Moon Wiring Club / Jon Brooks - Cafe Kaput - DD Denham

Moon Wiring Club and DD Denham: music for children, by children

The Guardian, 24 November 2010 

by Simon Reynolds

"One thing I've always wanted for my music is for it to appeal to children," says Ian Hodgson of Moon Wiring Club. "An ideal listening situation would be a family car journey. I think children would like all the voices and oddness. If you present kids with fun, spooky electronic music, then they might grow up wanting to make it themselves, like I did with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop." Hodgson's friend and collaborator Jon Brooks, aka the Advisory Circle, goes one better with the debut release for his label Café Kaput, which consists of spooky electronic music made by schoolchildren in the 70s.

Brooks and Hodgson originally met through MySpace. They rapidly discovered that they were "probably variations of the same person", according to Hodgson, with a shared passion for vintage 70s and 80s TV (not just the programmes but their incidental music and theme tunes). The friendship soon became an alliance. Brooks has done the mastering for all four Moon Wiring Club albums, including the brand new and brilliant A Spare Tabby at the Cat's Wedding. Hodgson, in turn, has done the artwork for Café Kaput. A full-blown collaboration between Moon Wiring Club and the Advisory Circle is in the pipeline.

The pair are chalk and cheese, though, when it comes to the way they operate musically. A skilled multi-instrumentalist whose music is "98% hand-played", Brooks makes little use of sampling or computer software. The Advisory Circle's 2006 debut EP Mind How You Go (reissued this year by Ghost Box in expanded, vinyl-only form) and 2008's much-acclaimed Other Channels reveals Brooks to be one of the contemporary scene's great melodists, with a gift for plush, intricate arrangements. Hodgson's approach, in contrast, is much more hip-hop raw. Entirely sample-based, Moon Wiring Club is assembled using astonishingly rudimentary technology: a PlayStation 2 and "a second-hand copy of MTV Music Generator 2 from 2001".

Hodgson turned to this crude set-up after struggling with software typically used to make electronic dance music. Because he's a longtime gamer, Hodgson found using a joypad to make music "much faster and more enjoyable" than clicking a mouse. But it still took him a while to work out how to get good results out of a PlayStation 2. "After months of tinkering, I discovered that it's good at sequencing short repeated phrases." Instead of looping breakbeats, Hodgson builds up rhythm patterns from single drum hits. Then he'll weave in sinuous and sinister basslines that are often coated in a dank layer of echo and delay. "I'll place the bass melody around the rhythm in a very 'stereo' way. I tend to see it all in my head as a 'cat's cradle'. Then if you add delay to the bass and time it right you get extra little melodies inside this structure. They sort of bounce and react with each other. Add melody and atmosphere to it and you get another interlocking structure – slightly organic, soggy, bouncy and knackered."

Moon Wiring Club often resembles trip-hop if its "vibe" was sourced not in obscure funk and jazz-fusion records but from the incidental music to The Prisoner, Doctor Who and The Flumps. Vocal samples are a huge part of Moon Wiring Club. Always spoken not sung, and always British in origin, they're derived largely from videos and DVDs of bygone UK television series such as Casting the Runes, Raffles and Ace of Wands. A scholar of "vintage telly", Hodgson can discourse at persuasive length about the superiority of British theatrical-turned-TV thesps such as Julian Glover and Jan Francis over American actors like Harrison Ford. He recently dedicated a podcast mix to 70s voiceover deity and Quiller star Michael Jayston.

Moon Wiring Club originally evolved out of what was intended to be "a peculiar children's book", Strange Reports from a Northern Village." That project got stalled but it did spawn the Blank Workshop website, based on an imaginary town called Clinksell, which has its own brand of confectionery, Scrumptyton Sweets, and a line of fantasy fiction, Moontime Books. The children's book project lives on also in the distinctive graphic look that Hodgson, a former fine art student, wraps around the Moon Wiring releases, drawing on influences including Biba's 20s-into-70s glamour, the strange exquisiteness of Arthur Rackham's illustrations, and Victorian fairy painters such as Richard Dadd. Blank Workshop and Moon Wiring Club is where all of Hodgson's enthusiasms and obsessions converge: "Electronic music, Art Deco, and the England of teashops, stately homes, ruined buildings and weird magic." Not forgetting computer-games music, a massive influence. "There is something about the forced repetition that makes you remember the tunes in a unique way," Hodgson says, adding that in some ways "Moon Wiring Club is meant to be Edwardian computer-game music."

