WOEBOT

It took six and a half hours to drive from London to Berkshire. As y'all probably know Berkshire was hit very hard in the floods.

As we approached where Glade was being held the road conditions started to deteriorate. The entrance was through a village called Thatcham which was submerged in water, precisely how deep we were unsure.

However as we foolhardily drove forth, the van started filling up with water, exhaust engulfed the cabin and we stalled, it became clear that the answer was......too deep. Our three hitch-hikers helped us push it half a mile back out to dry land.

On site the Bangface tent was heaving gently. In general the music was far too quiet and people seemed to, rather than dance, pull one boot from the mud, and then the other, loosely in time with the beats.

The mud was unbelievable. People moan about Glastonbury, but really this was on a wholly different, almost biblical level.

Grass and ecstacy freely available. Neither of which I touch, as my friends will vouch.

Bumped into Mark "Strange Attractor" Pilkington, escorting the mighty Erik Davis, who had been booked to give a talk at the West Coast Neuro-Age Tent. More on this in the coming weeks.

The glamourous backstage environment! Because Sacha was DJ-ing at "The Pussy Parlure", I essentially caddy-come-gogo-dancer, we had backstage passes. Walked past Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy at this very spot. Flashos's set was the best of the whole festival. Seriously. It was the only moment I saw people dance rather than frug.

As we left I took a minute to poke around, trying to locate The Black Dog's dressing Room. They were playing before Derrick May on (refers to appallingly designed pamphlet) the "Vapour" stage. Found Martin in a Portacabin, one end of which seemed to be sinking deep into the mud.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:47 PM | Permalink

• Stretch Armstrong used to be Hip-Hop's pre-eminent DJ. Now he makes Electro House. Go figger.

• Dan Selzer makes good on his promise and kicks off the Acute Blog in fine style.

• The almighty Jess Harvell gets the gig at Idolator. Rejoice.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:05 PM | Permalink

Mahal Rai Banda: Mahalageasca (Bucovina Dub)
From last year on the Atlantic Jaxx label. Gypsy music effortlessly recalling the splendrous elephantine trombone-stomp of Ska. And what's more Bhangra too.

Studio: Origin
Kompis & Erlend Oye: All Ears
Nordic Disco folded into song-form. The rest of the Studio LP disappoints slightly but "Origin" is like rowing a boat into the middle of a lake. Better still from the Off The Wall people is the utterly lovely "All Ears"- this is how I wished The Junior Boys sounded.

Peter, Bjorn and John: Young Folks (Featuring Victoria Bergsman)
Another track from last year, this is on adverts nowadays isn't it? Still I've totally fallen for it, especially Victoria's straight-out-of-bed vocals.

Yo Majesty: Club Action
Thanks to Flashos for the tip here (and elsewhere). Baltimore gal crew sounding as raw as the Scroggins ladies over tiptoeing beats.

Flying Lotus: Backpack Caviar
The third coming of Trip-Hop. Setting new standards in wonk.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:04 PM | Permalink

I'm not certain when the phrase "Todd is God" was coined, I suspect it was after 1993, however I distinctly remember it being the coinage of die-hard House music heads, the Masters At Work contingent, and that it switched me off right away. I don't know about the whole "proper" Deep House thing, I find it a bit boring, excepting one-offs like MAW's "The Nervous Track", and perhaps when things start to get Mauve?

This cult of Todd, with its apparently very shallow roots, managed to blind me to the exact nature of his work. Even when I had a few good examples of his stuff (of the discs below I've had Royal House's "Yeah Buddy", "To the Batmobile Let's Go", the Static and Tech Nine singles, and "Bounce" and "Daylite" for well over a decade) I was unable to grasp the significance of Todd's work, and to get a handle on him. Put simply, the whole UK Hardcore continuum probably owes more to Todd than anyone else. If the equation of Hardcore was House multiplied by Hip-Hop, then Mr. Terry had done his sums years before anyone in Britain.

