sick of You”, “I Wanna Be Your Dog”, “Search and Destroy”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Clearly,
a man determined to rock until he drops. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnyMSlENZNxxacFUmP3MYODFUqhl4OLl46J84Rvk4kmbx9aNwfYtAYrA6CIFW3uWlOdRp8XXTw-lwsZV8UMdHhj2AB_GGxOUDT7u7jQUj9hQaOC0dRn6IFbVn0XTDWjG4dPGptnvsl6UwK6u2d8X5UVSVWvKhRGuZefG47NXo6NxMDgZgPTlfPEWqrCQ/s275/download.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="275" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnyMSlENZNxxacFUmP3MYODFUqhl4OLl46J84Rvk4kmbx9aNwfYtAYrA6CIFW3uWlOdRp8XXTw-lwsZV8UMdHhj2AB_GGxOUDT7u7jQUj9hQaOC0dRn6IFbVn0XTDWjG4dPGptnvsl6UwK6u2d8X5UVSVWvKhRGuZefG47NXo6NxMDgZgPTlfPEWqrCQ/w400-h266/download.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Dusk descends and finally the Goddess
of Goth takes the stage. <b>Siouxsie</b> relives the trauma of the previous night, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>joking that she told the fire department that
the lightning was “just part of our fuckin’ light show.” </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Initially cloaked in a
Medieval-looking hood, she’s wearing a silver jump-suit that shimmers in the light. Her voice has grown deeper with the decades
but this lends her singing even more baleful authority, evoking some kind of vengeful
spirit of matriarchy. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The set starts
with “Nightshift” and “Arabian Knights”, both from <i>Juju</i>, the 1981 album
that is Goth’s Rosetta Stone. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Two
further <i>Juju</i> songs, “Sin In My Heart”, for which Siouxsie straps on a guitar,
and “Spellbound”, are played later, underscoring the genre-foundational nature
of the record. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">It’s Siouxsie without the Banshees – guitarist John McGeoch is
dead, drummer Budgie is now Siouxsie’s ex-spouse, and who knows if bassist and
band co-founder Steve Severin was invited or consulted? But the
Banshees-surrogates onstage do a fine job duplicating the glassy guitar, the
pummel-drone of the bass, and the tumbly-tribal rhythms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">But then Siouxsie repeats the Numan
Error. Instead of using her extended set time to disinter classics from <i>A
Kiss in the Dreamhouse</i> or play the Goth National Anthem “Fireworks,” she
plays no less than four songs from the solo album <i>Mantaray</i>. There’s a
tune off the <i>Batman Returns</i> soundtrack and a pair of duds from 1986’s
sparkless <i>Tinderbox</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>One unusual
choice that entrances is “But Not Them” from her percussion-and-voice side
project The Creatures. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s noticeable
that the video projections oscillate in quality and imagination in parallel
with the tunes – “Christine” comes with a mesmerizing psychedelic kaleidoscope,
whereas <i>Batman</i> tune “Face To Face” clunkily deploys cat’s eyes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hTWBRp3GaMI" width="320" youtube-src-id="hTWBRp3GaMI"></iframe></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Siouxsie’s return was a qualified
triumph: there was a touch too much turgid dirge in the setlist, and as her
energy levels flagged, the voice grew unwieldy and the enchantress-style arm
movements started to seem perfunctory. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">But with a glorious rendition of of
“Happy House” and the stunning encores “Spellbound” and “Israel”, the idol
earned her ovation. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEingAa4hH8W-vikrhVn4ZDoS2EII3NyStCwIZ8W3G2WLjNFO8OgBkAZXoHjCPrii8W_B-9E6f5TDsCMEQdh5P5W30qiZPwvOeCGJbnsVxR-huJb7CuRwC4ZyBx6Kf80Bjw5PklV4Gu-V23D3Qhh6DmIsPaWKrASWHRdjtgRqMq2rHSGN9S0T919viUaaA/s1200/download%20(1).jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1200" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEingAa4hH8W-vikrhVn4ZDoS2EII3NyStCwIZ8W3G2WLjNFO8OgBkAZXoHjCPrii8W_B-9E6f5TDsCMEQdh5P5W30qiZPwvOeCGJbnsVxR-huJb7CuRwC4ZyBx6Kf80Bjw5PklV4Gu-V23D3Qhh6DmIsPaWKrASWHRdjtgRqMq2rHSGN9S0T919viUaaA/w640-h426/download%20(1).jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span><p></p>SIMON REYNOLDShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01282478701882900354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6388160584739793679.post-7987381302591624222024-01-30T12:40:00.000-08:002024-02-01T10:11:45.544-08:00happy birthday Robert Wyatt<p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">Robert Wyatt</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">Going Back A Bit - A Little History of Robert Wyatt (Virgin)</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>Melody Maker</i>, 1994</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">by Simon Reynolds</span></b></p><p>At last, a long-overdue anthology of stuff and nonsense by one of the great eccentrics of English art-rock, Robert Wyatt. A miscellany of bits and bobs from solo albums and the shortlived outfit Matching Mole, its main selling-point, O punter, is that it makes available again, CD-sharp, 5/6 of his all-time 1974 classic Rock Bottom. But infuriatingly, not only is the album's original sequence jumbled up, for no apparent reason, but one track is shunted onto the second disc, so that you can't even reprogram it into the correct sequence. And one of the best is left off altogether.</p><p>With most albums this wouldn't matter a jot, but Rock Bottom is structured around a compelling emotional/musical narrative – it's a complex allegory of Wyatt's disablement (he tumbled out of a window during a wild party), his subsequent emotional regression, and his slow recovery. Even in the wrong order, Rock Bottom dazzles: it's a masterpiece of oceanic rock to rival Buckley's Starsailor, A.R. Kane's 69, maybe even Davis' In A Silent Way. On 'Last Straw', aqueous keyboards, refractory guitars and imagery like "seaweed tangled in a home from home" conjure up a poignant vision of the amniotic heaven of the briny deep. 'Sea Song' begins as an eerie serenade to a mermaid, then Wyatt spirals off into soul-harrowing scat-falsetto aquabatics.</p><p>'Alifib' is Wyatt at his lowest ebb, gasping out tiny breaths of anguish amidst a lachrymal sound-web of harmonium, while 'Alifie' sees him reduced to baby-talk drivel as his dependence on his wife Alfie deepens. "I can't forsake you or forsqueak you, Alifie, my larder", dribbles Wyatt; eventually she puts her foot down – 'I'm NOT your larder'. This is the turning point, the first step on the road to recovery, and the (original) album ends with the wonderful eco-terrorist ditty 'Little Red Riding Hood', with Ivor Cutler ranting about how he lies down in the road to stop the cars: "yeah me and the hedgehog busting tyres all day long".</p><p>Wyatt emerged, via the Soft Machine, from the late '60s/early '70s Canterbury scene, along with Caravan, Gong, Kevin Ayers, Egg etc. As well as an interest in bending rock form in all manner of jazzy-folky-weirdy ways, what these groups shared was a very English whimsy – at once their charm and their liability. And so on the 13 minute 'Moon In June', Wyatt extemporises about the joys of doing a session for the Beeb, while 'Soup Song' is sung from the point of view of one of its reluctant ingredients, a slice of bacon. Even Wyatt's lovesongs are skewered by irony. In the wonderfully sentimental 'O Caroline', Wyatt warns his sweetheart "if you call this sentimental crap you'll make me mad", while 'Calyx' is full of oddly phrased praise: "close inspection reveals you're in perfect nick".</p><p>Wyatt's wonderful voice is why he gets away with it whereas, say, Kevin Ayers mostly grates: he always sounds simultaneously wry and earnest, ironic and heart-felt. Damp, lugubrious, resolutely colloquial, totally unrock'n'roll (like a cross between Peter Skellern and Roland Kirk), Wyatt's voice could be the closest thing to an authentic "English soul" this nation's produced.</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDaOGD4ydFDG21vaPK630zN0s8iUL5m3wQ3u0vZe2bojQUN5NtsvTefkoLPjCd6yw4US_dFsFQOb4mo-jU8iThjf7Ia5Jdi4EsC9Lp0qDOwfvpikFyLnYcdto5vuhmVGuANNUO_mSGamokRNbu1Bu2H1cY2-zHRiY9GuvEZdSUnLc4XTA0bTiAq2kvIw/s2048/F4ELlDyaMAAlu3j.jpg" style="clear: left; font-weight: 700; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1522" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDaOGD4ydFDG21vaPK630zN0s8iUL5m3wQ3u0vZe2bojQUN5NtsvTefkoLPjCd6yw4US_dFsFQOb4mo-jU8iThjf7Ia5Jdi4EsC9Lp0qDOwfvpikFyLnYcdto5vuhmVGuANNUO_mSGamokRNbu1Bu2H1cY2-zHRiY9GuvEZdSUnLc4XTA0bTiAq2kvIw/w476-h640/F4ELlDyaMAAlu3j.jpg" width="476" /></a></p><p><br /></p><p><b>Robert Wyatt & Friends</b></p><div class="MsoNormal"><b><i>Theatre <st1:street w:st="on"><st1:address w:st="on">Royal Drury Lane</st1:address></st1:street> <st1:date day="8" month="9" w:st="on" year="1974">8th September 1974</st1:date></i><o:p></o:p></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><i>Observer Music Monthly</i>, November 20th 2005</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>by Simon Reynolds</b></div><p>Long bootlegged, this glorious live album documents <a href="https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2017/10/simon-draper-virgin-records" target="_blank">an intriguing moment in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">UK</st1:place></st1:country-region> rock history</a>, when the rock mainstream and the outer-limits vanguard were in bed together.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Three decades on, it’s hard to imagine a contemporary equivalent to the supergroup that Wyatt convened in September 1974: multiplatinum-selling musos Mike Oldfield and Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason rubbed shoulders with out-jazz players Julie Tippetts<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and Mongezi Feza, and with avant-proggers such as Henry Cow’s Fred Frith, Hatfield and the North’s Dave Stewart, and Soft Machine alumnus Hugh Hopper. There’s also a cameo appearance from <a href="https://reynoldsretro.blogspot.com/2016/01/ivor-cutler.html" target="_blank">Ivor Cutler</a>,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>John Peel’s favorite comic eccentric. Peelie himself features as the show’s compere, informing the long-haired, afghan-wearing audience that the musicians will be uncharacteristically sober tonight, because the door to the Theatre Royal bar has been locked for fire-and-safety reasons. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></p><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span>The wondrously woozy music played that evening must have been intoxication enough, surely, for performer and listener alike. After the Dada-esque sound-daubings of “Dedicated To You But You Weren’t Listening”, the bulk of the set consists of a run-through of Rock Bottom, the Wyatt album released earlier that summer, a crushingly poignant masterpiece shadowed by the singer’s paralysis following his fourth-floor tumble during a wild party. “Sea Song”,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>as mysterious and beautiful an oceanic love ballad as Tim Buckley’s “Song To the Siren,” opens up into a fabulous extended improvisation, a malevolent meander of fuzz-bass and glittering keyboards that’s something like an Anglicized <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bitches Brew</i>. Wyatt’s falsetto spirals up into ecstastic scat arabesques, as though his spirit is trying to escape his shattered body.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Little Red Riding Hood Hit The Road” --its title a whimsy-cloaked allusion to the accident--is equally stunning. Feza’s trumpet again channels Miles, while Wyatt’s delirium of anguish is only slightly softened by the English bathos of lines like “oh dearie me, what in heaven’s name..” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The singer actually miauows at the start of “Alifib,” a gorgeous quilt of shimmering keys and glistening guitar (courtesy of Oldfield, then regularly voted the top instrumentalist in the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">UK</st1:place></st1:country-region> by music paper readers). The feline thread is picked up with “Instant Pussy,” originally recorded by Wyatt’s short-lived band Matching Mole and featuring yet more gorgeous abstract vocalese from the wheelchair-bound bound singer. “Calyx”, a different sort of love song, features killer lines like “close inspection reveals you’re in perfect nick”, and the set ends with a rampant, edge-of-chaos take on<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“I’m A Believer,” the Monkees cover that took Wyatt into the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">UK</st1:place></st1:country-region> hit parade. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span>Alarming but true: the best record released in 2005 is a time capsule from 31 years ago.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPKr64nQi52hyQXR8--eYZfQKR7xXR6ooxerS8DCupXsPS4O-2UMKnZrHiiVwo8cGuropKW9Y_37qaV688zcAtyR5DmKtkJTlqgA-8-SdFT8N0ewGz12CSxfa5IOJ-tD3Yk4d3QWHxndliFSlC3i6NGM-oQIQPbGu7pha3QJsnfab3JVDXXuZlT8Oqwg/s599/R-6358097-1605700602-7668.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="597" data-original-width="599" height="638" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPKr64nQi52hyQXR8--eYZfQKR7xXR6ooxerS8DCupXsPS4O-2UMKnZrHiiVwo8cGuropKW9Y_37qaV688zcAtyR5DmKtkJTlqgA-8-SdFT8N0ewGz12CSxfa5IOJ-tD3Yk4d3QWHxndliFSlC3i6NGM-oQIQPbGu7pha3QJsnfab3JVDXXuZlT8Oqwg/w640-h638/R-6358097-1605700602-7668.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>KEVIN AYERS and ROBERT WYATT<br />unpublished piece owing to miscommunication across <i>Guardian</i> departments, fuckers<br /><br />by Simon Reynolds</b><br /><br />“I could hardly recognise him at first,” says Kevin Ayers. ”But there, under that great beard, was Robert and he hadn't changed a bit.” The singer is recalling his reunion after over thirty years separation, with Robert Wyatt, his former band mate in The Soft Machine. “As wonderful as it was odd”, the meeting took place in the summer of 2006 while Ayers was recording his comeback album,<i> The Unfairground</i>, his first record since 1992. In odd, wonderful synchrony. it came out last month only weeks before Wyatt’s own <i>Comicopera</i>.<br /><br />Intense friendships always seem like they’ll last forever, but time and the way of the world wears them away. Suddenly, decades have passed since you last saw that inseparable soul-mate. Wyatt and Ayers were co-founders of The Soft Machine, in their heyday second only to Pink Floyd as a psychedelic trip band at the swirling kaleidoscopic heart of Swinging’ London. But after their debut album and a gruelling tour of America supporting the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Ayers went off to start a solo career. Many thought he was set to be a big star, his tousled blonde mane and debonair charm making him the missing link between Syd Barrett and Bryan Ferry. “I think Kevin got waylaid by us nutters,” says Wyatt, meaning The Soft Machine and its anarcho-surrealist mish-mash of jazz and acid rock. “There was a window there, a moment when Kevin, with his songs, could have been up there in the charts, as a Donovan type figure.” Ayers is bemused by this notion that he was diverted from his true destiny. “Donovan? Good heavens. I am glad that I ended up as Kevin Ayers! And the people from Soft Machine were a big part of that.”<br /><br />Wyatt and Ayers originally met in 1961. “Someone had told Kevin, ‘oh there’s one other bloke in East Kent with long hair,” says Wyatt. “You’d get on.” They did. “Robert is an incredibly important figure in my life,” says Ayers. “He got me started. I liked him and he was doing music so I wanted to do music too. Robert was extraordinary, full of ideas and able to talk about art and books. I had never been in that sort of atmosphere.” Daevid Allen, a wandering Australian beatnik, was lodging with Robert’s mother--the infinitely tolerant and artistically supportive Honor Wyatt, a journalist. He befriended the teenagers, precociously turning them on the hippie values of drugs, sex and free spirited nomadism. He whisked Ayers off to Balearic bohemian paradise of Ibiza, where “one could get by with absolutely no money.” Recalls Ayers, “we hitchhiked down there and lived off fruit from the trees and fish we would catch.”<br /><br />Allen, Ayers, and Wyatt formed The Soft Machine with Mike Ratledge, a keyboard-playing prefect Wyatt had known at school in Canterbury. One of the great myths of The Soft Machine is that they were the product of a progressive school favored by Canterbury’s artists and intellectuals. “Actually, the Simon Langton School is a totally respectable, conservative grammar school,” says Wyatt, who remembers struggling academically and getting regular canings. He left at sixteen with no qualifications, having swallowed a whole bottle of his father’s multiple sclerosis pills because he was “terrified of having to go back to school”. Still it is true that the Soft Machine came from highbrow, arty backgrounds. “Robert was very lucky to have had parents who were interested in ideas and very open, you could talk with them about anything and they would listen,” recalls Ayers, describing the Wyatt household in Lydden as “an absolute refuge.”. Later, after Wyatt’s father died, his mother bought a small semi-detached house in West Dulwich and the entire band--plus girlfriends--lived there. “It was when the group were starting out,” recalls Wyatt. “I don’t how we all fitted in there. But we did and we made our racket and my mum was fine about it.” Says Ayers, “There were plenty of dishes piling up in the sinks and unmade beds. But everyone was being creative in one way or another, or being intellectual or questioning and this came out in various forms such as poetry or art, but most of all music. Soft Machine was the only family I felt I ever had. We were a group of middle class boys from literate backgrounds, into jazz and beat writers, and we went off together on this incredible ride.”<br /><br />The Soft Machine weren’t the first scions of the haute bourgeoisie to enter the rock world. But crucially, they were the first not to conceal their education or their accents. Indeed, alongside the equally well brought up Syd Barrett, Ayers was the first English rock vocalist not to sing in an American accent. Wyatt, who sang as well as drummed, followed suit on the group’s second album. “At first I was all, “waaugh, bab-eee,” he says, mimicking a standard American rock voice. But then Wyatt developed his own idiosyncratic style of falsetto singing, a wondrous blend of frailty and agility, melancholy and whimsy. “It sounded like me talking, only with notes.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />The Soft Machine immediately became central figures on the London psychedelic scene. Yet in many ways their orientation was always jazz rather than rock. Wyatt even describes himself as a Fifties person who felt “bemused because the ‘rich flowering of culture’ in the Sixties was really just the mainstreaming of all these things that had been underground in the Fifties, like drugs.” Beyond specific ideas to do with harmony, rhythm and improvisation, what they derived from jazz was “a kind of recklessness”, a spirit of discovery captured in Miles Davis’s instruction to his musicians: “play beyond what you know”. This freeform approach, combined with rock-derived but unheard-of-in-proper-jazz techniques like distortion and effects, made The Soft Machine ideal for the sensory overload aesthetic of clubs like UFO, where they played seemingly every other week in 1966-67.<br /><br />But Ayers’s pop sensibility was increasingly at odds with where The Soft Machine’s music was going, which was long, abstract pieces. ““Kevin had bravely soldiered on as bass guitarist in what had become really an instrumental band,” says Wyatt. “He’d accumulated this stash of songs, but there really wasn’t room for them in the band anymore.” The tour of America with Hendrix divided the band further: Wyatt enjoyed going on the piss and the pull with Mitch and Noel of the Experience, Ayers found the whole rampage of buses, booze and birds a gruelling affront to his sensibilities. The group split up on its return. When they reformed, they invited Hugh Hopper, another alumnus of Simon Langton, to be the bass player. Wyatt enjoyed drumming in a wild, freeform style unsuitable for backing pop songs and happily went along with the jazz-rock direction. But after three more albums, he too was squeezed out as the Soft Machine became an increasingly uptight fusion outfit with little room for playfulness.<br /><br /><br />As important as The Soft Machine was to their development, few would disagree that Wyatt and Ayers came into their own as solo artists. Initially, Wyatt formed his own Softs in the form of Matching Mole, but after a drunken tumble from a high window left him paralysed below the waist, he had to give up drumming and the gang mindset of the performing band, and reinvent himself as a studio-bound artist. Started before the accident but finished and informed by that shattering trauma, 1973’s <i>Rock Bottom </i>is Wyatt’s masterpiece. From “Sea Song” (an oblique portrait of his new love and lifelong partner-to-be Alfreda Benge, a.k.a Alfie ) to “Little Red Riding Hood Hit the Road” (which exorcised his post-paralysis anguish via bathos-laden turns of phrase like “oh dearie me”), the album combines experimentation, emotion and melody with an exquisite delicacy.<br /><br />Meanwhile, starting with 1969’s <i>Joy of A Toy</i>, Ayers launched an equally enthralling career, his output ranging from light-hearted ditties like “Clarence In Wonderland” to nihilistic noise-scapes like “Song from the Bottom of A Well”. Another highpoint was “Decadence”, a rippling, rhapsodic paean to his friend and fellow-traveler in hedonism, Nico, an ice queen “suffering from wear and tear” who perpetually slips back into “liquid night” despite the out-stretched arms of her lovers. “I never kiss and tell,” he says tartly when asked if he and Nico were ever involved.<br /><br />Ayers and Wyatt belonged to a milieu of English mavericks who recorded for “progressive” labels like Harvest, Island, Charisma, and Virgin. Sharing a similar sensibility of gentle humour and genteel experimentalism, this was an incestuous scene, the musicians frequently collaborating or guesting on each other’s albums. The labels, similarly, exuded a longhaired, we’re-only-playing-at-being-a-record-company vibe. Virgin seemed more like an arts council for weirdos than the Industry. “It wasn’t really that idealistic,” says Wyatt. It’s just that “the Railway Enthusiast”--his nickname for Branson--“had noticed there was a market for bands who could sell albums without hit singles, based around the college gig circuit.” Ironically, Virgin would later maneuver Wyatt into recording a single--a cover of the Monkees’ “I’m A Believer”--which actually did become a hit and got the wheelchair-bound singer onto Top of the Pops.<br /><br />Ayers, who’d left the laidback Harvest, was facing similar pressures. His new label Island were convinced they could turn him into a big star. “It really messed me up and I lost complete confidence in what I was doing.” It was the start of an unhappy period of desultory recordings and feeling disconnected from the music scene, with Ayers alternating between his houseboat in Maida Vale and long sojourns abroad.<br /><br />When punk arrived, the progressive scene was deemed the domain of “boring old farts”. The new dogma declared that rock had been enfeebled by its attempts at maturity and sophistication. It was time for a rejuvenating jolt of teenage proletarian energy. The Fall’s Mark E. Smith singled out the Canterbury Scene--The Soft Machine and all the welter of bands and solo artists it spawned--when he declared “rock was ruined when the students took it over”. Wyatt sympathizes with this attitude, which with typical kindliness he interprets as “a sincere attempt to reassert that rock music was a music whose vitality came from the bottom up in terms of social power structures”. Still, there was a moment there in 1976-77 when the mellow meandering of a whole generation of artists--everyone from Brian Eno to John Martyn--was deemed irrelevant.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xG2RJKhjGME" width="320" youtube-src-id="xG2RJKhjGME"></iframe></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><br />A few years later, the middle class cadres within punk stopped worrying so much about maintaining their fake-prole accents and hiding their Hatfield and the North albums. Punk turned into postpunk and the students took over again (had they ever really been dislodged?). Many of the new bands looked back to the music they’d been listening to before The Ramones and “Anarchy in the UK”. These groups, such as Scritti Politti (whose vocalist Green was hugely indebted to Wyatt’s “English soul”), wanted to move beyond straightahead punk, beyond rock itself, and the Canterbury Sound was a suggestive example of a concerted attempt to un-rock rock. Wyatt was coaxed back into recording by Geoff Travis, the boss of Rough Trade (home to Scritti). “Virgin were cross and said I couldn’t do albums for another label, so we decided to do a series of singles, cover versions.”<br /><br />During his period of disengagement from music, Wyatt had become politically engaged: he started tuning into foreign radio stations, including Radio Moscow, and reading the <i>Morning Star</i>. Eventually he joined the Communist Party because its internationalism fit his own “xenophilia”. He explains, “if anybody starts to build up a heat against Johnny Foreigner, sort that chap out, my instincts are to take sides with Johnny Foreigner. They used to call it being a traitor but actually I’m just a xenophile.” The Rough Trade singles included versions of Latin American revolutionary songs, a pro-Stalin ditty from 1940s America, a tune called “Trade Union” by a Bengali group based in Brick Lane, and most famously, Elvis Costello and Clive Langer’s anti-Falklands War ballad “Shipbuilding”.