The Mire

12 hour party people

2008-07-25T02:02:00.000-07:00

Uber Germanist Owen weighs into the debate on minimal:

It rather pains me to say this, as Berlin - with its healthy contempt for the work ethic, and its still extant left activism - is a far, far saner city than London, and by several leagues more pleasant, more rewarding a place to live. And yet, when - as seems largely to have happened in much of Mitte, Kreuzberg, Friedrichshain, Prenzlauer Berg - an entire chunk of a formerly working city becomes a playground for an international of 'creatives', something odd happens. One often got the sense in Berlin that whatever was happening, it didn't really matter, nothing was at stake: pure pleasure becomes boring after a while, as does the constant low-level tick-tock of a techno designed seemingly for little else than just rolling along. German techno seems fastidious, but not glamorous. An executive music for people who can make a living off DJing or curating here and there is a bizarre phenomenon, as is a futurist cottage industry. The restraint of the music is the effect of a culture with no restraints.

This perhaps makes sense of the link between minimal and hedonism that Philip Sherburne often insists upon. On the face of it, minimal is an extremely unlikely candidate to be considered a pleasure seekers' music. It's worth noting at this juncture, that, as Derek pointed out after my last post, there is very little 'tasteful' about a Villalobos, Luciano or Hawtin set – what appears tasteful at normal volume becomes something different when put through a club PA. Nevertheless, even at high volume, there is a certain restraint at work here – or perhaps it is better construed as an avoidance (of hooks, big riffs etc.) It could be that this avoidance of the hedonic spikes, the pleasure peaks, of music is the libidinal cost of distending pleasure over the course of a twelve hour party.

Berlin has in many ways become a capital of deterritorialized culture, a base for DJs and curators whose jetsetting lifestyle is indeed a "bizarre phenomenon". If hauntology depends upon the way that very specific places – Burial's South London Boroughs, for instance – are stained with particular times, then the affect that underlies minimal might be characterised as nomadalgia: a lack of sense of place, a drift through club or salon spaces that, like franchise coffee bars, could be anywhere.

paid in full

2008-07-20T09:42:00.001-07:00

The big news Grime-wise in London this month concerns Rinse FM's 14th Birthday party at The End in London on 22nd August – the Pay As U Go Cartel of Slimzee, Wiley, Gods Gift et al, some of Rinse's earliest stars, are reforming for the event. Anyone who witnessed Wiley's performance at one of these events a few months ago will know what to expect in terms of lyrical intensity. But it's especially heartening to see Slimzee out on the scene (the DJ who at one point was banned by an ASBO from being on the higher floors of tall housing blocks). Slimzee's DJ sets were key to the transition between Garage to Grime proper. His abrasive dubplates were as cold and tough as concrete streets – they called out for some human presence, if only to leaven the feeling of sheer loneliness. It was on these kind of tracks that London MCs first began to find their voice, and his Sidewinder sets with Dizzee Rascal are justly revered (they circulate in various forms, but you can get a taste of them on You Tube

On a similar tip, DJ Rupture's excellent WFMU show Mudd Up had a special show recently with Bok Bok and Manara, where they play tons of tracks from this limbo zone between garage and grime – you can listen here. Lots of memories for me here, including all but forgotten tracks by Alias, whose indefatigable toughness almost recalls Belgian Nu Beat.

Return to the fairground

2008-07-18T07:34:00.000-07:00

"Minimal, of course, was the straw that overflowed the glass of Red Bull," writes Philip Sherburne in his jeremiad on the state of electronic dance music.

Scapegoat or no, in the last 18 months, the ubiquitous and yet strangely ephemeral genre has become a lightning rod for every conceivable critique. It's too soulless. It all sounds the same. It's lost touch with the roots of "real" dance music. It might not be surprising to hear a DJ like Diplo tell Pitchfork, "I go to a club in Berlin and I want to kill myself." But even within the scene, everyone complains about minimal, leveling complaints that often seem indicative of a much wider unease.
But the problem doesn't really lie with minimal itself. (One difficulty, though, is defining what minimal "itself" is; and it's questionable whether everything now labeled 'minimal' can now usefully be defined as belonging to one genre or sensibility.) As Simon Hampson argued in The Wire 293, it is the position that 'minimal' occupies in dance music, rather than any properties of the music itself, that is the issue:

