Presumably no-one has mentioned that Lloyd Banks of G-Unit looks scarily like Craig David out of a fear of being lynched for being racist ("All black people look the same etc.")
Then I noticed that Dizzee Rascal on the cover of Showtime looks remarkably like Dr.Dre.
Snap!
http://ilx.p3r.net/thread.php?msgid=4940706
Quite a lot of people griping about The Wire here, particularly about them having Derek Bailey on the cover. My favourite comment came from Dave Stelfox who pointed out that it needn't be the mirror image of ILM/YourBlogspot to be a worthwhile entity. I am at sea with the rest of you when it comes to the broad sweep of their coverage. However, I thought Keenan's Derek Bailey article was great. Bailey comes across as a tremendous character; never mind opinions of his music:
"The original be-bop was all over the fucking place. They were always falling off a precipice. You didn't get that in Hard Bop, everyone knew what they were doing. With every music there is an exciting period when it's coming together and no-one has a clue what it's supposed to sound like. That's when it's happeneing. And it's authentic. The only way you can get through stuff is to do it. Once you've learned everything it's over."
That's super insight isn't it. And really applicable to the sceniuses of dance music. It's interesting to note that Bailey thinks Improv is officially over "so codfied and defined that it's effectively neutered." I'm quite impressed that Bailey is dedicated to collective playing too, he's apparently not that bothered who he jams with either as long as they can play their instrument. That runs counter to the high-snob ethos I've encountered in Improv. Bailey's idealogical rift with Evan Parker seemed to founder on EP's increasing reluctance to play with others.
And I liked this:
"Bailey is notoriously opposed to saxaphones and saxaophonists. "You cannot play a saxaphone and make it not sound like jazz," he insists "You simply cannot do it. The guy who has come nearest to it was Anthony Braxton."
Yes, and further, it's difficult to make the saxaphone sound anything else than deeply dreadful. If I was doing a list to match Jess's _your favourite sounds in music_ entitled _sounds you loathe in music_ http://shutyrgob.blogspot.com/2004_08_01_shutyrgob_archive.html#109222635758908172 then I'd put the saxaphone at the top. From "Baker Street", Madness, X-Ray Spex, The Red Crayola and Eurythmics to 95% of Jazz recordings it's a rubbish instrument in most people's hands. I have that key Braxton record "For Alto" somewhere, looked for it forever, and his is indeed an atypical sound.
And again Bailey on Drum and Bass (Was this article a covert stab at Reynolds I ask myself ?!?), particularly on the slightly tepid rhythmic backdrop to his "Guitar, Drums 'N' Bass" record:
"I would have preferred it if it had been much livelier. Where I live in Hackney is where one branch of Drum and Bass, when the called it Jungle came up. They had the loudest stations on my FM band, completely illegal, but they were just down the street from me. So I said to Zorn, "Listen to this shit" how do you fancy a record?".....He'd never heard it so I sent him a copy of some of the stuff that I'd taped off the station and he said, Fine. I said "I'll use these local guys from the radio." And he said, "No you can't, you have to get someone we can hire. I don't know why. The kids down the street were playing some fantastic shit. Very exciting. I used to practise with it. That's how I got into it."
Aaah isn't that so sweet! In his late sixties and still rocking the FM dial! Interesting to note that he WANTED to go with the real thing not the lame copy by Brum's DJ Ninj. Actually I think Bailey might have been under the impression that the guys on the radio were spinning their own dubplates, which can only have partially been the case.
And he's always swearing! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fucking, fuck. Aah, now I feel much better. Think I may pick up that "Ballads" CD. Listened to it when it came out and really liked it, but now I feel I should own a copy.
Ever since Mickey Tufluv's pioneering "bich-ass-muthafucka" breakthrough piece on DJ Screw:
http://tufluv.blogspot.com/2003_12_14_tufluv_archive.html
------->
I've been keen as hell to get my hands on the original DJ Screw artifacts.
First tactic was ask here what the best Screw was:
http://www.screweduprecords.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=349&PN=2
------->
The poll produced 5 clear winners:
_3 N'Da Morning
_No Drank
_Hard Times
_Killuminati
_Eintein
------->
Unfortunately the Screw shop:
http://www.screweduprecords.com/index.asp
didn't have them in stock.
------->
Through eBay I got in touch with this dude:
DATBOYPOLLO(at)aol.com
who was able to sell me them all.
Marco is sound but drive him down on the price of 3 N'Da Morning (ouch)
Direct from Houston Texas, the source.
------->
Over the past few days I've been listening to little else.
------->
DJ Screw is like Georg Baselitz (geezer who hangs pictures upside_down) he has a pungent iconoclastic trick (the french would say "truck") he slows all the tracks he spins to a molasses-engulfs-mexican-village pace. At once a superficial tactic and a window to a separate universe.
Don't believe Alvin Toffler! Our infolding present is as much a canvas for deceleration as acceleration. Ever waited 10 minutes on a phone tree? Ever spent 3 weeks on a 12 second shot for an Elton John commercial? Ever driven through town in a fast car at 4 miles per hour? Ever spent 2 hours downloading a bootleg application off the internet?
The idea that the future is heralded by quick music is misleading. Jungle reached a speed plateaux c.160bpm arriving at a langorous skanky double-time. Don't forget that the ULTIMATE prodigal future sonic oozed out of Trenchtown's makeshift studios in the 1970s.
"Speed it Up!" It's the cheesiest impact-effect available to the producer. Coleman Hawkins' solos pitched up a few notches become Charlie Parker's aspirational template. James Brown giving "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" the requisite lift by a hike in tempo. Dave Edmunds speeding up Love Sculpture's "Sabre Dance." It's very similar to the cartoon artist's stock tactic of shrinking his drawings on the photocopier to increase their intensity.
Mixing slow is hard. Matching beats with a gulf of time between them is extremely difficult. I always found mixing Jungle much easier than (less forgiving) Techno. And those smudged "awkward" super-imposed harmonies you find in the mix: they're here, only foregrounded by their extended duration. As per Luke Vibert comments about the inherenently avant garde properties of detuned samples held together in a beat matrix. That quavery sound of a mix held in place by the DJ nudging one deck forward, neeling the spindle of the other to delay it. That loping off-centred "parabolic" sound writ large on the Boards of Canada recordings.
