Yoko Ono

vintage profile of Yoko Ono by Joy Press, a/k/a the missus

Avant-Funk - A Certain Ratio and 23 Skidoo

A CERTAIN RATIO

The Graveyard and the Ballroom

To Each...

Sextet

The Old and The New

reviewed for The Wire, circa 1995

A CERTAIN RATIO were one of those bands who seem monstrously significant at the time, but then fade away, leaving little in the way of legacy and nary a trace in the folk-memory. There was a lot of it about in the post-punk 'anti-rockist' era (see also The Pop Group, Gang Of Four, Magazine). All this makes it both touching and puzzling that Creation, that most rockist of labels, was sufficiently fond of ACR to reissue their Factory oeuvre.

Perhaps one indicator of the sheer speed with which ACR's moment was eclipsed (after New Pop, their angst-funk seemed like no fun) is the fact that the only thing of theirs I ever acquired is 1979's "The Graveyard and The Ballroom". Originally a cassette-only release in a nifty translucent green plastic pouch, it's still the most appealing document of ACR's peculiar project: draining all the joy, sexuality and

ecstatic release out of black dance pop, transforming funk into a grimly addictive rhythmic metaphor for control and obsession. Factory's house producer Martin Hannett lent his deathly-dry touch to the 'Graveyard' tracks, his trademark vaulted sound turning the discotheque into a mausoleum. It's perfect for ACR's skeletal garage funk (on the sick-joke 'Crippled Child' they actually sound like a sub-'Nuggets' '60s punk band). Musically primitivist, maybe, but ACR were far from ignorant: "Do The Du" refers to Isidore Ducasse, a.k.a. Lautreamont, author of the awesome proto-surrealist prose-poem "Maldoror".

The live "Ballroom" side sounds more full-bodied and texturally brimming (despite the lo-fi, virtually hand-held sound quality, which makes a mockery of the CD reissue format). On "The Fox", "Oceans" and "The Choir", the miasma of echoed falsetto, background whispers and sub-Miles trumpet-in-fog is nicely mesmeric, kinda like Joy Division getting on the good foot. (Mid-song Simon Topping piss-takes Ian Curtis with a burst of "I was waiting for a guy to come and take me by the hand").

"Ballroom" was probably as good as ACR got. Perhaps if they'd hooked up with Grace Jones to cover Talking Heads' "Houses In Motion", as was once mooted, they'd have injected some soul or at least personality into their ghost-funk. As it is, the official studio debut "To Each..." (1981) is as obtuse and intransitive as its title. Hannett shrouds every instrument with gauzy condensation, so that only the superior rhythm section (dig Donald Johnson's restless hi-hat and crisp snare-cracks!) keeps the fog of avant-funk anemia moving. "Sextet" (1981) is marginally less muffled-sounding, but this is still disco for dead souls. Bustling drum and bass grooves are wreathed in wisps of Martha Tilson's affectless vocal alienation, while the horns sound winded and wan, like an existentialist Beggar & Co. Still "Knife Slits Water" is dankly compelling, urgent slap-bass slicing through aqueous ambience.

"The Old and The New", a 1985 compilation that swept up some 12 inch semi-precious gems, is probably your second-best bet after "Graveyard". The cold-fever fatback shuffle and lunar gyrations of "Flight", with its distant jazz-funk whistles (ghosts of Caister weekenders?) still sounds fab, as does the dessicated cover of "Shack Up". And "Thin Boys", a Hannett-produced early track,is a dirge-in-a-catacomb worthy of US hardcore band Flipper, with comically grave lines like "clinging to each other like magnetised leeches". Tres 1979.

By the 1983 Simon Topping had departed (to study Latin percussion in New York, if memory serves), resurfacing at decade's end as a mainstay of house group T-Coy and the De-Construction label, just at the point when avant-funk ideas were filtering into popular consciousness via acid house. With Donald Johnson at the helm, ACR honed their jazz-funk chops and turned into Level 42.

