WOEBOT

2003+2004*

Some Bloggers. Photo Sufi. (Left to Right): K-punk, Silverdollar, Evergreen Daze, Heronbone, Stelfox, Kin, WOEBOT.

I didn't quite get the warm glow I was anticipating from this Resonance show. I was kind of hoping it was going to form a perfect requiem for times past. Don't think I'm criticising Magz for one minute, she did an excellent job with this, but somehow the excitement I felt for those two years isn't conveyed. It may be a question of media, the experience of blogging was so tautly introspective, of so much relevance to itself, that to explain it within another context, well the whole thing just comes across as a facile waste of time.

No, it's not JUST that I come across a complete cock (winces, please Matt don't say it, quivers) it's more that nothing could do justice to the intensity of the experience. I really believed that something was at stake, that it was of earth-shattering importance (pompous I know, but so what?), that even though I wrote about nothing but music, that it wasn't about writing about music. It certainly wasn't about wanting to be a music journalist. It just was.

Download the Resonance FM documentary here.

*As near as damnit.

The Inner Sleeve.

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(splutters) What is this crap? Inner sleeves advertising other records. I've met people who actually collect them, record shop owners who ask me if I'm happy for them to keep the original lining. Yeah of course mate. Whatever turns you on. But I suppose they're the mementos of a forgotten time, when the music business wasn't so hopelessly cynical, or perhaps when it was more cynical. Why wouldn't this be possible nowadays? Perhaps now each pop moment is swollen in it's own watertight concept. Companies have worked out that for the magic to really work, for the punter to feel like the band are whispering sweet nothings into their ears alone (Isn't that what The Beatles pioneered, a sense of total intimacy with the group?) then the illusion mustn't be so obviously ruptured. Today's covers are so fucking 'orrible that to tile them up like "thumbs" would be repulsive rather than seductive anyway.

Here's my obvious favourite. A whole sleeve devoted to Andy Williams inside a Mahavishnu Orchestra LP! How did the record company work out that selling William's LPs to heavy fusion heads was a cracking idea. Yet that's one of the things that these inner sleeves illustrate so clearly, how much smaller the market was, how it was arranged in an utterly different manner. UA is one of the best examples: Shirley Bassey on the bumper, and Neu! under the hood.

Nowadays the whole panoply is organised in a much more tribal fashion, so even if Sony do own Underground Resistance, the smaller cells remain autonymous. In the old days the vertical knit was much tighter, a colleague gave the example of Enoch Light (of "Persuasive Percussion" fame). The easy listening pioneer turned his hand to producing underground psychedelia on his Project 3 label. Bands like The Free Design got airy string sections. If there's one reason why underground music is less sexier than it's ever been this might be it. It's been allowed to drift away from the some of imperative, glamourous values of the market which the major labels insist upon.

Look at the Moondog LP nestled in amongst the Simon and Garfunkel and Bob Dylan sleeves on this CBS liner sleeve! Oh and there's the Trees cover and Laura Nyro's "New York Tenderberry." That's quite a sewage flowing out of the gutter. But to foreground another condition of the "scene" take a look at this sleeve by Atlantic:

Wilson Pickett, Roland Kirk, Ornette Coleman, Dusty Springfield and Led Zepellin all sharing the same billboard.

Some wiseguys at CBS clearly thought that the Inner Sleeve was the future in breaking their artists into new markets. These three examples of the "Inner Sleeve" magazine taken from Miles Davis's "Bitches Brew" and a Edgar Varese LP even have an editor in the form of one Paul Merry! It's all so guileless. Nowadays we have music journalism which is insiduous "advertorial" Surprisingly, the blue "Inner Sleeve" throws up quite an interesting column in the form of a piece on "Black Composers Series on Columbia Records." Presumably no magazine would write about it so.....

The major labels had a bit of fun with the form from the mid fifties up until the dawn of the seventies, I guess those Island records sleeves with pictures of Robert Palmer sleeves beside ones by LKJ, John Martyn and the B52s are an anachronism, as are the appallingly tacky Rams Horn electro reissues with their voluminous lists of disco tracks available on the same imprint on the back cover.

It's quite charming to see how elephantine the recording industry was in adapting to the times. All the following records have their idiosyncracies, and this is another area which is highlighted by these Inner Sleeves. The following are amongst the oldest in my collection. The first is from Walt Dickerson and Sun Ra's "A Patch of Blue" LP, the latter the inner sleeve to Julie London's "Julie is her name" and so actually pretty representative of those eras.

But look at this one from the inner sleeve of John Coltrane's "Coltrane"!!! Er hello! The Black and White Minstrel show! The Band of HM Royal Marines "Beating Retreat and Tattoo"! Trane must have dropped like an atom bomb into this environment.

Here's a few more major label efforts. The green Warners one is a complete time capsule.

And the smaller imprints got in on the act too, and funnily enough with greater efficacy. I can quite believe that people purchasing records by Nonesuch, Motown, Elektra, Impulse and Vanguard would be interested in getting hold of other records on those labels, be curious to scope out what else was on offer.

Blah blah blah. Bor-ring. Even worse, deliberately so.

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I quite specifically wanted to round off this auspicious post with a few ruminations about the state of blogs, the state of the network if you like. It's with great sadness that I reflect that that small part of my brain where I'd go looking for the blogging thrill, the part of my cortex which glows in excitement when I ponder the fun I'm going to have writing here, feels like a spent ember. If this particular neck of the woods had a demi-semi-historic moment it lay between the dominance of NYPLM and the ascendancy of the mp3 blogs, pretty much coinciding with the rise of blissblog.

I haven't really remarked on the passing of heronbone, in part because I thought Luke was probably driven away by bloggers praising him to the skies, treating him like a poster boy (even going as far as posting pictures of him!!!!!), that and people biting his style when he's just a punk kid like you and me. I did a fair amount of that myself, praising the dude, but I do believe with a certain amount of tongue in my cheek, and even though I held his writing in as high esteem as anyone else did.

I miss engaging with Luke, likewise I miss engaging with Mark K-Punk who now has such a strong coterie of theorists around him that he doesn't have to muck in and talk music in order to join the party. Sad to report but at the moment I feel like I've had my moment, that at least right now it all seems pretty wearisome. I'm not asking for entreaties to continue (please please no) I'll probably just keep on posting boring shit without much theoretical backbone just for the hell of it. You wonder why bands split up, why scenes crumble, then you find out for yourself.

MP3 Blogs.

Who gives a shit what I think about the ethics of offering up mp3s for download? I mean, REALLY, it's none of my business! Practice your own ethics I say. However, not being an mp3 blog myself, I do feel able to evaluate these things in much the same manner as I might offer up a critique of a record store. Commenting on one's fellow blogger's blogs (not mp3 ones that is) is altogether stickier. It's easier to just be nice, and praise their strengths, rather than focussing on their manifold weaknesses (tee hee, only joking!) I do believe the same cloying chuminess which many people say ruins "The Bloglom" hampers the mp3 blogs. It's most obvious side effect, in my humble opinion, is that the quality of some blogs is inordinately less than their online profile would lead one to imagine. Some mp3 blogs are clearly at the top of their own links bars.

I've looked at in the region of 100 mp3 blogs and on balance I was pretty appalled by the lack of care and thought that went into the process of offering up other people's music for free. Blogs seemed, in the main, terribly designed with little or no thought going into the attached writing. The music offered up seemed at once pretty ropey and poorly assembled. It's a condition with these things that the writing seemed a pretty pointless exercise anyway, I mean, what's the point in reviewing music which is (thanks to you) instantly available. On the other hand, I don't go with Mark Fisher's argument that reading writing about music you haven't the opportunity of hearing is a waste of space one iota. That renders most music journalism a redundant exercise (er, pretty much like it is, grin). It's the job of the music critic to impart his enthusiasm, to MAKE you want to hunt down sounds, to stroke your lobes till they fizz with uncontainable desire.

For these reasons the best mp3 blog of the lot, gabba pod, almost entirely dispenses with writing, cuts to the chase and hits you with the stuff; not a skanky remix in sight. Obviously this is manifoldly disproved by some music blogs which use mp3s merely to illustrate a written theme. Here music blogs which have crossed over into being mp3 blogs are a case in point. For instance both Oliver Wang and Nick Gutterbreakz have both run eminently readable blogs up until a few weeks ago, and now they carry over their discerning taste and eloquence into this new medium.

The thematic approach to presenting mp3s, a whole bag of tracks from a similar area of music, is another useful trope for the mp3 blogs. The point here is to know your strengths. One of the most awful things I've ever witnessed on the Internet was some witless coot's mp3 guide to Reggae, a fucking embarassment, a travesty even. Some pull this approach off with real flare, like for instance Christopher Porter at The Suburbs are Killing Us others choose wisely to stick within a certain remit, like the truly excellent 20 Jazz Funk Greats mp3 blog (strictly perverse noise) and the superb Cocaine Blunts site (Hip-Hop old and new skool). Still others power their offerings through an extremely intense, exquisitely personal idea of what music should be. Music lovers and their sites like Jordan Himelfarb's Said the Gramophone, Stuart Buchanan's Fat Planet and Loki's An Idiots Guide to Dreaming.

All of this goes some way to explaining why I couldn't find a truly decent Pop mp3 blog. NYPLM doesn't count I'm afraid as it's only one tenth an mp3 blog. Lest you think I'm biased to "dead" music, I'll admit to being a little disappointed at this shortfall. Maybe Pop fans are too busy having fun to labour in this deeply nerdy way, presumably they're all too busy surfing Limewire and Soulseek sourcing their instant highs to bother with the hastle of collating and documenting mp3s, perhaps it takes the monomaniacal collector's ethos to weld together an mp3 blog which plays to the medium's own strengths. Without further ado...

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...THE TOP 11.

Gabba Pod
The clear undisputed winner. Incredible and painstakingly sourced tracks from the foamy edge at the tip of the wave.

Boom Selection
The home of the bootleg mash-up now offering up fantastic looking mixes.

Fat Planet
Beautifully collated catholic selection.

Gutterbreakz
Drool! Real underground stuff. Recent highlight being Nick's LFO compilation, the Moog special and Nick's excellent Robert Rental special.

Said The Gramophone
Flava in your ear. Currently plumbing the fathoms of post-rock.

Cocaine Blunts
Dedicated to Hip Hop, and lets hope it stays that way.

Soul Sides
Nourishment stylee. This man knows the deal.

The Suburbs are Killing Us
Authorative and free-ranging without being pompous.

20 Jazz Funk Greats
Close to my heart.

An Idiot's Guide to Dreaming
Ace. Invisible hand of Kek-W (of Kid Shirt fame) in evidence.

Stypod
Stylus wrestles profitably with it's student audience.

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I might even download an mp3 off one of these sites one day!

Brazil 10.

Reeee-wind! The phone has been running red since I posted that little rap about Caetano Veloso, so I've decided to play to my audience and bash up some more sleeves from the archives. Scratches head. This looks frighteningly like the "specials" of yore! Firstly apologies for not listing all the 5 records in the holy quintet of Tropicalia classics. I omitted to mention the Gal Costa LP (which I have and only really like "Baby" off) and the Gilbert Gil record with him in the admiral's suit (which I have and is very good). I have all these on vinyl (with the exception of the Smetak, sobs) and while it's a pretty random selection from the vaults, all these are unreservedly reccommended. Spiel to a minimum.

Baden Powell/Vinicius Moraes: Afro Samba

Swee-eet. Here with a slightly dodgy cover, not the reissue you see. Vinicius is essentially a poet, as I discovered to my chagrin when I bought an impenetrable record of his on the the strength of this classic. Also in the vaults Baden Powell's "Tristeza" on the German label MPS. It's safe to say magic is wrought here by legendary arranger Guerra Peixe.

Jorge Ben: A Tabula Esmerelda

I also have "Africa Brazil", "Ponte de Lanca Africano" off which is the killer cut. I'd like to take that track out for a walk on the dancefloor (never had the opportunity to play it out) The guitar on it SLAYS. Also Jorge Ben "1969". "O Bidu" is supposed to be excellent and is swilling around on reissue. This is the winner for "Zumbi" which sprouts impossible new layers of harmony and melody. Kind of like a favela dwelling with improvised bamboo loft extensions. And of course the occult-ish cover. We like.

Jair Rodriguez: Orgulho de um Sambista

A recent discovery, as plangeant and straw-strewn as "Afro-Samba."

Edu Lobo: Cantiga de Longe

Anything with Quarteto Novo on it. Here they're fresh from the Miles Davis "Live Evil" sessions. Edu v.dread.

Tom Jobim: Matita Pere

It took me ages to work out that Antonio Carlos Jobim and Tom Jobim were the same man. Many factors complicated this. His hugely varied look, his trans-continental presence, the gulf of years he was active, the polarity between his pop persona (Sinatra and Astrid Gilberto) and his more underground work. As a rule if you're a groovy cat like me, you refer to him as "Tom." I reckon he's been slightly dismissed, completely left out of Ben Borthwick's excellent "Tropicalia" primer in The Wire (which again though it purported to be about Tropicalia, was more or less a whistlestop guide to Brazilian music) This could be owing to his strong 1950's American barbecue profile. "Matita Pere", which also comes in a brown cover with a photo of him on it (I gave my other copy to Reynolds) is his masterpiece, and I know one of David Toop's favourite records too. Words can't do it's aching windswept orchestral score and Jobim's brooding portuguese justice. I also have "Urubu" (which has it's moments) and have often been tempted by "Stone Flower" (good vintage).

Milton Nascimento: Milton

This is great. But better, indeed possibly one of the 10 greatest records of any genre, is "Clube Da Esquina". I discovered this three years ago in what was a bad time, and it's food for the soul. Indeed it was for me then, almost in defiance of music that was being made then, my "Record of The Year." When you first hear it, it can be easy to miss it's wholly unusual unique qualities. I don't tend to be one to reccommend sticking with a record, a knock-out first encounter should lead to time spent together, but here's one exception. White chapels by the sugar-cane. Also have "Minas" which is nice.

Novos Baianos: Acabou Chorarc

Repeating myself here, but can't avoid including this babe.

Quarteto Novo: Quarteto Novo

Damn I LOVE this group. It's Hermeto and Airto's first outfit and they are SO hot. What could be mistaken for bossa nova were it not well-deep and entirely devoid of cliche, the rhythm here overpoweringly conduisive. I've always thought "Algodao" sounds like Led Zeppelin, and I also bet that The Beatles must have heard this record (whether that's any kind of recommendation I'll leave to you to decide). A classic.

Gilberto Gil: Refazenda

Gil here along with the "Refavela" LP (which I have and don't think is as good) plying a vision of pan-africanism. "Refazenda" off this is such a superb tune, the way that accordian starts, like a clockwork policeman spinning backwards anti-clockwise. The whole record consistently excellent, and what a great cover!

Walter Smetak: Smetak

A recent discovery, almost the skeletal other to these well-endowed raptures. Oblique, endlessly inventive but warmly engrossing.

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A big holler to Seb Morlu, Jon Dale and Nick Wrigley.

Caetano Veloso.

This superb mid seventies Veloso record has the most sumptuos cover. Catherine said it was nice to see a man relishing in his sexuality. Go "Open Image In New Window" to witness the gatefold in a bit more detail. They're quite disorientating these images, his narcissism is so extreme here, it seems like only gay men allow themselves to pout and preen like this. What is fascinating is how this lavish self-love is paired with the experimental bent of the music, it's almost as if self-indulgence is conjoined not with closeted masturbation (well that's the critical trope for solo avant-garde wank isn't it!) but with public self-exposure. That is an altogether rarer collusion.

The record is a collision of ethnographic-style recordings of Brazilian folk, tape loops and Veloso's gourgeous balladry. Traces of Garage Rock too. I've always been intrigued by the relationship Arto Lindsay has with Caetano. Lindsay, fluent in Portuguese and with a Brazilian background, was roped in to translate Veloso's biography into English and evidently they've remained friends. He'd also done liner notes for David Byrne's "Tropicalia" compilation (a classic case of compiler thrashing around in the dark, incorrectly curating the document of a scene, misrepresenting it with tracks recorded nearly a decade after the collective activity it purports to depict). To us in muso-land Arto looms large, he's an underground celebrity, but Veloso is almost obscure. Conversely Veloso is, in fact, practically a superstar in Brazil. So you see it's all intriguingly bent out of shape.

Other completely wonderful Veloso records are: his peak period "Caetano Veloso" (Phillips 1968) (which along with the first Os Mutantes record, Gal Costa's debut and the collective Tropicalia record "Ou Panis et Circensis" is *definitive* Tropicalia), his 1986 acoustic record on Nonesuch and apparently his 1969 "White Album". In keeping with my earlier observations most of his records seem to be eponymously titled.

Pete Frame.

Rediscovered Pete Frame's "Rock Family Trees" via a secondhand omnibus of them. This kind of completely pointless, lunatic scholarship is generally absent in dance music. Dance music bods *can* get excited about catalogue numbers but there are boundaries to their nerdishness. The nearest thing is probably something like Freddy Fresh's recent 'The Rap Records', but that didn't entail the same kind of turgid engagement with the raw facts. It must have taken Frame AGES to synthesise these awesome (also in the sense of terrifying) charts. In the preface he says: "On an average, I'd say each chart takes about three weeks of solid graft- including research, interviews, transcriptions, digging, checking, plotting, drafting and drawing." Blimey.

I do believe at the core of his programme there is a healthy dose of humour. In fact I'd like to see a similar chart drawn up for the Grime scene, detailing God's Gift, Doogz and Riko Dan's various trajectories through different crews. It'd be particularly funny in fact as it would wind up people who complain about rock-ist readings of dance music. I was going to post the Roxy Music/King Crimson history (which shows the intertwining of those two bands through the ages) though feared Mark Fisher might think I was taking the mick. Here instead is the "Resolving The Fairport Confusion" history, which I particularly like because of the absurd amount of incarnations the band went through. 14!

