SALT N' PEPA
Melody Maker, 26TH March 1988
by Simon Reynolds
Salt N' Pepa are on their way up. They're poised on the cusp between cult and mega. They come from a subculture characterised by an unusual (even by pop's standards) swiftness of turnover, rapid obsolescence, where the backrop to the boasts of uniqueness and omnipotence is the reality of anonymity and obscurity to which most rappers return after a brief spell of celebrity.
So Salt 'N' Pepa are determined that they are here to stay. They're working now on turning the initial furore of their arrival into a managed, planned career with the emphasis on longevity as much as impact. Their new LP is called Career Girls.
"You can never be complacent in this business. You have to build on any success to make it last. So on our new LP we're gonna have something for everybody – some rock 'n' roll, some radio pop, some hardcore rap for the street crowd. Something that appeals to every market, so that you don't get pigeonholed as the one thing that appeals to only one kind of person."
Eclecticism as maximum market penetration, straddling radio formats, diversifying your assets. Salt 'N' Pepa have been given sound advice.
But this isn't the story of co-option, of street energy being tamed and exploited by the industry. At every level of hip hop, from the precinct hoodlum, through the cottage industry small labels, right on up to the corporate empires of Def Jam and Cold Chillin', rappers are on the make, eyes on the main chance, looking to be promoted to the next tier of capitalism.
These days, even at the earliest, most amateur, semi-spontaneous level of activity, rappers have the rough details of their ascent worked out in advance. They know the rungs, the pitfalls. They're righteous about gettin' paid. To me, a socialist of sorts, hip hop is a political revelation: its pathological individualism exposes the psychosis at the heart of our free market system, capitalism's war of all against all.
"We always wanted to be in showbiz, but never thought it would really happen. So although it was kind of an accident, we weren't overwhelmed, we'd thought about it, and had prepared for it, in a way. And we know about the work you have to put into sustaining it. You're gonna be hearing about Salt 'N' Pepa for a long long time."
This is America, of course, the land where positive thinking and "self-realisation" seep from every pore of the media, where getting on in the world and getting on with people are both seen as boiling down to the same life skill: selling yourself to others.
Hip hop is a Black subculture, for sure, but it's also an American one – a fact the full significance of which still hasn't percolated through to some quarters here. Hip hop swallows the American caboodle of initiative, ambition, enterprise, "anyone can make it if they work hard", whole.
So Run DMC publicly announce their support for Joey Brown, the notorious black high school principal for New Jersey, whose "talk tough" policy towards pupils has caused much controversy in the States, because of its emphasis on discipline, rectitude, not to mention Brown's bent for patrolling the playground with a loudhailer in one hand and a baseball bat in the other.
And that closeknit family The Skinny Boys namecheck Bill Cosby as a major role model – Cosby the patrician, whose increasingly moralistic show always sees the parents putting their errant kids back on the rails of life with an appropriate homily and a firm hand, Cosby the massive shareholder who is believed to have engineered the dismissal of liberal David Puttnam from his influential Hollywood job.
Like Run DMC, Salt 'N' Pepa are uncomfortably poised between the monomaniac assertion ("here I am, I am Somebody") of the subculture they come from, and the vague feelings of responsibility (to be a "positive role model") engendered by massive success. Like Run DMC, like Whodini, Salt 'N' Pepa, I'm sure, will shift from the tyranny of their local struggles towards something more regal, magnanimous, publicly concerned. The apoplexy of 'It's Alright', with its dub-cavern of spectral scratch and its visionary cruelty ("burn you and leave your ashes smokin"'), the exuberant vindictiveness of 'I'll Take Your Man', the predatorial 'I Desire'...all this disproportion is already being evened out to fit the pop format. But there's still pleasure. 'Push It', the new single and a Top 20 smash in the States, abandons the grit of sampled R&B for the hygiene and precision of electro, its robotic lubriciousness strangely reminiscent of Devo.
On the B side, 'I'm Down' is an insanely itchy piece of digital raunch. But a lot of the uncouthness has gone, as the big time beckons, perhaps ceded to a new Hurby Azor creation, Antoinette, who raps with the meanest, cold-hearted voice I think I've heard in rap – like she has vinegar for blood.
Some people read Salt 'N' Pepa as a proto-feminist upsurge in the phallocentric world of hip hop. But to me, there was always too much competitiveness going down for Salt 'N' Pepa to fit comfortably into the scheme of sisterhood and mutual support against the phallocrats.
Salt 'N' Pepa fit more into the old soul tradition of female sass, of women being demanding within the terms of conventional gender roles: like Shirley Murdock duetting with Roger Troutman, (or Carla Thomas with Otis Redding, for that matter), where the women lambasts the man for dereliction of his obligations. The fundamental ideals of sexual apartheid aren't tampered with.
"What do I think are the ideal qualities in a man? He's got to be...sensitive...but masculine, y'know. Rugged. Lots of money. Well, not so much the money, as he's got to have the drive to make money. I love money, ha ha ha! But looks come second to personality every time.
"The War Of The Sexes? Yeah, well, it's always gonna be like that. Always has been, always will be."
Salt 'N' Pepa deal me a bunch of glibly-delivered stock answers this afternoon, the freshness and charm having become rather starched thanks to the massive itinerary of TV appearances and magazine interviews they've had to undertake as 'Push It' takes off. Are their stage/vinyl characters anything like the real people (Cheryl James and Sandra Denton) behind Salt 'N' Pepa?
