WOEBOT

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/omm/reviews/story/0,13875,1347746,00.html

Dunno if you missed the above, Simon's cool review of "Run The Road" for The Observer. I reviewed the compilation for FACT, should be coming out sometime soonish. We (at FACT) have also done a 4-part study of some of the names of the scene, we've done likkle spots with Wiley, Terrah Danjah, Danny Weed, Target and Plasticman. I didnt do the interviews I just said who I thought theyd be good talking to, though i've penned the intro for the piece. Look out for it.

Its an exciting time believe. Rather frustratingly (Logan Sama you bastard!) there are great tunes out there which dont look like they'll see a release this year:

• Bruza's "Can You Feel The Rush" (Aftershock?)
• Trim's "Bad Boy Trim" (Aim High?)
• Dogzilla's "I Want Out" (Shot City Records?)
• Dogzilla's "Neverending Story" (Aim High?)
• Riko {the discoey one off Creeper Volume 2}
• Roll Deep's "Shake A Leg"

ALL THESE TRACKS are the measure of anything that's come out of the scene to date. Seriously that good. However there are some hot tracks that have hit the shops, most interesting of which is on a new label called "Unknown Genius" its a Dizzy Rasklat tune, but the beat he's riding is some hypercellerated shattered maracas Todd Edwards bizniss, he's chopped his voice up like crazy, "Dizzy, Dirt Skank, Dirt, Dirt, Dirt, Dirtee" I guess it's a post-Babycyakes thing, like TD's rabbit-out-of-its-skin nu-RnB an attempt to figure a way out of the looming Grime impasse.

Yeah an impasse. The thing is if this was American Hip-Hop you could expect Grime to fall into a decade-long holding pattern, a purple-patch of creative abundance (kind of like the stretch between De La Soul is Dead and Mobb Deep's The Infamous) but with Grime I wonder whether that will happen. Part of me hopes that we get such a stability, but you know the Pirate-Radio-Party feedback-loop is so nervous, so restless that I just dont see it happening. I guess it's possible Grime gets sealed in a bubble, much like Jungle has done, though much more profitably, while the grassroots scene wanders off. If artists like Dizzy and TD can keep ringing the changes then hey there'll be no trouble, but if theyre outmuscled by those who attempt to consolidate their power base, try and freeze up the evolution, lock out the youngsters, then Grime'll be in trouble.

Also good this week P's and Q's is out (again, blink and you would have missed it on white label), Wiley's "Colder" with it's gun-cock hook and Slew Dem Production 16-Bar.

Original Thread Here

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:29 AM | Permalink

Been thoroughly enjoying the Rough Trade "IndiePop" Compilation. If you havent scored a copy of this do. It'll be the freshest most invigorating thing you pick up this year, and easily the best compilation theyve put out IMHO. Actually considering a) they couldnt get even half the tracks they wanted (the list of bands whose stuff they couldnt get is as long as your arm) and that b) much of the stuff comes from the 90s (when you had to be a leper to still be listening to indie ) its quite surprisingly excellent.

This weekend i finally picked up Stereolab's "Emperor Tomato Ketchup". I've a copy of "Space Age Batchelor Pad" and that rather dampened my ardour (its not that great) and my only other foray into the groop is the (awesome) "Simple Headphone Mind" (but I rather churlishly attributed thats success to its collaborator Steve NWW Stapleton). Side one of ETK left me a bit cold, ready to dismiss them as drinking from the right brews, but failing to do their own thing successfully, but POW the other three sides are excellent. "Le Yper Sound" i especially liked. Actually when I first went into Rough Trade to ask for Neu! in the early nineties (the dawn of my realisation that they were going to be a lot more difficult to track down that i'd thought) the bloke at the counter told me i should just buy the stereolab record... that was the lazy comparison early on wasnt it?

