WOEBOT

Lard Free are to Heldon as Laurel is to Hardy. Gilbert Artman played in Heldon and Richard Pinhas plays on Lard Free's excellent second album "I'm Around About Midnight" (1975), both bands get accused of being too "cold" which will hardly going to turn-off fans of Acid and Techno, even if it means Worzel Gummidge-like* Prog fans are a little shy of them.

The above is actually Lard Free's eponymous debut, repackaged by RCA France's library label April Orchestra. That pretty much sets the tone, it must show a diminishing commercial horizon when groups sell their back catalogue for music for TV. "Lard Free" is populated by refreshingly minimal, synth vistas. The bleeps on "Tatkooz a Roulette" resonate like submarine sonar, the plangent loped moog riff of "12 ou 14 Juillet que je sais d'elle", strongly reminiscent of Carl Craig's "Neurotic Behaviour (Beatless mix)" is interrupted only by a cool plain sax-line. There are other exquisite touches of jazz, and many commentators have noticed the record's debt to the modal Miles, while "Warionbaril" and 'Pale Violence Under A Reverbe" are cut from the same cloth as "Bitches Brew" and even "Pangea".

However Lard Free's masterpiece must be their third album, again nameless, fans have taken to calling it "Spirale Malax" after the awesome title track. A seventeen minute long maximalist raga of ARPs, EMSs, splashing backward rotating drum-machines and stellar axe work segue into brow-furrowed tomtoms and a jet trail of pulsating echoes. It's at once grotesque and surreal (echoing the Philip Guston-like painting on its cover), like an ugly jabbering Cluster (circa II). Side B, the "Synthetic Seasons" suite made me flash on PIL's "Metal Box (the one record I now regret omitting from my dandy 100), something about its unremitting starkness, the tower-block drums and perhaps (via Griel Marcus's "Lipstick Traces") the ghost of 1968. Both records have been reissued by Spalax where, as you can see for yourself, they're keeping great company.

Posted by WOEBOT at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Like a lot of music that has been made in France over the last forty years, Heldon have either been dismissed out-of-hand or cautiously acknowledged. I suppose Tangerine Dream are their closest counterparts, and yet Froese and the Tangs are heaped with accolades.

Richard Pinhas is an incredibly interesting character. At the barricades in 1968 as a fervent Trotskyite, possessing a PhD in philosophy from the Sorbonne, a close friend of Gilles Deleuze (who appears on the Electronic Guerilla LP), Pinhas (a white man..) used to sport an amazing gravity defying Afro, one wonders why his back catalogue doesn't inspire more interest. I mean, he even ropes Phillip K. Dick in to contribute to his 1977 Tranzition LP!

"Electronic Guerilla" was Heldon's first LP, was issued on the cult label Cobra (who also put out Sun Ra's "Cosmos") and is dedicated to Robert Wyatt, with whom Richard apparently came very close to releasing a collaborative LP with. It's a muthafucka with powerfully grungey post-MC5 riffing head-to-head with crystal-sharp electronic mantras, sounding like some kind of lost archetype for the revolutionary counter-culture. Maniacally scrubbed-clean in stark contrast with the hairier end of Krautrock with which it shares aesthetic aims (Amon Duul II always sound sound muddy to these ears) and miles more militant than the politically-disengaged Fripp and Eno (who Pinhas worshipped), I'd highly reccommend you pick up Cunieform's reissue of this chicken.

Pinhas actually disowned this "Allez Teia" their second LP along with "It's Always Rock 'N' Roll", their third, claiming they should never have been released. "Allez Teia" came highly recommended to me from none other than esteemed friend-of-WOEBOT the gallic supremo Seb Morlu on the basis of its superbly trippy Mellotron work. I'm totally sold on the cover, always dig that fighting-with-police-in-the-streets kind of attitude, but slightly less impressed by the record which seems derivative of Fripp's stuff (a freely acknowledged debt). However its great slabs of throbbing synth noise are kind of lovely, and yes, bracingly proto-Industrial.

Posted by WOEBOT at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Recently someone made the mistake of taking me to task for the amount of effort I'd put into my top 100 records post. Like, what fucking business was it of theirs? I was on the point of cussing them out, but to be fair it was within the context of a lot of other nice remarks and in the end I decided to forget all about it.

I was annoyed because, to me at least, my time is valuable. I'd scrimped and saved those hours. When you have two babies (and no childcare), a partner you cherish and silly amounts of work, it's difficult to find the time for something as questionably valid as blogging. Though, of course, I do firmly believe in blogging. One of its indisputable advantages is that you can do it to your own timetable, in those dead hours.

