WOEBOT

I was delighted to discover I hadn't sold this in the great Middlebrow purge of 1996. Are there any other sixties icons who ended up making bona-fide Post-Punk records? I suppose McCartney's "Temporary Secretary" and Jagger's "She's The Boss" could plausibly be termed New Wave records, but they're very much of the chipper MTV-friendly variety. "Broken English" taps into precisely the same Cold War alienation and personal-as-political undercurrents that distinguish the tuffest work of This Heat and Gang of Four. Perhaps it was her marriage to Ben Brierly of crap punk group The Vibrators that keyed her into the zeitgeist? Though somehow that seems unlikely. Her cover version of "Working Class Hero" is surely her argument that these same strands were alive in the counter-culture.

Where did that voice emerge from? It wasn't simply procured by dragging herself through the gutters of Soho sleeping rough as a smack-head, it must have been there all along, hidden. I can't think of a better example of Barthes's "grain of voice"; this utterly distinctive heartless, art-less croak evokes a recognition in one that is beyond language. It's the undisguised sound of wantonness and perception in collision with fag damage (note the glowing ember on the sleeve).

They showed a documentary about Marianne on ITV the other night with her being interviewed by Melvyn Bragg. There wasn't nearly enough archive footage, some (but not all) of the recent concert film was embarrassing, the pace dragged and poor old Melvyn looked somehow deflated. However Marianne was cool. She said quite a few striking things, notably about drugs and alcohol, and on stage when she got over the discomfort of being an old dame really burned brightly. Aged 19 I used to think the shots of the woman on the sleeve were of someone impossibly ancient, but in 1979 she was only 33. Is that young?

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:51 PM | Permalink

Totally T for tremendous documentary about Nu Groove records. Music sounds fucking fantastic.

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I just discovered this very entertaining interview John Prancehall did with Lee Perry. Mad crazy props to John for that.

Posted by WOEBOT at 12:05 PM | Permalink

I first heard about Mingering Mike in an issue of the magazine waxpoetics. The story goes that two crate-diggers Dori Hadar and Frank Beylotte found a very large collection of home-made LPs (with hand-drawn LPs DIY-shrink-wrapped and even vinyl-replacement cardboard discs with grooves drawn on them) at a flea market in Washington. There's a selection of these artefacts by the imaginary Soul Star here at Mike's site.

Hadar and Beylotte initially broke their story at a long-deleted thread at The Soul Strut Forum, home of the heaviest Funk, Soul and Jazz collectors; deleted because the two had pangs of remorse about making Mike's stuff available before establishing contact with him. However, now with Mike discovered and firmly on side, a whole book of his work has been issued. It's a beautifully put together, quite fascinating document.

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:09 AM | Permalink

In my recent deeply unpopular Funky House diatribe I noted that in the face of the shrinking market-place for Dance Music there has been a contraction in the genre-naming. Where once we might have a hundred fairly clearly delineated Micro-Genres now we simply have "House". A walk through London's few remaining record shops bears this out. The category of House has swollen in size, even occasionally swallowing whole other genres like Funky, Minimal and Electro House, while at once the overall terrain has contracted.

In many ways this could be gratifyingly viewed as a return to a normalcy, to be a manifestation of what "we" always knew. In the same way that Billy Joel remarked "Next phase, new wave, dance craze, anyways, It's still rock and roll to me", at the end of the day the multifarious strands of Acid, Hardcore, Garage, Gabba, Jungle, Illbient, Dubstep, Techno and (for a while) Grime were simply House music. This was the gist behind the Shanty House concept, though truthfully that entity owes almost nothing to House and everything to Hip-Hop.

