"there are immaturities, but there are immensities" - Bright Star (dir. Jane Campion)>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
"the fear of being wrong can keep you from being anything at all" - Nayland Blake >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> "It may be foolish to be foolish, but, somehow, even more so, to not be" - Airport Through The Trees
I remember very clearly the first time I heard Cut – it was the summer of '79, I was staying at my aunt's in the Yorkshire Dales, and I'd sneaked off to listen to The John Peel Show. The tracks – ‘Spend, Spend, Spend’ and ‘Newtown’ – sounded incredibly eerie and ethereal, partly because of the tatty, trebly transistor radio through which I heard them, but mainly because it was my first exposure to dub-wise production.
A few weeks later, Cut became the second album I ever owned. As with other records from the days when my collection was in single figures (like PiL's Metal Box), Cut's every rhythm-guitar tic and punky-dread vocal inflection is engraved in my heart.
As a just-missed-punk 16-year-old, I'd first encountered The Slits' name in a Melody Maker profile of Malcolm McLaren. After losing control of the Pistols, McLaren was offered the chance to manage The Slits and briefly schemed to make a wildly exploitative movie in which the girl-band go to Mexico, find themselves effectively sold into slavery, and are turned into porno-disco stars.
Thank God, The Slits slipped out of McLaren's clutches. He went off to make skin flicks in Paris, and The Slits made Cut – one of the greatest albums of the post-punk era, alongside Metal Box, Gang Of Four's Entertainment and The Raincoats' first two records.
One of rock criticism's minor dissensions is which version of The Slits is better – the untamed, untutored rumpus of their early live gigs versus the tidied up, punky-reggae studio-Slits with dub wizard Dennis ‘Blackbeard’ Bovell at the controls.
As exciting as the 1977-78 John Peel Sessions indisputably are, The Slits sound infinitely better after they fell in with Bovell, Budgie took over the drumming (following original sticks-woman Palmolive's departure for The Raincoats), and they acquired some basic chops. On the Strange Fruit CD of those Peel sessions, you can hear the embryonic glory of Cut, but the raw tumult is closer to heavy metal bludgeon than punky-reggae sway.
Compounding the taboo-busting frisson of the band's name, Cut's cover is a confrontational classic: mud-smeared and clad only in loincloths, The Slits strike bare-breasted Amazon poses and defiantly out-stare the camera's gaze. The backdrop is a picturesque, bramble-strewn English cottage – as if to say, ‘We're no delicate English roses’. The back-sleeve has Ari Up, Viv Albertine and Tessa Pollitt daubed in warpaint, lurking in a bush. The music and lyrical stance is just as fierce, kicking off with two jibes at punk rock machismo, ‘Instant Hit’ and ‘So Tough’ (the latter namechecking a "Sid" and a "John"). Everything great about The Slits is instantly audible in these songs: Albertine's itchy-and-scratchy rhythm guitar, Pollitt's revved-up but rootsical basslines, Budgie's clackety rimshot drums, and, above all, the strange geometry of the clashing and overlapping girl-harmonies. Ari Up's harsh Teutonic accent makes her sound like a guttersnipe Nico, on sulphate rather than smack.
‘Spend, Spend, Spend’ is where Bovell's dub-wisdom makes its presence felt. It's desolate dirge-skank, all sidling bass and brittle drums. Ari's portrait of a shopaholic is truly poignant as she tries to "satisfy this empty feeling" with impulse-purchases. But if ‘Spend’ is woman-as-consumerist-dupe, ‘Shoplifting’ turns this on its head, imagining petty theft as proto-feminist insurrection: "We pay fuck-all!" Oi!-meets-Riot-Grrrl backing vocals urge, "Do a runner! Do a runner!", and the music – surging, spasming dub-funk – does exactly that as Ari unleashes an exhilarating scream of glee-and-terror, then collapses in giggles with the admission: "I've pissed in my knickers!"
The sombre ‘FM’ critiques the mass media. Ari's protagonist wonders, "What's feeding my screams?", and describes radio transmissions as "frequent mutilation... serving for the purpose of those who want you to fear". ‘Newtown’ is an Irvine Welsh-like vision of a society based around addiction and surrogate-satisfactions, drawing a disconcerting parallel between the cathode-ray junkies "sniffing televisiono, taking foot-ballino" and The Slits' own bohemian milieu numbed-out on illegal narcotics. The jittery, scraping guitar mimics the fleshcrawling ache of cold turkey, while dub-FX of dropping spoons ram home the analogy.
‘Ping Pong Affair’ is about emotional withdrawal: Ari measures out the empty post-break-up evenings with cigarettes and masturbation ("Same old thing, yeah I know, everybody does it"). ‘Love Und Romance’, scorns the very lovey-dovey intimacy that ‘Ping Pong’ craved. It's a witheringly sardonic parody of smotherlove-as-braindeath, with Ari gloating to her boyfriend: "Oh my darling, who wants to be free?"
‘Typical Girls’ – the only single off Cut – was The Slits' manifesto, a mocking diatribe against the non-punkette ordinary girls who "Don't create/don't rebel" and whose heads are addled with women's-magazine-implanted anxieties about "Spots, fat, unnatural smells".
With its cut-and-dried, programmatic critique of conditioning, ‘Typical Girls’ is the closest The Slits got to the 1979 agit-funk bands. But unlike, say, The Au Pairs, The Slits sound riotous rather than righteous.
After Cut – 32 minutes of near-perfection that ends with the touching if slight ‘Adventures Close To Home’ – The Slits went all earth-mother feminist and tribal conscious. "In The Beginning There Was Rhythm", a 1980 split single with The Pop Group on the flipside, was terrific. But it took until 1981 before the sequel to Cut arrived: the African music influenced Return Of The Giant Slits, whose off-kilter meters and cluttered soundscapes make it a poor cousin to The Raincoats' mistress-piece, Odyshape.
inspired by the Nic Roeg movie?
But, by '81, the post-punk zeitgeist had shifted to New Pop. String sections, suits and synths were de rigueur; anything that smacked of bohemian withdrawal from the mainstream was lambasted as punky-hippie defeatism. The Slits scattered: Ari Up became a fully-fledged Rasta, settled down and had babies; Viv Albertine eventually worked in TV; Tessa got into martial arts.
Although The Slits' attitude was clearly a crucial ancestor for Riot Grrrl and its UK chapter (Huggy Bear et al), the question of their musical legacy is more elusive. 1979-81 post-punk experimentalism – death-disco, agit-funk, ‘John Peel bands’ – is one of the great neglected eras of modem music.*
Maybe, when people tire of Britpop's Sixties / New Wave tunnel-vision, that period will be rediscovered. But so far I've only ever encountered one band who cite The Slits as an influence: New York's goddess-and-Gaia-obsessed pagan funkateers, Luscious Jackson. Singer Jill Cunniff declared: "There was a time when The Slits were the epitome, the ultimate, the coolest of the cool. They were everything I wanted from life."