There's a direct analogy with dubstep - more than an analogy, actually, since dubstep and the empire of minimal are converging, what with Villalobos and Shackleton remixing each other, the 2562 record, etc. What is needed is the confident reassertion of a dance music mainstream. That's related to Simon Reynolds's comments in Philip's piece:

Whenever, as a producer, you feel yourself flinching a bit from using an idea or a sound or an effect, hesitating on the grounds that it's maybe a wee bit cheesy, then I would say just to push right past that feeling and go for it. Do it twice over, even. There can never be enough monster riffs or cheap tricks in dance music; there can definitely be a surfeit of just-so subtleties.
Could minimal be defined as 'devoid of cheese'? Maybe so - but it would be a mistake to equate cheese with a retreat from innovation, just as it would be an error to align tasteful restraint and austerity with experimentalism. Hearing XL's rerelease of The Prodigy's first LP recently, with its its vertiginous jump cuts and bizarre angles, brought this home with E-flashback ultravividness. The barrel organ-like cartoon euphoria of Experience has always sounded like fairground music, and indeed it was at home pounding out from a fairground as it was at a rave. Wandering around a fairground in Kent recently, I kept being drawn back to the ride that was pumping out Bassline House, the genre whose hectic animatronic ebullience is at home in the fairground environment as rave once was. Is it time to forget the austere appartments that minimalism is so often reminiscent of, and return to the fairground?

non-urban field place

2008-07-16T02:15:00.000-07:00

A puff-piece on Radio 4 recently marvelled over the rise of popular music festivals in the UK and beyond. Admittedly, it's nice that festivals like Green Man are taking advantage of outdoor settings for staging music, and certainly the feeling of a return to nature, of reclaiming the land, is a powerful one. However for me it's hard not to see the rise of outdoor music festivals in the UK as a corollary of the decline of urban music venues and the rise in property and rent prices everywhere. As cities grow, urban space becomes prohibitively expensive, and the only leisure spaces are at the peripheries, in temporary zones a day trip away from the city. Promoters turn to the greenbelt to host their events, and music festivals pile the acts high to keep prices relatively cheap. The performers appearing become ever more bland, as promoters focus on providing an undemanding soundtrack to the brief moments of summer reverie we get in the UK. Like out of town shopping centres, we end up with lots of choice in outdoor music festivals, but no real quality.

It's not the only example of live-flight in London music. Grime and garage events almost never happen in the city anymore – the police, assuming a role of 'advising' music venues, create a de facto ban on all but the most selective of these events happening in the city.

When in Blackpool recently, it struck me how much of the economy of modern life these days is predicated on punters paying money just to move around. Large tourist attractions make a lot of their money from meals and drinks, ie the subsistence costs people pay to sustain themselves in these other-places. It's why coffee places thrive in city centres – cities are so unwelcoming and psychologically stressful, you need to pay to go somewhere to chill out, and there's a feedback loop where the less publicly accessible places there are in cities, the more you need these refreshment waypoints and the more they make. Festivals are largely the same – you get sponsorship from a drinks company, and they mop up the refreshment tab. Like a lot of things in modern life, increasingly you don't pay for the actual products you want – ie music – but the delivery systems for those products.

Ridicule Is Nothing To Be Scared Of (Slight Return)

2008-07-15T05:59:00.000-07:00

Like David Stubbs, I'm of course delighted to have been shopped to the commissars of commonsense who compile Private Eye's Pseud's Corner. It's always bracing to be middlebrow-beaten; a pleasure I can expect to enjoy fairly regularly from now on, since, if the section from the Mark Stewart feature that they selected is considered fair game, then they might as well open up a permanent spot for me.

It's difficult to know what the alleged problem is: the conjoining of politics and music? Well, it's hardly stretching a point to argue that a record such as For How Much Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? might, y'know, have had some connection with geopolitical developments at the end of the 70s. Would the same objection be made to linkages between politics and other areas of culture? But of course what is objected to is as much a question of tone as of content. The default expectation in British media is that writers perform a homely matiness: writing must be light, upbeat and irreverent, never taking itself or anything else too seriously.

