WOEBOT

FLANGER
SPIRITUALS
NONPLACE

Flanger is the joint project of Senor Coconut, Mr. Uwe Schmidt and Burnt Friedman collaborator with Jaki Liebezeit and orchestrator of The Nu Dub Players. "Spirituals" will be their fourth album, and the first not to be associated with the Ninja Tune label. As such it's evidence of the ongoing proclivity of their collaboration, surely a rarity in the field of fly-by-night musical encounters.

Readers familiar with German-born Schmidt's playful bossa-nova reworkings of Kraftwerk and Friedman's glitch-inlected takes on Dub and Funk will recognise the tensions here between the authentic and fake, naturalised and alien. Though in "Spirituals" whose Angel Heart-style tracks ape New Orleans second-line motifs and reproduce early jazz's sinuous torch-songs their tactics may have become problematic. By invoking early Jazz they may have performed an implausible theoretical leap. Here is a music which had scant connections to the recording process itself, the sort of connections which the typical practitioners of "Glitch" music foreground. Unlike the duo's earlier experiments there is no thread within the Basin Street Blues which can be conceptualised through teasing out and embellishment in the manner that Friedman's dub attempts to "out-dub" the original. The recreation itself thus becomes surreal. In the case of the Senor Coconut project, the brutal contrast between the original and the copy lent a humour, but precisely what is gained in this contextualisation?

It's true that the duo make suggestive stabs in the form of tracks like "In My Car" (Single Mix) which cheekily adds a patina of vinyl crackle to the recording but elsewhere technology and artifice is almost wholly transparent. The listener has to fall back on the recording itself with its (albeit playful) mannered sepia-tinted tunes, cliched saxaphones and faintly naff overwrought vocals; "Crime In the Pale Moonlight" somewhat ironically spoilt by anonymous crooning. Unfortunately all this serves to pitch the project gently into the terrain of the Woody Allen Band.

Posted by WOEBOT at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It looks like my local store Golden Grooves is shutting down.

We came across the owner the other night emptying the store in shopping market trolleys.

"Trade's really bad, they've put the rent up and I'm going to have to shut the shop down", he said "I'm going to stash these in my basement and sell them on the net"

This year will always go down on record for me as the year the Second-hand record store died. Its a tragedy.

But on the other hand if you visit eBay or GEMM the whole place is filled with those self-same boutiques selling their stock. It occurred to me that the proclivity and deep availability of music, I mean you can literally get ANYTHING you want must have benefitted from this implosion of the second-hand stores into the web.

All the stock is there! And you can search it. If you'd been to any one of those shops you might have been able to get one or other thing you were trying to find, but as it is, as a swollen organism, now everything is findable at the press of a button.

I mean how many times have you bothered to search through an entire online boutiques stock via eBay or GEMM? You don't, you cherry pick.

However, conversely it strikes me that the maintenance and availability of these vaste databases of records isn't something that can continue indefinitely. I mean, the rewards we're reaping now, the conditions which have made that possible will change quite rapidly. For one thing as these stores go out of business, keeping the stock available will gradually become impossible. Quantities such as these, well people can't stash them under their beds, and it takes manpower to manage these record sales businesses, manpower which stores must be finding is scantily rewarded. How many records COULD an individual shop actually sell in these conditions?

Anyway, my theory is that quite soon, in lieu of conglomerates arriving and rounding up all this stock into huge acutely-catalogued warehouses, quite soon we'll find the "deep" availability will evaporate. In short, if it's rare, and you want it, but it now.

Original Thread Here

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:58 AM | Permalink

Run The Road: Volume Two (679)
They've taken the bold move of packing the sequel to the peerless RTR compilation full of exclusive tracks. There's plenty in the way of first class Grime (Big Seac's "Nah, Nah", JME's "Serious Remix", Doctor and DaVinche's "Gotta Man") but too much plain old UK Hip-Hop (Klashnekoff and Sway) and again an eccentric inclination to represent the practically non-existent axis of female Grime. Even if Mizz Beats "Saw It Coming" is an excellent production, why is it here in place of a Target or Aftershock joint? It's a good collection, the accompanying DVD is an excellent bonus, and it'll stand on it's own merits, but it's not what the scene needs, which is a Solid Gold Grime primer folk can pick up at HMV.

P Jam: The Compass EP (Dice)
An MC for each point on London's "Compass" Sporting a superb panic riddim from P Jam, Narstie (South) grips the beat like a gloc, Flirta-D (West) is at his most bizarre, Guyver (East) holds court as master of ceremonies, and Frisco (North) just plain excels. "Compass" is the ultra crunchula.

