WOEBOT

Comic Reviews.

Usually when I come across reviews of records as cartoons I groan. (groan). Like this one from a back issue of Audion. (groan).

Click to Enlarge.

Wasn't someone doing this sort of thing for Vice Mag too. (groan).

But look at these, by Nick Sylvester at Pitchfork, for a review of the Daft Punk Remix LP. See them in their original context, along with Nick's witty commentary, here. Classic stuff.

Grimestoppers Inc.

Wanted to briefly pick up the great blissed-out one's remarks re:Grime and thanks firstly to Angus who rode out of the swirling outback dust like Mad Max* to rescue me earlier. Reynolds himself has actually reflected in unpublished, behind-the-scenes correspondence** that he doesn't really like the term, and also that: "I wish someone would come up with a really hits-it-on-the-nail undeniable we-can-all-agree-on-this name."

Wiley's really gone to town with this himself. "Wot do you call it?" which I heard him deliver this at Eskimo Dance, and which is on the new LP, has lyrics which go: "What do you call it? Garage? What do you call it? Urban? 2-step?" etc ad nauseam. It's that the archetypal useless musicians cliche turned manifesto isn't it: "Don't categorise me!" Yep that makes me want to call it Garage... not just because it's dopey, but also cos you can't have lone musicians calling the changes. It's just not democratic baby!

Another reason I'm resistant to to Grime (beyond Angus's razor-sharp observations as given) is that "on the ground" you hardly ever hear the music being described thus, (to expand on what I said before) In the shops it's called Sub-Lo, or it's MC Garage, or it's 8-bar. There MC tracks are outnumbered 10 to 1 by Instrumentals. (This for reasons we explored last year. MC-ing mainly exists on the radio and at the dance, and the shops service the DJs who play backing tracks for the MCs.) Maybe the fact that the MC-ing records are still in the minority is a part of the reason the term "Grime" appears to be coming from outside the scene, where it's percieved (via Dizzee) as being an entirely MC-led art-form? Does that make any sense?

I've yet to hear ANY artists who are happy with the term (that's some kind of first surely). Wonder (who did the mighty "What" riddim and was a former member of Roll Deep) has found himself wedged between the FWD beat and "Grime" scene reflects in the RWD mag that: "...it's all just Garage." And, bear with me I'm getting to the BIG point, I think this might be the moment at which these genres stop subdividing.

Let's face Garage is shifting tiny quantities of records. Seems like I'm the only person buying it sometimes (wink) Luka told me the other day that he heard someone on the radio going (along the lines of): "so-and-so said he shifted a thousand records, man that is so not true." That's a joke isn't it! I think we've reached the final point of dance-music's expansion. The universe has already expanded to it's absolutely biggest point (maybe a year or so ago) and now it's contracting. Maybe what we're seeing is genres coalescing. The market share is so frigging small that to start calling such-and-such a genre isn't constructive business sense any more. We've got the insane situation where you have a artist (Wiley) declaring HE is a genre.

Plus whenever I hear someone refer to the music as Grime now, I know, I just KNOW that they've picked it up from a glossy, or a newspaper or the net. Just my opinion mind, and I get these things arse-about-tit pretty often. Anyway if it doesn't stick as a term those might be some reasons why.

* I'll be your Private Dancer bad bwoy...
** It's another Woebot exclusive.

Spotlight on Doobie.

My friend Doobie works for Max Read (Carol "The Third Man" Read's son) selling Limited Edition Prints and Multiples. Multiples are things like Piero Manzoni's Can of Shit.

Doobie has sold a lot of Dada/Fluxus stuff to Thurston Moore and recently we were chatting on the subject of Maurizio Kagel:

"We used to have a multiple by him...it consisted of a pair of scissors, with a larger loop of metal holding the handles of the scissors apart...thus creating a necklace...nice..."

Doobie's bible is the heavyweight "Contemporary Artists" tome by Colin Naylor & Genesis P-Orridge [sic]. He's also confessed recently to stocking some 7"s by Richard Long, though he's unsure what's on them.

Anyway, he needs a hand. He's got this Canadian 7" in and wants some info on it. Better still, I guess, a price he should put it out on sale for.

Ian MacKay! Isn't that the Minor Threat/Fugazi bloke?

So drop him a line if you can shed any light on it.

Erbert.

This is great. Thank fuck Herbert's got over his big band thing. "Goodbye Swingtime" had to be the worst, most pompous bit of crap that came out last year. This is a more muted exploration of the best parts of "Around the House" and "Bodily Parts." Is that what that green LP was called? I can't for the life of me remember. Less rubbish faux jazz, less irksome manifestos, less mucking around with utterly irrelevant found sound. If someone informs me it's actually pieced together from recordings of him and Dani baking bread I'll scream.

Apparently Herbert's new EP is great too, or at least that's what the folk at Soul Jazz said me when I picked this up. Yeah I go there. They were so busily telling me they undercharged me by a fiver. Usually I'd come clean, but was unsure whether I'd given them two tenners or...aw fuck it. It's quite a relief to be able to say nice things about Herbert cos (as I never tire of telling people) he's a close mate of a close mate. Yet more incisive music journalism at Woebot. Tomorrow I'll be doing a track by track breakout, except I won't.

Random Jpegs.

My nutty mate Gwen has been sending me JPEGS recently.

Gwen says of this: "heres what i'm listening to right now, unknown 10" issue with full music, cut-up text, sound fx. very nice." Mmm, I didn't know Goddard had put out a record. He's a bit of hero Goddard isn't he? Could I afford it? Was it even being offered up for my purchase? Like hell it was! Jamois you bastard.

I've a feeling he's mentioned this lot to me before. 1960's French maverick builds musical robots years before Kraftwerk?

Pope taps foot.

Gwen's in town this week and he's threatening to get me drunk.

Garage.

D Double E/Footsie: War Wid.

On Braindead records which is Tubby's label. I heard Tubby, who put out "Slush", on Rinse 100.3 FM this Sunday. He pretty much played instrumentals back to back. For the first time I thought, shit this is an instrumental set I can really dig, then my attention wandered. You've got to admit it, in terms of the instrumental, Garage has REALLY dropped the ball. You could happily listen to a whole evening of without an MC as recently as 2001, but now they're pretty dull on their own.

Tubby is placed somewhere between the Newham massive and the FWD breakstep crew. I said the same thing about Popadomz (Wizzbit & Riko Dan) and got my wrist smacked by a Ms. Fiddy. She says that Wizzbit has always made ruffer records; I said hang on a minute sweetheart he's on Dumpvalve. Whatever! Tellingly Tubby gave a shout out to Plastikman AND Wiley, clearly revealing his split allegiances.

D Double is now officially a loose canon. He's gone freelance, shows up on the Skepta record later. Luka was discussing recently Marcus Nasty getting out of jail and sacking Jammer first and then D Double. Old news innit. Marcus Nasty says that Jammer is "a snake" hoarding all the crew's money.

If D Double is free to show up on whatever records he pleases that can only be a good thing. He's certainly the next great MC talent to emerge from Garage after Dizzy. It's that bloody "Mui Mui" noise isn't it. Just so startlingly inventive! It's a mnmonic. A signal. That's it with D Double's voice isn't it too? It's weird. it stands out. I think MCs are wasting their time on lyrics, they ought to work on their sound. Ragga has always grasped this from Tiger to Elephant Man. You've got to find a sound that will burn through the airwaves.

"War Wid" is a fucking great track. It's the same combo of production depth and ferocious MC performances that made "Popadomz" the hit of 2003.

God's Gift: Girls Get Lend, To My Friend.

Well at this rate we're in for a absolutely scorching 2004. This is absolutely AMAZING. Gods Gift is one of those MCs who everyone doffs their hat to. He was in Pay As You Go with Wiley. Other stuff I've heard him on has been pretty good, nothing to write home about, like "Tribute to 32 MCs" (yeah OK your mudda likes it!) Gods Gift owns his own delicatessen! No he doesn't.

However, I've never heard him do a pure ragga delivery like he does on this excessively rude 12" (label reveals a close-up of a lady's snatch half-heartedly covered up with a couple of stick-on gold stars). This is blisteringly good, quite like Harry Toddler's "Donkey Kick" if it had really worked. This riddim, the Pum Pum Riddim, was all over the radio at Christmas. Other tracks on it which are good (and there are 3 EPs) are the More Fire version, a cheerful "la la, la la la la la la" chorus they give it. This riddim, by Commander B, rips a lot of ideas of Wiley's "Igloo", but so what, it's great. Spizzazzz crew also picked this up, so respekt to them.

Dice Recordings Presents: Life's a Dice Game Vol.1.

Holy moley! A 4 12" pack replete with cover put out by Skepta. This has got to be some kind of Garage landmark. Secretly I'd dreading other artists are gonna catch on. Wiley's Eskimo two 12"s weren't in anything as grand as a pack of their own. It's sort of like those dreadful, dreadful quadruple packs that started coming out of Jungle after first the Full Cycle and Dope Dragon packs (great) and then the Ram records pack (er, less great) and then a deluge. With any luck Skepta (who put out DTI as a double pack last year) is looking to US hip hop comps like the Ruff Ryders ones (or the slighly slimmer David Banner one) for his inspiration.

