Daft Punk interview

Daft Punk interview
New York Times, May 15th 2013

by Simon Reynolds

Thomas Bangalter, half of the influential French dance music act Daft Punk, has a house high in the Hollywood Hills here. He and his partner, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, divide their time between Los Angeles and Paris, where their families live. But for all the duo’s jet-setting lifestyle, there’s little evidence of rock star flash to be seen (well, apart from the Porsche that Mr. de Homem-Christo has parked in the driveway). Built in the symmetrical mid-century modern style called post-and-beam, the bungalow exudes a subtle retro feel, with white carpeting, a cross-section tree trunk coffee table, and a gravel fireplace in the living room. The swimming pool, a small square of radiant Hockney blue, is visible through the floor-to-ceiling glass walls. 

The home’s décor mirrors the retro-modern aesthetic that runs through all the stages of Daft Punk’s 20 year career. From its first dancefloor smash, “Da Funk,” in 1996 through the synthetic dazzle of the 2001 album “Discovery” to the 2010 score for the remake of “Tron,” the duo’s defining balancing act has been breaking new ground while simultaneously invoking earlier golden ages of club music, like 1970s disco and ‘80s electro-pop. 

Daft Punk expanded the audience for dance music alongside late-‘90s popularizers like the Chemical Brothers, influenced Madonna and Kanye West, and has been in the vanguard of developing the visual side of live dance music performance. Their iconic robot masks and their spectacular Pyramid-shaped stage set at the 2006 Coachella festival inspired the hi-tech showmanship of younger electronic dance music stars like Skrillex. In the eight years since the duo’s last studio album, EDM has become big business, while Daft Punk-like sounds have infiltrated Top 40 radio, popping up in songs by artists as mainstream as Justin Bieber and Ke$ha. 

But after years on the cutting edge, Daft Punk has reversed course with the eagerly anticipated “Random Access Memories,” out on Daft Life/Columbia this week. Spurning the digital audio software that empowers the EDM generation, the album is an analogue flashback to the era of live musicianship, involving a crack squad of session players and contributions from the disco legends Nile Rodgers and Giorgio Moroder, as well as indie rockers like Julian Casablancas and the hip-hop star Pharrell Williams. Mr. Rodgers and Pharrell both appear on the album’s first single,  “Get Lucky”, an uncanny replication of Chic’s sparkling disco-funk.

“In some ways it’s like we’re running on a highway going the opposite direction to everybody else,” said Mr Bangalter,  38, sitting on his white carpet while the taciturn Mr. de Homem-Christo, 39, slumped on a sofa.

 It’s a dilemma that confronts many innovators: when the rest of the world catches up with you, where do you go next? In a paradox that informs the entire project, doing something new for Daft Punk involved embracing the methods and mindset of the past. The result is an album that is impressive but backward-looking, drawing on influences from disco to progressive rock to New Wave. Aspiring to the sumptuous production and arrangements of late ‘70s rock and R&B albums, “Random Access Memories” contains many songs that allude to time, transience, memory, and yesterday’s idea of the future. The album title itself is a play on the idea of computer memory (RAM) versus human memory.

The promotional campaign for the album winds the clock back to an era before tweets and album streams.  Daft Punk and its team orchestrated a suspense-building trail of hints about a new project in the form of billboard ads and teaser mini-commercials on TV.  They haven’t completely bypassed the Internet, but their digital promotion has taken an unusual form: a series of well-made video interviews with their collaborators.

But the bandmates, who originally met at school back in 1987, are adamant that nostalgia is not their primary motivation. Nor is there anything “judgemental,” said Mr. Bangalter, about the anti-digital stance that Daft Punk took with the making of the album. But he does repeatedly refer to technology like Pro Tools and AutoTune as having “created a musical landscape that is very uniform.” Instead, both members enthused about the flexibility of the flesh-and-blood musicians they recruited, like the drummer John Robinson, who played on Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall."

 “It’s an infinity of nuance, in the shuffles and the grooves,” raved Mr. Bangalter, knocking over his drink in his excitement. “These things are impossible to create with machines.”

Of course, these intangible but essential qualities of feel and vibe exalted by Daft Punk are necessarily inaccessible to most of today’s young music-makers, whose do-it-yourself dance tracks depend on the same sort of computer technology that launched Daft Punk’s career in the Nineties.  A kid in a bedroom with a laptop and software can make records that sound like a million bucks. Making music the way Daft Punk has actually requires a million bucks, or more.

It also takes time. Begun in 2008, then interrupted when Daft Punk worked on the “Tron” score, the album took two and half years to complete. But the challenge of learning how to get results from live musicians rather than compliant machines was an important step for the duo. 

On their two most influential albums, 1997’s “Homework” and 2001’s "Discovery," Daft Punk proved themselves sampling virtuosos. They had a knack for locating the killer riffs secreted within otherwise deservedly obscure songs from the past and, through deft recontextualization and processing, unleashing their incandescent potential. Now with “Random Access Memories,” the goal is to make music that others might one day sample. Mr. Bangalter talks about the thrill of “starting every sound from scratch, creating a sonic world from the ground up.” Indeed there’s just one sample on the album, in the final track “Contact,” a blasting surge of sound that starts with the voice of Eugene Cernan, the last astronaut to stand on the Moon’s surface. That, plus the trademark electronic processing on their voices, is the only real continuity with their old methodology. 