Early Work (1987)

Obviously the US context of Todd's work gave him a head-start. While we in the UK think of Hip-Hop and House as separate entities in the US they were still intertwined. While the centre-ground of Hip-Hop abandoned Bambaata's Electro innovation; Detroit Techno, Miami Bass and crucially for this context Freestyle kept faith with the Planet Rock. Sa-Fire, The Cover Girls, Shannon, The Latin Rascals as well as less obviously Latino music like C-Bank and Mantronix is the context for Todd's earliest records. Like Lil' Louie Vega, Todd cut his teeth in the Freestyle era. Giggles Shannon-esque "Love Letter" on Cutting, home of classic Electro like Hashim's "Al-Naafiysh" and the Proto-House of Nitro Deluxe, is ever-so slightly grating, and uncharacteristic of his work, but there's Todd, tucked away on the credits.

In stark contrast the Masters of Work records that Todd put out on Fourth Floor that same year are utterly brilliant. People have mistakenly claimed that Todd gave the MAW moniker to Kenny Dope and Louie Vega, however according to Optimo's Twitch: "Masters at Work was originally Kenny Dope's name but he gave it to Todd Terry to use. Todd Terry then introduced Kenny Dope to Louie Vega and they took the name back when they started working together." So now you know.

Pitched somewhere between The Latin Rascal's epic dub mixes and Mantronix instrumentals like "King of The Beats" these tracks both use synth motifs ripped of Jellybean's "The Mexican" - ripping off Babe Ruth - ripping off Ennio Morricone's "Fistful of Dollars". They both cane the "Alright, Alright" refrain from Strafe's "Set It Off" to the extent that each track almost masquerades as a remix of that the original. This tension between original and remix is long-standing in Terry's work. Later on "Weekend" and "Go Bang!" are also ransacked to the degree that the concept of authorship is not so much challenged but systematically turned on its head, indeed there's something very consistent about his work as industry remix whore.

Breaking Out (1988-1989)

It's a miracle how cheap these records are. I've paid no more than $15 for the ones of these I didn't have recently, but mainly in the region of $10. It's equally astonishing how easy they are to pick up when you consider how impossibly hard to find the finest early UK Hardcore has become. Perhaps this has something to do with their almost insouciant Avant-gardism?

Simon Reynolds in Energy Flash brilliantly articulates how much of his work is "jarring because it's like a series of crescendos and detonations, a frenzy of context-less intensities without rhyme or reason." All of these records take decentralisation to disorientating plateaus, functioning on a completely different level to much ultimately song-based electronic music. They're spasmodic mini-master-mixes, almost artlessly reflecting the open-ended dynamics of a DJ mix. In this way they're also strangely unmemorable records, demanding one's attention intensely but in a very localised way, rather like reading The Bible with a magnifying glass.

The Swan Lake, Black Riot and Royal House record came out in the UK on Champion and they benefit from utterly exquisite vintage Trevor Jackson (him of Playgroup) sleeve designs. I've put both sides of these up because they're totally gorgeous, but also because they neatly show how Todd's music was embraced and decontextualised at the early raves in the UK. The pixelated cop on "Yeah Buddy", a sleeve I've cherished for years, is worth a thousand university white papers on Rave in the UK. But there are other indicators of his cross-over popularity here, the totally unavoidable Jungle Brothers remix; How many times did we hear this and Royal House's "Can You Party?" at raves? Also Limelife's Black Box-pillaging "Cause you're Ride on Time", a giant commercial track kidnapped and pimped on the streets of Brooklyn.

Late Period (1990-1993)

At the turn of the decade there was a stark shift in the nature of Todd's records. Where before he'd not worried about how lop-sided his musical structures were, suddenly they become conventional overnight. I suspect there's an element of peer-pressure here, of other artists being disdainful of his (fascinating and inventive) rampaging infantile grooves. The good news was that, for a while at least, he embraced the Mentasm-inflected corpulent sonics of the newly-bastardised Techno. "Fingertrips" still manages to sound raw, is in thrall to Hip-Hop, and forms a bridge to the earlier work. Utterly satisfying, bleak and nasty, it also sports much more space between the ruff beats.

