WOEBOT

Gosh! The horrifically ugly sight of media hipsters tripping over themselves to plant their flag in Niche House. Me, I'm interested but just lurking in the shadows. Still feeling pangs of remorse for deserting Grime a couple of years back.....

Following up some of Simon's tips it was a shame to find the older Cameo shows aren't archived. What I did discover inadvertently was that, quite bizarrely, fans (or I dunno maybe the label?) have uploaded many of the big Bassline tracks as YouTube clips.

Incidentally, the latest Cameo show is very good.

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:55 PM | Permalink

There was only one large record label that truly understood Disco and it was Island. OK, it's a broad statement and one could start to get bogged down in nuances. I suppose Casablanca could be classed as a "large" label and it started out signing KISS so you could argue it wasn't a Disco label per se. But really, c'mon, you know what I mean.....

Island on the other hand was a Rock label which grew out of Chris Blackwell's ambitions. Did you know Blackwell set up Trojan as Island's Reggae subsidiary? I surprised myself when I found that out. I didn't know the two had anything to do one another. I suppose they must have split early on. It's Blackwell's roots in Reggae that are the clue to understanding why Island was so successful with Disco.

In Peter Shapiro's quite amazingly excellent book on Disco "Turn The Beat Around" it's clear that Francois K was the real conduit of dub techniques into Disco. He was crazy about the Black Uhuru "Uhuru In Dub" LP on Jammys, and must have moved mountains to turn in his mix of Jimmy Cliff's "Treat The Youths Right". It's hard to imagine who would have been more pleased working with who on Kevorkian's "Snakecharmer" LP, him or the label. Though Larry Levan also got his hand in on the Peech Boys LP and the Padlock project.

Which, given that it's a super-groop effort, really has no right being as good as it is. There's a common sound to many of these records: a pungently bass-heavy, warmly-flowing current with the drums not perched on high-heels but in sneakers. It is as though the North Atlantic Drift was reversed and flowed up from the tropics past Manhattan, rather than down from the pole. It's a sound I find more enticing than the slightly stiff, electronic beats of Prelude or West End's deconstructed boogie. I've never been a fan of the Latin-tinged Salsoul percussion.

Less of the Island fingerprint here, but this is frequently dubbed to pieces.

I've never been a huge fan of this disc. As I think I said once before, the best thing about it are Ian P's liner-notes. There are better Kid Creole/Darnell things are elsewhere. "Wheel Me Out" is fun though Vortex's "Black Box Disco" (heard first here) is its superior twin when it comes to B-Movie Noir samples.

On 4th & Broadway, the Island subsidiary. And it's interesting that this Arthur Russell classic was the first release on the label.

This extremely eccentric slice of Eddy-Grant-style Disco (think BIG CHANT!) was big in Francois K's bag.

My favorite of Grace's records. Rare to find a compilation with this much integrity. Much of the "Gulf-Stream" flavor of the Island sound was to do with the teaming of Sly and Robbie with Marianne Faithful Guitarist Barry Reynolds and French/Benin keyboard-player Wally Badarou. This team were the so-called "Compass Point All-Stars", who if I had any journalistic ambitions at all I'd research. While my colleague Mark Fisher is fascinated with Grace, the icon, it'll always be her beats that I adore.

But the same sound is here on the lovely Blackwell-produced Hi-Tension single, so perhaps it's more to do with underlying principles?

Wicked egg-head Disco. Like Wobble's "Full Circle" LP it doesn't quite hit the mark but makes up what it lacks in tunes with texture. Arthur Russell pops here with the lyrics for "Hold On To Your Dreams".

The "Echoes" ("Mambo" from which was lifted by Massive Attack on "Daydreaming") and "Words of a Mountain" LPs come highly recommended too. Wally plays ace synth on Manu Dibango's undiscovered "Waka Juju" LP too, a WOEBOT fave.

Peter Shapiro seems to prefer "Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places" LP which admittedly has a beautiful Tony Wright sleeve (Wright, another Island peak-period signifier, see the Padlock sleeve and "Super Ape"), but this is far superior. A charming, floridly melodic listen. You know where the later Specials lifted all their ideas from when you hear these Kid Creole records. Like the "Mutant Disco" record this is a Ze release, but really, props to Island for seeing how beautifully it fitted with their aesthetic. I'll never forget Kid Creole singing "Annie" on Top of The Pops!

