"version" and "versus" - dub and the science of remixology

VERSUS: DUB and the SCIENCE of REMIXOLOGY

Pulse, 1995

by Simon Reynolds

     Last year, two albums--"Muziq Vs The Auteurs" and

Massive Attack V Mad Professor's "No Protection"--won

critical plaudits with their two different takes on the same

concept: a reknowned remixer's drastic (per)versions of the

original artist's material.

     Massive Attack's languid trip hop is deeply informed by

reggae and sound-system culture, so it wasn't such a huge

leap for the band to invite one of its heroes, UK dub

producer Mad Professor, to rework the "Protection" album.

The Professor's treatments, while often extreme,

were sublimely sensitive to the spirit of Massive, and many

fans and critics reckon "No Protection" superior to the album

proper.  But tekno boffin Mike Paradinas of Muziq and wordy

songsmith Luke Haines of the Auteurs come from utterly

opposed aesthetic universes.  Haines' willingness to

subject his finely honed rock-lit to Muziq's merciless

mutilation seems masochistic (especially given

that Paradinas has never concealed his contempt for the

material he had to rework).

    In both cases, it's the "versus" in the title that's

significant. . In the early '80s, a remix meant an extended,

marginally more dance-friendly version of a pop

song.  But today, "remixing" usually means creating

an almost entirely new track which contains only tiny shards

and ghostly traces of the original. It's now the norm for

remixers to operate with an almost contemptous disregard for

the original work; in turn, their clients give the remixers

licence to deface and dismember. It's this adversarial

attitude on the part of remixer towards remixee that the word

"versus" evokes. Alluding to the reggae tradition of the 'soundclash'--

a contest between rival sound-systems--"versus' also chimes in with the

widely held belief that dub pioneers like King Tubby and

Lee Perry are the founding fathers of today's science of

"remixology"

    "Versus" is the subtext of so much of the most

challenging and vibrant musical activity of the mid-'90s.  In

the area of "post-rock" experimentalism, the last two years

have seen a spate of "remix" albums by bands like God, Scorn,

Main, Tortoise and Ui, each featuring a gaggle of guest

remixers.  Even Jon Spencer Blues' Explosion got in on the

action with its "Experimental Remixes" EP, wherein the

Explosion's live'n'smokin' R&B got seriously studio-warped by

Moby, Dub Narcotic Sound System, Wu Tang Clan's Genius,

U.N.K.L.E., and Beck & the Beasties' Mike D.

     You can also see the 'versus' concept lurking behind

 John Oswald's "Grayfolded" (where the plunderphonic

pioneer sampled improvisatory material from 100 live versions

of the Grateful Dead's "Dark Star", then wove it into a

seamless, ultra-kosmik uber-jam); behind Stereolab's "Crumb Duck" EP (in

which the band's playing was collaged and processed by

veteran avant-gardist Steve Stapleton of Nurse With Wound); and behind

Faust's comeback album "Rien", which was spliced together by experimentalist Jim O'Rourke out of live recordings of the group's reunion tour of America from

a few years earlier. O'Rourke is also working on a remix project for Mille Plateaux, where he's using the Frankfurt-based label's entire avant-techno roster as source material.

     And all the above is before you even begin taking into account

entire genres of contemporary dance music, like trip hop, house and

jungle, where the simultaneous release of  a bunch of  barely

recognisable remakes by several different remixers (four,

five, six, and more!) is a common occurrence, and the "re-remix"

can prolong a track's dancefloor currency to a year or longer.

Dance music has its own 'remix albums' featuring guest producers, like trip-hopper DJ Food's recent "Refried Food", or The Shamen's CD-worth of versions of the same song, "Move Any Mountain". (One version consisted of dissassembled components of the track, to enable the listener to construct their own remix). Dance also has the 'remix tribute' album, where instead of covering songs by the original artist (as in the rock tribute album), forgotten innovators like Chris & Cosey or Yellow Magic Orchestra are 'honored' by having their classics vandalised by their aesthetic progeny. 

     *         *         *         *         *

      Ironically, one of the few places this kind of remix-mania

isn't the rage is in Jamaica's dancehall reggae scene.

Ironically, because Jamaica was where "versus" began.   

