Stephen Malkmus

Steven Malkmus - Groove Denied bio / text
Domino Records, 2019

by Simon Reynolds

When Stephen Malkmus first arrived on the scene in the early Nineties, as frontman and prime creative force in Pavement, the area of music with which he was associated couldn’t really have been further from the techno-rave sounds of the day. Electronic dance music, then as now, was about posthuman precision, inorganic textures, and hyper-digital clarity. Whereas the lo-fi movement in underground rock championed a messthetic of sloppiness, rough edges, and raw warmth -  a hundred exquisitely subtle shades of distortion and abrasion. “Imperfect sound forever” was the rallying cry for a micro-generation of slacker-minded dreamers and misfits.

Fast forward to the present and here comes Malkmus with a surprising new project that embraces the very digital tools and procedures he’d have once gone out of his way to avoid. Groove Denied – Stephen’s first solo album without his cohorts the Jicks since 2001 – was made using Ableton’s Live, a software sequencer and “digital audio workstation” that is the preferred tool of discerning techno producers and deejays worldwide. Instead of a human-powered rhythm section of electric bass and drums, Malkmus’s arsenal further includes drum machines, along with a host of plug-in FX and “soft synths” (digital simulations of vintage electronic hardware that inhabit your computer rather than take over your entire living room). 

For the first time on record, what you hear here is just Stephen and the Machine(s).

But Groove Denied is not a full-blown plunge into EDM or hiptronica, into the soundworlds of Deadmaus, Villalobos and Skee Mask. In fact, there aren’t any purely instrumental tracks on the album.  Every song is precisely that: a song, featuring Malkmus staples like an artfully askew melody and an oblique lyric.  But Groove Denied is Stephen playing hooky from his customary way of going about things, jolting himself out of a comfy routine. As Malkmus commented recently in a video interview, “It’s fun to mess with things that you’re not supposed to.”

This departure from the tried-and-tested stems back to earlier in this decade, when Malkmus spent a  couple of years living in Berlin and was exposed to the city’s vibrant club scene Back in the Nineties, Stephen had given rave culture a wide berth, in part because of bad personal associations with the drug MDMA (he’d had “a really really bad trip” on Ecstasy in 1987, bizarrely on a visit to New York to see Miles Davis perform). But in Berlin, thanks to a younger deejay friend, Malkmus made forays into the city’s world-famous all-night party scene and became fascinated by techno. “The music can be great… you can zone out, dance, and focus on music - or just get wasted!”

It would not be entirely off-base, or an overly cute rock-historical reference, to describe Groove Denied as Stephen Malkmus’s Low. Although largely recorded in Oregon, the bulk of the album was written while he was living in Berlin. Updating his home studio with Ableton and teaching himself rudimentary Pro Tools, Malkmus “started fucking with effects and loops”. He compares the process of track-construction to the way his kids “used to make these girls on my iPhone - choosing hair colour, dresses, etc. That intuitive swipe and grab thing. Chop and move the waves. Apple computer scroll style of thinking.” It’s a very different way of making music to the feel-oriented way of coming up with chord progressions and rhythm grooves on a guitar alone or jamming with a band. And in fact, electric guitar – while it does feature on Groove Denied – is really “just color for the most part”.

Yet while the methodology behind Groove Denied is absolutely 21^st Century, the reference points for the sound-palette hark back to the pre-digital era. “The electronic music side of the album, I wanted it to be sonically pre-Internet,” explains Stephen. “So the EQ-ing is a bit 1970’s, that sloppy DIY sequencing. And the influences are kinda 1981 post punk - actually quite British.” “A Bit Wilder”, one of the stand-out cuts, specifically recalls Cabaret Voltaire, its slack-stringed dank-with-reverb bass a dead ringer for the Stephen Mallinder sound.  “Yes, I was thinking the Cabs - and Section 25, whose 1981 album Always Now I think is a serious underdog stoner album. That grey industrial Martin Hannett sound. But also all these cute DIY group that imitated The Cure back then – loners with 4-tracks tape recorders and dreams of “Killing An Arab”.” Malkmus says he was trying to conjure or reinhabit the “fan perspective” on things like Joy Division and the Cure - the sort of “getting it a bit wrong” that unintentionally brings something new into the world.

