The Red Hot Chilli Peppers

In honour of the new RHCP doc, which is focused on Hillel Slovak, their tragically-died-young guitarist, and in further honour of Flea's jazz album, here are some writhings about the band. 

Whose second album Freaky Styley I bought with faint hope after reading about them (slim pickings that year) only to be insufficiently whelmed. 

They were apparently huge postpunk fans (something shown by the footage in the doc of their precursor bands, who are very Anglophile). 

Green Gartside told me that at some music biz award ceremony, they came up to him burbling about the early Scritti stuff (I imagine what turned them on were the funky-slinky "PAs' and the other 4 A-Sides tunes rather than "OPEC-Immac).... 

Keith Levene claimed that Flea auditioned to be in PiL after he, Levene, left, and was most disappointed that Levene was no longer in the band, since that was the prime reason he wanted to join.... and he did in fact contribute to Keith Levene's Violent Opposition, if I recall right ...  

And obviously they got Andy Gill to produce their debut. 

Which I have never thought to listen to until seeing this doc. 

Although more voluminous than I remembered, the below are not the complete collation of my writhings about Red Hot Chilli Peppers.... on some other occasion, I did opine that the wordless vocalese in the middle of "Under the Bridge" were the most unpleasant recorded sounds emitted by a human throat in the entire 1990s. 

I will say, Flea does seem like a a truly sweet geezer.  But yeah... if the group did start with postpunk,  you would have to say that not every pathway from a golden origin is a fruitful one.

The Red Hot Chilli Peppers

The Clarendon, Hammersmith, London

Melody Maker, March 5 1988

So the Clarendon faces closure, and yes it's a sad day for rock, another step in the drawn-out death of the London gig circuit, and where will the Buttholes and Bad Brains of this world play – but, here, tonight, sauna-sweltering in this rank sty of Grebo flesh, this post-punk meets pre-punk sewer, such a closure can only feel like an elementary and overdue sanitary measure.

This is The Red Hot Chilli Peppers' constituency, for sure. The Red Hot Chilli Peppers read like a good idea: an alliance of funk and metal, the best of both worlds, a doubling of pleasures (what drug experts call "potentiation"). But then look what happens when you mix funk and jazz – separately two of the finest things in life. Each undermines the other, mutes and dampens their respective effects.

The problem for the Chilli Peppers is that funk and metal are further away than ever, much further than in the age of funkadelia they hark back to. Metal has become monolithic, no longer beastly but cruelly hygienic, the proverbial sonic abattoir. And funk – who plays funk, these days? Modern black dance is assembled in the studio. This Organic Anti-Beatbox Band inevitably comes over a little dated.

The giveaway is their overbearing penchant for ye olde slap-bass. Once, around 1981, the sound of slap-bass was for me and all the other white-dopes-on-funk the very definition of ecstasy. Now slap-bass strikes me as lost, Claptonesque craft that should be allowed to slip quietly into disuse. After all, few black musicians play in that style anymore...

The Red Hot Chilli Peppers come across as a kind of National Lampoon's Gang Of Four. Body paint making them look like fluorescent salamanders, they have that generic hardcore look, neanderthal features combined with Bullworker-bodies, and they see their lame buffoonery as a major service to us and to the world. Like so many of these "wackeee" US bands, they combine sexism with a fervent loathing for racism. (All of them seem to have written at least one song about the genocide of the Red Indians.)

At their best, they're like a lumpen, sub-virtuoso approximation of Hendrix, funk fluency combined with rock's serrated edges. At their worst, they're like late Zappa, or a yob version of Firehose. This "funk" is too clenched, too trammeled by hardcore dynamics to approach maggot-brain diuretic gross-out.

There are some fab moments, like the great nervous tic of a chorus in 'Me And My Friends', rising up to buffet you in the face like surf. And the forthcoming LP is extremely fine*. Live, though, The Red Hot Chilli Peppers are too curvaceous and wriggly to be speed-metal, but too hasty and hamfisted to shimmy and wiggle like funk. They are neither carnal nor apocalyptic, neither swagger nor hurtle. It feels forced, albeit at times almost interestingly wrong.

* Is it though? Was it, though? 

RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS 

PSYCHEDELIC SEXFUNK LIVE FROM HEAVEN video

Melody Maker 1990?

     "Whoopee!", I exclaimed, on being presented "PSYCHEDELIC SEXFUNK LIVE FROM  HEAVEN" (Picture Music International, œˆ9-99), "a chance to relive the third worst night of my life!". 

This was back in 1988 when the intolerably zany Red Hot Chili Peppers played the intolerably humid Clarendon (now deceased, doubtless as a sanitary precaution). This video is thankfully not a document of that hellish night, but consists of live excerpts from a gig at Long Beach Arena, intercut with "behind the scenes mayhem".  The press release claims that these are so untamed and licentious that the video was awarded a 15 certificate, but the grainy shots of dressing room antics, Chad taking a shit, the drummer putting an Elastoplast on his chafed thumb, and the band gathering in a circle for a pre-match pow-wow session, hardly qualify as "Hammer Of The Gods" material. 

But then the Peppers are clean-cut, cleaned-up sorts these days. Music for them is a kind of sporting activity, a "healthy release of energy", and underneath the wacky hairdos they look like GI's. Onstage, they present a spectacle of taut, glistening musculature and relentless hyperactivity.  Red Hot Chilli Peppers version of funk allows no scope for languor or "lazy carnality". If it's seldom flagrantly sexist  "Stone Cold Bush", with its "she blows more than my mind" refrain is a notable exception), the Peppers' athletic sexuality is totally masculine, all thrust and pummel, exertion and "performance".

     The music too is all prowess and overkill, a sub-Hendrix muso-flash blur of slap-bass and finickity riffs. The unfavourable comparisons with Hendrix are compounded by their spoof trumpet version of "The Star Spangled Banner" - only twenty years too late.

Village Voice has a good term for the Chilli Peppers/Faith No More/Urban Dance Squad/Electric Boys blend of rock and funk that neither grooves nor slams: "runk". It sounds like an unpleasant residue left behind by food processing. This video only confirms what I've known ever since that night at The Clarendon: runk is rank.

