WOEBOT

Prog(ish).

Er yeah, hi it's me. Just for the record Carlin and I are best of mates now. I invited Mr.Grumpy to join "the boys" for our Gloomcore night-out, and that seemed to go down quite well. He'd vehemently deny this, but I'll bet he felt a bit excluded, and now he's got a "ladyfriend" (Have you seen photos of Gail? She's a right foxy chick!), a book deal......and, er, a duck; he probably feels he has the emotional resources to take on all-comers. To be frank I hope he's finished tearing into everyone and everything, we're just a bunch of losers struggling to do our own thing and though a bit of constructive criticism (of course framed within the context of greater love) shouldn't go amiss, a full on onslaught, character defamation and generally breaking bottles over people's heads like your Sid "Blinking" Vicious (Sid Viscous anyone?), well it's not so genteel, not REALLY so palatable. So cool it Carlin a'ight! Smack wrist!

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Prog.

(ploughs hand through fringe and pulls strained face) Christ how did I get myself into this situation! Surveying the 3 metre stretch of long-discarded Prog-Rock in the bargain basement of Notting Hill's Music and Video Exchange was like being on the diving board at the rim of a gigantic tank of cold baked beans. Hold your breath! I was surprised that there wasn't a larger collectors Prog-Rock bin in the fancy first floor of the shop. It seems that this stuff is losing it's status as commodity. Upstairs it was mainly what looked (to the untrained eye) to be deep obscurities and one-offs. Names I can't even begin to remember. Every record I picked up this week was reduced in price, and once I even got to the counter to be informed a further 25% had been slashed off my chosen item. Yikes.

No one wants Prog anymore. On one occasion I came back to a store a second time a week later (this venture took me to multiple stores in Notting Hill, Camden, Soho, Old Street, Brixton and Islington) to pick up something which I thought upon further consideration was probably worth investigating, looked in the same bin to find the record had gone. Vanished! You mean someone has actually bought it this week! I couldn't believe it. Closer inspection found it filed in the next-door rack.

No one wants it and also it has no cultural currency whatsoever. What the hell does Prog mean to anyone under 40? Absolutely fuck-all. Your over-40s (and I don't mean to be age-ist here) get all nervous round Prog because they fear some spiky-haired tossbag in a leather-jacket and tartan trousers is going to jump out from behind a rose bush and yell "Hippie!", at which point they're going to have to struggle to explain themselves, hide the offending long-playing al-bum. Come to think of it, what the flying rock has Punk got to do with anything either? What does Punk mean to anyone under the age of 30. Absolutely zilch. I'm 32 and I started in on my particular path into music aged 15 with The Velvet Underground. Before that I liked chart hits. At that time, in the mid-eighties Punk still had some kind of charge, some ghostly emanation, but it had largely vanished. It ought to be clearer than daylight that Post-Punk has an immeasurably larger presence today than punk does. The places one feels Punk's musical influence are almost uniformly dire, all that Blink 192 nonsense. This isn't to say that Donna Summer and Kool Herc (to bounce Marcello's pointers back to him) don't have a big/bigger influence today, just that within the field of Rawk, and other whitey noodling Punk means nothing. Again, Acid House! What the fuck does Acid House mean these days? The revolution is long-overdue innit. We're definitely plateau-ing.

And if we have reached a plateau what's to stop us checking out this Prog thing? This shabby behemoth de-invested of anything that made either an anathema or attractive? It's pointless to continue to read it against Punk, something which is patently as irrelevant. I'm surprised Prog hasn't a greater cult, though come to think of it with Kodwo Eshun listening to it on the sly, Vincent Gallo endlessly thumbing Yes, and I'm not going to spool out the myriad of examples that surfaced in the Internet's own Prog Month, perhaps it's bubbling under. In no particular order, ten groovy Prog records:

Kevin Ayers: Whatevershebringswesing.

Ayers is a great character. In fact I'd always wanted to find this record, but hadn't the stamina. I believe it's been reissued recently on CD. It slinks along at a lugubrious pace. Starring the full panoply of horns, string quartet, gently felt wah-wah guitar, grand Piano, and vibraphone but the soundscape is sparse, not an overplayed note in site. Great sample food in fact. Loverman Ayers is incredibly relaxed, there's none of the chocolate box intensity and misery-without-a-name of Nick Drake (dunno why I said that, I DO like Drake) Kevin Ayers was, a former Soft Machine alumni and like Robert Wyatt (who guests on this) was purged from "The Softs" in the drive towards goofy austerity. This is a Canterbury record. You CAN hear vestigial trace of hashish jollies, which as the decade wears on turns into a bad trip, but Song from the Bottom of the Well is pretty dark. Lovely record. Biba Kopf likes it too.

Kevin Coyne: Marjory Razorblade.

Double LP from former Social Therapist and Drug counseller from Darby. I love that career path! So un-glam! So British!? Kevin Coyne like the Third Ear Band got unlikely props when John Lydon played his record on Capital FM. I'd never heard anything by him before, and took it on trust that this was his best record. It's a bloody masterpiece. It has the melodic richness of Dylan circa Blonde on Blonde with sly touches of Beefheart's seventies LPs (The Spotlight Kid in particular). What makes it INTERESTING and SEDUCTIVE is Coyne's Darbyshire croak smack in the middle. Like the very best rock records there is nary a hint of the blues, all the tonalities and shadings seem to come from somewhere quite else.

The Mighty Groundhogs: Who will save the world?

Which applies to this too, the a-side of which (Earth is not Room enough/Wages of Peace/Body in Mind/ Music is the food of thought) is one flowing rock suite. The tuning is distinctly un-blues, "not-Rock" like Tom Verlaine's Television. This I got on recommendation from Julian Cope's mate The Seth Man. Indeed I like Cope's lateral approach to the whole Prog/Punk shebang, seems to reinvigorate both histories. People rabbit on about Prog's overplaying (and fo' sure this is true in many cases) though the playing on this is very streamlined and uncluttered in a Stoogey kind of way. Gorgeous harmonies and delightful clean refrains. Though the lyrics can be bit pompous and leaden, they're truly heartfelt. There's rather a beautiful elegiac aura surrounding the entire proceedings. Again, lovely.

Once, in the course of making a pop promo, I had a Black Dog suit made for a video. The wife of the puppeteer winked to me and said, you won't believe what band my husband used to be in! Queen it turned out. The poor guy had bailed out very early because he thought the future of pop music lay in snazzy instrumentation, better played music, and Freddie and his gang, well they weren't delivering that as far as he could ascertain. On reflection that's a classic Prog thing to do. That era from 1971-1975 (at which point unfussy Pub Rock began to make itself felt as a presence) was one heavily marked by this weird fetishisation of instrumental prowess. I'm certain alot of people were made to feel real daft cos they couldn't play well. In spite of Robert Wyatt being able to sing Charlie Parker's beat-bop solos note-for-note quite early on, he was by his own confession a terrible musician at the start of The Soft Machine. I'm sure this must have played some part in his alienation from that crew. Who even thinks about this nowadays? Everyone's a non-musician now!

The Third Ear Band: Music from Macbeth.

Part Anton Webern, part plainchant-styings (via Leonin and Perotin, if you haven't heard Perotin check him out, real birth of minimalism shit), part naff court of King Henry the Eighth's square-dance, part prole at the homestead folk musings, oboes on overdrive. All very eldritch! In their favour this is a soundtrack to Roman Polanski's Macbeth, and so some of these 15th century trappings do have a calling. I've often nearly bought their earlier Alchemy LP on the strength of the cover, but I'm glad I didn't now. The worst aspects of Avant-Folk find their pre-echoes here.

Hatfield and The North: The Rotters Club.

I did spend alot of time sifting through records, trying to only pick up quality stuff. In the name of this I heard alot of truly dreadful music, groups who I'd be glad to never listen to again: Yes, whose "Close to Edge" is probably the definitive Prog LP, I thought were truly appalling, and here Mark Fisher's comments at K-Punk with regard to Genesis seemed to also apply: "...what strikes me about their music is its lack of nuance. It is either quiet or loud, - no middle ground, no eddying flow or ebbing undercurrents, just a stuttering study in jerky contrast. Isn't that jabbing masculine jerkiness, that anti-plateau jumpiness, what is so much of a turn-off about Prog?" Worse than this Yes's music seems so deeply uncentred (am I contradicting myself here?), possibly due to the amalgam of these 5 very uncharismatic characters. I did buy Yes's The Yes Album this week (so cheap it almost seemed rude not to) and it's really dreadful, horribly bland, and yet I have a fondness for that "Owner of a Lonely Heart" tune. However no-one should be under impression that that constitutes Prog Rock. That would be like calling Starship's "We built this City on Rock'n'Roll" Acid-Psych-Folk Rock. Was Trevor Horn involved with them early on? I don't think so.

I also heard records by Caravan, Family, Sweet Smoke's "Just a Poke" (one of those German records that's too like Canned Heat to be Krautrock), Paladin (who I've been curious about for years, and who are stodgy blues-merchants), and a few whose names escape me. Being selective was the name of the game. Both Simon and this dude rated Hatfield and The North and on the strength of that I picked it up. I very nearly gagged on the cover. What is it with hairies that causes them, at the drop of a shilling, to don a tailcoat and tophat, like it was the funniest fucking joke in the world? Who cracked it first? Cream on the cover of "Goodbye Cream" probably, in those ridiculous white suits. I swear I've come across so many whiskered stoned grinning idiots dressed up like this on record covers in the last week. You goons! EVERYTIME the gag backfires backfires, and they look like sweaty dopey privately educated morons. And of course formal and stuffy to boot! This thirties filmstar on the cover was enough to set my alarm-bells ringing. If the cover is pants, don't buy the record. This is a lame record. The Soft Machine without the fuzz bass. It's too clean, too anemaic, the vocalist is a Robert Wyatt rip-off, while you could make a case for it as a Lonnie Liston Smith/Bob James inspired endeavour at the end of the day it sounds like wet jazz funk. I had been hunting very hard for records by The Egg (The Civil Service and The Polite Force) but on the basis that they're a retread of this, what John Peel would have referred to as "The Hatfields," then they're well worth avoiding.

Quiet Sun: Mainstream.

This I've had for ages, and it is a Prog record despite the presence of Phil Manzanera of Roxy Music, Brian Eno, and Charles Hayward (later of This Heat). It's the "suite" approach that is the hallmark. I remember Bill Drummond had slated the third KLF album as a Prog LP. He liked the fact that as kids they'd all crouch round in living-rooms and listen to entire albums, really concentrate on the lyrics, ponder the guitar solos, and after the whole record everyone would lean back and go "Far fucking out! Wow" and make like they'd been sucked into another dimension and had communed with Sir Arthur, Guinevere and hoary trolls. Drummond's feeling was that was a great way to listen to music. It would be nice indeed if one did invest more in music, really did spend a few months with a bit of music like one did when one first bought records. I remember my far-out uncle giving me a tape with Morodor's "Midnight Express" theme on it when I was 8, and my playing that tape (which also had The Beatles "Flying" and some ELO on it) nearly a million times. That and The Police's Zenyatta Mondatta. (I've no shame!)

This LP, which I'm now listening to on headphones, and of course that's how to listen to these records, is fucking great. It's weird and it rocks. Not gonna do a track by track breakout, I'll leave that to the masters! (wink)

Steve Hillage: Rainbow Dome Music.

A favourite of Alex Patterson's. The record he was playing at one of those early chillout sessions at which Hillage showed up and said "Oi mate I made that." (Cue much backslapping and ensuing Ambient high jynx) Pretty, lots of bubbling water and rippling synths. Verging on the tedious. From 1979 so shearing into New Age. A poor man's La Monte Young. I imagine Ultramarine also rated this along with Mike Oldfield's "Hergest Ridge" which I was unable to stomach. My friend Mike has a clear vinyl version of this! (Yawn)

Dashiell Hedayat: Obsolete.

An obscurity! Prog is the absolute elysian fields for obscure albums (I didn't say obscure 7"s!) I once bought some Russian Prog LPs from Ultima Thule which is the spiritual home for this music. They weren't very good LPs and we've since parted ways. In fact I apologise from the well of my heart that this selection isn't more obscure. What can I say? I'm new here too. I was delighted to find this record this week for loads of reasons. It's on the godlike Shandar label. It sports a cameo by William Burroughs , who was lurking in Paris in 1971. It features Sam Wyatt, Robert's 5-year old son. Also it has Daevid Allen on it who I delightedly informed you played on that Francois Bayle Concrete track on "Electronic Panorama." It enables me to include Allen here without recourse to mentioning Gong, who I've always found TOO MUCH. I also couldn't deal with Genesis. Ditto King Crimson. Ditto Jethro Tull. Ditto Gentle Giant.

This is almost a Psych Prog record, as epitomised by the Hard Rock output of Japan since 1971, Lost Araaf innit. This is Jon Dale(k)'s territory, and since we've swapped notes I know he's tackling it head on! Psych because the guitar has a Hendrix-ian flavour. I find the French vocalists seem to narrate and decant, never really sing, and Dashiell is no exception. Even their rappers fail to lock gears with the music, it's just a different approach I guess.

Prog was a europe-wide phenomen, a world-wide phenomenon. Like Metal in that way, the meme spreads. Dale tells me he's got some Peruvian Prog Rock! And Prog was huge in France. I would have touched on Magma, indeed I had a copy of Magma’s “Köhntarkösz,” but I sold it.

Cielo Drive on this record is awesome. Awesome, like the best of the Cosmic Couriers stuff.

The Plastic People: Egon Bondy's Happy Hearts Club Banned.

Again international Prog. One of the hippest bits of vinyl I own. Been reissued on CD. One to check. Though it's reference points are Zappa, The Fugs, The Velvets, Faust and Tony Conrad its a Prog rock record through and through. Vaclav Havel started here amazingly enough. (punches air) Rock matters! The recording wonderfully barbaric and raw, brutally metronomic and pulsating with a vicious energy.

Van Der Graaf Generator: Pawn Hearts.

And finally, in my Prog odyssey, VDG's "Pawn Hearts", stirringly described by Seth as "...the crowning achievement of English progressive rock." The thing with VDG, and I did have Godbluff at one point, is that like or hate 'em you can't TOTALLY ignore them. This is, to return to Fisher's handy prog put-down, not entirely "quiet or loud," though Godbluff does hinge on that axis. Hammill can be quite an off-putting presence too, his vocals are so absurdly mannered, somewhere between lord of the manor and man from the shed at the end of the garden. However there are some quite sexy themes, some groovy passages and with half an ear shut you can block out David Jackson's oboe-esque saxaphone. No it's interesting AND impressive, and would no doubt repay close listening (ha ha!).