Albums by megabands like Fleetwood Mac and The Eagles, with their no-expense-spared attention to detail, served as the model for “Random Access Memories”’s intricately layered production. “The late ‘70s and early ‘80s is the zenith of a certain craftsmanship in sound recording,” said Mr. Bangalter. For Daft Punk there is a subtle but crucial distinction between flawlessness as a goal pursued through human effort and the perfection easily achieved through digital means.  Mr. Bangalter’s complaints  about the standardization and sterility of the computer-created dance-pop that dominates contemporary radio ironically recall the derogatory language directed at disco by many rock fans in the ‘70s, who decried it as soul-less and mechanistic. Random Access Memories is, in part, a celebration of the rarely acknowledged musicality of disco, whose greatest exponents, like Earth Wind & Fire, were nothing if not great players. 

“They wanted the classic Nile, almost like we were doing a record back in the day,” said Mr. Rodgers, the  guitarist of Chic and one of the most in-demand producers of the ‘80s. This time travel sensation was intensified because the sessions took place at Electric Lady studio in New York, where Chic’s first hit “Dance Dance Dance” was recorded.

Daft Punk have always had a strong sense of history. Reverence for their musical ancestors inspired the “Homework” track “Teachers,”a roll-call of house music and techno pioneers. Its equivalent on “Random Access Memories” is “Giorgio By Moroder.”But the collaboration with Mr. Moroder, who pioneered the electronic style of Eurodisco, was not musical. Instead Daft Punk took snippets from two long interviews with the producer and layered them over an epic track incorporating a pastiche of the Moroder sound. The song jumps from his earliest days as a struggling musician to the 1977 recording of the futuristic Donna Summer song “I Feel Love,” whose metronomic rhythm track and pulsating synths spawned genres like ’80s synthpop and ‘90s trance. “One day I’ll type out the whole interview and that’ll be my biography,” said Mr. Moroder. 

Although Daft Punk’s collaborators on “Random Access Memories” include musicians their own age or younger, like Panda Bear (whose real name is Noah Lennox) from Animal Collective , it’s the partnerships forged with elder legends like Mr. Moroder and Mr. Rodgers that are most revealing of the project’s intent. This applies to the seemingly unlikely collaboration with the actor-singer-songwriter Paul Williams, who penned tunes for The Carpenters and the Muppets. Daft Punk have been fans since their early exposure to the 1974 cult movie “Phantom of the Paradise,” Brian De Palma’s rock satire in which Mr. Williams starred as a malevolent svengali. Mr. Bangalter describes it “as our favorite film, the foundation for a lot of what we’re about artistically. It embodied everything we liked when we were 13— horror, glam, esotericism. ” Speaking from his office in Los Angeles, Mr. Williams noted wryly that the movie was a flop everywhere apart from two cities: “Paris. And Winnipeg.”

On “Random,” Mr. Williams wrote lyrics for the songs “Beyond” and “Touch.” He also sang on “Touch,” a grandiose song-suite that merges prog-rock and pop schlock. Of his first hearing of the finished version of “Touch,” Mr. Williams recalled asking “’Can I see it again?’” and described the whole album as “an intensely visual experience.”

For Daft Punk, Mr Williams seems to represent some kind of pure spirit of entertainment.  It’s this belief in the magic of showbiz  that attracted them to Los Angeles in the first place.  The duo had a presence in the city as far back as 1996, when they met with Spike Jonze to enlist his directorial skills for the video for “Da Funk”. In the mid-2000s they established the company Daft Arts Inc here to develop the visual aspects of their work, including their feature-length film Electroma. 

But the attraction to LA is as much mythic as it is practical.   Gesturing out of the window towards the Hollywood lurking at the foot of the canyon,  Mr Bangalter talks about the “classic dream factory.”  Whether it’s the pulp fictions manufactured by the studio system or  the glitterball wonderworld of disco, for Daft Punk pop culture is all about fantasy, escape and self-transformation.  The idea for the robot masks they wear to protect their anonymity came from superhero comics and movies.  A delicate poise between kitsch and sublime is the hallmark of their greatest songs, from 2001’s “Digital Love” to the new album’s “Fragments of Time”.  Mr de Homem-Christo breaks his silence to talk about the near-mystical power of music. “You get that extraordinary feeling, that otherworldly feeling, of being transported somewhere.  I think we have a little bit of that edge, me and Thomas, these past 20 years. “

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



fan-made video made out of old Soul Train footage (i'd much rather be listening to the music these kids were dancing to originally than DP & Pharrell's retropastiche wouldn't you?)

directors' cut mix

Daft Punk interview
New York Times 2013
by Simon Reynolds

High in the Hollywood Hills nestles the Los Angeles residence of Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter.   He and musical partner Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo divide their time between LA and their hometown Paris.  But for all the duo’s jet-setting lifestyle, there’s little evidence of rock star flash to be seen chez Bangalter (well, apart from the Porsche that Mr de Homem-Christo has parked in the driveway).   Built in the symmetrical mid-century modern style called post-and-beam, the bungalow exudes a subtle retro feel, with white carpeting, a cross-section tree trunk coffee table, and a gravel fireplace in the living room. The swimming pool, a small square of radiant Hockney blue, is visible through the glass walls.

