VARIOUS ARTISTS, Now We Are Ten
Observer Music Monthly, July 15 2007
by Simon Reynolds
For over a decade, a gentleman called Jonny Trunk has trawled the charity shops, bargain basements, and jumble sales, sifting the dreck for bygone oddities and queer delectables. Chasing down obscure objects of collector desire (often barely more than rumours) or stumbling serendipitously on unknown treasures, Trunk has then tracked down the music’s elderly creators (invariably languishing in neglect and penury) and prised the right-to-reissue from their bony, arthritic mitts.
Jonny Boy specializes in genres of marginal reputation: never-before-available soundtracks from horror movies like The Wicker Man, incidental music from kids’ TV programmes like The Tomorrow People, fey folk-pop, library music. His sensibility lies at the exact intersection of Stereolab, Saint Etienne and el Records, but if that sounds too Anglo aesthete tasteful, you’ve got to factor in Trunk’s penchant for period pornography. Not only did he reissue Mary Millington’s spoken word records, he made a brand new one, Wisbey’s Dirty Fan Male, which involved an actor friend reading out lewd letters sent (so the story goes) to Trunk’s sister, a soft-porn starlet. One appears as a hidden track at the end of this excellent compilation: “…I think that my tongue would have to be surgically removed from your mouth-watering botty…”
There’s a serious core behind all this dotty whimsy: Trunk’s most crucial excavations have been works by maverick composers like Basil Kirchin, Delia Derbyshire and Desmond Leslie, pioneers of a peculiarly English form of musique concrete and analogue electronica that often sounds like it was cobbled together in a garden shed. The late Kirchin features with the uncharacteristically wispy femme-pop of “I Start Counting,” while the even later Derbyshire briefly appears with a 37 second synth-interlude. But overall Now We Are Ten downplays electronics in favor of acoustic instrument-based soundtracks and light-on-the-ear Briz-jazz. It’s a shrewd move, resulting in an unusually coherent, all-the-way-through listenable compiliation, unlike the ragbags of out-takes and “famous guest remixes” labels usually put out to celebrate their anniversaries.
Highlights include the pastel-toned poignancy of “Dark World” and “Nature Waltz” by Sven Libaek, the fragrant waft ‘n’ flutter of Paul Lewis’s “Waiting For Nina”, and Trunk’s own “O Zeus” (meta-library music woven out of samples from that incidental music genre typically churned out of Wardour Street studios by session-men and moonlighting composers). If the cloying flute of John Cameron’s theme from Kes really requires the sour bleakness of the movie to offset its sweetness, Vernon Elliott’s “Clangers--Music” has a stand-alone magic, although if you’re of a certain age the tinkling harps and tootling woodwinds will inevitably flash you back to the charm and wonderment of watching all those Postgate Films. Rescuing figures like Elliott, Kirchin and the rest from history’s rubbish tip is a valuable feat of cultural archaeology, and Now We Are Ten is the sweet and softly sad sound of someone giving their own trumpet a well-deserved blow. Fnarr fnaar.
Friday, December 14, 2007
NEIL LANDSTRUMM, Restaurant of the Assassins
director's cut, eMusic, 2007
by Simon Reynolds
An odd thing happened to electronic dance music this decade: it stopped moving. Once so fixated on the Future, the culture became mesmerized by its own past. The Nineties, one long blur of relentless innovation, had piled up such an accumulation of brilliant ideas that it became tempting for producers to go back rather than keep pushing forward. At its laziest, that has meant mere recycling. But it can also entail the creative reinvestigation of styles passed over too quickly during those hectic, head-long Nineties. This is what veteran Scottish deejay/producer Neil Landstrumm is up to on Restaurant of the Assassins: revisiting early UK rave and reactivating its dormant potentials. It’s as if all that mental music churned out on white labels had been given a chance to mature, but without losing its energy or insanity. The result is a bewitching blend of brutalism and sophistication.