                                                 

METAL BREAKDOWN: The Funk-Metal phenomenon
20/20, 1990

by Simon Reynolds

When it comes to the USA’s current birth explosion of funk-metal groups, all paternity suits should be filed with the Red Hot Chili Peppers: a “seminal” band in all senses of the word. Five years ago this Los Angeles group’s Freaky Styley LP coined a sound, an attitude and an onstage dementia that has since inspired an entire genre.

First there was Faith No More from Northern California, with their torrid, overwrought fusion of metal, rap and funk, and their morbid fixation on the darker side of life. Faith No More rapidly overtook the Chili Peppers, and last year cracked the MTV mainstream with their Top Ten hit “Epic”, an anthem-like encapsulation of their cartoon Nietzsche world-view.

In 1990, the funk-metal floodgates opened. Most of the time, the names tell you everything you need to know: Psychofunkapus, Scatterbrain, Limbomaniacs, Mindfunk, Sprawl, Sweet Lizard Illtet, Moneyspank, Electric Boys, Spin Doctors. All these bands are loosely aligned to the P-funk creed originally formulated by George Clinton and Bootsy Collins (“a creative nuisance… the recognition of stupidity as a positive force”) as reactivated and reinterpreted by the Chili Peppers with their combination of zany antics, horny-like-a-mutha lyrics and elasticated funk-rock.

How is it that a generation of metalheads reared on Black Sabbath, Led Zep and Aerosmith have suddenly become turned on to Funkadelic, James Brown and Sly Stone? One reason for the shift towards funk was a reaction against the sterile impasse that metal had reached by the late Eighties. Heavy metal had undergone a striking regeneration during the Eighties, reforming its worst abuses and trimming off its flabby excesses. It even achieved a degree of raised consciousness with the apocalyptic protest of groups like Metallica and Anthrax.

But the thrash/speedmetal boom rapidly hit a dead end. With its high-velocity blur and self-flagellating S/M aesthetic, thrash was about as sexless and ungroovy as rock music can get. Light years from rock’s R&B roots, thrash was the ultimate Aryan sublimation of metal. It was almost inevitable there would be a call for a reinfusion of ‘blackness’, a return to syncopation. Even mainstream metal groups have been lubricating their sound with a bit of funk fluency (Poison’s “Unskinny Bop”, Extreme’s “Get the Funk out”).

Another factor was the influence of rap: hip hop has set the agenda for US pop in much the same way that house has completely overhauled British chart pop. In particular, it was Def Jam’s rap/metal phase (Run DMC, Beastie Boys, LL Cool J) that opened a lot of headbangers’ ears. Also part of the ‘crosstown traffic’ of the late Eighties was the rise of black rock. Groups like Living Colour, 24-7 Spyz and Fishbone, coming from the opposite direction, have run head-first into the funk-metallers.

This connects with another reason for the rise of funk-metal: musicians’ tendency to get bored easily. Mixing genres allows the muso to show off. Once upon a time, it was the blues solo that provided the pretext for exhibitionist feats of dexterity: with the funk-metallers, it’s slap bass. In both cases, white musicians colonized a style that its black originators had almost unanimously left for dead. Contemporary black dance (house, swingbeat, rap) is technophile, happy to engage with state-of-the-art equipment. Funk-metal generally displays a Luddite techno-fear, following the Chili Peppers’ “organic anti-beatbox” creed, which declares that audience pleasure is in direct ratio to the amount of flailing energy expended by the band.

Body-awareness is at the core of funk-metal. In part this is a reaction against the chaste, fleshless aura of most metal. Death metal, for instance, is carnographic rather than pornographic. Its histrionic crescendos are more nuclear detonations than orgasms. And partly it’s that George Clinton’s lewd and lubricious bad-ass persona somehow seems a more acceptable role model for the male libido than trad metal’s penile dementia.

But funk-metal comprehends a range of contradictory attitudes to the body. On one hand, there’s the West Coast’s health-and-efficiency ethos--muscle-bound athleticism and the hardcore punk philosophy of straight-edge (no drink or drugs). Sweet Lizard Illtet sing of positive energy, rail against “merry-go round thrills” and aspire to the “honest bodily togetherness” of Afro-American culture. Other groups aspire to the debauchery and excess of a different West Coast culture. There’s the apocalyptic aura of decadence entwined around Jane’s Addiction, whose art-rock inflected brand of heavy metal brilliantly melds influences from funk, dub reggae and Eastern music. Or there’s Moneyspank’s pagan/voodoo vibes and sex-and-death lyrics. The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ career has included body worshipping (they invariably perform with their shirts off to showcase their muscled physiques) and desecrating their body-temples: guitarist Hillel Slovak died of a drug overdose, while singer Antwan aka Anthony Kiedis cleaned up his act and exchanged over-indulgence for New Age eco-platitudes.

All funk-metal groups agree that one form of self-abuse is still legitimate: moshing, stage-diving and other forms of lemming-like behaviour are de rigeur. Funk-metal gigs seethe with sweaty male bonding. This is the genre’s biggest defect--it’s a boy’s own affair. Not one of the score or more funk-metal bands includes a female musician. Admittedly, examples of outright sexism are surprisingly rare (one exception being Limbomaniacs whose Stinky Grooves LP includes songs like “Butt Funkin’” and “Porno”). But it’s also true that the representation of sex in funk-metal is totally masculine--thrust-orientated, with no place for languor or tenderness. In many ways, it’s an aggregation of the most phallocratic tendencies in the white rock and black funk traditions: Rick James meets Robert Plant.

Still, funk-metal earns a Brownie point for its anti-racist tendencies. Implicit in the musical miscegenation, these are often explicitly articulated in lyrics and interviews. The Chili Peppers even started a fashion for songs about the plight of the Native American with their “American Ghost Dance”. That said, the pro-integration sentiments don’t seem to have had much effect on the racial composition of the audiences or indeed of the bands themselves, who remain almost exclusively “white dopes on funk”.

Red Hot Chili Peppers

interview 

The Observer, September 29, 1991

One of the most hyperactive rock scenes in the United States is a genre called 'funk-metal' or 'funk 'n' roll'. Groups like Faith No More, Fishbone and Living Color have broken into the charts; scores of funk-metal bands, with names like Scatterbrain and Primus are waiting in the wings.