“Retro-modern” is the aesthetic through-line connecting all the stages of Daft Punk’s 20 year career.  From their first dancefloor smash “Da Funk” in 1996 through 2001’s Discovery to their 2010 movie score for the remake of Tron, the duo’s defining balancing act has been breaking new ground while simultaneously invoking earlier golden ages of club music like Seventies disco and Eighties electro-pop. Daft Punk have also been in the vanguard of developing the visual side of dance music live performance.  Their iconic robot masks and Pyramid spectacular at 2006’s Coachella Festival have inspired the hi-tech showmanship of EDM stars Skrillex and deadmau5. But after years on the cutting edge, Daft Punk have reversed course drastically with their new album Random Access Memories. Spurning the digital audio software that empowers the EDM generation, the album is an analogue flashback to the era of live musicianship, involving a crack squad of session players and contributions from disco legends Nile Rodgers and Giorgio Moroder. 

Making music the old fashioned way gobbled up time and money. Random Access Memories was self-financed, explains Mr Bangalter, who is seated on the white carpet while the taciturn Mr de Homem-Christo slumps on a sofa.  Begun in 2008, then interrupted when Daft Punk signed on for the Tron score, the album took two and half years to complete.  But the challenge of learning how to get results from live musicians rather than compliant machines was an important step for the duo.  In a paradox that informs the entire project, doing something new for Daft Punk involved embracing the methods and mindset of the past.  

Mr Bangalter repeatedly denies there’s anything “judgemental”  about the anti-digital stance  that Daft Punk have taken with Random Access Memories, whose title plays on the idea of computer memory (RAM) versus human memory. But he does repeatedly refer to technology like Pro Tools and AutoTune having “created a musical landscape that is very uniform.”  Conversely, Daft Punk enthuse about the flexibility of the flesh-and-blood musicians they recruited, such as John Robinson, whose drumming pedigree includes Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall. “It’s an infinity of nuance, in the shuffles and the grooves,” raves Mr Bangalter, knocking over his drink in his excitement. “These things are impossible to create with machines.”

On their two most influential albums, 1997’s Homework and 2001’s Discovery, which inspired mainstream artists as diverse as Madonna and Kanye West, Daft Punk proved themselves sampling virtuosos. They had a knack for  locating the  killer riffs secreted within otherwise deservedly obscure songs from the past and, through deft recontextualisation and processing,  unleashing their incandescent potential. Now with Random Access Memories, the goal is to make music that others might one day sample.  Mr Bangalter talks about the thrill of “starting every sound from scratch, creating a sonic world from the ground up.” Indeed there’s just one sample on the whole album, in the final track “Contact.” That, plus the trademark electronic processing on their voices, is the only real continuity with their old methodology.

One of Daft Punk’s best-loved songs is “Digital Love”, from Discovery. But Daft Punk appear to have fallen out of love with the digital world. The promotional campaign for the new album winds the clock back to an era before tweets and internet leaks.  The group and its team have masterfully orchestrated  a suspense-building trail of hints in the form of billboard ads and teaser mini-commercials on TV.  “In some ways it’s like we’re running on a highway going the opposite direction to everybody else,” says Mr Bangalter. 

Even Daft Punk’s business strategy could be construed as a throwback. When their contract with Virgin expired several years ago, they could have self-released their own album to their huge fan base via the internet, as Radiohead did with In Rainbows in 2007 and My Bloody Valentine has with m b v earlier this year. But instead the duo signed with Columbia, the most major of major labels, which Mr Bangalter hails as “the first record company, the inventor of the 33 rpm record”.  Comparing the record business in its Seventies and Eighties heyday to Hollywood’s studio system, he sounds wistful for the era of  “sonic blockbusters” like Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours or “Off The Wall,” albums that everybody heard or at least heard about.  “Pop culture is the monoculture,” he argues.  “Today the only monoculture is brands.” Using the marketing muscle of an entertainment conglomerate like Columbia, which is owned by Sony, Random Access Memories attempts to swim against the historical tide of popular culture’s fragmentation into niche markets and micro-genres.

Albums by megabands like Fleetwood Mac and The Eagles, with their no-expense-spared attention to detail, also served as the model for Random Access Memories’s sumptuous, intricate production.  “The late Seventies and early Eighties is the zenith of a certain craftsmanship in sound recording,” argues Mr Bangalter. For Daft Punk there is a subtle but crucial distinction between flawlessness as a goal pursued through human effort and the perfection easily achieved through digital means.  Ironically, though, Mr Bangalter’s complaints about the standardization and sterility of the computer-created dance-pop that dominates contemporary radio recalls the derogatory language directed at disco by many rock fans in the Seventies, who decried it as soul-less and mechanistic.  Random Access Memories is, in part, a celebration of the rarely acknowledged musicality of disco, whose greatest exponents, like Chic or Earth Wind & Fire, were nothing if not great players.

