WOEBOT

Shopping in Soho in more Detail.

Prompted by my good friend Job de Wit I thought I'd delve a little deeper. Marks are given on a scale of one to ten, with ten in London held only by the Notting Hill Music and Video Exchange branch of Soul and Dance and their Collector's First Floor. Apologies to people with lives and people who buy CDs.

Oxford Street Area.

1. HMV Oxford Street (7/10)
Excellent Dance music and some choice reissues. How do they do it? The best major by a mile.

2. Out on the Floor (8/10)
Tucked behind Virgin on Hanway Street a grimey ally-way. A diamond mine in the sense that one has to dig a lot to find scant but valuable gems. And you get your hands mucky. And you need a boliersuit. And one of those hats with lights on them.

3. Virgin Oxford Street (1/10)
A very handy short-cut through to Tottenham Court Road.

Berwick Street Area.

4. Wotsit (2/10)
Not it's actual name. Never been in there, never actually been tempted past the Blue Peter/Trade cut-outs in the window. Not my kind of (hard) bag.

5. Selectadisc (5/10)
Boring. Nearly mainstream. Nice selection of magazines.

6. Reckless Dance (8/10)
Slightly over-priced (collector-speak for "they know what they're selling"). Always nice to gaze up at the racks on the wall and see what the staff deem serious kit. The alumni here are almost as hardcore as the Notting Hill M&V crew, but not quite. Often playing very ropey Jazzy Techno in the background for some reason.

7. Reckless Rock (7/10)
Managed by my friend Fred. A bit scrappy and the collector's basement has been neutered recently with stuff being siphoned off to the Dance Store, but a respectable outlet.

8. Soul Jazz (9/10)
On Broadwick Street. Aren't you surprised!?! Nine out of ten! I think this lot have come a long way from Sounds of The Universe in it's previous incarnation. This store is now a better bet than Rough Trade, which is sliding into a bit of a ghetto. Their Disco, Electronica and Rock sections are almost as good as their Jazz and Funk. Formidable.

9. Koobla (6/10)
Quite a recent discovery for me last year. I was pleasantly surprised. Basically a DJs shop but shearing into the "eclectic". Nothing to write home about.

10. Daddy Kool (6/10)
Run by Keith, the big white bloke with the red nose, who must be one of the most miserable characters alive. Keith has been regularly rude to me since 1989 when I first started visiting the shop. I don't think he works at the counter any more, but he's always on the phone whingeing at the dude who is. Daddy Kool are in the basement now, a more generic dance shop having taken over the top floor (3/10). Oh and they don't stock very much Ragga like they used to.

Conversation topics to avoid: Jungle or indeed anything that might possibly have ripped off (been influenced by) Reggae.

11. Vinyl Junkies (3/10)
Boring DJ shop.

12. Thingammy (3.5/10)
Not it's real name. Is it Jazz Records? In that horribly seamy pedestrian precinct running from the foot of Berwick Street (Peter Street) to Brewer Street. Eclectic selection but TERRIBLE stock. Like Out on the Floor a mine, but a mine exhausted of it's natural resources by a greedy dictatorship.

13. Music and Video Exchange (5/10)
The equivalent of those crap M&Vs which trail off from Bayswater Road on the way down to Portobello. You'll only occasionally find good stuff here.

Conversation topics to avoid: "Can I listen to that?" Indeed any conversation at all.

14. Sister Ray (4/10)
I HATE this shop. Rubbish selection, terrible pokey racks you can't get your mitts in. Staff who never seem to know what the hell I'm asking for. I'd give them a one, but have to grudgingly admit they've half an eye on the zeitgeist.

D'Arblay Street Area.

15. Uptown Records (9/10)
Not just for their Garage, but mainly. Their "Urban" selection on the ground floor is also solid.

Conversation topics to avoid: Don't even bother asking for anything over a month old.

16. Blackmarket (6.5/10)
If I bought house music, this is where I'd go. But I don't. If I bought Drum and Bass, this is where I'd go. But I don't. The Garage section is pretty half-hearted, definitely a poor second to Uptown's.

Conversation topics to avoid: Any sentence with both the words Garage and Jungle in it (especially when Ray Keith's around). Cos Garage done ripped off Jungle seen!

Poland Street Area.

17. Mr. Bongo (6/10)
For sure a very useful stop for back catalogue Hip-Hop. However theirs is a slightly crippled vision of Hip-Hop (don't forget your backpack)...

Conversation topics to avoid: "Er excuse me have you got the Jay-Z record?" Cue much scoffing and raised eyebrows. "Not our thing mate." I do this just to annoy them now.

18. Phonica (7/10)
As per. Not bad but never going to be as good as Soul Jazz.

19. Harold Moore's (8/10)
On Great Marlborough Street. Bumba ras klaaat! You'll find some great ethnographic stuff and smatterings of excellent Avant-garde music in the basement.

Conversation topics to avoid: Make sure you know your Symphonies from your Sonatas when Nibbles is about!.

20. Deal Real (6/10)
Probably quite good. Doubles up Mr. Bongo, and doesn't do it as well. Never bother with it myself.

-

Blimey, that might even be useful to someone!

Shopping in Soho.

(Sipping Bacardi on chaise longue) In the spirit of meta-criticism I will no longer be reviewing records, only record stores. Following in this same vein we won't be talking genre, only distributors. We'll be discussing pressing-plants, audio software, and styli. It's blowing in the wind ladies!

Does Soho need any more record stores? There's a ridiculous amount at the moment. Walking south down Berwick Street there's Wotsit, Selectadisc, Reckless Dance, Reckless Rock, Soul Jazz, Koobla, Daddy Kool, Vinyl Junkies, the Music and Video Exchange and Sister Ray. On D'Arblay Street there's Uptown and Black Market. Walk South down Poland Street and you have Mr. Bongo and now ANOTHER store, Phonica.

I thought Deal Real (the Hip-Hop vendor) had shut down and tut-tutted to myself about the areas over-saturation with stores, ruminating (gleefully!) about the collapse of the dance music market and then found it had only moved round the corner to Carnaby Street! What's that all about?

Phonica is quite a handy shop, the typically "eclectic" round-up (ie no Garage or Gabba), and healthy selection of Kompakt/Perlon/Playhouse. In this manner it reminded me of Koobla. The store has a much better design finish than Koobla (upmarket like Soul Jazz innit) replete with coffee table littered with Tufluv's FACT magazine and retro furniture for the punters to "chill" out.

My friend tells me that Phonica was set up by the same team (Heidi and Simon) who were originally charged with setting up Koobla by a wealthy backer, before finding themselves swamped in his chosen staff. So they found themselves a backer of their own and set up their own store. More power...

Everything you ever needed to know about fish's hearing.

Ur-Gerausch.

I had wanted to put together these ideas as a comic. Not just for a laugh, but also because it would make it a lot harder for anyone to pin me down, accuse me of being a half-hearted academic pimping half-baked ideas. The reason I couldn’t was twofold, the quotes I dug out would have been too long to fit within a comic’s structure and I didn’t think I could have generated enough imagery without resorting to filler shots of me pontificating in a fireside armchair. You dig?

