ReynoldsRetro

2011-12-22T14:16:00.000-08:00

from Melody Maker's gossip/satire pages, sometime in late 1986 or early 1987 - affectionate pisstake of our comrade Frank Owen (the PhD-totin', cult-studs stud responsible for most of the paper's coverage of hip hop at that time) cobbled together by David Stubbs and me

2011-10-18T11:01:00.000-07:00

2011-10-07T16:43:00.000-07:00

DEATH IN VEGAS
Spin, 1999

by Simon Reynolds

"Have you got any Jack Purcell's?" asks Richard Fearless.

The burly sales clerk in Sports Authority looks blank.

"It's a make of trainers," Fearless explains.

The sales clerk looks blanker still.

"Sneakers, Rich-- in America, they call 'em sneakers," translates Tim Holmes, Fearless's sound engineer partner in Death In Vegas.

Arriving in New York, the first thing British bands --especially those affiliated to dance music--tend to do is hunt down the latest lines of name-brand sneakers. It seems typical of Richard Fearless that his holy grail is a ultra-obscure brand named after a post-war tennis champion; a brand he became obsessed with after spotting them on Elvis Presley's feet in a classic 1950s stage photograph. Style is something of an obsession for Fearless, who's reknowned in Britain for his mod-influenced sharp-dressed look, who recently turned down a Calvin Klein TV commercial, and whose prized pair of Patrick Cox snakeskin loafers were stolen when he passed out after DJing at a club.

Today, hitting the street again after the fruitless footwear quest, he's looking relatively under-dressed in a long sleeve pink shirt and faded jeans with the silver letters AC and DC stenciled on alternate buttocks. Still, in many ways Fearless and his band represent every Anglophobe's nightmare of style-over-content Limey art-rock. After getting an art scholarship at a boarding school aged 13, Fearless went on to study Fine Art at college, before switching to a graphic design degree course at the London College of Printing. It's in his blood: his mother is an art teacher and his sister designs shoes. Even his voice has the classic UK art school rock accent--middle class, but slurred and mumbly in a downwardly mobile effort to suppress its innately posh crispness and clarity.

Wandering the streets of mid-town Manhattan, Fearless's aesthete's eye is constantly
captivated. "What a marvellous little old man!" he enthuses as a dapper, David Lynch-
esque geezer waddles past. Fearless keeps stopping to take snaps of showroom dummies
in store windows--the mis-shapen, poorly executed physiognomy of mass-produced
mannequins fascinates him. One of his many projects on the go--which encompass a
movie about India influenced by Sixties experimental film-maker Harry Smith, a
documentary about Elvis fans, and a film score--is putting together an exhibition of his mannequin photos.

Over lunch at a noodle diner near Times Square, Fearless explains how Death In Vegas's
visuals are equally as important as its sonics. His record contract includes a clause that gives him total control of all aspects of the band's presentation--not just the cover art, but the advertisements too. Better still, he notes gleefully, the record company "has to pay us separately for the art work--including any amendments." For Fearless does it all himself, right down to the fonts--like the Gothic typography used on Death In Vegas's new album The Contino Sessions, which he hand-copied from Luftwaffe insignia.

Inspired by a James Ellroy character, Contino Rooms is the name of Death In Vegas's twin studio HQ in North London. With Holmes tweaking the music in one room and design partner Will Bevan finessing the imagery in the other, Fearless flits back and forth all day overseeing the work-in-progress. "With the new album, we were designing the sleeve while we were making the music," he says, a boyish grin brightening his pallid features.

Death In Vegas's dark 'n' dubby debut 1997 Dead Elvis was lumped in with the Big Beat
scene, largely because of Fearless's DJ residency at the Heavenly Social, the London club made famous by The Chemical Brothers. But with Contino, Fearless has broken decisively with that scene's relentlessly cheery antics and pledged his allegiance to moody, tripped-out trance rock---Sixties garage punks like Thirteenth Floor Elevators and Chocolate Watchband, the manic-depressive mantras of Velvet Underground and The Stooges, and, most of all, all the late Eighties neo-psychedelic resurgence of My Bloody Valentine, Loop, and Spacemen 3 that so enthralled Fearless when he was 17.

Contino Sessions mostly consists of instrumentals, such as the album's highpoint "Flying"--a celestial pageant of ringing, iridescent guitars that recalls Neu! and Harmonia, Fearless's Krautrock faves. But there are vocal cameos from archetypal leather-trousered rockers such as Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie, Jesus & Mary Chain's Jim Reid, and Iggy Pop, who contributed a psychosis-by-numbers monologue to "Aisha".

"Iggy was just a stab in the dark," explains Fearless, wolfing down food from the three
heaped and steaming dishes he's ordered. "We wrote a track for him, got our manager to
contact his manager, sent him a letter. It was a bit of a dream really that he said yes." The session took place in New York's Electric Ladyland studios. "Iggy turned up in a torn black T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off, blue drainpipe Levis, and black biker boots," recalls Holmes. "He did the vocal, and we just stood there open-mouthed." Holmes was was so buzzed by this encounter with his hero that he rushed out immediately afterwards and bought a pair of sneakers, only to find out later they were "three sizes too small".

Despite the duo's love of all things Iggy-esque and the new album's boycott of the
dancefloor, Death In Vegas remains very much a product of the last decade of UK rave
culture. Fearless describes the late Eighties acid house revolution as "my punk rock," and when he DJ-s he mostly plays Detroit techno. "I'm still excited by dance music, but with Contino we were trying to get away from that whole electronica tag, which seemed to be exploding here. It would have been too easy to make an album that would have ridden on that wave."

Although it sounds like incandescent rock'n'roll, Contino's mode of construction owes a lot to dance music. "What I love about the best dub reggae and techno is how hypnotic and monotonous it is," says Fearless indistinctly through a mouthful of fried rice. "When there is a change, you notice it so much more. That's what we tried to do with our album, but using live musicians."

Fearless can't play any instruments himself. Instead, he and Holmes operate as sound painters--sketching the outlines of songs, then using "real" musicians as a palette of colors. "We get the guys to play along to the tracks, and then we sample and rework the best bits, " explains Holmes, looking glum because his cellophane noodles with sliced pork haven't materialized. On Contino Sessions, the result
is a DJ's simulacrum of psychedelic rock--fuzzed-out, distorted, but looped and layered electronica-style.

If there's a drawback to this DJ/designer's sensibility to arranging sound, it's that it is necessarily somewhat detached. Unlike their inspirations from Moby Grape to
Spiritualized, Death In Vegas songs don't seem to be driven by urgent emotions. Adapting the Velvet Underground drone-rock aesthetic into a sort of wallpaper-of-noise, The Contino Sessions works as gloriously cinematic mood-food rather than soul-wrenched expression.

All the words on the album are written by the guest vocalists. "For me, it's all about sound," says Fearless. "I just can't take what goes on in my head and put it onto paper as lyrics. Being extremely dyslexic doesn't help." He claims that his brand of chronic dyslexia doesn't affect his reading abilities, only writing and arithmetic: "When somebody leaves a phone number on my answer-machine, I have to get someone else to write it down!"

And then, incorrigible art school rocker that he is, Fearless is pivoting 180 degrees in his seat and training his camera on a waiter at a distant table. The boy just can't help it.

2011-10-05T15:07:00.000-07:00

LAUREL HALO
Hour Logic
(Hippos In Tanks)
Antenna
(NNA Tapes)
director's cut, The Wire, August 2011

by Simon Reynolds

Laugh-out-loud moments are few and far between in the work of Fredric Jameson. But A Singular Modernity did elicit a chuckle from me – the laughter of uneasy self-recognition –with its characterization of the modernists as obsessed with “measurement”. Surveying the cultural landscape, fellows like Ezra Pound tabulated innovations levels, keeping inventory of “partial breakthroughs” and “intensities” that seemed to herald a new world.

The past decade has witnessed the steady incapacitation of this mode of assessing music. Just as linear directionality within culture has dissolved thanks to the internet’s effects on time and space, likewise it’s hard to locate a metric by which you could determine whether a particular artist or genre is more advanced than another. It was easier during the 1990s, at least within electronic dance music: change was felt viscerally, as an exponential rise in how challenging music was to dance to or simply withstand as a sonic onslaught. Beats got faster and more complex; bass grew gnarlier and heavier yet also more intricately molded and morphed. In the 2000s, this onward-and-outward drive gradually crumbled into the current swampy state of every-which-way: a hyperactive yet static end of history in which producers receive ovations for making records that sound like early 1990s House and ‘future garage’ is a two-steps back retreat to the skippy beats of 1999.

Atemporality, some folks call it. Yet it doesn’t have to be a predicament. Look at the way artists associated with the post-noise underground (the roster of Not Not Fun’s sub-label 100% Silk, for instance) offer an outsider’s take on dance music history, treating its archival deposits the same way they do New Age and 1980s ‘yacht rock’, as Play-Doh to be twisted into new shapes.

This is where Brooklyn’s Laurel Halo is coming from. Her music is neither referential nor reverential, but if you’ve listened to electronic music for a good while you will hear in her work a host of... let’s not say ghosts (there's nothing morbid or musty about Halo’s sound), let's say sprites: everyone from Ryuichi Sakomoto to Enya, Andreas Vollenweider to Danielle Dax, Ralph Lundsten to Laurie Spiegel. Specifically in dance terms, the feel is often undeniably early-to-mid 1990s: “Aquifer”, the opening track on the Hour Logic EP, had me flashing on Ken Ishii’s R&S releases, while elsewhere you might be minded of the early Black Dog, the young Carl Craig, or other producers who recorded for Kirk DeGiorgio's ART label.

Like these precursors Halo’s music finds the fine line between clubby floor-fodder and homebodied brain-food. What we have here isn’t so much Intelligent Dance Music, though, as Superfuckin’ Intellectual Dance Music. In interviews Halo discourses fluently about arcane concepts like ‘aural apophenia’ and ‘memory asymptotes’, while citing as inspirations everything from the Gnostic SF of Philip K Dick's VALIS to Hajime Sorayama’s super-realist soft porn. But Halo’s patter never seems willfully obscure or ostentatiously cerebral. It’s just a young, open mind looking for a harmonious connective logic to integrate all the things that arouse its curiosity, while also reaching for a language to describe and explain music whose operations and sensations are maddeningly resistant to verbalisation.

Hour Logic literally gives up on words: unlike last year’s song-and-lyric oriented King Felix, it’s almost completely vocal-free. “Constant Index” is the sole tune here that sticks with Felix’s 1980s 4AD vibe, which suggested an imaginary MARRS full-length with Colourbox calling on the blurry-voice talents of Elizabeth Fraser and Lisa Gerrard. Throughout Hour Logic, there’s a feeling of panoply, a luscious and fragrant sensuousness. The title track is a little marvel of audio feng shui, balancing wide and warm horizons of synth-waft with a chalky-yet-fluorescent bassline, gossamer percussion, and pensive chords. On “Strength In Free Space”, textures fan out and shimmer like a peacock’s tail. "Speed of Rain" shifts back and forth between boombastic surges of breakbeat-like propulsion and lulls of cascading serenity, like a jogger in a Japanese garden repeatedly halting to admire a koi pond or waterfall. But the absolute stand-out piece, “Head”, leaves behind loveliness. A dislocated pulsebeat, like a trance drum-roll build plucked from context and stretched out into a long ribbon of rhythm, forms a sort of endlessly suspended climax. The music brims towards a singularity, an exquisite crisis: flanged sounds converge at a sort of three-dimensional crossroads, forming a helix of tones that hovers, plangently, before scattering in disarray.

“Head” and “Strength In Free Space” both recur on Antenna, a side dish to the main feast. Like Hour Logic, this tape is nearly the length of an LP. But the contents are less structured: swatches of fabric whose patterns are attractive but would be more impressive still if cut and styled into garments. There's a shitload of Ambient music and minimalist composition already extant in the world and Antenna sometimes recalls earlier efforts in an overcrowded field: Meredith Monk-like mouth music, with the milky, churning nebula that is “Impulse”, while “Dia Sapien” grinds and purrs like an offcut from Seefeel’s Quique, and “Zoo Hypothesis” could be “In Dark Trees (Coil’s Sidereal Vicious Mix)”. Best of the batch are “Heuristic Gag Factory” (Blade Runner re-scored by Monolake) and “Factory Reset” (a cat’s cradle of pitch-modulated vocal warbles/wobbles).

Sky and ocean are major inspirations for Halo, in particular notions of suspension, diving, and freefall. These sensations all have a blissful-yet-perturbing effect on one’s sense of orientation. Which has a certain resonance with the notion of atemporality: the archaic modernist impulse to ‘push things forward’ blocked by the impasse of ‘which way would that be, then?’ Halo is well aware of these issues, and has talked eloquently of a vague-ening of memory caused by our brains starting “to mimic our patterns of information retrieval and consumption on the Internet – to the point where... we move towards this eternal Present.” The upside is that “you can make all these interesting sounds out of this rubble of time quickening”.

A whole heap of futures have stacked up behind electronic dance and non-dance music across three or more decades of unrelenting advance. But rather than striving strenuously and futilely for some kind of alien beyond, or lapsing into wistful, epigonic classicism, Halo flicks through all these futures-past like the pages of a flip book. The result – if such a thing could still be measured – feels new and now.

2011-10-02T21:22:00.001-07:00

ANTHRAX
Melody Maker, 17 September 1987

by Simon Reynolds

TILLBURG, HOLLAND: the Monsters Of Rock tour continues its traipse across Europe. There's no hard rain of piss bottles, and instead of mud there's Astroturf, but the William II Stadium, like Donington, is a vast human sty, a seeping eye-sore. The fans have gathered to celebrate together the belief that being yourself means wallowing in the worst that you're capable of, that true letting go involves lowering yourself, that any kind of grooming or self-nurture is a pretense, and that only neglect or active self-abuse are "authentic".

The men look like Vikings who've been out of service for a while, who are turning into couch potatoes. The women look like wenches. Everywhere you see the same slightly discolored flaxen hair, straggling over collars or drooping from upper lips. Men with huge guts, and bellybuttons you could lose a hand in, stagger around shirtless. One fellow, as gross as a shaved sow, nearly brains my diminutive Island Records chaperone with his bloated and glistening stomach.

Stepping gingerly over babbling brooks of urine, and comatose spectators, we somehow gravitate towards what must surely be the lowest spot in the entire festival. A gang of oafs are acting up for the benefit of a photographer from a Dutch music rag. They decide to make cruel sport with one of their number who's completely unconscious, drag him to his feet and pull his pants down for the camera. He comes to, struggles to escape like a hog in a slaughterhouse, makes feeble inebriate attempts to cover his modesty, but his "mates" keep pulling down his trousers, then turn him round so his privates are on display. A throng of onlookers snigger and cackle like serfs at a bear-bait or badger-taunt. Then all five moon in a row, to cheers. Unsightly. Unappetising. Gagging, we flee.

In this milieu of baseness and fatuity, Anthrax are a massive and caustic act of hygiene. As people, they're chummy and easygoing and up for fun, but – bar the regrettable faffing around of the 'I Am The Man' spoof-rap – their music is charged up with an apocalyptic sobriety. Metallica and Anthrax are to trad heavy metal (in all its 57 varieties of idiocy) what the Protestant Reformation was to Catholicism. A rigorous and purgative initiative whose aim is take metal out the Middle Ages and into modernity. Metal's medievalism is vested not just in its emotional repertoire – the themes of warrior manhood, honour, revenge and righteous violence, the fascination with Satan – but in the gaudy pantomime and ossified ritual of performance (which is what the peasant hordes out there lurve). Metallica and Anthrax are trying to replace all that by literacy and self-effacement.

In any other pop genre, this demystification would be a reductive maneuver; raising of consciousness so often leads to inhibited music (one thinks of the clipped, constipated Au Pairs approach to agit-pop, the Redskins/Faith Brothers brand of "sensible soul", the dwarfism of The Wedding Present school of authenticity). But the fundamental musical propositions of HM simply are gigantism, disproportion, and exaggeration; what Anthrax have done is retain the sheer mass of metal while excising what's laughable and embarrassing about its content. But hysteria is the essence of the idiom, so they've managed this by replacing tight-trousered hyperlust with an equally histrionic pitch of denunciation.

Hence the magnificent new single, 'Make Me Laugh', a splendid tirade against TV evangelism. Not that it tells me anything I don't already know; but the venom caused by the subject matter was clearly necessary to sustain the severity of the music.

Charlie Benante, drummer, explains in his thick New York Italian accent: "There's a lot of these guys in America. You turn on a channel, and you see a coliseum-type place, and there's this preacher looking out at you through the camera with this imploring expression, and he goes on about the will of God, and 'we really need the money'. And we see this all the time, and we think, 'this is so ridiculous'. It makes us laugh. But the sad part, the unfunny part, is that people believe in all this shit because they have nothing else to believe in. And the evil part is that this guy is sucking the lost and lonely in, brainwashing them to send in money and then everything will be beautiful. It's sick."

Do you think that the evangelists don't actually believe that they're the instrument of the Lord, that it's all a money-making con?

"No, I don't think they do believe what they say. Maybe some of it. I don't know. The main thing is they're making a lotta money out of this. It's a big fraud. All the money goes back into making more money, not good works."

What do you think you achieve, when you speak out on an issue like this? Education?

Joey Belladona (singer): "No. We don't have anything we want to get across to anybody. It's just something interesting to talk about."

Charlie: "Maybe it does make people more aware of what's goin' on."

Joey: "But it ain't preachy, man."

Charlie: "The other thing is that a lot of these evangelist organisations are ready to put down heavy metal music as corrupting, and there's the PMRC, but in reality they are the bad eggs, the mind-manipulators. All we're doing is playing our music. The thing that hurts us is when some kid commits suicide, and they find a tape in his room with Anthrax, Ozzy, etc on it – and right away, they blame the music. They don't go into the background of how the kid got fucked up, how his family was. Could be that the music was what kept the kid going for so long, his only reason for living. Who knows?"

Do they think that the emergence of Anthrax and Metallica within the addled genre represents a moral regeneration for metal – away from the glamorization of living fast and on the edge?

Joey: "Fast cars, sex and drugs, you mean?"

Charlie: "Metal has always had this larger than life image. We're more into being real. Onstage, people throw things at us, we bleed. We're not invulnerable. We just try to be on the same level as our audience – except we're onstage."

And along with a moral regeneration, there's a musical regeneration too – a return to discipline and precision after a long period in which metal has been slack and enervated and...

"Sloppy? Yeah, we try to run a fit band. Some lady was interviewing us last night, and she said 'a lot of it sounds like noise'. I took this kinda personally. We're pretty hot musicians, the stuff we play is pretty complex. It's not chaos, so if someone calls it 'noise', I get annoyed."

Is this like Metallica's vexation at being labelled "thrash", because it suggested some kind of shambles?

"I don't mind the tag, but only in the sense that kids come to our shows, and they thrash."

It's interesting that another of the tirades on the album is a song called 'Antisocial'. Traditionally, rock, and especially metal, has prided itself on being outside the law, careless and vandalistically self-directed. But here are you – with your temperance, your steady girlfriends, and "antisocial" is a term of abuse aimed at big corporations and the uncaring wealthy...

"Well, we didn't write that song, it's a cover of a track by Trust, this French political hard rock band. We agree with the lyrics, though."

The irony is that you combine this social concern with metal viciousness, whereas the bands who still try to peddle the renegade mythology (Guns 'N' Roses etc) have this blow-dried, weedy sound. What do you feel about "lite metal", its sentimentality and romanticism?

"A lot of people think you have to be flamboyant onstage, but it's not our way. We wear shorts, that's about as far as we'll go into dressing up. We're like these kids going out into the yard to play. But kids today are pretty smart, they can relate to us looking the same as them, they don't need all this glam shit."

You've been quoted as saying that the new album, State Of Euphoria, is your best yet...

"It's the most complete. We spent more time on it."

Do you ever worry about whether you'll be able to exceed what you've done before?

Joey: "We're just starting to get a groove going. This is the first album I've been properly integrated into the band."

Could you ever contemplate a complete step sideways?

Charlie: "Nah. I don't wanna drastic change. That's not what we set out to do. We'd get a lot of heat from people who are into us, if we changed. We're just getting a groove together, paving a way for us. When I was into a band as a kid, and they made a drastic change with the new album, did the album 'they felt they had to make', I felt so bad, it was like betrayal."

With something as unitary and monomaniac and, in the best sense, one-dimensional as Anthrax, though, each of you must have unrealised musical ambitions, wayward impulses that you have to keep in check for the collective good?

Joey: "We probably have fantasies of things we might do, but that doesn't involve or affect Anthrax at all. Those impulses don't matter, and if we indulged them within the group, we'd just get sideswiped from what we're doing. As musicians we're versatile and accomplished enough to do pretty much what we like. But not within Anthrax."

The one idea Anthrax keep returning to is the desire to be "real". And this obsession means they've not only taken metal out of medievalism into modernity, they've actually made it to the 20th Century. As such, they're unique (Megadeth by comparison, are 16th century millenarians gleefully waiting the impending Armageddon, Metallica perhaps Lutherans for whom the world is a huge globe of excrement and life merely a harvest of sorrow). The obsession with "realism" and "authenticity" is one of the great cultural symptoms of our era, a belief in cutting through artifice, role-play, protocols, social codes, rigmarole, mystique and mystification. This century has seen the burgeoning of counselling and therapeutic organisations who encourage the opening up and display of emotional innards, and who condemn dissimulation of the border between public and private life (think of the Goldman book, the focus on Dukakis' history of mental health); and culturally, from the nouveau roman to 'Brookside', there's been an attempt to "free" content of the prettifying veils of form, in order to achieve a completely "transparent" reproduction of reality.

At its most neurotic extreme, this longing to get in touch with "reality" leads to a kind of pornography of the real. This is the addiction to images of abjection, violence and catastrophe, because these are regarded as instances of reality in extremis, life at its most "demystified" and unromanticised and explicit. The whole aesthetic of hardcore (from Black Flag to Big Black) is based on such a pornography of the real, on a perverse pleasure in the worst this world has to offer. Anthrax and Metallica are driven by a similar desire to tear off the veils of false consciousness. While not descending to the carnographic depths of a Slayer, they do have a morbid interest in war and exploitation that reminds me of anarcho-punk groups like Dischord or even the mystical nihilism of The Pop Group. You could say that Anthrax have implanted the "soul" of hardcore inside the body of heavy metal.

A side effect of their distaste for mystification is in an attitude to the Love Song that reminds me of the Gang Of Four, as shown in songs like 'Damaged Goods' and, ironically enough, 'Love Like Anthrax'. Anthrax once declared that they'll never write a song with the word "love" in it.

Charlie: "Scott [guitarist and lyricist] feels that 'Finale' is the Anthrax love song. It's about being in a situation where you're with this person – it could be a boy or girl singing the song – and you've been with them for so long you fuckin' hate her, but you just go through with it. And then the song goes, 'finally he broke away'. But I can't see us writing love songs or ballads, it's not us. What we're about, is what I think metal should be about, that kinda 'no room to let up' attitude."

Are Anthrax as a band anti-romanticist?

"Personally, we're all romantic, we all have girlfriends. As a band, we try to have a positive attitude to life. We don't want to dwell on death, or glorify it, cos it ain't glorious. But I suppose we do like to think about evil things. You see I'm a great horror fan. The song 'Now It's Dark' off the new album, that was inspired by Blue Velvet. I told Scott, you gotta write a song about Frank Booth. You see, everybody is Frank Booth, there's some of that psycho in everybody."

Why does that potential fascinate you?

"'Cos there's good and evil in everybody. Everybody has bad thoughts, little impulses, maybe even on the level of wanting to trip somebody up, for no good reason. All I'm saying is, face up to it."

Was punk a crucial influence?

"Musically, yes. I was into Sex Pistols when they were huge and happening. I liked The Clash. I never adapted to the look though. But I just thought punk was cool. I liked Johnny Rotten, he was like this rotten teenage kid, who just did what he wanted to do, said what he wanted to say. The whole thing of being anti-establishment, the politics, I never bothered with that stuff. Sometimes, you get into that, it ruins the music. That's one of the reasons I like Public Enemy so much. I know they said a lot of bad shit in the press, but I'm trying to ignore that so I can get off on the intensity of the music, and its originality."

At one point, it seemed like speed metal and hardcore punk were going to merge, as "speedcore" or "thrash"... Is that still happening?

"It seemed like it was gonna happen, but it never did, they went apart again. I think they're really separate kinds of musics."

But the whole spirit of Anthrax – from your lyrics to your near "straight edge" attitude to drugs and drink – is closer to hardcore than heavy metal.

"I don't know about that. But as far as we're concerned, you just can't stand up onstage and sing about 'lovechild' and 'we're gonna party' and all that shit. It's ridiculous, it's so thin, so plastic. We like to sing about reality, everyday life, much more than 'baby, I love your spiked heels'. I don't know what you call that kind of rock – slut rock, glam rock, cock rock – but it's finished now. It's over."

2011-09-11T17:06:00.000-07:00

RETROMANIA ITALY TOUR / RETROMANIA WEST COAST US TOUR

1/ ITALY TOUR, mid-September

PISTOIA / 18th September

Arcana Puccini festival (September 11th – 18th)
organised by Nevrosi

Sunday 18th September - 10.30 am
Hall of Saint Dominic Friary, Pistoia (piazza San Domenico, 1)
QUESTION TIME
Nevrosi and John Vignola meet Simon Reynolds
A “question time” is held for music critics and practitioners, who must submit questions or topics to be be admitted, seats being limited. Send questons to nevrosi@nevrosi.org.

Sunday 18th September - 3.00 pm
Hall of Saint Dominic Friary, Pistoia (piazza San Domenico, 1)
EAST/WEST: STATES OF THE ART
Panel with Simon Reynolds, Zakhar Prilepin, Jaroslaw Mikolajevski, Paolo Cognetti, John Vignola. Moderator: Goffredo Fofi.
A talk about weaves, affinities and differences between western and eastern culture production processes.

ROME / Monday 19th SEPTEMBER

6.00 – 7.30 Lecture at John Cabot University (Aula Magna)

9.30pm PRESENTATION of RETROMANIA at Circolo degli Artisti - Via Casilina Vecchia 42
with Alberto Piccinini, Federico Guglielmi (Mucchio Selvaggio), Emiliano Colasanti ( Blow Up), Claudia Durastanti (writer).

followed by DJ sets by Simon Reynolds, Lele Sacchi

MILAN / Tuesday 20th SEPTEMBER

7.00 pm - PRESENTATION of RETROMANIA at FNAC Bookshop - Via della Palla 2
with Carlo Antonelli

10.30pm to 1.00 AM - DJ sets by Simon Reynolds, Lele Sacchi, at ATOMIC - Via Panfilo Castaldi

2/ WEST COAST USA TOUR, Late September

PORTLAND - Monday, September 26

7:30 PM to 9:00 pm POWELL'S BOOKS (BOOKSTORE)
1005 W. BurnsidePortland, OR 97209

Dialogue with Douglas Wolk, followed by Q&A and book signing.

SEATTLE / Tuesday, September 27

7:00 PM to 8:30 PM PT THE GROTTO (downstairs at the Rendezvous restaurant)
2322 Second Ave. Seattle, WA 98121

Dialogue with Luke Burbank followed by Q & A and book signing

BERKELEY / Wednesday, September 28

7:30 PM to 8:30 PM PEGASUS BOOKS DOWNTOWN
2349 Shattuck Ave. Berkeley, CA 94704
events@pegasusbookstore.com

talk/Q&A/book signing

SAN FRANCISCO / Thursday, September 29

7:30 PM to 9:00 PM BOOKSMITH
1644 Haight St. San Francisco, CA 94117
events@booksmith.com

Dialogue with Scott Hewicker, followed by Q&A and book signing.

LOS ANGELES / Sunday, October 2

12:15 PM to 1:15 PM - WEST HOLLYWOOD BOOKFAIR
8300 Santa Monica Boulevard
West Hollywood, CA 90069-6216

Panel event/signing. Also on the panel are Kent Crowley (author of 'Surf Beat,') and moderator Nic Adler.

precise location details TK

2011-09-09T11:50:00.000-07:00

PIRATES OF THE AIRWAVES
director's cut The Wire, 2008

By Simon Reynolds

Easily the most precious sonic artifacts in my possession are the tapes I made of London pirate radio shows in the early Nineties. Everything else is replaceable, albeit in some cases at considerable effort and expense. But these ardkore rave and early jungle tapes are almost certainly irrecoverable: given the large number of stations active then, the sheer tonnage of 24 hours/Friday-Saturday-Sunday broadcasting, and the drug-messy non-professionalism of the DJ-and-MC crews of those days, it's highly likely my recording is the only documentation extant of any given show.

In which case, if only I'd used higher quality cassettes! Before I got wise, I'd tape over unwanted advance tapes from record labels: since the radio signal could often be poor, buying chrome blanks seemed a waste . Plus, in those early days, I wasn't doing it out of some archival preservationist impulse. Like a lot of ravers I was just taping to get hold of the music, something hard to do otherwise because deejays rarely identified tunes. Later I'd discover that many were dubplates that wouldn't be in the shops for months anyway; in some cases, they were test pressing experiments that never got released at all. I was taping simply to have the music to play through the week when the pirates mostly dropped off the airwaves, and in 1993, when I spent large chunks of the year in New York, I took the tapes with me to keep the rave flame burning during my exile.

These relics of UK rave's heyday are editions-of-one because they're mutilated by my spontaneous editing decisions: switching between stations repeatedly when a pirate show's energy dimmed, or the DJ dropped a run of tracks I'd taped several times already; cutting off arbitrarily when I couldn't stay awake any longer, or dwindling into lameness because I'd left the tape running and went off to do something else. In the early days I often pressed 'pause' when the commercial breaks came on, something I now regret because those that survived are among my absolute favourite bits. With their goofy, made-on-the-fly quality, the ads for the big raves and the pirate station jingles contribute heavily to the dense layering of socio-cultural data and period vibes that make these tapes so valuable.

The crucial added element to these tapes, something you don't get from the original vinyl 12 inches played in isolation or even from the official DJ mix-tapes and mix-CDs of the era, is life. In two senses: the autobiographical imprint of my personal early Nineties, someone hurled disoriented into the vortex of the UK rave scene and still figuring it out, but also the live-and-direct messiness of deejays mixing on the fly and using whatever new tunes were in the shops that week, of MCs randomizing further with their gritty and witty patter. The tapes are capsules of a living culture. Something about the mode of transmission itself seems to intensify the music, with radio's compression effect exaggerating hardcore's already imbalanced frequency spectrum of treble-sparkly high end and sub-bass rumblizm. Pirate deejays, typically mid-level jocks or amateurs, also took more risks than big-name DJs crowd-pleasing at the mega-raves. Playing to a home-listening or car-driving audience, the DJs mixed with an edge-of-chaos looseness and squeezed in some of the scene's odder output rather than just sticking to floor-filling anthems.

Oh, they're not all pure gold, these tapes. Many shows stayed stuck at "decent" or slumped outright into "tepid". But the ones that ignited… ooh gosh! The vital alchemical catalyst was invariably the MC. On some sessions, it's like a flash-of-the- spirit has possessed the rapper, as electrifying to the ears as a first-class Pentecostal preacher or demagogue; you sense the MC and the decktician spurring each other to higher heights. It tends to be the lesser knowns that thrill me most: not the famous big-rave jungle toasters like Moose or Five-O but forgotten figures like OC and Ryme Tyme, who forged unique styles that melded the commanding cadences and gruff rootsiness of U-Roy-style deejay talkover with the chirpy hyperkinesis of nutty rave, or collided barrow boy argy-bargy with B-boy human beatboxing. Some of these tapes I know so well that the tracks are inseparable from the chants and the chatter entwined around the drops and melody-riffs; years later when I finally worked out what the mystery tunes were and bought them, they sounded flat without that extra layer of rhythmatized speech thickening the breakbeat broth.

[graph monitoring pirate radio activity from Touch magazine, circa 1994]

1992 to 1994, ardkore to darkcore to jungle, is the prime period for me. I seldom revisit the drum and bass years, when things got serious; things pick up again with the poptastic re-efflorescence of UK garage and 2step, when the number of London pirates resurged to its highest level. Grime is an odd one: I've got masses of tapes, and there's masses more to be found archived on the web, but the emergence of the MC as a capital A artist strikes me as a mixed blessing. With one eye on their career prospects (an album deal) the MCs increasingly came in with pre-written verses, reams of carefully crafted verbiage dropped with little regard to how it fit the groove. Pirate MCs always had an arsenal of signature catchphrases and mouth-music gimmicks, but with grime a vital element of ad-libbing improvisation got severely diminished. So excepting some 2002 tapes from grime's protozoan dawn, I've not got the same attachment or affection as I do for the classic rave sets.

Oddly, I've rarely found people who shared my obsession to anything like the same degree: a handful of collector-traders, and a guy called DJ Wrongspeed, whose fantastic Pirate Flava CD collaged the best bits from his now defunct Resonance FM series based around re-presenting pirate radio broadcasts. Often I've come across people who'll talk enthusiastically about recording the pirates "back in the day," only to reveal they'd long since taped over the cassettes, left them in the car to curdle in the heat, or just lost them. Aaaaargh!

But as a quick web search reveals, pirate tape fiends are out there lurking, and not just ones obsessed with the London-centric hardcore continuum: there's online archives and merchants for the original pirate radio of the 1960s (stations anchored in international waters or occupying abandoned offshore military forts) and sites dedicated to the land-based pirates of the Seventies and Eighties and to the Eighties hip hop mix-shows broadcast by London's pre-rave pirates. In terms of my particular addiction, you can find ardkore, jungle and UK garage sets archived at old skool sites, or offered for trade or sale; on various rave, drum'n'bass and dubstep message boards you'll come across individuals sharing huge caches of vintage transmissions.

The pirate penchant seems to be a minority taste within the larger niche market for DJ mix-tapes of the sort recorded through the sound board at the big commercial raves and then sold commercially through specialist record stores. People have been selling or swapping dupes of these sets for a dozen years at least (nostalgia for 1990-92 set in as early as 1996!). Today, an original Top Buzz mix-tape circa 1992, say, might fetch sixty pounds on Ebay. Strangely, from my point of view anyway, old skool fanatics generally prefer the slickly-mixed official releases to the vibe-rich but erratic pirate tapes; a lot of people just don't like MCs, it seems. But if, like me, you dig the brink-of-bedlam atmosphere of the pirate set, or are just curious to cop an in-the-raw feel of what it was like in those crazed days, seek out these online deposits of delirium:

http://www.hardscore.com/radiosets.htm
A sizeable cache of 1989-97 shows, mostly from the London area.

http://www.londonpirates.co.uk/TouchdownAudio.htm http://www.londonpirates.co.uk/DonAudio.htm
Sets from two of my favourite stations of the 1992-93 "golden age"

http://www.yorkshirejunkies.co.uk/music-pirate-radio-recordings.php
Massive archive of broadcasts from Sheffield, Leeds, Bradford, York, Huddersfield, Hull and other North of England stations, 1992 - 2006

http://www.tapesgalore.co.uk/prtapes.htm
Huge selection of pirate tapes, albeit for sale rather than download.

2011-08-05T21:15:00.001-07:00

JIM MORRISON
Melody Maker, 13 April 1991

by Simon Reynolds

It’s almost impossible to have a natural, unforced response to The Doors' music, to hear it clearly through the encrustation of platitudes left by the 20 year criss-cross of mythologisation and debunking. In recent years, the only pop figure to suffer a similar fate of over-analysis is Prince. This probably explains why, in cooler-than-thou circles, it's hip to argue that both Purple Imp and Lizard King are absurdly overrated; nobody likes the taste that clichés leave in the mouth.

Unlike Prince or other over-explicated phenomenons (The Beatles, Stones, Hendrix, Presley), Jim Morrison gave the critics a headstart by providing his own, extremely lucid commentary on what he was trying to do. In The Doors' very first press release, Morrison declared, "I am interested in anything to do with revolt, disorder, chaos, and especially activity that seems to have no meaning". Morrison was remarkably conscious about his quest for unconsciousness, supremely self-possessed in his pursuit of self-loss. Perhaps that's why he drank so much – a crash course in how to ‘learn to forget’, an escape route from self-built cage of having it all worked out in advance.

^^^^^^^^^^^^

Jim Morrison was the first pop deity to stage-manage his own self-mythologisation, to have a critical understanding of the mythical dimensions of rock 'n' roll. While that newly born species, the rock critic, was making its first stumbling comparisons between pop and Greek tragedy (Richard Meltzer), and its first paeans to the Dionysian madness of pop (Nik Cohn, Lester Bangs), Morrison was already articulating all that in his songs, in his performance, in his life. He was the prototype of the critically-minded rock deviant (Iggy Pop, Nick Cave, Perry Farrell, et al).

Morrison had a voracious appetite for what Meltzer calls "edge substances" (LSD, peyote, amyl nitrate, dope, alcohol). But more important were the cultural edge substances: Artaud's Theatre Of Cruelty; Blake's "doors of perception"; Celine's "journey to the end of the night"; Rimbaud's "sacred disorder of the mind"; Baudelaire's "perpetual drunkenness". From these Romantic and decadent influences Morrison derived the idea of the artist as a "broker in madness", an explorer of the frontier territories of the human condition.

But the most lethal intoxicant that Jim Morrison ever imbibed was the febrile writings of poet-philosopher Friedrich Nietzche. In his memoir Riders On The Storm, Doors drummer John Densmore goes so far as to say "Nietzche killed Morrison". Nietzche's Birth Of Tragedy has been described as "a philosophical road map to The Doors"; from it, Morrison drew the opposition between Apollonian art versus Dionysian art. Apollonian art promotes contemplation, calms the soul and ultimately serves social stability. Dionysian art, named after the god of drunkenness, incites pagan delirium, derangement of the senses, and the volcanic eruption within man of the untamed forces of Nature.

