When You Wake You're Still In A Nightmare 

a.k.a Where the Fuck are My Bloody Valentine? 

Alternative Press, October 1995

by Simon Reynolds 

During the almost FOUR years since "Loveless", every fan must surely have wondered: "What the FUCK has My Bloody Valentine been up to?!?"

Rewind to mid-1992: MBV parts acrimoniously with Creation, largely because of the 3 years and small fortune the band spent making  'Loveless'. By October, the band has signed to Island and immediately embarks upon the daunting task of following up one of the most critically praised and influential albums of the last decade.

"In retrospect, we had", says singer/guitarist/aesthetic fuehrer Kevin Shields, "a totally over-ambitious plan to find a premises, build our own studio, and get the record out by July 1993. We'd just completed the 10 month 'Loveless' tour, and we'd all this nervous energy. Not sleeping a lot puts me in a manic state."

Spring 1993, and it was all going according to plan. The studio was completed. But just as MBV was about to commence  recording, it discovered the desk had the technological equivalent to AIDS. " It took a whole year, until May '94, before we had a new desk sorted and could start again. By then we'd lost all the momentum. The fun side of  building a studio, thinking we could break the pattern of us doing things over a really long period, had gone."

Surprisingly, MBV's record companies---Island in Britain, Sire in the USA---were understanding. "Island have been bailing us out continually, they've already advanced us more money than they were contracted to. You rarely hear of stories of bands being treated so well. In a way I've done a lot more harm to the industry than vice versa!," Kevin notes  wryly.

Nonetheless, by Christmas '94, MBV was broke again. In order to economise, the members had been obliged to move into the South London house which contained their studio, and were living as an unhappy commune.  Isolated from the record companies, MBV was reduced to selling off unwanted gear accumulated during the decade of the band's existence. All this financial pressure, plus the band's gruelling aesthetic deadlock,  combined to trigger an existensial crisis for Shields, what he describes as a "meltdown".

"The things I experienced were quite unreal. I've been totally out there, I can honestly say I've experienced everything Aldous Huxley wrote about in 'The Doors of Perception'." Drugs--specifically marijuana---played their part. Shields says a book called 'Hypnagogia' "literally saved me and made me feel sane. Hypnagogia is the term for that state just before sleep where you have brief surreal flashes of scenes, almost like cartoons".  Reading the book, Shields found an explanation for his insomniac habits and aesthetic preoccupations."The author makes parallels between hypnagogia and all the other extremes of the human mind, mystical and drugged. Basically, there's a door to another type of consciousness and it's open all the time. Smoking grass, especially with the stronger THC content these days, makes you semi-hallucinatory, but mainly it simply enables you to stay awake when you're actually on the verge of dropping off."

As for the band's musical difficulties, they were complicated. Coming off the 'Loveless' tour, Shields wanted to create something with the same impact and immensity as the notorious 10 minute, one chord 'middle eight' of  'You Made Me Realise' which climaxed every gig. He also wanted to distance MBV from its shoegazer imitators, who'd tried to emulate the band's drone-swarm sound using methods (flangers, chorus pedals etc) that Shields despised as facile. "I was coming up with loads of songs, unusually complicated melodies---I have about 10 hours worth now-- but few of them were the sort of songs that facilitate the ideas I wanted to explore."

For the real problem was that MBV was, out of habit, making one kind of music but getting off on something totally different: jungle, the fusion of hip hop, dub, ragga and techno that has since emerged from London's underground to become the most happening UK scene since acid house. Precocious as ever, Shields and drummer Colm O'Ciosig were tuning into South London pirate radio stations in early 1993 and getting their minds blown.

"When I first listened to jungle, it seemed full of possiblities in a way I hadn't encountered since hip hop. Jungle was like hearing that early, very stark hip hop  like LL Cool J--- really raw and unpretentious, yet as out-there as you can get.  Hip hop's main influence on us was that it re-educated us about rhythm; now jungle's re-educating everyone again."

Circa "Isn't Anything", Shields talked of  how it was hip hop sampling that inspired them to create weird noises on the guitar; two year later, the gaseous guitars of "Soon" swirled around a hip-house rhythm-matrix. But cast your mind back to "Instrumental", the free 7 inch that came with "Isn't Anything" , which Shields described then as "a real acid house track". Actually, it's really an uncanny prophesy of today's drum & bass jungle. Over a looped breakbeat sampled from Public Enemy, ectoplasmic guitar weaves through  sublimely simple, poignant cadences redolent of Erik Satie. Speed the track up by 30 b.p.m, and you'd have 'ambient jungle', FIVE years before  Foul Play's "Open Your Mind". 