But the pioneers of funk-metal (a fusion of hard rock aggression and Seventies funk swagger) are the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Back in early Eighties Los Angeles, only they (and the all-black Fishbone) were exploring this currently overcrowded terrain.

The core of the Chili Peppers, Anthony Kiedis and Flea Balzary, were hanging out in the vaguely bohemian milieu around Hollywood Boulevard. Kiedis was a 'nomadic poet'; Balzary played bass for a hardcore punk band called Fear. The duo first turned on to black music when they encountered the 'punk-funk' outfit Defunkt. But Kiedis only considered getting involved in music himself after hearing rap. After forming the Chili Peppers, he developed a drawled vocal style between rap and singing.

"When we started fusing funk and rock, we never intended to spearhead a movement," recalls Kiedis. "It's not as though we're the first to mix funk and rock. Long before us there was Sly Stone and Parliament/Funkadelic. At the early shows, people used to say, ‘you guys are really into P-Funk, right?’

"At that point, we hadn't heard that stuff. But then we really got into it, and eventually we got George Clinton to produce the second album, Freakey Stylee." The album's title captured the flavour of the Chili Peppers' zany on-stage antics, notably their penchant for performing naked (except for socks pulled over their genitals).

By 1987 and their third album. The Uplift Mojo Party Plan, the Chili Peppers were calling themselves the Organic Anti-Beatbox Band, a dig at Eighties black dance genres such as rap and house which rely on hi-tech samplers and sequencers. Pitting themselves against the studio-based, producer-dominated dance pop of the day, the Chili Peppers complained about its sterility, and called for a return to 'dirty' Seventies funk. In interviews, they came over more than a little Luddite.

"We're not against music that depends on technology," clarifies Kiedis. "It's just that we prefer to be an all-live, hands-on band. But my favourite band is Public Enemy and they use samplers and drum machines. There's a lot of rap music that's ridiculously funky. What I don't like is house music – it's the most blasphemous, soulless, cold-blooded noise I ever heard."

With their creed of sweaty exertion, the Chili Peppers inspired heavy metal's rediscovery of 'groove' after the late Eighties, during which metal had become increasingly sclerotic as it lost touch with its roots in R & B, and reached its apotheosis with the sadomasochistic thrills of thrash metal. "That kind of ferocity is one-dimensional," says Kiedis. "It's very male music, but without any sexual energy."

The Chili Peppers' vibe is far from chaste. They once declared that "we want our music to give you an erection." On their fifth album. Blood Sugar Sex Magik, they propound a hazy philosophy in which lusty hedonism and New Age spirituality are conflated. Their back-to-nature rhetoric carries through to an interest in tribalism and an admiration for Native American folkways.

"The album title is an eloquent but abstract description of how we feel," says Kiedis. "We live in a world packed with desensitising forces, that strip the world of magic. And music can help restore a sense of magic. The world is full of negativity, but we fight back with positivity. We're inspired by oceans, forests, animals, Marx Brothers films. We can't help but project uplifting vibrations, because we love each other so much and get off on playing together."

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

This Kiedis interview done on the phone and I remember him being not exactly friendly. 

Around this time I interviewed Metallica for The Observer, also on the phone (and the drummer I think), although for reasons I can't recollect, this never ran. 

And yet another Observer piece, this time done in person, but with not-the-singer but someone else, was Faith No More. 

Jane's Addiction were also interviewed around this time, for The New York Times, pegged around Lollapalooza.  

I was really doing a sort of run-through a certain type of big-on-MTV but just before grunge type band, I guess.  

The Residents

 

THE RESIDENTS RETRO-ACTIVE

Melody Maker, 1989? 1990?

by Simon Reynolds

     From the start, The Residents had a parasitical relation

to the pop culture that surrounded them. The sleevenotes to

"Meet The Residents", their 1973 debut, describes how they

spent the Sixties scavenging together a collection of sonic

detritus: "cassettes of soldiers in Vietnam singing songs

with impromptu instrumentation... reels from second hand

shops... sound effects and bird call collections from garage

sales ... even a few bootleg tapes of well-known pop artists

going avant-garde between takes". They were samplers long

before the invention of the Sampler.

     The early Seventies were a time when pop culture had

become so pervasive, so totalitarian, that its myths and

protocols began to replace 'real life' as pop's subject

matter.  Glam was one version of this meta-pop practice

(whether self-consciously articulated, as with Ziggy Stardust

and Roxy Music, or brutally vacant as with Glitter). The

avant-garde vandalism of The Residents was another. "Meet The

Residents", with its grotequely defaced Beatles cover, was

the birth of what has since become practically a genre of

plagiarism and misappropriation (Culturcide, Pussy Calore,

Laibach etc). Musically, "Meet The Residents" makes me think

of The Band, of all people: a polyglot commingling of

American traditional musics (R&B, proto-funk, New Orleans

jazz). But in The Residents' case, it's as though this

poly-rhythmic bouillabaise is being played on invented

instruments, or has been adapted to non-Western scales with

only partial success.

     "Third Reich 'N' Roll" (1976) develops The Residents

idea of the totalitarian nature of pop's rise to the level of

this planet's Esperanto of desire. It turns Sixties pop into

the soundtrack for Hitler's Blitzkrieg. "Swastikas On Parade"

is a segue of bubblegum classics like "Psychotic Reaction",

"The Letter", "Land Of 1000 Dances", competing with

divebombing Stukas, sirens, and machine gun fire, plus free

jazz gibberish and giddy constellations of Sun Ra synth.

"Hitler Was A Vegetarian" is a more downered trek through

songs like "96 Tears", "It's My Party", "Pushing Too Hard"

and "Gloria". Imagine The Clangers aspiring to the poignancyt

of Erik Satie.  "Third Reich 'N' Roll' is probably The

Residents' masterpiece.  As an added bonus, the CD includes

their hell-spawn (per)version of "Satisfaction", and "Beyond

The Valley Of A Day In The Life", in which "samples" of the

Beatles' wiggier moments are reconstructed into a wholly new

work.