For Morrison, Dionysian music meant pre-castration Presley, the Stones, the blues. Apollonian pop? Well, he died before he could suffer the socially conscientious pop of The Style Council or Sting. But there was a distinctly Apollonian tenor to the counter culture: a longing to return to the garden of paradise, to a lost tranquility and order. As a Dionysian, Morrison believed that nature wasn't benign but the enemy without and within – a wilderness that was both threatening and alluring, offering an "eclipse of the self". As Densmore puts it: "Jim's message was endarkenment", not the enlightenment sought by the Love Generation. The Doors lay somewhere between the black leather nihilism of the Velvet Underground and the kaleidoscopic bliss-out of West Coast psychedelia. It was fitting that their base was Los Angeles, the city whose vibe lay somewhere between San Francisco (idyllic, temperate, perpetual spring) and New York (vibrant, uptempo, nerve-edged). L.A. is as divorced from nature as New York, but less characterful, more phantasmic: city-as-wilderness, whose endless freeways offered a soulless version of the Beatnik dream of travelling but never arriving.

"Our music is like someone not quite at home," Morrison said. The Doors' version of psychedelic experience was one of the estrangement and disorientation (‘Strange Days’), not blissful communion with the cosmos. The Doors' songs did not sound trippy so much as uncanny. The root meaning of ‘uncanny’ is a feeling of not being at home in the world. Freud used "the uncanny" to refer to when an object or person seems to have an abnormal, ominous aura (literally, a shadow cast by the unconscious). Morrison actively sought out this feeling of disorientation, driven by Baudelaire's ‘Great Malady’ ("horror of one's own home"). As with most rebels, he equated domesticity with domestication, and thus castration. Morrison owned nothing and lived nowhere; he lived like a bum and by all accounts stank like one too.

^^^^^^^^^^^^

Morrsion took the phallic model of of rebellion (transgression, penetration into the unknown) to the limit. But the ultimate outcome of that stance (the refusal to accept and affirm limits) ultimately leads nowhere. As Albert Goldman put it: "The flipside of breakthrough is estrangement. Once you've broken away, it's pretty bleak out there. The rebel cuts himself off." Morrison himself expressed regrets that The Doors had never done "a song that's a pure expression of pure unbounded joy... like the coming of spring, or a celebration of existence – a feeling of being totally at home." Instead, he stuck with the ‘dark side’. But as Densmore says: "Look where darkness gets ya!" – the gloom of the tomb.

The Oedipal psychodrama of ‘The End’ still divides opinion, but whether you reckon it an epic or embarrassingly contrived method melodrama, it takes us to the core of Morrison's rebellion. "Kill the father, f*** the mother" was Morrison's catechism. Basically it meant: reject all lawgivers (from the conscience to the State right up to God), accept no limits to desire. But according to Freud, it's the Oedipal complex that makes us human; if you do not go through the Oedipal trauma ie abandon the infant's delusions of omnipotence, you become psychotic. What the edge substances offered Morrison (the extremist art or deranging intoxicants that he indulged in) was a temporary trip into psychosis. And this connected with his ideas about the rock idol as shaman. "Shamans," said Morrison, "are professional hysterics, chosen precisely for their psychotic leaning... heroes who live for us and whom we punish."

^^^^^^^^^^^^

Whether he genuinely had such a psychotic leaning, or merely aspired to it, Morrison's behaviour was an amalgam of asshole and visionary. His press officer, Danny Fields, described him as an "adorable monster." His lust to transcend the human condition necessarily meant that he also left behind such prosaic human decencies as punctuality, hygiene, consideration, moderation-in-all-things, and eventually bladder control. All these were the casualties of Morrison's drive to be a poet, rather than simply produce poems.

As for the status-as-poetry of his work, the jury's still out. Some reckon the Doors were best as a pop band – concise, punchy, sexy (‘Hello I Love You’, ‘Light My Fire’). I personally favour the more outrageously pretentious and over-reaching stuff: ‘The Soft Parade’ (nine minutes long, five different sections, intentionally hilarious lyrics like "cobra on my left, leopard on my right") or ‘The Celebration Of The Lizard’ (17-minute song-cycle of mystico-Freudian tosh that still prickles my flesh as it did when I was an impressionable 16-year-old). I can even find some merit in An American Prayer, the poetry album released posthumously, against Jimbo's wishes, with backing supplied by the surviving Doors; an album that is generally regarded as either a calamitous exposure of the singer's poetic pretensions, or as a rape of the poet's original vision.

^^^^^^^^^^^^

Which brings us round to the matter of the current necrophiliac frenzy surrounding the dead Door: what would he have make of it? Yet more of the ghoulish voyeurism that drove him in later years to abuse his audiences and test their passivity to the limit? Vicarious living through someone else's exploits is the name of the game in pop; filtered through the lens of nostalgia, the prospect of real liberation seems remoter than ever. But who knows? Nietzche wrote that the effect of great music should be that "the future digs like a spur into the flesh of every present". Despite all the overkill of the present resurrection, maybe something of Jim Morrison's impossible dreams will abide unscathed and spur us to seize the time, not "waste the dawn".

(NB writing this now I would... A/ not sit on the fence quite as much B/ mention the music and the other members of The Doors at least once. Maybe thrice!

so bit more like the review below... but even that could testify a bit more than it does... )

THE DOORS, Perception (40th Anniversary Box)
Blender, 2006 [director's cut]

by Simon Reynolds

The Doors are the perfect band for when you’re seventeen, a time when you’re waking up to life’s possibilities, the future’s a wide-open frontier, and ten thousand volts of libido pulse through your flesh. In that highly impressionable and lusty state, a Doors classic like “The End”, with its Oedipal psychodrama and entrancing guitar-as-sitar aura of faux-Oriental mystery, sounds like the most profound and intense thing you’ll ever hear. Factor in the attractive shape of Jim Morrison’s life arc, its mythic surge through reckless hedonism to early death ensuring no embarrassingly twilight-of-the-idol comebacks or je-regrette-everything VH1 confessionals, and it’s easy to see why The Doors endure as the ultimate band for clever teenagers craving music that rocks hard but has some book-learnin’ under its belt.

Yet there are potent arguments in favour of the proposition that nobody much older than seventeen should really have an ounce of time for the man or his band. Wasn’t Morrison a real pig of a human being, a (literally) stinking drunk egomaniac who rampaged over most everybody he had any dealings with? Aren’t his poet-as-prophet pretensions insufferably clunky and self-aggrandising? When he goes into “erotic politician”/ counterculture-revolutionary mode (“Five To One”, “The Unknown Soldier”) doesn’t your skin just crawl off your bones and leave the room in embarrassment? Finally, the music itself--most of it’s kinda dated and overblown, surely? All those epic song-suites like “Celebration of the Lizard”, or worse, the dreary bleary blooze of “Backdoor Man” and “Maggie McGill”?

Yet Morrison is hardly short for company when it comes to rock’n’roll assholes who overdid the liquor, while his psychedelic doggerel is really no more cringe-worthy than John Lennon in LSD mode. People always forget Jimbo’s sense of humor, manifested in his surreal ad-libs-- “cobra to my left, leopard to my right” in “The Soft Parade”--and the sheer zest with which he threw himself into his shaman-as-buffoon persona. As for the music--most it still sounds pretty darn glorious.

It remains an unusual sound, not just because of the lead-instrument prominence of Ray Manzarek’s ornate keyboards but because of the way The Doors combined driving rhythm-and-blues with a cinematic clarity, thanks to spacious, glistening arrangements and production (more vivid than ever in this fabulously remastered incarnation). Robbie Krieger is an under-rated guitarist, his solos elegantly restrained, piercingly poignant, and mercifully succinct, while John Densmore’s drumming is deft enough to make a waltz rhythm swing on “Shaman’s Blues.”

The meat of the sound is hard-funking blues, but the Doors salted in all kinds of unlikely flavours: flamenco on “Spanish Caravan”, musique concrete on “Horse Latitudes”, Weimar-era cabaret with their cover of Brecht & Weill’’s “Alabama Song”, cocktail jazz with “Riders on the Storm”. They even bizarrely anticipate disco with one segment of the audacious song-suite “The Soft Parade”

Perception contains all six studio albums the Doors recorded before Morrison’s death, bolstered with the inevitable out-takes (a highlight of which is the demo prototype of “Celebration of the Lizard”) and partnered with DVDs of performance footage. You can retrace the band’s journey from the bold entrance of The Doors (their best album, if suffering slightly from over-exposure) through Strange Days (their darkest and most psychedelic album), onto Waiting For The Sun (their most confused and least satisfying), The Soft Parade (their funniest and most under-rated) and the alleged return-to-bluesy form of Morrison Hotel (their dreariest and most over-rated, while still containing plenty of gems) before winding up with LA Woman (their most accomplished and poignant). The latter’s title track, a freeway-rolling travelogue across Los Angeles with Morrison imagining their home city as a sad-eyed woman, is a last gasp of ragged glory that--and this is a rare example of the benefits of knowing your rock history--sounds all the more grand and moving because the singer wouldn’t be much longer for this world.

Morrison’s version of “the blues” owed as much to Frank Sinatra as Muddy Waters, and his sonorous majesty of tone and commanding cadences made him one of rock’s true originals as a vocalist. One measure of this eminence is how so many of the legion of Jim-itators are rock greats in their own right. Iggy Pop converted Morrison into the pure sexless monomania of punk rock, while Patti Smith adapted his persona to become the world’s first female rocker-as-shaman. Joy Division’s Ian Curtis translated the baritone-booming doomy side of The Doors into Goth, while Echo & The Bunnymen and Simple Minds conversely picked up on the music’s panoramic grandeur and wonderlust. And Jane’s Addiction’s Perry Farrell updated Morrison’s excess-as-the-road-to-the-palace-of-wisdom shtick.

And is there any wisdom to be found at the end of that highway, or along the way? This is a more pinched era than the Sixties, its sense of adventure and entitlement often seeming impossibly remote. In hindsight, the freedom-chasing can look more like irresponsibility, the lust for “experience” weirdly close to a sort of spiritual greed. Yet in an era when seventeen year olds are confronted by a resurgent Puritanism that seeks to roll back the gains of the Sixties, forces of anti-life looking to constrain the scope for pleasure and adventure, there’s a certain imperishable truth and urgency to Morrison’s warning that “no eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn”. In a strange way, he was a true American patriot, his spirit as large as the land itself.

2011-06-26T15:42:00.001-07:00

SALT N' PEPA
Melody Maker, 26TH March 1988

by Simon Reynolds

Salt N' Pepa are on their way up. They're poised on the cusp between cult and mega. They come from a subculture characterised by an unusual (even by pop's standards) swiftness of turnover, rapid obsolescence, where the backrop to the boasts of uniqueness and omnipotence is the reality of anonymity and obscurity to which most rappers return after a brief spell of celebrity.

So Salt 'N' Pepa are determined that they are here to stay. They're working now on turning the initial furore of their arrival into a managed, planned career with the emphasis on longevity as much as impact. Their new LP is called Career Girls.

"You can never be complacent in this business. You have to build on any success to make it last. So on our new LP we're gonna have something for everybody – some rock 'n' roll, some radio pop, some hardcore rap for the street crowd. Something that appeals to every market, so that you don't get pigeonholed as the one thing that appeals to only one kind of person."

Eclecticism as maximum market penetration, straddling radio formats, diversifying your assets. Salt 'N' Pepa have been given sound advice.

But this isn't the story of co-option, of street energy being tamed and exploited by the industry. At every level of hip hop, from the precinct hoodlum, through the cottage industry small labels, right on up to the corporate empires of Def Jam and Cold Chillin', rappers are on the make, eyes on the main chance, looking to be promoted to the next tier of capitalism.

These days, even at the earliest, most amateur, semi-spontaneous level of activity, rappers have the rough details of their ascent worked out in advance. They know the rungs, the pitfalls. They're righteous about gettin' paid. To me, a socialist of sorts, hip hop is a political revelation: its pathological individualism exposes the psychosis at the heart of our free market system, capitalism's war of all against all.

"We always wanted to be in showbiz, but never thought it would really happen. So although it was kind of an accident, we weren't overwhelmed, we'd thought about it, and had prepared for it, in a way. And we know about the work you have to put into sustaining it. You're gonna be hearing about Salt 'N' Pepa for a long long time."

This is America, of course, the land where positive thinking and "self-realisation" seep from every pore of the media, where getting on in the world and getting on with people are both seen as boiling down to the same life skill: selling yourself to others.

Hip hop is a Black subculture, for sure, but it's also an American one – a fact the full significance of which still hasn't percolated through to some quarters here. Hip hop swallows the American caboodle of initiative, ambition, enterprise, "anyone can make it if they work hard", whole.

So Run DMC publicly announce their support for Joey Brown, the notorious black high school principal for New Jersey, whose "talk tough" policy towards pupils has caused much controversy in the States, because of its emphasis on discipline, rectitude, not to mention Brown's bent for patrolling the playground with a loudhailer in one hand and a baseball bat in the other.

And that closeknit family The Skinny Boys namecheck Bill Cosby as a major role model – Cosby the patrician, whose increasingly moralistic show always sees the parents putting their errant kids back on the rails of life with an appropriate homily and a firm hand, Cosby the massive shareholder who is believed to have engineered the dismissal of liberal David Puttnam from his influential Hollywood job.

Like Run DMC, Salt 'N' Pepa are uncomfortably poised between the monomaniac assertion ("here I am, I am Somebody") of the subculture they come from, and the vague feelings of responsibility (to be a "positive role model") engendered by massive success. Like Run DMC, like Whodini, Salt 'N' Pepa, I'm sure, will shift from the tyranny of their local struggles towards something more regal, magnanimous, publicly concerned. The apoplexy of 'It's Alright', with its dub-cavern of spectral scratch and its visionary cruelty ("burn you and leave your ashes smokin"'), the exuberant vindictiveness of 'I'll Take Your Man', the predatorial 'I Desire'...all this disproportion is already being evened out to fit the pop format. But there's still pleasure. 'Push It', the new single and a Top 20 smash in the States, abandons the grit of sampled R&B for the hygiene and precision of electro, its robotic lubriciousness strangely reminiscent of Devo.

On the B side, 'I'm Down' is an insanely itchy piece of digital raunch. But a lot of the uncouthness has gone, as the big time beckons, perhaps ceded to a new Hurby Azor creation, Antoinette, who raps with the meanest, cold-hearted voice I think I've heard in rap – like she has vinegar for blood.

Some people read Salt 'N' Pepa as a proto-feminist upsurge in the phallocentric world of hip hop. But to me, there was always too much competitiveness going down for Salt 'N' Pepa to fit comfortably into the scheme of sisterhood and mutual support against the phallocrats.

Salt 'N' Pepa fit more into the old soul tradition of female sass, of women being demanding within the terms of conventional gender roles: like Shirley Murdock duetting with Roger Troutman, (or Carla Thomas with Otis Redding, for that matter), where the women lambasts the man for dereliction of his obligations. The fundamental ideals of sexual apartheid aren't tampered with.

"What do I think are the ideal qualities in a man? He's got to be...sensitive...but masculine, y'know. Rugged. Lots of money. Well, not so much the money, as he's got to have the drive to make money. I love money, ha ha ha! But looks come second to personality every time.

"The War Of The Sexes? Yeah, well, it's always gonna be like that. Always has been, always will be."

Salt 'N' Pepa deal me a bunch of glibly-delivered stock answers this afternoon, the freshness and charm having become rather starched thanks to the massive itinerary of TV appearances and magazine interviews they've had to undertake as 'Push It' takes off. Are their stage/vinyl characters anything like the real people (Cheryl James and Sandra Denton) behind Salt 'N' Pepa?

"Oh no, it's a character. I ain't like that. On stage I'm wild, I spin on my knees, I'm rude, I order people about. In person we're much more considerate. But people like the way we are onstage, they want to be controlled, cos then they know you're giving your all, really putting out onstage."

It's a spectacle of control, of course, as with Janet Jackson, where the spectacle of self-determination is masterminded by various backroom writers and sonic architects. Salt 'N' Pepa now write a bigger share of their own material, choreography, routines, but it was Hurby Azor who more or less created the concept of Salt 'N' Pepa, having first divined a potential in the raw material of their boisterousness.

It was Hurby who gave them a unique sound, one that has had a major influence on last year's shift in rap away from the bludgeoning dead end of total blackout and rhythmic seizure that seemed the logical destination for hip hop, towards a more sensual, loose-limbed sound.

Using first a technique called "poublaison" (a kind of tape loop) [2011 NOTE:ACTUALLY PUBLISON, A MACHINE THAT COMBINES SAMPLING AND EFFECTS) and now straightforward sampling with an Akai 900, Azar takes raw material (a Meters guitar lick, an ancient R&B drum sound, a string of call-and-response) and assembles a kind of Frankenstein dance monster out of funk-limbs that don't belong together. Check out the Hurby's Machine sampler of his creations. The different grooves almost, but don't quite fit – hence the friction, the rub, that makes the music so sensual, in comparison with the sado-masochistic jackhammer rhythms of previous hip hop.

Another effect is more eerie, the this-ness and then-ness of specific studio vibes, placed in uncanny adjacence with one another. There's a kind of crooked grooviness about the sound, something zombie: music that appears to be living and breathing, the result of the human touch, but is in fact only a simulacrum of life, "hyped up by Hurby".

AUTHOR'S NOTE: a disastrous interview this, stilted in itself on account of culture gap, but then as i was doing it i was aware of a strange whining electronic noise, only to discover at the conclusion of the interview that the tape recorder had malfunctioned and not a word had been recorded In a panic I asked the group if i could do the interview again - to which Salt replied, acidly, "Those questions?". So I bolted the building and rushed across the street to the nearest fast food joint and sat down scribbling whatever dregs I could dredge up from my short-term memory of the interview. Hence the rather low ratio of band quotes to SR pontification in this piece.

2011-04-22T16:00:00.000-07:00

PANDA BEAR
Tomboy
(Paw Tracks)
director's cut, The Wire, April 2011

By Simon Reynolds

The dominant sound on Panda Bear records is Noah Lennox's voice. Or I should say, voices: his production hallmark is massing his vocal so that it sounds choral. Heavy reverb intensifies the churchy aura. As does Lennox's pure-hearted tone, an alloy of yearning, devotion, and rejoicing shaped by his high school participation in a chamber choir. This self-singalong effect reminds me of three things:

* The artist Anthony Goicolea, who uses trick photography to create tableaus of boarding school boys--anywhere from two to a dozen--who all have the same face: the adult Goicolea's. The effect ranges from quirkily surreal to grotesque and disturbing.

* "Sanctus", the choral song that recurs throughout if... (Lindsay Anderson's 1968 film about a boys-only boarding school) and which comes from Missa Luba, an Africanised version of the Latin mass performed by a choir of Congolese children. Evoking the clear-eyed idealism of youth, "Sanctus"'s effect in if.. is uplifting yet ominous: it prefigures the bloody insurrection against the teachers and parents that climaxes the film.

* A peculiar tradition at my own all-boys public school, a ritual that wasn't formalized but seemingly spontaneously generated itself annually. During assembly on the last day of the school year, the boys sang the hymns with unusual vigour and volume (as opposed to the usual mouthing- the- words desultoriness). Every year, the masters on the podium looked stunned and cowed by this demonstration of insubordinate joy: school's out for summer.

At the heart of Panda Bear's music, and Animal Collective's too, is the cult of boyhood as the supreme state of being. The title Tomboy seems to shift from that slightly, but not really: the tomboy--that adorable tyke who likes rough-and-tumble-- is androgynous in the exact same way that prepubescent boys, with their high voices and sensitivity, often are. What PB/AC celebrate and hark back to is the clarity, purity, and simplicity of the world seen through the eyes of those yet to undergo the Fall into sexuality.

I'm a sucker for the whole psychedelic "younger than yesterday"/"he not busy being born"/"goin' back" mythos, despite being in my late forties and a parent with ample experience of actual childhood (oh they can be so sweet and innocent, but also, alas, totally innocent of basic human decency). Person Pitch--the previous Panda album, from 2007--drips with this kind of beatific naïvety and it's one of my absolute favorites from the last decade. And I'm not short of company: it would hard to over-state how feverishly anticipated Tomboy is in certain quarters. If there was any doubt that Lennox has emerged as the key figure in Animal Collective, the group's "soul" even, you need only the compare the response to Person Pitch and the underwhelmed reception of solo efforts by the group's ostensible lead singer/leader Avey Tare. In many ways Person Pitch was the flawless consummation of everything that Animal Collective have striven for and only fitfully achieved across their sprawling discography: an approachable avant-rock that marries euphony and experiment. Post-rock, with tunes.

Lennox has actually described Tomboy as more of a "guitar rock" record, based around "simplistic rhythms". But it doesn't really feel like a departure from Person Pitch's loops-and-samples. Some songs feature frantically strummed guitar parts, but they're fed through a Korg, and overall the way this music is organized and propels itself forward feels closer to German minimal tech-house than to rock'n'roll. As for the top line melodies and mood-textures, the Beach Boys are overwhelming present. It's a revealing influence, given their cult of boyish buoyancy of spirit and Brian Wilson's conception of Smile as a "teenage symphony to God". "Surfer's Hymn" is a blatant nod to the Boys and further oceanic allusions come with "Last Night At The Jetty" and the nautical-sounding "Slow Motion", whose swaying rhythm lies somewhere between sea shanty and Basic Channel. "Jetty" is like a gaseous and Gas-y postmillenial take on the Everly Bros, while "Alsation Darn" reminds me a teensy bit of, yuk, "Bridge Over Troubled Water". Panda's version of the latter's sentiment is the album-opening pledge "You Can Count On Me." Then there's "Friendship Bracelet", named after the American teenage custom of exchanging handmade tokens of undying amity.

As with the Wilsonian sonic universe, the presiding spirits of Panda Bear music are Agape and Apollo, brotherly love and the sun god. (The last song, "Benfica" is the Portuguese word for "light" and also Lisbon's soccer team). And like with the Beach Boys, there's not a hint of Eros or the Dionysian in this music, just shining eyes and open hearts. Listening, at times you might think of scouts gathered around a camp fire. There are only a couple of welcome breaks amid all this sweetness and light. Over an extended ache of organ, "Drone" unfurls long suspended canopies of voice that gradually twist in tone. Better still is "Scheherezade", a murky chamber where reverb for once on this album sounds eerie rather than idyllic. Tentative piano chords and sourceless groans of bass-frequency undergird Lennox's huge billowing voice; tinkling cascades of glass snowflakes spiral down intermittently. The song sounds pregnant with fathomless mystery.

It's an odd one, Tomboy: impressive on the first few listens, it grows irritating with repeat play. The analogy that springs to mind is chocolate gateau: lovely on the first day, sickening if you then have eat it every day for the rest of the week. Still, that doesn't quite explain why the exact same mood and techniques that worked sublimely for me on Person Pitch have come to seem oppressive and cloying. Perhaps it comes from my personal feeling that Brian Wilson is one of the most over-rated pop auteurs of the last half-century, his work the place where albino meets castrato. Perhaps it's because it's hard to get involved with these songs because the chorus-of-one vocals and reverb-blurriness render the lyrics virtually indecipherable. Perhaps, finally, it comes from the feeling that the whole "wordliness must keep apart from me", child-man thing has become a kind of spiritual cul-de-sac for Lennox, now in his early thirties (although he looks fourteen in his photos) and a parent with two young daughters. In the past decade nobody has sung "songs of innocence" better than Noah. Now we need to hear Lennox's "songs of experience".

Postscript
via mark richardson's tumblr

according to Anonymous, Lennox,when talking about Tomboy a year or so before it came out, "described Bach as one of his influences for that album" and talked about how his "use of reverb" was " a reflection of high vaulted ceilings and that church-like atmosphere both from his own life and some of the architecture of Lisbon"

2011-03-25T09:40:00.000-07:00

THE LEGENDARY PINK DOTS
The Legendary Pink Box
Melody Maker, 1991

By Simon Reynolds

The Legendary Pink Dots were once briefly championed by comrades Stubbs and Oldfield, as "pretentious psychedelia" (a compliment) and "baroque and outlandish... the first whale among 1987' pop minnows". That was about as close as The Legendary Pink Dots got to being known over here, and they dipped back into obscurity. (In Europe, they're a cult band, and have spent most of the decade in exile in Amsterdam.)

The reason isn't hard to fathom. Even now, with late Sixties gross-out thoroughly rehabilitated (to the point of orthodoxy) the LPD's orbit of reference points is at the furthest fringe of the "acceptable". LPD's temerity has been to: a) cite not just Pink Floyd but prog rockers Amon Duul, Mafma and Soft Machine as their influences; b) attempt a rehabilitation of the concept album, compose 21 minute pieces (like "premonition 13", included here). British post-punk pigheadness can't
tolerate such "indulgence", oh no -- not when the pruned concision and blunt urgency of the likes of Snuff and Mega City Four is so much more "topical".

"The Legendary Pink Box" is a triple-disc set of rare and unreleased stuff (or so I presume: it comes with no information). And it's as far-fetched and bound-less
...I could have hoped for. The overall impression is of the fey whimsy of Syd Barrett enveloped in the indiscriminate eclecticism of Faust... (everything can be
music). Nursery rhyme vocals sit primly amid gargoyle-grotesque sound-shapes like dank leakage from the unconscious. Their sound is admirably overcrowded with influences: electronics, chamber music, sampling,punkadelia, dub, Skinny Puppy industrial, muzak, the micro-tonality of composers like Ligeti and Stickhausen, early DAF, and more, are all in there. But the effect is never of clotted versatility or ostentatious virtuosity, but rather of expanse, of deranging space.

Edward ka-Spel's lyrcs suggest melancholia, withdrawl, delirium (one song is called "Thursday Night Fever"). More often they're a liquefaction of language: like
Wire, all assonance, alliteration, dotty thymes andpurple puns. A lexical labyrinth. Psychedelia as being lost in the derelict mansion of your own mind.
Ignore your better judgment, and investigate.

THE LEGENDARY PINK DOTS interview
Melody Maker, 1991?

by Simon Reynolds

In an Indian restaurant in west Berlin, The Legendary Pink Dots celebrate another
successful date on their latest tour of Europe. On the Continent, The Legendary Pink Dots play to rapturous crowds ranging from healthy-sized to huge. In the past decade, they've released 11 albums through Play it Again Sam, and established themselves as a cult band in Europe and North America.

But, in their native Britain, The Legendary Pink Dots remain neglected. Unjustly, maybe, but not without reason. The Dots' music--a gaudy and avant-garde music-- is too rich a diet to be stomached by the anorexic sensibilites of the British
"alternative" scene. Even the most unleashed exponents of far-out noise overload-- Spacemen 3, Loop- remain hidebound by a hidden agenda of sonic strictures.

It's this climate (where bands still adhere to the post-punk edict that "less is more", kowtow to a knee-jerk dread of the word hippy) that originally drove The Legendary Pink Dots into exile in Amsterdam some five years ago. Despite all the
loosening up of the past three years, the Brits flinch from the sheer expanse of the Pink Dots and their ilk.

Lead Dot, Edward Ka-Spel neglects his chicken tikka to expound upon the whys and wherefores of his band. His phrase for the Legendary Pink DOts's sound-and-vision is the "terminal kaleidoscope".

"If you look at history, the one thing that's certian is that events are accelerating. Things are changing faster and faster, like a ball rolling down a mountain. Our idea is that if things continue to accelerate at this rate, eventually we'll reach overload, cataclysm. We want to provide the relevant soundtrack to this process. Our sound is like this immense cocktail, saturated with all these elements of past music jumbled up with the absolutely modern, like sampling and synthetics.

"But we aren't pessimistic about this impending cataclysm. We belive that we're living through the most significant time in the history of the planet, and we should cherish the things we see and feel in these most exciting times. That's why our
catchphrase is "Sing while you may!" And that's why our new album's called "The Crushed Velvet Apocalypse". Apocalypse can mean simply change. Its like the death card in the Tarot: it doesn't mean death, it means drastic change.

"I don't know if these changes are gonna be for the good or the bad. I don't pretend to be any kind of seer or visionary. I just know that all kinds of philosophies,like Nostradamus, are pointing to the 30 years up to the year 2000 as being a time of great transition. Some point towards a Golden Age after it.

"But there's beauty even in the darkest things. The reason why sunsets are so beautiful these days is because of all the pollution. If you look at a river
that's been chocked with oil, it "is" beautiful. It's the strange twist in the tale. And I try to take all these things that are happening today, and take them to
their ultimate. I don't believe in the annihilation of mankind, but I do believe in mutation."

Through 10 years, 11 albums and a continually fluctuating line-up, the creative core of the Pink Dots has remained Ka-Spel and Phil Knight. The pair found each other in the mid-Seventies, through a shared love of Krautrock groups like Can and Faust. If the Pink Dots are "psychedelia" then it's more in terms of this European tradition of boundary-dissolving expansionism,than the Barrett/Ayers school of Anglo whimsy or American wig-out.

"In Britain, psychedelia is totally linked with nostalgia, and it shouldn't be. Psychedelia's about exploration,discovering new colours. It is not about looking back 20 years. That's as irrelevant as cabaret bands playing Elvis covers. Psychedelis's always got to go "further".

"I never like to talk of influences, cos they tend to be subliminal rather than overt. But to be honest, those German groups are what I still listen to the most,
because they just went so "far". So few bands go that far. A band like Nurse With Wound, who I really like, maybe go that far out. But I can't think of too many
modern bands that try something like that, that actually deranges.

"The beauty of those groups is that Can sounded nothing like Faust, who sounded nothing like Amon Duul, who sounded nothing like Ashra Temple... THe diversity
really puts you in all these different "worlds". It's something else! And that's why, with our music, I can't really say where it's going to go next, because there
are no boundaries. The one thing I can assure you is that it will never be rock'n'roll. I can't stand rock'n'roll.I'm allergic to it.

"If you take the German bands as having no traditional roots in rock'n'roll or R&B, as having roots more in Stockhausen than in Chuck Berry, than we follow on from
that, and are even more free-floating and rootless. I listen to stuff like Stockhausen, Penderecki, Xenakis, Ligeti, Pierre Henry, all that "avant-garde" stuff. But not from an intellectual point of view, but just to bathe in all the sounds and noises. It's totally exciting.

"We always dedicate albums to deviants, and I tend to like deviant music. Anyone who's a character, does something completely wilful and doesn't give a damn about
what other people think. There are a lot of people out there who do that, but they tend to get buried under the carpet."

Edward Ka-Spel is obsessive. He lives for music: in the first year of squatting in Amsterdam he went without food in order to plough all his slim resources into the Dots,and even his girlfriend has difficulty preventing him from spending his food money on obscure albums of experimental music. And Ka-Spel attracts obsessives. Fanzine writers pen lengthy treatises interpreting the densely woven tapestry of his lyrics (whose themes criss-cross from album to album to form an ongoing myth-world). Others engage with the music in a rather more negative fashion.

"There's a lot of humour in the music, but a lot of people home in on the disturbing side. It's got really disturbing on this tour. People have come to hate me. A guy in Oslo kept trying to assault me. I got a letter from another guy who basically blamed me for all his problems. He'd bought all the records, and he was basically accusing me of sending him over the edge."

A lot of Pink Dot's music does deal with madness and schizophrenia. One album, "Asylum"--so titled because it's "a place to escape to, and a place to escape from", plays with the idea of madness as a refuge from an intolerable world. Ka-Spel himself went through a period of psychiatric treatment as a child.

"I was a kind of guinea pig. They discovered that I had an IQ of 160 when I was three. This made me interesting to the people at Great Ormond Street hospital. They made me draw all these pictures. I used to have horrendous nightmares up
till I was 10. It caused a certain isolation for me as a child. It was particularly difficult cos I grew up in East London, which is not the best place to be when your're different."

Does it annoy you that Britain is one of the few places to be indifferent to the Legendary Dots?

"It hurts a lot. More than any coast-to-coast American tours, or playing to huge crowds in Pairs-- both of which we've done--what I'd really like to do is play in England,and prove something. It's like I've always had a bad deal in England. Right through my school years I had a really hard time. Then I started doing what I really wanted and believed in, and once again England gave me the cold shoulder. We do have a real drive to go back there, and say "See what you've been missing!"

THE LEGENDARY PINK DOTS
The Loft, Berlin
Melody Maker, 1991?

by Simon Reynolds

The Legendary Pink Dots have dwelt in self-imposed exile in Holland for the past six years. In Europe, they're a cult, able to make a living through frequent touring
and prodigious vinyl output. In Britain, they remain almost completely unknown, their musical premises too sprawling for the narrow sights of the British "alternative" scene. The LPD are committed to English and European psychedelia as an ongoing realm of sonic expansionism, whereas current British acid rock revisionism
conceives of psychedelia as; A) primarily American; B) wholly guitar-based; and C) firmly fixed in a long-lost glorious past. Add to this singer Edward Ka-Spel's
art-rock influenced sense of shamanic theater, and his penchant for fabulism, and you have a near insurmountable set of reasons why the British won't be clasping the Dots to their collective bosom in the immediate future.

Onstage, Ka-Spel has something of the hunched, obsessive air of a 19th century inventor. In Europe, he is regarded by many as a seer, and not without reason. The title of the latest, brilliant Dots LP "The Crushed Velvet Apocalypse" evokes his vision that the end of the world is gonna be pretty darn colourful and we're fortunate to be living through it. Several LPD songs are garishly vivid sound-
pictures of a future world rendered unnaturally beautiful by pollution, Ka-Spel's lyrics teeming with images of "menstrual lakes/Rainbow rivers and crippled dandelions".Tracks like "Hellsville" and "Helloween" lie somewhere between Skinny Puppy and Nick Cave of "Mutiny In Heaven" and "Saint Huck".

The legendary Pink Dots are "maximalists", on a quest for new colours. Barrett is often cited, but a more relevant reference point is Krautrock expansionism of Can and Faust. The LPS use sampling to update/facilitate those groups techniques (incorporation of found or "real" sound, noise-mutation, etc.). At times their music can be like an animated Bosch or Durer painting of Armageddon; elsewhere
(as with "Green Gang", which dares to employ sitar, tabla, treated woodwind instruments, and WINS), they create a gorgeously serene Taj Mahal of sound. The single,"Princess Coldheart", is Soft Cell meets Brothers Grimm; its B-side, "The Pleasure Palace", a circus of death, all greasepaint and grotesquerie.

German youth haul The Legendary Pink Dots on for four encores. Blighty's loss is Europe's gain. But homecoming dates are tentatively planned for late spring. Cast your blinkers aside, and investigate.

this reish is for Carl the mighty Impostume

2011-03-10T13:39:00.000-08:00

LOU REED
The Wire, February 1992

by Simon Reynolds

"Maybe to relate to this album you need to have been whacked around by life a bit," says Lou Reed. "This record won't mean that much to an eight-year-old, except you can just luxuriate in the sound, it's so thick and defined and dimensional. But an eight-year-old won't have the faintest idea what I'm talking about. And I'm not trying to offend eight-year-olds," he adds, the faintest of smiles flickering across his impassive features. "Maybe there's a very sophisticated one out there somewhere."

Where New York railed against the here-and-now specifics of Manhattan's disintegrating social fabric, Magic And Loss is Lou Reed raging against the limits of existence, the absolutes of life and death; it's also a glowing tribute (literally glowing, since the playing is luminous) to two friends who died recently. One was Doc Pomus, a songwriter friend from Reed's pre-Velvet Underground days as a salaried songsmith. The other, "Rita", was "just a friend. Not a celebrity, put it that way."

New York was socially engaged and street-real: Magic And Loss is a spiritual document. ‘Power And Glory’, for instance, trembles with a palpable feeling of revelation: "I was captured by a larger moment/I was seized by divinity's heart breath — gorged like a lion of experience... I wanted all of it, not some of it". The song teems with mystical imagery of metamorphosis, rooted in the paradoxes of terminal illness ("I saw a great man turn into a little child") and of radiation therapy ("The same power that burned Hiroshima/Causing three legged babies and death /Shrunk to the size of a nickel/To help him regain his breath").

"I came to understand that the album was about transformation," explains Reed. "Alchemy. The purpose of alchemy wasn't to transform lead into gold, that was just one example of the process, to be used later to transform yourself. I call the album Magic And Loss because that experience can be taken two ways. That's why the song ‘Power And Glory’ occurs twice, in different forms. A whole different tempo, a whole different way of looking at the exact same thing. The way they faced illness and death was very inspirational. In the end, it was a magical experience. A positive experience. Positive to have known them, positive to have watched them go through this. When, to quote myself, 'you loved the life others throw away nightly'. I thought they were giants."

Magic And Loss says Reed, is "an extension of the Songs For Drella album which was an extension of New York —.the idea of a thematically whole album. Right now, I'm not interested in the idea of twelve or so disparate songs." Each song has a subtitle, "like a novel, at the head of each chapter, a little phrase explaining what it is".

The album conducts you methodically through each stage of terminal illness and bereavement. There's the morbid, unbidden reveries of ‘Dreamin’ ’, perhaps the most lovely song on the record, with its braid of wavering guitar-synth and tremulous, plangent, pure Velvets guitar. ‘Goodbye Mass’ vividly evokes the awkward discomfort of the funeral service, Reed bemoaning the disparity between its dour gravity and the feisty, irrepressible good humour of the dearly departed. "You, you would have made a joke/ Isn't this something you'd say/ Tommorrow I'm smoke".

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

"Both of them made jokes straight the way through," recollects Reed. "It's unbelievable. I had said there's this great widescreen colour TV I could get for you, and I'll hook up all the wiring for you. And they said, Lou, this is not the time for long-term investments. Joking. I think that's magnificent. I just think some people are giants. You may never hear of them, but they just have this thing. They're like the sun, they're just glowing all the time. They stay that way. When they get hurt, they don't suddenly turn into this other thing. It would be totally understandable. If I get a flu, I start whining!"