Took a break from the super-abstract k-hole trip-hop of 3 N'Da Morning (Screw slurring the intro and zero-velocity shout-outs to m_y__c_r_e_w__f_r_o_m__t_h_e__s_o_u_t_h_s_i_d_e) and listened to Gunshot's "Patriot Games" which seemed ABSURDLY involuted and packed with manic detail in contrast with Screw's anaemicised tundrascapes.
Delight at Screw's obliviousness to the Hip-Hop Nation. You'll hear ESG (No, not the shrill chicks!) Al D, Big Moe, Botany Boys and Mack 10 but only a little outside of the crunk cosmos. Snoop and Too $hort are as big as the names get. So like London's tiny self-obsessed Grime network! Loving especially the extended hand-tailored slow raps of _No Drank. "Aggravated Rasta" and "White Horse" off 3 N'Da Morning pt.1 where the pace lends shaded menace to the electro-flavoured synths and patois stylings. Quite astonished that it's taken me ten years to catch up with this tortoise: that in 1994 when we were hailing Tricky, Goldie and Gerald that Mr. Screw was totally (practically) unknown. R.I.P.
-
I DO have archives!
http://www.woebotnik.com/trash/
-
Hi to John Dubversion who is both writing super stuff here:
http://ill-conceived.blogspot.com/
and also facing unpleasant, unnecessary harassment from the fuzz.
Thinkin' of U dubV.
Hipsters everywhere! Be sure to check the Donna McGhee "blink-and-you'll-miss-it" reissue. Balanced at the fulcrum between Boogie (Disco+Soul) and 80s Soul (New Wave+Soul) this gem of an elpee from 1978 is arranged by Patrick Adams. Almost punk garage in it's grainy low-fi splendour and sporting the lean yet lavish 8'10'' of "Make It Last Forever" whose sultry moans are infinitely more comely than Donna's. BUY BUY BUY.
-
Here's the tracklisting of my recent GRIME04CD:
Ch Ching: Lady Sovereign
Wonky Vocal: Jookie Mundo
People Don't Know: Donae'O
Bang Bang Bang: Jon E Cash/Black Ops
Lethal: Ruff Squad
S.T.D's: Target feat. Dogzee & Syer
That's Me: Flow Dan
Get Over It: Essentials
Girls get lend, to my friend: God's Gift
Don't Watch Me Though: Donae'O
Top Boy: MC Narstie
Straight Version: God's Gift
Torch: More Fire Crew
Bastard: Wiley
Back To School: Durty Doogz
Chosen One: Riko
Problems: Wiley
War Wid: Footsie & D Double E
Serious Thugs: D Double E & JME
Juggling: Terrah Danjah
Not that you're terribly interested. If SDC wants a copy he can have one in exchange for his fave Ruff Squad show. Can't squeeze much time off to surf the airwaves at the moment. Oh and BTW if you got sent one of these by me then please don't fileshare 'em or make too many CD dubs. At least not to your mate with the slsk folder. In spite of what Grasshopper at heronbone said ("Matt's just getting better at buying twelves") I do believe the recorded output of Grime is impoving. This comp is miles better than last year's one. That's good news for the scene's survival, I fear the MC on the airwaves may be a more fragile phenomenon.
-
The blogs are like an effing soap opera at the moment. That's alright! I like soap operas.
Standing in the sun at the window of Glens on the Byres Road watching Daniel Bedingfield noiselessly perform neutron ballad. Turned to the perfectly static hoverfly to my right: "That's what killed UK Garage. Affection for mainstream appraisal is a boom'n'bust cycle my son. They want broad public approval until they realise how naff you end up looking. Same thing with happened with Essex Soul and Level 42."
-
This from VICE UK's review of Dizzee Rascal's "Showtime": "While we don't want to take ALL the credit for Dizzee's rise to the Radio 2 A-list, we'll just remind you we were the first ones apart from RWD to write about him." Splutters. Also yawn. The whole VICE fast'n'loose critique thing has become extremely grating. They need to sort themselves out with some hardcore trainspotter-ish musicological action.
-
Rummaging through my brother-in-law's discarded vinyl in a Glasgow attic and found amongst
the boxes these tasty looking pieces:
_Brooklyn Beats Compilation.
(Featuring "Hot New Trax" by Beltram, Bones, Ralphie Dee, How and Little, Mundo Muzique and Wild)
_Front 242: Headhunters EP.
(Cello-tasm.)
_Earth People: Reach Up To Mars.
(Not as good as I thought it might be.)
_Pearls Before Swine: Balaklava.
(At last! Stand out track "I saw the World"- Sheer Loveliness. Very like Joe Byrd's USA this.)
_KLF: What Time is Love LP.
(With all the diff. versions of WTIL.)
I resisted my inclination to half-inch them. Even the Front 242 which there were 2 copies of.
The other day I went to an interview at The Wire. This was thanks in part to Jim Clarke who drew my attention to a vacancy they were advertising for a web editor. Cheers Jim. Apparently they'd received 80 CVs and were giving only 8 interviews. I was pleased to be taken seriously enough to warrant being summoned; was in truth a little anxious about how I was going to squeeze my duties into an already busy week, but determined to manage should they take me on. I didn't get the job in case you're wondering...
Their offices are tucked behind Spitalfields market, housed in a building called Universal House. This detail never makes the rubric of their address. They feel it might confuse the general public who might assume there was some connection between them and the UNIVERSAL media machine. It did however make discovering their whereabouts doubly complicated. Really how Wire-ish is that !?!
It felt really great to talk to Tony Herrington face-to-face. The mag may have it's detractors these days but let's face it, they're hardcore aren't they! They're doing their thing and surviving. I have a respect for that. Also I have an eternal affection for my own Golden Era of their activity between 1993 and 1996 when KE, SR and IP ran amok. It was particularly nice for me to be able to run a few scripts on Tony pertaining to how I might manage their Website; which I guess doubled as a method of feeling out what possible routes might be open to them. How would they feel about a little lebensraum being granted to coverage of, say, Urban World Music or Country or Metal (Don't mention Grime Matt!) Tony countered by remarking that he'd have no problem whatsoever with that. Actually I was really surprised. He said that with the magazine they're limited by the dictates of space as to what makes the cut, volunteering Grime as something which might be covered. With the website space wouldn't be a problem, he said, and consequently the remit could be broader.