     "Fingerprince" (also from 1976) is re-issued for the

first time in its full length. Along with the Hawaian guitar

pastiche "You yesyesyes" and the hilarious "Godsong" ("all

that God wanted to be/Just a normal deity"), there's two

pieces of particular interest. "Jealous Westinghouse" ,

described as a mini-opera, consists of electro pulsations

like Acid House at 16 rpm and doggerel dialogue in a Muppet

hillybilly twang. "Six Things To A Cycle" (a ballet) is an

atypically tropical suite of of crazy percussion and

Creatures campanology.

     "Duck Stab" (1977) is another fine collection of

25th Century nursery rhymes, conceived in the spirit of Dada

and Alfred Jarry. It's accompanied by "Goosembump", a

project undertaken with Snakefinger, whose aim was to bring

to the fore the macabre overtones latent in kindergarten

ditties. All the sounds were produced from childrens' toys,

but were drastically peculiarised by "adult studio toys". The

result is a suite of nauseatingly rubberised nursery rhymes,

that at times ("Three Blind Mice") are creepy almost

beyond endurance.

     Even more unsettling is "Eskimo", The Residents' 1979

elegy for the extinct Inoit culture of the now-thorougly

Americanised Eskimo. While their liberal tolerance for Inoit

rituals (e.g. bathing in urine, exterminating all superfluous

newborn girls) is a tad dubious, the album is a superb sonic

evocation of the irreconcilably alien Arctic lifestyle

(walrus hunts conducted in conditions of

disorientating white-out, 'arctic hysteria' induced by the

sensory deprivation of the long winter darkness).

     "Not Available" was actually recorded in '74, in

accordance with N. Senada's "theory of obscurity": the idea

that creating music in the understanding that it is never to

be heard, is the only way to avoid subconsiously pandering to

an audience. But Ralph Records slipped it out surreptitiously

in '78, when The Residents were falling behind their deadline

for "Eskimo". It's not that radical, actually: its cheapo,

pre-programmed beats making it a distant, Dadaist cousin to

shopping mall or funeral parlour muzak.

     "The Commercial Album" (1980) is probably the best

introduction to The Residents. It consists of 40 pieces each

exactly one minute long. The idea is that, since most pop

songs contain a verse and chorus repeated three times within

three minutes, if you condense that span down to one minute

(the length of most commericals) you get the kernel of the

song without the extraneous matter. Here, the result is a

collection of 'jingles' as intricate and succint as a haiku

poem (one of the prettiest is called "Japanese Watercolour")

and a sound somewhere between the Human League circa

"Reproduction" and the Suicide of "Dance".

     After "The Commercial Album", The Residents seemed to

lose their way. "The Mole Trilogy" and its sequels "Tunes of

Two Cities" and "The Big Bubble" amount to an impenetrable

allegory of something-or-other. Only the most dedicated fan

could be bothered to slog through through the dank, drab

textures of "The Mole Trilogy" to reach enlightenment. Then

there's the flaccid "God In Three Persons", a couple of live

albums, and a fine collection of material by Snakefinger

(their favourite collaborator, the now deceased guitarist

Philip Lithman).





The "American Composers Series" (The

Residents 20 year project of tributes) has brought back a

measure of rejuvenation to their sound. It seems we can

apprehend more clearly the nature of their alien-ating method

when they bring their warp factor to bear on something we

know already.  The mystery continues...

THE RESIDENTS at THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Art Review, 2006

by Simon Reynolds

From the start, The Residents saw themselves as a sound and vision entity. Way ahead of punk’s indie label revolution, the San Francisco group set up not just their own record company, Ralph, but a do-it-all-yourself production facility, which included, alongside studios for recording music and graphic design, a huge sound-stage for making films.

Before they’d even released their debut album, 1973’s Meet the Residents, the band had embarked on a movie, Vileness Fats, intended to be the world’s first fourteen-hour musical-comedy-romance set in a world of one-armed midgets. The project was pursued fitfully for four years only to be abandoned in 1976. But the warehouse HQ on Grove Street did spew out a stream of innovative and derangingly strange music videos and short films, and these, along with footage from the aborted Vileness, are now being honored with a MOMA retrospective.

Mixed-media performance and audio-visual malarkey were the norm in San Francisco’s postpunk scene. Tuxedomoon, an electronic cabaret outfit who recorded for Ralph,

came out of Sixties underground theater, with one member having belonged to the

legendary all-gay troupe Angels of Light,, while SF industrial band Factrix staged mind-bending spectacles in collaboration with local performance artists like Monte Cazazza and Mark Pauline (the robot-builder and pyrotechnician behind Survival Research Laboratories). Punk certainly opened things up and created a new climate in which bands like the Residents and Devo could find an audience. But in truth the Residents were post-psychedelic rather than post-punk: the group had been in existence since the late Sixties and had arrived in San Francisco from their native Louisiana

just as the high tide of acid rock was ebbing. According to Residents’ spokesman Hardy Fox (the group itself shuns interviews and has preserved its anonymity for over thirty years), the band “sprang from the fact that psychedelia dead-ended. The people who were doing experiments in that direction stopped when they had barely scratched the surface.”  Those “people” included the Beatles, Frank Zappa, and Captain Beefheart. Undeterred by the fact that they could barely play instruments, The Residents wanted to pick up where their freak heroes had left off. And, whether onstage or in their videos, they wanted imagery as weird and wigged-out as their sounds.

The visual work does indeed closely mirror the arc of the Residents music, (de)evolving from a lo-fi yet genuinely uncanny neo-Dada to a high-tech but increasingly sterile kookiness. The early “promos”--scare quotes because when they were made in the late Seventies there were hardly any places on American TV that showed videos and nobody, except maybe the cable TV fringe, would dare to show the Residents films--have a macabre whimsy and gorgeous grotesqueness that at various points brings to mind the Quay Bros, Eraserhead (a late-night movie-house fave with the San Francisco postpunk set) and the Anglo-surrealist children’s animations made by Postgate Films (The Clangers, Bagpuss, Pogle’s Wood).  In  Third Reich’n’Roll (1976) the Residents cavort in Ku Klux Klan-like head-dresses made from newspaper, pounding percussion as their mutant cover of Wilson Pickett’s “Land of a Thousand Dances” plays. 