The function of Pseud's Corner – to punish writing that in some way overreaches itself, that gets ideas above its station or gets carried away – has now been taken up by online discussion boards and comments facilities everywhere. The effect on any writer who internalises the critique is to be intimidated into colourless mediocrity. But the problem with most published writing today is not that it is 'pretentious', it is that is unreflective PR hackwork. David Stubbs is right to invoke a certain Orwell as the patron of bluff, plain speaking John Bull prose - but the Orwell of "Politics And The English Language" also attacked the mechanical circulation of dull, dead language. If only that Orwell were more heeded. "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print," he demanded, optimistically hoping that "if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin where it belongs." Over sixty years later, such "verbal refuse" continues to circulate with impunity, and is supplemented by a whole inventory of PR commonplaces and consumer-affect babble (journeys, rollercoaster rides). Surely any amount of 'pretentiousness' is preferable to these soporific linguistic screensavers?

Videos From Sónar 2008

2008-07-14T05:58:00.000-07:00

Check out three video clips from The Wire's visit to Sónar 2008: The final performance of the Yellow Swans, a Mark Fell (of .snd) installation and a work by the Spanish artist Pablo Valbuena (both exhibited at the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica)

Yellow Swans 20 June 2008:

Mark Fell Installation:

Pablo Valbuena Installation:

There's higher resolution versions of this through The Wire's main site here.

Dave Tompkins on air

2008-07-02T11:17:00.000-07:00

For those missing their regular fix of The Wire hiphop columnist Dave Tompkins, he did a great radio show last week, as part of the Finer Things programme in Poughkeepsie, hosted by another contributor, Hua Hsu. Great stuff which is heavy on the electro and vocoder flavours, and every bit as indefatigable and crate-diggerly as you'd expect from Dave's contributions to the mag:

Part One is here
Part Two is here

If you're still not sated, I'd recommend checking out the mammoth Miami Bass throwdown he did on WFMU from back in the day. You can access the archives here.

Far East sound

2008-06-27T02:31:00.000-07:00

Nice article on China's reggae heritage by Dave Katz, author of Solid Foundation. Not only did I not realise that Leslie Kong was of Chinese origin (and he's the guy who recorded arguably the best sides ever by The Wailers, some of the formative documents of roots reggae), but the scale of Vincent and Patricia Chin's VP label was brought home this week, when I realised they're now the people who own Greensleeves. Thanks for Steve Barker for pointing the article our way.

LFO Peel Session

2008-06-25T06:33:00.000-07:00

If you download only one thing today, I'd heartily recommend the LFO Peel Session from all the way back in 1990 that you can find at robotsound. Spine-tingling stuff. Like Peel Sessions from many other electronic types, it ends up somewhere between a studio track and live one – electronic sketches rather than fully fledged dancefloor wreckers. But that's the beauty of it – spare architectural lines, immeasurably expressive. It seems to drip with adolescent yearning – not surprisingly, as LFO were still barely out of their teens. Yet, it seems incredible to recall, they were in the studio with Kraftwerk around this very time (you can find their handwritten account of it in Rob Young's Black Dog Publishing book on Warp Records).

2008-06-02T07:28:00.000-07:00

With a certain synchronicity, just as Blissblog reminisces about old tapes (with the help of FACT magazine's Woebot), this item emerged from the postbag at The Wire – a promo release for the forthcoming Russell Haswell Editions Mego double LP Second Live Salvage (fearsome, thrilling noise architecture). The Wire office has been without a tape deck for a short while, so I had to do my own salvaging, retrieving mine from the loft to play it on.

I've no idea as to the sonic merits of tape versus CD or MP3. But in terms of how they are used, and how they embed themselves in you habits of music appreciation, there's lots to be said for tapes, specifically self-recorded ones which allow you to write many times/read many times. Many tapes of mine have changed like a patchwork quilt as I've dubbed new things next to old, over and over again. Strange juxtapositions emerge and persist (Black Dog Peel Sessions next to Will Oldham, Wu-Tang albums from mates bookended by Seefeel), and they become a living chronicle of obsessions and listening habits. Compared to the wealth of once-used CD-Rs which litter my desk, all of which carry a psychological traces of me wearily inscribing the album name on them, knowing soon they'll probably be lost among many other once listened to CD-Rs, tapes are like long lost friends. Of course, with iTunes, everything is at your fingertips anyway. But frequently one doesn't want them to be at fingertips. That conscious decision to access something feels too much like work, like acting as your own private librarian. Not only that, but you're at the mercy of the speed of the computer – so it's like being a librarian but needing someone else to clamber at that ladder for you.

