And so with the decade rapidly drawing to a close, I call upon all contributors to this blog (past & present) to nominate their Album of the Noughties. As individuals, none of us will have heard enough actual albums to even begin to have a properly informed opinion, but perhaps some universal truths will leak out if we all pull together just one last time and try to get our collective shit together, maaaan.
It's been a funny old decade. So much has changed, yet so much has stayed the same. I began the decade on the threshold of my thirties, the proud father of one 3-year-old son. I had never been online at this point (seriously! not once!! Ever!!). I am ending the decade at the beginning of my forties. I am still the proud father of a 3-year-old son, but now he has two older brothers, one of whom recently became a teenager. How the buggery-fuck did that happen?
Musically, I started the decade listening to American groups like Mercury Rev, The Flaming Lips and Bonnie Prince Billy, reading Mojo magazine and checking out loads of 'classic rock' and jazz albums. Wotta prick. Then somehow, thankfully, I got lured back to european electronic dance music. It was probably because I finally got online and started reading blogs instead of the music press - my salvation! That's how I found grime and dubstep, rediscovered minimal techno and ambient, got back into clubbing and djing again. But then I got all 'Haunted' and started wandering back into the past. These days I spend most of my time sifting through the vinyl debris of the 20th Century.
But I like to think I keep abreast of new developments. In fact the tastes of my kids are now becoming a useful navigational aid to the current pop climate. Thanks to them I know my Lady Gagas from my Lilly Allens, my Shakiras from my Alexandra Burkes, etc. In return, I have given them the gift of Toni Basil, Lene Lovich, Anita Ward and, somewhat improbably, The Flying Lizards. I'll admit I haven't really heard anywhere near enough albums to have a sensible opinion, but on balance, having weighed up the various factors, I have come to my decision.
My nominee has to be a popular album. I mean, it has to have been a critical and commercial success on a worldwide scale. It needs to be innovative and highly influential, totally plugged-in to the moment, a defining Noughties sound, but with respect and reference to the past, and also be future-proof enough to have aged well, so that it still sounds great today. Taking all things into account, the only possible album I can nominate with a straight face is one that came out early on in the decade, 2001 to be precise. It's an album that sounds cohesive and homogenised to the point of being obsessive yet at the same time all the tracks have a distinctive feel to them. It is an album that displays it's creators' gift for melody and understanding of composition and structure, yet also reveals a fetish for experimentation, textural detail, rhythm, repetition, etc. Its an album that works as a whole, yet each individual track is satisfying in its own right. In fact the only thing wrong with it is that it was made by the bloody French, and it spawned an awful lot of copycats (in both the dance and rock scenes) and a level of visibility that quickly wore away much of the goodwill bequeathed on it by the cognoscenti. I hadn't actually listened to the album myself for several years, only coming back to it this week whilst searching for potential nominees. I swear to God it sounded fucking great all over again. Brilliant. Genius. Timeless(?)
Okay, okay enough with the preamble. My nominee for Best Album Of The Noughties is.....
DAFT PUNK - DISCOVERY.
Stick that in yer pipe and smoke it.
29 November 2009
27 November 2009
The Hare And The Moon
The little ipod that runs my alarm clock - sets the tone for the day etc - keeps shuffling onto tracks from this album; my favourite sludgey, Wicker Man, experimental folk album of the year so far.
It's almost straight folk (at least compared to the Sunburned, American beardy weirdys, Four Tet, Music To Play In The Dark folk tangents ) but there's weird bits around all the edges and in all the corners... odd TV soundbites (Children Of The Stones? I'd have to check), Death In June drumming, frazzled guitar lines, odd angles... but all done with a lightness of touch uncommon in these fields... there's a hint of humour in amongst the sex and violence and a cackling, belladonna sense of darkness and light...
Unlike many claimants, this really could have been an alternative soundtrack to The Wicker Man...
This is not just Christmas...
...this is a Mutoid Waste Christmas.
I'll be doing all my Christmas shopping here, whether my Gran likes it or not...
