Dubstep, Noise, Metal - Pazz 'n ' Jop 2006 Essay

Dubstep, Noise, Metal - Pazz 'n ' Jop 2006 Essay

published as
"Reasons To Be Cheerful (Just Three)"
Village Voice, January 30th 2007

by Simon Reynolds

Discussed:
Mastadon, Blood Mountain, #44
Boris, Pink, #76
Burial, #89
Wolf Eyes, Human Animal, #297

This year it felt like everyone I knew—  - people of widely divergent musical persuasions— - were for once strangely united. We thought 2006 was a lousy year for music, with no new movements or developments, genres stagnant or at best just stolidly holding steady, the picture brightened (as always) only by isolated flickers of maverick genius. Running into one rock-crit friend (usually a poptimistic sort) and finding him even more bummed out than me, I blogged that here was conclusive proof that verily, all was shite. Only to find me and my buddy called out for our "pure laziness" by another journo-blogger, Phil Freeman, who contended that "barge-loads of fantastic music" were happening beneath the critical radar, most of it "METAL." As the end-of-year polls started coming through, it seemed that the only folk feeling positive about the State of Music were the über-hipsters, those nonlazy fiends who dedicate every waking hour to hunting down edition-of-200 hand-decorated cassettes and lathe-cut vinyl. Said fiends touted three reasons to be cheerful in 2006: noise, dubstep, and yes, metal.

What's striking about all these genres is that they're not just unpop, they're anti-pop. Rejecting the pop principles of accessibility and instantness, they're hard to find and hard to get into. Noise, dubstep, and extreme metal are also hard sounding, mixing varying degrees of aggression and abstraction, physical impact and structural convolution. Ideologically, they are ultra-rockist, cherishing a trinity of interlocking values—difficulty, danger, darkness—and fervently upholding the ideal of underground versus mainstream.

Pazz's electorate tilt more toward generalists than genre-rists, so this dark 'n' hard shift hasn't registered as seismically as it has elsewhere. But something is going on when "hipster metal" faves Mastodon enter the Top 50 out of nowhere, while the hugely acclaimed debut by dubstepper Burial makes it to 89 as an import. Beyond this poll, you can see the shift in everything, from the sales figures for doom-metal gods Boris (they've already sold twice as many of 2006's Pink as of 2005's Akuman No Uta, while their label, Southern Lord, enjoyed its best year yet) to the fact that Manhattan hipster temple Mondo Kim's now has a metal section, albeit cunningly rebranded as "aggressive." Noise remains some ways below the generalist critic's radar (Wolf Eyes' Human Animal just cracked the Pazz Top 300, despite being on Sub Pop), but the excitement around that scene continues to build.

One reason these underground scenes are gaining ground could be that they are all "reality-based communities." We live in cold, dark times, and these genres register that coldness and darkness—seldom in a directly politicized way, but more often through allegory or abstract sonic atmospheres. The most hipster-favored style of metal is doom, as purveyed by Boris, Electric Wizard, Om, and Sunn O))), a genre founded on the down-tuned riffs and depressive vibes of Black Sabbath, whose "War Pigs" has horribly renewed applicability today. Dubstep, crudely defined as a slowed-down descendant of drum'n'bass, is plastered all over the soundtrack to Children of Men, Alfonso Cuarón's dystopian movie set in London 20 years in the future (but like all science fiction, a displaced version of contemporary anxieties). Strangely, noise—for all its harrowing din and album titles like Black Vomit—is the most cheery of the three undergrounds. Shedding its industrial past, it's no longer so much about a "truthful" depiction of reality (as unremitting horror) as pure sensory overload and Dionysian mayhem. This de-industrialized noise has started to overlap with metal, a shift captured by Wolf Eyes' self-description as "it's noise, but it's rock" and by the U.K. noise mag Rock-A-Rolla —a title surely more suited to a French fanzine for leather-pants-wearing Stooges fans.

Another anti-pop aspect to these netherworlds of hard 'n' dark is the sheer physicality of the sounds. All low-frequency drone and trudge-tempo sludge, doom metal is a sort of visceral mood music, midway between assault and ambience. Dubstep's sub-bass impacts your viscera (there's actually a subgenre nicknamed wobble-step after its tremolo basslines), and noise immerses the listener in a hideously voluptuous sound-bath. All three styles are heard at their utmost in live performance or (with dubstep) DJ'd through a mighty sound system. A good stereo cranked high in a lights-off living room (bong optional) makes for a poor second best. It's pretty pointless hearing this stuff through your computer speakers, let alone an iPod. Modern pop production is mixed to work with the thin-bodied sound of MP3s and is often seemingly composed to end up as ringtones; "placeshifting"—the portability and import-ability of music—is the dominant paradigm. But noise, dubstep, and metal all resist this notion of consumer empowerment that only serves to disempower Art.

Did I mention weed? Dubstep, with its links to reggae's sound-system culture, its ponderous "half-step" rhythms, and sheer bass-weight, is obviously a stoner scene, while doom metal signposts its pot penchant with titles like Electric Wizard's Dopethrone. Both genres use trance-inducing repetition and ascetic minimalism to create a meditational vibe often described by fans as spiritual. (It seems telling that one member of doom pioneers Sleep, the precursor group to Om, left to enter a monastery.) In true burnout style, nobody in these scenes bothers too much with appearance: The doom dudes tend to be bearded fuglies, the noiseniks often look like they crawled out of a sewer, and dubsteppers are mostly whey-faced British boys in nondescript street wear. Nobody even knows what Burial looks like (except his label, Hyperdub). These underground sound-boys and noise-girls reject modern pop's subordination to the visual, its iconographic culture oriented around photo shoots and videogenic charisma.