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I must say I've thoroughly enjoyed my grand experiment. Picking out this stuff was about a million times more fun than ALWAYS buying old Ardkore 12"s, and treading into an empty arena like this, well it's a fookin' laugh! A challenge! Some of this music I found fresh as a daisy and utterly thrilling. So what if it wasn't made yesterday! (adopts demeanour of wizened old man lurking in a hut on the moors) "My children, in a blink of an eye your Belle and Sebastian and Pitman LPs will too be old records!"

David Em.

Midst all this Prog-Blog reverie (and the joke's turned sour as I've started to salivate at the thought of having a number more of these records, anyone heard of Paladin?) it's worth noting that Prog was probably the apex of the LP sleeve as self-conscious "art-form." As a teen I had Roger Dean posters on my walls, indeed without knowing what they were, simply cos at the school I was at these kind of things (drapes etc) would be sold from one boy to another for generations. Which in a round about way brings me to these.

Early 3D art has something really fantastic about it. There's a feeling that the practitioners were reaching out into an unknown world, exploring the possibilities of the form, delighting at their discoveries. All the while their offerings are kept in check by the technical limitations of the medium, kind of like a proficiency cap (the sort Jazz Funk should have had. "No Pastorius! You can only use 3 fingers!"). David Em was one of the masters of the form, and I'm cur-azy about his stuff, particularly the three sleeves he did for digital-era Herbie Hancock.

From 1983. One of Bill Laswell's better things. Not just "Rockit" but "Earthbeat" on this.

From 1984. Don't have this one. But what a splendid cover!

Which was originally entitled "Transjovian Pipeline", here is a close-up from Cynthia Goodman's excellent book: "Digital Visions: Computers and Art."

From 1988. Not so keen on this one. But forms the trilogy.

In fact Herbie's covers are a pretty good guage of the flavour of the day. I believe the good Kirk Degiorgio was making the same point in connection with Hancock's sartorial taste with his LP named "The Message in Herbie's Shirts."

”The Real Deal” Indian Music Part Two.

One look at the horror that is Putumayo Music is enough to put anyone off “World Music” for ever. The imagery for one, the “happy” naïve illustration is excruciatingly dreadful. The label deals music in a less sophisticated manner than we’re sold exotic fruit. We’re supposed to imagine the artists lounging in the back of a pick-up truck with a dog with a handkerchief round it’s neck, or laughing round a beach barbecue while extra-large ladies in batik hats gyrate in tie-die sarongs, paper lanterns lilt in the sea-breeze, rastas pluck acoustic guitars. No beggars. No chemical factories. They’re particularly keen on “musical journeys” so we get Starbucks-friendly collections like “Gypsy Caravan” and “Millwall to Mombassa” (OK I made that last one up). It’s vision of Reggae stretches between Ziggy Marley and Lucky Dube. The hellspawn of Putumayo also handily encapsulates everything everything “World Music” has become and I’m not even gonna start teasing that term apart. The “Putumayo” flavour is discernable everywhere, from The Rough Guide’s Introductions to World Music (they may contain excellent music for all I know) to Stern’s own label stuff (once again just a superficial swipe at “naff marketing”) to the Real World Releases (just plain guff in this case).

I’ll confess I’m hard to please, the recent Virgin Records series tried to aim at the street/hipsters (artists lit with red and blue lights) but didn’t entice. The only recent World Music series I’ve fell for has been “Ethiopiques”, but that’s just reissued old stuff. However I’m convinced it could be done well, and pitched just right. OK on the surface this might seem to be an issue of packaging, but it’s also where to “put” the music, who to associate with it, and crucially who to record in the first place. I find it frustrating to know there is a whole universe of utterly intriguing music blocked out, just because one middleman panders to another and to another. All dem underground Nigerian geniuses re-wiring Casio keyboards, dreaming of other galaxies; forever out of our reach.

It’s this same cloak of nonsense which has come to swathe Indian music. Admittedly Indian Classical music is a cussed inflexible entity thousands of years old. Indeed to frame it within a particular time, the 60’s and 70’s, which I guess I’m doing here, is total rubbish. In fact, you’d do as well to prepare yourselves to hear a lot of crap in this piece because I’m not even one hundredth the authority on Indian music that I ought to be. For starters I know (almost) NOTHING about the musical systems, that’s musicological shit as far as I’m concerned. Furthermore the connoisseurship within this music is preposterously deep. Hip-Hop has a way to go, believe! There’s an unyielding structure to what is deemed superb which mimics the centuries-old intransigence of the music. Holy Cows all over the shop. I tend, surprise surprise, to like the more “unorthodox stuff”, which within the realms of scholarship could be read as “that beneath consideration.”

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This from 1955. Yehudi Menuhin introduces Ustad Ali Akbar Khan to the USA, where it came out, I think on Angel records. The liner notes are quotes from an article by Menuhin on Indian Music from The New York Times. This record was the one that was La Monte Young’s first exposure to Indian music. By all accounts it blew his tiny mind. The “famous” passage (I say “famous” but I know of no-one else who’s tracked down this record in connection with this anecdote) features Menuhin introducing Shirish Gor’s Tamboura, which for a few moments plays on it’s own, without the Sarod or Tabla. If you don’t know, the Tamboura is the instrument that provides a constant underlying drone, a perfect circle of sound. The Tamboura sounds extremely like an electric current passing through the air, rising and falling through a cyclical frequency like the sound of a computer processor or the phasing of shortwave radio. This sound transported La Monte Young to his childhood experiences of resting atop giant Gasoline Storage Towers (inadvertently inhaling their intoxicating fumes) and tripping out to the sound of High-Tension Stepdown Transformers. The experience to be later remapped onto Opium and Minimalism.

But also an interesting record in that it points to the problems record companies would have/create in presenting this music to “The West”, signaling too the importance of characters like Menuhin and giants like Alain Danielou (behind all the UNESCO recordings) would have in bringing this music to foreign ears.

This my favourite volume from the *AMAZING* Anthology of World Music~North Indian Classical Music UNESCO recordings which you can buy here and is about the best whistle-stop guide you can get of the music. Particularly incredible off this is Bismillah Khan’s gamma-ray shenai. For a wholly organic music, this stuff can sure as hell sound electric. Unfortunately, you’re immediately confronted with one of the pitfalls of presenting this stuff abroad. Too often the music is framed within the structure of ethnomusicology. One has to root around on the original vinyl pressing to discover who the heck the instumentalists are. See this as well:

From 1954 on the French BAM label. No indication of musicians names. That's sorta dodgy.

This from 1952 on Folkways (scratches head, crikey I had no idea this one was THAT old) curated by Danielou again, with the emphasis on the broader picture rather than the individuals in practise. This is where I admit I’m frequently swayed into buying this stuff (dirt cheap usually) by the covers…..

…..Like this one’s on Ocora. Gold print onto cloth! A scratchy recording like the previous two, but a lovely “objet.”

And finally in the ethnomusicology bracket this:

Which is stunning, and which I’m offering a download of at the bottom. In this instance from the folk end of Indian Music. Play this back to back with The JB’s “The Grunt”. Featuring, again invisible on the liner notes by esteemed musicologist John Levy, Bismillah “Darth Vader” Khan. If you’ve a checked “Music In The World Of Islam” series by Jean Jenkins and Paul Rovsing Olsen then you’ll know of the musical continuities stretching from North India right across to Morocco. In the light of that its not TOO far-fetched to draw parallels between this and James Brown’s stuff. OK I’ll admit it’s a bollocks theory.

Now I’m going to endeavour to split things up into groups. First up Sitars.

Ravi on Deutsche Gramophon. Mmm not a big fan of the Rav-ster. Don’t like the sitar as an instrument that much. With the strings I prefer the sound of the Sarod, which is bassier.

Though this tremendous. Delicate and gourgeous. Bought after checking a huge pile of these records, and falling for it’s sound. Don’t bother looking for duplicates of these, just trust your ears and make your own discoveries.

Last bit of Sitar action. What an amazing cover! I saw Vilayat Khan the other day play the concert for Gujarat in London. It was a virtuoso, if incredibly demanding, performance. He’s a bit old now in truth.

This on Sarod.. Quite lovely. While I was busy damning any allusion to trans-islamic music the sarod on this sounds mighty like some kind of flamenco-tinged guitar. It’s a corny reference but some of the twists of the melody on this are reminiscent of Ry Cooder’s pedal steel on Paris, Texas. Like I said, naff reference point, but in spite of Cooder’s atrocious pedigree (he’s the Putumayo kid…I HATE the Buena Vista thing) I like that soundtrack. In a record store in Granada in Spain I found a treasure trove of (not-for-sale) trans-islamic records with lovely field recordings from Afghanistan amid LPs like “Concerto por Aranjua.” This record could have been in there.

While we’re still in the conventional frame, check these Vocal records:

In which seasoned dudes go “Aaha ahaaa ahhhha aaaaaha aaaaaaaahha”, and wave their right hand meaningfully in the air. The Bhimsen Joshi (which I got in San Francisco) by far the best. Though points too Gulam Ali Khan for the period screen-print and to Munawar Khan for his shades. Nuff Respek! The link here between Bhimsen Joshi and Pandit Pran Nath…..

..…being that both are of the Kirana school of vocalists. While Pran Nath’s record (on Douglas) was in the “Routes to India” chart, this is here because it’s a purer record than the other. La Monte and Marian on Tamboura here, and as you might expect it’s high in the mix. Pran Nath on heavy form. Really stunning recording, though the “authorities” say the alap (intro) is far too long and generally damn it as a fake. Oh well!

However it’s often the less acceptable, less classically sanctioned forms of Indian Classical music which are the most attractive, and that’s NOT JUST to non-westerners. Case in point being this:

A three way summit with the greatest “eccentric practitioners” of their instruments. Shivkumar Sharma on Santoor (a struck dulcimer), Hariprasad Chaurasia on Flute and Brijbushan Kabra on Guitar. This is really nice and was massively popular in India. It was something like the greatest-selling Indian classical record EVER. In consequence it’s relatively easy to track down a copy.

Sharma is absolutely brilliant, and the Santoor’s sound is just so sublime. I’m particularly fond of the latter which, seeing as it’s Ocora (this time props in effect), must still be available.

Onto other “non-official” instruments, the Sarangi, which is something like a viola.

Ram Narayan is the accepted master of this instrument. I have a whole slew of his (Hey I’m not showing you ALL my Indian records!), but this other one by Ustad Nathoo Khan particularly bewitching. The Sarangi snakes around the Tabla. It’s a very dark miserable sound. Very forbidding.

Of course the Shenai, Bismillah Khan’s instrument is deeply unorthodox. Here he is in a stunning duet with Prof. V.J.Jog, one of my all-time fave records ever this. Sounds like an open-air recording, crickets meshing with the Tamboura as Shenai and Violin (!) mimic eachother. Actually karnatic lore suggests that the Violin may have originally been an Indian instrument.

And finally, the Flute. The don of which is NOT to my mind Chaurasia but:

Pannallal Ghosh. And if you like your Tamboura mixed high check out the amazing track in the download pack. This is mind-blowingly great music. I sent Jon Astronaut this on CD and he LOVED it. So dig! And note the deeply “exotica” flavour of that second record cover!

Oh and this dude plays flute too:

But not very well.

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It’s always struck me as weird that this music doesn’t have a currency at least as strong as say that of Jamaica or West Africa in the West. BTW “Routes to India.” If you’re looking for “deep” contemplative music, something to run alongside the subterranean streams of Electronica, then with Indian Classical music you’re sorted. The music is elegiac and sweetly uplifting, even divinely fulfilling. Recovering from the scariest trip of my life (the point at which I vowed, successfully, NO MORE DRUGS!) At that time listening to Dub Reggae threatened to suck me into another aspect. It was L. Subramaniam’s violin playing and Pannallal Ghosh’s flute, so squarely and honestly expanded, open to the infinite spiritual horizon, that gently grounded me, without denying the logic of trans-dimensional experiences. Woah!

I visited India in 1991. I even went to and stayed in Rishikesh where The Beatles came to be with Maharishi Yogi. Seeing the Himalayas rise vertically from the flood-plains of the Ganges in a train. Mostly listening to Can.

"Routes to India." Indian Music Part One.

"You know the Sufi story that when God created the body, the soul didn't want to go inside. The soul could see that this was going to be a trap, it was going to be in this cumbersome thing and it was a life of hardship from there on. So God used music to lure the soul into the body. And the reason God did this is that the soul did not understand why it had to take the body and come to earth. The reason the soul had to enter the body and come to earth is so that it could study music, because sound is capable of presenting the most perfect model of universal structure....." La Monte Young Interview in Halana 1995.

Now breathe out. Forget about it. It's either hilarious or profound. It's the deeper, more colourful imagistic spin on the whole "atomic/musical vibration is the very substance of the universe" shtick. Makes no difference if you believe it or not, though often those who do wear flares on their flares. It's JUST a theory of theorising after all. Just an opinion.

India is a long way away. Go there in a plane and you're still not there. All those millions of people breathing the same air as you, walking the same earth, yet look them in the eye, and they're fixed on something wholly alien. What's it all about? What is that essential spark which unites them and you? If you knew what it was you'd be a step closer to knowing what it means to be human. Though plenty of people chose to take the Indian belief system as a given and work their way backwards. Get fixed up with a Guru, bosh in a few sitars. The two aims aren't mutually exclusive though synthesis/deeper-understanding seems to produce the more powerful music.

This piece is a preamble to Part 2 (Indian Classical music). This is "Routes to India" cos I'm going to try and take you there, to "The Real Deal". We're going to follow the lines of flight the myriad points of exit which lead to Indian Music proper, and consider what was going on in the minds of these voyagers.