I've been meaning to spread a little love since I started doing this again. My links-bar is a briar patch at the moment. It should perhaps represent what I think are the best blogs out there, whereas currently it's as much to do with showing gratitude and respect to individuals who've helped me out. Nothing wrong with that I suppose. I just wanted to take the time to single the following blogs out for some love because, simply, they are wonderful:

Blissblog
Every time. I know I'm not alone in treasuring every single word that gets posted here.

Beyond The Implode
Martin amazes me. He seems to overflow with this fabulous imagery. Fecund.

Gutterbreakz
I'm always touched by Nik's rabid devotion to Dubstep and I cherish those old-time specials he does.

Heronbore
The sleeping giant.

Kid Shirt
Love, love, love this blog. Love the guy too. What a great voice!

k-punk
I bow down before Mark's genius and learning. There's no competing with him on the theoretical front and these days I don't bother trying. Compulsive stuff.

Blackdown
Martin's taken to blogging like an eagle to flight.

Prancehall
Makes me laugh every time. John is a funny, funny bastard. MPC's comments box is a riot as well.

The Pillbox
Give thanks! The Pillbox is just superb these days. Again, and whould've thunk it, his comments box is a gas.

Uncarved
The man with the 1,000 year plan.

Worlds of Possibility
I have such profound respect for Jon's knowledge and taste. So great to see him blogging again!

It's just a shame ol' Silverdollar isn't cranking it out it still! Things are going to be busy here over the next fortnight as I'm starting a ten part thing on French music. I'm afraid it has to be in parts because they're all like discreet units. Modular innit, so don't accuse me of "rationing it like a tinker" or I'll lose my cool.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:14 PM | Permalink

Goldfrapp on the other hand I've never even half tolerated.

In case people haven't noticed they're not pure pop fun along the lines of Girls Aloud or Rachel Stevens. They're archetypal Observer Music Monthly fodder (see Mud Hut Woman). They started out working the post-Tricky John Barry thing, and seeing as that didn't quite pan out, converted to Hoxton Art Disco with just that littlest bit of extra irony to make sure sure you understood they weren't in fact making functional dance music, that you could reliably invest money in their album and play it at dinner parties.

"Ride a White Horse" is a travesty because they're trying to glorify the entirely crap activity of taking cocaine and (perhaps more crucially) because they are who they are, they come over like Marks and Spencers.

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Silverdollar on "Stop Making Sense"...

Posted by WOEBOT at 04:55 PM | Permalink

So far I've tolerated Black-Eyed Peas. But now, I'm afraid, the time has come to single them out for ridicule and vilification.

What's their stranglehold on the UK charts all about? Are they big in America? Some part of me suspects that they're not, and that they function as a surrogate Pop R'n'B, an R'n'B even less challenging than R'n'B proper, which let's face it isn't that grueling a listen to begin with. From this perspective I don't see the need for an alternative to R.Kelly and Missy Elliot. Can we think of acts like this in the past who re-branded Black Americana for the UK audience? Tina Turner, I suppose. She was always bigger here than in the US.

Is The Black Eyed Peas appeal to the mainstream audience based on the fact that there are white people in the crew, as well as black folk? The 4 step skin colour gradient between Will, Apl, Taboo and Fergie (I've done my research...) might almost have been devised by marketing committee; the focus on the woman Fergie conceived to ensnare the largest audience demographic, her appeal constructed as it is poised between sistahood and pan-racial sexual desire. Maybe these aren't such mysterious questions at all?

Hopping between fashionable Indo-Hop, sanitised Fugees re-licks (some people dislike The Fugees on the same grounds, but me I have a soft-spot for Wyclef) and now retro Electro. It's with "My Humps" that I've gotten got the hump myself. All those other tunes were harmless enough I suppose, catchy pop music but this is really appalling. Call me old-fashioned but I've never liked the term "Shorty" meaning girl (look it up). There's just something at once demeaning and also teeny-cloying about it. That's slang that doesn't work. "Bitches" on the other hand, "Bitch" works excellently, if you're a woman I imagine it's a good term to get working for you. There's an excellent Sa-Ra track doing the rounds as a bootleg at the moment called "Bitch" and they really have fun with the word:

"Baby we can get freaky,
we can get buck wild,
I can do you nasty,
even doggy style,
you can have some fun with me,
I can scratch that itch,
I don't want to wife you,
but could you be my bitch"

At which point a woman's voice cuts in with the hook: "B-i-i-i-tch!", with a mixture of full-finger up-yours insouciance and how-dare-you puffed-up outrage. One of the things I like about these lyrics is that they promise sexual gratification to the woman on her own terms. The man has to work. As well "Bitch", when used in the right way of course, is empowering to women. Plenty of women use the word to describe themselves don't they? It has a nicely self-aware deconstruction of the war-of-the-sexes embedded within it too.