Groove Denied is frontloaded with this Cold Wave redux sound -  a style we’ve never heard from Stephen Malkmus before. Opener “Belziger Faceplate”, for instance, features a most peculiar processed vocal that sounds withered and grotesque, like a deflated wrinkly balloon still lingering on in your house weeks after a party.  “I envisioned ‘Belziger Faceplate’ as  made by someone off their head after a night out in Friedrichshain,” says Malkmus, referring to a district of the former East Berlin now rife with techno clubs like the legendary Berghain.  “Coming back at 5 AM, firing up the laptop in the morning light and trying to make a song, but the  instruments  are tripping over each other. You can’t even speak because of all the Ketamine or whatever!” Malkmus adds that he’s never 

tried K but “for some reason I imagine it like that”. 

Then there’s “Viktor Borgia,” a title that playfully merges the name of the comedian-pianist and the ruthless dynasty of Italo-Spanish nobles. With its stately melody and the almost-English-accented  vocal, the coordinates here are early Human League or even Men Without Hats. “Yes, I was thinking things like Pete Shelley’s ‘Homosapien’, the Human League, and DIY synth music circa 1982. And also about how in the New Wave Eighties, these suburban 18-and-over dance clubs were where all the freaks would meet – a sanctuary.”

“Forget Your Place”  features another eerily wobbled vocal a la “Belziger Faceplate” plus dub-style detonations of submarine sonar and nagging bleeps. Frankly, it sounds pretty darn wasted. “Like ‘Belgizer’, this is a pretty solid Ableton-based track – moving waves around, finding a trippy loop and throwing an echo on it,” explains Stephen, adding that “at times it feels almost childish, working with Ableton - like finger painting. But ‘Forget Your Place’ also makes me think about death – don’t ask me why!”

Alongside the early Eighties “minimal synth” and industrial  influences, the other main palette of tone-colors audible on Groove Denied is closer both to Stephen’s comfort zone and to what his fans would expect from him: “warped psych,” as he terms it, that avant-garage tradition of dirty guitars and ramshackle grooves, except that in this case, it’s “one person pretending to be a band.” That illusion is pulled off magnificently on loose ‘n’ swinging tunes like “Come Get Me” and “Love the Door,” although the electronic element manifests still with the crisp and prim pitter of drum machine beats and a spume of Moog frothing all over “Door”.  Then there’s “Rushing the Acid Frat”, whose title came from Stephen’s memories of a student fraternity at the University of Virginia that, unlike the typical beery bro frathouse, had a “Grateful Dead druggy tie-dye” vibe. Malkmus imagined “Rushing” as a “Louie Louie”-style shindig rumpus to soundtrack a “Star Wars bar scene in such a frat… It’s kinda 12-bar, but gigged with psych lyrics”.

As the album enters the homestretch, it returns to more familiar Malkmusian terrain, with a warmer, grittier sound. “I did frontload Groove Denied with the stuff that signals “80’s/cold,” he says. “That stuff excited me the most - and it sounded braver. If I had another year, it could have been all in that style.”  Still, with the second half offering gorgeous tunes like the hazy-lazy ramble “Bossviscerate” and the glittering “Ocean of Revenge” – both graced with his signature style of odd-angled melodic beauty – who’s complaining?  Mellow closer “Grown Nothing” feels like Malkmus easing back towards the sound of his recent album with the Jicks, Sparkle Hard. In fact, although it has been released after Sparkle, 70% of Groove Denied was completed before work on the Jicks record. 

Indeed, Malkmus’s explorations with sound-processing influenced that album, most notably with the unexpected appearance of Auto-Tune on a couple of tracks.

Groove Denied will shake up settled notions of what Malkmus is about and what he’s capable of, repositioning him in the scheme of things. But looking at it from a different angle, his  engagement with state-of-art digital tech actually makes perfect sense. After all, Nineties lo-fi – the sound in which he and Pavement were initially vaunted as leaders and pioneers - was nothing if not insistently sonic – it was all about the grain of guitar textures, about gratuitously over-done treatments and ear-grabbing effects. Noise for noise’s sake.  It’s just that it was looking to older modes and antiquated technology. From the Big Muff and the Cry Baby Wah pedal through to today’s deliberately distorted deployment of pitch-correction, there’s really an unbroken continuity: the creative misuse of technology, the aestheticization of mistakes and flaws, wrongness-as-rightness.

As Stephen tweeted recently on the subject of Auto-Tune’s omnipresence in contemporary music-making: “We long 4 transformation....and we humans fucking luv tools.”