Anti-Epiphany

2008-05-23T01:39:00.000-07:00

Simon's response to Mark Wastell's Epiphany in Wire 292, fascinating not because it is a Rashômon-like alternative reading of the same event, but because - contrary to certain prevailing hedonic relativist orthodoxies - it demonstrates that there is something more involved in aesthetic judgments than a mere registering of sensations. The difference between Mark's response and Simon's was not at the level of pleasure; it wasn't that Mark found Parker and Braxton any more agreeable than Simon did. But, in Mark's case, the initially disagreeable sensations induced him to take a leap beyond the pleasure principle: a cognitive act, a commitment, a decision to override the 'anger and confusion' that the music first caused him to feel.(Simon of course has taken such leaps in respect of other scenes, other musics.)

The mantra of hedonic relativism has it that 'everything is subjective', where subjectivity is construed as an arbitrary set of preferences. But Mark's Epiphany vindicates the view that certain encounters - events - produce subjectivities, even as they destitute us, deprive us of old worlds.

August Darnell

2008-05-22T04:50:00.001-07:00

Discussion in The Wire office turned the other day to Kid Creole, with the recent release of Going Places: the August Darnell Years 1974-1983. Aside from fronting one of the plain weirdest bands of the early 80s, the tropical gangsters Kid Creole And The Coconuts, I hadn't realised, among his other projects, he'd produced perhaps my favourite ever disco track, Machine's "There But For The Grace Of God Go I", perhaps the most impassioned chronicle of inner city bigotry and white-flight in the entire disco canon. Listening to that track, a mix of gospel guts and pure synthetic pulse, what strikes me is how camp is an essential part of the physical DNA of the track – flamboyance and narcissism is practically built into its outre melodies and assertive, strutting steps. While the primal urge that runs through rock, funk and house - the drive, the motor of so much music, from Black Sabbath to James Brown – has been analysed to death, I wonder if the counter-current of camp, which delights in lateral movements and show-stopping pauses, has been analysed in dance music as much. It's easy to hazard a guess as to why it might not have been – male music journalists would rather talk about unbridled sexual energy than something as supposedly effeminate as camp.

Mostly, though, the compilation makes me wonder what's become of camp in urban music today. RnB and rap videos these days look airbrushed, as if hidden behind a plastic wall, a distancing effect exacerbated by the constant use of slow motion and fast cross-cutting. The big names of urban music are synthetic products of the studio system as much as (arguably more) than Hollywood stars. The overall impression is a fear of people finding out what they're like. This look-but-don't-touch sexual politics is, for me, deeply un-sexy, and it's music's loss.

'It's not your imagination ... who's there?'

2008-05-22T04:18:00.000-07:00

Steve Goodman's presentation at the excellent hauntology event last week focused on the phenomenon of 'audio spotlights', which deploy ultrasound to precisely target sonic messages at individuals. Predictably, the use of this Philip K Dick-like 'holosonic' technology - explained in the YouTube clip above - is being pioneered by advertisers to cut through the urban cacophony to reach consumers as they pass billboards.
It's interesting that the 'related videos' on YouTube are predominantly not about technological developments but the paranormal - not surprising when you watch the clip below, which shows how advertisers have insinuated an insistent voice saying 'It's not your imagination ... who's there?' into the heads of passersby. (I'm reminded of Carpenter's Prince Of Darkness , in which technicians transmit a message into the sleeping mind of the receiving subjects, saying 'This is not a dream'.)

It as if the voice flips from being a voice in your head - an invading signal, performatively announcing its own reality (it's not your imagination) - to being thevoice in your head - your 'own' 'inner' voice, asking who's there? On the face of it, this seems to be another vindication of Althusser's theory of subjectivity as an effect of hailing (or interpellation). But, as someone in the audience at the Hauntology event suggested, in projecting itself directly into your head, the holosonic hail almost risks schizophrenically subverting the interpellation process. Instead of the standard (mis)recognition of oneself as the object of a hail, the holosonic projection could invite a recognition that what you thought of as your 'inner voice' does not belong to interiority at all.