At the album’s core is the North East sound known as bleep: outfits like LFO and Unique 3 who created a uniquely British mutation of house that owed as much to electro's pocket-calculator melodies and dub reggae's floorquaking sub-bass as it did to Chicago. The title of “Big In Chapeltown” is a cute nod to the Caribbean district of Leeds with its sound systems and shebeens, while “Yorkshire Steel Cybernetics” has the characteristic Warp-circa-1990 blend of ominous stalking bass and skippy drum machine beats whose syncopation looks ahead to jungle rather than back to house. Restaurant isn’t one long bleep homage, though. Landstrumm plucks ideas from all across the 20 year span of UK rave, acid house to dubstep. Proto-jungle legends the Ragga Twins drop patois chat on “Reverse Rebel,” while “Assassin Master” recalls the dark, febrile strain of 2step garage purveyed by Groove Chronicles. Sometimes Landstrumm’s sound gets slightly congested with writhing detail, suggesting there’s a downside to today’s much-advanced technology (it encourages producers to tweak and twiddle, crowding the mix with clutter and clatter). But Restaurant gets emptier and more potent as it proceeds. “Lung Dub” sounds like the drum program was finished and then partially dismantled, its beats so spaced out they’re like blows coming out of nowhere. “The Underground King” is similarly stark, just bass-boom and percussion-simmer, until the jittery bustle of a section from The House Crew’s rave classic “Euphoria” takes over the song like a demonic spirit possessing a body.
With sample-ghosts like this flitting in and out the music, Restaurant of Assassins offers a form of time travel. Except it’s less a case of going back to some long-lost golden age of rave and more about bring the past into the present. What's really disorienting, though, is the fact that this music still sounds like the future.
director's cut, eMusic, 2007
by Simon Reynolds
An odd thing happened to electronic dance music this decade: it stopped moving. Once so fixated on the Future, the culture became mesmerized by its own past. The Nineties, one long blur of relentless innovation, had piled up such an accumulation of brilliant ideas that it became tempting for producers to go back rather than keep pushing forward. At its laziest, that has meant mere recycling. But it can also entail the creative reinvestigation of styles passed over too quickly during those hectic, head-long Nineties. This is what veteran Scottish deejay/producer Neil Landstrumm is up to on Restaurant of the Assassins: revisiting early UK rave and reactivating its dormant potentials. It’s as if all that mental music churned out on white labels had been given a chance to mature, but without losing its energy or insanity. The result is a bewitching blend of brutalism and sophistication.
At the album’s core is the North East sound known as bleep: outfits like LFO and Unique 3 who created a uniquely British mutation of house that owed as much to electro's pocket-calculator melodies and dub reggae's floorquaking sub-bass as it did to Chicago. The title of “Big In Chapeltown” is a cute nod to the Caribbean district of Leeds with its sound systems and shebeens, while “Yorkshire Steel Cybernetics” has the characteristic Warp-circa-1990 blend of ominous stalking bass and skippy drum machine beats whose syncopation looks ahead to jungle rather than back to house. Restaurant isn’t one long bleep homage, though. Landstrumm plucks ideas from all across the 20 year span of UK rave, acid house to dubstep. Proto-jungle legends the Ragga Twins drop patois chat on “Reverse Rebel,” while “Assassin Master” recalls the dark, febrile strain of 2step garage purveyed by Groove Chronicles. Sometimes Landstrumm’s sound gets slightly congested with writhing detail, suggesting there’s a downside to today’s much-advanced technology (it encourages producers to tweak and twiddle, crowding the mix with clutter and clatter). But Restaurant gets emptier and more potent as it proceeds. “Lung Dub” sounds like the drum program was finished and then partially dismantled, its beats so spaced out they’re like blows coming out of nowhere. “The Underground King” is similarly stark, just bass-boom and percussion-simmer, until the jittery bustle of a section from The House Crew’s rave classic “Euphoria” takes over the song like a demonic spirit possessing a body.
With sample-ghosts like this flitting in and out the music, Restaurant of Assassins offers a form of time travel. Except it’s less a case of going back to some long-lost golden age of rave and more about bring the past into the present. What's really disorienting, though, is the fact that this music still sounds like the future.
"
LIARS, Liars
Blender, 2007
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 than 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 own 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.
"
LIARS, Liars
Blender, 2007
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 than 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 own 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.
"
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)