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The explosion of interest in the music of the far east is usually dated from Debussy being confronted by Javanese Gamelan at the 1889 Paris Exhibition, the influence filtering into works like "Prelude A L'Apres-Midi D'Un Faune." Gamelan has an inordinately huge impact on Classical Music, also via figures like Benjamin Britten, Colin McPhee, Henry Cowell and John Cage. Gamelan got the gig in the 20th century to represent "the other". The newly opened LSO concert hall (beside my house) even has a Gamelan Room! I went to a rehearsal, expecting, well, Gamelan, and got a bunch of cast-offs from the third violins in a dopey facsimile of traditional garb. How embarrasing! Even Chinese music gets bigger props via Bartok's "Miraculous Mandarin." I can't think of any examples of Indian Music influencing Western music much before this: (though I'd be delighted to be proved wrong)

Yusef is a real trooper. He was a former Sun Ra alumni, you'd expect Ra to have picked up on Indian Music, as a rule he's first through the gate for EVERYTHING. Indeed the track "India" appears on Sun Ra's Super Sonic Jazz (1957), though maybe that's in the vein of languid lower-key romp, a bit of typical Ra kitsch, a "title" rather than any kind of exploration. Lateef, on the other hand, can claim a core interest in 3rd World music, still plugging away at it. He's now termed a "New Age" artist (meaningless marketing babble but also the heading under which he won a Grammy in 1987 for "Little Symphony"). In short we'll give him the credit. This from 1961, loveliest track "The Plum Blossom" played on a (er...um...) Chinese Globular Flute.

Yeah we're coming to Coltrane. This LP from 1963, which has always enjoyed a shadowy reputation thanks to successive generations of Ra-adulation. The Duke in his later years took the self-appointed role of global ambassador for Jazz. It's INCREDIBLE that he, during these tours, managed to touch base with both Count Ossie & The Mystical Revelation of Rastafari in Jamaica and Mulatu in Ethiopia, giving both crews the Ellington "thumbs-up." This LP has more than a little touch of the Exotica to it.

Here I'd defer to David Toop's excellent book of the same name. Slightly glossed over at the time, and maybe not packing the punch of "Ocean of Sound" (yeah YOU try and follow that!), it bequeathed us with at least two useful concepts. Firstly that "Exotica" was in many ways a convenient marketing umbrella for musics which wouldn't fit to easily in other categories. Hence something Like Eden Ahbez's deeply musical "Eden's Island", a utopian beatnik fantasy and Tom Jobim's widescreen "Matita Perê" get chucked in the bin, and are subsequently tarred with the "Hawaiian-shirt-Suburban-Barbecue" brush, when their progeny is infinitely more complicated. Secondly, and this sort of contradicts the last point, Toop suggests that the "fake" is as valid as the "real". In enjoying first-world music that is influenced by the 3rd world this is a profoundly liberating tool. Bored shitless by the insistently authentic fusions of Frederic Galliano and Banco de Gaia, yeah right you guys are "for real", well sweat not, cos the inauthentic is just as valid and just and subsequently influential on the source as the inauthentic. Valid like Panjabi MC's Knightrider samples. Inauthentic like "My Life in the bush of Ghosts." I'd refer you to this on Thursday May 6th

Why were all these Jazz musicians listening to Indian Classical Music? Certainly there was an element of fascination with the musician's virtuosity, an interest in the open/closed model of Indian music (improvisation within a structure) and filtering through Beatnik literature a curiosity in Eastern thought. But I reckon, and here I go AGAIN making sweeping suggestions about Afro-American culture (whiteys-in-conference pt.2), that in addressing Indian Culture, which was clearly on a par, if not more sophisticated than the Western Classical tradition, they might transcend the cultural restrictions imposed on their own "funk"/"jazz", the denigrated/abused music they practised, ever struggling for the recognition of it's artistry and validity. Beyond this there is the issue of attempting to reach for one's own inner humanity, by seeking the common elements across cultures. Coltrane nothing if not a searcher. "India" here from 1963.

Menuhin a "searcher" too. This 1966. A wonderful man. Maybe the only to be able to go head-to-head as an Instrumentalist with Ravi and not come out looking daft. Shankar, in case you didn't know, believed in the sub-continent itself to be the "living embodiment of Hindustani music." Like his music or not (not, in my case), as far as the authorities of this music reckon, none can test. Of course there's a Shankar/Phillip Glass record too, Glass consistently insisting his experience of transcribing Shankar's parts in late 60's Paris was the fundamental inspiration behind his chosen path. Minimalism alone in trying to ingest Indian Classical Music, to use it's forms as tropes, not it's instrumentation and tuning as colours.

Standing in here for The Beatles's "Tomorrow Never Knows", fruit of George Harrison's 5-minute sitar lessons with Ravi, The Stones's "Paint it Black" and the legion of Raga Rock Psych Punk renegades. Worthy of a mention too Peter Seller's "The Party" (groan). Indian music on the worldwide stage. Easy to dismiss, though Monsoon's Sheila Chandra (last through the gate as far as I'm concerned) had a strong Beatles twist to their harmonies. BTW earlier comments re:The Inauthentic. Maybe the closest Hendrix came to Shankar was the Monterey Pop Festival on 1967. Shankar's fee was ENORMOUS apparently and he got paid before he went on stage. He HATED the other acts.

Impressively early offering in 1967 from Joe Harriott and John Mayer. Possibly the first example of session with both Jazz and Indian musicians. The results are fairly patchy, the rhythms clumsy, the other LP they recorded together maybe better, though "Acka Raga" is charming. Needed to left in the oven longer. Ananda Shankar "Streets of Calcutta" etc

This incredibly rare. Jazz from India, so the other side of the coin to the "Indo-Jazz Fusions" of the other record. In contrast a quite stunning record in parts, I kid you not, heavily reminiscent of a pre-amplification Led Zeppelin. My friend has another LP, "Jazz meets Raga" which he found in Geneva, once again Bombay studio-time freed up for maverick Indian Beatniks, sitars played like guitars, still quite brilliant. Hilariously the line-up reads all Indian names on both records with the exception of a "Tony D'Casta" on drums. Who the hell is he? Heavy-scented.

It all took off in the seventies, largely in part to this nutter Pandit Pran Nath, La Monte's assumed guru. Pran Nath spent his formative years becoming part of the Kirana tradition of singers, involving years and years spent naked living in a cave, you guessed it, singing. I've included this record in this "Routes to India" line-up because, while it's less of a "fusion" than the one he recorded with La Monte and Marian (though that pure in intensity), it's released on Alan Douglas's label. Douglas was the cosmopolitan hipster behind records by The Last Poets, Lightin' Rod, Eric Dolphy, John McClaughlin and Jimi Hendrix (Doriella Du Fontaine). Pran Nath taught Charlemagne Palestine, Terry Riley, Jon Hassell, Don Cherry, Lee Konitz, Rhys Chatham, and Henry Flynt amongst others. Only La Monte seemed content to put up with this cantankerous old bastard, to wipe his nose with enough devotion to earn the mantle of pupil. Though Pran Nath had endured FAR worse in his quest to become a singer. Of all Western musicians Pran Nath only had respect for Coltrane, La Monte's offering's usually sniffed at (mild praise for "The Well-tuned Piano", ha ha).

Pran Nath's other dedicated pupil. This marathon organ work-out on the Shandar label pursuing India over the course of 4 sides. In fact Steve Reich being the only one of the "Big Four" Minimalists NOT to claim influence from India. He chose West Africa. There's no getting away from it, and it amazes me how little mention of made of them in the blog circuit (I don't touch anymore since......well that's my excuse!), but DRUGS play an important factor in the cult of India. I know for a fact that La Monte has a "steady" opium habit, indeed detractors say (scandalously) that much of the Dia Foundation grant went on keeping him and Marian stoked. Marijuana too. I'll bet Terry Riley smokes a hell of a lot of pot. How on earth would you play repetitive organ like this ALL NIGHT otherwise? How would you listen to it all night? It's probably the biggest single tourist attraction that continent has, and why it was number one destination on the Hippy Trail.

These together. Lurking Gurus ahoy. McLaughlin's Sri Chimnoy. Alice's Swami Satchdiananda. All parties quite clearly bonkers. Chromatic soupy Bollywood orchestras on the one hand, insanely over-played Tablas on the other. Approach with caution.

Not all 70s "Indo-Jazz" vomitous. Don Cherry forged a trans-global synthesis that aimed at understanding and imbibing the essence of disparate World Musics, building a "fusion" (terrible word to be saddled with) of intrinsic character. However stop short of Codona (and all ECM for that matter), though I saw Cherry in Glasgow in 1993 and he was a joy. Moki plays Tambura on this record, better yet is Cherry's AMAZING "Brown Rice" LP (not included here cos the cover aint so pretty and homespun). "Malakuns" off that LP the living shit, as powerful and intense as this...

...to which legend Badal Roy contributed tabla for "Black Satin." Terror on wax. Not much to be added to what Lester Bangs said.

This a fascinating document I picked up in Amsterdam. Baba Ram Dass was Timothy Leary's "second-in-command", author of "Be Here Now." It's interesting here to join the dots between Leary's philosophy (and if you haven't read the amazing "Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream" get thee hence) and India, where obviously Ram Dass washed up. This record by a Bhagavan Dass (some relation or clone?) features a quote from Ram Dass on the cover: "This is what I mean", the record sporting the same TERRIBLE caterwauling that issues from La Monte's "The Black Album", these white dudes sure sound like wrinkly frogs. Lines too from Leary to Rolf Ulrich Kaiser to this crew...

...and this lovely Indian-ate offering. The German node on the network.

Who has lost a lot of attraction in recent years through over-exposure but who still to my mind is a very worthwhile character. Did you know that "My Life In The Bush of Ghosts" started as a three-way project between Eno, Byrne and Hassell. Hassell brushed aside (discontent) by Byrne. So here we represent. In fact this from 1983 may be the final acceptable outpost of Indian-influenced music in the West. The diaspora begins to make it's mark on Western Culture itself? I can't find the time for your Trans-Global Undergrounds and your Asian Dub Foundations and your Talvin Singhs (in spite of the Sun Ra tie-in). Maybe I should be more opened-minded, maybe these older "fusions" get my approval purely as a result in the gulf of years, maybe THEY seemed goofy at the time.

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Curry. There, I said it.

Coming Next Week: Part 2: "The Real Deal"

Flex Records, Jump Up and me me me...

Something at Technicolor got me thinking. Jess asserted that Gerald never appeared to get his dues. He even invoked my lurve for Juice Box. I didn't leap into the fray because I didn't REALLY agree, but there was a kernel of truth in what he had to say. I'd suggest that Gerald didn't get the kind of blanket media coverage Goldie got in part because he seemed to the media to be old hat (no hat was older than Goldie!) but mainly because he was based in Manchester.

It's that old London-centric problem. UK Garage IS London, with the freak exception of crews like Laid Blak from Bristol, while Jungle was a nationwide phenomena. Many of the major labels were dotted across the country: Formation were in Leicester, Full Cycle were from Bristol, Juice Box were in Manchester and Flex were in Huddersfield. The London-centric bias of the media is a drag and something pan-UK culture warriors have waged war against for aeons. Flash on that Post-Punk sampler: "Hicks from the Sticks" and it's impassioned anti-London rhetoric. Often the best this country has to produce comes from the parishes throwing London 2 fingers. We're here, and we're gonna do our own thing, screw you. The Specials in Coventry. LFO in Sheffield. Postcard in Glasgow. Black Sabbath in Birmingham. The Soft Machine in Canterbury. And all their attendant scenes.

Actually my experiences of raving "back-in-the-day" were often outside London. I saw Rhythmatic in St. Pauls in Bristol busting out da bleep and bass (Mugged at gunpoint too! Well it could have been a concealed carrot but I wasn't about to argue!), I heard Dominator caned at Moss-side in Manchester, I saw Derrick May in Bath in 1990 (spooky), I raved incessantly at Pure in Edinburgh, open-air raves in Yorkshire, Terry & Jason in Glasgow etc. I was at that age when you just trucked around and fucked about (aah!) Being stuck in London is a drag actually. When I've enjoyed Auspicious Fish, it's been through Nick's (less swaggering) evocative descriptions of lingering on the Dawlish seafront with his mini-disc or getting a parking ticket at a nature reserve. Glad the photo's gone mate ;-) London-centricism is just the first wave of the effect of the USA sucking all the life out of UK culture. It's the first step towards homogenisation.

While I think Gerald got a pretty good crack of the whip, one geezer who I thought got next to no props at all was L Double. So it's kind of heartening to see that he's got a show on 1Xtra. Not that I'm endorsing the current Drum'n'Bass scene ya get me! This mini feature makes no claim to being comprehensive but these are among the best tunes which that crew put out. Starting of course with Unique 3:

Classic record. The Theme up there with Ability II's "Pressure" and LFO's "LFO" in the Bleep'n'Bass terrain. I root for the Original Chill Mix (not the Rob Gordon edit) which is propelled by that distorting morphing filtered bassline. And what a sweet cover. Loads of spirit! That's the kind of crap illustration which warms my heart.

More ham-fisted techno. But that's the point of this stuff. It's crude. It's not got the multi-tracked breathless drama of Detroit. It's base and heathen. As I type this, the rave-style horns kick in ha! I hear you fellas! Once again BASS in full effect. Rolling!

Urban Gamelan fer'real! A chopped up Italo-House Piano. None of the L Double stuff is particularly tuneful or hummable. I'm not about to make up breathless claims for it's gorgeousness, in a way for instance many of the Juice Box records have sumptuous lavish harmonies, but it's incredibly fascinating for it's obtuseness, directness and unearthliness. Wiley's stuff springs to mind as a very strong comparison.

Presumably the deal with London ran it's course.I remember mags like i-D (which once used to have good writing about music) complaining about the surplus of Bleep'n'Bass, surely the first rumblings of the media onslaught against Ardkore. L Double presumably on his own. This from 1993 not very good, though check the nutty/loony/mental cover and great titles like "Drugtalk '93". Every cloud etc.

Flex records springing to life in 1994 with this one. Marcus Intalex's classic. This is quite oooooh gourgeous. I love the (squares hands like a film director) BRANDING of this label. The Flex logo really captures the mechanical cold avowedly futuristic bent of the music. Shades of Giger. Very k-punk!

The Dubster is an awesome Cutty sampling monster choon! The Jump-up revival which is happening apace across "the-crew-that-used-to-be-drill'n'bass" Vibert/Paradinas (who angrily thumbed the 94 bin in front of me at the Soho M&V a few years back) as well as with the new Ragga-Jungle mix CDs issuing from the Indie-tronica axis have left me a wee bit puzzled. It's not that it ain't AMAZING music (viz the new Remarc reissue) but wasn't everyone on board at this stage? Weren't we all, them included, fully-fledged consumers of the stuff by this point? Why then the all-too-sudden retro turn-around? Am I missing something?

