riffs on riffs for The Wire's Greatest Riffs feature
The Wire, 2004
by Simon Reynolds
KING SUNNY ADE -- “Eje Nlo Gba Ara Mi”, “365 Is My Number/The Message” (from Juju Music, Mango, 1982), “Synchro System” (Synchro System, Mango, 1983)
The riff so good they used it thrice. Actually, that’s an underestimate. This twangy, twinkly rhythm guitar figure, mostly likely played by Ade himself, is all over The Best of The Classic Years compilation of 1967-74 material (notably “Sunny Ti De” and “Ibanujde Mon Iwon”), and I’m told it recurs throughout the man’s vast discography. Whether it’s creative thrift or a Zen-like exploration of the infinite inflectional possibilities within a few chords, who knows? In any given track, this crisp crinkle of scintillating Afro-funk serves a double function, operating as both audio-logo (this is KING SUNNY ADE you’re listening to) and intensifier, its flecked flicker tightening the surface of the music until it’s as taut as a drum skin.
NASTY HABITS--“Shadow Boxing” (31 Records, 1996)
Nasty Habits is the alter-ego of deejay/producer Doc Scott, one of jungle’s under-sung pioneers, and “Shadow Boxing” contains the most gloriously doom-laden and ponderous synth-riff in that genre’s history. Scott’s from Coventry, so it’s tempting to think he must have accessed the heaviness of this sluggish, scowling riff from the harsh West Midlands environment in the same way Sabbath did with “Iron Man,” “War Pigs,” and the rest. More likely, though, is that in the early Nineties Scott had his head rearranged at Coventry’s Eclipse raves and ever since then he’s been chasing down his own ultimate version of the miasmic “Mentasm” noise-riff, as heard on Joey Beltram’s early R&S tracks and Belgian hardcore anthems beyond counting. Beautiful and ominous like a cloud of poison gas looming on the horizon, “Shadow Boxing” is the culmination of a life’s work. Something drum’n’bass as genre most likely will never surpass.
RESILIENT--"1.2" (Chain Reaction, 1996)
There’s probably any number of fabulous riffs strewn across the discographies of the Basic Channel/Chain Reaction label-cluster (Maurizio’s “M6” and Monolake’s “Index” spring immediately to mind). But “1.2” by the enigmatic Resilient takes the BC/CR approach of miniaturising the riff to the limit. Riffs exist at the intersection of melody and rhythm, the mnemonic and the physical, and the Chain Reaction aesthetic in part involved seeing just how reduced (in terms of notes) you could make a pulse before it became purely percussive, just another beat. I’m not even sure there’s notes as such in “1.2”, it’s more like this spasming ripple of texture. It’s as if Resilient has conducted an archaeology of house music in order to uncover the primordial geocosmic vamp at the genre’s core. The first half of “1.2” consists of a tectonic shudder, a tidal current, that’s so contourless it’s at the very threshold of memorability. Then roughly six minutes in (you do tend to lose track of time) it abruptly shifts gear to a more rapid flicker of amorphous radiance. At which point, the sensation of spongy amniotic suspension quickens to a flooding bliss, overwhelming enough to get your eyes rolling back in your head. You start to see why some wag* dubbed this genre “heroin house”.
KRAFTWERK--“Ruckzuck” (Kraftwerk 1, Philips, 1971)
Given all the other choices available in the Kraftwerk oeuvre--the regular-as-carburetor pulse of “Autobahn”, the poignant heart-flutter vamps of “Neon Lights” and “Computer Love”, the eerie synth-shivers midway through "Home Computer"--it probably seems slightly perverse to pick the very first song on the very first album. Especially as the killer riff is played on a flute, not a synth. But the whole essence of Kraftwerk’s sound/feeling/Geist--serene urgency, Zen as the art of motorik maintenance--is distilled into Florian Schneider’s rasping flute lick. Or flute licks--at various points, it’s double-tracked so that Schneider is jamming with himself, the staccato patterns dovetailing to funky perfection. Flutes are usually a ghastly idea outside classical music, but here the instrument rocks--indeed, it’s hard to think of another instance of a woodwind being used to such percussive and propulsive effect. “Ruckzuck” is the missing link between Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians and Area Code 615’s “Stone Fox Chase”--i.e. that harmonica-driven theme tune for The Old Grey Whistle Test.