If slang is going to work it has to perform a meta-dissection of language; cut to the shit and re-motorise vocabulary. It's nothing as crass as street-signifier really, when it reaches that level it's usually worn out and the smart people are looking for new words. Like "Showerface" in Grime, I'll bet that's all worn out by now. Which brings me to what must be my least favorite lyrics of all time:

"My hump, my hump, my hump, my hump,
My hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump.
My lovely lady lumps (lumps)
My lovely lady lumps (lumps)
My lovely lady lumps (lumps)
In the back and in the front (lumps)"

I've done a little research on this and it seems people really do use the word "humps" and it's loathsome, but "lady lumps", jesus what a completely revolting phrase. I mean, "Booty" has a lovely full-some ring to it, "Booty" is about glorious in-your-face nudity, about hourglass buttocks busting the seams of tight jeans. It's akin to a Fugs-ian, counter-cultural call for hot, sweaty, *natural* sex. But "Humps" and (worse, I mean gravy has lumps...) "Lumps" are all about the body being uncomfortably fettered. OK, I can appreciate the "perv" angle, as much as the next red-blooded individual, but I just don't think it can be celebrated in the same way. Just like "Shorty" there is a gormless infantilism to the phrase "Lovely lady lumps" which really pisses me off as well. Grr.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Recently in that Underground NDW piece I was slagging off Abwarts.

Unbeknownst to me a track I'd been digging for ages, with its terrifically rousing "Stalingrad! Stalingrad!" slogan-chant, cue images of speed-addled, militant German youth marching at the Russian Bear to avenge the deaths of their fathers, was nothing other than Abwarts "Computer-Staat". This, with its stirring exploding tank graphics on the rear, must be the most expensive 7" I've ever bought.

If people have been struggling to get hold of NDW, I noticed man like soundslike1981 was offering a cool-looking mix for DL at Dissensus. Hunt around the Events, Releases and Mixes forum.

Rock, innit.

Posted by WOEBOT at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

One of my (surely hundreds of) gaping holes in understanding 80s music has been not knowing about The Fire Engines. I discovered the Postcard label last year, I'd always avoided Orange Juice, and had a bit of fun catching up; checking out "Poor Old Soul" and Josef K's "Chance Meeting" for the first time. I have to confess to being just a wee bit non-plussed though, and with hindsight it must be that The Fire Engines gave that era an essential lustre, like Dylan gave the music of the other early folkies. The Franz Ferdiand hype? Well that wasn't really persuasive for me, though on second thoughts I ought to have paid attention a whole lorra lot earlier.

I found these two, which contain nearly identical material, with just enough difference to warrant having them both, in a record store for what I thought was a real bargain. Scanning GEMM it appears that people don't actually pay very high prices for them. Weird. "Spass" was destined for the American market, an alternative to the mini-album "Lubricate Your Living Room" but supplemented with all of their singles. You can pick up an excellent Fire Engines compilation at Domino which is great but makes the odd weird choice like not including the string quartet-led version of "Candyskin", the string quartet Bob Last amusingly described to Simon as "not as expensive as you'd imagine". OK, enough spotter-ism already.

How on earth did a band from Edinburgh produce such a ferociously iconoclastic record? That may be the Glaswegian in me, but really? On the Scottish cultural horizon I reckon there are only two similarly intense gestures. Robert Louis Stevenson's "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" and Irvine Welsh's "Trainspotting", but no music. This is some vanguard stuff! So oblivious to geography and time that that they half seemed to believe it was joke music almost begins to make sense, were it not for the fact that its track-marked feistiness is so bloody-mindededly serious.

The Fire Engines make a racket like a corruscated, trebly Contortions, except that they ditch James Chance's embarrassing "nigger" stylings (sorry, hate to use that word, but it's intended pejoratively) and come out the other side sounding bleaker and more funky. Like a lot of modern rock, here is music which is defiantly drum-led, on the sleeve Russell Burns get the "lead" credit. Gnarling, insectoid, tooth-ache guitars, seem to grind away at their own axis, grooving around a handful of keys not really going anywhere, narcotically repetitive. Bass doesn't duck 'round the back, but pitched up, throbs in the same tonal centre, kind of like the quasi-bass lines Michael Rother laid down on guitar for Neu! David Henderson's twitchy yelps remind me of an anaemic Lux Interior, again bereft of ham hoodoo. In some ways I can't think of a better example of the qualities of rock. Grooving ain't a trivial thing y'see, its an uber-meta grasp of the internal dynamics of life itself, beyond and above the crude fumblings of theory.