The wondrous Strictly Rhythm records on the other hand, while hard as nails, also possessing a startling depth of sheen. The stabs are in some queer way lustrous, there's a textural richness to sounds like the burbling-sewer bass-line of The Youngbloods "Got Me Burning Up", and the riff on the US Rave mix of Static's "Dream It" is a flickering mirage of mammon in perdition. This is still very much "classic" Todd.

There's lots of wicked stuff on the Sax LP "If You Wanna Ride", "This will be mine" and "The Journey pt.II", but there is an encroaching tedious tastefulness in the form of Jazz-House platitudes. Sound Design is only really worth checking for "Make The Beat Pound", strange to compare these curate's eggs with the utterly successful Royal House and Todd Terry Project long-players. By 1992 and 1993 the broader culture began to show disgust at the excesses of Rave, and older artists like Todd pulling back from the brink of the black-hole into which Darkcore blithely forged forward into, often under the guise of "going underground". He was able to make great records within this new mould, like the brilliant "Bounce" or the equally fantastic "Sume Say Sigh", House tracks which, though bereft of the brutalist palette of Rave or Hip-Hop, were nevertheless supremely dramatic.

It took a gap of 6 years, and Todd's seemingly out-the-blue Drum and Bass LP "Resolutions", and it's welcome acceptance by the Dons of Jungle for him to come to some kind of truce with his early history. Looking back one senses he wished he never lost faith with the Rave.

The New Todd Terry Compilation

An old (but good) Todd Terry Compilation

A good Todd Terry Interview

The Monster Todd Discogs entry

A thread at Dissensus about Todd Terry

With Thanks to E.

Posted by WOEBOT at 12:04 AM | Permalink

How can the ICA justify hosting a festival like this? Where's the art in any of this populist mush?

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Derek is back. Or perhaps he never went away.

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Mark Fisher is teaching a five-day Critical Thinking course at Orpington this week. The advert invites you to acquire some Cold Rationalist intellectual weaponry.

Posted by WOEBOT at 03:59 PM | Permalink

Last night I DJ'd a party for my mysterious and glamorous brother in the countryside. He'd insisted I bring only House music, though I inferred from his tenor that the real agenda was "Not 'Aving It", there were to be "grown-ups" there and therefore my natural instinct to play Ardkore should be suppressed. Accordingly I stretched the remit a bit and bought along some disco as well, Hamilton Bohannon's "South African Man", Manu Dibango's "New Bell", Class Action's "Weekend (the M&M Dub), Cultural Vibe's "Ma Foom Bay" and Padlock. However beyond that, with admirable restraint of ego, I did exactly what I was told and bought House Music.

It was a wicked party, in a marquee under the stars, with bountiful stimulants, beautiful women, and (for which I was partly responsible) a busy little dance-floor. I say partly responsible because from time to time, when his mood dictated I was elbowed off the decks by my bro. And why ever not?!? It was his party! Anyway I hope I'm continuing to convey my almost transparent degree of cooperation. What did amuse me a little was given my closely prescribed musical parameters I half expected he'd adhere to them himself. Not a bit of it!

What I wanted to mention however was a phenomenon which I hadn't experienced to such a degree. I've been playing parties and clubs for nearly twenty years now, and yes from time to time people would come and ask me whether I had such-an-such a record. It's par for the course really isn't it? Also the inappropriate requests: Queen? No, terribly sorry I'm afraid etc. However at this party, which believe me was happy and lively, the dance-floor was quietly bustling, I had a constant stream of people cajoling, threatening, huffing, and sulking with me; of people going through my record box and hooking out stuff for me to play (this happened two or three times), people insisting on different genres of music, either by describing them by name or inferring them by making clucking sounds, one guy gesticulating at me with his two tiny dancing fingers demanding deeper music, girls asking for Rick James and Stevie Wonder and perhaps most remarkably a girl who kept on insisting that I download a Justine Timberlake song onto my brothers laptop and play that. The whole, never-ending experience was utterly wearing and eventually I gave in, politely telling one particularly persistent girl that she was "really doing my head in". Most weirdly the party seem totally unaffected.

