Blogging!

director's cut of piece in the The Guardian, roughly a year ago  - with the follow-up blog pieces below

I started blogging in 2002.  Prior to that I’d operated a website for around six years, but what grabbed me about blogging was the speed and the responsiveness – the way blogs picked up on what other blogs posted and responded almost in real time. I wanted to jump right into the midst of this crackling synergy between blogs. So I did.

The blogging circuit I joined was just one corner of an ever-growing blogosphere. Even within music,  my blog’s primary focus, there was a whole other - and larger – network of MP3 blogs. Still, my particular neighbourhood was bustling all through the 2000s. Out of its fractious ferment emerged cult figures like K-punk, a.k.a Mark Fisher, one of the most widely read and revered left-wing thinkers of our time, and the prolific architecture critic and author Owen Hatherley. Then there were those like me who fit a different archetype: already a professional writer but who relished the freedom of style and tone offered by blogging.  

Today, there are still plenty of active music blogs. They encompass established critics like Richard Williams, anonymous unknowns unloading a lifetime’s knowledge and passion such as Aloysius , K-punk-descended blogs like Xenogothic that move fluently between pop culture and theory, and the amiable anecdotes and keen observations of  musicians like Wreckless Eric. 

What’s changed – what’s gone – is inter-blog communication. The argumentative back-and-forth, the pass-the-baton discussions that rippled across the scene, the spats and the feuds – these are things of the past. If community persists, it’s on the level of any individual blog’s comment box.  I prize the unusual perspectives and weird erudition of my regular commenters, while wondering why so few of them operate their own blogs.

It’s easy to pinpoint what caused the fall-off:  social media. On Facebook, once copious bloggers craft miniature essays to an invited audience only. Twitter – at least when it was good – supplied even more instant feedback for rapid-fire opinionators. There are other rival repositories of bloggy informality, like  podcasts. Just generally there’s more news ‘n’ views bombarding us than ever. Now wonder the blogs have been shunted to the side.

I miss the interblog chatter of the 2000s but in truth, connectivity was only ever part of the appeal.  I’d do this even if no one read it. Blogging, for me, is the perfect format. No restrictions when it comes to length or brevity: a post can be a considered and meticulously composed  5000-word essay, or a spurted splat of speculation or whimsy.  No rules about structure or consistency of tone.  A blogpost can be half-baked and barely proved: I feel zero duty to “do my research” before pontificating. Purely for my own pleasure, I do often go deep. But it’s nearer the truth to say that some posts are outcomes of rambles across the archives of the internet, byproducts of the odd information trawled up and the lateral connections created.   

“Ramble” is the right word.  Blogging, I can meander, take short cuts, and trespass into fields where I don’t belong.  Because I’m not pitching an idea to a publication or presenting my credentials as an authority, I am able to tackle subjects outside my expertise. It’s highly unlikely I could persuade a magazine to let me write an essay  comparing Bob Fosse and Lenny Bruce https://shockandawesimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2022/03/showbiz-against-showbiz-bob-lenny.html

 or find a thread connecting Fellini’s Amarcord, Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, and Tati’s Playtime

https://retromaniabysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2022/05/decline-of-wes-or-three-movies-three.html

In recent months, I’ve  ruminated about Wiki-Fear and the sticky way that upsetting information attaches itself to favorite artists and their music, remembered the suggestive Flake commercials of my youth, https://hardlybaked2.blogspot.com/2023/10/flakeatio.html

looked at fame-as-royalty and royalty-as-celebrity via Dame Edna Everage and Clive James

https://shockandawesimonreynolds2.blogspot.com/2023/08/grotesque-with-gratitude-rip-edna-barry.html, and a dedicated a brief blog to a single scene in the film Charlie Bubbles involving Albert Finney protractedly masticating a bacon sandwich  https://hardlybaked2.blogspot.com/2023/06/chew-very-much.html

As those examples show, one of the great thing about blogging for a professional journalist is that you can write about topics that aren’t topical. You are unshackled from release schedules. An old record or TV program you’ve stumbled upon, or simply remembered, is fair game. YouTube’s arrival in 2005 brought a new dimension to blogging. The two go together so well because they are both handmaidens of 21^st Century archive fever, instruments of the atemporal culture brought about by the internet, social media, and streaming.

The motto at the top of my primary outlet Blissblog https://blissout.blogspot.com/ twists Tricky lyric’s “my brain thinks bomb-like”. My brain thinks blog-like: the digressive rhythms, the lurching between tones, it’s how my mind moves, when it’s not behaving itself in print.  I realized that I had, if not a problem, then perhaps some kind of disorder, when I started to spin off satellite blogs, initially dedicated to specialized zones of my brain  (the books Energy Flash, Retromania, Shock and Awe) but soon splintering to encompass particular obsessions and modes. Probably the most enjoyable to write – maybe to read too, although I couldn’t say – is Hardly Baked 2 https://hardlybaked2.blogspot.com/. Fragmented fumbles towards a thesis, sometimes based around ancient pop videos, occasionally entirely pictorial, these posts are, as the blog name makes clear, unfinished work. Often they’re completed, or expanded beyond anything I could have dreamt, by the comments below. But at the moment of posting, I’ve no idea whether this one will spark a discussion or plop into the void.  

Freedom and doing it for free go together. I’ve resisted the idea of going the Substack or newsletter route. If I were to become conscious of having a subscriber base, I’d start trying to please them. And blogging should be the opposite of work.  But if it’s not compelled, blogging is compulsive: an itch I have to scratch. And for every post published, there’s five that never get beyond notepad scrawls or fumes in the back of my mind.

I can’t imagine ever stopping blogging.  Perhaps eventually there’ll just be a few of us still standing. But I’m heartened that some of the younger generation have caught the bug – including my own son Kieran Press-Reynolds, who operates his own outlet and contributes to the collective music blog No Bells

https://nobells.blog/babyxsosas-houseparty/

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

The Guardian asked me to write about blogging. 

One thing I observe is that although the freedom and fun offered by the format endures, the inter-blog communication of the heyday has faded away.  At least, in this particular corner of the 'sphere. 

Blogging has become more of a solitary activity. A blogpost will be sparked by something "out there," or by something within, but rarely in response to another blog. 

This reminded me that the last time I did a bit of meta-blogging -  the 20th anniversary rumination of a year ago -  I'd intended to do a follow up: a tribute to the blogs of yesteryear, nodes in a network that once crackled like the synapses of an ever-growing mega-brain. Here, belatedly, is a sketch towards such a memorial. 

In the beginning... what sparked my interest was a bunch of blogs and blog-like entities whose existence I noticed around 2000 or so. There was Tom Ewing's outlets New York London Paris Munich and Freaky Trigger, Tim Finney's Skykicking,  Jess Harvell's blogs (Let's Build A Car, Technicolor, Rebellious Jukebox, others still?). Then there was Alastair Fitchett's webzine Tangents, featuring contributors like Kevin Pearce (under the name John Carney, for reasons unknown). And Robin Carmody's website Elidor (later on he blogged at House At World's End and Sea Songs and also here). 

All sorts of oddball characters sprouted up around then, offering skewed perspectives and obsessive accumulations of knowledge.  There was Josh Kortbein (who still maintains Joshblog). Scott of Somedisco.  David Howie aka I Have Zero Money. Others still. 

So the scene was bubbling before I jumped into the fray in October 2002. Still, it's fair to say that the launch of Blissblog had an accelerant effect. I must have been one of the first pros to start a music blog, although I'd had a website since 1996. 

Another accelerant was the excitement about grime - at that point such an emergent sound it wasn't even known as grime yet.  Wot-U-Call-It represented probably around 70% of the spur for me to start the blog - at the time I was largely taken out of journalistic commission by Rip It Up and Start Again and I desperately wanted to shout about this latest insurgency from the nuum zone. But I also just fancied having an opinions outlet - fancied joining in the arguments. Skiving off work while staying sat in front of the screen, in those first three years of blogging I generated probably a book's worth of text even while writing a not-short book on postpunk. 

Everyone knows about K-punk and Woebot (at the start known as That Was A Naughty Bit of Crap) (and which went away, then came back, then went away, came back and then went away yet again - but currently still exists). (And who remembers woebot.tv?)