RIP Scott Walker

Scott Walker annoyingly chose the week I was away on a trip to shuffle off this mortal coil, denying me the chance to pay tribute to one of my favorite musicians - one whom I've never quite had the opportunity to write at length about, somehow. In fact, the only times I've written about him have been either ludicrously brief (the micro-review for Blender  reproduced here without its grade out of five, or its 'pick hit' tune guidance, but with its 'in bold' dek, penned by me as if with a gun to the head) or it's been tangential (in the Sight and Sound piece about rock documentaries, so the angle was more on the approach and execution than the artist per se). Nonetheless here they are below. I do wonder how I would fare given an unconfined  occasion to address his life's work...  There's an impenetrable mystery and opacity to his songs, a secretiveness and privacy...  I can't help thinking that writing about the first four solo albums, or Climate of Hunter  (these are the ones I love and listen to with active pleasure), at length, would result in bombastic vagaries.  There are certainly some other artists who fall into that adored-but-daunting category (Arthur Lee, for one). But I daresay I would come up with something.

Scott Walker

The Drift

4AD

Blender (2007)

by Simon Reynolds

 Exquisitely poised torment from the cult crooner, his first record in a decade.

Scott Walker’s legend is based on his four late 1960s solo albums, an astonishing body-of-song that bridged the seemingly vast gulf between Righteous Brothers-style pop balladry and the anguished avant-gardism of European film-makers like Ingmar Bergman. Walker is something like a cinematographer of sound, using dense orchestration, imagistic lyrics, and, not least, his own elegantly harrowed voice, to paint the sort of motion pictures that trouble you long after you’ve left the theater.  Some songs on The Drift (his first album since 1995’s Tilt) are inspired by specific historical incidents--Mussolini’s lover deciding to be executed by his side on “Clara,” a lonely Elvis talking to his stillborn twin on “Jesse”. But mostly the lyric shards that issue from the 63-year old Walker’s peerless mouth--“the slimy stars,” “nose holes caked in black cocaine”--conjure abstract scenarios of crisis and corruption, dread and decay. From “Jolson and Jones” (its chorus, “curare!”, is the name of a poison that relaxes your muscles until you die of asphyxiation) to the hair-raising cackles of gargoyle laughter in “The Escape”, The Drift is unremittingly somber. It makes Radiohead’s Kid A look like a walk in an extremely sunny park. Persevere, though, and you’ll find that The Drift is that most rare and unnatural thing--a nightmare you look forward to repeating. 

Excerpt on 30th Century Man, the Scott Walker documentary, from 

TOMBSTONE BLUES: The Music Documentary Boom

Sight & Sound, May 2007 (full piece here)

by Simon Reynolds

Documentaries about scenes or sounds are far out-numbered by ones about individual creative units (a singer, musician, band…), presumably because they’re easier to make and easier to sell. Scott Walker: 30th Century Man and Joe Strummer: the Future Is Unwritten are superior examples of the rock doc as heroic biography. Both cleave to the “talking heads plus” formula but bring plenty of imaginative flair to the plus aspect.

In 30th Century Man, director Stephen Kijak frames the hermetic and hermit-like Walker as a mystery man prone to disappearing for decades at a time. Right at the start, David Bowie—the film’s executive producer and a Walker fan ever since he dated an ex-girlfriend of the singer and was forced to hear the former heart-throb crooner’s astonishing avant-MOR solo albums—asks rhetorically “who knows anything about Scott Walker?”. The doc then proceeds to shed a fair amount of light without truly penetrating the inner core of darkness that motivates this driven and uncompromising artist. 

Inclined to avoid media attention, Walker obliges with a rare on-camera interview, and comes over accommodating and articulate yet ultimately elusive. (He’s also remarkably ageless, at 63 looking uncannily like Beck’s elder brother). Associates and admirers (including Johnny Marr, Brian Eno, and Jarvis Cocker) generate a steady flow of recollections and insights, and we witness scenes from the sessions for 2006’s The Drift, Walker’s third comeback album, including the bizarre spectacle of a side of meat being used as percussion. The archival material is top-notch, ranging from Arnie Potts, a Walker memorabilia collector, guiding us through his treasure, to vintage TV appearances, to an open letter printed in a pop magazine and written by 14 fans disappointed by the avant-garde turn in the singer’s post-Walker Bros work: “don’t underestimate our force… the end is nigh, you’re way off course… your reign is over--goodbye Scott.”

One effective Kijak device is filming the famous fans listening to key songs, catching their facial reactions and off-the-cuff thoughts. Alison Goldfrapp, of all people, nails the quality of Walker’s voice circa his second comeback album Tilt-- “it’s beautiful and unpleasant at the same time...” . And you gotta love Marc Almond for bravely admitting to loathing that 1995 album: “ I went to the playback and everyone was sitting silent and reverent and I thought ‘is it just me or is this awful?’ 

