Melody Maker, December 6th 1986.
by Simon Reynolds
Mantronix don’t quite fit. Hip hop is getting to be more and more of an assault, more and more hyper-compressed and minimal in its search for harder and higher hits. But Mantronix are loosening up their music, bringing in a suppleness and textural luxury. Hip hop daily exceeds new levels of megalomaniac viciousness. But Mantronix are gradually squeezing the SELF out of their music, letting the music stand on its own madness.
Compare what Mantronix are doing with a track that represents some kind of zenith in current hip hop trends--“The Manipulator” by Mixmaster Gee and The Turntable Orchestra (off Electro 14). Here skill on the turntables becomes a twisted, bloated metaphor for omnipotence. The voice shoves itself RIGHT IN YOUR FACE--you can practically feel the spittle, smell the breath. It’s a voice intoxicated with power, quaking with rage.
MC Tee from Mantronix, in comparison, has a refreshingly adolescent voice, almost sweet--words are slurred, there’s the tiniest suggestion of a lisp. “Manipulator” style hip hop is given its impetus by being focused on the tyrannical charisma of the rapper, but with Mantronix the
raps seem almost superfluous. There are several instrumentals. With most hip hop the very sound of the music is a MASSIVE COCK waving about in your face. Mantronix erase every trace of the pelvis, every last ditch of humanism in hip hop. Their music isn’t weighted down by the heaviness of masculinity, but glides, skips, even frisks at times, rather than thuggishly stomping us weaklings underfoot. Mantronix sound disembodied, dislocated, out-of-it.
They are far out, a long way from firm ground. Mantronik marshals a host of uprooted fragments and abducted ghosts into a dance. He thieves indiscriminately, without prejudice, enlisting anything from Benny Goodman to The Old Grey Whistle Test theme tune. On “We Control the Dice” they even indulge in self-kleptomania (or perhaps simple thrift is at work), re-using the bass motif from “Bassline”. Their greatest influence, though, is European electropop--the scrubbed, spruce, pristine textures and metronomic precision of Kraftwerk and Martin Rushent’s Human League. While the brainy British bands of the day dedicate themselves to noisy guitars, it’s up to Mantronix (and House music) to uphold the spirit of 1981, to cherish the bass sound and the electronic percussion of “Sound of the Crowd” as a lost future of pop.
They have moments close to wildness-“Big Band B-Boy” commandeers a jungle of percussion--but I prefer it when Mantronix sound stealthy. “Scream,” with its curiously muted delivery of a party-up lyric (the word “scream” is almost whispered) is as eerie as Suicide lullabies like “I Remember” or “Cheree”. The title track has a roaming, furtive sense of space, the phrase “music madness” sampled, stretched and
melted into a series of beautiful belches. Best of all is the closing “Megamix”, in which everything you’ve been listening to for the last half-hour is regurgitated inside out and upside down, flashing before your ears like a drowned, garbled life. Sublime pandemonium.
Music Madness is the kind of music you’d hoped The Art of Noise would go on to make after “Close (to the Edit)”. Fleshless, soulless, faceless and fantastic.
by Simon Reynolds
raps seem almost superfluous. There are several instrumentals. With most hip hop the very sound of the music is a MASSIVE COCK waving about in your face. Mantronix erase every trace of the pelvis, every last ditch of humanism in hip hop. Their music isn’t weighted down by the heaviness of masculinity, but glides, skips, even frisks at times, rather than thuggishly stomping us weaklings underfoot. Mantronix sound disembodied, dislocated, out-of-it.