<br /><br />Ayers is a xenophile if anybody is. He spent his early childhood in Malaysia, “running around a beach and completely lost in my own world “. When his family returned to Herne Bay, the twin culture shock of England’s grey-skied, grey-faced repression and being plunged into boarding school aged 12 was a massive trauma. Ironically, for an artist who is regarded as quintessentially English, Ayers has spent most of his life since that “homecoming” trying to escape England, traveling all over the world and eventually settling in France. “Sunnier climes have always been more compatible to me--people there are so much more relaxed and have time for the good things in life like good food and wine.”<br /><br />* * *<br /><br />In 1992 Ayers declared, “Between the ages of 17 and 40 I had a great time, no grounds for complaint whatsoever. My problem is just that I don't know what to do with the rest of my life." For both of the ex-Softs, the Eighties and Nineties were…. variable. Wyatt alternated between sporadic recording and periods of depression, partly induced by “the political weather… you can get a very cold draught sometimes.” Both artists have had struggles with alcohol, culminating this year with Wyatt going sober and quitting the potions he’d always seen as essential to loosening his creativity. <i>Comicopera</i>’s first “act” partly concerns the deleterious effects of his drinking on his relationship with Alfie (who wrote a lot of lyrics on the album), a syndrome she has described as “bereavement within a marriage.”<br /><br />Both <i>Comicopera</i> and <i>The Unfairg</i>round deal with aging, that sense of twilight memorably captured by Dylan a few years ago with the lines “it’s not dark yet/but it’s getting there.” Serenity and wisdom have eluded both artists. In one song, Wyatt sings, at once wry and deadly earnest, of envying Christians and Moslems for their certainty, their confidence that God has got their back. After the first act dealing with personal relationships, and a second moving out into the real world of politics and war, the final section sees Wyatt casting around for “solutions” via a series of cover versions that touch on spirituality, revolution, surrealism, and free improvisation. <i>The Unfairground</i>, meanwhile, exudes a worldweary confusion distilled in the line “I don’t understand anything as I grow older/Nothing seems to be any clearer”.<br /><br />“When you get to a certain age the inevitable crumbling becomes very real,” Ayers admits. “It’s how you deal with that is the challenge. Robert said to me a very long time ago that I was the sort of person who would end up an old man on a park bench feeding ducks and wondering why people weren't nicer to each other!” Yet for all its bleakness, <i>The Unfairground </i>sounds sprightly and springheeled: falling in love was a major catalyst for Ayers even making a record again. And <i>Comicopera</i>’s sheer delight in strange and marvellous combinations of sounds is a tonic. In the end, there aren’t answers but there are consolations, the highest (and healthiest) being music and friendship. Both <i>The Unfairground </i>and <i>Comicopera</i> involved a company of musician pals: Ayers called on 26talents, among them folk singer Bridget St. John and Hugh Hopper, while Wyatt’s “imaginary gang” contained such seeming incompatibles as Brian Eno and Paul Weller. “I say imaginary cos they were never in the same room at the same time,” he chuckles. “I do believe in doing that, but I’ve found that often grumpiness ensues.”<br /><br />Parts of <i>The Unfairground</i> were recorded at the same studio, owned by Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera, where Wyatt recorded <i>Comicopera</i>. Hence the reunion last summer. “It was really great to see him again,” says Wyatt. “He’s gone through a lot of problems, battling the demons. And he’s looking battered, but he’s survived. And it was nice because I had the opportunity to say ‘Look, Kevin thanks very much for your tunes at the beginning’. Without his natural ability to write proper songs, The Soft Machine would have been hard pressed to cobble together much convincing original material of our own.”<br /><br />Wyatt actually appears briefly on his old friend’s record, albeit as a disembodied vocal texture, sampled and listed in the credits as The Wyattron. “It’s not Robert, but it is a memory of Robert,” says Ayers. “And that makes a lot of sense to me, as that is what I have.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Wyatt and Ultramarine </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br /></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkT5e_0CF5abXQiYdwVlcL7D7ZvB59ePRXLSwYDbMa72y9M15XJ6i4nNL_9FlIlAPIQjjCTmMDt2a-8lb9Emh58xzUsiq6Ta5OPzNck1EYyh0vpb3vDywx9ZIu1EAvjhRfp2B6XF3cccJkm7TjgUFnxPqT5c6w5joVCBvw6NIuxP91bzIiSXJuZby8bA/s2532/SR%20ultrarmine%20united%20kingdoms%20mm%20aug%2028%2093.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1952" data-original-width="2532" height="494" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkT5e_0CF5abXQiYdwVlcL7D7ZvB59ePRXLSwYDbMa72y9M15XJ6i4nNL_9FlIlAPIQjjCTmMDt2a-8lb9Emh58xzUsiq6Ta5OPzNck1EYyh0vpb3vDywx9ZIu1EAvjhRfp2B6XF3cccJkm7TjgUFnxPqT5c6w5joVCBvw6NIuxP91bzIiSXJuZby8bA/w640-h494/SR%20ultrarmine%20united%20kingdoms%20mm%20aug%2028%2093.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><b><br /></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">^^^^^^^^^</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size: large;">other stray fragments on Wyatt: </span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">from <i>Sex Revolts</i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Laziness was subversive in the (idle) hands of the counterculture; work</div><div class="MsoNormal">was to be replaced by 'play power'. The Soft Machine are classic examples of</div><div class="MsoNormal">late '60s layabouts... Kevin Ayers called one of his backing bands the Soporifics and wrote</div><div class="MsoNormal">songs like 'Butterfly Dance' in which he declared that 'everything is play'. In</div><div class="MsoNormal">'Diminished But Not Finished', he renounces all ideologies in favour of an</div><div class="MsoNormal">agnostic self-indulgence. His whole oeuvre is bathed in a sun-kissed</div><div class="MsoNormal">insouciance; it seems to take place, as Dave Maready put it, in 'an endless</div><div class="MsoNormal">summer on someone's else's money circa 1970'. The pinnacle of his hermetic</div><div class="MsoNormal">hedonism is 'Song From the Bottom Of a Well': for Ayers, the universe is just</div><div class="MsoNormal">'a comfortable bath'. He happily drowns himself in the womblike well, laughing</div><div class="MsoNormal">at a world whose toil and turmoil seems absurd. Robert Wyatt's solo albums also</div><div class="MsoNormal">courted infantile regression. But even after his conversion to militant </div><div class="MsoNormal">Communism, Wyatt could still confess, 'I've always been one to shirk responsibilities if </div><div class="MsoNormal">there was an opportunity' and 'my ideal state of life would be one of total </div><div class="MsoNormal">inactivity.... I don't approve of these people charging about all the time'.....</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In Rock Bottom (1974), Robert Wyatt created one of rock's most astonishing</div><div class="MsoNormal">and poignant visions of an undersea paradise. Like ambient, Rock Bottom was</div><div class="MsoNormal">conceived in a hospital; an intoxicated Wyatt had tumbled from an upstairs</div><div class="MsoNormal">window during a wild party at his home and broken his back. The album aches</div><div class="MsoNormal">with the anguish of disablement (Wyatt has spent the rest of his life in a</div><div class="MsoNormal">wheelchair), while its woozy, refractory sound simulates the effects of heavy</div><div class="MsoNormal">anaesthetic. The title, Rock Bottom, plays both on the idea of reaching an</div><div class="MsoNormal">emotional abyss, and some kind of escape to a subaquatic sanctuary (an</div><div class="MsoNormal">environment where Wyatt's mobility and grace could be recovered, in the</div><div class="MsoNormal">absence of gravity). The cover depicts a seascape in cross-section: Wyatt's</div><div class="MsoNormal">head and torso bob above the surface and he holds a bunch of balloons in his</div><div class="MsoNormal">hand, but under the surface we can see that he hasn't got any legs, just</div><div class="MsoNormal">tentacles or fronds of seaweed.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"> The opening 'Sea Song' sees Wyatt serenading his mermaid lover. Their</div><div class="MsoNormal">trysts take place with the rising of the full-moon, its tidal pull impelling</div><div class="MsoNormal">her blood to him: they are both moonstruck lunatics. Then Wyatt spirals up and</div><div class="MsoNormal">off into tremulous, bubbling scat, a voluptuous agony of freeform vocal plasma</div><div class="MsoNormal">midway between muezzin prayer wail and orgasmic shudders--a carnal polyphony</div><div class="MsoNormal">that rivals Tim Buckley's Starsailor. In 'A Last Straw', the oceanfloor is 'a</div><div class="MsoNormal">home from home'. The oozy, aqueous synths, refractory horns, and imagery of</div><div class="MsoNormal">taking refuge inside the mammary gland suggest that the briny deep Wyatt</div><div class="MsoNormal">describes is really the 'inner ocean' of the female body.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">'Alifib' reaches the nadir of despair, vocally reduced to wracked,</div><div class="MsoNormal">barely-there exhalations. This track and its sequel, 'Alife', are wordplays on</div><div class="MsoNormal">his wife's name, Alfie: Wyatt, in his abject dependency, has regressed to the</div><div class="MsoNormal">condition of a nursling at the breast. He calls her 'my larder': his neediness</div><div class="MsoNormal">is oral, a craving for the limitless plenitude of the infantile phase. Sense</div><div class="MsoNormal">degenerates into dribbled babytalk, as the music grows ever more sinister and</div><div class="MsoNormal">miasmic. He's reached rock bottom, his lowest ebb, and a sax takes over,</div><div class="MsoNormal">babbling free-form primal scream therapy. But then a woman's voice speaks</div><div class="MsoNormal">firmly: 'I'm not your larder'. It's Alfie, putting her foot down, and</div><div class="MsoNormal">signalling Wyatt's re-emergence from the foetal position, his coming to terms.</div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><b>^^^^^^^^^^</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><b><br /></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><b>from another project as yet unborn </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Robert Wyatt,
<i>Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard</i><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">A motley
meander compared to its immaculately immersive predecessor Rock Bottom, this
1975 album ranges from the woozy “Solar Flares” (the soundtrack to a short
experimental film) to the melodically fragmented “Muddy Mouse”, on which Wyatt vocally
mimics the sound of a muted trumpet to exquisite effect. “</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Soup Song” is a deliciously daft ditty
sung from the point of view of one of the broth’s reluctant ingredients, a
slice of bacon.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Matching Mole,
<i>Live In Concert</i><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Formed by
Wyatt after leaving Soft Machine, Matching Mole continues that group’s original
playful spirit – the name itself is a sly twist on “machine molle”, French for “soft machine”. The highlight here is the
first half of “Instant Pussy”, a lattice of wordless warbles from Wyatt layered
over gently shimmering keyboards. The rest is gnarly and frenetic jazz-rock akin
to Mahavishnu Orchestra. <o:p></o:p></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dzMY6dnoj38" width="320" youtube-src-id="dzMY6dnoj38"></iframe></div><br /><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><b>bloggage on the Canterbury scene</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><a href="https://hardlybaked2.blogspot.com/2023/02/canterbury-and-cuppa-tea.html">Canterbury and the Cup of Tea</a></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>the pre-punk <a href="https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2017/10/simon-draper-virgin-records" target="_blank">Virgin</a> Records story</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br /></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br /></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>snippet on "Grass", one of Wyatt's series of Rough Trade singles </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br /></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"> Violence of a different sort is the subject of "Grass", a darkly witty allegory about authoritarianism originally written by the late, great Ivor Cutler but covered here by Robert Wyatt, a pre-punk innovator who thrived in a postpunk world of anything-goes. Backed by the shimmering tablas and shehnai of East London Bangladeshi outfit Dishari Shilpee Gosth, Wyatt plays the role of guru imparting wisdom to an acolyte, the power relation underlined by lines like “while we talk I'll hit your head with a nail to make you understand me / I have something important to say."</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/QGx587id57Q" width="320" youtube-src-id="QGx587id57Q"></iframe></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Now this track, as heard on the <i>NME</i> / Rough Trade <i>C81</i> cassette, might be the first thing I ever heard by Robert Wyatt</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CKyo-oZKu_4" width="320" youtube-src-id="CKyo-oZKu_4"></iframe></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YQijlKfVBFk" width="320" youtube-src-id="YQijlKfVBFk"></iframe></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Mind you, possible that I heard one or other of the Rough Trade singles on Peel - "Caimenera", even "Stalin Wasn't Stalling" or "At Last I Am Free"</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Wyatt appears <i>twice </i>on C81 - his keyboards flicker through Scritti "The 'Sweetest Girl'", the curling synth for sure is him, maybe the piano too?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YvHZToOUG2U" width="320" youtube-src-id="YvHZToOUG2U"></iframe></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The first record I ever <i>bought</i> by Wyatt was "Shipbuilding". Great 7 inch single sleeve. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-63z5Smhh-rnFWWQ9gNPKLV0jCYxfrpCUNz_vJiI1Ken-P6i_nyAKuv9i-f-SDy2DsowvFl4QZ0mNd3QbCOYdvOdDD1IPNo3wfpusEa3x1-slRVDH-HUGPxG_w396FV7wOcXV68Y0r0SOihERM3HlrJS5S9SAxxNxvTKMnhj2eSaZag8nd-CBhJ0ENQ/s517/R-1812571-1273072443.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="517" data-original-width="511" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-63z5Smhh-rnFWWQ9gNPKLV0jCYxfrpCUNz_vJiI1Ken-P6i_nyAKuv9i-f-SDy2DsowvFl4QZ0mNd3QbCOYdvOdDD1IPNo3wfpusEa3x1-slRVDH-HUGPxG_w396FV7wOcXV68Y0r0SOihERM3HlrJS5S9SAxxNxvTKMnhj2eSaZag8nd-CBhJ0ENQ/w632-h640/R-1812571-1273072443.jpg" width="632" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://www.discogs.com/release/952567-Various-Mighty-Reel" target="_blank">On one of the send-off-for-cheap <i>NME</i> cassettes</a>, <i>Mighty Reel</i>, there's a lovely version of "Round Midnight" by Wyatt. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oaeUY0iAs2c" width="320" youtube-src-id="oaeUY0iAs2c"></iframe></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Same cassette starts with <a href="https://youtu.be/d714_sinsc4?si=bQcAnKJUDAO6lbiR" target="_blank">a fab tune by King Sunny Ade</a>... <i>NME</i> expanding minds in those days</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF4gyLZSdUmJiv9dM9bPMuNFVcnbMOHmrIO-69iVHfzXtAzvVB2GGLmO7RV3m2yZWNAAwgUoTVawsrKtZvUxFUGQWYMCfDFDyOj_7i64a80fRAflGOkBiisF4rMHUczAcDncvtoDhMXi0M11AHtMGTHavbEQauskk0jx71ehBBYLhLqzLIaJyle-oL3Q/s400/Robert%20wyatt%20and%20SR%20Hay%202007%20pic%202.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="400" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF4gyLZSdUmJiv9dM9bPMuNFVcnbMOHmrIO-69iVHfzXtAzvVB2GGLmO7RV3m2yZWNAAwgUoTVawsrKtZvUxFUGQWYMCfDFDyOj_7i64a80fRAflGOkBiisF4rMHUczAcDncvtoDhMXi0M11AHtMGTHavbEQauskk0jx71ehBBYLhLqzLIaJyle-oL3Q/w400-h300/Robert%20wyatt%20and%20SR%20Hay%202007%20pic%202.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div class="MsoNormal"><span>Me and Mr. Wyatt, in the green room (green tent?) at the Hay Literary Festival, 2007, prior to me interviewing him live onstage. Pix by Richard King. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span>I had no idea I was such a gesticulator until I saw this photo.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOFWin9e8NZJVyZbxgP5kCIHeLvrFJegeQiM1HeQKmDiDSPgB_eKtMGYM7n6oLJUseuK75t3OIeUvgZaMIhwWV2kPvtb0Rq4u7RiRxOz7m19xziqcBiEla5ImVZcLeRxVuH5PztvfDiIoUQgNAW2ENthK3BjOND5uvtJqXme-zvenY2CCr60c1Q7eE5Q/s400/Robert%20Wyatt%20and%20SR%20Hay%202007%20pic%201.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="400" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOFWin9e8NZJVyZbxgP5kCIHeLvrFJegeQiM1HeQKmDiDSPgB_eKtMGYM7n6oLJUseuK75t3OIeUvgZaMIhwWV2kPvtb0Rq4u7RiRxOz7m19xziqcBiEla5ImVZcLeRxVuH5PztvfDiIoUQgNAW2ENthK3BjOND5uvtJqXme-zvenY2CCr60c1Q7eE5Q/w400-h300/Robert%20Wyatt%20and%20SR%20Hay%202007%20pic%201.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF4gyLZSdUmJiv9dM9bPMuNFVcnbMOHmrIO-69iVHfzXtAzvVB2GGLmO7RV3m2yZWNAAwgUoTVawsrKtZvUxFUGQWYMCfDFDyOj_7i64a80fRAflGOkBiisF4rMHUczAcDncvtoDhMXi0M11AHtMGTHavbEQauskk0jx71ehBBYLhLqzLIaJyle-oL3Q/s400/Robert%20wyatt%20and%20SR%20Hay%202007%20pic%202.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /></a></div></div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Oddly enough, on Sunday night - after midnight, so technically Monday, certainly Monday UK time - I started watching this doc on YouTube about Robert Wyatt. Unawares that it was actually his birthday. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2Z5zy6MaFtI" width="320" youtube-src-id="2Z5zy6MaFtI"></iframe></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><p>Not a doc about Wyatt but one for which he did the soundtrack - the Animals Film - and if you like the "Born Again Cretin" moan-mode, this has some lovely wordless 'voice as muted trumpet' alongside eerie detuned synth smearage and chaotic drum smashige... </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/A_9akLNec9I" width="320" youtube-src-id="A_9akLNec9I"></iframe></div><div><br /></div>one of his most avant outings in some ways, wonder why it's never been reissued (perhaps it was and I didn't notice? ). My memory is so terrible I can't recall if I picked this second-hand on vinyl or not.... if not, more fool me... <br /><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Animals_Film" target="_blank">The film</a>, by Victor Schonfeld & Myriam Alaux, is about human exploitation and mistreatment of animals.... and also animal rights activists... narrated by the Wyatt-Benge family friend Julie Christie, who gave them a house or flat after the accident... </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Q_Z93tIefy4" width="320" youtube-src-id="Q_Z93tIefy4"></iframe></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>SIMON REYNOLDShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01282478701882900354noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6388160584739793679.post-12707368094184806122024-01-10T12:41:00.000-08:002024-01-10T12:41:21.974-08:00Add N To (X) - Add Insult to Injury - Artbyte - December 2000<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRs5IXzhVjrc6u2LqLZcMWMV74T0VA2N9-kxbuckFlFWEnFrtPhCbtK-lNnC7DjMqzNzLxfXSjHO_EvWbt-9LG_YmodtdrLdDdvMZZ1V3pjyGKEu1L8JxvUQjydXryC9IuzO6-3PkE5yu9mG793AIvki7MvZAaSoix8HoerPCdbU3Glqb-iWTnBl0/s1987/Simon%20Reynolds%20Add%20N%20to%20(X)%20Artbyte%20December%202000.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1987" data-original-width="1039" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRs5IXzhVjrc6u2LqLZcMWMV74T0VA2N9-kxbuckFlFWEnFrtPhCbtK-lNnC7DjMqzNzLxfXSjHO_EvWbt-9LG_YmodtdrLdDdvMZZ1V3pjyGKEu1L8JxvUQjydXryC9IuzO6-3PkE5yu9mG793AIvki7MvZAaSoix8HoerPCdbU3Glqb-iWTnBl0/w334-h640/Simon%20Reynolds%20Add%20N%20to%20(X)%20Artbyte%20December%202000.jpg" width="334" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRs5IXzhVjrc6u2LqLZcMWMV74T0VA2N9-kxbuckFlFWEnFrtPhCbtK-lNnC7DjMqzNzLxfXSjHO_EvWbt-9LG_YmodtdrLdDdvMZZ1V3pjyGKEu1L8JxvUQjydXryC9IuzO6-3PkE5yu9mG793AIvki7MvZAaSoix8HoerPCdbU3Glqb-iWTnBl0/s1987/Simon%20Reynolds%20Add%20N%20to%20(X)%20Artbyte%20December%202000.jpg" style="clear: left; 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float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRs5IXzhVjrc6u2LqLZcMWMV74T0VA2N9-kxbuckFlFWEnFrtPhCbtK-lNnC7DjMqzNzLxfXSjHO_EvWbt-9LG_YmodtdrLdDdvMZZ1V3pjyGKEu1L8JxvUQjydXryC9IuzO6-3PkE5yu9mG793AIvki7MvZAaSoix8HoerPCdbU3Glqb-iWTnBl0/s1987/Simon%20Reynolds%20Add%20N%20to%20(X)%20Artbyte%20December%202000.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1987" data-original-width="1039" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRs5IXzhVjrc6u2LqLZcMWMV74T0VA2N9-kxbuckFlFWEnFrtPhCbtK-lNnC7DjMqzNzLxfXSjHO_EvWbt-9LG_YmodtdrLdDdvMZZ1V3pjyGKEu1L8JxvUQjydXryC9IuzO6-3PkE5yu9mG793AIvki7MvZAaSoix8HoerPCdbU3Glqb-iWTnBl0/s16000/Simon%20Reynolds%20Add%20N%20to%20(X)%20Artbyte%20December%202000.jpg" /></a>r</div><p></p>SIMON REYNOLDShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01282478701882900354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6388160584739793679.post-54542438838312304342023-12-06T09:06:00.000-08:002023-12-06T09:06:07.314-08:00James Chance and the Contortions - Melody Maker - March 23 1991<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieBr8zKwF_lyRP1RaWrchWZj0KkBvvunISBoojRIe7PvYao221h9oqSPsRc_wWBQqZpp7_8ugzFgI9gk5A3net3-9qjY2qb4CKgZbpZ-8_QbEEg7KnUba__UgdgF6BtvTCwJKErs6i4yZ4KcpuMvyBMRy_b9LfFzPJz-wLrAXp4EUs9YOvv0x6no4/s2816/simon%20reynolds%20james%20chance%20MM%20march%2023%2091.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2816" data-original-width="526" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieBr8zKwF_lyRP1RaWrchWZj0KkBvvunISBoojRIe7PvYao221h9oqSPsRc_wWBQqZpp7_8ugzFgI9gk5A3net3-9qjY2qb4CKgZbpZ-8_QbEEg7KnUba__UgdgF6BtvTCwJKErs6i4yZ4KcpuMvyBMRy_b9LfFzPJz-wLrAXp4EUs9YOvv0x6no4/s16000/simon%20reynolds%20james%20chance%20MM%20march%2023%2091.jpg" /></a></div><br /> <p></p>SIMON REYNOLDShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01282478701882900354noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6388160584739793679.post-41851733109266804612023-11-25T17:25:00.000-08:002023-11-25T17:25:24.170-08:00looking back at 1994 - Xmas issue commentaries - Melody Maker - December 24-31 1994<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; 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float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3787" data-original-width="2800" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIJ_Dl3EHQiwKpW6ua8dm9nyown8l6Y-FaInQMfPjmfzD0UZ-vBxzEhcey2elPuQjCi3qqY3hAHM1ZRY0NDMIohy4AEKw_KawVqfeRqzfdUgHq99jtdV2Cw5aAfbSM33cUmkzWO9numPUcaujLYEVKZlSIHrdHDxdO-ljRQctUb10CKCzpQTIRe_eiUA/w474-h640/53351588383_b582565edf_o.jpg" width="474" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Freaky cover isn't it? </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">The whole issue <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/nothingelseon/albums/72177720312864624" target="_blank">readable</a> at <b>Nothing Else On</b></div><br /><p></p>SIMON REYNOLDShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01282478701882900354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6388160584739793679.post-40446953799192222992023-11-12T15:52:00.000-08:002023-11-12T15:52:13.692-08:00Ibiza-ification of pop <p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><b>The
Ibiza-ification of pop</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><b><i>Guardian</i> blog, 2011</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><b>by Simon Reynolds</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><b><br /></b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">The other
day we were driving in the car, listening to one of Los Angeles's<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Top 40 stations, and I turned to my wife and
asked, "How come <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">everything</i> on
the radio sounds like a peak-hour tune from Ibiza?"</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">All these
smash hits have the AutoTuned big-chorus tune bolted on top. But underneath,
the riffs and vamps, the pulses and pounding beats, the glistening synthetic
textures and the overall banging boshing feel: it's like it's been beamed
straight in from Gatecrasher or The Love Parade circa 1999. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">This week
The Quietus <a href="http://thequietus.com/articles/06073-a-plague-of-soars-warps-in-the-fabric-of-pop " target="_blank">published a piece</a> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">that pinpoints a particularly bludgeoning and tyrannical aspect of the now-pop,
what writer Daniel Barrow calls "the Soar": the wooshing,
upwards-ascending, hands-in-the-air chorus, which has been divorced from its
original context (Nineties underground dance-and-drug culture) and repurposed
as the trigger for a kind of release-without-release.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Barrow's
references to steroids ("<i>the steroided architecture of these tracks</i>",
etc) captures the unsettling "stacked" quality of these recordings.
