director's cut version, Village Voice, August 1995
by Simon Reynolds
What to do
when the industry calls the underground's bluff (all those complaints
about unresponsiveness, denial of
access) and in the blinking of an eye mainstreams the entire Amerindie matrix
of attitudes, sounds, tropes and traits? After punk reintegrated with metal to
form a populist all-American hard rock (that's GRUNGE), how to revive la
difference, resituate "us" on the other side of the pale?
Lo-fi was the US underground's
response: a weak response, since lo-fi is just grunge with even grungier
production values. As the ersatz folk
culture of used vinyl store clerks, record collectors and fanzine editors,
lo-fi was always gonna prove a stylistic and cultural dead end (which won't
stop Pavement, the genre's REM, from taking the sensibility into the
mainstream, four albums down the line).
In Britain , grunge
provoked the jingoist backlash of 'Britpop', whereby bands like Blur, Suede,
Elastica, Oasis, Supergrass, Gene ad nauseam rallied around a fetishized
Englishness. Beatles and
Pistols, Who and Jam, Buzzcocks and Smiths, have all been boiled
down into an insular amalgam of anthemic choruses, tinny production and
lashings of attitude; a white power-pop that symbolically erases not just
America (grunge), but Black Britain (jungle, trip hop) and pan-European prole
pop (rave).
But for other,
smarter Brit bands, grunge provided the impetus to make a final break with
rock. In America too, the underground is rustling
with the cogitation of a new breed of guitar-based experimentalists trying to
think their way past the impasse of lo-fi's
retro-eclectic obscurantism.
Together they form a loose trans-Atlantic movement: POST-ROCK. The
'post' signifies a break with both the formal traits and the ideological
premises of rock'n'roll. Post-rock means bands who use guitars but in non-rock
ways, as a source of timbre and texture
rather than riff and powerchord (Main , Flying
Saucer Attack, Skullflower, LaBradford, Stars of the Lid). It also means bands
who augment gtr/bs/drms with digital technology such as samplers and sequencers
(Techno-Animal, Scorn, Disco Inferno, Laika, My Bloody Valentine), or who
tamper with the trad rock line-up but prefer antiquated analog synths and
non-rock instrumentation (Pram, Stereolab, Tortoise, Long Fin Killie).
Post-rock has its
own sporadic but extensive history, which these bands draw on as much for the
suggestiveness of its unrealized possibilities as for actual achievements. In terms of electric guitar, the key lineage
runs from the Velvet Underground, through Krautrock (Can, Faust, Neu!, Cluster
et al) and Eno/Fripp, to such late '80s proto-postrockers as Jesus & Mary
Chain, Spacemen 3 and A.R. Kane.
Bypassing the blues roots of rock'n'roll, the VU melded folkadelic
songcraft with a wall-of-noise aesthetic that was half Spector, half La Monte Young. In the process
Cale & Co invented 'dronology', a term which loosely describes 50 percent
of today's post-rock activity.
Main isn't
so much a band as a studio-based research unit dedicated to exploring the
electric guitar's spectrum of effects-wracked timbres and tonalities; said
research is made public via EP's and LP's of bleakly bewitching ambience, dub
concrete, and homages to electro-acoustic composers like Stockhausen and Berio.
Appropriately, where Loop played gigs alongside sub-Hawkwind biker-psych bands,
Hampson is now to be found collaborating with experimentalists like Jim
O'Rourke, whose work in Brise-Glace and Gastr del Sol bridges the gap between
Sonic Youth's 'reinvention of the guitar' and the 'prepared instruments' of
avant-garde classical.
A clutch of
American bands--Sabalon Glitz, Jessamine, Bowery Electric--are currently poised
to cross the brink between neo-psychedelia and ambient, following in the
footsteps of Loop/Main, Spacemen 3 and its sequels Spectrum and Spiritualized,
and Skullflower and its offshoot Total.
If Sabalon, Jessamine et al finally lose the backbeat, they'll probably
levitate into the stratospheric vicinity of The Stars of The Lid, Dissolve,
LaBradford and Flying Saucer Attack: lustrous, meditational noisescapes,
permeated with dub's echo and reverb but devoid of any audible traces of Jamaica .