Download it here...

More Sunny Ade.

The Nigerian graphic designers who worked on these Sunny Ade sleeves were truly masters of the form. I'd attempt to spin some pseudo narrative around these like I did the previos batch but Matos would almost certainly catch me out like he did last time. "Check E" I read raved over by Robert Christagau in a Village Voice column I picked up whilst over in NYC last year (maybe I'll manage to come over again in the next few years). Unlike the Juju Music/Synchro System/Aura Island records it's a peak-period domestic Nigerian issue. Almost as great as "The Message", and that's saying something, the steel guitar as predictably electrifying. I paid c$10 for this at the Music and Video Exchange! What is it with people's failure to see beyond Afro-Beat? Doh!

This one is definitely a few years younger than the rest (catalogue number SALPS36), is lavish and spacey sounding with drum machine to the fore. Widely touted as his classic recording. Got this for $15 from cdandlp.com (which is great if you haven't checked it out) On the strength of these sleeves you'd think all the Sunny Ade records were lovely looking, but no, there's a whole slew of white covers with bad typography and ropey photography; records like "Jealousy". I'm tempted to think that those releases aren't up to the same standards as the ones shown here.

Jazz Memoires.

Been slowly going through the select list of stuff that Kirk Degiorgio gave me, tracking down records, appraising them, stroking my chin deliberately, thinking. I've found Donny Hathaway's "Extension of a Man", Linda Lewis's "Lark", Eugene McDaniel's "Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse" (thanks to Luke's extreme generosity), Weldon Irvine's "Spirit Man", and Jon Lucien's "Rashida" None of which are exactly obscure or rare, more kind of "classic" well-rounded LPs in a Jim Clarke stylee (Jim is a connoisseur of the LP form, his round up of 100 British records turned my head in a major fashion). The thing is, I was au fait with 75% of Kirk's Jazz Funk Greats list already, because I have a shady background as a Funk afficionado.

I know! Now he tells us! Just the other day in fact Derek Walmsely was chastising me for saying that the DJ Spooky mix record I reviewed in The Wire (yeah that was OK) was marginally more Cecil Taylor than Horace Silver. But sir, opined Derek, Horace Silver is a genius, dontcha know. I laid my circumspect knowledge on De'ek and he appeared to be satisfied. I DO enjoy Horace Silver, cherish my copy of "Song For My Father" and yes I guess I was being sorta glib. I can appreciate Kirk's depth of respect for the Blue Note label. In the past I've had Wayne Shorter's "Juju", Lee Morgan's "The Sidewinder", Donald Byrd's "A New Perspective", Bill Evan's "Undercurrent" free records by Ornette ("The Empty Foxhole") Cecil ("Conquistador") and Eric Dolphy ("Out to Lunch") as well as (consults Google to refresh memory) Monk's early sides. The Jazz Funk stuff I picked up later than the free stuff, that was accrued largely as a result of slavishly following Lester Bangs's lines of flight, thanks to Lester I have a copy of Archie Shepp's "Fire Music" and Albert Ayler's "Spiritual Unity" which truth be told, don't hit the decks all that often. But we're talking Funk, or Jazz Funk here, and the period when I picked up those more accessible Blue Note records was in the early nineties.

(Stokes his pipe with the finest Golden Virginia, rests the brandy on a small leather-topped mahogany table aside his shabby winged armchair and gazes into the lambent flickering flames of his calor gasfire. A harpist strums descending variations in C)

Jazz Funk was a university thing thing, a student thing. My first year at Glasgow was spent in a state of such insane abstraction it's almost comic. Weighing in at a princely seven stone, dedicated to taking all my course notes in my left hand (naturally right-handed, I thought my mental balance needed correcting, the notes subsequently illegible), wandering around with my right eye shut, wearing either red or green from top to toe and talking to no-one at all. Scary, and I guess my trajectory out of lonely travels through the Third World and experiments with hallucinogenics. Wasn't the counter-culture supposed to be fun? Somewhere along the way, I'd pretty much lost touch with the laughs. That's the thing about dionysian "mob" culture when it involves drugs isn't it? So often the paths lead away from the comfort of the herd at steep tangents.

Come the second year I'd started to fluff out at the edges a bit. Someone told me where the student union was! I visited it a few times! I also found a couple of friends who were interested in records, both of whom were into the Talking Loud strain of Acid Jazz, and dutifully I joined in. It seemed to be more fun than the extremes of noise and nihilism that were my tastes at the time, indeed there were a few amusing cross-over incidents: a DJ in Edinburgh extolling the dancefloor power of Miles Davis's "Rated X" (my eyebrow raised) ditto the appeal of Mahavishnu Orchestra's "Innner Mounting Flame". Then crucially there was the presence of A Tribe Called Quest's "Low End Theory" and Massive Attack's debut. Both the latter two, whilst on the one hand hardcore Hip-Hop (though Jazz inflected that's an extravangaza of rock-hard Bass'n'Drums) and the other a post-Rave lacuna, were also signposts to J_A_Z_Z. The Tribe record especially was seized upon by Gilles Peterson and Patrick Forge as validating their experiment. The first Rebirth Of The Cool compilation featured the cymbolic downbeat mix of "When the Papes Come" (seems to have been subsequently excised) and also Stetsasonic's "Talkin All That Jazz". This early the whole thing seemed like a good idea (I never made it as far as Volume Two), and The Dream Warriors "My Definition (Of A Boombastic Jazz Style)", Gilles Peterson's mix with samples lifted off Quincy Jones even gave it a chart spin. Gang Starr also made an extremely good case for the cause with "Step In the Arena", which along with The Ragga Twins "Reggae owes Me Money" was my soundtrack to Summer '92. At the time I even interviewed the Dream Warriors when they were in Glasgow such was my brimming over with unfocused enthusisasm.

I also interviewed Galliano when they made the trip across the border. You wouldn't find too many apologists for Galliano these days, though I cocked a wry glance when I noticed Simon's enthusiasm for Rob's recent Earl Zinger record. The Galliano interview was a complete debacle (I've mentioned it whilst blogging once before) I managed to completely cock up the huge clunky video camera so that my "technical accomplice" Fraser and I became aware just before the start of the interview that we weren't going to be able to record anything other than _w*h*i*t*e_n*o*i*s*e*_. Such was our intense embarassment that we decided to proceed regardless. The band were surly and defensive and when I (gently) challenged them about the Acid Jazz movement's uncritical omnivorousness, it was meant to be a talking point, ("So Freez are now a Jazz Funk outfit!") Galliano became enraged. At the concert later on he stopped mid set to rail at the audience about the idiotic journalist (cough splutter) who had interviewed them beforehand. A proud moment.

The chief delight of being a Jazz Funk afficionado came in the past treasures one discovered. Billy Cobham's "Spectrum" (caned by Massive Attack), Aaron Neville's "Hercules", The Blackbyrds "Rock Creek Park" and the "Flying Away" LP (both since sold!), Donald Byrd's "Blackbyrd", Johnny Hammond's "Gears" (the last four all Mizell Productions), Hustler's Convention's "Sport", Deodato's "Thus Spoke Zarathusa", Leon Thomas's "Shape Your Mind to Die", Roy Ayer's "We Live in Brooklyn", Herbie Hancock's "Watermelon Man", Leroy Hutson's "Hutson", Bob James's "Nautilus", Allen Toussaint's "Touissant" and "Southern Nights", everything by The Meters, Gabor Szabo's "The Sorceror", James Brown's "Pass The Peas" and all the People productions, Charles Rouse's "Hopscotch", David Axelrod and Shuggie Otis's records, Chocolate Milk's "Action Speaks Louder Than Words", Al Green's LPs (right up to but not including "The Belle Album") and the Winley Breaks compilations. Just a slew of awesome stuff essentially, and hearing these monsters for the first time was quite a rush. It's strange to see how the same pillaging that collectors of vintage Reggae practise has somehow remained hip, remained current, while the jazzbos are slated for being retrogressive. I guess at the time the main impetus behind the rediscovery of these records was galvanised by Hip-Hop's voraciosness for breaks, indeed if A Tribe Called Quest sampled it, it was usually marked down as instantly desirable. Funny too how one of the prime machines for disemmination of this stuff back in the day, namely Soul Jazz, has subsequently become indelibly associated with the reggae reissue programme.

I guess the sad truth is that very little that was recorded in the name of this music in the UK has stood the test of time. Hand on heart (ha ha) the only records I bought back then by were The Young Disciples, quite easily the cream of the crop. Groupie that I am I was really excited to pass Femi Fem in the hallway of the house he shared with an ex-girlfriend of mine. Aah such naked proximity to the beating heart of Acid Jazz. Their "Road to Freedom" LP was a gem, and I'm gonna find a copy tomorrow if I can. K-Creative, The Brand New Heavies etc etc ALL SHITE. Returning to pick up the thread of this stuff briefly was enjoyable, though in some ways the records I've been hipped too by Kirk, who has travelled much deeper into this territory, all lack what I'd describe as terror. Terror is something you need in music. Funny also to remember, kind of elliptically, that I drove my two Jazz Funk friends completely up the wall by being a paranoid obsessive (ha ha ha).

10 African Ethnographic Records.

My usual rejoinder: "I don't know much about this music" is really (really) true this time. I've been collecting choice ethnographic records for ten years and I really couldn't tell you much more than the next man about them. I have to confess too, that often as not I'll pick these artifacts up because their sleeves are beautiful and other-wordly. In a similar spirit I wanted to offer these spectacularly beautiful images up for your perusal, and found myself a little stuck for spiel. Rather than beating my chest and dribbling on interminably about music you aint gonna get to hear I thought I'd keep it short and sweet.

When it comes to Ethnographic Recordings the French have it, and this may (for better or worse) have something to do with their approach to their colonies. The British governed their colonies in a remote calculating fashion, examples might be Cromer's 75 year long "protectorate" of Egypt, in which the British skimmed the cream from the Nile economy, suppressed the Egyptians with the consent of their own ruling classes and showed little interest in the culture. Cromer displayed no inclination in educating the common Egyptians, imparting to them the benefits for instance, of Britain's technological advancement. Cromer believed that any education at all would just generate a class of radical discontents. They (we) did pretty much the same thing with the Raj in India.

The French on the other hand liked to get stuck right in there. You only have to look at Napolean's commission "Description De L'Egypte" with it's fanatical detailing of Egypt's ancient legacy, ream after ream of (actually quite remarkable) etchings and lithographs of the land of the Pharoahs, for proof of their voraciousness. I think I'm right in describing the project and resulting tomes as representing the most typical act of "Orientalism" for Edward Said. Unsure because it was so long since I read that book, which if you haven't come across it, details how one culture subjects another to a psychological tyranny by the act of subjectifying it through study and scholarship. The French took a similar tack in Algeria too, where they undertook to teach French culture, language and values. It's ironic to compare the French's vision of what they were doing (surely some deeply misguided generosity, after all they could have done what the British practised and not bothered!), with that of someone like Frantz Fanon's view of it whereby speaking French means that one accepts, or is coerced into accepting, the collective consciousness of the French.

France was home to the greatest Ethnomusicological labels in the world. I say was because the time window during which the practice of inscribing these sounds was relatively narrow. I have a cut-off date of 1975, after which I treat these documents with a degree of scepticism. The world has shrunk now to the point whereby the cultures which stood in such infinitely stark contrast to the mores of Western Capitalism are now effectively engulfed by it. The original music of the Central African Rain Forests, Tibet, Papua New Guinea and the Amazon has either vanished or been mothballed for tourists. Actually I'm not such an enemy of Globalisation, it's still possible for peoples to forge specific sounds, just that if you go looking for "purity" or "the other" these days you're wasting your time. Thankfully (I guess?) down to the work of the French (and others...) we have plenty of documents from that vanished world. Labels like Musée de l'Homme, Harmonia Mundi, Musiques du monde, BAM, Chant du Monde and (the finest) Ocora all published quite superb recordings made in the field.

Naturally Ocora deserves special mention. You can almost pick up any of their recordings and come away laughing. Probably the greatest Ocora recordings are the holy triumvirate of Musique Gbaya, Musique Aka Pygmees and Musique Burundi. The Aka pygmy set is the one which famously prized open Jon Hassell's skull, though for my money the greatest is the Gbaya set. If you're a fan of Minimalist music or Krautrock or Acid House you have to hear this. I'd be proudly boshing the sleeve up here if I owned the original Ocora edition however I have some early 80s cut of it with inferior artwork. That record, which is freely available on CD too is superior to all of these below.

See what I mean about the covers! What a stunner! Split 50/50 between recordings made in Guinea and those made in the Cote D'Ivoire. You often find the earlier recordings are more generalist and cover a broader terrain.

I've a suspicion this is (slightly) one for the tourists. From the collection of legendary tropical DJ Dave Hucker.

There are a whole series of these records on the UNESCO label. I've seen one for Greece! One can ponder the relationship between the United Nations as an organisation and the ethnomusicological drive (as per Said).

Stunning modernist design.

Hugh Tracey recorded some lovely stuff in the fifties and sixties. His Music of Africa series of which I have a number collate stuff not geographically but by their execution. This one is quite superb, and it's interesting to note that Tracey (an amateur British expat who later tarnished his reputation) was a conoisseur of the Mbira. He even devised his own version of it called the Kalimba which (oh dear!) has a traditional western tuning.....

Another beautiful looking Tracey recording.

It's sort of shambolic of me not be able to talk about these recordings in the way one might the latest Garage "joint." I guess the point is with Music like that of the Pygmies, there aren't the same kind of trans cultural conduits plugging them into other musics. They defy this kind of analysis because they're the product of isolated unique societies. One's not really equipped to comment on them because they're so alien and self-contained. Having said that in Colin Turnbull's liner notes (the same Englishman recorded the Rainforest Pygmies singing 'Clementine' which I discussed here) he says the Ituri dwell on the edge of the forest and thus are more open to influence.

One can't avoid discussing sexuality with a cover like this. Sometimes this can be quite brazen in this territory (shearing off into the Lyman/Denny/Baxter territory where it runs rampant). I have a recording of South Sea Creole Pidgin songs which features a semi-clad maiden (Gaugin style) reclining in a stream which I picked up in San Francisco. That IS quite a fruity one, though in general, speaking personally, I don't understand how people could get their kicks off this kind of thing. I've never found the National Geographic that stimulating, though one hear's voices assuring one of the impact these images of bare-breasted, ferocious looking tribeswomen had on the Victorian male psyche.

Disgraceland.

0000-0243 "Umculo Kawupheli" - Mahotella Queens.
0243-0534 "Bayizigidi" - The Cockerel Boys.
0534-0926 "Holotelani" - Nelcy Sedibe.
0926-1153 "Demazana" - Mahotella Queens.
1153-1538 "Awungilobolele" - Udoktela Shange Namajaha.
1538-1759 "Mkhulu Lomkhosi" - Mahotella Queens.
1759-2059 "Amazimuzimu" - Dilika.
2059-2436 "Phumani Endlini" - Jozi.
2436-2931 "Motshile" - Malombo.
2931-3047 "Radio Freedom Sign On"

(Hit the Wadio Woebot icon you Chumps!)

This stream at Wadio Woebot comes without the attendant ham-musicological spiel. Instead (leans over lectern) I'd like to return to refer readers to this entry. Yeah I came across pretty bitter there, railing against closed minds with my brimstone and fire. I'm aware that people might see me as in some way a proselytiser for unusual music. They might think I'm doing what's now being described as "cheerleading", a most repugnant term which posits the useless wastrel of a music fan as a worthwhile link in the music industry foodchain, selflessly drumming up grassroots support for dem poor folks wot can't afford proper PR. Vomit.

At the launch party the zydeco-band/electronica-one-hit-wonder lean into the mic: "Of course we wouldn't have made it thus far were it not for the sterling support of xxxxxx at xxxxxx.com" Crowd cheers. Failing that xxxxxx gets a mention somewhere deep in the liner notes and a confidential phone call assuring him of the importance of his contribution.

Really, and I'm sorry to have to break this news to any musician friends of mine, I couldn't give a shit about advancing their careers. Atop of that I should add that I couldn't give a toss whether anyone finds any of the music I've written about interesting. I just couldn't care less, I spent years without sharing any of this with a soul. Sometimes I wonder why I bother divulging my opinions on the subject with other people at all. I've come to the conclusion that the reason is twofold. It appears to be good for my mental health not have all this information bottled up. Secondly in the process of "shedding my load" I can have a bit of creative fun, and acquire some pint-size celebrity. Occasionally I enjoy the company too.

There is a point in my bringing this up in relation to World Music. People who promote World Music can be an evangelical bunch of tossers. Quite often they start out with the best intentions (a naive love of the music) but pretty soon you'll find them wearing tie-died cotton pantaloons and turbans, slaves to a belief that in some way, by spreading the music, they're making the world a better place. They're breaking down barriers, doing their bit for the Third World debt etc. Almost without exception, they're died-in-the-wool beatniks.

(sighs)

Check this Umbaqanga. It's hard as fookin' nails. At once sweet and stern it's the ultimate rocking party music. At the last do I played, Dani Siciliano was begging me, pleading me, for more of this stuff. I said Dani; Dani please! It's not klutsy and fake like most funk (bar The Meters) and it's not pretentious and long-winded like Afro-Beat. I dunno why Hip-Hop hasn't had more fun with Mavuthela's railway-sleeper breaks. Seems like Malcom Mclaren was unique in spotting their potential within that context. It's bonafide AvantYob music, as heavenly and disposable as a sun-warped Channel One 7". When these tracks came out in the early eighties they must have been quintessentially Urban and Modern.

South Africa hasn't been sleeping either. There isn't the political context to add yet pressure to the music any more, listen to "the sign on" of Radio Freedom which features Tambo and Mbeki amidst a collage of machine gun fire, threatening to overthrow their oppressors, THAT'S Pirate Radio! However Kwaito has been burning planet-sized holes in my conciousness over the past month. This little retro-ting is intended to constitute some kind of interim report before I can burrow deep enough into Kwaito till I'm satisfied. Stay chooned.