Then there's ‘Warrior King’, which documents the most confusing and ostensibly illogical symptom of mourning, a desire for bloody revenge that can't be slaked because it's intransitive.

"The character singing is very mad at the elements that have attacked and killed his friends. But there's no person to aim it at, with terminal illness. It's like, if you could take a physical, malleable form, I'd take you in an alley and do this, and this, and this. It's if I could, if I could... but with death, you can't. So it's that anger that causes the song afterwards, ‘Harry's Circumcision’, because you can't walk around with that anger in your heart. It causes these very negative thoughts, which is what ‘Harry's Circumcision’ is all about, taken to its natural conclusion (attempted suicide)." According to Lou's theory, you can't just stay in that mental state, you've got to go beyond that. Which is what happens on the album.

"The songs are in a particular order for a purpose, it's supposed to take you to a certain place. And that's a really positive state. This is not a negative, down album. I'm not the only person in the world who's experienced loss. Everybody has a brother or sister or father or friend somewhere that died and that means they can understand. You just have to have been alive for a little while to experience it. It's not a mystery. It's real life giving you a real hello, welcome to the club."
That "certain place" is reached on the final track, ‘Magic And Loss’, a spectral sleepwalk of mystic jazz-metal whose lyrics suggest reconciliation. It hints that Reed's even come to believe in some kind of afterlife: there's a door up ahead, not a wall.

"You can call it a spiritual awakening, or whatever you like. Things look a certain way, like you're driving directly into a wall. There's nothing you can do about it. But no, it's a door. You just didn't see it. And a door, obviously, can be opened. It depends how you look at things. The song ‘Magic And Loss’ I find very uplifting It's resolving the whole album. You don't wanna come to the end of that experience still feeling splintered. You have to reconcile yourself to it. But hopefully, it's a reconciliation with a lot of positive aspects to it. It's an inspiring thing, what I witnessed. I want to be as good as them. These were the people who were inspiring to me right the way through the last minute. It's really sad not being able to call Doc Pomus up right to this day, because he was like the sun. He was just one of those people that you feel good when you're around them. You could be feeling bad, and you visit them and they say two words and you feel good. But then, it would have been even worse not to have known him at all. That's part of the whole magic and loss deal."

^^^^^^^^^

Lofty speculations and spiritual quandaries withal, Lou Reed spends the bulk of his time grappling with the nitty-gritty technicalities of making records. It the truth be known, he's a bit of a muso. Way back in his decadent days, Reed could drive Lester Bangs up the wall by discoursing interminably about how George Benson invented a totally clean, totally pure amplifier. Even the unendurable din of Metal Machine Music was informed by audiophile obsessions. The interview has hardly begun before Reed launches into a diatribe about rock critics' cloth-eared ignorance about sound.

"It always amazes me — and this not meant to be offensive — how little you people hear, on a tonal level. I find the sound on the new album awe-inspiring. There is a radiance to it, an enormous tonal range. It's like a stereo image. It's very 3D-ish. You can actually walk around it. It has the sonic depth to match its subject matter. This time, I've got the tones I haven't quite been able to before. On the sleeve of New York I wrote about the equipment we used, and I was trying to let the people know there's a lot going into the choices that are there. It's not as spontaneous as it seems."

Reed explains, at considerable length, about the "incalculable hours" he and co-producer, second guitarist Mike Rathke, spent on research, refinement, and modification of equipment. He describes how the kind of tape you use, the pick-ups, even the wood in the guitar can all make a difference.* It's all very incongruous.

The reality of Lou Reed-as-technical-boffin jars discordantly with the image of Lou-Reed-as-icon-of-street- romanticism. In the post-punk scheme, technique and technology are generally deemed to be enemies of the gritty authenticity that's allegedly the heart of rock 'n' roll: Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, for all the arty input, are generally taken to represent the epitome of this raw expression. Because they tend to come from a Litcrit or humanities background, rock critics find the nuts-and-bolts side of music-making demystifying. But for Lou Reed, it's where the mystery is painstakingly constructed. It's a sort of science of magic.

"No one knows that better than me because I know how much magic disappears when the technical stuff is wrong. At the end of the whole process, when you listen to your finished CD, you realise that you've got a cassette from the very beginning that sounds 100 times better. So what happened? Why is it so cold sounding? There's no dimension. That guitar hurts my ears. Where's the bass? Why is it muddy? If you get into the why of it, it's fascinating. And it's a real thrill if you finally get it to sound right. The only way to learn is to make records. But most people aren't really interested, they think the magic is all over there, and the technical stuff is another matter, and if you have a good producer that's all taken care of. The writing and performance are one thing, but if the production and technical side aren't there... and I've got the records to prove it. A lot of my records, 'till I could get a handle on it, aren't even produced, except in the sense that I wouldn't let the producers do anything, rather than let them do it wrong. And the records are completely dry, 'cos I didn't know how it worked, but I knew they'd fuck it up so I wouldn't let 'em do anything. It takes a long time to learn, when you're making a record every couple of years. It's fascinating, but it's like this onion with all these skins, endless."

^^^^^^^^

Far more congruent with Lou Reed's received image is the fact that Penguin are soon to publish Between Thought And Expression, a selection of lyrics that he felt could stand up on their own without music. It's strange that it took him so long to get between book covers, considering that back in 1979 he declared "my expectations are very high... to be the greatest writer that ever lived on God's earth. In other words I'm talking about Shakespeare, Dostoevsky..."

"That was just me shooting my mouth off, but it is a real dream. To do something that's not disposable, that could really hold its own for ever. It sounds kind of glib and pretentious, to say you want to be up there with Dostoievsky, but I would. I wanna create art that will live forever, whether it's on record or on the printed page. That's why I avoid slang, any expression that will date, like 'dig it' or 'freaked out'."

Despite his aversion to transient argot, Reed's lyrics exude a great sense of demotic, everyday speech, rather than the ornately poeticised. The same love of ‘conversational tone’, the faltering rhythm of thoughts taking shape as they're spoken, informed his interviews with novelist Hubert Selby (Last Exit To Brooklyn ), and Czechoslovakian playwright turned President, Vaclav Havel, both of which are included in Between Thought And Expression.

"I don't like it when the interview's so cleaned up that both interviewer and subject sound like the same person. I like to keep the real rhythm of the way the person talks. With Selby, hopefully from the interview I did with him, you can hear him think. The way he puts things together I found really fascinating. Hearing a writer think like that, you can see why he's a great writer."

The most interesting thing to emerge in the Havel encounter was the Velvet Underground's indirect effect on history. First there was a Czech avant-rock band called Plastic People Of The Universe who covered Velvet Underground songs, and then they got sent to prison, and then the campaign to get them released evolved into Charter 77, which in turn led to Czechoslovakia's ‘Velvet Revolution’. That's a coincidence (the "Velvet" means soft, bloodless) but a beautiful one, and it highlights the way a band like the Velvet Underground, by symbolising absolute possibility, can be ‘political’ without being politicised, can change things without being explicitly consciousness-raising. Most touching of all for Reed is the fact that the Charter 77 activists recited his lyrics to themselves as a source of spiritual fortitude.

"I have the handprinted book of my lyrics, in Czechoslovakian, that Havel gave me, and it's an astonishing thing. It meant so much to them. Music was a real expression to them of social change. We walked over this beautiful bridge in Prague and they told me that a few years ago you wouldn't have seen a guitarist on that bridge with kids singing. It was considered dangerous. Where people get together is where ideas are generated, and that's a problem for totalitarian governments. It's hard for us to even conceive of living under such constraints."

When he goes about his daily life, or looks in the mirror, does he feel mythic, an icon?

"I don't even relate to that. It doesn't even cross my mind. What I'm really interested in is stuff like analogue to digital converter shoot-outs. I don't even conceive of that other stuff at all. It's like, they must mean someone else. It doesn't compute with me, simply because I know how hard I have to work with the limitations that I have, just to get to where I am."

Nonetheless, Lou Reed is one of those artists that people of a certain generation tell the time by. Like Neil Young, Reed is one of the few figures from his era to survive with credibility intact and muse in working order. But Reed denies feeling any responsibility to the people who look to him for the next big statement. "It wouldn't even dawn on me," he shrugs. He also claims to be oblivious to the legions of copyist who have turned ‘Lou Reed’ into a genre.

"I always thought of it as a situation where some really obvious ideas were sitting there, and I happened to be one of the guys who happened to hit the dirt first. It's like, hey, look at that, there's a whole continent over there. It seemed really obvious. Then you start listening to Brecht or Weill, and you realise quite a few people have been running around there."

BONUS QUOTES FROM THE PULSE MAGAZINE PROTO-VERSION
OF THIS PIECE

"I spend a lot of time researching. You could call it studying. I ask, Why does digital do that? What's the analog-to-digital conversion process? Are the filters better now? It goes back to the wood in the guitar, which pickups to use. Everything I have has been modified, tinkered with, to make it work for me." Reed and his co-producer, second guitarist Mike Rathke, spend "incalculable hours" in research and refinement. "I practically studied with some technical people who really helped me out. Because there's millions of choices out there and even if you had a zillion dollars and bought all these to try them, it’d take forever. So you really need someone knowledgeable and talented to guide you. Even down to the kind of tape you record on."

Reed takes similar pains when it comes to selecting compatible musicians, preferring to work with people he knows personally. He's quick to demolish the idea that tension heightens creativity, and is particularly scathing about what he calls "the Lou Reed/John Cale myth" (that the duo's prickly relationship is the font of their collective genius). "Things would be 1,000 times better without that tension." When you recall that he and Cale disagreed about such minutiae as the amount of time between tracks on Drella, it's easy to believe.

Reed's team on Magic and Loss is almost the same as for New York: Mike Rathke as second guitarist, Rob Wasserman on bass, with frequent Tom Waits and Elvis Costello accomplice Michael Blair replacing Fred Maher on drums. "We have the interaction of a real band. The music's based on ebb and flow. A song should give the impression of being a living thing. It's always going to be assembled; that's how recording works. But our stuff is about as live as we could get it and still satisfy my requirements for sound."

According to Rathke, the approach to Magic and Loss was, with New York, a fusion of vintage and state-of-the-art. "We try to blend the old with the new. Lou and I spend a lot of time on pre-production. It goes down to the kind of wood, strings, pick-ups, wirings, speaker cabinets you use. Neither vintage nor state-of-the-art does it all. If I was a painter, I'd want the colors to harmonize. And sounds are like colors in a way; they have to match."

With his perfectionism ("compromise makes me ill"), it's not surprising that Reed has only ever produced one other artist, Reuben Blades. "It's too much work. You'd have to love what they did, to spend that much time with their material. Plus I want things my way. I could imagine producing one song, maybe, and only if I got alone with the person. But I couldn't be brought along to produce a group – that's too many factors I couldn't control. I want as much control as possible."

^^^^^^^^^

Lou Reed is legendary for his antipathy to being interviewed. During our encounter, he had to cadge a couple of soothing cigarettes off me, even though he's quit smoking, because, he says, "I get nervous about interviews." He was even more uptight about being on the other side of the tape recorder.

"With Hubert Selby, I came in with typed questions, because I was sure I’d be nervewracked and I didn't want to forget anything. Same with Havel. The only reason I did it was that these were people I really wanted to meet, that I really admired, and here was a chance to meet them and ask them things that I was really interested in. I'm sure there are a few others I could think of, but it's just really hard work. I'd much rather go out for a drink with them. I found with someone like me it was really good to have notes, in order of asking, so that I didn't glaze out. And later kick myself 'cause I forgot to ask them the most important question. I had loads of spare batteries, and a microphone that I knew worked."

2011-03-03T13:00:00.000-08:00

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Dirty Water: The Birth of Punk Attitude
Year Zero
The Wire, February 2011

by Simon Reynolds

Punk must be the most over-determined event in rock history. The decade leading up to it is so crowded with antecedents that it's hard to see how it could possibly not have happened. Dirty Water runs to two discs but it doesn't come close to exhausting the prehistory of 1976-and-all-that. Indeed part of the fun of Kris Needs's expertly selected compilation is thinking of things that ought to have been included. So the righteous presence of The Sensational Alex Harvey Band's clangorous "The Hot City Symphony" makes one wonder why not The Sweet, whose 1976 hit "Action" simply is punk with a lick of gloss. If the serrated choogle of "Roxette" by Dr Feelgood and the football terrace stomp of "Oo Oo Rudi" by Jook make the cut, why not the Mockney rockabilly of Kilburn and the High Roads's "Upminster Kid"?

These aren't quibbles, though, just the listener's natural response to the compilation's premise. In this respect, Dirty Water recalls Chuck Eddy's heterodox heavy metal guide, Stairway To Hell: there's a similar mixture of what-you'd-expect and stuff straining the genre's definition to bursting point. So you get lashings of what Seventies rock writers called "high-octane" hard rock (MC5, Pink Fairies, Dictators, etc ) but also regular jolts of the aberrant: the multi-voiced babble of Sun Ra's "Rocket Number Nine," the psychotic mandolin busking of Silver Apples's "Confusion".

Proto-punk is inherently amorphous, since roots can stretch back as far and as wide as you care to trace them. The Silhouettes's "Get A Job" and Gene Vincent's "Blue Jean Bop" might be a stretch too far. Closer to Year Zero, there's Peter Hammill's "Nadir's Big Chance", title track to a 1975 album on which the prog rocker took on the alter-ego Rikki Nadir, a "loud aggressive perpetual sixteen year old" playing "beefy punk songs". It's a reminder that "punk" was common rock parlance for years before it signified a safety pin through the nose, from critics describing the young Springsteen as a "street punk" to boogie band Brownsville Station's 1974 LP School Punks.

Named after the Standells's Sixties garage ode to their hometown Boston's river and the "buggers lovers and thieves" clustered on its seedy banks, Dirty Water is a real blast of rock-historical edutainment. But its accumulation of precursors and pre-echoes has one less salutary effect, which is to further erode the sense of punk as out-of-the-blue, a shocking surprise. Archaeological investigations into the prehistory of revolutionary moments do tend to make them seem less of a break with the past than they felt at the time. Ideally, the Dirty Water listener will come away not with the belief that Seventies rock fans really ought to have seen punk coming long way off, but with an enhanced awareness of History's contingent nature. For this anthology points to the possibility that punk might have happened earlier, and differently. Equally, if it could have happened earlier, yet didn't, it's just remotely conceivable that in 1976 it might not taken off at all.

2011-02-27T17:30:00.000-08:00

TORO Y MOI
Underneath the Pine
Carpark Records
The Wire, February 2011

by Simon Reynolds

Have you noticed? Pop music sounds shit these days. I'm not talking about deficiencies of playing, singing, or writing (although doubtless these all play their part). No, I'm referring strictly to sound quality. Compressed, ProTooled, AutoTuned, and God knows what else, modern pop is engineered to cut through on iPods, smartphones, computer speakers: it reaches the consumer's ear pre-shittified, essentially. Meanwhile, down in the underground, it's the opposite: everybody wants their records to sound expensive. That makes perfect sense: if the mainstream sounds cheap 'n 'nasty and chartpop hurts your ears, ideas like lo-fi and noise become meaningless. "Slick" and "shiny" cease to be hallmarks of sterile, soul-less professionalism: they become ideals. They are also achievable goals these days. Digital audio workstations, soft synths, and sundry technologies of tweaking, tinting and tidying-up have placed the kind of production quality and session-player tightness that in the Seventies and Eighties required weeks of £ 500-a-day studio time within the reach of bedroom operators.

Where hypnagogic pop outfits generally look to back to the cocaine-crisp gloss of Eighties AOR and Seventies soft-rock, or to New Wave at its most synthetic, the coordinates for Toro Y Moi's sound lie more with black music of the same era: the utopian luxuriance of disco, jazz-funk, and those Eighties mid-tempo club grooves that cognoscenti and collectors nowadays seem to term "boogie". Listening to the skipping 'n' sliding beats of Causers of This, the debut LP from South Carolina's Chas Bundick, it seemed clear that these influences were mediated to a large extent by Daft Punk and J Dilla. But on Underneath the Pine, Bundick's dropped the digital tricknology for a sound that's all live instrumentation and no samples. In fact, the two albums were originally meant to be non-identical twins released into the world in the same year, 2010, to showcase different facets of Bundick's talent.

That Toro Y Moi are considered "indie" only highlights how confused and meaningless the term has become in the post-Ariel Pink/Panda Bear era. Opener "Intro/Chi Chi" features shoegaze guitar over its nimble, sinewy bassline and rippling hand-percussion, resulting in a cross between Slowdive and "Southern Freez". But otherwise the only real clue that this isn't a slab of vintage discofunk are a slight excess of reverb and Bundick's singing. Pale and introspective, dreamy and faraway-eyed, his often multitracked vocals float alongside the grooves rather get down 'n'dirty inside the music's engine room of rhythm. Bundick has talked about belonging to the tradition of danceable pop with "depressing subject matter", which suggests New Order as a reference point. Taken from the lyric to "How I Know", the title Underneath the Pine is an oblique reference to where Bundrick would like to be buried, while the album's recording was colored by the fact that the sessions started immediately after the funeral of a friend.

Not that you can really tell from a casual listen: on the surface, most of the music is upbeat, all succulent sensuousness and palatial polish. The sound is dominated by keyboards of every hue and grain: warm-milk swirls of Rhodes, smoky electric piano out of In A Silent Way, squelchy synths that summon the NYC postdisco of Peech Boys and Vicky D, gnarly distorted organ like Soft Machine and Hatfield and the North. "How I Know" is almost too sumptuous with its wedding-cake layers of keyboard timbres: upper register tinkles, fairy tale twinkles, bright Steve Reich pulse-work, thumping lower-octave booms.

That song occurs at the end of what is something of a soggy center to this album, where deities of rock overproduction like Todd Rundgren seem present in spirit if not as overt influence. "Divina" is sickly like Black Forest gateau, intersecting with that style of gussied-up, orchestrally embellished American indie that I call "cutesy-poo". "Got Blinded" is better, its white-on-white-on-white glare reminding me of the video for "Imagine", but the cooing vocals have a fragrant flutteriness vaguely redolent of Flora Purim. (In interviews, Bundick cites space disco and soundtracks, figures like Mandre and Morricone and de Roubaix, as prime influences on this record, but I'd be surprised if there wasn't some Brazilian fusion-funk in his iPod). Thankfully Underneath the Pine burns brightly at both ends. "New Beat" , the second track, is a glitterball groove that suddenly loses its way in a Miles-like maze; "Go With You", the tune that follows, is aquafunk of the sort we've not heard since Happy Monday's Hannett-produced and reverb-refracted Bummed. In the closing stretch, "Light Black" describes itself perfectly: dazzling yet dark, silky but sinister, its velvet-glove pummel eventually heads off into a stranger region, like Tim Buckley if he'd tried to fuse the astral vocalese of "Starsailor" with the gritty R&B of "Devil Eyes" from Greetings From LA. Closer "Elise" passes through similar weird-zones, sounding in places like Matching Mole meets the Blockheads, a stoned Chas Jankel languidly rinky-dinking the ivories while Wyatt gets gaseous a la "Instant Pussy".

In between there's stand-out track "Still Sound". I first heard the song unawares, on Los Angeles's public radio station KRCW, whose celebrated and influential "Morning Becomes Eclectic" programming template mixes up genres and eras. As so often with this and similar "alternative" stations, I couldn't tell if the song was a current release or made thirty years ago. "Still Sound" could easily be a lost Loft classic, or a track laid down during the sessions for Ultramarine's 1991 Every Man and Woman Is A Star, or some immaculate Arthur Russell-emulating simulacrum forged by Faze Action at the turn of the millennium. Again, only the listless vocals tie the song to the contemporary context of, ugh, chillwave. "I go for a timeless feel," Bundick has said. In that sense Toro Y Moi are exemplary hypnagogues, scrambling history to make real nowhen-and-everywhen pop.

2011-02-15T18:19:00.000-08:00

LLOYD COLE
Melody Maker, 1990

by Simon Reynolds

Upon reflection, it's hard to see why Lloyd Cole has
been so thoroughly vilified, why his name (particularly round
these parts) is so ineradicably besmirched. What must be
most galling for Cole is that his detractors aren't
consistent. Most recent example: Guy Chadwick, feted for very
much the same brand of Americanisms and plangent poignancy
that has hitherto brought only a shower of ridicule on Cole's
head. And there's the Blue Aeroplanes, who've long been
allowed to style themselves as Beatnik poet rockers without a
chorus of jeers.

Besides, most of the sins associated with Cole - over-
writing, name-dropping, terminal irony - he grew out of a
long time ago. Musically and lyrically, the new album "Lloyd
Cole" is his leanest and sparest yet. Recorded with Fred
Maher (drummer on Lou Reed's "New York) and Robert Quine
(legendary guitarist, most known for his days with Richard
Hell and The Voidoids) it's his best, most refreshed album
since "Rattlesnakes".

But for some, Lloyd Cole will remain the guy who put the
"nancy: into poignancy; a bogus bohemian; a clever-dick.
There's an abiding confusion about "authenticity" here. In
this post-modern age, our dreams are inevitably mediated
through images and icons drawn from cinema, literature, pop
history. When your mind is packed and bustling with this
detritus, it's inauthentic not to reflect it in your writing.
The Jesus and Mary Chain and Birdland have been celebrated
for work that is nothing but flagrant homage, an
iconographical inferno. Lloyd Cole, though, is derided for
twee name-dropping, smug knowingness.

There's no denying that Cole has frequently been
embarassing, usually when attempting the epic ("Forest Fire",
"Brand New Friend"). Other times, he's been merely droll.
But I've been touched by some of his delicately wrought,
underplayed vignettes. For "Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken",
"Patience", "2cv", "Why I Love Country Music", "My Bag", and
a substantial portion of the new record, I can manage to take
Lloyd Cole seriously.

What Lloyd Cole excels at is the evocation of a certain
kind of autumnal melancholy: the wilting of youthful
idealism, love losing its bloom, romance stagnating into
habitude. Cole's character's tend to be trapped in
relationships that have inexplicably died on them ("Why I
Love Country Music", "Mercy Killing"). Or they're desperate
for a chance to relive a bohemian life prematurely exhanged
for white collar sell-out ("Hey Rusty"). The opening track
on the new album is called "Don't Look Back", but it's
precisely the poignancy of retrospection that is Cole's
forte. And in a broader sense Lloyd Cole, along with the rest
of his generation of learned rockers, can't help but
communicate the feeling that the present era doesn't compare
with pop's glory years.

In person, Cole radiates a strange mixture of unease and
unshakeable confidence. He answers questions with the
brisk concision of someone who has a very clear idea of what
he's all about. Every so often a half-smile darts fleetingly
in between the terse replies, but mostly he seems rather
guarded. Well, this is the Melody Maker, after all. I put to
him what I've suggested above: that his forte is the
melancholy of lost innocence, a sense of fading possibilites.
Is this a glance back to a period of despondency before you
became successful, or is it how you really feel?

"Generally, my overview of life is that optimism is fairly
redundant. Certainly it causes more unhappiness than a
realistic, pessimistic approach to life. I don't think I
expect that much from life."

Why do you think people respond to this? How much is it
to do with people leaving college and realising they're
destined to succumb to settled mediocrity rather than do
something spectacular with their lives?

Lloyd frowns at the allusion to the dread word
'student'. "I don't know exactly who I talk to. The only way
I can think that people find it pleasurable is to think in
terms of blues. That it's some kind of catharsis for them,
enables them to feel better about their own lives. Blues can
be incredibly uplifting, even though, if one were to analyse
it coldheartedly, it's pretty depressing stuff."

But blues is more about abjection, whereas your thing is
more about disillusionment, the slow relinquishing of dreams.
The characters in your songs aren't laid low, more...

"Worn out. They're burnt out cases. But I still feel
that the way I write is connected to the sense of realism you
get when you listen to, say, Robert Johnson singing 'I'm
gonna beat my woman til I'm satisfied'. He's actually
confronting the nature of his problems, the hideousness of
it. Certainly, in 'Don't Look Back', I attempted to take my
worst fears about the kind of character I might become and
put them into a song. I was writing about how the closer you
get to death, the easier faith becomes. It's roughly about
what might have happened if things hadn't worked out for me."

* * * * * *

Do you have any regrets about your early music, the way it's
saddled you with an image you no longer deserve (literary,
Americanophile etc)?

"I think what I'm doing now is a lot more natural. When
I started, I'd just come out of studying literature, so in a
way it was quite natural for me to write like that. I think
I developed the idea of the proper noun as metaphor and
simile. That's one of the few innovations in songwriting
that I'm responsible for. To hear it referred to as name-
dropping, doesn't seem very nice. It certainly wasn't name-
dropping, I'd never met anyone like Norman Mailer, and I
never even read Simone de Beauvoir. But I knew what she
represents as a figure, so I thought she could easily be used
as a metaphor. As for the literary thing... Well, sure,
next to Billy Idol I look like a literary, intellectual guy.
Next to the genuine article, I look like a pop singer.
I don't even regret anything, although I do think I over-
estimated what the possibilities of the Pop Song were. I
over-reached at times, wrote more to say less, so to speak."

Whereas nowadays your appraoch is, in the words of "A
Long Way Down": "the reason it's a cliche is because it's
true"

"You get to the point where, in writing, the obvious is
the best thing to do. I shied away from that for a long
time. I think you have to be a better writer to use the
obvious, and still make it sound fresh. Maybe I feel
confident enough to do that now."

Do you feel you have a peer group - Morrissey, Paddy
Macaloon, Roddy Frame, Costello et al?

"I feel a certain affinity to Paddy. I think when he
writes a nice, simple song it's usually rather beatiful.
Sometimes he has the same problem as me, of trying to do too
much. I don't feel I'm part of movement so much... but I
guess the three of us, and old Edwyn too, have promoted the
idea of sensitivity. The idea that you can be sensitive and
still be a cool dude."

Is country rock very much your musical home?

"It's difficult for me to say, cos I really don't listen
to country music. I listen to the Jesus and Mary Chain. I
think it's my words that are country more than anything else.
My attitude probably has more in common with country than
with traditional rock'n'roll. The irony and the melancholy,
the funny/sad lines like "the last word in lonesome is me".
For me, this ability to find humour in tragedy is very much
what keeps one alive".

Your reference points are certainly very un-black. I
remember you once claimed that soul had become a bad
influence on British pop, in that passion had been elevated
over literacy.

"I was talking more about the influence of soul on
singing. With the exception of Dylan and the Velvet
Underground, rock singing has developed out of Gospel and the
blues. The whole idea of passion in delivery has become
method rather than real passion. I just find it intolerable
to listen to. Like a bad Simply Red record: it's all
technique, whereas when you listen to Otis Redding singing
"Try A Little Tenderness", that's real passion, he's
completely out of control."

What do you feel about the direction the culture's going
in - the materialism, and the inevitable backlash against
it?

"I almost felt quite smug when a journalist reminded me
that two years ago I had predicted a new hippy culture, a
backlash against yuppiedom. And we really have it now,
even in the adverts. Do you have the commercials for that
Honda car called Infinity over here? Really, it's most
incredible. There's this flock of geese making this V-sign
against the sky, and this guy talking in a very gentle voice
about how 'we take the forms of nature'. They don't even show
the car, they just have the name at the end: Infinity."

Although he's always argued that pop and politics are
poor bedfellows ("well-meaning gets to be an excuse for
clumsy writing") Cole is not averse to the occasional bout of
denunciation. He's good at portraits that are simulataneously
vitriol-laced and poignant, cruel and compassionate: witness
his put-downs of a New Age casualty's beatific certainty
("Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken"), or of soul-less social
climbers and yuppie mercenaries (the latest example being 'A
Long Way Down', off the new album). That one's almost a
morality tale. a la 'Wall Street'.

"Yeah, it's a slow version of 'My Bag' really, except it
wasn't specifically about cocaine, just about that mentality.
I wrote it for this film that never got made, about a painter
from Glasgow, who gets sucked into this New York high life
culture, and abandons his roots, his sense of morality, his
sense of proportion."

Cole himself has been in exile in New York for two
years. Does he still find it a romantic place?

"Not really. See, I'd been over quite a few times before
I moved there. When I was younger, the idea that I could
make a living writing songs and go live somewhere like New
York seemed impossibly romantic. But now, it's just my
everyday life. I don't see too much romance in my life these
days. Just luck. I've been incredibly lucky."

The nearest he's come to selling his soul to the high
life is hiring out his face for an afternoon, posing for a
series of adverts for Amoretto (an almond liqueur) that
appeared in fashionable magazines.

"I got paid the equivalent of five months rent for five
hours work. It's the highest paid work I've done outside
live work. And I direly needed the money. It didn't do me any
harm, cos it was kind of a cool campaign, and I checked out
the the kind of people I was being associated with. They're
mostly hip, upcoming young actors. I can't complain, I was
the only one they used two photos of. And they did humour me
by taking my photo outside a porno theatre in Time Square. On
the original shot, the words 'Wild Wet and Willing' were
clearly visible behind me. But in the event, they fagged
out, as we say, and printed the shot with the background out
of focus. That was a shame, cos it would have made me feel a
lot better about the photo."

Cole's approach (if not dirty realism, at least slightly
tarnished and off-colour realism) is at the opposite end from
British rock's current extremist and hunger for oblivion.

"I have quite often been in pursuit of oblivion, but
usually with a beer and whisky. But I remember seeing Ray
Manzarek on some TV documentary, and he said: 'Jim Morrison,
yeah man - he was living on the edge of reality'. And I
just thought: 'fuck! how can a 45 year old man still be
thinking like a 12 year old kid?!'. I'm not really interested
in that kind of glamour. There's enough glamour for me in is
just being able to exist as a writer, and not having to work
in a bar."

Does this attitude (being more interested in projecting
your work than your self) make you rock rather than pop?

"I did start out with the aim of being a pop star, but
within a year all my ambitions were achieved. I'd got on the
cover of NME, I had appeared on TOTP. So I had to find
something else. Now I just want to get better, do all kinds
of things with the music. Recently I've been writing
rock'n'roll songs, while at the same time having four or five
Walker Brothers, orchestral epics up my sleeve."

Do you think it's true that you have a healthier than
normal proportion of girls in your audience?

"It's not boys music, that's for sure. Which I'm glad
about. Certainly no one's gonna accuse me of being
misogynist. If I'm perceived as the sensitive, New Man,
that's fine by me. I always try to champion sensitivity,
argue that it doesn't mean you have to be a wimp. Which is
very much the James Dean thing of being cool but not
coldhearted"

One of the best songs on the album, "Undressed" appears
to be an admission of voyeurism.

"Absolutely. For what of a better word, it's a post-
feminist realisation that looking at naked bodies is not a
bad thing. You can get so hung up on being right-on and anti-
sexist, you go in the opposite direction, and almost end up a
frigid male.

Is it also about emotional voyeurism?

"Yeah. Half the song is about nakedness, and the other
half about emotional nakedness and vulnerability. That's why
it opens with the line 'you look so good when you're
depressed', because women do. If a woman looks upset, she
just looks more beautiful. It's really unfair!"

Six weeks ago Lloyd married his American girlfriend
Elizabeth, an Orange Juice fan "who doesn't mind my stuff".
He says that these days he's at his happiest "waking up
in the morning with my wife. I usually find it very hard to
get up and go to work." Apart from matrimony, his life is
occupied by writing songs, hanging out in local bars and pool
halls with musician buddies, and the occassional game of
poker.

"Y'know," he says as the interview dwindles towards its
close, "recently I've been quite enjoying the realisation
that I'm possibly closer to the end of my career than to the
beginning. I just don't want to do it for ever. Do I have my
my eyes on anything else? No. Having babies, maybe."

2011-02-14T12:03:00.000-08:00

X-RAY SPEX
Germfree Adolescents Expanded
(Castle/Sanctuary)
Blender, 2005

by Simon Reynolds

Barging in front of the Sex Pistols’ and Buzzcocks’ debuts, Germfree Adolescents is the best British punk album EVER. What clinches it is the sheer raunch of X-Ray Spex’s sound. Everything in the music--the punk-boogie grooves, the saxophone’s braying insolence, the blasting blare of Poly Styrene’s vocals--swings and jives. Heard at its utmost on “Art-I-Ficial” and “Let’s Submerge,” the result is a noise so powerful and so fine that sometimes all can you do is laugh out loud. Far from being date-stamped “1978”, Styrene’s lyrics--blistering diatribes against consumer society and mass-marketed youth exploitation--are more pertinent and penetrating than ever. Eventually the contradictions of having her own rebellion turned into a commodity (explored here humorously, with “Warrior in Woolworths,” and anguishedly, on “Identity”) caused the singer to have a breakdown. This expanded reissue adds the crucial early single “Oh! Bondage Up Yours!,” punk defiance at its most in-your-face, plus a pair of nice but inessential BBC radio sessions.

how weird for Poly to have her story/sound turned into a movie

2011-02-08T10:12:00.000-08:00

MY BLOODY VALENTINE: the resurrection
director's cut, Spin, August 2008

By Simon Reynolds

My Bloody Valentine made a lot of noise in America in 1992. Figuratively: their album Loveless, released at the end of the previous year, had become a critical and hipster sensation. And literally, with a spring '92 tour of the US that's been rated as the second loudest in history. "I was too young to see it myself but here in LA it's a badge of honor have been at their show at the Roxy " says Brian Aubert of Silversun Pickups, just one of countless bands influenced by My Bloody Valentine's neo-psychedelic bliss-blast . "The legend goes it was so loud that people's shorts were blowing about and flapping from the sound waves. People's hair was rippling." On each night of the tour MBV climaxed their set with the Loud Bit--the "middle-eight" of "You Made Me Realise," actually a chasm of one-chord cacophony that the group sadistically stretched out for as long as twenty minutes, although it's hard to be totally sure with audience members losing track of time and some even losing consciousness.

After this deluge of din came a deafening silence. Seventeen years of it, a quiet that grew increasingly perplexing and frustrating for Loveless's ever-expanding legion of fans, pining for the sequel that never came. During that time the album's sales accumulated steadily (worldwide they're estimated at a quarter of a million) and the legend of its agonizingly difficult, protracted, and costly making swelled. So did the rumors about the band's unmaking, their collective spirit shattered by the struggle to create a follow-up to surpass Loveless. A tarnished halo of mystique gathered around My Bloody Valentine's leader, singer/guitarist Kevin Shields. This eccentric recluse and driven perfectionist became alt-rock's very own Brian Wilson, his grim wrestle with a Smile-like Unfinished Masterwork swallowing up a million dollars along with his group's will to live.

Now, long after most fans had passed through the stages of grief and reconciled themselves to the band's utter extinction, in a final confounding twist My Bloody Valentine have reformed, announcing a slew of tour dates and festival appearances on both sides of the Atlantic, plus remastered reissues of Loveless and its just-as-fabulous 1988 predecessor Isn't Anything. Shields has even, tantalizingly, alluded to the possibility of a new album.

^^^^^^^^^^^^

For a group that would change the face of alternative music and release arguably the greatest rock record of the Nineties, My Bloody Valentine spent a mighty long time being mediocre. Formed in Dublin in 1984 by Shields and his drummer friend Colm O' Ciosig, for four years they eked out an existence on the British indie rock scene, where they stacked up a fairly substantial discography of singles, EPs and one album and for their pains were generally regarded as derivative and corny. In those formative years, their sound bore the heavy imprint of then-fashionable icons of UK indie, such as Nick Cave's psycho-blues outfit The Birthday Party and above all The Jesus and Mary Chain, whose feedback-drenched Sixties-evoking pop songs and riot-ravaged gigs made them the sensation of 1985. For a while un-originality served MBV well. In 1986, the UK music papers were desperately searching for the next Mary Chain and in typical literal-minded fashion latched onto Xeroxes of that group (rather something new but capable of instigating the same level of turmoil ). MBV enjoyed a smatter of way premature hype , soon to evaporate when the group's lack of genuinely distinguishing characteristics became apparent.

Around this time--early 1987--I met the group for the first time, at a gig where they were second from bottom of the bill: an amiable bunch, I thought, but decidedly retro with their Stooges circa 1969 haircuts. Later in the year an enthusiastic friend played me their single "Sunny Sundae Smile" and there was a discernible improvement: at least the Valentines were now ripping off the cutting edge of the American rock underground, the blizzard-guitar post-hardcore sound of Husker Du and Dinosaur Jr. But with alt-America roiling with madcap creativity, groups like Sonic Youth, Big Black and Butthole Surfers, it was hard to care.

Career-wise, a turning point occurred in My Bloody Valentine's horizontal trajectory (you couldn't call it a "rise" at that point) across the UK indie scene, when they played support to another Sixties-influenced band, Biff Bang Pow. That group included Alan McGee, boss of Creation, the label that gave the world Jesus and Mary Chain and (later) Oasis. When MBV blew Biff Bang Pow offstage, McGee was convinced they were the UK's Husker Du, potently mixing " pure noise and pure melody" (as Shields put it), and he promptly signed them on the spot.

Musically, a crucial shift had also occurred, with the departure of original singer Dave Conway and arrival of Bilinda Butcher, who now shared vocals (and soon a bed) with Shields. The latter had launched himself into intensive experiments with guitar-texture, the first fruits audible on the ethereal 1987 single "Strawberry Wine" but really flourishing on their astonishing debut for Creation, the You Made Me Realise EP. On the eve of its release in August 1988, My Bloody Valentine played a one-day Creation Records festival in the sweltering confines of London's Town and Country Club. So high was the group's standing with McGee, MBV were headliners, placed above even veteran Creation acts like Primal Scream. I recall their performance as thrilling but shambolic, the delicacy of the EP's eerie "Cigarette In Your Bed"--a sort of Sonic Youth psycho-ballad--completely trampled.

