At the mercy of a collegue's iPod.
It's not all bad news.
Heard Galaxie 500 again for the first time in ten years.
First time on a stereo that is, cos Jim used them on his short movie.
"Don't let your youth go to waste."
That's Jonathon Richman that is!
Met Richman in 1988 and feverishly shook his hand.
He was rather blinded/puzzled by my shm-indie adulation.
But there's a nakedness to that Modern Lovers stuff.
Also saw Galaxie 500 back in the eighties.
Upstairs in the Subterranean Club beside Grant Hart and we talked.
Grant dismissed the band as a "one-trick-pony."
There WERE kind of limited.
But I was pleasantly surprised to hear how well they've aged.
That first record on Rough Trade was the one.
Damon and Naomi now isn't it?
Plagueing poor old Robert Wyatt.
Also listened to Yo La Tengo.
Yikes.
Always thought they looked fabulously unappealing.
But then I found that Hubley's dad was a member of that crucial animation collective UPA.
"Gerald McBoing Boing."
Big finger to Disney.
Cut-out style.
Yeah and I was quite enjoying the music too.
Quite why The Wire like them I dunno?
It's very mellifluous...
But then suddenly I heard something familiar.
"Now what does that remind me of?"
Lloyd Cole and The Commotions!
Boum? Funky? Funky Do Morro?
Dodgy Download Area: http://www.evil-wire.org/~ampere/mp3/funky/
Forthcoming Compilation: http://www.haaksman.net/d_bio.html
And apparently feted by Kodwo Eshun!
Dave Moynihan mentioned in an off-hand manner in hyping his 'Hat on the Wall' night that he'd just come back from Brazil bearing Favela Funk. Quick as you like I emailed him offering all manner of bounty in exchange for a CD of the stuff. Dave has cherry-picked his fave tunes from native comps with names like 'Funk Neurotico' and has parcelled them on without much in the way of track names, not that I care an awful amount.
This stuff I've decided is the missing piece in my vision of what I'm dubbing "Shanty House." Shanty House is the new strain of post World Music engaging in the same cultural and social dynamics that have given us Crunk and Grime in the first world and Dancehall in JA. Detractors might bemoan the need to give Favela Funk, Kwaito and Desi a brand name. However, like it or lump it these forms are always going to exist on the peripheries of most people in the west's experience of music. If they aren't called something specific then they'll be less absorbable in their own right, and conversely will be viewed as an extension of World music. The concept of 'World Music' is inextricably intertwined with concepts of the natural, the earthen, and the rooted. However, the new wave of global urban music is mercilessly hooligan in it's agenda, synthetic by choice and necessity, often produced in a crucible of urban existence yet more extreme, precarious and violent than that which characterises the temperature of New York, London, Berlin.
Part of the immediate confusion with Favela Funk, or Funk as it's more commonly called, is it's name. The use of the word funk is interesting. It's almost as though the original term no longer exists, as if it has no meaningful signification and is thus up for grabs. Naturally one would expect the Brazilian Portuguese to be more semiotically cavalier with someone else's tongue. On first acquaintance the music has immediate musical associations: Tone Loc's "Funky Cold Medina", Kid Frost's "La Rasa" and the Boo Yaa Tribe, but crucially (and in consequence the 'House' signpost of my soon-to-be-forgotten neologism) shades of Miami Bass, Dynamix, Ladi Luv, DJ Battlecat even 2 Live Crew all of which exhibit an extremely techno-esqe linearity to their music*. But there's more, a strong flavour of Man Parrish's "Hip Hop Be Bop Don't Stop", DJ Jimi's pre-crunk masterpiece "Where They At" and almost ironically Plaid's "Scoobs in Columbia." I'm sounding like one of those wine critics ascribing the scents of honey and autumn to red plonk.
Samples of squawking chickens, decks spinning backwards, berimbeau loops, conga, cowbell, splashing 808s, breaking glass (right out of the Bam Bam songbook), a disorientating 3 choruses per song, crowds singing drunkenly, samples of smeared tropicalia march bands, traces of prowling distorted basslines, mentasm/torque stabs, singers making like donkeys, looped vocal hooks, and always these blank-eyed rap rants more Johnny Rotten than anyone. You could reasonably make a case for the music as the first proper Rock Rap on the basis of these hoarse, terrifyingly demagogical deliveries, and yet they're so propulsively lean, so different from the rhythmically redundant holler of Korn et al.