I got snowed under by requests for CDs of the Disco Mix, all of which will be honoured. Cos I'm feeling really grumpy I'm not going to make anyone a CD of this stuff. Download RealPlayer. Listen to the stream. Stop whingeing.

Desi.

Last year Desi blew up, I guess as a consequence of two things. Firstly thanks to it's strong connection with what we might call "The Bashment Phenomenon". The Bhangra-tinged samples of Missy Elliot's "Get UR Freak On" (tumbi and tabla on a r-r-r-roll), the Bollywood samples on Truth Hurt's "Addictive" (the Dre production) and Errick Sermon's "React", and the Sufi-inspired hand-clapping weirdness of Lenky's Diwali Riddim put Desi squarely on the map. Subsequently Jay-Z's (come on, totally useless!) version of Panjabi MC's "Mundian Te Bach Ke" led the forces of Hip-Hop to a make-shift camp outside Desi's city walls. Even Grimey Jammer got in on the act with the Biggaman produced "Step to the Beat". Secondly, and this is what might ensure the music of the NRI making a continued impression on the mainstream, Desi music has truly found it's own voice and sense of purpose.

Observers might want to draw parallels between Desi and The Asian Underground Scene of Nitin Sawhney, Talvin Singh, Asian Dub Foundation, Badmarsh & Shri with it's spiritual home of the Anokha club, but really the comparison is flimsy. As RDB's Kuly Singh remarked in the pioneering Desi cross-over article by Kevin Braddock in The Face Dec 2002: "People talk about Asian Underground and it gets boxed into this Talvin-Singh-Nitin-Sawhney-type-thing, which is really good, but it's serious. It's not Sharon and Tracey. You've got to be Sharon and Tracey...We don't give a shit, we're only interested in beats and basslines. We know how to party, yeah!" The Asian Underground Scene was a resolutely beatnik affair, essentially art music without strong roots within the Asian UK community (crossing-over with palpable ease into the mainstream). That's not to say that it didn't have it's moments, just that it lacked any real socio-cultural energy. I did visit Anokha once in 1995 and was pretty disappointed by it's watered-down, weirdly naive vibe. Having said this, some of the fusions which you can find on the Talvin Singh curated "Anokha Soundz of the Asian Underground" and "Calcutta Cyber Cafe" are more mature than those at the original grass-shoots of Desi.

Case in point being RDB's debut album, No.1 in all the UK charts for over 7 weeks, and a massive landmark for the Desi scene, today it sounds a little on the lame side, it's Garage beats wooly, fudged and dated in a manner that Garage from that era isn't. However with "Patlay Patlay" their bootleg remake of "Get UR Freak On" they pretty much grasp the consequence of Missy's track to Bhangra's future. Other earlier Desi like that on RDB's fellow Brum crew Tigerstyle's debut "The Rising" sounds really quite close to the Ambient Junglist fusion that we expect to hear from Talvin, breaking out in parts in a more traditional Bhangra style flecked with electronicisms. Tigerstyle's more recent gun-toting classic "Taakre", a brilliant bristling militant take on classic Bhangra might be seen as them engaging with the power-source of Desi rather than pimping off the dance scene.

Incidentally Bhangra is a traditional form practised in the Punjab since 300 BC, originally the music of Sikh's it has been adopted by the rest of the Indian diaspora. In Bhangra at least one person sings Boliyaan Punjabi lyrics and others beat the Dhol (those waist-mounted, deep-sounding drums) and play other instruments like the mandolin, banjo and harmonium. Desi is the modern form of Bhangra.

In spite of all this barrier building between Desi and "The Asian Underground" it would be cynical to declare Outcaste's recent "Essential Asian Flavas: The Future Cutz", about the only Desi compilation in the big stores and available to the mainstream, to be nothing but an attempt to cash in on the Desi's new-found glamour; even though the non-Desi tracks stick out like a sore-thumb and strain the patience. Oh no, another flavourless downtempo "joint"!

Wondering how to start my investigation into Desi on disc, "digging" as opposed to putting together the scenic overview which constituted The Face's aforementioned ground-breaking article, I rooted around to try and work out where I'd best be going to actually buy some Desi. Asking the question to myself why was there no follow through after that piece in the broader media, I was confronted by the stark fact that this was certainly owing to Desi's total independence from the mainstream circuits of music distribution. You just CAN'T buy Desi in a shop with any ease! With this in mind I first contacted RDB through their website, and when after a month I got no reply I rang them up and spoke to them. Where did they recommend I buy Desi in London? The answer was Southall's "Metro Music". So on February 12th I got on the train to Southall, a suburb in the far West of London, west of Acton town.

Walking into Southall from the train station was one of the weirdest sensations of my life. Suddenly, in my own country I was a conspicuous minority. I walked for miles through busy streets, and I'm not exagerating, encountered only one or two other white people with whom I exchanged rather nervous smiles. There's no sense of hostility towards white people in Southall and in this manner it differed from Black "Ghettos" I've been in in San Francisco and New York. In the process of looking for other Desi to complete my "survey" I also visited Green Street in Newham, London's other famous Asian community. Green Street is, conversely, located at the far east of the capital, and there (again while greatly outnumbered!) I found the ratio of Asian to Black/White less steep. I could have simply popped round the corner to Brick Lane, but my instinct is that the community there is equivalent to the Afro-Caribbean community in Notting Hill, essentially an historic relic, and largely eroded by the area's gentrification.

Weirdly in Glasgow, where I also took in a batch of CDs at the store "Bollywood", the Asian community is much less segregated than in London. The stretch of Glasgow running between the foot of the University and the M8 Motorway, between Woodlands Drive and the Great Western Road (SMACK in the middle of the city) is predominantly Asian, and one can find posters for Desi nights affixed to the lamp-posts on the Byres Road (the heart of bourgeois Glasgow!) Woebot reader Craig Macalister Combe even informed me of Bhangra parties (at least they play Asian music...) which were happening at The Halt Bar (another essentially beatnik Glasgow venue). I was as heartened to hear this, as I was as horrified by Baal's description of the recent BNP march in the city, a protest against a gang murder for which they were holding the Asian community responsible, and remarks heard elsewhere in the city about the supposed connections between the community and terrorism!!! I should very much like to visit the right parts of Birmingham and Bradford and take in the scenery.

Of the twenty or so CDs I picked up this one stood out in remarkable contrast "qua" album. This came out last year, but is still a massive presence in the shops, where Desi turnover is not what Dancehall's is. Dr. Zeus gleaned a bit of "Urban" bandwidth from his collaboration with General Levy "Shake (What Ya Mama Gave Ya)", that's not a bad track, an update on the Apachi Indian trope and interesting as evidence of the bleed between the Indian and Jamaican diaspora. However the LP is a different story, quite stunning, I've listened to it more this year than any other.

Zeus has fashioned an overwhelmingly powerful "sound" which digitises and virtualises the Bhangra template, gone is Bhangra's sonic compression instead we have huge building-high canvases of bass-space, widescreen vistas of rolling tumbi, liquid midi, dancing mandolin lines disappearing into the dub. Everything is placed "just so" in a mix as studied as those Cold Rush Gloomcore classics. Even more astonishing is the fact that these aching, supremely impassioned Boliyaan chants with their vaporous after-trails are incredibly tuneful. Zeus employs a Rocafella sound-a-like, name "Little Lox", to give him the Jay Z edge that Panjabi MC was lucky enough to garner for free, and (gasps) he's BRILLIANT! It's all far too good to be true! In a fairer world this record would be accorded coffee table status, damn you could even make out to it!

RDB, standing for Rhythm Dhol Bass are THE power of Desi. Last year they put out "Unstoppable" their second CD as a collective. I say CD, not (as I'm wont) LP because in Desi there is no vinyl to speak of. Having said this I have tracked down (eye blinks uncontrollably) a Desi DJ-only-imprint "Vinyl Club" called "The Kismet Vinyl Club" in Leicester! You know I'm hardcore! "Unstopabble" is NOT the trounce all-comers classic that "Unda Da Influence" is. Zeus's key innovation, beyond his startling production know-how (rumours were he was to do a mix for Liberty X?), is that he's grasped that Desi, to really rock and shock, HAS to be pitched in pace somewhere between Hip-Hop and Techno; that's to say near it's traditional velocity. RDB seem to want to muck around at a load of different speeds, turning in versions of Hip-Hop, Garage and Jungle replete with MC-ing in Punjabi. It can end up a right dog's dinner. It's the same conundrum which all fusions face, assuming that the successful subsection between the collision of genres is somehow larger by reason of the multiplicity of inputs. Wrong! The sonic domain open to a creative collision is in fact inverse in scale. The amount of useful elbow room available to a producer, without wanting to damage the power of what he's fusing, is tiny. Indeed sometimes the "straight" more traditional Desi Bhangra (as epitomised by the solid Jassi Sidhu "Reality Check" CD) can be all you need.

The best RDB tracks, and there are 3 TOTAL STUNNERS on "Unstopabble": "Nachdhey" by Ranjit Mani, with it's in-yer-face martial Dhol, LFO-come-fairground bleep, "RDB Valay" by Manak E and the steamrolling "Buleeain" Featuring Nee2, work at Bhangra's classic walking pace speed. Dhol and Banjo are cleverly meshed and impacted with splintering breaks and bass. All these tunes will have me wracked with goose-pimples. So I don't mean to diss RDB...

And tread carefully I might because their Untouchables imprint, the home of the peerless Desi compilations Danger (Volumes 1-3) and Urban Flavas (1-2) is the all-defining Desi label. Any of these comps will yield 3-4 killer tracks a piece. It's fruitless going into my favorites in any detail, but "Yaar Mil Gai" (Danger 1) spacey and wistful, "Dil Naeeyo Laghda" by Sanjeev (Danger 3) curiously reminiscent of some of the crushing mantras Loop once perfected, "Na Toro" by Lembhar Husianpuri (Danger 3) Rhythm and Sound meet Asian Nemesis, "Billo" by Gubi Sandhu feat G.I.Jatt & Lightning MC (Urban Flavas 2) which splits, folds and stutters Jatt's divine chant into rhythm-defining arcs and finally (this could go on forever) "Nachna" by Bikram Singh (Urban Flavas 2) which proves that up-tempo Garage-style speeds CAN work are all divine. The idea that RDB as a unit stands separate from the material on these collections (Danger Vol.1 somewhat confusingly ascribed to MCs Metz and Trix) is misleading. The RDB CDs proper are the fruit of collaboration between the same crews whose work fills these compilations. Better to view RDB as, not so much a production team, as Desi itself. They're an empire, Wiley could only dream of the kind of scene-wide domination these fellas practise.

I was a real slouch to get this, the Coventry-based Panjabi MC's cross-over LP. It's made up of material he has previously put out on a whole host of recordings. "Mundian Te Bach Ke" is the tune y'all know, and it's the killer, though the LP is, I was surprised to discover, consistently good. Punjabi MC seems happiest at Dubby/Hip-Hop paces which veer close to Trip-Hop at times (not good) BUT the music always manage to comprise some X-factor that keeps things heavy and street. At it's peaks, on the quite spine-tinglingly evocative "Challa" (storms gather, distant Bollywood choirs gesticulate, flutes, strings and harmonium vie and duel) it's scarily powerful. Also lovely is the lean tabla-driven "Ghalla Ghurian" with it's bewitching female vocal (much of the Desi I've encountered is righteously testoserone-fuelled).

It's necessary too to mention The Panjabi Hit Squad (I'm unclear about their relation to Panjabi MC, actually I suspect they may not have one). Since they've got their show on 1xtra they've been pumping the UK airwaves full of Desi on Tuesday nights 0000-0200. Alot of what they play is just straight bashment, you can listen to their show right now streamed off the site! This CD pictured above is 50% big Urban hits, the other 50% Desi. Whilst they're excellent cheerleaders they haven't, in my opinion, produced much in the way greatness, bar Ms. Scandalous's absolutely storming "Hai Hai", another example of a Garage-styled tune which rocks the joint. From their position at the interface with Urban culture it's a short distance to "Bootleg" Desi.

Compilations like "Bootleggers" (Bootleg) and "Streetbeats" (Ruthless) offer up R&B rhythms, often with the yank Rap drawl still intact, versioned over by wicked Punjabi MCs. For example "Ais Jawani" is an insane take on the Diwali Riddim (replete with Sean Paul chorus) "Chumka Te Lengha" a versioning of Beyonce's "Crazy" (aaah joy!), the best ones (sighs) I don't even know what the original is called! Of course the shady re-titling acts to obscure the original version from too much scrutiny. It's interesting to see that Asian music is faced with an even greater crisis at the hands of CD-copying and mp3-pirating than the mainstream industry, and is locked in identical chaos with regards to legality, provenance and originality.

On the one hand you have Surj from RDB explaining the secret of the sound: "(We) nick things, nick Bhangra records from India, nick other people's beats and put them together" and on the other Zeus remarking in RWD magazine on Desi's scale in the US: "It's so big in the states at the moment, but they're all downloading the tunes off the net and they don't know who we are!" There is an hilarious interlude on the RDB "Unstoppable" CD in which one of the members of the RDB crew breaks into a boy's bedroom with the boy's mother in tow (don't mess with this lady!), and proceeds to berate the poor sucker: "We did that album! Hard work man." The Danger 3 Compilation is actually the first CD which I've come across which employs the new copy-proof formatting! It's impossible to rip it to mp3 from it on a PC or a Mac! I was quite impressed! All the Untouchables CDs come emblazoned with heavy warnings against copying and sharing on the net and security stickers. Personally I'm in total sympathy, I love the way they're so up front about it too, none of this pussy-footing around and doublespeak which (post-Metallica) musicians believe is necessary. On the ground the reasons become quite clear, the whole exchange network for these CDs is grass-roots and amazingly haphazard. All the shops I've bought CDs from have sold other stuff; stuff like clothes, watches, DVDs, mobile phones! The opportunities for piracy are rife in such an unregulated environment. In one remote shop towards the north end of Green Street I asked if they had any Desi (and tellingly) the proprietor produced from under the counter the most rudimentary colour-photocopy created CD of RDB's first record. Another CD I actually bought looks on closer inspection to be a bootleg. Very dodgy!

Why do I love Desi so much? Well sadly, I do nurse a suspicion that my interest might not be sustainable. Sourcing this music has turned out to be an adventure in it's own right; an adventure, more spectacular, though along the same lines as procuring Dancehall 7"s was for me last year. It's a bit of a mission innit! It'd be a shame though because the sheer quality and power of this music is totally undeniable. As for getting hold of it yourself, well as usual I'd caution against using Woebot as an slsk/mp3 guide (please people, I HATE THIS!). The nice people at Untouchables have recommended this online store as the best place at which to acquire stuff. Just be sure to say you came from Woebot.

I can't think of any other genre where you'd get an advert for a firm of solicitors on the inner sleeve of your CD:

Desi. Check it out.

ART AT ILM.

Here reporting back from "Album covers redrawn from memory in MS Paint Parts 1,2,3 and 4". Link Courtesy of Nate at Hipster Detritus. This has to constitute my all-time fave ILM thread, props to all involved.

Here are a selection of my favorites. Now no whingeing cos everyone gets a correct attribution, I'm not sublinking, I haven't altered the files and I've provided links to them in their original context. On the other hand, if you've not been included don't give up and we apologise that work submitted can't be returned.

(Cue music Tony Hart's Take Hart "The Gallery")

Firstly it was amusing to see the same cover done by different artistes:

Particularly amusing:

Mark P

Dave M

Lovely renders of this:

Don at Search and Delete

Kenny

An underground one and I was surprised to see two takes on it:

Myonga Von Bontee

ddb

Then I noticed a few auteurs:

All four above by the very talented Zappi. Bravo sir!

Then these two:

(very topical!)

by the formidable Sean Carruthers.

These two above by the maestro 'My name is Kenny'.

Then there was a stream of loveliness, all one hit wonders:

OleM (Lots of Kraftwerk stuff incidentally...)

Curt (SFJ will be pleased!)

Andrzej B. (Is this the Andrzej B. I know?)

Kent Burt

Kurt (I loved this, such brut force)

Dan Selzer (Hilariously blatant self-promotion! Good on yer chum!)

Dave 225 (Exquisite, funnily enough I did a huge painting based on this when at school!)

Alex in NYC (Great! And also to prove that I'm not (too) taste-biased here, I HATE The Stranglers)

Aaron A (Genius!)

Rock Hardy (Very funny! The best ones were quite simple...)

and there's no getting away with not mentioning my own (coughs) humble contribution somewhere at the end of the fourth thread, four days after the whole thing kicks off, drawn from memory of course:

A huge round of applause to everyone.

DISCO.

00.00 Yazoo: Situation (Francois K Dub Mix)
Francois K was hired by legendary Disco DJ Walter Gibbons as a drummer to help him segue between records* and also to enable Gibbons stretch the music into yet weirder shapes. Kevorkian proceeded to build a rep of his own and well as turning in some excellent imaginative interpretations of tracks like Bohannon's "Lets Start to Dance III" and Michael Wilson's "Groove It To Your Body", acting as in-house re-mixer at Prelude (I have 12" mixes by him of L.A.X.'s "Fight Back", D Train's "You're The One For Me" and Musique's "In the Bush") he also crossed over with elan into to the Electro-Rock arena. As well as this awesome mix of Yazoo he was responsible for the legendary remix of Kraftwerk's "Tour De France" and collaborated with Jah Wobble on "Snakecharmer."