* "some wag"--Not sure but I think it was actually Kevin Martin who coined the term "heroin house". Nuff respeck.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
KRAFTWERK
unpublished piece for Village Voice, 1991
by SIMON REYNOLDS
During the last decade, Kraftwerk have been absent but omnipresent. You can hear their ghostly presence in house and techno, in the lovelorn electro of New Order and the inorganic sound-palatte of industrial disco. Rap groups don't cite or sample them so much these days, but in the early Eighties Kraftwerk were as crucial as James Brown. Long before Afrika Bambatta's JB collaboration "Unity", the affinity between "Sex Machine" and "Man Machine" was obvious (the arid, arduous pursuit of bliss-through-monotony). More outlandishly, Kraftwerk were a huge influence on the hymnal mantras of Spacemen 3's Playing With Fire.
Then again, Kraftwerk always namechecked the Stooges/MC5/Suicide/Velvets axis as their taste in rock).
But for a group whose image is of a sound-factory manned by technocrats who devoutly believe arbeit macht frei, Kraftwerk themselves have been curiously unproductive. Since 1981's Computer World, all that's come off the Kling Klang assembly line has been the "Tour de France" 12 inch and 1986's not-major Electric Cafe LP. A few months ago, a "new" Kraftwerk album
was released in the States, with little fanfare. The Mix (Elektra)
was a retrospective, but it didn't embalm its 11 "classic tracks" in their original period charm, and it didn't come complete with a hefty,hagiographical booklet (c.f. James Brown's Star Time box). This was Kraftwerk as living legacy. The songs have been drastically overhauled, the melodic arrangements stripped down and welded to contemporary rhythmic chassis (emphasising both the present's debt to Kraftwerk's futurism, and the group's right to compete in today's
b.p.m. marketplace). "Durability is a central concept in art," K-werk leader Ralf Hutter has proclaimed. "Our sounds and programmes are immortal. Thanks to the computer someone else will be able to continue what we are doing."
Soon Kraftwerk will be here in (impersonal)person, playing their first NYC show in ten years at the Beacon Theatre on September 20.* I caught them in London a few months back, and it was a strange experience. The crowd was a weird mix of fashion-conscious, post-acid house ravers plus Kraftwerk's original nerdish constituency, traditionally known by the shorthand epithet "physics student". Weirder still was the fervour and affection with which the Teutonic technocrats were receieved, like homecoming heroes. Live, Kraftwerk compensate for their static sobriety and the inherent unphysicality of computer-based music, with a spectacular stage set. Their banks of consoles are fronted by fluorescent light-tubes,like the bars of an electric fire; there are back-projected films (b/w footage of cyclists for "Tour de France", freeways for "Autobahn" -literal rather than lateral stuff, you dig); as the piece de resistance , automated doppelgangers of the band are unveiled for "The Robots", to perform a rather stilted ballet.
Immaculately groomed, dispassionate and perspiration-free, Kraftwerk still transgress most of the precepts of rock'n'roll. But the boys do crack a grin or two during "Pocket Calculator", and even "jam" together, improvising on hand-held mini-synths whose keys each cue a different motif or synth-riff. Sweat-less they may be, but soul-less? No way. Just check the sweeping poignancy of those arrangments (midway between systems music and Brian Wilson, one of their major influences).
Swoon to the obliterating pathos of "Computer Love", with its heart-murmur bassline, swirling synth-constellations and lachrymose lines about looking for "a data date".
Still, anonymity and monumentalism are what Kraftwerk are all about, and personally I welcome a dose of that, as a blessed reprieve from the surfeit of "real music" and "true grit" showered upon us from every corner (from the indie scene to VH1, there's too many human beings round here). "Trans Europe Express" remains their tour de force. With its girder beats and indefatigible pace, its arching synths that
rush over your head in simulation of the Doppler Effect, this track really does evoke the spiritual dimension of industrialism. Kraftwerk stir up nostalgia for the days when we thought technology would liberate us, when we beleived the city of the future would be planned and pristine. Nowadays, we know the city of the future is Mexico City or Bombay). Live, and on The Mix, the track develops into the astonishing "Metal On Metal", a funky iron foundry that puts Einsturzende Neubauten
on the good foot. As Britcrit David Stubbs wrote of Faust, Kraftwerk are just specks on their own landscape. Faceless, flesh-less,and fantastic.