A few years ago hipsters of the sort now rocking Kode 9 and Corrupted enjoyed flirting with mainstream pop, putting a Justin Timberlake or Tweet album, a "Toxic" or a "Yeah," in their Top 10s. But the palpable shift back to undergroundist values has been facilitated by the fact that overground pop is not coming up with the goods at the moment. Oh, you still get lone loonies claiming merit for Paris Hilton's CD while conscientious generalists urge us to check out modern country, but overall there's been a return to a default-mode rockism that prizes substance, complexity, edge. If TV on the Radio and Joanna Newsom represent the beguiling, easy-on-the-ear version of those values, those looking for a harder hit are turning to metal, dubstep, noise.

And there's much to admire about those renegade genres: the seriousness, the earnest aspiration to innovate and overwhelm, the sheer strenuousness and commitment entailed in being a fan. Yet personally I'm ambivalent about all three. (Most of my 2006 faves have a pop tinge: Scritti, Hot Chip, Lady Sovereign.) Noise in particular seems suspect to me, its belief in absolute states of intensity often leading to a sort of aesthetic fascism. Occasionally its impulse to shock and offend leads to puerile flirtations with the political sort, too. To be fair, such dodgy provocations are rarer these days, with noise operators like Yellow Swans and Sunroof more often seeing what they do in terms of chaos worship and ecstatic abstraction. Still, even this equation of lack-of-structure with freedom seems slightly pat and old hat. Dubstep really ought to be right up my exiled-Londoner's street, being the latest product of the city's pirate radio culture. But too much of what I loved about its post-rave precursors has been subtracted: jungle's frenzy, 2step's slinky sensuality, the personality of grime.

And then there's metal. There's a tiny part of me that can't help thinking that if hipsters are looking here for nourishment, things have gotten really desperate. Then I remember I actually have liked some metal myself. As a Sabbath lover and fan of the original doom crew Saint Vitus, it's the slow-and-low end of the current spectrum that hits me: Om's mystical and incantatory Conference of the Birds (like Saint Vitus meets Black Sun Ensemble maybe) and Boris— 0 the latter especially when they don't sound like yet another Japanese homage to Blue Cheer but go into ambient mode, as with much of Altar, their 2006 collaboration with Sunn O))). Other doom exponents tend to sound a bit like Saint Vitus screwed-and-chopped. Beyond the low-frequency quagmire, Pelican seem overly fussy, while Mastodon, consummate in their way, are hardly pushing the metal genre beyond itself.

As a post-punk kid who lived through the blithering idiocy of the new wave of British heavy metal (Iron Maiden, et al), it's hard to shake one's ingrained prejudices completely. Yet it's also true that if the ideals of post-punk live anywhere today, it's in metal. Just check out the world of "real metal," which overlaps and subsumes "hipster metal," but is much vaster and much dafter. The bands featured in magazines like Terrorizer and Decibel are conceptualist and progression-oriented to nutty degrees, at times so serious they're hard to take seriously. The premium set on formal innovation has resulted in sub-generic splintering that surpasses even the hair-splitting neologists and taxonomists of electronic dance culture: goregrind, tech-grind, prog-grind, sludge, drone, crust, brutal death metal (as opposed to technical death metal and melodic death metal), and power metal, and we haven't even touched on the dozen flavors of doom (including funereal doom, stoner doom, gothic doom, and my favorite, retro doom). Extreme metal is a world where 42-minute tracks (often devolving into long stretches of ambient noise) are just standard business, where bands compose concept albums about the Black Death or embark on bizarre postmodern projects of meta-metal that entail cloning Carcass's pioneering sound by studying the group's riff structures with Talmudic intensity. All this fervent experimentalism and genre-splicing makes the overtly post-punk-aligned revivalists of the last several years look like the lightweights they truly are. Of them all, only Liars could qualify for a feature in Terrorizer.


Metal's rise to the forefront of hipster consciousness seems symbolic. If all art aspires to the condition of music, then you might say that all art-music vanguards now aspire to the condition of metal. Recruiting a fresh crop of "soldiers of darkness" each year, metal represents a model of subcultural stamina over the long haul (while also holding the possibility of erupting into the mainstream every seven years or so). If noise and dubstep don't envy metal's infrastructural stability and the fanatical loyalty it commands, they should.

Elvis Costello

ELVIS COSTELLO AND THE ATTRACTIONS

Blood and Chocolate

Melody Maker, September 13th 1986 

by Simon Reynolds

Another one?! So soon?! How much quality product can a body digest in a single year?

Elvis Costello is undone by his own prolific stamina and consistency. A month ago I made an unlikely comparison between Costello and Cabaret Voltaire: the shared problem of routine brilliance. The possibility of his surprising us recedes because of his prior accumulated excellence. Each time, it becomes steadily more difficult to argue that you NEED another Costello record. But his fans aren't buying "surprise" anyway. Costello services a stable demand for one sure voice of sanity and compassion. It's a matter of keeping the faith.

Equally, it becomes less and less plausible to present Costello as the thorn in pop's flesh, a radical intrusion of intelligence, simply because these days he barely interacts with pop at all. Costello, all of us in fact, inhabit a little world that's drifted apart from the mainstream, a world whose parameters are night-time radio and the music press. "Progessive pop" occupies a different space to pop altogether, perhaps equivalent to that occupied by literature 50 years ago. Nothing is in jeopardy.

Everything valuable about Costello — craft, dignity, content, depth — actually disqualifies him from the pop race. Pop was always meant to be surface flash, rupture, contrivance, a spree of strangeness — not good work and firm conscience. Everything about POP! should be capable of absorption within a matter of moments. With Costello, you have to work.

So here comes a fresh glut of WORDS — a round of media hagiography, no doubt, plus a mass of artfully tangled statements for us to decipher. These days, when Elvis speaks out, the result is a prolix, purple sprawl of place names and mixed metaphors, leaving only the vague impression that he's pointing the finger at something. Much more useful are the more private songs, like "I Want You", a stark, extended gasp of choked longing.