One of the best tracks on the Rough Trade comp sounds just like Stereolab. The June Brides "Every Conversation" with its funny tootling trumpet, supposedly a big influence on Belle and Sebastian (another band I have to look inot one of these days). A track like this in the late eighties, mate, I would have dismissed it out of hand as twee, pointlessly lacking in ambition etc. The sort of things I liked were Sonic Youth, Big Black, The Buttholes, AR Kane, Loop, MBV (wonder what journalist i was tailing?)- quite portentous music that seemed sort of lofty and other, tuned into a superior frequency range. MBV's early stuff still has this homemade atmosphere, "Paint a Rainbow" for instance off this comp is cut from this cloth. And it got me thinking that the whole C86-vibed scene must have crashed headlong into the kind of expectations that teenager like me had at the time. "We dont want twee music like The Pooh Sticks!"

If there was one band which, almost singlehandedly collected all that was C86-ish in Indie and "re-branded" it, if you like, but simultaneously gave "proper uk indie" a more glamorous spin. It had to be Stereolab. If you once were an indie fan , then you probably became a Stereolab fan demographically speaking. It seems like the rest of indie went forever buzzcock-power-pop at this same point. In that sense, in this (typically) hastily assembled theory, I reckon Stereolab killed indie. Either that or they ate it alive.

Original Thread Here

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:56 AM | Permalink

Grime's relationship with the mainstream is peculiarly schizophrenic. With the exception of Wiley's "Treading on thin Ice", Dizzy Rascal has become the sole representative of the genre. How extraordinary is it that the Rascal can win a Mercury Award and sell thousands of records when a pulsating scene peopled by larger-than-life MCs and genius producers struggles to sell 500 copies a white label? It's media representation gone horribly awry! Currently it's strictly a cognoscenti of nerds and loose-limbed hipsters who've taken the trouble to dip into the (occasionally forbidding) murk of Grime. This is, of course, criminal. Grime needs to be heard more widely, and it's a delight that the 679 label's compilation "Run The Road" has hit the racks and that other compilations scooping up these limited-run releases by EMI and Relentless are mooted.

The FWD scene, here represented by Plasticman, have been lucky to garner support from Rephlex records. For many the Darkcore Croydon Techno sound is more easily digestable than the occasionally ugly tones of the MC-led riot, and its been no surprise to see them trading on the Grime "brand name". But is it the real thing? Fascinating perhaps, but I would say no, even if there are occasionally valuable detentes and collaborations between the two scenes can yield excellent records like Riko's "Popadomz" and D Double's "War Wid". Grime's true face is, though justifiably Dizzy's, also that of a gang of 4-dimensional hucksters; of voices so distinct you'd swear they were synthesised (D Double's "Mui Mui" chant, Trim's disarmingly dopey backward slanguage, Dogzilla's near-camp eyepopping outrage, Lethal B's pugged-into-the-grid delivery, Tinchy Stryder's lispy charm etc). It's the sound of a vernacular, frequently "endish", tripping into the light fantastic painting a blindingly vivid picture of life amid the blocks, of beefs, of friendships formed in shared adversity, of patient talent which refuses to quashed, of poetry and philosophy from the crucible of the street.

And yet it's increasingly the nth powers behind these words which makes the difference. Sure the MCs run the street, and they rule the pirate radio shows, but the producers are sliding surely into view, this in a sense a slow return to order, a reaffirmation of the producer's status in the Pirate Radio continuum. This year's undisputed pioneer has been Terrah Danjah whose Aftershock imprint has run 2004 with tracks like "So Sure" and "So Contagious" laying down new musical potentialities for the genre, positing an almost oriental-sounding R'n'B/Grime collision which may succeed in keeping the scene open to "the ladies" when sometimes its in danger of being a testosterone lockdown. Aftershock also laying down peerless MC tracks like "Bogeyman" and "Gansta Toys"

Again bestride the metropolis like a collossus is the Aim High camp, both Target, who can claim huge tunes Doogzilla's "STDs" and Riko's "The Chosen One" as his, and Danny Weed behind the fabulously-inventive ultra-bizarre riddims of yesteryear like "Rat Race" and red hot tracks like Donaeo's underrated "People Don't Know" and the soon-to-explode "Bad Boy Trim". It's an incredibly exciting time for Grime, and in the next six months, sealed by Wiley's brilliant Roll Deep LP, we'll surely see Grime settle into the unavoidably brilliant endlessly sustaining energy loop it's explosive beginnings have hinted at. Just don't EVER call it UK Hip-Hop.