Still it's packed with great stuff, including "Serious Thugs" with D Double and JME, which we all know as "Thuggish Ruggish." That Boyz to Men sample and the whole G-Funk flava (think Westwood!) was a bit of a turn off, but I've come round to it. A lot of the record has quite a down tempo side to it, prompting me to wonder bout the state of the rest of the UK's Hip-Hop. The difference, well Garage is clearly looking to crunk; and the rest to The Roots, Hieroglyphix and less nasty rap. But you know, I could be wrong.....

Armour: In the Biz.

Another N.A.S.T.Y. solo venture on my latest fave label After Shock. This is THE hot label of Garage. Actually this track is only OK. Not nearly as firing as the "I Can C U, U Can C Me", "Frontline" or "Cockback." Armour is a bit boring. The main reason I've got it is that I keep going down the shop going: "Excuse me have you got Riko's "The Chosen One" in yet." To which they reply: "Nah mate, come back in a couple of days, we'll definitely have it then..."I'm going mad to hear/buy that record. Supposed to be well 'ard.

Woebot on Toast.

I've been wanting to comment on this for ages. In it Tom weighs up the pros and cons of various approaches to talking about (ahem) Garage. I thought it was a really straightforward, honest, heartfelt reflection which had much wider ramifications. I think he pigeonholed me pretty accurately too, not as "Someone who has dug into the context" but probably "someone who I can relate to as a listener?" Tom's reflection has come at a time when I'm undergoing a lot of criticism for what I'm doing here. Not just at the hands of celebrity bloggers hiding behind pseudonyms on discussion boards but also via a stream of "bashment-googlers", like this one. The message I'm getting LOUD and CLEAR across the board is that what I do isn't properly researched enough.

Not properly researched. The thing is, this is JUST a weblog. It's not a manuscript in the making. (grooms himself) I'd flatter myself by saying that it uses the medium of both the web (graphics, downloads, animation) and the blog (fleeting daily digestables, the personal angle) okay. I absolutely love doing it, but I'd make no claims for the earth-shattering importance of it. I'm just fucking about; having a laugh. Actually (here in response to Marcello) the Sun Ra thing wasn't really a proper bit of research. You were right. It was OK. It was alright. It was put together from what I remembered, what a few friends told me. I didn't go to bed thinking "Ha ha now I've showed them who is the greatest!" I went to bed thinking "Thank fuck I've got that one out the way." In fact relative to the shite I usually post (titter) it WAS quite well researched. The best thing I could say about it was that it mapped out the terrain pretty accurately. I didn't ask anyone to say nice things about it, on the contrary I asked people to come up with suggestions to improve it. Anyway I'm sorry if you (Marcello) thought it was crap, some people liked it.....er, I think.

As for the "bashment googlers"** who are on my case, again sorry folks. In fact Luke was the first to pick me up on my inadequate coverage of Garage. Since then Deuce's*** Chantelle Fiddy has also had a crack. And subsequent to that I've had 2 or 3 wideboys pitch into me. I've followed the "Ardkore continuum" pretty intensely since 1991. I've wandered off from time to time to check out other scenes (in 1993, 1997 and 2002) but I've been buying these records since then. I've never read in depth about these scenes. Certainly before the loqualisation of 2003 (when everyone started speaking in tongues) there was no real surfeit of language anyway. Now, along with super-chatty MCs, we have an explosion of gossip, where once there were just dumb monolithic 12"s and cat numbers. Previously, in the absence of the kind of social theatrics which you could always find rock scribes banging on about (ooh Jack White punches out a member of the Von Bodines!), the super-detatched poetic/philosophic approach which Reynolds and Eshun practised made a lot of sense.

The way I guess I talk about Garage is almost entirely from the perspective of the vinyl junkie. I'm not tuned into the pirates (often) like Luka, I'm not exploring the textureology in purple prose like wot Tim does (and yes I guess we do have a similar approach in that we're both detached). I'm certainly a less useful commentator than Reynolds too (of course, natch!) because he brings a depth of philosophical understanding to what he's talking about. But I know a good record when I hear it, I believe through sheer investment of interest I've earned the right to have an opinion and I try and impart some of the excitement I feel. Have you ever read an Urban magazine? (rhetoric innit) They're murderously dull as a rule.

I don't mind criticism that much. I didn't enjoy the wholesale writing-off of music-blogging as a practice which Marcello was keen to make us swallow when he shut down COM. That implicated too many people's endeavour in his desire to declare "It is finished!", but I'm not averse to constructive criticism. The worst thing about criticism however is that it builds up your own self-conciousness, and if I'm self-concious when I'm writing I find I get bogged-down. I start "writing" and the moment one starts "writing", in my opinion the energy, life and interest of whatever it is that you actually thought you were doing evaporates. It starts to become boring to write and boring to read. Thankfully there aren't many "writers" in the blogosphere.

I do TRY and get my facts straight (were there many glaring innaccuracies in Ra piece?), because essentially that's laudable, but I'd warn readers that what I'm up to is imparting my enthusiasm. I don't really want to get mired in research and I'll freely admit that sometimes I haven't got a fucking clue what I'm talking about (er, Italo for starters). Information only becomes "facts" when the last bit of energy it represents had has been sapped from it. A five word news flash which sucks you into your chair is followed 6 months later a 10,000 page tome which you struggle to read. If I was to take a more clinical approach, rather than proceed with wide-eyed innocence and enthusiasm you'd find this blog increasingly brittle. You'd also find me staking out territories jealously (facts here as the gatekeepers of the monographic academic), my ass freezing in some cultural backwater. On the contrary I'd like to remain impartial, free-roaming and to keep having fun. Even if it means I talk a little shite and fail to ever be an expert on anything.

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*I enjoyed Marcello's 1985 thing, and was about to post a friendly remark along the lines of "plenty to agree with here" then found him slagging me off anonymously on ILM. Sighs.

** Put "Eskimo Dance" into Google. Hey presto. Woebot!

**There's a vibe at Deuce. I'm now a subscriber, so maybe my facts will improve...

My Blogz.

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Bedroom Disco.

Forget the micro-categories for once. Italo Disco? Let's just call it Disco and be done with it. Italo as a conceptual grouping must be one of the weakest I've encountered anyway. No it's not necessarily Italian, no it's not necessarily European, it doesn't seem to have a sensible window of time (extending back and forth nearly fifteen years), it blurs deeply into Hi-NRG, New Wave Electro, Disco and even House. I'm fed up with the term frankly; if you're gonna categorise do it with panache. It's a bit of fraff innit. Likewise "Grime", but for different reasons. Grime is a crap term I've decided, and henceforth I will be referring to music of it's ilk as Garage. Not UK Garage, just Garage. I've never had trouble confusing it with the Paradise Garage or Nuggets/Pebbles variety in any context, so why should anyone else?

The JPEG above is a scan of the label of Rephlex records latest (re)-release. the Legendary Black Devil Disco Club EP. I think they're shaping up to be the world's greatest reissue label. Hipper than Soul Jazz (by a few nautical miles) and unlike Strutt/Nuphonic (RIP) packing a serious roster of new acts. OK (ahem) only 2 or so records under their belt, but doing proud. I hope they follow this path. You got a problem with that? You got a problem with me supporting them? Good.

The Black Devil Disco Club record has picked up a tranche (well a slither then!) of notoriety right here in the Woebot comments box. Here and here. It's been on constant rotation since I got my copy, a wholly 'riginal masterpiece of Bedroom Disco, up there with later examples of the genre The Black Dog's "Virtual" and KMA's "Kaotic Madness." Lean back and feel the mattresses on the walls. The tracks go and on, pedalling sheer gourgeousness for ten minutes a side, grooves which twitch and resettle, voices doubled and masked by repetitive synthsaxsquelches, hidden depths blinking open issuing striating bleeps. "Timing, Forget the Timing" and "One to Choose" bleed into one another, an upbeat and a drawn breath and we're in the same low-curving re-shaping trance-arc. Wicked.

The whole thing reminded me of nothing so much as this:

Which shares with the B.D.D.C. the same sonic scuzz and after-fuzz; I mentioned this in the Ra piece. Disco but nasty. Euro (White) Trash on a dancefloor field-trip. I know next to nothing about it, and there are only the merest fragments of data covering it on the net. Brilliant.

And check this, a bit of Throbbing Gristle-style Disco proper! I'd like to hear Kevin Blechdom do a cover of this. Awesome.

Back to Skool.

Was delighted to come across this ad in the back of yesterdays paper. I called the number and they said come on down. Which was on the floor above Office Angels on Oxford Street. I waited 10 minutes in the lobby (Aspidestra and a coffee table straining with back issues of Mojo and Q) before I was called in to see Tony.

Tony asked me if I'd had any experience of this kind of thing, whether I had any University qualifications (not that I needed them he said). I said I'd done some writing on the Internet, where I'd written exclusively about music for OVER A YEAR! Tony said: "Oh you think you're that bloke who's got a publishing deal do you! Wise up sucker!" He said you don't know anything sonny. Tony had apparently interviewed some of the big acts in the eighties: McCartney, T'Pau, Peter Tosh. People who had shifted serious units. Oh so you like that funny music do you Matthew! Tony proceeded to tell me some toe-curling stories about life on the road with Stiff Little Fingers. It's not what you know, any monkey can shuffle around on Google, it's WHO you know, and he hinted that previous graduates had been able to rifle through his little black book. One guy apparently works for Sky's magazine on the back of a phone-call Tony had made to a mate.