-

Recently I’ve had ample opportunity to put my most special Christmas present into action. I was given a pair of those Bose "Quiet Comfort" Earphones by my lovely wife, ads for which often feature in the Sunday glossy inserts. If you’ve read the spiel you’ll know that these earphones use noise-cancelling technology to cut out background noise. Ambient incoming sound is mirrored and a negative aural impression is electrically generated so as to cancel it out. They’re quite ingenious, and work pretty well. Not all sound is excluded but what you might describe as "the body" of sound. Wearing them enables you to listen to deliacte music in noisy surroundings. I’ve been listening to the super-quiet Vashti Bunyan’s "Another Diamond Day" on the underground on the way into work, and the effect is incredibly eerie. You don’t have to pump up the levels to be able to hear. Part of the misery of listening to music on earphones comes when you have to pitch the volume at ear-shatteringly high volumes to block out the background clatter. You end up with bleeding ears. It’s even worse in the car on the motorway isn’t it?

The day before yesterday my iPod was buggered and I went to work with the earphones switched on and without any music. It was quite pleasant actually. Mid journey I took them off when I realised to my embarrassment that the mini-jack was swinging around freely. Qu'elle horreur, all those commuters being confronted by this lunatic wandering around with earphones on and no attached Walkman! As a result I was struck by the full force of the sound of the Northern line at 9.15 am. I wondered: Are my fellow commuters aware of this torrent of noise which surrounds them? Once one becomes immersed in noise one quickly becomes ignorant of it, one tunes it out. The background roar of traffic, a processor cycling, the extractor fan, wind rustling in the trees, waves lapping at the shoreside.

Cicero’s "Scipio’s Dream" tells of how Scipio is briefed by one Africanus whilst they float together in space. Scipio asks:

"What is this sound so strong and sweet that fills my ears?"

to which Africanus replies:

"This is the melody which, at intervals unequal, yet differing in exact proportions, is made by the impulse and motion of the spheres themselves, which, softening shriller by deeper tones, produce a diversity of regular harmonies."

From which declaration we might chart the concept of the Harmony of the spheres. Africanus goes on:

"Skilled men, copying this harmony with strings and voice, have opened for themselves a way back to this place, as have others who with excelling genius have cultivated divine sciences in human life."

It’s quite interesting to reflect that in the history of music great store has been placed upon the notional beatific and harmonious properties of the Cosmic Sound, but hark, as Africanus’s next comment contradicts this:

"As where the Nile at the Falls of Catadupa pours down from lofty mountains, the people who live hard lack the sense of hearing because of the cataract's roar, so this harmony of the whole universe in its intensely rapid movement is so loud that men's ears cannot take it in, even as you cannot look directly at the sun, your sense of sight being overwhelmed by its radiance."

This "auralisation" of the sound of the cosmos describes it as one of deafening volume, of incandescent white noise, yet the stereotype of essentially cosmic music might be Bach or late Beethoven, even as Harry Smith playfully suggests in The Anthology, a hoarse folky croak, but not plain old noise.

What I find most powerful about Africanus’s description is the idea of a universal sound which we cannot hear. Whilst it’s easy to imagine the universe generating a constant noise which is beneath and above the boundaries of our perception; a sound which exists along the lines of the sub-audible sonics heard issuing from the Black hole in the Perseus Galaxies, and recently picked up by the Chandra telescope to the tune of B Flat. It’s more difficult to conceive that we might be permanently engulfed in a raging sound we have come so accustomed to that we can’t hear. The father of this notion of an inaudible sound would have to be Rainer Rilke.

Rilke only wrote twice at any length on the subject of sound. His most famous concept, which crops up regularily in (yawn) cyber-discourse is that of the "Ur-Gerausch", which translates as "Primal Sound." Rilke was privy to some extremely early experiments, more like games even, exploring the mechanism of analogue reproduction. Fellow pupils and he spoke through a cone attached to a bristle of a clothes brush onto a wax cyclinder, imprints of their voices becoming indelible upon it. Later upon examining a skull Rilke found grooves naturally etched in it’s surface:

"By candlelight, which is often so peculiarly alive and challenging, the coronal suture had become strikingly visible, and I knew at once what it reminded me of: one of those unforgotten grooves, which had been scratched in a little wax cylinder by the point of a bristle!"

Prompting him to imagine what sounds these marks would release when played by a Gramophone needle. The underlying idea, of course, has these grooves themselves as being impressions of a sound played onto the surface of the skull. What sound was this?

To stretch the example into the realms of the (slightly) less prosaic one might wonder whether it would be possible to extract ancient conversations from pots spun in Greece and Mesopotamia. Again I’ve been meditating on the noise which gradually builds up in the grooves of my records. Someone must have reflected before that beyond the more literal explanations of the degradation of recorded music (a faulty needle, blim burns from stray joints, a child’s vomit), there must be an element of surface noise which is in fact the noise of one’s own environment being recorded onto the disc as one plays it to listen to music? For, of course, the process of recording onto vinyl/shellac and hearing the impression left therein is the same. This posits analogue recordings as always being somewhere on the incline between music made manifest and the repository of (inevitably encroaching) noise. Instead of treating noise on our records as a menace as Friedrich Kittler, Media Professor at Humboldt (more on him later) highlights, maybe we should be more forgiving to it:

"As we know, every record comes with interference. As connoisseurs we are not allowed to hear this interference; just as in a theatre we are obliged to ignore both the line that sets off the stage and the frame surrounding the scene."

The whole subject of noise’s place in music is a well-worn history, and not one I want to explore in much detail here. Whilst nosing around for this piece however I came across some quite cute citations as to the origin of noise’s intrusion into music. Kittler, is fond of describing Wagner’s Ring Cycle as the pointe zero:

"In Tristan, Brangaine was allowed to utter a scream whose notation cut straight through the score. Not to mention Parsifal's Kundry, who suffered from a hysterical speech impairment such as those which were soon to occupy the psychoanalyst Freud: she "gives a loud wail of misery, that sinks gradually into low accents of fear," "utters a dreadful cry" and is reduced to "hoarse and broken," though nonetheless fully composed, garbling."

My own favourite example of the relationship between noise and music comes not courtesy of Jimi Hendrix* but via Lee Perry’s late Black Ark recordings. Much is ascribed to Perry, yet it never fails to grate on my nerves how his genius is so frequently misunderstood. By endlessly overdubbing his own recordings and methodically re-feeding them back into the reel-to-reel Perry practised "bad" recording-studio techniques and encouraged the build-up of tape hiss. The usual logic dictates that you clean up sounds not subsume them in static, and yet that’s just what those pulsing phased sounds are on Black Ark records, sculpted shit. This isn’t as facile as the whole "bug-in-the-bassbin", "abuse-the-glitches-in-the-software" approach because the material Perry is manipulating is organic and totally without his control, it’s a considerably grander and weirder modus operandi than bottling and re-marketing Cubase errors. Added to which the noises he’s sculpting are analogue-generated, thus the sounds of the universe, the sound of earth and air and water, not the spasms of electrical circuits.