*the US tour was cancelled, which is probably why this piece never ran. When they did finally tour America in 1998, I caught one of their New York dates--truly one of the most amazing shows I've seen.
BONUS QUOTES
"The dynamism of the machines, the 'soul' of the machines, has always been a part of our music. Trance always belongs to repetition, and everybody is looking for trance in life--in sex, in the emotional, in pleasure, in parties... So, the machines produce an absolutely perfect trance"--Ralf Hutter
"The mechanical universe of Kraftwerk has been cloned or copied in Detroit, Brussels, Milan, Manchester, and even psychedelicized by the delirium of
house music. You can define it as you want: sci-fi music, techno-disco, cybernetic rock. But the term I prefer even so is robot pop. It fits in with our objective--which consists of working without a respite toward the construction of the perfect pop song for the tribes of the global village"-- Ralf Hutter
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Alan Warner, The Sopranos (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux)
Washington Post Book World, 1999
What is it about Alan Warner and the lassies? Morvern Callar, his first novel, was written from the point-of-view of a 21 year old supermarket girl from a remote Scottish port, and followed her pleasure-principled journey through the Meditteranean rave scene. His latest, The Sopranos, goes five better, recounting 24 hours in the life of a gang of convent schoolgirls from the same sea town--a more eventful day-and-night than normal, for the girls are travelling to the Scottish capital to participate in a national choir contest. But instead of the honor of the school, Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, the main concern of these 17 year old miscreants is losing--to ensure that they won't have to stay in Edinburgh for the next round of the competition, but can return home in time to visit the local Mantrap nightclub, where sailors on shore leave are hotly anticipated. The trip to the big city does have its attractions, though, allowing the girls to indulge their passions for alcohol, clothes shopping, flirting--opportunities they seize with such lusty ferocity that catastrophe, albeit of a richly comic sort, is inevitable.
34 year old Warner dotes on these girls. There's something blatantly vicarious about the way he revels in their salty repartee and bawdy imaginations, something close to envy in the way he admires their cameraderie, quick wit, and impulsiveness. Fionnula the Cooler, the most charismatic and self-aware of the gang, expresses their philosophy: "any opportunity we get in life, you should just GO for it. Grab ah it' . Occassionally Warner pauses the narrative for full-on exaltation: "They've youth; they'll walk it out like a favorite pair trainers. It's a poem this youth ... We should get shoved aside cause they have it now, in glow of skin and liquid clarity of deep eye on coming June nights and cause it will go... After all what do we amount to but a load of old worn-out shoes?" .
The Sopranos reminds me of the key lyric from "Common People" by the British pop group Pulp, a song that deals with the middle class's voyeuristic fascination for working class vitality: "they burn so bright and you can only wonder why." With the Sopranos, you don't have to ponder too hard about the whys and wherefores of their incandescence. Sparks fly from the friction between these girls's boundless hormonal energy and the multiple obstacles they face--oppressions of age, class, gender, and region (they live in a provincial backwater of a country, Scotland, that is itself subordinated within the UK). Early in the book, the sopranos run into a former classmate, Michelle, who quit school pregnant after a one-night stand with a sailor. Warner writes poignantly about the awkwardness of the encounter, as the girls sense their old friend now dwells on the other side of a definite boundary: her life is effectively over, "she'd devoured the few opportunities for the wee bit sparkle that was ever going to come her way."
Rather less subtly, Warner positions the girls as renegades against the gerontocratic, eros-denying regime of the convent school: they are pure instinct and raw sensuality struggling to express itself through the only avenues left by the frigid, dessicated nuns--secretly shortening the length of their regulation tartan skirts, wearing colorful shoelaces. This theme of Catholic girls as volcanoes of pent-up libido (27-and-counting girls at the school get pregnant that year) is hackneyed, but it doesn't stop Warner from overplaying it. It's one of a handful of false notes in The Sopranos--the implausibly hip music taste of one the girls, Kylah (although it's nowhere near as suspiciously male-thirtysomething-Wire-reader-like as >Morvern Callar's), and a lesbian love sub-plot that reads as a distinctly masculine fantasy.