The laser-like targeting of sound contrasted fascinatingly with a protest by Unite, the Trade Union, outside a building near to The Wire's offices last week. In pursuit of minimal workers' rights for the building's cleaners - such as paid holiday/ sicknesses - the protest was an exercise in noise generation, using the voice, whistles and improvised percussion in an effort to disrupt the working ambience of City drones. Unfortunately, I don't know how successful it was, either in its aim of distracting the smooth flow of capitalist immaterial labour - maybe the building was too effectively sound-insulated for the noise to penetrate - or in getting the cleaners' demands met. But here are two illustrations of the way in which sound - at least as much as images - is crucial to the management of contemporary social reality. While the role of images has been endlessly discussed, the role of sound remains undertheorised. What, for instance, is the sonic equivalent of the visual Spectacle?

Bing Tha Ruckus

2008-05-19T02:00:00.000-07:00

My recent Invisible Jukebox with Wu-Tang Clan's The RZA (featured in The Wire 292, which has just hit the streets) involved a train spotter's paradise of sample-spotting and internet researching as I looked into the building blocks of the great Wu-Tang albums of the mid-90s. One sample I missed, sadly, was that "Ice Water" from the RZA-produced Raekwon album Only Built 4 Cuban Linx featured a vocal sample from none other than Bing Crosby, singing "White Christmas". The langorous, grandfatherly "I'm...." from the first line is cut off just before the second syllable, leaving only a deep voice and wide vibrato that sounds like it's emanating from the depths of the pyramids. It's one of the most gothic moments in the whole of hiphop, using good ol' Bing's disembodied tones as an unearthly, weirdly non-gendered siren call.

It's odd to think of a sample fiend like The RZA getting a kick out of Bing's voice, but dig deeper and there's a strange kinship between the pair. The RZA recently invested a large amount of his own money in vinyl-to-digital scratch technology; Bing Crosby was instrumental in developing early tape technology, by investing $50,000 in the fledgling Ampex company.

Theo Parrish

2008-04-28T11:26:00.000-07:00

It's hard in the internet era to recreate that excitement of the unknown when you encounter a dusty, entirely mysterious artifact in a record shop. There's no such thing as a rare record these days, with the advent of eBay, and music available in digital forms is so extensively propagated around the internet that it's rare to encounter something you don't know at least something about (even if you haven't encountered it, you can often guess what it's like by a process of elimination.... "ah! so this must be that Scandinavian skwee stuff, as its not on one of the usual Swedish labels...").

However, Detroit producer Theo Parrish (whose Sound Sculptures Volume 1 was reviewed recently in The Wire 291) makes a fair stab at preserving that sensation in a manner that's neither drearily nostalgic nor hermetically self-referential. He's prolific but publicity shy, fiercely pro-vinyl, and shuns all genre terms. Nevertheless, you get the unerring sense in listening to his music that it could be from either the past or the future (or both). It's always familiar, interpolating disco, soul, funk and jazz, but carries only the feel of these musics - the sense of interplay, of elements engaging with each other - rarely the sort of obvious contours that distinguish each of these genres from each other.

It makes the mini-epiphany I had while watching him discuss his work online as part of the Red Bull Music Academy lectures (a strange hybrid of industry self-celebration and occasionally enlightening musician insider talk, which you can watch here) all the more pertinent. Parrish discussed James Brown's "Gonna Have A Funky Good Time (Doing It To Death)", and the track sounds startlingly like a blueprint for his entire oeuvre - elements fade in and out, a crescendo is never quite reached, but there's perpetual motion, perpetual funk. It's very much not the paradigm of a JB track, but instead the kind of thing his band played in concert when marking time – a vamp, basically.

Parrish's music has perfected this sense of always becoming, but never quite being, something fixed, defined. It's why his music has barely changed in 15 years, but when you return to it it seems to have some strange, almost chemical potential in the beats, a volatility that's not quite been resolved, like gunpowder still miraculously potent decades after it was made. Even so, it was a minor revelation to hear "Gonna Have A Funky Good Time (Doing It To Death)" next to his music: the resemblance is startling, as if he's taken the James Brown track and rearranged it for sequencer, synth and drum machine, a timeless variant of the endless vamp.

Heatwave

2008-04-14T08:26:00.000-07:00

The recent Soul Jazz An England Story compilation, from some of the people behind London club night Heatwave, reminded me of some of the excellent 7"s these guys have released over the years. In particular, this ragga refix of Kelis' "Trick Me" (already an astonishingly funky track, with its rhythm that lurks somewhere between technofied R&B and dust-caked ska), which I found while looking for records to DJ with in Brussels as part of The Wire soundsystem the other day.