"Oh no, it's a character. I ain't like that. On stage I'm wild, I spin on my knees, I'm rude, I order people about. In person we're much more considerate. But people like the way we are onstage, they want to be controlled, cos then they know you're giving your all, really putting out onstage."
It's a spectacle of control, of course, as with Janet Jackson, where the spectacle of self-determination is masterminded by various backroom writers and sonic architects. Salt 'N' Pepa now write a bigger share of their own material, choreography, routines, but it was Hurby Azor who more or less created the concept of Salt 'N' Pepa, having first divined a potential in the raw material of their boisterousness.
It was Hurby who gave them a unique sound, one that has had a major influence on last year's shift in rap away from the bludgeoning dead end of total blackout and rhythmic seizure that seemed the logical destination for hip hop, towards a more sensual, loose-limbed sound.
Using first a technique called "poublaison" (a kind of tape loop) [2011 NOTE:ACTUALLY PUBLISON, A MACHINE THAT COMBINES SAMPLING AND EFFECTS) and now straightforward sampling with an Akai 900, Azar takes raw material (a Meters guitar lick, an ancient R&B drum sound, a string of call-and-response) and assembles a kind of Frankenstein dance monster out of funk-limbs that don't belong together. Check out the Hurby's Machine sampler of his creations. The different grooves almost, but don't quite fit – hence the friction, the rub, that makes the music so sensual, in comparison with the sado-masochistic jackhammer rhythms of previous hip hop.
Another effect is more eerie, the this-ness and then-ness of specific studio vibes, placed in uncanny adjacence with one another. There's a kind of crooked grooviness about the sound, something zombie: music that appears to be living and breathing, the result of the human touch, but is in fact only a simulacrum of life, "hyped up by Hurby".
AUTHOR'S NOTE: a disastrous interview this, stilted in itself on account of culture gap, but then as i was doing it i was aware of a strange whining electronic noise, only to discover at the conclusion of the interview that the tape recorder had malfunctioned and not a word had been recorded In a panic I asked the group if i could do the interview again - to which Salt replied, acidly, "Those questions?". So I bolted the building and rushed across the street to the nearest fast food joint and sat down scribbling whatever dregs I could dredge up from my short-term memory of the interview. Hence the rather low ratio of band quotes to SR pontification in this piece.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Friday, April 22, 2011
PANDA BEAR
Tomboy
(Paw Tracks)
director's cut, The Wire, April 2011
By Simon Reynolds
The dominant sound on Panda Bear records is Noah Lennox's voice. Or I should say, voices: his production hallmark is massing his vocal so that it sounds choral. Heavy reverb intensifies the churchy aura. As does Lennox's pure-hearted tone, an alloy of yearning, devotion, and rejoicing shaped by his high school participation in a chamber choir. This self-singalong effect reminds me of three things:
* The artist Anthony Goicolea, who uses trick photography to create tableaus of boarding school boys--anywhere from two to a dozen--who all have the same face: the adult Goicolea's. The effect ranges from quirkily surreal to grotesque and disturbing.
* "Sanctus", the choral song that recurs throughout if... (Lindsay Anderson's 1968 film about a boys-only boarding school) and which comes from Missa Luba, an Africanised version of the Latin mass performed by a choir of Congolese children. Evoking the clear-eyed idealism of youth, "Sanctus"'s effect in if.. is uplifting yet ominous: it prefigures the bloody insurrection against the teachers and parents that climaxes the film.
* A peculiar tradition at my own all-boys public school, a ritual that wasn't formalized but seemingly spontaneously generated itself annually. During assembly on the last day of the school year, the boys sang the hymns with unusual vigour and volume (as opposed to the usual mouthing- the- words desultoriness). Every year, the masters on the podium looked stunned and cowed by this demonstration of insubordinate joy: school's out for summer.
At the heart of Panda Bear's music, and Animal Collective's too, is the cult of boyhood as the supreme state of being. The title Tomboy seems to shift from that slightly, but not really: the tomboy--that adorable tyke who likes rough-and-tumble-- is androgynous in the exact same way that prepubescent boys, with their high voices and sensitivity, often are. What PB/AC celebrate and hark back to is the clarity, purity, and simplicity of the world seen through the eyes of those yet to undergo the Fall into sexuality.
I'm a sucker for the whole psychedelic "younger than yesterday"/"he not busy being born"/"goin' back" mythos, despite being in my late forties and a parent with ample experience of actual childhood (oh they can be so sweet and innocent, but also, alas, totally innocent of basic human decency). Person Pitch--the previous Panda album, from 2007--drips with this kind of beatific naïvety and it's one of my absolute favorites from the last decade. And I'm not short of company: it would hard to over-state how feverishly anticipated Tomboy is in certain quarters. If there was any doubt that Lennox has emerged as the key figure in Animal Collective, the group's "soul" even, you need only the compare the response to Person Pitch and the underwhelmed reception of solo efforts by the group's ostensible lead singer/leader Avey Tare. In many ways Person Pitch was the flawless consummation of everything that Animal Collective have striven for and only fitfully achieved across their sprawling discography: an approachable avant-rock that marries euphony and experiment. Post-rock, with tunes.