I was playing "Lubricate Your Living Room" to a friend and he started laughing. "Sounds like pub rock", he chortled. Well I guess it does, if the house-band was The Velvet Underground. But what's wrong with that rough corpulence anyway? I mean, how much more cosmically illuminating is raving on e to being drunk in a bar? Genuinely. There's an unequivocal justness to "Everythings Roses" the divine head-cratering roll of those guitars that's unspeakably lovely and how relevant is which particular channelling of electricity? Isn't fetishising synths as wrong-headed as fetishising guitars?

All of which brings me to the Arctic Monkeys LP. In heretically admitting to *really* liking an Indie Rock record Simon has called what must be the first stylistic shift since "the blogs" started. I suppose all that we're left to see is whether anything subsequent scene-wise it can live up to "Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not" cos it's a super record. Two tracks in particular are stunning: "I Bet You Look Good On the Dancefloor" and "Still Take You Home", with no sign of the cloying "compressed" pop-music-played-on-guitars sound which characterises a lot of Indie. Oasis is about the only fair comparison to make, but Arctic Monkeys don't irritate in the way Oasis used to. A song like "Bigger Boys and Stolen Sweethearts" (on the I Bet You Look Good On the Dancefloor EP), there's no way Noel could write something as emotionally vulnerable as that and, as Simon remarks, the rhythm section is fabulous.

Denigrating new Indie Rock in the light of the old has run its course, and comparing something unimpeachable like The Fire Engines with The Arctic Monkeys (OK the latter may never be as blank-eyed or gnawingly splendid) but really how "original" were The Fire Engines? They weren't original at all! They were third generation VU-copyists! And yet 26 years later they smell as fresh as wet paint. My point? It's what you bring to the table that matters.

Posted by WOEBOT at 01:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

ARKSTAR
INDIVIDUAL ELECTRIC PITCH CIFTE MODULATORS
ISH

Emerging from Switzerland’s Jazz group Freeform Arkestra, Arkstar peddle a pallid yet loyal 70’s Jazz Funk, one cybernetically decontextualised within the digital domain. If you come expecting the volcanic sounds of Sun Ra as their name suggests, prepare to be disappointed even if you’re ready to accept a verisimilitude to Sonny Blount’s entryist works like “UFO” or “Nuclear War”. A perhaps unintended side effect of their one-way love affair with jazz is that on “Individual Electric Pitch Cifte Modulators” they end up voguely sounding like a Post-Punk revival act with chops, a comparison they might find flattering.

Initially their bare-knuckled sound does resonate with the William Burroughs quote that MC Dario De Nicola (who rather unpleasantly boasts of having murdered someone called Beaumont) relays in his spoken-word intro; “Take off your skin and dance around your bones”. The cauterised drum patterns and chicken-scratch guitar are disconnected aurally from one another like the femurs and ribs in an animated Ray Harryhausen skeleton, but sadly as the tracks progress this impact diminishes and one’s left struggling with lesser minor-key tunes like “Electro People of the Sun” and the almost cornily monikered “Jazzpunk”. It’s churlish to take them to task for their English but this critic couldn’t resist a giggle at Arkstar’s press release that charmingly promises a feast of “sizzling synthesiser” and “squeaking guitars”.

At its best, on tracks like “Dee B Boy” and “Arkstar”, with their fairly convincing Italo grooves “Individual Electric Pitch Cifte Modulators” impresses but gradually the oppressive cleanliness of the music, and its emotionless surfaces, becomes wearisome. Style, especially when second-hand, is never a strong enough raison-d’etre for a music.

Posted by WOEBOT at 05:31 PM | Permalink

ALOG
CATCH THAT TOTEM (1998-2005)
MELEKTRONIKK

Norwegian post-musical knob-twiddlers Alog specialise in decomposing a collage of samples, instruments like guitar, double-bass, tabla, trumpet, harmonium, flutes, and fender rhodes electric piano via intricate hard-disk editing. Theirs may be a method particular to them, but broadly these tactics are instantly recognizable to the new music listener. Even their trump card, bespoke Midi software for OS X called “the Method” is a familiar sight amongst the concoctions of other high-end boffins of electronica, who might pleasingly be compared to the instrument builders of yore.