Wot no Tom Tom Club!

See also.

Posted by WOEBOT at 03:47 PM | Permalink

The Road to the Crater

Look at September, look at October

The other House

Four Years

I discovered these pictures by Peter Schmidt in a slightly rotting folder in the basement. They belong in the inner sleeve of Brian Eno's "Before and after Science", but for a while in the early nineties I had them pinned to my bedroom wall. It was quite satisfying slipping them back inside the record's sleeve. I don't imagine too many second-hand copies of the record still have them contained within.

Eno explains on the rear (of the four offset prints from water colours) that "Peter and I have been working together and comparing notes for some time. In 1975 we produced a boxed set or oracle cards called 'Oblique Strategies', which were used extensively in the making of this record. The temptation when digitising them was to "Auto-contrast" or crush the levels, but really they're very gentle, and that's part of their wistful charm.

They're briefly described in an article in Melody Maker article from January of 1977:

This evening I visited Peter Schmidt (the painter who did the cover for Tiger Mountain and Evening Star, and with whom I published Oblique Strategies). He has just returned from a holiday in Madeira, and we look at the 12 watercolours he made there. The last three of the series are quite exceptionally beautiful - a tiny road winds down the side of an almost vertical mountain whose peak is lost in the clouds.

I walk from Peter's in Stockwell to Victoria station. It is a cold, exhilarating night. I am thinking about writing a song called "Man Making Measurements And Dancing." I can't sleep until 4.00 am because I have a flurry of ideas which won't wait their turn. It is most annoying.

Posted by WOEBOT at 08:44 PM | Permalink

(All the above from my collection)

Here's a very interesting label. Limelight starts out as Mercury records' Jazz subsidiary with fairly straight releases by Oscar Peterson, Art Blakey, Charles Mingus and Gerry Mulligan. The only hint of what was to come seems to be in their championing of Roland Kirk with records like "Rip, Rig and Panic" (named after a Bristolian Post-Punk outfit, teehee) and "I talk with the spirits". A slight digression: I don't know about you but I've always thought Roland Kirk's stuff is over-rated. In the past I've had "The Inflated Tear" and "The Case of The 3 Sided Dream in Audio Color" and despite alluringly psychedelic cover art, they're disappointingly conventional jazz. What is good is "Root Strata"; a disc I first heard in some "soixante-huit"-er's apartment in Paris.

I suspect towards the tail-end of the sixties Jazz sales started tanking and the label was speedily re-tooled as a catch-all "underground" operation. However, its ambitiousness is startling. Firstly they re-release the cream of French Concrete music, all Pierre Henry's major works as well as electronic works by Kagel, Xenakis, Ferrari, Maderna and Berio and complied the excellent survey of Norwegian electronic music "Response". They sopped up some of the most adventurous Electric Jazz (Melvin Jackson's delicious "Funky Skull"), put out home-grown US Electronic Music by (the obligatory) Beaver and Krause and the witchy Ruth White and were a home to rainbow-array of one-off discs by the likes of Spleen "The Sound Of Feeling" (a Folktronic twin to Buffy St Marie's "Illuminations"), the legendary Fifty Foot Hose's "Cauldron" (unquestionably the square-root of US Post-Rock as it manifested in Tortoise, Ui and Pan Am), and The Mecki Mark Men's eponymous LP. It would be quite unimaginable for a record label today with Avant-Garde inclinations to cover such a massive territory. Especially, I'm afraid to say, an American label.

As if to top it all they even carried titles such as these Indian and Iranian records. The first two I have held in my hands in record shops but not bought. I suspect that they're merely okey-doke tokenly-licensed material but, hell, the ambition is there. I suppose three letters make sense of the whole project. L, S and D.

Posted by WOEBOT at 04:40 PM | Permalink

Occasionally my job as Motion Graphics Designer/Animator means there's some cross-over with my musical interests as dramatised here at WOEBOT. Very recently I made live visuals for an event for Kieran Evans, who along with Paul Kelly, made the celebrated "Finisterre" film with St Etienne.