Lennox has actually described Tomboy as more of a "guitar rock" record, based around "simplistic rhythms". But it doesn't really feel like a departure from Person Pitch's loops-and-samples. Some songs feature frantically strummed guitar parts, but they're fed through a Korg, and overall the way this music is organized and propels itself forward feels closer to German minimal tech-house than to rock'n'roll. As for the top line melodies and mood-textures, the Beach Boys are overwhelming present. It's a revealing influence, given their cult of boyish buoyancy of spirit and Brian Wilson's conception of Smile as a "teenage symphony to God". "Surfer's Hymn" is a blatant nod to the Boys and further oceanic allusions come with "Last Night At The Jetty" and the nautical-sounding "Slow Motion", whose swaying rhythm lies somewhere between sea shanty and Basic Channel. "Jetty" is like a gaseous and Gas-y postmillenial take on the Everly Bros, while "Alsation Darn" reminds me a teensy bit of, yuk, "Bridge Over Troubled Water". Panda's version of the latter's sentiment is the album-opening pledge "You Can Count On Me." Then there's "Friendship Bracelet", named after the American teenage custom of exchanging handmade tokens of undying amity.
As with the Wilsonian sonic universe, the presiding spirits of Panda Bear music are Agape and Apollo, brotherly love and the sun god. (The last song, "Benfica" is the Portuguese word for "light" and also Lisbon's soccer team). And like with the Beach Boys, there's not a hint of Eros or the Dionysian in this music, just shining eyes and open hearts. Listening, at times you might think of scouts gathered around a camp fire. There are only a couple of welcome breaks amid all this sweetness and light. Over an extended ache of organ, "Drone" unfurls long suspended canopies of voice that gradually twist in tone. Better still is "Scheherezade", a murky chamber where reverb for once on this album sounds eerie rather than idyllic. Tentative piano chords and sourceless groans of bass-frequency undergird Lennox's huge billowing voice; tinkling cascades of glass snowflakes spiral down intermittently. The song sounds pregnant with fathomless mystery.
It's an odd one, Tomboy: impressive on the first few listens, it grows irritating with repeat play. The analogy that springs to mind is chocolate gateau: lovely on the first day, sickening if you then have eat it every day for the rest of the week. Still, that doesn't quite explain why the exact same mood and techniques that worked sublimely for me on Person Pitch have come to seem oppressive and cloying. Perhaps it comes from my personal feeling that Brian Wilson is one of the most over-rated pop auteurs of the last half-century, his work the place where albino meets castrato. Perhaps it's because it's hard to get involved with these songs because the chorus-of-one vocals and reverb-blurriness render the lyrics virtually indecipherable. Perhaps, finally, it comes from the feeling that the whole "wordliness must keep apart from me", child-man thing has become a kind of spiritual cul-de-sac for Lennox, now in his early thirties (although he looks fourteen in his photos) and a parent with two young daughters. In the past decade nobody has sung "songs of innocence" better than Noah. Now we need to hear Lennox's "songs of experience".
Postscript
via mark richardson's tumblr
according to Anonymous, Lennox,when talking about Tomboy a year or so before it came out, "described Bach as one of his influences for that album" and talked about how his "use of reverb" was " a reflection of high vaulted ceilings and that church-like atmosphere both from his own life and some of the architecture of Lisbon"
Tomboy
(Paw Tracks)
director's cut, The Wire, April 2011
By Simon Reynolds
The dominant sound on Panda Bear records is Noah Lennox's voice. Or I should say, voices: his production hallmark is massing his vocal so that it sounds choral. Heavy reverb intensifies the churchy aura. As does Lennox's pure-hearted tone, an alloy of yearning, devotion, and rejoicing shaped by his high school participation in a chamber choir. This self-singalong effect reminds me of three things:
* The artist Anthony Goicolea, who uses trick photography to create tableaus of boarding school boys--anywhere from two to a dozen--who all have the same face: the adult Goicolea's. The effect ranges from quirkily surreal to grotesque and disturbing.
* "Sanctus", the choral song that recurs throughout if... (Lindsay Anderson's 1968 film about a boys-only boarding school) and which comes from Missa Luba, an Africanised version of the Latin mass performed by a choir of Congolese children. Evoking the clear-eyed idealism of youth, "Sanctus"'s effect in if.. is uplifting yet ominous: it prefigures the bloody insurrection against the teachers and parents that climaxes the film.
* A peculiar tradition at my own all-boys public school, a ritual that wasn't formalized but seemingly spontaneously generated itself annually. During assembly on the last day of the school year, the boys sang the hymns with unusual vigour and volume (as opposed to the usual mouthing- the- words desultoriness). Every year, the masters on the podium looked stunned and cowed by this demonstration of insubordinate joy: school's out for summer.
At the heart of Panda Bear's music, and Animal Collective's too, is the cult of boyhood as the supreme state of being. The title Tomboy seems to shift from that slightly, but not really: the tomboy--that adorable tyke who likes rough-and-tumble-- is androgynous in the exact same way that prepubescent boys, with their high voices and sensitivity, often are. What PB/AC celebrate and hark back to is the clarity, purity, and simplicity of the world seen through the eyes of those yet to undergo the Fall into sexuality.