The solitary blunder on Kijak’s part is using cheesy abstract computer animations to backdrop some of Walker’s most sublime songs, like “Boy Child” and “The Electrician”. 30th Century Man is genuinely informative, with plenty of revelations about Scott’s working methods, but in the end you don’t really understand what impelled his journey from Righteous Brothers-style stardom to a solo career whose ambition was seemingly to fuse Nelson Riddle and Ingmar Bergman. There’s a passing reference to a lifetime of suffering nightmares, and a palpable sense--transmitted in just the delivery of the song “Rosary” on Later with Jools-- of a profound sense of human abjection (something strengthened by one commentator’s comparison of Walker’s work with Francis Bacon’s). But in the end Scott remains an enigma, which is perhaps how it should be. 

Soho (E don't wanna E don't wanna E don't wanna E)

Soho

The Observer, January 6th 1991

by  Simon Reynolds

The day their single 'Hippychick' entered the US Top 30, Soho were evicted from their squat in Hackney. Since then 'Hippychick' has scaled the American charts and has sold over half a million copies; not bad for a record that cost £300 to make and a day to record.

Tim London (the group's architect) and the singing twins Jackie and Pauline have just returned from weeks of superstar treatment in the States, to the squalor of their new, structurally unsound flat above an East-End drycleaners. It's unlikely that they'll have to put up with the "carcinogenic fumes" much longer. 'Hippychick' is about to be re-released in the UK, and Soho's days of penury and anonymity are surely numbered.

When it was first released in Britain earlier this year, the single grazed the Top 75 and enjoyed minor success on the dance scene. Punters focused on Soho's "witty" sampling of the guitar riff from The Smiths' 'How Soon Is Now'. It seemed as if dance culture was exacting revenge on Morrissey for his "burn down the disco/hang the DJ" crusade of a few years ago. So far Soho's impudence hasn't provoked any comeback for the ex-Smiths: in fact, Johnny Marr (who wrote and played the riff) is said to approve.

But in the USA, where The Smiths are only known on the college radio scene, people responded to 'Hippychick' as a seething, hardcore dance track. "In the States they just treat that riff as a noise," says Jackie. "It could have been a fart being sampled for all they care."

Another thing the Americans haven't picked up on is the song's political content. "It's a conversation between a young woman and her ex-boyfriend who's a policeman," explains Pauline. "She's on a demo for the miner's strike. She's saying she's not a hippychick, she's not gonna sleep with him to change his mind, she's got no flowers for his gun."

Soho are sceptical about the hippy belief that "love and peace" are all you need to change the world, a naive idealism that's recently been revived by rave culture, with its Second and Third Summers Of Love. On the cover of 'Hippychick', Soho revive some different slogans from pop history: "hippies roll over, yuppies fight back", and the old Sex Pistols line "never trust a hippy".

"Did you ever read a book called Playpower by Richard Neville?" asks Tim. "There's a lot of good ideas for resistance in that book, but they were never followed through because drugs got in the way of intellect. It's the same now."

"Ecstasy stupefies people and makes them passive," adds Jackie. "It turns them into teddy bears."

"All this stuff about the new Summer Of Love," continues Tim. "It's more like the Summer of Having a Good Time. It's no different from Saturday Night Fever, or Mod days; it's just a tradition of young working-class kids dancing and getting out of their heads."

Despite their dance-floor success, Soho are primarily a pop group. They were reared on radio music (Slade, Gary Glitter, Barry White) and passionately believe that the seven-inch single is still pop's most concentrated and sublime form of expression.

"The late Seventies were when the single was at its best," says Pauline, "the post-punk days when you could come home with an orange Day-Glo single by X-Ray Spex." Accordingly, their forthcoming LP, Goddess, is more like a collection of singles than an album.

'Hippychick' is a typical Soho hybrid. Tim's groove is sultry techno-funk, but the twins' vocals have more in common with West Coast psychedelia than soul, and approach the eerie, forbidding quality of Grace Slick on Jefferson Airplane's 'White Rabbit'.

The album reflects Soho's radical politics and feminist affiliations. "The LP was originally supposed to be all about strong women," explains Jackie. The title track namechecks female role models like Rosa Luxemburg, Emily Pankhurst, Diane Abbott and Dusty Springfield, as well as "friends of ours that we think are right on and pretty cool."