Friedrich Kittler remarks:

"Because their data travel along physical channels, technological media operate against a background of noise which determines the signal-noise-ratio, as does blurring in the case of film or the sound of the needle in the case of the gramophone. That is [according to Arnheim] the price they pay for delivering reproductions which are at the same time effects of the reproduced. Noise is emitted by the channels media have to cross."

Kittler, who I was hipped to by Tom McCarthy at The International Necronautical Society**, is very into radio as a medium. He’s re-tooled Rilke’s notion of "the static of angels" to explain the interference which affects radio signals. To Kittler the noises which impinge into radio transmissions are manifestations of Rilke’s "Ur-Gerausch." While some Avant-Garde music has played lip-service to this kind of idea, for example Robin Rimbaud’s Scanner project which filters voices from the ether (and tarts them up rather gimmickily with ambient drones) it’s more fruitful to find examples of the intrusion of noise into music anywhere on your FM dial. Failing that DJ Wrongspeed’s*** recent (and excellent) collage of the detritus of FM London is an entertaining stop-over.

Poor radio-signals are the stuff of Pirate Radio. Not only do they serve to disguise music in tantalising veils of static (quite often the records one hungrily tracks down after hearing them on Passion, Desire and Kool are substantially less sexy than one imagined them to be) they’re also signposts to a whole other dimension. The superb clarity of the kind of dub-plate to CD masters that I compile for my own pleasure are often too dessicated to enjoy. It’s the leaks and buzzes, crackles and noise which rightfully form half of the Pirate radio experience at it’s most enervating. It’s conceivable that the reason Pirate Radio is exciting is (beyond these superficial sonic additions) that through it’s faulty transmission it has plugged into the raging heart of the cosmos.

I’ve had the good luck recently to be able to put together two excellent quotes which perfectly illustrate the "cosmic" dimension of radio interference. The first came courtesy of my good friend Jon Dale. It’s a snippet from a wholly engrossing interview with one Don Bolles, former drummer with LA’s legendary Germs, and owner of the most extraordinary collection of Avant-Garde records I’ve ever come across. Dale brought Bolles to my attention because he owns a very healthy amount of "The Silver Records" (see the Me! Me! Me! Section on the links bar). Here is Bolles on shortwave radio:

"…around ’67, I started liking the shortwave stuff I was getting because it was just insane, amazing music- it sounded better than any music I heard anywhere. It had reverb all over it from bouncing around the ionosphere and it would echo and do all this amazing stuff, and you knew there was something going on there that wasn’t part of some kind of hideous marketing agenda."

Which makes the perfect twin with this comment from Jah Wobble:

"When I was a teenager I was drawn to listening to shortwave radio oscillations, primarily as a means of helping me sleep. I liked the very deep, naturally phased oscillations. Thanks to subharmonics these oscillations are inherently musical. As the frequencies drifted, ghostlike voices would appear, making a collage- sometimes Voice of America, baseball results, etc, or perhaps a Radio Moscow English language broadcast, boasting about the forthcoming grain harvests. However on one memorable occasion it wasn’t Cold War ideology I picked up; it was the voice of heaven: Oum Kalsoum. I had inadvertantly tuned in to Radio Cairo and Radio Tehran. I still think that all music sounds better imbued with shortwave radio phasing. I remember 1979 being a great year for shortwave radio oscillations. This is due to their link with sunspot activity, which peaks and declines every 11 years or so."

Amazing stuff innit! There’s a third element to this which is Robert Wyatt’s relationship with shortwave radio. Before the days of easily attainable World music, heads like Wyatt would tune into the radio stations of the Middle East and North Africa with their crystal sets.

I once met Jah Wobble in my local swimming-pool, he swims an excellent very powerful breast-stroke. When he was languishing in the shallow-end I greeted him and admitted to being a fan of his music. He seemed unfazed, was cheery took the compliment well. A few weeks later I greeted him in the baths again, slightly paranoid that he might think I was trying to pick him up, and he ignored me, even when I spoke quite loudly. It occurred to me that it was possible that he might be a bit deaf. Here Wobble again on his ill-spent youth:

"Most of all I was fascinated by the basslines I stood as near as I could to the bassbins (as I still do), and was overjoyed to see the bottoms of my trousers flapping."

Which brings me to my final point. In the late 1940s John Cage spent time in the anechoic chamber at Harvard University. An anechoic chamber is a room designed in such a way that the walls, ceiling and floor will absorb all sounds made in the room, rather than bouncing them back as echoes. They are also generally soundproofed. Cage entered the chamber expecting to hear silence, but as he wrote later, he:

"...heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation."

Would we expect to hear our inaudible sound of the universe in an anechoic chamber? Well, of course we wouldn’t, would we?

Strange to report however that one in five people (coughs) myself included might, in such an environment, also hear a high pitched tone. Somewhat amusingly ILM freaks like you the reader might have a greater probablity of having tinnitus:

"In a database of 1687 tinnitus patients, no known cause was identified for 43% of the cases, and noise exposure was the cause for 24% of the cases."

Tut tut! All those raves! All that leaning against the bassbin! That recalcitrant adolescence spent squeezing even greater volumes out of brick-like Walkmans! ****The most common form of Tinnitus is termed Subjective Tinnitus:

"This form of tinnitus may occur anywhere in the auditory system and is much less understood, with the causes being many and open to debate. Anything from the ear canal to the brain may be involved. The sounds can range from a metallic ringing, buzzing, blowing, roaring, or sometimes similar to a claanging, popping, or nonrhythmic beating. It can be accompanied by audiometric evidence of deafness which occurs in association with both conductive and sensorineural hearing loss. Other conditions and syndromes which may have tinnitus in conjunction with the condition or syndrom, are otosclerosis, Menier's syndrome, and cochlear or auditory nerve lesions."

I’ve had mild tinnitus since 1992. It emerged quite drastically in fact, and at much greater volumes than it has settled at today. It would occasionally wake me at night! I even wrote a film about it once, a three-screen extravanganza. The key to living with Tinnitus is to learn the art of tuning it out. Tune it out of your conciousness. Don’t worry about it. You can’t go through life without a few bumps and grazes! It has begun to strike me recently as quite a "cosmic" condition. The sound you’re hearing isn’t there, it’s a major malfunction of perception in some senses, a hallucination. But maybe, just maybe, it’s the sound of the universe itself which undamaged ears have learnt to not hear.

-

*I came across Penman’s eulogy to "Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)" on this trip, ooh la la!
**Jon Eden, you ought to drop this dude a line.
***The DJ Wrongspeed collection has the benefit of a number of hilarious transmission trompe d’oreilles. A builder on a mobile phone cuts into the signal of an Ardkore channel informing his (unheard) communicant in bulldog tones that he needn’t come to work on Monday.
****More bad news! Marajuana use greatly amplifies the symptoms!

Vashti Says.