 "King Tubby and Errol Thompson (Joe Gibbs' engineer) 

were the first remixers", claims Steve Barrow, A&R director 

of the reggae reissue label Blood & Fire and dub historian (he is

currently co-authoring "The Rough Guide to Reggae", set for

'97 publication by Penguin). "But dub didn't demolish the

original completely, whereas today the remix is a complete

remake--say, just a wisp of Mariah Carey's vocal over a

whole new rhythm track.  The ur-text of a dub is always the

original vocal version.

   "At first dubs were just called 'instrumentals', then they

started calling them 'versions'," Barrow continues.

"Gradually, more effects were added --echo, thunderclap, etc-

-and dubs got closer to what we now think of as a remix. By

1982 dub had run its course in Jamaica, it had become a

formula. But that was just at the point when dub techniques

were first being picked up by disco producers and used in

remixes."

     According to Barrow, the "versus" in Massive Attack V

Mad Professor is a "take-off" of the "soundclash", an event 

where sound-systems competed to attract the majority of the audience to its end

of the hall or enclosure.  "In the early days of reggae, you

might have Kilimanjaro Vs Jah Love Music. Most Jamaican

dances featured just one sound, but in the ska days, you'd

get places where loads of sounds would meet and compete.

There's always been intense competition in Jamaica between

sound-systems--to get the best, most exclusive records (a.k.a

dubplates), to have the most powerful PA system, the best

sonic effects.  Cos that's the way to increase patrons and

gate-money, and to build up loyal followers".

     Later, "versus" became a sort of free-floating buzzword,

as with albums by Scientist (Overton Brown, a protege of King

Tubby). "With, say, 'Scientist Vs Prince Jammy', that's just a

concept, to recreate the old vibe. It's similar to the idea

of 'meets', as in 'King Tubby Meets The Aggrovators At the

Dub Station': that phrase describes the economic relationship

between the producer and the band, but in a more vibesy way.

It's just a more exciting way of describing the record than

'this is King Tubby working over a bunch of Bunny Lee

rhythms.'"

     The current revival of "versus" has taken the word from

its original context and used it to describe the modern ethos

of remixing, ie. the remixer is paid handsomely for

mutilating, maiming and mutating the client's original work

to the point of utter unrecognisability.  But dub still comes into

play, in so far as dub's bag of tricks -- dropping out the

voice and certain instruments, extreme use of echo, reverb

and delay in order to create an illusory spatiality, signal

processing, the addition of sound-effects--have

been dramatically expanded thanks to digital

recording and mixing techniques.

     The idea that early '70s dub is the origin of

remixology's science of sound-mutation is fervently embraced

by Kevin Martin, who put together the celebrated compilation

"Macro Dub Infection" ("Compilation of the Year" in the Village

Voice's 1995 critics' poll). Drawing on artists as diverse as

New Kingdom, 4 Hero,  Tricky, Tortoise and Laika, "Macro Dub Infection"

tracks the virus-like spread of dub ideas throughout '90s music culture,

contaminating everything from hip hop and jungle to avant-techno

and post-rock.

      Kevin Martin also leads not one but three experimental

bands, God, Ice and Techno-Animal. God is one of a number of

English post-rock outfits who've released "remix" albums.  On

"Appeal To Human Greed", God's jazz-core tumult is vivisected

and reassembled by avant-garde kinsmen such as Bill Laswell

and My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields. Drone-rockers Main

and hip hop noir unit Scorn put out "Ligature" and "Ellipsis"

respectively, long-players based on the same premise.

American avant-rockers have followed suite: Tortoise with the

"Rhythms, Resolutions & Clusters" mini-LP, while Tortoise's

ubiquitous drummer/producer John McEntire is one of the guest

remixologists featured on Ui's "Unlike" CD  Why is there so

much interest in remixing? Is it just a knock-on effect of

rising interest in club-based and post-rave musics, itself a

bored response to the tired traditionalism of grunge'n'lo-fi

in America, and Britpop in the UK?  Or does it run a little

deeper?

    "People have lost respect for the heart of the song,"

argues Martin.  "The song is no longer considered sacrosanct,

it's seen not as a finite entity, but a set of resources that can be

endlessly adapted and extended." Martin thinks this state of

affairs is way cool.  In fact, when he got Kevin Shields to

rework a God track, and hired jungle producers Spring Heel

Jack to remix "Heavy Water" for Techno-Animal's "Babylon

Seeker" EP, he "told them they could leave nothing of

the original if they wanted. They were astounded!"