A few months later I got to interview the Valentines about their next Creation EP Feed Me With Your Kiss and imminent album Isn't Anything at the squatted house where Shields and O' Ciosig lived. The location was only a few hundred yards from the Town and Country, in a part of North London called Kentish Town with a long-standing Irish population. Back then, occupying abandoned buildings was less harshly prosecuted by the UK authorities than nowadays and squat culture, with its free rehearsal spaces and grubby circuit of below-the-radar gigs, was vital to the ferment of UK music culture. For young bands struggling to get careers off the ground, not having to pay rent meant they could pour their slim resources (often gleaned from claiming unemployment benefit) into equipment. They could also afford to hang out, come up with ideas, do the long hard slog of shaking off influences and coming up with an original sound. "MBV wouldn't have gotten anywhere if we hadn't been able to squat," Bilinda Butcher told me. "You need somewhere you feel free to make a noise." O' Ciosig concurred: "If we hadn't squatted, we'd probably have got really depressed and left London. 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 rehearsal room in our squat."

The building itself was pretty grotty. I remember a fridge so badly in need of defrosting, the doors couldn't be closed because of bulging ice, and the bizarre sight of the banister rail on the Victorian staircase, just hanging there surreally in mid-air, all its legs having been kicked away during a recent out-of-control party. In a murky upstairs room, I lowered myself gingerly into a shabby, slightly moist armchair and talked with the group for about three hours. It took that long to get stuff out of them. I was fearful throughout that the tape recorder wasn't going to pick up anything: the group were incredibly soft-spoken. On transcription, Butcher's faint and faraway tones could barely be extracted from the tape hiss. But then that was just like the group's music, which took the Jesus and Mary Chain's knack for "hidden melody" buried in feedback and Husker Du's love of smudging vocals into snowdrifts of open-tuned guitar to the outer limits. Listening you often wondered if a particular strand of high-end sound was a vocal harmony, a heavily-effected guitar, or an aural hallucination triggered by your ears being saturated by treble overload.

It transpired that MBV's lexicon of disorientingly innovative guitar-tones came from Shield's continuous sustained use of the tremolo arm (as opposed to the brief twinges favored by most guitarists) while he simultaneously strummed the strings frenetically, and from an effect called "reverse reverb". The result was what the group variously called "glide guitar" and "the not-really-there-sound".

"The thing is, the sound literally isn't all there," Shields explained. "It's actually the opposite of rock'n'roll. It's taking all the guts out of it, there's just the remnants, the outline." Isn't Anything's engineer Dave Anderson later claimed that Shields had got him to erase all the actual playing from the record and keep only the reverse reverb after-image of the chord-strum.

The technicalities of how MBV got their unique sound are secrets that a legion of bands scrabbled to work out in the years following Isn't Anything. What matters--then and now--is the effect on the listener, and why it struck such a resonant chord with audiences at that point in pop history. As Butcher explained to me, "It's like that bit in the middle of "You Made Me Realise", where it just levitates. You know it's there, and you know it's coming, but when it happens, half the time you forget it's on. Your mind completely wanders, you forget it, then you remember it."

Swoony oblivion and narcoleptic bliss were all the rage in alternative rock culture of the late Eighties and early Nineties. Dinosaur Jr's J. Mascis was the slacker icon of the era, hiding his face behind a curtain of hair and his melodies beneath a sandstorm of Big Muff distortion, mumbling his way through interviews and even on at least one occasion (with unlucky me) forgetting to turn up for them altogether. My Bloody Valentine's dazed-and-bemused aura and indistinct, non-thrusting presence was perfect for their music and perfect for the time. Like their American peers, their conversation had a curious quality of articulate inarticulacy. They talked quite eloquently about how they didn't really know what they were doing, had no concept or masterplan, were just drifting hazily through both the creative process and Life itself.

Underground rock groups of this era tended to mix Romanticism's classic ideals of "surrender" and "the sublime" with late Sixties psychedelic impulses (expressions like "blow your mind", "blissing out" and "wig out" were revived with only a faint patina of retro irony) plus their attendant drugs. What gave it a contemporary edge was the addition of a very late Eighties political fatalism and apathy that bordered on capitulation. In 1987, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had triumphed with her third election victory in a row; in America, two terms of Reagan would be followed in November 1988 with his Vice President George Bush taking the White House. With Conservatism in seemingly impregnable ascendance, many young people drifted away from politics and into inactivism. A new psychedelia had emerged, but with the 1960s's militant optimism replaced by a dream-your-life-away resignation that grunge grrrls L7 would later rebuke with their 1993 anthem "Pretend We're Dead."

Death's close analogue "sleep" emerged as the guiding metaphor for alternative rock, as if youth had gone into hibernation in the hope of waking up in more congenial times, Thatcher-Reagan just a bad dream. In 1988 Sonic Youth put out their masterpiece Daydream Nation, but MBV had gestured at the idea the previous year with “Safe in Your Sleep” on the Ecstasy EP. Chatting in the Kentish Town squat, it became clear that a weird oscillation between sleep deprivation and slug-a-bed drowsiness was key to MBV's vibe. Isn't Anything was recorded in a single week with only a couple of hours sleep per night. "Often, when we do the vocals, it's 7.30 in the mornings, I've usually fallen asleep and have to be woken up to sing," said Butcher. "Maybe that's why it's languorous. I'm usually trying to remember what I've been dreaming about, when I'm singing."

"Dreampop" was one term bandied about to describe the horde of British bands who tried form themselves in the image of Isn't Anything, a legion whose number included Ride, Lush, Slowdive, Chapterhouse, and Pale Saints. "Shoegazer" is what stuck, however, on account of the way the bands shied from meeting the audience's gaze. In the guitarists's case, they had an excuse, since they were typically activating an array of foot pedals in a doomed attempt to approximate the Kevin Shields Sound.

MBV was also highly influential in terms of their androgynous image. Accidental as it was, there seemed to be a subliminal sexual politics to their line-up, a gender spectrum ranging from regular-guy Ciosig through butch-looking bassist Debbie Googe (actually gay, although she rarely talked about it) to tousled boy-dreamer Shields and willowy pre-Raphaelite beauty Butcher. On the records, it was often hard to tell the lovers's voices apart, especially because Shields sometimes sang the higher parts and Butcher the deeper ones. But androgyny seemed to run right through the core of MBV's sound and spirit, with its paradoxical blend of might and vulnerability, force and tenderness, or as Shields himself put it, 'an attitude of uncompromising strength yet, at the same time, a fragile sense of uncertainty'. That balance would carry them through the troubled creation of Loveless, but, toppling towards doubt and despair, prove the undoing of My Bloody Valentine thereafter.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Started in February 1989, Loveless was two years in the making, something unheard of in the limited-finances realm of indie-rock. MBV ran through studios (a total of nineteen by the end), engineers (sixteen) and money, with a total cost ranging from 280 thousand dollars to over half-a-million, depending on whose version of events you trust. In 1999, Alan McGee told me Creation had spend 270 thousand pounds on Loveless, bringing the label close to bankruptcy at various points. "I could see my label slipping away. I'd even mortgaged my own house. In the end, I had to emotionally blackmail Kevin to get him to finish." In other accounts, McGee has claimed that to pay off one of several studios used by MBV he borrowed the equivalent of 40 thousand dollars off his working class father, and, worse, that it was the insurance money for his mother's death. Shields, for his part, has consistently argued that the amount spent was much smaller and not that far from the norm for major indie-rock bands like Creation's own Primal Scream.

What is clear that Shields and his increasingly forlorn comrades quickly fell into a dysfunctional lifestyle, addled by a fatal combination of perfectionism and procrastination. "We arrived in the studio at 6 PM and… began to work about 11 PM," Shields told one interviewer. "Then we ordered the dinner, which took about three hours. Actually, in a night in the studio, we worked about only a hour and a half..." Dick Green, McGee's partner at Creation and a man whose hair would famously go grey over night on account of Loveless-induced financial worry, recalled a nightmarishly endless litany of " studios and tape and engineers and equipment, taxis and food (lots of food, I seem to recall)", with the obsessive Shields invariably finding some defect in the mixing desk and insisting on moving the operations, at great disruption, to a new studio.

It was a time of emotional chaos in the Valentines camp, too. Shields and Butcher began to break up even while still cohabiting; they also developed tinnitus and had to desist from recording for a while. Ciosig, meanwhile, had a kind of nervous breakdown, caused by the precariousness of his living circumstances. "I went through a bad year-squatting in various places and getting evicted all the time… I was essentially homeless. After every day in the studio I'd walk down the streets until I'd find an empty house to live in."

It wasn't all darkness. In 1988-89 UK pop culture was convulsed by the mind-bending sound of acid house. Most of the roster of Creation--a label infatuated with all the myths of rock'n'roll decadence and debauchery--threw themselves enthusiastically into the rave scene's druggy vortex. "Me, Primal Scream, and the Valentines went to house clubs three times a week, getting shitfaced on Ecstasy and having these intense spiritual experiences," McGee told me.

My Bloody Valentine had been interested in dance music for some while. Isn't Anything came with a free single and the track "Instrumental B" was based around a Public Enemy breakbeat loop, while Shields told me "it was the weird sampling in hip hop records that inspired us to create eerie guitar effects in the first place"--probably an exaggeration, but as a statement of artistic intent and sonic impurism, a honorable one. The influence of hip hop's grinding groove power and house music's hypnotic trance was plastered all over "Soon", the lead track on the Glider EP with which MBV broke their studio-bound silence in 1990. Ambient pioneer and U2 producer Brian Eno hailed the song as setting "a new standard in pop . . . the vaguest piece of music ever to be a U.K. hit” (it actually just grazed the outside edge of the Top 40).

On their next release, 1991's Tremolo EP, My Bloody Valentine got into sampling--but rather than the recognizable loops and quotes you got in rap and rave, they use it to reprocess their own guitar feedback and vocals. The results--the amorphously wilting drone-tones of stand-out tune "To Here Knows When"--were vaguer still than "Soon", but amazingly, this time, a real-deal UK chart hit, reaching #29. Finally, near the end of '91, came Loveless. Released on Sire, it was the first time most American alt-rockers heard the group and has subsequently become an almost mythic release, a rite of passage on a par with the first Velvet Underground album. "I first heard them when a friend made me a tape of Loveless," recalls Brian Aubert. "It was scary and alien at first, I thought my stereo was melting. I didn't like it at first, but that's almost a clue to the things I'm really really going to like over the long run. When I got the CD, that's when I realized that someone had deliberately designed it to sound that way, like a melting canvas. The effect is like an orchestra of noise, and the almost inaudible vocals just send chills down my spine. In Silversun Pickups we love guitar noise, but that particular sort of blankety way, enfolding you. MBV were the ultimate at that, the best. When you compare them to other shoegaze groups, like Slowdive and Lush, those bands sounded much cleaner and prettier."

Although hardly anyone outside the band's immediate circle knew it at the time, Loveless was virtually a Kevin Shields solo album. Apart from Butcher's vocals and Ciosig's weird ambient doodle "Touched" (plus the odd flurry of drumming on a couple of tracks), every sound on the album originated from Shields's hands. Googe stopped turning up after feeling "pretty superfluous" when Shields couldn't communicate his desires and instead played the bass parts himself. Ciosig's emotional disarray and physical ill-health meant he contributed drumming to just two songs; Shields took elements of his playing and looped them into beats for the rest of the album.

My Bloody Valentine re-grouped for the Loveless tour, which quickly became notorious on account of the punishingly extended versions of "You Made Me Realise". The group's own nickname for the Painfully Loud Monotony segment was "the holocaust", but Shields subsequently liked to talk of it as an act of generosity. "It was brilliant watching the crowd reactions," he told me in 1995. "Normally people respond in obvious ways to the obvious musical triggers. But with that huge rumble, it was like everyone's imagination opened up at once, because by and large it was what people were thinking they were hearing that counted. It was like a big blank canvas, a giant sensory deprivation tank. But also in a strange way like putting a huge wall in between us and the crowd."

A wall was indeed to rise up between the band and their fans, built out of high expectations, of massive ardour invested but cruelly thwarted. An early bad augury was the fact that, despite the critical garlands and promising sales Loveless received, Creation immediately dropped the band. "It was either [Kevin] or me," McGee said many years later. Although he's sometimes described Loveless as "the best album I've ever put out", in recent years he's characterized MBV as "my comedy band… a joke, my way of seeing how far I could push hype." Undeterred by Shields's difficult reputation, Island Records signed the group for a reported quarter of a million pound advance, which the group spent on building their own recording studio.

"In retrospect, we had a totally over-ambitious plan to find a premises, build our own studio, and get the follow-up to Loveless out by July 1993," Shields told me in 1995. But the mixing desk developed a mysterious "ailment" and by the time the technological problems were sorted out, the post-Loveless momentum had dissipated. So had the initial advance from Island. By 1995 the members were forced to move in together in a South London house to save money and were selling off equipment to keep the operation afloat.

In terms of their musical vision, MBV were hopelessly confused, undermined by what had hitherto been one of their virtues, their open-ness to inputs from outside the indie guitar canon. At one point they were besotted with thrash metal, their night owl lifestyle having made them fans of a small-hours minority interest music TV show called Noisy Muthas. But they were simultaneously fixated on the post-rave genre of jungle, aka drum 'n' bass, tuning in obsessively to the dozens of pirate radio stations that broadcast its hyperspeed fractured breakbeats, warped samples and booming sub-bass. "When I first listened to jungle, it seemed full of possibilities in a way I hadn't encountered since early hip hop," Shields told me. "Raw, yet as out-there as you can get. Hip hop reeducated us about rhythm; now jungle's reeducating everyone again."

Inspired by how jungle breakbeats "shift and inverse on themselves, the way there'll be ten different beats at once, or effects like the beat's exploding," Shields and O'Ciosig threw themselves into learning how to program drums with a computer, but the digital modus operandi didn't gel with their more intuitive, hands-on approach to making music. Soon the group "felt like people trudging through the mud with our heads down not seeing where we're going." An album of drum 'n 'bass influenced material was recorded, but eventually dumped. "It was dead. It hadn't got that spirit, that life in it," Shields admitted in a later interview. To another journalist, he confessed, "I lost it.… I reached a sort of stalemate with myself."

On top of the musical crisis, Shields was afflicted with a psychological "meltdown", having resumed the biorhythmically disjointed lifestyle of the Loveless years (sleeping by day, working by night) and become a chronic weed-smoker. "The things I experienced were quite unreal," he told me. "I've been totally out there, I can honestly say I've experienced everything Aldous Huxley wrote about in 'The Doors of Perception'." Elsewhere he described pot-smoking as making him "soft in the head" and inclined to waste hours watching "shit movies".

Shields acknowledged how generous Island had been in supporting the group financially, telling me. "In a way I've done a lot more harm to the industry than vice versa!". But by 1998, the label's patience ran out and they stopped advancing MBV further monies. For a total tally of half-a-million pounds, scores of hours of music had been recorded but the only publically released fruit was a cover of a track by Wire for a tribute album. By that point, the group had effectively disbanded, with Googe and O'Ciosig having gone off to form or play in other bands.

Finally, in 2001, Island formally released MBV from their contract. In the meantime, legally in limbo, Shields had embarked on a series of handsomely remunerated but lackluster remixes for sundry indie bands. He'd also become an axe hero for hire, playing with his old soul-mate J. Mascis and actually joining his old label mates Primal Scream, for whom he contributed production and guitar-noise expertise in the studio and surprisingly basic, glide-free guitar on tour.

Shields's first high-profile flourish of creativity came with the four new tracks he contributed to 2003's Lost in Translation soundtrack (Sofia Coppola being a massive Loveless fan), with the worldwide success of the movie reportedly earning him his first million. Then in 2005 he stood onstage with Patti Smith at the Meltdown festival she curated in London, daubing abstract guitar soundscapes to accompany her poetic incantations. Titled The Coral Sea, the collaboration was released as a double-disc earlier this summer. "My Bloody Valentine were like my favourite new band," Smith told me. "I had left the rock scene in 1979 and had been leading a quiet life and when I returned and explored what was going on, I fell in love with MBV. Oliver Ray, who was in my band, played the album to me and I thought there was something wrong with it. I said, "did you leave it on the radiator?". He said, 'no, that's their music'. To me their sound was the logical next step for rock'n'roll ."
Many other groups agree. U2's The Edge cited the Valentines' music as a major influence on the group's drastic sonic reinvention circa Achtung Baby, while Smashing Pumpkins's Billy Corgan went so far as to hire Loveless engineer Alan Moulder to work on Mellon Collie.

Intriguingly, MBV's influence isn't limited to guitar bands: for many prominent electronic musicians, Isn't Anything and Loveless was a crucial factor in their shift from indie past to techno future. And in recent years there's been much chatter about an imminent shoegaze revival. Brian Aubert thinks it's already here. "As we get closer to 2010, which is twenty years on from the original shoegaze, I hear more and more bands in our circle going for that blanket-type sound with calm vocals. It's like everyone's done with the jagged, cut-and-dry dancepunk sound that comes from Gang of Four. Personally, I thank God for bands like Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine. They took a lot of bullets for us, paved the way for bands like us to a large extent. The Valentines deserve to come back and reap some rewards. They probably have more fans now they did at the time."

Is money actually the spur for this reformation--offers MBV couldn't refuse? It seems unlikely, somehow: Shields is an idealistic fellow, and besides, doesn't really need the dough, having done very well out of Lost In Translation's success. Maybe the reunion's real motive is, well, motivational: a team-building exercise to work up the camaraderie and psychological momentum to finally complete the sequel to Loveless. Being the focus of all that white-hot adoration at shows could well galvanise the band out of a decade's inertia. Indeed in early 2007, Shields promised that the group was "100% going to make another...record unless we die or something". Later that year, in an interview with VBS.TV, there were tantalizing allusions to the contents of a new release: it would consist of a "half-finished album" from 1996/97, material from 1993–94, and "a little bit of new stuff." It sounds a bit cobbled together, distinctly lacking the epic-ness of scope and vision that Loveless II would seem to demand. But it would provide an element of narrative closure, rewriting the band's story with a happier ending, possibly even pointing to a fresh start. I wouldn't count on it, though. We've been here before.

2011-01-14T09:00:00.000-08:00

BROADCAST
The Future Crayon
Warp
director's cut, Observer Music Monthly, August 13, 2006

by Simon Reynolds

There’s an invented word in Alfie that fits the music of Broadcast like a glove: “ghostified”. Remember the scene where Michael Caine's character complains about how Jane Asher's northern runaway turned live-in lover gets this faraway, 'ghostified' look, indicating she's thinking mournfully of the lover who dumped her even when flesh-and-blood Alfie's between her legs? Not only does Trish Keenan’s voice sounds as cool and pale as a ghost, but she and Broadcast partner James Cargill are haunted by a never-never vision of Sixties pop and have chased that will o’ the wisp for nigh on a decade now.

The Birmingham duo’s touchstone is the obscure psychedelic outfit United States of America, who pioneered of the use of synthesizers and whose singer, Dorothy Moskowitz, had one of those classic Sixties female voices: emotive but devoid of R&B grit and fire, “white” without being overtly folky. Channeling this purity and poise, Keenan gives songs like “Illumination” and “Unchanging Window” the characteristic Broadcast mood-blend of blithe and ominous; Cargill frames her songs with crisply detailed orchestrations and jazzily swinging beats that betray deep immersion in movie scores, library music and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Along with proper pop tunes, there’s a bunch of splendid mood-piece instrumentals, like “Minus Two”, a bleepy idyll that’s like nap-time muzak for a crèche full of robot tots.

Broadcast avoid the pitfall of retro-pastiche, of coming across either scholarly or campy, because there’s real emotion in these songs: “Distant Call”, for instance, is a lovely and loving song of pained empathy addressed to a friend mired in sorrow.

Not so much a “best of” as a miscellany that shuns their three full-lengths in favour of early EP tracks and rarities from other compilations, The Future Crayon isn’t the “new Broadcast album”, but it might actually be their best record, if you get me.

RIP Trish Keenan

2011-01-03T09:54:00.000-08:00

ARCTIC MONKEYS
Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
Domino
Blender, 2006

by Simon Reynolds

Late last year, Arctic Monkeys rode internet buzz to become the biggest UK guitar-band since Oasis. There are plenty of parallels--cocky-as-hell lads
from the industrial North of England instantly embraced as saviours of Brit-rock--but Arctic Monkey are actually by far the superior band. Their melodies are indelible without inducing Beatles flashbacks, the lyrics actually make sense and are about something, and, crucially, they've got a rhythm section that actually makes the music move. For all of Jamie Cook's abrasive, jagged guitar riffs, the Monkeys don't really sound "indie," and that's got everything to do with the agility of drummer Matt Helders and bassist Andy Nicholson, who can switch from punk relentlessness to Sabbath-style "heavy" dynamics to zippy punk-funk in the blink of a hi-hat. Showcasing this nimbleness to the max, Monkeys songs are crammed with thrilling swerves, jolts, and false endings.

What really elevates the Monkeys into a class of their own, though, is frontman Alex Turner. His insolent rasp sweetly tinged with plaintiveness and poignancy, Turner is shaping up to be one of the all-time great English singers. His delivery is full of delicious moments where his classic rock'n'roll snarl slips into a thick regional accent: "alright" becomes "al-reet," "up" becomes "oop", and you simply have to hear the twangy lasciviousness with which Turner sings lines like "you sexy little swine" or "dreams of naughtiness." Spiced with regional slang ("you've got the face on" = "in a bad mood"), his lyrics couple the invincible confidence of youth with a sense of pathos and fatalism of someone older, wiser, and sadder.

The band's hometown Sheffield is a famously bleak city once synonomous with the steel industry, and accordingly Turner's prime terrain is young people grabbing for fun and sparkle in the face of all the forces that would crush their spirit, whether it's psycho bouncers, limited funds, or simply England's wet winters and grey summer skies. Turner's observational flair is at its most acute and original on "Red Light Indicates Doors Are Secured," probably the first song ever about getting a cab home after a drunken night out. Turner sketches it all with keen-eyed economy: the driver who refuses to let six in the cab ("especially with the food"), watching the meter anxiously while contemplating doing a runner, and reliving the night's highlights, like the fight that broke out in the taxi line and the "beyond belief" babe in the pub that evaded his clutches.

Whatever People Say is front-loaded with hell-for-leather instant classics about chatting up and copping off, like "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor" and "Still Take You Home." Even better, though, are the slower songs, which allow the tenderness in Turner's voice to bloom and encourage
empathy to triumph over sarcasm in the lyrics. In 'Mardy Bum," Turner struggles to smooth things over with his pissed-off girlfriend (her scowl as fearsome as "looking down the barrel of a gun"), evoking memories of "cuddles in the kitchen" in a desperate attempt to dissipate the sour mood.

"Riot Van" is a wry ballad about watching bored youth expertly bait the town police but avoid actually getting arrested--most of the time, anyway. At 20, Turner is close enough to these lads to remember feeling that same mix of restlessness and cheek, but he also knows they're gonna get burned sooner rather than later. This delicate poise of intimacy and distance permeates the album, making the Monkeys vignettes of teenage wildlife resonate far beyond the local world they so vividly and vigorously document.

2011-01-03T09:47:00.000-08:00

HOT CHIP
Coming On Strong
Astralwerks
Blender, 2005

By Simon Reynolds

The title Coming On Strong is ironic. This music can barely look you in the eye. Imagine a bunch of Brits striving for the sass 'n' sheen of modern R&B and rap, but just too diffident to match the swaggering ebullience of Beyonce and 50 Cent. N.E.R.D., by real nerds, in other words. The Hot Chip vibe is distilled in “Playboy”, which sees the song’s lovelorn protagonist cheering himself up by cruising London with the top down, gangsta-style: “Driving in my Peugeot/20-inch rims with the chrome now/Blazin’ out Yo La Tengo” But the group’s two singer/songwriters, Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard, aren’t mocking black music
so much as conveying the pathos of the unbridgeable gap between pop’s fantasy world and the hum-drum reality most of us must inhabit. Bling on a budget, Hot Chip’s music is woven from the sort of burbling ‘n’ twinkling analog synth sounds you’d associate with a group like Stereolab, but the reference points are all from the last thirty years of black pop: Stevie Wonder, S.O.S. Band, Prince, Dr. Dre. Tracks like “You Ride, We Ride, In My Ride” and “Shining Escalade” have a translucent faintness, as if they’re diagrams of R&B songs that have yet to be colored in. Insidiously melodic and, in its subdued way, genuinely soulful, Coming On Strong is the best record of its ilk since The Streets’ debut.

2011-01-03T09:44:00.000-08:00

FRANZ FERDINAND
You Could Have It So Much Better… with Franz Ferdinand
Domino
directors' cut, Blender, 2005

by Simon Reynolds

In an early short story by Ian McEwan, a female novelist struggles to follow up her acclaimed, best-selling debut. The psychologically macabre twist in the tale comes when it’s revealed that the manuscript she’s been toiling over for months is actually a painstakingly typed-out, word-for-word reiteration of the first book. Now, You Could Have It So Much Better is far from a note-for-note duplicate of Franz Ferdinand. Still, for a band dedicated to the resurrection of arty pop, there are surprisingly few risks taken on their sophomore album. It used to be a matter of honor for art-rockers to make giant leaps with each successive record. But on You Could Have, the attitude seems to have been “let’s not mess with a winning formula, lads, shall we?”

As formulas go, it’s a winsome one: brittle white-boy funk topped by Alex Kapranos’ suavely crooned vocals and witty, sexually piquant lyrics. Franz are master exponents of that distinctly British forte for using abrasive guitars in a way that feels pop rather than rock. And they’re equally adept at that other Britpop ploy whereby fey young men seduce the girls in the audience by acting like they’re really more interested in boys. Last time, it was the bisexual epiphany of “Michael”; this time, it’s the homo-erotic ardor of “This Boy” and the saucy boast “your famous friend/well I blew him before you” in “Do You Want To.” A glorious, gleeful romp jam-packed with quotables, that song is the album’s strongest stab in Franz’s main mode of oddly fussy, flustered discopunk, closely followed by “The Fallen” and “I’m Your Villain” (one section of which actually recycles the riff from “Take Me Out”).

In a rockier vein, “Evil And A Heathen” stomps like Iggy Pop circa Lust For Life. But You Could Have’s only real departure is “Fade Together,” a piano ballad whose ebbing waltz-time rhythm gorgeously matches the langorous nihilism of the lyric, which could be about a suicide pact, or sharing a needle, but either way is alluring and disturbing in equal measure.

“Fade” is far and away the best thing on the record, in large part because it’s the least Franz Ferdinand-like. The song makes you wonder what this group could achieve if they actually pushed themselves, and the envelope, a wee bit, in the spirit of the art-rock ancestors--Roxy, Bowie, Wire, Gang of Four, Josef K--they either invoke or echo sonically. Art-into-pop should be about vision and ambition, over-reach and the possibility of falling flat on your face. So here’s hoping for a torturously difficult third album.

2011-01-03T09:40:00.000-08:00

ART BRUT
Bang Bang Rock & Roll
Banana Recordings/Fierce Panda import
Blender, 2005

by Simon Reynolds

In 2005, few things could be less “rock’n’roll” than playing rock’n’roll. Real estate speculation, starting a restaurant, modern art--all have stronger claims to the cutting edge. Yet rock groups infest the land, fresh droves of them arriving each month bearing ever stupider names. “Formed A Band,” the opening track on the debut album by London’s Art Brut (not actually a stupid name, always a good sign), hilariously skewers the presumptuousness of taking the stage and demanding attention like it’s a birth right. Yet tangled up inside the self-mocking chorus--“look at us, we formed a band!”--there’s a primal yelp of idiot-glee. Almost despite itself, the song exalts the exuberance and cameraderie of ganging up with your mates to make noise.

Dark droning punk with a twist of Wiry weirdness, “Formed” also recalls Steppenwolf’s “Born To Be Wild”, in the sense that this is the group’s defining, all-too-perfect song, the immaculate mission statement Art Brut may have problems surpassing. Hitting the listener with your best shot straightaway is a strategic blunder in terms of album sequencing, but there’s plenty of further excitements within Bang Bang. “My Little Brother” is shouty ‘n’ jumpy New Wave with another funny lyric, about being embarrassed by a younger sibling who’s only “just discovered rock’n’roll” and throws spazzy shapes on the dancefloor. On the title track, singer Eddie Argos demands “no more songs about sex and drugs and rock’n’roll/It’s boring,” while “Bad Weekend” mournfully confesses “popular/culture/no longer/applies to me.” But Bang Bang isn’t wall-to-wall meta. “Emily Kane” pines for a long-lost girlfriend (although Argos does imagine the song being such a hit that “kids on buses” will be “singing your name”) and “Rusted Guns of Milan” is an oblique account of erectile dysfunction, suffused with a hangdog seediness faintly reminiscent of Pulp.

On the downside, Argos’ half-spoken delivery means he sometimes seems to operate “outside” the music, in the mode of punk poets such as Jim Carroll and John Cooper Clarke, rather than in the thick of it, while the Art Brut sound occasionally verges on merely mundane liveliness. At their slightest, Art Brut come over like indie-rock’s equivalent to The Darkness (in “Good Weekend” Argos even eggs on Chris Chinchilla’s solo with a “go guitar!,” just like Justin Hawkins on “I Believe in a Thing Called Love”). But at their most thrilling, Art Brut fuse the spiky cool of Elastica with the witty self-consciousness of an LCD Soundsystem. They mean it, sort of, maaaaan.

2011-01-03T09:34:00.000-08:00

LIARS
They Threw Us All In A Trench And Stuck A Monument On Top
Blast First/Mute
Uncut, 2002

by Simon Reynolds

On the face of it, there’s no reason why LIARS’s brand of retro is superior to, say, The Hives’s. The former echo Gang of Four and The Fall; the latter are the latest in a long lineage of garage punk rehash that includes Fleshtones, Scientists, Billy Childish, and countless others. 1979 versus 1966: is there really a difference? Well, I’d argue that the post-punk template LIARS draw on is way more open-ended and possibility-rich than the narrow set of archival resources that fuel The Hives. And that those 1979-82 reference points are simply fresher: this is the first time post-punk has been rediscovered, whereas with the garage punk re-re-revival, pop has eaten these portions of itself several times already, the cud is thrice-chewed and flavourless.

New York’s LIARS are just one of a small swarm of American bands inspired by 1979-and-all-that. Others of note include The Rapture (check the "At Home He Feels Like A Tourist" disco-punk of their ace "House of Jealous Lovers" 12 inch), Erase Errata (steeped in untypical girl groups like Slits, Delta 5, Ut), and Radio 4 (named after a Metal Box tune, but sadly sounding nothing like that Satie-esque anomaly in PiL’s oeuvre). As for LIARS, they’re a bit like Gang of Four’s Entertainment played with a Birthday Party-like looseness (or "Loose"-ness, given the Aussie group’s debts to Funhouse-era Stooges). The fractious, backfiring rhythm guitar and the punk-funking pummel of the bass ‘n’ drums are sourced in Entertainment songs like "Natural’s Not In It". But the feel is less anally clenched than Go4, more Butthole-surfing: live, this band really kick out the jams.

"Mr Your On Fire Mr" is the stand-out here, with its stop-start groove, cowbell clatter and funky flurry of mechanical handclaps. "Tumbling Walls Buried Me in the Debris With ESG" (the title presumably nodding to legendary New York mutant disco outfit ESG, once hailed as PiL meets The Supremes), is close behind, its brittle fatback drum circling a doomstruck bassline that could be off Junkyard or Unknown Pleasures. And just as the Andy Gill homage starts to get a little stale, final track "This Dust Makes That Mud" showcases a whole other dimension to the band, its hypnotic, drug-hazy drone redolent of Queens of the Stone Age at their most motorik and Can-like. Eight minutes into its life, the song devolves into a locked groove riff that takes up the entire remainder of the CD (quite a lot because Trench is a short and punchy LP) and whose stuporous effect is so potent this reviewer woke up glazed and groggy with his forehead all qwerty-ed with the imprint of the computer keyboard.

Tranced-out narcosis is not what LIARS are really about, though: they’re a jolt of hyper-alert tension, a real anxiety-rush. Angus Andrew’s vocals, Anglo-accented (he’s actually Australian) and frequently distorted as if declaimed through a loudhailer, are hectoring yet opaque, M.E. Smith-stylee. Which brings up the big difference between ‘79 and ‘02: the original post-punk groups, operating in a highly politicized context, coming fresh from punk and burdened with its imperatives to change and confrontation, were much more upfront and direct about their critique. There’s a sense in which today’s wave of post-punk influenced groups are totally wired and fired by the idea of agit-prop and dissidence, but it’s not nearly so clear what inspires their ire, or whether they’ll ever find a context that lends their struggle any resonance. For now, though, LIARS transmit a powerful aura of commitment and militancy: mission implacable, if impenetrable. And They Threw Us All In A Trench is one of the most adrenalizing albums you’ll hear this year.

LIARS
Liars
Mute
Blender

by Simon Reynolds

Easily the most impressive of the recent swarm of postpunk-inspired groups, Liars have always strived to make music in that era’s adventurous spirit, rather simply replicating the sound of vintage futurism from 25 years ago. Unfortunately that made their last two albums easier to admire than enjoy. Now the Brooklyn-exiled-to-Berlin band have dropped their (avant) guard a bit and conquered their retrophobia with an album that risks reminding you of things from rock history you already like. So the big bashy drums and war-whoops of “Plaster Casts of Everything” recall Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song,” while the Gothtronica of “Houseclouds” resemble Love and Rockets remodeled for Generation Ecstasy. “Pure Unevil” even doubles the retro effect, harking back to Jesus and Mary Chain’s circa 1985’s Psychocandy ploy of submerging perfect Sixties melody in a murky crypt of dank reverb. Liars’s trademark experimental touches--the crunchily processed beats and glass-splinter textures--are still present, but they’re now put in service of songs and grooves. The result is their most straight-up entertaining record, riddled with moody hooks that lodge in your memory like brain-worms.

2010-12-31T15:28:00.000-08:00

CREEL PONE
The Wire, 2010

by Simon Reynolds

At some point in the middle of the last decade, a series of mysterious CDs began popping up on the "New Releases" lists of certain left-field music distributors. Sometimes they'd materialize directly on the shelves of a handful of esoterica-oriented record shops (surprising the owners, who couldn't recall having ordered them). These discs were packaged neither in plastic hard shells nor thick cardboard cases, but with thin card sleeves covered by a protective sheath of shrink wrap: they looked like five inch vinyl records, basically, rather than CDs. This effect was further intensified by the Deutsche Grammophon-style gold seals that each release sported. The legend proclaimed the series's name, its mission, and its means of production: CREEL PONE -- Unheralded Classics of Electronic Music - 1952-1984 -- 100 - Hand Assembled.

Eye-catching and intrigue-piquing, the covers were immaculate replicas of the sleeves of musique concrete and electronic records from that post-WW2 surge into the sonic unknown. They reproduced in miniature not just the original artwork but also--to take just one example, Andre Almuro's Musiques Experimentales--the six differently sized circles cut out of the front cover as spy-holes to a garishly psychotropic inner sleeve. Any liner note booklets or textual matter accompanying the original LP was likewise meticulously reproduced, and each CD-R was printed with the label of its source recording in vivid color. Great pains had clearly been taken to provide the purchaser with as close as possible to the sensation of having 'n' holding an original vinyl copy. But the retail price these avant-bootlegs went for--around ten dollars-- suggested a labour of love rather than an exploitative exercise in niche marketing. These were gifts for fans, made by fans.

Creel Pone's catchment stretched from the output of lesser-known state-funded or university-sponsored sound laboratories (60s and 70s compilations like From Czech Electronic Music Studios, the Flemish Elektronische Produktie Van IP.E.M, Musica Electroacustica Mexicana, New Zealand Electronic Music, Anthology of Dutch Electronic Tape Music, and, most mindblowing of all in a fiercely competitive field, Hungarian Electronic Music) to works by individual composers (Denis Smalley, Herbert Eimert, Phillippe Arthuys, Luis De Pablo, Ruth White, etc). The catalogue also encompassed "outsider electronics" self-released by synth-wielding mavericks unattached to any institution (Edward M. Zajda, Nik Pascal, Pythagoron Inc), along with one-off forays into sound by visual artists (kinetic sculptor Nicolas Schöffer, abstract expressionist painter Karel Appel), musique concrete made by animators like Norman McClaren (Music of the N.F.B.) and library music releases and movie scores by the likes of Tod Dockstader, Zanagoria, and Gil Melle (the splendidly hair-raising Andromeda Strain O/S/T.).

As the buzz about the quality, fetish appeal and sheer obscurity of Creel Pone output grew among electronic music fiends, so too did curiosity about the cryptic perpetrators of these exquisitely executed but wholly unofficial and unsanctioned reissues. Distributor advertorial for Creel releases alluded to a Mr. P.C.C.P. , a/k/a Pieter Christophssen. But suspicion mounted that this gentleman collector, who allegedly operated out of Iceland, was in fact a fiction: a Karen Eliot-style alias smokescreening the activity of a loose collective of crate-diggers and technicians. At the hub of this curatorial cabal, it transpired, lurked the experimental musician Keith Fullerton Whitman, who also runs the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based weird-music distributor Mimaroglu Music Sales.

The Creel Pone project came to a halt in the late summer of 2009 with the 99th instalment, Reinhold Weber's Elektronische und phonetische Kompositione (the "100" in the gold seal referred both to the plan to put out one hundred immaculate releases and to the approximate number of copies of each reissue made). Creel Pone may reactivate at some point, but, according to Whitman, it has most likely reached its "natural end".

Surveying the Creel catalogue as a curated body of work, two things emerge. One is that, as much as it was an idealistic international movement dedicated to opening up a new frontier of sound for humankind, the post-War electronic surge was also a craze that convulsed composers across the globe. Every developed nation (and quite a few developing ones) simply had to have its own electronic music research centre. Even the Catholic University of America had a resident concrete composer, Professor Emerson Meyers, whose 1970 LP Provocative Electronics was resurrected as Creel Pone #77.