23 SKIDOO

Seven Songs

(Ronin)

Uncut, 2001

by Simon Reynolds

Shame there's no good genre term sufficiently evocative and open-ended for the kind of music 23 Skidoo made. "Avant-funk" is too ugly, "death disco"  is melodramatic and PiL-specific, "industrial"'s been tarnished by its latterday exponents.  Whatever.  Skidoo were prime explorers of a sonic terrain that opened up in punk's aftermath, when people were looking for a forward path to take them as far from the reek of rock's corpse as possible. Funk, it was decided, was the new music of danger. Based on a quite small range of instances---the madness latent in James Brown's most frenzied polyrhythms, the voodoo grooves of  Tago Mago and Davis's On The Corner, Sly Stone's darker moments, Fela Kuti (Africa's JB), Last Poets--the idea of funk as a sinister energy emerged: rhythm as enslavement, as addiction, as possession. Mix in ideas borrowed from vanguard sci-fi authors Ballard & Burrough (sounds like a confectioners!) and paranoid vibes from Seventies auteur movies like Pakula's Klute and Coppolla's The Conversation, and voila, you've got the future. 

Proteges of Genesis P. Orridge (who let them rehearse at his Death Factory space), 23 Skidoo bridged avant-funk's first-wave (Pop Group, Cabs, A Certain Ratio) and lesser second-wave (Hula, Chakk, Shriekback, 400 Blows). Their records have been out-of-print for years, but Skidoo have enjoyed a spectral presence in dance culture: the bassline to their  single "Coup" was copied note-for-note by The Chemicals on "Block Rockin' Beats"; early darkside jungle circa 1993 was often bizarrely Skidoo-like, despite the absence of any direct lineage; the group's ethnological forgeries and tape-looped exotica pre-echoed the world music samplings of your Loop Gurus.

This sort of talk--precursors, legacies, inheritors, ahead-of-their-time, etc--is pretty academic, though: the real question is, why listen now? Because 1981's Seven Songs especially still sounds bloodcurdlingly intense. A malevolent tumble of hand-percussion, guitar feedback, and gutteral chants, opener "Kundalini" is as much Birthday Party as Gap Band, while the seething slap-bass and brittle-nerved rhythm guitar of "Vegas El Bandito" is offset by a lugubrious wail of lost-in-endless-fog trumpet. The track immediately cuts into "Mary's Operation", dropping everything but the dank, ailing Miles-like trumpet,  multi-tracked and mingled with tape-loop drones. This resulting gloomscape of wilted, billowing sound in turn devolves into  "Lockgroove", a roiling cosmic cistern. "New Testament" is dying machinery, a drum track massively slowed down and elongated, its rapid percussive events blossoming into pendulous cymbal-smashes and smeared snares. "IY" showcases Skidoo's strength (percussion) and  weakness (vocals), but "Porno Bass" is just ill: booming bassdrones reverberate in a cavernous murk, while Hitler fan Unity Mitford, plucked from some radio interview, rails against  pop music for displacing "manly" activities like athletics, sexually hyperstimulating da youth, and generally being "the sign of a degenerating race". When the rancid old nutcase opines that young people's  "ears become degraded by wrong style and senseless reiteration", Skidoo mischievously double-loop the word "reiteration". 

Seven Songs's closer "Quiet Pillage" references exotica king Martin Denny (whose Polynesian-flavored  "Quiet Village" was a massive Fifties hit) but evokes an Apocalypse Now: The Day After vibe of humid disquiet. The track's plinky metallic chimes look ahead to  1984's Urban Gamelan,  made after an expedition to Indonesia.  "GIFU" is basically an alternate mix of "Coup", Skidoo's  most straightforwardly funky single, with a Viet-Cong war-cry "G.I., fuck you" added for anti-imperialist edge, but most of the album is precisely what the title promises: gamelan-influenced drumstrumentals, all tuned percussion, hand-cymbals, and gongs. bals, gongs, and woodblocks. Well-produced compared with the hastily executed debut, Urban Gamelan often teeters on the thin line between minimal and underwritten. Its gently ominous atmosphere--space age bachelor padded cell music--grows on you, but it lacks the turbulence and sheer de-civilising ferocity of Seven Songs.