Like the images you find in bodybuilding magazines, the now-pop can often be at
once grotesque and mesmerising.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Strangely
Barrow makes no mention of the tune that seems like the now-pop's defining
anthem and blueprint, a song that is still omnipresent many months after it
first hit big: "Dynamite" by Taio Cruz. His name, with its odd
unplaceable quality (it sounds like some kind of Asian-Hispanic hybrid) suits
the Esperanto-like qualities of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the
now-pop. Although<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>often described by
hostile critics as Eurohouse, it is simply and purely international,
post-geographical, panglobal. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/iqnQN5vhoQM" width="320" youtube-src-id="iqnQN5vhoQM"></iframe></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><span style="font-size: 12pt;">(How apt
that the video for "Dynamite" is preceded here by a commercial for
Las Vegas tourism, since that city is both Mecca and model for a certain idea
of "a really good time"</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">that
is celebrated by so many of these in-the-club anthems).</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">I started
out <i>loathing</i> "Dynamite". The "ay-o" bit in particular
always made me think of "day-o" as in Harry Belafonte's
"Banana-Boat Song." </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/H5dpBWlRANE" width="320" youtube-src-id="H5dpBWlRANE"></iframe></div><br /><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><br /></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Gradually
I succumbed--or perhaps I should say,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>"submitted"--and started to think of "Dynamite" as
possessing a certain dumb genius. Especially the line that goes "<i>I'm wearing all my favourite brands
brands brands brands</i>". </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">But
looking from the vantage point of my forthcoming book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction To Its Own Past</i>,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>what's most striking and unsettling about the
now-pop is its not-so-now-ness: the fact that in the year 2011, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">mainstream pop sounds like the late Nineties</i>.
</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4m48GqaOz90" width="320" youtube-src-id="4m48GqaOz90"></iframe></div><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p>The Black
Eyed Peas pioneered all this of course, creating a sort of 21st Century update
of all that European "hip house" from even earlier in the 90s (Snap,
Technotronic, et al) and working in some Eighties-retro flavours here and
there.</span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JwQZQygg3Lk" width="320" youtube-src-id="JwQZQygg3Lk"></iframe></div><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p>"The
Time (Dirty Bit)" also qualifies, abundantly, for the category of
"dumb genius".</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">And as with
"Dynamite", there's that forced insistence that everyone's
"having the time of their lives". So much of the now-pop has this
vaguely coercive undercurrent. As Barrow notes, the producers know how to work
your reflexes, they've got pop pleasure down to a science, they target those
euphoria-centers of the brain as ruthlessly as soft drinks stoked with
high-fructose corn syrup.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Kids love
this kind of stuff, of course. At the</span><i><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></i><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Nickelodeon
TV channel's<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kids</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">' </span></i><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Choice</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">
Awards show in Los Angeles </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">a few weeks ago, The Black Eyed
Peas performed "The Time": what with the dazzling lights and
deafening volume, it really was like a rave for children.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We were there with our own kids:
five-year-old Eli in particular is totally into the now-pop. </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Recently, driving in the car and flicking back
and forth between pop stations and classic rock stations, he opined that
Katy Perry was "rock'n'roll"<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>but was quite adamant that The Stones's "It's Only
Rock'n'Roll" was "not rock'n'roll".<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> He</span> wouldn't be budged.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5ZbPokQvEXU" width="320" youtube-src-id="5ZbPokQvEXU"></iframe></div><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p>Perhaps Eli is correct, in spirit.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">The
substance of the now-pop has absolutely</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">nothing in common with rock'n'roll or indeed any form of live-band
music.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">But perhaps its blaring bombast
is the true modern sound of teenage (and pre-teenage) rampage.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Maybe all this steroid-maxed uber-pop is just
as artfully mindless and cunningly vacant as the records made by The Sweet with
Chinn & Chapman,</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">the production team
who were the Seventies equivalents to Dr. Luke and Will.i.am: expert
programmers of</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">artificial excitement,
architects of crescendo and explosion.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-spacerun: yes;"> Eli's</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> a big Sweet fan too.</span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mXvmSaE0JXA" width="320" youtube-src-id="mXvmSaE0JXA"></iframe></div><br /><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>SIMON REYNOLDShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01282478701882900354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6388160584739793679.post-86045081796880745292023-11-09T21:00:00.000-08:002023-11-09T21:00:50.785-08:00Let's Do The Time Warp Again (the Guardian, October 13th 1990) <p> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKeBnxvTABkvZP9uh22anQv9Ow4yEDtHgibRPpWMUYPouixgcIuqYjgop55aAZ7td68OT-svOK7JMFSLuBs-kgaCqstvInFHiuyk80gg3xpSGNZTxXHWRCf91NuDn_yzu4h3LaNagLnnf6ZPB0NPGRGijUjsiPRPrVIrtGH3ClnCqNbttmMK5YdQ/s2031/Simon%20Reynolds%20retro%20critique%20Guardian%20October%2013%201990.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1702" data-original-width="2031" height="536" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKeBnxvTABkvZP9uh22anQv9Ow4yEDtHgibRPpWMUYPouixgcIuqYjgop55aAZ7td68OT-svOK7JMFSLuBs-kgaCqstvInFHiuyk80gg3xpSGNZTxXHWRCf91NuDn_yzu4h3LaNagLnnf6ZPB0NPGRGijUjsiPRPrVIrtGH3ClnCqNbttmMK5YdQ/w640-h536/Simon%20Reynolds%20retro%20critique%20Guardian%20October%2013%201990.jpg" width="640" /></a></p><p>Startled to be reminded just how long now - and how far back - I have been gnashing my teeth about retro-paralysis! </p><p>And in fact there's a riff using the "re" that I would later use in Retromania - not recycling, though, I don't think - it just re-occurred to me. </p><p>(And in fact <a href="https://retromaniabysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2022/01/pre-echoes-of-retromania-4-of_9.html" target="_blank">someone else got there earlier</a>, which I didn't know in 1990, or in 2010). </p><p>(I guess reinventing the wheel would be no small achievement, if you never even saw a wheel in the first place). </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>SIMON REYNOLDShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01282478701882900354noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6388160584739793679.post-22779524791902522252023-11-07T09:35:00.000-08:002023-11-07T09:35:56.540-08:00Routes and futures<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgX50rChziXPS8cOJYN8aGypNHvtMRyiteb_gXpIiDb6DFw_D6hYOBKzs9vQlZ4obTu9O2hmxoqcomtv8ezE5We4Y8avFAyDDGrn3xTq-GvgZSmVjFtJRdF9tI2qOMh-pwf1YdPh7c2g2AybiWaZsUlmJ0O_SfbdS0P4iryKiW0_VptK1gCYKB6SiU67A/s3708/SR%20reviews%20kodwo%20eshun%20routes%20from%20the%20jungle.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1224" data-original-width="3708" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgX50rChziXPS8cOJYN8aGypNHvtMRyiteb_gXpIiDb6DFw_D6hYOBKzs9vQlZ4obTu9O2hmxoqcomtv8ezE5We4Y8avFAyDDGrn3xTq-GvgZSmVjFtJRdF9tI2qOMh-pwf1YdPh7c2g2AybiWaZsUlmJ0O_SfbdS0P4iryKiW0_VptK1gCYKB6SiU67A/w640-h212/SR%20reviews%20kodwo%20eshun%20routes%20from%20the%20jungle.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Various Artists</p><p>Routes from the Jungle: Escape Velocity Volume 1</p><p>Melody Maker, 1995</p><p>by Simon Reynolds </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>SIMON REYNOLDShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01282478701882900354noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6388160584739793679.post-48925667816258204492023-11-02T14:30:00.007-07:002023-11-02T18:19:03.346-07:00the trap decade <p>[alternate ending to this <a href="https://theface.com/music/trap-music-gucci-future-thug-travis" target="_blank">2010s-surveying piece</a> on the Trap Internationale for <i>The Face</i>]</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">At the moment, trap – indisputably the sonic vanguard of mainstream pop – is locked in a vicious cycle: the desire of the underclass to become overlords. MCs could hardly be more explicit in their declaration of this deadly intent. In her #1 single “Bodak Yellow”, Cardi B talks about leaving behind stripping for rapping just like her spouse Offset talks about leaving behind trapping for rapping: “I don't gotta dance, I make money move… I'm a boss, you a worker, bitch, I make bloody moves.”</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">Listening to trap is paradoxical: immense creativity, flair, flamboyance, life-force, slamming right up against a deadening set of thematic constraints, somehow magically rewriting and re-rewriting the stale script into inexhaustible freshness. An absolute wealth of brilliance, an utter poverty of imagination. Rae Sremmurd may rap about being “Black Beatles”, but we’re a million miles from “All You Need Is Love” and “Imagine.” </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">The politics of trap revealed themselves, unfortunately, on the earlier Sremmurd single “Up Like Trump”, released in 2015. Swae Lee raps about reading Forbes like the Bible, Slim Jxmmi describes himself as a “money fiend,” and in the video, a Donald mask-wearing figure parties with the duo on the open top of a bus riding through Times Square. Speaking to Complex magazine at the time, Lee declared, “Donald Trump is cool…. I’m like, ‘That’s a cool motherfucker.’ He’s rich as fuck.” In a Guardian profile after their role model was elected, the duo defined Trumpism as “owning businesses, being bossed up” and seemed to have no regrets about making the song. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">Rejecting party politics for apolitical partying, Jxmmi said that “young people wanna rage”. Sremmurd and their fans are about “living lit” and banging “our heads against the wall”. It’s a fitting cap to the trap decade: a President whose taste runs to nouveau riche glitz, who runs the White House like a Mafioso.</p>SIMON REYNOLDShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01282478701882900354noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6388160584739793679.post-21200412342156652812023-10-20T14:59:00.001-07:002023-10-20T15:28:51.636-07:00Umbrellas in the Sun (Disques du Crepuscule / Factory Benelux DVD)<p><b><span face=""Arial",sans-serif">VARIOUS ARTISTS</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span face=""Arial",sans-serif"><b>UMBRELLAS IN
THE SUN: A CREPUSCULE/FACTORY BENELUX DVD 1979-1987<o:p></o:p></b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span face=""Arial",sans-serif"><b>(LTM )<o:p></o:p></b></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span face=""Arial",sans-serif"><b><i>The Wire</i>, long ago</b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span face=""Arial",sans-serif"><b>by Simon Reynolds</b></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> Founded in <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">Brussels</st1:city></st1:place> at the dawn of
the Eighties, Les Disques Du Crepuscule was operated by a clutch of Belgian
aesthetes suffering from an unhealthy infatuation with Factory Records. They
swiftly formed an alliance with their <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">Manchester</st1:city></st1:place>
idols and jointly released records by the likes of A Certain Ratio in the <st1:place w:st="on">Low Countries</st1:place> (hence Factory Benelux).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now the equally Fac-obsessed reissue label
LTM-- not content with echoing the Belgian imprint in its very name, an acronym
for Les Temps Modernes--is paying tribute with this splendid DVD of promos and
live footage of Crepuscule/Benelux acts. </p><p class="MsoNormal"><span face=""Arial",sans-serif">Vintage videos can be embarrassingly
dated, but the bulk of the material on <i>Umbrellas</i> gives off a sense of
“limited means, effectively used.” ACR’s “Back To The Start” is a case in
point, juxtaposing murky hand-held film of the band shaking their stuff in a
field after nightfall with scenes of children dancing on the edge of an indoor
swimming pool. The sallow lighting, oddly angled shots, and strange bodily
geometries perfectly suit the group’s dislocated disco, its parched percussion
draped with the bled-like-veal vocal pallor of Martha Tilson.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span face=""Arial",sans-serif"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span face=""Arial",sans-serif"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/QtaFQ3rm--M" width="320" youtube-src-id="QtaFQ3rm--M"></iframe></span></div><span face=""Arial",sans-serif"><br /><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Josef K--like ACR, Northern punk-funkers
with cropped hair and very clean ears--appear here performing “Sorry For
Laughing” on a television pop show. The simple but clever twist is that the TV
footage intermittently appears projected, bluescreen-style, onto a lump of Gak
nestling on a girl’s bare stomach. Manipulating the goo, she distends the
images of the band as they bob on her belly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jXp4MQNf5kE" width="320" youtube-src-id="jXp4MQNf5kE"></iframe></div><br /><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal">On a purely sonic level, <i>Umbrellas</i>’ highlight is<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Cabaret Voltaire’s “Sluggin’ For Jesus,” the
lead track off 1981’s<span style="color: black;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Three Crepuscule Tracks</i> EP (arguably the group’s peak). Laced with
American televangelist prattle, the entrancing Karoli-funk groove is
accompanied by </span>light-flickered images of the guys fondling their synths
and, in Richard Kirk’s case, scritching away at a violin.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/L4FnPwx2h9A" width="320" youtube-src-id="L4FnPwx2h9A"></iframe></div><br /><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Close behind “Sluggin’” is the exquisitely
plangent threnody for Ian Curtis that is The Durutti Column’s “Never Known”
(although, for mystifying reasons, the track is here titled “Marie Louise
Gardens”). With Vini Reilly generating such agonizing beauty of sound, all
that’s required is the sparest of visuals, and that's what we get:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the “missing boy” alone in a deserted public
park at twilight, caressing the guitar strings with his finger-tips.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/c2GFGsFdURU" width="320" youtube-src-id="c2GFGsFdURU"></iframe></div><br /><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal">In scarcity terms, though, the gems here
comprise the fabulous monochrome footage of Malaria! onstage performing “White
Sky, White Sea” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tuxedomoon’s
“Litebulb Overkill,” also live, but juxtaposed with Eurail travelogue footage
(what looks like France seen from a moving train); and the 23 minute long film
of a performance by Belgian funkateers Marine live juxtaposed with arty,
kaleidoscopic visuals. Most known for the existensialist Chic of “Life In
Reverse”, Marine’s entire aesthetic was based on the debut Benelux
release, ACR’s emaciated cover of “Shack Up”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/y_vYzJt4YSs" width="320" youtube-src-id="y_vYzJt4YSs"></iframe></div><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p>This DVD sags somewhat near its end as we enter the undistinguished
and rudderless mid-80s phase of Factory output (the sub-Sade café bleu-isms of
Kalima, anybody? I didn’t think so). But overall <i>Umbrellas In the Sun</i> is
a wonderful document that conveys Crepuscule’s ultra-refined Euro-vision while
also capturing captures a lost moment of art-into-pop infusion.<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-_tz7yWn988" width="320" youtube-src-id="-_tz7yWn988"></iframe></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/H-vgmjzjkLc" width="320" youtube-src-id="H-vgmjzjkLc"></iframe></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HdDxCMf4NGw" width="320" youtube-src-id="HdDxCMf4NGw"></iframe></div><div><br /></div>ohmylord, this period of Anthony H. Wislon A&Ring is quite something innit <br /><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p>SIMON REYNOLDShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01282478701882900354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6388160584739793679.post-17996889545874388182023-10-16T09:37:00.001-07:002023-10-20T15:15:47.449-07:00Devo - Hardcore Devo - December 15 1990<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjucmpNe2WnLqY64cBIzylYhquqYafpa5TmYBUCKlYwCD0YjbHcZR3JwpWZiFMs5hSIeGAbOHb1Anc_6wkOjb4WNVr0spSD0p6LgSJj2Fo7wfkwWdLuxvvTr4cJ1RgfF5TsET5ap1p1-EZi6xIedWvIt55YozfOxf53wQTvpeIxvpnZaPc0wItqptqSpA/s1441/devo%20horrible%20heads%20advert%20series%204.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1441" data-original-width="1047" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjucmpNe2WnLqY64cBIzylYhquqYafpa5TmYBUCKlYwCD0YjbHcZR3JwpWZiFMs5hSIeGAbOHb1Anc_6wkOjb4WNVr0spSD0p6LgSJj2Fo7wfkwWdLuxvvTr4cJ1RgfF5TsET5ap1p1-EZi6xIedWvIt55YozfOxf53wQTvpeIxvpnZaPc0wItqptqSpA/w466-h640/devo%20horrible%20heads%20advert%20series%204.jpg" width="466" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiw5a7Irok88YDSgWv-a2iYxnPBJEF2cO97NlHgg6gFFnBsA1YURZcQETQde0nzYEYJO9TodxCfiebY3FHJ4ED3E_TDiBBPKEpsr5FDbBr625kPfieIRRT9cXpfK7x6sjt8laFr0zxrksKPi9qbXdcXt26RO-HJUVcLjp4prKnsEyaggpj34CyzvgeuQ/s1354/devo%20horrible%20heads%20advert%20series%203.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1354" data-original-width="1016" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiw5a7Irok88YDSgWv-a2iYxnPBJEF2cO97NlHgg6gFFnBsA1YURZcQETQde0nzYEYJO9TodxCfiebY3FHJ4ED3E_TDiBBPKEpsr5FDbBr625kPfieIRRT9cXpfK7x6sjt8laFr0zxrksKPi9qbXdcXt26RO-HJUVcLjp4prKnsEyaggpj34CyzvgeuQ/w480-h640/devo%20horrible%20heads%20advert%20series%203.jpg" width="480" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhP5cKNiR7WjbV7_o9D5DTFwnv2vjNIzNIXqKzr8thwEGZp_B_2ZzQTJRyQ_F-lqzVFu7nm2r6XC_2oeWe22XL2rYmTOHIQglkOiI4-q6gNuiDuGZE3h0GNk89a9wFr2KSkNsvbCuSEtCLwENE79i_49J698nBnAJQ4kySEl9TbGJHzELEUZCT4cUgJLw/s1397/devo%20horrible%20heads%20advert%20series%202.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; 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text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAHL8DEQFS7HqvLneriiwMSpEifJ6QYVchCJvhx-0I7zwMtKqpV3IGFaSbRItGEd0VX0kBejUFx05Eqzv7ZJ1eJSND3jWDilCGybZ-CVKcJIRnPUXAKSMCCtnWKMc9B2IjKgnBPSQdJm6LWGeyxiUy-5MYiYddH2hPjRoM3BVfNkOqPYddg9YBHwc/s2083/Simon%20Reynolds%20Devo%20Hardcore%20Devo%20Dec%2015%201990.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2083" data-original-width="490" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAHL8DEQFS7HqvLneriiwMSpEifJ6QYVchCJvhx-0I7zwMtKqpV3IGFaSbRItGEd0VX0kBejUFx05Eqzv7ZJ1eJSND3jWDilCGybZ-CVKcJIRnPUXAKSMCCtnWKMc9B2IjKgnBPSQdJm6LWGeyxiUy-5MYiYddH2hPjRoM3BVfNkOqPYddg9YBHwc/s16000/Simon%20Reynolds%20Devo%20Hardcore%20Devo%20Dec%2015%201990.jpg" /></a></div><br /><p></p><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUNzjYKiFN4uKKTqdJ3eu0X81y2Xjjh7jN1O5bVhh3fIecKzh6UMlTTIYkqdaFfV9r61O_8TM58aSbQd5waHT65TUEDjyLsmmMtQvfP0a-tZnvu9vvRzUi9KVsfPOoutJBSpwoMqibzXQ5BqhKSgOT0CJpzmvx5PXyX-BLjWm_7eGFK-x0RoKTvOGpNA/s2965/devo%20horrible%20heads%20advert%20series.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2965" data-original-width="2149" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUNzjYKiFN4uKKTqdJ3eu0X81y2Xjjh7jN1O5bVhh3fIecKzh6UMlTTIYkqdaFfV9r61O_8TM58aSbQd5waHT65TUEDjyLsmmMtQvfP0a-tZnvu9vvRzUi9KVsfPOoutJBSpwoMqibzXQ5BqhKSgOT0CJpzmvx5PXyX-BLjWm_7eGFK-x0RoKTvOGpNA/w464-h640/devo%20horrible%20heads%20advert%20series.jpg" width="464" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>SIMON REYNOLDShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01282478701882900354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6388160584739793679.post-75861677275507353352023-10-13T18:51:00.000-07:002023-10-13T18:51:02.218-07:00Vermorel / Westwood<p> (for Artforum)</p><p class="MsoNormal">Fred Vermorel achieved both renown and notoriety for his
unorthodox approach to pop biography and as a theorist of fame and fandom. But
1996’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vivienne Westwood: Fashion,
Perversity and the Sixties Laid Bare</i> was his most eccentric statement
yet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For a start, the book was as much
about Westwood’s partner Malcolm McLaren as the legendary designer
herself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her story was ably chronicled
in an imaginary interview weaved together from magazine quotes and half-remembered
ancedotes stemming from Vermorel’s long association with the punk couture duo
and the Sex Pistols milieu. But the book really came alive with the central
section: Vermorel’s memoir of Sixties London, when he and McLaren were
art-school accomplices. The longest and most vivid part of the book, it’s
packed with fascinating digressions on topics such as the semiotics of
cigarette smoking and the atmosphere of all-night art cinema houses. Among
Vermorel’s several provocative assertions is the claim that pop music back then
simply wasn’t as important as made out by subsequent false memorials to the
Sixties, but was regarded as unserious, a mere backdrop to other bohemian or
artistic activities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Posing as a profile
of a fashion icon, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vivienne Westwood</i>
presents the reader with an outlandish blend of cultural etiology (it doubles
as an autopsy on the Sixties’s impossible dreams and analysis of its perverse
psychology) and<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>triangular love story.
