WOEBOT

So what's this unfolding French thing of mine all about? It ought to be clear that the Avant-Yob/Lumpen axis of music is weaker than it's been at any time since since 1997, that time before Speed Garage had mutated into 2-Step, just as Jungle had stopped delivering the goods. That year I remember listening to Mouse on Mars's "Autoditacker" and a whole raft of obscure Avant-Garde classical music.

While there was plenty of music last year that spoke of the full ripening of many genres (especially Grime) there was precious little that pointed the way forward. One of the aspects of music generated by the collective, rather than the individual, is that when the full range of inherent possibilities are exhausted by design there's no space available for innovation. The collective centres upon a unity of aim; people breaking away aren't seen as innovators to be followed, but deserters. At times like these I always feel the time is right for the more erratic impulse of Bohemian culture to pick up the slack.

However, Bohemian culture is hardly in fine fettle either! Don't get me wrong, I'm not like Mark claiming that the modernist impulse in popular culture has died, there will be new music but it may take a year to rear its head again. So why do I think the posthumous exhumation of old records is going to help? These past weeks (months...) WOEBOT has looked like UNCUT for the freaks! I believe there's a distinction between Mainstream Retro culture and inquisitively rooting around the past. I wonder why those with a Marxist bent so valorise the Modern in the light of Marx accusing Capitalist production of the‘murder of the dead’. Maybe it's alright to listen to old records as though they were new ones, but not alright to make old records pretending they were new?

I always think certain old music throws up new potentialities, and in the leanest times, checking them out is like going back to to school. If we are looking at a time when Bohemian music could make some cultural power-moves, then it's worth re-examining those junctures in the past in the UK when Bohemian music has really mattered. One of the factors that has always signified the visionary expansiveness of British culture has been when we've made the psychological leap past our wretched island mentality. It's that chimerical mixture of humility and loftiness which is often signaled by, not just the easy adoption of of our internal factors (like the absorption of Reggae through the presence of the Afro-Caribbean community) but the gentle reaching beyond our own immediate borders. (shuffles nervously).

What French/British currents are there in music? Stereolab for one. Nurse with Wound's love affair with Jac Berrocal and Luc Ferrari. Weekend. Francophile Robert Wyatt and his "Machine Molle" (Matching Mole). Recommended records and Etron Fou Leloublan. Richard Pinhas's proximity to Fripp and Eno. It's all happening in a small rarified zone that you couldn't quite label but you can feel instinctively the delineation of.

Just the usual ragged selection of records, because, as it ought to be very clear I've not been producing anything in the way of a comprehensive or authoritative breakout. I'm not a huge fan of Library records generally, but these three are quite fun. I'd refer the reader to Johnny Trunk's lovely "The Music Library" for more on the subject. France, like Italy, Germany and the UK was big for Library labels. I've never figured out why so little of this stuff comes from the USA. Probably something to do with union regulations or some other occult music industry sheaningans.

Metamorphoses is off the Uni Disc label. Quotes from Trunk: "Paris-based label specialising in ballet and avant-garde dance music." Not a Library record in the purest sense then but a gorgeously ambient collection of pellucid analogue 'tronics originally designed for the interpretative Dance massive. Thanks to Sacha the Flasher, le grand fromage, for sorting me out with this.

There are lots of highly regarded French Library labels, Telemusic, Sonimage, Neuilly, Freesound; but L'Illustration Musicale seem to have a particularly high cachet. Anyway I notice people tend to sigh when I tell them I paid 50 pence for this in a second hand store in Glasgow. It's not bad.

Finally this absurdly baroque almost Zappa-esque Disco record. It'd be sample-able if it wasn't so ridiculously restless. I bought this from man like Gwen Jamois (another Froggy Strange Attractor), who thought it was probably a demonstration record of some kind for the completely unheard-of Lancios. Kind of like a showreel and calling card rolled into one. Fascinatingly awful.