MOOSE, XYZ
Melody Maker, July 5th 1992

by Simon Reynolds

You know, maybe the Scene wasn’t so bad after all. Sure, it churned out rapture by rote, but grunge has similarly turned rage into a cliché, and produced the same meager amount of precious music in the process. Right now, I’d gladly choose the shoegazers’ dazed wonderment and fragility over the shaggys’ bludgeoning belligerence anyday.

Anyhow, Moose have sensibly put considerable distance between themselves and the dismal figment with which they were lumped last year, with this C&W-scented debut album. XYZ is admirably ambitious. The melodies clearly aspire to (but don’t quite scale) the dizzy heights of lachrymose grandeur attained by Glen Campbell/Jimmy Webb ballads like ‘Wichita Lineman’ and ‘By The Time I Get To Phoenix’. The overall sound is like AR Kane attempting to simulate the tremulous, heart-strings-a-quivering arrangements of such Sixties pop-C&W, but using their swarm of ice-floe guitars instead of an orchestra. The result is a spectral avant-C&W that mostly works like a dream: there’s a real affinity between country’s lump-in-throat despondency and the shoegazers’ mumbling miserabilism.

‘Little Bird’ sets the tone, a happy-sad melody swathed in a gauzy miasma of mandolins, with a rubber-band bassline that’s pure homage to ‘Wichita Lineman’. ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ is candy-coated in acoustic cascades and rippling braids of pedal steel. Overall, gooey devotion is what Moose are about, rather than red-blooded desire. ‘The Whistling Song’ is all swoony glissades and dew-stippled cob-web and, yes, whistling. Then there’s a flustered cover of Fred Neil’s ‘Everybody’s Talking’", which doesn’t quite extinguish the memory of Nilsson’s Midnight Cowboy version. Slide One closes in epic style with ‘Sometimes Loving Is The Hardest Thing’: pang-laden strings and celestial vapour-trails of guitar form a slipstream of blurry majesty, like Bowie’s ‘Heroes’ meets George Jones.

On the flip, ‘Soon Is Never Soon Enough’ is the closest to conventional rock propulsion here; the model is possibly Exile On Main Street, but the candyfloss production impedes any real honky-tonk raunch. On ‘I’ll See You In My Dreams’, so hazy is Mitch (R.E.M.’s Murmur, Reckoning) Easter’s production, it’s like the song obscured in a dust-devil swirl of apple blossom. ‘High Flying Bird’ has one of the album’s prettiest out-of-time tunes and keening C&W-muzak strings. ‘Screaming’ is closer to the post-1988 radiance of Moose’s first and loveliest EP, a glad-foot gust of iridescence. ‘Friends’ is the least of Moose: it’s a ditty with a morose plod of a beat and Gedge-like vocals, although there’s nice acoustic embroidery as the song ambles into the sunset.

Finally, there’s ‘XYZ’ itself, the most successful fusion of the two sides of Moose’s schizo-aesthetic. It’s a desolate, ambient soundscape, a country homestead on the crest of the canyon. Whistling (again!) and Russell’s lonesome voice drift on the breeze, lustrous guitars peek through like shafts of sunlight after a downpour; the result is a gorgeously disorientating avant-MOR, like Eno at the Grand Ole Opry.

On the title track, Moose’s divided impulses (corny sentiment versus abstract expressionism, Glen Campbell versus AR Kane), which have coexisted rather precariously for much of the album, finally achieve glorious resolution. And the result is like nothing you’ve heard, right up there with Spiritualized’s ‘Step Into The Breeze’ in the annals of latterday bliss-rock.

Folks, this is one heck of a lovely record.

WHITE NOISE, An Electric Storm
The Wire, September 2007

by Simon Reynolds

The first time I ever heard of An Electric Storm was in the early Nineties, canvassing opinion for a list of the most extreme records ever, when an older colleague dimly recalled a “spectacularly out-there album by this band White Noise”. The band’s name made me expect a cochlea-scouring sandstorm midway between “Sister Ray” and Metal Machine Music, so when I picked up the first CD reissue a few years later, I was surprised to find my ears caressed by deliciously tuneful pop-psych ditties speckled with kooky synth-bloops. Things got significantly wiggier on Side Two admittedly, but still water off a duck’s back to a Faust fan.