Vermorel and Westwood emerge as both still besotted with the incorrigible
McLaren, despite having each “broken up” with him long ago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">-<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->Simon Reynolds<o:p></o:p></p>SIMON REYNOLDShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01282478701882900354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6388160584739793679.post-47404159680835726902023-10-03T12:43:00.002-07:002023-10-03T14:26:51.918-07:00me and Stereolab / me and Stereolab spoofed<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFuZthJd_Ctpd7YHhgIxcSiw5X7dmE68FM8QB2M3RbEPJO339NGw19JLUjtPxxoSktf0aX0UaCH_BQOkgKBCQMvzXav-rAxRhB4TE58cQ52ETJL5g0obPUxfsokRgIgS8NFDKRT8OgsblkHtXN_GNiGVaA7lwmGKvCqu8yr20s3CeiQV-aNHB7uJmlYw/s3786/SR%20Stereolab%20interview%20july%2016%201994.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3786" data-original-width="2747" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFuZthJd_Ctpd7YHhgIxcSiw5X7dmE68FM8QB2M3RbEPJO339NGw19JLUjtPxxoSktf0aX0UaCH_BQOkgKBCQMvzXav-rAxRhB4TE58cQ52ETJL5g0obPUxfsokRgIgS8NFDKRT8OgsblkHtXN_GNiGVaA7lwmGKvCqu8yr20s3CeiQV-aNHB7uJmlYw/w464-h640/SR%20Stereolab%20interview%20july%2016%201994.jpg" width="464" /></a><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">My first proper sit-down in-person interview with Stereolab </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">(<a href="https://reynoldsretro.blogspot.com/2008/05/stereolab-interview-melody-maker-july.html" target="_blank">more readable text only version here</a>)</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Expertly lampooned in <i>Melody Maker</i> by a reader a few weeks later (or possibly a colleague pretending to be a reader? David Bennun did the letters page that week).</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFMsWBxAx1JJcK7UWkgDehl62euu3KjG3aM-RBj62o2R4mefT8O82fR59n6XCbA7lhhuADbcvYrtFnZ0AdyaRa1A8Yif97fDmAI23SqXz_43Vmd9ryB50nvZdDkj5C8UWd73i-6UkuLf2pkWSt3uOOyiKDjQ0UauI5q3-f0_7lVOM5GQPBD_FZUprX0Q/s451/backlash%20august%2094%20spoofing%20me%20and%20stereolab%20close%201.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="451" data-original-width="425" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFMsWBxAx1JJcK7UWkgDehl62euu3KjG3aM-RBj62o2R4mefT8O82fR59n6XCbA7lhhuADbcvYrtFnZ0AdyaRa1A8Yif97fDmAI23SqXz_43Vmd9ryB50nvZdDkj5C8UWd73i-6UkuLf2pkWSt3uOOyiKDjQ0UauI5q3-f0_7lVOM5GQPBD_FZUprX0Q/w378-h400/backlash%20august%2094%20spoofing%20me%20and%20stereolab%20close%201.jpg" width="378" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8Z2s8EzA3uYRBWkhm2gaOJq9UxT9sxpYIBIA-Sws-Vhvz85DQ1qjtuGGEcuUHAwa93bT9DbhRposhBZB-_8t0oWt0LrPsxyjyhyMb20Z-sn_IaqOUp9difl3p4EKakkD-y1lhyphenhyphenWdFzFvidGwYIHRr5oHw7bPeYwdmHu3rfwqTZ1He_omoIO7eCCrJKQ/s936/backlash%20august%2094%20spoofing%20me%20and%20stereolab%202.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="936" data-original-width="412" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8Z2s8EzA3uYRBWkhm2gaOJq9UxT9sxpYIBIA-Sws-Vhvz85DQ1qjtuGGEcuUHAwa93bT9DbhRposhBZB-_8t0oWt0LrPsxyjyhyMb20Z-sn_IaqOUp9difl3p4EKakkD-y1lhyphenhyphenWdFzFvidGwYIHRr5oHw7bPeYwdmHu3rfwqTZ1He_omoIO7eCCrJKQ/w282-h640/backlash%20august%2094%20spoofing%20me%20and%20stereolab%202.jpg" width="282" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Other early Stereolab enthusiasm - mini-interview from<a href="https://reynoldsretro.blogspot.com/2017/02/kind-to-your-ass-ambient-and-chill-out.html" target="_blank"> a 1993 spread on Ambient as buzzword of '93</a>, where they sat alongside Main and Seefeel and the Telepathic Fish crew.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgleVPN0zXANIJKY6xtE2pFVh19A7nxXmZEl4mtrhnyTxx31N0PGyIuoCOWCfFxXmFomPjusBs1rjv8UK_Iz6l6cS2YqhneKgnYNzSXCdRdXsXSN-hzEAig0cGpFgMaXf2VTtbs6dRflAzqZ8P_In3zv4f3IHWv8dyiAHLawbAi6Y3puiXMx341qub5EA/s1682/stereolab%20sept%202%201993.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1610" data-original-width="1682" height="612" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgleVPN0zXANIJKY6xtE2pFVh19A7nxXmZEl4mtrhnyTxx31N0PGyIuoCOWCfFxXmFomPjusBs1rjv8UK_Iz6l6cS2YqhneKgnYNzSXCdRdXsXSN-hzEAig0cGpFgMaXf2VTtbs6dRflAzqZ8P_In3zv4f3IHWv8dyiAHLawbAi6Y3puiXMx341qub5EA/w640-h612/stereolab%20sept%202%201993.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">And Single of the Week #2 also in late '93</div></div><p></p><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWsL3oCCOnvIaUitE_1MsBfhMBLqZLvYHOp5uKigRWcDmyTiNhUYPgZI4AgQOtq9sU10ceyLIqkIhotmkNbZVrbgR55xleSb-GYuwdlOtvu8QOX-SgmfLg5Bpuw7ZLa856LGbvzGwcS-X-_Bkyhjh8T3zkY0cu_aQS1dEi1FCL7wCEU4H3T1UfhUKkjg/s1539/SR%20stereolab%20single%20of%20the%20week%20aug%2028%2093.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1539" data-original-width="1018" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWsL3oCCOnvIaUitE_1MsBfhMBLqZLvYHOp5uKigRWcDmyTiNhUYPgZI4AgQOtq9sU10ceyLIqkIhotmkNbZVrbgR55xleSb-GYuwdlOtvu8QOX-SgmfLg5Bpuw7ZLa856LGbvzGwcS-X-_Bkyhjh8T3zkY0cu_aQS1dEi1FCL7wCEU4H3T1UfhUKkjg/w424-h640/SR%20stereolab%20single%20of%20the%20week%20aug%2028%2093.jpg" width="424" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Also wrote about this mini-LP in Spin that year</p><p><br /></p><p><b>STEREOLAB </b></p><p><b>The Groop Played Space Age Batchelor Pad Music </b></p><p><b>Spin, 1993 </b></p><p>Stereolab is one of the more intriguing groups to emerge from Britain's now-kaput dreampop scene. And this mini-LP is the group's most artful gambit yet. The title and packaging is a sly parody-homage to the "exotica" genre of the '50s, when tropical-scented, easy-listening albums by Martin Denny, Arthur Lyman, etc, were designed so that the modern bachelor could (a) show off the stereophonic range of his state-of-the-art hi-fi, and (b) get his date "in the mood" before making his move. </p><p>It's a good joke, and a logical evolution for dreampop, since My Bloody Valentine, Cocteau Twins, Slowdive et al. always made for a consummate seduction soundtrack. Stereolab knows its musical history (it titled a recent single "John Cage Bubblegum") and on this album it explores the secret links between trance rock, ambient and Muzak. The result could be dubbed "kitschadelic": at once tacky and celestial, synthetic and sublime. On the opener, "Avant Garde M.O.R.", Laetitita Saider's serene and listeless vocals (midway between Nico and Astrud Gilberto) float through a fragrant mist of acoustic guitars, marimbas, and mood synths. "Space Age Bachelor Pad Music (Mellow)" could be the sort of jaunty, piped music you'd hear in a carpet store, but instead of being below the threshold of audibility, it's at full volume, so that its weirdness is in-your-face. The sequel, "Space Age Bachelor Pad Music (Foamy)" sounds like a Muzak vent that's fallen into a swimming pool. </p><p>The pace picks up on Side Two (New Wave), with "We're Not Adult Orientated". At first, the song's reedy Farfisa and staccato beat really do sound Noo Wave, but the track develops into something that's less like the Cars and more like the motorik style of the German band Neu!, a brimming, tingling, exultant onrush of sound that simulates the sensation of gliding down the Autobahn. </p><p>At times, Stereolab's parody of blandness is very nearly merely bland. But at its best, Stereolab is making the Muzak of the spheres.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>I also wrote up the whole <i>Melody Maker</i> interview as a Q and A for my friends's independent magazine <b>The Lizard</b> (someone should digitize the whole six issue run of that, it was a much superior branching off a monthly full-colour publication called <i>Lime Lizard</i>, that itself had a lot of good stuff in it)</p><p><br /></p><p><b>Stereolab</b></p><p><b>The Lizard</b></p><p><b>1994 </b></p><p><b>SIMON REYNOLDS quizzes TIM GANE and LAETITIA SADIER about muzak, minimalism, motorik, Marxism and their fab new LP "Mars Audiac Quintet".</b></p><p><br /></p><p>All the stuff that you were rehabilitating last year with "Space Age Bachelor Pad Music" and tracks like "Avant-Garde MOR" --muzak, mood and moog music, stereo-testing LPs, 'exotica'--is now tres hip. First there was Research's "Incredibly Strange Music" book/CD, now there's Joseph Lanza's "Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening and Other Mood Song", Bar/None's anthology of avant-muzak legend Juan Garcia Esquivel (coincidentally titled "Space Age Bachelor Pad Music"), and so on, ad nauseam. All that stuff appears to be on the verge of entering the canon of acceptable, cool music.</p><p> Tim: "My only problem with 'Incredibly Strange Music', or at least the first Volume (I've heard # 2 is better) is that it seemed to be trying to attract people for kitschy, B-Movie reasons. You know how people have all the B-Movie posters but probably never saw the films? There's a difference between putting that music on at a party to make people laugh, and genuinely liking it as music. For me, muzak, moog, exotica, etc, it did a lot of things much earlier than other more respected, artistically serious forms of music did. Maybe for different reasons, but that doesn't take away from the fact that it did them, and created often shockingly original connections or juxtapositions of sound and genre. A lot of the reason why it's popular now is that it was very modern music."</p><p> So you're saying that it's the context of a music's creation, and of its consumption, that determines how seriously people take it? And that muzak is denigrated because of the way it was used, i.e. background listening?</p><p> "A lot of it was done for the crassest of reasons. Martin Denny's Moog album was obviously a cash-in, but what he created had a resonance that was far greater than if it had been done for high art reasons. It's kind of beyond high art or low art, it mixes up those categories. And the best music should be confusing, something you can't immediately decide what it's all about. And that applies to Stereolab--we want it to have lots of spaces where the listener has to decide 'is it avant-garde? Is it pop? Is it just self-indulgence?' Music can be surrealist if you look at it the right way.</p><p> "My big attraction to mood & moog music etc is that it's about the future. But 'cos it was made in the '50s and '60s, its idea of 'the future' was quite crass, but also full of optimism and infinite possibilities. And that's different to now, where the future isn't about infinite possibilities..."</p><p> It's about infinite anxieties.</p><p> "There's an attraction there, that people thought 'the future is gonna be fabulous, and wow, this is the weird music we're gonna hear there'."</p><p> Other elements that you draw on seem purely nostalgic, though, like all the ba-ba-ba-ba backing harmonies straight out of French '60s MOR.</p><p> "There's a problem with that, which is you can get too close to El Records--too cloying, and such a close copy of the original that it's pointless. The point is to take that music and juxtapose it with something else, something it's never been associated with before. So that you create your own personality and your own sound. There's no point in fetishising something, copying all the details precisely..."</p><p> Because you create something that just sounds dated... I suppose Stereolab's prime juxtaposition of hitherto antithetical elements is the way your sound fuses ultra-naff middle aged easy listening with ultra-cool underground rock: the trance-minimalism of the Velvets, Silver Apples, The Modern Lovers,Faust, Neu!, et al.</p><p> "My favourite music of all time is German music from the early Seventies. Laetitia too. Hearing Faust for the first time, it completely changed me. I don't know why, but that music has a power over me that is just a little bit above everything else. But that said, I don't like the Faust & Neu! thing to be bludgeoned to death."</p><p> A lot of your songs do rely on the motorik beat that Kraftwerk and Neu! used, though. That very metronomic, unsyncopated, uninflected rhythm, that's almost anti-rock'n'roll even though you can trace it back from Neu! through The Modern Lover's "Roadrunner", The Doors' "LA Woman" and Canned Heat's "On The Road Again", to Steppenwolf's "Born To Be Wild". Why do you love that motorik feel?</p><p> Laetitia: "You can never get bored with that beat. There's a discipline there, but never as an oppressor, always as something liberating. I find rock'n'roll really alienating, so I'm glad that Neu! exists."</p><p> Tim: "Krautrock is also very anti-muso--it has spaces where it's free form, but it's always done in a way that's non-musicianly. There's no solos or self-indulgence. It's spontaneous and exploratory, but not in that jazz sense of musicians playing to their full extent. I still don't know what the precedent for Neu! and Faust is. I always have this argument with some friends in France, who say 'well, the French don't really play rock music, it isn't really in the culture'. And I say 'well, until Neu! & Co, rock hadn't been part of German culture, but they took it and made it into something that no one in America or England had dreamed of. It was an expression of something very particular to that country, and yet it was far in advance of anything going on in the USA or the UK."</p><p> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~</p><p>'Ping Pong' is a critique of capitalism's in-built cyclical crises of slump and recovery, masquerading as Francoise Hardy-style Gallic girl-pop; "Wow and Flutter" is a chug-a-long World Of Twist meets Neu! anthem, whose chorus--"it's not eternal, imperishable, oh yes it will go"--gleefully anticipates capitalism's fall. So, Laetitia, are you a card-carrying Marxist?</p><p> Laetitia: "There is something there that I probably agree with. I've read 'The Communist Manifesto' and that was written over a century ago, but some of it still stands up. Some of it is obsolete, cos it was written at a certain time. I don't like the term 'being a Marxist' 'cos that makes it a religion or something. But it's true that Marx was a great thinker and there's a lot to be learned from his writings, even today"</p><p> Stereolab's ideas about integrating politics and pop are a helluva lot more sophisticated than most forms of agit-pop--specifically Manic Street Preachers, Rage Against Machine, Fun-Da-Mental, where there's a rather pat equation of hard politics and hard aggressive music. That whole combat rock posture. The trouble with that kind of agit-pop is that the punters who buy into that ethos seem to think that buying a CD or a concert ticket (and then standing in a crowd of likeminds) is somehow a 'contribution to the struggle'.</p><p> Tim: "All records are about self-image, in that you buy the music that reflects your sense of yourself and position in the world. It's about wanting to belong to a certain group. And that's not something you can change."</p><p> Laetitia; "That approach is not subversive at all, because it's obvious. So screaming = 'angry'. The real subversion lies where you don't expect it."</p><p> So Stereolab's political contribution resides in fostering a subtle, insidiously effective climate of critical awareness, as opposed to constructing a tenuous, shallow solidarity via slogans and calls-to-arms?</p><p> Tim: "There has to be a certain amount of thought process involved on the part of the listener. Like Dada--when they wanted to combat the First World War, instead of putting up posters that said 'We are against the War', they transformed it into an art thing that wasn't immediately or literally about the war, but evoked its horror and absurdity. The Situationists did the same thing, with 'detournement'".</p><p> I was a big fan of the Situationists when I was younger, having read of them in interviews with Malcolm McLaren and initially assuming they were some fabulously subversive, evil rock band called The Situationists. Anyway, like you, I was very taken by their playful, mischievous forms of subversion--like pasting speech bubbles over advertising hoardings so that the people spouted anti-bourgeois rhetoric or surreal poetry. At the same time, the Yippies in America were doing similar kinds of agit-prop pranks, like proposing a pig for President. Eventually, however, the far-left and anarchist radicals of the late Sixties realised that Dadaist wit was no match for the batons and bullets of state power. And many of the idealists who were mobilised by 1968 evolved into terrorists units--the Weathermen in American, the RAF in Germany--and waged war on the State, fought fire with fire. I mention all this because I remember Laetitia once said in an interview that she believed revolution would necessarily involve bloodshed and violence.</p><p> Laetitita: "It's inevitable. The other day I was thinking about this, wondering: 'if revolution really does happen, what do we do with people like John Major? Do we kill them? Do we brainwash them? Do we get them to mop the streets?' When it gets that concrete, it's 'fucking hell!' Cos that's a hell of a responsibility. And that's why such a lot of revolutions, like the Maoists, involved so much blood and slaughter."</p><p> I sometimes whether the problem is not capitalism versus socialism, but industrialism itself. The Communist Bloc, as we all know, was state capitalist, not socialist--the surplus value generated by workers went to the Nation instead of private shareholders, which just meant that it went to finance the USSR's military-industrial complex. In some respects--like polluting the environment--Soviet state capitalism was worse than its Western equivalent. But who knows, even if 'proper' socialism was achieved--with real 'soviets', i.e. workers councils--maybe life would still be dreary. Because you'd still be living in a managerial, bureaucratic society, you'd still have people working on conveyor belts or cleaning toilets with minimum job satisfaction. Anyway, I guess what I'm trying to ask is: do you have a mental picture of utopia, of a perfectly run and just world?</p><p> Laetitia: "No, I don't have such a picture. I don't think there could ever be a perfect world. At the same time, there's plenty of scope for a much fairer system. At the moment 6 percent of the world owns 90 percent of the wealth. All that wealth should belong to nobody and to everybody! It's completely mathematical, things just don't add up in our system. And that's why there's slumps, that's why there's wars, and all these other dreadful things. So I can imagine a much better world. But when you get down to practical details, it's harder...."</p><p> I once asked another band this question (bizarrely enough, Dinosaur Jr, of all people...) Can you imagine a situation where you would take up arms against the state?</p><p> Laetitia: "The thing is that EVERYTHING must be used--your cleverness, the fact that you might be an acrobat... Everything from weapons to the little money that you have that can be invested properly, to cunning tricks. So, weapons, yes. They have a whole army out there, a police force, and they don't hesitate to use them."</p><p> Maybe the link between your interest in the Situationsts and the muzak & moog records is that very '60s sense of anticipation and excitement about the future. The Situationists' utopia was predicated on the idea of total automation leading to the abolition of work and a life of perpetual play. Which isn't so far from the idea of the comic book idea of the future, where your robot-butler brings your fried egg. The sleeves of the Moog records are full of techno-phile/neo-philiac, this-is-the-future iconography. It seems so naive now, but it's strangely touching and poignant.</p><p> Tim: "It's just the idea of the future as strange because it's so totally non-traditional."</p><p> Whereas now we know the future will be just like the past, only even more delapidated, and with hi-tech surveillance cameras in most urban areas.</p><p> Laetitia: "That's the trouble, people don't believe in the future, they don't believe in revolution, or a better world, anymore. They don't even want a better world. So therefore it's not gonna happen. You have to want it first and to think it's possible, in order to make it come about." </p><p><br /></p><p>&&&&&&&&&&&&&</p><p>This isn't even all my Stereolab writing! Did a thing on them and the Charles Long exhibition The Amorphous Body Study Center for <i>Artforum </i>(the CD they did of the music for that might be my single favorite album of theirs)<i>; </i> a review of <i>Emperor Tomato Ketchup</i>, a feature for Rolling Stone around that album. </p><p><br /></p><p>There can't be many artists I've written more about (Goldie? Who also got a single of the week the same week as 'Crumb Duck'. Young Gods? The Smiths / Morrissey, I guess... Aphex Twin... in recent-ish times Ariel Pink. And oddly Royal Trux)</p>SIMON REYNOLDShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01282478701882900354noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6388160584739793679.post-75561217463877747192023-10-01T17:25:00.004-07:002023-10-01T17:25:37.320-07:00Josef K - The Only Fun in Town / Sorry For Laughing + Young and Stupid (Melody Maker October 20 1990)<p> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkgGqROvJ5zdV7drf_2BPJhq_HkXL8RCIOJ5XfBkmSNLO2g22tieLZMzXCnhPo8xDsijQPNOkjitlX_c_9wEcocZWVmexpjrkAsEYM0DvtmP_IoucsX11qyszIdumEBGAXRZ-AL8g6RS3bXHF8swDnvdtYxcg18g7oUHhG07XjU03TBwa08feL_lE1/s2318/SR%20josef%20K%20reissues%201990%20October%2020.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2318" data-original-width="1589" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkgGqROvJ5zdV7drf_2BPJhq_HkXL8RCIOJ5XfBkmSNLO2g22tieLZMzXCnhPo8xDsijQPNOkjitlX_c_9wEcocZWVmexpjrkAsEYM0DvtmP_IoucsX11qyszIdumEBGAXRZ-AL8g6RS3bXHF8swDnvdtYxcg18g7oUHhG07XjU03TBwa08feL_lE1/w438-h640/SR%20josef%20K%20reissues%201990%20October%2020.jpg" width="438" /></a></p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkgGqROvJ5zdV7drf_2BPJhq_HkXL8RCIOJ5XfBkmSNLO2g22tieLZMzXCnhPo8xDsijQPNOkjitlX_c_9wEcocZWVmexpjrkAsEYM0DvtmP_IoucsX11qyszIdumEBGAXRZ-AL8g6RS3bXHF8swDnvdtYxcg18g7oUHhG07XjU03TBwa08feL_lE1/s2318/SR%20josef%20K%20reissues%201990%20October%2020.