"Still a kid in a lot of ways," is how Jon Brooks describes himself. His journey through music began "at pre-school age", thanks to his jazz session-player father. "Fellow jazzers would come round to record demos or share ideas. There were always instruments and tape recorders lying about." Brooks was proficient on a half-size drum kit his dad bought him before he even went to school. Soon the child prodigy was grappling with guitar, glockenspiel and keyboards, as well as messing with tape recorders and learning from his father about microphone placement. Although his dad died when Brooks was only nine, the son continued to pursue music, avoiding any formal training but studying music technology while helping to teach an A-level class in music technology.

Perhaps his early start with music, along with his later involvement in musical pedagogy, accounts for why Brooks was so intrigued by Electronic Music in the Classroom, an ultra-rare recording that was the byproduct of a course implemented at several home counties schools in 75-76 and which he has reissued through his just-launched downloads-only label Café Kaput. Originally released in a miniscule edition of reel-to-reel tapes and cassettes for the parents of the children involved, this remarkable record is credited to DD Denham, the peripatetic teacher who devised and implemented the course. But the contents are actually the creme de la creme of the work created by participating children. Now retired, Denham stresses that "the concepts were always those of the child. I would help quite a bit with technical realisation, in terms of connecting that concept to a sound. But I always explained to them the steps taken in order to achieve the sound. The children soon picked up various techniques and developed them on their own. So, a little bit of collaboration, but it was more guidance than anything."

Many of the pieces on Electronic Music in the Classroom are disorienting and disquieting, reflecting children's under-acknowledged appetite for the sinister. "Some children would get spooked by each other's compositions or sounds," Denham recalls. "Sometimes an oscillator would emit a loud wailing and lots of other children would gather round the instrument like a magnet, rather than run away. Kids actually love being scared and sound, although harmless in this case, can be scary and thrilling." The reissue comes with the original liner notes, in which Denham recounts some of the quirky inspirations that the children drew on, from a nightmare about nuns, to the unsettling smell of the air expelled from a church organ, to the ghostly flitting figures of poachers seen from afar after dusk.

Then there's The Way the Vicar Smiles, a delirium of drastically warped, vaguely ecclesiastical sounds (what could be church bells, a choir singing psalms). In the liner notes Vicar Smiles is accurately described by its young creators Robert and Luke as "a bit creepy". "The local education authority thought we were probably skating a little too close to the middle with that one," recalls Denham. "You couldn't get away with it now. However, the vicar in question disappeared from his work a couple of years later, without so much as a whisper. Make of that what you will."

RIP Malcolm Young

AC/DC
 High Voltage / Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap / Highway To Hell/ Back In Black / For Those About To Rock We Salute You 
Mojo, 1994

by Simon Reynolds

Beats me why AC/DC aren't rated alongside The Ramones as seminal mid-'70s
minimalists. Both have built a career out of flogging a formula. Musically,
AC/DC's rock'n'roll fundamentalism takes the form of stop-start raunch-riffs and
lewd sub-blues rasp, as opposed to the Blitzkrieg Boppers' buzzsaw ramalama and
gabba-gabba-hey. Lyrically, AC/DC's fuckin', fightin' and hellraisin' yarns, like
the Ramones' gonzo shtick, is 50 percent tongue-in-cheek rock'n'roll parody, 50
percent genuine thick-as-pigshit moronicism.

AC/DC and the Ramones both debuted pre-punk, and hit their creative stride
in '76. But one's hip and the other's not. The reason is that AC/DC have no
progeny, whereas The Ramones blueprinted punk. Flattening the syncopation and the
sex out of rock'n'roll, the Ramones inadvertantly created a whole new rock
aesthetic. Whereas what makes AC/DC trad is precisely their strongest point, the
supple rhythm section and hip-grinding riffage: they're a reversion to the pre-
punk, pre-metal days when rock was dance music. AC/DC funk, which is why the Beasties sampled them to def (jam). In fact, "TNT", from 1976's High Voltage, is rap megalomania a decade ahead of its time, with Bon Scott boasting he's gonna "explode" just like LL Cool J in Mama Said Knock You Out, then nominating himself "Public Enemy Number One"!