An Electric Storm isn’t a ravagingly extreme experience, even by its own era’s standards, but it is one of the prettier peaks in the mountain range of British art-into-pop. Indeed White Noise instigator David Vorhaus’s initial motivation was pure pop: all he wanted to do originally was score a massive hit single. Chris Blackwell virtually bribed him to make an album instead, giving Vorhaus a 3000 pound cheque roughly equivalent to the proceeds from a Top Ten smash in those days of lousy royalty rates. As helmsman of Island, the leading progressive label of the era, Blackwell could see the direction rock was moving: the emergence of a head culture, longhairs seeking long-form, immersive experiences and disdaining the cheap thrills of the three minute single, whose instantness was now deeemed “immature”. By the time Electric Storm came out in 1969, the psychedelic poppiness of tunes like “Firebird” was already dated, a throwback to “See Emily Play” from two summers earlier. “Serious” rock had renounced the folderol of Sgt. Pepper’s-style studio artifice as child’s play and staged a post-Big Pink return to “organic” naturalism.

All the more reason to cherish An Electric Storm for going against the grain of the blues bores and country rock dullards and sticking with the studio-as-playpen spirit of ‘67. Alongside its art-into-pop credentials, this album is a superlative merger of science and music. As much an inventor of instruments as an instrumentalist, Vorhaus had studied for an electronics degree while simultaneously undergoing classical training in double bass. His partners Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson were key members of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (a name more evocative of craft’n’graft than rarified research, and rightly so, the Workshop earning its keep cobbling sound effects for the Beeb). They had also formed a very “white lab coats”-sounding organisation called Unit Delta Plus, dedicated to propagandising for electronic music in all fields of art and media.

Because the album’s surface is so disarmingly attractive, an element of historically-informed projection is required to fully appreciate the technical ingenuity and painstaking labor involved. According to Vorhaus, Electric Storm contains more edits than any other recording ever, a claim that’s unverifiable and most likely superceded in the age of virtual studio technology. But Vorhaus, Derbyshire and Hodgson were doing it the hard, old-fashioned way, manually rather than digitally. The 12 minutes of “The Visitations” took three months to snip’n’splice together. “Love Without Sound” is decked out with violins, cellos, and violas, except it’s an illusion artfully and effortfully spun by the budget-restricted group, the string sounds being Vorhaus-played double-bass parts which were then vari-speeded. Listen past the shapely melodies, and the songs are riddled with disorientating detail: pitchshifting beats that sounds like nothing so much as the woozy, melting breaks of 4 Hero’s Parallel Universe, drastically panned whooshes (stereophonic malarky was Vorhaus’s specialty), fluttery trails of sonic after-images and before-images, jarring rhythmic judders, and a myriad other sound-shapes that defy either description or forensic tracing of their provenance.

“Your Hidden Dreams” is an especially heady collision of pop and experiment, oscillating between the most beguiling of the album’s summer-of-67 melodies and
a bedlam of sound-synthesis and mixing desk mayhem (phased drum rolls, violently flickering fluctuations between left and right speakers). The lyric, sung by Val Shaw in her demure, cottonwool-soft voice, is an “under the pavement, lies the beach”-style appeal to free the imagination and re-enchant the world. Yet, like “Garden of Earthly Delights” by White Noise’s US counterpart United States of America, there’s an ominous sense that loosing the shackles of rationality and super-ego opens a portal to the dark side as much as portends paradise regained: “Let go your thoughts and be engrossed in strange scenes”, Shaw coos, “take me by the hand/a stranger in a stranger land.” When she finally sings “take me and you’ll begin to understand”, you wonder if this isn’t LSD “herself” speaking, a siren luring the listener into the psychedelic maelstrom.

The maelstrom arrives with “The Visitations”, although even here White Noise don’t totally abandon pop, thanks to a recurring dreamy-eerie melody that comes from the same place as “Old Man Willow” by Elephant’s Memory (the group playing during the Plastic Inevitable-style party in Midnight Cowboy). But the pastoralism alternates with interludes of shaking sobs and whimpers, and the song ends in disintegrated desolation, anxious female voices pleading “please don’t go” to a near-catatonic male who can’t stop slipping “back to my darkness”. Grand finale “The Black Mass: An Electric Storm in Hell” was thrown together in a single night after Island started making threats about recovering their 3000 quid. Essentially a tremendous drum solo played by Paul Lytton, then phased-to-fuck a la “Itchycoo Park”, its combination of extreme processing and jagged percussion (paradiddles like California Redwoods toppling) suggests a phantom genre, “free jungle”. Over this mind-maiming rampage of rhythm, lunatic screams shoot like black bats across the stereo-field.