“They wanted the classic Nile, almost like we were doing a record back in the day,” says Mr Rodgers, Chic’s guitarist and one of the most in-demand producers of the 1980s. “I walked out of my room in the 2013 and I was back in 1979.” This time travel sensation was intensified because the sessions took place at Electric Lady studio in New York, where Chic’s first hit “Dance Dance Dance” was recorded.  The original plan was for Mr Rodgers to lend his trademark sparkling rhythm guitar to just one song, but the sessions were so electric he ended up working on three, including the album’s first single, “Get Lucky”.

Although Daft Punk’s collaborators on Random  Access Memories include musicians their own age or younger, like Noah Lennox from Animal Collective and Pharrell Williams of the Neptunes, it’s the partnerships forged with elder legends like Mr Rodgers that are most revealing of the project’s intent. This applies to the seemingly unlikely collaboration with actor-singer-songwriter Paul Williams, who penned tunes for The Carpenters and the Muppets and popped up on American TV screens for decades as a sort of celebrity-without-portfolio.  Daft Punk have been fans since their early exposure to the cult movie Phantom of the Paradise, Brian De Palma’s satire of Seventies rock in which Mr Williams starred as a malevolent svengali.  Mr Bangalter describes Phantom “as our favourite film, the foundation for a lot of what we’re about artistically.   It embodied everything we liked when we were thirteen— horror, glam, esotericism. ” Speaking by telephone from his LA office, Mr Williams describes  Phantom as “a cartoon done with real people” and notes wryly that the movie was a flop everywhere apart from two cities. “Paris. And Winnipeg.”

On Random Access Memories, Mr Williams wrote lyrics for two songs, “Beyond” and “Touch”, and sang on “Touch”.   “I’ve never been more blown away by something,” he says of his first hearing of the finished version of “Touch”, a grandiose song-suite that merges prog-rock and pop shlock.  Mr Williams recalls asking “ ’Can I see it again?’” after his first exposure to the whole album. “It’s an intensely visual experience.”  He praises Daft Punk for the risk they’ve taken by breaking with the sample-based sound that made them rich and famous. “It would have been so easy for them to recreate what they did before. Ride that to another commercial success. But this album feels like an event.”

For Daft Punk, Mr Williams represents some kind of pure spirit of entertainment.  The magic of showbiz is what originally attracted them to Los Angeles.  They’ve had a presence in the city since 1996, when they met with Spike Jonze to enlist his directorial skills for the video for “Da Funk”. In the mid-2000s they established the company Daft Arts Inc in LA to develop the visual aspects of their work, including the Coachella pyramid and their feature-length film Electroma.  “Almost everything we’ve been doing visually has been designed and engineered in this environment,” says Mr Bangalter.  But the attraction to Hollywood is as much mythic as it is practical.  Daft Arts’s location, which they requested be kept secret, is inside a complex of lots and studios whose storied past goes back to the earliest days of the movie industry.  Mr Bangalter discourses knowledgeably about the “classic Hollywood dream factory” that was based in “a few square miles, really just a few blocks.”

Daft Punk have always had a strong sense of history. Reverence for their musical ancestors inspired the Homework  track “Teachers”,  a roll-call of house and techno pioneers.  Its equivalent on Random Access Memories is “Giorgio By Moroder”.  But unlike the tracks with Mr Rodgers, the collaboration with Mr Moroder, who pioneered the electronic style of Eurodisco, was not musical. Instead Daft Punk took snippets from several hours of interview with the producer and layered them over an epic track incorporating a pastiche of the Moroder sound.  “One day I’ll type out the whole interview and that’ll be my biography,” says Mr Moroder, speaking by telephone from his LA home.  

The narrative of “Giorgio by Moroder” jumps from his earliest days as a struggling musician performing in German discotheques to the 1977 recording of “I Feel Love”.  Completing a Donna Summer album that contained songs evoking different periods like the Fifties and Sixties, “I Feel Love” was conceived as “a sound of the future”.  Combining a synth pattern with the machine-like regularity of a click track, Mr Moroder  created a sound that would indeed spawn futuristic genres to come like Eighties synthpop and Nineties trance. But as he recalls on “Giorgio by Moroder”, “I didn’t realise how much the impact would be.”

Daft Punk’s painstaking recreation on “Giorgio by Moroder” of a sound that once represented musical futurism encapsulates the contradictions at the heart of Random Access Memories, an album limned with references to time, transience and memory.  In the Nineties Daft Punk and their comrades in the techno-rave underground were pointing ahead to the digital future. Now, with EDM and Top 40 dancepop dominating the contemporary soundscape, that future has not just arrived, it’s become ubiquitous to the point of banality. So where next for yesterday’s prophets? The way forward is the way back, seems to be the argument of Random Access Memories. But that’s not something that young artists and emerging producers can emulate. Digital technology allows a kid in a bedroom with a laptop and some software to make records that sound like a million bucks. Making music the way Daft Punk have on the brilliant but backward-looking Random Access Memories actually requires a million bucks, or more.  Mr Moroder describes the duo’s strategy as “‘Get the human touch back in.  Make music without loops, played live.”  That may be a solution for Daft Punk, but it’s simply not feasible for the vast majority of music makers. 