I thought the request for the download was the most globally illuminating, because of course our relationship to consuming music has fundamentally changed. Even back in those days when we used to complain that "oh everyone is a DJ these days" there was the idea that it might be an interesting thing to do to graciously submit yourself to another person's tastes and whims. In fact, doing just that is key to the pleasure of the dance-floor. You let yourself go ferchrissakes! What it really reminded me of was that most wretched thing ever, last year's iPod Rave at Paddington Station. The contentment! We can all listen to exactly the music we want to. In isolation.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:10 PM | Permalink

Prompted by this excellent, fascinating article at Rolling Stone there are threads discussing The Record Industry's decline at ilm and Dissensus.

Just yesterday walking from the Seven Dials to Soho I was flabbergasted to see that the gigantic FOPP on the corner of Shaftsbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road had closed. I believe this has something to do with its sister company (which had been selling Imported CDs at reduced prices, thereby undermining the arrangements of the domestic market) finally being shut down by litigation. However the view from the street is simpler, another retail outlet gets nailed.

People probably don't know FOPP's background as a Glaswegian record store. I first visited the store in 1990 when they had a branch in Glasgow's city centre on (was it?) Renfield Street. I remember buying a Charlie Parker record from them which I still have somewhere. When I ended up at University in the city I would obsessively visit their Byres Road branch, often 2 to 3 times a day, as it was sandwiched between my flat and lectures. I remember wishing I would catch staff on different shifts. In those days they had big posters in the window which were collages of amazing, fabulous and exotic record sleeves. It was an immaculately conceived 'all-points-of-the-compass' buyers guide, perhaps a little like my WOEBOT 100, but one which you had to figure out yourself. For example, the cropped-out black dude with the Chinese hat playing an African flute in a cliff-top overlooking the sea turned out to be Pharaoh Sanders on the cover of "Thembi".

In the beginning the emphasis was never on bargains, though in time as the store began to expand that was how it came to be. To be honest, in a curmudgeonly way, I slightly disapproved of their stacks of classics-on-the-cheap. But, quite like the posters had done, nosing around the store was often illuminating as to what might be worth checking out. I'm sorry for the directors of the business who must be soberly surveying their shattered dream, one which had grown so far and which had shown so much promise.

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Postscript: It turns out there was quite a lot more to this than I was aware. Two WOEBOT readers who've contacted me worked for FOPP on the shop-floor (one in Scotland and one in England) and they haven't pulled any punches in describing how they believe the company ran itself into the ground. Tsk.

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:04 AM | Permalink

I've written about a couple of these records in the past here, however I couldn't resist bundling them in again to make that perfect 10.

Ananda Shankar: Ananda Shankar (1970)
Ananda Shankar: Ananda Shankar and His Music (1975)

The revelation for me was the Ananda Shankar. I've seen his records around for years. The resurgance of interest in him came with Talvin Singh and his Anokha club in the mid to late nineties. I went to Anokha in Hoxton Square once and it was rubbish. The problem was the tuning, not the beats. Convincing fusions always happen at the axis of the tuning. That there's a Tabla pattering away in the background means next to nothing if the harmonies are mushy and Western. Given that Ananda was the patron saint at Anokha, I wrote off his stuff as tepid exotica.

How wrong could I have been? The debut on Reprise is tuff. Typified by the majestic "Sagar" a West-Coast Cosmic-Country epic draped in reverberating sitar, Ananda finds a shared nook in the scales of the Honky-Tonk Blues and the Hindustani Alap. And there's nothing limp about it at all, this is bad bwoy music. The cover versions on the debut are also fantastic: "Light My Fire" and "Jumping Jack Flash" ring with dread vibes, the sitar steals the melody and rides it like a jockey on a donkey.

Conventional wisdom is that Ananda's "Ananda Shankar and his music" LP is superior, though this is typical hipster false consciousness at play. Recorded in India, not Hollywood, with local chops it's within a whisker of being a straight-up Bollywood LP. There's nearly as convincing Rock-Raga on a hundred Soundtrack LPs- though perhaps nothing as savage as "Streets of Calcutta". The record is also haunted by the spectre of Ennio, for example on the gently ululating vocal of "Cyrus", again slightly separating it from local produce. Nevertheless for me it's the debut which is interesting.