02.17 Smokey Robinson: And I don't love you (Special Remix by Larry Levan & Benny Medina)
Peter Shapiro, who now seems to writing less at The Wire because he's working a book on about Disco, brought this to my attention. It's a very minor Smokey Robinson Motown twelve inch from 1984, but Larry Levan's Dub mix of it is great. I've found Levan's mixes are among the most conservative of the disco crowd, this may be in some way a reflection of the fact that he had the highest profile of all the DJs and consequently moved in mainstream circles. The atmosphere on this is quite similar to Dionne Warwick's "Heartbreaker", neuromantic soul. I picture this in the soundtrack to some pink and blue neon-lit mid-eighties brat-pack B-movie, rubbing shoulders with Tangerine Dream.

06.25 Bruce Johnston: Pipeline
I've mentioned this track by former Beach Boy Johnston before and now y'all get to hear it. I was stoked to find this in Bleeker Bobs in the West Village (of all places!) Notable for the way the drums "star" in the mix and how the instruments fade into the sound of crashing waves and seagulls, must have made for a transportative dancefloor experience. Traces here too of the "Manhattan Disco Sound" that fullsome almost Broadway-Musical-cum-1950s-Dance-Craze-RKO-Radio-Transmission sound. (shrugs) Maybe you don't know what I mean? It's the sound of yellow cabs, prosperity and decadence.

10.20 Universal Robot Band: Barely Breaking Even
Patrick Adams, who produced this, has a serious Disco rep which I've always considered surprising given that he's very much a "workaday" producer. Probably most famous for Musique's "In the Bush" and Black Ivory's "Mainline" he also turned out some great fucked up synth-led grooves like Cloud One's mind-bendingly awesome "Atmosphere Strut" and their "Flying High" (the latter which I have a debt of gratitude to Dan Selzer to introducing me too). The Universal Robot Band track stands out by merit of it's bonkers percussion.

15.21 Class Action: Weekend (Dub Mix by Sergio Munzibai and John Morales)
I always play this and the next track at parties. I've had them both in my bag since 1992. The M & M Dub Mix is to my mind preferable to the full vocal version, what distinguishes it from some of the "too-spartan" dub mixes you can find in Disco is that here they keep all the best parts of the vocal line, and through the process of stripping away extraneous clutter the track grooves a mile better. The ladies love this!

22.05 Forrrce: Keep on Dubbin' (With No Commecial Interruptions) (Francois K Mix)
Astonishing that this towering monster of a track, about the best argument on wax for the viability of dub disco isn't more celebrated. I'm also confused about it's relationship Konk's "Baby Dee", essentially the same tune but transparently vastly inferior, has to this. You want to see people lose their minds on the dancefloor, well put this on a 10K rig, the whiplash on that bassline is devastating.

26.25 Kebekelektrik: War Dance
A Tom Moulton Mix. I'm permanently alluding to this project which seems to be Moulton's take on Kraftwerk. "War Dance" and it's lolloping synths is defiantly, engrossingly minimalist. I think this is Moulton, a "classical" Disco producer at his most eccentric.

33.21 Klein & MBO: Dirty Talk (European Connection)
Which must stand as the definitive Italo track. I've once again be surprised that this hasn't been more visible in the reissue of the Italo stuff. I think the assumption on the part of people putting this stuff out once more is that everyone knows it, but I'd have to disagree. The link between this (deprived of the giggling woman on this mix, maybe I should have spun the flipside...) and Rhythim is Rhythim's "Nude Photo" is indelible, making it a key document in the "Detroit-Techno-stems-from-European-Music" argument.

37.15 Raw Silk: Just In Time and Space (Dub)
A classic mix by David Todd and Nick Martinelli. I love the way the slinky Manhattan fanfare slips out of the "jungle" beat.

40.47 The Jammers: And You Know That (A Shep Pettibone Mix)
Shep's roots were in Hip-Hop, he worked on Afrika Bambaata and the Jazzy Five's "Jazzy Sensation" but crossed over into Disco. I've always thought his stuff maintains some of Electro's anti-linearity, his tracks can be arranged quite vertically. The squiggly bassline on this and the next track (another of his mixes) must be one of his trademarks.

44.04 Sinnamon: He's Gonna Take You Home (To His House)
This goes on forever! Just amazing, and I think benefits from being pitched up quite speedy on the twelve tens. I imagine disco would have often been faster when played out at clubs, it's wrong to pussy-foot around at lower more "faithful" tempos with the assumption that they are in some way more authentic.

50.55 Matsubara: S.O.S.
Don't know much about this. Lovely tune though.

55.13 Betty Lavette: Doin' The Best That I Can (Walter Gibbons Mix)
This, gulp, eleven minute mix of "Doin' The Best That I Can" is widely regarded amongst cognoscenti as Walter Gibbon's tour-de-force. Gibbons whose working relationship with disco god Arthur Russell (this is the context for all those tunes people!) produced "Let's Go Swimming (Coastal Dub)" and Indian Ocean's 10.11 mix of "School Bell/Treehouse." He practically chucks the kitchen sink in here, it's quite preposterous. I used to make the mistake of only using the last seven minutes of the track in my sets, but the full wide-screen splendour of the thing is only appreciable with the (once again) "Manhattan Sound" vocal bombast of the intro. Spine-tinglingly lovely stuff.

-

A big shout out to Angus at "I Feel Love" and Phil "Big Daddy" Sherburne. This one's for you, dudes!

*I couldn't rent a drummer for this mix (winks), so some of the cuts are verging on the messy/abrupt. Mixing disco is difficult people, but essential to understand the way the music works.

Kanye West+++

We don't tend to go in for much in depth album analysis here at Woebot. In fact you don't see much formalist texture-talk either. We leave that to Simon, Tim and Marcello. Them fellas do it better. I guess I tend to concentrate on the Geo-political, the Rhizomic Span TM, the interface with kulcha, being essentially what excites me. Also because, as Mark K-Punk remarked to me, it can be somewhat confusing hear people eulogise music YOU'RE NEVER GONNA HEAR in great detail. Sometimes I wonder that I have any material at all to post here, that I manage to pluck this endless stream of guff out of thin air, without recourse to deep-listening and elaborate description. However I thought my proclamation of 31st March was verging on the bald, and realised I still had time to properly nix Marcello's big review of the LP (grins, he'll be shaking his fist at me! Respekt as ever to MC), though of course Simon's shared his feeling with us about it already. Damn it's annoying always having to rely on the shops for this material. I was pissed to see that on the CD of this there was a sticker with glowing reviews from a whole bunch of half-life journals proclaiming it to be a masterpiece, cunts who got sent this as a promo probably last year where it sat gathering dust in their in-trays beneath the Amy Winehouse rekkid. Boo hoo!

I'm not really jealous, it's just fun giving the inkies a bit of a boot in the arse! Ha!* Did anyone else see the "Face off with the net" article by an Owen Gibson in the New Media Section of The Guardian. I'm going to have to type out a section cos the twats have made it impossible to read stuff online without being a member of the website. The context is the collapse of The Face:

"...few commentators have mentioned the simple fact that for anyone under 21 today, the internet now performs the job that culture-performing magazines once did. Only far more effectively. When teenagers from Abergavenny to Ayr are downloading music by bands that have yet to grace the pages of any magazine, tapping into global culture from Tokyo to New York and writing about their own lives on their own blog or fansite, a monthly magazine telling you what's hot and what's not soon becomes redundant."

So they trot out a whole bunch of hopefuls like Neil Boorman at Sleaze, Paul Mardles at Jockey Slut and Andy Capper at Vice in the UK who believe the website versions of their magazines will help save them from extinction. Wow look I just alienated three powerful magazine editors! Well not really, I mean if these mags can loosen up a bit (half-joking, and hire the likes of y'all on my links bar!!!) then the future might not be so bleak for them! Certainly Vice appears to be flourishing. Of course this plays into the recent suggestion of Mark K-Punk's that this particular blogipelago should coalesce and start a magazine. Unfortunately that would be the precise way to kill whatever energy is left in the circuit. Also why a magazine? That's like taking five steps back, though even a website would be turd-like. Can you imagine having to hastle Luka to deliver his copy on time! C'mon young Heronbone, we need that piece on caterpillars Monday morning sharp!

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, the Kanye West LP. What pushed me into doing this wee thing was reading the following review in my favorite beloved journal The Wire. And fingers-crossed this won't get me in any trouble:

Dejected bear mascot thinks college is a bunch of ho/frat hooey and a Cosby sweater so he samples Michael Bolton and turns a nail file into a Trans Europe Express hi-hat. Spat clever rhymes through a busted jaw (talk about suffering succotash) over Chaka Smurf. One line about Mercedes and mayonnaise was pretty much all it took for Chicago's Kanye West to convince Roc-A-Fella he could rap, despite wilfully mispronouncing Versace. "We don't Care" reactivates Monster Magnet's "School Free Drug Zone" campaign as a kiddie chorus taunts "We weren't supposed to make it past 25/the jokes on you we're still alive".

The next interlude ("Graduation Day") talkboxes with Jesus amid gospel wails of clap and strings. Then there's the corny Daft/Chromeo talk-box on the even cornier "Workout Song". The dope to wack ratio of innovative talk-boxing songs here is 2:1. Not Bad. "Last Call" is a Source interview in search of a song, Ikea shopping trip included. This unrefundable 11 minutes is better spent doubling up with electric sliding granny of "Family Business". The piano almost gets stuck in the sappy seats of Hornsby's Range Rover, but Nopac, it's much better than THAT song. A swaying hymn, "Spaceship" finds West with the retail blues and the self-deprecating consequence sort of at peace at being recognised as an extra in an old Busta Rhymes video."

I can't fucking believe I just typed that out. That was WORK! Dave Tompkins, who wrote this, is one of the big boys so as far as I'm concerned he can put up with a likkle sniping. I thought this was the WORST, most unsympathetic, cranky and pinched record review I have ever read. I think what's at stake is a fundamental misunderstanding of what Kanye West is up to. As I see it, "The College Dropout" is some kind of cultural tabula rasa. It's like someone standing up, and saying with wit and charm "Yo chill with the studio gangster bullshit!" The fact that it's on Roc-A-Fella, not some crappy independent label ought to make this doubly significant; you know *everyone* is going to buying it. Kanye West has forged some totally improbable detente between backpackers like Dilated Peoples, and the Neptunes' club banger crowd. It's a really heartfelt record that has one finger in a sympathetic understanding of ghetto life and another in that of the middle-classes (notice the shifts in "Family Business" between the black family beleagued by cockroaches and the family eating apple pie).

1. We Don't Care.
What I like about this song:
•The catchy chorus given by a bunch of under-tens: "Drug dealing just to get by, stack your money till it gets sky high"
Why:
(Smirks) That's inspired, using kids to do the lyrics. More than that, pitching them up against a gospel choir.

2. All Falls Down.
What I like about this song:
•Syleena Johnson's tortured hopeless vocals.
•Lyrics: "She's dealing with some issues that you can't believe, single-black female addicted to retail"
Why:
You can half hear Linton Kwesi Johnson railing against the "Black Petty Bourgeois" when listening to Kanye West. I guess BPB was big in the seventies, but I don't think what Tompkins dismisses as "retail blues" on evidence here and in "Spaceship" is an insignificant thing. Surely "Bl*ng" has meant Black America is consumed with capitalist desire? Are these not the problems which affect everybody?

3. Spaceship. (8/10)
What I like about this song:
•The twinkly bells and sped-up "Whoos" from "Distant Lover" by Marvin Gaye.
•Lyrics: "Working on this graveshift, and I ain't made shit, I wish I could, buy me a Spaceship and fly"
Why:
...also Kanye's tale of character quitting a job, sinking to the street, hustling, anger and fear creeping into his voice.

4. Jesus Walks. (6/10)
What I like about this song:
•The Stokely Carmichael intoned "Niggers!" textured sonic punched in the mix
•"You can rap about anything except Jesus, that means Guns Sex and Videotapes, but if i talk about god my record won't get played"
Why:
Kanye's God-thing, like the Slow Jamz aesthetic seems to some from that same place wherein Al Green made a confluence of sexual desire and the holy. It's about the only spot at which I can tolerate Christianity in music. Maybe this God is Asase Ya, the Ashanti deity for the Earth *and* Fertilty. Though of course the God of the Black Gospel is less frozen and austere than that of the High Anglican Church I grew up with. But respek to Kanye for rapping about "the big fella". That's bold.

5. Never Let Me Down. (8/10)
What I like about this song:
•The sped up "Never Let Me Down" hook from "Maybe Its The Power Of Love" by Michael Bolton.
Why:
We saw Kanye West recently on TOTP and he was saying words along the lines of Britain is my most important market, the folk who will appreciate my artistry. It was, on the face of it, typical bullshit, exactly what you'd expect from a smooth-talking industry player. But damn, all these sped-up vocal lines. They're pure Ardkore, pure 2-step Glossa-Garage. Sure there's the Smurf thing in Hip-Hop but that's long dead. The drug-addled acceleration of voices is a UK ting. They're right through the LP.

6. Get Em High. (9/10)
What I like about this song:
•Drums.
Why:
...also it's a choon.

7. The New Work-Out Plan (6/10)
What I like about this song:
•Violins.

8. Through The Wire. (8/10)
What I like about this song:
•The sped up "Through The Wire" hook from "Through The Fire" by Chaka Khan.

9.Slow Jamz. (7/10)
What I like about this song:
•The sped up "Gonna be, well, well" hook from "A House is not a home" by Luther Vandross.

10. Breathe In, Breathe Out. (9/10)
What I like about this song:
•Wicked Stax/Willie Mitchell loop.
•"But now I'm rapping about Money, Hoes and Rims again."
•Ludacris on the chorus.
•"I always had a phD, a pretty huge dick."
•The dub echo on hiccoughing Kanye at the end.
Why:
...also it's a choon.

11. School Spirit. (9/10)
What I like about this song:
•The sped up "Can you feel it, People do!" hook from "Spirit in the Dark" by Aretha Franklin.
•Particularly the "People do!" bit super quavery gospel innit!**
•Kanye West: "I feel a couple woofs coming on cuz"
•Hoods: "Woof! Woof!"

12. Two Words (7/10)
What I like about this song:
•The sped up "And it's bloody on these streets." from "Peace and Love (Amani Na Mapenzi)- Movement III (Time)" by Mandrill.

13. Family Business (10/10)
What I like about this song:
•Everything.
•Exquisite Gospel vocals (I'm not a fan as a rule) pitched against that melancholy piano riff, crackly radio preacher and just to nail it that 6 year-old in the background.
Why:
Deffo the centrepiece of the record. I found this unbearably moving. I cried after hearing it on Thursday. Pussy!

14. Last Call (10/10)
What I like about this song:
•Lovely wide rolling groove. Like an empty five-lane motorway you can just drive your call all over it.
•Ridiculous super banale monologue (genius!) about Kanye's progress in the industry, Highlights include:
•Musing about the drums on Dre's The Chronic 2000.
•Kanye gets to meet Jay-Z who has just spat rhymes on a riddim of his. Jay-Z says: "Oh you're a real soulful dude." Listening to the track Kanye reflects to himself: "Man, I'm one for like the simple type Jay-Z, I ain't one for the introspective complicated, in my personal opinion." Jay Z asks him what he thinks about it and Kanye says (adopts goofy voice) "Man that shit tight!" That's well funny.
•Moving out of his old flat with his Mum's help. Like a fucking normal human being.
•"They're looking at me like I'm crazy, cos I ain't got a jersey on."
•When he drops a rhyme he was going to use, and then tells the listener not to steal it cos he might use it later at some time.
•The groove drops out when his deal with Capitol falls through.
Why:
Kanye's throwaway attitude to his raps is one of the things that seems to infuriate Tompkins, dismissed here as a "Source interview," but surely this is what marks them as inspired, they're offhand. They don't sound like they've been sweated over. Why the fuck shouldn't he rap about visiting Ikea? You want him to pretend he steals his furniture?

-

But seriously, what other better LPs have there been in the past three years? Dizzy's? Forget it. It's up there with De La Soul's "3 Feet High and Rising" and Tricky's "Maxinquaye." I don't have to wait 5 years till someone "trendy" tells me so.

*The plosive "Ha!" is a Trademark of the estate of Luke Davis 2003. Used with permission.
**The offhand "Innit" is a Trademark of Woebot Inc 2003. All rights reserved.

Three Rock Records.

Three rock records have crept their way onto my deck, politely making their way through a crowd of scowling east-end raggamuffin white labels. If rock enables one to do anything these days it's to reflect. To slightly re-tool Simon's ZFI theory, it strikes me that the music he's using to illustrate the process of intensification is music whose modus operandi is...er...intensification. The thing about following a music like Grime or Crunk is that you find your head squeezed into a clamp. You're in a state of permanent breathlessness, constantly on the verge of an heart-attack. You're riding a car very fast through tunnels. You're pushing buttons as they rise.

My recent comments on Nouveau-Post-Punk's lack of engagement with a broader range of influences could be levelled trebly against the jackhammer static of the pirates, except in that instance the fixation upon here and now is virtuous in it's exclusivity, impossible to criticise in it's moronic intensity. I have a theory that the reason Back-to-1992/1994/1997 is a necessity is that the culture is so quick and unreasonably demanding that a cooling off period, an appreciation of what Luke calls "half-life-culture" is essential to extract pleasure from what is otherwise lost in a blinding white light.

Rock (whatever you want to call it) may not always have been the strain of music to enable a reflective mode of listening, one not so grindingly involving as the more commonly feted in these parts, but now it's distance from these axes of intensification bestows upon it a charmed calm. A cool space for exploring the romantic, the fey, and the lovely.

Quite to my surprise two of these records are Scottish-ish. While we've been insistently trying to keep alive the flame of 1997, or whenever it was that dance music exploded into the mainstream, in England the Scots have long-since lost interest. For instance register Simon at Silver Dollar Circle's surprise that Dance music is dead, that Grime isn't dance music. Yeah IT IS a surprise isn't it. It's like standing around at an open-aired rave and realising that yes the sun has come up and yes people are driving to work and yes the farmer's cows are staring at you and yes you're wearing ridiculous clothes. The Scots figured this out ages ago. Maybe they didnae have the mainstream presence of Dance music, maybe Ministry of Sound decided it wasn't going to be worthwhile perpetuating the myth up there. So it's been a case of smaller, possibly more fruitful stories gradually gaining their own impetus.