Just like Grime it's pretty wearing in a ninety minute stretch, but no less desperate and enervated. Like Desi and Kwaito this music makes a mockery of tradition.
-
*as a side-note it's worth noting that UK Techno in the form of Autechre, and The Black Dog took a great deal of influence from the crashing Miami Bass sound. Miami Bass might easily have had the rallying the rallying cry of "Electro will never die..."
Marcello, Evergreen Jim and now Mark K have all done lists combatting The Guardian's 'apparently' rather tedious one of the 100 greatest British Albums. I say 'apparently' cos I haven't seen The Guardian's one, but I'll wager they're right.
Awake in the middle of the night I tossed and turned over whether to turn in a list to the panel of my fellow music bloggers. They're extremely revealing these lists when done by individuals, almost constructed to shore off the sniping remarks of one's peers. Marcello was quite open about this in the funny interlude to his list. I'm not sure I've the emotional stamina (ha ha) to put one together at the moment. Whenever I've done lists like this in the past it's the casually interjected white label or flexi 7" that separates it from the crowd. Just albums, crikey! The album's heyday was the seventies, I think then it carried some weight as a format, but since then I'm not so sure...
Also I'm slightly cowering amid the rampant Anglomania we're experiencing in blighty at the hands of the Euro 2004 Football Championship. Right now I'd rather see a top 100 French Albums (Gwen?), or a top 100 British Albums compiled by an American (Matos?), or maybe a top 1,000 British Albums (Marcello?) That latter one would be quite nice to see whoever compiled it, cos naturally it's the records that fall between the cracks, that aren't consensually lauded, which are the most interesting ones.
"Picture me and you, you and me,
K. I. S. S. I. N. G,
Picture me and you under the tree,
F. U. C. K. I. N. G. "
Vybz Kartel.
->"Dance Moves" by Sky Juice (Harvel 'Gadaffi' Hart for Annex).<-
What with my favourite garridge tunes starting to sound on closer inspection like ham-fisted Ragga (God's Gift on Pum Pum and Str8) went foraging like a horse for the real "ting".
Result. Takes the slightly loping african-ate percussion of Coolie Dance to the eight track. Faintly eastern flute-y synth (ie Java) and a belly dancing bassline bringing up the rear. Sky Juice buried somewhere messily in the mix so it sounds like he's in the music, rather than pon top after-dubbing a riddim. He's got an Onyx-meets-Ol' Dirty Bastard rasp, repeating his name and other invocations in batches of four: "lighter", "roll it up", "scoobie doo", "boom boom over the wall" and "suck your breast."
When dancehall does it right like this it's effortlessly graceful,
sophisticated and superior.
Kirk Degiorgio is a gentleman and a sport. Nose around his website and you'll find the brilliant break-out of his favourite LPs, all with little images of the covers replete with lovingly-written well-informed notes about each of the records. There are special sections on Sun Ra, the Mizell Brothers and Blue Note. It's a real treasure trove.
{Fuck, there's that sound again! It's haunting me!}
I went through the collection with a fine tooth-comb and picked out the records which I didn't have, pruned it a little and then asked Kirk which ones on my list he thought I should definitely check out. It came back thus:
BILL EVANS: Symbiosis (MPS MC22094 - 1974)
JOE FARRELL QUARTET: Joe Farrell Quartet (CTI 6003 - 1970)
DONNY HATHAWAY: Extension Of A Man (Atco SD7029 - 1973)
LINDA LEWIS: Lark (Reprise MS2120 - 1973)
EUGENE McDANIELS: Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse (Atlantic SD8281 -1971)
SERGIO MENDES & BRASIL '66: Stillness (A&M SP4284 - 1970)
RUFUS & CHAKA KHAN: ASK RUFUS (1977 ABC)
Plenty Nice!
Sitting in my workroom at home over the last few months I've been made extremely uncomfortable by what SOUNDS like a child crying. It's not a violent noise but it's sheer repetiveness is very disturbing.
I brought it up with Catherine. She knows the family in the block next door, and we've had them over before. They're sweet but their circumstances are rather tragic. The grandmother looks after two children because their mother is a smack addict. Catherine says that the little girl Jamie cries a lot. I've always thought expecting grandparents to bring children up is very cruel. Somewhere I have a rhyme in the back of my head, maybe one of Chuck D's, of how the stress of child-rearing can drive the elderly insane. Jamie once had a bruise on her face, and I (almost certainly innacurately and unfairly) lept to the assumption that she'd been hit.