 

As it happens, Shields prefers the raw-to-the-core ruffness of ragga-jungle and minimalist drum & bass, to the smoother atmospherics of  'ambient jungle'. "Mostly, I've  been inspired by the way the rhythms shift and inverse on themselves, the way there'll be ten different beats at once, or effects like the beat's exploding. Someone wrote that black American music, being born of oppression, is downbeat even when it's meant to be lifting your spirit, but  that African music is always stepping off the ground.. I think that's what jungle rhythms do, and there's so much room for making the music air-borne, it really fits what I do with guitar on a track like 'Soon'. But the point is not to have jungle beats with guitars over the top, it's got be more oblique, just letting that influence seep in like hip hop did with tracks like 'Slow'".

There's other parallels between MBV and jungle: the oxymoronic mix of shattering bliss and panicky dread, the speedy on-rush of sensations. Shields sees jungle as "part of the whole speeding-up process of Western society. And you can't have an escalated culture without more extremes of everything,  positive and negative."

Talking of velocity, one of the bizarre rumours floating around during MBV's abscence was that Kevin had decided that thrash-metal constituted the most radical form of guitar playing on the planet, and accordingly MBV's LP was gonna be a thrash/jungle hybrid. Turns out there's a tiny grain of truth here: MBV are fond of the British TV metal show 'Noisy Muthas', and Shield went through a phase of liking the odd thrash track by bands like Sepultura. "It did influence me, although I've worked it out of my system now. For a while I was combining speed-metal riffs with Valentines grooves, but it wasn't coming from the right place, my head was too scrambled."

MBV's main problem with incorporating jungle into their sound was the amount of time it took them to program the rhythms. Now, after a three month sabbatical and another cash injection from Island and Sire, the band have regrouped with the intention of knocking out a half-finished mini-album in a couple of months, before re-embarking on the full-length sequel to 'Loveless'. What makes Shields confident they can quicken the pace is their acquisition of a new, digitally-fluent  member to handle programming, Alex Buess of Swiss jazz/core outfit 16/17.

With "Loveless'--an album on which the band experimented with sampling its own feedback, looping basslines and drum-patterns, etc--MBV became one of the very first post-rockers (i.e. bands who combine guitars with digital technology, who abandon riffs for non-rock textures and dynamics). Now there's droves of  'em: Laika, Disco Inferno, Main, Bark Psychosis, Techno-Animal, et al. What with post-rock, trip hop and drum & bass, we're living through a golden age for a resurgent British avant-pop. Yet all the media coverage has been commandeered by the Brit Pop squad of Blur, Oasis, Elastica, etc.

"From a sonic point of view, English music has gone completely backwards", Kevin complains. "Everything is justified in terms of the past . Creation were slagged off for being retro, but they could produce something like 'Screamadelica'. The whole situation in Britain right now is much more extreme 'cos they're not even cueing off  the most fertile things in the past. When people make a documentary about this era in the future, the people who are part of the NME/MM world are going to be seen as equivalent to the trad jazz scene in 1963," he predicts, alluding to the early '60s  student craze for  Dixieland  jazz. "There's that same reverence for a long-lost era."

"The only thing I like about Britpop is that, because it's a success, it's brought about a mentality similar to that of the early rave scene--there's a confidence and excitement about being young.  That buoyancy makes a pretty good platform to step off from. If Britpop is a recreation of 1966 and 1978, then what we might get next is 1967 and 1979. I'm hoping that out of all this energy will come a genuinely interesting breed of people with a bigger sense of what's possible, and they'll marry all the interesting developments in jungle and hip hop and everything. Cos I sometimes think maybe we can't be the people to do that, cos we're too old!"

----

for another take on the saga of My Bloody Valentine's disappearance and the epic delay for the sequel to Loveless, here's my 2008 Spin feature on the band's story, pegged to the reunion tour, and covering both the group's early days and what happened after 1995

Routes from the Jungle (Kodwo komp)

VARIOUS ARTISTS

ROUTES FROM THE JUNGLE: ESCAPE VELOCITY VOLUME 1

Circa
Melody Maker 1995

by Simon Reynolds

What we have here  is a damn-dear definitive history of the genre '91-'95,  ardkore to art-core. Taking in happy, dark-side, ambient and drum & bass, this two-disc set only shortchanges us vis-a-vis ruffneck ragga. And it gets round the problem of being comprehensive yet avoiding redundancy (given the excessive number of jungle compilations in existence), by A/ including unusual mixes of key tracks that have appeared elsewhere on CD, and B/ dredging up some lost classics never before CD-anthologised.

Lost classics like Lennie D Ice's "We Are E", which cheekily turned an African chant into an anthem for the Luv'd Up Nation. And like the sultry smooch-core of "Waking Up" by Nicolette (now of Massive, then of the Shut Up and Dance stable), and of Manix's unbearably tender "You Held My Hand". Lost-est and classic-est of the lot, and my absolute favourite hardcore track of all time, is Foul Play's remix of their own "Open Your Mind". With its angel-host harmonies and diaphonous ripple of succulent synth, this track is as goosepimply as the entire works of My Bloody Valentine liquidised in a blender and injected into your spine. Midway, the track veers into the twilight-zone, then turns vicious with a veritable St Valentine's Day Massacre of rapid-fire snares.            