The other major
strand of post-rock endeavor has jettisoned the dronologists' guitar-fetish. It also avoids the potential
aesthetic cul de sac that is pure ambience, by looking outside rock for
different forms of kinetic energy. Some
use the looped beats of hip hop and rave (Techno-Animal, Scorn); others merge
live funk and programmed rhythm (Laika, O'Rang, Moonshake). On their seductive debut "Silver Apples
of The Moon" (Too Pure/American), Laika blends hands-on playing and
sequenced riffs, sounding like they're
equally influenced by Can at their fizzy flow-motion peak circa "Soon Over
Babaluma" and by the jungle streaming out of London 's pirate airwaves. Another Too Pure
band, Pram, is releasing two brilliant albums via American this year,
"Helium" and "Sargasso Sea ". Less technophile than Laika, (it prefers
antiquated synths, home-made theremin, the wheezing respiration of the
harmonium), Pram nonetheless often sounds like trip hop irrigated with the
folky-jazzy fluidity of early '70s cosmonauts like Tim Buckley, Robert Wyatt
circa "Rock Bottom" and John Martyn circa "Solid Air". Completing this Too Pure triumvirate, Long
Fin Killie's glistening braid of pulses, tics and chimes warrants terms like
'systems folk' or 'Celtic gamelan'.
Tortoise is the
closest American parallel to the Too Pure acts' fluent rapprochement between
studio-magick and real-time improvisation. Its self-titled debut of last year
offers an unclassifiable all-instrumental hybrid of organic
jamming and dub-wise aural anamorphosis, sounding at times like the missing
link between Slint and Seefeel. With this year's "Rhythms, Resolutions
& Clusters", a collection of drastic reworkings of tracks from the
debut, Tortoise has plunged headfirst into the remixology that's all the rage
in England
(where God, Scorn and Main have gladly offered
their work up for butchery). Other
American groove-oriented combos--Cul de Sac, Ui, Run On--shun sweatless studio trickery and instead locate models of post-rock dynamics in
the flesh-and-blood rhythm-engines that powered Can and early '70s Miles
Davis. Another sub-strand of post-rock activity (Stereolab, Trans-Am, Six Finger Satellite, Medusa
Cyclone) aligns itself with the metronomic pulse-beat of the motorik aesthetic,
as coined by Kraftwerk and Neu!, who
bridged the gap between the Modern Lovers'
"Roadrunner" and Giorgio Moroder's Eurodisco.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Although these strands of post-rock stretch across the
Atlantic, there are real and telling differences between British and American
post-rock, and most of them revolve around British bohemia's susceptibility to
the influence of black music, whether African-American, Caribbean or homegrown.
US
post-rock can almost be defined by the absence of dub as a living legacy, and by the avoidance of
hip hop.
Dub's vast
impact on British left-field rock goes back to the late '70s, to the kinship
punk rockers felt with Rastafarian reggae's spiritual militancy and millenial
imagery of exile and dread. And so The Clash covered Junior Murvin's
"Police and Thieves" and Willie Williams' "Armagideon
Time", while Johnny Rotten went from the metallic KO of Sex Pistols to the
anti-rockist Public Image Limited, whose "Metal Box/Second Edition"
introduced a significant segment of his following to Lydon's true loves, dub
and Can. Brit-bohemia's enduring open-ness to the Jamaican sound-world, from
ska to dub to ragga, explains so much of what's bubbled up from UK subbakulcha
in the last two decades: you can trace the reverberations of Jah Wobble's bass
through Killing Joke and On U Sound to The Orb, or witness how Specials-fan
Tricky ended up collaborating with Mark
Stewart (formerly of '70s avant-funksters the Pop Group, later a solo artist with On U).