There was also Luke Davis's heronbone (urgent dispatches from the frontlines of grime, but also poetry and psychogeography), Silverdollarcircle (similarly pirate radio focused),  Martin Clark's Blackdown, John Eden at Uncarved, Paul Meme's Grievous Angel....

(A precursor to this kind of nuum-oriented bloggige was turn-of-millennium webzine Hyperdub, launched by Kode9 well before the label of the same name, and a place where Mark Fisher did some of his earliest public writing about music (under the name Mark De' Rosario) alongside UKdance forum stalwart Bat, Kevin Martin,  Kodwo Eshun, and indeed myself. The Hyperdub archives used to be maintained by bloggish entity Riddim.ca, but have now sadly disappeared. A couple of the proto-K-punk's pieces can be found here, though.)

Adjacent to this cluster but pursuing his own obsessions (Cabaret Voltaire, bleep, etc) and probably more aligned with dubstep than grime, there was Nick Edwards's once-prolific, long-shuttered Gutterbreaks.   Then there was History Is Made At Night, an archaeology of rave and club lore - and the interface between dance culture and politics -  maintained by Neil Transpontine to this day. And the bashmentological analyses of scholar Wayne Marshall at Wayne & Wax.

Getting deeper into the 2000s, the sporadic but extensive posts of Leaving Earth, by the enigmatic Taninian, claimed treasure in underappreciated genres like wobble and skwee, reassessed The Rave LP, and lost me a little with the paeans to postdubstep-as-revolution.  Other electronic-music slanted blogs came and went - Acid Nouveaux, Mentasms, Sonic Truth, Mutant Technology, Drumtrip, Musings of a Socialist Japanologist, Tufluv, World of Stelfox, MNML SSGS - saying interesting things for a year or two before going silent. Probably the most impressive of the second wave of electronic music oriented blogz was Adam Harper's Rouge's Foam.

Rewind a bit: by the mid-2000s, the scene was cleaving between the grimy nuum end of things and the poptimistic cru, each represented by a forum, although neither was as monolithically committed in stance or subject matter as the other might like to make out.  Still, you could have good arguments about these kinds of issues with the likes of Zoilus (aka Carl Wilson), Utopian TurtleTop. Koganbot, Nick Southall's Auspicious Fish, Jane Dark's Sugarhigh. Less-good arguments with others.  

Anti-rockist (OG anti-rockist 4 life) but in an orbit of his own: Momus, elegant and incisive public essayist rather than blogger per se, but hosting a lot of action in the comments. The blog was once called Click Opera, I believe.

When grime faded as a conversation-starter and centripetal agent,  hauntology - for a while, for some -  provided a new focus....   

Now there was a bunch of blogs whose preexisting obsessions with retro design, vintage TV, bygone modernist aesthetics, and sundry musty esoterica placed them in proximity to the H-zone, among them Toys and Techniques, Feuilleton, Rockets and Rayguns, Dispokino, I Hate This Film, and The Sound of Eye.  Then there was collective blog Found Objects.

There was another and quite separate gaggle that included Kid Shirt  (aka Kek-W), An Idiot's Guide To Dreaming  (aka Loki aka Saxon Roach) and Farmer-Glitch  (aka Stephen Ives) who could be considered fellow-travelers, albeit approaching the H-zone from a different angle: that esoterrorist thread running from Coil-y industrial to the eldritch fringes of rave and UK techno (The Black Dog and that sort of thing).  Funnily enough, their very proximity made them sniffy about the H-word -  both as concept and in terms of the output getting bigged up. Some of this blog cluster generated its own wyrdtronic output, via alter-egos like IX-Tab, Hacker Farm, Kemper Norton.... 

Other bloggers stepped into the sonic fray: Gutterbreaks became Ekoplekz and half of eMMplekz, Woebot became a musical as well as textual entity, and K-punk created a bunch of audio essays/ sound artworks. 

While Mark Fisher was a pillar of our end of the scene, K-punk also played a central role in a separate circuit of renegade-academic and philosophy-politics blogs. Not a neighbourhood I frequented much, but Alex Williams at Splintering Bone Ashes had some things to say while Steven Shaviro still does The Pinocchio Theory. 

Quite a lot of people on this circuit became authors (and /or fulfilled other functions) within the Zer0 / Repeater empire: Xenogothic's Matt Colquhoun,  Robin James of  It's Her Factory, Dominic Fox of Poetix. 

Others came to  the imprints via different paths: Carl Neville aka the Impostume, Phil Knight with his mystifyingly closed-and-erased The Phil Zone and later ceased-but-not-deleted The Interregnum Navigation Service.  Owen Hatherley of Sit Down Man, You're a Bloody Tragedy and The Measures Taken, Alex Niven of The Fantastic Hope, Rhian E. Jones with Velvet Coalmine. There was a cluster of collective blogs oriented around decades - the '70s, '80s, '90s - that involved many of these people and lively places they were for a while.

And then there were those who pursued their own completely personal path into the scene (and out again), helped in some cases by geographical distance - operating in a completely different hemisphere. Anwen Crawford (another who mystifyingly deleted their back pages - in this case fangirl),  Sam Macklin a.k.a connect_icut with Bubblegum Cage III, Geeta Dayal with The Original Soundtrack (now she has a Patreon), Jon Dale with Worlds of Possibility and Attic Plan and  Astronauts Notepad, Sam Davies's Zone Styx Travelcard, Aaron Grossman's Airport Through the Trees, Graham Sanford's Our God Is Speed,  Tim 'Space' Debris's Cardrossmaniac2,  W. David Marx's Néojaponisme, Oliver Craner, Beyond the Implode, Baal at Erase the World, Tom May's Where Shingle Meets Raincoat, Seb's And You May Find Yourself... , Dan Barrow's porridge-free zones The End Times and A Scarlet Tracery....   

Some of these bloggers were already writing in "proper" publications; some started after blogging....

It was interesting to see who out of the already-renowned professionals jumped into the fray and those who stayed aloof. For a virtuoso ranter like Neil Kulkarni, blogging was a natural playpen.  Ian Penman seemed unleashed by the format, frothing torrentially at The Pill Box - until he stopped, abruptly, for "reasons unknown". Chuck Eddy is a copious blogger at Eliminated For Reasons of Space.  David Stubbs has blogged sporadically over the years;  Richard Williams does it more regularly at The Blue Moment. Both these Melody Maker legends, though, are more like online essayists; they don't display that driveling incontinence that is the hallmark of the born-to-blog. 

But there were other pros who seemed to disdain the thought of writing for free.  One or two seemed faintly threatened by the blogs, the jabbering panoply of amateurs crowding out the main signal. 

There were various alternatives to blogs that went through vogues - livejournals and tumblrs  - but I never really cathected with  either of these mode-zones, couldn't see what they brought that was a bonus.

And today...  As I say in the column, there's still loads of blogs -  loads of specifically music blogs or mostly-music blogs. Some started relatively recently, like the sporadic but very interesting Aloysius,  the work of Dissensus bod Mvuent, and Infinite Speeds, a Substack by Vincent Jenewein exploring interfaces between philosophical concepts and the materialities of electronic sound + rhythm. Others, I'm unclear when they started but they have entered my ken only recently, like Lost Tempo (another Substack), the work of regular commenter Matt M.  And I see that ex-editor of The Wire Derek Walmsley, who used to have a blog back in the 2000s, recently started a new one: Slow Motion.

There are generation-or-two-below-me oriented entities somewhere between a one-person magazine and a collective blog. Like Joshua Minsoo Kim's Toneglow (another Substack). Like No Bells. To which my own flesh-and-blood contributes, while also operating his own KPRblog (currently surveying 2023 in music). 

So I wind to a close, with so many names unmentioned. 

Forgive me - it's almost certainly by accident. 

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

Xenogothic with some thoughts on blogging.  

Among many other things, Matt talks about blogs operated by musicians, by the likes of Deerhunter and Phil Elverum, as a whole other field of bloggy action. I suppose Momus's Click Opera,  mentioned in the previous Blissblog post about blogs then and now, counts in this category. In an earlier longer version of the Guardian column, I did link to a currently active music-maker blog that I enjoy: Wreckless Eric's Ericland. 