OK so maybe this was disingeneous, after all what defines a magazine EXCEPT what is left out. But I was inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. I think their anxiety about including a greater spread of music stems largely from a distaste of that perennial cultural studies bugbear, the "taking Madonna seriously" syndrome*. However if that means we don't see turgid writing by the clever brigade who've lost touch with the cutting-edge of music then I'm happy. And actually I can disclose that one Mr. X. has had some luck pitching them a primer more in keeping with this particular rhizome than one might expect.
Funny to note that Tony Herrington's greatest reservations with writing on the internet was it's uniformly formal sloppiness. S'funny cos I know at least one other blogger who doesn't sleep if he's got a comma in the wrong place, or at least correctly misplaced. Thanks to Tony and Ben for seeing me.
-
Dan Selzer says:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
my partner and I will be on WFMU tonight from 11pm to
3am eastern time. http://www.wfmu.org
it will be archived, it's OCDJ's show. If you can't
hear it tonight, check it out later, we'll play some
pretty cool stuff, some italo/eurodisco, regular
disco, 80s club stuff, punk whatever.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
That'll be some wkd shit.
Just wanted to take 5 and say how much I appreciate the sentiments issueing from my dear colleague Mark Fisher's writing. I've been very touched by Mark sticking his neck out, not just for me, but in the name of constructive debate. The k-punk blog is without a doubt, the epicentre (the beating heart!) of our network. Authoratitve, lovingly put together and always fascinating, it's as 'important' as it's creator made it.
/// 3 Of A Kind: Babycakes
Thought it was about time I took the bull by the horns on this one. I passed over "Babycakes" when it was out on white, it just seemed such a depressing step backwards. In terms of the routing of the white hot current of the London Underground sound it reminds me of Baby D's "Let me be your Fantasy" which was that moment when Jungle looked over it's shoulder and turned into a pillar of salt, or at least when the distinction between the hardcore revival hordes and jungle's main thrust became evident (Hixxy, Billy Bunter, Kniteforce, Sy choosing to, if not keep moving, then at least to stop flowing). Yeah "Let me be your Fantasy", great tune, fab production but definitely the end of something. It's mainly been down to Silver Dollar Circle's extremely evocative descriptions of "Babycakes" that I've even come back to it, obv it's blowing up on the radio, but it just doesn't really do it for this punter. Those chugging Todd Edwards-style drums, the plinky-plonk harmony that's straight off Tuff Jam's remix of Amira's "My Desire" (definitely ripped off something!), the nearly cloying sentiment recalls the dreamy Doollaly classics but this past is too recent. Hearing it is like being at a club where the DJ has panicked that he's cleared the dancefloor and just slams on a tune he KNOWS will keep the party going, that desperation audible, permeating through the gaps in the track. Not a bad song but I felt kind of cheesed off, coerced even, when I picked it up. So where are things headed?
/// Kano & Sadie: So Sure
/// Shola Ama feat. D Double E: So Contagious
Simon SDC is clearly right about the current sweetening/feminisation of the vibe. It's that same periodic problem that affects the 'nuum which Reynolds has identified time and time again, with the girls being driven away from the dance. The difficulty comes when producers throng back to pre-established modes and screw with the trajectory of the scene. Terrah Danjah, with these two productions, has found a way of bringing Wiley's futuristic innovations into play, creating a super-slinky Grime with nary a touch of 2step in sight. TD's productions have, queerly, the same glistening metallic yet abrasive textures that characterise Steve Albini's. If Wiley has got slightly lost in the cult of his own personality and has partially obscured his studio genius, see also Pharrell, (the latest Roll Deep 'Rollin Deep' EP is a bit wack, having said this the Eskimo Refix is excellent) then TD is making JUST the right moves. "So Sure" is the best thing I've heard in aeons, with a vocal like Brandy's over shards of chrome and "So Contagious" isn't too far behind. The trope is Shawwna and Ashanti's big beat ballads with Kano and D Double posing as Ja Rule and Ludacris (why are those two on every import twelve?) S'nice to see Shola Ama again; not since the days of Taboo and Glamma Kid, had a rough time on coke poor thing.
/// Gemma Fox & 2 Face: Gone
All this Da Vinche stuff is a bit off-putting. He's putting out more records than ESP. But this one is a corker! Totally boombastic salvo riff and (tellingly) the vocal sounds better pitched up to +4 for that quavery edge. You *know* we're stepping back in time! Again this succeeds where "Babycakes" stumbles for the same reasons outlined above. Relentless and pulverising bass tones. Mash up! And catchier than ANY of the American tunes I've heard recently.
/// Sunship: Almighty Father
Talk about throwbacks! What have this lot been up to?! Pimping 2-step presumably. I used to love their productions, particularly "Cheque, One, Two". Very Mantronik. And while this one, with a nasty Lady Saw-style vocal, sounds nothing like Grime ought to in 2004 (!), there's too much vertical drama, it's too funky, is still excellent. On the same label as Sovereign's "Ch-Ching". In the light of the potential commercial reincarnation that these more feminine tunes may bring to the scene it's interesting to notice that the long-dormant deuce magazine (which sprung to life on the Artful Dodger) looks like it might be re-emerging. So where's my subscriptions then geezers!
/// Jon E Cash/Black Ops: Champagne and Hoes
/// D.P.M. Feat Bruza, Napper and Shizzle: Ave Some of That
/// Dizzy Rascal: Stand Up
Couldn't resist the Black Ops number after it came in for serious scrutiny by SDC. The sex-ism is definitely there, but can't really find it in me to single it out for damnation. Not a great track mind, but I'm partial to their stuff. The brilliant D.P.M. tune is a sloppy cockernee knees up, with an unbeatable chorus "'Ave some of that, get me, get me, 'Ave some of that." The Dizzy record is rubbish! Reverse that Sepultura metal guitar pre-set riff and you'll hear the following words: "mumble mumble crossover mumble."Still no sight of the Ruff Squad releases!
Aaargh! He got me in one! Respekt to MC MC for firin' back.