The precise, gritty ruff-age of the vocals immediately raises the energy levels of the track. This melding of ragga vocals and R&B is like that of old school rapping and disco on Soul Jazz's fairly recent Big Apple Rapping - when the rough and smooth go together so well, what's not to like? Anyway, I have such fond memories of this 7" that I actually found myself running back to the hotel to get it mid-set, and anyone who's fallen for the UK/JA crossover of An England Story should surely seek this out.

Namings As Portals

2008-04-14T07:14:00.000-07:00

Speaking of postpunk autodidacticism, Owen Hatherley picks up on what I too thought was of the most interesting lines in Mark Sinker's Sight & Sound review of Grant Gee's Joy Division film:

Curtis' own writing was a teen scrapbook of anti-pop titles and sensibilities ('Interzone', 'Atrocity Exhibition', 'Colony', 'Dead Souls', invoke Burroughs, Ballard, Kafka and Gogol respectively, the effect dismissable only if you decide not to see such namings as portals).
Sometimes the names condensed more than one reference: 'Colony' invoked Conrad as much as Kafka's 'Strike Kolony'. Sometimes the references were unintentional misdirections; 'Atrocity Exhibition' is surely one of the least Ballardian tracks that Joy Division produced. In any case, construing these allusions as 'portals' that led somewhere – rather than as citations in a seamless postmodern circuit – is highly suggestive. Such portals could take the listener into formal education, but were also doorways beyond the school and the university, an alternative curriculum.

(Also well worth looking at on Owen's site: this essay on Neu!, published in honour of the recently deceased Klaus Dinger.)

'Other People Went To University...'

2008-04-14T06:27:00.000-07:00

If you're a cod-psychologist, I guess you could trace most of the Fall's output back to this period, to the wilderness years, the dole days - back to young Mark laying the hard foundations for the rough and brilliant years that he hasn't yet seen!

Mark E Smith, from a section of his autobiography, which is being serialised in The Guardian this week. Who knows how much culture in postwar, pre-neoliberal Britain depended on the indirect public funding – perhaps the best kind – provided by the dole? Of course, in the wake of Thatcherism and Blairism, today's equivalents of the young MES would find themselves quickly harassed back to work in a cracker factory by a Restart course. (Aptly, one of The Fall's many members was actually an extra in the scenes set in the Restart course in The League of Gentlemen.) The dole might have provided an alternative to university, a time in which proletarian autodidacts could pursue undirected research and engage in rogue reflections, but with the cutting of student grants and the introduction of tuition fees, the pause for thought which existed outside employment and official study is no longer available to many British students either.

Satire Is Dead, Again

2008-04-09T03:19:00.000-07:00

From the team that brought you this: 'Red is more like punk rock, hip hop, this should feel like hard commerce.'

Designer Despair

2008-04-07T02:16:00.000-07:00

Rousing praise for Portishead's latest amidst Simon Reynolds's latest bumper pack of reflections on Blissblog. I find Simon's enthusiasm for the LP a little perplexing, although, I must confess, I've never been that enraptured by Portishead. I became quickly fatigued wading through the gloopy designer despair of their debut, and had all but lost interest by the time of the follow up. The combination of kitchen sink torch singing, vinyl crepitation, sweeping film samples and brokeback hiphop beats possessed a certain stylishness, but the appeal quickly palled. It was the 'stylishness' that was the problem, actually. Even though I don't doubt the personal sincerity of either Gibbons or Barrow, formally it all sounded a little pat, a little too cleverly contrived, a little too comfortably at home in This Life 90s Style culture. Gibbons's gloom always struck me as being more like illegible grumbling than the oblique bleakness it wanted to be. As for the new album, it screams out lack of ideas: devoid of the vinyl crackle that might have given it some relation to the 'hauntological now' of Burial or Philip Jeck, I can only hear it as clapped out coffee table miserabilism ten years past its sell-by date.

(Meanwhile, I can't help feeling that Geoff Barrow and arch smugonaut Mark Ronson are right about each other.)

Weird coincidences...