10 November 2009
The Execution of Gary Glitter
Well, Channel 4 can hardly say they're ducking the punches. This was a tiny scratch of insanity writ large (could they have stretched it to a mini series or a phone vote? - I'll bet anything that was on the cards at some point, just grab someone from Ofcom, feed them a few drinks, and make them tell all). It started many bombs ticking; made people think about the death of TV, the death of the remix (the moment where Gary bug-eyes at the crappy remix is seventeen times more funny than intended), the death of the News, almost anything except the death penalty itself.
You watched, kept watching, felt your mouth creep open and hang there. This was coke spritzer in television form, a head bigger than Nikolai Valuev's, a head designed to punch. Channel 4 used to court this kind of controversy all the time; they clearly felt the need for some more. They clearly felt the need for a good kicking. Maybe they watched that programme on Mary Whitehouse and got a burst of vanilla-scented nostalgia for the good old days, when people could be relied upon to care enough to march on things. When people would do their cardies right up to the top and storm the barricades.
(The crowd / protestor scenes btw: pitifully empty. The budget needed thousands of extras; without them it was just some spinning cameras and a few people wandering around aimlessly. If they were trying to portray a surge of emotion then...)
I'm guessing at some level I enjoyed this; it acted like a counterpoint to A Short Film About Killing, a comical flipside, a film about death that didn't feel like a film about death. But, at some level, I enjoyed this because it's nice to be offered fresh meat now and then, it'll be interesting to discuss in class, it'll be a worthy addition to the the end of year WTF? lists and talking heads; it'll be on New Year's Eve again, attempting to catch in the throats of the post-pub crowd.
The remix will be out before Christmas. Is probably out now. Chris Moyles will be playing it.
It made me think of how understated I was being when I suggested the Young Gods version of Did You Miss Me ought to be playing from huge speakers on the clifftops as he crawled back to Britain. It made me think how, as a child, I used to think the phrase 'fact is stranger than fiction' patently absurd. It made me think of a time when Brasseye and The Day Today were surreal and over the top. I've already heard people gossipping that maybe this was a Derren Brown stunt; the sun didn't really disappear, this really wasn't on TV last night.
Does it matter that he's not dead? Is there anything to be gained in the rhizomatic linkage that has the other major drama on TV last night feature a literal car crash?
That said the guy that played Gary, played a blinder; he must've known what a weird one this was going to be and he looked and sounded like Gary Glitter, threw himself into it (eye-popping remix moment notwithstanding); this was a performance worthy of a better stage, a better script... Gary Bushell and Anne Widdicome played similar blinders; you really believed them, every nuance, every bombshell... they might have been one of the 54% of British people who favour the death penalty (but then they wouldn't be allowed to act on TV, would they? Well, I guess once Nick Griffin gets on, anything can happen). Anne and Gary B's performance was a twin-set of evil; some of the great screen monsters of our time - pity they couldn't get Jedward on the screen, doing a pro-death dance, singing an amended version of John Barleycorn...
09 November 2009
Gary Glitter Memorial Society
I'm looking through Gary Glit-ter's eyes, looking through Gary Glit-ter's eyes....
07 November 2009
Paul Young's Love Will Tear Us Apart
...is (deep breath) still my favourite version of the song. Not only do I have the same confession as Liz (though why we feel the need to confess, I'm still working on); that Paul Young's version was the first I heard but also that when I heard the Joy Division version a few years later I thought it was a ropey Paul Young cover - and in fact, that's how I still see things now.
When No Parlez came out I was perhaps 11 or 12 and Love Will Tear Us Apart played a significant part in an early on-off relationship I had with a spectacularly endowed (for 12) girl who perhaps I ought to have been better off being mates with. The cruelty and despair of love wasn't really available to me then, I didn't understand yet how much of a gut-kicking emotion it could be but this song seemed to hint at other ways that love could take you; darker ways, paths only hinted at by my understanding of girls and passion and so on at that time.
There was a darkness here, a love that pulled you under, a love that could tear you apart.
This was all intensified by Paul Young. He had a clear, untainted voice and paired with these dark mysterious lyrical images, I can remember being very unsettled, an unusual feeling when mostly I was listening to stuff like Wham! or The Style Council or maybe at the indie top end The Jam (who, anyway, I liked for the same reason as I liked The Specials - you could dance to them without looking like a twat in School Disco's - the interest in social commentary came later).