(Thinks: I really must stop swearing so much!)
http://hemingwoid.blogspot.com/2004/08/suebotnik-small-tribute-to-big-guy.html
-
Thanks to Seb Morlu for providing me with CD-R's of Walter Smetak's two long-deleted LPs replete with photocopies of their sleeves. Gwen Jamois, who has sold them in the past tells me these records are now beyond expensive, entering the terrain of museum prices (wink) I've only had the chance to dip my toe in to the debut on Brazilian Phillips (1974), which was produced by Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, a quite wonderful improbable sound world of Avant-Garde Tropical Futurism.
Kodwo Eshun, who tipped me off about Smetak in the first place last year also draws my attention to improviser Hugh Davis's recent letter to The Wire (August 2004) where he praises Smetak. Davis provides us with some useful links:
www.gilbertogil.com.br/smetak/etaktak0.htm
www.latinoamerica-musica.net/frame.html (select Smetak under "Compositores")
Blissblog on Fonts
http://blissout.blogspot.com/2004_08_01_blissout_archive.html#109180610680722801
Demands some thorough follow up. Scratched my head as to how best to do justice to this turtely EXCELLENT idea. The solution? A slice of ikon-o-graphic 3D, Reynolds declaiming theory over a backdrop of multiplexed (muxed) chron-ik breaks, his diatribe doubled in dynamic subtitling; Arial imperceptibly morphing into Trade Gothic Bold, deepening into Olive Antique Shadow before rupture in a baroque riot of Monster Outline, Grubstake and Mousehole. Giant marching glyphs looming over the camera: melting, throbbing and skidding.
-
Robot@Blogistan
http://83.216.135.129/607
Luv U Bismillah.
-
Shine on SilverDollarCircle
http://silverdollarcircle.blogspot.com/
Respekt mate...
> The fetishising of an "aesthetic essence" (viz the boiling away of the particular to
> establish a GENRE or a MARKETING NICHE or a MOVEMENT or an ATTITUDE
> or TREND) (ie ignoring what may be difft/interestin/exciting abt such-and-such a
> record or song or performance in favour of a general rah-rah bigging up of the specialist
> section of the record shop it's stacked in/section of the musicmag it's reviewed in) as the
> grounding for excellence = the ROCKIST FOE IN PLAIN VIEW."
http://www.freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2004_07_01_nylpm_archive.html#109085365016
663459
Wanted to, extremely belatedly, comment on this point by the esteemed Mark Sinker (He hates me too? Oh well!) I wanted to focus on this remark of Mark's a little bit more. Not in TOO much detail of course cos I'm really thick.
It's a great remark isn't it? If there is anything I'm guilty of as a music fan it's relying on some mathematical formula of my own creation which prescribes what music is "hot" and what isn't. I may be articulating it within the framework of bigging up a Grime record but, ROCK or not, the modus operandi is the same. Rather than denounce Mr Sinker's point as callous rubbish (Preposterous! I cherry pick the tracks I like strictly on the basis of how they appeal to me! Etc etc etc) maybe it's more honest to just agree.
But don't you think its kind of naive to assume that one comes to music without a whole framework of expectations? What one knows about a record's origin, it's producer's biography, its "pedigree" has everything to do with how one consumes it, whether one "believes" it. A pop-theologian might counter with the argument that the general public, that imaginary behind the formation of the chart aren't swayed by such effete elitist ideas, that like unwashed cattle they'll buy what appeals to their "innate" sugary taste-buds, but OF COURSE that's rubbish. The same mechanisms impact on everyone's choices. Car salesmen in Woking bought Gabrielle's "Rise Again" cos she's one soulful chick. Small children bought the McDonalds tune cos it would annoy the aspirational middle-class values they sensed in the dominant culture. Public school boys buying Kylie Minogue her disco flavours. The charts may be a huge mess of signals, but it still constitues signals. It's not just a flux.
In the same piece I thought I saw Mark suggesting the charts was a useful as a roll-of-the-dice music taste: "The charts - in this theology - throw stuff in front of you for reasons which is (in strictly aesthetic terms) merely random, or anyway so scrambled that you can't read back from the ultimate public selection to the formal material choices that went into its making." If THIS is the principle behind liking chart music wouldn't you be better off just making a dada-istic rule for yourself like "I will only listen to records by people whose name begins with the letter A"?
I don't think one has to be so paranoid about the magical properties of the assemblage of signifiers which produce for one a satisfying record. Furthermore approaching music from within the boundaries of preconceptions, which though will often put you in the shit if you value being "at the cutting edge" and often out of kilter with your peers; like being three years late into dance music or missing out being a Hoxton Twat (What you mean I AM a Hoxton Twat!), as a prescription it's both eminently useful and more often than not enables one to practise an open game, to take risks and be adventurous with one's choices on the basis of their semiotic validity, as opposed to being at the mercy of something as empty as a chart or a randomly-generated rule. There's A LOT of music out there!
Having loads of fun with CDs. I splashed out and got myself a really decent (ish) CD player, as opposed to the Cambridge Audio 50 quid bit of shite I've had for years. The one Lulu DESTROYED.
Despite the ridiculous, carefully manicured self-image I tender of being THEE vinyl junkie (what nonsense!) I've slowly began to admit to myself that collecting records isn't that important to me. Maybe this is akin to Luke's recent admission that he wasn't so interested in the pirates as a result of writing about them. Maybe one wears these more meaningless obsessions away in the process of writing about them? And more essential ones rise to the surface, like a well-grounded affection for music itself.
Quite a few months back my good man Sermad Buni asked me down to the Vinyl Vultures record meet. These dudes are scary nuts about records. All full to the brim about tales of 4-day taxi rides around the Bahamas and sojourns deep into the lost bins of Europe. There was even a celebrity digger present in the form of Bill "Last Night A DJ Saved My Life" Brewster. Actually I just *knew* what the musical territory was going to be. Library records, Funk and Disco obscurities etc. Just for a giggle I brought my Cold Rush Gabba records down, in part to spin them to Phil Sherberne (yo Phil wazzup!) who was in town. And of course I was greeted with half-cocked eyebrows. Er, Gabba? Well, in my defense, they are VERY RARE records. I do respect these guys, but a big part of me is thankful that other people are going down these long narrow corridors and doing useful things like making compilations, so I don't have to. If I may be a teensy weensy bit critical about the digger culture though, they can harbour an almost innate suspicion of new music. Taxidermists the lot of 'em! I think the experience went some way to making me question the importance of vinyl. I mean, luvvit, but it's only a format at the end of the day. Nice big pictures on the sleeve etc. But...