Whitman compares the runaway evolution of the music and the faddish excitement of its makers to the techno and jungle scenes he was immersed in during the Nineties: empowered by new technology, a swarm of second-division producers pick up on the breakthroughs of a few innovator- producers, ripping them off but in the process intensifying and mutating the innovations. "You'll hear a technique that's invented in 1954 in Japan going out to Berlin, then to Spain... trademark sounds that become part of this general lexicon of transformation, individual composer's tricks that enter this grand pool of ideas." Early electronic music, then, was about scenius as much as genius; Creel Pone revels in the generic-ness as much as the singularity of the sounds generated.

The other aspect relates to the "1952-1984" time-span Creel Pone marks off as its Golden Age. (Some of the Creel Pone seals varied the dates slightly: 1947-1983 was one variant, as above). Whitman argues that this was the most concentrated period of innovation in human history--not just in music but across the entire spectrum of culture and society. In terms of electronic music specifically, though, the cut-off point of 1984indicates the eclipse of analogue by digital. "From the early Eighties onwards you had digital synthesiers and samplers like the Synclavier, you had computers," says Whitman. Citing the deterioration of outfits like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, he argues that "the early music made using digital audio technology has dated very badly." He believes that the approach encouraged by sequencers and computers is "'I'll fuck around and see what happens'" whereas tape-based music required so much planning and time investment it led to superior results. ”For someone like Herbert Eimert, a two minute piece took a month of 18 hour days to achieve. It involved sitting down with a piece of paper and scoring out your sounds, making a chart of all the different combinations. And then actually doing it. You get music that's really thought-through." The Herculean effort, the heroic spirit of risk-taking, imbues the music with an intangible but undeniable aura. "Also analogue sounds are just better."

2010-12-31T15:04:00.000-08:00

C86: 20 years on
Time Out, Monday October 23 2006

by Simon Reynolds

Ours is a culture gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration. Anniversaries and Greatest Ever lists, remakes and reissues, albums played onstage in their original sequence and festivals like this year’s Folk Britannia… all our yesterdays swarm forth to crowd out the present. What’s freaky, though, is when it’s stuff that you’ve lived through that gets revived or revisited, as with this month’s
20th anniversary of C86 shows at the ICA.

As a rock writer starting out in 1986, this stuff was my journalistic beat. In Melody Maker I wrote a sort of manifesto (albeit uninvited, and not welcomed) for the new wave of indie-pop, titled “Younger Than Yesterday”, which I followed a few months later with a subcultural studies-style analysis of the scene’s fashion codes. C86 has become the tag for this brief moment in British pop history, on account of the cassette compiled by New Musical Express. But back then the talk was of “shambling bands,” a John Peel coinage that celebrated the self-conscious amateurism of the music, or of “cutie,” a nod to the child-like imagery favored by the groups, from their band-names (the Pastels, Talulah Gosh, 14 Iced Bears) and record artwork to the clothing (pigtails and plimsoles for girls, buttoned-up birthday-boy shirts and little caps for the lads).

The style element was the most fascinating thing for me: “anoraksia nervosa,” I dubbed it, because most cuties seemed to be skinny and small, and the scene’s signature garment was an anorak of the sort a child might have worn in 1961. Cutie fashion was so stridently virginal, it had to be some kind of statement. Noting how love songs on the scene were romantic rather than carnal, and that the white-only sources for shambling music (Velvets, Byrds, Buzzocks, the scratchy-racket postpunkers like Swell Maps) suggested an aversion to the earthy sexuality of funk and soul, I concluded that these kids were staging a revolt against Eighties values. Rejecting hypersexual chartpop and aspirational adulthood alike, the cutie shamblers harked back to both their own lost innocence and to pop’s childhood (the Sixties), creating a new bohemia based around purity rather than debauchery.

Fine and dandy, except that the music, by and large, was a wee bit flimsy. The scene leaders seemed to average one great song each--the Shop Assistants’ “Somewhere in China”, The Bodines’ “Therese,” Primal Scream’s “Velocity Girl” (the last two you’ll find on the ICA event affiliated Cd86: 48 Tracks from the Birth of Indie Pop compilation). Mostly what you got was a spindly, scrawny rehash of ideas done first and best by the Postcard label: past-its-sell-by-date Orange Juice, Josef K sans literary panache, early Aztec Camera without the excuse Roddy Frame had of actually being 16 (some of these would-be-kids turned out to be in their late twenties!). The C86 tape paled next to its predecessor, C81, a cassette compiled by Rough Trade and NME that documented the far more diverse and adventurous postpunk culture of the early Eighties. I recall going to the original ICA event organized around C86’s release, and feeling dismayed by how inbred and insular-sounding British independent music had become.

Yet C86 did go on to have more of legacy than doubters like myself imagined. Galvanised by Ecstasy culture and genius producer Andy Weatherall, Primal Scream shook off the malaise of Sixties retro and made Screamadelica. Shambling-era zine writer Bob Stanley formed Saint Etienne, who merged the holding-hands chasteness of C86 with house, dub and Northern Soul to create some of the most enduringly enchanting music of our time. The American branch of cutie clustered around K Records and Beat Happening would influence Kurt Cobain (a big fan of the Pastels and the Vaselines) and spawn the Riot Grrl movement. You can track C86genes in bands as diverse as Stereolab, Teenage Fan Club, My Bloody Valentine, and Belle & Sebastian... So it was a significant period, but more in terms of what spun out of it than the actual recorded legacy. Even the scene itself was more about creating a lovely sense of community in defiance of prevailing Eighties values, than of earth-shattering music.

C86 was in some ways the actualisation of a Jesus and Mary Chain song title, "My Little Underground". A tightly-knit intimacy verging on incestousness was almost the point of the scene, which was based around a small circuit of cramped pub venues and hang-outs like the Chalk Farm ice cream bar. The most crucial thing about C86 was that it involved a resurgence of the do-it-yourself ideal--young people shoving aside inhibiting notions of professionalism and gleefully making their own culture, with seemingly every fanzine editor in a band or starting their own label. If this amateur ethos often crossed into a wilful amateurism, if the lo-fi spirit sometimes turned into Luddite intransigence (one zine proposed that music should only be heard on flexi-discs and Dansettes!), the upside was a spirit of egalitarianism and autonomy. Women especially came into their own. The cutie image reconciled girlish glamour with tomboy androgyny, and Talulah Gosh would be regarded as honored ancestors by the more overtly feminist grrrl-bands of the '90s like Bratmobile and Huggy Bear. So if we must have a culture of rampant retro-mania, maybe this is a UK pop moment worthy of commemoration.

The ICA present two nights of C86-themed gigs this week: Friday’s bill features The Magic Numbers, GoKart Mozart, Vic Godard & The Subway Sect, plus a DJ set from Saint Etienne; Saturday’s bill has Roddy Frame from Aztec Camera, Phil Wilson from The June Brides, The Wolfhounds and a DJ set from The Pastels. The compilation album ‘CD86: 48 Tracks From The Birth Of Indie Pop’ is out this Monday on Castle Records.

2010-11-14T22:11:00.000-08:00

GUIDED BY VOICES
UNDER THE BUSHES, UNDER THE STARS
(Matador)
Request, 1996

by Simon Reynolds

Guided By Voices offends me. In this age of cultural overload and aesthetic surfeit, GBV is monstrously, disgustingly prolific. The band averages about 24 songs per album; last year, GBV put out a four-CD 'Box' of early, frankly dubious material; singer/songsmith Robert Pollard has a backlog of some 2000 tunes, but is still planning to write a 'Tommy' style rock opera. Who among us has a life empty enough to accomodate such a glut of undistinguished creativity?

GBV is basically America's very own Oasis. Both bands are led by incorrigibly incontinent songwriters who are morbidly obsessed with English rock of the mid-to-late Sixties, and who have nothing to say but insist on saying it. If--in the age of mostly instrumental, studio-warped genres like trip hop, jungle, post-rock, ambient etc--you're gonna stick with a craft as quaint as songsmithery, you should at least make sure you have something compelling or uniquely idiosyncratic to say. Oasis don't, but are at least shameless about it: Noel Gallagher's lyrics are a jumble of doggerel and epic-sounding phrases that allow fans to read whatever they like into them. But with Pollard, you can't be absolutely sure he has nothing to say, because every expression is convoluted and coded; he gets in the way. Titles like "The Official Ironmen Rally Song", "Bright Paper Werewolves" and "Rhine Jive Click" are the most daftly, wilfully oblique titles since Amon Duul II (who at least had LSD as an excuse).

Another similarity with Oasis is GBV's relentlessly upbeat mood: a neo-mod, bright-eyed poptimism that proclaims "it's 1966, the future is wide-open!". In England, such empty triumphalism elevated Oasis into a huge pop phenomenon, by tapping into young kids' desire to fly in the face of grim present reality. In America, GBV's Anglophile/necrophile quasi-anthems make the band a hit only with rockcrits and others steeped in the canon of classic rock (and thus able to appreciate the reverence and the references). Everything on "Under The Bushes" is tuneful in that deja vu, Tom Petty/Sebadoh way, while the riffs trigger your kneejerk-reflexes, conditioned by years of exposure to classic rock. And so the stop-start dynamics of "The Perfect Life" thrill mildly, in a oh-alright-one-more-time-then sort of way; "Underwater Explosions" is the Monkees on downers; "Atom Eyes" is as melodious as an American Squeeze. Can I be the only listener for whom half-liking a GBV song is unavoidably accompanied by shame?

GBV is just one more fat fly crawling over the dungheap of rock history, sucking it up and pooping it out. "Under The Bushes" is just one more dropping in a copious trail of disgrace.

2010-11-14T20:53:00.000-08:00

ARIEL PINK'S HAUNTED GRAFFITI
House Arrest
Paw Tracks
Observer Music Monthly,, Sunday 22 January 2006

by Simon Reynolds

Ariel Pink is the perfect antidote to the i-Pod. Instead of Radio Me, an onan-i-verse of sound playlisted for an audience of one, Pink’s music recreates the primal scene of the child falling in love with pop for the first time: ear cupped to an imperfectly-tuned transistor, plugged into an otherworldly beyond and wide open to the ravishment of surprise. The illusion is created partly by Pink’s artfully lo-fi production, out of focus and streaked by sudden leaks of colour-saturated noise, and partly by his stylistic disjointedness, the way an incongruous melody will jut into a song like interference from another station’s signal.

This Los Angeles recluse is driven by contradictory impulses that mesh to make sublime noise-pop. The formalist’s love of songcraft and period stylisation (one minute he’s channeling Hall & Oates, the next Blue Oyster Cult) collides with a psychedelic urge to shatter form with kaleidoscopic chaos. As if to signpost the latter, “Trepanated Earth” on last year’s Worn Copy featured a motif from “Eight Miles High” and on House Arrest there’s an actual Byrds sample, a miniscule fragment of “Turn Turn Turn”. Driven by a frazzled riff that recalls the Nazz’s psych classic “Open Your Eyes,” “Getting’ High In the Morning” is a mind-furnace that makes imagery of melted spines, brains dipped in fire, and skin turning to smoke dance before your eyes.

Running through everything on House Arrest-- just one of a horde of albums Pink home-recorded in the early Noughties that are only now getting a proper release--is the man’s religious love for pop. “Hardcore Pops Are Fun” is somewhere between a hymn and a manifesto, its off-the-cuff inanity--“pop music is free/for you and me/pop music’s your wife/have it for life/pop music is wine, it tastes so divine”--masking true devotion.

2010-11-08T18:42:00.000-08:00

CAN
LANDED/FLOW MOTION/UNLIMITED EDITION/SAW DELIGHT/CAN
Spoon/Mute
Melody Maker, 1990?

by Simon Reynolds

It's generally deemed that Can's post-United Artist work was less distinguished than pinnacles like Tago Mago, Soon Over Babaluma, and Future Days. Certainly, something
of their telepathic internal combustion was depleted after their switch from two-track to 16-tracks recording. But those later albums, now CD-reissued by Mute, are far from barren of enchantment.

Indeed, Landed (1975) is a bona fide masterpiece and no mistake. From the bluesy, galactic garage rock of "Full Moon On The Highway" (with its weird chorus, like the vocal has been dilated and distended by an expert glassblower)through the musky Middle Eastern tapestry "Half Past One", to the cosmic skank of "Hunters And Collectors", the quartet are in feverishly fecund form. On "Vernal Equinox" and the 16 minute epic "Unfinished" Can return to the unmapped territory of "Quantum Physics" and "Peking O", an omniverse where the normal laws of sound no longer apply. "Unfinished" is a flux of unravelling forms that coalesce into fleeting focus before deliquescing again; a sort of animated mosaic, or abstract expressionist cartoon.

Flow Motion (1976) is more mainstream, the work of a Can who were less self-sufficient, operating with one ear cocked to the new sounds of the day (reggae, disco, even boogie). "I Want More" was their one pop hit - if not a case of Can selling their soul, at least of them mortgaging it. But it's such a joyous disco novelty, it's hard to begrudge them. The main vein of the album is rhapsodic, oceanic fun not far from what was doing John Martyn at the time ("Solid Air", "One World") ; "...And More" and "Smoke" are tribal funk mantras that anticipate 23 Skidoo and Byrne & Eno.

Later that year, Can also released Unlimited Edition, a treasury of tracks from Can's gilded era (1968-75) that never made it onto the albums. It's all superlative stuff, with special honours going to "Cutaway": 19 minutes of Can at their most combustively spontaneous, going through myriad phases, before eventually devolving into a primordial soup of DNA strands, helixes and lattices.

Saw Delight (1977) was where the rot began to set in. Too often, Can cross the thin line between wandering and meandering, nomadism and onanism. New member Rosko Gee's
vocal's on "Call Me" is awfully prog-rock. The 15 minute "Animal Waves" is formula Can (a pan-global, sensurround groove, synths that wax and wane, simmering percussion, an exotic, sampled Arabic vocal) that never ignites into magic. "Don't Say No" bubbles and froths jauntily enough, but its lyric of mystical affirmation must have jarred badly with the negationist mood of punk.

"Can" (1978) was their last studio album (until 1989's "Rite Time") and their first without bassist Holger Czukay (the group's heartbeat). It's not a bad swansong. "All Gates Open" mismatches hokey harmonica with cosmic jaccuzzi synth-whorls, over a crisp-and-spry James Brown pulse. "Sodom" is yet another epic of iridiscent amorphousness, but must have sounded mighty flatulent next to the anorexic, angular demystification rock of the day (Gang Of Four etc). Bizarrely enough, "Aspectacle" - with its boogie guitar, in-the-pocket funk groove, swoogly noises and Michael Karoli's stoned, nonsense vocals - sounds uncannily like Happy Mondays. Even on their last legs, Can were ahead of their time as ever.

CAN
Anthology
Rite Time
(Spoon/Mute)
The Wire, 1994?

by Simon Reynolds

With Can (see also: Davis, Miles), there's a paradoxical sense that there's nothing left to say, and yet everything left to say. It seems like we've only scratched the surface of this music, and yet it's so hard to get critical purchase on Can's slippery magic.

The idea of a CAN-thology seems faintly sacriligous, so before anything else, let me iterate the bleedin' obvious: you NEED the original albums, yes, ALL of them. That proviso aside, and despite the inevitable dissension over highpoints absent and lowlights mystifyingly included, this double CD is a useful crash-course for the uninitiated and impoverished.

Early Can--examples here include 'Father Cannot Yell' and the awesome 'Mother Sky'--is cosmic garage punk, an acid-singed mantra-minimalism heavily indebted to the Velvet Underground. At this point, Can also went in for noise-swarms like "Soup"
and voodoo catacombs like "Augmn" that recall the Floyd at their most AMM-aleatory or even the Godz' atavistic sound-daubs.

By 'Tago Mago' and 'Ege Bamyasi', the Liebezeit/Czukay rhythm section has completed intensive studies in James Brownian motion, and the Can vibe shifts from motorik throb to fitful phatback shuffle. Hence the simmering pressure-cooker tension of "Mushroom", the succulent pulse-matrix of "One More Night". Magnificent, but these albums merely prepare the hallowed ground for the prehensile, octopoid,
Shiva-limbed ethno-funkadelia of 'Future Days' (1973), 'Soon Over Babaluma' (1974) and 'Landed' (1975): the Gaia trilogy. On tracks like 'Dizzy Dizzy', 'Moonshake' and 'Future Days', Can are making music so tender, tactful, tactile and telepathic it seems to become your bloodstream.

At this exalted point, Can were making the ultimate body'n'soul music, the incarnation of their Zen-tinged creed of mystic-materialism: flow motion, pantheistic awe, melt-your-psychic-defences and take-the-world-in-a-love-embrace,
every day is Mother Earth's Day etc. After "Landed", Can's cosmic libido starts to wane and droop with the later Virgin albums; what was implicit becomes literalised in the New Age affirmation of "Don't Say No". Can disintegrated; a decade-
long diaspora ensued, of interesting but not exactly satisfying solo projects (which are next in line in Mute's reissue/anthology program).

Finally, 1989's "Rite Time": no, there aren't too many examples of reformations that resurrect the original magic, but--unlike Television, Buzzcocks et al--Can's comeback is excellent, if hardly earthshattering. Reunited with original
vocalist Malcolm Mooney (whose parched drivel sounds like a blend of Alex from A.R. Kane, Shaun Ryder and a punch-drunk Ray Charles), Can are still peddling their Zen-funk credo: the 'Rite Time' is Here and Now, if only we could all see 'Like A New Child', et al. The latter is the best track, and possibly their finest since 'Babaluma''s "Chain Reaction/Quantum Physics": a vast, sprawling, panoramic
groovescape, pivoting around Irmin Schmidt's Zawinul-esque synth-helixes and Liebezeit's roaming drums, and punctuated by elephantine blasts of guitarfuzz. Other gems: the moon-skank of "The Withoutlaw Man", the shuffle-funk of "Movin'
Right Along", where Mooney's dubbed up vocal darts amidst Karoli's wah-wah scumbles and plangent Afro-bluesy licks.

'Rite Time' was recorded in Nice, which may explain its sun-baked, easy-rolling nonchalance. Can are just about the only band I know that can make jauntiness and lighthearted whimsy not just tolerable, but aesthetically compelling and even
existensially admirable. But then the miraculous is this band's metier.

CAN discography
Spin Guide to Alternative Rock
1995

by Simon Reynolds

CAN
Monster Movie (1969; Spoon/Mute 1990) [7]
Can Delay 68 (rec.1968/9, released 1981; Spoon/Mute 1990) [6]
Soundtracks (1970; Spoon/Mute 1990) [8]
Tago Mago (1971; Spoon/Mute 1990) [9]
Ege Bamyasi (1972; Spoon/Mute 1990) [8]
Future Days (1973; Spoon/Mute 1990) [9]
Soon Over Babaluma (1974; Spoon/Mute 1990) [10]
Landed (1975; Spoon/Mute 1990) [8]
Unlimited Edition (1976; Spoon/Mute 1990) [8]
Flow Motion (1976; Spoon/Mute 1990) [6]
Saw Delight (1977; Spoon/Mute 1990) [2]
Out of Reach (Peters Int'l) [1]
Can (1979; Spoon/Mute 1990) [6]
Rite Time (1989; Spoon/Mute 1994) [7]
Cannibalism 1 (compilation; Spoon/Mute 1990) [7]
Cannibalism 2 (Spoon/Mute 1992) [7]
Anthology -- 25 Years (Spoon/Mute 1994) [8]
Cannibalism 3 (Spoon/Mute 1994) [7]

As creators of a unique sound-world of wanderlust and wonderment, Can are up there with Hendrix and Miles Davis. Each phase of Can's meandering career has opened up vast vistas of fertile terrain for subsequent bands to colonise and cultivate: avant-funk (Talking Heads, PiL, Cabaret Voltaire), trance-rock (Loop, f/i, Cul de Sac), lo-fi (Pavement, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282) and post-rock (Bark Psychosis, Laika). As well inspiring solitary eccentrics from Brian Eno to Mark E. Smith to '90s ambient guru Mixmaster Morris, Can also uncannily anticipated many moves made by entire genres of contemporary 'sampladelic' music, such as ethno-techno, jungle and ambient hip hop. Basically, when it comes to psychedelic dance music, those crafty Krauts wrote the goddamn book.

Can's core members--bassist Holger Czukay, keyboardist Irmin Schmidt, drummer Jaki Liebezeit and guitarist Michael Karoli--came from avant-garde and improv-jazz backgrounds; Czukay and Schmidt had both studied with Stockhausen. But instead of exploring aleatory noise or jerky time signatures, Can discovered--through The Velvet Underground, and later via James Brown--the Zen-power of repetition and restriction. Minimalism and mantra-ism were hallmarks of the Krautrock aesthetic, but what set Can apart from their peers was their fervent embrace of groove. Like Miles' early '70s albums ("On The Corner", "Dark Magus" etc), Can's best work fuses 'black' funk with 'white' neo-psych freakitude. Recording in their own studio in a Cologne castle, the band adopted a jam- and-chop methodology similar to that used by Miles and his producer Teo Macero: improvise for hours, then edit the best bits into coherent tracks. As the band's Macero figure, Czukay worked miracles with a handful of mikes and two-track recording. Can's proto-ambient spatiality actually diminished when they went to 16 track in the mid-70s!

Early Can is a sort of kosmik garage-punk that combines the metronomic drive of the Velvets with the abstraction of Barrett-era Pink Floyd: over the throbbing Liebezeit & Czukay rhythm-engine, singer Malcolm Mooney (and later his successor Damo Suzuki) yowl acid-visionary drivel or onomatopeiac nonsense. Highlights of this 1968-69 period include "Father Cannot Yell", "Yoo Doo Right" and the awesome 15 minute rumble of "Mother Sky".

Named after a sorcerer, *Tago Mago* contains Can's most disorientating, shamanic work. Torn between two impulses- James Brownian motion and post-Floyd chromatic flux--the double album ranges from the polyrhythmic roil of "Mushroom" and "Oh Yeah", to "Augmn"'s dub-reverberant catacombs, to the fractal sound-daubings and scat-gibberish of "Peking O". A meisterwerk.

After the tense angst-funk of *Ege Bamyasi*, with its sharply etched guitar and crisp beats, Can's music literally seems to blossom with *Future Days* and *Soon Over Babaluma* (two glorious summers in a row, after the rotten weather that shadowed *Bamyasi*, is the band's own explanation). Can's octopus-limbed ethnofunkadelia is as succulently sensuous and touchy-feely prehensile as a rain forest or coral reef. At once light-hearted and urgent-like-your-life's-breath, the music embodies the band's Zen creed of mystic-materialism: pantheistic awe, take the world in a love embrace, every day is Mother Earth's Day, etc. So *Future Days*'s title track is a shimmering aural vision of Paradise Regained, while the side-long "Bel Air" is as beatific as a sea otter basking off the coast of British Columbia.

On *Babaluma*, the balmy, aromatic "Come Sta La Luna" sways to an undulant, off-kilter tango rhythm, but it's Side Two's sequence of "Chain Reaction"/"Quantum Physics" that is Can's absolute zenith. "Chain" is all flow-motion effervescence and iridescence, sonic hydraulics as ear-baffling as Escher's aquaducts and weirs are eye-confounding; "Quantum Physics" is a chaos theorem, funk translated into abstruse, polydimensional equations. Czukay's percussive/melodic bass and Liebezeit's Morse Code drum resemble the mandible-clicking telecommunication of the insect world.

Can's late '70s albums replay the *Future/Babaluma* phase's mystic and musical motifs, but with steadily diminishing returns and a rising whimsy-quotient. *Landed* is their last great album. Its highlight is the protozoan amorphousness of "Unfinished", 13 minutes of aural paella (looks a mess, tastes great). Other fine collage-tracks and 'musaics', like the 19 minute "Cutaway", appear on *Unlimited Edition*--a grab-bag of unreleased goodies recorded between 1968 and '75, ranging from exquisite addenda to *Babaluma* like "Ibis", to items from the Ethnological Forgery Series (affectionate pastiches of genres like trad jazz).

Back in the studio, Can's muse was ailing. The stylistic puree got lumpy with *Flow Motion*, as reggae and blues entered the mixing bowl. *Saw Delight* is a prog-rock frightmare, probably thanks (no thanks) to newbies Rosko Gee and Reebop Kwaku Baah (ex-Traffic), who gradually displaced the disenchanted Czukay. *Out of Reach* was so uninspired that it's never been reissued. The band rallied slightly for the sprightly swan-song *Can*, parts of which bizarrely pre-empt Happy Mondays' guttersnipe disco. Ten years later, the band re-united for the surprisingly excellent, if scarcely earthshattering (the world had caught up with them by then) *Rite Time*; the highpoint, "Like A New Child", is possibly Can's most gorgeous groovescape since *Babaluma*.

During the decade-long diaspora between break-up and brief reunion, the Can clan flowed everywhichway; *Cannibalism 3*, a sampler of their solo work and collaborations, will help you navigate the delta of stimulating, if seldom wholly satisfying, music. Czukay's six solo albums and sundry link-ups (with David Sylvian, Jah Wobble et al) are probably the most compelling; *Movies*, with its pioneering shortwave-sample of Iranian pop on "Persian Love", is something of a classic. Schmidt's soundtrack work (reissued on the triple-CD *Anthology*) is always interesting, if lacking Can's rhythmic intensity. As for introductions to Can itself, *Anthology--25 Years* is the most up-to-date selection. It's a comprehensive crash- course for the cash-restricted, that inevitably skips Can's longer--and wilder--excursions.

CAN
Future Days
Soon Over Babaluma
Landed
Unlimited Edition(Mute)
Blender, 2005

by Simon Reynolds

Among Can-fans, consensus decrees that the seething voodoo-funk of 1971's
Tago Mago represents the German group's zenith. But although the albums that
followed seem light-hearted compared with their earlier
Velvet-Underground-meets-James-Brown hypnogrooves, the playing still roils
with a supple inventiveness verging on supernatural. Their
improvised-in-the-studio, mostly instrumental music was never more cinematic
than on Future Days' 20 minute-long idyll "Bel Air." And it was never more
telepathically uncanny than on Babaluma's "Chain Reaction"/"Quantum
Physics," a song-suite that takes the listener out to the remotest recesses
of the cosmos. Whimsy sets in on Landed, although the musky, violin-laced
exoticism of "Half Past One" is haunting and "Unfinished" intimidates with
its abstract noise. Unlimited Edition, a collection of 1968-75 out-takes,
is a trove of delightful oddities, like "Mother Upduff," which wraps
psycho-jazz squall around a macabre storyline about death during a vacation.
These remasters add no new tracks but vastly improve on the earlier hissy,
drab CD transfers, bringing out the ultra-vivid textures and exquisite
details of Can's playing as never before.

2010-11-05T08:09:00.000-07:00

WASTED YOUTH
The Observer, November 1992

by Simon Reynolds

In 1992, Heavy Rules. All year, the US alternative scene has been dominated by bands who take their cues from the early Seventies, when groups like groups like Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Mountain, etc bastardised and brutalised the blues. And this
nouveau heavy rock carries heavy themes. Soundgarden rage against the impasses of life in "Rusty Cage" and wail about low self-esteem in "Outshined". Pearl Jam mingle melancholy with political awareness: their hit singles "Alive" and "Jeremy" tackle issues like child abuse and child neglect. Members of Soundgarden and Pearl Jam collaborated for the one-off project Temple Of The Dog, and broke into the US Top Ten with an album-length elegy to a friend and band mate who died of a drug OD

The most manic-depressive of the lot are Alice In Chains, also in the US Top Ten with their "Dirt" album. The band's name perfectly evokes their sound, whose ponderous riffs and toiling rhythms create an impression of struggle against insuperable obstacles. Listening, you feel like you're sinking into the slough of despond. Typical Alice In Chains songs deal with death ("Them Bones"), heroin ("Godsmack") and despair ("Down In A Hole")

If Black Sabbath are the overwhelming influence on US alternative rock today, it's because the early Nineties feel uncannily like the early Seventies, when Sabbath's doom-laden songs were the soundtrack to getting numbed-out on depressant drug (barbiturates, Quaaludes). So what ails the youth of America? The answer can be found in "Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia's Dead End Kids", by journalist/sociologist Donna Gaines, which has been hailed by Rolling Stone as "the best book on contemporary youth culture"

Gaines' interest was pricked by the teen suicide craze of the late Eighties, and in particular the 1987 case where four teenagers in Bergenfield, New Jersey gassed themselves in a car. Mingling with a segment of US youth universally known as "burn-outs", she won the kids' trust and uncovered the harrowing truth about their lives.

Burn-outs "bomb out" at school, fail to make their grades because they feel they have no future. With the decline of traditional manufacturing employment, the only options for these kids are ignominious service sector jobs, devoid of union protection or prospects of advancement. Persecuted by teachers and cops and despised by their more aspirational peers, burn-outs express their alienation in their scruffy clothes and long-hair. As on real-life teenager in the book says, "no job is worth cutting your hair for". With no incentive to plan for the future, burn-outs get wasted on drink and dope; some graduate to harder drugs like heroin. They listen to the classic metal of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath or its modern successors, the thrash-metal of Metallica and Slayer. Gaines wrote her book in 1990, so she missed the punchline: the mainstreaming of the burn-out aesthetic with the explosive success of Nirvana and the rest of the Seattle grunge bands.

For these kids, the gap between the expectations fostered by the dream factory of Hollywood and MTV, and what they can reasonably expect from life, is huge. The escape routes from this dead end include the the anaesthetic/amnesiac coma of drugs, and the one-way ticket "outa here" of suicide. For some, Metallica's ballad "Fade To Black" is a nihilistic anthem. The more optimistic imagine joining the army, or forming a successful rock band: both ways of seeing the world and learning a trade. And so you get the paradox of a band like Alice In Chains, who dragged themselves out of the mire of their native Seattle, and turned their loser worldview into massive success. Even after Bill Clinton's victory, things look bleak for American youth. Paying off the deficit will depress the US economy for years. So you can expect to hear US bands singing the "born to lose" blues for a long time to come.

2010-11-05T08:01:00.000-07:00

MEGADETH, live
Melody Maker, 1988

by Simon Reynolds

At a Megadeth concert, the fact is inescapable. Their audience is a congregation come to worship, and their God is Death. It's as simple as that. Why then does the
unrelenting bombast of "this life-denying nonsense" fascinate? Because it appeals to something deep-rooted and unbudgeable in masculinity, and if some girls can trip out on it, while many boys are repelled by what it stirs in them, then that's because we're all ambi-sexual, all torn inside by Eros and Thanatos.

Megadeth, like those other kings of their scenes (Bad Brains, Public Enemy, Big Black, The Ex) - exceed their own puerility by the extremity with which they're fixated. These fixations produce extreme art, attain a visionary edge. Megadeth's mediaeval, Good/Evil worldview appropriately generates a noise of absolutes - the futurist absolutes of rigour, acceleration and momentum.

Just as you can gasp at the Pyramids (if you choose to forget the immense suffering it required to erect them) or gawp at footage of a mushroom cloud (if you shut from your mind the truth of the specific South Pacific terrain and ecosystem vaporised instantly) so you can abstract elements of the spectacular, of pure form, from Megadeth. But only in clear conscience if you understand (and reject) the psycho-
sexual underpinnings.

At their peaks, Megadeth are all fire and brimstone, a sirocco of scalding ash. The incredibly simple (and similar) riffs sometimes mesh into a frenzied pitch and there's a white frazzle that is brighter than a thousand suns, while the bass chunnels several leagues beneath the crust. "In My Darkest Hour" and "Devil's Island" have colossal riffs that arch and flail like the spine of a whale in a boiling sea. The uncanny combination of ponderousness, agility and speed can decimate. But a lot of material fails to attain sufficient severity of punishment.

Like Reagan and some 61 million fellow Americans (according to Gore Vidal) Megadeth believe nuclear war is inevitable, is God's chosen means of implementing the
Armageddon. Megadeth are maybe more singular in the anticipatory glee ("you'll be the first to die") with which they approach this point finale of History. At least one hopes so.

2010-11-05T07:53:00.000-07:00

BLACK SABBATH
The Complete 70's Replica CD Collection 1970-78
(Sanctuary Records)
Uncut, 2001

by Simon Reynolds

The mystery of the riff--so crucial to rock, so oddly neglected by critics. Or perhaps not so strangely, given that riffs are almost impossible to write about: just try explaining why one monster-riff slays you where another one fails to incite. Riffs just seem to bypass the aesthetic faculties altogether and go straight to the gut. A killer riff is by definition simplistic--which is why self-consciously sophisticated rock tends to dispense with them altogether in favor of wispy subtleties. Riff-based music seems lowly, literally "mindless" because it connects with the lower "reptilian" part of the cerebral cortex which governs flight-or-flight responses, the primitive emotions of appetite, aversion, and aggression.

Talking of reptiles, Black Sabbath--perhaps the greatest riff factory in all of rock---irresistibly invite metaphors involving dinosaurs. For a group that wielded such brontosauran bulk, though, Sabbath were surprisingly nimble on their feet. Listening to this box-set, which comprises all eight albums of the classic Ozzy-fronted era, I was surprised how fast many of their songs were, given ver Sabs' reputation as torpid dirgemeisters for the downered-and-out.

Even at their most manic, Sabbath always sound depressed, though. Rhythmically as much as lyrically, Sabbath songs dramatise scenarios of ordeal, entrapment, affliction, perseverance in the face of long odds and insuperable obstacles. Tony Iommi's down-tuned distorto-riffs--essentially the third element of the awesome rhythm section of Bill Ward and Geezer Butler--create sensations of impedance and drag, like you're struggling through hostile, slightly viscous terrain. Joe Carducci, Sabbath fiend and theorist supreme of rock 's "heavy" aesthetic, analyses about how bass, drums, and guitar converge to produce "powerfully articulated and textured tonal sensations of impact and motion that trigger hefty motor impulses in the listener." But let's not discount Ozzy's role: his piteous wail is one-dimensional, sure, but it sounds utterly righteous in this abject context. And he's effectively touching on forlornly pretty ballads like "Changes" too.

With a few exceptions (Lester Bangs, notably) the first rock-crit generation abhorred Sabbath. Criticism typically lags behind new art forms, appraising it using terminology and techniques more appropriate to earlier genres. So the first rock critics, being postgraduates in literature, philosophy, and politics, treated songs as mini-novels, as poetry or protest tracts with tasteful guitar accompaniment. Expecting rock to get ever more refined, they were hardly gonna embrace Sabbath's crude putsch on Cream, which stripped away all the blues-bore scholarship and revelled in the sheer dynamics of heaviosity. Riff-centered rock--Zep, Mountain, ZZ Top, Aerosmith---was received with incomprehension and condescension. But while Seventies critical faves like Little Feat and Jackson Browne have sired no legacy, over the long haul Sabbath's originality and fertility have been vindicated by the way their chromosones have popped up in US hardcore (Black Flag/Rollins were massively indebted), grunge (Nirvana = Beatles + Sabbath x Pixies), and virtually every key phase of metal from Metallica to Kyuss/Queens of the Stone Age to Korn. Sabbath are quite literally seminal.

Sabbath dressed like hippies: check the groovy kaftans and loon pants in the inner sleeve photos of these CDs, which are miniature simulacra of the original gatefold elpees. And they clearly hoped to contribute to the post-Sgt Pepper's progressive tendency: hence pseudo-pastoral interludes like the flute-draped "Solitude," an idyll amidst Master of Reality's sturm und drang. But critics deplored them as a sign of rock's post-Sixties regression , mere lumpen bombast fit only for the moronic inferno of the stadium circuit, and as a symptom of the long lingering death of countercultural dreams. In retrospect, with Sixties idealism seeming like a historical aberration, Sabbath's doom 'n' gloom seems more enduringly resonant, tapping into the perennial frustrations of youth with dead-end jobs from Coventry to New Jersey: headbanging riffs and narcotic noise as a cheap-and-nasty source of oblivion. Sabbath's no-future worldview always becomes extra relevant in times of recession, like the economic down-slope looming ahead of us right now. Looking back, the much-derided Satanist aspects seem relatively peripheral and low-key, especially compared with modern groups like Slipknot. In old TV footage of Sabbath, the group seem almost proto-punk, their sullen, slobby demeanour recalling The Saints on Top of the Pops. There's little theatrics, and the music is remarkably trim and flatulence-free.

But then no one really goes on about Iommi's solos, do they? The riffs are what it's all about, and Sabbath's productivity on that score is rivalled only by AC/DC. "Sweet Leaf", "Iron Man", "Paranoid", "Children of the Grave," "Wheels of Confusion", the list goes on. So we're back with the mystery.... just what is it that makes a great riff? Something to do with the use of silence and spacing, the hesitations that create suspense, a sense of tensed and flexed momentum, of force mass motion held then released. If I had to choose one definitive Sabbath riffscape, I'd be torn between the pummelling ballistic roil of "Supernaut" and "War Pigs", whose stop-start drums are like slow-motion breakbeats, Quaalude-sluggish but devastatingly funky. "War Pigs" is that rare thing, the protest song that doesn't totally suck. Indeed, it's 'Nam era plaint about "generals gathered... like witches at black masses" has a renewed topicality at a time when the military-industrial death-machine is once more flexing its might.

2010-10-21T18:12:00.000-07:00

THE SLITS, Cut
Uncut, December 1997

by Simon Reynolds

I remember very clearly the first time I heard Cut – it was the summer of '79, I was staying at my aunt's in the Yorkshire Dales, and I'd sneaked off to listen to The John Peel Show. The tracks – ‘Spend, Spend, Spend’ and ‘Newtown’ – sounded incredibly eerie and ethereal, partly because of the tatty, trebly transistor radio through which I heard them, but mainly because it was my first exposure to dub-wise production.