"Thankyou so much. So great.

Very best wishes."

Been listening to little else this week. "Just Another Diamond Day" heartily recommended to all and sundry. Can't BELIEVE it took me so long to find this record...

Vashti.

Swaps.

Beyond indulging in the most almighty cosmic strop I've been trying to make sense of a foot high pile of CDRs which have washed up on my desk in the last year. The bloggers network has turned into something like the old tape swap network of yore. Sure there's the FTP crew pimping the download snapshots, but this is no equal to the intimate thrill of a fat brown packet landing on your doormat.

In truth I'll confess that in the past week or so I've been literally choking on music. I buy too much for my own sanity. I've come to think of myself as one of those old ladies who fill their apartments with so much crap that they can hardly open the door. I moved into this larger room in January, delighted by the expanse of space, but now piles of records are stretching their way into the centre of the room. Mating with one another, believe! Add to this mix the heady amounts of mouthwatering music I'm getting from key freaks round the world and you'll start to get the picture.

I've totally given up with mp3s in consequence. My iTunes library stands at 66.84 GB, that's 24 days, 16 hours and 54 seconds of music which I'm still struggling to digest. I don't seem to have the time to listen to listen to it all despite music's wondrous layering factor. You can listen to it while doing anything. Right now I'm typing like a spastic while the crisp dolorous tones of Mobb Deep's "The Infamous" spool out in the background (courtesy Oliver "The Dark Horse" Craner, who has a sweet, sweet, tightly-focussed, super-stylish record collection. Who'd have thunk it!) You see it's imperative to *LISTEN*, not to simply stockpile.

Part of my current crisis relates to this abundance of goodness. How on earth is one supposed to forge one's own musical identity when one is so inundated by other people's wonderful music. See for instance I'd like to hold forth on the qualities of the Banner and DJ Screw oevre, but this stuff ripped to my iPod (from CDs from Reynolds via the good Todd Burns at Stylus) is so demarcated, so conspicuously someone else's music that I feel quite unable to pretend I have any discursive power over it. Yeah, I'm honest like that. Added to the fact that our whole network is stifling with our collective inability to reach beyond an ever-tightening perimeter of sound. Not another Dizzy Rascal review! I have an unsurpassable respect for the likes (the like?) of Jon "Worlds of Possibility" Dale, who manages to plough his own furrow, and dig his own shit while everyone else fails to take musical risks, is to keen to want to ape his colleagues. And I'm no-one to preach. However, as far as I'm concerned, the key lies in articulating what I'm doing differently.

I've just bought new pwetty coloured plastic cases for all these CDs (so many of the ones I get sent have come in paper sleeves and worse, and these treasures deserve more respect.) I was going to list all of these CDs which I've been sent over the past year, but instead I'm going to break out a few choice discs:

Vashti Bunyan: Just Another Diamond Day (co Jon "Former Astronaut" Dale)

You have to crane close to the speaker to hear Vashti. She's that bloody fey. I hastled Jonno for this after reading the great interview with John Wood in a recent The Wire. Particularly struck by Wood's off-hand dismissal of the session, that Bunyan had gone travelling round the country in a caravan and had returned unimaginably twee, blissed-out by rural idyll. It's the delicacy of this that has secured it's survival. It's like a likkle Dandelion beneath a concrete underpass innit. In fact the unassuming lack of thrust and pallid finger-picking demeanour has seen this CD creep into my conciousness.

VA: Electronic Pop Music (Mostly) (co Jim "Bunnywelt" Backhouse)

Well you'd be surprised if Jim WASN'T a font of incredible music. He's been propping up the Kosmische show on Resonance for the best part of the year. That's (counts on fingers and toes) quite a few hours of music from which to cherry pick! And he didn't do too badly off me too I may freely report. Jim's comp made my Christmas. I was wandering round the bleak nether-regions of Glasgow plugged deep into the still neo-pagan strata of German music. Pretty much what I was doing in 1992 there to the tune of Neu! Highlight? Ruth Hohmann and Erbe Chor's "In Staub Der Sterne" (Das Licht) which was from the soundtrack to 'Kosmos' a GDR Socialism-in-space TV Series. (Hey there's one for the big man at k-punk!) This, and scuse me while I slide into Cope-ish Stone-Circle doggerel, has very real pre-historical under-currents. It sounds fucking ancient, like an undiscovered Bavarian cave complex. More superficially like an undiscovered Cosmic Couriers 7" edit, only better. Mmm.

Demon Fuzz: Afreaka! (Janus, 1969) (co Sasha "The Man" Frere Jones)

Crikey I've come a long way! From bedroom geek music obsessive to, er, bedroom geek music obsessive. In exchange for my Grime Scene 2003 CD Sasha Frere Jones (yes him!) sent me a handful of top notch CDs. This one blew me away. I pestered Sasha for more info on it, and he mailed me this jpeg (from his vinyl original) and confessed to knowing nothing more about it. Well I'm not to cool to beg, so if anyone knows do me a favour and plug the gap. First up, 1969, hmm that's early for this kind of record. While Sly is still purveying quite cluttered post-psych-punk soundscapes this is exceptionally elegant and laid-bare. Simmering underplayed hammond organ like desert heat-haze and horns which (and you're gonna laugh now) sound like the charts on Roy Davis Jnr's "Gabriel" It's got righteous rootical vocals and a sensibility lurking between Hendrix and the Band of Gypsys, John Lee Hooker, Afrobeat and Eddie Gale. Breaks galore! Loved this.

VA: some rareighties (co Seb "Le Rock est Mort" Morlu)

Eh Seb! Comment ca-va? Seb sent me this tippity-top comp of French/Euro Post-Punk. While Seb really favours the Chandra on this (I'm not convinced) I preferred the Nini Raviolette "Suis-je normale?" Well actually it blew me away. I begged Seb to buy me a copy (and posted him a Grime 12" in exchange- not sure if I don't STILL owe you more bad bwoy!) In short it's the living image of Stereolab at their cheeky breast-stroking frog-legging best. Lots of other amazing stuff on here also, like the Des Airs "Lunga Notte" EP of Crammed Records.

VA: Screwed and/or Chopped (co Simon "Don Dada" Reynolds via Todd "Crunk" Burns at Stylus)

Great! Thanks to Todd (who was presumably the unwitting source of this superb CD) as well as to Simon who has served up numerous super treats over the course of the year. Well what the hell, these tracks are positively ancient, so I might as well chuck in my 5c. "Tell Me Something Good", "I Smell Smoke" and "Blunt to my Lips" off this compilation blew my lid off. DJ Screw, as y'all know, slows the track down to the speed of molasses. He then overdubs super-delicate touches like strings and eeire smaples which fuck with your sense of the correct speed of what you're listening to. So luxuriant can this sound that I kept flashing on the deep-soul productions of Tom Tom Washington, Bobby Martin and Carl Davis/Eugene Record. On "Blunt to My Lips" the voices are pitched down till the slouching rappers aurally ressemble 40 ft tall Ketamine demons. This is some parallel universe shit.