     The subtext of "Macro Dub Infection", says Martin, is to

show "just how important the processing and treatments have become in modern

music. It's almost like musicians are accessories to the

process now.  You've got people doing great work who lack any

traditional instrumental skills"--Martin means sampler-

wizards and engineer/poets such as Tricky, Howie B,

jungle producers like Dillinja--"because the sampling and sequencing

programmes available enable them to rampage through the back

catalogue, the canon of past music, and create great things."

    Then there's relatively new technology like "hard disk

editing", of which Martin is a big fan: digital software

whereby musical information is chopped up, layered,

rearranged, processed through effects, all within the

"virtual space" of the computer, and to infinitesmal degrees

of intricacy.  What "hard disk editing" and

sampling/sequencing programmes like Cubase demonstrate is the

extent to which the techniques of remixology have ceased to

be a supplement to the original act of creativity. For better

or worse, remixology has infected the process of music-making

itself, with the result that there's no longer such a thing

as an 'definitive version' or a primal moment of creation.

It also means that "music has become a science, it's less

instinctive," admits Martin.  (The invention of

wordprocessing programs and the PC has had a similar effect on

creative writing).

     Ironically, Martin is only just embarking on his first

remix of someone's else music (he's reworked God tracks in

the past).  He's doing an Ice remix and Techno-Animal remix

of the Palace single "More Brother Rides", at the invitation

of the band's UK label Domino.

      "I'm toying with keeping some elements of the track,

'cos I like it, but it is tempting to obliterate it totally.

I think the Techno-Animal version is going to be more

devastating: I want to make it robotic-sounding, so I'll

probably just keep the vocal and highly process it. With the

Ice remix, I mislaid the instrumental contributions by the

other members of Ice, so--after panicking!-- I pitched down the vocal,

reversed the bass-line and accentuated the rhythm by looping

certain drum-fills. The idea is to turn a very cerebral song

into something more physical and hypnotic.  What interests me

about this Palace project is that it's the collision of state-of-art

studio techniques with a simple, heartfelt song grounded in a

rootsy, traditional genre.There's something about Will Oldham's

voice that made me think of roots reggae singer Horace Andy,

and I'm into the idea of playing on that, putting his nasal,

country voice into a post-dub context, framing it with music

that's like a hybrid of Mo' Wax-style  trip hop and PiL's "Metal

Box"."

    Despite "Macro Dub Infection", Martin doesn't necessarily

agree with Steve Barrow that Jamaica is the absolute and

undisputed origin of remixology. Echo effects were being

explored up by all kinds of artists in the psychedelic era,

from Miles Davis to Yoko Ono and Can.  Even before that,

Martin says, the early '60s "English Phil Spector", Joe Meek, "was

doing weird mixes of songs, while Brian Wilson was recording

peculiar alternate takes. It's just that the record companies

wouldn't put them out".

       Dub's concept of the "soundclash" does, however,

inform Martin's latest project "Techno-Animal Vs Reality",

which is soon to be recorded for the Mille Plateaux label.

 Five guest artists--ambient noir-ist Thomas Koner,

trip-hopper DJ Vadim, Sonic Boom (ex-Spacemen 3, currently of

E.A.R), New York dub collective Word Sound, and ambient-

jungle producers 4 Hero--will supply Martin and his partner

Justin Broadrick with  "minimal material". Techno-

Animal will then add rhythm tracks.  The results will be

handed back to the guest artist, who will do a final version;

Techno-Animal will also do its own version of each track.

As such, "Techno-Animal Vs Reality" will combine the

antagonistic aspect of "versus" and the collaborative

implications of "meets".

     *         *         *         *         *         *

If remixology and dub-derived studio-as-instrument sorcery

have rejuvenated left-field rock, there are times when you

have to wonder if remix-mania hasn't gone too far. Is there perhaps a

case for a neo-conservative stance on remixing: ie. that it's

time to bring back remixes that enhance the original or bring out

hidden possibilities, rather than dispense with the

blueprint altogether?