Elsewhere, Costello's writing seems to increase in opacity as he turns over and over his familiar concerns — domestic deceit, doomed relationships, bread and circuses, the hegemony of the trivial and the tawdry. You come to wish he'd be less zealous in his anxiety to avoid insulting our intelligence

[portion of review missing here]

But such dissent seems destined to remain isolated and contained. No matter how he struggles to shake up the settled state of his career — this year's peculiar gambit of "murdering" the Costello persona — Elvis Costello is doomed to make only big splashes in a small pond, our pond. "Hang The Deejay" could well have been Elvis Costello's very own anthem.

Elvis Costello / Martin Amis

Arena, 1991

by Simon Reynolds

Listening to his new album, "Mighty Like A Rose", I had an abrupt insight: Elvis Costello is the Martin Amis of pop. For the people who don't read many books and/or don't listen to many albums anymore, Amis and Costello are the only ones left who dare to go for the grand, over-arching vision of our time. They take the pulse of the age and diagnose the malaise. Nobody else has the ambition or temerity to take on this task, which is why Amis/Costello are seen, by some, as saving graces and solitary saviours.

   

Amis has made two magnum opus stabs at encapsulating the shittiness of the Eighties in "Money" and "London Fields", with their Dickensian anti-heroes John Self and Keith Talent: repulsive incarnations of the era, pimples on the zeitgeist's backside. Costello, too, has been lunging for the Big Picture's jugular for over a decade. Songs like "Pills and Soap", "Beyond Belief" and "Tokyo Storm Warning" are dystopian panoramas in the tradition of Dylan's  "Desolation Row". His albums are cross-sections of a diseased British body politic, drawing the dots between personal and political squalor, between the husband's brutal fists and the election-winning war ("Armed Forces" was originally titled "Emotional Fascism"). 

 Against this backdrop of degraded private and public language, Amis and Costello dramatise themselves as solitary bulwarks against the "moronic inferno" of popular culture. Amis flinches and shudders at the masturbatory nature of 'remote control' culture (TV, porn, video games). Costello has perennially diatribed against the 'bread and circuses' of tabloid culture, the "chewing gum for the ears" of conveyor belt pop. On his new album, "The Other Side Of Summer" is a predictably vituperative blast against rave culture:  "the dancing was desperate, the music was worse". In Costello's jaundiced eyes, the post-Aciiied scene is merely a culture of consolation, an anaesthetic/amnesiac refuge from an intolerable reality. "Invasion Hit Parade" similarly dramatises Costello as one of the few who refuse to collaborate with the new regime of "non-stop Disco Tex and the Sexolettes".

 For Amis/Costello, one of the reasons the world is in such a state is precisely because no one reads books or listens to albums anymore - or at least the kind of books and the kind of albums that tell you what a state the world is in (precisely the kind they write/record). Both mourn the disappearance of depth in a world of surfaces, slogans and cliches, the withering of attention spans thanks to blip culture. For Amis, the role of the author has been usurped by soap opera, gutter press, even style mags. For Costello, the problem is the decline of the songwriter in the face of a pop culture organised around videos, 12" remixes, the sampler and the dee-jay. In the embattled Amis/Costello worldview, the kind of reader they demand is an endangered species: people who've absorbed a lot of literature, who are schooled in the rock canon, and are thus well-versed enough to get the references that riddle the Amis/Costello ouevre. The prospect of a 'disliterate' population (technically literate, but who never bother to read anything) or, in Costello's case, a rock culture no longer based around the reverential interpretation of lyrics, is terrifying. A future based around TV/video/12 inch rather than novel/album bodes a nightmare world of emotional illiterates, like John Self in "Money" who doesn't have the self-analytical skills to know why he's fucked up, or the teenage girl in "The Other Side of Summer" who's "crying cos she doesn't look like like a million dollars", but "doesn't seem to have the attention span" to work out how media and advertising have messed with her mind.

 In the Amis/Costello universe, stuff is always dying: love, language, truth, the planet are all on their last legs. America has a particularly diabolic status; it's the leading edge of the apocalypse, the original "moronic inferno". The replacement of politics by advertising, the castration of rock'n'roll, a junk culture where porn is the biggest grossing leisure industry, mugging, yuppies, MTV - you name it, the US trailblazed it. Amis and Costello document a Britain slowly succumbing to the crappiest aspects of US mass culture but without the space and the naivete that is America's saving grace. In America, the born-to-run reflex is a safety valve for class antagonisms: people just move on. In Britain, rage festers and turns to bile. Amis/Costello have a vivid grip on the stuffiness of English culture: Amis is good on the modern British pub, stuck between the  fustiness of tradition and the plastic tackiness of the future. Costello could have been a Springsteen, but, growing up in more confined circumstances, became a poet of claustrophobia rather than of wide open spaces.

In their early days, both Costello and Amis were regarded as bitter and twisted misanthropes. Costello talked of how he only understood two emotions, "revenge and guilt"; Amis was reknowned for stories that left a bad taste in the mouth. Although both have mellowed somewhat with age, matured into a more compassionate and humanist outlook, their forte is still the banality of evil and the evil of banality: portraits of bastards, brutes, cheats and crushed inadequates, vividly etched with an insider's insight into what makes a shit tick. Revealingly, neither of them can "do" women. Whether manipulative or manipulated, their female characters are ciphers. Nicola Six, the 'heroine' of "London Fields" is even compared to a black hole, the ultimate misogynist metaphor for the femme fatale/vagina dentata.

But ultimately this misogyny is just a facet of a generally misanthropic worldview. Amis and Costello belong to a peculiarly British strain of the satirical imagination, a tradition that includes Evelyn Waugh, the Ealing and Boulting Brothers comedies and Private Eye. In this fallen world(view), there are no heroes, only shits and shat upon - an odious, privileged minority and the loathsome, downtrodden multitude. "Good' characters aren't admirable, but despicably unwordly and naive, weak and gullible fools like Guy Clinch, the amorous fall guy in "London Fields".