When this record came out I went to see Roni Size and L Double play a tiny club off Regent Street called "Ah London Someting". It was brock out, which you'd not expect for a central London club. People were going mad! The race ratio was about 90% black. This was at the time when there was a massive influx of interest in Ardkore from (gonna have to be careful here) mainstream black UK culture. When Jungle was tearing it up at the Notting Hill Carnival. Definitely one of the three best nights of music in my life. Guys jumping in the air throwing off 3 metre-long trails of flame from their lighters (you wedge a pin in the nozzle). Sexy gals. And the most pulverising all-encompassing body-numbing BASS. Totally dread. Roni (circa "The Warning") at the peak of his powers.

This came out soon after, which for my money is alongside Dillinja's "The Angels Fell" the best on Metalheadz. I was mad about Metalheadz early on (up to Hidden Agenda) I had even had a Metalheadz logo cut into my hair. What a twat! (ha ha) Cut to Richard "Big Beat" Fearless laughing AT me at a dinner party over this (humorously-delivered) anecdote . (Coo aren't I dropping names today!) I don't care. Loving music's not about being "cool". I remember Fabio giving it the nod though!

Great. Stop-start G-Funk sample. Lurking Reese bassline. Gunshot ricochets. Amen drums leaping into the fray. Booyacka! Then the think drums on top. Polyriddim©!

I'm a sucker for a 10". I have another of these I couldn't find. The hastle it involves digging up tunes for these specials! I have ABSOLUTELY NO FILING SYSTEM WHATSOEVER you might be surprised to know. Tried it once, bored the living shit out of me. Martin Denny will rub shoulders with Fred Locks until such time as them get shuffled around/hooked-out. Anyway, great track.

Which brings me to this (and "The Shit" to follow) which are just STUNNING. It's always nice to see artists actually get BETTER. Not "mature" but actually come closer to incandescence. This track covers every square inch of available flesh with ice-cold goosebumps. I'm gonna break into Dillinja's house NOW and put it on his sound-system. TEARING! From that time when Jungle's drums were it's calling card now they're flaccid/lite/fail to engage. This track opens with a tabla! Then a Leviticus-style "swaying" harmony loop. The drums take off. It's very linear, like those late-ish Philly Blunt tunes (Firefox and Glamour Gold) and also fast like them, before the rhythmic tabula rasa that constituted Tech-step. It grips you and won't let go.

And look at that picture disc. Both sides presented here. (Quick everyone get the FBI labs on that stretch of white wall, where does this Ingram-feller live? Bust down his door!) BTW earlier comments about the Flex phuturistik aestetic.

"The Shit" indeed! Less psychedelic than The Rider, and later, so things are being stripped-down and cleaned up about. Still, this is AWESOME 1996 Jump-up.

Captain Kirk.

Kirk Degiorgio chats to me.

Blogger wet it's pants about posting this, so it's not on the main page. Sorry.

(Insert/Extract/Eject/Insert/Burn/Eject/Insert/Tag/Label/Box)

Since last July I've been copying my friend Steve Caruana's CDs. I've just finished. These CDs are his rips of his entire 7" collection of vintage Roots Reggae. This numbered about 3,000 singles, though you'll find this figure varies every time I quote it. He sold them (groan) before it was a lucrative thing to do. Steve isn't bothered. He's pretty oblivious to material concerns. He backed the collection up on VHS too! Ever heard of this? Well VHS has a fat receptive bandwidth. Imagine that, piles of VHS's with no images on them, just Reggae. At the moment Steve is in Africa (this from an email 2 days ago): "Just back from Benin, off to Burkina Faso after the big yam festival here." He's been building mainframes in Togo. Also picked up Malaria out there. The only thing you need to know about Steve, however, is that he has impeccable taste.

I thought these CDs constituted a real resource* (Steve baffled). I mean 75% of this stuff has never been issued on anything other than on subsequently deleted yard 7"s. Half of it are Dubs, as Steve always records the Version/B-sides. My plan was to copy each and every one of the 150 strong collection onto new CDs and ID tag each track. Many of these CDs are over 10 years old and showing it. Uniformly the most painful labour has been struggling with discs reluctant to give up certain tracks. This can take hours. By the process of tagging not only will a PC/Mac recognise the CD when it's inserted through Gracenote/CDDB but also I will be able to rip the whole collection as mp3s/AACs with track info embedded in them. I've been torn over whether to share this stuff. Another friend has been keen I give him the whole collection and dump it on his FTP server, thereby making it freely available to the world to download. Then I read this from the liner notes of (my own copy) of Sylford Walker and Welton Irie"s "Lamb's Bread International", Sylford's wonderful LP for Glen Brown's South East Imprint (reissued by Blood & Fire): "It wasn't until 1989, when Glen Brown secured a four album deal with UK independent Greensleeves Records, that Sylford's songs finally saw their first album issue, a decade after they were recorded. Sanachie also issued the set 'Lamb's Bread' on CD that year. Sadly it failed to sell enough during the period of the contract and remaining stocks were sold off cheaply as 'cut-outs.' A tour planned to promote the set never materialised; thus a disillusioned Sylford Walker remained on Gold Street, where he continued to eke out a living for himself, his wife and their three children, by selling roots drinks and juice to his fellow ghetto-dwellers." Which came like a bucket of cold water. So actually I'm not sure WHAT I'm going to do with this set. I've been toying with the idea of giving some reasonable-sized donation to a Jamaican charity, just for the pleasure of copying the tracks, but that's just a load of sentimental bollocks, and would probably be swallowed up by inefficient bureaucracy. Having said all this I WILL be offering up copies of the collection to one or two lucky (deserving) parties.

Check these randomly selected examples for the kind of intense labour the tags have taken me per CD:

No comments on the music here I'm sorry to report. That'll come later.

Not always helped by Steve's spidery handwriting:

The next, though smaller, task (sigh) is to rip the fuckers. The question being mp3 or AAC. (As it goes in the shampoo ad) Now for the science. AAC is the new Dolby created standard that will supercede the mp3 standard. Currently it's used in all DVDs, and people with golden ears (not like old deffo here) say it equals CD quality, yet the file sizes are tiny. What's the point in ripping this huge valuable resource to mp3s, a soon-to-be-superceded standard? I tried to discuss this and other matters on the iTunes board chez Apple. But sadly went about it in the most obnoxious manner imaginable (in fairness to myself I didn't realise I was going to upset people) I just got carried away with *THE MISSION*, demanded to only speak to the finest minds and greatest authorities (shielding own eyes- OH NO! WHAT WAS I THINKING?). So if you want to have a giggle at my expense and see me suffer at the hands of a succession of worthies then go to Apple>Support>Discussions>iTunes Music and watch me writhe. I'd link you directly, but since my last rant I've "hung-up" and not gone back. Fear and shame. Actually I was quite startlingly obnoxious (titter). Jess, former frog prince of ILM, would have been proud of me! On the other hand, if I hadn't been such a fu**ing modest mouse my entire life, I might have achieved something.** Nah, I take that back, I'm a lucky man! To return to the subject in hand (ahem) I think I'll go the AAC route. Winamp have a plug-in for the format already, and supposedly there are more and more players on the market that work with it, not least the iPod. If you have a suggestion DO PLEASE email me!

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*Me data fetish! Nah!

**These online scraps REALLY haunt me. This to amuse you: The morning after my Spizzazzz fight the doorbell rung at 8 A.M. I thought (cold): It's that eCrunk, he's not a Geology Student he's a bloody 7 foot tall gangster from Hackney with a 6 pack like 50 cents, a slum computer wizard, and he's come to break my arm. So I answer the telecom (clear firm, but unrestrainably posh) "Hello." No answer. Then I flash (deeper terror): Christ he's gonna email me, and he's gonna say. "8 A.M. Sunday. We know where you live loser!" Apparently Eden thinks that (deep down) I love all this confrontation, trust me I don't. Or at least I don't think so.

Oh no more Avant-Garde Records!

Firstly I should like to apologise for any emotional damage inflicted by that piece. Think for a minute what a VERY sad individual I must me.....aaah you're feeling better already! Secondly, and more seriously, apologies for waving these discs under your noses with nary a downloadable mp3 pack in sight.* Please note much of this music is very much available on CD, and forget the vinyl fetish thing with Music Concrete, cos it sounds BETTER on CD, crackle hiss and hum totally screw up the experience of this music. Your first stop should be here. Iannis Xenakis's "Persepolis" is often described as the greatest work in the series and that's on CD, as is Luc Ferrari's "Heterozygote" which is also one of the most important. Apparantly "the just released Teige mix (of "Persepolis") on the 2 CD Editions RZ Xenakis set" is even more dynamic than the original 8 track Phillips version. As for Parmegiani, his best work comes later on the INA GRM label (don't start me...) and "De Natura Sonorum" is THE ONE, if you can't get it at Recommended, try here.

To give y'all a window of hope Marcus at Rephlex: "...got the Pierre Henry "Variations for a Door and a Sigh" for $3", though (titter) that strains the patience a bit that one (you can get it on CD) AND his "...mate picked up the Prospective 21 siecle box set for about $11 in this shop in Greenwich." Bastard!

Jon came back with some extremely generous comments. He's got a photo of Don Bolles with his silver discs which I look forward to seeing. I was particularly pleased that Bolles had the same reaction to the Les Percussions Strasbourg, in fact I punched the sky and said "Yes!" Seeing the link to Ed Maurer's superb bit of research brought me down to earth with a bump though, not least because I missed it myself, which considering that I used Mr. Maurer's work to back up the Shandar thing I did on January 14th was pretty goofy. I've contacted Ed and hope I can contribute a sleeve image or two for his site. Great too that Simon had furnished Julian House with the Henry's Voile D'Orphee/Entite/Spirale cover for his forthcoming book on record covers as:"Possibly my favorite album sleeve" (Preening self in mirror): "Looking good!"

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I'd like to round up with a few other bits and pieces which are of relevance to that piece, and I've tried very hard to keep on subject; not just bosh up a load of sleeves and congratulate myself for my sound investment.

1. Xenakis: Polla, Ta Dhina, Akrata, Achorripsis.

Not an electro-acoustic work. Included here for two reasons. Firstly to signal the existence of quite another INCREDIBLE series of Avant-Garde music, EMI's Perspective Musicales. I have only this record from that collection. Secondly, to draw attention to it's sleeve design, which is the one aped by Sonic Youth in their Avant series.

2. Luc Ferrari: Und so weiter, Music Promenade.

This IS an electro-acoustic work. It's great. Once again another themed Avant-Garde series. This time on the Wergo label. I have the Bo Anders one too on vinyl, which Jim O'Rourke reissued on CD for Dexter's Cigar (excellent). Curiously this sleeve design has been copied too, but I can't remember who by...

3. VA: Response: Electronic Music from Norway.

A collection on the Limelight label (I knew I had another of theirs). Does exactly what it says on the tin. Pieces here by Nordheim, who "represents" on the Electronic Panorama, Janson and Fongaard. Once again available on CD.

4. VA: Panorama of Music Concrete.

A 1950's British compilation on London records (Ducretet Thomson). $10 in Frocester in Gloucestershire. Right now $320 at the Music and Video Exchange, it's partner Volume 2 priced as high. Am I sounding pleased with myself? Maybe a bit. Though there's a lesson here. Marcus found his pieces in Truro in Cornwall. Small towns people!

5. Pierre Henry: Mouvement, Rythme, Etude.

Ooh what a pwetty cover! Mentioned in passing in the piece Henry on Phillips but NOT on the Silver Series. This, which I found in Belgium, also available on CD.

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OK I'll shut up now.

The Silver Records.

I can't help but compare this current "blog-a-peligo" with the early days of Acid House. Then one might have Fabio, Richie Hawtin, Judge Jules and The Mover all on the same bill. Look at my current micro-gang: a philosophy lecturer, a poet, a few music journalists, me an animator. It's a wonder we're sharing the same page. Frankly I'm amazed that someone like Luka is even faintly interested by what I've got to say, it must appear to be sheer goggly-de-gook to him most of the time and completely boring. Flash on that classic situational comedy skit where the dog watches the family: "Blah blah blah blah BISCUITS blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah WALKIES", Luka must read TWANBOC thus: "Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah WILEY blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah WRONGLY QUOTED MC." And yet I've noticed a few fellow record-collector geeks firing up their own ventures. Believe you me there's very few crew who are at the coalface like this represented online, and quite alot who (maybe more interestingly) digest culture with the aplomb of the media-savvy. Historically only this chick springs to mind, and in classic record-collector-autist fashion she failed to reply to my emails.

So now the goons are coming to the party I thought it was time I did a bit of the old bollocks-on-the-table. Let all you kids snapping at my heels know what you're up against. Which is an absolute disgrace because the records I've chosen to perform this nasty trick with are among the most important documents of the 20th century. It's a brittle knife-edge this record-collecting lark. I was admonishing the Furry Embryo for calling me a "hipster" the other day, because, and this is the essential drive behind Ian's (non-)attack on me, viewing culture within the frame of what's fashionable is spiritually bankrupt. There is no crime greater than to digest what should be nourishing and transformative as chips on the casino table, and yet so many of us teeter on this tightrope. Though that's not something I'd feel entitled to say if I was being paid to write it. He won't necessarily thank me for pointing this out, but Reynolds' championing of Ardkore and Rave culture was an attempt to give value to what only "people who couldn't be expected to know better" valued. To understand what no-one believed in, on it's own terms, without patronising it in the process of it's recontextualisation. That's a mean feat. Though in a weird (utterly predictable) twist, he succeeded in making it fashionable, when that was the precise inverse of what it was. It was genuinely SCARY, terrifyingly OUT-OF-CONTROL and anathema to the dominant values of the middle-classes and the media. People were paying silly money for these records before interest subsided in Ardkore. tWist informed me he sold his collection in the nick of time. For the record I paid about $8 a pop for most of mine. Often less. Reynolds' I know was a great $5 12" harvester.

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Various Artists: Electronic Panorama.

Certainly the most valuable record I own. At a time before the current economic crisis, when I was earning (what now appears to be) crazy money, I paid about $150 for this, which was an absolute steal. A friend sold a copy of this to The Chemical Brothers for $650 in 1996. I reckon I could comfortably sell it for about $1,000. It's the record-collector's equivalent of an Edward East Clock or a Gainsborough. It's the holy grail of electronic music. I recently read a mini article, a discussion with Andy Votel, who was boasting that he'd recently flown all the way to Poland with the sole intention of picking up a particular obscure soundtrack which (and this amused him greatly) he bragged at only having listened to ONCE. What a berk! I couldn't swear that I listen to this everyday (ahem) but every couple of months I take it out and give it an aural fondle.