I second that emotion.
* Well, I hadn't realised I was already starting to think about postpunk as a neglected era as early as 1997. Seeds of Rip It Up and Start Again, ahoy!
actually come round to Return of the Giant Slits as a lost demi-classic, but still no match for Cut
“Ghosts of My Life confirms that Mark Fisher is our most penetrating explorer of the connections between pop culture, politics, and personal life under the affective regime of digital capitalism. The most admirable qualities of Fisher’s work are its lucidity, reflecting the urgency of his commitment to communicating ideas; his high expectations of popular art’s power to challenge, enlighten, and heal; and his adamant refusal to settle for less“ - blurb for Ghosts of My Life
"As much as his actual ideas – which have
been so influential, and certainly have influenced me – what I respond to in
Mark’s work is the writing itself, being a writer myself. The sheer style of
it, and the clarity. I admire the way he could distil complex ideas into
instantly graspable, punchy one or two-sentence statements. Or even just a
phrase, which would then worked as a kind of concept-slogan, a meme:
“capitalist realism”, “depressive hedonism”, “the secret sadness of the 21st
Century”, so many more.
Although he was intensely serious, Mark
could also be savagely funny – usually when he was tearing something to shreds.
If he thought something was pernicious or reactionary, he gave no quarter, and
ridicule was one of his most effective weapons. His strength as a thinker and
writer came precisely from this polarized love/hate, adore/abhor
approach. So Mark could heroize certain figures like Burial with definitive
takes on what their music represented, make them into almost mythic figures.
But he would also “nihilate” – that’s a term he used, the power of nihilation -
the opposition: anything that didn’t come up to his exacting standards of
what pop culture could and should be."
Yes, that's the young Mark Fisher staring piercingly out of the picture!
As I discuss in the foreword to k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, I had a meeting of minds with Mark several years before I actually met him in person, or indeed even knew of his existence. In 1994 I wrote a mini-feature on D-Generation, an ideas-packed groop whose press-release spiels caught my fancy. They sent me a press release / letter and a demo tape for an EP titled Entropy in the UK.
I tried the three numbers listed and got through to one of them, Simon Biddell. And it was he who I interviewed. In the piece (below) he is identified as the D-Generation's ideologue. It never occurred to ask about the other members of the group - it was a total ideas-oriented, polemic-oriented discussion. Zero factual information! Not untypical for me in those days....
But Mark was certainly co-ideologue with Biddell - his mindprints are all over the group's self-framing, the titles, choice of samples etc etc. (I don't know what the role of Lee Thompson, the third member of D-Generation was). Prefigurings and portents of K-punkian obsessions limn the D-Generation manifesto.
Below are two pieces on D-Generation from 1994
D-Generation
Melody Maker, 1994
by Simon Reynolds
D-Generation are highly influenced by '60s mod and freakbeat. This Manchester trio took their name from The Eyes' "My Degeneration", a parody of The Who's anthem. D-Generation love the psychedelic/psychotic intensity of freakbeat bands like The Eyes, John's Children, The Creation, but they don't want to recreate it. Psychedelia means abusing technology, they argue, and today that means fucking with samplers and sequencers, not guitars.
Unlike These Animal Men and Blur, D-Generation haven't forgotten that mod was short for modernist. The original mods wanted to fast-forward into the future, not replay lost
golden ages. So D-Generation's "psychedelic futurism" draws on ambient and jungle--music that's absolutely NOW, absolutely BRITISH. And instead of the usual iconography of swinging London or English whimsy, D-Generation pledge allegiance to a "dark, deviant tradition"
of Englishness that includes The Fall, Syd Barrett, Wyndham Lewis, Powell/Pressburger and Michael Moorcock.
D-Generation's atmospheric dance is like a twilight-zone Ultramarine--lots of English imagery, but instead of bucolic bliss, the vibe is urban decay, dread and disassociation. On
their EP "Entropy In the UK", "73/93" rails against the "Nostalgia Conspiracy", using Dr Who samples of "no future". D-Generation call their music "techno haunted by the ghost of
punk" and on 'The Condition Of Muzak' that's literally the case, as it samples Johnny Rotten's infamous taunt: 'ever get the feeling you've been cheated?". Originally, the target was
rave culture itself, but this has widened out, says band ideologue Simon Biddell, "to implicate the entire culture of cynical irony." Then there's "Rotting Hill", a stab at "a 'Ghost Town' for the '90s"; Elgar's patriotic triumphalism is offset by samples from the movie Lucky Jim--"Merrie England? England was never merry!".
D-Generation, says Biddell, are dismayed by the way "young people are content to embrace a rock canon handed down to them, and seem unable to embrace the present, let alone
posit a future." But they're optimistic about the emergence of "a counter-scene, bands like Disco Inferno, Bark Psychosis, Pram, Insides, who are using ambient and techno ideas but
saying something about the 'real world', not withdrawing from it".
Add D-Generation to the list of this nation's saving graces.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The second piece about, or touching upon / deploying D-Generation, was a side-bar to a one-pager I contributed to Melody Maker's "New Wave of New Wave" cover-story feature package, March 26th 1994. This was the side panel to an interview with Jon Savage about the NWofNW, groups like SMASH, These Animal Men, and Fabulous.
Actually, now I think about it, this came out before the proper mini-feature on the group above. When this side bar to Savage piece appeared, some of my colleagues at MM simply assumed that I had made up the group to fit my polemics of the time. So the 'new band of the week' in the Advance section of MM was a kind of rejoinder, maybe - "see, they are real!".
TECHNOPHOBIA! The New Wave of New Wave versus d-generation
The great failing of the nouveau punk bands is their willful denial of the music of the last six years. The Sex Pistols had a relationship with both their era’s chartpop (glam’n’glitter like the Sweet) and its underground rock (The Stooges). Any band hoping to have the same impact today would have to take on board the innovations of sampler-based music, from rap and rave to ambient and avant-rock. A Nineties Pistols would be something like a cross between The Prodigy (this era’s Sweet), The Young Gods (this era’s Stooges) and Public Enemy (the black Clash).
Another big failing is that the NWONW’s refried Who riffs lack any kind of relationship with contemporary black music. Although the influence of roots reggae and dub really came through musically in 1979, punk had a spiritual kinship with reggae: both punk and Rasta were about exile and alienation. A Nineties punk should also have at least an awareness of - if not outright alliance with - today’s black British subcultures. And that means ragga and jungle techno, music of pre-political rage and urban paranoia. If These Animal Men are really into speedfreak music, they should be making 160 bpm ardkore jungle, which is driven by a rage-to-live that’s pure punk. THIS is the sound of youth today, whereas These Animal Men’s “This is the Sound of Youth” is the sound of youth yesterday: 1966, or worse, that year’s dismal replay in 1979, with neo-mod bands like Secret Affair and Squire.