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2318" data-original-width="1589" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkgGqROvJ5zdV7drf_2BPJhq_HkXL8RCIOJ5XfBkmSNLO2g22tieLZMzXCnhPo8xDsijQPNOkjitlX_c_9wEcocZWVmexpjrkAsEYM0DvtmP_IoucsX11qyszIdumEBGAXRZ-AL8g6RS3bXHF8swDnvdtYxcg18g7oUHhG07XjU03TBwa08feL_lE1/s16000/SR%20josef%20K%20reissues%201990%20October%2020.jpg" /></a></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>SIMON REYNOLDShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01282478701882900354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6388160584739793679.post-61179136368676640022023-09-29T15:23:00.001-07:002023-09-29T15:23:07.391-07:00first glimmer of "post-rock" (Avant Rock and Ambient Techno: Eno's Bastard Children, September 1993)<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCBboZatbUAABJXS6GUzO7Focvs7tRHM4rYtz-dy8Y3H5b4sTZSIfZ0WGBRI0RP-UW4oDS-TASib9TcDBbtwM-Ey9Ps3IsIqLNtui8pBq-E3vP1d4-SDLJhPolqulxF_Q1T_q2nZcu48fCiL9kuxK5bEcWKmTffWj37p_F498RwyHE2Pi6n2O_Wv8meg/s680/ambient-in-the-UK-image-tshirt-anti-NWONW.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="498" data-original-width="680" height="293" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCBboZatbUAABJXS6GUzO7Focvs7tRHM4rYtz-dy8Y3H5b4sTZSIfZ0WGBRI0RP-UW4oDS-TASib9TcDBbtwM-Ey9Ps3IsIqLNtui8pBq-E3vP1d4-SDLJhPolqulxF_Q1T_q2nZcu48fCiL9kuxK5bEcWKmTffWj37p_F498RwyHE2Pi6n2O_Wv8meg/w400-h293/ambient-in-the-UK-image-tshirt-anti-NWONW.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiq-78h4hqhyWtyjxdUyVAJpP9h01ftc4aYpsBy_cTjB2nEk-n283oOgGPRJbx09dM7SHLq6UDTvb6DPZXo4b4zM_YNZTjBGa-LijPIOMk1Yg2f-FWd67vuKQkLCDPKf1QTIqNBrxCKGJipv69wtmx0caJz5c8xrHl2r2TEYtCwHLmRbLzrMX7ceGo/s1961/Simon%20Reynolds%20Avant%20Rock%20and%20Ambient%20Techno%20Eno%20Children%20MM%20sept%2025%201993%201.jpg" style="clear: left; display: inline; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1961" data-original-width="698" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiq-78h4hqhyWtyjxdUyVAJpP9h01ftc4aYpsBy_cTjB2nEk-n283oOgGPRJbx09dM7SHLq6UDTvb6DPZXo4b4zM_YNZTjBGa-LijPIOMk1Yg2f-FWd67vuKQkLCDPKf1QTIqNBrxCKGJipv69wtmx0caJz5c8xrHl2r2TEYtCwHLmRbLzrMX7ceGo/s16000/Simon%20Reynolds%20Avant%20Rock%20and%20Ambient%20Techno%20Eno%20Children%20MM%20sept%2025%201993%201.jpg" /></a></p><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQ3Zdlt0T1z9YYWVDOP_mv4p9gv_s3Camjr8LZ3aZWTJFaMs036q_inQVARLy8xhBW4JeuBPq3FgC4Xgk1dkKBlttDI9AoeN6M0tHzg4Yy7hlYfO9SVMpmCSuzdbPk2B_MaD4rdW1uVCM9JXxwc9rkT7c8iL-uQohrcFQRQ-OHkPVq_IHtV__I2wI/s1074/Simon%20Reynolds%20Avant%20Rock%20and%20Ambient%20Techno%20Eno%20Children%20MM%20sept%2025%201993%202.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1074" data-original-width="651" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQ3Zdlt0T1z9YYWVDOP_mv4p9gv_s3Camjr8LZ3aZWTJFaMs036q_inQVARLy8xhBW4JeuBPq3FgC4Xgk1dkKBlttDI9AoeN6M0tHzg4Yy7hlYfO9SVMpmCSuzdbPk2B_MaD4rdW1uVCM9JXxwc9rkT7c8iL-uQohrcFQRQ-OHkPVq_IHtV__I2wI/s16000/Simon%20Reynolds%20Avant%20Rock%20and%20Ambient%20Techno%20Eno%20Children%20MM%20sept%2025%201993%202.jpg" /></a></div>SIMON REYNOLDShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01282478701882900354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6388160584739793679.post-81529320235447351532023-09-24T10:31:00.000-07:002023-09-24T10:31:00.196-07:00In The Neighborhood - Ernest Hood<p><b>Ernest Hood</b></p><p><b>The Nation, November 5 2019</b></p><p><b>by Simon Reynolds</b></p><p><br /></p><p>South Pasadena, where I live, looks like the archetypal American suburban dream. Craftsman houses from its tree-lined streets featured in <i>Thirtysomething</i> and <i>Back to The Future</i>, to name just a couple of the town’s many screen cameos. And just a little way down our road, there’s a darling little house that’s frequently used in TV commercials. The film crews, craft services, and costuming trucks with their racks of garments were an amusing novelty at first. I particularly enjoyed the Christmas commercial, fake snow covering lawns while the sun shone down on yet another perfect 73-degree LA day. But then it got to be a drag, all those large vehicles parked up and down the road. The telegenic image of our street as an ideal neighborhood was detracting from the reality. </p><p>These mildly aggrieved thoughts flickered through my mind while listening to Ernest Hood’s <i>Neighborhoods</i>, a gorgeously tender sound-portrait of the all-American suburban idyll, originally released in 1975 but now lavishly reissued as a double-disc vinyl set. Woven out of plangent ripples of zither, wistful synthesizer refrains, and children’s voices field-recorded by Hood in the streets of his own Portland neighborhood, the album can’t help reminding you of <i>Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood</i>, <i>Sesame Street</i>, and the halcyon mood, if not, the sound of Vince Guaraldi’s jazzy <i>Peanuts </i>score.</p><p>The only album Hood ever released, <i>Neighborhoods</i> is considered by some to have invented ambient music a couple of years before Brian Eno. “Musical cinematography” was Hood’s own description in the original liner-notes. “It’s like watching a movie—you get establishing shots and you’re pulled in,” says his son Tom Hood by phone from South East Portland, where he still lives. “In that sense, it’s not ambient, because with that you’re meant to tune out, but <i>Neighborhoods</i> makes you focus.” </p><p>Each track is evocatively titled—“Saturday Morning Doze”, “The Secret Place”, “Night Games”—and comes with an impressionistic description designed to trigger mental movies, like the reference to “cards flapping in the bike spokes” in the text for “After School.” Sometimes the sense of place is very particular: Hood’s “caption” for “From the Bluff” mentions Portland’s Oaks Amusement Park and the “distant marshes” of the Willamette River. Layer upon layer of nostalgia enfolds the record: it’s partly inspired by Hood’s memories of his own pre-WW2 childhood in Charlotte, North Carolina, but the album also features snippets of his 4-year-old children recorded in 1950s Portland. Playing <i>Neighborhoods</i> today only adds extra layers: the charmingly dated synth is redolent of 1970s PBS, while each listener will affix personal memories date-stamped to the decades of their own childhoods and linked to their hometowns in other states or countries. </p><p>Hood was a professional musician who played guitar in jazz bands until polio - which he contracted in the late 1940s when still a young man – made the travelling lifestyle unworkable. He carried on doing session work and briefly ran a Portland jazz club, but increasingly his energy was dedicated to the obsessive documentation of everyday soundscapes. Even before reel-to-reel tape machines became readily available, Hood used an earlier technology, the wire-recorder—a machine that captured sound by magnetizing points on a thin steel wire. He captured bird song and frog noises and would give tapes of outdoor sounds to ill people who couldn’t leave their houses. Hood had a particular obsession with the sonic ambience of covered bridges and would make expeditions to record and sketch Oregon’s surviving examples. Tom Hood recalls making a pilgrimage with his father to his ancestral hometown in North Carolina and recording the entire road trip. He is currently combing through his dad’s vast unruly archive, digitizing tape reels with a view to possible further releases. </p><p>Hood’s preservationist impulse seemed to stem in part from an acute susceptibility to nostalgia. This pained awareness of the passage of time also expressed itself through a hostility to the modern world’s noise pollution. He wrote letters to local newspapers complaining about the assaultive properties of contemporary music. A flavor of this invective can be gleaned from the <i>Neighborhoods</i> liner note, which passingly rails against “commercial music purveyors” and “plastic novelty music played on military weapons.” One of Hood’s pipedreams was a low-power, small-radius radio station that would play 1920s and 1930s music, carefully leaving 30-second gaps between each 78 r.p.m. platter to allow for proper musical digestion. That never transpired, but Hood did help to found the volunteer-run local radio station KBOO FM, to which a portion of the proceeds from the <i>Neighborhoods</i> reissue will go. </p><p>*</p><p>Hood strikes an “it takes a village” note when he writes about how the record will trigger pangs in listeners no matter “which neighborhood you sprouted,” describing the project as the paying of “a debt to some beautiful and loving people…. older folks… who put up with my childhood pesters [and] played such an important role in the formation of comfortable memories.” Hood emphasizes that while the record is not something to play in gregarious situations like a party, “it is a social record in that it reminds us of the fact that most of us made our first social contacts… in our neighborhood streets.” </p><p>Reading Hood’s words while listening to his shimmery cascades of electronic instrumentation, which often have the flashback quality of a cinematic dissolve, I wondered to what extent the close-knit, placed-based nurturance that Hood celebrated still applied. I also wondered if I’d ever experienced anything like it. Britain has its romanticized myths of working-class community: a sentimental folk memory of housewives chatting over garden fences in back of terraced housing, next-door-neighbors popping round to borrow cups of sugar, and so forth. But once you go up the class ladder, self-contained privacy becomes the norm: as their descriptors imply, semi-detached and detached houses indicate a weakening of the social bond. That’s what it was like where I grew up, an English commuter town surrounded by fields and woodland but close to London: people were civil but largely kept to themselves.</p><p>Ascend some more rungs and you reach the super-rich, who lead completely de-territorialized lives, thanks to their multiple homes and cunning ways to avoid paying tax in the places through which they pass. Privilege is measured by the extent to which you can avoid public space and public transport (private planes and private elevators). You can live as though the humans immediately surrounding you do not exist. Hence the vogue in the posher parts of London for the ultra-wealthy to expand their properties underground, excavating subterranean floors for swimming pools and gyms, blithely disregarding the noisy and dirty disruption caused to everyone else in the street by the building work. The ultimate assault on the idea of “neighborhood” is owning a property without living there, ghosting out an abode as a vessel for investment while pricing out regular folks from the area. If rootless transience—a nomadic lifestyle that mimics the free movements of international capital—is privilege, then conversely it’s those at the bottom who are most territorialized, literally kept in their place. </p><p>Class is a factor, but so is age. Young people who move to cities are partly attracted by the freedom of dislocation, the chance to escape the bonds and binds of belonging to a community. As a twentysomething living in London in the 1980s and 1990s, I recall being barely on nodding terms with neighbors in the various apartment blocks or subdivided houses in which I lived. </p><p>*</p><p>The neighborhood as an extension to family that the uncannily named Hood celebrated seems to exist largely for children. That’s when I remember it as a social fact in my own life: you played with whoever was near to hand. And it was only when I had children myself that I really started to feel like I lived in a neighborhood. That was in the East Village of New York, a city that otherwise would seem to represent the ultimate in disconnection. Yet both within our 12-story apartment-block coop and in the surrounding streets, there was a pleasant sense of community. Children were the glue, or rather the dissolving agent, in terms of interpersonal boundaries. You talked to people with whom you might not have much in common simply because your kids played together. Halloween provided the treat of peering inside the apartments of people on other floors. Compared with the East Village’s jostling intimacy, suburban LA is diffuse, although PTAs, Little League, and “home churches” counteract the centrifugal tendencies of a spread-out, non-pedestrian city. </p><p>Although the freedom for kids to wander around their neighborhoods that some of us enjoyed in the 1960s and 1970s has largely been curtailed by anxious parents, small children still have that here-and-now, face-to-face orientation. But as soon as they get phones, bonding systems emerge that are steadily less related to geographic proximity. They start to resemble adults, with friendship systems organized around taste or interests. My own “true” neighborhoods for some time now have been unmoored from real space and real time: internet-based forms of conviviality and parochialism oriented around musical or intellectual concerns, gathered around blog clusters or message boards. A while back I started jokily addressing readers of my own blog as “parishioners.” And it would have been through a music-sharing blog or an online collective audio-archive that I first heard Neighborhoods some years ago. </p><p>Originally released on his own Thistlefield imprint in an edition of a few hundred, offered for mail-order sale at $5.95 but mostly given away to friends, Neighborhoods gradually found its true audience as it circulated in used record shops, then reached the internet. Hood died in 1991, long before he could see the rediscovery of his one-and-only album. I don’t know if he would recognize file-sharing as a form of neighborliness. But he would surely have felt delight and vindication at its long and winding ascent to cult legend. </p><div><br /></div>SIMON REYNOLDShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01282478701882900354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6388160584739793679.post-63807920202709295372023-09-18T14:06:00.007-07:002023-10-12T18:37:36.642-07:00El Ef Oh!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOBuhNX9jb7UzSKQiQbrLZna3ko3Ckss9HMIRJzPLjLhTlBgPDjpcDKlSr1SS_6uJr1j3yAmeBY8F4tlCA7SFId-1kqjOJWFgYdgMtfV-TCsPka88569_Ud4vJT9SPRS1-GI7g19Tw8jPAV2iYIA-tkR71HW-Ue3JUuB_cwIy-uqpxB_AoUIH-Ju7adQ/s1219/LFO%20bit%20Details%20piece%20roundup%20of%20rave%20dance%20records%20October%201991.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1219" data-original-width="713" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOBuhNX9jb7UzSKQiQbrLZna3ko3Ckss9HMIRJzPLjLhTlBgPDjpcDKlSr1SS_6uJr1j3yAmeBY8F4tlCA7SFId-1kqjOJWFgYdgMtfV-TCsPka88569_Ud4vJT9SPRS1-GI7g19Tw8jPAV2iYIA-tkR71HW-Ue3JUuB_cwIy-uqpxB_AoUIH-Ju7adQ/w374-h640/LFO%20bit%20Details%20piece%20roundup%20of%20rave%20dance%20records%20October%201991.jpg" width="374" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p> </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhl0EB5HTqFdaXBug7cjT8xSvU1ZfdA7lfCa5SX4Me1Wk1rbUWoRRJdcniU4X3jsUj1JpDbRk5MvU02ON39B1vL4h8z-jzp4nCn9QZMg20-2qM_eviZemWkr8IcTjTay8fVzV9IRCvJJHWV2hjOc86Y5Bs1XUt8Le7HuHhBwC3ZvZCwT28e1JwBrtn1WQ/s1777/SR%20LFO%20live%20june%2025%201994%20Seefeel%20Aphex%20also.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1777" data-original-width="1712" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhl0EB5HTqFdaXBug7cjT8xSvU1ZfdA7lfCa5SX4Me1Wk1rbUWoRRJdcniU4X3jsUj1JpDbRk5MvU02ON39B1vL4h8z-jzp4nCn9QZMg20-2qM_eviZemWkr8IcTjTay8fVzV9IRCvJJHWV2hjOc86Y5Bs1XUt8Le7HuHhBwC3ZvZCwT28e1JwBrtn1WQ/w616-h640/SR%20LFO%20live%20june%2025%201994%20Seefeel%20Aphex%20also.jpg" width="616" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Oddly, never made the connection between the electro roots of Mark 'n' Gaz (who met as members of rival teams in a breakdance contest) and the fact that Tommy Boy put out <i>Frequencies</i> in the USA. </p><p>Tommy Boy also put out 808 State's <i>Ninety</i>, in a remixed form. </p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/k7Dz-IdNk54" width="320" youtube-src-id="k7Dz-IdNk54"></iframe></div><br /><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDV4XNFp_2-AsgMuS8Ai-JtHcGkOMk8c-8CH4jz80oxQR36XQ_WTNfWt5LrHbelvNBjhCXhdFXKic6n7KWMpNbcsBH3TCxIXqcSK8kUkFN1BdwaLOKJErgE1cl1A4flI2XL_enoWaFgwUh55JGEgAF2KjKmokIssl0YJP87MQ0sAHBjquFcIkPkfrkNA/s3264/Details%20piece%20roundup%20of%20rave%20dance%20records%20October%201991.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3264" data-original-width="2448" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDV4XNFp_2-AsgMuS8Ai-JtHcGkOMk8c-8CH4jz80oxQR36XQ_WTNfWt5LrHbelvNBjhCXhdFXKic6n7KWMpNbcsBH3TCxIXqcSK8kUkFN1BdwaLOKJErgE1cl1A4flI2XL_enoWaFgwUh55JGEgAF2KjKmokIssl0YJP87MQ0sAHBjquFcIkPkfrkNA/w480-h640/Details%20piece%20roundup%20of%20rave%20dance%20records%20October%201991.jpg" width="480" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><b>LFO</b></p><p><b><i>Sheath</i></b></p><p><b>(Warp)</b></p><p><b>Observer Music Monthly, 2003</b></p><p>It’s a tough time for dance music believers. Mainstream house culture has imploded, with superclubs closing, dance magazines folding, and average sales for 12 inch singles on a steady downward arc. The more cerebral end of home-listening electronica suffers from stylistic fragmentation, overproduction (there’s just too many "pretty good" records being made), and the absence of a truly startling new sound (even a Next Medium-Sized Thing would be a blessing at this point). Trendy young hipsters think dance culture’s passe and really rather naff: these days they’re into bands with riffs, hooky choruses, foxy singers, and good hair, from neo-garage groups like The White Stripes to post-punk revivalists like The Rapture. </p><p>Little wonder, then, that the leading lights of leftfield electronica have been looking back to the early Nineties, when their scene was at the peak of its creativity, cultural preeminence, and popularity. There’s been a spate of retro-rave flavoured releases from the aging Anglo vanguard--a reinvocation (conscious or unconscious, it’s hard to say) of the era when this music was simultaneously the cutting edge and in the pop charts. </p><p>LFO’s Mark Bell is a case in point. Today he’s better known for his production work with Bjork and Depeche Mode, but back in 1990, he was one half of a duo who reached #12 in the UK singles charts with their self-titled debut "LFO". This Leeds group pioneered a style called "bleep", the first truly British mutation of the house and techno streaming over from Chicago and Detroit. In 1991 they released <i>Frequencies</i>, the first really great techno album released <i>anywhere</i> <b>*</b>(unless you count ancestors Kraftwerk, alongside whose godlike genius LFO’s best work ranks, if you ask me). Just about the only bad thing about <i>Sheath</i>, LFO’s third album and first release for seven years, is its title, which I fear is being used in its antideluvian meaning of "condom" (only "rubber johnny" could have been worse). Really, this record should be called <i>Frequencies: the Return</i>. </p><p>Deliberately lo-fi opener "Blown" instantly transports you back to the era of landmark records like Aphex Twin’s <i>Selected Ambient Works 1985-91</i>. All muddy heart-tremor bass, creaky hissing beats and tinkling, tingling rivulets of synth, it has the enchanted, misty-eyed quality of those childhood mornings when you wake to look through frost-embroidered bedroom windows. "Mokeylips" teems with fluorescent pulses and those classic LFO textures that seem to stick to your skin like Velcro. As bracing as snorting a line of Ajax, "Mum-Man" is industrial-strength hardcore of the kind that mashed-up the more mental ravefloors in ’92. With its robot-voice dancemaster commands and videogame zaps, "Freak" harks back further still to LFO’s Eighties roots as teenage electro fans body-popping and spinning on their heads in deserted shopping centres. "Moistly" shimmers and surges with that odd mixture of nervousness and serenity that infused the classic Detroit techno of Derrick May and Carl Craig. And the beat-less tone-poem "Premacy" pierces your heart with its plangent poignancy. </p><p>Electronic music may be suffering from the cruel cycles of cool at the moment, but <i>Sheath</i> (ugh, I really don’t like that title) shows that music of quality and distinction is still coming from that quarter. Yet more proof (if any were still needed) that all-instrumental machine-music can be as emotionally evocative, as sensuously exquisite, as heart-tenderising and soul-nourishing as any rock group you care to mention. (Like for instance Radiohead, whose Thom Yorke, as it happens, was a huge fan of the Northern "bleep" tracks released by Warp in the early Nineties). One can only hope this album finds the audience it deserves.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">And some bits from my 2008 <i>FACT</i> <a href="https://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2008/04/bleep-20-fact-februarymarch-2008-by.html" target="_blank">celebration of</a> Bleep</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></b></p><p><b>LFO</b></p><p><b>"LFO"</b></p><p><b>(Warp, 1990)</b></p><p>Kraftwerk reincarnated as a pair of teenage ex-breakdancers from Leeds, LFO's Mark Bell and Gez Varley took bleep into the Top 20 with this immortal classic. Portentous and momentous like "Trans-Europe Express", the opening synth-chords make you feel like you're being ushered you into the presence of greatness. Then that dark probe of a bassline bores its way into the depths of your brain, via your anus. LFO would go on to record the immaculately inventive Frequencies, one of electronic dance music's All Time Top 5 Albums.</p><p><b>LFO</b></p><p><b><i>What Is House</i> EP</b></p><p><b>(Warp, 1992)</b></p><p>Where better to end than with LFO voicing the question originally raised by bleep itself--just how far can house music be stretched and still be house? With its gnarly synth and electronically-distorted spoken-not-sung vocal, the title track sounds like the Fall if Mark E. Smith was reborn as a 20 year old South Yorks pillhead. The concise lyric pays homage to "the pioneers of the hypnotic groove"--from Phuture, Fingers Inc and Adonis to Eno, Tangerine Dream, YMO, Kraftwerk and Depeche--but like all tributes implies: we're more-than-worthy inheritors.