2008-04-04T08:43:00.000-07:00

Further to Derek's observations on Villalobos's 'Enfants', below ... Even though the sample is taken from a Christian Vander track, when I first heard 'Enfants' it reminded me of nothing so much as the piano on Nina Simone's 'Sinnerman'. It seems that I'm not the only one to make the association ... If the similarity between the tracks is eerie, then this only adds to the strangeness of Simone's already intensely uncanny song, which acquired even more weirdness last year when it was used by both David Lynch (in INLAND EMPIRE) and Timbaland (on the first track of his Shock Value LP).

Nu-linguistic programming

2008-04-04T06:27:00.000-07:00

Infinite Thought's diatribe against artspeak raises all kinds of issues. The soporifically ubiquitous language against which she rails is part of the reassuring background noise in what passes now for high culture. It is the institutional artworld's revenge on Duchamp and Dada's idea that nonsense could be revolutionary. But the problem with this language is its oversignfication as much as its lack of content, the excess of meaning with which it freights objects and shows, fixing them into a pre-defined cultural place via the use of a laudatory linguistic muzak that combines portentous gravitas with vapid weightlessness: all those notions that are negotiated with, those boundaries that are blurred, and everything, of course, is radical... This is the soundtrack to the postmodern conversion of events into exhibits, a process so total, so relentless, that it has become invisible, presupposed. An old story: those who sought the destruction of the art space and its prestige find themselves the objects of the latest retrospective ... And just wait for all those May 68 commemorations next month...

This 'nu-language' is more than a matter of institutional inertia. It is an expression of an interlock – a synergy – between art, business and promotion. At the End of History, all language tends to the condition of PR . And lurking not far behind all this is the spider bureaucracy, now rebranded as 'administration', since funding bodies require artists – practitioners - to themselves internalise and proliferate nu-language. This can't be attacked at the level of discourse alone – as IT suggests, nu-language itself puts into practice the occlusion of objects under referent-free discourse – but, by keeping faith with the events of the past and anticipating events yet-to-come, criticism can surely play a part in the attack on nu-linguistic programming.

new build music

2008-04-03T07:49:00.000-07:00

Walking out of Kode9's DJ set at the recent BLOC weekender in Norfolk, all of us there in The Wire's chalet were saying more or less the same thing- noone else plays the kind of music Kode9 currently plays out. There's very little of anything approaching dubstep in his sets: instead, there's what sounds like speeded up crunk, Southern hiphop reedited into ever sharper shards, all kinds of ghetto funk given technofied refixes, neo-soul taken at breakneck pace.

Both Kode9 and Hyperdub seem to be going in the opposite direction to what you might associate with dubstep: the music is getting quicker, sharper, more synthetic and fractured. Watching his set, I wasn't sure whether to dance or to just marvel at the way he's able to splice these musical genres together. The breadth of music traversed was enough of a rush on its own.

It strikes me that few artists are able to speed music up and retain the funk when they're remixing; it's much more common to slow beats down, to straighten them out and explore the spaces within (think of screwed and chopped hiphop, triphop etc.) It's a much more difficult feat to speed music up and yet find a way to still make it successfully mesh with other styles, to engage the body. To do so is like trying to tinker with an engine while with someone stepping on the accelerator. Perhaps understandably, remix culture is more about breaking music down than building it up. It's perhaps only Kode9 and Surgeon who've I've really felt they we able to do this the other way round.

As Kode9 himself has suggested, the relationship between dance genres (and their tempos) and the body is a deep and complex one (think of how techno and house have subtly different emphases despite fairly similar tempos, and yet they seem to 'work' entirely differently). Splicing the DNA of dance genres is a bit like playing Frankenstein. I'm still seriously impressed that it ends up creating something so graceful and exhilarating, rather than some disfunctional mutant that only a drugged-up crowd would enjoy.

Haynes

2008-03-26T05:36:00.000-07:00

The other night I saw Velvet Goldmine for the first time. I seem to recall that when it came out ten years ago, it looked quite cool, but folks who had seen it hadn't been too positive about it. I hadn't thought much about it in the interim, but not too long ago I came home and my flatmate was watching it. I caught the part where Ewan MacGregor plays Iggy Pop on stage and was immediately interested. Ewan is fully convincing and his screen character Curt Wild (geddit?) has even more extreme added twisted back story (one can only hope that Iggy didn't have it so bad, but maybe if I ever get round to reading his biography, I'll find out just how close it is). It made me want to see the rest of the film and when I found out that writer/director Todd Haynes had done this movie I made it a priority. I'd recently seen Haynes's Dylan 'biopic' I'm Not There and found it flawed, but really brave and very good. That plus Time Out some months ago had a cover feature of their top 50 rock flicks (or something like that) and Haynes's barbie-casted Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story had come out on top. Synchronicity!