I have been going back and adding more blogs and bloggers that I remembered from the olden days to that post. But there are still swathes of blogging that I didn't cover - even within the music blogging arena.

For instance, I don't talk about MP3 blogs. But then they were never something I got into. The free MP3s seemed as unenticing as the flexi singles attached to fanzines back in the day. And the textual element rarely seemed as interesting as the output of the blogs I considered my true neighbours.

There was a whole other phase of hyperactive blogging I clean forgot about - all the blogs associated with hypnagogic pop and that late 2000s / early 2010s emergence of largely-online DIY micro-genres like witch house and vaporwave.  Blogs such as 20 Jazz Funk Greats and Visitation Rites and Gorilla vs. Bear and Rose Quartz that would be shepherded for a while under the Pitchfork-hosted mantle of Altered Zones.  I tried to evoke its neophiliac fever in this piece:

On Altered Zones and its constellation of blogs, the flow is relentless: What matters is always the next new name, the latest micro-genre, another MP3 or MediaFire. Artist careers likewise are a continuous drip-drip-drip of releases, a dozen or more per year—there’s no reason to edit or hold back, every reason to keep one’s name out there. Stimuli streams in, largely via the Web; creativity streams out, largely via the Web. Today’s musician is a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence.... This scene is about being engulfed and enthused, carried along by the currents of the new. Drifting not sifting. 

Another huge wave of blog energy - and one that had a huge effect on me, albeit not necessarily for the good - was the whole-album sharing blogs. Some of these didn't just offer an album cover image and a link to Rapidshare / Megaupload  / Mediafire, but had proper textual content: well-written and informative, if rarely polemical or argument-starting. Serious curatorial activity, as undertaken by the likes of Mutant Sounds, Continuo's, Twice Zonked!, A Closet of Curiosities... I wrote about that scene in this piece for The Wire on "sharity" blogs. Even interviewed a couple of figures behind blogs.  That scene is much declined from its height but there's sharity soljas out there still, digging strange shit up... 

Yet another still active sub-subculture of music blogging: the "imaginary albums" blogs. This overlaps with the sharity in so far as they sometimes - not always - share their recreation of the rumored but never released album. Some of these blogs generate an enormous amount of counterfactual text, as discussed in this essay of mine on alternative history and music: 

Fans for years have been creating unfinished or unreleased albums like Beach Boys's  Smile, Hendrix’s First Rays of the New Rising Sun, The Beatles's  Get Back, the Who’s Lifehouse – using bootlegs, demos, out-takes... Today there is a whole realm of blogs dedicated to this practice – Albums That Never Were, A Crazy Gift of Time, Albums That Should Exist, Albums I Wish Existed… Usually they create fake artwork for the counterfactual albums. 

Some of these blogs, such as Strawberry Peppers, don’t stop at creating imaginary albums and record covers – they write incredibly detailed and extensive alternative histories of worlds where the Beatles didn’t split up, or where David Bowie joined the Rolling Stones, or where the Soft Machine’s Kevin Ayers, Robert Wyatt and Daevid Allen don’t leave the band, or alternate timelines where Syd Barrett stayed in Pink Floyd.  A kind of counter-discographical mania erupts.  

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

In addition to Xenogothic, there's been some other post-Guardian-piece posts -  a few from blogs I know well (like Feuilleton), most from blogs I'd never come across before:  Torpedo The Ark, Bhagpuss, The Sphinx. Somewhere amidst all that chatter I gleaned that there's been  unconnected blog talk going on too, at The Lazarus Corporation, at Velcro City Tourist Board, and in a piece about the internet getting weird again by Anil Dash for Rolling Stone.

RIP Danny Thompson

Danny Thompson worked with a host of people, including a stint in Pentangle, but for many of us he is inseparable from the name John Martyn  - and revered as the co-author of "Go Down Easy", "I'd Rather Be The Devil", "Solid Air", "Couldn't Love You More", "Glistening Glyndebourne"....

Here by way of indirect tribute are three pieces about Martyn in which Thompson flits into view here and there. Most prominently in the first one, a Blissblog recollection about about the only time I ever saw Martyn live - in New York, just months before he died, with Thompson by his side, the only other person on the small stage with him - which doubled as an obituary. The fond bond between the two was very evident that night.

There is also a short piece about "I'd Rather Be The Devil" and a longer piece about Solid Air as a Desert Island Disc written for the 2007 book Marooned (Phil Freeman's unofficial sequel to Stranded). 

John Martyn RIP

Blissblog, January 31st 2009

RIPs appear here quite regularly. Rock is long in the tooth; musicians you admire, whose music you've grown up with, seem to be popping their clogs with mounting frequency. Usually I feel sad for a bit, in a fairly removed sort of way... then life's petty urgencies resume. But this week's big one, I must admit, has hit me quite hard. It's cast a shadow over the last few days. It feels a lot more personal somehow.

It struck me that I might possibly have listened to John Martyn more than any but a handful of other musicians. Actually I can't think of who else I'd have listened to more, over such a sustained period. The Smiths? Love? But if you broke it down, it would be Solid Air and One World that accounted for 95 percent of that lifetime of Martyn listening. Those two albums have been such a large and constant presence. They keep coming back, or rather, they don't go away, whereas there's other central artists, deep deep favourites, where there are long periods of mutual leave-taking (Can, for instance--I seem to be taking a breather from them, for some reason just don't feel the urge, but I know the time will come again.) (Another example: postpunk, which dipped away for much of the Eighties and almost all of the Nineties). But John Martyn… it barely took me a minute to settle on Solid Air as my desert island disc when asked to contribute to Marooned. It was my first choice, and then to do it proper I thought up some other candidates (closest contender being Rock Bottom). But it was always going to be Solid Air, partly because the "desert island" scenario suggested it somehow, but also because of its inexhaustibility as a record.

Strangely, though, when I think of John Martyn's music, I don't think of personal memories particularly. Some records evoke times of your life: Head Over Heels and Sunburst and Snowblind, the debut Smiths album, those records remind me with incredible vividness of a student bedsit in north Oxford, the yearnings and miseries of that time; "Thieves Like Us" carries with it the flush of romance remembered; there's plenty more examples. But with most music, the memories carried are memories of the music itself, if that makes sense. When you're a music fiend, that function of commemoration or life-soundtracking or "our song" that perhaps remains prominent for the more casual listener, it really fades away. You might say that music's life eclipses your own, or it becomes one with it, or it fills in the holes. Music doesn't serve as a mirror for narcissistic identification so much as a means of leaving one's self behind. A favourite record, then, might be more like gazing at a landscape, the kind of place you'd revisit at different stages of your life. A perennial source of wonder. (This is why I'm not a huge fan of memoiristic criticism: oh, it can be done well, but even at its best it doesn't really tell you anything about the music; that one individual's memories adhere to a piece of music in a particular fashion doesn't have any relation to what I or anybody else might get out of the record or glom onto it, experientially. Although it's also true that the narcissistic projection towards a song/album/group that music arouses so potently can make it feel like those life-experiences somehow inhere to the music).

But back to John Martyn--another strange thing is that I'd never gone to see him perform live. This despite being a fan since 1985 (when I'd taped Solid Air off David Stubbs--cheers David!--having been intrigued by this Barney Hoskyns interview with Martyn that compared Solid Air to Astral Weeks--cheers Barney!). The opportunity just never presented itself , and I'd never felt tempted to seek it out. I guess the sense you got was that after the 1970s heyday Martyn onstage was likely to be... variable. He'd be playing with bands composed of younger musicians, a modern soft-rock/AOR-ish sound like on those post-Grace and Danger Eighties albums, you heard tell of the keyboard sound being thin and digital-synth nasty. It seemed to promise disappointment. Anyway, I've always been more of a records man; I just don't have that compulsion to witness everybody whose music I love perform live at least once.