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><b>*</b><b> the first really great techno album</b></p><p>Is this unfair to 808 State, who did <i>Ninety </i> a year earlier? Maybe, but not really, as I don't really think of that album as techno - it's more like a dreamy, ambient-tinged house record. Great album, and one that has lasted for me whereas <i>Ex:Cel</i> (which is slightly more techno, even has some hardcore-aspiring tunes on it, and came out in '91) hasn't endured. </p><p>Unfair to anyone else? Not sure what month it came out in '91, but Ultramarine might have pipped LFO to the post - but then again, <i>Every Man and Woman Is A Sta</i>r isn't really techno, is it? It's more acid meets chillout meets pastoral fusion. </p><p>Also that year was Orbital's debut - but <i>Frequencies </i>wipes the floor with that. </p><p>LFO labelmates Nightmares on Wax also debuted at album length in 1991 but <i>Word of Science</i> is already trying to expand beyond bleep and touching on the downtempo smoker's muzik of their later discography.</p><p>Unique 3's <i>Jus' Uniqu</i>e came out in 1990. There's great stuff on it: deep-bleep like "Phase 3" and "Digicality", tuff little unit of a toon "Code 0274", plus the classic singles up to that point. Overall, though, it's not quite on a par with <i>Frequencies</i> - bit too much of an eclectic sprawl, with some Rebel MC-ish rap tracks that are fun but a bit dated. </p><p>DHS did <i>The Difference Between Noise and Music</i> in '91 - I'll have to give that a relisten. Possibly a real contender against LFO. (I did give it a relisten and it's pretty interesting stuff but not as consummate as <i>Frequencies</i>)</p><p>Oh, blimey, how could I forget - there's A Guy Called Gerald's <i>Automanikk</i>, from 1990. I don't recall it <i>quite </i>being on a par with <i>Frequencies</i>, or even with <i>Ninety</i> (the apposite comparison). The great, all-time Gerald album is <i>Black Secret Technology</i>, with '92 's <i>28 Gun Bad Boy</i> also a strong statement. </p><p>A couple of contenders - 4 Hero's <i>In Rough Territory</i> (but it's before they've really found their path, and I don't remember it being a great album - a bit rough, in fact, and not ruff-rough). And then Nexus 21's <i>The Rhythm of Life</i> (from as early as '89), which I think is pre-bleep and when they are still very much Detroit-emulative and specifically Kevin Saunderson fanboys. </p><p>Where else could we look for pipping-<i>Frequencies</i>-to-the-post possibles? Detroit? I don't think any of the major artists had done an album-album by that point. Germany? </p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/c5uiQ26jLnU" width="320" youtube-src-id="c5uiQ26jLnU"></iframe></div><br /><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1r-4DVauXwE" width="320" youtube-src-id="1r-4DVauXwE"></iframe></div><br /><p><br /></p><p>Even more consistent and long-running LFO / Warp / bleep + bass celebration (for the benefit of certain folks who should know better, and in fact, I wager, actually do know better)</p><p><br /></p><p><b>Warp Influences / Classics / Remixes</b></p><p><b>VARIOUS ARTISTS</b></p><p><b>Warp 10+1 Influences</b></p><p><b>Warp 10+2 Classics</b></p><p><b>Warp 10+3 Remixes</b></p><p><b>(Warp/Matador)</b></p><p><b><i>Spin</i>, 1999</b></p><p><b><br /></b></p><p><b>by Simon Reynolds</b></p><p>UK rave started out as that strange thing--a subculture based almost entirely around import records. In 1988-89, British DJs had several years backlog of feverish house classics to spin, plus fresh imports from Chicago, Detroit and New York every week. Homegrown tracks, mostly inferior imitations, couldn't compete. All this changed by early 1990 with a UK explosion of indie dance labels and the emergence of a distinctively British rave sound that merged house with elements of hip hop and reggae. Based in the Northern English industrial city Sheffield, Warp was the greatest of these dance independents, and one of the few to survive the era. Released to commemorate the label's tenth anniversary, these three double-CDs showcase the sharp ears and canny self-reinvention skills that have ensured Warp's longevity and continued relevance.</p><p>Warp's first phase of cool came as the prime purveyor of "bleep-and-bass"--a style that owed as much to electro's pocket-calculator melodies and dub reggae's floorquaking sub-bass as it did to acid house's trip-notic compulsion. Much of Classics sound like a direction Kraftwerk could have followed after 1981's Computer World. Sweet Exorcist's "Clonk," for instance, is like Ralf und Florian lost in the K-hole, an inner-spatial maelstrom of weird geometry and precise derangement. Ranging from Tricky Disco's cartoon-quirky almost-pop, through the cold urgency of LFO and Forgemasters, to Nightmares On Wax's proto-darkside disorientation, Classics is a fabulous document of a forgotten era of UK dance culture. Fortuitously, bleep-and-bass sounds fresher than ever today, chiming not just with the electro renaissance within techno (i/F, Ectomorph) but with the dry, drum machine beats, geometric stab-riffs, and chilly-the-most synth-tones audible in recent rap/R&B--Cash Money bounce boys like Juvenile, Ja Rule's "Holla Holla", Timbaland/Missy/Ginuwine.</p><p>Influences mostly consists of sinister acid house from the import-dominated era of Brit-rave. But two inclusions locate the blueprint for early Warp more precisely in that late Eighties phase when twilight electro merged with the harder, tracks-not-songs side of house. New York outfit Nitro Deluxe's 1987 "Let's Get Brutal" is a vast drumscape underpinned with tectonic shock-waves of sub-bass and topped by a shrill, staccato keyboard vamp made out of a vocal sample played several octaves too high. Kickstarted by the hilarious vocoderized mission statement "we are the original acid house creators/we hate all commercial house masturbators," and motored by a miasmic bassline that recedes into the mix then swarms back to subsume your consciousness like malevolent fog, Unique 3's "The Theme" was actually the first bleep tune; as their old skool name suggests, the group was a North of England B-boy crew turned ravers.</p><p>Where Influences works as a superb primer in early house, Remixes intentionally fails to document the post-bleep Warp that most people know-- revered home of Aphex Twin, Black Dog, Autechre and Squarepusher, those godfathers of IDM (Intelligent Dance Music, or dance music you can't really dance to). Instead, the double-CD aims to capture the shape-shifting spirit of the post-rave network (with its one-off collaborations, multiple aliases, and omnivorous eclecticism) by subjecting some of Warp's finest to remixes from a host of suspects usual and unusual. UK post-rockers Four Tet, for instance, take a track from Aphex's Selected Ambient Works Vol II and turn what was originally as lustrous and near-motionless as crystals forming in a solution into a frisky work-out reminiscent of an over-caffeinated Tortoise. </p><p>Highly listenable, the double-CD nonetheless suffers from the cardinal drawback of modern remixology--rather than enhancing the beloved original or locating some latent potential within it, the remixers almost invariably replace it with an all new track containing only a token trace of the ancestor. In that sense, Warp 10+3 Remixes effectively evokes the present moment in electronica, where too many producers have got so infatuated with technique, they've lost contact with the dancefloor. Whereas Classics captures a lost moment of perfect coexistence between auteurism and popular desire, when experimentalists (like Sweet Exorcist's Richard H. Kirk, formerly of Cabaret Voltaire) briefly got on the good foot. </p>SIMON REYNOLDShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01282478701882900354noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6388160584739793679.post-43420794526242544062023-09-15T11:34:00.000-07:002023-09-15T11:34:29.425-07:00Mo' Wack<p><b>Various Artists</b></p><p><i><b>Royalties Overdue</b></i></p><p><b>Mo' Wax</b></p><p><b><i>Melody Maker</i>, June 18 1994</b></p><p><b><br /></b></p><p><b>by Simon Reynolds</b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDmOr92rKx1nlw4ebezOAebOBlt0d1-r7e2ze1GJylfHfy3gte3XFpdprwQuLSRVwvAAPS4twy7QiCbAFxWU0ev4m89p1tXuIicwlMu8nW1I9RyhueUltpXj5F8B_muX52JInyQ40PeP5K1SQcLQ__Sc6U76B3I21sO7LvuBkNxOiwIuZ0KgtqSxAjsg/s1748/SR%20Mo%20Wax%20compilation%20june%2018%2094.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1748" data-original-width="1672" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDmOr92rKx1nlw4ebezOAebOBlt0d1-r7e2ze1GJylfHfy3gte3XFpdprwQuLSRVwvAAPS4twy7QiCbAFxWU0ev4m89p1tXuIicwlMu8nW1I9RyhueUltpXj5F8B_muX52JInyQ40PeP5K1SQcLQ__Sc6U76B3I21sO7LvuBkNxOiwIuZ0KgtqSxAjsg/w612-h640/SR%20Mo%20Wax%20compilation%20june%2018%2094.jpg" width="612" /></a></div><br /><p></p><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><b>VARIOUS ARTISTS </b></span><br /><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><b><i>Headz 2 </i></b></span><br /><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><b>(Mo Wax)</b></span><br /><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><b><i>Village Voice</i>, 1996 (remixed slightly for Faves of 1996)</b></span><br /><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><b><br /></b></span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><b>by Simon Reynolds</b> </span></span><br /><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">In the age of compilation gigantism, <i>Headz 2</i> dramatically ups the ante. Mo </span><br /><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Wax's latest anthology consists of not one but two separately sold double-CD's </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">(or two quadruple albums, boxed like Wagner's Parsifal), which contain nearly </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">five-and-a-half hours of music spanning not just trip hop but leading innovators </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">in drum & bass, techno, art-rap and electronica. Before I even saw these </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">dauntingly oversize collections in the stores, I was put off by the air of </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">hubris and self-congratulatory connoisseurship hanging over the project. When I </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">saw them, the deluxe vinyl sets instantly reminded me of those calfskin-bound, </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">gilt-inlaid editions of Dickens (sold through mail-order ads that appeal to </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">"your unstinting pride"), which remain unread on the shelf but testify to an </span><br /><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">interest in being cultured. In <i>Headz</i> case, the word is subcultured. </span><br /><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Despite their garish abstrakt covers, the vinyl <i>Headz </i>also resemble headstones, </span><br /><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">perhaps because Mo Wax supremo James Lavelle has herein constructed a kind of </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">mausoleum of late '90s "cool". Appropriately, the music itself is sombre and </span><br /><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">subdued, mostly cleaving to the trip hop noir norm: torpid breakbeats, entropic </span><br /><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">sub-bass, dank dub reverb. (When it comes to non-junglistic breakbeats, give me </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">the rowdy, rockist furore of the Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim and their amyl </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">brethren, any day). The same Mo Wax kiss-of-def that resulted in Luke Vibert's </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">only uninteresting release to date affects contributions from the likes of Danny </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Breaks, whose abandons his normal hyper-kinaesthetics for the idling headnooding </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">tempo of "Science Fu Beats". (Perking the track up to 45 r.p.m improves this, </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">and several other tracks, considerably). </span><br /><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Mo Wax belong to what you might call the "good music society", or more </span><br /><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">precisely, they belong to a specific "good music society" which dates back to </span><br /><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">the "eclectic" list of influences on Massive Attack's "Blue Lines" (wherein PiL, </span><br /><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Mahavishnu Orchestra, Isaac Hayes and Studio One coexisted in smug </span><br /><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">self-congratulation). The sensibility is pure fusion: "it's all music, man", </span><br /><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">"what kind of music don't I like? -- just bad music!". Every area of music has </span><br /><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">it own "good music society", its little cabal of cognoscenti, what Kevin Martin </span><br /><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">calls the "taste police": Junior Boys Own for deep house, Creation (in the late </span><br /><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Eighties at least) for leather-trousered rock, Grand Royal for white American </span><br /><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">B-boyism. Each maintains a canon of cool, and as with all canons, what is </span><br /><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">excluded is as significant as what is included. What is excluded tends to be </span><br /><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">both the vibrantly vulgar and the genuinely extremist/out-there: neither The </span><br /><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Sweet nor Stockhausen make it. (Although Pierre Henry, bizarrely, has been </span><br /><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">canonised --as a pioneer of E-Z listening alongside Jean-Jacques Perrey!!!).</span></div><div><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><br /></span></div><div><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><br /></span></div><div><b>Bonus hateration</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b><span style="font-size: large;">The return of WANKLE </span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;">(from Retromania blog)</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>I saw an early version of this James Lavelle <a href="https://youtu.be/76Op7MtBRSA?si=jSPcbcrWRjpXgYbB" target="_blank">doc</a> at a festival a few years ago and what amazed me, first and foremost, was <i>how many</i> UNKLE albums there'd been.<br /><br />The first was bad enough - so I guess I'd assumed that that would have been it<br /><br />But no, no, they persisted after <i>Psyence Fiction </i>(yuk wot a title) - there's something like FIVE subsequent UNKLE albums!<br /><br />And what's worse is that they get increasingly rocky, involving such as Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age<br /><br />Like Lavelle started buying into this really naff idea of rock rebellion and intensity and authenticity<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/igRcOdtfQsM/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/igRcOdtfQsM?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div><br /><br />Like a less tastefully executed version of the Death in Vegas approach - a studio assembled simulacrum of rock, without the actual rhythmic engine of band-energy powering it<br /><br />I guess it shows the odd lingering prestige of rock - and especially the punk strand within rock - as the ultimate stand-in for rebellion and individuality, which continues to exert its thrall over people who've come up through hip hop or dance music, and whose creative procedures are radically different<br /><br />For some reason deep in their hearts their burning desire seems to be to collaborate with Noel Gallagher (as with Goldie circa <i>Saturnz Returnz</i> on "Temper Temper") or Pete Doherty or somebody like that, despite being light-years ahead sonically of those guys.</div><div><br /></div><div>Give this a butchers if you fancy a cringadelic experience</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/a80WucaomnI" width="320" youtube-src-id="a80WucaomnI"></iframe></div><br /><div><br /><br /><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/uNfZJwhkEnk/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uNfZJwhkEnk?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe><br /><br /><br />The other thing I gleaned from the doc - and Lavelle's embrace of rockism - was that he'd managed to convince himself that being a curator really is <i>the same</i> as being a creator - that's there's really nothing to writing songs, creating a distinctive band-sound, a band-voice.<br /><br />All you need is some famous pals, and some connections - and taste, and attitude<br /><br />Simply convening the ingredients would somehow generate vibe in itself, hey presto, through the magic of chutzpah<br /><br />Wrong!<br /><br />Hubris 101: not knowing your limits, the nature of what you are actually good at (in his case, arguably at any rate, branding, packaging, spotting talent in others i.e. Shadow, Krush, building a buzz)<br /><br /><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/9RXbjhZ1W1M/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9RXbjhZ1W1M?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe><br /><br /><br />Yet despite this, UNKLE is still going - there's a new album out soon - The Road: Part II/Lost Highway - a "filmic" affair whose cast includes the Clash’s Mick Jones, Dhani Harrison, Editors’ frontman Tom Smith, The Duke Spirit’s Leila Moss, Mark Lanegan, Keaton Henson, Queens Of The Stone Age’s Jon Theodore and Troy Van Leeuwen, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds vocalist Ysée, Brian Eno collaborator Tessa Angus, producers Justin Stanley and Chris Goss, BOC, spoken-word contributions from legendary Scottish actor Brian Cox, and more<br /><br />First single<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ABJgYXuC8Bc/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ABJgYXuC8Bc?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div><br /><br />Press release:<br /><br /><i><span face=""trebuchet ms" , sans-serif">“Once you have walked the road, everything becomes clear,” says Elliott Power on the Prologue to the sixth album from genre-bending pioneers UNKLE. ‘The Road: Part II / Lost Highway’ is the sound of an artist forever in transit on life’s journey of discovery.</span><br /><span face=""trebuchet ms" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""trebuchet ms" , sans-serif">“My work has always had an eclectic essence and soundtrack-influence in its structure,” says Lavelle. “If you go through the back catalogue, there’s a continuity between the motion and the ambition of the sound. Ideally, you’re constantly collaging and sampling elements of what’s relevant at the time to create something new.</span><br /><span face=""trebuchet ms" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""trebuchet ms" , sans-serif">“Now, there’s a lot more freedom. When I first started, the walls between genres in front of you were a lot greater to climb. We’re at a much more open-minded and eclectic place with music now.”</span><br /><span face=""trebuchet ms" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""trebuchet ms" , sans-serif">"I started doing a show on Soho Radio last year, which made me think about playing records in a different way,” says Lavelle of his life after ‘Part I’. “It wasn’t about trying to make people dance in a nightclub. It was a breath of fresh air, and about playing a more eclectic mix. ‘The Road Part 2’ was made in the same way – it’s a mixtape and a journey. You’re in your car, starting in the day and driving into the night. The language of it was for it to be the ultimate road trip.</span><br /><span face=""trebuchet ms" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""trebuchet ms" , sans-serif">He continues: “It’s the mid-part of a trilogy. The first record is like you’re leaving home; you’re naive and trying to discover. There are elements of my early days in there, as well as a bit of everything since. There’s an optimism and excitement to it, as there was with me having to direct this project alone for the first time.</span><br /><span face=""trebuchet ms" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""trebuchet ms" , sans-serif">“This record is the journey. You’re on the road, out there in the world. There are let downs, highs, lows, love, loss and experiences. The third record to come is basically about coming home; wherever that may be."</span><br /><span face=""trebuchet ms" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""trebuchet ms" , sans-serif">With the album split into two acts each with a beginning, a middle and end, the trips from light to dark, from brute force to tenderness make for both the full arc of the adventure and suites to be enjoyed separately. It’s a bold, assured and confident collection – from the Americana of ‘Long Gone’, to the Kanye West ‘Black Skinhead’ - inspired ‘Nothing To Give’, the alt-orchestral rush of ‘Only You’ to the guitar-heavy mantra of ‘Crucifixion/A Prophet’ and the electronic child’s lullaby of ‘Sun (The)’ – via covers of ‘The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face’ made famous by Roberta Flack and the ‘guilty pleasure’ of the euphoric ‘Touch Me’ by Rui Da Silva. Helping to travel further down the myriad avenues of UNKLE’s sound are the full spectrum of collaborators and guests.