“Catch That Totem”, a compilation of previously unreleased and hard-to-find material amounts to Alog’s fourth release after the acclaimed “Red Shift Swing”, “Duck Rabbit” and “Miniatures” CDs. It’s a quietly lovely collection of organic machine music, conjuring images of benign nano bio-robotic organisms unconsciously beavering away at mysterious tasks. Alog’s intensely detailed canvases have a deliriously over-studied quality that conveys to the listener an almost Victorian density of intention. The band is known to spend up to three years working on an individual track. Their music closely comparable in manic spirit and in its particular propulsiveness to This Heat circa “Health and Efficiency”, albeit without that band’s vicious cut and thrust. Concomitantly to avoid missing detail in background ambient sloop one has to turn up the volume high.

Alog apparently pride themselves on their accessibility and why should their obsession with micro-texture preclude it? Much of “Catch That Totem” is sweetly poppy, the rotations of “Becklager, Nicholas” melodically generous, the title track a tunefully lush reverse-skank, and “Soung Sung Inwardly” a gentle piece of shoe-gaze-era Indie snowstorm. “Catch That Totem” may not be the most uniquely iconic example of the glitch genre, but it’s nevertheless rewarding.

Posted by WOEBOT at 05:31 PM | Permalink

HECQ
BAD KARMA
HYMEN

Hecq’s third album is the kind of record one assumes there hundreds of. Scanning the catalogue of Hymen records throws up lots of equally obscure names like L’Ombre, Lusine ICL, Snog and Beefcake, artists unknown outside of the tiny gene-pool of Post-Techno Electronica, who one imagines make records just like Hecq’s. That’s to say sleek and eldritch by default, programmed with terrifying attention to detail on the latest kit and un-preoccupied with their own consequence. However, I wonder if any of these other people’s records are quite as satisfying as “Bad Karma”?

Hecq, aka Benny Boysen, has a superb grasp of rhythm. He manipulates glitch’s hiccoughs and tics into fine-fibered black steel webs occasionally co-opting sampled drum and bass patterns, tom toms and tablas into his filigrees. It’s refreshing to hear electronica not destined for the dance floor, traditionally myopic, white-bred and stuffy, seizing upon rhythm’s visceral power and inherent melodic qualities (the drums here are exquisitely tuned). Equally it’s not surprising that other commentators have found the record unnecessarily arid in much the same way folk used to complain all James Brown’s records sounded the same.

Tracks like “(Untitled)” a dark froth of softly rolling congas and aleatory shifts in timbre are seductively blank-eyed, perfectly embodying 808 State’s old adage “Flow Coma”. “Scumdrum” another highlight uses a Darbuka drum and nimbly weaves its characteristic hard Middle-Eastern sound through a minefield of galloping hip-hop breaks. Also excellent is the half-paralysed clunk-skank of “Into the Unseen”. All of these rhythmic palettes have been cryogenically frozen in same sonic cold storage, strafed with Hecq’s signature lift-shaft Doppler effects, their ambience sounding like dry-ice looks.

Posted by WOEBOT at 05:30 PM | Permalink

Books on Tape
Dinosaur Dinosaur
Alien8

Listening to “Dinosaur Dinosaur” one gets an ironic frisson recalling Edgar Varese’s dreams for synthesised sound: “I myself would like, for expressing my personal conceptions a sound machine (and not a machine for reproducing sounds).” For here Books on Tape man one of Varese’s sound machines and are bent not on devising new soundscapes of originality and infinitude, but in pumping out crystal-clear frat rock. From John Wall to Public Enemy sampling performs an alchemical transmutation. Likewise electronic music strives for de-substantiation, swerves away from literalism, disguises instruments, veils voices in gauze. Books on Tape on the other hand use the studio as cheesily and refreshingly as a “Band-In-A-Box.”

Something like “Killing Machine” be eminently reproducible on drily-miked drum-kit, strat and synth, Todd Drootin doing his best keep his channels clear so each instrument feels separate. There’s precious little here that would stretch the chops of a nimble punk band. The effect of all this faithful reproduction, “Upon Rock City” is just waiting for a vocal by Lux Interior, is to exacerbate the jerkiness of Carducci-styled classic rock, to render it yet more wooden and charmingly moronic. Indeed it’s fascinating to speculate what Carducci (author of “Rock and the Pop Narcotic”), who celebrates this sound in the name of the usual group-interplay it is usually the product of, and yet abhors Brian Eno and his studio crimes, would make of this.