Other gems on Disc One include the febrile avant-funk of DJ Edrush's dark-core classic "Bludclot Artattack", as flesh-crawlingly foreboding as stumbling into a voodoo ceremony; the gloriously garbled "Secret Summer Fantasy" by the undeservingly forgotten Body Snatch (somebody anthologise their awesome "Just For U London", pu-leeze!!); plus A Guy Called Gerald's cyber-tribal "Nazinji-Zaka", making good its mysterious omission from the "Black Secret Technology" LP. Drawing mostly on late '94 and early '95, Disc Two is a handy survey of the state of the art-core. The old skool's rushin'-and-gushin' euphoria has given way to a more measured passion; fusion and Detroit techno influences are entering the junglist gene-pool. The result is a sort of ferocious elegance, best exemplified here by the delicate, deliquescent melancholia of Dillinja's "Deeper Love", the clockwork-gone-crazy convolutions of 4 Hero's Wrinkles In Time", and Droppin' Science's "Volume 2", with its radioactive synth-glow and grotesquely elasticated breakbeats.

All this, plus excellent sleevenotes from compiler Kodwo Eshun, makes "Routes From The Jungle" the most essential jungle-primer for the uninitiated since last year's "Drum & Bass, Selection 1". It's a history of the phuture. Buy, buy.

PORTISHEAD
Third
The Word, 2008

by Simon Reynolds

A confession: my copy of Dummy languishes in a cardboard box in the basement, one of many such boxes in which I keep the music I could never bring myself to get rid of but equally can't imagine ever actively desiring to hear again. Which is odd considering that Portishead's 1994 debut was one of my favourites of that year, but not so odd if you recall the chronic overexposure the album suffered over the ensuing couple of years, as chic-ly depressive background music in countless designer bars, trendy cafes and hair salons. Factor in the swarm of imitators churning out torch-tinged downtempo through the mid-to-late Nineties and you can see why Portishead got sick of themselves. In the almost 11 year gap between their second album (self-titled and essentially a recapitulation of the debut) and Third, the group struggled with the classic dilemma that faces all innovators (see: My Bloody Valentine), how to reinvent yourself (and thereby leave the copyists for dust) while still retaining your essential character.

Third pulls it off handsomely. Rarely resembling trip hop or the Bristol Sound, the sound is rockier, with a grating lo-fi edge (lots of distortion and painstakingly achieved rough edges) that will likely derail its prospects as dinner party ambience. The mood, though, is totally of a piece with Portishead's slim body of work so far. Once again, Beth Gibbons presents a portrait--vocally, melodically, lyrically--of a woman running out of reasons to delay her tryst with the Void. Running out language: again and again across these songs, there are references to an inability to verbalise: "The taste of life/ I can't describe/It's choking out the mind" (from "We Carry On," a title reminiscent of Samuel Beckett's "I can't go on... I'll go on" in The Unnamable) to "Silence" with its "wandered out of reach/too far to speak." The silence here is a despair too deep to be articulated, a blackness that threatens to seep up through the melancholic's speech and eclipse it completely. Hence the halting rhythm of some of Gibbons' melodies, creating a feeling that each line could be the last.

Musically, there's three sets of--on the face of it--incongruous influences that gel successfully on Third. Several songs have a folky quality. I imagine "The Rip" as music for the closing sequence of McCabe and Mrs Miller: Julie Christie's whorehouse madam dragon-chasing away her heartbreak in the Chinaman's opium den, a fancy triggered partly by the song's Leonard Cohen-esque vibe and partly by the line "white horses, they will take me away." With its ukulele strum and barbershop harmonies, "Deep Water" reminded me of Laurel and Hardy's "The Trail of the Lonesome Pine". On "Hunter" Gibbons' vocal has the fetching sadness of Opal's Hope Sandoval, while the song's sound has a faded-with-age quality, like a yellow-mottled silverplate photograph.

At the furthest extreme from this old-timey aura, Third also draws on early hip hop: the crashing drum machine beats of Schoolly D and Mantronix, the era before looped breakbeats and sampling took over rap production. On "Machine Gun", processing and delays make the colossal beat shudder and shimmer even as it stomps; Gibbons entwines her wuthering, peaky-sounding vocal around this imposing pillar of rhythm.

Finally, there's a potent infusion of Krautrock and psychedelia coursing through Third's veins. With its hypnotic organ pulse, cavernously rumbling drums and needling atonal guitar, "We Carry On" finds the interzone between Pink Floyd's "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun" and Sonic Youth's Sister. "Nylon Smile" could be a slowed-down loop from "Mother Sky"-era Can," while Small" is almost scholarly in its meticulous simulacrum of the moment when psychedelia turned heavy (Adrian Utley's guitar issuing fabulous reverb-splattery whinges and pings). There's the Cale-droney "Magic Doors" and there's "Threads", whose loping, hobbled beat and glinting guitar resemble Jefferson Airplane's "Today," except with its reborn bliss turned to dead-inside gloom.