The RIFF is one of those things that rock-critical thought has no purchase
on. As with the grain of the voice in soul, or the bassline in funk, it's
something you can't really talk about, or explain why one grabs you where
another doesn't. The RIFF is rock's base element, and AC/DC's absolute essence;
it's not Angus Young's solos, but his and brother Malcolm Young's dual rhythm guitars
that are the lure on "Rock'n'Roll Singer", "Live Wire", "Problem Child", "Highway
To Hell". AC/DC also have a great way with a teasin' intro, e.g. "For Those About
To Rock We Salute You."

Other aspects to AC/DC are pretty peripheral next to the meat-and-potatoes
of the boogie. Juvenile is the keynote: this is the band that put the 'base' in
back-to-basics. The bawdy misogny and puerile innuendo can get mighty tiresome:
the VD metaphors of "The Jack", the drooling lechery of "Love At First Feel",
"Beating Around The Bush", ad nauseam.

Then again (returning to the punk analogy), "Rock'n'Roll Singer" (from High Voltage) parallels "Career Opportunities" as Bon rants "you can stick your 9-to-5 living ...and all the other
shit they teach the kids at school". And "Problem Child" (from Dirty Deeds) is as psychotic as "No Feelings". AC/DC's ethos is nothing if not "the truth is only known by guttersnipes". But truthfully, their petty delinquency is closer to Oi! than Class of '77. Imagine Cockney Rejects, but with 'feel' and 'groove'.

An anthology of singles (AC/DC are one of the great singles band) and best
album tracks is way overdue, but until then these digitally remastered reissues
offer an opportunity to reappraise the aged Aussie reprobates. High Voltage is a stone classic, and the rest all have their moments.

Carol Clerk remembered

reminiscence of a Melody Maker colleague, part of a memorial package that The Quietus organised in April 2010 in celebration of Carol



Carol Clerk is a vivid and indelible presence in my memories of my time at Melody Maker. The same surely goes for anybody who passed through the portals of that paper (and the public houses adjacent to it). I remember the impish twinkle in her eye, the cadence of her voice, the tininess of her frame (often brought into relief by the size of the pint glass in her hand). She was one of the most approachable people in the Melody Maker office but also probably the most formidable. I think I escaped getting a tongue-lashing from her at any point during my time at the Maker (even after "helping" out on the news desk one week with typing in information about new releases and inserting some made-up stuff about a couple of bands I detested). No doubt I would remember such a well-deserved telling-off if it had happened.

Actually I'm surprised I was let off, because in my mind's eye I picture Carol as this newspaperwoman of the old school, a real professional, still chasing stories hard on a Friday afternoon, when most everybody else in the office was slacking off down the pub. The British music press was unique in that you could prosper there and get right to the top, without any journalistic training or being the slightest bit versed in traditional reporting or editing skills. Carol was an anomaly in that respect, in that she actually did have that training. If I remember correctly, she had worked at a newspaper or two on her way to ending up at the Maker. One thing that really amazed me was when I learned that she did her interviews without a tape recorder, just using a notepad, scribbling down the conversation in short hand.

Carol was an anomaly in another sense, a woman in what was (especially when she started out) a male-dominated field. ("Dominated" always strikes me as a bit of an overstatement: I think most people in the music press really wanted more women to be involved… but at the same time it's true there could be a laddish aura about the Maker). Carol thrived despite this in part because she could out-drink, out-smoke and out-joke any of the men, but at the same time she managed to retain through it all an aspect that was…. motherly.

Another admirable thing about Carol was the way she stuck with the music she was into, which was basically hard rock. There was no keeping up with what was au courant (she must have found so much of what got covered in the Maker--and the way it was covered-- to be ridiculous). Carol liked what she liked and with characteristic tenacity and loyalty she stayed with it.

slackers

SLACKERS
end-of-year essay for Melody Maker, unpublished i think
1992?

by Simon Reynolds



There were "slackers" long before anyone gave them a name. For

decades, every college town and major city in the Western world has

had its bohemian sector of n'er do wells and time-wasters busily

engaged in trying to stave off the Real World for as long as

possible.  Rejecting the career ladder, these drop-outs prolong

adolescence and mess about - for a few years, for decades, sometimes

forever.  Financial insecurity seems a fair trade for more time to

devote to creativity, questioning and self-discovery. It was this

bohemian milieu that birthed the hippy and punk movements, and it

remains the perennial breeding ground for indie bands.