“Dinosaur Dinosaur” is a hell of a lot of fun. Drootin has a handle on all the qualities that make Rock a gas, its compulsive grooves, its resolute unpretentiousness its poppy hooks and if it’s hard to get a handle on why anyone would choose to rebuild rock like this then one’s too busy enjoying the racket to be unduly bothered. Besides, all too often in yielding to the imagined parameters of electronic instruments artists end up making finely-graded sludge, or Techno.

Posted by WOEBOT at 05:29 PM | Permalink

Matthias Schuster’s “Atelmos” (NLW at http://nlw.backagain.de/) is a vintage slice of militantly bleak classic NDW (short for “Neue Deutsche Welle”, German New Wave). At times strongly reminiscent of the clipped synth and real drum-kit sound of DAF’s “Die Kleinen Und Die Bösen” on the devastating “Für Alles Auf Der Welt” and “Geschichte Der Nacht” and at others of a No Wave Ambience. “Atelmos” (1981) excels in it’s bracing truly ‘unheimlich’ atmospheres, evinced in the pinky and perky vocal chatterings of “Language Trainer” (surely the strangest context for these voices so far?) and in the frigidly contemplative “Habari Gani”, “An Rah Robeel” and “Harakiri”.

Recorded originally for the cult Konkurrenz label, set up as an off-shoot of Phonogram by the painter Gerhard Richter’s grandson, the true counterpart of the original Rough Trade imprint and home for Schuster’s band Geisterfahrer, this release of “Atelmos” is augmented by impossible find tracks from Schuster’s “Ritual” EP and the stunning NDW anthem “Im Namen Des Volkes” 7”. Possibly an acquired taste, the musical equivalent of Grappa, nevertheless here is a truly fascinating document of a scene which is being freshly rediscovered.

Posted by WOEBOT at 05:28 PM | Permalink

Softland
War againstt error.
SPEZIALMATERIAL

Softland is Christof Steinmann, multi-media dabbler, student of audio visual arts, and the cheekily monikered “War against error” is his second release for the widely praised Swiss Spezialmaterial imprint. With its distinctively generic minimal “glitch-art” sleeve graphics (a tasteful collage of pixelated print and elegantly stroked vectors) you know precisely the kind of charmingly low-key, faintly unprepossesive sounds that are going to emanate from it.

Hurdle the first track, “Please confirm the world” with its off-putting Sylvian-with-a-sore throat vocals, and you have twenty one essentially lovely tracks stretched in front of you. The reason qualification is required is that “Meter” (skippy bleep patterns meet Bebe Barron-style drones), “Moire” (Eno-isms), “Mille” (gyrating electro-harmonies) and “Wlochy” (“Dark” fangless post-Fungle bests), while unassumingly excellent, don’t exactly burn down the house, mess meaningfully with any templates or promote much more than a tacit approval. It’s the wearingly familiar case of underachieving, carefully cloistered Electronica. The pretentious interstitials, field recordings marked by their map reference numbers “44º50'N 14º25'E” like “46º32'N 8º21'E”, though sonically appropriate, contribute to the general air of preciousness.

There are more attractive elements that deserve recognition, the springy World-of-Echo double bass on “Huch” and again the double bass on “Llum”, this time played right through the depths of the piece to quite powerful and poignant effect. It’s touches like these which push the record into the black, and it’s only a shame there isn’t more use of the instrument elsewhere on the record. As Francois Rabbath proved with his 60s recordings, it can be wielded artfully.

Posted by WOEBOT at 05:28 PM | Permalink

DJ/Rupture
Low Income Tomorrowland
TAX RECORDS

Everyone’s favourite Middle-Eastern-inflected breakcore artist and pioneer of improbable cantilevered R’n’B and sino-Techno mashups returns with a mix on a par original breakthrough standard the prescient “Gold Teeth Thief”. GTT quite simply the most accurate soundtrack to the devastation and confusion of 911 and one which succeeded in adroitly embracing the full global picture at a time when all eyes were on the USA, this long before the Middle-East’s own perspective was broadly acknowledged.

Eclipsing the excellent “Minesweeper Suite”, L.I.T. was originally commissioned by the highly-regarded Lemon-Red weblog, at once signalling blogs continuing, even burgeoning, impact on the mediascape (Rupture himself blogging at http://www.negrophonic.com/words/) and the reason for the mix’s enticing loose-limbed frenzy. As though without the pressure of delivering for CD release Jace has produced something, in the most artistic sense, personal and quietly adventurous. We find herein amongst other improbabilities a Tracey Chapman remix!