This Uter record is a case in point. This four-tracker is consistently excellent. The stand-outs being not the craftily chosen cover versions of "My Little Underground" (JAMC) and "Ohm Sweet Ohm" (Kraftwerk come Auld Lang Syne) but (promisingly) Declan Roney's quite lovely "Tomorrow's Clowns" and "Vibrato." These would have even the hardiest LSD-reconstructed bad bwoys crying into their beer; crying for the shimmering, androgynous, mute-love bliss-scapes of 1988. There's no getting away from the comparisons, here in the high-lonesome harmonies, to My Bloody Valentine. Those seductive basslines: New Order. That crystalline feedback: AR Kane. The utilitarian drum-machine pulse: JAMC. It's quite lovely stuff.

I'll admit to being a total sucker for ANY music whatsoever sold in art galleries. I was delighted to pick up this CD by Martin Creed in the shop at The Serpentine in London. Martin Creed, in case you've forgotten, won The Turner Prize in 2001 with (amongst other works) "Work No. 227: The lights going on and off." I guess like all Turner Prize Winners he's slowly slipped out of people's minds. I'd be surprised if he didn't feel a little like yesterday's man. Someone who something marvellous had happened to, and who now had to struggle through life settling for a lesser level of acclaim and attention. Don't think I'm being cruel by saying that, it's just that I know quite a few conceptual artists and it's a miracle if you make the big time like Scotsman Creed did. Often as not they have to settle for second-best. In fact, and this may come as some consolation to Sean Loaf, one very famous Saatchi-feted artist I know has decided that, in spite of being (on the face of it) enormously successful that the money was rubbish and that she'd rather be a mum. Incidentally while I'm in full hot gossip mode it might be worth mentioning that Catherine, Lulu and I walked past Saatchi and Nigella Lawson coming into the current Roy Lichtenstein exhibition at The Hayward as we were leaving. He eyeing me suspiciously. It's true!

I remember seeing a very good documentary made about Creed and his work, and it featured footage of his band Owada. At the time I thought, gee that's interesting if not brilliant, cos they were very fucking dry. If you read some of their lyrics you can see that Creed took the conceptual angle a little too far. Counting to one hundred, my yes, very minimal...attention wanders. He'd taken the same equation Rhys Chatham* had: Ramones + Steve Reich = Minimal Rock and ended up producing quite similar sounding music to Chathams. I am surprised in retrospect that his cause wasn't picked up The Wire (who went as far as putting out Chatham's music on the short-lived Wire Editions label), of course any music on this art-punk axis is blessed by the spirit of Andy Warhol**. Creed even got David "Flying Lizards" Cunningham to produce him and with the Owada record coming out on Cunningham's Piano label he was crying out for the right kind of attention, but still no bites...

So presumably Creed is "reduced" to putting out limited edition CDs in small galleries. It's some kind of tragedy then that "I don't know what I want", the one two minute fifteen second song on here is a bit super. For one musically it's built on a logical, rather than artificial rotation. Quietly shambling and genuinely touching, i love it. What's quite funny is that when you put the CD into your PC, CDDB recognises it as an album by a band called "APOTHEOSES" the song (erroneously titled?) "Orff's Carmina Burana Piece." This is either gentle self-reflexive prank or confusion writ accidental.

Bit of a flashback here. Ever since reading Dave Lang's excellent piece on SST at Perfect Sound Forever, I've been hunting for this record. The Tar Babies are definitely a very minor bit of history, but when you consider that the most fruitful and important strand to come out of that label has been not the Huskers or The Meat Puppets but The Minutemen then maybe The Tar Babies (the other funk-inflected act at SST) deserve more attention. Certainly I recall my big chum Sasha Frere-Jones singling them out for quiet praise and Dan Bitney one of the three member of The Tar Babies ended up in Tortoise. I rest my case.

So, at last, as is inevitable (records can't evade one forever***) I found it the other day. And was pleased to discover that "Fried Milk" (their first LP) is a little gem. Sloppy, fun, original, generously tuneful and something one comes back to for repeated listens.

Can I take my leather trousers off now?

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

* Chatham had tuned pianos for La Monte Young and had his head turned by hearing "Beat on the Brat" at CBGBs, Creed describes his music as "Steve Reich meets The Ramones."
** Just like he blessed Curiosity Killed The Cat ;-)
*** Still searching for The Meat Puppets "Up On The Sun" incidentally.

Gothic Futurist.

Stuart Argabright looks like a villain from a Die Hard film. He parts the staff in the bar we meet. They’ve been bitching at me to move on, and now tiptoe around. He addresses me with the ease and grace of someone not used to being messed with, his a demeanour of soft dread, part Southern Gent, part Austrian count. Perhaps it’s a result his army upbringing. His father worked for US Intelligence on the military’s precursor to the Internet, his brother on F-16’s. It’s difficult to know where to start with Argabright. History’s been bent out of shape with the post-punk revival. We’re supposed to be more interested in some chapters of his story more than others. He’s been ploughing the same furrow since he left Washington DC, and his early band The Rudiments (captured on the obscure “30 Seconds over DC” Compilation with other punk contenders like the Slickee Boys), and left for New York under the spell of Tom Verlaine’s Television.

I had propped a copy of the Dominatrix record “The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight” (Streetwise/upRoar 1984) on my table. We’d failed to work out beforehand how to identify one another. I reasoned it’s lurid pink sleeve would catch his eye, then it seemed a valid entry point for our conversation. Argabright is heartily sick of the track: “Dominatrix was the anomaly in my scheme of things, but if most people know me at all, they think of that record.” Having been released recently on Andy Weatherall’s “Nine O’Clock Drop” (Nuphonic 2000) and at least 4 other compilations previous to that, it’s just been put out again, in the original sleeve with accompanying re-mixes, by DJ Hell’s International Gigolo label. It’s perky chiming synth riff, crisp drums and playful lyrics made it a surprise hit for Stuart in the mid-eighties. He ended up playing it for the disco crowd at Studio 54 and the Paradise Garage wedged between Robert “D.A.F” Gorl and Run DMC. This was ironic turn of events. The crowd Stuart emerged from HATED the disco scene and it’s “…frivolous mirror ball sensibility.” It’s easy to forget that despite today’s re-imagining of that era, disco and punk were sworn enemies, with the Mudd Club and it’s progeny structuring themselves as a response to the 9-5 Weekender attitude of the disco crowd. We’re soon to be treated to the first bonafide history of the era at the hands of New York-based Academic Simon Reynolds' eagerly anticipated Post-Punk book. “None of the disco people went to The Mudd Club. You got the Bianca Jaggers thrown in once in a while, but if we saw those people we'd trip 'em up, kick 'em, and if they came dressed all disco James Chance might just mug them on the dancefloor. The strata of people was pretty pronounced. When you say Disco people I think Studio 54 people, that was a whole tribe of people. More power to them, but it jusn't wasn't our scene.” With Dominatrix he was trying to engineer transgression, not homogeneity: “Its good to have boundaries because then you can say “this” and “this” get together, and its not just a pool of musicians.” This boundary breaking was echoed in the track’s subject matter. “I'd been hanging out with Dominatrixes, they were my good friends. I wanted to do a thing which showed what they were about…these women in power who were beating and peeing on the top music business lawyers in New York.” Stuart clearly in awe of these girls and the down-up inversion of power they practised.

“We were working at Unique studios, which was the hot studio at the time, by Times Square”, The group had laid their hands on Peter Baumann’s studio (of Tangerine Dream, interesting for his “Skin Diver” record with Nona Hendryx) the synth, mixer and podium made for Kraftwerk. “While me and Ken Lockie were in there doing the record Ivan Ivan the co-producer was out playing video games in the hallway and in the next studio was Arthur Baker... Arthur was like "What's this record? I gotta have it!" The record at that point was being produced by Joel Weber’s upRoar recordings, Weber the man behind the hot music biz conference of the day the NMS, but a deal was struck and Dominatrix consequently came out as a joint Street Wise and upRoar production. In a depressingly familiar scenario Stuart never managed to properly collect for the record, a grim parallel could be made with Liquid Liquid’s treatment at the hands of that other R’n’B empire Sugarhill. He doesn’t have a nice word to say about Arthur Baker.

Ike Yard was the foundation for all this activity. The group was put together by Argabright (Drums) and Kenny Compton (Bass). These two spent months locking patterns before inviting electronics wizards Fred Szymanski and Michael Diekmann on board. With the “Night after Night" EP (Les Disques Crepuscule 1981), they made a cultural leap by being on the forward-looking Belgian label, as opposed to a homegrown NYC one. The only similar deal centred on transatlantic Post-punk axis was brokered between Ed Bahlmann (99) and London’s Dick O’Dell (Y) yet never bore fruit in the export to Europe of New York’s Music. Ike Yard were trailblazers. There were predecessors mining similar sonic territory (Suicide) and contemporaries (Liquid Liquid and Gray) but Ike Yard upped the ante in the abstract ferocity of their sound. Their true musical kindred spirits were German; D.A.F. and bands on the Atatak label like Der Plan and Pyrolator. Argabright was keen to point out that their “angle” came as much from literature, notably from J.G.Ballard’s “Crash”, from Japanese author Ryu Murakami (especially his novel “Almost Transparent”, which was the inspiration for the lyrics of “Half A God”), and William Burroughs “..for his cut-up technique.” It’s music which speaks of the intense alienation of cold water flats in the Lower East Side, seductive in its frosty hauteur but also plying hefty rhythmic ebb.

With their second record “A Fact A Second” (Factory 1982) Ike Yard were delighted to be on the same label as Joy Division. This time Fred Szymanski and Michael Diekmann, both of whom had an academic background in electronics, truly made their influence felt. Argabright recalls his introduction to Xenakis and Stockhausen and the electronic music issuing from IRCAM at their hands: “We bathed in it”. Argabright describes the nascent electronics scene: “Here in Manhattan there was this place called PASS, Public Access Synthesiser Studio, where you could go for $3 an hour and there was this synthesiser, a Buchla which was as tall as this wall. A phone patchbay thing which took you half an hour to get any sound out of it. Then came the suitcase sized EMS synthesiser which Brian Eno had, but also that Fred in Ike Yard owned. Suddenly we were able to have a thing we could walk around with...and wow we can set this thing on top of an old ironing-board on stage and we can do a live thing with it. OK!” A Fact A Second” sports a “purely electronic” sound with synths and drum machines all triggered through midi. Tracks like “Loss” and “NCR”, the latter audible on Gomma’s excellent “Anti-NY” (Gomma 2001) compilation, are quite stunning not just for their whispering iciness, but also their low-slung electro-funk. Suicide, who Ike Yard had also supported (others included New Order, A Certain Ratio, Young Marble Giants, Non, and Lydia Lunch’s 13.13), may have been prodigally in advance, but possessed an unmistakable rockabilly sound. Hearing what Argabright terms these “ones of a kind” of Post-Punk, is fascinating. Twenty years on this music is bang up to date, and it’s heartening to know that thanks to the Troubleman label, who recently brought us the hotly-tipped New Wave upgrade of Erase Errata, both these Ike Yard records will imminently be available once more. As a footnote to this era, note the impact Ike Yard and Dominatrix may have had over the birth of New Order’s “Blue Monday”: “Factory America’s Michael Shamberg was always hanging around the scene and making connections. With Dominatrix on Street Wise, it was just a jump away in the club to go from talking to the Street Wise guy (Baker) to the New Order guy (Tony Wilson). I would venture to say that in whatever vaporous way the connection with Ike Yard and Factory, and Ike Yard and Arthur Baker somewhat smoothed the way for the New Order Arthur Baker thing.”

Gomma, who also reissued “Exterior Street,” Stuart’s collaboration with Rammelzee which came out on Death Comet Crew’s “At the Marble Bar EP” (Beggars Banquet 1984) have just, after Argabright’s suggestion, put out Rammelzee’s first LP. “Ramm”, as Stuart affectionately refers to his colleague, and he have forged a persistent collaboration since that record. It’s an unusual partnership, founded on their mutual “Gothic Futurist” aesthetic. They first met at The Gallery in Berlin in 1983. Argabright had fled New York after being stabbed twice in a mugging. Since then Rammelzee has also contributed to two tracks on Stuart’s Black Reign record on the Industrial Label 5th Column in 1986. Argabright has taken the role of producer in the project; he’s recorded all the vocals in New York with Rammelzee, Shock Dell and K-Rob (the first time they’ve worked together since “Beat Bop”). He has marshalled contributions from the German Hip-Hop crews Quanuum and Terranova and added his own production on one of the tracks. He’s aiming to help “Ramm” on tour, as the Ikonoklast Panzerist can often have his plate full when performing in his beautiful trash assemblage outfits. Stuart joked: “Ikonoklast Panzerism, a great buzzword unless your talking to Jewish toymakers....he was trying to get his toys out there and people were all excited and he went "Gothic Futurism and...Ikonoklast Panzerism" Jaws drop, eyes bug out. "What do you mean by Panzerism?" End of meeting!” Not that it’s his place to apologise for his friend’s iconography, but Argabright is quick to explain the phrase has nothing to do with “the forties”. A remix by El-P of the original Death Comet Crew record, whose lovely vintage 3D cover Stuart and I fauned at over at his apartment, is also mooted. Stuart holds the Def Jux crew in high esteem, and also singled out the No-U Turn Tech-step label for praise.

Argabright has been busy with a consistently inspiring stream of activity between these earlier records and the current offerings. Amongst other things he’s been heavily involved with the author William Gibson, who he contacted the week after Neuromancer’s release, telling the soon-to-celebrated cyber-punk that HIS music was the soundtrack to that book. Highlights of this partnership include Stuart being asked to do the music for the 10th Anniversary Audio Book of Neuromancer by Time Warner in 1994, and his score for the Robert Longo/William Gibson movie “Johnny Mnemonic” (“a bust”). His improbable avant-thrash outfit Black Reign who mixed The Misfit’s three minute pop songs with equal parts Einsturzende Neubauten metal-work pounding played GG Allin’s last concert and the notorious anniversary of the Tompkins Square Riots at Tompkins Square Park, surrounded by a phalanyx of police. Yesterday he was the on the phone to Bachir of The Master Musicians of Jajouka with whom he is co-ordinating a project with Judy Nylon, another long-term collaborator. This is the kind of restless activity it’s heartening to see in an old dude. On our way to his flat, in the mysteriously perfect Stuyvesant Park public housing estate, Stuart described his vision of electronic music: “…I envision a cable jerking around spraying out sparks” danger, in a word. It’d be good to see more threat of rupture in some of the smooth surfaces of modern electronica.

Special Thanks to Paul Kennedy.

DeMeDo
Gomma
International DeeJay Gigolo
Troubleman Unlimited

C90 Roots.

A Reggae tape I made four years ago. Hit the Woebot icon above! Let's go!

00.00 Jackie Mittoo: Hi-Jack
My first exposure to Studio One at a party in Manchester in 1991 where I was DJ-ing Bleeps in the cellar. The bass on the Coxsone tracks was in an entirely different range of the frequency to where I'd previously found bass in seventies rockers. Kinda punched you in the chest. I love a bassline you can hear being clipped.

02.07 John Holt: Ali Baba
Holt's phrasing and timing on this Treasure Isle classic are spectacularly sensitive. Mime this, it's fun!

04.46 Joe Higgs: Hard Times Don't Bother Me
Didn't Higgs have a hand in tutoring Bob Marley? This from the quite lovely "Life of Contradiction" LP.

08.13 Harry Mudie/King Tubby: Where Eagles Dare
Tubbs had meaningful relations with a whole heap of producers. This is almost symphonic. And looooong...

14.30 The Wailing Souls: Real Rock
I SO rate this lot. Like Leroy Smart's vocals they're not glutinous in the least, something quite unique in their delivery I can never put my finger on.

17.31 Zap Pow: The River
My fave roots track period. Lee Perry at his absolute apogee. Harmonies seem to happening on about eight plains.

20.58 Jackie Mitto: Hairy Mary
Much later Mittoo, again psychedelic without being dubbed-out. Ever so slight jazz tinge to this. Shimmering organs.

23.52 Fred Locks: Black Star Liners
Bit of a classic. Super spooked tuning.

26.32 Dillinger: Truth and Rights
"Dillinger entered looking dapper in a blue track suit with a pair of shoes tied by the lace slung round his neck, Dillinger greeted Jammy who looked up and remarked on whether or not the footwear was new, Dillinger sharp as a ratchet blade replied, "Yeh man, me got me new shoes and the talking blues." Dave Hendley.

32.34 The Wailing Souls: I've got a burning fire.
Another AMAZING track from this lot.

34.38 Winston Scotland: Buttercup
Brother Jess might recognise the hook off this as used on the Brainkiller's "Screwface." He might even know this track! My copy here on the genius Pama imprint.

37.04 Tapper Zukie: Viego
Clement Bushay's production on "Man Ah Warrior" is sweet, crisp and light. Recently reissued, the "Music of the Most High" release masterminded by Lenny Kaye with its beautiful cover photo of a lockless Tapper by Robert Mapplethorpe is rare as hen's teeth. Zukie is sometimes dismissed by Roots afficionados, I lurve his singjay tone.

39.44 The Agrovators: West Dub
Mash up vinyl here. The bottom note on this, where the rudderless melody swirls into an impossibly involved pool, before snapping up into an euphoric high echo, is one of my all time favorite musical moments. Just goes to show how Tubby could make a track.

42.04 Pablove Black Bagga and The All Stars: After Christmas
I play this to everyone. Apparently Shaka used to mash up this old Studio One dubplate all the time.