A few weeks later, Cut became the second album I ever owned. As with other records from the days when my collection was in single figures (like PiL's Metal Box), Cut's every rhythm-guitar tic and punky-dread vocal inflection is engraved in my heart.

As a just-missed-punk 16-year-old, I'd first encountered The Slits' name in a Melody Maker profile of Malcolm McLaren. After losing control of the Pistols, McLaren was offered the chance to manage The Slits and briefly schemed to make a wildly exploitative movie in which the girl-band go to Mexico, find themselves effectively sold into slavery, and are turned into porno-disco stars. Thank God, The Slits slipped out of McLaren's clutches. He went off to make skin flicks in Paris, and The Slits made Cut – one of the greatest albums of the post-punk era, alongside Metal Box, Gang Of Four's Entertainment and The Raincoats' first two records.

One of rock criticism's minor dissensions is which version of The Slits is better – the untamed, untutored rumpus of their early live gigs versus the tidied up, punky-reggae studio-Slits with dub wizard Dennis ‘Blackbeard’ Bovell at the controls.
As exciting as the 1977-78 John Peel Sessions indisputably are, The Slits sound infinitely better after they fell in with Bovell, Budgie took over the drumming (following original sticks-woman Palmolive's departure for The Raincoats), and they acquired some basic chops. On the Strange Fruit CD of those Peel sessions, you can hear the embryonic glory of Cut, but the raw tumult is closer to heavy metal bludgeon than punky-reggae sway.

Compounding the taboo-busting frisson of the band's name, Cut's cover is a confrontational classic: mud-smeared and clad only in loincloths, The Slits strike bare-breasted Amazon poses and defiantly out-stare the camera's gaze. The backdrop is a picturesque, bramble-strewn English cottage – as if to say, ‘We're no delicate English roses’. The back-sleeve has Ari, Viv and Tessa daubed in warpaint, lurking in a bush. The music and lyrical stance is just as fierce, kicking off with two jibes at punk rock machismo, ‘Instant Hit’ and ‘So Tough’ (the latter namechecking a "Sid" and a "John"). Everything great about The Slits is instantly audible in these songs: the itchy-and-scratchy rhythm guitar, the revved-up but rootsical basslines, Budgie's clackety rimshot drums, and, above all, the strange geometry of the clashing and overlapping girl-harmonies. Ari Up's harsh Teutonic accent makes her sound like a guttersnipe Nico, on sulphate rather than smack.

‘Spend, Spend, Spend’ is where Bovell's dub-wisdom makes its presence felt. It's desolate dirge-skank, all sidling bass and brittle drums. Ari's portrait of a shopaholic is truly poignant as she tries to "satisfy this empty feeling" with impulse-purchases. But if ‘Spend’ is woman-as-consumerist-dupe, ‘Shoplifting’ turns this on its head, imagining petty theft as proto-feminist insurrection: "We pay fuck-all!" Oi!-meets-Riot-Grrrl backing vocals urge, "Do a runner! Do a runner!", and the music – surging, spasming dub-funk – does exactly that as Ari unleashes an exhilarating scream of glee-and-terror, then collapses in giggles with the admission: "I've pissed in my knickers!"

The sombre ‘FM’ critiques the mass media. Ari's protagonist wonders, "What's feeding my screams?", and describes radio transmissions as "frequent mutilation... serving for the purpose of those who want you to fear". ‘Newtown’ is an Irvine Welsh-like vision of a society based around addiction and surrogate-satisfactions, drawing a disconcerting parallel between the cathode-ray junkies "sniffing televisiono, taking foot-ballino" and The Slits' own bohemian milieu numbed-out on illegal narcotics. The jittery, scraping guitar mimics the fleshcrawling ache of cold turkey, while dub-FX of dropping spoons ram home the analogy.

‘Ping Pong Affair’ is about emotional withdrawal: Ari measures out the empty post-break-up evenings with cigarettes and masturbation ("Same old thing, yeah I know, everybody does it"). ‘Love Und Romance’, scorns the very lovey-dovey intimacy that ‘Ping Pong’ craved. It's a witheringly sardonic parody of smotherlove-as-braindeath, with Ari gloating to her boyfriend: "Oh my darling, who wants to be free?"

‘Typical Girls’ – the only single off Cut – was The Slits' manifesto, a mocking diatribe against the non-punkette ordinary girls who "Don't create/don't rebel" and whose heads are addled with women's-magazine-implanted anxieties about "Spots, fat, unnatural smells". With its cut-and-dried, programmatic critique of conditioning, ‘Typical Girls’ is the closest The Slits got to the 1979 agit-funk bands. But unlike, say, The Au Pairs, The Slits sound riotous rather than righteous.

After Cut – 32 minutes of near-perfection that ends with the touching if slight ‘Adventures Close To Home’ – The Slits went all earth-mother feminist and tribal conscious. 1981 saw the belated sequel to Cut: the African-influenced Return Of The Giant Slits, whose off-kilter meters and cluttered soundscapes make it a poor cousin to The Raincoats' mistress-piece, Odyshape.

But, by '81, the post-punk zeitgeist had shifted to New Pop. String sections, suits and synths were de rigueur; anything that smacked of bohemian withdrawal from the mainstream was lambasted as punky-hippie defeatism. The Slits scattered: Ari Up became a fully-fledged Rasta, settled down and had babies; Viv Albertine eventually worked in TV; Tessa got into martial arts.

Although The Slits' attitude was clearly a crucial ancestor for Riot Grrrl and its UK chapter (Huggy Bear et al), the question of their musical legacy is more elusive. 1979-81 post-punk experimentalism – death-disco, agit-funk, ‘John Peel bands’ – is one of the great neglected eras of modem music.

Maybe, when people tire of Britpop's Sixties new wave tunnel-vision, that period will be rediscovered. But so far I've only ever encountered one band who cite The Slits as an influence: New York's goddess-and-Gaia-obsessed pagan funkateers, Luscious Jackson. Singer Jill Cunniff declared: "There was a time when The Slits were the epitome, the ultimate, the coolest of the cool. They were everything I wanted from life."

I second that emotion.

2010-10-14T12:32:00.000-07:00

AMBITION
GQ Style, winter 2009

by Simon Reynolds

Just a few months before Michael Jackson died, I felt the urge to write about him for the first time ever. I was in a café and "Don't Stop Til You Get Enough" came on and even though I must have heard it hundreds of times since first seeing the video on Top of the Pops in 1979, for some reason the song hit me like a lightning bolt. For all its falsetto-funk silkiness , the sheer aggression of the sound--the coiled rhythmic tension, the stiletto penetration of Jackson's voice--seemed to attack with the force of The Stooges or Sex Pistols . But what I really came away with was a vague idea, just a phrase really: "total music", the idea of a category of pop set apart from the merely excellent. Listening, rapt, I imagined the electricity of the Off the Wall sessions: Quincy Jones assembling the highest-calibre session players available, no expense spared, and pursuing perfection with an almost militaristic focusing of energy. The achievement: flawlessness so absolute that it didn't so much transcend commercialism as blast right through it, such that domination of the radio and the discotheques was merely a by-product, a secondary benefit, of the quest.

"Total music" occurs through the synergy of talent, limitless funding, a really good idea… and something else: a superhuman drive, the "right stuff" that Tom Wolfe wrote about in connection with NASA's moon missions. I imagine this intangible elan infused the making of Abba's music, or the classic recordings of the Beatles, Phil Spector, Brian Wilson. There's loads of music that I love and that probably means more to me than "total pop", records made by artists both more unassuming yet in some ways more narcissistically self-absorbed and idiosyncratic. But there's no denying the special charge that imbues music when it's made by people who know they're making history, who can be confident they're taking it out onto the largest stage available.

In the Sixties there was a long moment where the best pop (in terms of constantly pushing forward and sheer musical quality) was also the best-selling: Beatles, Stones, Hendrix, Byrds, Dylan, Beach Boys, Doors. (There's really only a few exceptions: Love, Velvet Underground). Aesthetic ambition and commercial ambition were indivisible. This folk-memory of this ideal persisted long after it ceased to apply, inspiring everyone from Bowie and Roxy to the major punk bands to the likes of U2, Bjork, Radiohead. But over the last couple of decades the two kinds of ambition have come to seem more and more tenuously connected, to the point where a phenomenon like the Beatles seems almost implausible, a fluke.

My dad had this maxim, something like: aim for the top, because if you fall short, you'll at least reach higher than if you'd aimed for the middle and fallen short of that. It's not completely true: o'er vaulting ambition can result in "EPIC FAIL", whereas a shrewd strategy of modest aspiration might lead to steady sustained successes. Still, remembering this motto led me to this thought: if you want to do great work in music or any art form, just as important as talent or imagination is the desire to be great. You might have the most refined melodic gift, the subtlest musical mind, but if you don't have that will-to-power, the balls and the gall…

Certain bands only make sense at the top of the pop world: Springsteen and U2 were made to work in widescreen, to issue the most sweeping, speaking-for-Everyman statements. "Overbearing", "bombastic": the insults are merely the measure of their achievement, and nobody can take away those moments when they mattered (Born To Run, then again Born in the U.S.A., for Bruce; the majestic sequence from "Pride" to "Streets Have No Name", for Bono and Co). Of course, there are artists who have the temperament of the world-historical genius but who don't actually have anything worth saying. Jim Steinman, the fevered brain behind Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell, Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart", and Celine Dion's "It's All Coming Back To Me Now", exemplifies this syndrome. Steinman is far from deficient in the will-to-greatness: he's got an unbridled flair for the grandiose, plus the requisite perfectionist streak (he's been known to spend huge amounts of his own private money on projects when the original budget's run out). Unfortunately his ambition is not accompanied by the filter of taste, to put it mildly.

Talking of finances, the rise over the last decade or two of home studios and digital audio workstations, has meant that it's possible for artists to make massive-sounding and expensive-seeming albums for a fraction of what it once cost. It's much cheaper and easier to create the illusion of luxuriant orchestration or to pull off ear-boggling sonic trickery of the kind that would have taken days of intricate labour by George Martin and Abbey Road's white-coated technicians. Artistic ambition, in the old days, had to go hand in hand with commercial ambition, just to pay off the bills. Nowadays the two kinds of aspiration have become severed. The Colossal Sounding, Colossally Ambitious Album is today a sort of specialist subgenre of rock, purveyed by groups like Flaming Lips. And not just rock: take Erykah Badu, who renovates the tradition of politically engaged, autobiographically personal "progressive soul" masterpieces by the likes of Stevie Wonder, Sly Stone, and Marvin Gaye. Her vastly ambitious New Amerykah Part One (4th World War) sold pretty well but it could never hope to achieve the mass cultural impact of Songs In the Key of Life or What's Goin' On. These are different times and Badu, like her buddies The Roots and Common, is catering for a niche market of historically-informed cognoscenti who still listen out for that kind of takes-the-measure-of-the-zeitgeist Epic.

Although a singer, Badu regards herself part of hip hop. Surprisingly, given its sketchy record with the Album, rap has been one of the main places this decade where commercial ambition and artistic ambition have remained tightly entwined, with performers like Outkast, Jay-Z and Kanye West putting out sonically adventurous, alternately self-glorifying and socially-conscious albums that sold in huge numbers. It stands to reason that rap is richly endowed with "the will to be great" because the genre is all about self-aggrandisement. What LL Cool J called "talking on myself" still defines the art's core: MCs exalt their own ability to dominate and defeat the competition, finding the most vivid, witty, unique and creatively brutal ways of describing their prowess.

Rap expresses and exposes the ugly side of pop's ambition: its profoundly inegalitarian streak, a drive towards status, glory, preeminence. The aspiration to greatness often comes with a certain monstrousness of personality. Look at
Morrissey. Pop stardom was always, he frankly admitted, a form of revenge exacted on the world for his outcast adolescence. But when society's "mis-shapes" (to use Jarvis Cocker's term) become stars, the result can be unsightly. The retaliatory narcissism of early Smiths lyrics ("the sun shines out of our behinds", "England owes me a living") is one thing when the singer is a skinny wisp only a few years out of obscurity. But from a fifty year old pop institution with the build of a bouncer, striding across arena stages and tossing the microphone cord with lordly disdain, it starts to look like any old showbiz prima donna. Rap has its own Morrissey in Kanye West. I never used to understand hip hop fans complaining about his monster ego (this is rap, what did you expect guys?). But after the bloated self-pity of much of 808s & Heartbreak and his disruption of the MTV Video Awards, I'm starting to see their point.*

The supreme case of the will-to-be-great turning rancid is Michael Jackson, of course. Around the point he started calling himself (and insisting on being called) the King of Pop, Jackson 's output shifted from "total pop" to "totalitarian kitsch": the nine gigantic statues of MJ as a Dictator built at his requirement by Sony and installed in European cities to promote 1995's HIStory: Past, Present & Future, Book 1, the fascistic promo film for that record with Jackson in full Khadaffi-style regalia amid hundreds of soldiers. Think too of the Versailles-like indulgence and corruption of Neverland, and that peculiar quasi-dynastic marriage to Lisa Marie Presley, daughter of the King. When pop stars try to externalize the grandeur inside their music, to make reality match up to its utopian absoluteness, the results can be grotesque, a tragic-comical catastrophe of nouveau-riche kitsch.

* oh and check this review of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Pitchfork's Ryan Dombal which examines Kanye's obsession with Michael Jackson.

2010-10-14T12:29:00.001-07:00

U.K. versus U.S.A.
(published under the title "Remotely Interesting")
GQ Style, Autumn 2008

by SIMON REYNOLDS

I never felt the faintest twinge of patriotism when I actually lived in Britain. The political sort seemed either silly or ugly; I wasn't into sports. As for pop, I was always embarrassed when music journalists got into flag-waving boosterism, could never see the point of their quests for the homegrown version: UK reggae, Britfunk, Britrap…. that long line of underachievement. In reaction, I became almost an Anglophobe, preferring American underground rock of the Eighties to this country's scrawny indie fare. For every Smiths, there seemed to be a score of jingle-jangly Housemartins-type bands and Wedding Present-style Northern miserabilists; for each My Bloody Valentine, a couple dozen shandy-weak shoegazers of the Ride/Chapterhouse ilk.

All this changed when I left the U.K in 1994 and settled in New York permanently. Not immediately. But, in what's probably a common syndrome with expatriates, it was only upon removal from the native context that I actually ceased to take it for granted, saw it properly for the first time. The crappy mundanity that makes up so much of the UK music scene dropped away and I started to appreciate the lippy, quippy, concept-driven approach of the better British bands; the way they dedicated their energy to shaping a striking-looking aesthetic rather than mastering the craft of rocking convincingly. I missed the hype-d up metabolism of UK pop culture, fueled by the competition between the music papers and between individual journalists, motored by bands skilled at self-salesmanship and image-cultivation.

The British scene's excitingly frenetic pace contrasted with sluggish alt-America, where trends evolved at tortoise-like tempo, thanks to cautious, responsible, hype-wary magazines, and to bands full of mumbling slackers pretending to be less articulate and educated than they actually were, and who espoused a sort of anti-corporate passive-aggressiveness that made a virtue of lack of ambition. In Britain, thanks to the influence of the music papers on the record industry, Top of the Pops was a reachable target. The UK charts were regularly penetrated by scruffy indie bands (along with underground dance anthems and all manner of novelty hits), whereas in America, only corporate muscle and ruthless professionalism could get you into the Billboard Top 40.

Top of the Pops was actually one of the things I started to miss as an expatriate, along with John Peel's show. This despite the fact that I hadn't listened to Peel in ages while TOTP had become an increasingly disappointing experience during my later years living in London. Nonetheless, the existence of these channels for the mediation for the underground into the mainstream, with their distant echo of Lord Reith's vision of the BBC as the educator of public taste, seemed to explain a lot about the volatility and eccentricity of the UK pop landscape over the decades.
In the second half of the Nineties, ie. pretty much immediately after I'd left the country, there suddenly seemed to be a lot to be patriotic about, musically. Not so much Union Jack-clad Britpop, though. For me it was all about our endlessly fertile and mutagenic dance culture, from jungle and trip hop to Big Beat and 2step garage. House and techno may have started in middle America in the mid-Eighties, but there's no doubt that in global terms the UK was Number One Rave Nation. In 1997, it was thrilling to see some of that wild spectrum of sound bust its way into the US mainstream--Prodigy, Chemicals, Orbital, Underworld. By then I'd also began to feel intensely, wistfully nostalgic about a particular British approach to pop, fashioned by art school kids and petit bourgeois autodidacts. The success of Pulp (which I'd have so loved to witness first-hand but caught only an after-tremor on a rare visit home, when the DJ played "Common People" at my brother's wedding reception) reminded me of how in the UK it's always seemed possible for figures who weren't obvious heart throbs or even particularly able (in conventional terms) as singers to become pop stars: the lineage of unlikely charisma and peculiar sex appeal that runs from Ray Davies via Ian Dury and Morrissey through to Jarvis. The US pop machine has never had a place for such mis-shapes.

"Nostalgia" originally referred not to the impossible longing for "lost time" but to homesickness for one's native land (an 18th Century physician coined the word to describe a psychosomatic malady affecting soldiers on long tours of duty abroad). The pangs I felt for the UK art-into-pop tradition were obviously related to my own geographical displacement, the ache caused by the thought of the shape of post boxes, the taste of Marmite, the vocal timbre of Radio 4 announcers. But in truth, that artpop tradition was become more remote in time too: back in Blighty it was, if not fading away completely, then certainly being pushed to the periphery of the pop mainstream. The culprits were the having-it hedonism of club culture (what rave had degenerated into by 1998) and the boorish nu-philistinism of the Oasis end of Britpop. Then around the turn of the decade, UK pop culture was inundated by hip hop and R&B.

All these changes--and there's no denying that the brash, ego-maniacal energy and futurism of Black American music also had invigorating effects--contributed to a slowly building, retrospective pride about British pop on my part. Almost in reaction to the UK's subordination by American music this past decade, I've become preoccupied by the earlier phase of pop history when it was a two-way street spanning the Atlantic. Again, perhaps it's only when something is gone that you appreciate how remarkable it was. I'm talking about the singularity of the British pop achievement, how for a huge stretch of its lifespan we enjoyed co-dominion with America over global pop culture. This, despite having only one-fifth the population of the U.S.A. and lacking their organic connection to rhythm-and-blues, soul, country, etc.

"Co-dominion"? Actually, during the Sixties, it's game set and match to Britain: the Beatles and Rolling Stones wipe out everything else. The massive Dylan industry of books and documentaries that's gone into hyperdrive these last dozen years or so is, I reckon, a semi-conscious retaliation to British dominance of the Sixties, a delayed form of American babyboomer patriotism that seeks to boost the profile of the only possible candidate when it comes to rivaling the historical immensity of the Beatles. But when I were a lad in the late Seventies, Dylan seemed like an esoteric, far-from-the-centre-of-things figure, a talisman only for those fusty freaks known as Dylanologists (admittedly this was during the singer's Born Again Christian phrase, an all-time nadir in the graph line of his iconicity). Same goes for the Beach Boys, actually: they were this slightly naff surf group with castrato voices, and once again it's only sustained effort from the Brian Wilson Is a Genius industry that has subsequently placed them in vicinity to the Fab Four. No, from Liverpool in '63 to London from '65 onwards (with a slight intermission for San Francisco, but who actually listens to the records made by that fair city's acid-rockers?), Britannia ruled the airwaves even as she repeatedly waived the rules of rock.

In the Seventies, things evened out between USA and UK, but on balance I'd still give it to us Brits. We invented three of the decade's crucial rock genres (metal, prog, glam) and co-invented (I'd say perfected) the other one, punk. Without the Sex Pistols and all that followed them, punk would never have changed rock history; the New York scene was a coalition of post-Beatnik poets, junkie axe heroes, and B-movie obsessed record collectors. Give or take "Marquee Moon" the song, I'd swap the entirety of NYC punk for the Buzzcocks' Singles Going Steady.

The Eighties? Started well, with a Second British Invasion (what American journalists dubbed our horde of gender-bendy synthpoppers and fair-haired funkateers, with MTV playing a treasonous Benedict Arnold-type role) that echoed if not quite equaled the British beat boom's impact on Sixties America. But then things started slipping in the later Eighties and from grunge and gangsta onwards it's been downhill ever since for the UK in terms of our special relationship with America. In 1984, the peak year of the Second British Invasion, UK artists commanded 28 percent of the best selling albums in America; by 1999 that figure had shriveled to 0.2 percent and, despite a Coldplay here and an Amy Winehouse there, it's never really recovered. It's like an extremely unfair trade pact: the Yanks flood our market with their pop product but (outside a niche audience of nutty Anglophiles) they've no interest in taking our exports.

Paul Morley suggested recently that pop music--our flair for it, our prominent role in it globally and historically--has been perhaps the major force in holding the nation together during its post-imperial twilight of identity confusion. That pop was a kind of groovy surrogate for the British Empire, in fact. So what happened? How did we manage to lose a second Empire? Simon Frith argues that the 1963-84 period was an exceptional "moment," during which a confluence of historically contingent factors made the UK an equal partner with America. Rock'n'roll may have started out as purely American, but by the time the music became "rock" it was Anglo-American, and with the emphasis on the first half of that hyphenate. Just at the point--1963-66--when the music acquired a sense of artiness and literacy (while simultaneously coming into alignment with revolutionary and progressive currents within society) Britain came to the fore. And did again, with punk, recharging the fading battery of rock-as-oppositional-force. Perhaps Britain's eminence has declined in ratio to the extent that those things are no longer what rock is about? Maybe our eclipse ran in parallel with the gradual relapse of rock/pop into showbiz, a fully-integrated product within the capitalistic leisure/entertainment complex?

There are other factors that gave us our historical edge, I think. One was the very element of distance, which opened up possibilities of irony, artifice, and conceptualism, but also had sonic effects. The American theorist Joe Carducci notes how Sixties and Seventies British bands's music often had a quality of starkness, comparing the "organic", muddily-produced sound of US groups (everyone from Grand Funk Railroad to the Stooges) with the relative clarity of heavy-riffing outfits like Sabbath, Zeppelin and Free (just think of the use of silence in "Alright Now"). That led in turn to the punchy production of glam rock and the diagrammatic sound-structures of postpunk outfits like Wire and Gang of Four. It's almost as though our remoteness from the roots source allowed for a certain coldblooded detachment, an ability to stand back a little way and then open up the rhythmic engine of rock to rearrange its moving parts. Perhaps that's also why British bands embraced the studio so avidly. I've long felt that British rock is essentially about recordings, whereas Americans invariably withhold judgement about a band until they've seen them live (where sound is more mushed-up and what counts is "feel"). Compare the Beatles, tampering with the raw materiality of sound using effects and tape-splices at Abbey Road, with the Byrds, whose innovations were rooted more in the fluidity of the improvisatory jam. The Beatles were Stockhausen fans; The Byrds admired Coltrane. That difference goes some way to explaining the UK lineage of studio wizardry that takes in Joe Meek, Pink Floyd, 10CC, Brian Eno, Trevor Horn, the list is endless. There are American equivalents--Brian Wilson, Todd Rundgren, Lindsay Buckingham--but not nearly so many.

Another factor to consider is the special British susceptibility to Black American music (and Caribbean too--could there ever have been an American Specials, a U.S. Police?). Scan across British pop history and you'll repeatedly find black sounds of diverse sorts sparking the brightest musical minds: countless Sixties groups who studied blues recordings with a scholarly intensity; Robert Wyatt with his love of jazz and vocal emulation of Dionne Warwick; John Lydon going to reggae "blues" dances chaperoned by Don Letts; entire cults from trad jazz to Northern Soul to 2-Tone based around bygone styles of black dance; everyone from Jamiroquai to LTJ Bukem mooning over the "kosmigroove" jazz-funk of Roy Ayers; Mike Skinner entranced by Nas and Raekwon but then deciding to honor the rap dictum "do you"… Sometimes it feels like we feel this music more deeply than any other non-black people on Earth: it supplies something we need, lets loose something that would be otherwise hopelessly knotted. But at our best we've always brought something to the music, our own twist, some uniquely British content.

Why did our mutations of the Black American source sounds stop playing so well internationally, though? By the end of the Nineties, our overseas profile had slipped to the parlous point where chart-topping UK sensations as various as So Solid Crew and Girls Aloud not only failed to match their UK impact in America, they couldn't even get their albums released there! The reason, I think, is the dominance of hip hop and our failure (unlike with R&B in the Sixties and funk in the Seventies and Eighties) to come up with spin on it that Americans cared for or found convincing. Jungle, trip hop, 2step, grime: all fantastically innovative, but with a few exceptions--Portishead, riding high in both Billboard and the UK Top Forty as I write--they never got close to rivaling American rap. Not even in the UK itself. Hip hop's appeal is partly based on the fact that it is always originally a local music, rich in a sense of place, steeped in 'hood lore. But injecting exactly that sort of English parochial quirkiness into rap got UK artists like the Streets and Dizzee Rascal no more than cult followings of Anglophile hipsters in the USA.

We may no longer be able to foist our homegrown pop peculiarities on the entire world like we once did. But we still, occasionally, foist them on ourselves. Amid the latest American-made machine pop and its second-rate homegrown clones, there are always things in our singles chart that could only ever be a hit in Britain. Bassline house from Sheffield and Nottingham, all faecal-splattery low-end and deliriously treble-tastic euphoria. Wiley and his "Rolex". Daft art school chancers like the Klaxons, who modeled their career on the KLF's The Manual: How to Have a Number One Hit the Easy Way and ended up performing a live mash-up with Rihanna and her "Umbrella" onstage at the 2008 Brit Awards. Only in the UK! For sure, there's a pathos to that. But there is also-- strangely, resiliently, defiantly--a pride.

2010-05-29T20:27:00.000-07:00

DOLPHINS INTO THE FUTURE
The Music of Belief
(Release the Bats)
director's cut, The Wire

by Simon Reynolds

Don't know about you, but I was sold on Dolphins Into The Future the moment I saw the name. Is that silly? Naming a group is half the battle, I think. Done well, the name works as a miniature poem, a manifesto condensed to slogan size. It frames and guides the sonic experience like "set and setting" does with psychedelics. An outfit called Dolphins Into The Future could hardly fail to have something going for it.

Onset - Beyond Clouds from Adam Sammons on Vimeo.

As it happens, "Dolphins into the Future" is a cultural readymade, re-porpoised by Lieven Martens, a 28 year old from Antwerp, Belgium with an extensive pedigree in "freenoise", a string of aliases (notably Duncan Cameron and collaborative project Blobs), and a cassetteography as long as both your arms. It's the title of a memoir by Joan Ocean, a groovy lady who's spent many years communing with a "pod" (a tribe, I guess) of Hawaiian spinner dolphins. But you don't need to know about her Damascene encounter with a California grey whale, her theory of "sound holography" (how cetacean creatures communicate), or her New Age resort Sky Island Ranch, for the name Dolphins Into the Future to do its magic. Those four words get reveries in motion: musings about dolphins as the alien race, that we imagine is out there in some corner of the cosmos , already in our midst; Gaia-conscious grief for the abuse we've inflicted on Mother Water ( pollution, garbage dumping, overfishing, polar ice cap melting, unstaunchable oil leaks from deep sea drilling).

But listeners would probably be picturing coral reefs and luminescent bottom-feeders even if Martens had picked the name Hot Pink Freon Jizz. Much of his sound-palette, as heard on cassette-only releases like Mountains Saturnus, suggests whale-song, sea horse stridulations, and other subaquatic chatter. Produced using tape-loops and a mixture of analog and digital synths, and often altered by slowing-down or pitching-up, Martens's textures typically have a smeared, swaying off-pitch quality redolent of Boards of Canada. But there's also glinky, glass-bottle percussive sounds suggestive of gamelan, and rustling, chittering ambiences that could be painstaking forgeries of ethnological field recordings or samples directly taken from "Nature Sounds" cassettes.

Martens is a prominent figure in the international post-noise network catalysed by the Skaters. But while there's clearly a debt to Spencer Clark and James Ferraro's strain of Pacific-idyllic New Millenium Exotica (specifically the 2006 Pan Dolphinic Dawn single), Martens has fastened on one rivulet in the torrent of ex-Skaters output and developed it into a distinct and more fully realized sound-stream. Dolphins Into the Future is a significantly more electronic proposition, touching on just about every decade of its history, from early Dutch operators like Dick Raaijmakers, through the Seventies analogue synth gods and their New Age-y Eighties offshoot "space music" (Martens gives props to Windham Hill sub-label Private Music, artists like Michael Stearns and Emerald Web, and America's long-running Hearts of Space radio show), up to Nineties electronica heads like The Orb.

"The Voice Of Incorporeality," the 30 minute opening track of Martens's first CD release, actually reminds me a little of "A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld," The Orb's debut single. It raises the delicious thought that Martens is, deliberately or not, pushing retro-chic into the early Nineties, or one sector thereof: chill out rooms, smart drinks, Mixmaster Morris, Fax Records, Telepathic Fish, etc. But since that moment had its own retro-futurist and "cosmic camp" invocations going on, "Voice" equally reminds me of Rainbow Dome Musick, the two LP-side-long compositions recorded by Steve Hillage as an ambient soundscape for the 1979 Festival of Mind-Body-Spirit. Like that album's "Garden of Paradise", just about every sound in "Voice" is a glisteningly gauche signifier of Heaven or Eden. The trickle of a waterfall and the liquid chirruping of tropical birds establish the mise-en-scene: an aquatic bower-of-bliss in a jungle clearing. Harp-like twinkles of synth cascade gently while a dazzling drone gyrates, like a polygon whose mirrored facets keep catching a shaft of sunlight. Yet this isn't really New Age: the music's contours aren't picked-out cleanly enough, everything's too saturated and overloaded, and as the never-changing/ever-shifting track reaches its end the final effect is bruising bliss.

Taking up Belief's second half, "Observations Through the Halocline of the Worlds" is a nine-part suite whose components range from thirty seconds to eleven minutes long. Highlights include the third sequence (plinking gamelan, offset by what could be light raindrops skittering across a drum skin) and the fifth (the closest to "classic" Dolphins Into the Future, a swatch of aqueous yet fractured texture, like a National Geographic seascape photo spread chopped up and tessellated into an abstract blue collage). These longer pieces are juxtaposed with environmental snippets suggestive of a rainforest canopy or a savannah watering hole at dusk. "Observation" #9 is a celestial organ solo, an echo-shrouded spire of melody swirling up and away into outer space.

When I read in David Keenan's hypnagogic pop overview in the Wire last year that New Age music was all the rage with the post-noise underground, I was tickled pink. It struck me initially as a well-established hipster move: the subliming of kitsch, pioneered by groups like Butthole Surfers in the late Eighties, albeit using figures--Black Sabbath, Donovan--that now seem straightforwardly canonical, not cheesy. When the text that come with The Music of Belief describes "The Voice Of Incorporeality" as a "soundplay accompanying you during your ascension on the ladder of Mystical Tones towards the Silence, the Nada "or dedicates "Observations Through the Halocline" to "Saturn as the Throne, the Sea, Mitragyna Speciosa, J.C.L. and the Cetacean Nation", it's hard not to wonder how deep Martens' tongue is lodged in his cheek. And yet he plays it very straight, with none of the obvious winks to the listener that the Buttholes or indeed The Orb would place in plain view. My sense is that he is both amused and amazed by New Age culture, the gaudy kitsch of crystals, flotation tanks, wind-chimes, and all the outlandish beliefs and outré sonics that come with them. But he's also profoundly attracted to the underlying concepts: healing music, serenity, deep listening, getting in touch with your anima.

At a time when our computer-based lifestyles involve a lot of frantic surfing and skimming across the shallows of culture, the idea of slowing down, breathing deeper, listening calmly, and re-establishing contact with the elemental (hello trees, hello sky) has rather a lot of utterly non-ironic appeal. If, like me, you spend most of your working day engaged in data-processing and sign-decoding, while the bulk of your leisure involves media of one kind or another, you can end up with an existence that's simultaneously immaterial yet devoid of spirituality. The idea of a life that is more earthed and embodied but that at the same time at least entertains the possibility of higher planes, seems attractive.

Adhering to the hippie maxim "be here now", New Age was one path taken out of the Sixties. As a result New Age music has a number of perfectly respectable neighbours: from Krautrock to Jon Hassell's 4th World zone, from Obscure and Ambient Series artists like Harold Budd and Laraaji to cosmic fusion and ECM. Perhaps Martens is trying to locate the buried utopianism in New Age, reactivate its psychedelic potentials? In which case, the title of this lovely album--The Music of Belief--lays it on the line. It's a dare to the listener: suspend your cynicism.

Lieven tells me he used to be a big fan of The Orb, and also that David Toop's Ocean of Sound was a huge influence on him

2010-05-18T16:52:00.000-07:00

my contributions to
THE WIRE's THE HUNDRED BEST RECORDS OF ALL TIME
The Wire, Issue #100 June 1992

1970
THE STOOGES
Funhouse (Elektra)
When they say it's the greatest rock'n'roll record of all time, they really mean Side One. The first album's morose, moribund entropy (a compliment) (honestly!) EXPLODES with "Wild On The Streets", "Loose", "TV Eye", a triptych of controlled abandon that's never been equalled. The delirium of subhuman snarls and sucking sounds emitted by Iggy at the climax of "TV Eye" is the living end, a nether limit even the Birthday Party (for whom Funhouse was bible) underpassed. After immolation, burn-out: "Dirt", a hymn to transcendence thru abjection, with Ron Asheton alternating between piteous blues and silvered cascades. The Bowie-fied Raw Power probably had more to do with spawning punk, but Funhouse is the real animal: progeny include Black Flag, Pixies, the wah-wah mantras of Loop and Spacement 3, and the SubPop/Nirvana crowd.
Simon Reynolds

1971
LED ZEPPELIN
Led Zeppelin IV (Atlantic)
Contrary to received wisdom, Led Zep didn't bastardize the blues: they aggrandized them, inflated them from porchside intimacy to awe-inspiring monumentalism. Detached from their contemporary context (in which they could only seem a fascistic, brutalised perversion of rock) we can now only gasp and gape at the sheer scale and mass of Zep's sound, never more momentous than on this LP - the megalithic priapism of "Black Dog", the slow-mo boogie avalanche of "When The Levee Breaks". But Zep were more than just heavy: both "Misty Mountain Hop" (slanted and enchanted acid-metal) and "Four Sticks" (a locked groove of voodoo-boogie) sound unlike anything recorded before or since. Perhaps because of this, er, eclectic experimentalism, Led Zep actually didn't have that much influence on HM, except for odd instances like Living Coloür's fusion-metal and Jane's Addiction's funked-up deluges of grandeur.
Simon Reynolds

1974
CAN
Soon Over Babaluma (Spoon)
Like Tago Mago and Future Days, Babaluma is inexhaustible; a hundred listenings in, and you still find new worlds. "Dizzy Dizzy" and "Come Sta, La Luna" are Can at their most telepathic and tactile. The Mandelbrot whorls and 7th dimensional involutions of "Chain Reaction/Quantum Physics" are the deepest psychedelic grooves I know outside early 70s Miles. Humour, poignancy, awe, groove, Dada, intimacy, immensity - sometimes I wonder why I bother listening to anything else. Anticipates (or pre-empts): the Fourth World pan-Globalism of Talking Heads' Remain In Light, Byrne/Eno's My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, Jon Hassell, the avant-funk of PiL and The Pop Group, The Raincoats, 23 Skidoo, ARKane's oceanic rock, even some rap and rave.
Simon Reynolds

1984
HUSKER DU
Zen Arcade (SST)
Along with the Jesus and Mary Chain's Psychocandy, this kick-started/blueprinted the late 80s regeneration of rock. Like J&MC, Husker Du trailblazed a whole new way for pop and noise to coexist. Their fusion of folkadelic yearning and foaming fury, bleeding hearts and bleeding ears, spawned the Dinosaur Jr/Nirvana school of "zen apathy/bewilderness rock", and was a pivotal influence on My Bloody Valentine et al too. The 13-minute all live raga-improv blizzard "Reoccurring Dreams" that closes this magnificent double didn't, however, ignite a Mahavishnu revival (shame!). They recorded more accomplished albums (Warehouse, Flip Your Wig) but Zen Arcade was the Du at their most unleashed, expansive and emotionally devastating.
Simon Reynolds

you can read the whole piece with contributions from the Wire writership here

2010-02-28T19:47:00.000-08:00

DIZZEE RASCAL for The Word magazine's People of the Decade
director's cut, The Word, January 2010

By Simon Reynolds

It was the voice that grabbed you. A voice like wounded eyes. Strung taut between lashing-out and tears, its rapid-fire, blurting rhythm was like thoughts racing so fast they trip over themselves. That voice was heard first on a white label played with mounting frequency on London's pirate radio stations during the summer of 2002. "I Luv U" dramatised the war of the sexes as a duet (Dizzee's “that girl’s some bitch yunno” thrown right back in his face by an unidentified female MC) over bass-blasts closer to hard techno or punk rock than UK garage.

The voice was unique, quirky, but also collective, the sound of the streets. Dizzee's back story likewise told of the struggle of an exceptional individual but also somehow who was the product of an environment. Raised in "the ends" (East London) by an African-born single mum, Dylan Mills was kicked out of four schools in four years, got into all kinds of trouble, looked likely to get into worse. But then, like so many others from the same place, Dizzee found a way out through music. "Where I'm from, there ain't a lot of other options," he said in 2003. All that aspiration and desperation forced through the narrow channels of pirate radio's intense competitiveness had created a scene overflowing with talent. "Thousands of DJs and MCs… it’s kinda our hip hop," said Dizzee of the genre that what would soon be known as grime. "I think this country needs to listen to this country more. Americans speak English, what are [US rappers] gonna tell us in our own language? There’s ghettos here--it’s not recognized. We’re underneath… and we’re about to blow up and rise."