The four One-Minute Movies for the sixty-second tracks off 1980’s Commercial Album are visual haikus as exquisitely eerie as the tunes, full of images that linger in the memory: a female corpse cocooned in cob-webs, a rheumy-eyed geezer watching TV on a bare mattress who suddenly levitates to the ceiling, a dead pig with roman candles stuck between its trotters. In several of these micro-movies, The Residents appear in their famous Fred Astaire meets Un Chien Andalou image: the elegance of top-hats, tails, and canes disrupted by the gigantic, veiny eyeballs that completely replace their heads. A fractured tale about a mis-shapen misfit with  Zelig-like traits of recurrence and ubiquity, Hello Skinny (1980) pays homage to Chris Marker’s La Jetée with its black-and-white stills, the  collaging of photographic and drawn material further recalling Terry Gilliam’s animations for Monty Python.

The Residents had a parasitical-cum-parodic relationship with mainstream pop culture, which they regarded as a new form of totalitarianism, evil because of its banality. Hence the love/hate for the Fab Four expressed in the cover of their debut album, a defacement of Meet the Beatles’s famous cover; hence Third Reich ‘n’Roll’s  transformation of the entirety of Sixties pop into the soundtrack for Hitler’s Blitzkrieg. By the mid-Eighties, the group launched a massive project, the American Composers Series, 20 albums across 20 years that would honor-through-vandalisation the work of figures like George Gershwin and Hank Williams.  (In the event, the series sputtered to a halt after just two records). It’s as this point that things start to go awry with the Residents output, sonically and visually: the irritatingly goofy cover of James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s World” is out-dulled only by the uninspired animations that accompany it, while The Residents’ video for their take on John Philip Sousa "Stars and Stripes” is a smug and clunky exercise in anti-militarism (World War III rendered as an amusement arcade shooting gallery designed by Lari Pitman and Disney: clown-face bombs, rabbits riding on top of intercontinental missles, and so forth).



What the later Residents work, like the flat and strangely static 2000 video for “Constantinople”, shows is that 98 times out of 100, analog trumps digital. Computers can create the most superficially “fanstastical” images, but because you literally can’t believe your eyes, there’s no sense of the unheimlich, none of that “dreamed” quality possessed by the Residents’ early work, made when the group had to get by with hand-made props, stage sets, and costumes, with lighting and camera-work, and above all with their own bodies. 

from a guide to parody and pastiche in pop and rock, Pitchfork 2016

The Residents: The Third Reich ‘N Roll (1976)

The Residents started out spoofing Meet the Beatles! with their own debut album Meet the Residents. As the grotesquely defaced cover art indicated, theirs was a love-hate relationship with the Fab Four and their entire era. The Third Reich ‘N Roll was a through-the-looking-glass replay of the previous decade, like some parallel reality where World War II and the ’60s temporally coincided; Wilson Pickett’s “Land of 1000 Dances” and Count Five’s “Psychotic Reaction” compete with the din of diving Stuka bombers and MG15 machine guns.

That same year, the Residents released a cover of the Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” even more mangled than Devo’s. Then, in 1977, they put out The Beatles Play the Residents and the Residents Play the Beatles. The A-side “Beyond the Valley of a Day in the Life” wove together samples of the Beatles and interview soundbites in which Lennon appears to apologize to the fans: “Please everybody if we haven’t done what we could have done, we’ve tried.” After several albums of all-original, gloriously peculiar music, the Residents returned to the perverted cover version concept with The American Composers Series, attempting ambiguous tributes to 20 musical greats. This petered out after just four twisted homages across two albums, to George Gershwin, James Brown, Hank Williams, and John Philip Sousa. By this point in the mid-’80s, the Residents had spawned a mini-genre of vandalistic plagiarism which we’ll encounter later, whose exponents include John Oswald, Negativland, and Culturcide.

idm misc

from the 2017 Pitchfork greatest-IDM-list (that ruffled a few feathers, that did, it was like negative catnip for nerds!  I had nothing to do with the selection, honest, apart from being one of many who sent their ballot in) 

Isolée: Rest (2000)

There was a moment, around the turn of the millennium, when IDM-aligned figures like Matthew Herbert started to embrace the slinky sensuality of the house template while weaving in glitches and clicks from the Oval/Fennesz world. The term “microhouse” was yet to be coined in 2000, but this is the undefined zone into which Rest slipped to wow the cognoscenti.

As the name hints, Isolée is a one-man-band, Rajko Müller. A German who spent much of his childhood in a French school in Algeria, his music is suitably cosmopolitan and border-crossing, connecting house and techno with ’80s synthpop and discreet touches of hand-played world music, like the Afro-pop guitar figure that flutters intermittently through “Beau Mot Plage” like a darting-and-dipping hummingbird. Müller’s sound works through the coexistence and interlacing of opposites: spartan and luxuriant, angular and lithe, crispy-dry and wet-look sleek, mechanistic and organic. Sensuous, ear-caressing textures juxtapose with abrasive tones as unyielding and chafing as a pair of Perspex underpants.

“Text,” the absolute highlight, is mystifyingly only available on the original 2000 compact disc. It’s an Op Art catacomb, a network of twisting tunnels, abrupt fissures, and pitch-shifted slopes that’s deliriously disorienting but never loses its dance pulse. Other tracks offer an exquisite blend of delicacy and geometry, like origami made out of graph paper, or echo the Fourth World electro-exotica of Sylvian-Sakamoto and Thomas Leer. We Are Monster, Müller’s 2005 follow-up, was excellent but a little too busy, losing the balance between minimal and maximal. So the debut remains Isolée’s true claim to acclaim, laurels on which Müller could Rest forever. 

and my intro text

Party in My Mind: The Endless Half-Lives of IDM

At the outset, it needs to be said that “Intelligent Dance Music” is—ironically—kind of a stupid name. By this point, possibly even the folks who coined the term back in 1993—members of an online mailing list mainly consisting of Aphex Twin obsessives—have misgivings about it.