46.04 Treasure Isle Dub: Dub So true
Very early Tubby, but a towering monster. Lovely vocals here too.

48.10 Jo Jo Bennett: Leaving Rome
An early Harry Mudie track. The super soupy string undercut by the bath-time bird whistle. Like the Mittoo stuff here, instrumental Reggae that's crazy without being dubbed out.

50.41 Scientist: Bad Days Dub
Scientist off the "Scientific Dub" LP. Brad Osbourne's riddim. I like the Clocktower riddims, why Bullwackie gets all the hype I dunno.....

54.55 Cornell Campbell: The Sun
Lovely. Nice to hear him still working, the Rhythm and Sound thing he did was the best of the series. Like Horace Andy he has a high open voice that's rough yet tender.

58.02 Burning Spear: Creation Rebel
The Spear's first record is essential.

1.00.32 Alton Ellis: Set a better example
Punchy rocksteady. Keening vocals from The Flames.

1.03.07 The Royals: Sufferer of the Ghetto
Roy Cousins' recordings are really crafted, quite different to most Reggae of the period where the artists are shuttled in, do their thing over pre-ordained backing tracks and leave by the back-door.

1.06.28 Dennis Alcapone: Dancing Version
Adore the way Dennis leaps into the blue with his "Yeah yeah yeeeeeeaaahhhs."

1.08.37 Linval Thompson: I Love to smoke Marijuana
Classic innit. I used to love to smoke marijuana ;-)

1.11.53 Keith Hudson: I broke the comb
He's a really weird character the dark dentist of dub. How the record companies ever thought they might have another Marley with him is impossible to understand.

1.14.29 Tapper Zukie: Ital Pot
Something deeply unworldly about this Yabby U riddim (U under-represented here, along with a whole lotta folk, it's just a fekkin' mixtape, it's not the best of reggae you loser!), the way the chorus springs from the abyss of the mix. From the LP Jon mentioned here Penny Reel writes the notes on this, didn't you get in trouble with him Jon?

1.17.28 Nicky Thomas: Lonely Feeling
A Joe Gibbs Amalgamated-era production. I've always liked this. Really crunchy.

1.19.51 Prince Jazzbo: Pepper
He's no I Roy. However, in one of his "routines" Mark E Smith's goes on about how rubbish Jazzbo is. Bollocks! Jazzbo is great! Smith doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about.

1.22.50 Glen Brown: Black Dub
Godhead.

1.26.10 Big Youth: Dreadlocks Dread
Never gone a bundle on live Reggae recordings (totally beside the point innit) though check THIS! Dem's lungs! First four rows flattened.

Stop.

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!

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.

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*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!

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.

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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.

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!

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.

Un Ra.

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

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

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

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

(Girds loins) In no particular order:

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1. Eddie Gale: Ghetto Music (Blue Note)

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

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

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

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

3. Tadd Dameron: Fontainebleu (Victor)

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

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

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

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

One of Hildegard's Illustrations from Scivias

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. George Duke: The Inner Source (MPS)

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

7. Karlheinz Stockhausen: Illimite (Shandar)

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

Interviewer: Can you say how you know about Sirius?

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

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

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

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

9. Arthur Lyman: Taboo (HiFi)

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

10. Unknown Ethiopian 7". (Emporio Musicale)

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

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

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

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

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

11. Patrick Cowley: Mind Warp (Megatone Records)

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

12. MC5: Kick Out The Jams (Elektra)

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

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

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

13. Oliver Messiaen: Turangalia Symphony (RCA Victor)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I rest my case ;-)

15. Disney Original Soundtrack: Dumbo (Disney)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

18. Harry Partch: Petals (CRI)

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

19. Eddie Palmieri: Exploration (coco)

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

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

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

21. Scriabin: The Poem of Ecstacy (Everest)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

24. Hermeto Pascoal: Slaves Mass (Warner)

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

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

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

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Abyssinia.

Swag.

Driving in the car down the M11 in the dark. On the radio I heard two children being interviewed about their collections:

Grown-up (earnest): "Why did you start collecting?"
Little Boy (playing with own fingers): "Well that's a really long story, but the main reason was to impress my friends."

I know what you mean mate. Let's face it, often it does boil down to (adopts that pose held by noble men in Renaissance Italian pictures, forefinger pointed adroitly at the sky): "Look at my splendour!"

(cut to)

Little Girl: "The best thing about collecting is that you can share your collections with your friends."

That's a softer, nicer way to look at this impulse to hoard. A Milk Chocolate Button for you sweetheart.

-

My friend Gwen came round last night. I've known Gwen for about ten years. In the early nineties he was making music with Charles Bullen from This Heat. Together in 1991 they put out the Circadian Rhythms 12" in an edition of 100. They gave one to Colin Faver I believe. I wonder whether he could have made it's head from it's tail. It's one of those mythic records, a quite sensible "pointe zero" for "Electronica", in the sense that that constitutes a Post-Acid-House form of Electronic Prog.(own eyes pop out on stalks)

I thought Gwen, whose family is French, was working at IRCAM in Paris. Actually he got a scholarship and is studying at Xenakis's institute the CCMIX. He's got his head buried deep in Maths and Stochasticism and has been given tutelage by Bernard Parmegiani, Francois Bayle, Luc Ferrari and Michel Chion. Gwen, the inveterate fanboy, has had all his Music Concrete LPs signed and adorned with drawings by these magi. The unit has amazing compositional hardware, including one computer which will perform realtime timestretching. Hey Geeta check that out! Gwen works incredibly slowly. He'll think about about a piece for 4 months and then knuckle down and compose it in a month. Sadly he forgot to bring any of his music over with him.

Wonderboy makes very good money on the side as a record dealer. Bar possibly one or two people (he insists they exist) he's Europe's pre-eminent dealer. His list of clients is beyond scary. Interestingly a major part of his trade is in Modern Jazz; selling Argentinian Trios to Japanese collectors, and Tubby Hayes records to the highest bidder. Apparently he's losing interest in the dealing game, becoming buried deeper in making his own stuff. I picked up four records off him, which I could scarcely afford, however we don't hook up all that often. I'm going to keep the identity of those ones a secret, but I thought you might be interested to know what else he had in his bag; records I didn't buy. He'd already sold three apparently amazing Bruno Nicolai Italian Soundtracks before he got to me.

Karel Appel: Musique Barbare.
Quite a few famous artists have made records. I have seen LPs by Salvador Dali, Kurt Schwitters, Jean Dubuffet and Jean Tinguley. Usually the great men are assisted by a few musically-inclined chums. I've always been fascinated by Karel Appel, the Dutch "Abstract Expressionist" and founder member of COBRA. That collective's stuff pushes at the boundaries of the acceptable, it takes Expressionism down one of it's ill-trod paths, towards a scatalogical, wilfully out-of-control naiveity. I'm surprised COBRA isn't a bigger touchstone for musical things like Throbbing Gristle, Gabba etc. It's one of those rare instances of a hooligan bourgeois art-form. Have a giggle at this *GREAT* photo from the lavish insert photo-booklet:

Weighty and Solid, Heavy and Light.
A library record from 1966 distinguished by the fact that it contains one brief two minute track by a very early incarnation of Can. Apparently the Can heads are doing their nut in about this record, which *NO-ONE* knew existed before. The track is a very choice little slice of Soundtracks-era Can, a piece they recorded for a porno film (natch). What threw Gwen initially was the flute on it, apparently contributed by an itinerant Englishman, or at least that's what Holger Czukay told him.

Dream Sequence: Cosmic Eye.
This record should have been in that Routes to India spiel I did way back. It's from 1970 and includes John Mayer in it's line-up. Damn it's a beautiful record, better than the Harriott Indo-Jazz ones. A languid, echoing, baubled vision of something twixt Jazz, World and Electronic music. Couldn't afford it sadly.

Mauricio Kagel: Atem.
You might remember me alluding, in that piece immediately after The Silver Records thing I did, to another series of Avant-Garde Records. A series which inspired Sonic Youth's design of their "Avant" collection. Here's another one from that Perspectives Musicales collection. According to legend these were originally produced with clear ribbed plastic sheathes which, when slid on and off, exaggerated the optical effects on the sleeves. Gwen told me he sold Thurston Moore one of this series.

Musikalische Gruppen-Improvisation.
Not a clue what this was, but (before someone pins me down and tells me) to be honest not that interested. Nice cover though.

Theatre Du Chene Noir: Aurora.
A truly exquisite bit of melodic drifting improvisation by an obscure Theatre troupe from Avignon. Amazingly confident performance from a group of totally obscure players. This is on the legendary Futura label, which allegedly outshines BYG and Saravah, indeed parts of this were reminiscent of Don Cherry's Mu (Part 2), though possibly more sublime. Sealing it's status as lost classic is and extraordinary super-intense half-sung monologue by some insane French hippy-chick, adopting the pose of a deity surveying mankind, warning us (in words even dumbo here could understand) to beware of the "Bird People" who will snatch us and carry us from planet to planet, from star to star. Nuts! And before you try and drop me a line to pester me for Gwen's number with a plan to buy this, you ought to know that he was selling it for, gulp, $1,000. Yeah, now we're ALL frustrated!

Umiliani: il Corpo.
Lovely lovely warm "Axelrod-esque" Italian Soundtrack by this master of the genre. This has recently been been reissiued. Form a queue!

Umiliani: Suspense.
(weeps) I desperately wanted this one, which *hasn't* been reissued, but again couldn't afford it. Though it was something like a fifth of the price of Aurora, it was still out of my league. It's darker, emptier and more electronic than the other score.

Marc Moulin: Sam Suffy.
Also REALLY wanted this, an original pressing from 1975, though mainly because I missed last year's reissue of it, which our friend Kirk Degiorgio wrote the liner notes for. As the story goes, Moulin was subsequently involved with electro-disco-pop outfit Telex. His career path strongly resembling the relationship Harry Hosono had with YMO. Gwen also insisted that I track down Placebo "3". I'm afraid this is a game of catch up which I can't afford to play..

BJT.
A great French Jazz curio on the mighty Saravah label (Brigette Fontaine et al), sustained harpsichord over crisp flowing cymbals. (punches sky) I won points by comparing it to the Art Ensemble of New York on Folkways.

The Vampires of Dartmoore: Dracula's Music Cabinet.
Funny how when we English think of the eldritch we imagine Nosferatu in the forests of Bavaria, while these Germans picture Dracula on Dartmoor. This record has a certain notoriety as Andy Votel (Not really in the same league as my Parisian colleague. Ha!) used it on a compilation he put out on Twisted Nerve.

Musica Ed Eletronica.
Grand Piano and Electronics. Nice but/and a little kitsch.

Philosophis.
Er, pass.

Sound Sculptures.
Cute compilation on the interesting Spectrum Label.

Michel Portal: Our Meanings and Feelings.
French Free Jazz stone tablet.

Michel Magne: Musique Tachiste.
Absolutely extraordinary mid-fifties record by this undiscovered genius. Michel Magne had his own manifesto of "Tachisme", a "Tache" in French being a stain. This wonderful bizarre record sports a full orchestra along with close-miked chanting. The thrust of it is extremely rhythmic, bringing to mind Cage's Prepared Piano Pieces like "Mysterious Adventure", but is less monk-ish in that it's scored symphonically. Very "3D" sound. Magne was a proper jobbing musician, he recorded strange Bossa Nova 7"s for the Tourist market and also turned his hand to a genre-defining Exotica record, which hardcore fans of Lyman/Denny/Baxter believe trumps the masters.

-

All in all a fascinating haul. I had a bit of fun playing Gwen "Igloo", some Cold Rush stuff, "I Luv U", Linda Perhacs, and The Books, none of which he'd heard before (you can see he's yet more retro than me!) and which I was delighted he loved. I've been sworn to send him a Grime CD. Lovely to see you bad bwoy.

Grime Central.

Witness Jim's adventures at Uptown Records. It's a top shop. Probably my most regular Garage haunt, this is largely down to it's placement in the Beatnik's "Golden Triangle" of Soho Record Emporiums.

However, I wouldn't agree with Mickey Toughlove's (admittedly casual) observation that it's got the same vibe as the Black Market Records basement did in the heyday of Jungle. Even though they're on the same street. Something to do with Jungle's UK-wide status meant that THAT WAS the hub of Jungle, as opposed to somewhere slightly outside central London. One would see Roni Size, Gerald and L Double all popping their noses in.

Grime Central, and this is commensurate with it's status as a distinctly "London Someting", is Rhythm Division on Roman Road (Befnall Green innit), as I believe Reynolds correctly ascertained in one of his series of missives on the Ardkore Continuum published in The Wire. The only reason I don't get out there that often (a pathetic single visit this year) is that I'm a puny toff. Jim on the other hand is a barrell-chested cockney mofo, AND lives further east than me, so he hasn't got an excuse.

Delia and Daphne.

In one of those strange group mind moments a number of Bloggers have been talking about the BBC and Delia Derbyshire. Emerald Daze has been heaping praise on the White Noise LP (a recording I'll confess to never having really enjoyed), Gutterbreakz refers to Derbyshire in heaping scorn upon Paul McCartney and K-Punk has been lamenting the remake of TOTP. Fisher's approach to the Beeb fascinates me, he's always credited it with an aesthetic of it's own. This might seem an unusual approach, assigning a signature to such an enormous amorphous institution, but I think he's right. Beeb product is usually morally responsible, it's also (as Mark once remarked) "homespun." The BBC never manages to be very glamorous. What I like about K-Punk's angle is that in nailing the Beeb, it's easier to identify the gaps in it's mollusc-like grip on the British psyche, easier to "see" it. To add a parallel strand to the discourse Rephlex records have just released a 4x10" collection of music from The BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Be like me, buy it.

The single best essay on the BBC Radiophonic Workshop is at Elidor, an insanely well-researched piece by Robin Carmody. After a thorough investigation of the Rephlex disc I can confirm Carmody's qualitative observations are positively spot-on. Delia Derbyshire's oevre sails above all other contributors, with John Baker's coming a respectable second place. There is a lightness of touch to Derbyshire's work that amply explains the laurels heaped on her by (amongst others) Sonic Boom. At turns funny, "Door to Door", oblique "Ziwzih Ziwzih OO-OO-OO" and tense "Pot au Feu" her music is always both sweetly tuneful and refreshingly "other". Better yet are the tracks Rephlex have grouped on the B-side of her dedicated EP. "Blue Veils And Golden Sands", "The Delian Mode" and "Toward Tomorrow" are vaste darkwave driftworks cut loose from the fabric of late 1960s culture, more charming and sensuous than Stockhausen's blank-eyed zero-kelvin mantras ("Telemusik", "Hymnen" etc) they clearly owe more to Pop than Serialism, without this compromising their integrity, but what Pop? I guess, without wanting to become mired in a fierce debate about sexual politics, hers is a woman's work. It's music you want to bathe in rather than be objectified by, and in that sense it's more modern than the extreme atonality of 60s masculine hair-shirt Avant-Gardism. In fact her music resonates with the period of Post-Techno Electronics, when the glowing embers of the rave are still red in the grate, and before the fiddly encroachments of Modern Electronica in thrall of conceptualism and cowering beneath the legacy of the aforementioned avant-dudes. It's hardly a surprise that Rephlex (home to The Aphex Twin) have put this out.

John Baker's disc is crankier. Baker has fun with textureology, he's not plumbing the depths of the synthesiser like Delia. Duane Eddy twanging ahoy! Tunes tend to be overcompressed with detail, not as in awe of space, though at times the sounds are given room to breathe as on "Accentric" "Brio" or "P.I.G.S" (where a cyborg cello outro it opens up the virtual sonic terrain unexpectedly) and you're left craving more. Inevitably his music is marked by the times, though this isn't always such a bad thing. 50% of the attraction of this music is it's wholly unexpected timbre. If one's used to the invisible colour of the Korg, Casio and Roland these hokey synths sound gourgeously elastic and unfettered, organic even. The attraction of Derbyshire's "Doctor Who Theme" lies surely in it's heathen lollopping echoaic bassline. So loose! So organic! One can see why these old synths are collectible, they're like tickets to another sonic dimension. I believe Carmody makes the same point (with more authority), that the renewed interest in the music is largely to do with it's analogue "freshness."

The problem with this music is precisely that which afflicts Library music, with which it shares the attraction of sonic slinkiness, and which has also been mined to exhaustion by a generation of plunderers bent on feeding their AKAI's new old sounds. It's lacking a purpose. Differing from the ringing cash register of Library music, the work of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop has been curated at the behest of the BBC, the closest thing this country has to government-endorsed culture. Publicly incorporated in 1927 (a commercial venture for 5 years) it has been haunted by Sir John Reith's values, a well-intended wish to act "contributing consistently and cumulatively to the intellectual and moral happiness of the community." However owing to it's dependence on a license fee, farmed at the behest of the ruling majority, it's quite easy to view it's role as Number Ten's Nanny. It's colloquially referred to as "Auntie", a moniker resonating with revealing complexities. The true maverick geniuses of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Daphne Oram (more later) and Delia Derbyshire both came at odds with this "official" culture and left, Daphne (who set up the Workshop in 1957) first in the mid sixties, then Delia in 1971.

There are examples of other similar cultural experiments which happened in the shadow of the BBC, most notably, and interestingly also in a space which was opened up by the second world war (when the British Government, through processes such as the distribution of rations, came to act in a wholly Socialistic manner by necessity) was John Grierson's Documentary Film Unit. Indeed the maverick of that collective, Humphrey Jennings, could be seen as the Delia Derbyshire of Documentary film. (Love those Ds!). Also it's worth noting at this point that Government-curated music needn't necessarily be devoid of socio-cultural frisson, for example France's IRCAM experimental audio unit (while also capable of being mothballed) is connected to the rhizome of government beauracracy. I'll have to confess I feel quite strongly on this point, ever since digesting Marshall Berman's wonderful "All That Is Solid Melts Into Air" I've had a suspicion of feudal culture. And that's it; for me the BBC represents the unsightly hangover of pre-modernity, of liege and lief. For all the wonderful contributions it's made (Eastenders innit!) I wish it'd cut itself free from Government.