I'm a sucker for the whole psychedelic "younger than yesterday"/"he not busy being born"/"goin' back" mythos, despite being in my late forties and a parent with ample experience of actual childhood (oh they can be so sweet and innocent, but also, alas, totally innocent of basic human decency). Person Pitch--the previous Panda album, from 2007--drips with this kind of beatific naïvety and it's one of my absolute favorites from the last decade. And I'm not short of company: it would hard to over-state how feverishly anticipated Tomboy is in certain quarters. If there was any doubt that Lennox has emerged as the key figure in Animal Collective, the group's "soul" even, you need only the compare the response to Person Pitch and the underwhelmed reception of solo efforts by the group's ostensible lead singer/leader Avey Tare. In many ways Person Pitch was the flawless consummation of everything that Animal Collective have striven for and only fitfully achieved across their sprawling discography: an approachable avant-rock that marries euphony and experiment. Post-rock, with tunes.
Lennox has actually described Tomboy as more of a "guitar rock" record, based around "simplistic rhythms". But it doesn't really feel like a departure from Person Pitch's loops-and-samples. Some songs feature frantically strummed guitar parts, but they're fed through a Korg, and overall the way this music is organized and propels itself forward feels closer to German minimal tech-house than to rock'n'roll. As for the top line melodies and mood-textures, the Beach Boys are overwhelming present. It's a revealing influence, given their cult of boyish buoyancy of spirit and Brian Wilson's conception of Smile as a "teenage symphony to God". "Surfer's Hymn" is a blatant nod to the Boys and further oceanic allusions come with "Last Night At The Jetty" and the nautical-sounding "Slow Motion", whose swaying rhythm lies somewhere between sea shanty and Basic Channel. "Jetty" is like a gaseous and Gas-y postmillenial take on the Everly Bros, while "Alsation Darn" reminds me a teensy bit of, yuk, "Bridge Over Troubled Water". Panda's version of the latter's sentiment is the album-opening pledge "You Can Count On Me." Then there's "Friendship Bracelet", named after the American teenage custom of exchanging handmade tokens of undying amity.
As with the Wilsonian sonic universe, the presiding spirits of Panda Bear music are Agape and Apollo, brotherly love and the sun god. (The last song, "Benfica" is the Portuguese word for "light" and also Lisbon's soccer team). And like with the Beach Boys, there's not a hint of Eros or the Dionysian in this music, just shining eyes and open hearts. Listening, at times you might think of scouts gathered around a camp fire. There are only a couple of welcome breaks amid all this sweetness and light. Over an extended ache of organ, "Drone" unfurls long suspended canopies of voice that gradually twist in tone. Better still is "Scheherezade", a murky chamber where reverb for once on this album sounds eerie rather than idyllic. Tentative piano chords and sourceless groans of bass-frequency undergird Lennox's huge billowing voice; tinkling cascades of glass snowflakes spiral down intermittently. The song sounds pregnant with fathomless mystery.
It's an odd one, Tomboy: impressive on the first few listens, it grows irritating with repeat play. The analogy that springs to mind is chocolate gateau: lovely on the first day, sickening if you then have eat it every day for the rest of the week. Still, that doesn't quite explain why the exact same mood and techniques that worked sublimely for me on Person Pitch have come to seem oppressive and cloying. Perhaps it comes from my personal feeling that Brian Wilson is one of the most over-rated pop auteurs of the last half-century, his work the place where albino meets castrato. Perhaps it's because it's hard to get involved with these songs because the chorus-of-one vocals and reverb-blurriness render the lyrics virtually indecipherable. Perhaps, finally, it comes from the feeling that the whole "wordliness must keep apart from me", child-man thing has become a kind of spiritual cul-de-sac for Lennox, now in his early thirties (although he looks fourteen in his photos) and a parent with two young daughters. In the past decade nobody has sung "songs of innocence" better than Noah. Now we need to hear Lennox's "songs of experience".
Postscript
via mark richardson's tumblr
according to Anonymous, Lennox,when talking about Tomboy a year or so before it came out, "described Bach as one of his influences for that album" and talked about how his "use of reverb" was " a reflection of high vaulted ceilings and that church-like atmosphere both from his own life and some of the architecture of Lisbon"
Friday, March 25, 2011
THE LEGENDARY PINK DOTS
The Legendary Pink Box
Melody Maker, 1991
By Simon Reynolds
The Legendary Pink Dots were once briefly championed by comrades Stubbs and Oldfield, as "pretentious psychedelia" (a compliment) and "baroque and outlandish... the first whale among 1987' pop minnows". That was about as close as The Legendary Pink Dots got to being known over here, and they dipped back into obscurity. (In Europe, they're a cult band, and have spent most of the decade in exile in Amsterdam.)
The reason isn't hard to fathom. Even now, with late Sixties gross-out thoroughly rehabilitated (to the point of orthodoxy) the LPD's orbit of reference points is at the furthest fringe of the "acceptable". LPD's temerity has been to: a) cite not just Pink Floyd but prog rockers Amon Duul, Mafma and Soft Machine as their influences; b) attempt a rehabilitation of the concept album, compose 21 minute pieces (like "premonition 13", included here). British post-punk pigheadness can't
tolerate such "indulgence", oh no -- not when the pruned concision and blunt urgency of the likes of Snuff and Mega City Four is so much more "topical".