For the first 120 quid Tony would tell me what gigs I should attend, and he would mark 5 gig reviews. He'd also provide me with 3 recent promotional releases (2 Rock and 1 Dance) which I would have to review. One 500 word review and one 100 word review of each gig, again for his perusal. We laughed about the 500 review, apparently that gives the students a right headache. Tony said he could sort me out with a cracked copy of Microsoft Word if I needed one ("Word is your friend Matthew!") and even a laptop ("not the latest model, but satisfactory") I might even be able to get some things published through the course, not for money, but it always looks good on the old CV. The Academy has strong links with a load of mags.

Okay, that's not true.

This course is actually the brainchild of me, Dave Stelfox and Mickey Toughlove; and if you've got a blog or are a regular contributor to ILM you get a 25% discount (not applicable to over forties). We've got some big names down as Course Contributors; none of whom we've asked yet, but hopefully we'll get clearance before we publish the sylabbus.

Okay, that's not true either.

Dido...

...or Dildo as we refer to her in my house. Well, it makes us laugh. Isn't her career supposed to have tanked? Yet I noticed on TOTP that her Album is Number One! Will TOTP please sort out their bloody graphics; what's with these minute-long interstitials shown on horrific angles? And while they're at it they should sack that Kash idiot immediately. (As per k-punk's recent demands).

I have connections with Dido in a 6-degrees-of-separation fashion. Nothing to be particularly proud of, so I can boast of them freely. The house she lives in in Islington's previous occupant was my Dad's best friend; which was (a factoid for all the Grime fans) in the same square she was brought up in. Also my ex-girlfriend (may she rest in peace) introduced me to Rollo, her brother, at a Warehouse party a decade or so ago. That was before he was Faithless. I was interested to meet him largely cos of The Woodentops. I reckon The Woodentops, with their balearic take on The Feelies "Crazy Rhythms", might be entering the hip zone any month now.

Dido appeared in a dream I had last night, and all very chaste it was too. A local Jewish Deli had asked for a photo of her outside the shop holding some of their food. Later in the same dream I teased her (metaphorically pulling pigtails I guess) about being famous. Am I revealing more about myself than I should Dr. Freud?

What's Dido's recipe for success? Look at her new LP's title (and no I don't own a copy): "Life for Rent." You might as well call your record: "I am *AVAILABLE*" That's pretty canny mass-psychology, she looks like the kind of girl you wouldn't have too much trouble asking out for a drink either. Girls like her as well...

There was something I wanted to say to Dido (shaking fist at the sky): "Stop playing with my mind beyatch!"

Un Ra.

I have 25 or so Sun Ra LPs. Some of them are recent "semi-dodgy" reissues, some are from the early seventies batch of Impulse releases of classic Saturn material, some are bootlegs, some (9 or so) are actually original Saturn releases (gasp). There exist a few collectors who ONLY buy Sun Ra records; I've heard tell of at least one such nut. That's probably a sustainable habit because there is a universe within the man's music. You're also pretty well catered for quantity. In the wonderful "Omniverse" tome, put together by the leading Ra scholar Harmut Geerken, there are listed 189 records (a few of which admittedly Ra is not wholly central to). That's a staggering output which, I think, dwarfs that of all the competition. There will be releases which even Geerken isn't aware of I suspect.

In 1992 at a Record Fair held in Camden's Electric Ballroom I came across a guy from Birmingham who was standing over a school-room desk atop of which was a single, very large crate. This chap couldn't get mugged, he explained to me that he had received practically no interest in his stock, which was exclusively vintage Saturn releases he'd acquired from a garage sale (mmm). I remember looking through this selection of three hundred or so Saturns, all in their white cardboard sleeves, many of which were festooned with paintings and stamped with swirling linocut imagery, and not having a clue where to start. He was offering them for $50 a piece, which was (though mildly dear) a very good bargain even at the time. If I'd been more business-minded I'd have bought the whole lot off him. As it was I thumbed a copy of Disco 3000, passed it over and then suggested he call a dealer friend of mine. Which he did the next day, and who promptly bought the whole crate. They'd probably each fetch an average of about $350 today. Not a decision I really regret, but my mightiest brush with Saturn on vinyl.

I haven't come here to talk about Le Sun'y'Ra as such. I wanted to share with you a parlour game which I play with a few of my buddies. How often is it that one comes across the phrase: "That is just like Sun Ra." All the bloody time innit! It's one of the standard yardsticks for categorising and qualifying a vaste swathe of music. Well I thought it was about time someone tried to systematise that off-hand remark, and (puffs out chest) who better than me? (wheezes) What I've tried to do is examine the whole terrain, and through of a process of acutely disciplined selectivity and via much cogitation and some pretty deep research, come up with a fairly definitive batch of records which epitomise the "Un Ra."

This has involved leaving aside thousands of records, most of which which could be justifiably included: The entire oeuvres of Lee Perry, Fela Kuti, Magma, George Russell and Juan Garcia Esquivel; Figures like La Monte Young, The Residents, Om Kalsoum, Roland Kirk, Frank Zappa and Roky Erikson; The works of former Ra alumni like Pharaoh Sanders, Yusef Lateef and Brother Ah; Sonic bredren like Edgar Varese, Oskar Sala and Duke Ellington; and perhaps most sadly a whole lot of modern music by the likes of The Black Dog, Position Normal, New Kingdom, Jimi Tenor, The Polyphonic Spree, Quasimoto, cLOUDEAD, Killah Priest, King Biscuit Time, 4Hero, Scienz of Life and Underground Resistance. Yep it was a reet tuff task. Rather than calling me names (like "goggy" fr'instance) I'd really *REALLY* appreciate it if people would use the comments box to offer up their own suggestions for inclusions into the (ahem) very select canon. Please also forgive me if certain records are not accorded sufficently thorough annotation, this has taken me too long already (faints).

(Girds loins) In no particular order:

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1. Eddie Gale: Ghetto Music (Blue Note)

Trumpeter Eddie Gale, like the aforementioned Yusef Lateef and Brother Ah was a member of Ra's group in the early 1960s. He recorded this LP for Francis Wolff at Blue Note in 1968. The recording is "manned" by a sixteen piece group comprising a full choir. The tone is not entirely dissimilar to that of Donald Byrd's "Another Perspective" LP on Blue Note except that the singing, while also on a re-contextualised Spirituals/Gospel tip, are lot looser. The instrumentation, including colours like Jamaican Thumb Piano, Steel Drum and Bird Whistle is equally (satisfyingly) shambolic. The highlight of the record has to be "The Coming Of Gwilu," thematically matching the African-themed clothing on the sleeve. It's worth remembering that female choral vocals, what Ra referred to as "Space Ethnic Voices", the collective headed by June Tyson and featuring Ruth Wright, Cheryl Banks and Judith Holton (amongst many others) was key to the Ra sound. June Tyson was very important to the Arkestra's sound for years, as well as guiding the group's look.

2. Armando Sciascia: Impressions in Rhythm & Sound (Vedette)

This Sciascia Library Record, an absolute pearl (sustained harpsichords ahoy!), standing in for the whole Italian Soundtracks crew, comprising Bruno Nicolai, Piero Umiliani and Ennio Morricone. In particular I'm led to believe that Sciascia's Soundtrack to Metempsycho has moments of sheer unadulturated Ra-ness. The track "Latin Physics" supposedly a killer. On what grounds do this lot merit inclusion? Often as not they emerged from Avant-Garde roots, Morricone was famously a member of the collective Gruppo Di Improvisazione Nuova Consonanza, and yet they find themselves "hard-at-work", earning a crust as Film Composers. Often the material they have to score for is at the gutter end of the market, for Porn and Horror Soundtracks, ironically giving them more creative freedom than they might otherwise have had. It's at this juncture, between the cheap and avant-garde that they become Ra-esque. As is frequently commented on, at moments the Arkestra could sound like the most uncompromising protagonists of Free-Jazz, at others cheesy as brie, and therein lies their one of their charms.

I'm quite aware that this breakdown could be littered with Library recordings, in defense I'd make the standard criticism which I trot out on these occasions, that Library music (for me at least) lacks a philosophical and cultural agenda. To compare Ra's output (him the philosopher incarnate) with Library tracks would be entirely missing the point.

3. Tadd Dameron: Fontainebleu (Victor)

This from 1956, is a quite lovely example of orchestrated Jazz, splendid gutbucket stuff for a small group. Dameron had previously done arrangements for Jimmy Lunceford, Billy Eckstein, Georgie Auld and Sarah Vaughn. A Duke Ellington piece like "Black, Brown and Beige" would make the point I'm trying to here. That is that, whilst he receives praise and comparsion with artists in fields as diverse as Post-Rock, Techno etc Sun Ra would always view himself as a post-Fletcher Henderson band leader. Henderson with whom he was endlessly proud of having worked with. In this sense, ditch the spacey trappings and you have a character not dissimilar from Tadd Dameron. A simplistic though sympathetic reading.