But how does this affect the integrity of the practitioners of the Radiophonic Workshop? I harbour a suspicion of all institutionalised art. With everyone tripping over themselves to give the unit a posthumous thumb-ups (it shut down in 1998) I'll admit to being deeply unwilling to bestow on it's creations the mantle of "ART," even Delia's exquisite offerings. I'd rather call the free-market, capitalistic, morally-bankrupt shenanigans of Advertising art. This might boil down to a discomfort at the smugness of bourgeois middle-class institutionalised "artists" describing themselves as such, though I don't mind in the least when they call themselves anything else. There's a story which Berman quotes from Baudelaire which perfectly sums this up. Written just before Baudelaire's death, "Loss of A Halo" tells the tale of a poet and an "ordinary man" who bump into eachother in a brothel, to the embarassment of both. The ordinary man who has always cherished an exalted idea of the artist is aghast to find one here:

"What! You here my friend? You in a place like this? You the eater of ambrosia, the drinker of quintessences! I'm amazed!"

The poet explains:

"My friend, you know how terrified I am of horses and vehicles? Well, just now as I was crossing the boulevard in a great hurry, splashing through the mud, in the midst of a moving chaos, with death galloping at me from every side, I made a sudden move, and my halo slipped off my head and fell into the mire of the macadam. I was much too scared to pick it up. I thought it was less unpleasant to lose my insignia than to get my bones broken. Besides I said to myself, every cloud has a silver lining. Now I can walk around incognito, do low things, throw myself into every kind of filth, just like ordinary mortals. So here I am, just as you see me, just like yourself!"

Obviously the central tenet of the parable is the collision of bourgeois self-sanctity with the dynamic thrust of modernism, with the street in essence. Macadam. I think that the only artist is a dethroned artist, and that more often than not institionalised culture works against this, procuring in the individual a self-satisfied "halo" which, within the world as it exists today, just isn't tenable. When I read Sean railing at Upper Middle Class twats with comfortable jobs in the Media I think of this. These are people clinging onto their "halos." (Jesus I'm sounding self-opinionated tonight) It's not as crass as a call to arms for the bedraggled Underemployed (Freelancers) cos many great artists worked to fund their art. Within the field of music, off the top of my head you have Roy Cousins (The Royals) who worked religiously at the Kingston Post Office to fund his reggae recordings, or at the other end of the spectrum John Cage's darling Charles Ives and his enormously successful Insurance Company, his composing hidden in the background. Maybe it's just personal frustration at never quite finding the right niche, but if I ever do get that "wonder job" shoot me in the fucking knees if I tell you I'm an artist.

One character who I was surprised escaped Robin's masterful summary of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop was Daphne Oram. Daphne who passed away aged 77 in January of this year to nary a squeak. Clearly the instigator of the entire project, and evidently (like the ladies conducting the buses) a person given enough space by the cultural upheaval of the second world war to sneak into the male-dominated world. Daphne, as we mentioned earlier, tired of the strictures of the BBC early on, in part owing to meetings with both Cage and Stockhausen, and upped-sticks to the Kentish Coast where she worked on an eccentric image-to-sound science of synthesis called "Oramics", eeirly similar to the kind of thing Morton Subotnik has been working on in recent years. If you can see past the gormless strapline: "The Unsung Pioneer of Techno", the obituary (on the BBC's own site!) is touching, especially owing to the comments posted after it, particularly those of Hugh Davies the composer.

Because I'm a freaky crate-digger I even have an Oram record! As I write this I'm enjoying "Three Single Sounds Taken in Canon" from the EP pictured bookending this thinly-disguised rant (you should be able to read the type off the back cover). The 7", from 1962, is orchestrated so sparsely as to function like ultra-minimal morse into the void. These sounds, which must have been impossibly difficult to produce has, once again, share echoes with Stockhausen's "Gesang der Junglinge" of 1956. The latter a hymn for youth, the former "intended for children to enjoy" and which "may lead them into movement of a dancelike character..."

Eskimo Dance.

I put on my wedding shoes and went down to Eskimo dance. Waited two hours in the queue. Purgatory. An incessant struggle twixt security and ravers. The lead security officer ressembling a First AD in the movies. His late-arriving crew greeted him like a commandant. Wiley performed a walk-by with camera crew in tow. The queue stretched the length of the arch. Bristling for nearly half a mile. All along its length shifty guys and gals were hovering, observing possible moments in which to jump in. Our "general" walked its length offering a ten pound entrance to people who doffed in jumpers. Also forcing us onto the pavement. Suddenly people start screaming. The queue behind me dissolves into panic and overwhelms the security, people fill the tunnels breadth. As a wave of fear sweeps through my surrounding group we duck into an enclave to avoid a crush. Gradually things are brought back into control.

Wiley walks by the queue.

Inside the crowd is mellow, cheerful. In fact I get no agression from any punter through the night. Even the girl whose leather boots I soaked with my drink.

First up were two kids from Direct FM in Battersea Nikke and Nyke. A bit squeaky. Then Wiley on his own, not quite commanding the excitement he thinks he should. "You call it garage, you call it urban, I'm a topboy" etc. Security wouldn't let MCs through the crowd. Jammer was kept hanging around at the foot of the stage. Eventually loping on in white, his dreads swaying. We waited while Nasty crew coalesced backsatge. CK Flash spun some more dancehall and Jay Z's Pimp.

Nasty explode onto the platform. All eight of them. Kano seems to be the star. Like early Wu-Tang or Old Skool Jams the individual personalities are often hard to pick up. It's the collective that forms the focus. The other evening, with Davis around, I finally GOT the shows. It's all about excitement isn't it, the best act is the most exciting radio phenomenon. Davis rolled his eyes like I'd been well late on the pickup, "Exactly!". The metaphor extends to Grime, or Eski as Wiley calls it. It's not music really. It's just an expression of excitement, like a rush of adrenaline or crack. The crowd is hyped beyond reckoning as Nasty Crew pitch rhymes at one another. One by one each coming to the boil, triggering a rewind. They jostle one another, not a whiff of the kind of showmanistic entertainerism of Heartless Crew. It's real. Enervatingly so.

Nasty Crew onstage.

Then Donao. Proving one MC aint enough. "Bounce" is always fun though. Wiley steps up as Roll Deep, this time only with Karnage from that crew. Major Ace and Special Delivery filter onstage and all an a sudden there are twenty or thirty MCs on stage. Wiley looking coy but chuffed. For ten miuntes it seems to good to be true. In telekinetic style MC tosses verse to MC from crew to crew, the DJ hitting every switch bang on time.

Then.

Somewhere in the middle of "Countdown" Kano gets into some kind of fight with someone else. The repartee immediately breaks down. The music cuts. The gang on stage heave back and forth. Security sail into the melee dragging Kano from the stage. Wiley intervenes and rather than calming the situation things get worse. This time waves of panic ripple into the audience, the crowd crush back across the dancefloor. I huddle into a fire exit by a speaker stack. The doors spring open onto the street. There people are confused and disorientated.

While the sound is still off, I head back inside and gather my coat. On the way out I'm bowled aside by a phalanx of overexcited security, sprinting backstage looking for a fight. On the street there is now a heavy HEAVY police presence. Dogs howling. The queue, now aware of some kind of struggle happening inside (the doors had been shut) still stretching far along the tunnel.

I walk home.

Water 10.

Recently read in magazine that it's best to share your knowledge with a lightness of touch. Surely better to really ram your learning down other people's throats until their tonsils are sore?

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Don't go into the sea when you're on drugs kids! It's like adding another strain to the cocktail. Once upon a time, whilst in a very disturbed drug-induced state of mind I went surfing in Cornwall. It was an October day. I was wetsuited. Cold sand crushing between my toes. A thin mist over the rocks. A man with a goaty playing with a black labrador. The sky grey over the tumbling sea. I swam out on my board. Each time I came upon a wave I ducked beneath it. And.....amazingly.....found myself (zap) in a large black room....opened my eyes as I rose to the surface to catch breath and.....amazingly.....found myself (zap) bobbing on the surface of a stormy winter sea. Again and again. Pretending to myself that I wasn't struggling with the current. Drugs eh! You'd have to be crazy to take 'em.

All of these records have been meticulously selected from the racks at home. The concept is water. In fact, and now I'm showing you my cards, they're all tracks that I think could have been in the discography of David Toop's wondrous "Ocean of Sound." A few of these I'd love to play to Toop (some he may not have heard) but as the legend goes (ha ha I love this): "Needless to say, no correspondence can be entered into regarding the author's record collection."

Bill Fontana: Sounds of The Bay Area.
Post-Cagean environmental recordist Bill Fontana offers up the Sounds of San Francisco's Bay Area. All the recordings marked by deep sloshing water, foghorns, seals and gulls. Best track: "An Expansion Joint on the Golden Gate Bridge" Oh and "Amtrak Trains going through Level Crossings in Berkely" is ALL OVER the KLF's "Chill Out."

Plasmic Life Vol 1: Water Baby.
Burbling water straight offa Can's "Future Days." Squeezed superpitched drums on a Shimon "Predator" tip. Monkey noises. Are we forgetting that for a brief moment the suggestion of "Jungle" sonics actually meant something? Corny I know but also fascinating. Neil Trix visualising to Reynolds the fronds, creepers and marsh of the "Jungle" behind "Gesture without Motion". Strafing doppler effects. The skipping "on the boil" conga/fill/break pattern. That incessant soft phased signal riff issuing from the depths.

Pecheurs de Perles et Musiciens Du Golfe Persique.
One of the really great ethnomusicological recordings. The recorder sits at the aft of the boat clutching his Nagra tape deck as the crew groan, grind (really), moan and wail like a chain gang pulling the pearl fisher's boat further out to sea. Truly scary. Immediately bringing to mind the film adaptation of Steinbeck's The Pearl and The Wailing Soul's epochal endlessless "Row Fisherman Row."

Bruce Johnson: Pipeline.
Classic Disco innit. Starts almost stodgily. Ungainly strings. Bruce (former Beach Boy) Johnson's drums as high in the mix as you'd expect on his own single. But then the hook slides on in: "de de daa la da da da da daa da (la de da)" then "do do do doo" (am i getting this across?) As good a hook as any of Arthur Russell's (and damn he was sparing with them). We segue into the sound of the surf, seagulls caw, Bruce's drums come further to the fore inna tribal style. Yeah you might be in the disco, but your mind maan, your mind is on a longboard riding a ripcurl. Toobing baby! Back to the disco, your working it, the glitterball strobing, sweat glistening off your perfectly formed pecks and damn your date is looking hot hot hot.

Zap Pow: The River.
The greatest Lee Perry track. And it's on the "Voodoism" Compilation (Pressure Sounds) so there's no excuse for not owning the thing. That noise of Perry's tracks. It's tape hiss bro. It's what studio engineers call bad noise. Lee liked it. He liked it so much he'd feed his tape back into the reel again and again. He'd build that hiss up. He'd let the distortion envelop his tracks. He'd suck those 3 part harmonies into a whirlpool. Forget the 24-track fantasies of MBV this is blissed-out distortion made of mud, ash and guava juice. And the concept here is tighter than Peter Tosh's leather trousers. River of eddying swirling reggae man it's gonna take you home. Home to the spirits in the sky.

Sheila Chandra: Quiet.
All the tracks on this called Quiet (1-10). That's gonna make it easy to discuss. I'm not sure if the H2 on the cover is meant to denote water. But I'm going to give Sheila and Steve the benefit of the doubt. There were lots of of other choices: Tim Souster's "Sw1t Dr1mz", Dave Holland's "Emerald Tears", Seefeel's "Quique", X-103's "Atlantis", er LTJ Bukem's "Atlantis", Herman Chin-Loy's "Aquarius Dub", Drexciya's "Deep Sea Dweller", Julian Priester's "Love, Love", Hugo Largo's "Mettle" etc etc etc. But this is an exquisitely aqueous record. No drums just shimmering jathis, sargam bells, water wok, sitar, tamboura, dilruba, gamelan, whispered hi-hit, santoor, cabassa, wind chimes, cymbals, gongs, madhal, surmandel and eqtara. Truly lovely.

Nelson Riddle: Sea of Dreams.
My favourite track being the lovely "Drifting and Dreaming". Huge, empty, cheap, lazy, orchestral, music. Sublimely effortless and underdrawn with a little twinkling bell. This is what I'll be listening to as I dance with my beautiful wife and baby under the waves. Riddle is a curious one isn't he. Solo Exotica then orchestration for Tom Jobim and Sinatra and finally those CTI LPs. He probably ended up scoring for Broadway or the Movies. Superhack.

Bill Evans/Jim Hall: Undercurrent.
More girls underwater! I bought this record during my brief Blue Note fetish period. Round that time the Young Disciples and A Tribe Called Quest were checking the label. The cover totally sold me. The cruel ear would shout DINNER JAZZ. In fact there is nothing particularly watery about it, except for the way it flows, through the telekinetic improvisation going on between Jim Hall and Bill Evans. That there are no drums helps with this eddying to-and-froing. Anyway Bill Evans isn't as hip as he should be. Nice!

Bola Sete: Ocean.
Bola Sete was one of John Fahey's great contributions to music. Nicer indeed than any of Fahey's recordings. This dude can really play a 12-string guitar. Motifs travel across the fretboard like it was the Isthmus. All you bring to an instrument is your soul aint it, and Sete's is no puddle.

Michel Redolfi: Immersion/Pacific Tubular Waves.
One of my favourite INA-GRM records. I have, well I have shedloads. They're better than the Silver Phillips series because they benefit from beautiful modern production. You know there may have been a golden era of production. I reckon production now is inferior to what it was in the years leading up to 1977. You don't need to be a genius to figure out why. These INA-GRM records may be the best produced records ever.

The Redolfi's record's title is curiously and hilariously reminiscent of Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells."Maybe they thought they could shift a few units to hippy stragglers. I quote from the liner notes (well I'm supposed to be a crap writer so I may as well quote as much as I can): "In April 1979, I decided to utilize the work "Pacific Tubular Waves", composed the preceeding winter, so that I could play it and re-record it under the same waves that had been the source of my fantasy during the elaboration of the piece in the studio. Thanks to the water-proof equipment, I was able, hydraphone in hand, to cover the sonorized depths and listen to the natural remodelling of my sounds by the currents of water and the movement of the stones below." So he rebuilds the sounds of the ocean (you know those noises you hear whilst surfing) within the digital domain. The cover of this record is 3D, the specs with my copy have gone unfortunately, but the specs that came with the Detroit Techno "Virtual Sex" Compilation show it off splendidly. (Goggle eyes) Oooh!

Now kids, I've said it before and I'll say it again, that's HARDCORE. Michel Redolfi is hardcore. He's not doing it for money. He's not doing it cos everyone else is doing it. He's not doing it so he can behave like a pompous twat, to build up an image of himself. He's not acting. He's real. He's HARDCORE. He's a nutter. The rest of the world can go do it's thing as far as he's concerned. He's a dreamer, a lover, a believer. Gord bless im.

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Needless to say, no correspondence can be entered into regarding the author's record collection. (Only kidding!)

Mastering a Record.

The Beast. Acetate Box at the bottom left.

In my capacity as (cough) self-appointed authority on all things musical, I was invited by Kin Records supremo Nick Kilroy to attend the mastering of (coo) the second Junior Boys EP. The facility was Transfermation in Borough, which has a reputation second to none in this field. Our engineer and host was Noel Summerville, a cool hand who has in the past year or so chalked up clients such as The White Stripes (for "Elephant"), Squarepusher, Prefuse 73, Manitoba, really too many to mention meaningfully.

Notice the tone arm at the back for testing.

What is record mastering? It's the process by which audio is transferred onto acetates. Acetates which are used as a template by the pressing plant who produce as many vinyl copies of it as are required. The process is a crucial part of the chain which connects the artist's vision to the realisation of a finished artifact. It's taken very seriously by many musicians, it turned up in conversation that Beyonce had attended the mastering of her record at Sony, London.

The Producer, or Manager or Artist hands the mastering engineer a reel-to-reel, DAT or CD with the tracks on it. The engineer imports the tracks and EQs them, normalises them (the process of keeping all peaks balanced without there being distortion, bringing to memory the tale of LFO goading the terrified engineer responsible for mastering their epochal first twelve to master the bass preposterously high), and organises them into a sequence which corresponds to the available space on the acetate (be it 7", 10" or 12").

This makes a nonsense of hardline arguments about the superiority of vinyl (analogue) to CD (digital). 99.9% of material supplied to a mastering facility like this is in digital form, and I would guess the norm is as a DAT, which has a ceiling bitrate of 48khz (that's superior to the CD's 44.1khz). How can one argue, as Akin Fernandez of Irdial discs famously did, that analogue is "better" than digital, when at source the signal is so often noughts and ones? Of course, and here is the counter-argument, at even the worst mastering plant, the digital signal is buffered and EQ'd in an analogue environment (an exquisite spartan Neumann mixing desk at Transfermation) and the subsequent signal is transferred to the record in the age-old manner of analogue encoding.

Aw what a cute little hoover!

The method of encoding is as unchanged in essence as it was in the days of the 78. The sound is effectively "shouted" at the recording needle as it travels across the surface of the plate. We rather superstitiously kept quiet during the process of the transfer. After all, in theory, if we talked really loudly, our voices would be imprinted onto the grooves along with Jeremy Greenspan's svelte yet wounded vocals. As the groove was being cut I was amused to notice that a little hoover travels behind the needle, sucking up the scratched out plastic.