</span><br /><span face=""trebuchet ms" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""trebuchet ms" , sans-serif">‘The Road: Part II/Lost Highway’ welcomes The Clash’s Mick Jones, Dhani Harrison, Editors’ frontman Tom Smith, The Duke Spirit’s Leila Moss, Mark Lanegan, Keaton Henson, Queens Of The Stone Age’s Jon Theodore and Troy Van Leeuwen, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds vocalist Ysée, Brian Eno collaborator Tessa Angus, producers Justin Stanley and Chris Goss, BOC, Philip Sheppard and artist John Isaac among others – as well as spoken-word contributions from legendary Scottish actor Brian Cox (who used to be Lavelle’s landlord) and Stanley Kubrick’s widow Christiana, who leant her trust and voice to Lavelle following his acclaimed exhibition to the seminal director. The two names who crop up most throughout the record however are rising West London singer and producer Miink and experimental rapper Elliott Power.</span><br /><span face=""trebuchet ms" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""trebuchet ms" , sans-serif">“They’re just both so incredibly talented, and everything I love about London right now,” says Lavelle. “I’ve been playing a lot with going back to sampling and going back to certain aesthetics from when I was first buying records and DJing, then to mix that with something contemporary. They’ve helped me create this ‘Bladerunner meets London Soundsystem’ kind of vibe.”</span><br /><span face=""trebuchet ms" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""trebuchet ms" , sans-serif">But then, Lavelle has always been an artist as inspired by the past as he was racing towards the future.</span><br /><span face=""trebuchet ms" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""trebuchet ms" , sans-serif">“The way that things are now are what we were always doing with Mo’Wax,” says Lavelle. “The legacy was that we broke down barriers, took down everything culturally-lite and put it into something. Now street culture is the predominant visual culture of the world. It’s mad to think that Supreme is more popular and recognised than Louis Vuitton. Every major label and rapper is making sneakers and toys. At the time it was seen as vanity and gimmicky, but look at the way culture is now. That’s what we started.”</span><br /><span face=""trebuchet ms" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""trebuchet ms" , sans-serif">The striking artwork of the hooded knight that adorns the sleeve on 'Lost Highway' is by celebrated artist John Stark – renowned for drawing upon magical realism and using the more mystical elements of the past to reveal something profound about the present.</span><br /><span face=""trebuchet ms" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""trebuchet ms" , sans-serif">"It’s about the yin and yang, night and day, the rolling journey," says Lavelle of the artwork. "Here's a Ronin-like, lone warrior. It represents what it means for me to be going out into the world and finding myself."</span></i><br /><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/g_pVr8O9rVE/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/g_pVr8O9rVE?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div></div><div><br /></div>SIMON REYNOLDShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01282478701882900354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6388160584739793679.post-7695169741757435952023-09-10T15:37:00.001-07:002023-09-10T15:37:45.493-07:00Analord<p> <span style="font-weight: bold;">AFX</span></p><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Analord 01--11</span><br />(Rephlex)<br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2005-08-30/music/analogjam&page=67">Village Voice</a></span>, August 30th 2005<br /><br />By Simon Reynolds</span><br /><br />Since the debacle that was 2001’s over-programmed <span style="font-style: italic;">Drukqs</span>, there’s been zero transmissions from Planet Aphex. So when Richard D. James reemerged at the start of the year with the launch of an extended series of EPs, the response from his still sizeable cult mingled joy, skepticism, and a heap of curiosity. Could James--once techno’s greatest melodist-- possibly have anything more to give?<br /><br />The analog-only concept underpinning Analord seemed like a tacit admission that, like so many of his peers, during the late Nineties James had gotten lost in the mire of options offered by state-of-art technology. Riddled with detail and addled by effects, <span style="font-style: italic;">Drukqs</span>’ delirium tremens of twitchy-glitchy beats and fruitless FruityLoops-ery suggested it was time for a drastic rethink. In the Dogme-like spirit of Holger Czukay’s maxim “restriction is the mother of invention,” on <span style="font-style: italic;">Analord</span> James shuns digital signal processing, plug-ins and “virtual studio technology” programs in favor of synths, sequencers, and house music’s favorite tools, the Roland 909 drum machine and the Roland 303 bassline generator (source of the wibbly-bibbly acid-sound). The series stages a strategic retreat to the sort of set-up James used at the very start of his career some fifteen years ago.<br /><br />Consistent with the analog concept, these EPs are vinyl-only releases, high quality pressings from whose deep grooves emanate sounds as thick and glossy as the platters themselves. Vinyl fiends always bang on about “warmth”, but that’s not exactly what you hear on <span style="font-style: italic;">Analord</span>, given that the music is electronic and therefore innately glacial. But even before you appraise the tracks as compositions, your ears are struck by the rich presence of the sound. Vinyl-fetishism is also a crucial aspect of the EPs visual appeal: transparent sleeves invite your eyes to feast on the inky blackness.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Analord 11</span> is where the series has paused (for breath, or permanently, it’s not clear), which makes now a good moment to survey the length and breadth of what by any standard constitutes a formidable amount of sound (three 74 minute CD-R’s worth) to have issued in just six months. Alongside reverting to the restricted means available to him as a youth, it seems like James has also tried to recover the creative mindset. Circa ‘95, jungle threw the entire “electronic listening music” community off-balance, making producers focus their creativity on rhythmic complexity rather than haunting melody (the genre’s true forte). Analord reverses that priority. The beats, while deftly programmed, assume a largely subservient role; mood and melodiousness return to the fore. These tracks invoke a time when the concept of “machine soul” was fresh and inspirational: the era of classic releases by Derrick May, Fingers Inc, LFO, Carl Craig, The Black Dog, et al, long before chopped-up breakbeats impinged on the “purity” of electronic music.<br /><br />The crucial question, though, is whether any <span style="font-style: italic;">Analord</span> tracks approach the heights of James’ own classic phase (1991’s “Analogue Bubblebath” to 1995’s “Alberto Balsalm”, approximately). The answer: not quite, but close enough. If the weaker material recalls the output of James’ early Nineties second-division pseudonyms, the better pieces--the lustrous chitter of “Boxingday” (A3), the cyborg-toad jabber of “Analoggins” (A6), the writhy glisten of “”Backdoor. Netshadow” (A9)--display his unique flair for clustered dissonances, ghostly harmonic wisps, and eerie in-between emotions. (Consumer Guidance: your best buys are 2, 3, 10, and 11). The pieces that linger in your memory possess a somber, sorrowful quality: the pensive, frowning chords of “Pissed Up In Sel” (A2), the weepy-eyed melody-foam of<br />“Pwsteal.ldpinch.D” (A8), the dank mazes of glum that take up side two of Analord 11.<br /><br />Instrumentally, the most Valued Player here isn’t the near-omnipresent 303 but whatever reverb unit James uses to drape his sounds in his signature shroud of muzzy melancholy. You start to wonder: could it be that The Aphex Twin is, like, <span style="font-style: italic;">depressed</span>? Has he been dumped (one mournful ditty is titled “Where’s Your Girlfriend?”)? Or is this simply the blues of the innovator who ran out of future, and who’s gone back in the hope of finding a better way forward?SIMON REYNOLDShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01282478701882900354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6388160584739793679.post-60116177216830228272023-09-06T18:34:00.004-07:002023-09-06T18:34:38.012-07:00Stewart Home - Pure Mania - Melody Maker, January 20 1990<p>Reprinted in celebration of the reissue this month of <i>Pure Mania</i> </p><p><b>Stewart Home</b> is doing an event at <b>Typewronger Books</b> in Edinburgh, on September 10, at 7pm. <a href="https://www.typewronger.com/home/events" target="_blank">Details here</a>. .</p><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiRObizlTtIKYLeQfFsBwxEFXe-lUvGYIvpvaUfNOTmjAT6bVVsTiN69Kq9bfgYaOs3q-CPWDGY8TYiTuZYhMWIVCCWgoOYjTOaePfCBFWAHf9nnYxT9sF0Nq6JsWZzW7PFTtOlCUw2ZpUmaz_M18DnbezKlou0YrZ0NwQehSoUdL5bD8Pl1M8mujzbw/s3498/Sr%20Stewart%20home%20jan%2020%2090.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3498" data-original-width="2734" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiRObizlTtIKYLeQfFsBwxEFXe-lUvGYIvpvaUfNOTmjAT6bVVsTiN69Kq9bfgYaOs3q-CPWDGY8TYiTuZYhMWIVCCWgoOYjTOaePfCBFWAHf9nnYxT9sF0Nq6JsWZzW7PFTtOlCUw2ZpUmaz_M18DnbezKlou0YrZ0NwQehSoUdL5bD8Pl1M8mujzbw/w500-h640/Sr%20Stewart%20home%20jan%2020%2090.jpg" width="500" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #4d5156; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #5f6368; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold;">Déjà vu - or </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #4d5156; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #5f6368; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold;">déjà lu?</span></p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhztV1FJK8cq5Hwpyo8R7mYZSPuQ3WZ_p0b0ENPSolidulWopZDm0KdiAMcvxkqmC_-PM3Qp4Co6YUTLrp9p1pf2eXRq1de44_Rr3hf7Tzj5hiZYYVB61pHBU1x3gVXekXj8PTkOlaTBpTYE9G9YhKLPd05CNtrRyywVgDmHb1f4mQnwJu61Sh7unk31w/s2883/Stewart%20home%20and%20deja%20video%20Jan%2020%2090-page-002.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2883" data-original-width="2550" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhztV1FJK8cq5Hwpyo8R7mYZSPuQ3WZ_p0b0ENPSolidulWopZDm0KdiAMcvxkqmC_-PM3Qp4Co6YUTLrp9p1pf2eXRq1de44_Rr3hf7Tzj5hiZYYVB61pHBU1x3gVXekXj8PTkOlaTBpTYE9G9YhKLPd05CNtrRyywVgDmHb1f4mQnwJu61Sh7unk31w/w566-h640/Stewart%20home%20and%20deja%20video%20Jan%2020%2090-page-002.jpg" width="566" /></a></p><p><br /></p>SIMON REYNOLDShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01282478701882900354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6388160584739793679.post-2933022359704020982023-09-04T20:14:00.000-07:002023-09-04T20:14:29.079-07:00Criminal Injustice <p> <b>CRIMINAL INJUSTICE: THE TORY WAR AGAINST POP CULTURE </b></p><p><b>+ micro interviews with MY BLOODY VALENTINE and BARK PSYCHOSIS</b></p><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><b>Melody Maker, summer 1994</b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><b><br /></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><b><i>[whole feature package below with contributions from Carl Loben and Ngaire Ruth + bonus material]</i><br /><br /></b><b>by Simon Reynolds</b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><br /> The Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill is oozing its way through the parliamentary digestive tract and will be probably be passed into Law by a Commons majority in July. It contains a host of pernicious extensions of police powers, but it's Part 5 that will affect your world most, with its devastating attack on the radical fringe of pop culture: illegal raves, free festivals,<br />squatting and travellers.<br /><br /> Cutting through the Bill's legalistic nuances, the gist of Part 5's provisions is as follows. First, it gives the police hugely expanded and highly discretionary powers to thwart raves. Whilst a rave is defined by the Bill as a mere 100 people playing amplified music "characterised by the emission of a<br />succession of repetitive beats" , the most disturbing clause allows the police to harass gatherings as small as ten. If an officer "reasonably believes" the ten are setting up a rave, or merely waiting for one to start, he can order them to disperse; if they fail to do so ASAP, they're committing a crime, punishable by a three month prison sentence or a œ2500 fine. Moreover, the police are granted<br />the power to stop anyone who comes within a one mile radius of this 'rave' and direct them not to proceed. The leeway for local police to interpret events, and the scope for abuse, is enormous.<br /><br /> Another bunch of provisions practically illegalise squatting. If an 'interim possession order' is granted against squatters, they have 24 hours to leave; failure to do so, or returning to the premises any time within a year, is punishable by a prison sentence of 6 months or a œ5000 fine. Part 5 of the Bill also includes draconian measures to deal with trespass and unauthorised campers (i.e travellers) and against 'aggravated trespass' (aimed at hunt saboteurs, but these could be used to suppress, say, environmental protests against new motorways.)<br /><br /> As a whole, the Criminal Justice Bill is a desperate attempt by a decrepit government to toughen up its image. (Labour, chickenshit about opposing the Bill for fear of seeming "soft on crime", looks likely to abstain rather than vote against it.) The origins of Part 5 go back to the Castlemorton mega-rave of May '92, which created a new 'folk devil' in the crusty-raver/New Age traveller. The<br />ensuing media panic about this unfamiliar subculture convinced the public that hordes of unwashed, drug-crazed, outlandishly garbed anarcho-mystics were set to descend upon hitherto genteel neighbourhoods, whereupon they would blast deafening hardcore techno for 7 days solid, sell acid to children and shit on the shrubbery.<br /><br /> Few people sympathise with travellers and squatters; fewer still are prepared to defend them. So it's been easy for the government to add them to the list of 'enemies of society' targetted by the Criminal Justice Bill. It may be hard to believe, but Kenneth Baker once lumped squatters in with armed robbers and rapists as wrong-doers that the Tories vowed to "get tough" with. Squatters!<br />who harm nobody but just help themselves by taking over abandoned, usually derelict buildings (90% of squats are empty public sector housing owned by local authorities). Squatters! who actually preserve the market value of these delapidated domiciles by fixing them up. Of course, the Bill doesn't appeal to reason or statistical reality, but to bigotry and paranoia--the consternation<br />caused by those who look and live differently. And it appeals to a secret resentment many feel towards those who repudiate 'straight' reality (suburban slow-death via the satellite dish and other forms of stupefaction). Sort of: "I don't live today--so why should they?!"<br /><br /> But why should you care about the rights and the plight of squatters, travellers and other n'er-do-well deviants? Simply because Part 5 of the Bill threatens to extinguish some of the crucial spaces in which radical popular culture has survived and thrived over the last 25 years. Squat culture has been the breeding ground for bands as diverse as the Sex Pistols, My Bloody Valentine<br />and The Shamen. Squatting enables bands to survive through those difficult, impecunious early days, especially if they're trying to do something innovative or uncommercial. Much the same applies to artists, film-makers, writers etc. Destroy squatting, and our pop culture will be depleted--not instantly, but insidiously and inevitably.<br /><br /> Warehouse and squat parties, illegal raves, and the free festival circuit are also vital spaces for alternative culture. Ever since the 30,000 strong gathering of the tribes that was Castlemorton, the police have been determined to crush the sound-systems and the festival-bound convoys; the Criminal Justice Bill provides them with an embarassment of powers to abuse. Local police forces are already collaborating in the use of computers to log data on 8000 travelers (including info on their vehicles, nicknames and associates). Some county police forces are determined to ensure that even legal raves don't happen this summer.<br /><br /> All these developments reinforce a general trend in British society over the last decade: the contraction of possibility. Dole culture (another breeding ground of bands) has been all but obliterated, via the harassment of claimants, compulsory Restart programmes etc. Once students were able to use their time to explore ideas as well acquire marketable skills. But the loan system and the removal of dole and housing benefits have plunged them into debt and into dread;<br />now they must scurry up the conformist career ladder in order to pay off loans and overdrafts. The impoverishment of students (who incidentally make up eight percent of the squatting population) and the bare subsistence offered by dole, have a knock-on effect on pop culture: there's a severely reduced market for interesting, risk-taking music, media and culture generally. Only the most dedicated bands and labels perservere with innovation in the face of declining sales and meagre prospects. The effects of all the above converge to create a palpable feeling of contraction in the culture, a withering away of possibility, daring and risk.<br /><br /> All these effects on pop life may seem minor compared to the other sinister ramifications of the Criminal Justice Bill: the removal of the right to silence, arbitrary stop-and-search powers for the police, and a host of other measures that push this country closer towards what has been called "elective tyranny". A decrease in the number of interesting rock bands may seem a negligible<br />side-effect of the illegalisation of squatting, given its more immediate result: another 50,000 added to the number of homeless sleeping rough on the streets.<br /><br /> But since <i>Melody Maker</i> is a music magazine, in this 4 page special we focus on the ways in which our turf--rock and rave culture--is threatened; at the ways your world is being circumscribed and impoverished.<br /><br /><b>MY BLOODY VALENTINE</b><br /><br /> Colm O 'Ciosig (drummer): "Originally, it was just a question of finding somewhere to live when Kevin Shields and I first came to London. We couldn't afford a deposit for a flat, so we squatted a house in Kentish Town. It's more fun living in squatland anyway, outside the landlord system. It raises your spirit, whereas bedsitland makes you apathetic. You have to be quiet, it's<br />really oppressive. If we hadn't squatted, we'd probably have got really depressed and left London. We paid for our first records with dole. If we'd also had to pay rent, we'd have had to get jobs, and doing something we didn't want to do would have destroyed our spirit. We sat around a lot, sure, but that's conducive to coming up with ideas. We wrote the 'You Made Me Realise' EP in a<br />rehearsal room in our squat."<br /> Bilinda Butcher (guitar/vocals): "I squatted for four years in the barrier block on Coldharbour Lane, Brixton. Having a baby boy, I wouldn't have been able to be in a band without the squatting community, cos they ran creches. And MBV wouldn't have gotten anywhere if we hadn't been able to squat. You can't practise in a bedsit. You need somewhere you feel free to make a noise. Plus, if we'd<br />been paying rent we'd never have had enough money to pay for rehearsal space and gear and guitar strings, which are always breaking. If the Bill is passed I don't know how bands starting out will manage. The whole music scene will suffer, there'll only be room for mainstream stuff."<br /><br /><b>BARK PSYCHOSIS</b><br /><br /> "I don't go along with the hippy baggage that surrounds the squat lifestyle, that whole heroic outsider thing," says singer/guitarist Graham Sutton, who squatted for several years with (now former) Bark bassist John Ling. "For us, it was more a survival thing, surviving to make music. It made sense to dodge rent and poll tax. There was kind of a punk, DIY ethic to it, too--fixing up the<br />place, doing your own decorating, electrics, plumbing. Where we squatted (Claremont Road in Leyton, East London) was quite a scene: every other house was squatted, and everybody was doing creative things. There wasn't that wastoid culture element. That scene got a name for itself, and for a couple of years it was really good--lots of parties, a real community feeling. Then they started<br />evicting people to make way for the M11. I'd already left, for rented accomodation, 'cos the scene had become a bit of a bubble.<br /> "What I find weird about the 'crime' of squatting is that it doesn't make sense, even according to Tory logic. Most squatters repair the places they live, cos it's horrible to live in a shit-hole. They're saving these places from deteriorating and losing their value."<br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3As_Epph1DUXCKFLEvLtDTCrOHn6L8TRuRrI9Xnc3JooPvJYFvpCNY225sbkfm6K1rGTJXTZzWMWcMAdacKxApcaLZ4yh-rcaJHFZkwgmVh9VZBqZqXx5_fHfSWwDXY1mFdfb0UyYJC2lCePwPq2QknBtupepkzEa_UnIHDGn-8LJdho6eFpIsDdKZQ/s3861/53145809181_0691e7cd1f_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3861" data-original-width="2796" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3As_Epph1DUXCKFLEvLtDTCrOHn6L8TRuRrI9Xnc3JooPvJYFvpCNY225sbkfm6K1rGTJXTZzWMWcMAdacKxApcaLZ4yh-rcaJHFZkwgmVh9VZBqZqXx5_fHfSWwDXY1mFdfb0UyYJC2lCePwPq2QknBtupepkzEa_UnIHDGn-8LJdho6eFpIsDdKZQ/w464-h640/53145809181_0691e7cd1f_o.jpg" width="464" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQwm5zepLoDD_MOhluMBvtVaI44IrUJbLC0A9mZkEAUMPXArkj2cHIx-4C3uhnfz81_1EpdhlGJUV_Nicx6FSOBjJ-XLcdnV6hMG_lZmtPzeFddb-paR5LWhUNXYHWTIHtXLc06UJa7v-CaOTvAcv47-_t5fMipsALUumNdPmrF-IaAdmIwB5JOgtQIQ/s3866/53146235175_dcb19b6372_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3866" data-original-width="2792" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQwm5zepLoDD_MOhluMBvtVaI44IrUJbLC0A9mZkEAUMPXArkj2cHIx-4C3uhnfz81_1EpdhlGJUV_Nicx6FSOBjJ-XLcdnV6hMG_lZmtPzeFddb-paR5LWhUNXYHWTIHtXLc06UJa7v-CaOTvAcv47-_t5fMipsALUumNdPmrF-IaAdmIwB5JOgtQIQ/w462-h640/53146235175_dcb19b6372_o.jpg" width="462" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; 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text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFsCyJOyZ4rkJ3c6k-P1A9EOXBuBC28hYnjhzDJnf_mvgUtO4iFf1Ojl-CccWgJyZ9DWy2caYAx1uj998-Bze2-8Ynxv1ho5cN2dMzAGROGpgp5InjraeCoJRvNBieZg9FTjBQzlvwXtSux-_LbxcbndzvVpoSCMrcYKogA2KArUDLaAiv-N9t4R-fSw/s1996/rupa%20huq%20future%20letter%20to%20Melody%20Maker%20on%20CJB%20may%2014%2094.