It always amuses me to read on Ira Gitler's liner notes for this: "In 1949, Tadd went to the Paris Jazz Festival with Miles Davis and remained on the other side of the Atlantic to write for England's Ted Heath." Heath who became famous later as a Conservative politician and Margaret Thatcher's nemisis.

4. Hildegard of Bingen: Feather on the breath of God (Hyperion)

Some commentators believe Hildegard Von Bingen's visions were the result of her suffering from acute migraines. This reminds me of the theories that Einstein was in fact an Aspergers Syndrome sufferer. It's bland and reductive isn't it? Why not just accept them for their wondrous individuality and genius? Is her assertion that she was the recipient of divine visions any worse an explanation? Hildegard lived between 1098 and 1179 when she went from being abandoned by her family at birth to holding court to the Kings and religious leaders of her day. Hildegard shares with Sonny a devoted cult of initiates (though her pulling power far exceeded Ra's), a very personal and kooky cosmology and a penchant for forging otherworldy music music.

One of Hildegard's Illustrations from Scivias

This recording, graced by the exquisite voice of Emma Kirkby features "reed drones' throughout it, marking it strange even in the generally peculiar world of Gothic music (Leonin and Perotin are both among La Monte Young's declared influences). David Tibet is apparently a fan, and when I wrote to Harmut Geerken in 1998, offering to source a copy of Sun Ra's "Live at the Gibus" LP (Geerken had lost his copy and I had tracked one down) he sent me this postcard, the stamp of which was one of Hildegard's pictures. Very cosmic innit.

5. The Jonjun Crew: Lost in Space (Tommy Boy)

Space. Maybe Ra's overriding obsession. Here is Sun describing his abduction by aliens from John F. Szwed's definitive biography "Space is the Place", the first three quarters of which is likely to be the most inspiring thing you'll ever read. So go buy it. Sonny returned from class and found his room-mates huddled over his bed, reading his diary and laughing:

"They were having a good time. So then I abolished the diary. But I still retain the memory, and in there I said that these spacemen contacted me. They wanted me to go to outer space with them. They were looking for someone who had my type of mind. They said it was quite dangerous because you have to have perfect discipline...I'd have to go up with no part of my body touching outside of the beam, because if i did, going through different time zones, I wouldn't be able to get that far back. So that's what I did. And it's like, well it looked like a giant spotlight shining down on me, and I call it transmolecularisation, my whole body was changed into something else. I could see through myself. And I went up. Now that's what I call an energy transformation because I wasn't in human form. I thought I was there but I could see right through myself.

Then I landed on a planet that I identified as Saturn. First thing I saw was something like a rail, a long rail of railroad track coming out of the sky, and landed over there in a vacant lot...Then I found myself in a huge stadium, and I was sitting in the last row, in the dark. I knew I was alone. They were down there on the stage, something like a big boxing ring. So then they called my name, and I didn't move. They called my name again, and I still didn't answer. Then all at once they teleported me, and I was down on the stage with them. They wanted to talk with me. They had one little antenna on each ear. A little antenna over each eye. They talked to me. They told me to stop (teachers training) because there was going to be trouble in schools. there was going to be trouble in every part of life. That's why they wanted to talk to me about it. "Don't have anything to do with it. Don't continue." They would teach me some things that when it looked like the world was going into complete chaos, when there was no hope for nothing, then I could speak, but not until then. I would speak, and the world would listen. That's what they told me.

Next thing, I found myself back on Planet Earth...."

The Jonzun Crew's "Pac Jam" is certainly pointe zero for the strain of electro star-worship that one finds in the Underground Resistance World to World/Galaxy to Galaxy series of records, and would you believe it, Sun Ra gets thanked on the sleeve's reverse!

6. George Duke: The Inner Source (MPS)

Recorded the year following Duke's departure from Frank Zappa's group (and don't ask me what Zappa records he was on cos I don't bloody care) this is a very rare and wonderful slice of electric jazz on the German MPS label. It's softer than Herbie Hancock's "Sextant", which would have made a more obvious choice for this slot, but less flabby than the Weather Report (though apparently "Non-Stop Home" is amazing). Ra, with his rocksichord, and via Bugs Hunter's engineering wizardry on records like "Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy" (1963) was the pioneer of synth music in Jazz. Whether that puts him ahead of the game across the board I'd be loathe to say.

7. Karlheinz Stockhausen: Illimite (Shandar)

Alongside "Ceylon" and "Stimmung" one of the most florid and mystical of Stockhausen's recordings. Witness Stockhausen in interview with Peter Heyworth in the book "Towards a Cosmic Music":

Interviewer: Can you say how you know about Sirius?

Stockhausen: It would lead to a misunderstanding and false interpretation. It is an inner revelation that has come several times to me, that I have been educated on Sirius, that I come from Sirius, but usually people laugh at this and don't understand it, so it doesn't really make sense to talk about it. It is alright to talk about such things privately, to one who is willing to understand and has similar visions, but it doesn't make sense to talk about it in public.

It makes quite a stark contrast to the usual image of him as an arch modernist doesn't it. Though perhaps this is widely known? Ra and Stockhausen were also both deeply engrossed in The Urantia Book, a 2,000 page-long "channeled tome" which they were each given in mysterious circumstances in the early seventies. It's also amusing to note that Stockhausen once attended one of Ra's concerts which clearly confused the hell out of him: "The first hour or so was avant-garde music of the very highest calibre, then it became like a hotel band."

8. Teo Macero: What's New? (Columbia)

In which Teo takes side one. Very Ra-like in the most superficial ways, highly-structured odd-ball Jazz orchestration. But of course beyond the sonic similarities Teo Macero is a crucial link between Jazz (the remixing he did made Miles's "In a Silent Way" and "Bitches Brew") and the Avant-Garde. In this great interview hosted at Jason Gross's Perfect Sound Forever site he describes Edgar Varese as being like a "second father" to him. Varese's "Ionisation" is as close as the classical music world comes to sounding like Ra, closer even than John Cage's Prepared Piano pieces.

9. Arthur Lyman: Taboo (HiFi)

It's quite easy to view Ra as a kind of more spiritually commited practitioner of Easy Listening. See also Eden Ahbez's "Eden's Island."

10. Unknown Ethiopian 7". (Emporio Musicale)

This 7", from the collection of my good friend Sacha Dieu, is pure Ra. Jazz from the Far East FOR REAL!

Part of the mythology around Ra centres upon his visit to Egypt in December 1971. In an extraordinary moment of synchronicity, the collector Harmut Geerken picked up a black hitchhiker who asked to be taken to the pyramids. This gentleman turned out to be Ra's perennial stalwart (and the man who can take some credit for affecting John Coltrane's later direction) John Gilmore. Ra ended up recording with Geerken's friend Salah Ragab on a number of occasions most notably on "The Sun Ra Arkestra Meets Salah Ragab in Egypt plus The Cairo Jazz Band." Ragab was a jazz afficionado, drummer and percussionist and was formerly in charge of the Military Music Department of the Egyptian Army. Ragab was one of the very few non-Afro-American musicians to work with Ra (Talvin Singh being another).

Ra's visit and dalliance with Egyptian music singles him out as deeply courageous and forward-thinking. For all of Rastafarianism's focus on Ethiopia, and Afro-American music's "Back-to-the-motherland" inclinations there exist precious few instants of collaborations between musicians of the (notional) diaspora. It's missing the point to invest too much meaning in this, and unrealistic to expect more (there are the financial considerations to consider, plane tickets aren't cheap), but yet it does surprise me. Instances of trans-cultural meetings of this type are certainly more common in recent years, though as always they're no guarantee of worthwhile music. In terms of Jamaica there is only Lee Perry's recordings of two African visitors at The Black Ark, elsewhere only Guy Warren's work, Olatunji's dalliance with Ra and Coltrane (Did they record together? I don't think so), Ellington's casual encounters with various third word assembalges (more later), Roy Ayers's LP with Fela Kuti, the work of Ahmed Abdul Malik and a brace of lesser examples before disco and Laswell-style Global Futurism make it a normal working practice.

In recent years, thanks to the work of Franco Falceto, who has curated the wonderful series of Ethiopiques records, Ethiopia's Jazz-inflected music has been made readily available in the West for the first time. Prior to this Modern Ethiopian music of the sixties and seventies has been under-represented, available only on a few compilations. It's a wondrous treasure trove of sounds too. It's arguable that the greatest auteur this series has unearthed is that of Mulatu Astatke. Mulatu's music is superb and I incite you to track down Volume 4 of the Ethiopiques series (an absolute *MUST HAVE*), it's a bejewelled, languid, eastern-tinged Ra-like hallucination of jazz. At once groovy and mysterious. Here is the limited edition vinyl reissue of the same CD, which you might still be able to snap up if you don't nap:

We'll be coming back to this Eastern Jazz theme. Pay attention, no nodding off in the back there!

11. Patrick Cowley: Mind Warp (Megatone Records)

Italo, or is it Hi-NRG? Cowley was Sylvester's producer, behind huge hits like "You Make Me Feel Mighty Real." This is perhaps the disco twin to The Jonzun Crew record. The sleeve graphics (ahem, MUCH better than the record) are what sealed the deal here. The Indoor Life record on Celluloid, especially "Voodoo", which Cowley produces and plays on is the killer.