We need real modernism, not mod revivals. So let me introduce: d-generation. As the name suggests, their music is informed by, but also a swerve away from, the music of the E Generation: “the corrupt modernism” of dark techno, jungle, ambient and ragga.
“We would have been punks in ‘77”, admit d-generation, “but today we can’t see why anyone would ignore modern music.”
They call their sound “psychedelic futurism, techno haunted by the ghost of punk”. It sounds like Ultramarine gone noir: ambient drones, lonesome dub-reggae melodica, stealthy junglist breakbeats. Like Ultramarine, d-generation deploy imagery of “Englishness”, but instead of pastoral quirkiness, the vibe is urban wasteland, influenced by “the dark, expressionist, deviant tradition” of Wyndam Lewis, The Fall and Michael Moorcock.
On their yet-to-be-released EP Entropy in the UK, ghostly allusions to punk are omnipresent. “73/93” turns around the sampled phrases “eroding structure, generating entropy… no future”. “The Condition of Muzak” (the title is from a Michael Moorcock novel) goes even further, using Johnny Rotten as a stick to beat the rave generation. A sample from the Pistols’ last performance at Winterlands is turned into a techno riff: Rotten’s famous “ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated” and mirthless cackle “ha ha ha”. Perfect: if this was played at a rave, it would start a virus of disaffection that would undermine the whole subculture. So many ravers have a cheated look on their faces, sometimes cos they’ve been sold dodgy E, mostly cos they’re burned out and can never get as high as they used to.
Rave is full of submerged utopian longings (“living the dream” etc). But because they aren’t articulated, the culture ultimately functions as a safety valve, releasing frustration at the weekend then returning you to workaday drudgery.
It’s not a culture of refusal, but an anti-culture that defuses. d-generation suggest one way that a true successor to punk (rather than a mere replay) could operate: as spies in the house of the loved-up, sowing seeds of discontent, making a grim dance of our national decay.
The second - but unreleased - EP from D-Generation - Concrete Island.
Although I have two pre-release cassettes with D-Generation on the spine in my possession still, in the event they only put out just the one vinyl EP . That's because they were forced to change their name on account of the existence of a fairly dreadful NY trad-rebel-raunch'n'roll outfit of the same moniker - if I recall right, they got sent one of those cease-and-desist type letters from the management or the record company. But D-Generation did continue under a different name, The Lower Depths, and released at least a couple more EPs. One of the Concrete Island tunes appears on the first Lower Depths EP. Press releases below - again, spot the proto-K-punkian elements!
In the Key of Jim Jarmusch: the movies and the soundtracks
Film Focus, May 2009
director's cut version (snigger)
by Simon Reynolds
STRANGER THAN PARADISE (1984)
During the late Seventies and early Eighties, New York City
was a cauldron of experimentation and hybrid creativity.Artists moved back and forth across the
suddenly porous boundaries between postpunk rock, the visual arts, the worlds
of underground cinema and theater, and the emerging hip hop scene.If anything was central, though, it was rock,
which became the cultural hot spot with the arrival of punk and flourished
further with the confrontational No Wave movement and then the more colorful,
playful genre known as mutant disco. There was a time when almost every artist
was also in a band:painter Jean-Michel
Basquiat and future actor/director Vincent Gallo, for instance, were both in
the weird noise outfit Gray, while Jim Jarmusch sang and played keyboards in
The Del-Byzanteens."At that time everyone in New York had a
band," Jarmusch recalled in 1984. "The idea was that you didn't have
to be a virtuoso musician to have a band. The spirit was more important than
having technical expertise."
It was while he was moving through the
incestuous downtown Manhattan scene that Jarmusch became friends with John
Lurie, who would not only star in Stranger Than Paradise but score the film and
help the director come up with the idea for the story's first part.Lurie fronted The Lounge Lizards, whose scrawny
mutant take on bebop he described as "fake jazz" in an unguarded
interview moment. The quip became a
millstone but actually fits the Lounge Lizards musically and sartorially: their
retro-tinged sound and suave suits harked back to some bygone pre-rock era but
subtly warped it.
Much the same could be
said for Stranger Than Paradise, which seems to be set in some indefinable era
that's neither present nor past. Being shot in black-and-white contributes to
this effect, as do the old-fashioned clothes worn by Lurie's character Willy
and his buddy Eddie (pork pie hats, suspenders and jackets that seem to come
straight out of The Hustler), the quaint household appliances , the vintage TV
and movies on the portable black-and-white television,and the one non-Lurie composition on the soundtrack, Screamin' Jay
Hawkins's ghoulish R&B classic "I Put A Spell On You".
The movie is suffused in Americana (at one
point Willy tries to explain the football on TV to Eva, his visiting Hungarian
cousin, only to give up) and in some sense is about America as a mythic
wonderland that somehow eludes the grasp even of those born in the USA.Lurie's score, though, avoids jazz or
R&B for a faux-European vibe: a neurotic chamber music of cello and violins
that sometimes sounds agitated and highly-strung, sometimes subdued and
achingly melodic.It's perfect for the
uncanny way Jarmusch's movie makes middle America (a snow-covered and shadowy
Cleveland, a blizzard-shroudedLake
Erie) look like Mittel Europa. Even Florida, which Willy, Eddy and Eva visit on
a disastrous vacation, is made to feel chilly, bleached of color and cheer by
cinematographer Tom DiCillo.
DOWN BY LAW (1986)
Jarmusch's second movie to feature Lurie's on-screen
charisma and atmospheric score, Down by Law was actually born of the director's
musical obsession with New Orleans, the city in and around which the film is
set.Jarmusch had never been there, but
felt that he had gleaned "a very strong sense---maybe abstract, maybe
inaccurate--of New Orleans from its music culture." By this he didn't mean
jazz so much as the city's 1950s and '60s rhythm-and-blues and early funk,
figures like Professor Longhair, The Meters, Irma Thomas, Dr John,Allen Toussaint, Ernie K. Doe, and Irma Thomas (whose "It's Raining"
appears as a jukebox tune at one point).This music, along with the Louisiana port city's historical associations
with voodoo and pirates, and its unique architecture and food, gave New Orleans
a pungent mystique for Jarmusch.
Like
Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law has a curious time-out-of-joint, twilight
zone atmosphere, the sense of a present almost oppressively haunted by the
past's ghosts.Lurie plays Jack, a pimp
who ends up sharing a jail cell with a deejay called Zack and Bob, a mysterious
Italian buffoon.Zack was played by
Lurie and Jarmusch's friend Tom Waits, recently relocated to New York after a
long period in Los Angeles where he'd become a cult singer-songwriter with his
beatnik -barfly image and huskily drawled vignettes.Probably influenced by the New York postpunk
scene that the Lounge Lizards belonged to, Waits music shifted in an
experimental direction with the albums Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs. The latter
album contributed two tunes to Down by Law's soundtrack, theblues-tinged but dissonant "Jockey Full
of Bourbon" and "Tango Till They're Sore."