I like canonical engineering and there isn't enough of it about these days. From the perspective of the consumer it's generic individuation that makes buying records fun. It's depressing to be confronted by a morass of blandly un-placeable music. I really admire exercises like Harold Bloom's "The Western Canon" and F.R. Leavis's "The Great Tradition". It's not just the critic's job to dissect, it's a crucial task to re-imagine and assemble. My recent idea has been, in the absence of any other strong generic competitor to it, to try and extract from within the tradition of House-music-proper a strand of what I'm calling "Mauve House". If the methodology used in tackling the pyramidic proliferation of dance music genres, used to be naming each subset, nowadays a more appropriate approach might be like filleting a joint of beef, that's to say stripping out one strand from the carcass.

Mauve House is, I believe, the truest manifestation of House music. In the same way that if you met God you'd be overwhelmed by his strangeness* what I'd describe as the true House music might appear marginal and curious. More heretically and illogically it's New York, not Chicago, that is the spiritual home of Mauve House. Birthed by Arthur Russell, and carried into the world by Underground Solution's "Luv Dancin" and Todd Terry's "Bango". It's the early output of Strictly Rhythm and Nu Groove records that most perfectly encapsulates the Mauve House aesthetic: minor-key, rhythmically improbable, with even Techno by Joey Beltram and Lenny Dee infused with the half-lit, gentle presence of Soul.

Isn't this what's implied by "Deep" House? I'd argue that Deep House is implicitly tied in with Chicago (even if it's not from Chi-town), with being "down with the programme". Deep House is equivalent to Detroit Techno purism. Even though, and now we move forward in time, one subsequent label's output, that of Clubhouse Records perfectly fits the bill of both, though what follows it wouldn't. In fact subsequent Mauve artists are round pegs distinguished by their inability to fit into square holes. The second wave came from all over the place: Miami's Murk, refugee from Detroit Marc Kinchin, and Holland's almost forgotten René et Gaston.

Todd Edwards must be the archetypical Mauve House artist. There's always been something deeply unconventional about Todd's melodies and harmonies to the degree that his mass appeal to the UK Garage Underground always baffled me. Todd acts as a conduit of Mauve House into the UK underground in the form of 2-Step. There seems to be a slight confusion about 2-Step at the moment which I'd like to clear up if I could. Joe Goddard of Hot Chip just did a "Twenty Best...2-Step records" for the always excellent FACT magazine. I'd link it but it's not online yet. It's a great break-out of very good records but almost none of them are 2-Step records, they're mostly early Grime MC tunes. Anything before So Solid or PAUG is 2-Step, anything after is Grime or Dubstep avant-le-lettre. Not to say that people didn't continue making stuff within the 2-step idiom, after all there's "Babycakes". Maybe this'd be better expressed with an equation: if either the Hip-Hop or Dancehall element or a combination of the two eclipses the House element then it's not 2-Step. Up until the year 2000 Locked On probably encapsulated the 2-Step sound. People have always scoffed about the idiocy and inappropriateness of UK Garage somehow claiming descent from the Paradise Garage, but I dunno, I hear it.

It's curious how often the "auteurs" of House music, in a sense those who dare to tread a path outside of the utilitarian dictat of the dancefloor have ended up making eccentric music which sounds Mauve. In the mid-nineties Mood II Swing made an improbable sonic pact with Berlin while Matthew Herbert strived to literally tear up the music's fabric while strangely (at his best) being recognisable within it. Around the same time two artists with a unique, skewered vision of House revived the fortunes of Detroit's Planet E, Moodymann and Recloose.

Very little of the Minimal House, obsessed as it is with stripping out "flavor", could qualify as Mauve house, however the intimate bedroom-disco quality of Isolée's music instantly mark it as Mauve house. Today the spirit of Mauve House is embodied in the beats of Jackson and his partner in crime Pépé Bradock. It's a shame to have to play gatekeeper but (disappointingly) none of the Funky House I've heard recently cuts it, let alone makes it Mauve.

*That's something that's borne out the recent excatations of the early gospel. Innit.
**I don't mean the over-exposed belting of Otis and Aretha, but rather the troubled blue vision of Bobby Bland and Ann Peebles or even the liminal voice-as-texture stylings of a thousand Disco renta-divas.

