Tips for '94

 

My picks for "ones to watch for '94", in a January 1994 issue of Melody Maker. The other writers picks are right at the bottom.

Foul Play makes sense.  (Later in '94, the "mysterious outfit" became less mysterious as I met Brad + John in a cafe in Belsize Park, where I lived for most of the year, for an interview). 

The other nomination, though, is a bit of a head-scratcher, because clearly I must have been pretty taken with Keiji Haino at precisely the time of writing  - but it's not something I followed through with, at all. 

If memory serves, Kevin Martin - we used to hang out quite a bit in those days and back then he was  almost as much a critic as a musician, had a column in the Tower Records magazine  - Kev gave me a tape of Fushitsusha.  

Pretty soon jungle and electronic music took up all of my bandwidth, the avant-rock stuff got shunted aside pretty much.  

Vague memories of actually seeing Haino, much later, playing in NYC.

Listening to this again - almost certainly for the first time since - it really don't sound like my cup o' tea at all!

Whereas this, this is what I want played at my funeral. 

Apropos of nothing: a place Kevin liked to meet was Bunjie's Coffee House, in Litchfield Street (where The Mousetrap played for decades, and where I saw it as an 11 year old). Much, much later I learned Bunjies had been a legendary folk cellar.  Now I get a retrospective thrill at the idea of having once been in a space through which passed Anne Briggs -  and who knows what other folk goddesses and occasional god -  and breathed song into the air.  But in the early '90s such ancestral vibrations would have meant nothing to me. I remember the food being cheap and cheerful, if a little dull, and the decor utilitarian -  seem to remember tiles everywhere.

 

 

These sort of joint-prophecy / tip-sheet / ones-to-watch session always interesting to look back at -  kudos to those who mentioned Liz Phair, Elastica, Mu-ziq, and, at least in terms of predictive accuracy, if not quality assessment, Echobelly, Oasis, Sleeper, Guided By Voices....

  But then Fin? Not to be confused with Fin De Siecle (also ?). Southpaw? Not to be confused with Paw (also ?). Throneberry? Thrum? Ad, or maybe AD - either way, ? Honky? Baby Chaos? AC Acoustics? 

Techno-Animal - Ghosts - Melody Maker - August 24 1991

 

Macro Dub Infection

VARIOUS ARTISTS

MACRO DUB INFECTION VOLUME 1

Virgin 

Melody Maker, the ideological absolute midpoint of the 1990s

by Simon Reynolds 

     Before ambient, before disco, dub reggae hit upon two crucial notions: the idea that bass and drum could be the melodic foreground of music, and the idea of intermittance, of a decentered mix-scape wherein sounds morph, fluctuate, drift, disappear. Today, these once scandalous ideas are the structural principles governing all the interesting strands of modern music, pop and avant-garde.

            As its title suggests, "Macro Dub Infection" recognises and celebrates the fact that dub's legacy's lives largest as a rogue chromosone in genres that aren't directly descended from '70s roots reggae, mongrel genres like trip hop, post-rock, drum & bass and ambient techno.  Compiled by Kevin Martin (from God/Ice/Techno-Animal) as a sequel to his landmark "Isolationism" anthology, "Macro" has some agreeable offerings from digi-dub revivalists like The Disciples, Irration Steppas and The Rootsman, but the contributions from non-dreadlocked figures such as Tricky, 4 Hero and Laika are far more excitingly experimental. 

     On the jungle front,  Spring Heel Jack and 4 Hero amply substantiate the notion that drum & bass is cyber-dub. On Spring Heel's "Double Edge", reverb-hazy piano chords and whispery trails of hi-hat hurtle down echoey corridors and shafts, but at fin de millenium hyperspeed as opposed to torpid skank-rate.  Even better is 4 Hero's "The Paranormal of Four Forms", lulling you into a false sense of tranquility, then erupting into a pandemonium of accelerating/decelerating breaks that zig-zag between all four corners of the mix; breaks so heavily processed they sound like they're drummed on foil, quartz and bed-springs.  The track then winds down into an paradisical oasis of phusion-tinged electro.