Bring the Noise era interview (2007)

Q/A with Jonathan Gharraie of the Cherwell

JONATHAN GHARRAIE: I suppose I want to start by asking a general question about why you started writing – where there any particular pieces of music that made
you think this was something you wanted to engage with, to decipher
for your readers or alternately to provoke them? And how was your
approach shaped by the critical climate of the time? I have the
impression there was a much greater creative dialogue between music
and music writing. Was this the case?

SIMON REYNOLDS: I wanted to be a music journalist from about the age of sixteen or seventeen, which would have been around 1979. Soon after getting into music seriously in 1978, with the Sex Pistols and Ian Dury and then the postpunk stuff like Slits, Talking Heads, Gang of Four, etc, I hooked into the UK weekly music press, in particular the NME, which was going through a golden age in terms of adventurous writing. And I realized that was what I wanted to do in life. Music was the most exciting, most forward-thinking and fast-moving area in culture, and the music journalists at that particular moment in history played a big role in terms of championing certain bands or scenes, pushing certain directions for music, making certain values attractive and a certain kind of language or way of thinking about music seem “sexy’. Not all rock writers had such an exalted notion of what they did, but the ones I gravitated towards as a reader certainly were in that Lester Bangs mode of rock writer as prophet/catalyst--the writer as someone who set challenges for the music as much as they simply documented what was going on. During postpunk there was a synergy, or even a symbiosis, between the criticism and the artistic practice--people in bands, or at least the most interesting bands, thought like critics, indeed often were writers as much as musicians, and the writers often crossed the line into making music or getting involved in the business. I never had any interest in that, having no actual music-making impulses, but I liked the idea of the activist critic who makes things happen and shakes things up.

More specifically, I'd like to know why you and David Stubbs set up Margin –
was it a response to the do-it-yourself attitude that was infiltrating
the music scene at the time and was Oxford the right place to set up
something like that?

I don’t think it was particularly a do-it-yourself thing, it was more in the tradition of people at university starting magazines. Paul Oldfield, who was the instigator of Margin really, had done a couple of arts magazines before, White Room and Radical Review, and I contributed something to the latter, that’s how I got to know him. Then Paul wanted to do something more “pop” and fun, so he and a bunch of us (including David Stubbs) started doing Margin, which looked more like a zine and had articles about pop music, fashion, polemics (I did a defence of pretentiousness, having been dismayed by how many students at Oxford used the word “pseud” and struck anti-intellectual attitudes), pieces on leisure (Paul did one critiquing student parties and imagining how to revolutionise the party!) It was a proper stapled together fanzine at first, but we soon tired of walking up all those steps trying to flog it to reluctant students (who were never in their rooms most of the time anyway) so we hit upon the idea of doing it as a poster magazine. The idea was half copying that Daily listing wall sheet thing (I forgot the title, Daily Information? the guy who founded it died recently -- is it still going?), and half influenced by the Situationists, the idea of the revolutionary screed pinned to a wall. We figured the outright financial loss of printing these things and giving them away for free would be compensated for by not having to slog around all the colleges, plus we’d get a much wider readership. So we stuck it on notice boards, laundry walls, all over the place. It made a few waves.

Margin the wallposter got more and more polemical and philosophical, as the influence of reading post-structuralist and other critical theory kicked in, and less to do with pop culture. By the end we were doing these manifestos, espousing this radical nihilistic creed of withdrawal and apathy, and the posters were very striking looking. We did a mini version of one issue, about the size of postcard and virtually illegible at that size, and we went around sticking them inside toilet rolls and under toilet lids. Inside people’s loaves of sliced bread, in between the slices... The idea was kinda “Margin--we’re everywhere! insidiously eroding your ability to carry on!”.

Then when the bulk of us graduated in 1984, we were on the dole, hanging around in Oxford, and we decided to do a proper magazine that was dedicated to pop culture,. That was Monitor. By the third issues, we got funding from an unexpected source and the magazine became very high production values and beautifully designed, on glossy paper. So again nothing to do with the postpunk do-it-yourself ethos really, or at least, we were doing it ourselves, but the idea was not to look amateurish or anti-professional, which is what most indie fanzines made a fetish of. We wanted to be the opposite of a fanzine -- we would be all think-pieces and no reviews or interviews (which is what most zines consisted of - word for word Q + A transcripts in tiny print, every last cough or giggle noted down), on this very clearly printed, stark design, quality paper.

I'd like to understand why you decided to compile the book now. I
particularly liked that opening piece from 'Monitor', which sets the
tone for much of the book with its discussion of the faltering
dialogue between black and white musical cultures. How important to
your understanding of pop music has this dialogue been? And what has
happened to it recently?

It was weird rereading the 1985 piece from Monitor because a lot of what I was complaining about could be applied to the present. If you removed the period-specific band-names like Membranes and the Mary Chain, it could have been a description of now.