-

So yes, that represents but the tip of the iceberg. Thanks to everyone who sent me stuff. It's ALL amazing. I can't say how grateful I am, how exciting I find it. I know I've thanked y'all already, but (blows kisses) thanks again. I love to be able to share out what I'm gathering up too, so if anyone out there has some stuff they think I'd like to hear, and wouldn't mind a bit of "that there" drop me a line and let's swap! Terms and Conditions apply.

Disgraceful!

Express Yourself (Correctly).

I just got an email from Mrs. Charles Wright. Eva tells me that:

"Charles Wright is not related to Easy E in any way or fashion."

My sincere apologies.

Tim on Grime.

Superb.

Desi.

Downloads Removed.

Hope you enjoyed them while they were up.

Ear.

This morning the Postman delivered an envelope seeping blood.

Wiley's Hats.

Pop Depression Update.

My mood is slowly improving.

Not Pop.

I find Tom's blanket definition of Pop rather depressing. (sniff, don't worry Tom it's not your fault) Tom describes "Pop" as music for imaginary rather than real communities. I'd never really considered it in terms so crisp, but yes it works as a definition.

Within this frame of reference everything I listen to could be termed "Pop", it's just that (as far as I'm concerned) this brings everything down to it's lowest, emptiest form. You can laugh at me all you like, but I'll always feel that while often on the "demographic periphery" I belong to whatever scene I'm lurking around. I don't think people care too much about my background, in a dancehall or at a venue no-one is too bothered. Everyone has a Mum and a Dad, everyone watches TV, everyone buys baked beans. I find the self-conciousness at the heart of the Post-modern "Pop" propsition to be wholly inimical, unhelpful even in the way it acts to dispossess, separate and ultimately elevate.

I don't think being a scene surfer means you're not engaged either. Even the "die-hard" Garage crew have always got their sweet tooth for things you'd find unexpected. All that fucking hoo-ha when Dizzy says he likes Sepultura, my my.

(sighs) Let's not forget we're all people.

Now That's What I Call Sun Ra.

Just put together a Sun Ra compilation for lovely Hannah which has involved ripping a load of stuff from vinyl. She's been bugging me for this since last June, I'm not ALWAYS super-reliable! Hannah's getting married to her girlfriend at a special ceremony in Iceland soon. She asked me along as a mate, and also to do the DJ thing, but I had to let her down (family/cost). And yes, like you dear reader, all my friends are super-groovy...

Here's what I put on her CDs:

Bassism (from The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra)
Satellites are Spinning (from Solar Myth Approach Volume One)
Love in Outer Space (from Out There a Minute)*
Adventure Equation (from Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy)
Nuclear War (from Eponymous 12")
Sleeping Beauty (converted from mp3)**
Strange Celestial Road (from Eponymous LP)
Interplanetary Music (from Interstellar Low Ways)
Twin Stars of Thence (from Languidity)
Walking on the Moon (from My Brother the Wind II CD)***
The Golden Lady (from The Nubians of Plutonia)
Worlds Approaching (from Strange Strings)
Friendly Galaxy II (from Nuits de la Fondation Maeght Volume II)****

* This is better than the version on The Night of the Purple Moon.
** "Honest like Dave Stelfox!"
*** I have My Brother the Wind I on vinyl, but it's nowhere near as good.
**** Again, Volume One is the clinker.

The only thing is.....now I don't have a functioning email address for her.

Poptimism Rules.

Wanted to chip in on Mark's Poptimism thread, a wholly engrossing riff on Marcello's splendid 1985 thing. With big guns like Mark Sinker roaming his comments box like Tyrannosaurus Rex I've elected to do it from the safety of my own webs(h)ite. Coward! Metaphor mixer! (Shit I'm starting to sound like Alan Titchmarsh).

While nowhere near being a Poptimist myself (I couldn't give a flying fish about the charts) I'm sympathetic to their cause. Doesn't pop thrive on blind enthusiasm? Isn't suspension of disbelief at the core of Poptimism? For Pop to do it's job don't it's audience HAVE to think year XXXX represents the best, most shiny thing yet? If you approach Pop (which I unerringly view as unredeemable tosh, the lowest common denominator which yields higher meaning only in the hands of the great and the good) with too sharp a critical eye, aren't you missing the point? That it's power lies in it's hooky intransience, that it excels much like sugar in your tea.

This isn't to say that with the benefit of hindsight we can't sit back and make sound qualitative judgements about the strength of certain years above others, just that for the Poptimist to get any pleasure from his pursuit he can't allow this kind of cynical clarity.

Nobody does it better.

I know he's my mate, and I know I spend half the bloody time giving him (and Reynolds) props, but this is just breath-takingly brilliant. I don't know how he does it! Sheer bloody magic!

Fugs Love.

Just picked up Ed Sanders's book on the Manson Family for a song. Sanders was in The Fugs. I remember Lester Bangs raving about this book, knocked out by Sanders' post-Fugs acumen, and doubly impressed by a story Sanders told in which he claimed he had broken into Brooklyn Zoo and had sex with a gazelle. They were giants etc etc.

More Permalinks ------->

Hot shit!

Old Skoolish.

I get these stupid, stupid ideas into my head! To compare, in rough outlines, the Old Skool Hip-Hop scene with Grime (ahem) as it stands today is to try and spoon one form into another. The fit in some instances is so crude as to be laughable, but at the root of the attempt are what I believe to be immutable truths, that's to say watertight observations.

These MC records which have been coming out of the UK over the last few years are the first proper indigenous "rap" records we've had. They emerge from a coherent home-grown aesthetic, they're not American copy-cat records, and they're not isolated cultural objects (See the Potted History of UK Bounce thing here.) They represent a cultural tidal wave of new music which is here to stay. I think, ironically enough, that we've now reached a moment when a comparison to the stateside explosion of Hip-Hop holds water. Previous to this time there were superficial comparisons between UK Hip-Hop and it's American counterpart (and drawing parallels could only flatter British Rap) but now the deep structural parity is striking.

One of the first criticisms I'm expecting this breakout to inspire is the one that holds Grime, beyond anything, to be a version of Dancehall Reggae. The theory that Ardkore/Jungle/Garage is a relexification of Reggae culture (same structures supplanted with different content) is enticing. But of course exactly the same thing could be said of Rap with almost stronger conviction. From pioneering block soundsystem owner Kool DJ Herc's Jamaican roots but onwards in to the structure: The Clappers label, BDP's strong Ragga stylings, Cutting Records dub mixes (The Imperial Brothers), one off tunes like Soul Dimension's "Trash-an-Ready" etc. Furthermore, riddim-ology, while it rules the airwaves has yet to make any impact on the style of records being released beyond Eskimo and the small dent of Fidget. I don't think any of the UK's artists aspire to being Elephant Man either, they'd much rather be Busta Rhymes or Redman (that might sound like I'm contradicting myself already!) Of course the truth is that, at last, Grime is it's own music, and maybe in consequence able to accomodate being held up to others in the same manner that one might hold the output of 70's Germany against that of 70's Jamaica.