"The Legendary Pink Box" is a triple-disc set of rare and unreleased stuff (or so I presume: it comes with no information). And it's as far-fetched and bound-less
...I could have hoped for. The overall impression is of the fey whimsy of Syd Barrett enveloped in the indiscriminate eclecticism of Faust... (everything can be
music). Nursery rhyme vocals sit primly amid gargoyle-grotesque sound-shapes like dank leakage from the unconscious. Their sound is admirably overcrowded with influences: electronics, chamber music, sampling,punkadelia, dub, Skinny Puppy industrial, muzak, the micro-tonality of composers like Ligeti and Stickhausen, early DAF, and more, are all in there. But the effect is never of clotted versatility or ostentatious virtuosity, but rather of expanse, of deranging space.
Edward ka-Spel's lyrcs suggest melancholia, withdrawl, delirium (one song is called "Thursday Night Fever"). More often they're a liquefaction of language: like
Wire, all assonance, alliteration, dotty thymes andpurple puns. A lexical labyrinth. Psychedelia as being lost in the derelict mansion of your own mind.
Ignore your better judgment, and investigate.
THE LEGENDARY PINK DOTS interview
Melody Maker, 1991?
by Simon Reynolds
In an Indian restaurant in west Berlin, The Legendary Pink Dots celebrate another
successful date on their latest tour of Europe. On the Continent, The Legendary Pink Dots play to rapturous crowds ranging from healthy-sized to huge. In the past decade, they've released 11 albums through Play it Again Sam, and established themselves as a cult band in Europe and North America.
But, in their native Britain, The Legendary Pink Dots remain neglected. Unjustly, maybe, but not without reason. The Dots' music--a gaudy and avant-garde music-- is too rich a diet to be stomached by the anorexic sensibilites of the British
"alternative" scene. Even the most unleashed exponents of far-out noise overload-- Spacemen 3, Loop- remain hidebound by a hidden agenda of sonic strictures.
It's this climate (where bands still adhere to the post-punk edict that "less is more", kowtow to a knee-jerk dread of the word hippy) that originally drove The Legendary Pink Dots into exile in Amsterdam some five years ago. Despite all the
loosening up of the past three years, the Brits flinch from the sheer expanse of the Pink Dots and their ilk.
Lead Dot, Edward Ka-Spel neglects his chicken tikka to expound upon the whys and wherefores of his band. His phrase for the Legendary Pink DOts's sound-and-vision is the "terminal kaleidoscope".
"If you look at history, the one thing that's certian is that events are accelerating. Things are changing faster and faster, like a ball rolling down a mountain. Our idea is that if things continue to accelerate at this rate, eventually we'll reach overload, cataclysm. We want to provide the relevant soundtrack to this process. Our sound is like this immense cocktail, saturated with all these elements of past music jumbled up with the absolutely modern, like sampling and synthetics.
"But we aren't pessimistic about this impending cataclysm. We belive that we're living through the most significant time in the history of the planet, and we should cherish the things we see and feel in these most exciting times. That's why our
catchphrase is "Sing while you may!" And that's why our new album's called "The Crushed Velvet Apocalypse". Apocalypse can mean simply change. Its like the death card in the Tarot: it doesn't mean death, it means drastic change.
"I don't know if these changes are gonna be for the good or the bad. I don't pretend to be any kind of seer or visionary. I just know that all kinds of philosophies,like Nostradamus, are pointing to the 30 years up to the year 2000 as being a time of great transition. Some point towards a Golden Age after it.
"But there's beauty even in the darkest things. The reason why sunsets are so beautiful these days is because of all the pollution. If you look at a river
that's been chocked with oil, it "is" beautiful. It's the strange twist in the tale. And I try to take all these things that are happening today, and take them to
their ultimate. I don't believe in the annihilation of mankind, but I do believe in mutation."
Through 10 years, 11 albums and a continually fluctuating line-up, the creative core of the Pink Dots has remained Ka-Spel and Phil Knight. The pair found each other in the mid-Seventies, through a shared love of Krautrock groups like Can and Faust. If the Pink Dots are "psychedelia" then it's more in terms of this European tradition of boundary-dissolving expansionism,than the Barrett/Ayers school of Anglo whimsy or American wig-out.
"In Britain, psychedelia is totally linked with nostalgia, and it shouldn't be. Psychedelia's about exploration,discovering new colours. It is not about looking back 20 years. That's as irrelevant as cabaret bands playing Elvis covers. Psychedelis's always got to go "further".
"I never like to talk of influences, cos they tend to be subliminal rather than overt. But to be honest, those German groups are what I still listen to the most,
because they just went so "far". So few bands go that far. A band like Nurse With Wound, who I really like, maybe go that far out. But I can't think of too many
modern bands that try something like that, that actually deranges.
"The beauty of those groups is that Can sounded nothing like Faust, who sounded nothing like Amon Duul, who sounded nothing like Ashra Temple... THe diversity
really puts you in all these different "worlds". It's something else! And that's why, with our music, I can't really say where it's going to go next, because there
are no boundaries. The one thing I can assure you is that it will never be rock'n'roll. I can't stand rock'n'roll.I'm allergic to it.