     The UK equivalent of slackerdom used to be "dole culture",

before signing on became an increasingly untenable lifestyle after

Thatcher's assault on the Welfare State.  In the USA, middle class

kids try to drag out their college education as long as possible;

after college, some live off private incomes (as with the notorious

"Grandma's trust fund" that subsidises every Lower East Side

hardcore band's recording costs and drug habits), others eke out a

living with temporary jobs (waiting, working in record stores, etc).

     But in the late Eighties, a particular rock aesthetic and

worldview emerged that was eventually christened "slacker".  It

combined elements from earlier boho-movements: slacker = the stoned

dreaminess of hippy + the faithless vacancy of punk. But perhaps

more significant was what it left out of the fusion: slackers were

hippies without the world-changing idealism, punks without the

speed-fuelled uptightness and will-to-power. The defining quality of

slacker is limp: as Mercury Rev put it on their second album,

"Boces" - "if there's one thing I can't stand, it's up".  The

slacker is apolitical, a Rebel against Causes, against Movements

(and movement).

    Perhaps the archetypal slacker in rock is J.  Mascis. On the

early Dinosaur Jr's albums "You're Living All Over Me" and "Bug"

(1987/88), he came over as a pampered, housebound, spiritual

invertebrate. Mascis' ragged, frazzled guitar-sound, torn-and-frayed

drawl-whine of a voice, and fatigued lyrics, all aspired to that

early Seventies Neil Young feeling of burn-out, that stemmed from

the bitter comedown after the late Sixties high.  Another early

classic of slacker rock was Sonic Youth's "Daydream Nation" (1988),

which imagined New York as a psychedelic labyrinth, "a wondertown"

for the dazed-and-confused wanderer.  Songs like "The Sprawl",

"Eric's Trip" and "Hyperstation" took unmoored drifting to the brink

of psychosis.  Then there was the nouveau acid rock of the Butthole

Surfers, whose Gibby Haynes and Paul Leary chucked in careers in

accountancy for a life of making mess (on stage, on record) and

getting wasted.

     In the US, there's another strand of maladjusted, unmotivated

youth, who have less choice about wasting their lives: they don't

have any opportunities to squander in the first place. These kids,

known as "burn-outs" or "stoners", drop out while still at school.

Despised by their teachers and by their more aspirational peers,

burn-outs wear long-hair, smoke pot by the bike shed, and listen to

heavy metal (classics like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath,

contemporary thrash like Metallica and Slayer).  They hang out in

car lots and abandoned buildings, get harassed by the cops,

sometimes graduate to harder drugs like heroin.  The British

equivalent of burn-outs are probably the kind of delinquents that

made up Happy Mondays or todays' hardcore techno youth. But rave

culture hasn't impacted suburban America yet, so burn-outs don't get

hyper and happy, they numb the pain as best they can.

     In her book "Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia's Dead End Kids",

Donna Gaines pinpoints the predicament that faces the burn-outs.

With the decline of traditional manufacturing employment, the only

options for these kids are ignominious service sector jobs, devoid

of union protection or prospects for advancement.  Hence their low

self-esteem, the feeling that there's no future, and the commonly

expressed sentiment: "no job is worth cutting your hair for".  The

gap between the expectations fostered by the dream factory of

Hollywood and MTV, and what they can reasonably expect from life, is

huge.  The escape routes from this dead end include the

anaesthetic/amnesiac coma of drugs, and the one-way ticket "outa

here" of suicide. The more optimistic imagine joining the army or

forming a successful rock band: both ways of seeing the world and

learning a trade.  Even after Clinton, the outlook is still bleak

for American youth: paying off the deficit will depress the US

economy for years. There's literally "No Future": the babyboom

generation have already spent it.