Lurie's own compositions come from a similar
place-- a mongrel sound midway between the art house and the burlesque hall--and
use some of the same musicians who played on Rain Dogs.The style is a gumbo of American bohemian and
lowlife musics, all clanking percussion,low blares of lugubriously sleazy trumpet,cold-turkey scrapes of guitar, and plinky
sounds that recall the invented instruments of hobo composer Harry Partch.Defective yet affecting,moodily atmospheric yet somehow audibly in
quotation marks, it's the perfect soundtrack for a movie that deliberately
skips the narrative's most dramatic moment (the escape from prison) and cuts to
the Louisiana swampland, where Bob announces "we have escaped, like in the
American movies".
DEAD MAN (1995)
Neil Young and his backing band Crazy Horse are the Wild
Bunch of rock, haggard but heroic survivors of a grander, free-spirited musical
era.One of Neil Young's most famous
albums, After the Goldrush, echoes that elegiac sense of the frontier having
closed a long time ago, the ache left by the loss of American wilderness and
wildness.The name Crazy Horse itself
comes from the Lakota warrior chief who rebelled against the Federal government
in the hopes of preserving traditional Native American folkways.
All these associations made Young the ideal
candidate to score Dead Man, a sort of postmodern Western that in typical Jarmusch
style manages to be poignant and playful at the same time.The story concerns a city slicker by name of
William Blake (Johnny Depp) who migrates from Cleveland to the very end of the
railroad line in pursuit of a promised job only to find himself stranded out
West,an incongruously clean-shaven and
smart suit-wearing figure in a land of rugged, hairy trappers and prospectors.
Yet the Industrial Revolution has already reached this wilderness: the town is
called Machine and Blake's job was supposed to be working at a metal-works
firm.
For the score, rather than write
fully-fledged songs, Young improvised in a recording studio while watching the
film. Minimally titled on the soundtrack CD as "Guitar Solo, No. 1",
"Guitar Solo, No. 2" and so forth, the result was a sequence of
guitar miniatures: flickering micro-riffs full of tension and strangeness,glistening golden trails of melody that cut
abruptly to a single crunching powerchord like the report of a rifle.The music gestures towards the epic grandeur
of Young in his full-bore, Crazy Horse-assisted mode but its fragmentary form
withholds the full ragged glory the listener craves, just as Jarmusch's movie
alludes to the Hollywood Wild West but slyly frustrates one's expectations with
absurdist twists.
GHOST DOG: THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI (1999)
Yet another Jarmusch movie that involved the creative input
of a musician from an early stage, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai is
described by the director as a three-way collaboration between himself, lead
actor Forest Whitaker and legendary hip hop producer The RZA.All are fans of martial arts culture. As soon
as they arrived in American theaters in the early Seventies, martial arts
movies struck a chord with inner-city audiences: the notion of violence
contained by discipline and given spiritual meaning by a code of honor
resonated with youth from the ghetto, where gangs functioned as surrogate clans
and often thought of themselves as a kind of nobility of the streets.The RZA's rap ensemble the Wu Tang Clan named
itself after a renegade sect of Shaolin monks in China and titled their 1993 debut
album Enter the Wu-Tang in homage to the Bruce Lee classic.
By the late
Nineties the RZA was exploring modern polished production styles but Jarmusch
was keen to get the "poetically beautiful, slightly damaged sound of early
Wu Tang".Right from the start the
RZA's style was praised by critics for its "cinematic" qualities,
while the producer himself argues that"all my music is pitched to the pictorial." Weaving mood-manipulative snippets of
orchestration over looped breakbeats , the RZA has often been playing games
with ideas of "the soundtrack" in the same way that Jarmusch's movies
have fun with movie genre by--in Ghost Dog's case--mixing up elements from the
mob movie, blacksploitation films, and the samurai epic.
Like a worn-out through over-playing bootleg
video of a kung-fu film, the RZA's sampleshave acorroded, wavering
out-of-focus quality, while the rhythms manage to be both disjointed and funky.
It's very much a digital-era update of
the archetypal Black American interest in the blue note and the off beat.One of the main Ghost Dog themes is a
faltering loop of a faded-sounded electric piano lick that almost focuses you to sharpen
your perceptions,placing you in the
mindset of Whitaker's character, a professional assassin. Another theme made
out of flutters of vaguely Oriental orchestration and pugnacious breakbeats
perfectly choregraphs the great swordfight practice scene on the rooftop. There's
also some nice hip hop savvy uses of music within the film's action. A gang of
B-boys rappingthe tune "Ice
Cream" by Wu Tang clansman Raekwon sets up the first appearance of Ghost
Dog's only friend, a Haitian man who sells cones from a truck called Ice Cream
Palace. And in a cute scene the evil Mafia boss is seen grooving, absurdly, to
Public Enemy's Flavor Flav in his deluxe bathroom suite, dressed in a Hugh
Hefner-style dressing gown.
In one of his most interesting deployments of music yet,Jarmusch calls on the Japanese heavy rock
bandBoris for sounds that contradict
the film's repressed emotional atmosphere andcrisp camerawork. Inspired by acid rock and doom-laden metalof the lateSixties and early Seventies, Boris's blissfully amorphouswaves of guitar distortion seem to spill
across the screen, evoking all the limitlessness and uncontrol that the Lone
Man has banished from his existence.(When agorgeous secret agent
with an unexplained penchant for wearing no clothes tries to seduce him, Lone
Man explains he never has sex while on a mission).The tingling ambient horizons of Boris's
"Farewell", which recurs at several key points in the movie,
initially conjure a mood of swoony reverie, before the tune erupts into
pummeling bombast, as if to promise the violence to come later in the movie--
an orgiastic spilling of blood to release the tension built up by Lone Man's
self-discipline.
Intriguingly, Boris's
sound is the polar opposite of the music listened to for pleasure within the
movie's action by Lone Man: refined and courtly classical by Schubert.
Somewhere between the twoextremes lies
the flamenco performed in another scene,whichfuses the catharsis of
extreme emotion with the poise of the staccato dance style.In a black-humorous joke, the flamenco
performance prefigures the assassin's use of a guitar string as a lethal
weapon. It's yet another example of the centrality of music to Jim Jarmusch's
warped and witty imagination.
(mini-interview as part of The Observer's package feature on the kind of Christmas being enjoyed by famous people with the name of Smith)
The Observer, December 23, 1990
by Simon Reynolds
Given his curmudgeonly image, you might expect Mark E. Smith to regard Christmas as a time to endure rather than enjoy.
"I don't mind it," he says. "I'd like it more if it was just for a couple of days. But when the whole country shuts down for two weeks, I find it gets on me nerves a bit. Christmas in this country just drags on and on. Apart from that, it's okay. You can't knock it, can you?"
Mark E. Smith's group, The Fall, are something of a post-punk institution. But, unlike most institutions, The Fall don't stand for anything.