Today I've had to lug my Mac to an office nearby to do some motion-graphics jiggery-pokery for them. It's been a hard and tedious start to the job, cleaning up mattes which have been blue-screened poorly at 25 frames/second. I started to notice the same noise. This half-mew/half-wail just at the edge of my hearing's threshold. It occured to me that the sound must be issuing from my Mac, the hard drive spinning down or perhaps the processor cycling, but to be honest I'm not at all sure. The really naseating feeling is that it might might be some kind of sonic hallucination, some liminal cry from the universal unconscious. Nuts, I know.
Saw a paraplegic guy on Oxford Street playing a penny whistle. He was only playing a C over and over again, admittedly with a certain amount of gusto. I can't believe he couldn't manage an E, though I'm sure he gets more money just playing the same note. You pity someone more who can't stretch to tonal theatrics. Oasis.
Shroomadelica! No one can take this seriously cos the NME is staffed with ex-Sun journalists. Personally I think it's quite promising. Whenever psychedelics light the litmus of white male rock, you've got to pay attention. Watch those fragile egos flicker and melt. It's pure voyeurism.
S'funny how the "Avant-Garde" often has humble beginnings in the coarse trendy student pop of the day. Ornette Coleman playing R'n'B. More pertinently and obviously Please Please Me > Revolution No.9. Crassly Loop > Main. Better The Walker Brothers > Scott. I always think it's a bit sad how "Wire" culture seeks to distance itself from it's less than elite origins. Doesn't Rob Young have healthy shoe-gazing pedigree? I'm talking post-jazz 'Wire" obv. Sad how the only admitted song canon is from the 70s; but when the chips are down The Grateful Dead are no more radical than The Beta Band. Maturity isn't necessarily the path to enightenment grasshopper.
I heard The Bees record today called Is it "Peas" or "Peace"? Quite a sexy looking ten-inch. That vinyl cult thing is exactly what enabled The Beta Band to cross-over into the hipster zone. It's a really nice record. Two tracks are quite stompy organ-y kind of things (think Country Joe and The Fish and shades of breakbeats) the flip side is a more Syd Barrett-y, quirky West-Coast rock-styled thing. Not AMAZING, but you know really nice, quite refreshing. I'll wager that in a year or so, if they keep with the strict fungi diet, these groups may yet produce something of lasting value.
Found SFJ eulogising this LP somewhere in The Wire's online archives:
Howlin' Wolf: "The Howlin' Wolf Album aka This is Howlin' Wolf's New Album And He Doesn't Like It" (Chess/Cadet 1968)
Sasha: "...it's very universal power scalds anyone exposed to it. (Think more Ark of the Covenant, less collector marginalia)..."
Supposedly a sort of No Wave line-up backing Howlin' Wolf doing some of his
greatest hits. Pete Cosey on guitar (squalled all over those seventies Miles LPs).
Tracked down a copy of Muddy Water's "Electric Mud" (same line up). Majestic but a tad rote. The Wolf LP though is nowhere to be found, eBay, GEMM, forget it. I _have_ come across it once. Somewhere.
Set me on a small Electric Blues trip. Like I say, No Wave. James 'Blood' Ulmer,
Music Revelation Ensemble, DNA, Captain Beefheart. Lester Bangs referencing Otis Rush's "Groaning The Blues: Original Cobra Recordings 1956-58". While I have quite a few blues LPs, I've never had any Wolf. Weirdly have never stumbled upon them, can't have looked very hard (at all). Big mistake. Picked up his double Chess Blues Master Series. Unbelievably good stuff. Van Vliet man! What a copy cat!
From: xxxxx xxxxxx
To: 'Matthew Ingram'
Subject: RE: Donation.
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 09:16:40 +0100
Dear Mr Ingram,
Many thanks indeed - that's very kind of you. It's always good to hear that
students have enjoyed using the Library!
