POSITION NORMAL
Stop Your Nonsense
SAINT ETIENNE
Places to Visit
Village Voice, 1999
by Simon Reynolds
The bursting
of Britpop bubble's has left the UK's
(non-dance)
music scene in
the terminal doldrums. A&R's and hacks alike
twiddle their
thumbs and wonder why nothing's happening.
One
reason is that
Britpop's make-it-big-nothing-else-counts
triumphalism has
withered the left-field and virtually obliterated
the concept of
independent music. Another is that all the purely
musical intellect
around has entered the dance arena,
leaving
rock to those whose only virtuosity is auto-hype,
e.g. Gay Dad,
with their former
pop journalist frontman and reheated Suede homo-erotic-rhetoric.
Position Normal's enchanting Stop Your Nonsense
(Mind
Horizon) is a
flashback to the infinitely more robust UK music
culture of 1979-81---the postpunk ferment which spawned
genuinely
independent
labels like Rough Trade and Fast, brainy but intensely
musical bands like Pop Group, This Heat and The
Associates, and
the countless
one-shot flashes of DIY inspiration
aired nightly
on John Peel's
radio show. It was an era when bands still operated
in the modernist
conviction that absolute novelty was absolutely
possible.
Even though Nonsense is mostly
sample-based, its homespun
imprecision feels
closer to hand-made tape loops than digital
seamlessness;
collage-wise, it's somewhere between Nurse With
Wound and De La
Soul's debut. Only Nonsense's
stoned-to-say-the-
least aura locates
the album in the post-rave Nineties.
Chris
Bailiff, the man
behind Position Normal, is as fastidiously
attuned to the
timbral colors of sound-in-itself as Aphex Twin or
Wagon
Christ. His favorite production trick is
a combination of
reverb and
filtering that make sounds glint like they've been
irradiated by a
sudden shaft of sunlight pouring into a gloomy
room.
He EQ's the Lotte Lenya soundalike on "German" until her
He EQ's the Lotte Lenya soundalike on "German" until her
voice crumbles
into a billowing gold-dust rush, makes a pizzicato
mandolin refrain
glisten uncannily in "Jimmy Had Jane," and
reverbs the
stark piano chords of "Rabies"
so they sound as
poignant as Erik
Satie marooned in Keith Hudson's dub-chamber. On
"Bedside
Manners," a lustrous mirage of
echoplexed guitar
backdrops a surreal medical monologue, with guest-vocalist
Cushway perfectly
capturing the condescending cadences and
smarmy
solicitousness of
a English doctor.
In its semi-conscious way, Stop Your Nonsense is an essay
In its semi-conscious way, Stop Your Nonsense is an essay
about Englishness
and its inevitable evanescence. The album's
dream-drift haze
is peopled with spectral traces of all those
eccentric
relatives (The Fall, Ivor Cutler, Viv Stanshall, Ian
Dury, John Cooper
Clark, Vini Reilly) written out of the
will
when Britpop
pruned its family tree down to the straight-and-
narrow
lineage: Beatles>Pistols>Stone
Roses>Oasis.
Never overtly nostalgic, Position Normal's music triggers plangent sensations of
Never overtly nostalgic, Position Normal's music triggers plangent sensations of
nostalgia, at least for this expatriate. Perhaps because
its
samples are pulled
off crackly vinyl platters and reel-to-reel
tape spools
foraged from thrift stores and garage sales, Nonsense
evokes the
bygone, parochial crapness of Olde England--the quaint,
musty
provincialism banished by the New Labour government's
modernising
policies and by the twin attrition of
Americanisation/Europeanisation.
Some of Nonsense's most magical
Some of Nonsense's most magical
tracks aren't really music, but melodious mosaics
of speech
expertly tiled
from disparate, sepia-tinted sources.
"Lightbulbs"
sets a cheeky
little rascal against a 1970s hi-fi buff
droning on
about "my
main gain fader". On "Hop Sa Sa"
Bailiff varispeeds a
kiddies' choir
singing about monkeys, interjects a middle-aged
man's quizzical "why not for donkeys?,"
and then, for a
inexplicably
heart-tugging coda, transforms the title's nonsense
phrase into an
ostinato hanging in an echoey void.