     As well as being a fad, you also have to wonder if

remixology isn't just a giant scam some of the time. There's

a story, which may or may not be apocryphal, concerning

Richard "Aphex Twin" James--a highly sought-after remixer,

even though he's infamous for obliterative revamps that bear

scant resemblance to the original. Hired by a famous band's

record company to do an overhaul, James

agreed, then promptly forget all about the assignment. On the

appointed day, a courier arrived chez Aphex to pick up the

DAT of the remix.  Initially taken aback, James quickly

recovered his composure and scuttled upstairs, rifled through

his massive collection of demos and unfinished tracks, picked

one at random and handed it to the messenger.  Band and

record label both professed themselves highly pleased with

his reinterpretation!

     True or not, many of Aphex's remixes might as well be

all-new compositions. The scale of devastation is in ratio

to his estimation of the band: Curve and Jesus Jones got

absolutely decimated, Saint Etienne (of whom he said "I

think they're a good pop group but I don't actually like

them, if you know what I mean") got severely mutated, but

Seefeel got loving, respectful treatment. For his gorgeous

remixes on that band's "Time to Find Me", James retained most

of Seefeel's original track, albeit considerably rearranged.

     Recently, Aphex Twin has largely dropped out of the

remixing game (although he did rework Gavin Bryars' "The

Sinking of the Titanic", with mixed results).  But James'

buddy Luke Vibert, a.k.a. Wagon Christ, has stepped

into the breech, becoming one of the busiest, most in-demand

remixologists of last year. Not only can he dish it out, he can take it too: 

witness the brilliant Wagon Christ EP "Redone", which features an extremist jungle

version of one Vibert track by none other than Richard James.

     Of all the genres of modern dance, jungle has taken remix-

mania the furthest. As a result, jungle has a fluid, hazy-

round-the-edges notion of authorship. Often, a track will be

popularly attributed to its remixer; generally, remixes are

so dramatically different from the originals that this seems

only just. One example is Omni Trio's "Renegade Snares",

often regarded as a Foul Play track, owing to their remix and

subsequent "VIP" re-remix. Ironically, both versions are

examples of sympathetic remixing at its best: each

dramatically intensifies the thunder'n'joy of the original,

turbo-charging the breakbeats while retaining the tracks'

hooks and melodic refrains, albeit in shuffled order.  Appearing live,

Foul Play have also been known to "play" their masterly

remix of Hyper-On Experience's "Lords of the Null Lines" as

if it were their own track (which in a sense, it is).

     Jungle has introduced some new twists to remixology.

There's the "VIP Remix" (basically a marketing buzzword), and

there's the sequel, on which the original artist re-

interprets his own work.  Metalheads (the name Goldie used to

operate under) put out the "dark-side" classic "Terminator"

in late 1992, then followed it up half-a-year later with

"Terminator II".  Such is the track's repute, a full three

years on, that "Terminator 3" is due out any week now,

confusingly released via another alter-ego, Rufige Cru.

Goldie's ally Doc Scott has just done the same thing to his

'92 classic "Here Come The Drumz", which  has just been 'resurrected' in the

form of "Drumz '95".  Here, the only remnant of the original,

barely recognisable because of the extreme digital processing

bought to bear, is a tiny fragment of Chuck D's vocal:

"drums!".

     *         *         *         *         *         *

Posing questions about authorship and attribution, remixing

also problematises the notion of copyright. If, in the age of

"versus", the remix is tantamount to an all-new track,

why should the original artist get all the royalties? At the

moment, copyright remains with the original artist, and the

remixer gets a flat fee. (Sometimes artists will "swap"

remixes of each others' work). But Kevin Martin says he can

"see it getting to the point where percentage points are

added to the contract, so that the remixer gets royalties.

Then again, in jungle particularly, so much of the 'original'

music is sample-based, that you could argue that neither the

artist nor the remixer are 'creators' in the traditional

sense. It's more the case that both the artist and the

remixer act as 'filters' for a sort of cultural flow".

     In this vision, beats and riffs, textures and

atmospherics, circulate in the sort of "data ocean" described

by David Toop in his book "Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient

Sound and Imaginary Worlds".  Creativity operates on the

macro-level of the entire genre, not the individual artist, a

phenomenon Brian Eno calls "scenius", as opposed to "genius".

The deejay's role in all this is acting as yet another filter

for the information-flow (of course, in jungle and techno, most

"artists" are also professional deejays). The turntable "selector"

constructs the raw material of tracks into a meta-track, a

"journey" for the listener, or, with less propulsive genres

like ambient, an "environment". 