Nearly as
important as dub as an influence on the Brit post-rockers is Brian Eno. From
the early '70s onward, Eno was
connecting, in both theory and practice, the dots between the dub of Lee Perry
and King Tubby, Teo Macero's labyrinthine production of Miles Davis, Can's
fractal funkadelia, Cluster's Op Art guitar-tapestries, and so on. Eno's notions--the studio-as-instrument, recording as the architectonics of 'fictional
psycho-acoustic space'--are the organizing principles of post-rock. Most rock
producers strive for a glossed-up, embellished simulation of the band in
performance. Dub's fluctuating mix tampers with that 'realism', makes the
band's presence hazy and mirage-like;
although Tubby et al worked with live bands, they halo-ed different
instruments, different parts of the drum kit, with echo and reverb, so that
each strand of sound appears to exist in its own distinct acoustic space. Following Eno and dub, post-rock uses effects
and processes to sever the audible link between what you hear and the physical
act of a hand striking a guitar-chord or pounding a drum-skin. Where a rock
record creates a mental picture of a band onstage engaged in strenuous
collective toil, post-rock offers a blank canvas for the imagination.
Sampling
and a related technique called 'hard disk editing' (where sounds are chopped up and rearranged
inside the computer's virtual space) dramatically increase the possibilities
for disorientation and displacement. With sampling, what you hear could never
possibly have been a real-time event, since it's composed of vivisected musical
fragments plucked from different contexts and eras, then layered and
resequenced to form a trans-chronistic pseudo-event. You could call it 'deconstruction of the
metaphysics of presence'; you could also call it 'magic'.
Which
brings us to hip hop, and once again the contrast between the avidity of its
embrace by British underground rock versus the hesitancy of the US
post-rockers. It was the weird noises on rap records that first inspired My
Bloody Valentine to invent its 'glide guitar' sound; later, the band looped
beats and sampled their own feedback on "Soon" and the
"Loveless" LP; currently, MBV is struggling to incorporate the
breakbeat-science of jungle, hip hop's successor, into its swoon-rock tumult.
Similarly, Hank Shocklee's densely layered Bomb Squad production for Public
Enemy is cited as a crucial influence by the likes of Disco Inferno and
Techno-Animal, while Scorn creates paranoiac groovescapes strikingly similar to
those stalked by East Coast horrorcore rappers Jeru the Damaja and Nas. In Britain ,
staying unaware and uninfected by hip hop and its homegrown offshoots (trip
hop, drum & bass) can only be achieved by a strenuous feat of cultural
inbreeding (congratulations,
Britpopsters!). But in America , where
you'd think it'd be even harder to ward off rap's influence, white bohemians
shy away, perhaps feeling hip hop is the cultural property of
African-Americans, and not to be dabbled with lightly.
As for
techno-rave having any impact on American post-rock, forget it. A cluster of
bigotries form a near impenetrable barrier: the premium on live performance,
the
lingering legacy of 'disco sucks', the hatred of machine
rhythms. The upshot of all this is that UK post-rock outfits, influenced by
various admixtures of dub, hip hop and techno, tend to be studio-centric sound
laboratories for whom live performance is an irrelevance; whereas American
post-rockers remain deeply committed to the band format and playing live. Instead of drawing on contemporary black and
club music, they revisit those brinks in rock history when eggheads pushed
rock's envelope beyond bursting point: Krautrock, obviously, but also Tim
Buckley circa 'Starsailor'; the Canterbury scene (Soft Machine, Robert Wyatt,
Henry Cow etc); the freeform passages and proto-ambient lulls that punctuate
the Velvets, Stooges, MC5, and were developed further by Glenn Branca and Sonic
Youth.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
If you wanted to trace the tangled lineages of post-rock,
you couldn't do much better than to check out two landmark anthologies compiled for Virgin by Techno-Animal's Kevin Martin,
"Isolationism" and "Macro Dub Infection"
(both released over here by Caroline).
Each unravels the cat's-cradle of connections radiating from the figures
of Brian Eno and King Tubby respectively. "Isolationism" was
conceived as a riposte to 'ambient', at least in its degraded modern version as
womb-muzak for raved-out spliffheads. Returning to Eno's original idea of
ambient as environmental music, and cueing off Uncle Bri's musical peak
"On Land", 'isolationist' music artists create entropic hinterlands
of sound; a nowhere-vastness that
externalizes the inner void left when the utopian imagination withers and dies.