12. MC5: Kick Out The Jams (Elektra)

Och aye the noo! The McFive. Better get this out the way for all the Lester Bangs groupies. I saw Sun Ra live actually. I saw him at a free concert in Central Park in the Summer of 1992 where he shared the bill with Sonic Youth. It was one of those iconic moments, embodying the spirit of the ESP label, where Sun Ra and other Jazz heavyweights like Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler and Alan Silva rubbed shoulders with Arty-Primitive Garage Punkers like The Fugs and The Godz. By the time I saw him Ra was by this time unable to walk and was pushed up to his piano on a wheelchair. If truth be told the vibe wasn't really happening, the Arkestra seemed tired, but you know "I was there!" Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore famously sold his entire collection of early Sonic Youth recordings to fund his purchase of a vaste hoard of Ra vinyl.

From Szwed: "Under (John) Sinclair's musical and political tutelage, the MC5 took rock and roll in directions it had only teased about before. They came on stage carrying rifles and guitars, their amps emblazoned with inverted American flags. They played thirty-minute songs, planned an album to be called Live on Saturn, tried to get ESP to record them, created versions of Archie Shepp's, Pharoah Sanders's and John Coltrane's compositions, and recorded "Starship" on their 1969 Kick out the Jams Elektra album using a poem from the back cover of The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Vol. II ("There is a land/Whose being is unimaginable to the /Human mind...")

John Sinclair, founder of The White Panthers and the band's manager and svengali, went as far as bringing the Arkestra out to Ann Arbor in Detroit for a series of concerts and moved them to the house adjacent to the MC5. Amusingly Sonny was: "shocked by their hippie lifestyle- their language, drugs (Ra never took drugs), their state of undress and the Police Surveillance which followed them. And to make matters worse some of the Arkestra's musicians were drifting over to hang out with the ladies in Sinclair's place." Aah you've gotta laugh...

13. Oliver Messiaen: Turangalia Symphony (RCA Victor)

Odd almost cheesy electronic instruments (the Ondes Martenot), CHECK, Composer with obsessive, bordering on the curious, religious cosmology, CHECK, Disciples in evidence (who *WASN'T* tutored by Messaien), CHECK, Far Eastern strand (Seiji Ozawa conducts here the most famous performance of the picece, twinned with Toru Takemitsu's "November Steps" for good measure), CHECK, Pop Art Sleeve (Robert Indiana's "Love"), CHECK.

14. Count Ossie and The Mystic Revelation of Rastafari: Tales of Mozambique (Dynamic)

Not such a struggle to slip this one in, while the "Grounation" Triple LP might have fitted better (sheer quantity was one of Ra's strong points) this has the advantage of more distinct horn charts, it's not a percussion smorgasbord. Ossie was responsible for the heavy driving drum accompaniment on The Folkes Brother's "Oh Carolina" which distinguishes it from the preceeding Jamaican R&B. Ossie's method of playing is "Burru" a Rasta style of percussion. Lloyd Bradley uses the hit as the birth moment of Reggae.

Duke Ellington visited Count Ossie on his trip to Jamaica. According to the LP's liner notes: "He urged them to tour the world and let others hear their music of Peace and Love." They appeared at the Newport Jazz festival with the pianist Randy Weston too, both of which events strongly tie them to the Jazz tradition. Like alot of the pivotal figures in early Reggae, Coxsone Dodd, The Skatalites etc, Ossie was a Jazz maven. To seal it's status as "Un Ra" check these remarks by one of the band's circle:

"Think about the Creator of the Universe, the one out of whom in whom out of in which we are manifested and moved, think about the Sound-Mind which is the vibrating consequences of the rhythm.

Listen and you'll see this Music which came from Outer-Nothing to Out-Nothing, the Void, in response to the Burning Need for Nothing-Else: for nothing-else will do:

The mystics are two much Black Magic, High Energy, Soulful, Tribal, Solar, Rasta, Tighteous Sounds which totally bombard the Senses and provoke a tidal-wave of Positive-Thoughts.

If Creation is what Conception aspires matter to Be; then the Mystics are the Concious Creators of the Antennae that receive Visions of a more Communal/Tribal Life and transmit these Visions/Hopes into Concrete Realities."

I rest my case ;-)

15. Disney Original Soundtrack: Dumbo (Disney)

Ra's introduction to Disney came at the hands of Hal Wilmer. Wilmer asked Sonny to cover "Pink Elephants on Parade" for the Tribute to Walt Disney's films entitled "Stay Awake." Ra found he could identify with Dumbo, the ungainly, gentle, asphasic individualist and particularly the far eastern imagery found in the "Pink Elephants" sequence itself, of course most notably the pyramids. Here are some screenshots I have artfully hacked off the Dumbo DVD (bit of an interval this):

Ra proceeded to undertake an entire tour as "The Disney Odyssey Arkestra", playing themes from the Disney songbook, and Walt rose to prominence among Ra's pantheon of the divinely inspiring alongside Fletcher Henderson. I'm not entirely sure, but Ra's love of Disney may have inspired "Sleeping Beauty" perhaps my favourite Sun Ra track ever, which still remains unissued.

16. Marion Brown: Afternoon of A Georgia Faun (ECM)

An early early ECM record, before they'd dovetailed into the svelte and vacuous. One of my favourite Ra stories comes not from within the mythology, but outside it. A musician, whose name I can't recall, made a passing comment to the effect that he'd been in Philadelphia and had popped in to the Arkestra's communal dwelling to witness them "bang on cans." It cracked me up anyway, because there is so much earnestness invested in Ra scholarship, at least as much as Ra and his cohorts invested in their painstakingly practised "free" music. But that little comment says so much, throwing a kindly but revealing light on the proceedings in hand. If Ra lived next door to you (or me!) we'd think he was nuts. Harmless, but nuts.

This Marion Brown recording operates in a similar seemingly amateur manner. The title track, a riff on Debussy, is just this. A recording of folk clapping coconuts and whistling. Very atmospheric however and a means, through it's inclusion, for me to avoid talking about free jazz in any greater depth. "Un Ra" covers that turf too, I could have dug out LPs by Francious Tusques, AACM or The Globe Unity Orchestra but I don't really have a stomach for it. Next!

17. Philip Cohran and The Artistic Heritage Ensemble (Hefty)

Which I'd slept on buying, but rushed to pick up for this survey. Don't be slack folks! The original of this would probably set you back a thousand or so dollars, AND it'd be scratchy. Cohran, who received a marvellous extensive write-up in The Wire a couple of years ago, played what he called a Frankiphone, essentially an amplified Mbira or African Thumb Piano. It's an indelible sound. His group ply a deep funk which some commentators have compared to Kool and The Gang, causing me to flash on both the marvellous Kool LP "Love and Understanding", featuring one of my fave rave up tracks "Universal Sound" and also the fact their Michael Ray chose to ditch life with the band to join Ra in the Arkestra. Oh and the Cohran LP has very "June Tyson" vocals courtesy of Patricia Anna Smith.

Funnily enough who do you think was thumbing the bin beside me when I picked up this? Gilles Peterson innit. I'll growing a goatee next.

18. Harry Partch: Petals (CRI)

Another fan of Ancient Philosophy, another Beatnik who treads a single-minded path through the post-war landscape of American music.

19. Eddie Palmieri: Exploration (coco)

Proving once again that deep jazz psychedelia isn't just the province of Afro-American music. It's the B-side you want, specifically "The Mod Scene (Lo Que Pasa Hoy En Dia)" and "Random Thoughts (Pensamientos Desconectados)". In truth the mood invoked is closer to "Bitches Brew" and "In a Silent Way"-era Miles though, like Ra's recordings, Palmieri's electric piano is to the fore and the sleeve evokes a Mayan/Egyptian/Interplanetary agenda.

20. Andrew Hill: Points of Departure (Blue Note)

Neither my favourite Hill (the Blue Note out-takes on "One for One" are unmissable) nor my favourite peak-period Blue Note Free Jazz record (Alfred Lion cut the BEST sounding free jazz with Eric Dolphy's "Out to Lunch", Ornette Coleman's "The Empty Foxhole" and Cecil Taylor's "Conquistador") but still wholly unavoidable. Hill was a mysterious pianist born and raised in Port-au-Prince in Haiti. I've often found the cult of Hill (like Ra a post-Thelonious-Monk Pianist commited to formal innovation) co-existing with Ra's and I've always been keen to hear Hill's "Grassroots" LP.

21. Scriabin: The Poem of Ecstacy (Everest)

Unfortunately I haven't had the time to tease apart Alexander Scriabin's connections with Theosophy, however clearly this Russian Romantic composer was bound up in Ra's mind with the works of Madame Blavatsky, Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. If you want to find out more about Blavatsky go here. Scriabin is widely feted for "Prometheus, The Poem of Fire" Scriabin's fifth symphony (from Szwed) "with a chorus (and audience) dressed in white, and an organ which played lights and colours" and "The Mysterium", a piece with a week-long duration which would "literally destroy the world and raise the human race to a higher plane at it's finale." Strictly speaking "The Poem of Ecstacy" is his first deep foray into the devotional and metaphysical, it's wonderfully overwrought, florid, passionate stuff. Just like that sentence.