Yeah, and sorry for being a right old fusty bore. Always viewing things removed from their context can be a real shitter, can suck the energy out of any discourse.

The Fatback Band feat. King Tim III -vs- Scott Garcia feat. MC Styles

Afrika Bambaata insists that the Fatback Band record is the first true Hip-Hop record. The band are better known as a straight-up funk act, responsible for tunes like "Ain't No Half Steppin" and "Yum Yum", but here, on the b-side of "You're My Candy Sweet" they were joined by their master-of-ceremonies/warm-up act King Tim III. It's a pretty good track in fact!

The Scott Garcia record is from 1997. It might be the earliest incarnation of the Grime record as we know it today. It's essentially a Speed Garage tune, moving along at the same speed as 187 Lockdown's "Gunman" and Gant's "Sound Bwoy Burial", drums have that huffing, shambling, splintered impact. The synth line bears a weird resemblance to the perky slightly redundant techno trilling of the early Black Dog records. MC Styles isn't working as hard as King Tim though, "Rinse the Bass Out!" "It's a London Thing", "This is a London thing", "This is a DJ thing" that's practically all he says! I guess Scott Garcia (and Baffled is lurking on this twelve too) wanted a re-fashioning of Code 071's "It's a London Someting."

My point? Here are rappers piggy-backing disco tunes. Just like Rap, especially at the hands of Sylvia Robinson at Sugarhill, was Disco Rap; Early Grime was MC Garage.

Sugarhill Gang -vs- TKS

With toasting moving into the centre frame. The absurd length of "Rappers Delight" (15 minutes 34 seconds on my version) could contextualise it as a slice of dancefloor MC-ing run riot, gormlessly untrammeled to fit the medium. Like the Flash and The Furious Five record later in this piece, the record is like a bit of Pirate Radio MC-ing slapped straight to disc. It's not as if Wonder Mike, Big Bank Hank and Master Gee's lyrics are worth the trawl anyway (Big Bank Hank didn't even write his own, ripping off Granmaster Caz of the Cold Crush Brothers).

I've always had a similar whinge about the spelling lyrics on "Fly Bi", which stamp it as ear-filler, as goofy as the Sugarhill Gang's vacuous nonsense. In the same manner the Sugarhill record rides Chic's "Good Times" bassline into infinite tedium, "Fly Bi" (like the Scott Garcia record) is STILL a dancefloor/disco record tarted up with a bit of MC-ing, yet it's a big step forward from "It's a London Thing", the combination of riddim and MC really gells. I've grown quite fond of "Fly Bi" in fact. Simon is a noted advocate of it.

It's worth reflecting that while Teebone, Sparks and Kie became household names, shifting millions of copies of "Fly Bi", forever stamping their name on the evolution of the genre, the Sugarhill Gang sold a couple of thousand of their tune before sinking into obscurity.

Bonus Record From The Archives: (Strokes Chin) Worth considering in the light of the "Is it Dancehall?" or "Is it Hip-Hop?" issue.

Grandmaster Flash -vs- So Solid Crew

Ouch! Yet another thorny one! Both "The Message" and "Oh No" can be classed as the point at which folk really got their shit together. At once the real deal, true Grime and true Hip-Hop, and right in the media glare.

Of course there are far too many factors involved in each group for one to draw much mileage beyond this superficial comparison. Megaman is the closest thing Grime has to an Afrika Bambaata. So Solid Crew (sighs, minus the drugs and guns) is pretty like the Zulu Nation, a large body of well-organised ghetto youth engaged in a positive head-on clash with the recording industry, headed up by a charismatic, widely-feted Don Dada. On the other hand there is no sonic wizard in So Solid to match Grandmaster Flash, who even had his own science of scratching in 'Quick Mix Theory' and 'Clock Theory' as well as managing to develop and market his own DJ device, the 'Flashformer.' The only sonic genius we have yet in Grime (er I'll pass on Oxide and Neutrino) is Wiley.

As I mentioned briefly earlier the Bozo Meko "Flash it to Beat" is a gripping live show by the Furious Five, in spirit a C90 mastered to vinyl. The sound quality is almost as bad as one of Luka's mixtapes, but the energy is totally ecstatic, the crew swoop and dive over a huffing beatbox, pile into one another's slips and fuck-ups, the organisation of their rhymes at once so deadly neat and crazed, crowd noise filtering through their singjay chants. It's just like NASTY at their best. And what's on the b-side, in the form of "Fusion Beats Vol.2", but your own Rap riddim!

Boogie Down Productions -vs- DJ Luck and MC Neat (Red Rose Records)

The thinnest comparison yet! (Though there is worse to come, believe!) DJ Luck and MC Neat have subsequently gone on to form Special Delivery with PAUG's Major Ace. This illustrates the way these early gene pools of MCs are functioning, that's to say with a great deal more flexibility than in Hip-Hop today, with artists passing fairly freely between crews (often all old school-mates). So for instance one of the original members of the Funky Four Plus One, Raheim, left to join the Furious Five; while Major Ace also appears to be a member of East Connection and Sharky Major now seems to be a member of NASTY when he was once in East Connection etc ad infinitum.

I put this lot together not just because of their DJ & MC structure, but also because of the strong reggaematic vibes to their stuff (KRS One slipping into patois and cos of the Dancehall vibe to alot of the Red Rose stuff). For example the joint Red Rose/Kronik records classic joint "Troublesome" featuring DJ Luck, Shy Cookie, Oracles and Jay-T which is busting with Ragga-attitude. Interestingly I think that their Reggae flavours are after-traces of their root etymology, there's a conciousness in both the BDP LP and "Troublesome" of the Reggae source of each respective music's true structural origin. Ya get me! Just remember i don't get paid to write this, ha!

Soul Sonic Force/Treacherous Three/Fearless Four -vs- Pay As You Go Crew/More Fire Crew/Heartless Crew

PAUG was a hook up between 'The Ladies Hit Squad' (Maxwell D, Target & Wiley) and Pay As You Go Cartel (Major Ace, Plague and Slimzee). It then went on to feature DJs Slimzee, Target and Geeneus and MCs Major Ace, Plague, Gods Gift, Riko and Durrty Doogz. (Draws breath). That's a lot of people! All these groups are bunched together because they feature a prodigous (er, more than 3 MCs a piece) amount of people in them. I reckon that's an unusually high number of MCs per record. It's a characteristic of a nascent scene that there are improbably high levels of expectation that more than one or two people will survive together in the music industry. It smacks (rather nicely) of amateur enthusiasm, of some kids getting swept along in the trail of their more talented mates; more talented mates who are happy to have them along for the ride. If you look at Hip-Hop nowadays the default configuration is the solo artist, the self-obsessed egotistical career-minded polymath. Like Jay-Z. Can you imagine Jaz-Z wanting to share the spotlight with four other guys? Nope! Other examples being Grand Wizard Theodore and the Fantastic Five, The Funky Four Plus One and Genius Crew and Corrupted Crew.