I just love my CD player. It's a real relief to have separated CDs from the computer's own player. I've got some funky oxygen-free cables, and I've been loving the CD-Rs that I've been getting from friends across the net in exchange for stuff. Really loving these funky silver things with their hand-written tracklistings. There's something deeply personal about them, like a stash of secret wholly personal music that's worthless to anyone but me. I find that attractive. And of course the copies sound as good as the originals (the wonder of 0's and 1's), and cos the original shop-bought CD is a wholly shit, essentially rubbish object then these proliferating copies aren't "delibidinized" in comparison with the original.I even PREFER them to the originals. CDs! I've got racks of 'em.
After my filesharing rants this may sound like rank hypocrasy, maybe it is, and unforgivable in consequence; but really I do insist there's a difference between making a mate a copy of a CD and just blankly offering it up willy-nilly to the whole P2P universe. Though I ask you, if mp3s do prove to be it's downfall, how stupid was the recording industry to invent CDs? The whole principle of digital music and the ability to make perfect replicas! Did they not consider this in the least? Remember how worked up they got about home taping?
Funny to reflect that my Dad had a huge (really!) collection of C90s he made of recordings of concerts on Radio 3. I think my bro got them and either taped over them or chucked them out. Don't think I'm condemning him mind, cos I got Dad's old records (a long time before he died) and flogged them. I kept the Wagner for a bit then relented. That probably sounds really callous (it was a bit, the sort of thing you do when you're young) but at the end of the day it doesn't really matter. Actually I think Dad ended up being more fond of his CDs, and Mum's got those ;-)
Best things I've heard in a while:
Palais Schaumburg - Palais Schaumburg
Everything I like about DNA only more so. Extremely edgy clipped stop/start sound. Full-on "deutsche-angst" vocals but in a very delicate context. Improbable crab-walking spikey bass/drum patterns. But also fidgety Liebezeit-a-like percussion. Snatches of eldritch fairground organ. Existential to the core. Not a pop harmony in sight but insanely catchy. AMAZING essential stuff.
Richard X: Back to Mine
Loathsome series comes up trumps here with Richard's brilliant selection. This surely must be the first place you'll come upon someone making a case for Radiophonica/Library music of the 80s (as in Denton and Cook's "Tomorrow's World Theme") Other highlights being Nivea's "Run Away" a 'lost' Neptunes production which in Rich's words: "The future equivalent of the Southport Weekender will dig up in 20 years time."
Padlock (feat Sly Dunbar, Robbie Shakespeare, Gwen Guthrie, Wally Badarou, Larry Levan)
When SciFi told me his story about waking up one morning and deciding that today was the day he was GOING TO GET THIS RECORD NO MATTER, I was slightly non-plussed. I used to pass it over lots, and then I skipped the bootleg re-issue of it too. Because? Well the supergroup concept and the disco record didn't seem to belong together: one the definition of industry anality, the other's success dependent purely on how it works on the dancefloor/it's tunefulness. I just couldn't see the construct producing anything as spontaneous as was necessary. Fer chrissakes it's even got a celebrity record cover designer in the form of Tony Wright who did Scratch's "Super Ape" amongst other. Eventually I succumbed to a dusty old copy, and cool! Sweeeeet record. "Padlock" itself has a lovely acheing tune: "Gonna padlock my heart" and the limber Compass Point sound goes together with it beautifully. Scary disco heads like Andy Kellman (Yo wazzup Andy?) Phil Wilkins and Joe Estes might like to know I also picked up the Walter Gibbons mix of Loretta Holloway's "Hit'n'Run." How did I do? ;-)
Revolution: The Journey Continues
Had to import this from www.musica.co.za. What joy! Top SA Kwaito DJs like Christo come to the UK to buy Deep House they take it home and, get this, pitch it down! With this stuff it's the boom boom thud that connects it with Mbaqanga. Revolution are two black dudes from the townships. Their last CD (which I played 'Cina' from on that set I did last at Resonance) is called "The Journey" but this is even better. It's very like hearing a set by an African Chris Brann or even Deep Dish, but the flavours are distinctly African: mbira, township rap and choirs over pumping deep house. The CD is one mix of twelve or so tracks, so it really is a journey. Such succullence and also in parts extremely techno-esque abstraction.
-
Big up Gutterbreakz.
Thanks to Doobie for passing on this excellent article.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Shortwave And the Calling
By David Segal
In a cluttered home office in the World's End section of London, Akin Fernandez is trolling the dial of his newly acquired shortwave radio. It's December 1992 and it's late at night, when the city is quiet and the mad-scientist squawks of international broadcasts have an otherworldly tone. Fernandez, the owner and sole employee of an indie music label, is about to trip across a mystery that will take over his life.
Shortwave signals are bouncing, as they always do, around the globe, caroming off a layer of the atmosphere a few hundred miles above the Earth and into antennas all over the world. Fernandez can hear news from Egypt and weather reports from China. But his browsing stops when he tunes in something startling: the mechanized voice of a man, reading out numbers.
No context, no comment, no station identification. Nothing but numbers, over and over, for minutes on end. Then the signals disappear, as if somebody pulled the plug in the studio. And it's not just one station. The more he listens, the more number monologues he hears.
"Five four zero," goes a typical broadcast, this time in the soulless voice of a woman with a British accent. "Zero nine zero. One four. Zero nine zero one four."
Numbers in Spanish, in German, Russian, Czech; some voices male, others female. When Fernandez lucks into hearing the start of a broadcast, he's treated to the sound of electronic beeps, or a few bars of calliope music, or words like "message message message." Then come the numbers. A few stations spring to life the same time each night, others pop up at random and cannot be found again.
At first, Fernandez figures it's a prank, the work of radio pirates with a sense of humor. But you need a license for this part of the radio band, and why would anyone break the law just to read digits into the dark yonder? In England the penalties are serious. Where's the comedic payoff?
Nobody has answers. Not the guy who sold him the radio, who claims they're weather stations -- which is crazy, because weather stations don't hopscotch to different spots on the dial, as many of these did. Not a manual he buys about shortwave frequencies, which has a chapter on "numbers stations" and describes them as a riddle that nobody has solved. Not the British Library, which seems to have catalogued every other sound on the planet.