When I hear Ian Curtis singing it, or later Michael Gira or Robert Smith or Nick Cave or whoever, they seemed to miss the point of the song; it didn't work for me coming from those kinds of mewled, blank, seen-it-all faces, the song couldn't be captured by people who already knew these paths. It was a dark light that Paul and me and her were discovering for ourselves.
I can remember me and her playing this in her bedroom and the feeling that somehow this was a wormhole into new, undiscovered, country was almost unbearable. It used to make her cry and it confused the hell out of me why she'd want to keep playing it. This was pre-sex, pre-understanding. I wasn't sure how things could ever turn out between a man and a woman, much less a girl and a boy who only a few before had been happily rolling in fields with no lingering sexual tension, no real understanding of gender at all...
This song, sung by Paul Young caught a frozen moment in our adolescence and meant that no songs would be the same again. I can still feel this song and no matter what anyone says: the Joy Division version is a lost and ropey cover.
28 October 2009
Delorean - Ayrton Senna EP
In the midst of a hellish day, when all music seemed wrong, Delorean's seasun came on and made me happier. There's elements of Global Communications 'benevolent' music plus the usual dollops of acid-house stranded shoegaze (as opposed to the mythic, blank-eyed, white-night strand of shoegaze); it's friendly in it's DNA, one of the least antagonistic musics I've been able to hear this week. A beuatiful, rose-tinted gauze when needed. It also contrasted bluntly with the understated malevolence of the next track - Shackleton's Moon Over Joseph's Burial - which made me want to throw someone in front of a train.
Download Seasun here and smile along.
25 October 2009
O Rang - Spoor
By the second album, I'd lost it. Even by the first album, Herd Of Instinct I was starting to lose it but Spoor seemed a genuine burst of skew-eyed otherness, in all the right ways. Whatever got tapped during the making of this, whatever barks and roots got steeped (perhaps just Gold Blend and sleep-deprivation), Spoor seems to just run with it; the music is as channelled as any I know and yet it doesn't spin off into 'my dad's bigger than your dad' (clue: he'll fucking die earlier) noodling, not even when the people involved are clearly excellent musicians, something that generally sends me swimming off in the other direction.
O Rang seemed to open something up and they seemed to have done it more or less accidentally. By the first album, the songs seemed more designed to impress and by the second album I'd completely lost the thread, as if somehow they'd recognised what they were doing and tried too hard to capture it (I can remember trying to capture the slow slurred Hamburger Lady TG sound in my bedroom when I was still at school and you could never get it right because it wasn't right).
Spoor pooled resources that it couldn't own. It sounded like everyone involved was making music during accute acclimatisation; it's music starved of oxygen or rather how music might sound when you're starved of oxygen and waiting to die. It's the music played secretly as Argentina are losing 6-1 to Bolivia. Jungle music up high. Dream-machine music.
Excellent Review of Herd Of Instinct here.
13 October 2009
09 October 2009
08 October 2009
Bloggers' WAGs is Go
A repository of the astute, mischievous, blase, rat-infested, paranoiac, half-baked, half-arsed, beatific, mendacious, sorry-owled, frivolous, crepuscular, moon-addled, canny, circumspect, broked-limbed, supercilious, sanguine and blown-fused critical comments from the wives and girlfriends of your favourite, self-esteemed, male cultural critics and bloggers. Inspired by a throwaway comment that perfectly encapsulated the life-work of David Bowie - "Murgh, murgh, murgh; I live on Mars" - this attempts to find the real truth behind the multiple metaphors and verbal pile-ups of the blogging world and keeps begging the question: "How much of the incandescent NOW will be remembered in the clip-shows of the future?"
I'm hoping this will end up being hugely inappropriate and sagely informative in more or less equal measures. Let's see. As ever, if you want to get involved, add your own WAG (or HAB) etc then drop me a line with your email and I'll invite you to join...
06 October 2009
Glowings
Glowing fungi in Brazil
And still causing surprises...
Now, if only they'd quickly crossbreed / GM them with the right kind of indoles, there could be some very entertaining night-time walks this Autumn...