"If you take the German bands as having no traditional roots in rock'n'roll or R&B, as having roots more in Stockhausen than in Chuck Berry, than we follow on from
that, and are even more free-floating and rootless. I listen to stuff like Stockhausen, Penderecki, Xenakis, Ligeti, Pierre Henry, all that "avant-garde" stuff. But not from an intellectual point of view, but just to bathe in all the sounds and noises. It's totally exciting.
"We always dedicate albums to deviants, and I tend to like deviant music. Anyone who's a character, does something completely wilful and doesn't give a damn about
what other people think. There are a lot of people out there who do that, but they tend to get buried under the carpet."
Edward Ka-Spel is obsessive. He lives for music: in the first year of squatting in Amsterdam he went without food in order to plough all his slim resources into the Dots,and even his girlfriend has difficulty preventing him from spending his food money on obscure albums of experimental music. And Ka-Spel attracts obsessives. Fanzine writers pen lengthy treatises interpreting the densely woven tapestry of his lyrics (whose themes criss-cross from album to album to form an ongoing myth-world). Others engage with the music in a rather more negative fashion.
"There's a lot of humour in the music, but a lot of people home in on the disturbing side. It's got really disturbing on this tour. People have come to hate me. A guy in Oslo kept trying to assault me. I got a letter from another guy who basically blamed me for all his problems. He'd bought all the records, and he was basically accusing me of sending him over the edge."
A lot of Pink Dot's music does deal with madness and schizophrenia. One album, "Asylum"--so titled because it's "a place to escape to, and a place to escape from", plays with the idea of madness as a refuge from an intolerable world. Ka-Spel himself went through a period of psychiatric treatment as a child.
"I was a kind of guinea pig. They discovered that I had an IQ of 160 when I was three. This made me interesting to the people at Great Ormond Street hospital. They made me draw all these pictures. I used to have horrendous nightmares up
till I was 10. It caused a certain isolation for me as a child. It was particularly difficult cos I grew up in East London, which is not the best place to be when your're different."
Does it annoy you that Britain is one of the few places to be indifferent to the Legendary Dots?
"It hurts a lot. More than any coast-to-coast American tours, or playing to huge crowds in Pairs-- both of which we've done--what I'd really like to do is play in England,and prove something. It's like I've always had a bad deal in England. Right through my school years I had a really hard time. Then I started doing what I really wanted and believed in, and once again England gave me the cold shoulder. We do have a real drive to go back there, and say "See what you've been missing!"
THE LEGENDARY PINK DOTS
The Loft, Berlin
Melody Maker, 1991?
by Simon Reynolds
The Legendary Pink Dots have dwelt in self-imposed exile in Holland for the past six years. In Europe, they're a cult, able to make a living through frequent touring
and prodigious vinyl output. In Britain, they remain almost completely unknown, their musical premises too sprawling for the narrow sights of the British "alternative" scene. The LPD are committed to English and European psychedelia as an ongoing realm of sonic expansionism, whereas current British acid rock revisionism
conceives of psychedelia as; A) primarily American; B) wholly guitar-based; and C) firmly fixed in a long-lost glorious past. Add to this singer Edward Ka-Spel's
art-rock influenced sense of shamanic theater, and his penchant for fabulism, and you have a near insurmountable set of reasons why the British won't be clasping the Dots to their collective bosom in the immediate future.
Onstage, Ka-Spel has something of the hunched, obsessive air of a 19th century inventor. In Europe, he is regarded by many as a seer, and not without reason. The title of the latest, brilliant Dots LP "The Crushed Velvet Apocalypse" evokes his vision that the end of the world is gonna be pretty darn colourful and we're fortunate to be living through it. Several LPD songs are garishly vivid sound-
pictures of a future world rendered unnaturally beautiful by pollution, Ka-Spel's lyrics teeming with images of "menstrual lakes/Rainbow rivers and crippled dandelions".Tracks like "Hellsville" and "Helloween" lie somewhere between Skinny Puppy and Nick Cave of "Mutiny In Heaven" and "Saint Huck".
The legendary Pink Dots are "maximalists", on a quest for new colours. Barrett is often cited, but a more relevant reference point is Krautrock expansionism of Can and Faust. The LPS use sampling to update/facilitate those groups techniques (incorporation of found or "real" sound, noise-mutation, etc.). At times their music can be like an animated Bosch or Durer painting of Armageddon; elsewhere
(as with "Green Gang", which dares to employ sitar, tabla, treated woodwind instruments, and WINS), they create a gorgeously serene Taj Mahal of sound. The single,"Princess Coldheart", is Soft Cell meets Brothers Grimm; its B-side, "The Pleasure Palace", a circus of death, all greasepaint and grotesquerie.
German youth haul The Legendary Pink Dots on for four encores. Blighty's loss is Europe's gain. But homecoming dates are tentatively planned for late spring. Cast your blinkers aside, and investigate.
this reish is for Carl the mighty Impostume
The Legendary Pink Box
Melody Maker, 1991
By Simon Reynolds
The Legendary Pink Dots were once briefly championed by comrades Stubbs and Oldfield, as "pretentious psychedelia" (a compliment) and "baroque and outlandish... the first whale among 1987' pop minnows". That was about as close as The Legendary Pink Dots got to being known over here, and they dipped back into obscurity. (In Europe, they're a cult band, and have spent most of the decade in exile in Amsterdam.)