 Amis and Costello give this black, bilious brand of satire an apocalyptic, fin de siecle twist. "London Fields" was at one stage  entitled "Millenium"; new Costello songs like "Invasion Hit Parade" and "Hurry Up Doomsday" are panoramic panic attacks. Through Amis's  paranoid uppercrust eyes, the Portobello Road is transformed into a  hellzone of lowlife iniquity. Costello's distempered gaze pans across a culture rank with the stench of mendacity, rife with "professional liars" and "perpetual suckers", zombies and bloodsuckers. Like all apocalyptic visions, the Amis/Costello worldview is prone to overstatement, over-ripe imagery, a certain stylistic overkill. And one problem always looms for the professional prophet of doom: how to keep on upping the apocalyptic stakes. Both Amis and Costello's future would seem wedded to further deterioration of the social fabric, to the continued viability of 'The End'.

While "Mighty Like A Rose" suggests Costello is condemned to spurting exquisitely crafted bile in perpetuity, Amis has taken a sideways step towards an obliquer angle on the Big Picture. His work-in-progress "Time's Arrow" (previewed in Granta 31) borrows its premise from science fiction: the protagonist experiences time running backwards through the eyes of an American doctor called Tod Friendly. This has the salutary effect of making our everyday human procedures and transactions seem eerie and absurd: all power and energy mysteriously originates from the toilet bowl, kind-hearted pimps give money to whores who then squander it on old men, doctors make their patients sick and ambulances rush victims from their hospital beds and painstakingly insert them into wrecked cars. Although the device has been used before in science fiction and comics, Amis does it well: after reading the Granta excerpt, it takes a couple of hours for the uncanny feeling of time running in reverse to wear off.

Abandoning the omniscient, God's eye view for a baffled and bemused first person is a smart move for Amis, and timely too. The judgemental gaze (seeing through facades, looking down on folly) is too sneery and know-it-all for these dazed and confused postmodern times. In rock, fewer and fewer people look to a Big Figure, a Dylan or Lennon, to tell them "what's goin' on"; instead of a counter culture, there's an array of undergrounds orbiting a lost centre. Contemporary literature offers not The Truth, but a plethora of worlds each with their own singular truth, partial glimpses of the Big Picture. Still fatally hung up on the notion of author-as-oracle, Amis and Costello ply their magisterial trade in an ever-expanding void. 

The leading edge in contemporary fiction and music aims to mirror chaos, not offer salvation from it (the kaleidophrenic whirl of Don DeLillo's writing, My Bloody Valentine's neo-psychedelia). But this cutting edge can be hard to grasp for those who cling to an oldfashioned idea of art as reinforcer of values or source of guidance. These people still look for an angry voice of sanity. Deploring the waning of literacy and the craft of songwriting, but lacking the energy to keep up with the state of the art, these middlebrow types look to Amis and Costello for reassurance: firstly, that the culture is still deteriorating; secondly, that they are on the side of righteousness. In reality, they're part of the problem. 

ambient archaeology

Genealogy of ambient with multiple lines of descent - something I did for Details in 1993. The text / timelines. not the actual design. 

AMBIENT / CHILLOUT thinkpiece /feature package with SEEFEEL, MAIN, STEREOLAB and TELEPATHIC FISH 

Melody Maker, 1993 

by Simon Reynolds

    In '93, 'ambient' is everywhere.  The span of music that 

calls itself 'ambient', or is ambient-tinged, is staggering. 

     In the post-rave zone, there's Aphex Twin, Orbital, 

Bandulu and the Infonet crew, R & S's Apollo offshoot 

(Biosphere, Jam & Spoon), Sandoz, Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia, 

and the triumvirate of Peter Namlook/Dr Atmo/Mixmaster 

Morris.  In a post-Orb stylee, there's the sometimes beatific 

(Original Rockers, Higher Intelligence Agency), mostly boring 

'ambient dub' on the Beyond label.  And there's a yawning and 

yawnsome expanse of "electronic easy listening" (Sven Vath, 

Future Sound Of London, the Recycle Or Die label etc) - 

pseudo-mystic bilge that you too could cobble together, with 

some bird-song samples, 'cosmic' synth-sounds, a 24 track 

studio and a spliff. 

     On the post-indie front, there's Stereolab's muzak-of- 

the-spheres; the ice-olationist tundra-scapes of Main, Thomas 

Koner, Ice, Scorn and Lull; the post-MBV locked grooves of 

Seefeel and Moonshake; the post-Eno art-rock of Papa Sprain 

and Bark Psychosis.  And if you really want to stretch the 

definition a bit, you could add the sampladelic Spector of 

Saint Etienne too. 

     So what does it mean to align yourself with 'ambient' 

these days?  Rock starts to take on an ambient tinge almost 

as soon as it departs from 'naturalistic' recording, the 

simulation of a live band.  If you go down the path of using 

the studio-as-instrument, what Eno called the creation of a 

"fictional psycho-acoustic space", chances are that you'll 

finish up making ambient. 

     In some ways, ambient is the ultimate destination of the 

psychedelic impulse. Technically, in that psychedelia 

pioneered stereo and the illusion of spatial dimension; 

spiritually, in that ambience is the heavenly end of the 

psychedelic trip. Where acid rock plunges into into the 

cosmic beyond, ambient is more like treading water, drifting 

in cosmic/oceanic womb-space. For instance, Spacemen 3 

started out trance-rocky, then got progressively more ambient 

and nirvanic ("Playing With Fire", Spectrum and 

Spiritualized).  The blurry zone between psychedelia and 

ambient is a bit like the way abstract art is always on the 

verge of lapsing into mere decorative art (in rock terms, 

think of the way MBV evolved from the action-painting chaos 

of "Isn't Anything" to the almost ambient placidity and 

prettiness of "To Here Knows When"). 