Blog-buzz propelled the teenage MC towards an XL record deal and "I Luv U" was given a full-blown re-release in early 2003. Too harsh for radio, the single only dented the UK Top 30. Boy in Da Corner, the debut album, showcased just how many sides, emotionally and musically, there were to this reflective rude boy. On the dreamy, vaguely Oriental opener "Sitting Here," he's the painfully acute observer (“I watch all around/I watch every detail/I watch so hard I’m scared my eyes might fail”) while on the equally ethereal closer "Do It" Dizzee revealed his fragility ( "everyone’s growing up too fast,” “it’s almost like I’ve got the world on my shoulders sometimes.”) But in between he was cheeky and cocky, boasting on "Fix Up Look Sharp" of “flushing MCs down the loo", while on non-album track "Ice Rink" (produced by Wiley, his former colleague in Roll Deep) he instructed listeners to "kiss from the left to the right/kiss til my black bum-cheeks turn white”.

Boy made 19 year old Dizzee the youngest Mercury Prize recipient ever. A win can be a mixed blessing, almost a career ender (hello Gomez), especially for "urban" acts (hello Roni, Dynamite, and possibly Speech Debelle too). But Dizzee was too shrewd, too strong for that. He had no interest in being a critics darling and his ambition extended way beyond grime. For a while he kept a foot in both underground and mainstream. 2004's Showtime mixed experimental beats with poppy novelty singles (the Captain Sensible "Happy Talk"-sampling "Dream"). Sounding confused and torn, he talked about how still being part of grime, "I just don't do raves and I don’t do pirate radio". (But without raves and pirate shows, what else is there to grime?). 2007's Maths + English took a firm stride towards realizing Dizzee's popstar promise, with the old-skool rap rampage "Sirens" and the Lily Allen over Bugsy Malone team-up "Wanna Be". But it was eerie opener "World Outside" that served as a message to his scene: "there's a world outside of the ends and I want you to see it/I can see it." The message was: Goodbye.

Dizzee got strategic next. Where once he'd made most of his own backing tracks, now he farmed out production to a motley bunch of beat-makers that included New York house ruffian Armand Van Helden and electropopster Calvin Harris. He was no longer grime (sinking back into the underground, that scene could no longer serve as a launching pad for anybody) but simply a modern-day pop musician, sonically all-over-the-place. Fourth album Tongue 'N' Cheek is not an aesthetic triumph like Boy, but a canny mixed bag that serves to cap a triumph of a different sort: it contains three number one singles, all scored within just over a year. The Rascal is now the king of pop's castle. The mark of Dizzee's achievement is that newspapers don't describe him as "top grime MC" anymore but as "the UK's biggest rapper". He was even invited on Newsnight to discuss the election Barack Obama, where he impishly entertained the possibility of himself being Prime Minister one day.

With supreme cunning and determination, Dizzee Rascal maneuvered his way through the Noughties, ending up exactly where he wanted to be , where he deserved to be. With the punk-house stormer "Bonkers", the second of that string of chart-toppers, Dizzee ended the decade in fine style: riding a sound as exciting in its own way as "I Luv U," with words that turned the despairing darkness of Boy In Da Corner into a sort of dayglo nihilist cartoon. As he put it back in 2002, "There is so much to care about in this world… If you give a shit, you’ll go nuts."

2010-02-24T11:11:00.000-08:00

BJORK,Debut
New York Times, 22 August 1992

by Simon Reynolds

Bjork exploded into public consciousness with her starburst vocals on 'Birthday', the 1987 debut single by the Sugarcubes. Björk’s ethereal voice and elf-girl image had critics and fans bewitched. Rave reviews predicted imminent world conquest for the Icelandic band. But it didn't happen, and the Sugarcubes never quite scaled the heights of their debut again. Over three albums, the group veered from moderately captivating dream pop to quirky, negligible new wave and gradually whittled down its cult following rather than expanding it.

Now Björk (who doesn't use her last name, Gutmundsdottir) has gone solo, as some devotees always fell she should. In recent interviews, the 27-year-old singer has professed that she never much cared for the alternative-rock qualities of the Sugarcubes' music. With Debut (Elektra, 9 61468-2; CD and cassette), she set out to combine her love of jazz with her ardor for rave music. To this end, she hooked up with Nellee Hooper of Soul II Soul, who produced most of the album and co-wrote five of the 11 songs. Mr. Hooper's rhythmic expertise provides the kind of groovy settings Björk's voice has always deserved. The collaboration has proved effective; the album is rapidly climbing Billboard's pop chart.

At its unleashed peak — as first heard on 'Birthday' — Björk's singing communicates an ineffable alloy of mixed-emotions, a mad jumble of astonishment, elation, rapture, dread, awe. Debut is drenched with just this goose-pimple-inducing stuff. The title of 'Violently Happy' captures the Björk effect perfectly: a gush and rush of euphoria, a tidal wave of oceanic feeling. Over the song's brisk house beats, Björk stammers as she struggles to express feelings of excitement so intense she seems on the brink of leaping out of her skin: "I'm driving my car too fast with ecstatic music on/I'm daring people to jump off roofs with me." In the end, she and Mr. Hooper resort to studio wizardry to gesture at inexpressible feelings, sampling one syllable and turning it into a stuttering vocal tic.

This breathless, insatiable lust for life pervades the album. In 'There's More to Life Than This', Björk gasps like she's choking on her own rising bliss, while the sultry 'Big Time Sensuality' has her vaulting from chesty growls to hyperventilating harmonics so piercing she sounds as if she's inhaled helium. But Björk is actually most effective when her vocal histrionics arc relatively restrained. The album's stand-out track, 'One Day', has a wonderful sense of tremulous, mounting anticipation that's just barely contained. Singing lines like "One day, you will blossom," Björk glides through a shimmering, brimming soundscape of undulating beats and twinkling keyboards.

Debut often recalls the early 70's jazz-fusion of bands like Weather Report. But where these fusionists combined jazz harmony with funk and acid rock, Björk marries her scat-vocalese and off-kilter melodies with the futuristic textures and programmed percussion of today's techno and acid house. In this vein, 'Aeroplane' is even more of a lush polyrhythmic jungle than 'One Day'. Its iridescent keyboards hark back to fusion players like Herbie Hancock and Joe Zawinul. 'Venus as a Boy' heads East for it’s exoticism: Talvin Singh's and Sureh Sathe's strings have the lavish, melodramatic quality of the orchestral soundtracks to Indian movie musicals.
For the most part, Debut is a collection of love songs. Some are inspired by flesh-and-blood passion (Björk croons the jazz standard 'Like Someone in Love', her voice cradled in harp and swoony strings). Others are about being in love with life or with her own bizarre fantasy world. There's one exception to the joyous vibe, the foreboding 'Human Behavior' (the first single off the album). Over an ominous rhythm track that sounds like thunderous tympani, Björk draws a disconcerting parallel between the beastliness of humanity and the bestiality of nature.

In the brilliant video, Björk plays the role of a little girl who lives in a sort of Disney noir forest. As in the best fairy tales, underneath the picaresque surface lurks the sinister and macabre. A cute teddy bear becomes a cruel, marauding beast (Björk ends up in his tummy), while the parallels between human and animal drives are underlined by juxtaposing a moth that flies blindly into a light bulb with Björk as a cosmonaut hurtling to the moon. The video plays on Björk's childlike image and the fact that she comes from Iceland, a country where a large percentage of the population believe that fairies really exist. Appropriately, Debut is an enchanting album.

BJORK, Post : SPIN'S ALBUMS OF THE NINETIES issue
Spin, 1999

by Simon Reynolds

Bjork's career has been a series of test cases to determine just how much strangeness a song can contain and still work as pop. Post is the sound of the Icelandic icon revelling in the possibilities opened up by the commercial success of Debut (her first solo album after quitting The Sugarcubes). Instead of playing it safe, Bjork compressed even more left-field weirdness (electronica's abstract textures, jazz-fusion's edgy tonality, dance music's rhythmic science) into her songs.

In retrospect, she'd felt that 1993's Debut had been somewhat tentative and tame: "I had very safe pop songs...and I was sort of shy and humble towards the whole thing," she said in 1995. "This time I felt more at ease." Shedding the boutique-and-soiree-friendly aspects of Debut that allowed some cynics to dismiss her as a Sade-for-the-'90s, Bjork took the three million copies Debut sold worldwide as license to experiment. She hooked up with multiple collaborators from differentcutting edges, and forged a schizo-eclectic tour-de-force. The orchestral grandeur of "Isobel," the technoid seduction of "Possibly Maybe," the industrial juggernaut of "Army of Me," and the big band retro-romp of "It's Oh So Quiet" each highlighted a different facet of her fascinatingly mutable identity. This fracturing of persona was further dramatized in a series of brilliantly inventive and wildly different videos which diversified Bjork's established space-pixie/child-sprite image.

"Post helped popularize the modern idea of an album as a
delicatessan," says Bjork-collaborator Graham Massey of techno outfit 808 State.
The two tracks co-written and co-produced by Massey--"Army Of Me" and "The Modern Things"--date from the Debut> era. Recorded in just one 1991 day at a Manchester home studio, the demo versions of "Army" and "Modern Things" were deemed too harshly inorganic to fit Debut's lush sound-world, but the songs were reactivated for Post.

The lyrical concept of "Army of Me" (Bjork in tough-love mode telling a self-pitying friend to shape up) was suggested by the implacable, monolithic groove, not vice versa. "A lot of vocalists just sit in the corner and get tortured over the lyrics," says Massey. " But being a formidable musician as well as a singer, Bjork develops melody before words--the lyrics all start out as this wordless mumbo-jumbo. That approach works very well with electronica, 'cause you're forming the music as you go along. We'd get a lot of material down on the computer, and then it was like dressing up--'try this, try that.'" In the "electronic playground," Bjork comes into her own, says Massey, because of "she's one of the few artists who has a real streak of innocence".

Alongside its creator's confidence and curiosity, Post reflects the creative turmoil circa 1994-95 of London, where Bjork had relocated from Iceland. Jungle was exploding out of the underground, and strange hybrids such as trip hop and post-rock were bubbling.

"If Bjork had moved somewhere else, like New York, it would have been a totally different sounding album," says Massey. Yet although it was mostly conceived in London, Post was actually recorded and mixed in the Bahamas at Nassau's famous Compass Point Studio. According to trip hopper Howie B, who engineered Post and co-wrote the frisky Latin house tune "I Miss You", "Despite being in this Caribbean vacation paradise, we only had one day off in three weeks. And because the studios have no windows, we might as well have been in London." Bjork did record some of her vocals with her feet in the ocean, though, thanks to a long microphone cord.

Two collaborations with Tricky--the sensuous tone-and-texture poem "Headphones" and the shatteringly intense "Enjoy" were recorded in the totally un-tropical climate of Iceland. "They were like rough demos," says Tricky, who later dated Bjork. "I kept waiting for her to say 'let's take them to an expensive studio'. But Bjork had the courage to release the songs as they were, and that still shocks me. She ain't scared of nothing." Of their first meeting, Tricky says "I fancied her straight away. The idea of us collaborating as artists wasn't even discussed, it was sort of already known. I thought she was mad cute, but didn't think anything would come of it-it was like she was on a different planet to me, a superstar."

But then the cool thing about Bjork is precisely the elegance with which she manages to straddle the murky underworld of marginal music and the overlit
overground of videogenic pop. Post represents Bjork's balancing act at its highwire pinnacle.

BJORK, interview
Uncut, October 2001

by Simon Reynolds,

She's not a bit how you'd think she'd be. From the public persona of song and video, you might reasonably expect effervescence, an explosive extravagance of self; at a bare minimum, vivaciousness. But Björk 2001 is surprisingly subdued.
She's also oddly awkward for a seasoned superstar who's been interviewed a gazillion times, nervously asking if I mind if she has something to eat. We're in a Japanese tea room a few yards from the rehearsal studio in Chelsea, New York, where she and her "band" – experimental electronica duo Matmos – are adapting the new album Vespertine for Björk's upcoming world tour of opera houses.

One symptom of her discomfort is an almost Tourette's-like compulsion to pull at her face – tugging at her cheeks, wiping her nose and almost-picking with little digs on the rim of the nostril. These tics go on for so long I start sneaking peeks to see if anything's lodged up there, some dangling boulder of bogey. But nope, clean as a whistle – two of the daintiest nostrils I've ever seen.

Over the next two hours, Björk is perfectly forthcoming, but there's this sense that she's wary, withholding herself somehow. In the past she's talked of being a warrior, and 'fierce' remains one of her favourite words. But 'flinty' seems a better fit for this new Björk. Seemingly made of the same stuff as Iceland's igneous landscape, she's like a pebble: small, but elementally obdurate. "Born stubborn, me," as she sings on Vespertine, an album that is all about sanctuary, withdrawal, and privacy.

Maybe this hard shell is something you acquire when you've been in the public eye for 25 years. Björk first became a star aged 11, when her album of pop covers was a smash in Iceland. "I didn't like being recognised on the streets," she says, nibbling at a tofu salad. "And I felt weird 'cos all I did was sing the songs. I only wrote one tune on the LP." Instead of doing a follow-up, she shaved her eyebrows and started an all-girl punk band. Spit & Snot, the first of four (some accounts say seven) bands she participated in before The Sugarcubes.

Icelandic punk had a different inflection – it wasn't fuelled by political rage (Iceland has no class system, claims Björk) or death-tripping nihilism. Instead, it was about overthrowing Anglo-American pop-culture imperialism. "Before punk, the only live bands were cover bands who'd sing in English. Icelandic punk was this explosion of live bands, all singing in Icelandic – a statement of pride. And it was very positive – happy punk. Nobody on heroin!" Post-punk music from overseas was almost impossible to get hold of, so Björk and her friends started an import record shop. "Everybody worked for free. It was the punk spirit."

After drumming in Spit & Snot, Björk played flute for the prog-rocky Exodus, then sang in another happy-punk outfit, Tappi Tikarrass (which translates as "smooth as a cork in a bitch's arsehole"). But Björk's most formative band, pre-Sugarcubes, was Kukl, an Icelandic post-punk supergroup that included future Cubes Einar Orn and Siggi Baldursson. "I'm a bit mushy about that band," she says, twinkling ever so slightly. "It was my most important school. People have described Kukl as 'prog-punk' and it was more complex than most punk: we wouldn't write anything in 4/4 or use major keys, 'cos we considered that 'cheap'. But Kukl was pretty noisy and dark, really grim chords."

Kukl recorded two albums for Crass' record label, but rather than anarcho-punk, the band were on a kind of pagan magick primitivist trip (Kukl translates as 'sorcery'), achieving an intensity Björk compares to The Birthday Party and Einsturzende Neubauten. "Einar would wrap the mike cord around his neck and pull it until he fainted. Jump into the crowd and get bones broken. I still meet people who say Kukl was like a religious experience. Either that, or the worst thing they ever saw."
Björk was also hanging out with Medusa, a collective of artists and poets who were trying to stage Iceland's own version of surrealism, with street performances and all manner of aesthetic terrorism. "Medusa was into changing society, through shock."

By 1986, she and husband Thor Eldon had a baby and a one-bedroom flat. "This became the meeting point where all these people would hang out. Kukl had exploded, the record shop went bankrupt. So there was all this collision and energy, and a lot of parties!" One byproduct of this was Bad Taste Ltd, a company initially intended to publish literature but ultimately focusing on music. The name came from Picasso's declaration that "the worst enemy of creativity is good taste". In mid-Eighties Iceland, says Björk, "a lot of art was just ripped off the Scandinavians...Very good taste, but we just didn't think it was Icelandic." The other byproduct of the Medusa/Kukl milieu was The Sugarcubes, who first formed to play at parties, "just music to get drunk to."

The name was not an LSD allusion but inspired by the surrealists' fondness for swigging absinthe with a sugarcube between the teeth. "We used to go to Barcelona and bring back illegal home-brewed absinthe. It's definitely a drug. I remember us getting drunk on it and walking through a plate glass window into a club – six of us straight through the glass and onto the dancefloor."

According to Björk, The Sugarcubes was a joke band – something to get pissed to, take the piss in. "But then the world took us seriously!" An understatement. Elderly readers will remember the maelstrom of purple praise that swirled around the Cubes in the months following 'Birthday'. Björk says they had "no clue" that the song – knocked out in a few minutes "for one of those parties" – would have so much impact.

'Birthday' introduced the world to That Björk Emotion – heart-bursting euphoria, a serotonin supernova of exultation, the sensation she once described (talking about early jungle) as "fierce fierce fierce joy...sort of 'I'm just too happy, I want to explode'." You can trace this oceanic rush of pantheistic awe running through her work, from Debut's 'One Day' and 'Violently Happy' to Homogenic's 'Alarm Call'. In the case of 'Birthday', the feeling came partly from the energy of the Medusa/post-Kukl milieu and partly from the birth of her son, Sindri. "It was written about a month after that. Just the most fantastic thing that ever happened to me...And kids in the street thought it was my little brother, kept asking me when my mum was coming home. It was summer and completely magical, this cocoon of... just love. Excellent!"

The Sugarcubes remained UK gods through almost-hits like 'Deus' and debut album Life's Too Good. But 1989's Here Today Tomorrow Next Week! started the backlash. The band's B-52s-ish/Lene Lovich-like new wave novelty side came to the fore, and people complained about the way Björk kept getting-upstaged by Einar's irritating "rapping".
Björk says the Cubes didn't give the tiniest toss about the backlash. "Because we'd been doing some sort of terrorism in Iceland for eight years previously, we were perhaps guilty of a little bit of arrogance," she says drily. "If it was Kukl getting slagged maybe we'd have been devastated. But The Sugarcubes was more about taking the piss. Only two members of the band were into music as the most important thing in their lives. For the other four, it was poetry. We thought it was going to be a party band for a couple of months, then it just kept going and we were, 'We're going to do another album?! Er, okay'."

Despite these professions of non-careerism, the third Sugarcubes album, Stick Around For Joy (1992), showed clear signs of compromise: this was a tamed and toned-down Cubes, brandishing a would-be hit single titled, haha, 'Hit'. It was but, in touring the album, the band lost interest in itself and scattered.

Finally, Björk struck out for solo stardom. She had already made forays outside The Sugarcubes, hooking up with 808 State for two songs, 'Ooops' and 'Qmart', on 1991's Ex:El. "Just out of hunger for good stuff, I'd started going to clubs when I was in the UK, 'cos the rock gigs were just crap," she recalls. "Very quickly I fell for 808 State, 'cos they were more rhythmically complex." Another UK techno outfit she liked was bleep'n'bass pioneers LFO, whose Mark Bell would later collaborate with her on Homogenic.

"I was going up to Manchester a lot, going to raves and clubs with Graham Massey and the rest of 808. That sort of scene seems to last a couple of years – you're in a small room and everyone's on their toes, anticipating what song's going to be put on next. And I was spoilt because 808 State knew all the places to go. I don't remember specific clubs – when you're with a gang of people, they just take you around. Plus, maybe I wasn't particularly sober!"

Björk started working on tunes for a solo album with Massey as early as 1991, but the songs, 'Army Of Me' and 'The Modern Things', demo-recorded in a single day at Massey's home studio, had to wait until 1995's Post to be completed. Harsh and bombastic, the Massey collaborations didn't fit the emergent Debut's lush, organic soundworld.

With Soul II Soul's Nellee Hooper at the helm, Debut offered a seductive hybrid of contemporary groove science and fusion-esque jazzual flava, laced with exotica (Talvin Singh's tabla) and just enough traces of Björk's quirky-scary intensity to stave off home-listening diva blandness. It was a monstrous success, but many believers felt this new Björk was a tad too innocuously chic – a Sade for the Nineties. Björk agrees: "I felt guilty about a lot of things I did on Debut. I was so insecure and shy with that album, but on Post I was braver."
Hooking up with collaborators from different cutting edges (Massey, Tricky, Howie B), on Post she created a smorgasbord that ranged from the symphonic grandeur of 'Isobel' to the icy stealth of 'Possibly Maybe' and big band retro-romp of 'It's Oh So Quiet'.

The title Post was evocative. Beyond its obvious meaning (the record after Debut), it suggested the idea of mailing reports on her existential whereabouts back to Iceland. "Most of the songs are about moving to another country...being a bit rootless and dealing with it," Björk said at the time. But it also evoked the notion of post-everything music: a fusion of 20th century sounds, from Stockhausen to Hollywood musicals and the rhythms of London's post-rave club scene.
London, Björk's new home, was crucial. Jungle had exploded from the underground, and

Björk was a convert: trip hop, post-rock and other hybrids were bubbling. Post has everything of the exhilarating turmoil of London during 1993-95: London as a crossroads in the musical traffic between America, Europe and the Caribbean. "There was a sort of Immigrants United thing going on with Post. I felt very strongly I was an immigrant, so I related more easily to people who were immigrants too – like Talvin Singh. We're sort of English, but we're not."

London's intensity is creative, sparking new forms with its densely circulating swirls of people and ideas. But the city can be wearing. Ratcheted up several notches by her post-Post celebrity, London "was getting tricky for me by 1996," says Björk "It was like when I was 11 with my gold record. I'd walk in the streets and everybody's staring at me, and you kind of inflate to this big size. I think I'm pretty crap at being a celebrity." 1996 was her annus horribilis, bookended by her February freak-out at Bangkok Airport, where she knocked down an intrusive reporter and repeatedly bashed her head against the concrete, and the September nightmare of a letter bomb from a psycho fan (who objected to Björk's engagement to a black man, drum'n'bass star Goldie, and who committed suicide after mailing the package).

Björk initially downplays the idea of 1996 as one long horror show: "There were basically 180 days in between the two incidents that were actually okay." But almost immediately she contradicts herself by describing how whirlwind fame did her head in. "To an extent the letter bomb was the tip of the iceberg," she says. There was an incident in which Goldie and ex-lover Tricky brawled in a New York nightclub, and then the break-up with Goldie.

Leaving London with the intention of sorting out who she was ("am I English now?"), Björk went to her drummer's villa in Spain for a weekend, and ended up staying six months, using his studio to record Homogenic. "I cancelled everything, because I craved to just make music. That's what I was into it for in the first place, not going to fancy parties."

Where Post was a grab-bag of styles, Homogenic reacted against this eclecticism. "Post was totally sincere, but afterwards I felt a little bit guilty – like, 'Wait a minute, what is your identity?' I wanted to figure out what Icelandic music might be – does it even exist? The title was about the music being just this one thing: volcanic beats and strings from the Icelandic string octet. Plus my voice."

In 'Joga', Björk summed up her new sound with the lyric "emotional landscapes". Homogenic's massive distorted beats sound geological, like continental plates shearing against each other. It evokes Iceland as the Earth's foundry, the (c)ore beneath the crust. "I was trying to refer to the lava and volcanoes with those sounds. There's nothing pretty about Icelandic nature, it's very stark. Homogenic is a warrior album – with a heart, not weapons."

We speed past the fraught making of Dancer In The Dark (her clash of wills with director Lars von Trier resulting in a vow to never act again) and Selmasongs, and move on to Vespertine, definitely not a warrior album (its working title was Domestika).

"I wanted it to be a love affair to the home, about creating paradise under the kitchen table," says Björk. "It's about creating peaks without outside stimulants...The kind of peaks you reach reading a book." In other words, "the opposite to all the explosive stuff" Björk is most famous for.

'Vespertine' means things that come out in the dark or flourish in winter. 'Vespers' also means evening prayer, which fits the semi-religious feel of songs like 'Aurora' and the use of choir through much of the album. "Being Icelandic, I'm definitely not into religions, 'cos they're authoritarian," says Björk. "But having been a proud atheist all my life, I was becoming interested in falling on my knees and just being humble. And for some reason I was listening to a lot of music that was a bit like prayers."

Perhaps representing a new post-superstar phase of Björk's life, Vespertine is about craving sanctuary and solace. 'Hidden Places' has a smudgy glow, like you're hiding under a blanket and the light's coming through the same colour. 'Cocoon' is even more intimate: Björk and boyfriend make love in the night, half-asleep, in "a saintly trance"; they "faint back" into slumber, then Björk wakes up again and he's still inside her. Björk's vocal – so breathy it crackles and sparkles, as if covered in the furry spikes of crystals forming in solution – virtually pulls the listener under the sheets with her.

A record about tiny epiphanies, Vespertine is riddled with "microsonics": the ultra-minimal texture riffs and rhythmic tics you find in techno sub-genres 'glitch' and 'clickhouse', from where she's drawn her latest cast of collaborators – Matmos, Matthew Herbert, Thomas Knak, Martin Console.

"I fought hard to keep the album see-through, like crystal. Instead of programming one beat you have to program 40 micro-beats. They have to be really small so they don't fill up the gaps, unlike Homogenic with its massive doof-doof beats. It takes much more work to do humble records than arrogant ones!"

The album's primary sonic colours are crystalline and prismatic – and that's down to harp player Zeena Parkins, an instrument called the celeste, and a music box Björk had specially made from glass rather than wood ("so it sounds more plunky"), with her own tunes scored on big brass discs.

If you don't know the connotations of 'vespers', Vespertine sounds like a precious stone or some medieval craft of glasswork. "I was thinking hibernation and frozen things," says Björk. "The album is frozen, like crystals. It's a winter album." Her best yet, it reminds me of the jackfrost wonderland of Cocteau Twins circa 'In The Gold Dust Rush', of the bejewelled coldness of Siouxsie & The Banshees circa A Kiss In The Dreamhouse. The glittering sound fits the album's idea of inner riches, the treasure people keep hidden inside.

"After meeting the most exciting people in the universe and getting very stimulated," says Björk wryly, "I got interested in the idea that instead of the exciting people being the loud, flamboyant ones, maybe it's the people who don't say anything for a week and then whisper three words."

So is Vespertine Björk mellowing as she gets older (she'll be 36 in November)? A Björk no longer defined by the rush of "fierce, fierce joy", but a more Zen-like plateau of calm elation? "I'm not sure. Sometimes I think something's happening 'cos I'm getting older, and then a week later I wanna hear thrash metal!"

2010-02-24T11:01:00.000-08:00

KATE BUSH
Melody Maker, 1993

by Simon Reynolds

Kate Bush is an English original. In 1978, when her debut single
"Wuthering Heights" hit Number One in the UK, her wavering,
starburst voice seemed to come out of nowhere. But only because it's
from that same un-American, un-rock'n'roll place as Johnny Rotten's
snarl or Morrissey's plummy plaintiveness. Like the above, Kate
Bush's singing is almost like 'English soul' (ie, nothing to do with
pseudo-American blue-eyed soul).

Exploding into fame at the tail-end of punk, Bush was initially
far from hip. Her sense of glamour, while outlandish and eccentric,
seemed closer to the conventionally feminine than the likes of
Siouxsie and Poly Styrene, while her florid art-rock, with its
frilly, sumptuous surfaces and lofty conceptualism, seemed to belong
with the middlebrow likes of Pink Floyd (whose Dave Gilmour was
instrumental in getting her career off the ground) and Peter Gabriel
(later a friend and collaborator). Songs like "England My Lionheart"
partook of the olde Albion nostalgia of progressive rock (Floyd's
"Grantchester Meadows", Genesis' "Selling England by The Pound").
Actually, Bush is half-Irish on her late mother's side, and thinks
herself as much Celtic as Anglo-Saxon.

But now sufficient time has elapsed since the punk v. hippy
wars for Bush to be reclaimed and acclaimed as part of the canon of
British-and-proud-of-it art-rock. And so the likes of Brett Anderson
of Suede rave about her in the same breath as Bowie or Bolan; Suede
play Bush melodramas like 'Wuthering Heights' as a prequel to
hitting the stage and singing ballads like 'The Next Life', in which
Anderson endeavours to scale Bush's stratospheric heights of vocal
excess. And as may prove the case with Suede, it's the Englishness
of Bush's singing that's prevented her from breaking America.

"I don't sing with an American accent," she admits. "I'd not
considered that as a factor before, but certainly a lot of English
singers do sing with an American accent. I used to love that about
Bryan Ferry, that he sung with such an obviously English voice, when
so few people did. I loved Roxy Music, really loved the first four
albums. I loved David Bowie circa 'Young Americans' too."

Hipness may have eluded her during punk, but with her first few
albums, Bush plugged into the same realm of suburban teen dreamlife
and angsty, arty intensity as The Cure (Robert Smith was once
described as "the male Kate Bush") and The Smiths did later. If she
lacked the street credibility that was de rigeur during punk and
post-punk, it's because she was busy exploring "the great indoors"
of her imagination, fuelled by visions from literature and
mythology. Bush's early music and image exude much the same kind of
wispy pre-Raphaelite feminism as Fleetwood Mac's Stevie Nicks
(another England-obsessed hippy chick): a wild and free femininity,
an autonomy achieved not through confrontation but elusiveness. A
nicer, girl-next-door-ier Siouxsie Sioux, Bush has used maquerade
and mystique as a way of tantalising but evading the male gaze (as
opposed to the demystification strategy utilised by she-rebels from
The Slits and Poly Styrene to Riot Grrrl). For a certain kind of
young woman, Bush's dressing up and fantasies of flying free was a
form of rebellion that spoke to them more keenly than punk's anti-
glamour postures and agit-prop polemic.

In 'The Secret History of Kate Bush (& the strange art of
pop)", a brilliant subversion of the star biography, Fred Vermorel
pinpoints suburbia as the well-spring of Bush's magick. He quotes
the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard: "If I were asked to name
the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters
daydreaming, and the house protects the dreamer, the house allows
one to dream in peace". Where Siouxsie sang songs like "Suburban
Relapse" which presented domesticity as a prison that drives women
mad, Bush was a homebody, cocooned in the bosom of her family, whose
encouragement allowed her to become the teen prodigy she was and
Renaissance woman that she remains. Home-loving, suburban, Bush has
never been much of a rock'n'roll character (rock being the sound of
the city, of leaving home, cutting the ties that bind).

"Being born in the back of a pick-up truck, yeah, that's
rock'n'roll...," she laughs. "I've always found it really ridiculous
that I'm doing what I'm doing, cos in some ways I'm really
unlikely."

Fred Vermorel also waxed lyrical about Bush's NICENESS, but
acknowledged that she sometimes seems to use it as a shield, fending
off intrusive questions, protecting her private space (one of her
most disturbing and perplexing songs is "Get Out Of My House" off
1982's "The Dreaming"). "She will neutralise you by dissolving her
prescence in a polite fog", Vermorel observed. A few of my more
pretentious or lofty lines of enquiry are deftly neutralised and
dissolved in this fashion. For instance, citing the host of female
friends who testified to me about the huge impact Bush's music had
on them as teenagers, I move on to ask her about the female-ness of
her art. But she snuffs out the woman-in-rock approach by
responding to the prequel: "if people get anything out of my music
that's fantastic, I feel very privileged to do what I like for a
living, it makes me feel very humble that people actually play my
records." Only later, in transciption, do I realise how expertly she
parried and quashed a line of enquiry that probably bores the pants
off her. Kate Bush is nobody's fool.

* * * * * *

Bush's new album "The Red Shoes" is a diverse affair, almost a
collection of singles rather than an 'album', ranging from a classic
Bush-style keyboard-based ballad like "Moments Of Pleasure" to a
futuristic funk-rock scorcher like "Big Stripey Lie". And she's got
a raft of illustrious guest players on board this time, 'big names'
like Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Prince.

"My guitarist [Alan Murphy] died a few years ago," says Bush,
now in her mid-thirties but remarkably ageless. We're sitting in a
North London film editing studio where she's putting finishing
touches to her directorial debut, "The Line, The Cross, The Curve".

"And there were a lot of tracks I wanted guitar in and I felt a bit
lost. So when I wrote a song I'd start to imagine who would be the
best guitarist I could possibly have. It was a bit of game at first!
But people were so responsive. It did concern me a bit that if I
wasn't using these people well, it would just come across as very
flash. Sometimes having someone who has a distinctive sound doesn't
always work very well in other people's music."

The subdued, desolate ballad 'And So Is Love' features Eric
Clapton and, on keyboards, Gary Brooker (ex-Procul Harum). "When I
was writing that song, it took on a certain flavour. Quite empty,
slightly bluesy. And I felt how wonderful it would be to have Eric
to play on it. What he played was so beautiful, it became a
question of finding other sounds that would suit the texture. I
love the Hammond organ, and I'd met Gary Brooker years ago on some
charity thing and I'd wanted to work with him."

Other guest players include Jeff Beck, the punk-hairstyled
classical violinist Nigel Kennedy, and the Black British comedian
Lenny Henry, all of whom Bush describes separately as "a bit of a
mate". Lenny Henry doesn't tell any gags, but does some rather fine
soul singing on "Why Should I Love You"--the same song to which
Prince contributes guitar, keyboards, bass and vocals, lending the
track a luscious Paisley Park feel. Apart from obviously having
some kind of mutual admiration pact, Prince and Bush share some
affinities: hippy-dippy mystical leanings, but more importantly, a
love of sumptuous arrangements, a delight in molding the exquisite
stuff of sound, frolicing in the studio playpen. Prince and Bush
both make records that are so luscious, tantalising and succulent,
they're almost edible.

"I think he's so talented," gushes Bush. "One of the few people
in this business who's very prolific, but very consistent. Again,
it was a bit of a whim, I was writing the song and I thought 'who'd
be nice to play guitar?'. We never actually met while doing the
track, only later. But that appealed to my sense of humour, sending
tapes back and forth."

Another track on the album, "Big Stripey Lie", is the kind of
futuristic funk-metal freak-out that the boy wonder might have
knocked out circa "Purple Rain" or "Sign O'The Times". Unusually,
it's Bush herself who does the screeching axe-work.

"I'm not one of those people who can pick up an instrument and
make a noise - keyboards are my instrument. But for a couple of
years I really wanted to play electric guitar. I had no interest in
acoustic, I just wanted to have a thrash. There was this heavy
metal wild man inside me that just wanted to come out!"

The song also reminds me a bit of the cross-generic
crush-collisions that a producer like Bill Laswell loves to throw
together (only less academic and sterile than his hybridology tends
to be).

"I do have a fascination with taking things that supposedly
don't go together and finding a way of making them go together. I
like playing with opposites a lot. The whole question of songs and
sounds and which ones go together and which don't - it fascinates
me."

"The Red Shoes" also sees Bush resume her periodic delvings into
non-Western ethnic music. The sprightly "Eat The Music" is the
result of a recent infatuation with Madagascar's folk music. She
first heard it through her brother Paddy, who hips her to a lot of
world music. (He plays 'fujare' and Tibetan singing bowls on "Lily",
another song on the album).

"If I hear things and think they're really great, it's hard not
to be influenced. I've always had an interest in traditional music.
Madagascan music is so fantastically joyous. And I really wanted to
do something that could hopefully use that joy but fit it into a
rock context. It was wonderful working with this Madagascan guy,
Justin Vall. His energy was extraordinary. Just like the music, so
very innocent and positive and sweet.

"Paddy's always listening out for traditional music. It
probably came from my mother, who was Irish. She was always
surrounded by traditional music when she was a kid. When I was
growing up people would come in and they'd just start playing a
tune. So there was always, in my early life, this thing of music
being treated as a joyous thing, part of life. Someone would pick
up a fiddle and everyone else would get up and dance." Bush mourns
the absence today of that festive, convivial, participatory approach
to music. "It's to do with our English temperament, it's hard for us
to learn to enjoy ourselves. In Ireland, people just play music all
the time cos they love it."

"The Red Shoes" also renews Bush's collaboration with the Trio
Bulgarka, whose Bulgarian harmony singing stems from a folk culture
in which music is intertwined with the prosaic textures of everyday
life. The Trio can sing songs about doing the laundry and make it
sound transcendental. "Well, not all of their songs are so trivial
as that," says Bush. "Some of the stories are really quite sad. But
yes, they can make you cry to a tune that's about making bread!"

Bush first called on the Trio's services for her
last album, "The Sensual World". Again, it was Paddy Bush who
turned her on to Bulgarian music, but it was Joe Boyd (legendary
producer of The Incredible String Band and other folkadelic weirdos
associated with Elektra, and founder of Hannibal, the pioneering
world music label) who hooked her up with the Trio, and equally
important, with a translator and an arranger. "I was scared,"
recalls Bush. "'Cos what they do is so... profound and so ancient,
and I felt naive in my musical ability. I didn't want to involve
them in some... pop song, y'know, and end up abusing their talents.
They're people with such integrity. Such lovely people. They have
such hard lives."

The everyday hardship of Eastern Bloc life led the Trio
Bulgarka to respond rather oddly to one line in "You're The Only One
I Want". It's a song about breaking up a relationship, and Bush
proclaims herself a free spirit who can go where she pleases 'cos
"I've got petrol in the car". "The Trio were most jealous, cos they
have to queue for 48 hours to get a gallon of gas. They had a
totally different way of looking at it!"

* * * * * *

Along with her "wispy" mystical leanings (in the past she's had
hit singles with songs about oddball mystics like Gurdjieff and
Reich), if there's one thing that makes Bush a love-or-hate,
adore-or-abhor proposition, it's her voice. For some it's swoonily
intense, a voice to drown in; for others, it's gratingly
over-the-top, frilly and overwraught. Bush's bursting, exultant
style is unique and unprecedented, and, as is the way with
originals, it's been a big influence on subsequent female singers.
Not that Bush appears to have noticed (indeed she likes to make out
she doesn't listen to much contemporary music). She's non-committal
when I reel out the roll-call of the indebted. These include Tori
Amos (whose piano-based melodrama owes a lot to Bush's early style),
Sinead O'Connor, 'kooky' Canadian singer-songwriters like Mary
Margaret O'Hara and Jane Siberry, and even a few post-punk
chanteuses (ex-Sugarcube Bjork, Liz Fraser of Cocteau Twins).