Posted by WOEBOT at 12:00 PM | Permalink

You know how it is. On one hand, and this is the most principalled way of conceiving it, we are driven by a hunger for new sounds to distort our perception of the world into fascinating new shapes. On the other, the drive to acquire music is, lets face it, associated with what is seen as a debased volition to "be cool." Debased because one plays what is seen to be capitalism's game, debased because one is engaged in a seemingly pointless pursuit- the acquisition of an invisible, essentially meaningless status, as a means of reinforcing one's own fallacious sense of self-worth.

Recently I've been thinking (in my own small way) that by dismissing this latter instinct as the worst kind of empty hipsterism we might be missing something. That perhaps these motives might map onto a larger matrix of behaviour. Thinking that it might be worth considering the acquisition of "cool" as having some kind of more profound meaning.

In my vision of this theory I'd create an implicit connection between the cold abstract demeanour of the hipster and his/her confidence in the "amulets" which give them power. It'd be to easy to dismiss this link with the observation that the most intently rapt devourers of culture are often frothing at the mouth. Aren't these people usually vivacious proselytsers for their own brands of culture, and therefore hardly diffident? I don't think this can diminish their core distance. Even the frothiest hipster enjoys a comforting perspective in the company of "lesser mortals". Indeed I've noticed that many of the most hyper-sensitive consumers of culture, even if they are masters of conveying their own enthusiasms, (true to this theoretical pairing between hipsterism and "the cool") DO tend to be diffident. If they weren't diffident, they'd be be swamped by culture, too easily excitable to critque acutely.

I'm only partially in possession of the kind of theoretical knowledge that'd be able to illuminate these fumblings. I do have a few pointers however. There must be some kind of socio-historical history of "cool", some text which defines human being's deployment of the armament of "cool", a work which takes in the psychological machinations of the french aristocracy and blue mountain rastas and their use of signifiers to territorialise their demeanour.

Actually I'll admit to be being curious that the notion of "cool" has a quite explicit socio-historical descent. I remember David Toop alluding the attitude's origin in West African witchcraft. Obviously much of the occult is concerned with the ways in which certain modes of behaviour can have calculated effects (I'd tend to view this kind of manipulation of the environment as a social science/psychological trick, but you could just as easily take the other side if you were so inclined). In this afro-centric visioning of the phenomenon, the "cool" meme passes into Blues and Jazz and into the broader culture. Now with Wiley and his frozen wastes we have the latest incarnation froideur. As a sidenote I was fascinated to hear on Trim's Bogeyman Wiley threatening to "break your face down, bring the spirits in..."

Beyond the voodoo jiggery-pokery entailed in my vision of what is entailed in "cool", it's tactical detournement of street politics, there is an element of "cool" which pertains to the mutabilty of existence. Isn't there some part of the desire to constantly remain at the edge of things which is to do with attempting to control or arrest the passing of time? With each new acquisition we believe we have "fixed" the flux, nailed into place the world's location and our relationship to it.

Original Thread Here

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:32 AM | Permalink

This cover is so punk! A bridge to Favela Funk in that sense, proof positive of this music's avant-lumpen cred. Love affair with Brazilian stuff continuing unabated. I've ripped this record, an absolute masterpiece BELIEVE to CD so if people can hit me with brilliant stuff they haven't heard I can pass it on. Lo Borges (as any fule kno?) was the singer/collaborator on Milton Nascimento's "Clube Da Esquina". If you ask me, the crisp arrangements on this street funk masterpiece point to him being the nth power behind that record. So sublime and such rock-hard breaks, sample fodder indeed.

Nick Wrigley has sent me:

Caetano Veloso's 1969
Really excellent, one or two tracks surpassing his highlights, but rather too many lyrics in english.