Third impacts as an indivisible whole, but if one was obliged to break down its achievement analytically and portion out credit for inventiveness, in first place would come Utley and his guitar, followed very closely by Geoff Barrow's beat-making and mood-shaping, followed very closely by Gibbons as vocalist-melodist. A slightly larger distance behind everybody would be Gibbons as lyricist. It's not that the lyrics aren't good--in their way, they're as chilling an anatomy of crippling uncertainty and alienation as Nico's The Marble Index, riddled with memorable lines ("wounded and afraid/inside my head/fallen through changes", "I'd like to laugh at what you said/but I just can't find a smile"). The words, though, are the only part of Third that has the faintest air of self-parody and deja vu to them. When, on the musically and vocally stunning closer "Threads", Gibbons confesses to being "worn out" and "tired of my mind", you might find yourself seconding that emotion, or recalling people you've known with depressive or self-destructive tendencies who end up exhausting the patience of even their most loyal friends. Overall, though, Third is so good it's got me thinking about venturing into the basement to dig out Dummy.

cultural striptease

 Cultural Striptease

for an Italian publication, 2010? 

NB this would need to be updated and amended if done now e.g. the iPhone has now entered my life, to ruin it

Your first cultural memory?

Probably The Beatles ("Yellow Submarine"). Unless we count British children's TV shows like Andy Pandy and Pogle's Wood.

 

The song where you would like to inhabit?

The second (subaquatic-idyllic) section of John Martyn's "I'd Rather Be The Devil", but I'd need to have gills instead of lungs.

 

A song you are listening obsessively on your iPod? (do you have one?)

I do have an iPod but hardly ever use it. The last song to obsess me was Black Eyed Peas's "Boom Boom Pow" which came out in summer 2009 but which I only heard this month -- that got several replays on YouTube.

 

An embarassing (or dangerous cultural) pleasure?

I can't think of anything that embarrasses me. I suppose I am ashamed of how much time I waste watching junk TV -- cooking shows, reality-type pseudo-documentaries, "Best Interior Design/Next Top Model" type contests. There really are so many better things I could do with my time.

 

The song/movie which changed your life (a quote from it).

Sex Pistols, "Anarchy in the U.K."--no specific line, but the excessive demand in the song and Johnny Rotten's performance left me with excessive, unrealistic demands in terms of what I expect from music (world-shaking impact, breath-choking intensity)

A recent album/book/movie/author that you consider your personal discovery.

In the era of webbed music and hyper-hipsterism, it is very hard to be first on the block with a new group, or a new anything. Generally I am happy to pick up on things a little bit after the "new thing" hunters get there.

 

Things your children should read, listen and see?

The Wind In the Willows by Kenneth Grahame.

Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony.

The Railway Children.

 

If I say television: is there a sitcom or something unexpected you can’t stop to watch at?

Peep Show.

 

Music: the playlist/soundtrack of your life, in 5 songs.

The Slits, "So Tough"

My Bloody Valentine, "Slow"

Orbital, "Chime"

Omni Trio, "Renegade Snares (Foul Play Remix)"

Ariel Pink, "The Ballad of Bobby Pyn"

 

The ringtone you have on your your mobile phone, now?

The standard one it comes with.

 

What do you think of people who obsessively wear earcuffs while walking or other?

It's not how I would choose to live. I don't like to be insulated from the outside world. I was never a big fan of the Walkman and the only time I use my iPod is on long train or bus journeys, or late at night when I want to read while sitting on the sofa (rather than attached to the stereo via headphones).

 

A quote from a song to tell someone: you love him/her; you want to leave him/her. And a song (quote) to convince someone to stay with you?

"It's only me/Who wants to wrap around your dreams"--Fleetwood Mac, "Dreams"

"Lovin’ you...isn't the right thing to do"--Fleetwood Mac, "Go Your Own Way"

"I can still hear you saying/You would never break the chain"--Fleetwood Mac, "The Chain"

 

Your relationship with new technologies: do you have a Blackberry/iPhone, you are an email addict, what’s your opinion about Facebook or similar?

No Blackberry, no iPhone, only shaky command of my mobile phone to be honest. Email, addicted, yes of course. Facebook--coming up with clever comments on stuff is too much like work for me. I'm on it but I hardly ever update or leave anything comments. Twitter is another step in the ephemeralisation of everything: I can remember magazine articles and music paper record reviews from 30 years ago; I can remember certain blog posts and online essays from 7 or 9 years ago. But do people remember a Tweet for more than a day?

A stupid thing that you cannot stop to do online. Or a digital gaffe.