In the 14 years of their existence, they have recorded a gargantuan body of work as demanding, wayward and cryptic as Dylan's, while Smith has been a perennial and voluble presence in the music press.
His Northern bloody-mindedness and bracing inflexibility of character has been reflected in The Fall's coruscating sound — and his views on the so-called festive season.
"Usually, I try to get away altogether. I try to avoid the claustrophobia of being cooped up with the family, and all the arguments," he says.
"This year, though, I'm spending it with my mum, 'cos she's on her own."
And how about the grisly business of giving? "I do all the present buying the day before Christmas. I'm not much of a shopper. I go by instinct. On Christmas Eve, the shops are clear.
"Overall, I enjoy New Year much more than Christmas. I used to live in Edinburgh until recently, and I like the Scottish attitude to New Year. I have a lot of friends up there — real friends, who don't know who I am, if you know what I mean."
Smith migrated to Scotland from his native Manchester after splitting up with his American wife, Brix, last year. During Brix's stint in the band, The Fall shifted somewhat in the direction of pop, and even enjoyed some chart success.
Now 32, Mark E. Smith says he's enjoyed the return to the single life. "It's fantastic, and I need space to work in anyway." Meanwhile, Brix is pursuing a solo pop career and has been romantically linked with violinist Nigel Kennedy.
Smith has his own connections with high culture. The Fall have collaborated with Michael Clark, most notably in a genre-trashing ballet, called I am Curious, Orange, in 1988.
Currently Smith is working on a musical, the details of which he prefers to keep under wraps. It's indicative of the singer's contrary nature that if anybody else in rock had dared to make similar dalliances with high art, they would have been lashed with his most scathing derision.
Smith has often fulminated about how rock 'n' roll was ruined when the students and art-college kids got hold of it. And he's long been the music press's token anti-liberal.
His out-of-kilter notions and pet bigotries are relished as an antidote to the right-on pieties of the alternative scene. In interviews he's typically to be found ranting about how wholemeal bread tastes like dust, or why nuclear weapons are preferable to conscription.
"I think aloud when I'm doing interviews," says Smith. "Sometimes the things I say are just a wind-up, but they get taken seriously. But if you're looking for an illiberal quote, then I can tell you that I believe we should be at war with Iraq right now."
If Smith has a creed, it's probably a kind of brass-tacks scepticism, a thoroughly old-school British distaste for humbug and cant.
"There's two things wrong with Britain nowadays," he says. "There's too much media, TV is too much in charge. And everybody's starting to take politics seriously again, now that Thatcher's gone.
"I was always brought up to think that politicians were all as bad as each other, that they were all idiots. I always thought that the good thing about Britain was that everybody thought politics didn't matter, whereas in Europe they think it does."
With his cut-the-crap nature, does he find Christmas nauseatingly twee? Or does he have a secret sentimental streak?
"Well, I'm actually a very nice bloke, I'll have you know. I tend to get written up in a particular way. Of course I have a sentimental side, perhaps overly so. I have a family and all that. I'm just about the only man left among 80 women. All the menfolk are dropping off like flies."
This Christmas, it seems, "our Mark" will be smothered firmly in the ample bosom of his family.
A ripple
runs through it. The peal of piano -
reflective or rhapsodic, elegiac or euphoric - is the lineament that marks almost
all of Robert Haigh’s music across his nearly forty years of recording. You hear it on his Eighties releases, when he
aligned with the esoteric industrial underground but had more in common with
Harold Budd. You hear it as a Morse signal summoning dancers to the ravefloor
in the series of Omni Trio EPs recorded by Haigh for the jungle label Moving
Shadow in the early Nineties, and again – but
now more serene and slinky - on his
cinematic drum and bass albums from later that decade. Finally, in the 21st
Century, you hear the piano naked and unadorned once more, with the flurry of
albums Haigh recorded after parting ways with U.K. dance culture, culminating
with the quiet triumph of Creatures of
the Deep late last year.
At the risk
of bringing Billy Joel into proceedings – possibly a first time appearance in
the pages of this magazine - Haigh is truly the Piano Man.
When I
enquire just what it is about the instrument that speaks to him so deeply and
persistently, Haigh gathers his thoughts slowly over the phone from his home, a
tiny town near Truro in Cornwall.
“I think
it’s just the fact that you can – on your own – make a really wide sort of
sound with the piano. You can create chords and the basslines as well. What
attracted me in the beginning was that I could do the whole thing myself.”
Later, dissatisfied, Haigh returns with clarifications via email: “The piano is
essentially a percussive instrument but it’s capable of the most fluid extended
voices. It can produce thunderous bass tones alongside the most intimate and
fragile top notes. I also like the fact of its self-containment and
independence. This makes it a great tool for improvisation, which is the basis
for most of my writing.”
As for initiating raptures that made him notice the instrument’s
potential, Haigh mentions the title track of Bowie’s Aladdin Sane, featuring Mike Garson’s famously jagged, dissonant and
somehow decadent solo, and the “strange discordant piano” on The Faust Tapes.In his late fifties now, Haigh is old enough
to have experienced that album as a real-time astonishment, thanks to his older
sister, who bought Virgin Records’s 50p bargain only to be baffled by it, and
passed it on to 14-year-old Rob. Beyond the piano element, Haigh attributes a
profound formative impact to this early exposure to The Faust Tapes. “Initially I couldn’t make much sense of it either,
but because I only owned two or three albums at that point, I persevered. If
you listen to my stuff you wouldn’t immediatelythink ‘This guy’s influenced by Faust’. But there’s a seam of experiment in my music and it probably started with the way Faust’s music is all cut
up and juxtaposed, with beautiful melodies next to atonal chaos.”
Haigh’s first hands-on encounter with the piano came much later, though,
when he was a student at London’s Central School of Art.“There was a room in back, with a piano in
it, and I used to go in there sometimes and plonk about.I never really thought‘this
is what I wanna do’. The piano was just
something I kept being drawn to.”
Nothing came
of it, though, and Haigh headed down south to art school. But
instead of painting, most of his creative energy got siphoned into the roiling ferment of postpunk. He formed the
avant-funk outfit Truth Club (later renamed Fote) which bore the heavy imprint
of the Pop Group and This Heat and would support groups like Clock DVA and
Cabaret Voltaire. Haigh was still playing guitar at this point, but in an unorthodox
fashion: using a dildo instead of a plectrum.“I’d seen This Heat doing something similar,” he laughs. Attracted both by the visual
provocation and the possibilities for making strange sounds, Haigh procured his
own plastic phallus and soon found that if he “put it near the pick-ups and
just moved it an inch away, it made a buzzing tone. I even cut a little notch
in the end of it and I could put that over a string, move that along the
fretboard and that made a really cool sound.”