But late last year I heard that John Martyn was playing in New York. (I have to thank Rob Tannenbaum for the tip off, I'd have completely missed it otherwise--cheers Rob!). October the 9th, at Joe's Pub--less than ten minutes away. And not only playing in New York, virtually round the corner, but playing with Danny Thompson. So I had to go, even though this was the night before we flew off to London for the annual see-the-folks-and-friends vacation, there was packing to be done that night, an early rise the next day.

I got there and found quite a long line to get in, which surprised me, as I'd always had the impression Martyn wasn't really known in this country. And nor was it the case that the line was entirely composed of British expats. I ran into a friend-of-a-friend, an experimental musician (of the academic kind) who I'd not have particularly expected to be a John Martyn fan. We positioned ourselves near the bar with good sight-lines of the stage.

Joe's Pub is not a pub at all, but a sort of nightclub/performance space attached to The Public Theater on Lafayette. It's the sort of place where you'd expect, oh, Norah Jones to play; it's got a bit of an acid jazz/downtempo/Giant Steps type vibe to it. The last thing I saw there was ages ago: Herbert and Dani Siciliano doing the full chanteusy-meets-clickhouse thing. Anyway, there was this small, scarlet curtain at the back of the stage, which just seemed like part of Joe's plush cabaret-ish décor. All of a sudden there's a ruffling with the curtain, the suggestion of struggle and kerfuffle behind it, almost a Tommy Cooper/Morecambe & Wise-esque effect. And then, with evident difficulty Big John and his wheelchair were maneuvered through the red fabric and onto the tiny stage. I might be misremembering it but I think they actually had to wheel him on backwards. At any rate, it wasn't a dignified entrance.

First impression was of a ruin of a man. Magnificent, maybe, but definitely a ruin. In fact what I couldn't help thinking of was the sketch in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life ... the monstrously obese diner who eats so much he explodes. Martyn's face had this sagging quality, it seemed to droop and merge into the sprawl of his torso.

They opened, I think, with "Big Muff". It was great, totally different from the One World recording naturally (no drummer, just John and Danny), loose and swinging. I can't remember the exact sequence of songs, but at some point early in the set, they did "Sweet Little Mystery", Martyn's voice this immense blubbery ache of sound, a beached whale of bluesiness, bedraggled and beseeching. But apart from "Mystery" from Grace and Danger and "Muff" from One World, everything else was from Solid Air: "Jelly Roll Blues", "May You Never" (which got a cheer), the shatteringly tender imploring of "Don't Want To Know", "Solid Air" itself, maybe another one or two I'm forgetting. It was almost a Don't Look Back, except the order was scrambled and they didn't do "Go Down Easy", to my chagrin. The friend-of-a-friend pointed out how different the guitar tunings on each song were from the recorded versions.

Indeed between the songs there was some tuning-tweaking going on. There was also banter. But Martyn's speaking voice was so slurred, plus he was sat slightly far back from the mic (fine for singing but not for stage patter) that it was all completely indecipherable. He told jokes but through his bleary, sodden mumble they became abstract jokes. You could pick up the cadence and the timing of joke-as-pure-form, almost to the point of getting the comedic pay-off when the punchline came. But the actual content was lost. I picked up one or two lines: one involved a man going into a bar, another one was about penguins. I think he might also have cracked his post-amputation standard about having promised the promoter not to get legless, boom boom.

But I did manage to catch it clear when he apologized for the set being below par--"that's just the way it goes sometimes". At which Danny Thompson leaned over and gave him a kiss on the top of his balding head, affectionate yet reverent. I also just about made out what Martyn said before they launched into what turned out to be the final song: something like "this is by a gentleman called Skip James, who doesn't deserve to have his song murdered." It was "I'd Rather Be the Devil" of course and it made me wonder what other examples there are of a great artist--a writer and performer of brilliant original material--whose absolute greatest recording and signature song in live performance is a cover of someone else's song. (From the rock era obviously; there's loads of examples from the era when singers did standards, didn't write their own songs, etc). Of course to call it a "cover" is to underplay the amount of reinvention imposed on the original (which must be why John changed the title from "Devil Got My Woman", a bit of justified arrogance there: took your song, made it my song, whatchu gauna dee aboot it, eh?). So "Devil", live at Joe's Pub: not as torrential and tectonic as Live At Leeds, not quite the exquisitely wrought aquamiasma of Solid Air. But I wasn't disappointed. Oh no. Stole my breath away it did.

And then they were off, John wheeled backwards through the red curtain with the same awkward strenuosity it had taken to get him onstage in the first place (apparently he'd reached 20 stone in his last year). Semi-apologising for the brevity of the set as they shuffled off, Danny Thompson explained that the gig was kind of impromptu: John was coming to New York to visit a hospital to get a new prosthesis fitted, and they thought "why not?".

So, my first and only John Martyn Live Experience. I walked home aglow, much earlier than I'd expected (just as well with the flight) but not dissatisfied, not in the least. I meant to blog it after we got back from London but the moment passed. Now the man has passed and the moment seems right.

^^^^^^^^

John Martyn

Solid Air 

Island, 1973

By Simon Reynolds

(for Marooned, ed. Phil Freeman, 2007)

Picking my favorite record of all time, identifying the album that means the most to me, singling out the one I could least bear to never, ever hear again – such a task would surely make my head explode. But the desert island scenario (and I’m curious: who came up with this conceit first, historically?) actually makes narrowing things down much easier. Something with a very particular bundle of attributes would be required, a tricky-to-find combination of consoling familiarity and resilient strangeness. You’d need a record that could retain the capacity to surprise and stimulate, to keep on revealing new details and depths despite endless repetition. But it couldn’t be too out-there, too much of an avant-challenge, because solace would after all be its primary purpose. Which in turn would mean that the selection would have to feature the human voice, as a source of comfort and surrogate company – a criterion that sifts out many all-time favorites that happen to be all-instrumental (Aphex Twin’s two Selected Ambient Works albums, Eno records like On Land and his collaboration with Harold Budd The Plateaux of Mirror). But, equally, songs alone couldn’t sustain me on the island – I’d need some element of the soundscape, the synesthetically textured...food for the mind’s eye...something to take me out and away. 

Four albums sprang to mind based around a framework of songs-plus-space (or songs-in-space, or maybe even songs versus space). (Actually, there’s a fifth album in this vicinity, but Lester Bangs bagged it last time around: Astral Weeks). All are from roughly the same period in rock history – the early Seventies – and all can be characterized as post-psychedelic music in some sense. Tim Buckley’s Starsailor is just too wild, too derangingly strange; its restlessness would stir me to rage against the limits of confinement, rather than adopt a sensible stoicism, and its eroticism would be no help at all. Robert Wyatt’s Rock Bottom is rich and lovely, but the album’s emotionally harrowing arc (it was made shortly after the fall that left him paralyzed from the waist down) might be too wearing for someone in such dire straits; even its ecstasy is on the shattering side. Stormcock is brilliant and beautiful, but Roy Harper’s diatribes wouldn’t warm my lonely soul, and besides, it only consists of four long tracks, all pretty much chipped from the same block of sound.

So my choice is John Martyn’s Solid Air. There’s something about this album that suggests “island music.” And I don’t just mean that it came out on Island – probably the most highly-regarded record label on Earth at that point, a haven for the visionary, the esoteric, the not-obviously-commercial. The other day I was searching through my stuff for a review I wrote a long time ago of the reissue of another John Martyn record (1977’s One World, which is hard on the heels of Solid Air as much-loved album/potential D.I.D.), only to be pleasantly ambushed by the opening lines:

John Martyn was a castaway on the same hazy archipelago of jazzy-folky-funky-blues as other burnt-out hippy visionaries of the Seventies (V. Morrison, J. Mitchell, etc.)

Ha! That list should have included T. Buckley, R. Wyatt, N. Drake (a close friend of Martyn’s and the inspiration/addressee of Solid Air’s title track), and probably quite a few others too. “Archipelago” still seems like the right metaphor. These artists didn’t belong to a genre, each of them had their own distinct sound, but there’s enough proximity in terms of their sources, approaches, and vibe, to warrant thinking of them as separate-but-adjacent, a necklace of maverick visionaries sharing a common climate.

