gang gang dance

Gang Gang Dance

Revival of the Shittest

(The Social Registry)

The Wire, 2004

by Simon Reynolds

Probably the most peculiar band to emerge from the ferment of out-rock activity in New York these past few years, Gang Gang Dance are a disconcerting live experience. Of the two shows I’ve caught, the first was fairly excruciating and the second was sublimely odd. Half the enjoyment, at least for over-acculturated hipster types, is trying to get a handle on where the band are coming from. You might momentarily flash on Can’s “Peking O”, The Sugarcubes’ “Birthday”, Attic Tapes-era Cabaret Voltaire,  The Raincoats’ Odyshape, or forgotten downtown New York outfits from the Eighties like Saqqara Dogs and Hugo Largo, only to have the reference point confounded within 30 seconds as the group move back into untaggable territory. Gang Gang Dance’s music is like a myriad-faceted polyhedron. As it gyrates before your ears, different aspects flash into focus: No Wave, prog rock, drill’n’bass, psychedelia, glitch, assorted world musics, and more. But there’s always a feeling that the music is an entity, animated by some kind of primal intent, as opposed to being the byproduct of eclecticism and aesthetic flip-floppery.

Coming only a few months after their self-titled album on Fusetron, Revival of the Shittest is a vinyl rerelease of the group’s sort-of-debut, which originally came out in the autumn of 2003 in an edition of one hundred CDRs. Pulled together from live tapes, studio out-takes and rehearsals recorded on a boom-box, the six untitled tracks capture moments in the protean early life of  the band. The first thing that grabs, or gouges, your ears is singer Liz Bougatsos. It’s hard (at least for someone with my limited grasp of  technical terminology) to pinpoint precisely what she’s doing with her pipes--singing microtonal scales inspired by Middle Eastern music, perhaps?  On Track 6, she emits what can only be described as a muezzin miaouw, while elsewhere there’s often a kind of 4th World/Ethnological Forgery aspect to both her vocals and the group’s music that suggests a sort of defective Dead Can Dance. Sometimes she seems to be simply singing every note as sharp as possible. Whatever the technique involved, the end result ain’t exactly pleasant--indeed, her ululations have a set-your-teeth-on-edge quality, like vinegar for the ears. But there is something queerly captivating about the way Bougatsos weaves around the strange, sidling groove created by her bandmates Brian DeGraw, Josh Diamon and Tim Dewitt. 

Seemingly a blend of drum sticks on electronic pads, hand-percussion, and digital programming, Gang Gang Dance’s beats have clearly assimilated the bent rhythmic logic of  electronic music in the post-jungle era. Heavily effected (often using reverb and delay), the drums generate a florid textural undergrowth redolent  at various points of  4 Hero, Arthur Russell, and Ryuichi Sakomoto’s B-2 Unit. Needling guitars and glittering keyboards, often processed so that it’s hard to tell which is which, exacerbate the chromatic density. Writhing with garish detail, Track 5 feels like you’re plunging headfirst into a Mandelbrot whose patterns aren’t curvaceous but geometric-- endlessly involuting cogs and spindles, the acid trip of a clock-maker surreptitiously dosed at work. On tracks like this, Gang Gang Dance music has a quality of deranged ornamentalism (think pagodas, mosques, but also coral reefs and jellyfish flotilla) pitched somewhere between exquisite and grotesque.  A beautiful horror unfurls--folds and fronds, filigree and arabesque-that reminds me of Henri Michaux’s maniacally exact accounts of his mescalin experiences in Miserable Miracle.

At 31 minutes, Revival of the Shittest is just long enough--anymore and you’d be worn out by its poly-tendrilled density. At the same time, it’s this very quality of TOO MUCH-ness that makes Gang Gang Dance so compelling.

Mokum Madness

VARIOUS ARTISTS

BATTLEGROUNDS: A COLLECTION OF HARDCORE CYBERPUNK

Mokum 
The Wire, 1996

by Simon Reynolds

Now that jungle is totally assimilated, and even happy hardcore and handbag house have their apologists,  Dutch gabberhouse is the only post-rave style left to be gentrified. Gabba is the most extreme version of the ultra-fast hardcore techno that's still popular in Northern Europe and Scotland. If hardcore is derided by Detroit buffs as 'the new heavy metal', then gabba is the rave equivalent of thrash: even faster (180 to 250 b..p.m), even more macho, mindless and monotonous.

The English connotations of 'gab'---"to talk in a rapid, thoughtless manner'---are stunningly appropriate, but in Dutch, 'gabber' means 'mate, lad, yobbo'. This Rotterdam-based 'hooligan-house' originally emerged in antagonism to the more decorous Amsterdam rave scene. Originally a negative, exclusionary term wielded by Amsterdam hipsters, 'gabba'  was seized upon as a banner of underclass pride by hordes of  Dutch proles. Label names like Ruffneck and Terror Traxx, track titles like Sperminator's "No Woman Allowed" and Wedlock's "I'm The Fuck You Man!", eloquently convey gabba's  rowdy male-bonding and adrenalized aggression.

"It's just not music" is a rhetorical strategem used by those who simply aren't prepared to subject themselves to the specific regime of sensations that a particular form of musical extremism enforces. Both early UK 'ardkore  and thrash/speed/death-metal were both diss(miss)ed  in these terms (despite the fact that thrash is intensely, baroquely muso in its construction).  So is gabba music? Of course. Do you want to listen to it? Probably not. Like thrash, the sensation gabba offers (Virilio's  "becoming speed") is too one-dimensional to appeal to most.