Bush has always loved to make an unusual voice even more
unearthly, by revelling in studio treatments and multi-tracking
herself into a disorientating polyphony. On the new album's
"Rubberband Girl", she lets loose a geyser of scat-vocalese mid-
song, a sort of horn solo for the human voice, then spirals off into
an eerie drone-chant. "A lot of those vocal experiments just happen
in the studio," she says. "But then a lot of the times I'm writing
in the studio, onto tape, as opposed to taking a song in with me."

From very early on, Bush made production an inseparable part of
composition. She's vigorously and flamboyantly seized on the
studio's possibilities for sound-sculpting. Surprisingly, given
that she's one of the few female artists to go so deeply into
studio-mastery, she's done hardly any production for other artists.

"I've had offers, but I've been too busy. I do love the idea of
helping someone else to make a record, 'cos it's a very difficult
process. The whole question of songs and sounds and which ones go
together and which don't, it fascinates me. You have to use very
strange language to describe sounds to musicians or engineers, like
'cold' or 'warm'. Sound's a bit like smell, in that it's hard to
describe without comparing it to something inappropriate. They say
that smell is most closely connected to the memory centre of the
brain, and I've always been obsessed with the fact that you can just
smell something and it'll take you right back. You can't even place
where it comes from, but you just know it's from someplace way back
in your childhood. And in some ways, maybe music does the same
thing."

Bush's interest in exploring the possibilities of the
studio-as-instrument, the importance she places on "chromatic"
timbres and textures in music, makes her very much part of the
British art-rock tradition. In particular, she has much in common
with Brian Eno. Both are fascinated by what Eno regards as the most
radical aspect of rock, the timbres, textures and treatments that
can't be scored with traditional notation, can only be gestured at
feebly with metaphor and simile. Eno too has pointed out the
affinities between smell and sound as sensory zones for which we
have no verbal map.

As it happens, Bush has "a lot of respect" for Eno.
"I think he's had a very big influence on the music business. The
album he did with David Byrne, "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts",
that's been incredibly... revolutionary. A lot of the sample-based
music that's happening now stems straight from that. Such a turning
point in music, the whole use of repetition. It was a big influence
on me too. It's a shame that 'My Life In The Bush' was so
under-rated at the time. But that's always the way: the innovators
tend not to have such big hits. And then you get people who copy
two or three stages down the line, who get huge hits and are hailed
as the new sound. "

Could this be a veiled allusion to Bush's own neglected
masterpiece, "The Dreaming"? While far from a flop, the 1982 album
was sufficiently avant-garde to alienate some of her audience, and
it didn't spawn many chart-toppers.

"I had bit of a rough time with 'The Dreaming' but I'm not
surprised really. It's kind of a weird album. But it was a very
important period for me, I just wanted to do something that meant
something to me and wasn't at all commercial. I was happy with what
we achieved, even though a lot of people didn't get it. It
consolidated feelings in me about doing things that felt right as
opposed to doing things so they'd be incredibly popular."

As well as containing her first concerted embrace of world
music influences (like the didgeridu-driven, aboriginal soundscape
of the title track), "The Dreaming" was also the album on which Bush
got to grips with sampling, in the form of the then expensive and
rather exclusive Fairlight. Nowadays samplers are cheap and
commonplace, and the sampler-delic sorcery Bush trailblazed is part
of the fabric of modern music, from hip hop to techno.

Appropriately, Bush recently found herself being 'sampled'. For
their rave hit "Something Good", British techno unit The Utah
Saints took a slice of vocal euphoria from her "Cloudbusting" hit
(off 'The Hounds Of Love'), and modulated it into a swooning loop.
Bush's mystic ecstasy ("I just know that something good is going to
happen") was transformed to evoke the raver's breathless
anticipation as the Ecstasy starts to come on strong. Perhaps
unaware of its full naughtiness, Bush approved of the song, and with
typical, almost thespian modesty, says she was "flattered".

* * * * * *

Coincidentally, the title track of "The Red Shoes" hymns the
trance-dental power of dance - an obsession that also inspired
Bush's directorial debut, "The Line, The Cross, The Curve".
Currently in the final throes of post-production, the hour long film
stars Miranda Richardson and mime Lindsay Kemp, (with whom Bush
studied dance in her early days of stardom). It's based on the same
fairy story as Michael Powell and Emerick Pressburger's classic
movie "The Red Shoes".

"It's just taking the idea of this shoes that have a life of
their own," Bush says of both the song and her film. "If you're
unfortunate enough to put them on, you're just going to dance and
dance. It's almost like the idea that you're possessed by dance.
Before I had any lyrics, the rhythm of the music led me to the image
of, oh, horses, something that was running forward, and that led me
to the image of the dancing shoes. Musically, I was just trying to
get a sense of delirium, of something very circular and hypnotic,
but building and building."

With its mix of acoustic instruments (mandola, whistles,
valiha) and synth-like keyboard textures, "The Red Shoes"
immediately made me think Bush was trying to make a link between
ancient and modern ideas of dance, pagan rites and techno-pagan
raving. The way that these primal modes of ecstatic trance-endence
have resurfaced in an ultra-modern hi-tech context --lasers,
strobes, 50 K sub-bass sound--suggests that these impulses lie
dormant in our collective unconscious or even genetic code. People
have instinctively reinvented these rituals despite, or perhaps
because, our culture in impoverished when it comes to forms of
communal release.

"Something very similar was on my mind, the idea of trance,
delirium, as a way of transcending the normal. Maybe human beings
actually need that. Things are very hard for people in this country,
maybe they instinctively need to transcend it. It's very much that
ancient call."

Has dancing ever had that ecstatic function for you?

"A couple of times, it has really made me feel like that. Of
course, just doing exercise puts you in a much better state of mind.
I can feel negative before I do a class, and I always feel so much
better afterwards. But that may simply be a question of getting
oxygen to the brain!"

The reason I ask was that you used to tell a story sometimes
about your childhood: how you would dance unselfconsciously to pop
music on TV, but then some visitors laughed at you, shattering your
innocence, and you never danced that way again. You even said: "I
think maybe I've been trying to get back there ever since."

"I do remember being incredibly unselfconscious, but it wasn't
that people laughed at me, it was that they came as an audience at
one point. And suddenly being observed made me terribly
self-conscious. I was only 3 or 4 and I would dance to any music.
But children all reach that point where they become self-conscious
about things that are obviously extremely natural to them. And then
you either never get back there, or you spend a lot of time trying
to recover it."

* * * * * *

This longing for lost innocence is a thread running through
Bush's oeuvre. The genderless protagonist of "In Search Of Peter
Pan" (from 1978's "Lionheart"), keeps a picture of Peter Pan in a
locket, as a symbol of the limitless imagination and fantastical
dreams of chilhood, which he knows he's about to lose as adulthood
looms. Some critics have seen J.M. Barrie's immortal boychild as
androgynous (before the calamity of puberty, which Peter Pan never
suffers, the sexes aren't so differentiated, which is why the Riot
Grrrls so often mourn the lost invincible tomboy of prepubescence).
As it happens, androgyy remains an obsession for Kate Bush (another
Suede connection!), and surfaces on the new record with "Eat The
Music". The song's crux is the lines: "he's a woman at heart/and I
love him for that/let's split him open/like a pomegranate/insides
out/all is revealed/not only woman bleed".

"It's playing with the idea of opening people up," explains
Bush, "And the idea of the hidden femininity in a man, and the man
in a woman. I do think androgyny is a world movement. Whether people
are consciously controlling it or not, it's what's happening.
Although in some ways it's extremely confusing, it's got to be
positive in the long run. It seems such a shame that men and women
don't help each other. Maybe that's a naive thing to say, but
they're always working against each other. The main thing I'm aware
of is, in terms of growing awareness, is the fact that the 'anima'
and 'animus'" - she's referring to Carl Jung's feminine and
masculine archetypes -"is quite a popular conception now."

Back in 1978, Bush declared: "when I'm at the piano writing a
song, I like to feel I'm a man, not physically but in the areas they
explore".

"I do remember saying that I didn't necessarily feel like a
woman," she says now. "If you have a subject matter for a song, you
pretend to be that character. It's one big make-up and dressing up
game. Not so much now, but early on, I did write songs from a man's
point of view, or even from an object's point of view".

While the 1978 quote may simply reflect the lack of female role
models in the prog-rock/art-rock field to which Bush aspired, it
suggests to me another idea: that pop is androgynising. It's a space
which in which either gender can appropriate the other gender's
"privileges": men can be hyper-emotional and vulnerable, women can
seize the creative reins, be self-aggrandising, aggressive,
larger-than-life, loud. Is pop, at its best, a utopian space in
which the limits of gender and physical identity are transcended?

"That's what all art's about - a sense of moving away from
boundaries that you can't, in real-life. Like a dancer is always
trying to fly, really - to do something that's just not possible.
But you try to do as much as you can within those physical
boundaries. All art is like that: a form of exploration, of making
up stories. Writing, film, sculpture, music: it's all make believe,
really."

KATE BUSH
Pulse magazine, 1993

by Simon Reynolds

Kate Bush is very... unlikely. A teen prodigy, she
rocketed to the pinnacle of the British charts with her 1978
debut, "Wuthering Heights", a very... unlikely pop single
inspired by the Gothic/Romantic novel. Her keening,
cloudbusting warble ("it's meeee, I'm Katheeeee") immediately
marked her out as an original. Over the next few years,
Bush's florid art-pop, outlandish image and lofty lyrical
concerns won her a devout cult following, while a larger mass
audience was seduced by pop hits like "The Man With The Child
In His Eyes". If her feminine glamour and the lavish
loveliness of her music prompted sneers from critics (punk
was all the rage), Bush connected with the imagination of
suburban youth, and particularly with the fantasy life of
introspective young women. Her albums, "The Kick Inside" and
"Lionheart" (both released in 1978), found a place right next
to Pink Floyd's 'Dark Side Of The Moon' and Genesis' "The
Lamb Lies Down On Broadway' in every small-town dreamer's
collection.

Kate Bush gradually whittled away her mass popularity
by pursuing an increasingly experimental course, a tendency
that surfaced on 1980's 'Never for Ever' and the harrowing
nuclear-Armageddon scenario of the single "Breathing", and
blossomed with the extravagantly uncompromising 1982 album
"The Dreaming". Bush faded from public view for a while,
then returned to enjoy a second phase of pop stardom with the
ecstatic lyricism of singles like "Running Up That Hill"
(from 1985's "The Hounds Of Love") and 'The Sensual World'
(from the 1989 LP of the same title). And for the first time,
Bush began to make an impression in America, hitherto rather
baffled and bemused by her Englishness and arty-ness.

Her new LP "The Red Shoes" could be the one to break her
big over here. It's a diverse affair, almost a collection of
singles rather than an 'album', ranging from a classic Bush-
style keyboard-based ballad like "Moments Of Pleasure" to a
futuristic funk-rock scorcher like "Big Stripey Lie", which
sees Bush wrenching out some feral noise-guitar. And it
surely won't hurt that she's got a raft of illustrious guest
players on board this time, 'big names' like Eric Clapton,
Jeff Beck and Prince.

"My guitarist [Alan Murphy] died a few years ago," says
Bush, now in her mid-thirties but remarkably ageless. We're
sitting in a North London film editing studio where she's
putting finishing touches to her directorial debut, "The
Line, The Cross, The Curve" (see side panel). "And there
were a lot of tracks I wanted guitar in and I felt a bit
lost. So when I wrote a song I'd start to imagine who would
be the best guitarist I could possibly have. It was a bit of
game at first! But people were so responsive. It did concern
me a bit that if I wasn't using these people well, it would
just come across as very flash. Sometimes having someone who
has a distinctive sound doesn't always work very well in
other people's music."

The subdued, desolate ballad 'And So Is Love' features
Eric Clapton and, on keyboards, Gary Brooker (ex-Procul
Harum). "When I was writing that song, it took on a certain
flavour. Quite empty, slightly bluesy. And I felt how
wonderful it would be to have Eric to play on it. What he
played was so beautiful, it became a question of finding
other sounds that would suit the texture. I love the Hammond
organ, and I'd met Gary Brooker years ago on some charity
thing and I'd wanted to work with him."

Other guest players include Jeff Beck, the punk-coiffed
classical violinist Nigel Kennedy, and the Black British
comedian Lenny Henry, all of whom Bush describes separately
as "a bit of a mate". Lenny Henry doesn't tell any gags,
but does some rather fine soul singing on "Why Should I Love
You"--the same song to which Prince contributes guitar,
keyboards, bass and vocals, lending the track a distinctly
Paisley Park feel. Apart from obviously having some kind of
mutual admiration pact, Prince and Bush share some
affinities: hippy-dippy mystical leanings, but more
importantly, a love of sumptuous arrangements, a delight in
molding the exquisite stuff of sound, frolicing in the studio
playpen. Prince and Bush both make records that are so
luscious, tantalising and succulent, they're almost edible.

"I think he's so talented," gushes Bush. "One of the few
people in this business who's very prolific, but very
consistent. Again, it was a bit of a whim, I was writing
the song and I thought 'who'd be nice to play guitar?'. We
never actually met while doing the track, only later. But
that appealed to my sense of humour, sending tapes back and
forth."

"The Red Shoes" also sees Bush resume her periodic
delvings into non-Western ethnic music. The sprightly "Eat
The Music" is the result of a recent infatuation with
Madagascar's folk music. She first heard it through her
brother Paddy, who hips her to a lot of world music. (He
plays 'fujare' and Tibetan singing bowls on "Lily", another
song on the album).

"If I hear things and think they're really great, it's
hard not to be influenced. I've always had an interest in
traditional music. Madagascan music is so fantastically
joyous. And I really wanted to do something that could
hopefully use that joy but fit it into a rock context.
It was wonderful working with this Madagascan guy, Justin
Vall. His energy was extraordinary. Just like the music, so
very innocent and positive and sweet.

"Paddy's always listening out for traditional music. It
probably came from my mother, who was Irish. She was always
surrounded by traditional music when she was a kid. When I
was growing up people would come in and they'd just start
playing a tune. So there was always, in my early life, this
thing of music being treated as a joyous thing, part of life.
Someone would pick up a fiddle and everyone else would get up
and dance." Bush mourns the absence today of that festive,
convivial, participatory approach to music. "It's to do with
our English temperament, it's hard for us to learn to enjoy
ourselves. In Ireland, people just play music all the time
cos they love it."

"The Red Shoes" also renews Bush's collaboration with
the Trio Bulgarka, whose Bulgarian harmony singing stems from
a folk culture in which music is intertwined with the prosaic
textures of everyday life. The Trio can sing songs about
doing the laundry and make it sound transcendental. "Well,
not all of their songs are so trivial as that," says Bush.
"Some of the stories are really quite sad. But yes, they can
make you cry to a tune that's about making bread!"

Bush first called on the Trio's services for her
last album, "The Sensual World". Again, it was Paddy Bush
who turned her on to Bulgarian music, but it was Joe Boyd
(legendary producer of The Incredible String Band and other
folkadelic weirdos associated with Elektra, and founder of
Hannibal, the pioneering world music label) who hooked her up
with the Trio, and equally important, with a translator and
an arranger. "I was scared," recalls Bush. "'Cos what they do
is so... profound and so ancient, and I felt naive in my
musical ability. I didn't want to involve them in some...
pop song, y'know, and end up abusing their talents. They're
people with such integrity. Such lovely people. They have
such hard lives."

The everyday hardship of Eastern Bloc life led the Trio
Bulgarka to respond rather oddly to one line in "You're The
Only One I Want". It's a song about breaking up a
relationship, and Bush proclaims herself a free spirit who
can go where she pleases 'cos "I've got petrol in the car".
"The Trio were most jealous, cos they have to queue for 48
hours to get a gallon of gas. They had a totally different
way of looking at it!"

There's a similar soundclash of folk traditionalism and
modern studio artistry on the title track, "The Red Shoes",
where acoustic textures (mandolo, whilstes, valiha) rub
up against synthesisers. The effect suggests that Bush was
trying to make connections between ancient and modern ideas
of dance, between the Celtic jig-and-reel and the techno-
pagan rites of raving. "I was trying to get a sense of
delirium, of something very circular and hypnotic, but
building and building, so that you transcend the normal.

With its dervish-whirling frenzy, the song is vaguely
evocative of the Tarantella, in which angst-racked young
Italian women would dance away the heartache, dance their way
out of their "constrictions" (as Funkadelic put it in "One
Nation Under A Groove"). Dancing has sometimes had that same
trance-endent function for Bush. Earlier in her career, she
used to relate an anecdote about how, as a small child, she
would dance whenever pop music came on TV, quite
unselfconsciously. But one day, some family friends saw her
and laughed, shattering her innocence, and "from that moment
I stopped doing it. I think maybe I've been trying to get
back there ever since".

"I remember being incredibly unselfconscious," says Bush
now, "but it wasn't that people laughed at me, so much that
they came as an audience, and it made me self-conscious that
suddenly I was being observed. I was only 3 or 4 and I would
dance to anything. Children all reach that point where they
become self-conscious about things that are obviously
extremely natural to them. and then you either never get back
there, or you spend a lot of time trying to recover it."

A yearning to recover lost innocence, to attain a state
of grace and easy connection with the world, is something of
thread running through Bush's work, from her early obsession
with the 'eternal child' Peter Pan to the spiritual and
religious allusions that still pepper her lyrics (in the past
she's had hit singles inspired by oddball mystics like
Gurdjieff and Reich). Although Bush is too "wary of
doctrines" to align herself with any particular belief
system, she admits that she's something of a seeker. On the
new album, "The Song Of Solomon" is inspired by the famously
sensual and erotic passages from the Bible, while "Lily" is
riddled with apocalyptic imagery: "unveil to us the face of
the true Spiritual Son", ""walking in the Veil of Darkness" .
The song was written as gift to its namesake, a "very dear
and a wise lady" who helped Bush through a "rough time" (a
veiled reference to the death of her mother Hannah, to whom
'The Red Shoes' is dedicated). And it's the real Lily who
recites the song's first verse.

"She's one of those ladies who has gifts, and she's very
giving. She believes very strongly in angels, in a way I've
not really experienced before. My concept of angels comes
from when I was a child. But the way she understands angels
is not like that at all, she sees them as very powerful,
helpful forces - a bit like that film 'Wings Of Desire'. And
angels are something that are coming forward in the public
consciousness, in films and art - don't you think?"

* * * * *

Along with her "wispy" mystical leanings, if there's one
thing that makes Bush a love-or-hate, adore-or-abhor
proposition, it's her voice. For some it's swoonily intense,
a voice to drown in; for others, it's gratingly over-the-top,
frilly and overwraught. Bush's bursting, exultant style is
unique and unprecedented, and, as is the way with originals,
it's been a big influence on subsequent female singers. Not
that Bush appears to have noticed (indeed she likes to make
out she doesn't listen to much contemporary music). She's
non-committal when I reel out the roll-call of the indebted.
These include Tori Amos (whose piano-based melodrama owes a
lot to Bush's early style), Sinead O'Connor, 'kooky' Canadian
singer-songwriters like Mary Margaret O'Hara and Jane
Siberry, and even a few post-punk chanteuses (ex-Sugarcube
Bjork, Liz Fraser of Cocteau Twins).

Bush has always loved to make an unusual voice even
more unearthly, by revelling in studio treatments and multi-
tracking herself into a disorientating schizo-chorale
polyphony. On the new album's "Rubberband Girl", she lets
loose a geyser of scat-vocalese mid-song, a sort of horn solo
for the human voice, then spirals off into an eerie drone-
chant roundelay. "A lot of those vocal experiments just
happen in the studio," she says. "But then a lot of the times
I'm writing in the studio, onto tape, as opposed to taking a
written song in with me."

From very early on, Bush made production an inseparable
part of composition. She's vigorously and flamboyantly seized
on the studio's possibilities for sound-sculpting.
Surprisingly, given that she's one of the few female artists
to go so deeply into studio-mastery, she's done hardly any
production for other artists.

"I've had offers, but I've been too busy. I do love the
idea of helping someone else to make a record, 'cos it's a
very difficult process. The whole question of songs and
sounds and which ones go together and which don't, it
fascinates me. You have to use very strange language to
describe sounds to musicians or engineers, like 'cold' or
'warm'. Sound's a bit like smell, in that it's hard to
describe without comparing it to something inappropriate.
They say that smell is most closely connected to the memory
centre of the brain, and I've always been obsessed with the
fact that you can just smell something and it'll take you
right back. You can't even place where it comes from, but you
just know it's from someplace way back in your childhood.
And in some ways, maybe music does the same thing."

Bush's interest in exploring the possibilities of the
studio-as-instrument, the importance she places on
"chromatic" timbres and textures in music, makes her very
much part of the British art-rock tradition. In particular,
she has much in common with Brian Eno (his first band, Roxy
Music, was a childhood favourite of Bush's). Both are
fascinated by what Eno regards as the most radical aspect of
rock, the timbres, textures and treatments that can't be
scored with traditional notation, can only be gestured at
feebly with metaphor and simile. Eno too has pointed out the
affinities between smell and sound as sensory zones for which
we have no verbal map.

As it happens, Bush has "a lot of respect" for Eno.
"I think he's had a very big influence on the music business.
The album he did with David Byrne, "My Life In The Bush Of
Ghosts", that's been incredibly... revolutionary. A lot of
the sample-based music that's happening now stems straight
from that. Such a turning point in music, the whole use of
repetition. It was a big influence on me too. It's a shame
that 'My Life In The Bush' was so under-rated at the time.
But that's always the way: the innovators tend not to have
such big hits. And then you get people who copy two or three
stages down the line, who get huge hits and are hailed as the
new sound. "

Could this be a veiled allusion to Bush's own neglected
mistress-piece, "The Dreaming"? While far from a flop, the
1982 album was sufficiently avant-garde to alienate some of
her audience, and it didn't spawn many chart-toppers.

"I had bit of a rough time with 'The Dreaming' but I'm
not surprised really. It's kind of a weird album. But it was
a very important period for me, I just wanted to do something
that meant something to me and wasn't at all commercial. I
was happy with what we achieved, even though a lot of people
didn't get it. It consolidated feelings in me about doing
things that felt right as opposed to doing things so they'd
be incredibly popular."

As well as containing her first concerted embrace of
world music influences (like the didgeridu-driven, aboriginal
soundscape of the title track), "The Dreaming" was also the
album on which Bush got to grips with sampling, in the form
of the then expensive and rather exclusive Fairlight.
Nowadays samplers are cheap and commonplace, and the
sampladelic sorcery Bush trailblazed is part of the fabric of
modern music, from hip hop to techno. Appropriately, Bush
recently found herself being 'sampled'. For their rave hit
"Something Good", British techno unit The Utah Saints took a
slice of vocal euphoria from her "Cloudbusting" hit (off 'The
Hounds Of Love'), and modulated it into a swooning loop.
Bush's mystic ecstasy ("I just know that something good is
going to happen") was transformed to evoke the raver's
breathless anticipation as the Ecstasy starts to come on
strong. Perhaps unaware of its full naughtiness, Bush
approved of the song, and with typical, almost thespian
modesty, says she was "flattered".

These days, of course, it's hip to declare that you
always liked Kate Bush. But when she started out, she was
very much identified with progressive rock (Pink Floyd's Dave
Gilmour helped kickstart her career, and she's long been a
close friend with ex-Genesis art-rocker Peter Gabriel).
While Bush's success dwarfed most of the punk bands,
critically she suffered somewhat from punk's overhaul of
values, which decreed that social realism and raucous
minimalism was where it was at, and Bush-style conceptualism
and sonic maximalism was passe. For many, Bush was a bit of
a hippy chick, a throwback.

"It was one of those points in time when stuff was being
thrown up, and it was quite incongruous, me turning up at the
same time," she remembers. "At that time, there was a certain
over-the-topness that needed to be expressed by a lot of
people. But I did like a lot of punk music at the time. It
an important period of music, it shook things up a bit."

Looking back, it's now possible to reappraise Bush as
a sort of nicer, more palatable version of Siouxsie Sioux,
the punk Ice Queen. They share a similar piercing, banshee-
like vocal style, a similar delight in ransacking history's
wardrobe for striking images, a similar blend of proto-
feminist strength and feminine mystique. Unlike the rock
tomboys (from Joan Jett to L7), who emulate cock-rock
mastery, the likes of Bush and Siouxsie use mystery as a
weapon. Like Stevie Nicks' Welsh witch "Rhiannon", they
elude and evade the male gaze, even as they enthrall it.

Which is why so many teenage girls in the late Seventies
and early Eighties fixated on Bush or Siouxsie (and sometimes
even both). With her interest in literary and mythological
archetypes of wild women, Bush connects with that part of
female experience that involves adventures in "the great
indoors". Where boys go wild in the streets, girls more often
roam the wilderness of their imagination.

Talking to female friends, I discovered that Kate Bush
had much the same formative effect on them as someone like
Johnny Rotten/Lydon had on me. There are some parallels
between Bush and the ex-Pistol: the influence of a Catholic
mother; the fact that Bush was a Pink Floyd protege, whilst
Rotten was wearing a Pink Floyd T-Shirt when he first met his
svengali Malcolm McLaren. Admittedly, Rotten had scrawled
'I Hate..." on top in biro, but he must have liked them
once (his tastes in prog, glam and art-rock were otherwise
remarkably close to the young Bush's). There's even a
parallel between Public Image Limited's experimental 1981
album "Flowers Of Romance" and Bush's "The Dreaming": both
Lydon and Bush messed around with a palatte of exotic, non-
rock instruments, and there are remarkably similar stories
about them devoting days to extracting strange percussive
sounds by bashing together unlikely objects.

But what they really have in common is the originality
and sheer Englishness of their voices - Rotten's Dickensian
snarl, Bush's quivery stratospherics, were both defiantly un-
American. So now that the punk versus prog wars have long
since faded, it's possible for a new Brit-and-proud-of-it
band like Suede (current ringleaders of a 'Yanks go Home'
anti-grunge backlash) to talk of loving the Pistols, Kate
Bush and Bowie all in the same breath.

Bush doesn't respond too well to questions of gender,
perhaps wary or plain bored of the 'women-in-rock' fix, but
she is very interested in androgyny (an Anglo-pop tradition
recently revived by Suede). In "Eat the Music", she
celebrates the fact that "not only women bleed". "It was
just playing with the idea of opening people up, the idea of
the femininity in a man that's hidden, and the man in a
woman," she says. In fact, Bush believes that there's "a
world movement towards androgyny. Whether people are
consciously controlling it, or not, I do think it's what's
happening. The main thing I'm aware of is that the concept
of 'anima' and 'animus'" (she's referring to Carl Jung's
female and male archetypes) "has entered the public
imagination in quite a big way. Then there's the way people
are dressing too. I think it's very positive. It's seems
such a shame that men and women don't help each other, that
they're always working against each other."

Back in 1978, Bush confessed that "when I'm at the piano
writing a song, I like to think I'm a man, not physically but
in the areas that they explore." While this may simply be an
indication of the extent to which Bush was venturing into a
field - art-rock - almost totally barren of female role
models, it also suggests that pop is a space for androgyny,
for playing with gender and transcending limits. A utopian
space.

"That's what all art's about - a sense of moving away
from boundaries that you can't, in real life. Like a dancer
is always trying to fly, really. To do something that's just
not possible. But you do as much as you can within those
physical boundaries. All art is like that, a form of
exploration, of making up stories. Stories, film, sculpture,
music: it's all make believe, really."

SIDE PANEL: THE FILM

The title of Kate Bush's new album is a tribute to the
late film-maker Michael Powell, who, in partnership with
Emerick Pressburger, made "The Red Shoes" and other classic
British movies like 'Black Narcissus', 'The Life and Death of
Colonel Blimp', 'A Matter Of Life and Death' and 'Peeping
Tom'. Confusingly, Bush is making her directorial debut with
'The Line, The Cross, The Curve', based on the same fairy
story as "The Red Shoes".

"I'm a big fan of Michael Powell's films. They're just
very lovely - very sumptuous in their look, but very human as
well. There's this lovely sort of heart all the way through
his stuff. I also think he had a really wonderful attitude
to women, they're always portrayed as women AND as people. I
was very lucky in that I got to meet him just before he died,
and he was such a lovely person. He left quite a big
impression on me. My film is nothing like his film 'The Red
Shoes' really, but it's based on the same idea of these shoes
that have a life of their own, and if you're unfortunate
enough to put them on, you're just going to dance and dance.
It's almost like the idea that you're possessed by dance."

For 'The Line, The Cross, The Curve' Bush hooked up with
two of her heroes, the dancer and mime Lindsay Kemp (with
whom she used to study with in her early days of pop
stardom), and actress Miranda Richardson (Oscar-nominated
star of "The Crying Game"). "I just think she's one of the
best actresses we've got," gushes Bush. "I'm just so pleased
she got involved."

The hour long film was made with amazing swiftness. "It
was written and rehearsed in a couple of months, and took
three weeks to film - we should really have had twice as
long. It's been hard work, but really interesting for me,
really educational. For years I've been saying to friends,
'oh, I'd love to make a film', but I hadn't really planned on
doing a film like this, one that's partly based around tracks
from the album. I would like a shot at making a proper film
one day. See, I'm not really sure if there's a a lot of
opportunities to show short films like 'The Line, The Cross,
The Curve'. I've no idea where it will actually be shown, but
it would nice for people to get to see it in its entirety.
Just once!"

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Kate Bush as the child Cathy - a photo book by her brother

Fred Vermorel on Kate Bush

extracts from Fred Vermorel's piece (Village Voice/Voice Literary Supplement, October - November 2000) on his approach to renegade biography Fantastic Voyeur:Lurking on the Dark Side of Biography

"There was a metal fire escape up one side of her house. At the top was a black emergency door with a bar, the kind you find in cinemas. Such doors could be jimmied open. But was it alarmed? I often climbed to the landing outside this door and made a nest, camping on the iron slats. Sometimes her cats passed below and looked up at me. Would they tell? Sometimes she passed below, wheeling her bicycle for nocturnal sorties. Squatting there, refreshing myself with sandwiches and tea from a flask, I would listen to her dwelling as a lover sprawled over her body, detecting her heart."....

.... "There is also a sensuous and flirtatious aspect to biographical research: breaking seals and confidences, untying ribbons from bundles of documents, raising the dust of strangers' lives, dealing and unpacking other people's intimacies, deciphering their photos . . ."

.... "Sometimes I pressed my ear to the door and heard distant comings and goings. The gist of events and conversations, uncertain threads and emissions of her and her brother's lives. Explosions of hoohas, pounded stairs, slammed doors, flushing cisterns, music. It was as if they were putting it on to fascinate and tease me. Listen here, Fred! What is this noise here? And that one?"...

"All games I played while researching The Secret History of Kate Bush, an absurdist experiment to see how far the rock bio could be stretched without snapping. I adopted the persona of a mad professor so obsessed that he traces Kate Bush's genealogy back to the Vikings. And I also stalked the woman, as a phenomenological acting out of that uneasy and twisted boundary between fascination and obsession. Oddly (or perhaps not), the book became the bestselling bio of that singer. But what most struck me was how straight were the readings people made of this text. I still find discussions on the Internet debating whether "I" was "really" obsessed with Kate Bush, as well as allegations I not only had an affair with her, but that while researching her life I ran over her cat.

Far from running over her cat, I seduced both her cats, Zoodle and Pywacket. I'd watch her let them out the door at night and coo them over to my hiding place, where I'd stroke their grumbling fur. Her cats were my Trojan horses to carry the smell of the hand I caressed them with back into her house, into her very lap. "

... "The morning John Lennon was shot I woke suddenly around 4:15. Numbers were flashing through my head: a phone number. I jotted it down on a pad. Turned over but still couldn't sleep. Around seven I turned on the radio and heard the news. A few days later, out of curiosity I rang the number. Kate Bush answered."....

2010-02-15T08:59:00.000-08:00

Manifesto: A Century of Isms edited by Mary Ann Caws (Bison Books/University of Nebraska Press)

Village Voice, May 16 - 22, 2001

by Simon Reynolds

If writing is a pharmacopoeia (and why else read, if not to reach altered states of consciousness?), then the manifesto surely corresponds to the amphetamine. Ingest, and the world becomes wonderfully crisp and clear; you feel both a hunger and a readiness for action. Committed speed freaks often experience sensations of gnosis and revelation. The manifesto fiend reaches this state of grandeur through word magic alone. Perhaps they should really be called mania-festos: Only cranks and madmen are ever this certain about anything.

A chunky compendium drawing on the textual output of modernism's myriad sects, Manifesto pulsates with that special eureka! euphoria of those who believe they've located the right path to the future. Fittingly, it was the Italian futurists who peddled the manifesto rush in its purest, fiercest form, with their fevered calls for total aesthetic renewal in painting, music, sculpture, poetry, and even cuisine (Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wanted to replace pasta with more, ah, rigorous dishes, such as perfumed sand).

The Futurists glorified war, worshiped machines, and exulted in speed. Speaking of which, if you think my manifesto-as-methedrine analogy far-fetched, check this: The first words of Marinetti's 1909 screed "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism" are "We had stayed up all night." Anyone who's written to the end of the night knows about the eerie switchpoint that occurs round dawn's first glimmer, when the brain starts flooding your system with neurochemicals that induce a giddy triumphalist feeling. Futurist texts all seem to be written from inside that grandiose delirium: It's almost as if they became hooked on the body's own natural stimulants. Indeed, there's a persistent thread of imagery throughout the futurist oeuvre that exalts "feverish insomnia" and equates sleep with death and emasculation.

The futurists' rantings and ravings highlight a notable aspect of the manifesto, literally spelled out by the word's first three letters: MAN. With a handful of exceptions ("SCUM Manifesto" by Valerie Solanas, Guerrilla Girls, certain cells within the riot grrrl movement), this genre has tended to be dominated by men. Once again, Marinetti and company took this to the limit. Their language is riddled with erectile and ejaculatory imagery. The futurist exaltation of "the dynamic of the male vertical" is a barely concealed figure for a kind of priapism of the spirit. And "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism" climaxes, twice in short succession, with a trope of cosmic onanism: "Erect on the summit of the world, once again we hurl our defiance to the stars!" Word-as-seed, heedlessly spilled: Marinetti, prolific penner of manifestos and indubitably something of a wanker, left a sticky trail across Europe.

The bulk of this anthology stems from what editor Mary Ann Caws dubs the Manifesto Moment, 1909-19 (which, non-coincidentally, was also modernism's peak). Along with the usual suspects (cubism, dadaism, expressionism, vorticism, Bauhaus), Caws has gleaned a nice crop of lesser-knowns: face-painting wannabe savages the Rayonists, the witty Nunists, and the primitivists, whose Polish chapter is represented here by a little gem of an address to the world from one Stanislaw Przybyszewski, who calls for "streetfights with the beethovenists" and promises that if we only open our eyes, "then swine will seem more enchanting to us than a nightingale."

The language of the archetypal manifesto lies somewhere on the continuum between the aphorism and the slogan. Many of Caws's selections, though, lack the imperious or rallying tone. Gary Snyder's 1967 "Poetry and the Primitive," for instance, seems more like a brilliant essay about poetry's archaic origins in Paleolithic pantheism than a tell-it-like-it-is manifesto. Others, like the prose poems by Blaise Cendrars and Guillaume Apollinaire, are so abstract and imagistic, they are really embodiments of cubist aesthetic principles rather than their articulation. Not that the classic BAM-BAM-BAM style of manifesto, with its numbered decrees or bulleted points, is the genre's sole format. One entertaining subgenre is the fake dialogue, in which a fictitious interlocutor has the role of skeptic and Aunt Sally.

As Caws notes, the manifesto's essence is now-ness and new-ness. These calls to seize the time induce nostalgia for the days when exhibitions or concerts (like futurist composer Luigi Russolo's clangorous symphonies of "noise sound") could actually trigger riots in the audience; a time when the bourgeoisie was still capable of being épaté. The fervor of these texts seems to reach us from across an unbridgeable divide, which could be dated to approximately 1950. Caws's chronological chart at the start of the book shows that 32 of the movements included in the book were in full swing by 1918; of the remaining 19, there's only five from the second half of the 20th century. This suggests that in the postmodern era, the amphetamine emotions that accompany certainty, belief, and readiness-for-battle have faded away; ambivalence, doubt, what Fredric Jameson identified as "blank irony" have all conspired to disable the manifesto-mongering impulse.

If selection is a covert form of argument, this seems to be what Caws is saying. Actually, it only takes a cursory Web search to reveal the absolute contrary: One could almost say we are living through a new boom time for the manifesto. The Web allows almost anybody to nail a broadsheet to the virtual wall for all to see. And cyberculture's neophiliac tendencies lend themselves to the manifesto format: Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" and the many screeds issued by cyberfeminists, cyberpunks, hackers, extropians, and the like, none of which are included in Caws's collection. Another curiously neglected area is that entire realm of post-situationist writing that ranges from Hakim Bey to anarcho-surrealist pranksters like the International Association of Astronomical Artists. Music criticism has its own microtradition of aesthetic clarion calls: Classics of the last decade include Kodwo Eshun's Afro-futurist foreword to his book More Brilliant Than the Sun and "riot boy" band Nation of Ulysses's 13 Point Program to Destroy America (complete with echo-of-Marinetti diatribes against "sleep's supplicating arms"). Someone has even written a manifesto of avant-garde librarianship! And let's not forget the Unabomber.

All this is obviously well outside the remit Caws has set herself: modernism. But the inclusion of more recent material would have mitigated the sepia-tinted melancholy that unavoidably suffuses the book. As conveniently copious and endlessly fascinating as Manifesto is, perusing its pages is akin to strolling through a mausoleum of expired revolutionary enthusiasms, movements now immobile, and new days that never quite came.

2009-12-08T13:42:00.000-08:00

2009-12-08T13:39:00.000-08:00

2009-12-08T13:37:00.000-08:00

2009-12-08T13:35:00.000-08:00

2009-12-08T13:32:00.000-08:00

2009-12-08T13:28:00.000-08:00