I'd been wanting to see this for ages and repeatedly hassled the dozy in-house runner for a copy of the film. In the end I dug around their server, found it and burnt a copy myself. Finisterre (2003) is a documentary about London set to the music of St. Etienne. Its emphasis is on presenting the side of London familiar to Londoners (if not tourists) and in discovering the eternal in the banal. This translates to designerly-composed stills thick with grime of the improbable and fleeting. The static, impassive lens works beautifully in capturing London's breathless rush, bringing to mind the photograph on the rear of Nick Drake's "Bryter Later", Nick watching the traffic on the Westway speed in and out the lights. Much of the cinematography is ravishing; some of the images bordering on the iconic.

The voiceover by Michael Jayston is immaculate, immediately conjuring up the fusty odor of the past. Phillip Ellsmore's narration on Mordant Music's "Dead Air" had the same effect of plunging one into the nether-world of half-lit memory, of the dog-eared and unseemly. Complimenting this are interviews from amongst others Julian Opie, Vic Godard, Vashti Bunyan and Julian Opie which are refreshing not only for their informality but also because we never get to see the interviewee, the body in question is London.

There are things about the film that don't work: the series of uncomfortable living portraits of kids who, even though their discomfort is fore-grounded, look out-of-place and unfortunately the music of St Etienne themselves. To someone who, though a big fan of Bob Stanley's curatorial work, has never really embraced the band this came over as a series of slightly soul-less, music-by-numbers genre studies. However in all the film is a richly inscribed time-capsule conveying and inspiring an affection for this city which I think I ceased "seeing" years ago.

It's funny to reflect that Jim Clarke was planning on making "Heronbone-The Movie" with our kid Luke Davis what must have been a very long-time ago now. Paul Kelly went on to make "What have you done today, Mervyn Day?" a bid to "capture the mood and look of the lower lea valley area before it is transformed forever". Yeah boys, you missed a trick there.....

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:56 PM | Permalink

Acute Records have cemented their reputation as the world's finest reissue label by putting out The Fire Engines "Hungry Beat" an immaculate selection of the groups three singles and their mini LP "Lubricate Your Living Room".

Selzer and co really seem to be punching far above their weight with this one, the all-powerful Domino only got their hands on a bunch of out-takes. This is utterly essential music, buy a copy today.

Posted by WOEBOT at 04:38 PM | Permalink

Yesterday I put some cork tiles up in my children's playroom so they could pin up their pictures. Because a lot of them needing cutting it was taking a long time and I thought some music might kill the tedium. There was no stereo in there so I logged online with their Mac Mini (they use it to go to the CBeebies site, and my daughter keeps her photos on it).

The first place I went for a bit of the ol' cheeky streaming audio was Blogariddims. Just last week I was freelancing in some design studio or other and found a shared iTunes folder which I was surprised to discover had a couple of Blogariddims mixes in it. The one I listened to was Heatwave's utterly brilliant "An England Story" mix, which is their "personal take on the history of MCing in England" and is quite un-missable. It seems as though Soul Jazz will be releasing an official compilation based on it next year. Slug's Krautrock mix doesn't contain any surprises and also manages to screw up Neu!'s majestic "Leb Wohl" by dribbling Tangerine Dream and Kluster over the top of it (thinks: "mixes" don't always make musical sense). However it is both a nicely personal take on the sound (I would choose totally different tracks myself, but like, so what?) and in its funny way something like a Primer for the totally uninitiated.

I was getting the hang of the streaming audio thing, so my next stop was Mary Anne Hobbs's "Experimental Show" at Radio 1. I'd never heard this before, I think perhaps because I knew exactly what to expect. I dunno, I suppose I feel pretty ambivalent about it. Firstly, it seems like the BBC missed a trick having an 8 foot-tall Amazon warrior covering this music. Isn't it just a little bit like reverse sexism? Surely it would be more appropriate to have some slightly dweeby, middle-class bloke pushing forty presenting (preferably with his own website, you dig). If they'd asked me I probably would have passed, but I can think of a candidate or three. MAH is alright, though she does have a slightly annoying "stoned-wow" delivery. All the artists she discusses as though they're "her boys"; it does sort of come across a bit gauchely maternal. It did make me giggle a bit.