They are far out, a long way from firm ground. Mantronik marshals a host of uprooted fragments and abducted ghosts into a dance. He thieves indiscriminately, without prejudice, enlisting anything from Benny Goodman to The Old Grey Whistle Test theme tune. On “We Control the Dice” they even indulge in self-kleptomania (or perhaps simple thrift is at work), re-using the bass motif from “Bassline”. Their greatest influence, though, is European electropop--the scrubbed, spruce, pristine textures and metronomic precision of Kraftwerk and Martin Rushent’s Human League. While the brainy British bands of the day dedicate themselves to noisy guitars, it’s up to Mantronix (and House music) to uphold the spirit of 1981, to cherish the bass sound and the electronic percussion of “Sound of the Crowd” as a lost future of pop.
They have moments close to wildness-“Big Band B-Boy” commandeers a jungle of percussion--but I prefer it when Mantronix sound stealthy. “Scream,” with its curiously muted delivery of a party-up lyric (the word “scream” is almost whispered) is as eerie as Suicide lullabies like “I Remember” or “Cheree”. The title track has a roaming, furtive sense of space, the phrase “music madness” sampled, stretched and
melted into a series of beautiful belches. Best of all is the closing “Megamix”, in which everything you’ve been listening to for the last half-hour is regurgitated inside out and upside down, flashing before your ears like a drowned, garbled life. Sublime pandemonium.
Music Madness is the kind of music you’d hoped The Art of Noise would go on to make after “Close (to the Edit)”. Fleshless, soulless, faceless and fantastic.
MANTRONIX
Melody Maker, August 1st 1987
FORGET “THE SONG”
Mantronik does not write Good
Songs. He is not an author, but an engineer, an architect. His music is not the
expression of his soul, but a product of his expertise. What Mantronik does is
construct a terrain, a dance-space in
which we can move, float free. Unlike the Rock Song, there’s no atmosphere, no
nuances, no resonance, here: instead, simply a shifting of forces, torques,
pressures, gradients. Mantronik’s work (and it is work) is neither
expressionist nor impressionist--it’s cubist, a matter of geometry, space,
speed, primary colours (not the infinite shades and subtle tones of meaning).
Populist avant-gardism.
The song is the primary object of
Rock Criticism--the work of art as a coherent, whole expression of a whole
human being’s vision. Most rock criticism is poor Lit Crit, forever trying to
pin down pop to What’s Being Said (whether that’s nuggets of “human truth” or
blasts of “social commitment”), forever failing to engage with the materiality
of music. A Mantronix track isn’t a song, a finished work but a process, a
space capable of endless extension and adaption; a collection of resources to
be rearranged and restructured. Hence the six different mixes of “Who Is It?”;
hence the closing “Edit” on the last LP Music
Madness, in which the whole album is compressed into a volatile six minutes
reprise; hence the “Primal Scream Dub” of “Scream”, the fantabulous new single,
virtually an entirely new piece of music altogether…
FORGET THE HUMAN
Pop is drowning itself (and in the
process drowning us) with “humanity”--from the sickening, hyperbolic “care” of
“Let It Be” and “We Are the World” to the firm, all too firm flesh throbbing in “I Want Your Sex”. Swamped by this
benign, beige environment, this all-pervading warmth, it’s scarcely possible to feel the shiver down the spine,
the sharp shudder of ecstasy: modern pop
just massages you all over, comforts and reassures. Practically every walking
minute of our lives we’re condemned to be human, to care for people, to be
polite, to be socially concerned. Should’nt our leisure (at the very least; for
a start) be a place we can escape our humanity? A place to chill?
Mantronix make perhaps the most
nihilistic music on the planet today; only House could claim to be more blank.
Unlike rock nihilism, this is nihilistic without any drama, without an iconic
figure like Michael Gira or Steve Albini--the creator simply, silently, absconds;
creates an environment in which nothing of himself resides.
Unlike the first LP, which shared
with hip hop a boastful, “deffer than the rest”
rapping style, on Music Madness
the megalomania is vested in the whole expanse of sound, the inhuman perfection
of the dance environment, rather than a charismatic protagonist. Poor MC Tee!