     The current invocation of 'ambient' as buzzword and 

rallying cry is really a quiet revolt against grunge, a 

nouveau hippy riposte to grunge's punk revivalism. It recalls 

that moment in the late Eighties when former hardcore/noise 

musicians decided it was more radical to whisper rather than 

scream: Cowboy Junkies (who were tres ambient in that they 

recorded in a church), Hugo Largo (who abandoned drum beats 

and riffs), Swan's reverberant offshoot Skin, etc.  The 

ambient impulse is an anti-rock gesture, or rather a 

rewriting of the meaning of rock: rock, as in a cradle 

motion, or rock as in petrified, stoned immaculate.  Ambient 

is un-rock'n'roll because it's built up by layers, whereas 

rock is about jamming: instruments fit together like cogs, 

forming a rhythmic engine that kicks your ass. Ambient is 

kind to your ass. It's sofa rock, Erik Satie's "furniture 

music". 

     For rave musicians, pledging allegiance to 'ambient' is 

a revolt against a different kind of hardcore: manic 

breakbeat-driven 'ardkore, which has alienated droves of 

burned out ravers, encouraging them to abandon speedy E for 

dope.  Ambient techno is dance music for the sedentary, for 

oldsters who want to chill out rather than shake that butt. 

     And the future? Well, the anti-grunge guitar-based 

experimentalists, and the post-rave sampladelic artists seem 

to be merging into a single, seamless continuum of 

progressive music.  I have seen the future, and it's flat on 

its back. 

OPEN MIND/TELEPATHIC FISH: THE AMBIENT TEA PARTY 

    "Basically, what we're trying to create at our events is 

a massive bedroom. After raves, we used to chill out in each 

others' bedrooms. Now we've turned the bedroom into a party." 

     So says Kevin Foakes of Open Mind, the organisation 

behind the 'Telepathic Fish' series of 'ambient tea parties'. 

He and colleagues/flatmates Chantal Passamonte, David Vallade 

and Mario Tracey-Ageura formed Open Mind last summer, after 

becoming disillusioned with rave culture's "harder, faster" 

ethos.  The first party was in their East Dulwich flat, and 

featured DJ-ing by ambient ally Mixmaster Morris of The 

Irresistible Force. It was a huge success, obliging them to 

holding the sequel outside the flat. There've been four so 

far, and the fifth is taking place this Sunday in Brixton 

(for details, see below). Open Mind hope to turn Telepathic 

Fish into a monthly event by Xmas, despite problems in 

finding suitable venues. 

    "Traditional clubs just don't work," say Chantal.  Most 

promoters are interested in people getting overheated so they 

buy overpriced drinks. "We're into tea rather alchohol!". 

The flyer for one event even incorporated a tea bag! 

    So what is an average tea party like? 

    "There's an abundance of mattresses. Lots of soothing 

lights - strictly ultraviolet, no strobes.  Lots of oil 

projectors, computer graphics." Where your standard 'ardkore 

rave is stress-makingly staccato (cut'n'mix beats, epileptic 

strobes), Telepathic Fish is all undulating ebb-and-flow , a 

wombadelic sound-and-light-bath.  The last event was styled 

after a fish-tank, and Sunday's party will boast "deep sea 

decor".  The music ranges from post-Orb ambient to Dead Can 

Dance and Main. And the punters?  Some do floaty dancing, 

most simply get recumbent and spliff up. 

    "We went clubbing a lot last year," says Kevin, "and by 

the end it got so fast, it was like you had to work to have a 

good time." Where 'ardkore's slogans often mimic the language 

of graft and toil ("get busy", "work it up", "shovelling 

tunes"), Open Mind don't like the 'work hard, play harder' 

mentality (where you're a slave to the rush hour, then rush 

your nut off at the weekend).  "People who can afford to go 

to a 15 quid rave have all this aggression to get out of 

their systems from working all week.  The crowd we attract is 

more laidback and bohemian".  The feud between 'ardkore and 

ambient is like the split between the mods, who were 

city-loving, insomniac amphetamine-freaks, and the hippies, 

who were into dope, pastoral indolence and sleep, and 

declared 'speed kills'.  And so Mario will refer derisively 

to "gurning E-heads", while Chantal talks of the ambient 

thing as being "more organic.  Our parties are as close to 

getting it together in the country as you can get in London." 

     Of course, ravers have been chilling-out informally 

since the early days of rave, inventing their own rituals to 

enhance the post-E afterglow and cushion the come-down. 

"People are doing this in their bedrooms all round the 

country," says Chantal. "But we decided to do it for 300, 500 

people, not just 10".  And they're not alone. There are 

similar outfits all over Britain: Sonora in Glasgow, Sunday 

nights 8 til 12; Oscillate in Birmingham, every second 

Friday; London's Zero Gravity (every other Wednesday at 11 

Wardour St) and Dream Time Environment (midnight Friday right 

through to midnight Sunday, at 67, West Yard, Camden Lock). 

    Open Mind have larger ambitions. They're bringing out an 

ambient magazine, Mindfood, whose first issue contains 

articles on Terence McKenna and floatation tanks.  And 

they're linked with an ambient specialist record shop, 

Ambient Soho (5 Berwick St, London).  For idlers, they're 

pretty fucking busy. 

     'Telepathic Fish IV: The Fishing Trip' is this Sunday, 

October 3, from 12 noon to 10 pm, at Cooltan, 372 Coldharbour 

Lane, Brixton. For info, call 081 693 9903 

MAIN 

    Mick Harris, who left Napalm Death to form ambient dub 

terrorists Scorn (plus his own pure ambient side project 

Lull), claims that "if you play early Eno records from the 

70's and turn them up really loud, there's a darker edge to 

it all, it becomes really quite unnerving." It works the 

other way round, too: Gibby the Buttholes once said that if 

you play thrash-metal really quiet, it sounds ambient. 

     It's this zone of un-easy listening over which Main 

currently rule supreme.  Formed by Robert Hampson of Loop, 

Main explore the kind of post-catastrophic soundscapes that 

always seemed the logical aftermath for Loop's apocalyptic 

trance-rock.  Shifting the emphasis from riffs towards 

guitar-generated and environmental timbres, Main owe a fair 

amount to Eno's original ambience, although Robert insists 

"we take it a lot further." 