What's with the numbers?
Answering that question, it turns out, would take Fernandez years, and it left him nearly penniless, at least for a while. It also brought him a horde of admirers on another continent, eventually earned him a credit in a Tom Cruise movie and sparked a legal battle with the acclaimed band Wilco.
Fernandez would study numbers stations largely because he couldn't stop even if he tried -- which is to say, he fell into the grip of an obsession. But along the way, by both accident and design, he discovered amid all that static the raw material for a point he likes to make, with characteristic zeal, about the future of rock-and-roll.
That, however, is later. In December of '92, Fernandez is just listening. And listening. He stays up till 4 or 5 every morning, jotting down frequencies and figures, looking for patterns. He keeps a detailed log, not for weeks or months but for years, without a clue about what exactly he is logging. Sometimes Fernandez doesn't leave his house for a week.
"You just get submerged," he says, on the phone from London. "You get immersed in it. There are so many questions and the only answer is to listen more, because no answers are coming from anywhere else."
The Secret Sounds
A few things you should probably know about Akin Fernandez: There's the basic background stuff -- that he's the son of Nigerian-born parents, that he grew up in Brooklyn and moved to London when he was 15 years old. He calls himself a geek. He believes UFOs are real. More mysteriously, there appear to be grooves carved into his clean-shaven head, the origins of which he politely declines to discuss. ("Irrelevant," he says.) He is now 41.
Also -- and this is key -- Fernandez hunts for audible thrills the way a shark hunts for meat, which is to say constantly and ravenously. This makes it a little easier to grasp his passion for numbers stations. They were unlike anything that had ever hit his ears.
And the radio counting wasn't just new to Fernandez, it was beautiful. He's a disciple of an Italian named Luigi Russolo, who argued in a 1913 manifesto called "The Art of Noises" that the bustle of city life and industrial machinery ought to be included in our musical language, alongside chords and harmonies, violins and oboes. This proved a tough sell. In 1914, Russolo held his first concert with noise-making machines he called Intoners and the show ended in a melee: performers against the audience.
"I understand that shortwave noise is a kind of music," Fernandez says, sounding Russolovian. "And to me the numbers brought another level of beauty to the music."
One final thing to know about Akin Fernandez: He's prone to fixations. His first was a collection of Marvel comic books that swelled to 5,000 when he was a kid. In his twenties, he noticed that literary-minded prostitutes in London were advertising their services, and phone numbers, with saucy little poems written on cards glued to the insides of phone booths. ("Once upon a time in Earl's Court / reigned the wicked Love Queen . . . ") For months, Fernandez would mortify friends and family by painstakingly peeling the cards off the glass, until he owned more than 600 of them. In 1984, he published the lot in a volume called "The X Directory."
"My mother came to the book party," Fernandez recalls. "I couldn't believe it."
Numbers stations, with their variety and quantity, triggered all of his impulses to catalogue and collect. The stations had personality, if you listened long enough. One always began with a few bars of "The Lincolnshire Poacher," an old British folk song. On another you could occasionally hear roosters or echoes of Radio Havana in the background, as though someone had forgotten to turn off a mike. One starred a young lady with an exotic accent who dramatically read words from the International Radio Operators alphabet, somehow making inscrutable phrases -- "Sierra. Yankee. November." -- sound life-and-death urgent.
While the rest of London slept, Fernandez chased these voices all over the dial, never sure when or where he'd find one. He wrote down the results in a green book bound with fake leather. A typical entry looked like this:
Sept 6 '93
Freq Time Signal
6.201 USB 12:30 am BIZARRE German Children's Voice
Station starts with beeps, then
GLOCKENSPIEL!! Then count
From 1 to 10 then ACHTUNG!
And message!! [expletive] Hell!!
There are a lot of exclamation points in Fernandez's log.
"You're listening, and all of a sudden you come across a really strong signal," he says. "It's the most chilling thing you've ever heard in your life. These signals are going everywhere and they could be for anything. There's nothing like it."
To pay the rent, Fernandez released music through Irdial-Discs, which by then was part of a small ecosystem of clubs and record shops selling avant-garde music in London. Finally, after three years of wee-hours number logging, he heard about a book called "Intercepting Numbers Stations" by a guy named Langley Piece. He mail-ordered it from a place in Scotland, and when it arrived he sat and devoured it in a sitting. The book confirmed Fernandez's initial hunch -- the stations were no joke.
"They're deadly serious, in fact," he says. "That little German girl reading numbers, she might be ordering someone to assassinate a person with a poisoned umbrella."
Mission: Indecipherable
Let's say you're a spy, out in the field, spying. You need instructions now and then from headquarters, but you don't want to risk exposure by picking up a phone (tappable) or getting an e-mail (traceable). Face-to-face meetings carry their own risks. What do you do?
One solution, dreamed up during the Cold War: Listen on shortwave radio at a predetermined time and frequency for a message that only you can understand. Numbers stations, it turns out, are the one-way chatter of espionage agencies to their spies. This isn't conspiracy theory hokum; it's referenced in a dozen-plus memoirs of assorted ex-spooks and defectors. And though numbers broadcasts might sound low-tech in the age of the BlackBerry, the idea isn't utterly cockamamie.
"In a two-way communication, you have to acknowledge the message," says David Kahn, author of "The Codebreakers," a history of cryptology. "But with a shortwave broadcast, anybody can listen, which means that nobody knows who the message is intended for."
The numbers, Kahn explained, are translated with the aid of what's known as a one-time pad, essentially a dictionary for a language that is spoken only once. Most pads are destroyed after a single use -- some of the Soviet pads, lore has it, were edible -- making them one of espionage's rarest artifacts. In 1988, three were found in a bar of hollowed-out soap when a Czech spy, posing as an art dealer in London, was caught by authorities as he sat in an apartment and transcribed a message sent via shortwave.
For Fernandez, this spy angle was a red rag to a bull. A dozen new questions arose, such as how much was all this costing taxpayers, and what messages were being sent? It irked him, too, that no government official, at least in Britain or the United States, would acknowledge this whole system was in place. He was unmoved by the argument that if the system were acknowledged it wouldn't be secret anymore. It didn't matter to him that the messages were totally indecipherable, or that nobody else seemed remotely worked up about them. The more Fernandez thought about it, the more outrageous it all seemed. British citizens -- and citizens of other countries -- underwriting secret messages, sent to agents, telling them to do God knows what.