All this music crackles with intelligence. Evincing the quickness and edginess of characters brimming over with sparkle. The box is a head-to-head of the four major electronic studios of the day; the GRM of the ORTF (Paris), The University of Utrecht (Netherlands), Radio NHK (Tokyo) and The Warsaw Radio Studio of Experimental Music (Poland...) and frankly once you've heard it you'll wanna dig a huge hole in the ground and fill it with with your Nurse With Wound and Autechre (et al.) records. Somehow no other experimental electronic music comes near this stuff. On a similar note I recently read Autechre going on about how they didn't think Stockhausen was "all that" and my lip curled. SHUT UP you dweebs! Go fiddle with your multi-tracks and leave the dude alone. If you had any idea of the gargantuan scale of the work involved in making this music! The slav-ish blinding toil these tape-edits constitute. Go on (you total saps) hit that "Avant Garde" Cubase preset and act all superior. There's a whole other dimension to this of course, the reason this music is so super-humanly powerful and unexpected is that it emerged from the ravaged psyches of the second world war. This is particularly true when you're talking about Stockhausen (here only in spirit) and Xenakis; the former whose mother was murdered by the Nazi's for being "insane" the latter who lost half his face fighting in the Greek Resistance movement. These people are drawing on emotional resources the scale and depth of which you can't even imagine.

Disc one is the cheese. Frankly the French have it. Parmegiani's "Ponomatopees II" is a dizzying seething swathe. A pile-up of snatches of speech folded and sliced, extremely influential on later INA_GRM alumni like Phillip Mion. Parmegiani was very much Pierre Schaeffer's protege, and as such he works close to the spirit of Musique Concrete. If you don't know it (and apologies if you do) the celebrated "essential moment" of Music Concrete came when Schaeffer cut the sound of a bell being struck from a recording, leaving only the sound of it's ring. The whole idea is right there, decontextualise a real-life sonic event and impel the listener to listen to it on it's own merits. Parmegiani's later work explores this sound-as-sound idea with breath-taking power. Also, and this EVERYONE should hear, Francois Bayle's "Solitioude" (1969) which the composer describes as such: "Irreverent movement, in spite of a series of light genuflexions (to Duke Ellington...Boris Vian...the Soft Machine)". To my mind it is the defining text for the Student Riots of the previous year, featuring elements of the sounds of the street battles of that confrontation and, get this, guitar parts provided by David Allen (The Soft Machine, Gong etc). In fact the Bayle and Parmegiani recordings, the latter of which is: "inspired by...some of the vocal ravings of pop singers" should dispel the lie that this music is in anyway an ivory tower undertaking.

The Japanese disc has, as one might expect, a more contemplative yearning. Toshiro Mayuzumi's "Mandara" has these flitting dragonfly in a swamp fx, and the tone is markedly less strident. Listenable even ;-) I also like Makoto Moroi's "Shosanke" which: "is a suite of six variations on a trumpet sound traditionally associated with the Buddhist "Ceremony of Water" It's amazing how the symbolic possibilities inherent in electronic music are seized on so early in the day. Decade after decade we run across the same themes, usually peaking from time-to-time as demand for "depth" in electronic music varies. For example you can hear scant evidence of these characteristics in Grime, though I'd argue Wiley's tracks are picking up on it, particularly the whole frozen wastes shtick he's peddling. Actually Erik Davis's "Techgnosis" book was pretty good on the mile-wide currents running between the esoteric and electronic music. The contemplative, the other (via 3rd world music and elements thereof) the occult, the convergance of high and low culture. It's all here.

The Warsaw and Utrecht crews also have a good bash. Krzysztof Penderecki's "Psalmus" (1961), the only purely electronic piece of his I'm aware of is splendid. Gabba fans take note, ha ha. Huge 2mm gaps punctuated by gloomy passing icebergs. Arne Nordheim also contributes a track. (I'm having real fun with this!) Of the dutch lot Koenig is "firing on all cylinders."

Bernard Parmegiani : Violostries.

The historic Avant-Garde eh! Gawd bless 'em. What a funny bunch of cranky old men! If I'm feeling at all low, I like to dig out these records and have a giggle at their lovely chops, their 3/4 inch thick lab spectacles, the abundance of all manner of facial hair, little pointed goatees, thick well-clipped beards, unkempt eyebrows spiralling off into the third dimension, those distant fixed gazes, that pipe akimbo, their wonderful seriousness and earnestness. Compare their benign troubled looks to those of the wave of the nu-electronic avant-garde. No don't, it's almost unfair! Those mean pinched expressions, ergonomic haircuts, clipped nostrils, arrogance, carefully-chosen foot-wear, the cloying allusions to street-awareness in their lean garb.

A friend of mine sees Bernard Parmegiani in the street in his neighbourhood from time to time. Apparently he looks like Hornblower bill in his nautical blazer and blue and white striped top. Smoking a generous pipe. I embellish; clutching a baguette and a copy of Le Monde. "Violostries" is from 1964 and is scored for solo violin and four channels. It's a deeply crass comparison but think "Strings of Life". Right from the outset with those stabby striations (I kid you not) and the wonderful deep repeating phased bass line. This record with the original green label spotters!

I implore you to find Parmegiani's "La Creation du Monde" or better yet "De Natura Sonorum" or better yet (well DNS is the accepted classic, but I have a personal fondness for this) "Dedan-Dehors" They're all available on CD.

Francois Bayle: Jeita.

If you look hard for these records, and France is the place naturally. You'll still find the occasional one or two, though quite a number are a bit dodgy. There's LOADS I've passed over, freak-out organ recitals at Notre Dame, endless records by Les Percussions de Strasbourg which you'll see all over the shop and incline to the dull. This however is an utter gem. Once again a purely electronic score, it's a soundtrack for the then recently discovered Lebanese Jeita Caves complex. A son-et-lumiere for the deeply twisted. As you might imagine for the composer of a(nother) piece called: "Espaces Inhabitables", Bayle was interested in the transportative architecture of sound, it's 4th dimensional attributes, unlike most site-specific sonic installations however (yawn), he's still impelled to take the listener somewhere. It's subtitled meaningfully "Murmur of the Waters" and thats what we have in this exquisite piece, synthesised drips, gentle spilling equibriums and aquatic fluctuations all amidst the cavernous yaw of echo. Ambient innit.

Francois Bayle: Various.

Cool!

Pierre Henry: Apocalypse de Jean.

What with "les jerks" his celebrated work with Michel Colombier (the man ALSO behind Serge Gainsbourg's "Histoire de Melody Nelson) you might be tempted to think Pierre Henry the joker of the pack. Not so, not so. While his "Mouvemente Rythme Etude" (also Phillips) is charming and technically stunning his work on the Prospective 21eme Siecle series is 'ard as nails. I'll confess to knowing next to nothing about the label itself. I've done a bit of nosing around, but can't find anything. Nothing too on the sleeves which are clearly classics of period design and match the beautiful but stern metallic music housed within. I'll wager there's some tie in with Varese and Xenakis's installation at the Pavilion Philips de l'Exposition Internationale de Bruxelles (1960), which I think I'm correct in saying was housed in a specifically designed Le Corbusier building, which drew on his pupil Xenakis's understanding of the qualities and possibilities inherent in concrete and which was summarily demolished after the fair. Nothing on the label in Roger Sutherland's excellent and comprehensive book "New Perspectives on Music" either.

Henry was a pupil of Boulanger's and Messaien's and it's clear as Pimms there's more than a smattering of Oliver Messaien's troubled catholocism to his work. Particularly in "Apocalypse de Jean", which is by some margin the scariest record I own. Surely a more fitting soundtrack to 9/11 than Enya? While slightly marred by Jean Negroni's overly sincere voiceover, in, er, French, there are some stunning passages to this: the rasping strident "Revelation"; from the "First tribulations, the Seven Seals and Seven Trumpets", "The Four Horses", notably the chillingly controlled overload of "The Black Horse"; "No wind on the earth" (I mean, these titles!); and from "Cataclysms II", "The third part of the sea became blood." On the cover shot, Henry looks like a cleric.

Pierre Henry: Le Voyage.

Not silver! Though squarely from the series. What do you think I am? Made of money! Though look here some greek chap is selling the original on eBay, a very few drachma for this great record which I routinely see for $240. I saw a wall of these silver records in New York as a matter of fact, not very good ones, all for $260 a pop, yikes. Buy buy buy! Actually the American 60's label this is on, Limelight, is a very interesting source of re-issues. I've seen a cool-looking Indian LP on it too. "Le Voyage", based conceptually on The Tibetan Book of the Dead (the occult etc) is "a trip", and it's clear why this quite hippy-ish imprint should choose to license it. Ambitious stoner material... Like Apocalypse to Jean it's an horizontal record. Unlike those of, say Xenakis which are so vertically arranged as to be threatening to topple over.

Various: Xenakis/Berio/Maderna/Kagel.

I was really sad when Xenakis died. If you get the opportunity read Nouritza Matossian's Biography of him. It's the most wonderful book which I can unreservedly recommend to ANYONE at all. After completing it a few winters ago I almost left the house for good. And that's the kind of intense character Xenakis was. Other people value "Persepolis" (one of the other silver records) highly which you can now buy on CD. I'd also rate "La Legende D'Eer" incredibly highly. "Orient Occident" on this is a real bruiser, once again (like Stockhausen's "Telemusik") strong 4th World elements.

Les Percussions de Strasbourg: Americana

The best of their records. Nice version of Varese's "Ionisation" which succeeds in not making it sound like Gershwin (where many other versions fail). Good Cage track too.

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Well, you'd be lucky to find any of these at even halfway decent prices these days. But keep you're eyes peeled for a glint.

Optical Effects on 3 Famous Records.

1. Gang of Four: Entertainment.

Gang of Four Flash here

Take your copy of The Gang of Four's "Entertainment" to a dark room, or where the lighting is low, and wobble it up and down. You'll see the type "shaking". This can also be performed with Pylon's first LP. I tried to film this myself but it didn't come out.

2. Mark Stewart: As the Veneer of Democracy Starts to Fade.

Mafia Flash here

Had to bite my lip when this LP came up in conversation at Uncarved recently. Put the record on the deck and switch it on. Look closely for one minute at the swirling pattern. Then look at something else. SCARY! This bit of Flash performs the same task perfectly, and will spare you a few bob on a really ropey record.

3. Faust: The Faust Tapes.

Faust Flash here

Neatly in sync with Bridget Riley exhibition at the British Tate. Every stoners' favorite cover. But did you look closely enough? Give it at least 15 seconds and then you'll really appreciate this Op-art splendour.

Red Rob.

"They were taken with thing called improving music, improving culture, which is good for you, and naff culture, which is bad for you, and children must be guided away from all these bad things. The more I read about it, I realised that this tendency had been going on for centuries. The church, for example, used to have a problem with rabble music. Organised church music was elevating, and the music of the rabble, when they got pissed, caught sexual diseases and that sort of thing was the bad kind. The church monitored the rabble with totalitarian verve, intervening constantly to break down the power of mob culture and mob music. Following on from that, you couldn't shock my parents' communist or egalitarian friends by saying "I don't believe in God", but you could by saying "I don't believe in Mozart"...The left missed a trick there, because the idea that serious music was morally elevating took a bit of a battering after the Second World War." Robert Wyatt 2003.

Really I could sling inverted commas round the whole piece and leave it there. Wyatt's a fantastic thinker. He was probably the person responsible for coming up with the term "World Music", which while both a good AND bad thing is certainly a coinage to be reckoned with. Brian Eno would spend long afternoons with him in the seventies chatting, casually teeving his thoughts. Wyatt, and I read John Peel revealing this, has two houses a mile apart from one another which he swaps between. Cool! So many ideas swilling through this it's difficult to know where to pick up the thread.

The first thing I noticed was that Wyatt was exploring the tension between what Simon Reynolds would call the "Avant-Lumpen" and what we might call the "Beatnik". We talked about this here a while ago under the guise of "classic Cartesian dualism" Beatnik-vs-AvantYob. It's pretty safe to suppose Wyatt's family were classic Bohemians or Beatniks. They were part of poet/author Rupert Graves circle, and would holiday with them in the South of France. Isn't the idea of British bohemian retreats only having to be as far away as Majorca (Kevin Ayers and Terence Stamp's bolt hole) and the Provence wonderful? Nowadays folk have to own their own villa in Essouria or Mustique. I know I do.

Music which "improves" one is one of the hallmarks of Beatnik culture. It's one of the criteria that separates The Beatles from The Stones (ad infinitum). Wyatt's term "naff culture" spells it out larger. Reynolds might splice naff up with football culture, herd thinking, mass abandon on LSD, in short everything one might infer from The Mover's "Mescalinum United" alias. Wyatt's historical comparisons with church repression immediately made me flash on Greil Marcus's discovery of Jon of Leyden, medieval Germany's Johnny Rotten and also the thought that once-upon-a-time folk music* constituted this notional great unwashed. I guess Wyatt represents one part of a transgressive tradition that is neither "Beatnik" nor "Yob", but square to the politik of both.

What really stimulated me was his idea that the left had "missed a trick". It's got to be true. Right from the outset Communism (then Socialism) has persistently backed the wrong dog. The very earliest Communist experiments with siring a culture of their own were the Avant-Garde projects of Tatlin, Vertov, El Lizissitsky. A total cock-up in terms of state sanctioned art, sure we can enjoy the fruits of it as the western bourgeoisie but what possible success did it suspect to have with the "proletariat". Ditto the heavy-handed romanticism of Stalinist cinema and art with its top-down dogma and cut-out sentiments, almost not culture at all but untrammeled propaganda. You couldn't expect people to suck on a culture as bland as that. As for Capitalism, we've the compulsive shenanigans of Hollywood and Pop music leading us a merry dance down the supermarket.

Flash forward to Billy Bragg and his thoroughly bohemian re-shaping of The Clash as Woody Guthrie. It's no stronger a signal, in the final reckoning a culture of opposition which is eternally doomed to be the underdog. So where next Comrades? Well this is the germ of an idea I saw hatching in Wyatt's article. Why hasn't Socialism attached itself to "the invisible culture", the culture without trappings that is mob ecstasy? It's a snug fit with the political rally. Surely that's the missed trick Wyatt's referring to? Of course they picked up the folk thing in the early sixties all that pre-Bringing it Back Home swirl of Peter Paul and Mary** and Joan Baez. But by that stage folk music was, to use a term hijacked from Luka in a state of "Half-Life", it's radioactive fizz subsided to a degree that it was safe for the middle-classes to appropriate it. That whole wave of post Harry Smith's The Anthology folk was gestural rather than harboring potency.