Picking highlights is at once crass, so intermeshed and multi-tiered is the mix. Add to the confusion of origin, the collection’s meta-philosophical point, of distinct tunes (Clayton opting for Grime hit “Pow” producer Dexplicit’s remix of MIA’s “Pull Up The People” above the original mix) tracks like Bong-Ra’s “Old Skool Armageddon” are revisionist Ragga-Jungle where hi-jacked Dancehall samples are spooled over skidding Amen breaks has questions of source further muddied by Rupture overlaying Junior Byles’s roots classic “Fade Away”. The “unit” becomes the focus of one’s evaluation, the fluid nimble-toed raps of David Banner’s “Crank It Up”, the still-glowing solder on the breaks of Krumble’s “Backward Country Boy Explosion”, Sizzla’s satisfyingly coarse rasp, the unfailingly enervating gunshots. The CD Inner somewhat tellingly lists L.I.T’s “Main Ingredients” for to break-out its individual components would presumably take too long.

Its particularly heartening to see Clayton embrace London’s Grime, marking him as the single globe-trotting internationalist to be alert to its undisputed power and unfazed by the (hardly overwhelming!) obstacles in the way of getting a handle on it. The under-rated East Connection’s “We’re Ready” and Jammer cohort Lewi White’s “1 & All” feature in L.I.T and the CD+ format allows Rupture sneak in a set he’s turned in for Hamburg’s BTTB FM, one heavier yet on Grime as well as taking in his usual coordinates of Crunk, Dancehall, the music of the North African Muslim continuum, and Squatcore.

Posted by WOEBOT at 05:27 PM | Permalink

THE KALLIKAK FAMILY
MAY 23rd 2007
TELL-ALL RECORDS

It's arguable that within electronica the margins for error are slight, without intuitive self-censorship and a superhuman musicality many recordings are doomed to grate. At once like like stand-up comedy and watercolour painting the forbiddingly solitary nature of the process and the practitioners slight arsenal mean that without alloying powers of collaboration (the trump card of genre and the reason behind the artistic success of as disparate units as Foul Play and Pansonic) there simply isn't enough tension in the music. Perhaps Andrew Peterson, himself misleadingly The Kallikak Family, must have realised this in enrolling the services of Phil Evrum, Adam Forkner and Liam Singer to augment his once solo offerings. As it turns out this isn't the only thing he got right.

The CD "May 23rd 2007" is named after a date for which a fortune-teller predicted Petersen's death, but there's nothing morbid about the songs here, which more often than not strike an elegaic tone. Most clearly exploring death and a notional afterlife is the excellent title track. Built on a strobing flurry of flamenco, pitched somewhere between vibration and tone and ruptured by interjections of taut machine-gun-spray drums haunted by the ghost of Drum and Bass "May 23rd 2007" breaks suddenly ("Second Phase") into a hallowed free-fall reminiscent of the abrupt shift between atomic frameworks in Can's "Chain Reaction" before regrouping in "Phase Three" for one of the record's more unusual sonic canvases in which sustained voices (think Eno's "Music for Airports") duel with splattering drums, Unique 3-era bleeps and a weirdly encumbered half-speed Reese bassline.

There are plenty of other highlights: The Vietnamese folk song of "Portland Oregon Part 2" punctuated by clangorous drones and machine-part rhythm and the snakily-tooled pluck drums and crisp metal clang of "Portland Oregon Part 4." Almost too many highlights to mention in fact. It's only a shame that Petersen's often sublime envelopes are ever so slightly lost in the fug of software synthesis. It'd be nice to hear some crisper, more trebly tones and a little more richness and depth.

Posted by WOEBOT at 05:25 PM | Permalink

V/A
FLO-MOTION VOLUME 2
KUDOS

Conceived as a sampler and compiled by Nick Luscombe (who has been running the Flo-Motion show on XFM for five years on a "innovative yet accessible" tip) only artists Johnny Trunk and Thomas Fehlmann from this collection could be described as coming strictly from The Wire "zone." It would be wrong, however, to dismiss Luscombe's endeavor out of hand. It's striking how the slinky often jazz-inflected grooves contained herein by relative unknowns by the likes of Husky Rescue, Solar Apple Quarktette and Sebastien Tellier manifest an alternative future to that travelled by The Wire itself, which ten years ago was content to put Coldcut on the cover.

"Accessible" is surely the key word, and the Coldcut comparison isn't idle. Many of these tracks could easily feed into a Solid Steel show, for instance the Alice Coltrane veering into Keith Jarrett vamps of Maki Mannami's "Moon Palace" might slot into one of their more ambient sections. Likewise there are acceptably high quotients of Dub and Techno in Nathan Fake's "Dinamo" and One Deck and Popular's "Inner Space." Ultimately it's telling that Johnny Trunk's "Zeus", with its residual strains of car-boot-sale must, stands proud over the slightly painful mellifluousness of the thing.