                                                                                                                               

J Dilla

THE CULT OF DILLA
June 16th 2009, The Guardian


by Simon Reynolds

Record stores are dying in my neighbourhood, the East Village of New York. The only ones that are hanging in there, even prospering, belong to a particular type:  boutiques that offer a tidied-up version of the crate-digging experience, without the dust and the graft, the knees-bent flicking through musty cardboard boxes in roach-infested basements.  Smart-looking and well-organised, these stores have nice-looking racks made of unvarnished wood, while their wares--funk and soul, bebop and fusion, soundtracks and library music--tend to be selective and pricey.  As well as selling source vinyl for the  breaks and samples prized by deejays and producers, these stores also stock vintage rap 12 inches and current underground hip hop (always on vinyl, of course). Up by the counter, they'll have copies of Wax Poetics on sale.

Several years ago I was in one of these local shops, just about to clap headphones on my head and sift through an armful of vinyl, when some wondrous music streamed out of the store's sound system. All rippling ribbons of synth and quiet storm diva murmuring and gasps, it was the most swooningly cosmic thing I'd heard in a small eternity. As I headed down the aisle to the back of the store where the deejay lurked, the thought popped into my head: "p'raps this is Dilla?" 

I don't know why, really, since I only had a vague idea of who he was, having read about his recent death and gleaned that he was this big deal cult producer.  J Dilla, a/k/a Jaydee, a/k/a James Dewitt Yancey, is someone I had "slept on" (to use the American expression).   To be honest, I avoid that whole backpacker rap/Premier-is-God/Wax Poetics area.  (In fact I only go to these crate-digger boutiques because they sometimes have Sixties and Seventies rock and weird avant-garde stuff). I'm one of those who believe that the sector that kept rap vital these last dozen years wasn't the underground but that cusp zone between "the streets" and commercial mainstream: Cash Money, Ruff Ryders, Ludacris, Lil Jon. Mostly Dirty South, in other words: hip hop that isn't encumbered by crippling reverence towards its old skool past. 

Still, sometimes as a critic you just absorb a sense of the musical landscape through osmosis and sure enough when I asked the deejay what record he was playing, he reluctantly (the attitude, typical for this kind of store, seemed to be "if you need to ask, you're not someone who needs to know") showed me the instrumentals version of Dilla's posthumous album The Shining.

In the next week I got hold of as much Dilla as I could:  stuff he'd done with his group Slum Village and in collaboration with Madlib, solo records like Donuts, Ruff Draft, Welcome To Detroit, and, naturally The Shining (where I discovered that the track that blew my mind in the store was called "Won't Do"). 

As a body of work, though, it seemed… variable. For every "Won't Do" or similar gem like the halcyon summer-soul-breeze "So Far To Go"  (also on The Shining) there'd be a bunch of backpacker-friendly beats with a languid MC rapping on top.  Still cultists love fragmentary, scattered bodies of work, they enjoy nothing more than chasing down obscure remixes and impossible-to-find mixtapes.  

And sure enough, in the ensuing years, the cult of Dilla has grown ever bigger. An entire wave of music has come through influenced by his trademark style, the most prominent exponents being Flying Lotus, a/k/a Californian experimental hip hop producer Steven Ellison, who recorded the Dilla homage "Fall In Love",  and SA-RA Creative Partners, who collaborated with Dilla on the track "Thrilla" and whose splendid new album Nuclear Evolution: The Age of Love is out soon.  

There's also a burgeoning micro-industry of posthumous product.  Rapster/!K7 have issued two Dillanthology compilations of his productions and remixes for other artists, the second of which is out this month. As is the all-new album Jay Stay Paid, a selection of basement tapes sequenced and spruced up by his mother Maureen Yancey with help from Dilla's hero Pete Rock (like Premier, one of those  cult producers that underground rap types drool over).  As far as I can tell, Jay Stay Paid is the first time that a hip hop beat-maker has gotten the kind of life-after-death treatment afforded superstar rappers like Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G. You even get people wearing T-shirts that say "J Dilla Changed My Life".