Position Normal's fondness for "found sound" (the patter
of Cockney
stallholders in a fruit'n'veg market; creaky-voiced
Aunty Betty leaving
a phone message for Doreen)
reminds me
of Saint Etienne's penchant for punctuating their
early albums with
snatches of movie dialogue and cafeteria chat
eavesdropped onto
a dictaphone. Like Bailiff, Saint
Etienne are
sampladelic poets
whose subject is a lost Englishness. The trio--
singer Sarah
Cracknell, soundboy Pete Wiggs, and
Melody Maker
journalist turned
Spector wannabe Bob Stanley--started out as part
of that superior early phase of Britpop that
included World Of
Twist, Denim, and
pre-megastardom Pulp. Instead of the later
Britpop's loutish
laddism, the sensibility was mod-stylist--
proudly English,
but cosmopolitan, as open to 1960s French girl-
pop, Nineties
Italo-house, and A.R. Kane's halcyon
dub-noise as
it was to Motown
and Dusty Springfield. Trouble was, the
trio's
futile fixation
on scoring a UK Top Ten hit persuaded them to
gradually iron
out all their experimentalist excresences,
including the
"found sound" interludes. Reconvening in 1998 after
a four year
sabbatical, Saint Etienne got sleeker and slicker
still on Good
Humour, abandoning sampling altogether
for Swedish
session-musicianship
and a clean, crisp sound inspired equally by
The Cardigans and
Vince Guaraldi's lite-jazz Charlie Brown
music.
A a pleasant surprise, then, to report
that Saint Etienne's
six-track EP Places To Visit (SubPop) is an unexpected
reversion
to... everything that was ever any good about
them. "Ivyhouse"
is angel's breath
ethereal like they've not been since
Foxbase
Alpha's dubtastic
"London Belongs To Me."
Produced by Sean
O'Hagan of
avant-MOR outfit The High Llamas,
"52 Pilot" features
sparkling vibes,
an elastic heart-string bassline out of "Wichita
Lineman",
and radical stereo separation (don't try this one on
headphones).
"We're In the City" is cold 'n' bouncy dancepop in
the vein of So
Tough's "Clock Milk," with deliciously itchy
percussion. And "Artieripp" is a tantalizing
tone-and-texture
poem as subtly
daubed as anything by Mouse On Mars.
Recorded in four different studios and
drawing on diverse
talents like O'Hagan and avant-gardist-for-hire Jim
O'Rourke,
Places shows that
Saint Etienne belong among the ranks of the
sound-sculptors.
(Their next project is apparently a collaboration
with To Rococo
Rot). Saint Etienne are aesthetes who love the Pop
Song not for its
expressive power but for the sheerly formal
contours of its
loveliness. Hopefully, Places To Visit
will work
like Music For
The Amorphous Body Study Centre did for Stereolab:
as a rejuvenating
sideline, a detour that parodoxically sets them
back on a truer
course.
Another take on Stop Your Nonsense, for Uncut
POSITION NORMAL
Stop Your
Nonsense
Mind Horizon
Recordings
Uncut, 1999
*****
Sampladelic
nutter debuts with the missing link between The Residents' *Commercial Album*
and Saint Etienne's *Foxbase Alpha*.
Chris Bailiff, the 27 year old eccentric responsible for *Stop Your Nonsense*, used to perform under the name Bugger Sod. It's a moniker that captures the spirit of amiably insubordinate Anglo-Dada he's now perpetrating as Position Normal. If you wanted to get pop historically precise, you'd place *Nonsense* at the intersection of three genealogies. There's the bygone John Peel realm of post-punk DIY weirdness 1979-81
---Native
Hipsters's "There Goes Concorde Again", Furious Pig, Virgin Prunes.
Then there's the more recent lineage of Krautrock-influenced lo-fi that
includes Stereolab and Beta Band. And because *Nonsense* is all done with
samples (plus some guitar and the occasional "real" vocal), you'd
also have to mention Saint Etienne's
eerie "found sound" interludes on their first two albums, Wagon
Christ, and Bentley Rhythm Ace (if they abandoned Big Beat boisterousness for
ambient chill-out).
The Bentleys, who scavenge carboot sales
for ultra-cheesy vinyl, and Wagon Christ, a sampladelic wizard who specialises
in alchemising cheddar into gold, may be
the most apt contemporary parallels. Position Normal's sample sources sound
like they've been plucked from charity shops and skips--warped spoken-word
albums and crackly E-Z listening platters; faded BetaMax videos, ancient reel-to-reel tapes, and worn out
answer-machine cassettes. Accessing the dusty, disavowed memories purged from a
nation's attics and cellars, Bailiff has reanimated all the fusty English
quaintness that Blair-ite modernisation and cappucino culture have allegedly banished.