Saving articles and blog posts "to read later". "Later" never comes and I have a folder called Reading Matter with a couple of thousand files inside it.

 

Have you read books on kindle or some e-readers?

No.

What you would have want to learn to do in life?

Practically: Drive a car (I've just moved to Los Angeles so this is essential). Play a musical instrument. Learn how to make beats. Learn how to beat-match as a deejay.

Existentially: Be more patient. Waste less time.

 

What did you learn from a book/movies/music about: sex?

There's no substitute for hands-on experience.

 

Do you read magazines?

Yes, but not as much as I used to.

What did you save/hated of our last ten years culture, the so called Noughties, Anni Zero.

Love: Music's inexhaustible capacity to come up with the unexpected, the revelatory, unknown pleasures (Dizzee Rascal, Animal Collective, Ariel Pink, Ghost Box, Vampire Weekend...). Blogging as a rebirth of music  journalism.

Hate: The effect on the internet on my attention span, which is shot to pieces (see above, about magazines). The wars and the propaganda machine that attempted to justify them. Still waiting for the future/the 21st Century to start, the first ten years just seem like the Nineties continuing. Twitter as the slow erosion of blogging

A word that you love. A word that you hate.

Joy

Root canal

Were would you go for a “cultural” tour? 3 places

Places I've never been -- Tokyo, Bombay, Beijing.

If you would have to write an autobiography, what could be the first line? And the dedication?

 

I will never write an autobiography. But the dedication would be "For Jenny and for Joy".

MARC ALMOND
The Stars We Are
Melody Maker, 1988

by Simon Reynolds

Can we trust Marc Almond? I don't know if we can trust someone who uses the word "I" so often - in 1988, the year of the eclipse of the self. Is he really the man, as he so incessantly claims, to take us to the borders of experience
("I'll take your heart to limit", he promises), or lure us to our doom in the "labyrinth of hopes and fears" that is his soul?

Marc Almond seems a little too happy in his abundant awareness that he's one crazily mixed up kid. His ideas about himself are just a little too collected. And he's far too confident that we all share his fascination with himself. Is he really that uncomfortable with himself and the world? His work smacks more of of self-possession, than of a soul possessed or dispossessed.

Of course, there's still a place for autobiography, or storytellers who use the first person singular - Nick Cave springs immediately to mind. But in 1988, the real "heroes" are on a suicide mission. They are vanquished by, and vanish into, some Other - whether it's the Loved One, or the blue Beyond, or some irretrievable, halcyon memory of continuum at the mother's breast. Guy Chadwick, A.R. Kane, My Bloody Valentine... they want to gaze, not be gazed upon; they disappear, rather than dramatise themselves in the spotlight, centre stage.

And so the production style of the moment is the Haze, where the voice blends and bleeds into the sound. Almond, revealingly, chooses to ape the production of Sixties
"entertainment music", where the voice is mixed upfront and diction crystal clear. Every painfully ill-fashioned word (random extract: "in my hand/like grains of sand/a thousand million moments of emotion") is pushed to the fore of our
consciousness.

The cabaret idea is to give pain poise, even grandeur. The models are Scott Walker, Gene Pitney (there's a cover of his "Something's Gotten Hold Of My Heart"), Piaf, perhaps Tim Rose. Almond doesn't realise that the broken, beaten or deficient voice actaully communicates more these days (Vini Reilly, Band Of Holy Joy, The Valentines). He's even, finally, learnt to sing "properly". Like his lyrics, his
vocalisation is outre: what we get are the hallowed mannerisms of passion. It's over-demonstrative, full-bodied, plummy.

His words have always been prosaic, never quite purple or baroque enough. What inflamed them was his singing, that bruise of a voice. What was great about Almond was the way his voice didn't flow: it was the grain (the body's resistance to the voice) that gave his songs their special, glowering intensity. But The Stars We Are contains Almond's most controlled performances, and that sense of hysteria, of something being torn from the body, has gone.

As for the "classicism" of the arrangements, for all the wide-screen, windswept tumult of strings, horns, tympani and grand piano, this music isn't quite lush or flushed enough. It sounds a little cut-price, some-expense-spared. Almond's
ambitions fall short in much the same way that The Associates' Perhaps wasn't the passionade it could have been. Only "Your Kisses Burn", with its kettle-drum calvacade and Nico's frost-bite hauteur, is truly grandiose. The Stars We Are fails because you can't get that Scott Walkers feel in modern studios (you need compressors etc). But neither is it as dignified a rapprochement with modern technology as Walker's recent Climate Of Hunter, or as radical a deconstruction of orchestral pop as Skin's brilliant Shame, Humility and Revenge. Instead, what we get is faintly fetching, period drama. Hommage.