The cover of Solid Air invites aqueous reverie. A hand passing through sea-green water leaving an after-trail of iridescent purple ripples, the effect is idyllic on first glance. But then you notice that the image is a circle of color on a black background, introducing the possibility that we’re inside a submarine looking through a porthole, and the hand’s owner is outside, drowning. Solid Air’s title track, we’ll see, is about someone who’s figuratively drowning, unable to resist the downward currents of terminal depression. One of the best songs is called “Dreams By The Sea,” which might resonate for a homesick castaway, except these are “bad dreams by the sea.” 

Water flows through the entire John Martyn songbook, from “The Ocean” to his delightful cover of “Singin’ in the Rain,” while two of his post-Solid Air album covers feature images of the sea. 1975’s Sunday’s Child shows the bearded bard standing in front of crashing surf, while One World’s cover is a painting of a mermaid diving up out of the waves and curving back into the ocean, her arched body trailing a glittering arc of sea-spray and flying fish. In that review, I dubbed the album “a Let’s Get it On for the Great Barrier Reef,” a comparison inspired mainly by the reverb-rippling aquafunk of “Big Muff” and “Dealer,” two songs that mingle the language of sex and drugs such that you’re not sure what brand of addiction they’re really about. One World’s final track, the nearly nine minutes of almost-ambient entitled “Small Hours,” was recorded outdoors beside a lake. 

Solid Air, though, has just one song that actively sounds aquatic, “I’d Rather Be The Devil,” a cover of Skip James’ “Devil Got My Woman.” After almost 15 years of loving Martyn’s version, I finally heard the original “Devil” in the movie Ghost World, where this out-of-time specter of a song harrows the teenage soul of heroine Enid. Most songwriters would have flinched from attempting such an unheimlich tune, but Martyn’s cover is so drastic it fleshes this skeletal blues into virtually a brand-new composition: imagine the clavinet-driven funk of Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition,” if it actually sounded superstitious, witless and twitchy with dread. “I’d Rather Be The Devil” starts as a sickening plunge, a dive into seductive but treacherous waters. Roiling with congas and clavinet, the glutinously thick groove rivals anything contemporaneous by Sly Stone or Parliament-Funkadelic. Martyn moves through the music like a shark. Lyric shards come in and out of focus: “my mind starts a-rambling like a wild geese from the west,” “stole her from my best friend...know he’ll get lucky, steal her back.” But mostly Martyn’s murky rasp fills your head like a black gas of amorphous malevolence. The song part of “Devil” gives way to a descent-into-the-maelstrom churn, a deadly undertow of bitches-brew turbulence. Then that too abruptly dissipates, as though we’ve made it through the ocean’s killing floor and reached a coral-cocooned haven. Danny Thompson’s alternately bowed and plucked double bass injects pure intravenous calm; John Bundrick’s keys flicker and undulate like anemones and starfish; Martyn’s needlepoint fingerpicking, refracted through a delay device, spirals around your head in repeat-echoed loops of rising rapture. This oceanic arcadia is something music had touched previously only on Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland with the proto-ambient sound-painting of  “1983...(A Merman I Should Turn To Be)/Moon, Turn The Tides...Gently Gently Away.” 

Listening to this split-personality song – glowering storm-sky of dark-blue(s) funk/shimmering aquamarine utopia – it’s hard to believe that only a few years earlier John Martyn had been a beardless naïf with an acoustic guitar, plucking out Donovan-esque ditties like “Fairytale Lullaby” and “Sing a Song of Summer.” What the hell – more precisely, what kind of hell – happened in between? 

Arriving in London from his native Scotland in the mid-Sixties, John Martyn hung out at the city’s folk cellars, learning guitar technique by sitting near the front and closely watching the fingers of Davy Graham and Bert Jansch. Soon he was performing at spaces like Les Cousins and Bunjie’s himself. He signed to Island (one of the first non-Jamaicans on the label) and in October 1967, aged nineteen, released his debut album London Conversation – fetching but jejune Brit-folk. Like many of his contemporaries, he gradually fell under the spell of jazz, especially John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders. He later described Impulse as the only truly pure label in the world. The Tumbler, from 1968, featured the flautist and saxophonist Harold McNair, while The Road To Ruin, his second collaboration with wife Beverley, involved jazz players Ray Warleigh, Lyn Dobson and Dudu Pukwana. But neither of these records really transcended an additive, this-plus-that approach; they fell short of a true amalgam of folk and jazz. 

 

It’s not known if Martyn learned and drew encouragement from, or even heard at all, the voyages of Tim Buckley, who was on a very similar trajectory from pure-toned folk troubadour to zero-gravity vocal acrobat deploying the voice-as-instrument. But Martyn did talk in interviews about digging Weather Report (particularly the colorized electronic keyboards of band leader Joe Zawinul) and Alice Coltrane (he called her “my desert island disc” but didn’t specify which particular disc of hers he had in mind!). A less-likely influence was The Band’s Music From Big Pink, especially the Hammond organ sound, which he mistook for electric guitar, and described as “the first time I heard electric music using very soft textures, panels of sound, pastel sounds”. He and Beverley Martyn made one album, Stormbringer, in Woodstock and New York City, with some members of The Band playing. But that was something of an aberration in the general drift of his music towards a jazzed fluidity. The ideal of a “one world” music possessed the imagination of many at this time – Can and Traffic, Miles Davis and Don Cherry – and throughout this period, at the cusp between the Sixties and the Seventies, Martyn was also listening to Indian classical, high-life, and Celtic music. (He would later record an electric version of the Gaelic air “Eibhli Ghail Chiun Chearbhail.”) This all-gates-open receptivity was part of Martyn’s refusal, or more likely inability to tolerate divisions, his compulsive attraction to thresholds and in-between states. And it would culminate in the untaggable and indivisible alloy of folk and jazz, acoustic and electric, live and studio, songform and space, achieved on Solid Air. "I think that what's going to happen is that there are going to be basically songs with a lot of looseness behind them," he told Melody Maker at the end of 1971, less than a year before recording the album.

As jazz entered Martyn’s musical bloodstream, it affected not just his songwriting and approach to instrumentation, but his singing too. The clear diction of folk gave way to slurring that turned his voice into a fog bank of sensuality tinged with menace. Folk privileged words because of the importance it placed on messages and story-telling, but Martyn had come to believe that “there’s a place between words and music, and my voice lives right there.” One characteristic Martyn mannerism – intense sibilance – can be heard emerging in his cover of “Singin’ In the Rain” (on 1971’s Bless the Weather, the immediate precursor to Solid Air), where “clouds” comes out as “cloudzzzzzzz,” a drunken bumble bee bumping against your earhole. 

If Martyn’s music grew woozy “under the influence” of jazz, during this period he was equally intoxicated by...well, intoxicants. The ever more smeared haziness of his voice and sound owed as much to the drugs and drink entering his biological bloodstream; dissolution and the dissolving of song-form went hand in hand. Martyn had always felt the bohemian impulse (he’d gone to art school in Glasgow looking for that lifestyle, only to leave after a few months, disappointed) and on his debut album he sang the traditional folk tune “Cocain.” But with its jaunty lyrics about “Cocaine Lill and Morphine Sue,” the song sounds like it was recorded under the effect of nothing more potent than cups of tea.  Bless the Weather, again, is the moment at which the music first really seems to come from inside the drug experience. “Go Easy” depicts Martyn’s lifestyle – “raving all night, sleeping away the day...spending my time, making it shine...look at the ways to vent and amaze my mind” – but it’s “Glistening Glyndebourne” that hurls you into the psychedelic tumult of sense impressions. The title sounds like it’s about a river, and the music scintillates with dashes and dots of dancing light just like a moving body of water, but it’s actually inspired, bizarrely, by an opera festival in a stately home near where Martyn then lived; the suited formality of the upper class crowds provoked him to reimagine the scene. 