02 October 2009
01 October 2009
Position Normal
A mysterious, unheralded email with a yousendit attachment has appeared in my inbox from Chris Bailiff of Position Normal, er, fame. I'm at work and so am locked out of the yousendit spaces and I'm not going to have access to my home 'puter for a few days so it's gonna have to stay mysterious. Maybe it's a complete mp3 edit for the new Position Normal fetish cassette which I haven't bought because I don't have a cassette player (though i might get one anyway. just because i like the colour)?
I'll find out on Monday.
For the Mnemonically inclined, or else those style besotted with the H word, then Position Normal's Goodly Time and Stop Your Nonsense albums are excellent scrawls and crawls through old baggage, stuck public service announcements, twitchy C81 rhythms and general sampladelic mischief... very (s)light of hand, and very cassette orientated... (like the best bits of, say, The Tape Beatles only more open-spaced, less dense - in both senses of the word) ...almost as if all the bands in Rip It Up And Start Again have been oddly conflated and given a sense of humour. The Past Sound Of Now.
Great stuff...
21 September 2009
10 - 20: Neurobashment
...it's about placement: the 10-20 stuff passed through the circuitry from Thorsten at Highpoint Lowlife (cheers!) is finding a way into my skull; the songs I've heard so far appear slightly ragged and loose-limbed and it's only during a very close listen that you recognise the patterns and the placement are rather more considered than that...
...at first, this reminded me a little of a dubbier, steppier Nurse With Wound (I'm thinking especially the proto-junglist tinbox percussive NWW of the Automating Vol 2 compilation, esp. The Strange Play of the Mouth... but then, then, the structure sort of creeps out at you, leaves that kind of automation (writing, scribing, channelling) behind, replacing it with a more mechanistic, lurching robot, signature that does seem to have order...
<<<<<....placement of electrodes on the scalp; sending beams in and recievers switching themes and blocking patterns and shooting shards of pure energy into the brain. The intent was never to free the patient, more to entrap them in a device of our making...>>>>>
From: Tripwires and Tangents: the misuse of others by Dr. G. A. Solomon
...and it's then that a lot of what I said about previous Highpoint Lowlife releases starts to take hold - again, this seems like accidental dubstep, leaking electricity, currents running through everything... the beats are considered in the sense that they follow the paths of electricity itself, the sounds come in waves because, well, they are already travelling in waves...
<<<<<...we'll turn them, inside and out; that was the whole point of everything I argued for...>>>>>
From: A Bird's Eye Of The Brain by D. A. Robertson
and then it makes me think that 10-20 as a human is just there to press pause at appropriate moments; is there primarily to observe, to consider when the circuits should be switched... this music might be as endless as all the audio gunk from that early Eno software... the human simply cuts in and out... music as flint knapping...
Highpoint Lowlife are putting together an impressively coherent roster... they are due some attention...
Of course, if the 10-20 relates to something entirely different then I'm going to re-evaluate, re-listen and re-hear - if there's one pair of ears I have no problem mistrusting then it's my own...
Mike Hinge
After recognising a paperback cover at Breakfast In The Ruins, I found some more of Mike Hinge's artwork... Psychedelic and slightly wobbly.
16 September 2009
14 September 2009
Inner-VIew W/Julianna Barwick
...second* in a series of inner-views with random artists whom I think might be the future... long-scale guesses, open-asks, shrills and tidings - sweeping up detritus from the aether regions, old hands swapping with new faces...
Your music strikes me as very 'benevolent'( see here for what I mean by that); is it designed to be?
I've heard from a lot of people that they find my music very relaxing, chilled-out, meditative, etc. I saw on itunes the other day that 2 kids said that 'florine' helped them get through finals! I'm not aiming to make peaceful or zen'd-out music- it all kind of comes out the way it wants to so i guess most of them are slows jams- i'm a pretty relaxed, daydreamy, easy-going person so maybe that's why it sounds the way it sounds. If it takes people to a dreamy place when they listen then i'm really happy about that.
There's a clear similarity to certain kinds of religious, choral music; is this a conscious influence?
Totally. I grew up going to church 3 times a week and we sang a
cappella. Beautiful, beautiful hymns with layers and layers of vocals and
even some quirky 'fun' ones with clapping and female vocals and male
vocals taking turns, and back and forth. this undoubtedly informed my
musical tastes. Later I was in choir in high school and then an opera
chorus so I was always acquainted with the human voice and what it can do
in a choral setting. I just love the sound of many voices coming together-
especially the swells of emotion in most hymns and choral pieces. the
church i sang in when I was a kid was a cavernous space that supplied a
beautiful, echoing, ringing reverb that also has stuck with me. I try to
achieve that kind of sound in most of what i do.