The white-on-black thing is something I have been trying to work out, about whether it has actually gone into abeyance and if so, why is that? Obviously historically the entire story of rock and pop would not exist without this white-on-black syndrome, the white romance with black music, and that is especially pronounced in terms of British pop, from the Beatles and the Stones onwards. The whole postpunk period is all about white bohemia catching up with the rhythmic and production innovations of funk, disco, dub, and not just sonic innovations but in terms of expression and mood too. But just because historically this white-on-black mutation has been the motor of change in music doesn’t mean that it’s always going to be like that. At the moment, there seems to be a kind of go-your-own-way impulse, you have things like freak-folk which is really interesting but it has no relationship to black music, it’s totally white-bread in its sources. Now, is that even a problem? I don’t know, I suppose I am questioning my own ingrained impulse to feel that this is not healthy. Perhaps that is an archaic attitude. But then why is it that the people who make up the freak-folk scene, who are classic bohemian types, are not feeling any inspiration from modern black music, which is what white bohemians traditionally always did, whether it was jazz or blues or reggae. Perhaps the experiential gulf between street rap and white indie-rock types has grown so big that it’s discouraging people from trying to take on ideas from hip hop or grime. But back in the Sixties that didn’t stop all these middle class British boys from sheltered backgrounds feeling the pull of the blues, which was really from and about a totally different world than the one they inhabited. So… I have no answers as such, I am just intrigued, and concerned, by the possibility that this relationship between black music and white music has become unglued somehow.

In terms of why do the book, partly it was having been around so long—20 years—it felt like a good moment to take stock both of the development of my writing and the journey taken by music during that time. The fact that Rip It Up ends in 1985, which is when I started being a professional writer, at the end of that year, almost seemed to set up the question: what happened next? So this collection is kind of my answer to that. I put commentaries after each piece partly because they often needed some kind of contextualization, but also to tilt the collection towards the present, the question of ‘where are we now?’.

Your writing reflects a commitment not only to aesthetic principles
but to a sense of aesthetic community as well. This is particularly
evident in your writing on rave culture but on things like post-rock
and grime too, both of which were subcultures where the music's sonic
distinctiveness reflected something of the unusual conditions in which
they were produced/disseminated/listened to.

More recently however, on blissblog, you've been writing about
commitment - particularly in relation to metal and the return to
rockist values though I think that this also informs 'Rip It Up' which
at times reads like a memorial to the pop innovation inspired by the
post-punk movements. I wonder whether that's because you think that
the kind of dedication which music used to inspire has been somehow
lost. What has happened to commitment/community in music and how has
this affected rock criticism? Is this why you took up blogging – does
this mode of publication help to recover the synergy between criticism
and practice that you mentioned earlier?

This is something that relates mostly to the area of being a consumer and the circumstances in which you become an active consumer. You’re not supposed to talk about passive consumption these days, that’s an outmoded, Adorno-esque notion. But I can’t help but think the higher mode of engagement with music is when it mobilizes you in some way. Skimming through loads of downloads on your computer in a desultory fashion doesn’t seem as impressive as being a participant in a subculture, where’s there an element of strenuousness, whether it’s going a rave and having an adventure—sometimes a misadventure, when the rave is busted. Or being a fanatical metal fan and going to cramped, sweatpit gigs, and doing things like moshing and crowd surfing. The problem with music now is that it is too easy. It’s plentiful and available to an almost pernicious degree, because this creates a relationship with music that’s on the level of cable TV—that sort of distracted, skimming mode where you’re skipping through the channels. Obviously you can have profound aesthetic experiences with TV, there’s television where certain programmes are an Event, but a lot of the time we sit down to watch television rather than a specific program, the experience is much more ambient and vegetative. And music is getting like that. It’s like the music beams in from somewhere and we don’t get too bothered about who made it or what its context is, it diverts us and ultimately it’s kinda disposable. Ordinary consumers are now in the position that critics have always been in with the inundation of freebies they get, having to process so much music they can’t get inside it or let it get inside them because they’re always moving on the next thing. I think the scarcity model we had before with music, when there was a finite amount you could hear, and actual intervals between reading about something or hearing it was going to be released and then actually getting to hear it -- that created certain kinds of intensity that have been eroded. In a context of chronic abundance, it’s quite hard to maintain any passion or even appetite for music. This is one of the curses of the professional, long-haul critic, but now it’s everybody’s affliction!

I’ve strayed from your question, but I think in the age of overload and consumer inconstancy, the process whereby community forms around a scene or a particular band necessarily gets weakened. Abundance encourages dilettantism, a sort of noncommittal eclecticism. It’s a vicious circle, because the more noncommittal and ephemeral our modes of engagement with music, the less it becomes possible for critics to claim stuff for music, because it’s not motivating people to do anything beyond consume it, it’s not catalyzing interesting behaviour or social energy. So you get this creeping inconsequentiality. And in a context where everything seems inconsequential, no one wants to look silly or get carried away, so you get this predominant style of music writing, where the tone is light, amused, slightly distanced. The prose never gets too heated, it avoids the kind of cadences that create an atmosphere of momentousness. Because it’s only music. Blogs seemed to be a place for that kind of messianic writing, also for hyper-theoretical speculations about music, for whimsical and surreal fancies, for savage humour. That’s why I jumped in myself—it seemed like a total space of freedom for all the critical modes that there’s no place for in respectable publications. For a large moment back there, blogland was that space. Now and again it’s still like that, but only in flashes. The back-and-forth between the blogs has diminished a lot, it’s become more like solitary obsessives prattling into the void.

