WOEBOT

Wikkid!

Mr Agreeable
Mr. Stubbs with an once supremely laid back and sound reflection on "ABSTRACT ART VERSUS ABSTRACT MUSIC". Stubbs muses why Avant-Garde Music has failed to attract the audience which Avant-Garde Art has before proceeding to nail the conundrum with this reflection: "Sound is more insidious, circumambient, less easily shut out, permeates deeper into our heads, subliminally, perpetually. Which can be distressing. A painting you can take in, move around, move away from."

Abstract Art seems to benefit from the containment implicit in it's form. It's worth musing that the most outre, least containable forms of Modern Art are invariable repackaged for the gallery: Land Art in the form of Photography (is Land Art not a strain of Photography?) and Performance through the medium of poorly-shot badly-lit video (ha!) I wonder if the mutant strains of the Street Avant Garde (Darkcore, Sampladelic Hip-Hop) could be seen as a digestable formal recontextualisation of Avant-Garde music; not a workable parallel really...

Elsewhere Mr. Stubbs provides a stout defense of "Calling Out Of Context." Raining on the Russell reissue parade was a mean thing of me to do. People who haven't heard "World of Echo" might not be aware of the sheer power and enormity of that piece. An equation with it is possibly the stiffest comparison any recording could have to undergo. It's the best record EVER by quite a clear margin, and folk should be extremely excited that it'll soon be available again. Funny how Mr. Stubbs makes a case for Russell's removal from the Disco canon while here we were arguing precisely the opposite! Incidentally (plug) that RealAudio feed is working splendidly now, the channel is clearer than it has been and the comments box is open again.

Search and Delete
An excellent piece by one of my fave new-links: Don at Search and Delete. "Ten of the Best: Sleng Teng" is an cute breakout of Sleng Teng's history. I mean to rifle through the racks and dig out some more Junglist uses of the riddim for Big Don.

Derek Walmsley's Poplife
I permalinked Deek rather shadily a while back. Here he picks up the Vincent Gallo thread with his usual aplomb and grace. Note to Reynolds, Ewing, Clarke: Look! Another MVE Alumni!

Oliver Wang's Poplife
A recent behind the scenes scuffle between Luka and me foundered on my wholly innacurate claim that Souls of Mischief had a brilliant small-circuit release before their classic "'93 Til' Infinity" LP. My principal belief in this record's existence stemmed from having (I believed) found reference to it the excellent compendium Classic Material which I'd thumbed through rather greedily in an East Village Bookstore. Googling the web provided no break-out of the LPs listed in the tome (really, excellent) but I discovered to my glee that the editor, one Oliver Wang had a feckin' Blog. Soon I put two and two together and realised this was thee O. Wang who graced the permalinks at Catch Dubs and SFJ. Doh!

I emailed Oliver and he got back to me to inform me that...................the Souls........first........LP........was.....in fact.....indisputably....."'93 Til' Infinity". And I was having such fun confusing heads behind the counter in Hip-Hop shops demanding a copy of this record! Since that auspicious day I've been checking in at Wang's regularily and it has rapidly become one of my favorites. It's his unusual tone which hooks you at first. Permalink on the way Oliver!

Silver Dollar Circle
Simon, who must have escaped appearing in my vote-winning breakout of fave blogs the other day by a whisker. Great stuff.

Posted by Woebot at April 14, 2004 08:04 AM