Certainly in Grime people have started to splinter off from these unwieldy collectives. Lethal B seems to be doing more stuff on his own away from the More Fire Crew. Doogz (what a star!) is carving his own furrow, as are Riko and Gods Gift. Heartless are still very much together, but haven't recorded much, they seem to concentrate on gigs and their 1Xtra show. There's a good parallel here with the The Treacherous Three's Kool Moe Dee who had a respectable solo career after leaving his crew behind.

Footnote: Check the hilarious graffiti on this second-hand UK reissue (on Y records) of the Treacherous Three's classic. Richard where are you now?

B-Boy Records -vs- Social Circles

Most curiously of all, and this was (imagine my surprise!) picked up by Robin at Undercurrent their appears to a be a strong, burgeoning sonic parity between the atonal crash of Old Skool Hip-Hop and Grime. I say Old Skool, but at the time this stretch between 1984 and 1987, after Electro's triumphs and before Run DMC forged the blueprint and identity of Hip-Hop once and for all, was referred to as "New School." I'd refer readers to J. Saul Kane's "Beat Classic" compilation of yesteryear (excellent liner notes by David Toop), except that in a move of astonishing myopicity Kane (aka Depth Charge) saw fit to include most of the tracks in their Instrumental form! Doh! This represents "breaks" culture at it's most ignorant I'm afraid.

You'd do much better to track down this amazing Sampler on Landspeed Records, I wonder if it's still in print? Concentrate for a second now.........this is one of the greatest records I have ever bought. I only got it recently, like why pretend? In fact I have (beyond a smidgen of envy) absolutely no respect whatsoever for people who cherish "original" copies of records from this era. Mainly because the chances are they didn't pick them up when they came out*. Its too fucking long ago, you'd have to be in at least your mid to late thirties to have been on the ball and fitted up with cash, not to mention living stateside unless you could be in London and afford the imports as they arrived. But really some of this stuff is not to be missed, so reissues will do just fine.

Turn the volume up to eleven and put on the Cold Crush Brothers "Feel the Horns". Man Caz's diction is immaculate! The beats are exquisitely reigned in and understated, it's impact is *heavy* but wholly due to the preternatural symphony and pitch of the whole meshing sonic. The James Brown horn sample is superbly lean and the tuning so perfect, murky and stealthy. Listening to what I'm now dubbing the "Stealth Harmony" of Grime has laid my ears wide open to this, granted, much ruffer sonic palette of terrorising accidental melody. There are SO MANY incredible tracks here. For instance, Jewel T's "I Like it Loud", once again the clarity of the mix is scary, Jewel T sounds like a (mildly) less angry LL Cool J, the funky drummer break here is cavernous. Jewel T shouts: "I like it loud," a gaping yaw opens out, a deep-pitched vocoder voice intones "Can I move off? Can I move off?" over the humming silence, it's the voice of the riddim, asking for permission to move on. Jewel T snaps: 'Give us some Guitar!" You half expect/dread some screeching Satriani fretwork, you get some scary fucked-up tortured bass squelch. Damn it's all amazing.

Really Sticky ought to be well chuffed with such a comparison! Social Circles *IS* the best label qua label on the scene, though they've put out a few dodgy records very recently so they'd better watch their pedigree. After Shock are doing better now. When will Wiley come to realise the NERD power of a label brand? It's something Brian Gee worked out pretty early on with V Records, and he's been laughing all the way to the bank for years. A label has a much greater staying power than an artist.

Wiley -vs- Marley Marl

Aah! This is a good one! Stable of Artists (Flow Dan, Jamaki-B, Dizzy Rascal, Breeze -vs- Steady B, Biz Markie, Daddy Kane, Steady B, Roxanne Shante) and a distinctive extremely raw pioneering studio sound. As an added bonus you have a parallel between the Juice Crew All Stars and Roll Deep (lets face it a vehicle for Wiley). (Obviously people disagree with me on this) Marley Marl isn't a terribly good MC either ;-) If only Wiley could get an imprint like Marley Marl's Pop Art together eh!

Roxanne Shante -vs- Ms Dynamite

Yeah! That's better! Both feisty chicks in a testosterone-dominated world. I'm kicking myself that I sold my copy of "Bite This", man that is one bumbaclaat track! I'm stalking a copy at the moment.

One extremely strong connection between "the Old Skool" and Grime as it stands right now is that the lyrics haven't really deepened out into message tracks. I know some folk advocate the poetic aspects of the form, though really I think it excels in it's lyrical and confrontational energy. The boast and the slack lyric (yeah I KNOW they can be poetic too!) still rule, as opposed to the more self-conciously poetic lyric which ruled hip-hop before Timbaland/The Neptunes. Could be a controversial observation...(strokes chin)

The Beastie Boys -vs- The Streets

On a good day you could argue that both were healthy protagonists of an undiscovered scene. That they both ("Cookie Puss" and "Original Pirate Material") were "in" the scene in the old days (though Locked On had pretty much run out of steam by the time they signed Skinner); that they proceeded respectably giving credit where credit was due (The Beastie Boys feted Schooly D and Mike Skinner celebrated Dizzy Rascal); that they each made hugely successful crossover albums.....yawn...this is becoming boring. Alright, lets face it they were both a load of old shite.

Schooly D -vs- Dizzy Rascal

As per last entry. This is kind of useless too, ha! However, don't forget that Schooly D had quite a bit of cross-over clout. He was a hardcore underground artist who one heard whispered about by very cool people. Actually Dizzy bears stronger resemblance, at least sonically, to Errick Sermon (lisp) or Kool Keith (sqwauk), but those folks are out of our time-frame.

Biz Markie -vs- D Double E

Of course! Innit!

LL Cool J -vs- Durrty Doogz

I picked up this LL Cool J when it came out! See I told you I was a funky hipster! I can do "I can't live without My Radio" (replete with plummy accent) as a party trick. So yeah, Doogz and LL Cool J, they both sound like they'll nut you at the slightest sign of disrespect.

----------------------

There it is! What I think it illustrates is a few things. That sonically and lyrically with Grime we're somewhere circa 1984-1985, two years away from Run DMC's Raising Hell. We also haven't had someone like Run DMC to really focus or define the form. It's very early days, and that's why the name has yet to glom. It's just the beginning!

*I picked up my original copy of "Beat Bop" replete with Basquiat cover for 50p in a carboot sale! Suckers!

My Mind turns to Grime.

Horrified to notice via Philip Sherburne’s Blog that Rolling Stone are calling the music "Grimy". Fucking Yanks eh! That's two worse than Grime. (muses to himself) When an arch-neologist like Sherburne falters you've got to wonder...

As I was saying to one correspondent, with the term Garage I wasn't suggesting as Angus did (and he won't thank me for invoking him) that we should hallow a connection between the Paradise Garage and "the now sound of the london pirates", but rather draw an historical line from the point whereupon the UK started to fess with US Garage (Todds, MAW et al). That's the sensible point zero of Garage. To disagree with K-Punk I always thought the move to the term 2step was so infintessimal as to be laughable, meaningless even, woo hoo it’s a bit skippier; like the move between Mac OS 10.2.7 and 10.2.8 (That's W2K SP2 to W2K SP3 Windoze users). Another factoid to mess up your head: when Skepta was recently asked which musician he'd most like to work with he said....Todd Edwards. Yeah I was surprised too.