Today, having watched Superstar on the internet (the only way to see the short film, as its distribution suffered after Richard Carpenter sued), I can now say I've seen Haynes's music-inspired films (all within two months of each other) and it's an interesting trajectory. Superstar (which is Haynes's second film released in 1987) is certainly the most straightforward, even with the barbies. It's an easy narrative punctuated by ominous foreshadowing and illuminatingly preachy text concerning anorexia. Given the primary device, it can't help but be tongue-in-cheek ("No, we can't eat at The Source! hahaha"), but I found it a sympathetic portrayal of Karen's self-cancellation. One might assume (as Richard Carpenter probably did) that by using dolls Haynes was making fun what must have been a tragic and difficult situation, and while it may have actually been borne of financial necessity, it makes for some tender homage in a form similar to children at play. The love of children is not usually duplicitous, and similarly that affection is revealed, as in the lovingly rendered barbie-sized sets and costumes.

With Velvet Goldmine (1998), the on-screen rock stars aren't at all veiled mirrors of their real life counterparts, but in this case Haynes makes his own story using real characters instead of relying overly on their real-life stories, as so many young children are given readymade characters (like Barbie and GI Joe) complete with a look and a backstory to make their own adventures with. My main beef with this vastly entertaining and rather beautiful film is Haynes still felt the need to retain lip service to an overarching plot, which plods along between the lavish set-pieces that are full of wit and insight not least because of constant references to and quotes from Oscar Wilde, which in itself ties the set-pieces together better than the 'plot'. One short scene of Curt Wild and Brian Slade (David Bowie) musing on their love is acted by dolls in one child's voice and intentionally cliched dialogue making it an oddly touching and innocent portrayal of such a moment: gay hedonist rock star love.

Ten years later and Bob Dylan becomes the fetishised pop star in I'm Not There, made up of vignettes close and inspired to his life, the viewer's knowledge of which making the lynchpin that allows the film to roam plot free. Losing that structure seems to release even more ideas from an already imaginative director and perhaps obsessive fan. The life of Dylan is such a rich tapestry to draw from and Haynes really does that justice. He keeps a few stylistic choices (making some scenes deliberately stiffly acted, which can be a bit jarring when it's not done humourously), but it's an incredibly engaging way to tell a story and kind of makes you feel as though you're learning something about the subject as well – getting a sense of that elusive charisma that made them something special in the first place.

Turns out Haynes's first film is actually about Rimbaud, who is a poet I had recently decided to investigate. Synchronicity has dictated my next foray.

more is less

2008-03-18T09:13:00.000-07:00

First up in April's office ambience was Ricardo Villalobos's "Enfants", a minimal Techno masterpiece comprised solely of a metronome-like hi-hat and beat, rolling piano and samples of a children's choir. The music is derived, oddly, from a piece by Christian Zander of Magma, and it becomes a matter of fascination trying to spot where the loop of singing starts and finishes (I still haven't managed it).

The treatment is so simple and elegant that, despite running for all of 17 minutes in its full version, you yearn to play it again as soon as it finishes. The 12" was hammered repeatedly in the office in the run up to the April issue. Personally, I could happily hide myself away with this record for a day or two to try and discover its secrets. It exemplifies a trend that has developed in my listening habits over the last year or so: as the amount of music easily available grows exponentially, a reaction is a corresponding fascination with singular pieces of music, whose multiple layers can be unpeeled onion-like. Minimal Techno 12"s on the Cadenza label have tracks that run for well over ten minutes on each side, with endless tricks of perceptual acoustics that you have to listen to and relisten again in order to grasp.

I can hardly remember the last time I listened to a recent album more than 20 times, but I'm probably close to it with this 12". Whether this yearning for simplicity is a lifestyle matter, like the desire to have all your record collection on one handy Mp3 player, I'm not sure. But there is a desire to have more-of-less that my obsession with this track reflects.