Posted by WOEBOT at 04:11 PM | Permalink

Mordant Music: The Tower Parts VIII-XVIII

It seems like ages since I was sent the first "Tower" CD. Bleak is the operative word here: repetitive synth dirges and Loop-(the band)-like growling/prowling slow-burning guitar strum.

Mordant Music: Carrion Squared

40 miniature drones commissioned by the Boosey and Hawkes library label. Perhaps not as satisfying as The Tower? My favorite MM stuff is quasi-Techno (eg "Plant Room") that's why I enjoyed stuff on here like "Deportivo Suppressant".

You Are Hear Compilation

Imagine if rather than burn up a compilation of your favorite tunes you: set up a radio station, invited artists to record sessions over a four year period, combed through the live studio recordings for the best performances and then (with the backing of the National Lottery) released a CD into the shops? Quite a lot more work. Although I gravitated towards the Xylitol-like electronic recordings here (Jim Backhouse is one half of You Are Hear), stuff like Asja Auf Capri, Vanishing Breed and Carter Tutti, I also enjoyed the idea of Resonance FM's Hanway Street studios imparting some atmosphere to all the live elements of the tracks. Special mention must go to Momus's "Going for a walk with a line" which was great.

Battles: Mirrored

There's not a great deal I like about this I'm afraid, though marginally less off-putting their first low-key release. One of the things that is made a lot of with Battles is their instrumental virtuosity. The cover shot of all the band's gear laid out, kind of comically, like an rock arsenal underscores this. As you'd expect all the tracks sound like "jams", there's no real compositional meta-structure which betrays the absence of thought. Post-Rock was never Prog. It was about deconstructing rock.

On a more positive note I'm very much looking forward to WARP's new signing Flying Lotus.

Black Moth Super Rainbow: Dandelion Gum

One of Simon's faves this year I wholeheartedly recommend this for instant purchase. Daft-punk-fixated stoners play taught Crazy Horse-style Hip-Hop-friendly breaks in real time with attendant Mellotron.

John Eden: Best of 2006

Absolutely "W" for wicked selection of JA Dancehall tracks which was enough to convince me (where many others had failed) I'd been seriously missing out. Not commercially available. Beg John for a copy!

RVNG Presents Justine D

From the same people who bought us the legendary Crazy Rhythms CD another mix-illogical classic.

Mount Vernon Arts Lab: The Seance at Hobs Lane

This reissue is certainly a fitting release for the Ghost Box label.

Andrew Pekler: Cue

With tracks conceived around Library records strap-lines. For example take the words: "Driving piano-led theme, w/ uplifting feedback sweeps and coda" and work forwards from there. This, appropriately enough, is somewhat like a groove-laden Focus Group.

Connect_icut: 'Moss' and 'They showed me the Secret Beaches'

Aka Blogger Sam Macklin. Hesitant and tender glitchwork which remind me, not unpleasantly, of the sort of discs I used to have to review at The Wire. Sam's stuff is pitched somewhere between the electronica with spirit of Coil's "Musick to play in the Dark" and Fennesz's modernist abstractions.

DMX Crew: Snow Cub EP

Of all the electronic records here, the one which leapt most dynamically from the speakers was this vinyl EP by DMX Crew. Ed doesn't march under the banner of "analogue" but nevertheless none of these tracks have been near a computer. It shows. There's an urgency and physicality to the sound of these razor-sharp, old-skool genre moves which, in spite of their sonic familiarity, is immediately engrossing.

Robert Logan: Cognessence

This is kind of awesome. The last word in studious electronica's re-imagining of Grime and Dubstep. At moments it is preposterously architectured, like a housing estate built by Iannis Xenakis hellbent on fully exploring the possibilities of concrete.