So what made Dilla special?  If you could break his style down into three main components, they'd be his way with a vocal sample, his way with a beat, and his way with synths.  

As an example of the first, let's look at a really old track that's on the first volume of Dillanthology:  "The Light" by Common. I loved this when it came out in 2000 but I'd never realized that Dilla produced it until I got Dillanthology.  "The Light" is pretty much the only Common tune I've ever cared for and such was my antipathy to the rapper that for a long while I considered the track a kind of sample-delivery machine: you wait patiently through the verses for the gorgeous, glistening chorus, which is derived from "Open Your Eyes" by Bobby Caldwell, a white-but-sounds-black singer who hit big in early Eighties America with a similar "rock 'n' soul" sound to Hall & Oates. 

If you compare the original song (and do check out Caldwell's hat while you're about it) with "The Light" you can clearly see  Dilla's artistry: he's taken an already lovely, if slightly schmaltzy song and created another song out of it.  "Open Your Eyes" is a guy telling a woman to stop pining for her lost lover, because what she needs is right here in front of her. Combining different bits of the chorus into a new chorus, Dilla extracts from the original song a more mystical statement about L.O.V.E. that fits Common's lyric (which I grew to find, um, touching) like a glove.   The most extraordinary, steal-your-breath part of "The Light" comes at the end where Dilla takes vocal fragments from various points in the song--a line here, a curl of grace notes there-- and weaves them into what sounds like a stretch of spontaneous soul-singer extemporizing. It's as though Caldwell is right there in the studio with Dilla and Common, scatting over the beat.

Talking of beats: Dilla's signature, widely forged at the moment, is what tech-heads call unquantized drums.  Quantization is a procedure that makes rhythms perfectly regular, grooves superhumanly tight.  The gist of what Dilla did (and I invite comments box experts to fill in the gaps in excruciating technical detail) is to avoid quantizing and go for a looser, human feel, fitful and fallible, sometimes pushing "off-beat" to the edge of plain wrong.  Hip hop headz talk of Dilla as the catalyst for "the return of the boom-bap"  ,  a phrase originally from  KRS-One's  1993 album "Return of the Boom Bap" . 

Sometimes rendered boom-boom-bap, it's a phonetic evocation of hip hop's classic drum pattern.  The booms are the kicks, the bap is the snare, and the combination is that loping midtempo groove that tugs at your neck and your head, not so much at your hips or your feet.  As it has developed in underground rap circles these past fifteen years, boom-bap has come to refer to hip hop for nodders and smokers.  To backpackers it's the very pulse of life itself, but to these ears, boom-bap strikes me as being as capable of being blandly formulaic as any other kind of beat.  Dilla did his fair share of perfunctorily functional grooves but at his most creative he deconstructed the rhythm, placing the booms and baps, hi hats and claps, in an off relationship to each other, clustered too close or coming in too late, but always retaining a ghostly relationship to hip hop feel.

And finally the synths, which burble and twitter through a lot of Dilla tracks (see "On Stilts,"  "Spacecowboy vs. Bobble Head" and "Dilla Bot Vs. The Hybrid,"  highlights of Jay Stay Paid) , although it's often hard to tell if they are sampled off some obscure record or played on a vintage analog keyboard.  Even more than the cut-up "vocal science" and the stumbling beats, this is one of the most widely imitated aspects of Dilla's style, especially within that amorphous genre-not-genre known as Wonky.  A musician friend of mine, Matthew Ingram (check out his debut album as Woebot ) tells me this has a lot to do with the rise of "soft synths," which have been embraced by producers in lots of different genres.  Simplifying the technicalities, what this means is that producers can have the virtual equivalent of an analogue synthesizer inside their digital audio workstations.  This enables them to simulate the hands-on fun of knob-twiddling and moving sliders that you get with an antique synthesiser and which generates all those supercool retro-futurist wibbles and wooshes.  "Soft synths aren’t always emulations of analogue synths," says Ingram. "But analog synth emulators are increasingly popular at the moment."  And they're one reason Dilla is such a spectral (omni)presence across the left-field music landscape of the late Noughties.