Edu Lobo's "Missa Breva" (1973)
Absolutely STUNNING, every house needs a copy of this. Really strong tinge of lapsed catholicism (don't tell Fisher!), subdued choirs of women hymning the lord, super-chic easyisms (deep breathy floot), some beyond seductive tunes and edu (as previously observed) SO DREAD! Strong influence on Stereolab "Dots and Loops"-era mooted. Better than "Cantiga De Longe" by a mile, invisible on vinyl but you can get this on CD. Forever indebted to Nick for this one.

Lo Borges "A Via Lactea" (1978)
Quite nice, but a bit saccharine/gloopy. A few too many misplaced synths. Still, nice. I'll hit you with my Borges Nick, though suspect you may have it.

Morlu sent me:

Gilbert Gil's 1969 (feat. Celebrio Electrico etc)
Just dipped my ear in but sounding like fully-expanded baroque tropicalia. (Kodwo you can have one of these if you want.)

Caetano Veloso/Gal Costa's "Domingo" (1967)
Looked for this for ages in vain. Kind of had the idea it was reissued on vinyl. Not checked this yet owing to backlog ;-) or the last one i've got here...

Caetano's "Joia"
...which again comes highly recommended.

I also picked up Veloso's "Trans" recently and again found the lyrics in english a real turn off. Looking forward to a package from Jon Dale, who (poor feller) is having a miserable time of it, thoughts with u pal. Did anyone catch the recent FACT mag with it's top 25 Brazilian records? (Tufluv not around to ask) Anyone care to furnish us with the details here?

Original Thread Here

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:38 AM | Permalink

I was making a pink love CD for the wife and had cobbled together (quite unselfconciously in a muso kind of way) a batch of songs I knew she'd like. Anyway the last two tracks on the CD were:

Scritti Polliti: The Sweetest Girl
PM Dawn: Set Adrift on Memory Bliss

and I just thought when I played it back

*SNAP*

those are two tracks that belong together.

For lots of reasons:

1) The skooshy drum machines on "The Sweetest Girl" reaching fwd in time.
2) The Spandau Ballet sample on the PM Dawn (edging it into Scritti's historical zone).
3) Scritti's neo-soul shaking hands with PM Dawn's.
4) Scritti's later dalliance with hip-hop.
4) Lets face it, both tracks are perfectly "Blissed Out"TM.

Damn it they were practically singing from the same songbook.

Original Thread Here

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:37 AM | Permalink

Just looking at American Artists I've isolated the following:

Jean Michel Basquiat

Keith Haring

The Hungry Who

Sol Lewitt

Robert Longo

Robert Rauschenberg

Kenny Scharff

Michael Snow

Andy Warhol

Do you know of any artists, famous or otherwise who've designed record sleeves? If you can contribute JPEGS to this thread so much the better!

Original Thread Here

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:17 AM | Permalink

has anyone heard these? there's rumour they sound powerfully good. better than the original vinyl? i bought my copy of tago mago in a record store in an underground station in vienna in 1989 (aged 18). taking it on board was probably THE pivotal moment in the development of my musical agenda. that sounds pretentious, so what...

nights spliffing endlessly to tago mago. mushroom.

rececntly, pursuant my la monte young fetish (bit of a digression that maybe?) the velvets edged can off the number one spot. quite why on the face of it i do not know. one has to listen to the velvets with a bit of imagination, with can WOOOOMPH, it hits you. its completely undeniably. itd be quite easy to argue that EVERYTHING came from can.

in fact i reckon i got into funk and jazz funk AFTER getting hooked on the can riddim. i remember, and this recurs wierdly in my head like a mantra, a remark made by some wire journalist (i think hopey glass, whoever he/she is) to the effect that such and such a piece of music could never appeal to him as he was a "can fan and jazzophobe". i've never shaken that phrase out of my head. tuning into resonance fm the other day on the way back from the airport i heard "halleluwah", man i was pulverised, rocked to the core, i pulled up at the house and just sat there in the dark for 15 minutes as it steamrolled to a close.