My fave new term for describing the term came from the Grevious Angel himself, who chipped in with the eminently sensible "Rap." OK I'll admit to some degree I'm having a laugh, not playing the game whereby a name is called and we all rally round it. In my defense there is precious little support within the scene for Grime, and (here disagreeing with K-Punk again) great monikers of the past, be they detourned insults, always did come from within. Jungle came from within. Junglist. I guess the real issue at stake is that magazines and the cross-over crew don't just need a name, a handle, they need a NEW name. It's packaging and advertising isn't it, a NEW product is needed to stock on the shelves. It's typical of recalcitrant Garage that it can't seem to give a toss about it's own brand identity. That's as it should be.

They're records sir, but not as we know them.

It's becoming a bit cliched this casual spiel interjected with a few record covers which I do. Oh well! The Sun Ra thing was definitively the last one I was going to attempt, though I've said that before. I'd like to spend a bit more time with some records, really dig deep into them, relish their texture and explore their textuality. On the other hand listening to things too thoroughly always bores the shit out of me. I used to be able to listen to the same thing over and over again, my first experience of this was with The Police's "Zenyatta Mondatta" and a tape my stoned uncle made me with the Theme from Midnight Express and The Beatles "Flying" on it. Actually the uncle gave me The Police record too, he must have thought: "Hmm. This ten year old will want to get with the New Wave thing."

I'm the same in Art Galleries, in and out in 5 minutes. If it's going to hit you, and you're going to get anything out of it, I'm of the school of thought that believes you'll get hit in in the first couple of minutes, or not at all. A close friend plays the exploration game with musty Hip-Hop Long-players, waxes rhapsodic about the new Afu-Ra record, and in the process of repeated listening salvages pleasure from tracks with no pep. He's crazy. Having a baby daughter is a good antidote to this sort of pornographic aural habit, we'll listen to the Jungle Book and Mary Poppins Soundtrack again and again and again. I've told you this before right?

Some records in my collection I've NEVER listened to at all. Not thoroughly anyway.

Like this one I found in San Francisco's Amoeba Records. $2. Irresistable. David Toop did a great thing in The Wire ages ago about the kind of sonic detritus which for a long time washed up on vinyl. The classics of the genre are of course the Folkways Titles: Sounds of A Junkyard, Sounds of the Desert etc. Why here are two which are happen to be on sale on eBay right now!

Not from my collection I might add. I believe Folkways did a few Educational records for Doctors and Dentists too. "Sound of a Filling being Extracted." On my last trip to New York I came across a record of recordings of heartbeats. I was going to buy this (and should have bought it) for my father-in-law, who ran the heart unit in Glasgow for years. He's often held forth about how listening to the sounds a heart makes is the key to diagnosing various conditions. He's even tried to sing the sounds to me on a number of occasions.

Ha! This is just terrible, though there are some handy noises on here which I used to use on mixtapes. The music on this kind of Demonstration record is what you NEED to hear to to grasp how empty and lifeless music can be made to sound. I imagine this came with a record player originally, it's distributed by "Allied Radio Shack- Division of Tandy Corp". What is quite amazing, and which I've only this minute seen, is that the "A&R Direction, Script and Annotation" on this is by none other than Tom Wilson! Producer of Zappa's "Freak Out" and the Velvet Underground innit.

Quite novel, if desperately tedious. Now I'm indulging a little autobiographical bent (OK I'm always indulging it) I can tell you how, aged 17, for the school end-of-year amateur dramatics display, I recorded every sound of my day. On the last day of term I performed this for a throng of gathered parents, teachers and pupils. I played back the tape and acted out various highlights to accompany the crackling sonics: Getting out of bed (Prop: Duvet), Brushing Teeth (Prop: Brush and Paste), Going to class (Prop: Pen). From dawn to dusk in this manner. It took AGES. People shuffled in their seats evincing profound embarassment and boredom. I was so relieved when it was all over. What a cock eh!

Somewhere I've a recording of the Moon landing which is sponsored by a Soap company.

You've been Woebotted.

That'll learn 'im.

Named and Shamed.

This pissed me off for three reasons.

1) He doesn't link these pictures to their original context so people can see how I presented them.
2) He "piggybacks" my server space. The only reason you can see them is that they're hosted on webspace I pay for. Try "Open Image in New Window" on one of the JPEGs and you'll see their original URL.
3) He doesn't ask me if he can do it, and he doesn't reply to two of my (friendly) emails.

Shape up Hernan! You'll a big shot with a nationally syndicated radio show! I'm just a poor shmuck!

I don't embed a www.woebot.com tag on the images which I very carefully put up here, though maybe I should, because I've noticed to my horror that people have been tagging images AFTER they've ripped them off my site. I'm also very careful to credit other people's ideas.* Wanna rip me off? And of course I'm NOT talking about linking to crap I do here! All you have to do is ASK, or at least TELL me politely what you're planning. Netiquette innit!

Go: Get Personal>I need you to know.

*Though YES, I'm also a total cunt and post mp3s I've ripped here. For this my soul will burn in eternal damnation.

Black Comedy.

Franklyn Ajaye isn't that funny, but I love the LP cover on this. Ajaye manipulates nine foot high stereotypes; makes hardcore culture risible for safe white middle-class folk. He sounds like he's high on grass, giggling effervescently, having SO MUCH FUN on stage! To be fair he is pretty amusing at times, if deadeningly incorrect. Fr'instance the skit in which he assumes he's gonna "whup the ass" of the chinese ping-pong player, who (obviously) pastes him. This goes out to two of the crew who are fighting back the weed.

And I also dug out this. I love Richard Pryor. I like the way he pitches cynical up against cuddly. Isn't he great in Superman too? Pryor, unlike Ajaye, is no performing monkey. I guess I should have an Eddie Murphy record here too to make up a trilogy. People are always telling me to watch "Raw." This week there's going to be a few other non-musical records too.

Nick Cave, you pussy.

Got a text message from my brother the day before yesterday:

"Just saw Nick Cave buying a cashmere scarf! Pussy!"

Then another text 5 minutes later:

"Fuckin aussie sell out batty man. Nice scarf, mind."

Interlude

Then yesterday he admitted he'd gone and said hello on the basis that I (his brother) ALWAYS pester celebrities. His exact words:

Toby: "Sorry Mr. Cave, I'm going to pester you."

Nick: "Aw, no warries mate."

Toby: "I just wanted you to know that I once won a 40 quid prize at school for a poem in which I plagarised some of your work."

Nick: "I'll ave arf of that."

You're joking right!

Phew! I thought the prices for old Ardkore records were going down (Sell! Sell! Sell!), but clearly not. It's time to crack open the champers!