     "Some deejaying is already live remixing," says Kevin Martin. "Not just in the linking and layering together of different records, but in the use of

effects: deejays have 'kill switches' that can drop out

entire frequencies for periods, and some advanced decks have

sampling equipment with two-second memory and an array of

sonic processes."

     In dance cultures like jungle, house and techno, the

"versus" concept is not so important as another dub reggae

term, "version". This was the idea of endlessly re-using the

same drum & bass grooves as the basis for different songs,

so that you'd get entire albums based around a particular

"riddim". In the jungle scene, "version" has gone

haywire, fractal. One particular breakbeat, called "Amen"

because it's taken from a funk track by The Amen Brothers,

has featured in over 2000 tracks and is still being chopped

up and processed.  Hundreds of tracks feature an instantly

recognisable hiccup --a sped-up snatch of James Brown yelling

"you're bad, sister!"--as a convulsive percussive tic. A 21st

Century blend of cyber-dub and digi-funk, jungle has set up

an anarcho-communistic free-for-all in which (musical)

property is theft. In this new world order, everybody is

"versioning" everybody else, and music is about the

undeclared war of all "versus" all.

DISCOGRAPHY

'Muziq Vs The Auteurs' (Astralwerks)

Massive Attack V Mad Professor -- 'No Protection' (Circa, UK

import)

King Tubby, The Observer Allstars & The Aggrovators ---'King

Tubby's Special, 1973-1976' (Trojan)

*************************************

Faust -- 'Rien' (Table of the Elements)

John Oswald -- 'Grayfolded' (Swell/Artifact)

Stereolab/Nurse With Wound -- 'Crumb EP' (Duophonic). One

track appears on the Stereolab compilation "Refried

Ectoplasm".

*************************************

'Macro Dub Infection, Volume One' (Caroline)

God-- 'Appeal To Human Greed' (Big Cat)

Techno-Animal --'Babylon Seeker' EP (Blue Angel Records)

Main --- 'Ligature' (Beggars Banquet)

Scorn -- 'Ellipsis' (Scorn)

Tortoise --'Rhythms, Resolutions & Clusters' (Thrill Jockey)

Jon Spencer Blues Explosion ---'Experimental Remixes'

(Matador)

Ui-- 'Unlike: Remixes Vol 1' (Lunamoth)

******************************************

Aphex Twin Remixes:

   --Seefeel's "pure, impure", released in America as part of

'Polyfusia' (Too Pure/Astralwerks)

   --Saint Etienne's "Who Do You Think Youre Are", on "Hobart

Paving" EP (Heavenly)

   --Gavin Bryars' "Raising the Titanic: The Aphex Twin

Mixes" (Point)

Wagon Christ Remixes:

   --remixes of RHC, Ruby and Project One on "The Real Trip:

Further Self Evident Truths" (Rising High USA)

   --"Redone EP" (Rising High USA)

*****************************************************

Jungle, trip-hop and house remixology:

---"Renegade Snares (Foul Play VIP Re-Remix)", on Omni Trio's

"Music For The Next Millenium" (Sm:)e Communications)

---"I Seen A Man Die (4 Hero NW2 Gangsta Move)" and "4 Hero

Reinforced", on Scarface's "I Seen A Man Die" EP (Virgin,

import)

---Remixes by Wagon Christ, Autechre, Dr Rockit, Fila

Brazilia and others on DJ Food's "Refried Food" (Ninja Tune)

---Green Velvet "Flash Remixes" (Relief) --- 7 versions total on one double 12 inch pack, and another three versions out in the UK too! Is this a record?

Warp Influences / Classics / Remixes

VARIOUS ARTISTS

Warp 10+1 Influences

Warp 10+2 Classics

Warp 10+3 Remixes

(Warp/Matador)
Spin, 1999

by Simon Reynolds

UK rave started out as that strange thing--a subculture based almost entirely around import records. In 1988-89, British DJs had several years backlog of  feverish house classics to spin,  plus fresh imports from  Chicago, Detroit and New York every week. Homegrown tracks, mostly inferior imitations, couldn't compete. All this changed by early 1990 with a UK explosion of  indie dance labels and the emergence of a distinctively British rave sound  that merged house with elements of hip hop and reggae. Based in the Northern English industrial city Sheffield, Warp was the greatest of these dance independents, and one of the few to survive the era. Released to commemorate the label's tenth anniversary, these three double-CDs showcase the sharp ears and canny self-reinvention skills that have ensured Warp's longevity and continued relevance.