Best wishes,
xxxxx xxxxxx
*********************************************
xxxxx xxxxxx
Subject Librarian (Music)
xxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx Library
xxxxxxx xxxxxx
xxxxxxx xxx xxxx
Tel: xxxx xxx xxxx
Fax: xxxx xxx xxxx
E-mail: x.xxxxxx@xxx.xxx.ac.uk
-----Original Message-----
From: Matthew Ingram [mailto:alias@hollowearth.org]
Sent: 16 June 2004 12:10
To: xxxxx xxxxxx
Subject: Donation.
Hi there,
I was a student at the University and got great pleasure from your Music Library.
Accordingly I've donated the following to your collection:
PARTCH, HARRY PARTCH: COLLECTION: VOL1
TOURE, ALI FARKA: RADIO MALI
XENAKIS: LA LEGENDE DEER
CAGE, JOHN: SONATAS & INTERLUDES
Which HMV will be delivering to your care at the library itself.
Naturally no kind of inscription/note of donor is necessary.
Best,
Matthew Ingram
Date: Wed, 19 May 2004 12:00:59 +0100
From: G Master
To: alias@hollowearth.org
Subject: wotcha woebot
you are both a pompous twat and an ignominious fool. your pathetic, onanistic, self-serving rants and tantrums stand as a monument to the introspective idiocy of music 'critics' within the blogosphere. Rest assured that everything you release through your ridiculous mail order system will be on soulseek and kazaa within a month - i'll personally guarantee it! Now get back in your box.
I though it'd be really great to interview Paul McCartney at WOEBOT. The world's most famous musician (?) on a Weblog.
I pitched it with near perfection to his Manager Geoff. I must have spoken to him about 9 times now. Followed up with extremely neat professional emails. Sometimes he seemed really keen. Sometimes less so. But always on a decreasing incline of interestedness.
"Hi Geoff, it's the bloke off the internet again."
"But we just did an interview on the net!"
"Ah yes, but that was in an MSN chat-room and you can't access those in the UK. You can't do too many interviews on the net Geoff, it's the new thing mate, believe! It'll be like David and Goliath. It's a fanzine on steroids, (coughs) WOEBOT is the pre-eminent music blog. The kids'll love it. Just in time for Glasto. It's rock'n'roll innit; yaay tear your hair out, go crazy, give an interview to a blogger."
Macca. He's great isn't he. Though my mate Sacha said the other night there's nothing so unattractive as a really successful musician. Someone who's fucked all the women, taken all the drugs, has all the cars, flown all over the world. Yeah that stayed with me.
Though of course Macca was pretty far-out wasn't he? It wasn't just Lennon was it. Surely everyone knows this? I did a load of background research for this. I read Ian Peel's (pretty weak): "The Unknown McCartney" and AND Barry Miles's (excellent) "Many Years From Now." I'm a fookin' expert on Paul McCartney I tell you. Playing a coin on a radiator at an AMM gig, nearly roping in Delia Derbyshire to score "Yesterday", meeting Luciano Berio, building his own little tape-loops years before Lennon got interested, indeed turning Lennon on to alot of wacky stuff, holding forth on Albert Ayler and Stockhausen, turning in an easy listening version of his Ram LP as Percy Thrillington, a helping hand behing Indica books, Zapple and IT, recording in Lagos, playing with The Meters, putting out ambient techno as The Fireman and post-rock with Youth. Yeah yeah we know.....
"You see I'd also like to touch on Sir Paul's love of Animation. I believe as animator I'd be able to really do justice to this side of his persona. Yeah and all the animals, what's with that? The dogs, the racoons, the frogs, the deer and the blackbird?"
"Well you see he's got a lot of interviews lined up and we're quite squeezed for time."
"Yeah and you don't know WHO I am. I mean I could be some total lunatic. Some gun-toting obsessive. I mean, I could be really fucking dangerous! Let's face it. Though we have met eachother once before on the street in Soho. And, well, I didn't try anything then. But I guess the kind of things I'd want to talk to him about have been covered in a great deal of detail by Peel and Miles. And for goodness sake, Ian Peel wrote a whole book, A WHOLE BOOK, without an interview with the man himself. And of course all this recent exploration of his avant tendencies, well it's probably bad for business in the long-run isn't it? And well, I'm just a blogger. Ha! A blogger. A useless amateur. How could I possibly expect to get an interview. I must be stark raving mad. Yes it's probably best that we leave it like this. Though I'd like to say Geoff, thanks so much for not just telling me to fuck right off in the first instance. That was awfully nice of you."