At one point, you describe how 'the future has become a minority
interest'. What has happened to innovation in pop music?

Like the white-on-black issue, this is another thing I’m trying to work out. Is it just that innovation has been driven out of or denied entrance to pop culture? I’m not sure it is because I don’t sense that amazing, unprecedented breakthroughs are taking place on the margins either. The kind of experimental fringes covered by a magazine like the Wire, they seem fairly set in their ways too. They tick along creating a reasonable harvest of pretty interesting stuff every year, but I don’t get the sense that there are giant strides into the unknown being made.

There’s a definite feeling that pop music is stalled, on the innovation or sonic surprises front. The last time a real burst of startling sounds came from pop was the end of the 90s and the first few years of this decade when you had this surge of rhythmic invention and freakadelic production in hip hop and R&B. You had highpoints of commercially massive yet pretty bizarre-sounding music like Missy’s “Get UR Freak On”, Neptunes’ productions like the Clipse stuff and Kelis’ “Milkshake”, the early Destiny’s Child hits, too many things to mention. And these ideas filtered into pure pop leading to exciting records like Britney’s “Toxic” and “Slave 4 U”. Some of the ideas in hip hop and R&B seemed to involve reworking techno and house and jungle innovations, but that might have been an illusion, maybe the producers were just using the same technology. And then for me the next stage after that was grime, where the producers were doing their twist on all the sick-sounding street rap coming out of America, tracks from people like Ludacris. The grime producers were melding all those Dirty South, crunky ideas with noises and rhythms from the rave tradition, from hardcore techno and jungle. But grime was pretty much barred from entry into pop. And while electronic music as a whole seems to me to have been pretty stagnant for most of this decade, there are really innovative people working within it like Ricardo Villalobos. But they are operating a long distance from pop music. The only Euro-electronic fad to have any influence on pop in the last few years has regrettably been its most reactionary trend, schaffel, the fad for T-Rexy glam rock and glitterstomp type rhythms. That was picked up by people like Girls Aloud and Goldfrapp.

Black music by and large is the engine of pop culture, in terms of innovation, but the engine seems stalled at the moment. Which means that pop is running on empty.

Related to these last two questions, I was surprised at the absence
of your long piece on Ghostbox, who fittingly haunt some of the later
pieces even though they're neither hip-hop nor hip-rock. What
attracted you to hauntology? Does it have any bearing on the
historical orientation of this book and 'Rip It Up'?

The interest in the hauntology groups does have a relationship to Rip It Up, in so far as researching the postpunk era definitely gave me an appreciation and appetite for groups that had tons of ideas and a conceptual bent. Ghost Box and Mordant Music in particular are incredibly thoughtful and erudite types; they are as much researchers and cultural historians as they are musicians, really. Another postpunky aspect is the audio-visual thing both those groups have, the fact that the music is inseparable from its packaging. Julian House being a designer by profession is kinda redolent of the art school input into postpunk. Although postpunk doesn’t seem to be particularly a point of reference for either group musically. Ghost Box’s immediate ancestors are people like Stereolab, Broadcast, Saint Etienne, again groups where there’s a great deal of attention paid to the visual presentation of the music, where the music is one element in an entire aesthetic sensibility, a worldview even.

Rip It Up also led me to an interest in retro culture, the question of why was there this turn to retro that took place at the end of the postpunk era, circa 1984? Why, after such an intense and prolonged surge-phase of forward-looking music, did left-field rock succumb to nostalgia for the Sixties? Retro culture and hauntology are like two sides of the same coin. Some of the Ghost Box stuff is a hair’s breadth away from period pastiche. But the best of it is genuinely… ‘haunting’ is the only word, whereas retro-pastiche is just nullifying.

Actually there’s another connection which is that one of the groups that got me thinking about postpunk again, this obscure outfit called Position Normal, were also a really crucial precursor for Ghost Box. Their 1999 album Stop Your Nonsense had this John Peel, quirky postpunk quality, but also the Englishness thing that you get in Ghost Box and Mordant, the use of found voices, like school children and Cockney fruit market stall-holders.

ECM

A proposal by me and Paul Oldfield to write a profile of ECM Records and its chamber-jazz  on the occasion of its 20th birthday in 1989.  

It would have been the third in a trilogy of pieces we co-wrote for the Guardian, including a moderately infamous critique of world music and a defense of hyper-masculine music like rap, metal and Electronic Body Music (for the deconstruction of male identity it afforded). 

We were really pushing it with this one though and I'm not surprised it was not given the green light. Shame, though.

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

This year Germany's ECM record label celebrates its

twentieth anniversary. Because it doesn't promote itself, ECM

has always had a low profile: this despite its commercial

success in the Seventies with artists like Pat Metheny, Keith

Jarrett and Chick Corea, and a current roster that ranges

from acclaimed improviser Jan Garbarek to the Estonian

composer Arvo Part. This relative obscurity stems from the

label's founder, Manfred Eicher, who has zealously preserved

his vision of ECM as an island apart from the modishness and

market-consciousness of the music industry, whose output he

characterises as "environmental pollution".