Quibbles aside, the overpowering feeling this reader gets from The Sopranos is verimisimilitude. Warner has the sharpest ear for dialogue this side of his compatriot Irvine Welsh. The way he captures the rhythms of girl-talk--the ping-pong rallies, swerves, nonsequiturs and explosions of mirth--suggest he's spent a lot of time eavesdropping in McDonalds or hanging around school playgrounds. As with Welsh's novels, The Sopranos is rich both in pungent slang ("beastie" = penis, "pissed mortal" = very drunk, " "dinnae scum us out" is roughly equivalent to the Valley girl's "gag me with a spoon") and in regional dialect ("greeting" means crying, "ceilidh" is a chat, "oxters" are armpits), which are almost always cleverly deployed so the reader can work out the meaning from the context. Like Morvern Callar, the whole book is written in vernacular Scottish, with phonetic spellings. The difference is that the first novel was all from Morvern's point of view, whereas The Sopranos has an omniscent narrator who speaks like the girls, only more self-consciously poetic. Although this creates vivid language--"there was a bit of silentness," neologisms like "gigglestifled"--it can also come across forced. The incessant spelling of "and" as "an" and "of" as "o" can be irritating, and Warner's impulse to simulate the non-grammatical shorthand of how real people really speak (dropping of definite articles and prepositions) makes some descriptive paragraphs feel stilted; the prose freezes up, the eye glides over them.
Ultimately, The Sopranos is neither social realism (it's not hum-drum or uneventful enough) nor magic realism (despite some heavy-handed symbolism involving an escaped Venuezalan parrot), but something in between. It's about the strangeness of ordinary people and the absurdist poetry of everyday life. In some ways, it's less a narrative than a concatenation of great anecdotes, the sort of embellished and exaggerated stories you might pick up in a pub and pass on, the tale growing in the telling: mad things such-and-such a person did when drunk, bizarre incidents that befell a friend-of-a-friend. In Morvern Callar, the heroine notes how the middle-class publishing people she meets in London never tell stories, they discuss ideas. Like the other inhabitants of their town, the sopranos love telling tales; you sense that the mischief and mayhem they get up to in this action-packed, alcohol-soaked 24 hours is entering their collective mythology even as it happens. Compared with the oddly bleak hedonism of Morvern Callar, The Sopranos is remarkably upbeat. Despite the ever present sense of youth's transience and the looming shadow of the socio-economic odds stacked against the girls, the book ends on a high note. Unlike Trainspotting, it won't need to have its ambivalences ironed out to be transformed into the feel-good youth movie it's clearly destined to be.
SIMON REYNOLDS
Washington Post Book World, 1999
What is it about Alan Warner and the lassies? Morvern Callar, his first novel, was written from the point-of-view of a 21 year old supermarket girl from a remote Scottish port, and followed her pleasure-principled journey through the Meditteranean rave scene. His latest, The Sopranos, goes five better, recounting 24 hours in the life of a gang of convent schoolgirls from the same sea town--a more eventful day-and-night than normal, for the girls are travelling to the Scottish capital to participate in a national choir contest. But instead of the honor of the school, Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, the main concern of these 17 year old miscreants is losing--to ensure that they won't have to stay in Edinburgh for the next round of the competition, but can return home in time to visit the local Mantrap nightclub, where sailors on shore leave are hotly anticipated. The trip to the big city does have its attractions, though, allowing the girls to indulge their passions for alcohol, clothes shopping, flirting--opportunities they seize with such lusty ferocity that catastrophe, albeit of a richly comic sort, is inevitable.
34 year old Warner dotes on these girls. There's something blatantly vicarious about the way he revels in their salty repartee and bawdy imaginations, something close to envy in the way he admires their cameraderie, quick wit, and impulsiveness. Fionnula the Cooler, the most charismatic and self-aware of the gang, expresses their philosophy: "any opportunity we get in life, you should just GO for it. Grab ah it' . Occassionally Warner pauses the narrative for full-on exaltation: "They've youth; they'll walk it out like a favorite pair trainers. It's a poem this youth ... We should get shoved aside cause they have it now, in glow of skin and liquid clarity of deep eye on coming June nights and cause it will go... After all what do we amount to but a load of old worn-out shoes?" .