and yet theyre so ubiquitous now we almost take them for granted. like the fookin air we breathe. discovering those spoon records in the early nineties, alongside the rave explosion, well it was mind-altering, paradigm-shifting for young nobs like me.

i think the packaging of them of quite exquisite, i love the thick curved-edged jewel cases and the layout. however the artwork reproduction came in for a little criticism (from rob young in the wire). i was on the inside track on this one and have it from the horses mouth, so to speak, that the design company were handed the scans used by the record company (spoon, mute i dunno) and did their very best with them.

we actually have a czukay signed up to dissensus (delusions of grandeur soon to be dashed to pieces, is it mike czukay from sacramento..?)

Original Thread Here

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:41 AM | Permalink

A good friend sent me this email the other day, and (I hope this is OK with him) I thought I'd open it up to the floor:

"I’ve got a question about end 60's/begin 70's jazz. I’m digging into that stuff at the moment, and from earlier posts of you, you seem to know a lot about this stuff AND have a bit of the same taste I have. It’s hard to find reliable information on this stuff. For instance, people rave about Cecil Taylor and Albert Ayler, but what I heard from them, it does nothing for me, or rather, I find it’s horrible. Things I do like are things like Pharoah Sanders (Karma, Black Unity, Tauhid, Izipho Zam) Alice Coltrane (Journeys in Satchidananda, World Galaxy), Archie Shepp (Live at the panafrican festival), Don Cherry (Mu, Eternal Rhythm, Brown Rice) Sun Ra (Lanquidity, Space is the place), Art ensemble of Chicago (theme de yoyo). On my fence are Roland Kirk and Ornette Coleman, some things are kinda nice, but most of it leaves me cold (free jazz, the shape of jazz to come)

From what I read, I’m interested in things on the BYG label (like Alan Silva, Arthur Jones, Clifford Thornton, Dewey Redman, Grachan Moncur III, Sunny Murray), AACM people (like Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell, Muhal Richard Abrams) and someone like Marzette Watts. The problem is, I can find nowhere to listen to this stuff, and when I order it online, I’m afraid I’ll find I paid lots of money for some horrible stuff. Do you know these guys? Which would you recommend? Have you any other recommendations?"

Actually I am very sympathetic with him. Before the free lot ride in on their lancers they ought to bear that in mind. I mean skronk isn't to everyone's taste, and actually I have a pretty low threshold when it comes to it myself. I haven't put that much thought into his contention but here's my 5c:

--------------

• First off check Kirk Degiorgio's site. The link is on the www.woebot.com links bar. Kirk has heavy jazz ears but isnt that fond of the free stuff either, so he's a good place to start.

• Roland Kirk's Root Strata is brilliant. Others like "The Inflated Tear" and (isit?) "Man with The Three Way Horn", and his eponymous one don't hit the mark. Actually I think Kirk is a lesser talent.

• The nicest Ornette is "Change of the Century" Ramblin' off that is everything Free Jazz might be. I saw Ornette live the other day and he was brilliant. I have a lot of his other records (like about 6!) but theyre often a bit iffy, and certainly difficult listening.

• BYG is cool. I have a heap of that stuff (as do Nick Wrigley (who I hope chimes in) and Jon Dale) Probably the most listenable are Don Cherry's Mu Part 2 and (my fave) Gracan Moncur's LP. The Shepps, the Silvas, the Sharroks theyre all OK, but a bit skronky.

• Again AACM, I have a bit. "Reese and the young ones" (?) is pretty OK. I always wanted a copy of Roscoe Mitchell's "Sound".

Literally off the top of my head:

• There are some good ones amidst the non-jazzy stuff here: http://www.woebot.com/movabletype/archives/000082.html Especially the George Duke and the Phillip Cohran.

• er thats it for the moment. I'll chip in with other stuff when i get my juices up

Original Thread Here

Posted by WOEBOT at 11:40 AM | Permalink