Postpunk
contained an abundance of the same qualities Haigh had first thrilled to in
Faust:contrasts and collisions, discipline
and disorder. “Such a music of possibilities,” is how he fondly
remembers the 1979-81 period. “Instead of being based around chords, like rock was in the
Sixties and then again in Britpop, postpunk was more like counterpoint: a more
spacious way of composing. So with a band like PiL, there was a
repetitive deep bassline and almost Steve Reich-like patterns played on a
scratchy guitar.” By the early Eighties Haigh had quit art school and was working at a Virgin record shop on Oxford Street – not the famous Megastore but a branch further up the road. The basement became a hang-out for London’s industrial-aligned musicians. Former employee Jim Thirlwell would bring his Foetus releases, Nurse with Wound’s Steve Stapleton visited regularly and likewise came bearing strange sounds, and all of it got played on the big sound system. After recording a solitary Truth Club / Fote single, Haigh had by this point launched Sema, a “dark ambient” solo project, which in rapid succession generated three albums (Notes from Underground, Theme from Hunger, Extract from Rosa Silber) during 1982-3, all issued through his own Le Rey imprint. “Steve was into the Sema stuff. We would hang out at his graphics design office, just down the road from Virgin. Then he invited me to some Nurse With Wound sessions.”
Haigh contributed to the Faustian frolics of mid-Eighties Nurse With Wound albums such as The Sylvie And Babs Hi-Fi Companion and Spiral Insana. Meanwhile, he put out the EPs Juliet Of The Spirits and Music From The Ante Chamber via the Belgian label L.A.Y.L.A.H., joining a roster of industrial luminaries that included Coil, Current 93, 23 Skidoo, Organum and Hafler Trio. In an echo of Throbbing Gristle’s “dis-concerts”, L.A.Y.L.A.H. talked about putting out “anti-records,” while the label’s name was an acronym for the Aleister Crowley dictum "Love Alway Yieldeth: Love Alway Hardeneth." But Haigh says he never had too much truck with the magick and ritual element in industrial culture, responding more to its cut-up and Dada side. Besides, Haigh’s own music was steadily drifting away from the industrial zone. Sema started as disquieting abstract ambience sourced in various processed instrumental sounds, but the piano gradually emerged as the principal voice, and a calming one. A pivotal release was 1984’s Three Seasons Only. Credited to Robert Haigh and Sema, the Haigh side was piano-only. Satiesque sketches like “Two Feats of Klee” pointed ahead to Valentine Out of Season (released on United Dairies in 1987) and 1989’s A Waltz in Plain C. Both came out under his own name. The Sema moniker was borrowed from an artists organisation co-founded by Paul Klee. “I was a Klee fan from my art school days and I think I just literally opened a book on him, saw the word ‘Sema’ and thought ‘I’ll have that!”. Other homages include “Rosa Silber” (a reference to Klee’s painting “Vocal Fabric of the Singer Rosa Silber”) and “Concrete and the Klee” (presumably a play on “Concrete and Clay”, the 1965 hit for Unit Four Plus Two). “Some of Klee’s work is probably not far off a visual representation of Satie’s music,” Haigh says. He relates the juxtaposition of “figurative and nonfigurative” in Klee’s work with the blurring between tonal and atonal that fascinates him in music. “When I’m doing a tonal piece I’m trying so hard to pollute it with wrong notes, notes that aren’t meant to be there, because I find that’s what makes the music stick. If it’s all tonally correct, I lose interest.”
Allusions to high culture pepper Haigh’s output of the Eighties (which was reissued several years ago by Vinyl on Demand as the box sets Time Will Say Nothing and Cold Pieces). There’s the Fellini nod of “Juliet of the Spirits”, the Chopin reference of “Berceuse”, and the John Cage title pilfered for Valentine Out of Season, while “Empire of Signs”, from Three Seasons Only, is named after Roland Barthes book about Japan.
“I was young then”, Haigh says with a self-deprecating chuckle. True, the trying-a-bit-hard comes over slightly jejeune. What’s more striking, though, about all these serenely sad etudes for solo piano, and their highbrow framing, is how there’s minimal indication that within just a few years Robert Haigh will be making intensely rhythmic music at the pulsating heart of a working class drug culture.
^^^^^^^^^^^^
By the late
Eighties, Haigh was still working at Virgin but he and his wife had moved out
to Ware in Hertfordshire and were raising the first of three children.
Increasingly frustrated by the commute and the way it cut into his parenting
time, Haigh and his partner decided to start their own record store in nearby
Hertford. “She’d worked at Virgin too,
so between us we knew the retail game inside out.”
Or so they thought:opened in 1989, Parliament Music’s first year
proved to be a real struggle.
“Going into
it, we had the attitude of, ‘we’ll make it work’. But it wasn’t
working and it was a very depressing time. And then what came along and helped
us make it work was this axis of rave music: the house and techno 12-inches that
a certain faction of kids came into the store looking for. I realised that if
we could get more of that stuff, we’d have the edge on the other, more
mainstream record store in Hertford.And
then when I started to listen to that stuff, I found myself falling in love
with it.” Haigh discovered not just sonic affinities with postpunk – rough-hewn
DIY music released on tiny labels - but that figures from the scene in which
he’d been so passionately involved were cropping up as significant players in
the new movement. Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H. Kirk, for instance, reappeared
in Sweet Exorcist, leading lights of the Northern bleep ‘n’ bass sound. “Not
only did rave save my business, it opened up a whole new way of thinking about
music. Because my direction at that point had started to wane a bit.”
One thing
that caught Haigh’s ear was the way this radically futuristic, insane-sounding
music prominently featured – of all things - the piano. In 1989, a wave of
Italo-house anthems built around rattlingly rhythmic piano breakdowns had
conquered the UK scene and would permanently place the piano vamp at the core
of hardcore’s sonic arsenal. “It’s that juxtaposition thing again:tracks would have this tough beats-and-bass
work-out, and then in would come the uplifting melodic piano. “
The
oscillating flicker and rictus-like optimism of the piano vamp is synonymous
with the sensations and emotions catalysed by MDMA. Amazingly, given the supremely
Ecstasy-attuned records he would soon be making, Haigh never experienced that
side of rave culture. “I got a taste of it, though, from certain days in the
shops,” Haigh says, referring to Saturdays when local kids, still buzzing from
the night before, would congregate to hear the latest white labels.He says that his only vice really was
alcohol. Besides, as a parent in his early thirties, he was a generation older
than most everybody else involved in rave. Haigh recalls Andy C of “Valley of
the Shadows” legend coming into the shop and realizing that the 16-year-old
deejay / producer was young enough to be his son.
Many leading
rave labels started out of record shops (think Warp in Sheffield, or Romford’s
Boogie Times, which spawned Suburban Base).Retail awareness of what’s selling turns into an A&R instinct for
where the music wants to go next; relationships develop between the staff and
local deejays and producers.So it was
that Parliament Music became PM Recordings, as young customers started to show
Haigh their own stabs at making techno. Blown away by the results achievable on
an extremely basic set-up, Haigh invested£300 in an Amiga 500 and got hold of the ultra-rudimentary ProTracker software. “It was just 8 bit, whereas the minimum anyone
would use nowadays is 16-bit.And
ProTracker just had four tracks, scrolling down the screen, into which you
would drop events that would trigger a breakbeat or a sound. So it was very
primitive indeed”.