Electric Storm is unavoidably date-stamped with its era’s follies. A baroque bordello colliding cutting-edge sound-synthesis and kitschadelic frippery, “My Game of Loving” has an orgy for a middle eight (actually, a mixture of a fabricated orgy and the gasps and moans of the real thing). How swinging Sixties is that? (The tune ends, wittily, with the sound of shagged-out snoring). Sometimes the record is just silly: “Here Come the Fleas” is more Spikes Milligan and Jones than Pierres Schaeffer and Henry. One foot in the brave new worlds of Germany's WDR and Paris's INA-GRM, the other in the already campy universe of Carnaby Street and The Knack... And How To Get It, White Noise could easily be enjoyed in that hindsight-wise mode of amused condescension so prevalent (and hard to shake off) in our retro-conscious culture. Even the most deranged moments of “Visitations” and “Black Mass” are simultaneously mindblowing and “mindblowing, man”, if you get me. Yet alongside its period charm and its oh-so-English charm (the well-brought-up voices of singers Val Shaw, Annie Bird and John Whitman sound like Daphne Oram’s nieces and nephew), An Electric Storm still retains charm in its original sense: magic. Above all, what endures is the spirit of curiosity, mischief, and discovery that animated its creators.

ISOLATIONISM, genre survey/thinkpiece
ArtForum, January 1995

by Simon Reynolds

In Brian Eno's original definition, ambient simply meant 'environmental'. It was music as decor, a subliminal accompaniment to everyday life; later, with Eno's On Land, it became psychogeographic music, an evocation of real or imaginary landscapes.

Ambient has assumed a different meaning in the last four years with the rise of ambient techno in Britain, Europe and increasingly America. Evolving out of the post-rave phenomenon of chill-out music, ambient has become a genre unto itself, based around albums more than 12 inch singles,and with its own stellar artists (Pete Namlook, The Irresistible Force, Future Sound Of London, Biosphere, The Orb). Whatever its stylistic debts to Eno, Jon Hassell, Harold Budd et al, this nouveau ambient is closer in spirit to New Age. Swaddling the listener in a wombing sound-bath, today's ambient means retreat from the environment, relief from the stresses of urban existence.

Inevitably, there's been a reaction against ambient's dozy, cosy pleasance, in the form of a sort of ambient noir. The Aphex Twin shifted from the idyllic, Satiesque naivete of early tracks like "Analogue Bubblebath" to the clammy, foreboding sound-paintings of his recent Selected Ambient Works Vol II. Aphex Twin and fellow ambient noir-ists like Seefeel and David Toop/Max Eastley have drifted away from rave and into the vicinity of "Isolationism". This term, coined
by critic Kevin Martin, describes a loose network of disenchanted refugees from rock (Main, Final, Scorn, Disco Inferno, E.A.R.) and experimental musicians (Zoviet France, Thomas Koner, Jim O'Rourke). Now all the above, plus another 13 avant-rock and post-rave units, have been corralled onto a landmark compilation, masterminded by Martin and titled Isolationism. It's the fourth in Virgin UK's
best-selling series A Short History of Ambient, which has ridden the crest of the chill-out boom; ironically, because Isolationism breaks with all of ambient's feel-good premises. Isolationism is ice-olationist, offers cold comfort rather than succour. Instead of ambient's pseudo-pastoral peace, it evokes an uneasy silence: the uncanny calm before catastrophe, the deathly quiet of aftermath.

Musically, Isolationism still shares many attributes with ambient.
First, the emphasis on texture and timbre: many tracks are a fog of numinous drones,
generated by effects-processed guitars, samplers or, in Thomas Koner's case, the
long decay of gongs. Second, the abscence of rhythm: if there's
percussion, it's either a metal-on-metal death-knell (Null/Plotkin's "Lost (Held Under)"), or gamelan-style texture (Paul Schutze's "Hallucinations"). Third, it adheres to Eno's dictate that ambient music should be uneventful. But instead of being lulling and reassuring, Isolationist repetition induces a pregnant unease.

One of the best tracks on the compilation is David Toop & Max Eastley's "Burial Rites (Phosporescent)". Toop is a critic as well as musician, and recently he wrote of how certain strands of contemporary music reflect "the sensation of non-specific dread that many people now feel when they think about life, the world, the future". He argued that this sensation was the other side of the coin to a sensation of non-specific bliss. Toop's bliss/dread notion fits with the way Isolationism turns ambient inside out, so that the sonic traits (hypnotic loops, amorphous drones) that normally signify a plateau of orgasmic/mystic bliss (in techno) or serenity (in ambient), induce the opposite sensations: slowburning panic, dissassociation, disorientation. With Isolationism, the abscence of narrative signifies not utopia but entropy, paralysis. But there's still a neurotic jouissance to be gleaned from this music. It's a victory over what Brian Massumi calls 'ambient fear' (the omnipresent low-level anxiety of the late 20th Century mediascape): by immersing yourself in the phobic, you make it your element.