Almond's confession rise a little too easily to the surface: there's no sense of a violent unblocking. He's neither a consumptive nor a self-exorcist, but a product of
this century's incitement to self-analysis. We live in a therapeutic, counselling culture, where we're urged to a constant interrogation of ourselves, in order to penetrate the essence of our being. Madness, perversion, criminality, aberration, are no longer considered pathological, but as something within us all, and possibly the founding truth and mainspring of our identity. We're encouraged to gather more and more data about ourselves, and then reveal it the caring "experts". This
neurotic drive to self-probing and public baring has in the past driven Almond to the extreme of writing an anthem to masturbation, "Mother Fist". But some forms of self-knowledge are just banal, and Almond's writing reminds me more of the
current spate of singer-songwriters, or Cosmo-consciousness, than the haunted, hunted men he evidently admires -- the black, bitter solitiude of Scott Walker, Tim Rose's terrible burden of shame.

His work is like some exhaustive, protracted and public diary, all bald depiction and naff fantasy ("She Stole My Soul In Istanbul"!). The insatiable quest for self-knowledge that can drive someone to rewrite a diary from two years back, in order to include the insights of hindsight, can be touching in a friend. Certainly, it's better than being in poor contact with your heart of hearts. But is Almond's
relentless self-scrutiny turning up anything worth bringing to public attention? I fear not.

He was immensely special for a time, up to and including "Soul Inside", if for nothing more than his capacity for being embarrassing. And he's still an endearing presence. But what's likeable is his "innocence". He never seems borne under by the experiences he's (apparently) had, never sounds as though he's seen too much, or can't live with himself. It's this halo of ingenuousness that's the flaw in his art.

Like that other charming man, Morrissey, it could be that the seam of his troubled self is exhausted. But he's one of our last characters, you cry! Hmmm. Certainly, Marc Almond- like Julian Cope, Jobson, and all those other never-wozzers - makes the journalist's job easy. Just get them onto their favourite subject, and they're off, and you can put up your feet. I distrust those who fete the Last Eccentrics, in the same way I distrust people who say they only read biographies: people who subscribe to the Great Man theory of history, invariably secretly reckon themselves to be Great Men too. 1988 is the year of "the end of me", and poor old Marc Almond -I think we can strike him off our agenda of bliss.

my contributions to
THE WIRE's THE HUNDRED BEST RECORDS OF ALL TIME
The Wire, Issue #100 June 1992

1970
THE STOOGES
Funhouse (Elektra)
When they say it's the greatest rock'n'roll record of all time, they really mean Side One. The first album's morose, moribund entropy (a compliment) (honestly!) EXPLODES with "Wild On The Streets", "Loose", "TV Eye", a triptych of controlled abandon that's never been equalled. The delirium of subhuman snarls and sucking sounds emitted by Iggy at the climax of "TV Eye" is the living end, a nether limit even the Birthday Party (for whom Funhouse was bible) underpassed. After immolation, burn-out: "Dirt", a hymn to transcendence thru abjection, with Ron Asheton alternating between piteous blues and silvered cascades. The Bowie-fied Raw Power probably had more to do with spawning punk, but Funhouse is the real animal: progeny include Black Flag, Pixies, the wah-wah mantras of Loop and Spacement 3, and the SubPop/Nirvana crowd.
Simon Reynolds

1971
LED ZEPPELIN
Led Zeppelin IV (Atlantic)
Contrary to received wisdom, Led Zep didn't bastardize the blues: they aggrandized them, inflated them from porchside intimacy to awe-inspiring monumentalism. Detached from their contemporary context (in which they could only seem a fascistic, brutalised perversion of rock) we can now only gasp and gape at the sheer scale and mass of Zep's sound, never more momentous than on this LP - the megalithic priapism of "Black Dog", the slow-mo boogie avalanche of "When The Levee Breaks". But Zep were more than just heavy: both "Misty Mountain Hop" (slanted and enchanted acid-metal) and "Four Sticks" (a locked groove of voodoo-boogie) sound unlike anything recorded before or since. Perhaps because of this, er, eclectic experimentalism, Led Zep actually didn't have that much influence on HM, except for odd instances like Living Coloür's fusion-metal and Jane's Addiction's funked-up deluges of grandeur.
Simon Reynolds

1974
CAN
Soon Over Babaluma (Spoon)
Like Tago Mago and Future Days, Babaluma is inexhaustible; a hundred listenings in, and you still find new worlds. "Dizzy Dizzy" and "Come Sta, La Luna" are Can at their most telepathic and tactile. The Mandelbrot whorls and 7th dimensional involutions of "Chain Reaction/Quantum Physics" are the deepest psychedelic grooves I know outside early 70s Miles. Humour, poignancy, awe, groove, Dada, intimacy, immensity - sometimes I wonder why I bother listening to anything else. Anticipates (or pre-empts): the Fourth World pan-Globalism of Talking Heads' Remain In Light, Byrne/Eno's My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, Jon Hassell, the avant-funk of PiL and The Pop Group, The Raincoats, 23 Skidoo, ARKane's oceanic rock, even some rap and rave.
Simon Reynolds