     Trip hop also comes up with the goods. Nothing like the "Maxinquaye" original, Tricky's "Ambient Pumpkin" is as barren and queerly-lit as one of Saturn's moons; New Kingdom honeycomb their acid-rap palava with pockets of dubspace and reverse-loop their cymbals like Jimi on "Are You Experienced?"; Earthling's lost '94 classic "Nothingness" is a swelteringly humid slice of paranoia-funk a la Miles' "On The Corner". Doyens of 'new complexity techno', Bedouin Ascent throw down some densely tangled monsterbeats somewhere at the intersection of 'Rockit' era Herbie Hancock, Man Parrish and 808 State, while technohead-turned-triphopper eccentric Wagon Christ constructs a minimal-is-maximal matrix of metallic timbres.

     But perhaps the most intriguing item on this remarkably consistent 2-CD comp is by the barely-classifiable post-rock unit Tortoise, who have an unusually dub-tweaked sensibility for Yanks. On "Goriri", it sounds like they caked each track on the mixing desk in sonic matter, then wiped off large swathes, leaving behind a whispering wall of spidery percussion and furtive glints and smears of mosaic texture.

     "Macro Dub" shows that dub methodology has contaminated all forms of modern dance and  head musik. There's no putting the genie back in the bottle; all attempts to protect the sacrosanct integrity of the Song are mere ostrich-head-in-sand rearguard manoeuvres. You're either dub-wize or you've consigned yourself to history's junkheap.

                                        

Chain Reaction, Porter Ricks live

CHAIN REACTION / BASIC CHANNEL

Dance column, Spin 1998

by Simon Reynolds

PORTER RICKS Biokinetics

VAINQUEUR Elevations

MAURIZIO untitled CD

VARIOUS ARTISTS Decay Product

MONOLAKE Hongkong

 Think "house," and in your mind's ear you'll probably hear a thudding, metronomic kick-drum and a shrieking soul-diva. Nearly fifteen years on from its Chicago genesis, house has evolved way beyond this original, winning formula, and diversified into at least a dozen subgenres. From the disco cut-up style popularised by Daft Punk to the unhinged abstraction of nu skool Chicago label Relief, the most exciting contemporary house is designed for  "track-heads"--purist connoisseurs who prefer minimal tracks to anthemic songs. I don't like purists either, but if the truth be known, when pop music's final reckoning is done, house is not going to be remembered for adding to the sum of  "great songs," nor for its pantheon of distinctive vocalists. Its real contribution and innovation resides

elsewhere.

 In this spirit, the Berlin label Chain Reaction have distilled house down to its essence: no songs, no vocals, barely any melodies, sometimes not even a beat. What, you might wonder, is left after such

ruthless pruning? Texture and pulse-rhythm. Or more precisely, texture-rhythm as an indivisible plasma-like substance that is molded and extruded through dub-space. Take Chain Reaction's aesthetic pinnacle to date, "Resilient 1.2": a slow-motion tsunamai of  ego-melting,

body-boundary-haemorrhaging bliss. Some people call the Chain Reaction sound "heroin house"; "Resilient 1.2" actually reminds me of Velvet Underground's "Heroin". A soundtrack in waiting for the first zero-gravity nightclub, it was my favourite track of 1997; you can find it on the Chain

Reaction CD Decay Product, a compilation of tracks by the production team Various Artists.

Based out of Berlin's Hard Wax record store, Chain Reaction is the sister label of Basic Channel, whose nine 12-inch releases were the toast of techno-house cognoscenti  throughout the mid-Nineties (but don't let that put you off!). Devoted to vinyl, the mysterious figures behind the twin labels established their own pressing plant. This makes Chain Reaction's series of single-artist CD compilations--encased in striking metal cans that resemble DJs's record boxes--a sort of ideological lapse, a concession to the market realities of the digital era.