“Glistening Glyndebourne” was also the track that first captured what had become the signature of Martyn’s live performances, his guitar playing through an Echoplex. It seems likely that he was, unconsciously or not, looking for a method of recreating sonically the sense of the dilated “now” granted by drugs. Martyn initially turned to the machine thinking it could provide sustain (a quest that had previously and briefly led him to attempt to learn to play a jazz horn). He quickly realized that the Echoplex wasn’t particularly suited to that task, but that he could apply it to even more impressive and fertile ends. Set to variable degrees of repeat-echo, the machine fed the guitar signal onto a tape loop that recorded sound-on-sound; the resulting wake of sonic after-images enabled Martyn to play with and against a cascading recession of ghosts-of-himself, chopping cross-rhythms in and out of the rippling flow. The Echoplex appeared in discreet, barely-discernible form on Stormbringer’s ““Would You Believe Me,” but “Glistening Glyndbourne” was something else altogether. Its juddering rush of tumbling drums and Echoplexed rhythm guitar was the dry run for “I’d Rather Be The Devil.” 

Solid Air starts with “Solid Air,” twinkles of electric piano and vibes winding around Martyn’s close-miked acoustic guitar and bleary fug of voice. For most of my years of loving this album I never knew the song was about, and for, Nick Drake, and I almost wish I could un-know that fact (especially as I’ve always secretly felt that Martyn deserved the mega-cult following that his friend and Island label-mate has, as opposed to his own loyal but medium-sized cult). But the phrase “solid air” still retains its mystery. Listening to it just now it suddenly flashed on me that “solid air” sounds like “solitaire,” raising the possibility that it’s a punning image of the lonely planet inhabited by the melancholy Drake, cut-off from human fellowship as surely as any desert island castaway. More likely, though, is that lines like “moving through solid air” attempt to evoke what depression feels like, suggesting both the character in Talking Heads’ “Air” who’s so sensitive he can’t even handle contact with the atmosphere, and someone trying to make their way through a world that seems to have turned viscous. The song, written over a year before Drake committed suicide, is at once an offer of help, an entreaty, and a benediction: “I know you, I love you...I could follow you – anywhere/Even through solid air.” Sung with a sublime mixture of maudlin heaviness and honeyed grace, it’s a huge bear-hug to someone in terrible pain. But, with the advantage of hindsight, it also feels like a lullaby – rest in peace, friend.

There’s a symmetry to the way Solid Air is constructed. Side Two starts like the first side, with a soft, slow whisper of a tune gently propelled by Danny Thompson's languid but huge-sounding double-bass pulse. In texture, tone and tempo, “Go Down Easy” is very much a sister-song to “Solid Air,” but this time the air is thick not with melancholy but with a humid sexuality that’s oddly narcotic and ever so slightly oppressive. It’s a kind of erotic lullaby: the title/chorus seems logical enough, the kind of thing lovers might say, until you actually contemplate it, and then it sounds more appropriate to an agitated animal being quelled or a child being calmed down at bed time. “You curl around me like a fern in the spring/Lie down here and let me sing the things that you bring,” croons Martyn, drawing out the chorus “go down easy” into a kind of yawn of yearning, as he draws his lover into a space where breath becomes tactile and intimacy almost asphyxiating. 

On Solid Air, John Martyn is a hippie with a heart of dark, equally prone to brawling and balladeering, his voice constantly hovering between sweet croon and belligerent growl. In an interview, he talked about wanting to be “a scholar-gentleman...I'm interested in spiritual grace,” and this side of Martyn – the idealist, albeit one whose ideals his all-too-human self tended to fail – comes through in songs like “May You Never” and “Don’t Want to Know.” The former (his most well-known song, widely covered, mostly famously by Eric Clapton) is a good will message or blessing to a friend; that empty social formality (“best wishes”) fleshed out with specifics, bad things to be warded off (“may you never lay your head down without a hand to hold,” “may you never lose your woman overnight”). An anti-hex, if you will. Lines like “you’re just like a great big sister to me” and “you’re just like a great big brother to me” show that this song’s domain is agape as opposed to the eros of “Go Down Easy.” Eros, in Martyn’s world, is the danger emotion, the destabiliser, source of addiction and division (stealing your best friend’s woman in “I’d Rather Be The Devil”). 

If Martyn had only ever recorded delicately pretty, heartfelt songs like “May You Never” and “Don’t Want To Know”, he might have been as big as, oh, Cat Stevens or James Taylor (although his thumpingly physical and rhythmic acoustic guitar playing always put him several cuts above the singer-songwriter norm). “Don’t Want to Know” is an even more desperate attempt to ward off malevolent forces with a willed withdrawal into blissful ignorance: Martyn says he doesn’t “want to know one thing about evil/I only want to know about love.” It’s a kind of shout-down-Babylon song (even though his voice is at its softest), with a strange apocalyptic verse about how he’s waiting for planes to fall out of the sky and cities to crumble, and lines about how the glimmer of gold has got us all “hypnotized”. Martyn often talked about wanting to leave “the paper chase” behind, move out to the country, live a purer lifestyle. But if this song envisages corruption as an external contaminant that you can escape by putting distance between yourself and it, “I’d Rather Be The Devil” and its own sister-song “Dreams By The Sea” treat evil as an intimate. In “Devil,” it’s inside his lover, his best friend, and most of all himself (“so much evil,” moans Martyn midway through the song), while in “Dreams”, a song fetid with sexual paranoia, he goes from imagining there’s “a killer in your eyes” to a “killer in my eyes.” The track is tight, strutting funk, Martyn’s "Shaft"-like wah-wah coiling like a rattlesnake. At the end, it’s like the fever of jealousy and doubt (“Nah no nah no/It can’t be true...Nah no nah no/It’s not the way you are”) breaks, and the track unwinds into a lovely, forgiving coda of calm and reconciliation, laced with trickling raindrops of electric piano. 

 

There’s one more pair of songs on Solid Air, and in these Martyn figures as incorrigible rogue rather than demon-lover. Side One’s “Over The Hill” is deceptively spring-heeled and joyous, its fluttery prettiness (mandolin solo courtesy Richard Thompson) disguising the fact that Martyn here appears as a prodigal rolling-stone returning in disgrace. “Got nothing in my favor,” he blithely admits, while flashing back to Cocain Lil with a line that confesses “can’t get enough of sweet cocaine.” Babylon’s own powder, coke is a drug that stimulates desire for all the other vices, from sex to booze. “The Man In The Station,” on the opposite side of the album, catches the roving minstrel once again wending his way back to the family hearth, but this time he seems less cocksure and more foot-sore, ready to catch “the next train home.” These two coming-home songs would sound especially right on the island, where I’d need music that both acknowledged the fact of isolation while offering consolation for it. The album ends with “The Easy Blues,” really two songs in one: “Jellyroll Baker,” a cover of a tune by acoustic blues great Lonnie Johnson and a Martyn concert favorite whose blackface bawling is the only bit of Solid Air I could happily dispense with, and then the light cantering “My Gentle Blues” which almost instantly flips into a sweetly aching slow fade, draped with a poignant (if dated) synth solo played by Martyn himself.  

I’ve sometimes argued in the past that rock’s true essence is juvenile, a teenage rampage or energy flash of the spirit that burns brightest in seemingly artless sounds like ‘60s garage punk or ‘90s rave. Solid Air, though, is definitely adult music. Crucially, it’s made by an adult who hasn’t settled down, who’s still figuring stuff out; his music shows that growing pains never stop. 

This aspect of Solid Air also owes a lot to its historical moment: Martyn as open-hearted hippie emerging from the Sixties adventure to confront the costs of freedom (the problem of being in a couple but remaining fancy-free; drugs as life-quickening versus drugs as “false energy” or numbing tranquiliser). 

Solid Air is post-psychedelic also in the sense I mentioned earlier. These are songs, like the self that sings them, blurring at the edges and melting into something larger. This expanse was designated “space” by the cosmic rock bands of the era, but Martyn’s utopian image of healing boundlessness was “the ocean.” In “Don’t Want To Know,” the vengeful verse about cities a-crumbling ends with the wistful yet mysterious line “waiting till the sea a-grow”: a mystical image of world destruction as world salvation, perhaps, as though unity will only come when the continents (gigantic islands, if you think about it) drown in the sea of love.