This last token of the human seems to be fading fast. It’s as though someone
has taken an eraser and all but rubbed him out of the picture: a little lost
voice wandering in a vast, intimidating Futurist adventure playground. And the
words uttered, in that fey, fragile voice, are little more than psychedelic
gibberish, a vestigial anchor for us to centre our attention, otherwise
dispersed and fractured across the jags and fissures of the mix. Mantronik is
candid about the relative importance of text and material: “the words don’t
mean shit, there’s no lyrical structure, but the shit pumps!”
You’re horrified, but after all,
isn’t pop all about the desire to transcend or step sideways from the cage of
one’s humanity? To be more, less or other than simply, naturally human: to
become angel, demon, ghost, animal (butterfly or invertebrate). Mantronik’s
desire is to be superhuman; he envies the prowess, the infallibility of the
machine. He loves all the sci-fi films (the techno-heroic strand in science
fiction that buffs call “hard sci-fi”, rather than New Wave s.f.’s odysseys
into “inner space”). There are links between Electro’s space age imagery and
the sword’n’sorcery/superhero comic book elements in heavy metal, speed metal…
similar male fantasies of omnipotence and invulnerability.
For Mantronik, sampling is his
“special power”, the key to demi-godhead. “You can take a sound, any sound, and
you can tamper with it. Add other sounds to it. Look at its wave formations on
a screen, and change the patterns around. And you don’t have to take sounds off
records, you can get them from the environment, from hitting things against
the wall, anything. And with my set-up, I can record music right up to the
point doing vocals, in my bedroom. Then
I go into a studio. With samplers, I never read the instructions. I like to
learn from my mistakes and incorporate blunders.”
FORGET SOUL
For Mantronik, the history of
Black Dance Music doesn’t begin with James Brown, Sly Stone, George Clinton,
even Van McCoy or Chic; it begins with Kraftwerk and flowers with Trevor Horn’s
Art of Noise. It was the krafty krauts’ glistening plastic vistas and stainless
girders, plus Art of Noise’s fleshless, faceless, sense-less and soul-less
techno-symphonic sky’s-the-limit mastery that first made him want to make dance
music. Indeed, Mantronik seems to take Trevor Horn as a kind of guardian spirit
or touchstone, talking of how he’s “now working on stuff that would blow Trevor’s
mind. I’m working on things Trevor wouldn’t even understand.”
Mantronik’s attitude to the past
is strictly utilitarian, post-modern pagan; there’s no veneration, no
allegiance to outmoded [beats]. His reprocessing of the past in in accordance
with functionalist criteria, not nostalgia. “All those old Seventies percussion
lines were recorded real rough, real shitty, using dirt cheap reverbs. There’s
a certain old, gritty sound you just can’t achieve in a modern studio. What I
do is take that old sound and bring it back, into the future.”
There’s nothing in the way of the
rockthink cult of the origin, of roots here, but rather an insatiable pursuit
of the fresh, the ultra-modern. “The old music bores me.” Styles and beats
have a rapid turnover, are produced in factory conditions. Mantronix are simply
the latest stage in a long history of black music; the largely unwritten
history of corporoate design, brand names, backroom technicians, rather than
sacred cow artists or communities struggling to be heard.
What troubles critics about
Mantronix, about house, is that they’re illegible.
You can’t read anything into them. There’s no text, just texture, and those who
endeavour to wrap meanings around the music are always shown up, the failed
despots of discourse. The sheer opaque, arbitrary
force of the music slips the net of meaning, again and again.
Instead, for those who listen, there’s the fascination of
details, a seduction in the endless intermittence of dub. “The new stuff? A
whole mix of things. Not play-it-safe. Kind of teasing, flirtatious. I’m not
gonna give it to the listener all at once. It’s like if you’re going out with a
girl, and she gives it you straightaway, you lose interest.” Mantronix never
lose you, even as you lose yourself.
God. That was fun to read. Made me want to listen to Music Madness. (But I didn't. It would only disappoint).
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