     In the late Eighties, after years of "lite-metal" (all those

poodle-perm groups like Bon Jovi), metal got heavier again,

musically and thematically. Bands like Metallica took on punk's

attitude, cutting down the musical flab and addressing grim reality

in their lyrics.  Meanwhile, the post-hardcore bands were getting

heavier, fusing the turgid ponderousness of early Seventies blues

rock with the belligerence of punk. And so grunge was born. And out

of its birthplace, Seattle, Nirvana exploded into the mainstream

with "Smells Like Teen Spirit", a record that briefly forged

middle-class slackers and blue-collar burn-outs into a unity of

disaffected youth. Only Nirvana could do this, because of their

unique combination of intelligence (Cobain and Novoselic are

art-school drop outs, politically sussed) and raw, simplistic

aggression. Today, the grunge spectrum extends from arty absurdism

to bludgeoning, brain-dead bombast. At the slackerdaisical end of

the spectrum, there's Pavement, with their surreal wit and mild

disillusionment: at the other end, pure burn-out, you'll find Alice

In Chain, who are devoid of irony and totally mired in despondency.

     Pavement exemplify the brighter side of the slacker condition:

namely, that all that freedom from responsiblity gives you time to

bliss out on the weirdness and wondrousness of everyday life, time

to acquire an obsessive knowlege of music. But there's a downside

even here: you can tell that Steven Malkmus' inordinately large

record collection hasn't made him happy, that in fact he feels

dwarfed and unworthy when faced by the achievements of previous rock

eras. And like true slackers, Pavement disguise this by terminal

irony.  The dark side of slackerdom comes through more plainly with

bands like Alice In Chains, Soundgarden, Rollins Band, Nirvana:

feelings of impotence, entropy, entrapment.  I reckon grunge is

'castration blues', and if you think that's fanciful, consider the

fact that Alice In Chains actually have a song called "Slow

Castration", that there's a line in "Smells Like Teen Spirit" about

being "neutered and spayed".

     In that one song, Nirvana captured all the anguish and the

cruel irony of the slacker condition.  Nirvana want to rebel, they

want to believe that music can change the world, but their

insurrectionary spirit is crippled in advance because they know that

resistance is futile: the music industry routinely turns rebellion

into money. Teen spirit is bottled, shrinkwrapped and sold over the

counter.  And so Cobain's rage chokes in his throat, festers and

turns to bitter bile.

     *         *         *         *         *

    As well as Nirvana's breakthrough, 1991 also saw the cult

success of the movie "Slacker". Directed by 28 year old Richard

Linklater, it was a low-budget snapshot of the shiftless, decentred

life of the twentysomething hangers-on who inhabit the fringes of

the University of Austin, Texas.  Drifting through Austin's summer

streets, Linklater's camera bumps into a hundred of these ne'er-do-

wells, eavesdropping on their bizarre monologues and debates

(usually concerning conspiracy theory or elaborate validations of

their own apathy), and observing their peculiar rites. Funny,

touching, but implicitly sad, "Slacker" steadfastly refuses to judge

the slackers. For Linklater the film was neither diatribe nor

celebration, just a document.

    One of the things "Slacker" captured so well was the way that

slackers, while passive and weak-willed, envy those capable of

action. They have a voyeuristic, vicarious fascination with

assassins and mass murderers, perhaps because they offer a mesmering

spectacle of pure will.  "Slackers spend their whole lives in their

own heads," says Linklater.  "Making that leap of faith into action

is hard.  So when they hear of one person who did make a difference,

they're impressed, even if it's a mass murderer."

     Slacker's main activities (or passivities, more accurately) are

"daydreaming as productive activity" and trawling the detritus of

decades of pop culture.  The result is a slacker aesthetic, a weird

mix of kitsch and mysticism, that has obvious parallels in music

(Butthole Surfers, Sonic Youth, Bongwater) but also in modern art.

Artforum magazine identified a slacker school of artists, whose

installations involve random accretions of found objects, trashy

knick-nacks and personal souvenirs. In slackerdom, wrote Jack

Bankowsky, "everyone worships at their own jerry-built altar".

     1991 also saw the publication of Doug Coupland's 'novel'

"Generation X", an amusing but lightweight dissection of the

twentysomething malaise. Seeing no hope for advancement on the

career ladder, Coupland's X-ers are into "lateral mobility", moving

from one unsatisfactory "McJob" to another.  After the success of

their debut efforts, both Linklater and Coupland turned their

attention to teenagers: Coupland wrote "Shampoo Planet" (about

today's global teens) and Linklater filmed "Dazed and Confused"

(about Seventies high school burn-outs). Meanwhile, Hollywood

detected a market in the twentysomething demographic, and started

churning out slacker-sploitation pics, like Cameron Crowe's cute but

slight "Singles" and Michael Steinberg's stylish but pseudo-profound

"Bodies, Rest and Motion".