Anyway it's not her fault I find dubstep boring, and I suppose she's doing a good job. But it isn't illegal to have a pop at Radio 1 DJs is it? Even if narrow-casting has meant there are so fucking many of them and it all feels like a bloody cottage industry.....and you're only going to be separated from them by 2 degrees, not the more satisfactory 6. I can do with all the degrees of separation I can get my hands on when it comes to Chris Moyles. On this weeks show I did think Skepta was alarmingly bad! Really if this is the best that Grime can come up with these days it's in deep trouble. Skepta just doesn't have a "voice" like for instance D Double or Wiley do. He also doesn't have any lyrics. And he also doesn't seem to have any beats. A tune I can do without, the rest not. Skepta also kept doing this crucifyingly embarrassing thing, calling MAH "the Grimey Uma Thurman". I put down my saw and cringed, thinking, "Please Skepta, don't say it again," and he bloody did. It was crap the first time.

Looking over the Radio 1 site for more entertainment my eye caught Zane Lowe promising to play the entire of Nirvana's "Nevermind". Just this week I was finishing that show "Six Feet Under" and Nirvana cropped up in the plot-line which got me thinking of them. I have never heard this record. It won't surprise regular readers to know that my brother and I were so fucking hip that we had "Bleach", Mudhoney's "Touch Me I'm Sick" and even the Green River LP before "Nevermind" came out. We were fully switched-on indie kids, with The Pixies first EP ("Caribou" I always loved that track) and Sonic Youth's "Sister" under our belts. We'd seen MBV about two hundred times, Dinosaur Jr plenty, hell I even saw Steve Albini's Rapeman back Sonic Youth once! We'd been into Husker Du for years, Meat Puppets II and even stranger, more obscure stuff like Live Skull and Die Kreuzen.

It was interesting and amusing to read Simon Reynolds's "Sub Pop 200" review in his recent "Bring The Noise" collection because it totally captures our general sense of boredom and exhaustion with Indie Rock of that era. It simply ceased to appear so interesting, just...spent as an idea. In his afterthought Simon classes the review as a "misjudgment" largely because of Nirvana's subsequent meteoric ascent but also because he has a healthy sense of self-critique. But really I'm not so sure. "Nevermind" ushered in a whole load of things which were almost ALL bad. Firstly it destroyed the playful naivety of almost all contemporary rock music. There's no better example of this than Sonic Youth who went straight from being one of the greatest bands of all time (EVOL>Sister>Daydream Nation....you can't touch this) to corporate whores chasing the dream of crossing over. I'm not one to have a go at bands for trying to reach a bigger audience, but they REALLY fucked up. There was something missing in "Goo", nearly a great record, but by "Dirty" I just didn't *believe* in them any more. I don't think I could ever look them straight in the eye after all of that scrabbling around. And that was Nirvana's fault.

And there's more. Not only were Nirvana guilty of fascinating all the borderline Heavy Metal kids and drawing them into the game, they are also the godfathers of EVERYTHING that is bad about Indie rock today. The whole Pop-melodies-meets-crunchy-feedback thing, that didn't come from the Buzzcocks or Husker Du, that came from Nirvana in the sense that they zipped it up/abstracted it so it seemed like a total option, a degree zero of music. It didn't surprise me in the least to find out in the show's pre-amble that Zane Lowe, who here in the UK is the crown-prince of Young Rock on the Telly, had been a Hip-Hop fan in New Zealand before discovering "Nevermind" and it "changing his life". I'm not trying to aggrandise my own cultural choices by framing them beside Lowe's (I am not worthy, tee hee...) but they were precisely the opposite of mine. I had to scoff really, Zane Lowe didn't know "Bleach" till later on! That guy needs a hip operation.

Anyway it was very cool to hear the record, I was really surprised to find how many of its tracks I knew from what must amount to cultural osmosis. Yeah it's OK. The cork tiles look wicked by the way. I went upstairs and stuck on The Meat Puppets "Up On The Sun". Now that IS a masterpiece. If we're going to have whole LP radio shows, AM-style, we ought to have records like that on them I reckon.

Posted by WOEBOT at 04:04 PM | Permalink