23 SKIDOO
Seven Songs
(Ronin)
Shame there's no good genre term sufficiently evocative and
open-ended for the kind of music 23 Skidoo made. "Avant-funk" is too
ugly, "death disco" is
melodramatic and PiL-specific, "industrial"'s been tarnished by its
latterday exponents. Whatever. Skidoo were prime explorers of a sonic
terrain that opened up in punk's aftermath, when people were looking for a
forward path to take them as far from the reek of rock's corpse as possible.
Funk, it was decided, was the new music of danger. Based on a quite small range
of instances---the madness latent in James Brown's most frenzied polyrhythms,
the voodoo grooves of Tago Mago and
Davis's On The Corner, Sly Stone's darker moments, Fela Kuti (Africa's JB), Last
Poets--the idea of funk as a sinister energy emerged: rhythm as enslavement, as
addiction, as possession. Mix in ideas borrowed from vanguard sci-fi authors
Ballard & Burrough (sounds like a confectioners!) and paranoid vibes from
Seventies auteur movies like Pakula's Klute and Coppolla's The Conversation,
and voila, you've got the future.
Proteges of Genesis P. Orridge (who let them rehearse at his
Death Factory space), 23 Skidoo bridged avant-funk's first-wave (Pop Group,
Cabs, A Certain Ratio) and lesser second-wave (Hula, Chakk, Shriekback, 400
Blows). Their records have been out-of-print for years, but Skidoo have enjoyed
a spectral presence in dance culture: the bassline to their single "Coup" was copied
note-for-note by The Chemicals on "Block Rockin' Beats"; early
darkside jungle circa 1993 was often bizarrely Skidoo-like, despite the absence
of any direct lineage; the group's ethnological forgeries and tape-looped
exotica pre-echoed the world music samplings of your Loop Gurus.
This sort of talk--precursors, legacies, inheritors,
ahead-of-their-time, etc--is pretty academic, though: the real question is, why
listen now? Because 1981's Seven Songs especially still sounds bloodcurdlingly
intense. A malevolent tumble of hand-percussion, guitar feedback, and gutteral
chants, opener "Kundalini" is as much Birthday Party as Gap Band,
while the seething slap-bass and brittle-nerved rhythm guitar of "Vegas El
Bandito" is offset by a lugubrious wail of lost-in-endless-fog trumpet. The
track immediately cuts into "Mary's Operation", dropping everything
but the dank, ailing Miles-like trumpet,
multi-tracked and mingled with tape-loop drones. This resulting
gloomscape of wilted, billowing sound in turn devolves into "Lockgroove", a roiling cosmic
cistern. "New Testament" is dying machinery, a drum track massively
slowed down and elongated, its rapid percussive events blossoming into
pendulous cymbal-smashes and smeared snares. "IY" showcases Skidoo's
strength (percussion) and weakness
(vocals), but "Porno Bass" is just ill: booming bassdrones
reverberate in a cavernous murk, while Hitler fan Unity Mitford, plucked from
some radio interview, rails against pop
music for displacing "manly" activities like athletics, sexually
hyperstimulating da youth, and generally being "the sign of a degenerating
race". When the rancid old nutcase opines that young people's "ears become degraded by wrong style and
senseless reiteration", Skidoo mischievously double-loop the word
"reiteration".
Seven Songs's closer "Quiet Pillage" references
exotica king Martin Denny (whose Polynesian-flavored "Quiet Village" was a massive
Fifties hit) but evokes an Apocalypse Now: The Day After vibe of humid
disquiet. The track's plinky metallic chimes look ahead to 1984's Urban Gamelan, made after an expedition to Indonesia. "GIFU" is basically an alternate
mix of "Coup", Skidoo's most
straightforwardly funky single, with a Viet-Cong war-cry "G.I., fuck
you" added for anti-imperialist edge, but most of the album is precisely
what the title promises: gamelan-influenced drumstrumentals, all tuned
percussion, hand-cymbals, and gongs. bals, gongs, and woodblocks. Well-produced
compared with the hastily executed debut, Urban Gamelan often teeters on the
thin line between minimal and underwritten. Its gently ominous
atmosphere--space age bachelor padded cell music--grows on you, but it lacks
the turbulence and sheer
de-civilising ferocity of Seven Songs.
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