The measure of a really good master, Nigel informed us, was lack of surface noise. The less surface noise the better the transfer. He also explained to us the classic pay-off of acetate mastering: The longer the track you're trying to squeeze on the dubplate, the quieter the master will be. Customers, he told us, typically used to complain that their single wasn't as loud as a Motown 7" pressing. Motown's secret? Tracks coming in at 2 and a half minutes. One can hear this pay-off on two extreme instances of mastering: Elvis Costello's "Get Happy" which crammed 25 tracks onto each side the result sounding kind of thin (recently reissued on on a dubble CD Costello fans!) and Double Exposure's "Ten Percent" on Salsoul, the first 12" as we know it today which, as it fitted what once would have been on a 7" onto a 12" plate (more room, more volume!)

It's like summat out of a Soviet Power-Station innit!

When all was done Nick was left with two acetates (the blank acetate alone each costing around $50). You can't record onto the flipside of an acetate, they're one-sided in this sense, so if you're doing a double-sided EP you walk away with two acetates, which are (literally) bolted into a rigid brown cardboard box like the one visible in the bottom left-hand corner of the top image. This is why, as Simon pointed out the other day, many Grime 12"s have the same tracks on both sides, if you're only pressing one acetate, unless you want a blank B-side you've no option but to duplicate the A-side.

You can, in theory, put an acetate onto a normal record deck and play it, however, because the acetate is usually larger than 12"s (about fifteen inches?) on the whole they won't fit onto most record players. That is of course unless they're 10" acetates, which I guess is the default size for the sort of dubplates which circulate in the field of dance music (I once came across Grooverider's 10" acetate of DJ Hype's "Cops" at a stall I used to frequent back inna de day in Camden). The thing about acetates, and this was confirmed by my dear pal Steve Caruana who had a heap of Jamaican dubplates is that they wear out or even fall apart, they're not made of durable material like vinyl.

Mastering matters! Public Enemy scored their splash in some part as a result of the hugely loud mastering of their records which bust out of the airwaves a few decibels above their competition. Worse, bad mastering can suck all the contast and subtlety out of a recording and swamp it with hiss. Thanks to Noel and Nick for letting me witness this fascinating process.

Truly Revolting.

Got asked down to the Rephlex gig by none other than Paul Meme (be sure to totally ignore Paul's eulogy for TWANBOC...too nice pal!) and another big fella John Eden. I jumped at the opportunity and paid for the pleasure to meet the Meme-ster in the flesh. He's barking mad, refreshingly larger than lager and I had the feeling that even if the music hadn't been earsplittingly loud he would have been shouting at the same volume.

Aphex was on the decks second. Dead early in the evening. Isn't that cool! Not at 4am shrouded in a cloak and dry ice but just like a regular DJ. More than anything I like Rephlex's attitude. And I like the fact that they've taken us bloggers to their bosom. In case you hadn't noticed we dudes are where it's at! Their new compilation is well nice, I'm particularly into the things like Yee King's "Goodnight Toby", D'Arcangelo's "Shipwreck", Cyclob's "Smack 'em up sharp" and Bochum Welt's "Radiopropulsive" these four are all marked by their subaquatic flavours, backwards techno riddims and fondness for sounds that make you go "ooh!" Really gourgeous and alone worth the entrance fee.

As far as this hardened (deaf) raver is concerned the eternal re-run of early 1990s Idyllitronica is more artisitically respectable than the various strains of Fungle. While beautifully executed Luke Vibert's "Remember This", Bodgan Raczynski's "There are many things" and AFX's "Mangle 11" are verging on the exhausting. Somehow the signifier as it's intended (Jungle Beats=We're Well 'Ard) doesn't work for me on disc. At the Rephlex show this criticism was, however, made irrelevant. When mashed up with 'riginal Ardkore and Jungle from back in the day (I spotted Made in 2 Minutes "21 Seconds", 2 Bad Mice's "Bombscare"(not the remix alas), Splash's "Babylon" and was that Remarc's "Gangsta" off the new Planet Mu comp (jesus creepers that sounded ABSOLUTELY fantastic)? Then it works like a dream, like a funny/goofy sideshow off the main event, softening the old jungle's towering bombast. Other things worthy of a mention on the Rephlexions comp include Pierre Bastien's endearingly silly Gamelan Blues and The Gentle People's "Tiki Mix", the latter all turquoise lagoons and swaying grass skirts.

The thing about Rephlex is that they are what you could term a "POST" label. For them history seemed to end sometime round 1996, the latest datable sonic signposts being the Shadowboxing bassline off Luke Vibert's track, and last through the gate JP Buckle's "Flex" an IDM vision of bashment that needs a bit of a tweak. Maybe it's a result of the dearth of what Reynolds would call "pungent cliches," I'd argue (no really I would!) that Grime is still groping around for a signature sound around which to glom. The hungriest Tiger probably nearly there. But survey the panoply of Hip-Hop, Ragga and R&B. Maybe only Timbaland has produced any enduring sonic innovations. I like the "POST" attitude. I have no problems with it. I liked the fact that AFX remarked in that Wire interview recently given by the Rephlex crew that he was exhausted by novelty, that: "To be honest, I'd be quite happy never to hear anything new again." Yo soundbyte!

At the gig, was it Cyclob (or Smojphace) played a set that was a timeless amalgam of cold techno, mentasm stabs, and ragga flavours. A stranger came up to me and asked me "What track was that?" Do I look like that much of geek that I'd be able to tell you! I'm not craned over the decks like those saddos yonder! I've not got a frigging notebook in my mitts! Mate, I have not a bloomin' clue! "Probably a dubplate I opined", off the hook (phew). The immaculate selection just this, well Rephlex-ive sound. If you were being cruel you could remark: "C'mon get with the program Grandads!" But, unlike the first time around, this is less like a revolt, than a permanent riot. Less Castlemorton more a drifting commune of gypsies. And yes politics are in evidence! Refusal is all over The Bug's LP, whose live show I missed, my ears eventually throttled by AFX's set which seemed to escalate forever in intensity and ferocity eventually suffocating the gaps between the beats. I tried to record the Peel show last night (man like Pete Maplestone asked me to in June!), dammnit I waited up till ten o'clock, I'm usually in bed at 9! I've been informed you can hear it here. And if it's coming to your town BE SURE to check the Rephlex Tour. Rephlex we loves ya!

Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fashion.

My lovely wife was feeling blue, so I took her shopping. I love showing y'all what a nice romantic dude I am. I've a new theory that (in spite of the creeps, you know who you are!) the internet is full of love. All those beautiful isolated people like yourselves too genuine to be mashed up by Babylon have fled here to practise the fine art of being sensitive, helpful and generous.

She has expensive tastes my missus, but she doesn't really indulge them terribly often. Going clothes shopping with her is awesome, suddenly I'm thrust out of the dingy basements I frequent in search of vinyl blinking into the neon glare. As it stands today the "youf" fashion industry is divided into two halves. On the one hand you have clothes which are influenced by Hip-Hop. These are easy to spot by their unisex nature, their simple colours, "practical materials" and by staple items like T-shirts, hoods, jeans and trainers, also by the abundance of apes (groan) and wild-style graphics.

On the other hand you have Electroclash clothes. Slightly more upmarket, or pitched as "slumming", slashed garments (holes everywhere in fact), lots of black material, neon highlights, touches of chrome and silver, flowing diaphonous silk, punk style stencilling, items such as long dresses, high-heels, wierd furry open-topped boots, decorated denim and everywhere reflective sunglasses and the whiff of cocaine.

Really it's a clear as daylight the divide. On the one hand Hip-Hop. On the other Electroclash. It caused me to think of the way in which what becomes style is first felt as a sonic idea. The dematerialised weirdos who lurk at the boundaries of this dimension pick up cosmonic echoes and transmit them into the first wave of solidifaction.....sound. Then that sonic impact causes ripples to radiate outward, first into the cohort of sounds which follow it, echoing the original's patterns, often unsure as to it's meaning, but wide-awake to it's sensations. Rippling from the domain of sonics into the word, then on to more substantiated matter. Til, ha ha, fashion picks up the baton. It's too easy to scoff here really. It's a hell of a alot harder to manifest a clothing range than it is to make a 1,000 white labels. Isn't Wiley working on his own clothing range? I was wondering how it'd look, probably devolved Wu-Wear of course, but why not reclaimed charity shop clothes hewed into bizarre forms?

Fashion always runs about 5 years behind the latest sonics. Take the new branch of Voyage in London. Voyage was for a few years THE clothing shop in London. Run like an exclusive club Madonna was famously refused entry, Naomi Campbell too. Their clothes used to be a Lenny Kravitz-meets-Victoriana vision of South-East Island frills. Always preposterously over-tailored. They usually had a naff Ambient 4th World CD playing, or Jimi Hendrix. The shops I visited today with the Mrs had either Hip-Hop on the deck or like Vivienne Westwood and the new Voyage shop, Electroclash. Yeah that's right Voyage has done an about turn! I always thought the last shop was evidence of Ambient House lapping on the shore six years late, and now they've gone Electropunk. Bankrupted in the meantime, jeez how symbolic is that!

Voyage's look trickled down into the mainstream. All those frilly things girls were buying in Top Shop and Monsoon, that was (via Voyage) the distant echo of post-rave utopianism. While they couldn't claim to have invented the Electroclash look, just a reassemblage of an imagined notion of what dystopian punk electro chic might have looked like (working their imagination harder than the music scene in many cases), like Donna Karan, Versaci and Vivienne Westwood Voyage have capitalised on it, produced it to mirror the music.

We got her some nice boots.

Stadium Rap.

Just got a stereo in my car. Everytime I get a stereo it gets teefed. I've had four stolen. Omar my friend and neighbour, who has a choice crack habit that cost him his marriage, smokes fags by his window at night. There's a big pile of ends there in the morning. Omar warns off kids from the motor. He IS my mate Omar. I don't think it bothers him that Sandra moved out. Sandra's last kid looked suspiciously unlike Omar. When I listen to the radio I tend to skip relentlessly from one station to the next. Most be pants.

I'm feeling the stadium rap at the moment. Three tracks have blown me away. Spizzazzz. Well lets face it E-crunk probably got a pillow call from Ludacris telling him bout these releases sometime mid-June. That's not to say these are Spizzazzz endorsed tracks, I haven't been taking notes recently (ha ha). These tunes probably be so old Mr Marcello "Heart FM" Carlin is down wid dem too. Me and Marcello at the labour club, Marcello says to me "What's that smell old fellow?", "Oh crikey I'm terribly sorry Carlin my bladder has just given way again." Carlin gets the Bacardi in. Barman tells him they don't serve Albanian refugees. Carlin beating chest, "Don't you fucking know who I am young man" peeling a vaste pile of paper tied together with twine from his leather satchel pounding the counter with it. Rod Stewart on the jukebox. I start singing "Oh nestle me into your bosom."

Fatman Scoop's "Be Faithful". Love this tune. Love its incredible video. That's what I call animation! Love the way his eyes appear dead. And a very apposite render of the sonic too, track dominated by that disembodied voice. Shouty voice be 2 miles from twangy backdrop; Fatman built of a head, sneakers and hands. Kids like it. Grannys like it (probably not my Granny). I was so surprised when I found it was number one! I saw Fatman Scoop on Top of the Pops and he was priceless. Near the end of the performance peeling off his shirt. Jesus he really IS fat! He couldn't give a toss. I don't care if everyone hates I think it's brilliant. This and the Fast Food Rockers (I know all the moves, get me drunk!)

Ludacris's "Stand Up" is by far and away the best thing he's done since "Southern Hospitality." There's a similarity between the flow of them both. Darn this rolls. I was amazed at how much of this stuff gets played on Radio One. Never really listened to it before. Heard Scott Mills' show. He's a pretty good selecta. Quite a buttoned-down subdued presence, very English (we like) makes a welcome contrast to the tiresome Chris Moyles. What is the attraction of this man? He's a witless slug. I heard a brace of nice tracks on Mills' show. At last got to hear Missy's (frankly shite) "Pass the Dutchie" and the rubbish Outkast tune. Outkast, in my humble opinion are useless. "Elevators" was brilliant, forget the rest.

Also digging Obie Trice's "Got some teeth" brilliant spongey zinging production. Pity poor Eminem and Dre though. Here's another great single which will soon spawn a stillborn career. 50 cent is a lifeless turd isn't he? They capitalised on his Frankenstineity on "In Da Club" though now it's clearly a problem, such a berk in the PIMP video. I saw Obie on MTV's TRL, and (though I love this) he had the charisma of an unemployable freelance animator.

Dancehall Rejection.

Every few weeks since, I dunno, March, I've been down to Silvertone Records in Brixton. It's quite a hike but I like the store. The owner is pretty relaxed and he'll play me all the latest 7"s so I can pick a few. It's a nice ritual. One has to be considerate however as the process is largely dependent on his patience. You won't get such a treatment at Red Records or any of the Dub Vendor Stores (Clapham, Ladbroke Grove). A couple of times I've trekked down there and it's been busy (usually over the weekend) and I've had to go away and come back in the week. I think they're a great shop, and they have a top selection of tunes. Turnover is pretty rapid too.

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Jiggsy King: Modelling

Magelling! What the hell is that! I've always wondered. Betcha Pete "Dr.Smile" Maplestone veteran of Afflicted Yard will straighten me out. That's it with patois, it comes over like a cipher, gets lost in your eardrum, opens the wrong door, barges in, steals a mountain bike. This track on Big Jeans records. I have one by Vybez Cartel on the same excellent squidgy bleepy riddim. Jiggsy King runs the Kingston Municipal Aquarium, his preferred hobby is table-tennis and his favourite artist is Bob Marley and The Wailers. OK I'll admit I know nothing whatsoever about him.

Assasin: Roll In

This got into the select ten by the film of plaque on his gold teeth. Not an outstanding performance but Lenky's Riddim does indeedy roll along nicely.

Sizzla: Mama Africa

I heard occult bad bwoy dub marxist Jon Eden giving Sizzla a fileting round at Uncarved the other day. I know he's rootically partial so probably prefers "Black Woman and Child"-era Sizzla. Though I love that track I have BIG problems with Roots Ragga. It seems like it must float on a huge tourist board grant. I followed Buju right up to his conversion to Rastafari, I bought "Batty Rider" the day it came out at a record store at Halfway Tree in Kingston (so tough!), and while he didn't die creatively overnight ("Oh God of my Salvation", "Murderer" both on Penthouse), it had to be a slightly cynical change of tack. A way out of the mess he'd made with the homophobic nastiness AND a rather canny marketing move. I've heard those Mercury LPs and I'm of the distinct opinion that they're clinkers. Anyone who doesn't think so hasn't been following the script closely enough.

As for Sizzla, well I'm rather intrigued by him. I bought both of these Sizzla 7"s entirely on their own merits and it's only now that I've connected the two performances. I think he's a fascinating character. Part of the intrigue I'll admit is of the most desperately cynical kind. Here is a guy who sounds like he's been broken, like he's tossed aside his ideals for crack and nasty sex. But is he emotionally bankrupt now he's turned Gangsta? Is this too some cleverly concocted act like Buju's Rastafarianism? All that writing round Robert Johnson was so 'orrible because it treated Johnson like some kind of mono-dimensional naif. I saw Buju in interview once and he was the most scarily intelligent dude I'd ever witnessed. Sizzla will be no fool.

Also Vbyz Kartel's take on this Riddim "Please" is wicked. You get some nice African chanting left on the riddim which is stripped out on the Sizzla version.

Sizzla: Oh Yes Baby

Oh yeeeeahhss baaaby. Sounding here like a drunken wretch.

Ward 21/Vybz Kartel: Nah Climb

"...like Michael Jackson's curls jheri, inna de Pepsi Ad." This rhyme is as inwardly revolving as the riddim. A flamenco guitar and Basic Channel pulse tango-ing together backwards down a spiral staircase. At the bottom, revelation...

Ward 21: Hey Gal

The radio edit of this is amazing. The dirty lyrics have been "cleaned up" with a whole mash-up soundscape of weird effects. This reminds me so strongly of the sonix on Mark Stewart's "Learning to cope with Cowardice." It's not as if the delivery itself isn't enough to welcome one's attention. The bloke with the deep voice in Ward 21 has a totally original flavour. I can't think of another voice plumbing such depths in Reggae. It almost makes me flash on The Specials it's so "off-island", quite what the relevance to Coventry's finest I dunno.

Fact fans! Ward 21 is the name of the high-security wing of Jamaica's mental hospital. Mad.....and a danger to society.

Wayne Marshall: I will love the girls

Egyptian blew up this year almost as big as Diwali. It was a delight to pick this up weeks before the Greensleeves comp hit the shelves. I can't be doing with 15 versions of the same track. I did adore Vybz Kartel's "Sweet to the Belly" on it too, the way the voice transmutated into that seesawing Indian violin line, that was bewitching. However I prefer Wayne's take, if only for the totally wunderbar intro. Wayne wails like the temple's pet dog. Oh and Blaxxx records have this great label logo (see above). A lady in a wheelchair, I think that's really genuine.

Vibes Kartel: Nobody No Dead

Everybody dead. Amazing bleeptastic riddim with ultra-logical delivery by this years hottest MC.

Ward 21/Bounty Killer: Badda than that

Bagpipes! Bounty Killer back from a de opera. Like a car with square tyres. Like a lightbulb hanging from a tree. Like a boat with one oar. Like a fish flapping on a pier. Like a goat tethered to a powerstation railing. Like a naked rasta in a drainage ditch. Like a policeman with a leather glove. Like a mud-encrusted crack-pipe. Like a bus which waits longer than it drives.

Mr.Lex: Face It

Nice!

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There were a load of other tracks I got on labels like High Society, Raggedy Joe, South Rakkas Crew, 360 degrees, Big Yard, Baby G, Hot-A-Tac and Purple but these 10 really stand out. I've also heard this years "hits" on the VP comps. I like the hits, but for the real flava you're best hewing out gems at the coalface.