     Robert's pretty scornful of the current vogue for 

ambient. He's never liked hippies, always preferred the 

proto-punk nihilism of The Stooges or MC5 or the post-punk 

gloom'n'doom of The Pop Group and Mark Stewart.  "I can't go 

along with the hippy attitude, you do need a bit of ugliness 

and confrontation.  'Cos we don't all love each other, we 

don't want to embrace everything." 

     And yet he talks of how Main "want to embrace our 

environment, not retreat from it like ambient techno. Main 

music reflects the way we're surrounded by noise, all the 

hums and buzzes of traffic, planes, road drills, the constant 

clatter you can never really escape".  The band use what The 

Young Gods' called 'urban sonorities": a new track is based 

around a backing drone, "the sound of a main road, processed 

through an effect so that it's sounds really beautiful." 

Robert describes the recent Main instrumental EP "Firmament" 

as "musique concrete dub", reflecting his love of 

drone-theorists like La Monte Young, Terry Riley and 

Karlheinz Stockhausen (Mains' first EP "Hydra" was dedicated 

to the Kraut electro-acoustic composer). 

     Kevin Martin has coined the term 'Isolationist Music' to 

describe the likes of Main. "I dunno about that," says 

Robert. "But I do feel isolated musically.  Rock is getting 

really stale again".  If he has one "comrade in arms", says 

the Main-man, it's Thomas Koner, maker of austerely beautiful 

meditational music, that's often inspired by Antarctica. 

"Emotionally, his music stabbed its mark on me, just the fact 

that such extremely minimal music could stir so many visual 

feelings. I thought 'Nunattak' was the most beautiful thing 

I'd heard in ages.  Then 'Permafrost' took the minimalism to 

its logical extreme." A Main/Koner collaboration looks set to 

happen next year.

     Main's twin EP's "Dry Stone Feed" and "Firmament" are 

out now on Beggars Banquet. 

SEEFEEL 

   "Ambient's lost its definition," reckons Mark Clifford of 

Seefeel. "Now it just means anything that's droney and 

drifting, anything that isn't too bothered about songs. But 

it's good that there's so many different meanings to 

'ambient' now.  The term's either been emptied of meaning, or 

it's been filled up with lots of meanings." 

     Seefeel's billowing bliss-rock tapestries illustrate how 

'ambient' has become a sort of horizon for post-Cocteaus/ 

post-MBV bands, or as Mark puts it, ""any band that want to 

go beyond the constraints of 3 minute punky pop, beyond 

choruses".  So is 'ambient' the final death of punk? 

     "We did a gig where we played one truly ambient piece, 

almost like a whale song, and this old punk shouted 'bring 

back the Sex Pistols'. It seemed such a negative and old- 

fashioned comment. That really inspired us to go even 

further. Anyway, someone like Richard James is modern punk, 

his music has that DIY, lo-fi naivete. That said, most 

ambient techno is really safe and boring." 

     On their latest EP "pure, impure", Seefeel got Aphex to 

remix "Time to Find Me", and a full-fledged collaboration is 

in the pipeline. With "Time to Find Me", Richard James paid 

them a rare compliment, in that, rather than junking almost 

all of the original track as usual (see Curve, Jesus Jones) 

all the sounds he used came from Seefeel's song. 

     Seefeel are also highly influenced by ambient's cousin, 

dub reggae. But does this mean that today's ambient, like 

dub, is 'just' music to get stoned to? 

    "I'd be upset if the only way you could get into Seefeel 

is to get wasted. A lot of the mediocre ambient techno is 

like that. Actually, a good litmus test for ambient is: if 

it's good, you don't need to get stoned to enjoy it". 

     Seefeel's "pure, impure" EP is out now on Too Pure. 

Their debut LP "Quique" is out in late October. 

STEREOLAB 

     The first of Stereolab's two albums of 1993, "Space Age 

Bachelor Pad Music", paid homage to an earlier genre of 

proto-ambient easy listening: the 'exotica' and stereo- 

testing records of the Fifties/early Sixties, artists like 

Martin Denny and Arthur Lyman. 

     "I've been into stereo test, sound effects and Moog 

albums for a while," says the Lab's Tim Gane.  "I like the 

pseudo-scientific language on the sleeves.  Our name actually 

comes from a hi-fi testing label, Stereolab, an offshoot of 

Vanguard.  We liked the name 'Stereolab', cos it's 

yesterday's idea of 'futuristic', but today it seems quaint 

and kitschy.  With Martin Denny & Co, I like the idea of 

taking something that was utilitarian and very much part of a 

specific era, and taking it out of that context so that it's 

this alien music.  Plus, it fucks up the official history of 

rock, the fact that amazing records came out in 1961!" 

     So is 'exotica' a sort of illegitimate father to Eno's 

ambient? "Well, those were the first records designed to make 

you sleep. But Stereolab are more into minimalism than 

straight ambience". By minimalism, Tim means everything from 

John Cage and La Monte Young's Theatre Of Eternal Music to 

the Velvets to Krautrock (he's a big fan of Neu and Cluster's 

"meditative doodling").  Stereolab followed one of the more 

obscure Krautrock tangents by linking up with Nurse With 

Wound, whose Steve Stapleton has a massive archive of German 

avant-rock.  For the recent "Crumb Duck" 10 inch, Stapleton 

Faust-ified a Stereolab song using tape-manipulation 

techniques. 

     Then there was their homage to the grand-daddy of 

ambient, the 7 inch single "John Cage Bubblegum".  "That was 

just a way of saying you can like avant-gardists like Cage 

and you can like bubblegum like The Archies, and you can even 

combine the two.  Because they're both extremes in their own 

way." Similarly, on the 'Bachelor Pad' album, Stereolab's 

titles are meant to evoke imaginary genres that really should 

exist, e.g. "Avant-Garde MOR" . Another fictional genre that 

Gane & Co are currently hatching is 'ambient boogie': "I like 

the idea of taking an almost Status Quo bass-riff but looping 

it, making it just go on." Generally, Gane says the band are 

interested in making "rock music without rock dynamics, no 

solos, just ebb and flow", as on their brill new LP 

"Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements". 