While it's often remarkable how the celebrated present is infinitely skronkier than the hallowed past; for instance it's hard to imagine how with today's strict agendas the oeuvre of artists like Scott Walker and Brian Eno would gain admittance to the canon. This noted, the toothless rootless beats of Flo-Motion Volume 2 probably strain the case for serious consideration. Its particular selection is a shame given the fact Luscombe's show often treads a more adventurous path.

Posted by WOEBOT at 05:19 PM | Permalink

I've had a strongly folk-themed week in a "bloke-in-a-media-bubble" kind of way. I've not exactly been writing slogans on my acoustic guitar or smoking gitanes in coffee shops. Not been protesting about Pershing or Cruise. I've had plenty of baths. I just bought this CD box set in a record store and went to a concert.

The box set is awesome, but CD one is so flipping great that I've got stuck on it (spangly troubadour bizniss), only just venturing onto the second disc. It's been put together by this guy David Wells, and greater authorities than me have made assurances as to its comprehensiveness. Highlights thus far have to be The Ian Campbell Folk Group's cover version of "Dirty Old Town". Did you know Ian Campbell was Ali and Robin of UB40's father? There's some kind of micro-history/theory right there. People complain about "Dirty Old Town", about how it's all worn out. But I remember liking The Pogues's version, and I heard The Dubliners version recently as well and I liked that too. The whole poetry of it I find irresistible, the idea of the smell of the spring wafting into the city, the natural's casual, ever-so-subtle victory over the man-made.

Also I like the Hamish Imlach. I'd *always* wanted to hear some Imlach ever since John Martyn spoke about him in the same breath as Skip James. I believe Martyn took lessons from him. There's a funky quality to "Clive's Song", Imlach leans into some notes, pulls back from others. Last night I heard the faintly awful act King Creosote (yeah I'm sorry I didn't like them, let's hope they don't get upset like ol' R Stevie Moore) and then one song caught my ear, and even though the vocalist sounded like a janitor from a sitcom I found myself digging it. Then it slowly dawned on me that it was Imlach's "Cod Liver Oil and Orange Juice". Wow that's a nice tune.....

The rest of the evening was a huge downer. I just hated Adem, god what plodding and caterwauling! Max Richter who produced the new Vashti LP was horribly precious with his laptop and string quartet, like an updated Philip Glass, not nice. Apologetic yanks Currituck & Co emerge from the Devandra Banhart hegemony. I guess they were OK, they did a post-Patty Waters take on Nina Simone's "Black is the color of my true love's hair" forging some nice bits of almost soukous-y guitar scaffolding. They triumph for me cos I have more truck with the The Wire-ish vision of neo-folk than the fRoots thing. Even if Devandra Banhart does next to nothing for me whatsoever.

Looking forward to the old people I was a bit mystified as to where Bert Jansch went? I fear he may have played a very early set. Mike Heron I was really pleased to see on stage. He carries a huge grin which is obviously tempered by a whole lotta livin'. Most of these other folky dudes were a bunch of pussies. If you've nothing but an acoustic guitar and some congas to prop you up you need to have something pretty flinty to offer. Too many of them make what Flashos, in his infinite wisdom, described as "crying music", it's all very well making music which makes people cry but only a weed would start off with the assumption that he wanted his audience to cry. It has to be unintentional. Mike, who I now suspect to be Vashti's husband, was joined by his daughter Georgia, and they were OK until the last track The Incredible String Band's "The Hedgehog's Song" when sparks flew, and they rocked.

I was beginning to dread Vashti's performance. I needn't have cos she was great. What a lovely, bewitching, almost hilariously modest lady. The volume dropped about 10 decibels, everyone playing as quiet as they could. The new songs were nearly the equal of the old ones. Fun like Vashti performing the song Jagger and Richard wrote for her with a little wiggle. Actually prompting me to really invest in my Vashti as Rolling Stones-in-a-separate-universe idea. I love Vashti with a passion. People have criticized me recently for forsaking Nick Drake for "A Diamond Day", I have this to say to those people: You're a bunch of emotionally stunted cloth-eared clods.

Posted by WOEBOT at 06:05 PM | Permalink

At last one of these London Tube Maps relexifications that actually works conceptually. I always thought The Great Bear was a missed opportunity. Download it here.

Posted by WOEBOT at 01:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)