For as a guiding concept, IDM raises way more issues than it settles. What exactly is “intelligence” as manifested in music? Is it an inherent property of certain genres, or more about a mode of listening to any and all music? After all, it’s possible to listen to and write about “stupid” forms of music with scintillating intellect. Equally, millions listen to “smart” sounds like jazz or classical in a mentally inert way, using it as a background ambience of sophistication or uplifting loftiness. Right from the start, IDM was freighted with some problematic assumptions. The equation of complexity with cleverness, for instance—what you might call the prog fallacy. And the notion that abandoning the functional, party-igniting aspect of dance somehow liberated the music and the listener: a privileging of head over body that reinforced biases ingrained from over 2,000 years of Western civilization, from Plato through St. Paul and Descartes to more recent cyber-utopians who dream of abandoning the “meat” and becoming pure spirit.

And yet, and yet... Dubious as the banner was (and is), under that aegis, some of the most fabulous electronic music of our era came into being. You could even dance to some of it! And while its peak has long since passed, IDM’s half-lives echo on around us still, often in the unlikeliest of places: avant-R&B tunes like Travis Scott’s “Goosebumps,” tracks like “Real Friends” on The Life of Pablo, even moments on “The Young Pope” soundtrack.

You could say that the prehistory of IDM was the ambient chill-out fad of the first years of the ’90s, along with certain ethereal and poignant tracks made by Detroit producers like Carl Craig. But really, it all kicks off in 1992 with Warp’s first Artificial Intelligence compilation and its attendant concept of “electronic listening music,” along with that same year’s Aphex Twin album Selected Ambient Works 85-92 (released on Apollo, the ambient imprint of R&S Records). Warp swiftly followed up the compilation with the Artificial Intelligence series of long-players by Black Dog Productions, Autechre, Richard D. James (operating under his Polygon Window alias, rather than as Aphex), and others. Smaller labels contributed to the nascent network, such as Rephlex (co-founded by James) and GPR (which released records by The Black Dog, Plaid, Beaumont Hannant). But it was Warp that ultimately opened up the space—as a niche market as much as a zone of sonic endeavor—for electronic music that retained the formal features of track-oriented, rave floor-targeted dance but oriented itself towards albums and home listening. ELM, as Warp dubbed it—IDM, as it came to be known—was private and introspective, rather than public and collective.

Phase 2 of IDM came when other artists and labels rushed in to supply the demand, the taste market, that Warp had stirred into existence. Among the key labels of this second phase were Skam, Schematic, Mille Plateaux, Morr, and Planet Mu. The latter was the brainchild of Mike Paradinas, aka μ-Ziq— one of the original Big Four IDM artists, alongside Aphex, Autechre, and Black Dog. (Or the Big Six, if you count Squarepusher and Luke Vibert, aka Wagon Christ/Plug). Most of these artists knew each other socially and sometimes collaborated. All were British.

The two stages of IDM correlate roughly with a shift in mood. First-phase intelligent tended to be strong on melody, atmosphere, and emotion; the beats, while modeled on house and techno, lacked the “oomph” required by DJs, the physical force that would cause a raver to enthuse about a tune as bangin’ or slammin’. Largely in response to the emergence of jungle, with its complex but physically coercive rhythmic innovations, Phase 2 IDM tended to be far more imposing and inventive with its drums; at the same time, the mood switched from misty-eyed reverie towards antic excess or whimsy. Often approaching a caricature of jungle, IDM tunes were still unlikely to get dropped in a main-room DJ’s set. But by now, the genre had spawned its own circuit of “eclectronica” clubs on both sides of the Atlantic, while the biggest artists could tour as concert acts.

You could talk about a Phase 3 stage of IDM, when the music—not content with borrowing rhythmic tricks from post-rave styles like jungle—actually moved to assimilate the rudeboy spirit of rave itself: the original Stupid Dance Music whose cheesy ‘n’ mental fervor was the very thing that IDM defined itself again. This early 2000s phase resulted in styles like breakcore and glitchcore; these had an international following and, for the first time in IDM’s history, a strong creative basis in the United States. Drawing on an array of street musics from gangsta to gabba, upstart mischief-makers like Kid606 and Lesser made fun of first-wave IDM’s chronic Anglophilia, releasing tracks with titles like “Luke Vibert Can Kiss My Indie-Punk Whiteboy Ass” and “Markus Popp Can Kiss My Redneck Ass.” Around this time, IDM pulled off its peak achievement of mainstream penetration when Radiohead released Kid A—an album for which Thom Yorke prepared by buying the entire Warp back catalog.

Seventeen years after that (albeit indirect) crossover triumph, the original IDM crew continues to release sporadically inspired work. Autechre’s discography is quite the feat of immaculate sustain, Richard D. James unexpectedly returned to delightful relevance after a long silence, Boards of Canada remain a treasure. Label-wise, there’s Planet Mu, who appear to be unstoppable, hurling out releases in a dozen different micro-styles. Overall, though, you’d have to say that IDM as a scene and a sound doesn’t really exist anymore. But its spectral traces can be tracked all across contemporary music, from genius producers like Actress and Oneohtrix Point Never, to the abstruse end of post-dubstep, to Arca’s smeared, gender-fluid texturology. Its reach goes way further: I’m constantly hearing IDM-like sounds on Power FM, the big commercial rap/R&B station here in L.A. At the end of the day, stupid name though it may be, IDM has given the world a stupefying immensity of fantastic music. And its reverberations have yet to dim.

Someone in Italy asked me questions about Selected Ambient Works 1985-1992 upon the occasion of its 30th Anniversary. This is what I said: 

There was this moment when some record labels astutely noticed that there was the beginnings of a demand for music that related to rave dancefloor sounds like techno but was designed for home listening – atmospheric, intricately textured, dreamy or pensive in mood. Artists had started to do tracks like that on the B-side of their dancefloor-target singles, or on the fourth track of an EP. Ambient interludes or stuff that had drums but wasn’t as pounding and body- coercive as the kind of techno a DJ would play. The two main labels that really spotted this development and saw that it could be the basis of album-length works – and album-oriented careers - were Warp, in Sheffield, England, and R&S, in Belgium. It was R&S who put out the Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92 and then Richard D. James signed to Warp. He was also doing that kind of thing through the label he co-founded, Rephlex.