"Even if you assume that most of the messages are 'pick up this money' or 'drop off the laundry,' think about what numbers stations represent. The only way a secret like this can be kept is if you live in a society where everybody is obeying and everybody is a little sleepy. But if you're a curious kind of chap you'll wonder, if your government can keep this a secret, what other secrets are they keeping."
If you knew Fernandez back in 1994, there was no talking him out of his numbers addiction. He claims he had a social life through his super-fixated years, but ask for the name of a buddy who knew what he was going through and he comes up empty.
Well, a girlfriend named Anne Marie came by one night and listened and her jaw dropped. More typical, though, was the reaction of a cousin who lives in London, who was perfectly baffled.
"I'd call and he'd say, 'I'm listening to something, do you want to hear it?' " remembers Enitan Abayomi. "And then I'd hear a voice over the radio. And I'd think, so? I just didn't hear what he heard in it. But he's very, very bright, and I often feel like he's leaving me miles behind. So I thought that people with higher IQs than mine might understand what he's talking about."
At some point, Fernandez began to think he'd never kick his numbers habit. It had pushed nearly everything else out of his life. He'd had enough, and in 1997, he tore himself, at last, from his radio. How did he do it?
"The Conet Project," he says.
The Leading Edge of Rock.
In the annals of recorded music, you'd be hard-pressed to find anything rivaling the ambition and absurdity of "The Conet Project." (Conet, a word he heard often on the shortwave, is Czech for "end.") Four CDs with 150 different broadcast snippets from all over the world. More than 280 minutes of white noise, numbers and beeps. Plus a 74-page booklet with background, logs, playlists and a bibliography -- the sort of treatment ordinarily reserved for platinum-selling bands with a massive fan base. Fernandez poured everything he had into "Conet." It sold in the United States for $62.
At Aquarius Records in San Francisco, co-owner Allan Horrocks keeps track of sales of the enigmatic sounds packaged as "The Conet Project."
Randi Lynn Beach - For The Washington Post
"I wanted it to be perfect," he says. "I didn't know what it would do, if it would just sit in boxes, because nobody had done anything like this before. But it was obvious to me that it had to be done."
This is a pretty succinct definition of obsession: a thing you feel you have to do, even though you don't, even if doing it will cost you everything, which is what it cost Fernandez. There were a few head-scratching reviews of "Conet" and sales of about 2,000 copies, modest even by indie standards. Fernandez closed up Irdial, and the last pressing of "Conet" was in 2001. He took a series of jobs that he'd rather not discuss.
"They were jobs," he says. "Just jobs."
That might have been it. But something happened. "Conet" slowly acquired a cult following. A fervent cluster of devotees cropped up in San Francisco, around a store called Aquarius Records, a haven for the musical avant-garde, the sort of place that crows about albums such as "Insect Electronica From Southeast Asia." To Aquarius's owners and regular customers, "Conet" was a little ridiculous and totally irresistible. They posted a chart behind the cash register that tracked the store's "Conet" sales, and asked everyone who bought a copy to pose for a photo. They stopped with a photo of customer No. 386.
"It works in a lot of different ways," says Allan Horrocks, a co-owner of the store. "It's kind of creepy and mysterious because of what it is -- this secret thing that you can't understand. We'd think it was cool if it was just an experimental drone record. But it's more than that."
Much more, actually. "Conet" gives off a whiff of the vaguely forbidden: Maybe the government doesn't want you to hear this. And your parents won't get it. And if you listen today, in the age of Code Orange, it actually sounds a little sinister, with echoes of the "chatter" the Bush administration is always warning us about. What could be more frightening than "chatter"?
"Conet," in other words, delivers a couple of the slightly subversive thrills that rock could once deliver without breaking a sweat. It feels new, a little dangerous, a ticket into a subculture of sorts. That's an experience you don't find in record stores much anymore, in part because rock has been around for 50 years -- and can anything that old really feel dangerous? -- and in part because corporate America long ago figured out there's gold in the underground, and now mines and mass-produces it faster every year. In a way, "Conet" is a measure of just how fringeward you need to head these days to find something that delivers the frisson of the margins.
Which is part of Fernandez's point. From the beginning, his label released what he calls "fine art noise" and "underground dance music," all of it made by a batch of artists you will never see on the charts. To Fernandez, Irdial's niche product occupies some of the only fertile ground left in music. It's his heartfelt belief that rock-and-roll has been dead for years.
"Rock bands now are just following the path that's already been marked," he grumbles. "Right down to the riffs, right down to the production. These people are copying their fathers' record collections.
"I think the truly creative people have left this area. A real artist would look at the canvas and find the corner that hasn't been painted yet. Nobody is doing that. . . . The first thing that anyone in a band with a guitar and drums should do is put down their instruments."
So what's a rock band to do if it wants to keep the guitars and churn new ground? How do you make something so familiar seem daring?
Enter Wilco, a quintet that started as an alt-country act and is now boldly going where no rockers have gone before. Two years ago the group released an album with a song called "Poor Places." It starts as a droopy ballad, but eventually the drums fade, the melody evaporates, and up roars a truly terrifying hurricane of sound. As it builds to a climax, a woman's urgent semaphore peeks through the noise:
"Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot. Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot. Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot."
It's a track from "Conet," the voice of Ms. International Radio Operator herself. The band sampled it and used it to name the album. "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" would earn Wilco its strongest reviews ever -- it was No. 1 that year in the Village Voice national poll of music critics -- and it sold decently, too.
At various moments on "Yankee" you can hear lead singer and co-songwriter Jeff Tweedy struggling with the where-do-we-go-now question. And he finds an answer, or at least part of an answer, in the same place as Fernandez, way way out there, in the ionosphere. Which is apparently where you wind up now when you seek the unpainted corner of the musical canvas.
It's enough to make you think that what's left of rock's frontier isn't very pretty; there isn't even music playing there. At some point -- after punk crested, perhaps, in the late '70s -- innovation in guitar pop became a matter of creative arithmetic. Blind Willie McTell plus Led Zeppelin times garage rock equals the White Stripes. The Velvet Underground plus the Cars divided by an intercom system equals the Strokes. But this has limits, too. The Strokes' second album, "Room on Fire," is just a rehash of their first. It's redundant and kind of gutless. It's everything that Fernandez hates.