1984
HUSKER DU
Zen Arcade (SST)
Along with the Jesus and Mary Chain's Psychocandy, this kick-started/blueprinted the late 80s regeneration of rock. Like J&MC, Husker Du trailblazed a whole new way for pop and noise to coexist. Their fusion of folkadelic yearning and foaming fury, bleeding hearts and bleeding ears, spawned the Dinosaur Jr/Nirvana school of "zen apathy/bewilderness rock", and was a pivotal influence on My Bloody Valentine et al too. The 13-minute all live raga-improv blizzard "Reoccurring Dreams" that closes this magnificent double didn't, however, ignite a Mahavishnu revival (shame!). They recorded more accomplished albums (Warehouse, Flip Your Wig) but Zen Arcade was the Du at their most unleashed, expansive and emotionally devastating.
Simon Reynolds


you can read the whole piece with contributions from the Wire writership here

HEROIN HOUSE aka DUB TECHNO aka Chain Reaction

PORTER RICKS

 Biokinetics

 VAINQUEUR

 Elevations

 MAURIZIO

 untitled 

 VARIOUS ARTISTS

 Decay Product

 MONOLAKE

 Hongkong

 (all Chain Reaction)

Spin, 1998

by Simon Reynolds  

Think "house," and in your mind's ear you'll probably hear a thudding, metronomic kick-drum and a shrieking soul-diva. Nearly fifteen years on from its Chicago genesis, house has evolved way beyond this original, winning formula, and diversified into at least a dozen subgenres. From the disco cut-up style popularised by Daft Punk to the unhinged abstraction of nu skool Chicago label Relief, the most exciting contemporary house is designed for  "track-heads"--purist connoisseurs who prefer minimal tracks to anthemic songs. 

I don't like purists either, but if the truth be known, when pop music's final reckoning is done, house is not going to be remembered for adding to the sum of  "great songs," nor for its pantheon of distinctive vocalists. Its real contribution and innovation resides elsewhere.

In this spirit, the Berlin label Chain Reaction have distilled house down to its essence: no songs, no vocals, barely any melodies, sometimes not even a beat. What, you might wonder, is left after such ruthless pruning? Texture and pulse-rhythm. Or more precisely, texture-rhythm as an indivisible plasma-like substance that is molded and extruded through dub-space. 

Take Chain Reaction's aesthetic pinnacle to date, "Resilient 1.2": a slow-motion tsunamai of  ego-melting, body-boundary-haemorrhaging bliss. Some people call the Chain Reaction sound "heroin house" *; "Resilient 1.2" actually reminds me of Velvet Underground's "Heroin". A soundtrack in waiting for the first zero-gravity nightclub, it was my favourite track of 1997; you can find it on the Chain Reaction CD Decay Product, a compilation of tracks by the production team Various Artists.

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

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

Although CR artists would probably distance themselves from rave's drug culture, their music sounds like Ecstasy sensations encoded in sound, abstracted into a velcro-sticky audio-fabric that tugs at your skin-surface and gets your goosebumps rippling in formation. Melody is minimal--limited to rudimentary vamps and ostinatos--because it's just a device for displaying sound-in-itself. Simple motifs twist the timbre-fabric in order to best show off its properties, making you thrill to the scintillating play of  creases and folds, crinkles and kinks.

            CR music isn't all opiated oblivion: Monolake's "Lantau" and "Macau" are like Cantonese reggae, while Porter Ricks material often has an abrasive industrial tinge,  reflecting the fact that one half of the duo is acclaimed ambient experimentalist Thomas Koner. But my favorite CR output is the stuff that offers a sublime surrogate for MDMA experience, a bliss-space you can access at any time then leave, without cost or comedown. 

That said, this music's appeal  extends way beyond ravers--anyone who's ever swooned to neo-psychelicists like Spacemen 3 and My Bloody Valentine, or  been mesmerised by minimalists like Steve Reich, will find almost unbearable pleasures here.

            As well as Chain Reaction's own CD and vinyl 12 inch output (available at domestic prices), addicts will want to search out the artists's releases on other labels:  Porter Ricks' self-titled album on Mille Plateaux, Various Artists's glistening pulsescape "No.8" on Fatcat. Porter Ricks also created a fine remix album, The Koner Experiment, based on  music by Experimental Audio Research--a collective that includes ex-Spacemen 3 leader Sonic Boom and MBV's Kevin Shields. That fact alone that should seduce any hesitant psych-guitar fiends into taking the plunge.

* Heroin House copyright Kevin Martin

dubbing tapes (I am reggae hear me ROIR)

If we're not counting things like Jah Wobble's The Legend Lives On album, or the bonus 12-inch with UB40's Signing Off, then my first proper immersive encounter with dub would have been in the late '80s. I must have caught some on Peel before that. Heard the FX and tricknology at one remove in  postpunk settings or on electro-funk / postdisco 12-inch remixes.