The reason isn't hard to fathom. Even now, with late Sixties gross-out thoroughly rehabilitated (to the point of orthodoxy) the LPD's orbit of reference points is at the furthest fringe of the "acceptable". LPD's temerity has been to: a) cite not just Pink Floyd but prog rockers Amon Duul, Mafma and Soft Machine as their influences; b) attempt a rehabilitation of the concept album, compose 21 minute pieces (like "premonition 13", included here). British post-punk pigheadness can't
tolerate such "indulgence", oh no -- not when the pruned concision and blunt urgency of the likes of Snuff and Mega City Four is so much more "topical".
"The Legendary Pink Box" is a triple-disc set of rare and unreleased stuff (or so I presume: it comes with no information). And it's as far-fetched and bound-less
...I could have hoped for. The overall impression is of the fey whimsy of Syd Barrett enveloped in the indiscriminate eclecticism of Faust... (everything can be
music). Nursery rhyme vocals sit primly amid gargoyle-grotesque sound-shapes like dank leakage from the unconscious. Their sound is admirably overcrowded with influences: electronics, chamber music, sampling,punkadelia, dub, Skinny Puppy industrial, muzak, the micro-tonality of composers like Ligeti and Stickhausen, early DAF, and more, are all in there. But the effect is never of clotted versatility or ostentatious virtuosity, but rather of expanse, of deranging space.
Edward ka-Spel's lyrcs suggest melancholia, withdrawl, delirium (one song is called "Thursday Night Fever"). More often they're a liquefaction of language: like
Wire, all assonance, alliteration, dotty thymes andpurple puns. A lexical labyrinth. Psychedelia as being lost in the derelict mansion of your own mind.
Ignore your better judgment, and investigate.
THE LEGENDARY PINK DOTS interview
Melody Maker, 1991?
by Simon Reynolds
In an Indian restaurant in west Berlin, The Legendary Pink Dots celebrate another
successful date on their latest tour of Europe. On the Continent, The Legendary Pink Dots play to rapturous crowds ranging from healthy-sized to huge. In the past decade, they've released 11 albums through Play it Again Sam, and established themselves as a cult band in Europe and North America.
But, in their native Britain, The Legendary Pink Dots remain neglected. Unjustly, maybe, but not without reason. The Dots' music--a gaudy and avant-garde music-- is too rich a diet to be stomached by the anorexic sensibilites of the British
"alternative" scene. Even the most unleashed exponents of far-out noise overload-- Spacemen 3, Loop- remain hidebound by a hidden agenda of sonic strictures.
It's this climate (where bands still adhere to the post-punk edict that "less is more", kowtow to a knee-jerk dread of the word hippy) that originally drove The Legendary Pink Dots into exile in Amsterdam some five years ago. Despite all the
loosening up of the past three years, the Brits flinch from the sheer expanse of the Pink Dots and their ilk.
Lead Dot, Edward Ka-Spel neglects his chicken tikka to expound upon the whys and wherefores of his band. His phrase for the Legendary Pink DOts's sound-and-vision is the "terminal kaleidoscope".
"If you look at history, the one thing that's certian is that events are accelerating. Things are changing faster and faster, like a ball rolling down a mountain. Our idea is that if things continue to accelerate at this rate, eventually we'll reach overload, cataclysm. We want to provide the relevant soundtrack to this process. Our sound is like this immense cocktail, saturated with all these elements of past music jumbled up with the absolutely modern, like sampling and synthetics.
"But we aren't pessimistic about this impending cataclysm. We belive that we're living through the most significant time in the history of the planet, and we should cherish the things we see and feel in these most exciting times. That's why our
catchphrase is "Sing while you may!" And that's why our new album's called "The Crushed Velvet Apocalypse". Apocalypse can mean simply change. Its like the death card in the Tarot: it doesn't mean death, it means drastic change.
"I don't know if these changes are gonna be for the good or the bad. I don't pretend to be any kind of seer or visionary. I just know that all kinds of philosophies,like Nostradamus, are pointing to the 30 years up to the year 2000 as being a time of great transition. Some point towards a Golden Age after it.
"But there's beauty even in the darkest things. The reason why sunsets are so beautiful these days is because of all the pollution. If you look at a river
that's been chocked with oil, it "is" beautiful. It's the strange twist in the tale. And I try to take all these things that are happening today, and take them to
their ultimate. I don't believe in the annihilation of mankind, but I do believe in mutation."
Through 10 years, 11 albums and a continually fluctuating line-up, the creative core of the Pink Dots has remained Ka-Spel and Phil Knight. The pair found each other in the mid-Seventies, through a shared love of Krautrock groups like Can and Faust. If the Pink Dots are "psychedelia" then it's more in terms of this European tradition of boundary-dissolving expansionism,than the Barrett/Ayers school of Anglo whimsy or American wig-out.
"In Britain, psychedelia is totally linked with nostalgia, and it shouldn't be. Psychedelia's about exploration,discovering new colours. It is not about looking back 20 years. That's as irrelevant as cabaret bands playing Elvis covers. Psychedelis's always got to go "further".
"I never like to talk of influences, cos they tend to be subliminal rather than overt. But to be honest, those German groups are what I still listen to the most,
because they just went so "far". So few bands go that far. A band like Nurse With Wound, who I really like, maybe go that far out. But I can't think of too many
modern bands that try something like that, that actually deranges.