22. Gil Evans: The Individualism of Gil Evans (Verve)

Another bandleader exploring the possibilities of jazz orchestration, when strictly speaking the Jazz orchestra had no cultural currency. The era of Ellington and Basie, at it's latest in the fifties, was the time when the big bands were "alive." Figures like Ra and Evans, whilst creating brave new sounds, are essentially throwbacks to that golden era. "The Barbara Song" off this is incredible.

And I'll take this opportunity, which I missed when talking about Teo Macero, Miles's other great collaborator to pose the suggestion that the Japanese-Double-LP-era of Davis's ("Get Up With It", "Pangea", "Dark Magus") is (coughs) vibrationally in thrall to early sixites Ra records like "Art Forms and Dimensions of Tomorrow", "Astro-Black" and (of course) "Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy." Discuss.

23. Cedric Im Brooks and The Light of Saba (Honest Jons)

I was recently quite disparaging of this reissue. Silly me. I've had the Saba LP on a CD courtesy of my mate Steve Caruana for a while and never really enjoyed it. This however has a whole LPs extra of material, much of which is the deepest instrumental roots you could dream of. Don't miss the reissue.

Now I get to chasten some sloppy tarts who have been wrongly informing people that Cedric Brooks played with the Arkestra. He didn't. But he DID visit Ra in Philadelphia (maybe at about the time Sonny was working on "Languidity") and witness proceedings:

"We went to Sun Ra, which really got me into the whole kind of vibes, because they were playing jazz, but it was a mixture of all the jazz styles, because they had some really good musicians with them. The energy of the music expressed the philosophy he was talking about. I was very much taken with that, I was over-awed by it. They had a discipline, and actually I was trying to get involved in it, but I had to wait to go through the steps that were necessary.....When I left Philadelphia to come home to Jamaica, when my second daughter was born, I decided to pursue the music in that way of Sun Ra."

24. Hermeto Pascoal: Slaves Mass (Warner)

Physically a freak and a proponent of the electric piano to boot. Notable immediately for the squeezed "Live Pigs" played by Airto Moiera on the title track. Very Ra that. Hermeto cuts a much more impressive dash when seen live. I was lucky to catch him at the Barbican a few years ago. He had a rent-a-band with him, but one or two imported Brazilian soloists. What stuck in my mind, beyond the goofy/charming theatrics in which the entire ensemble play children's toys, was Hermeto recounting a game he and Airto play when they're alone together. They have to guess what kind of sound an object will make when it is struck: a tree, some railings, a discarded tin can. Hermeto explained that an object's sound is it's soul.

25. Ahmed Abdul-Malik: East meets West (RCA Victor)

See also "Jazz Sahara". This one from 1960, years ahead of it's time. Both records recently reissued. This an original (swoon).

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Abyssinia.

Nice.

Thanks to Doobie for these

Normal Service Will be Resumed Shortly.

Wazzup!

A picture of a Banana by Dick Bruna, author of the Miffy Books. Ring any bells?

A minor "State of the Blog" address I'm afraid.

1) Yay, I got mentioned in Ben William's Metacrit round up at Slate! Thanks to all the Slate massive.

2) Hi to Stephen Pastel, who I bumped into in Woolworths in Glasgow at Christmas Eve. My first words were, "Oh Yeah, you know my friend Jon Dale!", to which Stephen replied, "Isn't he that BLOGGER?" They'll write it on our gravestones Jon.

3) I hope everyone's enjoying their CDs and such. I've burnt through a stack of 50 or so blanks keeping up with the demand for sounds and thanks to David Laister in Austria for sending me the Sharky Major tune on vinyl. What the hell was doing out there?

4) There is an absolutely HUGE piece in the pipeline at the moment. (Cue embarrassed shuffling by Woebot readers; er HUGE, doesn't that spell like *really boring"?) Let's hope not folks! I've actually put more time and energy into this than any other previous post either here or at TWANBOC, it has required alot of R'n'D. Hope you enjoy when I finally deliver.

Milkshake.

I was driving down the Portobello when I came across this poster, illuminated in bright sunshine, red pitched against a deep blue sky. What an awesomely arresting image! I stopped the car and snapped it. It's a bit of genius design, utterly uncluttered by marketing microtype; just Kelis in pink sitting on top of a gigantic milkshake.

Very naughty of course, and in keeping with the high-school imagery of the song:

My milk shake brings all the boys to the yard,
and their life, it's better than yours,
damn right it's beter than yours,
I can teach you, but I have to charge!

The single came out ages ago in the USA, and for some reason it's only been available over here as a Star Trak Import, only now gaining a British release proper. I think it was the only good Neptunes record of 2003; Snoop Dogg's "Beautiful" had it's fans, but it does nothing for me. And "Milkshake", what a strange song! It reminds me of nothing so much as the curious "left-footed" club tracks on Sleeping Bag records, like Nicky Siano's "Tiger Stripes" and The Jamaica Girls "Need Somebody New", too artful and sexy to groove conventionally, even seeming to move backwards. Another reference point must be Eve's "Gotta Man" which also pimped a naive, insouciant, lollipop-licking chorus. I mean, lets be frank!

I thought The Neptunes had shaken off Kelis. I read interviews with her where she dropped Pharrell's name one too many times; telling how she was involved in helping to conceive their clothing line. Unlike Missy, who *wrote* a massive amount of Timbaland's material, she seemed a dispensible pawn in The Neptunes fame game. I that found really sad. I liked her attitude alot, she seemed sufficently courageous to hold on to her gentle sexuality in the media glare. I thought she dared to be tender. Look at a woman like Madonna, and I'll probably be labelled sexist for this, but is she not a bit TOO ballsy? I respect powerful individual women, but isn't softness an incredibly pursuasive tool?

Trying to think of precedents for the kind of imagery Kelis uses here within the field of pop, I came up with a few leads, but none which had the same psychological depth.

Here for instance is Janet Jackson off of her debut LP cover. There are similarities here with the "Lolita" imagery Kelis is manipulating, though obviously (well it is the Jackson family!) there are more complicated overtones. Janet was probably very young here, whilst Kelis is a fully-grown woman.

Iconographically this is my favourite pairing:

Donna Summer from the reverse sleeve of "Love to Love You Baby', obviously a head-to-head combination of Black Southern Belle (itself a powerful detournement):

Vivien Leigh in "Gone With The Wind"

and Fragonard pastiche:

There are mildly disturbing overtones to "Milkshake", not just owing to it's US High School Disco trappings, but also (in this poster) of the commodification of women. "Take a lick" the image says. The project's head keeps it's head above water largely because we trust in Kelis's control over her own image. However none of this could be conceived as shocking in a culture dominated by the likes of Britney Spears and Girls Aloud and their desperately cynical use of similar imagery.

Of course K-Punk (at the old address) discussed with reference to Christina Aguilera's "Dirrty" and Adolf McGrrot, the notion that women pimping their sexuality who were under the impression that they were liberating themselves, were sadly deluded. I have strong sympathy with the idea when run alongside Kylie Minogue and Ms. Aguilera, but such is the understatement of Kelis's tack that I'm more than inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt. Certainly I can't bring myself to get overly worried about it in this instance.

But take a look at this!

The similarity is undeniable, well OK she isn't wearing any clothes... Mel Ramos had, early on, a profile matching Lichtenstein's and Warhol's. It always amuses me to see his paintings in the same tomes alongside more knowing self-reflexive "sexists" like Tom Wesselmann and Allen Jones. Ramos is the Russ Meyer of Modern Art. I think he's an interloper, someone who just happened to share some approaches to the construction of pictures which filtered through from Graphic Design as Hockney et al. Ramos's later work really shows him up to be the tawdry (yet funny and fascinating) artist he is.

Very similar image to the Kelis "Milkshake" layout though producing very different codes. Oh, and have a laugh at this! It's really so wonderfully awful!

Kelis got married to Nas. Did you hear the story of what happened what they met? He said: "Wow, I'm so glad to meet you, you're the girl I'm going to marry." And she said: "Well that's funny cos you're the guy I always wanted to marry." The lady knows what she wants.

Burning Decks 23.

Here's the tracklisting for my set last night. With any luck Resonance will be able to supply an mp3 again. Sorry if you missed it, I didn't engage in the mass email promotion I did last time.

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1. Wizzbit feat. MC Riko: Popadomz
2. Nebula II: Peacemaker
3. Mescalinum United: We Have Arrived
4. Millsart: Step to Enchantment (Stringent)
5. DJ Hype: Weird Energy
6. Acro: Superpod
7. The House Crew: Maniac (The Final Conflict)
8. DJs Unite: Bass Penetrates
9. Noise Factory: My Mind
10. Basic Channel: BC03 (With Bloggers Shout-Outs)
11. Durrty Doogz: Hold Me Down
12. Just-Ice: Cold Gettin' Dumb
13. Rampage: Wild For Da Night
14. The Wiz: The Wiz is a Genius
15. Divine Styler: Make it Plain
16. Mike Ladd: Airwave Hysteria
17. Footsie and D. Double. E: War Wid
18. Juvenile: U Understand
19. The Horrorist: One Night in NYC
20. Andy C: Mind Rise
21. Doc Scott: Drumz
22. DJ SS & EQ: In Your Eyes
23. The Mover: Over Land and Sea

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Once again special "tanks" to Jim Backhouse and the engineer Jim. It was well doomy!