What if Socialism had harnessed the rave? I'll bet I'm gonna receive a few dozen emails pointing me to the Socialist Worker's Bank Holiday party at Camber Sands with Judge Jules' Political Science Graduate brother on the decks. Red Square in a heavy fog of dry ice, the cupolas of St.Basil’s ablaze with lasers, grubby street-urchins selling black-market vodka-flavored gum, enormous inflatable tanks and submarines, a 4000k Turbo rig manned by Cossacks on a microdot ration, 100,000 strong crowd of Soviet ravers chewing their cheeks, Vladimir Putin in loose-fitting clothes sneakers and a medallion urging the legion on and upwards with quotes from Das Kapital and the latest corn production figures from Georgia, huge Stalinist Tower-block-sized screens playing old skool stroboscopic videos like “The Man with the Movie Camera” and proto-rave visuals like “Earth”. Monday morning back down the tin-mine the dutiful weekenders have Trotsky on a white horse dancing across their corneas.

The Christians had a good crack, if not much success. I saw an hilarious programme on TV the other night with the god squad cruising Ibiza, teaching holiday-makers how to DJ, playing at Mambo (was it?) before Carl Cox. The highlight being one of the girls in the outfit recounting seeing an angel at one of the islands superclubs, no really! Sit down because you'll wet yourself over this, what did he look like this angel: "Really cheeky...he looked really cheeky, like a regular clubber." Actually I couldn't laugh either, I was numb. So you see despite Chris Brain the Anglicans are still trying to have their way with the four-four beat. And why shouldn't the Socialists too? I expect they'll cotton on sometime in 2015 when we're all driving hovercrafts amid the frenzy of “scent” culture, I tell you the ears have had their day, onwards the nose!

Bye to all that...

And now presenting, direct to you from the hipster with the heart, the second T.W.A.N.B.O.C. Megamix. It's closely themed as from the time before acid house yet after electro. From that era when the spores of electro had wafted across a whole variety of genres (African music, Arty NYC Post-punk, London Roots, Art Rock and Kraut) which then proceeded to play catch up too late. It's a transitional period when everything was up in the air, when possibilities were still being worked out. The value of presenting it here? Well to my ears it sounds fresh, and that's all the excuse I need. A depressing view of the acceptable retro window sliding forward in time? Incidentally Andy Weatherall seemed to read the brief wrongly on his "Nine O'Clock drop compilation", there wasn't much post-punky about that, it seems closer to this, fruitfully prescient or big gaff?

0000 Pee Wee Herman (from Pee Wee's Big Adventure)
My favourite movie. Well one of them...

0006 Ray Lema: Marabout (Iyolela) from Medicine LP (Celluloid 1984?)
Electro from Zaire from genre-buster Ray Lema. Martin Meissonner at the helm. Lovely Dennis Morris cover. Impossible to find. Lema's "Gaia" LP easier to track down and also excellent.

0420 Les Liasons Dangereuses: Avant - apres Mars from Eponymous LP (CHBB 1981)
Who for years I confused with Palais Schaumberg. This LP has been recently reissued. Check it out!

0624 Lady's Choice: Girl's Night Out (Serious Party Dub) 12" (Streetwise 1983)
Richard Scher and Lotti Golden in covert Warp 9 action.

0859 Wally Badarou: Chief Inspector 12" (4th & Broadway 1985)
The hipster himself. Compass point magic.

0952 Chakk: They Say (Fon 1985)
Really blew me away. The Sheffield crew ply dub.

1157 Manu Dibango: Abele Dance (Dub) (Celluloid 1985)
Meissonner again, let no-one else near African music! Head-caving beats and truly joyous fruity sax.

1513 Akabu: Watch Yourself 12" (Body Rock 1984)
This label the joint progeny of On-U and Tommy Boy. Presumably as Sherwood was steering the rhythm section over here.

1515 Bang The Party: Rubbadubb from Back to Prison LP (Warriors Dance 1990)
Kid Batchelor you is a god! Nice tie in with the afro-dubs of Paul "Groucho" Smykle at the Addis Ababa studios.

1759 Coach House Rhythm Section: Timewarp 12" (Ice 1977)
Eddy Grant casually inventing house music.

2029 David Van Tieghem: In a Gadda Da Vida (Black Light Mix) (Wide Angle 1986)
From that exciting time Basquiat/Haring etc. Kenny Scharff day-glo cover on this. Strikingly pre-acid. Ecstacy going down.

2316 Lake Eerie: The Nightmare (Bonesbreaks "Go Bongo" Dub) (Nu Groove 1988)
Which I found recently in London. Can't say enough how much I love the Nu Groove aesthetic.

2524 Aqua Regia: NYC Smile on me from DFC Ambient House Compilation (Irdial 1991)
Wandering round India half-naked stark raving mad, having discarded my clothes, carrying only a haversack full of bootleg cassettes. Getting lost in Bombay cul-de-sacs listening to this. Walking walking walking.

Anyway I hope you enjoy it. I need a break, so I'm off for 10 days. Luka has informed me that I'm not to approach a computer. Peace and Love.

Bringing It All Back Home.

Be sure it's fully loaded then have a nose around!

The Politics of Production.

Oakey and Co. have an incredibly boring conversation as to whether or not, and how, to release (the above pictured Flexi-disc) which they're talking on.

Did anyone else notice this........ever?

I love the look of early computer-generated imagery. It's clumsy and raw, everything digital art has, in these Maya dominated times, swung away from. This is a spotty record featuring alot of very bad sax playing which I left out of my East-coast Post-Punk special. It has one highlight, a tune written and sung by Gordon's collaborator Arthur Russell, called "That Hat." I've been dismissive of this track before (scraping the Arthur Russell barrel blah blah blah) but actually it's wicked.

On the paper insert that comes with my record there is a photo of Peter Gordon:

He looks quite the sultry young egg-head. Boy genius, not. Look closer at that perfectly shaved dome:

If that isn't a mosquito snacking on his grey matter! You see you've got to pay attention, or you miss these things.

29 Detroit Techno 12"s.

This started out innocently enough. That's to say with me combing through my racks for 10 Detroit choons. Then it got out of hand. The mission was to dig up the obscurer records. Not Strings of Life, but slightly less well-known classics. It turned out to be easier than I'd first thought. There were SO many awesome records which came out of Detroit. In the end I just though fuck it. Don't ration like a tinker, bosh it out. GO MAD! So if you're used to reading tidy digestable wee posts from me, apologies.

Detroit now has a slightly tarnished reputation. When I started buying these records it was often a word-of-mouth affair. Hushed tones and all that. Or taking chances, following hunches and trusting one's own ears. Then quite quickly the history was assembled, and as soon as that happens, well people walk away, cock a snook. Or they have a knock. Ascribe things to it which are easily targeted at an edifice. Reynolds, god bless him, had lots of fun for ages puncturing the myths that had accrued around Detroit Techno. I have a sneaking suspicion that he has a fondness for it, references seem to be creeping back in to it in his writing via The Mover (Suburban Knight "Art of Stalking") and 4Hero (well documented Detroit link-up). Did you witness the roasting he got at the hands of Kirk Degiorgio, which quickly revolved around differing perspectives of "The True History of Detroit", go back to his first blog entry. Kirk (with friends like these Detroit doesn't need enemies) made a big play of insider chat that he had heard in Detroit. That Mayday only said he liked Frankie Goes to Hollywood to get a record deal. That they infinitely preferred George Clinton to Cabaret Voltaire. I'm tempted to think that they told Degiorgio what he wanted to hear. All this "Detroit-Techno-is-a-tradition-emerging-from-Jazz-Funk" is nonsense (er that's about 3 Blue Note records, Herbie Hancock's "Nobu" and "Sextant" and Bernie Worrell and Julian Priester's synth work) as opposed to the more balanced view that it's largely an extension of the line that runs from "The Model" to "Planet Rock". For crying our loud! That Detroit took to Visage and The Flock of Seagulls, as opposed to swallowing the standard tradition was what made it interesting. Kirk seems oblivious to the fact that the Detroit crew find him charismatic BECAUSE he's a white european, he seems to factor out himself in the whole situation, like it's plain to see that as an honorary black man he fits with this crew.

While I was backing Reynolds over the Degiorgio tiff, Simon did singlehandedly knife Detroit in the back. The general critical consensus swung towards Ardkore as the tradition to watch as a consequnce. Bravo Reynolds, that's clout! It was a dirty job, but somebody had to do it. You'd even read Mayday in interviews going: "For fucks sake! The Music Institute was just a club! All this stuff is boring ancient history. Detroit, GET OVER IT!" You'd be hard pushed to fight a case for Detroit-influenced music, essentially because what has spun out of Detroit has been too reverential, and I'm talking here about the whole Luke Slater, Neuropolitique, Degiorgio, B12, Speedy J and Stefan Robbers thing as well as the Wax Doctor, Alex Reese late Moving Shadow thing. There's been too much reduction, not enough addition. The best music which followed the Motor City's lead, The Black Dog, Basic Channel, The Mover has added to it, or has just not taken THAT much on board. It's hardly Detroit's fault is it? It doesn't negate something's value if it's progeny is considerably less worthwhile does it! However, when it comes to Reynolds' critique of Detroit (as opposed to it's effect), I put the book down and look puzzled. Are we really talking about the same thing? Detroit Techno gets labelled delicate, as sporting water-colour synths, is described as being all perfect sleek shiny surfaces, as being devoid of excitement. It just doesn't match what I've heard.

The "other" book on Detroit was Kodwo Eshun's "More Brilliant than the Sun". Which is, of course, perfection incarnate. I guess it's fairer to say that it's an Underground Resistance book. And, despite sound rejoinders like "Dusseldorf was Detroit's Mississippi Delta" it's largely Afro-Astro-Centric, taking Greg Tate's cyber-negritude and amplifying it. I don't have a problem with Kodwo's reading at all. It's supremely imaginative, it's just that it's so polemical it's spotless. So beautifully breathlessly concieved it doesn't take in all Detroit's messy undercurrents. Kodwo doesn't get bogged down in the whole socio-cultural currents tedium either, he leapfrogs between the nodes, Buckminster Fuller to Nick Land. Thats FINE he clearly didn't set out to write a history of Detroit (you know, how boring!), it's just that Detroit's PR problem has become that it's too fantastical, too glacial and too lofty, when truth be told, when the chips are down, its rough-as-fuck BUST-YO-ASS dance music.

So why am I presenting these trax for your attention? Firstly, naturellement, to show off what a trendy young chappy I am, how cognisant and eagle-eyed I am (raises forfinger to chin, raises eyebrows, purses lips). Secondly, and of course less importantly, to try and open up the canon a bit. Make things a bit messier. Devolve attention away from the "classic" records of the Belleville 3 (though they get a look-in of course). Thirdly, there is a MAJOR secret agenda, which will become clearer to readers of my ongoing waffle later this year. On a more pastoral note there are two very good compilations out on Planet E at the moment, Double EP-style, called Detroit Techno Classics (or something) which I can recommend highly. I'm not going to offer this lot up as mp3s, not because I want to underscore the myth, but because in this case it'd be too like ripping off the artists.

1. Dan Curtin: 3rd From The Sun EP.
On Sinewave records. One of those blink and you miss them imprints that also put out a John Beltran 12". This is before Curtin got to make those LPs. If The Belleville 3 were "The First Wave of Techno" and UR and +8 et al were the Second, this along with the Red Planet things is the Third. My attention waned at this point. After this there were KHand, Plastikman, Flexitone things like that and I lost interest. The stand-out track here is "3rd from the Sun" itself: a bubbling 303, infolding drums, super-fast crunching microbreaks and forbidden planet tonalities. Wicked tune.

2. Blake Baxter: When a Thought Becomes You.
There are a few great non-UR records on the UR label. That Suburban Knight one is good. Shoot me down but I'm not THAT big a fan of UR. Some records excepted. This is ace. Blake's "Sexuality" is the bomb, not included in this list because everyone knows it (?). That is one VERY raw tune. Prima facie evidence of Detroit corpulence. Sounds like a miner in a giant baked-bean tin. This is Baxter in Jamie Principle sexual-whispers mode. Just like the stuff K.Alexei perfected on "All for Lee-Sah". A nursery harmony. Electro-paen to his broken heart. Floppy plastic drums. Curdling acid fill gives way to modulating bassic melody. Baxter reclining pensive-prostrate in lovers dreadlocks.

3. Dan Curtin: Space EP.
Metamorphic was Dan Curtin's own label. He put out other peoples stuff too. I know 4Hero loved this record, they licensed some stuff for the Deeper Shade of Techno compilation they put out on Reinforced. Damn I wish I'd bought that. It's too easy to be sniffy about comps. As Kodwo says they're one of the artforms of the 21st century. I've actually got another Detroit feature up my sleeve, 10 great Techno compilations, I'll get round to that sometime. It's easy to tell why Dego and Marc liked this though....breakbeats! On the epic "Envision" congas do battle with too-precise martial drumfills. Colliding multi-tiered breakbeats build impossible t-t-tension. Sinewave drones pair and part. At the end it all gives way to a 33-pitched pile-up, tribes on mars kind of vibe.

4. States of Mind: Elements of Tone.
This was the first release on +8. Richie and Jon were chuffed to bits when Derrick May picked it up. It's almost too quaint. At the start you think "Oh No!" zimmer-techno. Then, however, gourgeous vocal synths soar and a cute push-me-pull-you bassline joins the fray before, arching above the mesh, the most seductive subdued almost inaudible bleep-hook. You sit out the middle eighth early-warp-style break just dying for that refrain. Oooh! As sexy as "We are the Music Makers". The best of these Detroit tracks are just working out their own inner logic.

5. Neal Howard: To be or not to be? (Mayday Mix)
Future sound was a Chicago label. There's plenty of to-ing and fro-ing between the Chicago scene at this point and Detroit. Actually it's a wonder there wasn't more. On reflection there was almost a mutual-appreciation thing going on, rather than anything more solid. This is a first-wave record. Rephlex did a Future Sound compilation. This was a big tune so you can see all the Future Sound Chicago players got to turn their hand to a mix, Terry Baldwin, Bad Boy Bill etc. Mayday's mix is the peach, lopsided and organic sounding with an improbable flowing bleep riff spilling out of the grooves. Think this music is all serious? Well check the super-silly fairground bassline as it wheels around and rolls up the sides. Kevin Saunderson's "Perpetual Motion" also worth a look-in.