Charles Cohen and Ed Wilcox: Those are pearls that were his eyes

A truly lovely improv recording that I keep returning to. Made fascinating by its unusually sexy instrumental palette. Comparable to many heavyweight 1970s and 1980s records, its exquisitely rich production sets it heads and shoulders above many of them.

Lullatone: Plays Pajama Pop for You

I've had this sitting on my desk for ages now and I only just managed to check it out. The logical extension of the Indie fascination with all things cute and Japanese. Reminiscent of Satie but also of artists like Roedelius and Klimperei. Simply charming!

Posted by WOEBOT at 05:07 PM | Permalink

I'm on Resonance FM tonight between 9.30pm and 11pm and I'll be playing some treats.

Thanks to the Kosmische Possee, who it seems have taken me under their wing permanently, I'll get to play a show every six weeks. What I want to do most of the time is have a guest along. It's more fun that way. I have three people pencilled already.

Posted by WOEBOT at 01:39 PM | Permalink

There's a load of mixed sentiments about the blogosphere in two recent interviews with Simon Reynolds for his excellent collection of essays "Bring The Noise". I feel a little uneasy taking up the thread of his objections here, I mean are we joined at the hip or what? But seeing as how Simon quite explicitly laments the halcyon days of inter-blog banter I suppose tackling this was reasonable enough.

In his FACT interview with k-punk, Simon is fairly unequivocal at laying the reason for the dearth of vital energy in music at the feet of the internet:

"The web has extinguished the idea of a true underground. It’s too easy for anybody to find out anything now, especially as scene custodians tend to be curatorial, archivist types. And with all the mp3 and whole album blogs, it’s totally easy to hear anything you want to hear, in this risk-less, desultory way that has no cost, either financially or emotionally."

Reading this I felt like I was dodging bullets, if not exactly taking one in the neck (not being a scene custodian, phew!). Even if you take the position of not downloading music, if as a music buyer you rely on eBay and GEMM, there is an implicit disconnection from the grassroots networks that used to contain one's consumption of music. The barriers once erect, if not demolished, have been lowered. Simon's is such a well-worn unequivocal statement as to be almost transparent.

I admit to wriggling in the noose here but there might be sticking points. Myspace has thrown up some interesting phenomenon, eroding insurmountable obstacles to the will-to-glom in otherwise hopelessly disconnected and fractured networks. It has created scenes where otherwise there would be none; for instance the healthy collectives of Gypsy music. An institution like The Wire magazine could be seen as proto-web, relying not on hegemonies bound by geography, but by forming a focal point for like-minded individual across the globe. As such it managed to survive the extinction that befell many other mags earlier on this decade. Much of the cultural impulse behind blogs like WOEBOT and the sharity mp3 LP sites works on a similar premise to The Wire. Of course, infintely more than the press, the web is the perfect vehicle for narrowcasting. But crucifying the net itself for being the perfect utility to channel what are indubitably swelling currents in society is unfair. Indeed there's an irony in recognising that by "Underground" here Simon means an alternative consensus.

I'm not sure if what Simon regards as the "Underground" doesn't by definition (cf Dick Hebdige) require a greater investment in fashion and style, music and literature than will ever be available through the internet. Scenes require talismans. If you're socialising at clubs or festivals, and these will always be the degree zero of any vibrant music scene, you need the right junkets. Though equally this applies if you're inviting people round to your house. Showing some girl your Arctic Monkeys mp3 just won't wash. The other night I was in Hoxton upstairs at The Old Blue Last. You'd have to be both blind and ignorant not be able to pick up on the deftly-tailored styles, musical and otherwise, on the vibes of the whole scene. It was the same at the Grime raves I used to go to (and I imagine it still is). One shouldn't go looking for the "underground" from within the context of the internet and equally one shouldn't be disappointed by music being used in a utilitarian fashion in the hood.