Burning Decks.

Tune in to Resonance 104.4 FM at midnight tonight for a Woebot "Burning Decks" session. Expect massive choons and a casual approach to beat-mixing (yawn). Shouts to all crew.

Glad to be "Gay"

My friend's Michel Magne record sleeve reminded me of Gerard Hoffnung. Hoffnung is a strange beast. He's an example of that unholy creature, a parasite on a different mode of expression. In this way he's rather like the music journalist, well of course he IS a kind of music journalist. This type of parasite never gets the respect that the practitioner themself gets, and what he produces is always seen as a charming but inferior "art." Like we care! There's always been a strong strain of music fetishism (and the collector's pathology) in comics, one only has to look at the Crumb/Zwigoff axis for evidence.

I went to a Hoffnung concert in Edinburgh once (aged 14) and it was brilliant; like his drawings the perfect antidote to classical music's stuffiness. The performance I remember most clearly featured a singer on stage who was repeatedly interrupted by someone in the audience coughing (if memory serves). The soloist went from frustration, to consoling the woman (a plant, which *REALLY* shocked and delighted me at the time), offering her a glass of water, to striking up an amorous duet with her. Well it's just pure Cagean/Kagellian buffonery innit!

Hoffnung's drawings have that charming (usually infuriating) quality of classical music culture, that of delicacy and piety. One word sums up the mood of his work to my mind, "gay." And I mean here, "gay" in it's old usage. It's a shame people aren't "gay" anymore. They're either rushing on joy or smugly content. I like "gay" people. I like gay people too!

Liquidamente 1956

His Master's Voice 1953

Bass Flute 1955

The Flute and the Piccolo Flute 1955

Tenor 1956

Signs of life.

Gareth with one of the more individual charts of 2003.

When Phil says he's got Ricardo Villalobos in his crate...he really means it.

Nuff action at SFJ.

Citta Violenta. Where blog entries have bibliographies.

Post Punk Post.

Jay and Nik "hipped" me to the controversial recent issue of Mojo which has succeeded in making quite alot of folk feel old. Along the lines of: "*this* in MOJO, what next?" There is also an EXCELLENT piece on Arthur Russell in it written by my mate Dave Mandl, which manages not to double up any of David Toop's exhaustive (and also great) portrait in The Wire. I've now heard it on two personal accounts that the material which Audika is about to release (and I'm talking here about the hitherto unreleased stuff) is quite astonishing. The major domo of Audika keeps calling a friend up, practically in tears, lost in disbelief at the treasures he's sitting on. The thing about the Soul Jazz record (nifty as it was) was that nutters like me already have that material now. In my case (natch) on original 12"s, not on the admittedly enticing bootlegs which have been subsequently in circulation. The only track on there I didn't have was "Pop Your Funk," which was once only available as a 7". That Soul Jazz record should have come out in 1995 (at the very latest) and mopped up after David Toop's Ocean of Sound. At the time I remember Phillip Glass was rumored to be releasing the entire back catalogue through Point Records, but in the end all we got was "Another Thought", which (if you'll forgive me for being frank) isn't THAT great. It'll be fascinating to see Russell's cache go through the roof with all this mooted bounty; actually I can't wait, I think he's going to reach a new plateau of adulation, the kind of one Can are resting on, rather than languishing in the eaves as a highly-respected curiosity.

The main reason I wanted to pick up on the MOJO thing was to quite gently throw a little mud, to break that other of my New Year's Resolutions, that of not engaging in professional envy. You see now I've succumbed to a spot of "Bumfighting" the dam has burst! I'll try and be even-handed. Anyway, Jon Savage has just about all the respect he could possibly muster. His "England's Dreaming" account of Punk is regarded as the best book on Punk. He's even described elsewhere in the same magazine his "C-30! C-60! C-90! GO!" Post-Punk breakdown featues in as: "probably (that) movement's most astute chronicler." I'm afraid I'm not that keen on his chart which the editor's strapline rather crudely describes as "the ultimate Post-Punk Tape." In fairness Savage's own description of it is much more muted: "a companion volume to the excellent Rough Trade Shops compilation, Post Punk 01."

Firstly there's an awful lot of B-sides in there (I'd say four too many, not including Eno & Snatch's cut-up "R.A.F" which does quite justifiably merit inclusion). Sorry but this fills me with dread. Secondly, and this is really the fulcrum of my argument, WAY too much rock-ism. I 'spose this is wholly justifiable after a fact, there was a lot of rock swilling around at the time, but what made the whole phenomonen worth re-investigating in the 21st Century (as far as I was concerned) was it's NON-rockness. I'm sure The Screamers, Subway Sect, Siouxsie and The Banshees, Metal Urbain, The Sleepers, The Urinals, The Prefects, Wire and Joy Division (yes them too) are very fascinating (and I wont pretend to have heard all these tunes so am clearly talking out of my arse to a certain extent) but they seem a bit plodding and pubby to me. On reflection maybe Savage's trajectory, *though* Punk and *into* Post-Punk is what defines his angle, maybe it's MOJO's editorial line. Where's Mark Fisher when you need a helping hand? I'm afraid that the whole PP exhumation is going to leave us with two concrete things; Junior Senior on TOTP and The Face's barometer showing The Cure rising.

I think I made EXACTLY the same comments about the Messthetics series of Bootlegs last year (yay there's one New Year's Resolution I'm gonna be able to keep, repeating myself). That collection was too rockist too. You find one or two diamonds on each of those CDs, the rest of the tracks are johnny-come-lately three-chord wonders. Yikes. And while I'm having a whinge I thought it'd be worth mentioning that there was quite a stale aroma to some of the tales surrounding Post-Punk dug up elsewhere in the mag (mercifully not in the cheerful and sparking Savage piece). It felt like some accounts were not third-hand, but eighth hand, passed down as oral tradition in the tar-stained pubs of Camden. For this reason, amongst others, I'm particularly relishing Reynolds' book, which hearsay suggests is absurdly deeply researched, with an exhaustive set of new interviews conducted, most of which won't even fit in the book, so vaste is the amount of fresh material which has been generated.

I was hoping to be able to identify with confidence the track which Savage has said he's omitted from his selektion. I was SURE it was implog's "Holland Tunnel Drive", I happen to know he has a fondness for it too. I was anticipating being able to completely ruin the competition as it's been organised. But then I spotted it's one of the tracks he's confessed to not finding room for. I'm genuinely curious to find out what it is.

Euro Disco.

Frequent readers might remember a feverish craving I had for Italo Disco. Actually the mission to put out forgotten classics from this period is well under way. Beyond recent, official, releases of music of the era on the "The Secret History" comp, there are avilable semi-legal things like the boot of Scotch's "Penguin Invasion" on Dig-It International, shadier records like the Automan bootlegs (which feature stuff like Kebekelektik's "War Dance" and disco edits like "Preaches and Prunes", rumoured to be a Ron Hardy-style cut-up executed by K. Alexei back in the 80s). Furthermore there are the Music Box series of bootlegs (dedicated somewhat spuriously to reviving tracks played at the legendary club of the same name), quite a number of which I picked up early last year.

I did a little more research and tracked down this earlier series of reissues put out in the mid-to-late eighties by the ZXY label. From 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 right up to 15. That's a hell of alot of music, and surely just the tip of the iceberg. Scary really. The thing is, I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that what I've heard through recent forays "in the field" (ya dig?) doesn't really put parmesan on my fusili. There is a slight emptiness to the sound. That's never really upset me in Detroit Techno but somehow the emptiness in THAT music conveyed an ontology, a philosophy; it's a thrilling void that one finds in those records. Italo on the other hand seems a little gormless, a bit bland. I'm still hoping that the tracks (ahem) I've been promised by my esteemed colleague Dan Selzer change this perspective. I'd MUCH rather it was a goldmine of inspiring tunes. It might be worth mentioning that Optimo's DJ Twitch was sharing his own lukewarm feelings towards the genre with me the other night in Glasgow. Maybe this is one point where the retro impulse might run aground; likewise it's rumoured that Belgian New-Beat (which is currently garnering support) is also not all it's cracked up to be. How can one make such broad generalisations about Genres? Easy really.

One of the reasons I was disappointed to find Italo Disco not living up to my hopes for it was that I had finally worked out a way of getting to grips with Micro-House through it. Micro-House, I flashed, at it's best and most proper is the living extension of Italo Disco. Not a tributary of Techno as had been previously thought. Micro-House is an urbane, cosmopolitan, existential, sexy dance music. The same attributes characterised the colder European end of Disco. Just picture the Italo Disco fantasy of glitterball discos in exclusive ski resorts, of fur and yaucts, of upwardly mobile philosophy graduates from the Sorbonne dancing clutching champagne bottles; and map that onto Micro-House. Makes perfik sense dunnit. OK sure this generation of mainland Europeans are cautiosly camoflagued in combat gear, but the accoutrements of "the street" are a millimetre thin veneer. I guess it's an apposite symmetry, because I struggle to get any pleasure from Micro-House too. We'll see.

Oh yeah whatever.

(screams) aaaaaaaaargh!