Emil Richards and The Microtonal Blues Band: Jouney to Bliss (1968)
Bill Plummer and the Cosmic Brotherhood (1968)

Of course the Alice Coltrane records were in the Impulse frontline, however dig a little further back and you'll discover these. I was hipped to the Emil Richards by Tony Wilds at the quite stunning Hip Wax site. In fact if I recall Tony had a couple of copies of this beauty left. I suppose to call this Indo-jazz is some kind of misnomer. Emil Richards is, after all, principally famous for his vibraphone work. Folks might also want to check out his "Stones: New Sound Element" LP (in this instance hipped to me by ilm's Milton Parker). The vibes's instrumental counter-part is more precisely something like the Balinese Gamelan, the record's general tenor Greenwich Village does Jazz. "Journey to Bliss" the LP is an utterly perfect, daringly light-footed, intricately woven mesh of percussiveness. Even the guitars chicken-scratch and the wurlitzer dodges breaks. The pinnacle of the LP must be the sublime "Mantra" which is your every fantasy of leopard-skin loin-cloths brought luridly to life. "Journey to Bliss" the six-part track itself is more obviously Indo-jazz thanks to some charmingly out-of-tune meandering sitars. But how close the aesthetic of something like is to La Monte Young's early work!

Not nearly as splendid as the Emil Richard's record is Bill Plummer's "Bill Plummer and The Cosmic Brotherhood." Bill, armed with his twin bass concept, played on The Rolling Stones's "Exile on Main Street" fact fans. My friend Christian found a copy of this in a store in Edinburgh in 1992 and we laughed long and hard at Bill on the cover. "Journey to The East" is, however, sort of wonderful and crops up frequently on Jazz compilations. Also, close your eyes and check Bill's cover of "The Look of Love" and the similarity to Ananda's cover-versions is undeniable.

Dewan Motihar Trio/Irene Schweizer Trio/Manfred Schoof/Barney Wilen: Jazz Meets India (1967)

The fruit of a World Jazz festival co-ordinated by legendary German Music Journalist Joachim-Ernst Berendt, this particular LP (there were others in the "Jazz Meets The World" series on MPS) was amongst the most successful. Recorded in 1967 what is perhaps most remarkable about is the protean Krautrock elements therein for The Irene Schweizer Trio who take care of the rhythm section on the LP contains none other than Mani Neumeier on drums and Uli Trepte on bass of Guru Guru. Mani is interviewed extensively in Berendt's liner-notes, discussing the Tabla "the most perfect percussion instrument created by man" and his own invention the "Mani-Tom". There's another Krautrock connection as playing cornet and trumpet beside Barney Wilen is Manfred Schoof who was of course Jaki Liebezeit's boss.

It seems wholly appropriate to me that Indo-jazz, this almost imagined music, almost like an exercise in musical R&D, should play a part in spawning Krautrock but also (and very convincingly) Minimalism and Avant-Disco. Avant-Disco I hear you chafe! I'm sorry but Arthur Russell is nothing if not a re-incarnation of the likes of Emil Richards and Bill Plummer, a beatnik plundering the orient. Let's not forget Russell's training with Ali Akbar Khan- sort of like the logical extension of the whole trip, a hardcore hipster's Indo power-move and his work with Allen Ginsberg.

The Indo Jazzmen: Ragas and Reflections (1968)

This is a curios one, essentially an exploitative take on the Mayer/Harriot records, it manages to be rather sublime, possibly even superior to what it's plagiarising. Saga was a dodgy London-based record label.

Shankar Jaikishan and Rais Khan: Jazz Raga Style (1968)
T.K Ramamoorthy: Jazz Jazz Jazz (1969)

My babies! The entirely Indian side of the coin. Amongst my most obscure and treasured records. The latter I discovered about four years ago and I've caned its quasi-Led-Zeppelin-esque grooves for a while now. The former is more of the same kind of shenanigans which I've picked up subsequently. Proving once and for all how all manner of music falls into this bizarre terrain.

Joe Harriot and John Mayer: Indo-Jazz Suite (1966)
Joe Harriott-John Mayer Double Quintet: Indo-Jazz Fusions (1967)

Innit.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:46 PM | Permalink