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1996" data-original-width="1317" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFsCyJOyZ4rkJ3c6k-P1A9EOXBuBC28hYnjhzDJnf_mvgUtO4iFf1Ojl-CccWgJyZ9DWy2caYAx1uj998-Bze2-8Ynxv1ho5cN2dMzAGROGpgp5InjraeCoJRvNBieZg9FTjBQzlvwXtSux-_LbxcbndzvVpoSCMrcYKogA2KArUDLaAiv-N9t4R-fSw/w422-h640/rupa%20huq%20future%20letter%20to%20Melody%20Maker%20on%20CJB%20may%2014%2094.jpg" width="422" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>From future Labour MP <b>Rupa Huq </b><div>(who had also done work experience at <i>Melody Maker</i> at some point either before or after this letter)<div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>All clips via <a href="https://twitter.com/nothingelseon" target="_blank">Nothingelseon</a><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><br /></div></div></div>SIMON REYNOLDShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01282478701882900354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6388160584739793679.post-29168410322455297882023-08-30T11:03:00.004-07:002023-08-30T11:03:50.172-07:00HEROIN HOUSE aka DUB TECHNO aka Chain Reaction <p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b>PORTER RICKS<o:p></o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><i><o:p> </o:p>Biokinetics</i></b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b><o:p></o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><o:p> </o:p>VAINQUEUR</b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b><o:p></o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><o:p> </o:p><i>Elevations</i></b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b><o:p></o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><o:p> </o:p>MAURIZIO</b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b><o:p></o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><o:p> </o:p><i>untitled</i> </b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b><o:p></o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><o:p> </o:p>VARIOUS ARTISTS</b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b><o:p></o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><i><o:p> </o:p>Decay Product</i></b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b><o:p></o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><o:p> </o:p>MONOLAKE</b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b><o:p></o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><o:p> </o:p><i>Hongkong</i></b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b><o:p></o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><o:p> </o:p>(all Chain Reaction)</b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b><o:p></o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><b><i>Spin,</i> 1998</b></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b><o:p>by Simon Reynolds </o:p> </b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Think "house," and in your mind's ear you'll
probably hear a thudding, metronomic kick-drum and a shrieking soul-diva. Nearly
fifteen years on from its <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">Chicago</st1:city></st1:place>
genesis, house has evolved way beyond this original, winning formula, and diversified into at least a dozen
subgenres. From the disco cut-up style popularised by Daft Punk to the unhinged
abstraction of nu skool <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">Chicago</st1:city></st1:place>
label Relief, the most exciting contemporary house is designed for
"track-heads"--purist connoisseurs who prefer minimal tracks to anthemic songs. </p><p class="MsoNormal">I don't like purists either, but if the
truth be known, when pop music's final reckoning is done, house is not going
to be remembered for adding to the sum of "great songs," nor for its pantheon
of distinctive vocalists. Its real contribution and innovation
resides elsewhere.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In this
spirit, the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:state w:st="on">Berlin</st1:state></st1:place>
label Chain Reaction have distilled house down to its essence: no songs, no vocals, barely any
melodies, sometimes not even a beat. What, you might wonder, is left
after such ruthless pruning? Texture and pulse-rhythm. Or more
precisely, texture-rhythm as an indivisible plasma-like substance that
is molded and extruded through dub-space. </p><p class="MsoNormal">Take Chain Reaction's aesthetic
pinnacle to date, "Resilient 1.2": a slow-motion tsunamai
of ego-melting, body-boundary-haemorrhaging bliss. Some people call the
Chain Reaction sound "heroin house" <b>*</b>; "Resilient 1.2"
actually reminds me of Velvet Underground's "Heroin". A soundtrack in waiting
for the first zero-gravity nightclub, it was my favourite track of 1997; you can find
it on the Chain Reaction CD Decay Product, a compilation of tracks by the
production team Various Artists.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Based out
of <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:state w:st="on">Berlin</st1:state></st1:place>'s
Hard Wax record store, Chain Reaction is the sister label of Basic Channel, whose nine 12-inch releases
were the toast of techno-house cognoscenti
throughout the mid-Nineties (but don't let that put you off!). Devoted to vinyl, the mysterious figures
behind the twin labels established their own pressing plant. This makes
Chain Reaction's series of single-artist CD compilations--encased
in striking metal cans that resemble DJs's record boxes--a sort of
ideological lapse, a concession to the market realities of the digital era.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Prise open
the cannisters, and on tracks like Maurizio's "M6", Vainqueur's "Reduce 2" and Porter Ricks'
"Port Gentil" you'll encounter electronic music as warmly cocooning and spongy as the
lining of the womb.What initially sounds monotonous reveals itself as an
endlessly inflected, fractal mosaic of
glow-pulses and flicker-riffs. Using studio-processes like EQ, filtering, phasing and panning to tweak the
frequencies and stereo-imaging of their sonic motifs, CR artists weave
tantalising tapestries whose strands shift in and out of the aural
spotlight. The effect is synaesthetic, like fingertips tremulously
caressing your neck.</p><p class="MsoNormal">Although CR
artists would probably distance themselves from rave's drug culture, their music sounds like Ecstasy sensations
encoded in sound, abstracted into a velcro-sticky audio-fabric that tugs at
your skin-surface and gets your goosebumps rippling in formation. Melody is
minimal--limited to rudimentary vamps and ostinatos--because it's just a
device for displaying sound-in-itself. Simple motifs twist the
timbre-fabric in order to best show off its properties, making you thrill to the
scintillating play of creases and
folds, crinkles and kinks.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>CR music
isn't all opiated oblivion: Monolake's "Lantau" and "<st1:place w:st="on">Macau</st1:place>" are like
Cantonese reggae, while Porter Ricks material often has an abrasive industrial tinge,
reflecting the fact that one half of the duo is acclaimed ambient experimentalist Thomas Koner. But my
favorite CR output is the stuff that offers a sublime surrogate for MDMA
experience, a bliss-space you can access at any time then leave, without
cost or comedown. </p><p class="MsoNormal">That said, this music's appeal extends way beyond ravers--anyone who's ever swooned to neo-psychelicists like Spacemen 3 and
My Bloody Valentine, or been
mesmerised by minimalists like Steve Reich, will find almost unbearable pleasures here.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>As well as
Chain Reaction's own CD and vinyl 12 inch output (available at domestic prices), addicts will want to search
out the artists's releases on other labels: Porter Ricks' self-titled album on Mille Plateaux, Various Artists's glistening pulsescape
"No.8" on Fatcat. Porter Ricks also created a fine remix album, The Koner
Experiment, based on music by
Experimental Audio Research--a collective that includes ex-Spacemen 3 leader Sonic Boom and MBV's Kevin Shields.
That fact alone that should seduce any hesitant psych-guitar fiends into
taking the plunge.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p><br /><p></p><div><br /></div><div><b>* Heroin House copyright Kevin Martin</b></div>SIMON REYNOLDShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01282478701882900354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6388160584739793679.post-54268580208756026962023-08-22T22:51:00.001-07:002023-08-22T23:05:19.021-07:00Robert Wyatt & Friends - Theatre Royal Drury Lane 8th September 1974<p><b></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDaOGD4ydFDG21vaPK630zN0s8iUL5m3wQ3u0vZe2bojQUN5NtsvTefkoLPjCd6yw4US_dFsFQOb4mo-jU8iThjf7Ia5Jdi4EsC9Lp0qDOwfvpikFyLnYcdto5vuhmVGuANNUO_mSGamokRNbu1Bu2H1cY2-zHRiY9GuvEZdSUnLc4XTA0bTiAq2kvIw/s2048/F4ELlDyaMAAlu3j.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1522" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDaOGD4ydFDG21vaPK630zN0s8iUL5m3wQ3u0vZe2bojQUN5NtsvTefkoLPjCd6yw4US_dFsFQOb4mo-jU8iThjf7Ia5Jdi4EsC9Lp0qDOwfvpikFyLnYcdto5vuhmVGuANNUO_mSGamokRNbu1Bu2H1cY2-zHRiY9GuvEZdSUnLc4XTA0bTiAq2kvIw/w476-h640/F4ELlDyaMAAlu3j.jpg" width="476" /></a></b></div><b><br /><span><br /></span></b><p></p><p><b><span><br /></span></b></p><p><b><span><br /></span></b></p><p><b><span><br /></span></b></p><p><b><span><br /></span></b></p><p><b><span><br /></span></b></p><p><b><span><br /></span></b></p><p><b><span><br /></span></b></p><p><b><span><br /></span></b></p><p><b><span><br /></span></b></p><p><b><span><br /></span></b></p><p><b><span><br /></span></b></p><p><b><span><br /></span></b></p><p><b><span><br /></span></b></p><p><b><span><br /></span></b></p><p><b><span><br /></span></b></p><p><b><span><br /></span></b></p><p><b><span><br /></span></b></p><p><b><span><br /></span></b></p><p><b><span><br /></span></b></p><p><b><span><br /></span></b></p><p><b><span>Robert Wyatt & Friends</span></b></p><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span><i>Theatre <st1:street w:st="on"><st1:address w:st="on">Royal Drury Lane</st1:address></st1:street> <st1:date day="8" month="9" w:st="on" year="1974">8th September 1974</st1:date></i><o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span><i>Observer Music Monthly</i>, November 20th 2005</span></b></div><div><b><span><br /></span></b></div><div><b><span>by Simon Reynolds</span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span>Long bootlegged, this glorious live album documents <a href="https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2017/10/simon-draper-virgin-records" target="_blank">an intriguing moment in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">UK</st1:place></st1:country-region> rock history</a>, when the rock mainstream and the outer-limits vanguard were in bed together.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Three decades on, it’s hard to imagine a contemporary equivalent to the supergroup that Wyatt convened in September 1974: multiplatinum-selling musos Mike Oldfield and Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason rubbed shoulders with out-jazz players Julie Tippetts<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and Mongezi Feza, and with avant-proggers such as Henry Cow’s Fred Frith, Hatfield and the North’s Dave Stewart, and Soft Machine alumnus Hugh Hopper. There’s also a cameo appearance from <a href="https://reynoldsretro.blogspot.com/2016/01/ivor-cutler.html" target="_blank">Ivor Cutler</a>,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>John Peel’s favorite comic eccentric. Peelie himself features as the show’s compere, informing the long-haired, afghan-wearing audience that the musicians will be uncharacteristically sober tonight, because the door to the Theatre Royal bar has been locked for fire-and-safety reasons. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span>The wondrously woozy music played that evening must have been intoxication enough, surely, for performer and listener alike. After the Dada-esque sound-daubings of “Dedicated To You But You Weren’t Listening”, the bulk of the set consists of a run-through of Rock Bottom, the Wyatt album released earlier that summer, a crushingly poignant masterpiece shadowed by the singer’s paralysis following his fourth-floor tumble during a wild party. “Sea Song”,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>as mysterious and beautiful an oceanic love ballad as Tim Buckley’s “Song To the Siren,” opens up into a fabulous extended improvisation, a malevolent meander of fuzz-bass and glittering keyboards that’s something like an Anglicized <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bitches Brew</i>. Wyatt’s falsetto spirals up into ecstastic scat arabesques, as though his spirit is trying to escape his shattered body.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Little Red Riding Hood Hit The Road” --its title a whimsy-cloaked allusion to the accident--is equally stunning. Feza’s trumpet again channels Miles, while Wyatt’s delirium of anguish is only slightly softened by the English bathos of lines like “oh dearie me, what in heaven’s name..” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The singer actually miauows at the start of “Alifib,” a gorgeous quilt of shimmering keys and glistening guitar (courtesy of Oldfield, then regularly voted the top instrumentalist in the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">UK</st1:place></st1:country-region> by music paper readers). The feline thread is picked up with “Instant Pussy,” originally recorded by Wyatt’s short-lived band Matching Mole and featuring yet more gorgeous abstract vocalese from the wheelchair-bound bound singer. “Calyx”, a different sort of love song, features killer lines like “close inspection reveals you’re in perfect nick”, and the set ends with a rampant, edge-of-chaos take on<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“I’m A Believer,” the Monkees cover that took Wyatt into the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">UK</st1:place></st1:country-region> hit parade. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span>Alarming but true: the best record released in 2005 is a time capsule from 31 years ago.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPKr64nQi52hyQXR8--eYZfQKR7xXR6ooxerS8DCupXsPS4O-2UMKnZrHiiVwo8cGuropKW9Y_37qaV688zcAtyR5DmKtkJTlqgA-8-SdFT8N0ewGz12CSxfa5IOJ-tD3Yk4d3QWHxndliFSlC3i6NGM-oQIQPbGu7pha3QJsnfab3JVDXXuZlT8Oqwg/s599/R-6358097-1605700602-7668.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="597" data-original-width="599" height="638" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPKr64nQi52hyQXR8--eYZfQKR7xXR6ooxerS8DCupXsPS4O-2UMKnZrHiiVwo8cGuropKW9Y_37qaV688zcAtyR5DmKtkJTlqgA-8-SdFT8N0ewGz12CSxfa5IOJ-tD3Yk4d3QWHxndliFSlC3i6NGM-oQIQPbGu7pha3QJsnfab3JVDXXuZlT8Oqwg/w640-h638/R-6358097-1605700602-7668.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal">bonus Wyatt worship </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Robert Wyatt</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><i>Going Back A Bit - A Little History of Robert Wyatt </i></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Melody Maker, 1994 </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">At last, a long-overdue anthology of stuff and nonsense by one of the great eccentrics of English art-rock, Robert Wyatt. A miscellany of bits and bobs from solo albums and the shortlived outfit Matching Mole, its main selling-point, O punter, is that it makes available again, CD-sharp, 5/6 of his all-time 1974 classic Rock Bottom. But infuriatingly, not only is the album's original sequence jumbled up, for no apparent reason, but one track is shunted onto the second disc, so that you can't even reprogram it into the correct sequence. And one of the best is left off altogether.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">With most albums this wouldn't matter a jot, but Rock Bottom is structured around a compelling emotional/musical narrative – it's a complex allegory of Wyatt's disablement (he tumbled out of a window during a wild party), his subsequent emotional regression, and his slow recovery. Even in the wrong order, Rock Bottom dazzles: it's a masterpiece of oceanic rock to rival Buckley's Starsailor, A.R. Kane's 69, maybe even Davis' In A Silent Way. On 'Last Straw', aqueous keyboards, refractory guitars and imagery like "seaweed tangled in a home from home" conjure up a poignant vision of the amniotic heaven of the briny deep. 'Sea Song' begins as an eerie serenade to a mermaid, then Wyatt spirals off into soul-harrowing scat-falsetto aquabatics.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">'Alifib' is Wyatt at his lowest ebb, gasping out tiny breaths of anguish amidst a lachrymal sound-web of harmonium, while 'Alifie' sees him reduced to baby-talk drivel as his dependence on his wife Alfie deepens. "I can't forsake you or forsqueak you, Alifie, my larder", dribbles Wyatt; eventually she puts her foot down – 'I'm NOT your larder'. This is the turning point, the first step on the road to recovery, and the (original) album ends with the wonderful eco-terrorist ditty 'Little Red Riding Hood', with Ivor Cutler ranting about how he lies down in the road to stop the cars: "yeah me and the hedgehog busting tyres all day long".</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Wyatt emerged, via the Soft Machine, from the late '60s/early '70s Canterbury scene, along with Caravan, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/nov/18/gong-daevid-allen-steve-hillage-prog-rock-psychedelia" target="_blank">Gong</a>, Kevin Ayers, Egg etc. As well as an interest in bending rock form in all manner of jazzy-folky-weirdy ways, what these groups shared was a very English whimsy – <a href="https://hardlybaked2.blogspot.com/2023/02/canterbury-and-cuppa-tea.html" target="_blank">at once their charm and their liability</a>. And so on the 13 minute 'Moon In June', Wyatt extemporises about the joys of doing a session for the Beeb, while 'Soup Song' is sung from the point of view of one of its reluctant ingredients, a slice of bacon. Even Wyatt's lovesongs are skewered by irony. In the wonderfully sentimental 'O Caroline', Wyatt warns his sweetheart "if you call this sentimental crap you'll make me mad", while 'Calyx' is full of oddly phrased praise: "close inspection reveals you're in perfect nick".</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Wyatt's wonderful voice is why he gets away with it whereas, say, Kevin Ayers mostly grates*: he always sounds simultaneously wry and earnest, ironic and heart-felt. Damp, lugubrious, resolutely colloquial, totally unrock'n'roll (like a cross between Peter Skellern and Roland Kirk), Wyatt's voice could be the closest thing to an authentic "English soul" this nation's produced.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>* an opinion I have not so much modified subsequently, as <a href="https://reynoldsretro.blogspot.com/2013/02/kevin-ayers-songs-for-insane-times.html" target="_blank">completely inverted</a>. </div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span>Kevin Ayers and Robert Wyatt interviewed, separately, but entwined <a href="https://reynoldsretro.blogspot.com/2007/12/kevin-ayers-and-robert-wyatt-grauniad.html" target="_blank">as a piece</a>, alas unpublished owing to an interdepartmental communication problem at the <i>Grauniad </i></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><i><br /></i></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF4gyLZSdUmJiv9dM9bPMuNFVcnbMOHmrIO-69iVHfzXtAzvVB2GGLmO7RV3m2yZWNAAwgUoTVawsrKtZvUxFUGQWYMCfDFDyOj_7i64a80fRAflGOkBiisF4rMHUczAcDncvtoDhMXi0M11AHtMGTHavbEQauskk0jx71ehBBYLhLqzLIaJyle-oL3Q/s400/Robert%20wyatt%20and%20SR%20Hay%202007%20pic%202.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="400" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF4gyLZSdUmJiv9dM9bPMuNFVcnbMOHmrIO-69iVHfzXtAzvVB2GGLmO7RV3m2yZWNAAwgUoTVawsrKtZvUxFUGQWYMCfDFDyOj_7i64a80fRAflGOkBiisF4rMHUczAcDncvtoDhMXi0M11AHtMGTHavbEQauskk0jx71ehBBYLhLqzLIaJyle-oL3Q/w400-h300/Robert%20wyatt%20and%20SR%20Hay%202007%20pic%202.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span>Me and Mr. Wyatt, in the green room (green tent?) at the Hay Literary Festival, 2007, prior to me interviewing him live onstage. Pix by Richard King. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span>I had no idea I was such a gesticulator until I saw this photo.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOFWin9e8NZJVyZbxgP5kCIHeLvrFJegeQiM1HeQKmDiDSPgB_eKtMGYM7n6oLJUseuK75t3OIeUvgZaMIhwWV2kPvtb0Rq4u7RiRxOz7m19xziqcBiEla5ImVZcLeRxVuH5PztvfDiIoUQgNAW2ENthK3BjOND5uvtJqXme-zvenY2CCr60c1Q7eE5Q/s400/Robert%20Wyatt%20and%20SR%20Hay%202007%20pic%201.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="400" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOFWin9e8NZJVyZbxgP5kCIHeLvrFJegeQiM1HeQKmDiDSPgB_eKtMGYM7n6oLJUseuK75t3OIeUvgZaMIhwWV2kPvtb0Rq4u7RiRxOz7m19xziqcBiEla5ImVZcLeRxVuH5PztvfDiIoUQgNAW2ENthK3BjOND5uvtJqXme-zvenY2CCr60c1Q7eE5Q/w400-h300/Robert%20Wyatt%20and%20SR%20Hay%202007%20pic%201.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF4gyLZSdUmJiv9dM9bPMuNFVcnbMOHmrIO-69iVHfzXtAzvVB2GGLmO7RV3m2yZWNAAwgUoTVawsrKtZvUxFUGQWYMCfDFDyOj_7i64a80fRAflGOkBiisF4rMHUczAcDncvtoDhMXi0M11AHtMGTHavbEQauskk0jx71ehBBYLhLqzLIaJyle-oL3Q/s400/Robert%20wyatt%20and%20SR%20Hay%202007%20pic%202.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /></a></div><br /><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br /></span></div>SIMON REYNOLDShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01282478701882900354noreply@blogger.com3