WOEBOT

Three Rock Records.

Three rock records have crept their way onto my deck, politely making their way through a crowd of scowling east-end raggamuffin white labels. If rock enables one to do anything these days it's to reflect. To slightly re-tool Simon's ZFI theory, it strikes me that the music he's using to illustrate the process of intensification is music whose modus operandi is...er...intensification. The thing about following a music like Grime or Crunk is that you find your head squeezed into a clamp. You're in a state of permanent breathlessness, constantly on the verge of an heart-attack. You're riding a car very fast through tunnels. You're pushing buttons as they rise.

My recent comments on Nouveau-Post-Punk's lack of engagement with a broader range of influences could be levelled trebly against the jackhammer static of the pirates, except in that instance the fixation upon here and now is virtuous in it's exclusivity, impossible to criticise in it's moronic intensity. I have a theory that the reason Back-to-1992/1994/1997 is a necessity is that the culture is so quick and unreasonably demanding that a cooling off period, an appreciation of what Luke calls "half-life-culture" is essential to extract pleasure from what is otherwise lost in a blinding white light.

Rock (whatever you want to call it) may not always have been the strain of music to enable a reflective mode of listening, one not so grindingly involving as the more commonly feted in these parts, but now it's distance from these axes of intensification bestows upon it a charmed calm. A cool space for exploring the romantic, the fey, and the lovely.

Quite to my surprise two of these records are Scottish-ish. While we've been insistently trying to keep alive the flame of 1997, or whenever it was that dance music exploded into the mainstream, in England the Scots have long-since lost interest. For instance register Simon at Silver Dollar Circle's surprise that Dance music is dead, that Grime isn't dance music. Yeah IT IS a surprise isn't it. It's like standing around at an open-aired rave and realising that yes the sun has come up and yes people are driving to work and yes the farmer's cows are staring at you and yes you're wearing ridiculous clothes. The Scots figured this out ages ago. Maybe they didnae have the mainstream presence of Dance music, maybe Ministry of Sound decided it wasn't going to be worthwhile perpetuating the myth up there. So it's been a case of smaller, possibly more fruitful stories gradually gaining their own impetus.

This Uter record is a case in point. This four-tracker is consistently excellent. The stand-outs being not the craftily chosen cover versions of "My Little Underground" (JAMC) and "Ohm Sweet Ohm" (Kraftwerk come Auld Lang Syne) but (promisingly) Declan Roney's quite lovely "Tomorrow's Clowns" and "Vibrato." These would have even the hardiest LSD-reconstructed bad bwoys crying into their beer; crying for the shimmering, androgynous, mute-love bliss-scapes of 1988. There's no getting away from the comparisons, here in the high-lonesome harmonies, to My Bloody Valentine. Those seductive basslines: New Order. That crystalline feedback: AR Kane. The utilitarian drum-machine pulse: JAMC. It's quite lovely stuff.

I'll admit to being a total sucker for ANY music whatsoever sold in art galleries. I was delighted to pick up this CD by Martin Creed in the shop at The Serpentine in London. Martin Creed, in case you've forgotten, won The Turner Prize in 2001 with (amongst other works) "Work No. 227: The lights going on and off." I guess like all Turner Prize Winners he's slowly slipped out of people's minds. I'd be surprised if he didn't feel a little like yesterday's man. Someone who something marvellous had happened to, and who now had to struggle through life settling for a lesser level of acclaim and attention. Don't think I'm being cruel by saying that, it's just that I know quite a few conceptual artists and it's a miracle if you make the big time like Scotsman Creed did. Often as not they have to settle for second-best. In fact, and this may come as some consolation to Sean Loaf, one very famous Saatchi-feted artist I know has decided that, in spite of being (on the face of it) enormously successful that the money was rubbish and that she'd rather be a mum. Incidentally while I'm in full hot gossip mode it might be worth mentioning that Catherine, Lulu and I walked past Saatchi and Nigella Lawson coming into the current Roy Lichtenstein exhibition at The Hayward as we were leaving. He eyeing me suspiciously. It's true!

I remember seeing a very good documentary made about Creed and his work, and it featured footage of his band Owada. At the time I thought, gee that's interesting if not brilliant, cos they were very fucking dry. If you read some of their lyrics you can see that Creed took the conceptual angle a little too far. Counting to one hundred, my yes, very minimal...attention wanders. He'd taken the same equation Rhys Chatham* had: Ramones + Steve Reich = Minimal Rock and ended up producing quite similar sounding music to Chathams. I am surprised in retrospect that his cause wasn't picked up The Wire (who went as far as putting out Chatham's music on the short-lived Wire Editions label), of course any music on this art-punk axis is blessed by the spirit of Andy Warhol**. Creed even got David "Flying Lizards" Cunningham to produce him and with the Owada record coming out on Cunningham's Piano label he was crying out for the right kind of attention, but still no bites...

So presumably Creed is "reduced" to putting out limited edition CDs in small galleries. It's some kind of tragedy then that "I don't know what I want", the one two minute fifteen second song on here is a bit super. For one musically it's built on a logical, rather than artificial rotation. Quietly shambling and genuinely touching, i love it. What's quite funny is that when you put the CD into your PC, CDDB recognises it as an album by a band called "APOTHEOSES" the song (erroneously titled?) "Orff's Carmina Burana Piece." This is either gentle self-reflexive prank or confusion writ accidental.

Bit of a flashback here. Ever since reading Dave Lang's excellent piece on SST at Perfect Sound Forever, I've been hunting for this record. The Tar Babies are definitely a very minor bit of history, but when you consider that the most fruitful and important strand to come out of that label has been not the Huskers or The Meat Puppets but The Minutemen then maybe The Tar Babies (the other funk-inflected act at SST) deserve more attention. Certainly I recall my big chum Sasha Frere-Jones singling them out for quiet praise and Dan Bitney one of the three member of The Tar Babies ended up in Tortoise. I rest my case.

So, at last, as is inevitable (records can't evade one forever***) I found it the other day. And was pleased to discover that "Fried Milk" (their first LP) is a little gem. Sloppy, fun, original, generously tuneful and something one comes back to for repeated listens.

Can I take my leather trousers off now?

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* Chatham had tuned pianos for La Monte Young and had his head turned by hearing "Beat on the Brat" at CBGBs, Creed describes his music as "Steve Reich meets The Ramones."
** Just like he blessed Curiosity Killed The Cat ;-)
*** Still searching for The Meat Puppets "Up On The Sun" incidentally.

Posted by Woebot at March 28, 2004 10:08 PM