The Sopranos reminds me of the key lyric from "Common People" by the British pop group Pulp, a song that deals with the middle class's voyeuristic fascination for working class vitality: "they burn so bright and you can only wonder why." With the Sopranos, you don't have to ponder too hard about the whys and wherefores of their incandescence. Sparks fly from the friction between these girls's boundless hormonal energy and the multiple obstacles they face--oppressions of age, class, gender, and region (they live in a provincial backwater of a country, Scotland, that is itself subordinated within the UK). Early in the book, the sopranos run into a former classmate, Michelle, who quit school pregnant after a one-night stand with a sailor. Warner writes poignantly about the awkwardness of the encounter, as the girls sense their old friend now dwells on the other side of a definite boundary: her life is effectively over, "she'd devoured the few opportunities for the wee bit sparkle that was ever going to come her way."
Rather less subtly, Warner positions the girls as renegades against the gerontocratic, eros-denying regime of the convent school: they are pure instinct and raw sensuality struggling to express itself through the only avenues left by the frigid, dessicated nuns--secretly shortening the length of their regulation tartan skirts, wearing colorful shoelaces. This theme of Catholic girls as volcanoes of pent-up libido (27-and-counting girls at the school get pregnant that year) is hackneyed, but it doesn't stop Warner from overplaying it. It's one of a handful of false notes in The Sopranos--the implausibly hip music taste of one the girls, Kylah (although it's nowhere near as suspiciously male-thirtysomething-Wire-reader-like as >Morvern Callar's), and a lesbian love sub-plot that reads as a distinctly masculine fantasy.
Quibbles aside, the overpowering feeling this reader gets from The Sopranos is verimisimilitude. Warner has the sharpest ear for dialogue this side of his compatriot Irvine Welsh. The way he captures the rhythms of girl-talk--the ping-pong rallies, swerves, nonsequiturs and explosions of mirth--suggest he's spent a lot of time eavesdropping in McDonalds or hanging around school playgrounds. As with Welsh's novels, The Sopranos is rich both in pungent slang ("beastie" = penis, "pissed mortal" = very drunk, " "dinnae scum us out" is roughly equivalent to the Valley girl's "gag me with a spoon") and in regional dialect ("greeting" means crying, "ceilidh" is a chat, "oxters" are armpits), which are almost always cleverly deployed so the reader can work out the meaning from the context. Like Morvern Callar, the whole book is written in vernacular Scottish, with phonetic spellings. The difference is that the first novel was all from Morvern's point of view, whereas The Sopranos has an omniscent narrator who speaks like the girls, only more self-consciously poetic. Although this creates vivid language--"there was a bit of silentness," neologisms like "gigglestifled"--it can also come across forced. The incessant spelling of "and" as "an" and "of" as "o" can be irritating, and Warner's impulse to simulate the non-grammatical shorthand of how real people really speak (dropping of definite articles and prepositions) makes some descriptive paragraphs feel stilted; the prose freezes up, the eye glides over them.
Ultimately, The Sopranos is neither social realism (it's not hum-drum or uneventful enough) nor magic realism (despite some heavy-handed symbolism involving an escaped Venuezalan parrot), but something in between. It's about the strangeness of ordinary people and the absurdist poetry of everyday life. In some ways, it's less a narrative than a concatenation of great anecdotes, the sort of embellished and exaggerated stories you might pick up in a pub and pass on, the tale growing in the telling: mad things such-and-such a person did when drunk, bizarre incidents that befell a friend-of-a-friend. In Morvern Callar, the heroine notes how the middle-class publishing people she meets in London never tell stories, they discuss ideas. Like the other inhabitants of their town, the sopranos love telling tales; you sense that the mischief and mayhem they get up to in this action-packed, alcohol-soaked 24 hours is entering their collective mythology even as it happens. Compared with the oddly bleak hedonism of Morvern Callar, The Sopranos is remarkably upbeat. Despite the ever present sense of youth's transience and the looming shadow of the socio-economic odds stacked against the girls, the book ends on a high note. Unlike Trainspotting, it won't need to have its ambivalences ironed out to be transformed into the feel-good youth movie it's clearly destined to be.
SIMON REYNOLDS
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