Ruff Sqwad: Underground (Ruff Sqwad Recordings)
Just as the squid hit us with their latest, a bizarre rough-riding version of Billy Joel's "Uptown Girl" (which some commentators have remarked is eclipsed by Westlife's version!), it's worth casting our minds back to this Grime classic of a couple of months back, surely the only candidate for Grime track of the year?

Statik: Connected (All Star)
State of the Art Grime triple twelve inch from old skool giants Heartless Crew's producer. D Double E fascinates on "Superdoop" on top of Statik's prismatic carousel riddim. Other highlights include the star-studded MC extravanganzas of "Polygraph" and "The Set". Even the splendid comic-book cover art takes no prisoners.

Posted by WOEBOT at 12:01 PM | Permalink

JACKSON & HIS COMPUTER BAND
SMASH
WARP

Jackson Fourgeaud has swiftly become the great hope of dance music. The 26 year old Parisian was snapped up by WARP on the strength of early tracks like "Utopia" and "Radio Caca", (both included herein) as well as breathtaking remixes like that of M83's "Flowers". Jackson's music, in which minor-key disco symphonies are shredded until the tics and gasps resemble the output of the INA-GRM, is truly Disco Concrete in the least trivial manner one could imagine. Like the work of Delia and Gavin, whose Mini-moog spirals depict Persian Surgery Dervishes whirling in the Paradise Garage, Jackson looks to Disco (the broadest all-encompassing genre of all time) to house his catholic visions of 'musique sans frontieres'.

Hotly-tipped by everyone from Matthew Herbert and Matmos to Ricardo Villalobos and Trevor Jackson "Smash" weighs in with high expectations. The record isn't without it's awkward eccentricities. Created in atmosphere of deliberate artistic self-indulgence, as an exercise in baroque trans-generic opulence, one should be surprised more of Fourgeaud's "unmatchable elements" aren't incongruous. Only the spoken-word vocal provided by his four year old niece on "Oh Boy" is a creative mistake, leaden and uncomfortable as it is.

However the rest of the record is sheer divinity. For body-wracking four-dimensional funk and mandelbrot-whorl aural wig-out nothing whatsoever can compare to "Radio Caca", less a track than a confluence of statics. "Utopia" is a wreckage of Diva spasms, hearing it is akin to experiencing the centrifugal g-force of a high-velocity journey down the seven circular levels of Dante's hell, as though that was like the descent into a never-ending inner-urban car park, the steering-wheel locked hard right. Listening to the new single "Rock On", with it's stuttering rigid stop-start beats, straight after "Utopia", and later on the Glitter-band stomp of "Teen Beat Ocean", Jackson's rhythmic inventiveness is made plain. Just as the record is stock-full of the hardiest most nervous cut-ups so it is home to some exquisite sonic candy, the almost out-of-earshot, low-slung arpeggiated riff of "Arpeggio" and the reverse-logic melody of "TV Dogs" (both reminiscent of the jerks of an electric cable) are pure loveliness, as are the lolloping harmonies of "Tropical Metal".

Records as stylistically ambitious as "Smash" are rare, and when successful, like this record or Todd Rungdren's "A Wizard A True Star" they are giddying, intoxicating even. Moreover the abundance of musical ideas gives the satisfying impression that more such sonic feasts lie in store.

Posted by WOEBOT at 12:19 PM | Permalink

Recently I've been nursing a bit of a Kraftwerk thing. I'm even reading Pascal Bussy's really dreadful book about them. And actually a month or so ago I'd think this was beneath discussing....

Then it came to my attention that they let Coldplay "adorn" one of their rubbish LP filler tracks with the chords from "Computer Love."

Why on earth did they let this happen? apparently they usually never approve this sort of thing.

On one level it's a tritely clever gesture of Coldplays. "Classic rock riff", rendered as classic rock riff. A likke Radiohead-ification, in character with a band that seem to flirt with all the post-rave paraphanalia but never get-it-the-fuck-on which Thom Yorke and crew (to their credit) did on Kid A.

Surely Kraftwerk must have seen this strictly as a kind of astute demographic advertisment. With Techno and Rave seeming like they never happened, they feel they need to latch safely and squarely onto the new generation of guitar music.

But what a wretched track to let happen. The way the original works those chords are the hook, but on the geetar version its like the sounds are in the wrong place in the track. At the wrong time.

Original Thread Here

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:16 AM | Permalink