There's also a couple of things I wanted to pick up from Simon's interview at Ballardian:

On Blogs: "Now I’m significantly less excited, while still finding more to read and be inspired by in the non-professional blog world than in music magazines. What I enjoy most, and what has dimmed quite a bit since ‘the golden age’ a few years ago, is the conversational aspect – people riffing on other people’s riffs, that whole argumentative side. But with a few exceptions people seem to have retreated back into a more solitary, monologue-like thing."

Guilty as charged. Quite a bit of that original discursive energy from these parts went into Dissensus, where enough of it for my tastes survive. I suppose I got a bit burned out by the orgy of interlocution and went back to mono-blogging. I also have to admit a bit of a distaste for the "link-me-link-you" motor at the centre of the Technorati blog economy, and quite often that's what is at stake with hyperlinks, even if Simon to his credit is oblivious of this. The move away from inter-blog banter was concomitant with the balance of my writing shifting from exposition to research and that leads me to the last point of Simon's I wanted to look at, about theory:

The only music blogs I can think of that go for real hardcore theory are k-punk and… that’s it really. There are blogs that are primarily philosophy and/or art blogs who also deal with music now and then, like Sit Down Man, You’re A Bloody Tragedy or Poetix, but I don’t think people would think of them as music blogs. Actually k-punk isn’t just a music blog either, although music is a privileged area of culture for Mark. You get music blogs that do music criticism in a high-powered form or go deeply into the minutiae of subgenres and esoteric knowledge. But I can’t think of that many who are applying concepts from critical theory.

I’d make a distinction here between theorising about music and using critical theory and applying it to music. The former goes on a lot, obviously – and you could argue that any critical position is at some level theoretical, it relates to an idea of what music should be and how it works. But there is plenty of theorisation about music going on. What I don’t see a lot of is people using ideas from critical theory or philosophy and so forth and using them to explicate pop music. Even I don’t do nearly as much as I used to. But I certainly still generate theorems and analytical ideas that go beyond the thumbs up/thumbs down consumer guidance aspect.

This is bound to be a more introspective and self-serving observation than usual, and I'd like to apologise in advance for that, but when the shift occurred in the nature of WOEBOT, essentially when I worked my way to the bottom of my then-existing collection, and the blog started to be almost like a diary of my day-to-day searching and researching rather than objectively poring over the past, then it simultaneously became less theory-orientated. It became less about perspective because, working so close to the coal-face, that perspective was something of a luxury. Whatever theory I've picked up has almost exclusively, even though I've labored at times to disguise this, been gleaned from music journalism. As soon as I set off on my own travels unaided then there has been no hiding my general, not necessarily disinterestedness, but discomfort, with theory. Stuff I picked up and read more recently, Badiou and Spinoza, (unlike the Virlio, Rorty, Deleuze, Popper, Bhaba, Gilroy and McLuhan I'd read in the past) just didn't seem to have any bearing on music. I am aware that Simon himself has less room for theory in his writing than in the past.

I've moved to a position of being very focussed on history, on tracking currents within music with micro-precision, quite like someone in information technology might track flows, but usually with the explicit aim of trying to tease out new possibilities for the stultified present. Even though this has quite occasionally led to, perhaps amusing conflagrations with my peers; I can see that to quite a lot of people it might be very boring. Except to point out crassly that the stats on the site last month showed over a million hits, I wouldn't really know how to defend myself.

Posted by WOEBOT at 01:04 PM | Permalink

And finally. The Future Sound of London have a particularly bad rep these days, their post-Papua New Guinea brand of Intelligent Techno is generally viewed as being the least salvageable strain of dance music of its era. This might have something to do with designer Buggy G Riphead's rococo sleeves of the period. Reminiscent of the corniest visual excesses of Prog, in fairness these only reflected the unrestrained sonic orgy unleashed by extended sample-lengths within the music itself. By the mid-nineties music technology had reached a point whereby dreamers like Cobain and Dougans actually got the kit they were after, and moved from that fruitful (but technically frustrating) position of being limited by their hardware's capabilities.