If the rave scene of the period was marked by ecstasy, what drug could be associated with IDM?

Cannabis – and for some LSD perhaps. It’s also music that was associated with the after-party and the chill-out room – so music that fit the afterglow of MDMA but not so much the “I got dance like a maniac” phase. But overwhelming it’s cannabis. That’s why the robot on the front of Artificial Intelligence, the Warp compilation of Aphex-type music, is blowing smoke rings and puffing on a fat joint.

Why did IDM strike a chord with Silicon Valley geeks? And what effect did it have on ravers?

Electronic sound fits the aethetic of digital technology – and the musicians are using a lot of the same equipment as the Silicon Valley people. So there’s an affinity there on both levels. Also I think Aphex Twin type music is ideal for people who are working at computers – it’s hypnotic, it’s rhythmic but not “get up dance NOW”, there are patterns in it that are attractive to the ear but you can also tune out if you need to concentrate and it falls back very easily into being background music.

IDM didn’t get a lot of play on the rave dancefloor, it might get some play in side-rooms where people want to chill out after frenzied dancing. But also there developed a scene of chill-out clubs, people sitting around and smoking while listening to ambient and floaty electronic music.

What memories do you have related to the release of the album?

It was probably my favorite album of that year and certainly the one I played the most. I must have played it about a hundred times at least. Because it was a CD I quickly reprogrammed it to my favorite five or six tunes. But the whole album is brilliant.

What are your favorite tracks on the tracklist? And why?

I can’t be getting into reviewing the album, but my favorites are “Tha”, “Pulsewidth”, “We Are the Music Makers” and “Heliosphan”. “Xtal” is really dreamy and conversely "Hedphelym" is a really scary bit of dark electronic music.

What was Aphex Twin trying to tell us with the quote from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, We Are The Music Makers?

Well, I think it’s simply an honestly arrogant reflection of his self-belief – he knows he’s a genius. So that’s what he literally thinks musicians – the greatest musicians – do. They weave dreams.

In what elements does the album echo Brian Eno's ambient lesson?

Apart from “Xtal” and “Tha”, it’s not really an ambient album. It’s only ambient in comparison to the hardcore techno, jungle and gabber of that time, which was breakneck fast. Most of the tracks have beats and some are pretty propulsive – “Pulsewidth”. It’s music that has a physical element and a relation to dance music, but it pulls at your body gently.

But you can use as background music, something to fill the air like fragrance, so in that sense it can be used like ambient music. It’s a bit too insistent melodically and rhythmically to qualify as Eno’s definition of ambient being “as ignorable as it is interesting”.

What does it feel like to listen to the album again today thirty years later?

I haven’t listened to it.

What distinguishes Aphex Twin from Autechre and Boards of Canada?

Aphex Twin versus Autechre – well, it’s just much better music. It’s not afraid to be beautiful and it connects to actual human emotions that are relatable. Autechre have interesting textures but I don’t hear tunes like Richard D. James. Autechre have commanding rhythms but they’re not groovy, whereas with Aphex Twin there’s more of swing and feel – you can imagine dancing to them.

Aphex Twin versus Boards of Canada. Both are sublime melodists. But Aphex Twin has more interesting rhythms – again, you can imagine dancing to much of his music, whereas BoC is about the headnod. The way they use hip hop beats is very effective but as the brothers would admit, they have very little to do with club music. Aphex music is much more on the edge of rave.

Boards of Canada also have this consistently elegaic, nostalgic, wistful quality – the sense of childhood or a lost future. Aphex will go into that zone but generally sounds more aligned with the idea of the future or outer space, in that sense he’s more of a techno artist. BoC are more like a shoegaze band that when into sampling and loops.

Are some elements of IDM present in the conceptronica today? Or in what music?

Where I hear the textures of IDM is actually in a lot of the last several years trap and mumble rap – Playboi Carti, Rich the Kid, Migos, Lil Uzi Vert, Travis Scott, Young Thug. You get the blurry, idyllic textures and the bittersweet melody-loops. Even the vocal presence, fed through the glittering and glitchy textures of Auto-Tune, sounds very IDM-compatible – dreamy, sparkly, passively swooning. That kind of trapadelic sound is almost the sole bastion of minimalism in modern popular music, which is otherwise overly dramatic and busy. 

Conceptronica has the thoughtfulness of certain kinds of IDM – like Oval or the label Mille Plateaux Fax – but it rarely has the kind of sheer melodic beauty of Aphex and Seefeel and Boards of Canada. Most of today’s conceptual electronic artists are trying to reflect or deal with issues related to contemporary society – whether it’s queer identity, racial injustice, rage against what’s going on politically, or it’s the stresses and distortions of personality caused by living on the internet and social media, that “always on” purgatory of today’s existence. So the sounds they make are often not pretty and they are rarely relaxing in the way that Selected Ambient Works could be. They are often trying to put you through an extreme or challenging experience. Or they are trying to command your full attention. Either way it’s not music – for me – that I can use in everyday life like I did the great Aphex Twin music.

introduction to Valerio Mattioli's book Exmachina: Storia musicale della nostra estinzione 1992 → which centers on Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Boards of Canada, and is a genius work that someone needs to translate into English

The idea that certain kinds of music have a special relationship with the Future has a long history and continues to make a potent appeal to our imaginations—as listeners and thinkers, and as music-makers too. 

In the early ‘90s, for instance, David Toop – a critic and a musician - wrote evocatively about a sensation of “nostalgia for the future” that wafted vaguely off the recordings of The Black Dog,  a British group associated with an emerging genre briefly identified as “electronic listening music” but later permanently rebranded as Intelligent Dance Music or IDM.  

The notion is not limited to professional analysts and champions of music. William Gibson, in his 1996 near-future novel Idoru, ventriloquizes his own insight through the character of Mr. Kuwayama, a Japanese entertainment executive, who observes that pop “is the test-bed of futurity”.   Jacques Attali, in his classic 1977 treatise Noise: The Political Economy of Music, constructed an entire theory of music’s evolution based around the belief that music is prophecy. But his argument is not so much about the formal properties of music (say, increased tolerance for dissonance, as the title Noise might suggest) as the structures and hierarchies that music engenders around itself. Attali’s focus is on the modes of music making, distribution, and  consumption, which he sees as a preview of emerging forms of social organization. 