Warp's first phase of cool came as the prime purveyor of  "bleep-and-bass"--a style that owed as much to electro's pocket-calculator melodies and dub reggae's floorquaking sub-bass as it did to acid house's trip-notic compulsion. Much of Classics sound like a direction Kraftwerk could have followed after 1981's Computer World. Sweet Exorcist's "Clonk," for instance, is like Ralf und Florian lost in the K-hole, an inner-spatial  maelstrom of  weird geometry and precise derangement. Ranging from Tricky Disco's cartoon-quirky almost-pop, through the cold urgency of  LFO and Forgemasters, to Nightmares On Wax's proto-darkside disorientation, Classics is a fabulous document of a forgotten era of UK dance culture. Fortuitously, bleep-and-bass sounds fresher than ever today, chiming not just with the electro renaissance within techno (i/F, Ectomorph) but with the dry, drum machine beats, geometric stab-riffs, and chilly-the-most synth-tones audible in recent rap/R&B--Cash Money bounce boys like Juvenile, Ja Rule's "Holla Holla", Timbaland/Missy/Ginuwine.

Influences mostly consists of  sinister acid house from the import-dominated era of Brit-rave. But two inclusions locate the blueprint for early Warp more precisely in that late Eighties phase when twilight electro merged with the harder, tracks-not-songs side of  house. New York outfit Nitro Deluxe's  1987 "Let's Get Brutal" is a vast drumscape underpinned with tectonic shock-waves of sub-bass and topped by a shrill, staccato keyboard vamp made out of a vocal sample played several octaves too high. Kickstarted by the hilarious vocoderized mission statement "we are the original acid house creators/we hate all commercial house masturbators," and motored by a miasmic bassline that recedes into the  mix then swarms back to subsume your consciousness like malevolent fog,  Unique 3's "The Theme"  was actually the first bleep tune; as their old skool name suggests, the group was a North of England B-boy crew turned ravers.

Where Influences works as a superb primer in early house, Remixes intentionally fails to document the post-bleep Warp that most people know-- revered home of Aphex Twin, Black Dog, Autechre and Squarepusher, those godfathers of IDM  (Intelligent Dance Music, or dance music you can't really dance to). Instead, the double-CD  aims to capture the shape-shifting spirit of  the post-rave network (with its one-off collaborations, multiple aliases, and omnivorous eclecticism) by subjecting some of  Warp's finest to remixes from a host of  suspects usual and unusual.  UK post-rockers Four Tet, for instance, take a track from Aphex's Selected Ambient Works Vol II and turn what was originally as lustrous and near-motionless as crystals forming in a solution into a frisky work-out reminiscent of an over-caffeinated Tortoise. 

Highly listenable, the double-CD nonetheless suffers from the cardinal drawback of modern remixology--rather than enhancing the beloved original or locating some latent potential within it, the remixers almost invariably replace it with an all new track containing only a token trace of the ancestor. In that sense, Warp 10+3 Remixes  effectively evokes the present moment in electronica, where too many producers have got so infatuated with technique, they've lost contact with the dancefloor. Whereas Classics captures a lost moment of perfect coexistence between auteurism and popular desire, when experimentalists (like Sweet Exorcist's Richard H. Kirk, formerly of Cabaret Voltaire) briefly got on the good foot.  

Mantronix profile + manifesto (1987) + review of Music Madness (1986)

MANTRONIX, Music Madness (10 Records)
Melody Maker, December 6th 1986.

by Simon Reynolds


Mantronix don’t quite fit. Hip hop is getting to be more and more of an assault, more and more hyper-compressed and minimal in its search for harder and higher hits. But Mantronix are loosening up their music, bringing in a suppleness and textural luxury. Hip hop daily exceeds new levels of megalomaniac viciousness. But Mantronix are gradually squeezing the SELF out of their music, letting the music stand on its own madness. 

Compare what Mantronix are doing with a track that represents some kind of zenith in current hip hop trends--“The Manipulator” by Mixmaster Gee and The Turntable Orchestra (off Electro 14). Here skill on the turntables becomes a twisted, bloated metaphor for omnipotence. The voice shoves itself RIGHT IN YOUR FACE--you can practically feel the spittle, smell the breath. It’s a voice intoxicated with power, quaking with rage. 