I'm a fookin prisoner of my fookin reputation. I'm doomed to live my musical life by proxy. Doomed to the gentle charm of record company types too strapped for a PR budget. You'd better hang tight next year crew. If you thought I was winging it in the last twelve months, you're in for one hell of a surprise. It's going to be wall-to-wall bhangra. Just you see! Bhangra every day. I know even less about about bhangra than I do about Grime. Readers might be interested to know that I failed the Grime module at the Luke Davis Academy of Urban Music. More Heronbone bashing in a minute.

I'm a fookin prisoner of my fookin reputation. How come everyone else just gets to do a little informal speech, serve up some random ill-though-out waffle and I feel duty bound to produce these MAGNUM OPUSES. One after another. For no money. No money at all. I am a fucking idiot. A TOTAL idiot. Readers might be interested to know that my mentor Simon spends hours making his posts look informal, squeezing in those "authentically ardkore" spelling mistakes. Perhaps that's what's everyone is doing, though I doubt it.

If i want to write a load of shite I bloody well will. So here goes:

It's been an unusual few weeks at Heronbone my first suspicion that something was "a brewing" came on December 23rd, 2003. Part the cloud of your festive hangover and think back to that day just before Christmas. Young Luke, or Luka Vandross (as he quite occasionally refers to himself) accused senior dance music journalist Mr. Simon Reynolds of being "a moany old bastard". He proceeded to pepper his prognosis of the direction of the musical movement foreigners are referring to as "Grime", with what looked like cyrillic icons. Huddled amidst the more recognisable text were euro signs, letter "a's" appended with the french circumflex, dollar signs and the trade-mark icon. How very curious! I checked the esteemed Mr. Reynolds own daily journal and there seemed no attempt to rebut the young pretender's insult. No hint of annoyance, no sly post explaining that he was neither "old", nor "moany" nor "born out of wedlock". It seemed that young master Luke had failed to arouse the ire he seemed desirous of.

A few days passed. Mr. Davis presumably became involved with the business of Christmas. I'd hesitate before drawing comparisons between the firebrand and shit-stirrer we know and love and Tiny Tim from Dickens' Christmas Carol. Still loosening his belt from his hearty turkey dinner Davis took time to draw our attention to a squabble that had occurred a few weeks before between a Mr. Robin Carmody and a Mr. Nick Southall. It must have seemed to Davis that there was yet more fun to be had at goading these two highly-respected intellectuals into further infighting and mutual recriminations. Davis was careful to provide hyperlinks so inclined people would be enabled to soak up each person's arguments and mull over which polymath they would be most advantageously aligned with. Davis iced the cake with a scurillous truc of his own invention, a fight the two great thinkers were accused of having in the past: "sparked when an argument concerning the merits of Talk, Talk's maudlin magnum opus 'laughing stock' reached boiling point, Carmody accusing Southall of being 'a pussycleet' and Southall respoding in kind, calling Carmody 'a battyhole.'" Nestled in there, lest Southall assume he was the recipient of Davis's support (hinted at earlier in Davis's description of Southall's response as "spirited") was a below-the-belt jab at Talk Talk, widely understood to be Southall's favourite pop group.

On the following day, Sunday 28th December 2003 Mr. Davis started his "blog-du-jour" by tossing a compliment to Australian Blogger Mr. Jon Dale. Feeling perhaps that, amidst his already commited and subsequent posts, he would be wise to have the good Mr. Dale "on-side". Keen on this day as well to maintain his own "internet-image" as a high-minded gentleman, an intellectual at heart, Mr. Davis discussed a book he had been suggested might be worth perusing by one "jamie." There, however, once again, was that charmingly underhand heronbone compliment: "pretty (good/fascinating) as it goes" suggesting Davis, whilst aware of the book's virtues, might not feel to compelled to pack it with him on a long transatlantic cruise.

Yet Davis's hidden agenda reared it's ugly head once again on Wednesday December 31st, 2003. He backed Mr. David Stelfox into a metaphorical corner with this: "stelfox says 'I'm not particularly down with narcissistic, anarchic, undisciplined, self-indulgent ranting, wherever it may appear.' b-b-but, but, dave, i thought you liked heronbone!" Presumably Mr. Stelfox felt duly bound to approach the maverick Davis and insist that he did in fact "like his writing," that he was actually "down with the heronbone thing." Davis cackling from the sidelines, confident in his own daily journal, unconcerned (susbsequent to this political artifice he had constructed) of Mr. Stelfox's opinion of him. Very wicked! And then, dear reader, I too became sucked into Davis's psychopathological vortex. Upon first confronting Davis's comments: "matt's right of course, if you want to pretend to be a music critic this is the place to be" I felt delighted to receive such approbation from a colleague. To be linked by means of hypertext. Especially from a mind as sharp and widely-respected as Mr. Davis's. Then, however, the sentence, or "nearly sentence", as it was deprived the dignity of a full-stop, sunk past my outer-defences and troubled my own self-worth. Pretending to be a music critic, but, but, but... Davis went on to remark: "sometimes i like pretending to be a music critic, but it's not a role i inhabit with any conviction. sometimes i like pretneding to be a poet, and sometimes, when i'm really excited i like to be pretend to be divinely inspired." And yes, at that moment I too saw the genius of heronbone. All the other bloggers, why they're just "writers", wordsmiths, pen-pushers, plodders, ham-actors. The word "writers" i kept returning to. Yes, I'm just a "writer". I'm not touched by divine fire! I'm not a radio, dammnit, I'm a filing cabinet! All these dense feelings of self-doubt bore down on me.

The next day, Thursday 1st January 2004, Davis returned, not to wish us the best of festive cheer, but to threaten us not to "bite" his style: "for the new year, if any boy gets paid for ripping off heronbone i'm coming round your yard and busting up your hands with a nine pound hammer, you'll be typing up articles with your nose for the rest of your life. don't think i'm joking either, thats my resolution." Actually I was momentarily relieved, for though it was blunt I knew from whence this statement was issuing. I myself had recently expressed a thinly-disguised unease at being an amateur surrounded by the cream of the world's music journalists, and like Davis, seemingly unable to secure a proper writing attachment. Davis rounded off his day by remarking: "i had a couple of beers and a couple of zoots on me own last night and left it at that, and thats the way i wanted it so fuck off," which was, once again a legitimate expression of his own feelings. I myself had been in a nightclub in Glasgow (Optimo if you're curious) on my own, where I made the mistake of writing a post on my handheld communicator describing the scene as it unfurled before me before posting it on the internet, whereupon I discovered I was in the bar of the club, not the main room. Thus that the broadcasted statement was not only inaccurate but potentially hugely embarrassing. Yes, I too like Mr. Davis knew what it was to be "abstract" on New Years Eve. I noticed a day or so later Mr. Stelfox "big up" Mr. Davis, saluting his sound method of dealing with the worst night of the year. Perhaps here was David's heartfelt approach to Mr. Davis's earlier remarks.

On Friday January 2nd 2004, Mr Davis lay his cards on the table: "here's my prediction for 2004, the breakup (acrimoniously preferably) of the blogsphere. we'll alkl splinter off into little subgroups, which will split again and agin, getting smaller each time, like fundamentalist protestant sects, with a new schism each week. people will write things like, of sourse,now there is no 'blogspohere' as such, just a series of small sattelittes without a planet to orbit." Plain as day. And I'll wager the machivellian thinker Vandross sees his central roll in the coming the year as engineering this collapse in our wholesome communication. One might not like his dastardly tactics but his nerve is breathtaking. Davis proceeded by issuing a spine-chilling statement to the broader inkies: "the other thing i'm dreading is the amount of pure bollocks thats going to be written about grime in the magazines and the newspapers ('you can't defeat the griminess') i'm seeing it already and my heart sinks, please please please do a little research before writing down your ill-considered, ill-informed opinions to paper, if you don't know your plasticman from your wiley, your dubstep from your griminess, your jammers from your digital mystics", which undoubtably must have set many teeth on the "so-called-blogosphere" on edge. I know I was worried. Why? Because I quite patently know NOTHING whatsoever about Grime. I buy the records, oh sure, but when the chips or down that just means I have(n't) expendable income. People are now really worrying. Deuce magazine's subscriptions double in a matter of hours. Argos sells out of sturdy FM Radios. Davis proceeds by lauding the widely respected Spizzazzz crew, a husband and wife team, widely acknowledged on the Internet as well-versed in their particular topics, and thus a safe political harbour for many an internet skirmish. Once again I marvelled as Davis's acumen and astuteness, covering his rear so superbly. Finally, and bringing you up to date, Davis lambasted the press (and thus perhaps tacitly the Internet Grime contingent, Reynolds spared here): "hipsters were laughing at this music last year, don't forget that, probably still would be if it weren't for reynolds and the 'trickle-down effect' so if you realise that you're like that, that you have no real love for the music, you just namedrop it to seem like you're still down with the kids then you really need to take a long hard look at the contents of your soul, maybe take a couple of months of work, think about the direction your life's going, how did you become reduced to this? grubbing degenerate, pederast by proxy..." My lord he's scary.

Where all this is leading I have no idea, though don't be surprised if you see a serrid line of second-string internet music music fanatics swinging from ropes o'er Tower Bridge, the furious Mr. Davis roaring with delight and pinching prostitutes at a nearby tavern. Oh yes, I'll be there too, swinging in the chill January air, my tongue lolling from my mouth while seagulls peck my eyes.