Maybe it's just where my head is at right now, but *Nonsense* triggers sepia-tinted flashbacks to
*temps perdu*: chalk-dust motes irradiated in the shaft of light
streaming from a classroom window; a paper bag of boiled sweets from the row of
jars behind the counter; butcher shops with bloody sawdust on the floor.
*Nonsense* contains too many highlights.
"The Blank" rubs clangorous Fall circa "Rowche Rumble"
guitars up against quiz-show samples ("what is the blank?").
"Jimmy Had Jane" is like Ian Dury meets The Faust Tapes: a baleful
Cockney voice crooning about a sordid sexual encounter perpetrated by a bloke
with "pickled egg eyes," offset by the eerie glint of a filtered 'n'
reverbed ukelele. "German" is Lotte Lenya marooned in King Tubby's
dub chamber. "Bucket Wipe" sounds like the carefree whistling of a
Martian postman. "Nostril and Eyes" could be fragments of *Under
Milkwood* reassembled into surrealist sound-poetry: "is there any *any*?
Rank, dimpled, drooping... Smudge, crust, smell--*tasty* lust."
"Rabies" shifts from a helium-addled Frank Sidebottom ditty to shatteringly poignant Satie-esque piano chords drenched in cavernous reverb. "Lightbulbs" and "Hop Sa Sa" expertly crosshatch shards of speech (a chirpy schoolboy praising "a lovely bit of string", a hi-fi buff boasting about "my main gain fader", a kindergarten choir singing a song about monkeys) into melodious mosaics.
"Rabies" shifts from a helium-addled Frank Sidebottom ditty to shatteringly poignant Satie-esque piano chords drenched in cavernous reverb. "Lightbulbs" and "Hop Sa Sa" expertly crosshatch shards of speech (a chirpy schoolboy praising "a lovely bit of string", a hi-fi buff boasting about "my main gain fader", a kindergarten choir singing a song about monkeys) into melodious mosaics.
The many samples of children's voices, the
cover picture of a little lad utterly absorbed with his Scalectrix, and the
title *Stop Your Nonsense* (a cross grown-up telling off an incorrigible brat)
all suggest that if Position Normal is "about" anything, it's
regression as a refusal of the state of dreamlessness commonly known as
"adulthood". As such,
*Nonsense* plugs into that British absurdist comedy tradition of cracked whimsy and renegade daftness that
includes Spike Milligan, Ivor Cutler, and Reeves & Mortimer . Above
all, *Nonsense* has charm--not in its
degraded modern sense (Robbie Williams's cheeky-chappy grin) but "charm" as casting a spell on the
listener, charm as enchantment. My favourite record of 1999, so far.
<
The Beta Band, Lo-Fidelity Allstars, Royal Trux>>
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
prototype version of Voice piece
The bursting of
Britpop bubble's has left the UK UK
In many
ways, Position Normal's Stop Your
Nonsense is a flashback to the infinitely more robust UK music culture of 1979-81; the postpunk ferment which produced
truly independent labels like Rough Trade and Fast, brainy but intensely
musical bands like The Pop Group and
This Heat, plus the countless one-shot flashes of DIY inspiration that were
aired on John Peel's radio show. It was a time when eccentricity was encouraged
and bands operated with absolute confidence that there were still millions of
new things to do; the idea of consciously referring back to the pop past would
have been disgusting. Even though
Nonsense is mostly sample-based (plus a bit of guitar and a few 'real' vocals),
it has a homespun imprecision that feels more like hand-made tape loops than
digital seamlessness; collage-wise, it's somewhere between Nurse With Wound and
De La Soul's first album.