     Stereolab have a peculiar, rarified approach to music - 

they really are like boffins in a soundlab, gene-splicing 

in order to create mutant styles. But so long as the results 

are captivating, who gives a tinker's cuss? 

     Stereolab's latest LP is out now on Duophonic. 

PROPHETIC MOMENTS IN AMBIENT'S EVOLUTION 

JOHN CAGE - "4' 33''" . Erroneously known as 'Silence', 

Cage's composition instructs the pianist to do nothing, 

forcing the audience to listen to the barely audible noises 

of the environment. 

TERRY RILEY - "In C" . A symphony in one note, sifting and 

shifting layers rather than developing melodically. 

JIMI HENDRIX -"1983, A Merman I Should Turn To Be/Moon, Turn 

The Tides...  gently gently away" ("Electric Ladyland, 1969). 

MILES DAVIS - "He Loved Him Madly" ("Get Up With It", 1975). 

Teo Macero's soundscape production is cited by Eno as the 

inspiration for "On Land". 

NEU! - "Leb Wohl" -("Neu! 75).  Krautrockers switch off the 

motorik engine and bask in a seaside idyll. 

KING TUBBY -"King Tubby's Special 1973-1976".  Along with 

Perry, Pablo, Far I etc, this dub-meister paralled Eno in the 

use of echo to create spatial, sacrosant, meditational music. 

JON HASSELL -"Dream Theory In Malaya" LP (1981).  Trumpeter 

pal of Eno's and pioneer of "Fourth World" ethnodelia. 

JAN GARBAREK - "Paths, Prints" LP (1982). Or anything else on 

cooler-than-thou jazz label, ECM (motto: "the most beautiful 

sound next to silence"). 

BRIAN ENO - "On Land" LP (1982).  Uncle Bri's ambient 

pinnacle: no pitches, just timbres, plus sounds of sticks, 

stones, and insects. 

ARTHUR RUSSELL -"Let's Go Swimming" (1987). Aqua-funk by NY 

avant-gardist who loved disco's hynpnotic repetition. 

MY BLOODY VALENTINE -"Instramental" (bonus 7inch with "Isn't 

Anything", 1988).  Erik Satie-esque glide guitar drifts like 

a disconsolate ghost over junglistic hip hop beats. 

RECENT PARAGONS OF AMBIENT 

POM MI RU - "Koh Tao" (from Infonet CD comp. "Beyond the 

Machines").  Bandalu + hippy guitarist = pastoral bliss. 

THE IRRESISTIBLE FORCE - "Flying High" LP (Rising High) 

THOMAS KONER - "Permafrost" LP (Baroni) 

Wanna chill out? Try these hypothermic wastelands. 

METALHEADS - "Angel" (Synthetic 12").  Ambient ardkore?! 

Hyped up jungle beats collide with lush, languishing jazz- 

tinged melancholia worthy of David Sylvian's "Gone to Earth". 

ORIGINAL ROCKERS -"The Underwater World of Jah Cousteau" 

(from 'Ambient Dub II', Beyond). Oceanic dub: Zion = 

Atlantis. 

PETE NAMLOOK -"Air" LP (Rising High) 

SANDOZ - "Digital Lifeforms" LP (Touch) 

Ambient the Buzzword of 1993 

Christmas 1993 overview mini-essay

Melody Maker, December 1993

by Simon Reynolds

    Aphex Twin's "Selected Ambient Works 1985-92" wasn't just the

most sheerly beautiful album of '93, it was also the most

significant. It signalled a Zeitgeist-shift, pointing the way to a

whole new future.  First, by being so accomplished, it gave credibility

to the then emergent genre of ambient techno (a.k.a intelligent

techno, electronic listening music etc). It singlehandedly won over

many indie fans who hadn't really listened to much techno, thus

encouraging them to seek out more.  Second, it's had a profound

effect on the more progressive elements in British indie-rock, the

results of which will really BLOSSOM next year.  The fact that bands

as diverse as Curve, Jesus Jones, Saint Etienne and Seefeel rushed

to submit their songs to Richard James' remix-mutilation showed how

keen the smarter indie popsters are to get in on the NEW THING.

     

"Selected Ambient" and James' other releases (Polygon Window's

"Surfing On Sine Waves", AFX's "Analogue Bubblebath 3" etc) weren't

the only proof that techno has matured into an aesthetically (and

commercially) viable album-based genre.  There were splendid

offerings from Sandoz, Orbital, Bandulu, Reload, Black Dog, Pete

Namlook, Mixmaster Morris and more.  But inevitably, the ambient boom

has also opened the floodgates for a deluge of mediocre spliff-and-

sofa muzak (B12, Sven Vath and droves more Vangelis-with-a-beat

types).  Another dubious development was 'ambient dub': sometimes

wonderfully spacey (Higher Intelligence Agency, Original Rockers),

more often vaporously insipid sub-Orb stuff.  Like trance, ambient

techno has reached something of a dead end; hopefully the sharper

operators will step sideways into more interesting territory.  Aphex

Twin's long-awaited sequel "Selected Ambient Works 2" - a double-CD

of sombre minimalism and music concrete sound-paintings -will blow a

lot of the competition out of the water.