But it's this very "apartness" that has proved so

attractive to the increasing number of pop musicians who have

fallen under ECM's spell during the Eighties.  David Sylvian

left behind his glam icon past as lead singer of Japan in

order to pursue a solo career in 'ambient pop', and has

recorded several albums with musicians from the ECM stable.

'Dreampop' experimentalists A.R. Kane have explicitly cited

ECM as an influence, and other groups (Cocteau Twins, Talk

Talk, Durutti Column, Hugo Largo) have much in common with

ECM's quest for "the most beautiful sound next to silence".

As well as it's influence on the pop avant-garde, ECM is

important because of the way it illustrates what both "New

Age" music and "world music" (those buzz concepts of the

Eighties) could and should have been like. New Age music

tends to be the aural equivalent of a Radox bath: it's

therapeutic, a palliative that helps sustain the listener

against, but also within the demands of modern, capitalist

life. Like vitamin supplements or homeopathic remedies, New

Age records are little capsules of pastoralism that enable

the stressed-out executive to cope with urban life. New Age's

soothing emulsions of sound, like Transcendental Meditation

for businessmen, are a tranquiliser rather than a path to

enlightenment. But ECM's "tranquility" is debilitating rather

than restorative: it's about fixing your consciousness on

something until you lose all sense of yourself and your

separateness.  The crystalline, open structures of John

Abercrombie's or Ralph Towner's music suggest not so much

withdrawal as a hyper-alert state of suspension, heightened

receptivity.

This "meditational" aspect of ECM music is close to

the Eastern idea of nirvana: the serenity that comes with the

cessation of desire. In his later years, Freud came to

believe in the existence of a "nirvana principle" or "death

instinct" inherent in all organic life: a drive that seeks to

return to the lowest possible point of tension. Freud

believed that human anxiety was caused by the repression of

this natural 'death instinct', resulting in a futile pursuit

of immortality through wordly achievement. 'Nirvana' is the

state-of-grace that comes with the recovery of contact with

the 'death instinct': a sublime inertia where you're wide

open to the world rather than restlessly engaged in leaving

your mark upon it.

'Nirvana' is, in fact, a kind of living death or 'life-

in-death'. So it's interesting that Manfred Eicher describes

ECM music in terms of entombment, of sound that is "burying

itself in a crypt of its own making". It's a metaphor that

connects with the very funereal/Egyptian images of 'cool

jazz' found in Miles Davis or Sun Ra. Other sources of this

meditational/monastical condition are the pervasive

Mediaevalism of ECM (its interest in liturgical, devotional

music) and also its attraction to the Romantics, with their

awe before the "sublime" and "terrible". (ECM's Russian

pianist Valery Afannasiev talks about music that should be

fatal in its beauty, such as Gesualdo's madrigals).

ECM suggest this blurring of boundaries, this blissful

oneness with the world, by their recurrent use of LP cover

images and titles that suggest immense, undifferentiated

spaces - polar landscapes, tundra, deserts, barren cliffs -

expanses that are unchanging over the millenia.  ECM's

artists never seem to have any referents, no locus in time or

space.  This nomadism, exemplifed by titles like "Wayfarer"

and "Paths, Prints", is based in the intuition that true

bliss is to be nowhere, bewildered in the wilderness.  (It's

revealing that the root meaning of "utopia" is nowhere).

This placelessness distinguishes ECM from the "world

music" that it has supposed to have prefigured by a decade or

more.  ECM do draw on ethnic music, but this is world music

without any of the Western, liberal ideologies attached to

it: there's nothing rootsy, convivial or feistily "authentic"

about it.  Different cultures are crossed at will. An artist

like Stephen Micus uses instruments from every conceivable

time and place, and even invents his own. These ethnic or

ancient musics are often "inauthentic" too: where music

hasn't been written down (e.g. for the albums of Mediaeval

songs) new music is composed, or music from completely

different times and places borrowed for the accompaniment.

Nor is there world music's dogged adherence to Third World

or folk sources. ECM musicians also borrow from elitist,

court cultures, as in Paul Hillier's troubador courtly-love

songs from 12th Century Provence, or Micus' use of

instruments from early European orchestras. Or there's Arvo

Part, who gave up writing serial music, and turned to a

minimalist, neo-Mediaeval partsong. Or the improviser Keith

Jarrett playing a Bach stripped of baroque mannerism or

modern musicianly interpretation and "feeling".  Unlike world

music, ECM doesn't try to rediscover pop's Dionysiac values

elsewhere; unlike "authentic" classical performers, it

doesn't try to recreate music as it was.

ECM music, then, is a quest for nirvana through the

transcending of time and place. ECM music offers the listener

a gentle apocalypse (an "end of history" and an "end of

geography"): a tiny foretaste of eternity. Perhaps this

timelessness is actually the most timely phenomenon today:

perfect rest at the heart of the pop world's hyper-active

clatter, an "endless end" to pop's relentless turnover of

the new.