Only the
album's stoned-to-say-the-least, mildly hallucinatory aura gives the game away
that this is the late Nineties. Like Beta Band and Wagon Christ, Position
Normal's Chris Bailiff exhibits a fetishistic attention to the texture of
sound-in-itself that is the hallmark of
post-Aphex/post-Tricky music-making. Bailiff's fave production trick is
using a combination of reverb and EQ-tweaking to make sounds glint uncannily
likely they've been irradiated by a sudden shaft of sunlight pouring into a
gloomy room. He uses it on a music-hall mandolin refrain that's the magic heart
of "Jimmy Had Jane" and on the Lotte Lenya soundalike in
"German", and again for the second half of "Rabies", whose
stark, plangent piano chords sound like a sistraught Erik Satie trapped in a
dub-chamber dungeon. "Bedside Manners" features a similarly shimmery
mirage of lustrous, echoplexed guitar, over which guest-vocalist Cushway
intones a surreal monologue of medical non-sequiturs, perfectly capturing
the condescending cadences and smarmy
solicitousness of a English family doctor.
In a
probably semi-unconscious way, Nonsense is a kind of essay on Englishness. Its
spectral haze is full of indistinct echoes of all the eccentric relatives--Viv
Stanshall, The Fall, Ivor Cutler, Ian Dury, John Cooper Clark--written out of the will when Britpop's family tree got
trimmed down to the straight-and-narrow lineage of Beatles>Pistols>Stone Roses>Oasis.
Never overtly nostalgic, it triggers powerful sensations of nostalgia, at least
for this expatriate: a sense of the
bygone, lovable crapness of England
These and
Nonsense's other "found sound" assemblages (the patter of Cockney stallholders in a fruit'n'veg
market; Aunty Betty leaving a phone message for Doreen)
remind me of the interludes with which Saint Etienne
peppered their first two albums Foxbase Alpha and So Tough--snatches of movie
dialogue, cafe and bar chat caught on dictaphone, and so forth. Like Position
Normal, but rather more self-consciously, Saint Etienne traffic in sampladelic
essays on lost Englishness. They started out as part of a superior early phase
of Britpop that included World Of Twist, Denim and the pre-megastardom Pulp.
The sensibility was mod-stylist rather than Britpop's lad-boorish -- proudly English but metropolitan and
cosmopolitan, equally open to Sixties French femme-pop and Nineties
Italo-house, and as enamored of the dub-noise splendor of A.R. Kane as the
Motown-beat of Northern Soul. But being morbidly obsessed with scoring a UK Top
Ten hit (a doomed fantasy they should have abandoned when their masterpiece
"Avenue" stalled on the threshold of
the Top Forty), Saint Etienne gradually smoothed out the experimental
lumps (including those found sound interludes) and got increasingly
characterless and sleek. Reconvening in 1998 after a four year sabbatical, Pete
Wiggs, Bob Stanley and Sarah Cracknell slimmed down further still for Good
Humour, which abandoned sampling for Swedish session musicians and a clean,
crisp sound inspired equally by The Cardigans and Vince Guaraldi's lite-jazz
incidental themes for the Charlie Brown cartoons.
A pleasant
surprise, then, to report that Saint Et's maxi-EP-or-is-it-a-mini-album Places To Visit (SubPop) is an unexpected and
welcome reversion to... everything that was ever any good about them,
basically. Its six tracks were recorded in at least four different studios and
draws on such diverse collaborative talents as Sean O'Hagan of avant-EZ outfit
High Llamas and post-everything hired gun Jim O'Rourke (who supplies
"electronic wizardry"). On "Ivyhouse,"Saint Etienne are
dubby and angel's breath ethereal in ways they haven't been since Foxbase
Alpha's "London Belongs To Me." The O'Hagan produced "52
Pilot" features sparkling vibes, a elastic-band bassline out of
"Wichita Lineman", and radical stereo separation (don't listen to
this one on headphones). "We're In the City" is cold'n'bouncy
dancepop in the vein of So Tough's "Clock Milk," with deliciously
itchy percussion sounds and a neat Kraftwerky interlude. And "Artieripp" is a tone-and-texture
poem as tantalizing and deftly daubed as anything by Mouse On Mars; apparently,
Saint Etienne are soon to embark on a collaboration with To Rococo Rot.
Overall, here's hoping that Places To Visit has served a similar function for
Saint Et as Music For The Amorphous Body Study Centre did for Stereolab:
a sideline project, a rejuvenating chance to stretch out and mess around, that ends up setting them back on course. For
Saint Etienne have always been pop aesthetes -- interested less in songcraft as a means of emotional expression and more for the purely formal contours of
its loveliness; like their US counterpart Stephen Merritt, they're interested
in expressing themselves but in crafting
"pretty objects to treasure for ever."