The oceanic, “only connect” impulses of Sixties rock were political and musical at the same time. In the Seventies, these twin dreams collided with political reality and with a music industry that was becoming more market-segmented, and less of an anything-goes possibility space. By the end of the Seventies, Island’s Chris Blackwell would inform Martyn that his meandering muse had driven him into a niche marked “jazz,” a pigeonhole that every fiber in the singer’s artistic being revolted against. 

Only a few years earlier, in happier times, Blackwell produced Martyn’s #2 masterpiece, One World, its title track a disillusioned hippie’s plea as plaintively poignant and ardently apolitical (because seeking to abolish politics?) as Lennon’s “Imagine” or “One Love” by Martyn’s labelmate  Bob Marley. But the track’s sentiment is also a musical ideal, the call for a “one world” music being made by many at the time (see Miles Davis’ Pangaea, named after the original supercontinent that existed some 300 million year ago).

Martyn had already reached it on Solid Air: a body music that feeds the head, a sound woven from the becoming-jazz of folk, the becoming-electric of jazz, the becoming-acoustic of funk (not that Martyn, an earthy fellow, would ever use such Deleuzian jargon). The schizo-song of “I’d Rather Be The Devil” is where it all comes together, while coming apart. Sonically traversing the distance from the Mississippi levee work-camps in which the young Skip James toiled to Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way, “Devil” captures the ambivalence of “blue”: the color of orphan-in-this-world desolation, but also of back-to-the-womb bliss. The two halves of “Devil”, like the play of shadow and light across the whole of Solid Air, correspond to a battle in John Martyn’s soul – between sea monster and water baby,

danger and grace. 

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

"I'd Rather Be The Devil" for The Wire's cover story on cover versions, November 2005

“Devil Got My Woman” (Skip James, rec. 1931)

Blues might be the most worn-out (through over-use and abuse), hard-to-hear-fresh music on the planet, but James’ original “Devil” --just his piteous keening voice and acoustic guitar--still cuts right through to chill your marrow. The lyric surpasses “Love Like Anthrax” with its anti-romantic imagery of love as toxic affliction, a  dis-ease of the spirit (James tries to rest, to switch off his lovesick thoughts for a while,  but “my mind starts a-rambling like a wild geese from the west”). Most singers would flinch from taking on this unheimlich tune. But John Martyn, reworking (and renaming) it as “I’d Rather Be The Devil” on Solid Air (Island, 1973) not only equals the original’s intensity but enriches and expands the song, stretching its form to the limit. It starts as a sickening plunge, a dive into seductive but treacherous waters. Roiling with congas and clavinet, the band’s surging aquafunk rivals anything contemporaneous by Sly Stone or P-Funk; Martyn moves through the music like a shark. Lyric shards come into focus now and then--“so much evil”, “stole her from my best friend… know he’ll get lucky, steal her back”--but mostly Martyn’s murky rasp fills your head like this black gas of amorphous malevolence. Then suddenly the bitches-brew  turbulence dissipates; ocean-as-killing-floor transforms into a barrier reef-cocooned idyll. Danny Thompson’s bass injects pure intravenous calm, keyboards flicker and undulate like anemones, Martyn’s needlepoint fingerpicking spirals in Echoplexed loops of rising rapture. Sonically traversing the distance from the Mississippi levee work-camps in which the young James toiled to Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way, “I’d Rather Be The Devil” captures the ambivalence of “blue”: the colour of orphan-in-this-world desolation, but also of back-to-the-womb bliss. The two halves of Martyn’s drastic remake also correspond to a battle in the singer’s soul--between monster and water baby, danger and grace.

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

                                                        

Oneohtrix Point Never

Oneohtrix Point Never

Village Voice, July 6, 2010

by Simon Reynolds

Daniel Lopatin, the young man behind the spacey and spacious mindscapes of Oneohtrix Point Never, operates out of a cramped bedroom in Bushwick. Most of it is taken up by vintage Eighties synthesizers, rhythm boxes, and assorted sound-processing gizmos, plus a gigantic computer monitor.  Every inch of surface area is covered with tsotchkes: a Tupac mug, little sculpted owls, John and Yoko kissing on the sleeve of "Just like Starting Over".  Besides the computer, a stack of tomes represent upcoming areas of research for the erudite, philosophy-minded Lopatin:  a guide to Alchemy & Mysticism, a lavish book on ECM Records, Ray Kurzweil on The Singularity.  Most intriguing, though, are the notes posted above his work-space:  maxims, self-devised or sampled from thinkers, that are midway between Eno's Oblique Strategies and  those embroidered homilies people once stuck on their kitchen walls.   

"Do More With Less (Ephemeralize)" is fairly self-explanatory. The more opaque "'Linear'  -- Kill Time vs. 'Sacred'" is clarified by Lopatin thusly: "People think killing time is bad, you should be productive --but when music is at its most sanctified, it's a total time kill."   There's something in Hebrew and Cyrillic that nods to Lopatin's Russian Jewish background.  Most revealing of these "little critical reminders" is "N.W.B.", which stands for "Noise Without Borders".  "Everything is noise," elaborates Lopatin, whose yellowish hair and reddish beard mesh pleasingly with his off-purple flannel shirt and kindly, dreamy green eyes. "Noise can be sculpted down to become pop; pop can be sculpted down into noise. But it's also to do with the idea of not having genre affiliations".

Oneohtrix Point Never emerged out of the noise underground, but for a long while Lopatin felt like an outcast among the outcasts. The ideas he was developing--bringing in euphonious influences from Seventies cosmic trance music and Eighties New Age, creating atmospheres of serenity tinged with desolation--went against the grain. "My shit wasn't popping off at all", he laughs. This was 2003-2005, when Wolf Eyes defined the scene with their rock 'n 'roll attitude.  Lopatin and a handful of kindred spirits such as Emeralds felt a growing "boredom with noise, a sense we'd done it: we get this emotion." Around 2006, the scene began to shift slowly in their direction. "We were all talking about Klaus Schulze," he recalls of the gig where he first bonded with Emeralds. He notes also the huge clouds of pot smoke pouring from vans outside the venue, Cambridge, MA's Twisted Village.  "Drugs!" is his answer when asked about how the noise scene reached its current ethereal 'n' tranquil state-of-art. "Noise, at the end of the day, is headspace music. Drugs are a big part of getting into that experience, from a playing side, and from a fan/listener perspective too."

A flurry of Oneohtrix releases plus collaborative side projects such as Infinity Window made Lopatin a name to watch. But it was last year's Rifts--a double CD for Carlos Giffoni's No Fun label pulling together a trilogy of hard-to-find earlier releases--that propelled him to underground star status. U.K. magazine The Wire anointed Rifts the #2 album of 2009. The CD also sold out its two thousand pressing, making it a blockbuster success in a scene where the majority of releases come out in small runs anywhere from 300 to 30 copies. Rifts was further disseminated widely on the web, talked about and listened to with an intensity that sales figures don't reflect. 

Another profile-raising "hit" for Lopatin was Sunsetcorp's "Nobody Here"-- a mash-up of Chris DeBurgh's putrid "The Lady in Red" and a vintage computer graphic called "Rainbow Road," that has so far received 30,000 YouTube hits.  Lopatins calls his audio-video collages "echo jams": they typically combine Eighties sources (a vocal loop from Mirage-era Fleetwood Mac, say, with a sequence from a Japanese or Soviet hi-fi commercial) and slow them down narcotically (an idea inspired by DJ Screw). Lopatin collated his best echo jams on the recent Memory Vague DVD.  His Eighties obsession also comes through with the MIDI-funk side project Games, a collaboration with Joel Ford from Brooklyn band Tiger City. (Ford also lives in a room at the other end of the Bushwick apartment).  Lopatin plays me a new Games track that sounds like it could be a Michael McDonald song off the Running Scared O/S/T and says "We want people to be playing this in cars."

In what is simultaneously a further step forward and another step sideways, the new Oneohtrix album Returnal is released this month on the highly respected experimental electronic label Mego.  Although Lopatin's preoccupations with memory are similar to the label's most renowned artist Fennesz, sonically Returnal has little in common with Mego's glitchy past.  Yet Returnal is a departure for Lopatin, too.  Several tracks adhere to the classic OPN template established by tunes like "Russian Mind' and "Physical Memory": rippling arpeggiations, sweet melody offset by sour dissonance, grid-like structures struggling with cloudy amorphousness. But the most exciting tunes are forays into completely other zones. 