Released on
PM Recordings in 1992, the first of Haigh’s hardcore forays came out under the
name Splice. They include the aptly named “Pianism,” the bonus track “7
Original Piano Breaks for DJ Use,” and numerous collaborations with a Parliament
Music employee who went by the name Rhodes K. But Haigh would rather draw a
discreet veil over this early phase. Indeed when I first interviewed him back
in ’94- a conversation conducted via
the Royal Mail and written in capital letters, as if lower case would be too intimate
– Haigh did not even mention Splice or PM Recordings. For sure, while tracks like Syko Mak’s
“Recognise” or Splice’s “Falling (In Dub)” have the nutty, made-in-two-minute
charm of the era, there’s no lost classics to be found here. Indeed there’s a
palpable quantum leap with the first release as Omni Trio: the Mystic Steppers EP, initially released
on the PM sub-label Candidate, and then, in refurbished form, as his debut
record for Moving Shadow.
If piano is
the instrument of Haigh’s life and remained a melodic signature through all his
rave-era discography, he rapidly manifested two other forms of mastery: vocal
science and breakbeat science. Haigh’s deployment of diva samples was inspired,
his choices often locating emotional resonances that escaped the enclosure of
rave (allprimary-colour explosions of
E-lation and collective celebration) to connect with real-world feelings of
anguish, self-doubt and fragility.Case
in point: “I know I’m not that strong enough”, the main vocal lick in the Mystic Steppers track “Stronger.”
Haigh
attributes this to the advantage of working in a record store and accessing “a lot of a cappella albums that other people couldn’t
get their hands on, import records...” . He also talks about using vocal
samples as the starting point for his tracks, which he’d fashion around them
(partly because of his obsession with everything being in key). But you can’t
help thinking that being so much older than most of his producer peers – and a
parent too – Haigh might also have had a deeper feeling for how challenging
life can be.
As for
breakbeat science, Haigh’s rhythmic finesse first surfaced on “Mystic Stepper
(Feel Good”) with its slip-and-slide drums (some psychedelically reversed for
extra instability) and blossomed with the epochal “Renegade Snares”, the lead
track on 1993’s Vol.3 EP.“One of the things important to me was
personalizing a break as much as I could. I think I was one of the first to chop
up a break into its constituent parts.” Taking anywhere from a bar to four bars
of a drum break, Haigh would slice it into sixteen components and essentially
write them into new breaks. “Once you’ve chopped it, you can move any
bit to any position – and that’s where the fun is because you can really mess
about. For me it was all about owning
the break.”
Heard on tracks like the “Roasted Rollin” mix of “Renegade Snares”, the
result involved an inversion of standard musical priorities. Instead of a
steady background foundation to the track,the rhythm section became the focus of listening, grabbing theear with its baroque contortions, the
ultra-crisp intricacy of the meshwork of snares, kicks, hats and shakerscomplicated further by detonations of bass
syncopating against the drum groove.Meanwhile other elements in the track – piano motifs, synth pads,
orchestrationsmodeled on or sampled
from film scores – might be childishly naive in their heart-tugging
insistence. Drum patterns became primary hooks, the melodies that sang in your memory. Like the intro to Vol. 4’s “Original Soundtrack,” a vertigo-inducing beat-sequence that feels like a video loop of a swimmer plunging into a pool only to reverse out of the splashy surface and back onto the board. Or like the stiletto stitch-work of the breakdown in “Soul Freestyle” (off 1994’s Vol. 5), a ballet of exquisitely controlled violence.
As jungle
crested to a peak of unexpected musicality in 1994 – only a year earlier it had
been widely dismissed as sub-music, chaotic drug-noise for kids so pilled-up
they’d lost any sense of discrimination - the genre achieved that oxymoronic
coexistence of opposites that Haigh had always craved: frenzied and chilled,
minimal and maximal, street and avant-garde.Another paradox about the scene was that while it was accurately
associated – both in terms of its imagery and its demographics – with the inner
city, there was a surprisingly strong suburban contribution. Having grown up in
that county myself, it always tickled me that Hertfordshire was such a major player:
along with the Hertford-centered Parliament Music nexus, Moving Shadow was
based out of Stevenage, while Source Direct and Photek hailed from St Albans.
As his
series of EPs kept on intensifying the Omni soundclash of fierce and filmic,
Haigh released The Deepest Cut Vol 1,
one of the first drum-and-bass full-lengths, and still one of the finest ever.
Then came a style switch. On 1995’s Vol.
6, Haigh bid farewell to the explosive mode (shredded Amen breaks,
hypergasmic divas) that made his name with the dazzling B-Side track “Torn”, a
play on the junglist superlative “tearing”. Meanwhile the A-side “Nu Birth of
Cool” showcased a new direction: rolling, jazz-tinged, glistening with a sheen
of luxuriance. Abandoning what he now deemed the Pavlovian pyrotechnics of the
“Renegade Snares” era, Haigh sought a more “fat” sound, as he termed it, on the
second Omni album Haunted Science.
The shift paid dividends on “The Elemental,” a miracle of restraint, with a
bassline as delicately poised as beads of condensation trickling down a blade
of foliage in a rain forest, set against a second low-end pulse thudding like
distant thunderclaps.But later albums
like Skeleton Keys and Byte Size Life steadily eased into
background listening.
From being
at the centre of jungle, Omni Trio had gradually slipped into the subgenre
known as liquid funk, as had other leading Moving Shadow artists like EZ
Rollers and Flytronix. Meanwhile, the genre’s mainstream had gone in the
opposite direction: crowd-pleasing rampages of roaring bass and treadmill beats
like an interminable chase-scene.“The
drums got pared down to a big heavy kick and a big heavy snare,” Haigh recalls of
these disillusioning days at the turn of the millennium. “The beat became just
a vehicle for the bassline, and those were getting more and more outlandish,
verging on comical. But it worked on the dancefloor and deejays loved those
tunes. That stuff would just fly out of our shop. Even a poor deejay could mix
those tunes, ‘cos it was all the same beat and there were no tricky, intricate rhythms.”
For a producer like Haigh, the ascendance of the two-step, bass-blast
style of drum and bass “really narrowed down the possibilities... you couldn’t really explore a musical phrase.
I really felt like I couldn’t compete with producers doing that type of drum
and bass, and I didn’t want to. I was being drawn into working in other areas. It
was a wrench at the time but I just felt, ‘Go on, be brave’.I had to have a little conversation with
myself. “ He also had to have a conversation with his wife, for jettisoning the
Omni Trio name would jeopardise their livelihood (the early albums especially
having sold very well internationally). “But it had been building in me, and I
felt I had to be honest and move into a different sphere. It wasn’t really a
choice – I could continue and fake it, but that would have blotted the memory
of something that people still talk about affectionately.”