As someone who’s dedicated his life to magnifying the power and significance of music, this kind of talk is very much to my taste: it stirs my patriotic feelings about music as an area of human existence. Through my personal history of listening and the accident of the era I was born in, I’m wired to seek out and recognize “the future” as it manifests in music, and equally primed to be entranced by arguments and narratives that present music as the herald of a world to come. 

So in many ways I’m an ideal reader for Valerio Mattioli’s extraordinary book. It’s a feat of hyper-interpretation that detects the flexing of the Zeitgeist within the discographies of just three operators, preeminent in a field that is relatively speaking a marginal sidestream of popular music, the aforementioned genre-not-genre known as IDM. To those who know them, Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Boards of Canada are gods, whose every last scrap of recorded work warrants decoding by the devotees. But even these cult believers will be taken aback by the intensity of Mattioli’s scrutiny and the scale of the claims he makes. 

Exmachina is an archeology of the future embedded in music made a quarter-century or more ago; a future that is now our present. As with Attali’s theory, that futurity is not so much in the surface trappings of the music – the coldness of synthesized sound, the domineering mechanistic rhythms – nor even in the imagery wrapped around it (often “futuristic” in a way that was even at the time fairly familiar and occasionally bordered on sci-fi kitsch). The futurism resides more in the deeper grammar of the music and the subjectivity that the music proposed, modeled, and elicited; a future that the music in some way trained the listener for, through the molding of perception and instilling of affect.  

Although the subject of Mattioli’s book is the latent future in music some of which is 30 years old now, the future that has come true and is now our digital everyday, in other ways a big part of the pleasure of reading it for me is frankly nostalgic. Exmachina is a kind of time machine: it creates a delicious sensation of being plunged back into the  early ‘90s and immersed in all the wide-eyed excitement about the oncoming future that seemed to be manifesting itself through electronic dance and non-dance music, swept up once again in the fevered intellectual climate of that time. 

In 1992, computers had become widespread at work and in domestic spaces, but they didn’t dominate our existence. Broadband was still many years away; dial-up was cumbersome and time-consuming, and when you got on the internet, there was hardly anything to see (which was just as well given how long it took a page to come up). Almost no one had email; mobile phones were still  in their infancy, in terms of widespread usage and the things you could do with them. None of the commonplace “superpowers” of today – wi-fi, search engines, Siri, social media, etc – existed, and some weren’t even imagined. The digital realm existed in a cordoned-off zone of our existence. Yet precisely because of this, digital technology could then carry with it the scent of the future—an alluring or alarming aroma, depending on your inclinations. 

For most people, the places where you could get the most pungent advance whiff of how things were going to be were music and videogames. They offered the hardest hit of futurity that an ordinary person could access - and even more so if that person happened to make music themselves. As well as the Promethean rush and world-building buzz of grappling with machines and software that by today’s standards are laughably rudimentary and clumsy, electronic musicians in the ‘90s were conceptually stimulated by emergent forms of technology outside of the sonic realm, including things that were then barely more than rumors or pipe dreams. Concepts like virtual reality and surveillance provided imagery for techno and jungle artists long before VR became commercially available or CCTV became omnipresent in some countries.

The polarities represented by VR and CCTV – the artificial pleasuredome  versus the Panopticon – relate to a curious bi-polar quality to the writing about digital culture during the 1990s. The naïve optimism and excessive dread were two sides of the same coin: a euphoria that flipped so easily into dysphoria. Reading theorists like Arthur Kroker, Paul Virilio, Donna Haraway, Sadie Plant, Erik Davis, Mark Dery, Jaron Lanier, Kodwo Eshun (and many of these names pop up in Mattioli’s text), all it took was to tilt your angle of reading slightly and the exultation could be taken as denunciation. The fervor and fever of the prose would be the same in either the utopian or dystopian modalities. With some of these writers, it was never clear whether they were anticipating or flinching from the posthuman future. And some former evangelists have subsequently morphed into Jeremiahs, writing books with titles like You Are Not A Gadget or New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future.  

With music in particular, it was an exhilarating time to be a critic. For someone like myself or Kodwo Eshun or the young Mark Fisher and Steve Goodman (both then associated with the para-academic outfit Cybernetic Culture Research Unit), you rarely found yourself using reference points from history. You couldn’t resort to coordinates based on existing earlier music because the new music was going right off the map.  The rapidly advancing and mutating tones and beats put pressure on you to generate new tropes and concepts. Hence the proliferation of  neologisms and invented genre terms. And the posthuman feeling of the music, its seeming absence of human touch, also seemed to demand a depersonalized analysis that attributed a purposive sentience to the way that individual tracks unfolded and that entire genres and scenes evolved.  Mattioli reinhabits this mindset, this ecstatically paranoid sense that the music is independent of human designs and has its own dark agenda. Humans didn’t make the music; the music is remaking – and undoing – the human as a category. “We must change for the machines” and “human viewpoint redundant," as the video art / theory collective 0(rphan)d(rift>), put it in a 1995 book called Cyberpositive, a delirious collage-text infused with their experiences of going to techno clubs and being mangled mentally by the combination of loud music and hallucinogens, written in a tone of mystical masochism.   

Mattioli entered a similar kind of mind-state when writing Exmachina. But rather than reach it through immersion in the congested darkness of the rave space, it was the covid lockdown’s enforced isolation that pushed him into a state of creative paranoia in which everything radiated significance and hitherto hidden patterns pulsated into visibility. Decades before wi-fi,  Baudrillard imagined the tele-connected citizen of the future as essentially living inside a satellite, a sealed pod in orbit around the void where society once was. Plugged into networks, this was a new kind of porous self, vibrating in a perpetual  “ecstasy of communication. All secrets, spaces and scenes abolished in a single dimension of information.”  A desolated self “open to everything in spite of himself, living in the greatest confusion... He is now only a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence." That describes how many of us having been living during 2020 and 2021. Mattioli took the pandemic trauma and used it to create an adventure close to home. This is the story of where the music took his mind.