Long before their profile as Q-man's electronic music, in the years from 1989 to 1993 before they signed to Virgin, TFSOL put out a whole slew of wild music on the Jumpin' and Pumpin' label; a weird abandoned interzone between Ragga Ardkore and Intelligent Techno. A great deal of these tracks are seriously 'avin it though certainly not all of them are by the egghead duo. Jungle misfits Genaside II put out a handful of classic lumpen breakbeat tracks on the label (think the Jungle Brothers with bad vibes and no rapping: "Death of The Kamikazee", "The Alchemist" and "The Motiv"), there are EPs by Flag (later The Jimpster), and Adrkore refugess like DJ Freshtrax and DJ HMS. Indeed, in the absence of evidence, logic dictates that it wasn't their label as such. Quite soon it established itself commercially with a series Rave Hits compilations, however their man Riphead's really very appealing, uniformly 8-bit, cyber-punk sleeves makes it feel thus. Also I suspect that the two must have acted in the capacity as unofficial A&R men in these early days.

Brian and Garry's tracks made under aliases like Yage, Smart Systems, and Indo Tribe like "Owl", "Drive", "Tingler" and "Coda Coma" inhabit a wonderfully improbable terrain. As ruff as the those most vicious urban Ardkore they have hidden depths, deliciously echoing bottom-ends, exquisitely crafted bleep-sequences and four dimensional breakbeats. Indeed it's the use of breakbeats that singles them out from the rest of Techno's slightly pious re-workings of the glacial Detroit sound. Definitely worth investigating.

Posted by WOEBOT at 04:18 PM | Permalink

From what seems like beyond the dawn of time, these records came out in 1989. Produced by Nigerian ex-pat Tony Addis and recorded at his Addis Ababa Studios (unfortunately not in Ethiopia). They represent a "House-ification" of Jazzie B's Africa Centre vibe. House became an unwitting agent of deconstruction and the results were fascinatingly unstable, throwing up all sorts of imminent possibilities. Bang The Party's "Bang Bang Your Mine" is a Jamaican-inflected take on tracks by Chi-Town House divas like Jamie Principle. Their revisions of House music found favor with Derrick May and Kid Batchelor's utterly wonderful "Release Your Body" ended up with a Mayday mix and a release on the Rolls Royce of Techno labels Transmat.

The signposts North, East, South and West are yet more nuttily prescient. "Rubba Dub" from the "Back To Prison" LP with its slow, echoing, displaced power-drill break-beats is what a dose of inspiration would have done to Trip-Hop. "Righteous Rule Dub" must be one of the best contenders for thee Ur-Dubstep track, maybe I'm showing my age (remembering the crazy old record dealer who tried to sell me Sequence on Sugarhill as Techno), but I can't hear the difference. In fact the Dub angle to the Warriors Dance stuff is well-documented, David Toop mentioning the label in his iconic A to Z of Dub in the May 1994 issue of The Wire.

Most interesting to me in 1992 was the recontextualisation of African music within Black Techno that was manifest on No Smoke's "Koro Koro" and their International Smoke Signal LP. For the first time there seemed practically nothing tackily "tribal" about the use of a sample of African (Bambara) singing. In Senegal we were told that "Koro Koro" meant "underground" and adopted it on all our flyers.

My pal Marcus at WARP forwarded an email from his tape enthusiast friend talking about some of his recent acquisitions, and I'll hope they won't mind me quoting it: "And my absolute favorite is that Soul All Dayer Of The Century album (also 1987) which has got Mike West on it as part of Beatfreak Sound mixing "Singing In The Rain" with digi reggae and DJ Ron cutting Pablo Gad's Hard Times into Planet Rock at half time to it. It is actually as close a moment to the birth of the idea of jungle as I've heard." Marcus paraphrased this is "jungle without the drum and bass" and that neatly encapsulates the vibe of the Warriors Dance stuff.

Posted by WOEBOT at 06:27 PM | Permalink