6. F.U.S.E: Approach and Identify.
I never did dug Richie Hawtin's later stuff. Jon Aquaviva was a former Disco DJ and he brought loads of flavour and colour to their music. I interviewed them once and Richie sat there clammed up like an insect, "observing me", while Jon rabbited on garrously. You can see where the whole minimalist Plastikman project came from, there's an almost uneven fit between the rushier aspect of this and it's "Futuristic Underground Sonic Experiments" intent.
"Approach and Identify" is a GREAT track, impossibly bassy with BLEEPS floating severed. "Phase I" on the flipside also has it's adherents, nicely chopped up vocal hook. If I was being unkind (here goes), while lovely, this and the States of Mind record date like nothing else i'm putting together here.

7. M-D-EMM: Get Acidic.
Good gosh! Early obscure-ish Transmat action. Features the skills of later Striktly Underground boss, Junglist Londoner Mark Ryder. So in fact absolutely nothing to do with Detroit Techno. This is heathen! It takes a laid-back and arsey angle on (Chicago) Acid. Rough squelches compete to out-demonise one another. This rolls along like Ardkore. I love the "Acid House" whispers, nuff flavour! And those Throbbing-Gristle-spirited whooshes. I'd say play it at my funeral but you'd never know where I'd end up.

8. Paperclip People: Oscillator.
Wha! Who says Detroit is all spick and span synths. For a while Carl Craig was using nothing but breakbeats, as on this banging disco monster. Absolutely rocking! I guess this is the secret sister to "The Climax", which as any spod knows is the record-collectors Detroit Techno Holy Grail. Don't have a copy myself, only the re-issue. The esteemed Dr. Lloyd Beryl owns a copy and my friend Gwen did too. Gwen sold his to James Lavelle for top dollar. And who says Detroit can't and do cheesy and norty sampling like Ardkore can? This is Snap's "I've got the Power" looped up and filtered to distraction. Yeah! And on that Piece record on Planet E he samples Duran Duran's "The Rephlex". Simon LeBon snatched by multi-dimensional monsters. Oooooh!

9. Octave One: I Believe.
Another bit of rare Transmat. One mix of this made it on to the 10 records "Techno 2" compilation, notable for featuring Psyche's "The Elements", which didn't get a conventional release elsewhere (at the time). However it's Magic Juan's mix which is the one you want, not the original. Think Timbaland. It's got a rolling synthsoul bassline, backwards-bossa percussion, and moaning laydee. What basslines these records have! Ardkore's basslines are almost uniformly weedy, despite it's much vaunted connections to Jamaica. It's only post, or during, Darkcore, under the auspicies of an investigation into sonic possibilities that they sort out the lower end. Just in time for the Dred invasion. Damn it's corny, and Damn it's an under-rated virtue, but all these records are so well-produced. Yeah we know the logical conclusion is Deep Dish, but this lot didn't have million pound synthesisers and pro-tools rigs the size of appartments, they just used fairly limited kit elegantly and stylishly. Bringing to mind Holger Czukay's PERFECT four-track recordings of Can. It takes genius to exploit minimal resources. You wouldn't buy a picture you couldn't see would you!

10. Carl Craig: Suspiria.
How the heck Craig wring that plangeant other-wordly sound he got on the Retroactive records from the same machines as everyone else? Retroactive, in case you didn't know is the champion of all Detroit labels. More distinctive than the recognised market-leading brand Transmat/Fragile. There's a looseness and roughness to the Retroactive sound. No edge is sharp. Every texture oscillates and pixelates. Suspiria is octopine many limbed, almost ungainly, but intentionally so. The 21st century ballad of "Wrap me in its arms" on the other side is one of my personal faves. When Sarah Gregory's gaussian blurred vocal stretchs over the dubbed out bass and percussion bridge I struggle to regain composure. That glinting 2 finger refrain. Those vocals utterly unmannered, depressed and exquisite. Not a quiet storm cliche in sight.

11. Carl Craig: Wonders of Wishing.
On another of those blink and you'd miss it labels Eclipse. This got factored into DJ Rap's limpid Journeys By DJ set at the time when Fabio was spinning Innerzone Orchestra's "Bug in the Bassbin" at 45. I heard him do that and it sounded shit. This is nice, it has a lagoon-ous intro then a glitched-out vocal hook which swerves around pitchwise. The bass and drums play catch up.

12. Psyche: A.R.T. EP3
From all my slagging off of Kirk deGiorgio you'd think I wouldn't appreciate his contibutions. Well no. The first batch of records on ART, right up to Elegy's "Tone Poem", were great UK Techno. He also did the world an unrepayable favour by putting this out. Every track of which is stunning, from insane uptight dream disco bebop of "Chicken Noodle Soup" to the come-down bliss "How the West was one." As for the ambient mix of "Neurotic Behaviour", the remix of which came out on the earlier Transmat Psyche EP, well words can't do it justice. Portentous yes! But also unbelievably powerful. Check that swaggering propulsive mid-range weft. I'd say wobble but Finney'd slap a writ on me. Records with this "weight" you just don't hear these days.

13. Suburban Knight: The Groove.
The precursor to his genre-defining classic "The Art of Stalking" (God striking matches) this is more fun if less thrilling. Essentially a step on from Raze's "Jack the groove" I adore it's "Ooh that's Hot" and "House Groove makes you move" snatches. On reflection the moment all those "Yer bad sister" hiccoughs got cleaned out of the Think break then Jungle was nearly dead. Compare the original of Dillinja's "Deep and Deadly Subs" with the remix. Ou est la fromage?. Once again, to return to the matter in hand, check that PREPOSTEROUS bassline, the whole track rides it like an Indian family on top of a train.

14. Sueno Latino: Sueno Latino (Mayday mix)
The King of Treble! From that time circa Rhythim is Rhythim's "The Beginning" (the end surely?) when Derrick was just stupidly overwhelmingly brilliant. ABLAZE! When artists reach effervesant combustion, you've just got to sit back and admire them. They're somehow able to make the simplest uncluttered gestures. Wow! Obviously a key part to the whole E2-E4 micro-history, this is it's apogee. By a long margin. I actually played this to Mr. Reynolds when he came round to my house in (was it?) 1998. He LOVED it! Angels frolicing in the jetstream. I Weep.

15. Kosmic Messenger: Soundscape.
Again on Eclipse. Stacey Pullen was great. His "Ritual Beating System" EP on Fragile is really good. Particularly "Wave the Rave Goodbye" off that. This is another bassline-led tune with trilling bleep riff. I heard Mr.C. play this at a free Rave I went to in Yorkshire in 1993. Mr.C, despite being the incarnation of the super-dodgy "Ebeneezer Goode", always used to play really "purist" Techno. After his set (6 A.M.), me ducking out to my mashed-up car parked in the field to roll joint after joint, I gave him a tape of Krautrock in thanks for the party. Harmonia's first on one side and Popol Vuh's "Seligpreisung" on the other. And he just sneered at me. You know thanks would have been nice. What a twat! If you're reading this Mr.C fak off!

16. Psyance: Motion.
Amazing tune on +8. Clickety-fingers intro then pneumatic bassline drops. Stick out your boom! Ron Allen went Techno-Soul eventually if my shot-to-pieces excuse for a mind serves me right. "EQ" on the flip also brilliant. You don't see these +8 tracks around like you used to.

17. Open House: Seven Day Weekend.
On Nu Groove, the very definition of a New York Label. There is a bit of a NYC/Detroit cross-over. Mark Kinchen and Area 10 records etc. A nice little tune, elegant bassline, and racing cymbals. Can't hold a candle to "Aquatic" though.

18. Reese: Just want another chance.
Kevin's "dark" alter-ego. Incognito also put out Blake Baxter's "Sexuality". Hardly an obscure record, though unlike the Metroplex/KMS/Transmat nexus, which has serviced it's back catalogue extremely well, you can't get the Incognito stuff. For a while it seemed the shops had so many Transmat records they couldn't give 'em away. Still that's no bad thing. That bassline. Hear it in "Deep Deadly Subs" AND Groove Chronicles' "Stone Cold". You can't fault it. A stacatto castanet intro then it OOZES.

19. Reese: Funky Funky Funk.
In which everything, drums and all, is rendered as a stab. This seethes and boils. Alarms shrill and whorl. My copy is not the Fragile release but the Network one. Green and plays inside to the out. In fact I like all the non-authentic issues I have of this stuff, they're more genuine. The original imports of these were so rare about 10 people got them. Though if you get to see the original labels of this Detroit stuff leap at the opportunity. I only have one early original of Rhythim is Rhythim's "Beyond the Dance". It's a quaint handmade-looking drawing of a geometric head with shades on. The one of Carl Craig's "Galaxy" I've seen is exquisite. The temptation with those graphics was to make them sleeker and more corporate, but the originals cottage-industry look undercut the blazenly futuristic sound within very nicely.

20. Octave One: Octivation EP.
On 430 West. I like the track "Nicolette". I wonder if this has anything to do with the SUAD chanteuse. Clean popping bassline, cloudy riffs and swings around a 7-part bleep. Nice!

21. MK: Feel the Fire.
Gwen told me he used to play this in the morning. They'd get up in their freezing flat turn on the 3-bar electric heater slip this on and dance around like loonies. Geddit? I used to play this out ALOT. You could guarantee people would go mental to it. Another nail in the coffin of the "Detroit music is Wimpy" myth. A Black Box sample dancing on a cymbal loop. MOTOR disco bass. That riff becoming insistent. Vocal immediately snaps into full focus before flipping back in rough contrast. Also great here is "Never on a Sunday". A bleeptastic finger-snapping take on Mayday's "Illusion."

22. Underground Resistance: Sonic EP.
Unnaccountably missing from Kodwo's book, presumably factored into the "Revolution for Change" LP, as a stand-alone EP it excels. On a good day my favourite Techno record ever. I'm at the bar talking to my bird. "Orbit" comes on the PA and I start to sweat, my face begins to contort involuntarily. Those spooked-out effortlesly sinister chattering FX give way to a rolling bassline (no more than a sinking and rising pitch) Now I'm stripped to the waist on the dancefloor with a Vicks inhaler in each nostril. Halfway through the track and I'm rubbing myself with a prime cut of beef. Hunt this record down! "Predator" is also out of this world, nay EVEN better!

23. Kenny Larkin: Metropolis.
Kenny was a stand-up comedian on the side. Ha ha. Always struck me as a shame that he failed to deliver beyond the early tracks he did. His one on the first Artificial Intelligence compilation (great music, BORINNGG concept) was also ace. That LP he did for Warp was dreary. "Metropolis" is built on a distorting bass pattern. Actually it sounds very like Wiley's stuff, same eyeball-vein thrombosis effect. "Colony" is a natty bit of Forth World posturing.

24. Reese: Forcefield.
Reese here almost as hot as on "Just want another Chance". Lots of stabs. Repeat after me in Darth Vader styled voice: "Force...Field". AGAIN a bassline track.

25. Constant Ritual: Hardway to Come.
Jeez I'm a saddo. This was a Promo which accompanied the second Network Techno Compilation. Nice wider grooves and fatter production than on the elpee. But Look! I've painted over the label so as to disguise from my brother the fact that I've nicked it off him. Seriously I will not be thanking anyone who tells him! Vice's Jay Denham in ambient mode. All micro tension. Can I say Micro here Phil? Is that OK? Pivoting on one of those characteristic 2 finger bleep riffs. Steamy shunting drums. I played this to my Dad once. He thought it was boring. It's ace!

26. Kenny Larkin: Biotic.
Another bit of Promo action. Makes one soberly reflect on all the great music we mortals never get to hear, which circulates on dub-plaes and white labels. THAT's the real story of Detroit. This is sooo Aquatic, and actually mixes up a treat with that track. Possibly a little before Drexciya, so aqua-pioneering. Drexciya I'd class as Fourth Wave and I've never really dug them, a bit too austere. Not clubby enough for old hotpants here. I do have "Deep Sea Dweller" which is nice, especially "Sea Snake" off that.

27. Morgan Geist: Quadri-Locular.
Which came up in conversation with Dan Setzer, Morgan's buddy, the other day. Yeah he's no spring chicken. I had this for nearly ten years before he scored big-time with Metro Area, which I also rate, particularly the third EP. He's been doing the same shit for years too it appears. "Spillway" off this is beautiful digital disco. Strange! Like Ramsey & Fen's "Love Bug" it's got queer 1930s Charleston overtones.

28. Art Vader EP.
I'm not sure if this is a bootleg. It's got "Tell Alexei" by K.Alexei Shelby, one of his characteristic "moan" tracks: "Tell Alexei how much you love him", nice Steve Poindexter-esque whistles and shekere. That figues K.Alexei was from Chicago too. Art Vader EP also features Mayday's "Wiggin" without the steel drums that spice it up on the "Innovator" Network 6-tracker, which I aint seen on Transmat.

29. Open House: Aquatic.
Another monster Retoactive tune. Somebody PLEASE do a proper reissue of this stuff! Lovely sleeve drawing by Alan Oldham (see Pedro bell and Limonious). Whales innit.

Well that was fun if a little exhausting. Now I know how Marcello feels! Anyway do you get the point? That's to say there is alot more heterogeneity to the music of Detroit than is given justice to in the current critical climate. Detroit-vs-Ardkore. It's not a competition!

(Only!) Three "Industrial" records I rate.

Coil: The Snow (Aphex Twin Mix)
Which I heard Derrick May spin at Pure.
Bad vibes looped and writ large.
Look whose been rolling around in the muck!

Stereolab with NWW: Simple Headphone Mind
Awesome.
Which Reynolds gave me on tape and I eventually tracked down in its silver pop-art plastic bag.
A must hear for all Krautrock fans.

Throbbing Gristle: Hot on the Heels of Love
Played to me by my friend Famous Record Producer who runs the Earful club.
A bit TOO stern, but great pellucid electro nonethless.

Ooh aren't I the trendy one!

Rampant Anglophilia.

This is a picture of The Palace Guard one of those Nuggets-era psych-punk bands from the USA. They had a hit called "Falling Sugar", their one concession to practicality was not wearing Bearskins. One of my grandfathers (the milkman's dad) was a guard, I wonder if he was aware of this lot? Mmm, unlikely. Hard to imagine anything like this happening these days.

Though look at this:

More recent. No wave disco from 1985, the cover only slightly giving the game away (The Communist Party etc). Made ridiculous by patently affected British accents. Strange attractor here Joy Division/New Order not The Beatles.

Anybody got any more fun examples? There must be loads of this stuff! I think it's all dead healthy, the antidote to American Isolationism. Next week French people pretend to be Americans.

RAAAAAAK!