Rogue
Satellite, the final Omni album, came out in 2004, and its closing track bore the
symbolic title “Suicide Loop”. To this
day he gets regular requests from old skool rave promoters asking him to do an
Omni Trio PA (something he never did even in his heyday) but he always
declines. “I don’t think I’ve cut up a break in over twelve years now.”
^^^^^^^^^
Since closing that chapter of his life, music has been pouring out of
Robert Haigh, with eight albums of solo piano in the past decade.Creatures
of The Deep, released towards the end of 2017 by experimental music label
Unseen Worlds, is different from the sparse, piano-only watercolours of earlier
albums like Written On the Water.It would be a massive exaggeration to suggest
there’s something faintly Omni-like about Creatures,
but it does sound significantly more produced.The backwards sounds on “From the Mystery” made me flash momentarily on
the psychedelically-reversed beats of “Mystic Stepper”, while “Winter Ships”
actually features a bassline of sorts. “It’s this simple motif that doesn’t
quite repeat itself”, explains Haigh, “It’s shifting slightly as it moves
along, almost forming a drone for the piano motifs to weave in and out of.”
“I Remember Phaedra” harks back further to Sema and that wintry postpunk
/ industrial vibe,its hovering drones
and indeterminately-ethnic woodwind vaguely reminding me of Eskimo by The Residents.Overall, Creatures
of the Deep teems with unidentifiable wafts of texture, subliminal smudges,
and an intense attention to sculpting the ambience through subtle adjustments
of reverb halo or stereo placement. “It’s like painting pictures,” says Haigh,
referring to the compositional balance, the contrast, and the shaping of empty
space in his pieces. “I don’t set out to be experimental but it always creeps
in, because I’m always looking for a fresh way of doing something. I don’t know
if I have a lot to say but I look for new ways of saying it.”
Entirely self-taught as a pianist, avoiding notation (except
occasionally for his own self-devised diagrams), Haigh composes through a
process of improvisation and editing.He
once said that it would be more accurate to say that he uncovers music rather
than writes it.“I’ll just play and play - and then
I’ll come back to it. It’s like chipping away at something, rather than
building it up.”
Haigh once argued that “all genuine music is to some extent autobiographical” . That’s
an intriguing assertion, especially from someone who’s avoided the public eye
and about whom most of his fans know very little. What is his lyric-less music
telling us about Robert Haigh the man?“I don’t think there is a narrative coming through, except perhaps on a
subconscious level. But I do wonder sometimes what is attracting me to a
Lydian-type scale that I seem to be drawn to, or a Dorian minor scale in some
of the tunes.”
The closest
Haigh has got to autobiographical music in the commonly understood sense
was2015 album The Silence of Ghosts.That
came out of a period of illness, the sort of perpetually sapping malaise that
makes normal functions of life (eating in this case) difficult, and that in
turn triggered a depression. “The last thing you wanna do when you’ve got
some kind of ailment is obsess about it. But when it’s that sort of intimate
ailment, you keep coming back to it. It coloured everything I did through that
period.” Thankfully the condition eventually improved and Haigh’s equilibrium
was restored.
More generally, though, there’s a feeling that runs through most of
Haigh’s work –the post-Sema records,
the breakbeat era, the last decade’s run of solo piano – that was beautifully caught
by Kodwo Eshun in his phrase “the kindness of Omni Trio”. A feeling of benediction
and grace that shone through even when the beats were at their most frenetic.And now the beats have been taken away, that
cloudless blue-sky serenity is, as Haigh says, “more exposed now”.
Another factor that’s possibly brought this reflective and soul-soothing
aspect to the fore is that Haigh has been practicing meditation for almost two
decades now.“I was a bit of a mess by
the end of the Nineties”, he says, referring to the twin attrition of overwork and
drinking to unwind. “I was turning into an anxious wreck. Because I was
drinking in the evenings, my days were a bit foggy for a while. I was looking for
an alternative to living like that and one day I just came across a book, in
W.H. Smiths I think. A really cheesy, commercial book on meditation, but there
was something in there about mindfulness of the breath. ‘Watching the breath’ –
that caught my eye and I thought, ‘I’ll give that a go.’And surprisingly on my first attempt, a
little switch went off in my head.So
meditation is something I try to do to keep my spirits up.And I’ve had varying degrees of success with
it, but I’ve stuck with it for eighteen years. I do it practically every single
morning.”
He pauses.
“Please don’t turn me into a bean bag hippy!” ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Further Reading on Omni Trio and Robert Haigh
blog post on Haigh's pre-Moving Shadow pianocore tunes for PM Recordings
ambient jungle feature from September 1994 for The Wire (a/k/a Hardcore Continuum Series piece #2) including interview with Omni Trio
review of Moving Shadow rave Voodoo Magic in May 1994 at which Omni Trio supposedly performed + the same '94 interview with Omni Trio repurposed for 1995 Melody Maker mini-profile
Incidentally, that short interview - conducted remotely via the post, 24 years ago - is the only other time I've profiled Haigh. So it was a great pleasure to speak with the man - one of my favorite artists of all time - earlier this year and finally do a full in-depth profile covering the entire span of his career, including the pre- and post-Omni activity. BONUS BEATS, OR BONUS VAMPS: ROB HAIGH ON PIANO LICKS IN RAVE SR: In rave anthems like Landlord's “I Like It (Blow Out Dub)”or Outlander's “The Vamp” or your old pals 2 Bad Mice's beyond-classic remix of Blame's "Music Takes You" - specifically at the break at 3.52 - what is happening on the piano? The effect is very euphoric and UP!! – is that due to the kind of intervals used (they seem very simple, major chord-y), or just the rattling-along propulsive nature of the riffs? Sometimes I hear what sounds like a double-chording, like the same chord being played very quickly in succession. The timbre is also part of the bright optimistic feeling. They also have something of the quality of the player piano about them.
Robert Haigh: In each case here the piano is a sample of a chord. That sample/chord is then laid out across the keyboard and triggered (simply with one finger) at various positions (so it’s always the same chord but played at various pitches.)
On Landlord, we have a sample of a minor chord which is triggered at four points giving us the effect of G+m - D+m - F+m then C+minor.
With "Vamp", which sounds like the very same sample (maybe eq’d a little differently), the sample is triggered at five points giving the effect of C+m - D+m - Em - F+m then G+minor.
The sound (which I agree is wonderful) appears to be doubled up and highly compressed and clipped - I suspect all this was in the original sampled chord (probably from a Deep House or Techno track - it’s got a bit of a Kevin Saunderson feel.)
Same deal with 2 Bad Mice. This sounds like a maj 7 chord and again the sample been laid across the keyboard and triggered at various pitches.
Maybe it’s the artificially quantised nature of the notes/chords which give it the player piano quality.