"Conet" ultimately defines the crux of rock's problem in middle age. How do you double back without seeming timid? How do you roll forward without seeming incomprehensible for its own sake? On the Record Though Fernandez and Wilco might sound like kindred spirits, they never exactly cozied up. The band didn't pay for that "Conet" loop, and in 2002 Fernandez sued.
For years, it's been Irdial's policy to post free downloadable versions of every song in its catalogue. (Head to Irdial.com to download any Irdial title, including the entirety of "Conet.") But Fernandez makes a distinction between personal and commercial use of his work. If you're going to make money from his labors, he thinks he should share in the wealth. At minimum, he thinks you should ask nicely. In 2001, he granted Hollywood director Cameron Crowe the right to several "Conet" cuts for use in the film "Vanilla Sky," free of charge, because Crowe requested permission. The cuts are heard in those arresting moments when Tom Cruise shows up in Times Square and discovers that he's all alone.
Wilco, the band's lawyers would eventually explain, figured there was no copyright on sound that anyone could have heard on the radio, that obviously wasn't a song and that hadn't in any way been artistically altered. Whatever the merits of the case -- and Fernandez says the law in England is clearly on his side -- Wilco settled out of court, saying it preferred to skip a drawn-out fight. That was in late June. The band's label sent Irdial-Discs, aka Akin Fernandez, about $30,000 to cover his legal costs, plus a royalty payment several times that sum. See if you can guess what Fernandez did with the money.
Today he is married, to Anne Marie, the one person who seemed to grasp the lunacy and charm of numbers stations, and they are raising four children. Some family men might take a windfall like the Wilco loot and renovate the house, or take the kids on vacation. Fernandez didn't do that.
"The kind of guy who releases 'The Conet Project' isn't the kind of guy who goes on vacation," he says.
How about a new car?
"Absolutely not," he says.
Fernandez revived Irdial with the money, and he re-released "The Conet Project." New copies went on sale July 13 and the sales chart at Aquarius Records is back in action. In just a few weeks, the store has already sold 120 more copies.
"Conet," of course, will never earn a profit, but that was never the point. Fernandez calls it a total artistic triumph because it's in the Library of Congress, because it's in the British Library and because numbers stations are less of a mystery than when he first ran into them, 12 years ago. In 1998, a U.K. government spokesperson acknowledged for the first time that shortwave radio is indeed used for espionage.
"These [numbers stations] are what you suppose they are," the spokesperson told the
Daily Telegraph, in a story that was prompted by the release of "Conet." "People shouldn't be mystified by them. They're not, shall we say, for public consumption."
To the untrained ear this might have sounded like an unremarkable brushoff. To Fernandez, it sounded a lot like "uncle."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So that's what happened to Irdial! Remember that slightly crazed sleeve insert they did on CD -vs- Vinyl which caused so much controversy?
One of the things I've been picking up a lot of at the moment is *early* Ardkore Techno. Naturally I have ridikulous amounts of what you could call early Jungle, I'm always thrusting that HUUUUGE list of my records down people's throats; but this is an ever so slightly different zone, though one which, if you know what you're listening to, is clearly definable. I'm talking about all the Bleep'n'Bass stuff (Forgemasters, Ability II, Rhythmatic, Unique 3, the brilliant Original Rockers LP - Bleep'n'Bass was the one special replete with RealAudio stream that I didn't do at WOEBOT), the Belgian stuff (absolutely LOVING the 80 Aum stuff at the moment, particularly Incubus), the early Mover things ("Into Mekong Centre"), the Lenny Dee releases on Nu Groove, records like RAC's "National Breakdown", Eon and Ubik's tracks. I guess the XL and R&S stuff belongs in here, though maybe not the (more self-concious) WARP records. When you follow this trail and you come up against Psychotropic's "Hypnosis" you've come too far and you're in Jungle. The thing about this stuff is that it's STILL dirt cheap, it's been frog-leaped by people buying the Ardkore stuff. Maybe wisely, ha ha!
1991, of course, was the time when Techno and Ardkore "proper" were inseparable, when Fabio was sharing the bill the Colin Faver. There is a real directness to this music which is very refreshing. I remember a little later Techno heads (I guess perversely) decrying Ardkore for it's rhythmic panache saying "You know if you listen closely to Techno you'll find the rhythm is far more sophisticated," but the "early Ardkore Techno" period is almost, by definition, before people could and would say such things. There is a thuggishness to these plodding 4/4 rhythms laced with geriatric breakbeats that you just _know_ is completely moronic. It's certainly before you could make arguments for the "artistic qualities" of rave. You could just pull that gormless mouth-wide-open expression, freeze your neck and gaze blankly into the distance nodding to it in the comfort that that is exactly what everyone else will be doing. Like a rave storm trooper.
I was quite chuffed to pick up (on separate occasions recently) the Automation EPs. I know nothing about these records or their maker, though actually their anonymity is quite appealing in this context. There's a bit of writing on the back of the Red EP that says it all:
A BIG SHOUT OUT TO ALL THE HARDCORE-HEADS OUT THERE.
WE'D LIKE TO THANK CHILLIN FM, INNOCENCE FM, KISS FM AND A MASSIVE SHOUT-OUT
TO COLIN DALE AND COLIN FAVOR FOR OUR FIRST AIRPLAY. HARDCORE RULES.
Ha ha ha ha ha. I find that well funny, (regains composure) sorry maybe that's lost on anyone else. The labels all have this black lino-cut head with a plug in it with rays coming out of the plug. One is red, one is green and the other is blue. I'm guessing there is a yellow one somewhere but, truth be told, I can live without it, they're not AMAZING these records. Still I like them. The track I'm listening to at the moment has a Wil-E-Coyote sample on it ("Charly" style). There are quite alot of Classical "Pops" samples like William Tell Overture and Swan Lake, there's heaps of Mentasm sounds (very "overdriven" bass lines) snatches of 303s. If I had to compare them to one tune it'd be the DJ's Unite track, some tunes on here like "Drone" on the Red EP are nearly as good as that epic (coughs) only not quite...
Ditch the elaborate post-rationalising and go find your own subcultures.