"The beauty of those groups is that Can sounded nothing like Faust, who sounded nothing like Amon Duul, who sounded nothing like Ashra Temple... THe diversity
really puts you in all these different "worlds". It's something else! And that's why, with our music, I can't really say where it's going to go next, because there
are no boundaries. The one thing I can assure you is that it will never be rock'n'roll. I can't stand rock'n'roll.I'm allergic to it.
"If you take the German bands as having no traditional roots in rock'n'roll or R&B, as having roots more in Stockhausen than in Chuck Berry, than we follow on from
that, and are even more free-floating and rootless. I listen to stuff like Stockhausen, Penderecki, Xenakis, Ligeti, Pierre Henry, all that "avant-garde" stuff. But not from an intellectual point of view, but just to bathe in all the sounds and noises. It's totally exciting.
"We always dedicate albums to deviants, and I tend to like deviant music. Anyone who's a character, does something completely wilful and doesn't give a damn about
what other people think. There are a lot of people out there who do that, but they tend to get buried under the carpet."
Edward Ka-Spel is obsessive. He lives for music: in the first year of squatting in Amsterdam he went without food in order to plough all his slim resources into the Dots,and even his girlfriend has difficulty preventing him from spending his food money on obscure albums of experimental music. And Ka-Spel attracts obsessives. Fanzine writers pen lengthy treatises interpreting the densely woven tapestry of his lyrics (whose themes criss-cross from album to album to form an ongoing myth-world). Others engage with the music in a rather more negative fashion.
"There's a lot of humour in the music, but a lot of people home in on the disturbing side. It's got really disturbing on this tour. People have come to hate me. A guy in Oslo kept trying to assault me. I got a letter from another guy who basically blamed me for all his problems. He'd bought all the records, and he was basically accusing me of sending him over the edge."
A lot of Pink Dot's music does deal with madness and schizophrenia. One album, "Asylum"--so titled because it's "a place to escape to, and a place to escape from", plays with the idea of madness as a refuge from an intolerable world. Ka-Spel himself went through a period of psychiatric treatment as a child.
"I was a kind of guinea pig. They discovered that I had an IQ of 160 when I was three. This made me interesting to the people at Great Ormond Street hospital. They made me draw all these pictures. I used to have horrendous nightmares up
till I was 10. It caused a certain isolation for me as a child. It was particularly difficult cos I grew up in East London, which is not the best place to be when your're different."
Does it annoy you that Britain is one of the few places to be indifferent to the Legendary Dots?
"It hurts a lot. More than any coast-to-coast American tours, or playing to huge crowds in Pairs-- both of which we've done--what I'd really like to do is play in England,and prove something. It's like I've always had a bad deal in England. Right through my school years I had a really hard time. Then I started doing what I really wanted and believed in, and once again England gave me the cold shoulder. We do have a real drive to go back there, and say "See what you've been missing!"
THE LEGENDARY PINK DOTS
The Loft, Berlin
Melody Maker, 1991?
by Simon Reynolds
The Legendary Pink Dots have dwelt in self-imposed exile in Holland for the past six years. In Europe, they're a cult, able to make a living through frequent touring
and prodigious vinyl output. In Britain, they remain almost completely unknown, their musical premises too sprawling for the narrow sights of the British "alternative" scene. The LPD are committed to English and European psychedelia as an ongoing realm of sonic expansionism, whereas current British acid rock revisionism
conceives of psychedelia as; A) primarily American; B) wholly guitar-based; and C) firmly fixed in a long-lost glorious past. Add to this singer Edward Ka-Spel's
art-rock influenced sense of shamanic theater, and his penchant for fabulism, and you have a near insurmountable set of reasons why the British won't be clasping the Dots to their collective bosom in the immediate future.
Onstage, Ka-Spel has something of the hunched, obsessive air of a 19th century inventor. In Europe, he is regarded by many as a seer, and not without reason. The title of the latest, brilliant Dots LP "The Crushed Velvet Apocalypse" evokes his vision that the end of the world is gonna be pretty darn colourful and we're fortunate to be living through it. Several LPD songs are garishly vivid sound-
pictures of a future world rendered unnaturally beautiful by pollution, Ka-Spel's lyrics teeming with images of "menstrual lakes/Rainbow rivers and crippled dandelions".Tracks like "Hellsville" and "Helloween" lie somewhere between Skinny Puppy and Nick Cave of "Mutiny In Heaven" and "Saint Huck".
The legendary Pink Dots are "maximalists", on a quest for new colours. Barrett is often cited, but a more relevant reference point is Krautrock expansionism of Can and Faust. The LPS use sampling to update/facilitate those groups techniques (incorporation of found or "real" sound, noise-mutation, etc.). At times their music can be like an animated Bosch or Durer painting of Armageddon; elsewhere
(as with "Green Gang", which dares to employ sitar, tabla, treated woodwind instruments, and WINS), they create a gorgeously serene Taj Mahal of sound. The single,"Princess Coldheart", is Soft Cell meets Brothers Grimm; its B-side, "The Pleasure Palace", a circus of death, all greasepaint and grotesquerie.
German youth haul The Legendary Pink Dots on for four encores. Blighty's loss is Europe's gain. But homecoming dates are tentatively planned for late spring. Cast your blinkers aside, and investigate.
this reish is for Carl the mighty Impostume
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