             

Prise open the cannisters, and on tracks like Maurizio's "M6", Vainqueur's "Reduce 2" and Porter Ricks' "Port Gentil" you'll encounter electronic music as warmly cocooning and spongy as the lining of the womb. What initially sounds monotonous reveals itself as an endlessly inflected, fractal mosaic of  glow-pulses and flicker-riffs. Using studio-processes like EQ, filtering, phasing and panning to tweak the frequencies and stereo-imaging of their sonic motifs, CR artists weave tantalising

tapestries whose strands shift in and out of the aural spotlight. The effect is synaesthetic, like fingertips tremulously caressing your neck.

Although CR artists would probably distance themselves from rave's drug culture, their music sounds like Ecstasy sensations encoded in sound, abstracted into a velcro-sticky audio-fabric that tugs at your skin-surface and gets your goosebumps rippling in formation. Melody is minimal--limited

to rudimentary vamps and ostinatos--because it's just a device for displaying sound-in-itself. Simple motifs twist the timbre-fabric in order to best show off its properties, making you thrill to the scintillating play of  creases and folds, crinkles and kinks.

             

CR music isn't all opiated oblivion: Monolake's "Lantau" and "Macau" are like Cantonese reggae, while Porter Ricks material often has an abrasive industrial tinge,  reflecting the fact that one half of the duo is acclaimed ambient experimentalist Thomas Koner. But my favorite CR output

is the stuff that offers a sublime surrogate for MDMA experience, a bliss-space you can access at any time then leave, without cost or comedown. That said, this music's appeal  extends way beyond ravers--anyone who's ever swooned to neo-psychelicists like Spacemen 3 and My Bloody

Valentine, or  been mesmerised by minimalists like Steve Reich, will find almost unbearable pleasures here.

As well as Chain Reaction's own CD and vinyl 12 inch output (available at domestic prices), addicts will want to search out the artists's releases on other labels:  Porter Ricks' self-titled album on

Mille Plateaux, Various Artists's glistening pulsescape "No.8" on Fatcat. Porter Ricks also created a fine remix album, The Koner Experiment, based on  music by Experimental Audio Research--a collective that includes ex-Spacemen 3 leader Sonic Boom and MBV's Kevin Shields. That fact alone

that should seduce any hesitant psych-guitar fiends into taking the plunge.

2013 postscript: "heroin house" it should be noted was in fact the coinage of Kevin Martin aka The Bug, then doing a lot of writing about music as well as making of it. 

PORTER RICKS,

live at the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage

Village Voice,  Tuesday, Jul 3 2001

by Simon Reynolds

No doubt about it, the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage is an amazing space. As a music venue, though, this gloomy maze of looming, steep-sided chambers leaves a lot to be desired: Performers tend to drown in a quagmire of reflected sound. On June 28, the final installment of Creative Time's annual series of avant-electronica events (a 10th birthday bash for Frankfurt's Force Inc and its sister label, Mille Plateaux) saw some groups faring better with the acoustics than others. Panacea's 180-b.p.m. Gothkore bombast suited the medieval ambience, but Kid606's set was too busy and event-crammed (Boredoms do IDM) to thrive in this catacomb. SND suffered from the opposite syndrome: Too sparse even for the Anchorage, they sounded like an ailing metronome trapped in an echo chamber.

Luckily, Porter Ricks fit the space like a glove. Thomas Köner and Andy Mellweg first came to acclaim with their late-'90s releases on Chain Reaction, Berlin's "heroin house" label. Combining Köner's texturology (he's an avant-garde composer renowned for bleak arctic dronescapes) with Mellweg's grasp of house's pump-and-pound rhythm, Porter Ricks make formlessness funky.

But that's no preparation for how hard they rocked tonight: Imagine Eno's On Land meets the Stooges. Porter Ricks use a guitar processor on all their synth sounds, which helps explains the added grit in their grind. Early in the set, the songs felt like spelunking through spongy-walled caverns flushed with foamy water: total body-massage. But as the beat got steadily more bangin' and the texture-riffs flared fierce like magnesium, Porter Ricks hit a sublime pitch midway between warm pulse and cold rush: a sound as visceral as hardcore, as sensuous as deep house, as abstract as glitch. The combination of this glorious roar and the Anchorage's architecture was like being teleported through time-space to Berlin's legendary early-'90s club E-Werk, a disused power plant. Finally, the Anchorage became the rave temple it has always promised to be