MC Tee from Mantronix, in comparison, has a refreshingly adolescent voice, almost sweet--words are slurred, there’s the tiniest suggestion of a lisp. “Manipulator” style hip hop is given its impetus by being focused on the tyrannical charisma of the rapper, but with Mantronix the
raps seem almost superfluous. There are several instrumentals. With most hip hop the very sound of the music is a MASSIVE COCK waving about in your face. Mantronix erase every trace of the pelvis, every last ditch of humanism in hip hop. Their music isn’t weighted down by the heaviness of masculinity, but glides, skips, even frisks at times, rather than thuggishly stomping us weaklings underfoot. Mantronix sound disembodied, dislocated, out-of-it.



They are far out, a long way from firm ground. Mantronik marshals a host of uprooted fragments and abducted ghosts into a dance. He thieves indiscriminately, without prejudice, enlisting anything from Benny Goodman to The Old Grey Whistle Test theme tune. On “We Control the Dice” they even indulge in self-kleptomania (or perhaps simple thrift is at work), re-using the bass motif from “Bassline”. Their greatest influence, though, is European electropop--the scrubbed, spruce, pristine textures and metronomic precision of Kraftwerk and Martin Rushent’s Human League. While the brainy British bands of the day dedicate themselves to noisy guitars, it’s up to Mantronix (and House music) to uphold the spirit of 1981, to cherish the bass sound and the electronic percussion of “Sound of the Crowd” as a lost future of pop.

They have moments close to wildness-“Big Band B-Boy” commandeers a jungle of percussion--but I prefer it when Mantronix sound stealthy. “Scream,” with its curiously muted delivery of a party-up lyric (the word “scream” is almost whispered) is as eerie as Suicide lullabies like “I Remember” or “Cheree”. The title track has a roaming, furtive sense of space, the phrase “music madness” sampled, stretched and
melted into a series of beautiful belches. Best of all is the closing “Megamix”, in which everything you’ve been listening to for the last half-hour is regurgitated inside out and upside down, flashing before your ears like a drowned, garbled life. Sublime pandemonium. 

Music Madness is the kind of music you’d hoped The Art of Noise would go on to make after “Close (to the Edit)”. Fleshless, soulless, faceless and fantastic.

MANTRONIX

Melody Maker, August 1st 1987

by Simon Reynolds

FORGET “THE SONG”

Mantronik does not write Good Songs. He is not an author, but an engineer, an architect. His music is not the expression of his soul, but a product of his expertise. What Mantronik does is construct a terrain, a dance-space in which we can move, float free. Unlike the Rock Song, there’s no atmosphere, no nuances, no resonance, here: instead, simply a shifting of forces, torques, pressures, gradients. Mantronik’s work (and it is work) is neither expressionist nor impressionist--it’s cubist, a matter of geometry, space, speed, primary colours (not the infinite shades and subtle tones of meaning). Populist avant-gardism.

The song is the primary object of Rock Criticism--the work of art as a coherent, whole expression of a whole human being’s vision. Most rock criticism is poor Lit Crit, forever trying to pin down pop to What’s Being Said (whether that’s nuggets of “human truth” or blasts of “social commitment”), forever failing to engage with the materiality of music. A Mantronix track isn’t a song, a finished work but a process, a space capable of endless extension and adaption; a collection of resources to be rearranged and restructured. Hence the six different mixes of “Who Is It?”; hence the closing “Edit” on the last LP Music Madness, in which the whole album is compressed into a volatile six minutes reprise; hence the “Primal Scream Dub” of “Scream”, the fantabulous new single, virtually an entirely new piece of music altogether…

FORGET THE HUMAN

Pop is drowning itself (and in the process drowning us) with “humanity”--from the sickening, hyperbolic “care” of “Let It Be” and “We Are the World” to the firm, all too firm flesh throbbing in “I Want Your Sex”. Swamped by this benign, beige environment, this all-pervading warmth, it’s scarcely possible to feel the shiver down the spine, the sharp shudder of ecstasy:  modern pop just massages you all over, comforts and reassures. Practically every walking minute of our lives we’re condemned to be human, to care for people, to be polite, to be socially concerned. Should’nt our leisure (at the very least; for a start) be a place we can escape our humanity? A place to chill?