Opening with the sculpted distortion-blast of "Nil Admirari" is a fuck you to those who have Lopatin pegged as "that Tangerine Dream guy". It's also a concept piece, a painting of a modern household, where the outside world's violence pours in through the cable lines, the domestic haven contaminated by toxic data: "The mom's sucked into CNN, freaking out about Code Orange terrorist shit, while the kid is in the other room playing Halo 3, inside that weird Mars environment killing some James Cameron-type predator."" At the opposite extreme, the title track is an exquisitely mournful ballad redolent of the early solo work of Japan's David Sylvian. Lopatin's vocals have featured occasionally before as Enya-esque texture-billow but never so songfully as on "Returnal" (qualities that emerge even more strongly on the forthcoming remix/cover voiced by Anthony Hegarty).

Finally, most astonishingly, is "‡Preyouandi∆", the closing track: a shatteringly alien terrain made largely out of glassy percussion sounds, densely clustered cascades fed through echo and delay. On first listen, I pictured an ice shelf disintegrating,  a beautiful, slow-motion catastrophe.  This "blues for global warming" interpretation turns out to be completely off-base, but "‡Preyouandi∆" is the sort of music that gets your mind's eye reeling with fantastical imagery.

Both "Returnal" and "‡Preyouandi∆" contain textural tints that explicitly echo the hyper-visual sounds and visionary concepts of Jon Hassell, who back in the 1980s explored what he called "4th World Music":  a polyglot sound mixing Western hi-tech and ethnic ritual musics.  "I wanted to make a world music record," says Lopatin. "But make it hyper-real, refracted through not really being in touch with the world.   Everything I know about the world is seen through Nova specials, Jacques Cousteau and National Geographic."   He explains that the stuff that indirectly influenced Returnal were things like the unnaturally vivid and stylized tableaus you might see in that kind of documentary or magazine article--a 100 Sufis praying in a field, say.  "So I'm painting these pictures, not of the actual world, but of us watching that world." 

Oneohtrix Point Never, Elizabeth Fraser

“Tales from the Trash Stratum”

[from Pitchfork end of year tracks blurbs 2021)

The original “Trash Stratum” on 2020’s Magic Oneohtrix Point Never entwined distortion and euphony in fairly familiar Dan Lopatin fashion. This year’s drastic reinvention lovingly collages ‘80s production motifs: pizzicato string-flutters as fragrant as Enya, blobs of reverb-smudged piano that evoke Harold Budd, high-toned pings of bass that could be The Blue Nile or Seventeen Seconds Cure. It’s like Lopatin is a bowerbird building a glittering nest to attract a mate – and succeeds in reeling in the onetime Cocteau Twin.  Fraser’s contributions -  ASMR-triggering wisps of sibilant breath, chirruping syllables from a disintegrated lullaby – are closer to a diva’s warm-up exercises than an actual aria, and sometimes you long for her to take full-throated flight into song.  But it’s lovely to hear the Goth goddess brought into the glitchy 21st Century. 

Queries + replies from / for Amanda Petrusich and her New Yorker profile of Lopatin

1.    Dan's work is really conceptual, but I'm also curious how it lands on you as MUSIC -- how you see it fitting in amongst his genre peers, and also his predecessors? My sense is that he's not the first artist to do some of these things, but there's something about his work that feels really special.

 

Dan is one of the pioneers and exemplars of what I call conceptronica. Sometimes with that not-quite-a-genre (it’s more like a mode of operation) the framing can be a bit overbearing. Occasionally he’s veered too far that way. But unlike many of those who operate like that (i.e. with a highly articulated rationale pitched to the audience and to critics) , at its best his music has an element of sheer beauty and emotional pull to it that transcends, or just bypasses, the verbalization. I’m thinking of pieces like “Physical Memory”, which just aches with feeling.  

I’m not even sure I can pinpoint what the emotions are – often it's like strange new affects of the future.

But then something like his most famous eccojam, “Nobody Here” – the emotion here is human and relatable. He’s said it’s about his own loneliness in New York, having recently moved there. Which is not the emotion in the original song,  a romantic ballad. But somehow he was able to take that little vocal sliver and repurpose it, in combination with that early computer graphics animation in the video. I don’t think there’s any element in “Nobody Here” that sonically or visually was generated by him, it’s all found material, but out of it he created something new and emotionally resonant. 

When he first came along he was identified with this scene that some called hypnagogic pop and then later chillwave was the term used for the more song-oriented stuff out of that area. So he would be bracketed with artists like James Ferraro and Emeralds – a lot of the emphasis was recycling Eighties mainstream pop or rehabilitating New Age music. When I tried to pinpoint what defined this wave of artists I came up with this idea that it was Pop Art meets psychedelia. So, reusing detritus from mass culture, but shot through with this hallucinatory quality.

In some ways, although he uses older musical material or references it, Dan’s ancestors aren’t so much in music but in the visual arts – the Appropriation Artists in particular, which is essentially Pop Art part 2..

 

  

2.    I'm super interested in an idea you write about a lot in "Retromania," that the Internet has left everything essentially untethered to space and time, and therefore we're moving laterally, and not backwards, when we recycle or reappropriate or repatriate or recontextualize ideas from the past. I'm curious what you think might be dangerous -- if anything! -- about this new way of consuming culture? 

 

I don’t know if it’s dangerous – it’s disorienting for someone like me who grew up with ideas of progress and sort of construable linear evolution for music and culture, in which some things get definitively superseded and you move on to the next stage, ideally at exhilarating speed. That was my outlook and my expectation growing up, but it might already have been a somewhat old-fashioned sort of modernism even then – those ideas lingered far longer in popular music than they did in art and architecture.

Dan has some great quotes that I used in Retromania (from the original interview I did with him for Village Voice) to do with how we’re living in  a time of reprocessing culture, this enormous junk heap of material left over from the 20^th Century, it’s an aftermath phase of salvage and tinkering and recycling.

That said, there are clearly plenty of new technological things happening that are creating new cultural forms or the potential for them. At the time of writing Retromania I didn’t realise how much Auto-Tune would become a creative tool and lead to all this completely new-sounding music, particularly in hip hop but also on the experimental fringe. The voice became the field of action in terms of experimentation. (Dan’s done quite a bit of stuff in that vein, whether it’s things like “Sleep Dealer” or the vocal entity created for Garden of Delete)

And then there’s AI.

So maybe that archival moment that was happening in music in the 2000s (and also in art  - reenactments, what Claire Bishop recently wrote about in terms of research based art), maybe that has passed. It was a temporary phase created by the way that the Internet, YouTube etc seemed to erupt into existence and suddenly we were all sitting amidst this enormous cultural junkheap, It was irresistible to explore and excavate. Overpowering in terms of its claims on our attention and how creative people’s imaginations were affected. Indeed, there was a kind of helplessness to it, I think.

That is still going on, there’s a lot of archival based work, revivalism, pastiche - but there are things that are happening, enabled with newer technology, that result in the genuinely unforeheard.

 

3.    This is kind of a weird one, but does it feel, to you, like Dan has invented something new, some new idiom or sound?

I think he has, in moments, particular tracks. There’s a lot of referencing and recycling –  the whole hypergrunge idea was very clever.

But something like “‡PREYOUANDI∆” – I can hear faint echoes of earlier artists (like a bit of Jon Hassell maybe) but it’s really like nothing I’ve heard.

Even “Physical Memory”, while you might think vaguely of Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze, it doesn’t really sound much like those groups. It’s probably more inspired by an idea of the analogue synth epic, these very long electronic mindscapes that could sometimes take up the whole of one side of an LP. 

A lot of what has fascinated Dan is older futurisms - the pathos of new technology that gets obsolesced but also might contain dormant possibilities that were passed over too quickly at the time in the onrush of development. You can hear all these echoes or reactivations of 1980s early digital textures and effects. 

So the whole idea of the future and the new is sort of simultaneously jettisoned, or questioned, and yet still has this pull, still continues to have this hold on the imagination .