Pure gabber is totally percussive/concussive. Every musical element--stomping kick-drum, hissing hi-hat, one note bass-thud, stun-gun oscillator-synth-- functions rhythmically, yet the rhythm is incredibly simplistic. We're talking multiple tiers of four-to-the-floor, as opposed to polyrhythmic interplay. On this Mokum compilation, Haaardcore's "Toxic" is typical, offering the same kinaesthetic rush as Richie Hawtin and Jeff Mills but about 40 beats per minute faster. The effect is as astringent and soul-rigidifying as snorting sulphate cut with Ajax. Recently, however, gabba's rhythm-science has gotten less stiff, as producers like Robert Meijer and Francois Prijt (who dominate "Battlegrounds") have begun to incorporate breakbeats, albeit whipped up way beyond jungle's 150 bpm to a convulsive, trebley skitter

Another weird but fascinating development is the strange spiritual affinity between rap and gabba, whereby Dutch oiks have appropriated the rage and ressentiment of the African-American underclass (hence band names like Gabbers With Attitude or Fear of A Ruffneck Planet). "Battlegrounds" features lots of vocal samples from Public Enemy and other early Def Jam artists. Chosen Few's "Ravedome" samples LL Cool J's "think I'm gonna BOMB" from 'Mama Said Knock You Out", while Annihilator's "I'll Show You My Gun" abstracts a Chuck D combat-rap imperative (from "Mi Uzi Weighs A Ton"), transforming it into a blare of context-less belligerence. A similar mood of empty insurrectionism characterises High Energy's "Revolution", which turns around a soundbite from a Latin American demagogue.

            
The Public Enemy connection makes sense, since PE is the fastest of rap groups, and producer Hank Shocklee accentuated the high-frequencies in order to match the aural attack of punk. Gabba shares PE's aura of panic, imminent apocalypse, mass rally. But the music with which gabba has greatest affinities is metal. Just clock the  militaristic band names: Annihilator, Strontium 9000,  Search and Destroy. Musically, gabba's ur-texts are Joey Beltram's "Mentasm" and "Energy Flash", whose death-swarm synth-stabs evolved into the 'Belgian Hoover' sound of T99 and Human Resource (still active in gabba). Consider the fact that Beltram is a big Sabbath and Led Zep fan and the connections between HM's ear-bleeding decibellage and hardcore's 'nosebleed'-inducing

bass-frequencies start to make ghastly sense.

Thankfully, gabba also has something of metal's self-parodic sense of humour. The logo of gabba-label K.N.O.R.  is a horned demon in diapers, while the Babyboom label's mascot is a nappyclad infant giving you the finger: both images nicely blend rave's regression with metal's puerility. And the most enjoyable tracks here are the silliest. Despite its Sabbath-echoing title, Search & Destroy's "Iron Man" is a wonderfully daft collage of rave styles, cutting from sped-up ragga chants to a  snatch of the Buggles' soppy "Elstree" to a burst of Goldie/Rufige Cru's '92 classic "Darkrider" to 303 aciiied uproar to a brief interlude where the 200 b.p.m. frenzy drops to a languid 90 b.p.m. skank.  Also exemplifying the new hybrid of happy-gabba or fun-core (gabber infused with happy hardcore's cheesy ravey-ness) is Technohead's "I Wanna Be A Hippy", whose nursery-rhyme tantrum ("I want to get high/but I never knew why") is bellowed by an apoplectic Poly Styrene soundalike.

    
At its best, gabba is a blast.

Roy Harper

Roy Harper

Flat Baroque and Berserk

Stormcock

Roy Harper and Jimmy Page

Jugula

director's cut, Blender, 2008

by Simon Reynolds

Although he rivals Richard Thompson as a supremely inventive folk-rock guitarist and easily surpasses him as a charismatic vocalist and an original songwriter,  Roy Harper is barely known this side of the Atlantic.  In Britain, though, this Manchester-born minstrel  enjoys the adoration of a cult following and the admiration of superstar pals like Led Zeppelin (check their homage  "Hats Off to  [Roy] Harper") and Pink Floyd (he sang on  "Have A Cigar").  

It took Harper a while to find his voice: on his fourth album, 1970's Flat Baroque and Berserk,  pre-electric Dylan's imprint is audible still in the nasal tone and acoustic jingle-jangle of "Don't You Grieve,"  while "I Hate the White Man" hark even further back to the populist sloganeering of folk-revivalists like Woody Guthrie.

But the four long songs of 1971's Stormcock saw Harper arriving at his style:  obliquely scathing protest poetry sung with a unique mix of searing intensity and soaring majesty, framed with delicate-yet-muscular guitar and subtly spacious production. Lyrically, the tone remains scathing , but there's a new subtlety and wit to Harper's diatribes against injustice and the pompousness of authority ("Hors d'Oeuvres" swipes judges and critics), sometimes veering so far from the old plain-spoken speaking-out as to become flowery and oblique.    

The textures are folk and mostly acoustic, but this music rocks and electrifies, "One Man Rock and Roll Band" swings heavy and ominous  like Zozo Unplugged,  while  Jimmy Page himself  guests on  "The Same Old Rock,"  a 12 minute epic whose twisting and plunging song structure climaxes with a dizzy-making chasm of multitracked Harper vocals criss-crossing like close-formation jets at an air show.  That trick worked so magically the singer couldn't resist  recycling it repeatedly across his career, including on "Nineteen Forty-Eightish"  from 1985's Jugula,  a fine full-blown collaboration with Page.