     *         *         *         *         *         *

     Since the Zeitgeist-defining moment that was "Smells Like Teen

Spirit", the precarious alliance between slackers and burn-outs has

disintegrated, in much the same way that punk dispersed into a

myriad fragments after the Sex Pistols auto-destructed. The slacker

contingent has gone off into the rarerified realm of noise-for-

noise's sake. In the wake of Pavement, a burgeoning movement of

lo-fi avant-garage bands has emerged: Unrest, Ween, Sebadoh, Mercury

Rev, Flaming Lips, Truman's Water, Royal Trux, God Is My Co-Pilot,

Timber, Thinkin' Fellers Union Local 282, Smog, etc.  Like Pavement,

these bands favour cryptic song-titles, surreal lyrics, arcane

influences (The Fall, Krautrockers like Can, Faust, Neu), and

a mess-thetic of loose ends and wilful dishevelment.  Meanwhile, the

bulk of the audience that Nirvana created has stuck with the simpler

fare of pure grunge: the brawn and bombast of punk-metal bands like

Stone Temple Pilots, Kyuss, Flotsam and Jetsam, who all plough the

narrow strip of terrain between Black Sabbath and Black Flag.  It's

seems unlikely that this split between arty elitism (the slackers)

and artless populism (the grungers) will be repaired.

     And what of Nirvana, the band who made the Slacker a public

figure? Judging by the sequel to "Nevermind", with its ultra-grunge

Steve Albini production, Cobain & Co seem deadset on alienating

their audience and shortcircuiting their success. You only have to

read the sleevenotes to "Incesticide", with Cobain's angst-wracked

writhing about integrity and his almost pathetic namedrops of

obscure bands, to realise that Nirvana want to go back to the indie

womb. A slacker who's somehow landed himself with a millionaire

career, Cobain is knocking on the underground's door, begging for

readmission.  And ain't that pure slack?

Boys in the (band) Hood (do cry)

Hood 

Cold House 

(Domino/Aesthetics)

Spin, 2001

by Simon Reynolds 

Hood make mope-rock for the laptop era.  

This English quartet are survivors from a brief early Nineties moment of mingling between UK indie dreampop and techno. Reared on the guitarhaze of A.R. Kane and My Bloody Valentine,  these groups  had their heads flipped around by  Aphex Twin.  While some of these outfits, like Seefeel, gradually went all the way into abstract electronix,  others, like legends-to-a-few Disco Inferno, remained attached to the song and the voice.  Updating this indie-meets-electronica formula, Hood offering glitch with a human face, their sound poised somewhere between the jackfrost fragility of  New Zealand janglers The Chills and the faded-photo poignancy of  Boards of Canada. Crunchy filtered beats jostle with bright acoustic guitar, crestfallen analog synths waver alongside mournful horns.

But just as you've got Cold House pegged as a way-underground cousin to Kid A and Vespertine,  another element comes in from far left-field:  hip hop. Abstrakt-to-the-max rhymes from Dose One and Why? of Bay Area crew cLOUDDEAD feature on three tracks, ranging from surreal lines like "sometimes the sunset doesn't want to be photographed" to stuff that's more like a braid-of-breath than actual decipherable words.

As Cold House's title suggests, the dominant mood is desolate (Hood come from Leeds in the infamously bleak  North of England) . On "The Winter Hit Hard" gale-force winds of dubbed-out drumming buffet a frail sapling of a vocal melody, and the entire album teems with  images like "there's coldness in this sky" or "your cold hand in mine". 

This heat-dearth is as much a matter of internal affect as climate, though.  The singer's fallible voice recalls too-sensitive-for-this-world folk minstrel Nick Drake, and the lyrics manage to stay just the right side of "precious" as they flick through snapshots from what seems to be the drawn-out death throes of a relationship. Pained insights flash by concerning regret, the oppressive weight of the past, dreams "snatched from your grasp," and the way the world seems dead, stripped of all enchantment, after the love had gone.  

For Hood, life's a glitch, and then you cry.