 Scritti's "The 'Sweetest Girl'" has a bit of floaty dubbiness in its final stretch. 

Another at-one-remove encounter would have been King Sunny Ade's track on this NME cassette Mighty Reel - seemingly an out-take or offshoot of Juju Music, whose production has a real swimmy dubbiness, apparently introduced by producer Martin Meissonnier. 

But proper dub reggae dub? The first things I acquired were a whole bunch of Mad Professor albums, bought in one batch at the Virgin megastore, and some ROIR cassettes I got sent. Among them was a Prince Far I tape featuring this mighty mighty tune -  probably the beginning of true dub love for me, setting me on the "Right  Way" indeed.

And here is the cassette itself. 

Must have been affection for "The Right Way" and the whole record that made me gravitate towards reviewing this reissue out of a whole batch of first-time-on-CD Virgin Front Line records that came into my possession in the summer of '91.

Among the ROIR batch - which included stuff like Raincoats live in NYC, Suicide 1/2 Alive, (with the Lester Bangs sleevenote), early Television etc - there was at least one other dub tape, this collection of Japanese dub - about which I cannot recall much. 

Looking at ROIR's other reggae releases, which are plentiful indeed, a lot of the covers seem familiar, but I'm not sure if that's because I got sent them or just saw them in shops. Some of them do look so familiar from the design that I feel like I must have had them in the house, but no specific auditory memories adhere. 

This next one in particular feels very familiar and I think it came with that first batch that included Mute Beat and the Cry Tuff tapes. 

At some point in the early '90s, by this point often visiting NYC for long stays and then full-time living there, I  got friendly with the guy who founded ROIR, Neil Cooper. I was burbling about jungle and he actually offered me some some money to do a jungle compilation. But the amount was too small to pay for tracks, as far as I could ascertain what the going rate for tunes was. At least the type of killer tracks I'd want to have on a scene-representing comp. 

Nice guy though, Neil. And he put out some great archival documents on the label. He was a firm believer in the cassette and regarded high-quality chrome as being as good a format as any.  The Prince Far I certainly sounded great. 

I believe Cooper's son carried on the label after his passing and it exists to this day, albeit no longer tape-based. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Tapes! I have hundreds of them still and whether through repeat-play cathexis or nostalgia, the sound of certain things on that format often sounds better to me than the CD or digital-file or streaming versions. 

In some cases, the advance cassette version sounds better to me than the actual proper vinyl release a few months later, for the simple reason that this is what I fell in love with. 

Isn't Anything, on vinyl, has never sounded as good as the advance tape, which had a completely different sequence, a bunch of tunes that were on the Feed Me With Your Kiss EP at the end plus the bonus single for Isn't with the Public Enemy breakbeat and ghostly wavering tones. All shoved together on a C90 in an absolutely glorious surge. The sequence sounds right to me because it's what I listened to in blissed disbelief  over and over and over for a month or so prior to interviewing My Bloody Valentine. 

 

Postscript 10/7 - fuck me I just noticed the first tune of side 2 is "Soon". Presumably a prototype for the "Soon" that would be released 18 months later as the lead track of the Glider EP in April 1990. I have no specific recollection of that track from this Isn't advance tape - but I will give it a listen to see how different it is from the immaculate consummation of the released version

I'm not sure I ever played the vinyl Isn't Anything more than a few times. It just didn't sound right. Everything was in the wrong order. The sound was cleaner and more picked-out. I preferred the lesser-fi blur of the cassette - more amorphous.

So there's tapes like that I've kept. (Also advances of things that were never released at all).  And then there's all the mixtapes made by friends that you get attached to. And your own mixtapes made for parties or long-car journeys, that ended up getting a lot of use. Then there's another category of comp, which is the sort of seasonal round-up type of tracks in a genre you've bought recently. Taped really just to save the bother of getting up repeatedly to put a succession of jungle or speed garage 12-inches on the deck. These capture a moment in the genre nicely. 

So this is why I have not simply chucked all these tapes on the dustbin of format history -  even though  when it comes to it, practically speaking, if I want to hear a tune I'll go straight to YouTube or a streamer. I can't quite bring myself to toss them out.  It's sort of one or two levels below taking your pet to the vet to be put to sleep. No, it's not a living thing, but a once-beloved, much-played tape is saturated with cathexis. The cathexis of effort spent (your own or your friend's, or an acquaintance's) in the assembling of said tape. The cathexis of repeat-listening in an era when music was still relatively scarce and wasn't on tap, in an instant, like it is today, so the relative convenience of the self-made compilation or the friend-made collection was invaluable. 

Plus you never know, do you?  The internet may collapse, streamers may go out of business, some kind of unanticipated digital corrosion might render the compact disc compilations and CD-singles unplayable... you may someday need the analogue repositories, the vinyl and the cassettes, to hear the things you want to hear.