Mantronix make perhaps the most nihilistic music on the planet today; only House could claim to be more blank. Unlike rock nihilism, this is nihilistic without any drama, without an iconic figure like Michael Gira or Steve Albini--the creator simply, silently, absconds; creates an environment in which nothing of himself resides.

Unlike the first LP, which shared with hip hop a boastful, “deffer than the rest”  rapping style, on Music Madness the megalomania is vested in the whole expanse of sound, the inhuman perfection of the dance environment, rather than a charismatic protagonist. Poor MC Tee! This last token of the human seems to be fading fast. It’s as though someone has taken an eraser and all but rubbed him out of the picture: a little lost voice wandering in a vast, intimidating Futurist adventure playground. And the words uttered, in that fey, fragile voice, are little more than psychedelic gibberish, a vestigial anchor for us to centre our attention, otherwise dispersed and fractured across the jags and fissures of the mix. Mantronik is candid about the relative importance of text and material: “the words don’t mean shit, there’s no lyrical structure, but the shit pumps!”

You’re horrified, but after all, isn’t pop all about the desire to transcend or step sideways from the cage of one’s humanity? To be more, less or other than simply, naturally human: to become angel, demon, ghost, animal (butterfly or invertebrate). Mantronik’s desire is to be superhuman; he envies the prowess, the infallibility of the machine. He loves all the sci-fi films (the techno-heroic strand in science fiction that buffs call “hard sci-fi”, rather than New Wave s.f.’s odysseys into “inner space”). There are links between Electro’s space age imagery and the sword’n’sorcery/superhero comic book elements in heavy metal, speed metal… similar male fantasies of omnipotence and invulnerability.

For Mantronik, sampling is his “special power”, the key to demi-godhead. “You can take a sound, any sound, and you can tamper with it. Add other sounds to it. Look at its wave formations on a screen, and change the patterns around. And you don’t have to take sounds off records, you can get them from the environment, from hitting things against the wall, anything. And with my set-up, I can record music right up to the point doing vocals, in my bedroom. Then I go into a studio. With samplers, I never read the instructions. I like to learn from my mistakes and incorporate blunders.”

FORGET SOUL

For Mantronik, the history of Black Dance Music doesn’t begin with James Brown, Sly Stone, George Clinton, even Van McCoy or Chic; it begins with Kraftwerk and flowers with Trevor Horn’s Art of Noise. It was the krafty krauts’ glistening plastic vistas and stainless girders, plus Art of Noise’s fleshless, faceless, sense-less and soul-less techno-symphonic sky’s-the-limit mastery that first made him want to make dance music. Indeed, Mantronik seems to take Trevor Horn as a kind of guardian spirit or touchstone, talking of how he’s “now working on stuff that would blow Trevor’s mind. I’m working on things Trevor wouldn’t even understand.”

Mantronik’s attitude to the past is strictly utilitarian, post-modern pagan; there’s no veneration, no allegiance to outmoded [beats]. His reprocessing of the past in in accordance with functionalist criteria, not nostalgia. “All those old Seventies percussion lines were recorded real rough, real shitty, using dirt cheap reverbs. There’s a certain old, gritty sound you just can’t achieve in a modern studio. What I do is take that old sound and bring it back, into the future.”

There’s nothing in the way of the rockthink cult of the origin, of roots here, but rather an insatiable pursuit of the fresh, the ultra-modern.  “The old music bores me.” Styles and beats have a rapid turnover, are produced in factory conditions. Mantronix are simply the latest stage in a long history of black music; the largely unwritten history of corporoate design, brand names, backroom technicians, rather than sacred cow artists or communities struggling to be heard.

What troubles critics about Mantronix, about house, is that they’re illegible. You can’t read anything into them. There’s no text, just texture, and those who endeavour to wrap meanings around the music are always shown up, the failed despots of discourse. The sheer opaque, arbitrary force of the music slips the net of meaning, again and again.

Instead, for those who listen, there’s the fascination of details, a seduction in the endless intermittence of dub. “The new stuff? A whole mix of things. Not play-it-safe. Kind of teasing, flirtatious. I’m not gonna give it to the listener all at once. It’s like if you’re going out with a girl, and she gives it you straightaway, you lose interest.” Mantronix never lose you, even as you lose yourself.