While the "Isolationism" anthology
spans guitar-freaks like Main, techno
renegades like Aphex Twin and avant-droners like Zoviet France, "Dub Infection" is even more
wide-ranging, encompassing trip hop (Tricky, New Kingdom), techno (Bedouin
Ascent, Wagon Christ) jungle, (Omni Trio, 4 Hero) and post-rock (Laika), as well
more obvious dub resurrectionists. (Significantly, the only white American
outfit to appear is Tortoise, with the awesomely peculiar sound-maze
"Goriri"). Perhaps this multiracial mix prophesies the dissolution of
'post-rock' itself into a broader anti-category, a sort of perimeter region
where all the post-s gather to trade ideas: refugees from rap, from rave, from
jungle... anybody who feels shackled by
genre, by the expectations attached to identity and community.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
What does the emergence of
post-rock say about the Zeitgeist? If music, as Jacques Attali famously
claimed, is prophecy, mirroring-in-advance future changes in social
organization, then the 'post' in post-rock seem to chime in with other
tendencies in the culture (e.g. computer games, virtual reality etc), ones
which seem to indicate the emergence of a new model of post-human
subjectivity, organized around
fascination rather than meaning, sensation rather than sensibility.
Form and
ideology go hand in hand, as ever. With its droneswarm guitars and tendency to
deliquesce into ambience, post-rock first erodes, then obliterates the Song and the Voice. By extension, it also parts with
such notions as the singer as storyteller, the song as narrative, source of
life-wisdom or site of social resonance. The more 'post' a post-rock band gets, the more it abandons
the verse/chorus/verse structure in favor of the soundscape. A band's journey through rock to post-rock
usually involves a trajectory from narrative lyrics to stream-of-consciousness
to voice-as-texture to purely instrumental music. In the process, there's a
dismantling of trad-rock mechanisms like "identification" and
'catharsis' (which is replaced by plateau-states of bliss, awe, uncanny-ness,
or prolonged sensations of propulsion, ascension, freefall, immersion). In
post-rock, 'soul' is not so much
abolished as radically decentered, dispersed across the entire field of sound,
as in club musics like house, techno and jungle, where tracks are less about
communication and more like engines for "the programming of
sensations" (as Susan Sontag said in 1965 of contempoary art from
Rauschenberg to The Supremes). Music that's all surface and no 'depth', that
has skin instead of soul.
Above all,
post-rock abandons the notion of rebellion as we know and love it, in favor
of less spectacular strategies of
subversion; ones closer to notions of 'dissidence' and 'disappearance', to the
psychic landscapes of exile and utopia
constructed in dub reggae, hip hop and rave. At the heart of rock'n'roll stands the body
of the white teenage boy, middle finger erect and a sneer playing
across his lips. At the center of post-rock floats a phantasmic un-body,
androgynous and racially indeterminate; half-ghost, half-cyborg.
For the time
being, the margins must remain the zone for this future-music's
research-and-development. On both sides of the Atlantic ,
popular taste and critical opinion clutch tightly to the certainties and
satisfactions of song and singer, and their attendant fictions of community and
resistance, while the biz demands 'charismatic personalities' (Juliana
Hatfield! The bloke from Live!!!) as the focus of its marketing schemes. For post-rock to go mainstream would require
a Dylan figure--a Stipe or Vedder, say--shocking his folkie audience by
appearing onstage with a sampler, as Dylan did when he went electric. (And what is the electric guitar now but the
new acoustic guitar, signifier of grit and earth and folk-blood?).
A final,
emotionally-ambivalent thought about the difference between rock and its post-.
Let's consider the Stones' "Gimme Shelter", described by Greil Marcus, accurately, as the greatest
piece of recorded rock'n'roll ever. Consider specifically the all-too-brief
instrumental prequel, the way Keith Richards' soliloquy of a solo conjures a
shattering pitch of ecstatic anguish and longing. For a multitude of reasons, the historical
conditions that made 'Gimme Shelter' not just possible, but of oracular significance,
are gone; not only has rock's grand narrative petered out into a delta of
micro-cultures, but the possibility of writing a redemptive narrative itself
seems to be fading. A post-rock band
would take that intro's appalling poignancy, loop it, stretch it out to six
minutes or more, turn it into an environment. Because that limbo-land between
bliss-scape and paranoia-scape, narcosis and nightmare, is where we postmoderns
live.