     As for the indie avant-garde, 'ambient' is useful as a loose

umbrella term for any band that deploys the studio-as-instrument and

sampling in order to imagine some kind of FUTURE for rock (one that

doesn't rely on blues-rock riffs, glam postures or punky-pop

choruses).  Perhaps the most techno-affiliated of these bands were

Insides and Seefeel (who actually linked up with Aphex on the sublime

"pure, impure" EP).  Both bands demote the guitar to just another

iridescent thread in their swoony tapestry of sampled and sequenced

sound.  Disco Inferno ditched their axes for samplers, while the

art/cosmic rock of Bark Psychosis and Papa Sprain is also ambient-

tinged.  On two superb 1993 LP's, "Space Age Bachelor Pad Music" and

"Transient Random Noise Bursts", Stereolab explored the unlikely

links between early 60's muzak and late 60's drone-rock (Velvets, La

Monte Young).  The 'Lab also imagined 'impossible' but desirable

genres like "Avant-Garde MOR" and "John Cage Bubblegum".  Other bands

took Eno's legacy in a chilling, as opposed to chill-out, direction.

This "isolationist music" or "uneasy listening" ranges from Ice and

Scorn's post-apocalyptic dub-metal, to Main and Thomas Koner's

lustrous, meditational soundscapes.

     The upshot of all this is that British avant-rock and left-field

dance are coalescing into a single, seamless vanguard of progressive

music.  The zone in which they commingle is the fertile hinterland

between the dreampop of MBV, A.R. Kane and 4AD (so many techno

artists cite the Cocteaus as an influence!), the

Kraftwerk/Detroit/Warp techno lineage, and dub reggae's echo-drenched

expanses.  The resultant halcyon, herbalistic sound is the fulfilment

of Erik Satie's fantasy of "furniture music": sound that enhances and

tints your life like a fragrance.

     "Ambient" is the rallying cry of those in revolt against two

different kinds of 'hardcore'. For indie-rockers, it's a revolt

against grunge (hardcore punk gone metallic and bluesy); for techno-

heads, it's a revolt against 'ardkore's manic frenzy.  After the

false start of 1991's ambient house craze, chill-out clubs and events

made a comeback this year, thanks to outfits like London's Open Mind.

The latter are responsible for the 'Telepathic Fish' parties:

"massive bedrooms", strewn with mattresses and bathed in wombing

lights, where burned-out ravers recline, spliff up and mellow out.

Open Mind's DJ's mix Irresistible Force and Pete Namlook with Main

and Dead Can Dance.  Where grunge offers crude catharsis and ardkore

ravers find release through going mental at the weekend, the ambient

response to our increasingly grim, anxiety-wracked world is to seek

refuge in a sacro-sanctuary of sensuously spiritual sound.  Ambient

caresses where grunge/ardkore concusses.  (That said, one of the most

interesting developments of late '93 was 'ambient ardkore', bands

like Metalheads and Foul Play who fuse jungle beats and langorous

textures to bizarrely beatific effect.)

   Yes, it's all a bit hippy. Is ambient the final death of punk?

Does quiet music = quietist politics (Stereolab would say no).  Given

given the choice between Rage Against The Machine and soft-machine-

music, though, there's only one response: BLISS ON!

sidepanel to some kind of big feature package on ambient in Melody Maker

In the UK right now, avant-rock and left-field dance are

coalescing into a continuum.  On one side, there's the likes of

Seefeel, Disco Inferno, Main, Stereolab, Moonshake, Papa Sprain,

Insides (formerly Earwig), Ice, et al, truly independent bands who

have very little to do with the trad connotation of "indie" (i.e.

scrawny Luddite grot).  On the other side, you have post-rave

innovators like The Aphex Twin, Orbital, Sandoz, etc, who are

reaching beyond the dancefloor to a new audience of disenchanted

ex-indie fans.  In this new state-of-play, an "indie" band like

Seefeel patently has far more in common with a "techno" artist like

Aphex than either has with its supposed genre-peers. Which is why

they've collaborated with each other rather than, respectively,

Slowdive or Sven Vath.

     For better or for worse, the word that's come to crystallise the

merger of neo-psychedelia and post-aciiied is "ambient".  For bands

looking to transcend indie rock, "ambient" signifies going beyond

riffs; for the techno-heads, "ambient" means leaving behind the dance

beat.  But ambient isn't inappropriate, because all this post-rock

and post-rave stuff (the stuff worth cherishing in '93) does

ultimately descend from Brian Eno (with a few extra genes spliced

from dub reggae).  The original soundscape gardener, Eno pioneered

the techniques that are the foundation of progressive Nineties music:

the studio-as-instrument, tape loops (or its easier, quicker modern

equivalent, sampling), the use of effects and treatments so that

timbre and texture is more important than chords or riffs.  Any music

that exploits the studio, that doesn't sound "naturalistic" (i.e.

like you're five rows from the front at the Falcon) is in some sense

Eno-ite. To put it another way: ambient is the polar opposite of

grunge.

     Of course, the likes of Papa Sprain and Stereolab probably have

only an indirect relationship to Eno, as mediated through A.R. Kane

and My Bloody Valentine, who themselves drew more from the sources

that inspired Eno (Can, Velvet Underground, Hendrix, dub) than the

man himself.  MBV, in particular, paved the way for the sampladelic

non-rock of Seefeel and Moonshake (whose last record featured

virtually no guitar).  Kevin Shields said that it was "the weird

noises on hip hop records" that goaded them towards "Isn't

Anything"'s guitar-reinvention.  Then MBV fell under the spell of

rave: "Loveless" saw them sampling their own feedback and looping

beats and basslines.  Along with the Primals' "Higher Than The Sun",

MBV's "Soon" showed that it's the subliminal influence of rave

culture that gives British avant-rock the edge over its US

counterpart.  The Krautrock deluges of Mercury Rev, the epileptic

eclecticism of Thinkin' Fellers and Pavement, are great, but they're

hidebound by garageland, by the Luddite limits of bass/gtrs/drums. US

avant-rock is crippled by the abiding delusion that "disco sucks".

   

  Because they both inhabit a Eno-ite universe, the UK's

avant-rock and neo-techno units are inevitably merging into a single

phalanx of progressive whatever-you-wanna-call-it. For this kind of

music, 'ambient' is a sort of horizon: the outer limit of

form-dissolving halcyon chaos that it strives for, but doesn't

necessarily reach.  Because sometimes it's better to travel than to

arrive.