Other Isolationist artists withdraw from paranoia-inducing reality into
a kind of sanctuary of sound. Unlike ambient techno (which models itself on that pseudo-womb, the flotation tank), Isolationism's idea of utopia is empty space. If this music evokes mind's eye images of unpopulated expanses, it's because it's purged of all the normal signifiers of 'humanity' or 'sociability' in pop (vocals, lyrics, a funky beat). Koner has recorded a series of albums inspired by Antarctica, while other Isolationist pieces induce reveries of deserts, tundra, subterranean grottoes, post-apocalyptic wastelands or virgin planets. Typically, the music suggests extremes of climate or temperature--Zoviet France's "Daisy Gun" conjures up the polar twilight in Siberia, Total's "Six" is as
astigmatic to the ears as staring into a blast furnace is for the eyes. The common denominator is inclement environments, hostile to human life.

What is the appeal (for Isolationist music does have an uncanny magnetism) of these
morbid reveries, so different from the oceanic surge of 'intimate immensity' that you feel when listening to cosmic rock or ambient techno? In The Intellectuals and the Masses, John Carey notes the tendency of modernist writers to fantasize about world destruction or mass annihilation, diagnosing it as a response to a verminously overpopulated planet. The empty landscape/soundscape seems intimately connected with a heightened, fortified sense of
individuality; it relieves the perennial avant-gardist anxiety about disappearing in the morass of the masses, about the purity of art succumbing to the mush and pap of an abject popular culture. In another sense,the Isolationist impulse, and its accompanying 'face the future, brave the unknown!' rhetoric, seems to
be a redirection, into inner-space, of perennial male longings for the frontier; a harsh bracing wilderness, fit for a rugged masculinity, and far from the soft-options of domesticity.

If rave and rock culture are about creating an ersatz community
in the face of atomisation, Isolationism, with its fetish for asocial spaces, is a renunciation of that illusory solidarity. This is music that embodies and embraces the 'death of the social'; music that's impelled by a near-monastic impulse to flee pop culture's noisy hyperactivity for a rigorous aesthetic of silence and sensory deprivation. At its ultimate degree, this becomes a kind of aestheticised death-wish. Perhaps the rock precedent for Isolationism is Nico's The Marble Index, on which the Ice Queen's nihilist hymns are framed in John Cale's vistas of vitrified sound. Nico seems possessed by Freud's nirvana-drive, a longing to revert to an inanimate, inorganic state, free of the irritation of fleshly, animal desire. Devoid of R&B's hotblooded vitality, The Marble Index is one of the whitest albums ever.

As wideranging as its parameters are, the Isolationist compilation
also seems a bit too Caucasian. Stretch just a little bit further, and it could encompass strains of modern black music whose aura of desolation and entropy verges on Isolationism, albeit reached via a different route: blues, dub reggae, and blunted rap. There's the burgeoning British genre of ambient rap [ie trip hop]: artists like Portishead, Massive Attack, DJ Shadow and above all Tricky (just check the titles of his brilliant singles "Aftermath (Hip Hop Blues)" and "Ponderosa"). And there's London's jungle scene. Jungle draws on hip hop, techno and ragga, but its sound and mood is more like dub reggae gone ballistic. Its hyperkinetic drum'n'bass is designed, like dub, for ganja-smokers. But devoid of Rastafarianism's utopian hope, jungle's apocalypse is faithless: dread without Zion. One strand of jungle, 'dark/ambient', combines treacherous breakbeats and minefield bass with soothing heavenly textures: a mish-mash that expresses, non-verbally, its audience's divided impulses--to lose themselves in amnesiac bliss and to stay vigilant, to flee and to face down "inner city pressure".

SELECT DISCOGRAPHY
Various Artists: Isolationism--Ambient IV (Virgin)
Aphex Twin--Selected Ambient Works Volume II (Sire)
David Toop and Max Eastley--Buried Dreams (Beyond)
Thomas Koner--Permafrost and Nunatak Gongamur (Baroni)
Tricky --"Aftermath" and "Ponderosa" (4th & Broadway EPs)
KK. Null/J.Plotkin--Aurora (Sentrax)
Zoviet France--Shouting At The Ground (Charrm)
Portishead--Dummy (Go-Beat)
Various Artists--Drum & Bass, Selection 1 and Selection 2 (Breakdown)