I've never seen you play but I'm curious how your stuff translates to a live setting...
it's just me on stage, with some stuff, building the loops one at a time - usually just singing. It can take close to ten minutes sometimes to
end up with the 'song'. It's starting with the spare, lone vocals and
builds to a choir of sound - of sorts.
Are you going to play in the UK anytime soon?
Would love to but no immediate plans as of yet. spring?
For the sake of the techie geeks that read this(you know who you are) could we have an equipment / software list? You use a Loop Station don't you?
...sure do - i sing into a shure mic (sm58)- into an effects pedal (helicon voice tone create- the only pedal i could find that was made specifically
for voice and that has reverb, delay, and tons of other effects, all in
one), into a roland rc-50 loop station - you can build 3 loops at a time
and fade in and out, and that's it. i've been known to use an electric
guitar occasionally, keyboards, a triangle, and some other things (even a
brian eno iphone app---yes), but 90% of the time it's just me and singing
and the equipment.
Care to name some musical influences?
...aforementioned church music, bjork, thom yorke/radiohead, panda bear/animal collective, boy choirs (i've seen the american boy choir, vienna boys choir, and the boys choir of harlem live- so amazing)-- there are tons of musicians/groups that i love but as far as influencing me - those take the cake.
Anyone you'd like to collaborate with?
...any of the above, antony, nico muhly, bill callahan, black dice, film scorers, city center, laurie anderson.
What about non-musical influences? Films? Books? Which book do you think you could soundtrack effectively?
...almost as influential, but not quite, as my experience singing in church,
was seeing the film 'empire of the sun' when i was 7 or 8 in the theater.
the song 'suo gan' has played a pretty important role in my life - i love
it so much. and the rest of the soundtrack has gorgeous choral music that
i have always been smitten with. i think aesthetically 'the virgin suicides' is one of the most beautiful films-- lots of kubrick, too - visually, he made my favorite films, hands-down. I, like everyone else, am a huge salinger fan. i could completely
visualize all of his books in my mind - like no other author- so wonderful.
my favorite book, though, is probably 'the fountainhead' by ayn rand. i,
for better or worse, love the idea of an individualistic mindset. doing
our best, making yourself better - i loved not only the story but the
themes in the book. that being said, i'd love to score a new version of 'the fountainhead' and a close second would be the short 'a perfect day for bananafish' from salinger's 'nine stories'.
Is ambient a dirty word? It always seems like it is.
...it connotes ugly things. but there's a lot of beauty in the 'ambient'
world.
Are you interested in scoring an actual choir?
YES. someday. yes.
Are there any forthcoming projects that we should be aware of?
i'm working on the next record, will have a song featured in the
forthcoming 'esopus 13 CD' (esopusmag.com), have a project going on
kickstarter.com to try and put the florine ep on vinyl
(http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/928045737/florine-ep-on-vinyl-limited-edition),
lots of shows stateside soon and everywhere else for spring.
Did I read somewhere that you've done some remixing?
Yes, i was asked by the people at XL to do a remix for radiohead's
'reckoner' and jack penate's 'tonight's today'.
*You must remember the Weird Tapes Inner-View?????
28 August 2009
24 August 2009
A Curious Sucked Orange
As a continuation / logical extension of conversational tics here, I'm now thinking that the character from the front of the A Sucked Orange compilation might be the logical sidekick for the cartoon Professor Brawnstawm-Stapleton Undertaker... an elemental being, similar in theory to the daemons of the His Dark Materials books... an irrationalist Hobbes to Calvin... Leviathan Rising...
Maybe Mark E Smith could be another sidekick... in his ghost-hunter guise... his slipping false teeth themselves deadly weapons of limited range...
Maybe Joe Meek playing the John Barrowman role?
21 August 2009
20 August 2009
Fangs And Arrows
Having fun here at the minute... becoming quite a little repository of cyclical sounds... including lots of OOP Pocahaunted / The Skaters stuff...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
-front.JPG)
.jpg)