Remember that ridiculous list of hip projections I put together a couple of months ago? I was practically praying that I'd "recoup my investment". Well, that's life isn't it, the more you put in, the more you get back. I've had it in spades, been lucky recipient of some totally fantastic inside tips, makes one feel a little like Delia Smith when she goes (of practically every recipe); "Thanks to Gaston, head chef at Le Caprice for this delightful chilled almond cream soup." Actually I've been hustling people for these jolies bijoux. And what's on the menu? Rock, my little darlings!

There's something deeply self-assuring about checking out Rock. That's what I started out listening to, and to go back to it is extremely validating. As if to say, YEAH, those values you held as a 15-year-old were spot-on. And yep "Dance" music doesn't negate all that stuff (the real agenda at stake with the mildly daft Cobain/Morosey/Sylvian Dizzy Rascal parrallels). Reach for Rock!

Thorns:Thorns

Nick Terry, former Editor of Terrorizer, and Slayer fan hipped me to this. Thorns is the vehicle for Snorre W. Ruch, Death Metal legend from Oslo, Norway. He, notoriously, was the getaway driver for a gang of nasties who murdered one of their competing metallers. Yeah I know some of the "beefs" on the blogs get out of hand, but this is ridikulous! I DO like this record, particularly "Shifting Channels" which is dead sludgy and "Vortex" with it's Penderecki-styled male choir and churning sooper-stoopid riff. Snorre plays "Electrically powered Devices" too, they call them synths in neighbouring Estonia. The lyrics are delivered in classic cobwebbed monster style. It's about a million times more entertaining than the latest Indie Rock toss, and you sense that, even though it's clearly not meant to affect YOU (the diehard crew ONLY), there's something at stake. Or at the stake.

Lightning Bolt:Lightning Bolt

And this came courtesy of Portugal's very own Jose Marmeleira, but I also noticed the charming David Stubbs thumbing them. All their artwork looks like this, a pile up of Bosch and Baselitz. I can identify too the guiding hand of Mary Jane. This isn't death-metal like the other two releases. Jonathon Selzer, another former editor of Terrorizor, has that genre pegged as THE font for interesting Rock of the last 5 years. He may be right. The Strokes-stoked garage-band revival was stymied by being too avowedly retro. Other sources of new Rock? Japan has plenty but it's too hippy and feedback-fixated for me (granted I've only heard some Boredoms, Magical Power Mako and Acid Mothers Temple) and the whole God Speed You Black Emperor!!!/Jackie O Motherfucker wotsit, while cool, is too worthy and too beatnik. Making friends here! Lightning Bolt sound like a supremely cultured metal band. Their spiritual forebears are more Creedence Clearwater Revival than Iron Maiden, though they share with metal those insanely quick arpegiatted riffs (NOT stabs, riffs). You're going to howl at me, but the structure of the LB stuff reminds me of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto, particularly those extended, clockwork harpsichord solos. I got pilloried by the massive for this the other night ("11" and that), but it's all ringtones at the end of the day.

Old Man Gloom:Seminar III.

Last, and best of all was this, which I was tipped off about by the aforementioned Selzer, who looks like he may be reneging on the promise of sending me a batch of OMG mp3s (no worries mate, I've bought it now!) This record is utterly brilliant. Once again, like the Thorns fantastically portentous, a refreshing change from the flippant. This lot are from the States, but once again defiantly Metal. While the artwork of the Thorns screams Fincher's "Seven', these svelte sci-fi graphics, gracing sepia-tinted shots of the grand canyon, place it somewhere else iconographically, perhaps Tarsem's "The Cell". The one half-hour track on Seminar III is a slow-burning bad vibe epic peppered with movie samples. The first 5 minutes or so you don't hear anything at all! This crew have carried on where Black Sabbath's first LP left off. I'm going out on a limb here, but this may be as an important record as Tortoise's debut. SLOOOOOW and HEAVY! Highly reccommended.

The curious thing about these records is that, while they're not as instantly gratifying as dat latest garridge 12", I keep finding myself returning to them to listen a little more closely. They're cussed wee bastards, difficult to get a handle on, and that's a high compliment.

5 DJ Premier Classics.

I keep twitching at my lace curtains and filtering the phone-calls but I've yet to be contacted by any high-end record company lawyers. In fact, and please bear this in mind all you badass solicitors, I've sold quite a few records for you folk. The usual rejoinder. Blah blah blah. You know me, in more trouble than Paddington Bear!

Not going to get to wordy about this lot; I'm acquainted with these tracks better sonically than culturally, and I've said quite enough this week. Ya get me! This is a great DJ Premier site if you want to find out more about the all-conquering genius of Premo. Here is my selection of truly wonderful, vaguely obscure, Premier productions. Premier defined the mid-range woomph of hip-hop, and he's done lots of productions for loads of folk. Practically anyone who showed up at D&D Studios with a rhyme sheet got a nice little beat to walk over.

1. Jeru the Damaja: Me, Not the Paper (Remix)
The best Jeru track I've heard. Took me an age to track it down, as it doesn't seem to have an orthodox release. Sheer beauty.

2. OC: My World
Won this on a bid at eBay, then the seller turned out to be two blocks away (Pete at Smallfish!). I like Time's Up too, but I think thats someone else, not Premier.

3. Lady of Rage: Some Shit
This really busts out! She's one sassy lady.

4. Sunnyside: Finsta Bundy
It's unclear whether this is Premo or not. Ego Trip seem to believe it is. Actually the beats are better than the rap, but that sound perfectly captures the sensation of steam rising off summer-hot streets.

5. All City: The Actual
A joint production between Pete Rock and Premo, a rare example of a super-partnership actually working. Check those stabs! The LP is a bit so-so. I found this 12" on my recent NYC jaunt.

The Story of The Stones.

1. "She's The Boss" Mick Jagger (1964)

Made a couple of years before he got wrapped up in the travelling circus that was The Rolling Stones. Produced by Jean-Paul Gregorakus the greek ex-pat who was to soar as the owner of the french free-jazz label BYG. The prodigal genius Bill Laswell (aged only 12 here) took the helm for Jagger's merengue-influenced "Pass de Pineapple", a nod and a wink to Harry Belafonte's proto-metal track "Pass dat Coconut". "She's the Boss" is every bit the stone classic, and it's no surprise that when Jagger met Keith Richards in 1965 at a pool party thrown by Reg Presley of The Troggs in the leafy suburb of Richmond, that the two should hit it off so splendidly. Jagger, but a glimmer in the eye of the entertainment industry, nevertheless to Richards (who had just ditched soprano sax for the ukelele) a star! The party has become legend for an impromptu set of folk strumming by one John Hammond, later to gain notoriety as Bob Dylan's muscular accountant,and also of course for the tragic death of Brian Jones. No-one could calculate the influence which the ethnomusicologist Jones, an authority on gagaku, might have had on the evolution of The Stones. Those fine legs on the cover belong to none other than natural blonde and biscuit heiress Jane Asher, who was singlehandedly responsible for turning Mick onto the work of AMM and Pierre Schaeffer.

2. "Goats Head Soup" The Rolling Stones (1965)

The first of the Stone's quickfire trio of albums all released before the fall of 1966, "Steel Wheels" and "Their Satanic Majesties Request" fulfilling the triumvirate. London was swinging with Peter Sellers, Mini-skirts, Carnaby Street Boutiques, David Bailey and the nascent Techno scene. "Goats Head Soup" benefitted from the rock-solid rhythm section of Carlton and Aston Barratt, who Jagger and Richards had met at a shebeen in Brixton with Kristeen Keilor and John Profumo. The Stones steeped in the rare Appalachian, Bluesgrass and Hillbilly 7"s which their accordianist Mick Hucknall picked up from American sailors on barges moored in Grenwich. We all know the classics off this record: "Wild Horses", with it's bewitching harmonica solo from Eric Clapton (later of The Yardbirds and Blodwyn Pig), "Under Cover of the Night" whose steely riff amped the hysteria of a million ponytailed girls and their anthem, possibly THE ANTHEM of the sixties "Dancing in the Street", a duet with the young David Jones (later Bowie) the track later appearing on his Pin-Ups LP and subsequently covered by Motown's Martha Reeves and The Vandellas. These weren't LPs so much as experiences encapsulating the joie de vivre and unfettered sexuality of the times.

3. "Exile on Main Street" (1968)

Aston and Carlton's Visa ran out and they were deported back to Ghana where they later were to appear on The Travelling Willburys "Edikanfo"LP produced by Brian Eno and released on the EG label. The band were at the height of a debauched lifestyle, ritually murdering butterflies in Green Park, the subject of a two hour documentary by french "auteur" Claude Chabrol, gorging themselves endlessly on Mars Bars, driving Rolls Royce's into swimming-pools (a tableau later reinacted by the Joy Division tribute band Oasis on their "Tattva" LP cover), sharing girlfiends with Rod Stewart (and other politicans), and throwing impromptu seances at their holiday homes in Mustique and in the Atlas mountains of Bulgaria. Nothing could come in the way of their barbarous and licentious lifestyle, accordingly, and echoing other earlier Rock follies like Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk", ABBA's "The Arrival" and Ringo Starr's "Just 16" "Exile on Main Street" proved to be their "Sandanista". Stretched over 6 LPs and an accompanying 4-track reel AND an interactive DVD the album set new standards for self-indulgence. Ron Wood, formerly the conductor for Deep Purple, even had his own record which consumers were soon to discard, though which now ironically fetches huge sums at Mod record fares. Ocean Colour Scene amongst it's noted advocates. Amid the massed street choirs and saxaphone solos there lurked a solid R'n'B album. Let us not forget the classics off this LP: "Angie", written by the lovestruck Jagger for Patti, then wife of Dr.John and "19th Nervous Breakdown", penned by their new bass player Bill Wyman for latest amour Jerry Hall, Bryan Ferry of Quiet Sun's ex. All the while production handled by the cheroot-smoking hawaain-shirt attired Steven Stapleton.

4. "Between the Buttons" 1969

...and then THIS. Resplendent in it's crayfish ghoulash cover, painstakingly wrought by the young Keith Floyd. Back to Basics indeed. A lean buzzing rock'n'roll masterpiece. A true classic. Firstly gone is Bill Wyman, over a royalties tustle, fleeing to Majorca where he set up house with Mandy Smith, former flame of Kevin Ayers (now running the Airline Virgin Atlantic) a relationship of such durability in the fickle world of showbiz that it's often compared to that of Goldie Hawn and Bruce Willis. And In comes Shuggie Otis. Possibly The Stones most consistent LP, songs seemed to flow into one another in almost operatic spleandour. Richard's bareknuckled polyrhythmic riffing aided by his dalliance with Richard Hell guitarist Bob Quine. Yet once again as the lead track says "It's only Rock'n'Roll (but I like it)". My own personal favourite on this record was the Gram Parsons influenced country singalong "Just Fade Away", originally a cover of a Woody Allen tune, before gaining fame sung by Buddy Holly for a charming TDK advert. "Between the Buttons" proving that The Stones were a true album band while packed to the gills with CLASSIC singles "Tumbling Dice", tearing down the house with it's reggae stylings and "Get off of my cloud" with its theremin solo (often absurdly ignored by more self-conciously outre histories). Jagger and Richards were there at least a year before Lothar and the Hand People, and give me Jagger's theremin over Jonathon Richman's anyday!

5. "Let it Bleed" 1971

After Jagger's terrible motorbike accident in 1970 broke their rhythm the Stones took a year off before recording again, this time in the comfort of record boss Richard Branson's South African manor house. Vocals were handled by a Charlie Watts. An established saxophonist on the London Free Jazz circuit, Watts had played with Mike Figgis and Terry Day in The People Band, gracing their now difficult to find "Karoybin" LP before founding the early Prag Vec with Ian Penman and Ridley Scott. Watt's low croon fitted perfectly with The Stones early disco ballads elevating tracks like "Parachute Woman" and "Who needs Yesterday's papers" from sketchy bar-room jazz into full-blown epics. Jagger is famously credited as playing "Triangle" on this LP, though it's rumoured that he actually handled most of drummer Moe Tucker's parts as well as contributing lyrics to flesh out the record's Fascist/Gastronomic themes.

6. Flowers (1973)

With Flowers The Stones underlined that in spite of their connections with other bands on the scene they were an island unto themselves. A compilation of album-only cuts might have seemed a regressive move, but the re-played re-made takes of "Sweet Black Angel", dedicated to Stokely Carmichael's mother Angela, and"Harlem Shuffle" a version of Chuck Berry's "My Ding a Ling" make it all seem worthwhile. The stunning cover of this LP was put together by underground cartoonist Robert Frank who Richards had met on the set of the Nic Roeg film "Ned Kelly". Frank had been reluctant to do the work, but was swayed by Richard's commitment to The White Panthers.

7. "Beggars Banquet" 1975

Coming out at the same time as David Bowie's Tin Machine project (proto-Branca noise stylings) this LP, named after the hip pub-rock label of the day saw The Stones sense the pre-echoes of punk-rock. The background to the record is complex. John Lennon had asked Jagger to join forces with his band The Small Faces for a TV rock'n'roll documentary provisionally entitled "Rock House", a show which sadly never saw the light of day. Many of the tracks off Beggar's Banquet, "Mother's Little Helper", "Little Red Rooster" and "Loving Cup" were written and recorded for the special, albeit in a folk vein. One of the benefits which their encounter brought was a conversation between Jagger and Lennon in which John informed Mick that playing live was a better experience in the new era of super-amplification. The Stones had avoided playing live since their negative experiences at Reading Festival in 1966. A bold re-invigorated band took the invitation to play Woodstock 2 alongside headliners The Sex Pistols. The appalling outcome is compellingly described in Marcello Carlin's unmissable collection "The Dark Stuff". One of the biker gang hired by Stones groupie Pamela Des Barres as security for the band was trapped inside a speaker stack and was cooked like an egg by the radiating volume, rescued only at the last minute by roadie Noddie Holder. As if in a moment the public's acceptance of Jagger and Richards' Prince-of-Peace-stylings evaporated. A Times leader of the day by the Queen's lepidopterist Sir Luke Davis entitled "Oi, Jagger!" perfectly caught the mood of the day. The versions of the tracks one can hear on some of the circulating bootlegs of that TV special, and those on the subsequent LP versions are starkly different. Producer Steve Albini pushing the sound into ever more corruscated abstraction, Jagger who once again handled the vocal duties, sounds like a puppy being pulled backwards through gorse. The Stones poorest selling LP, but a worthwhile exercise in that in curried them favour with punks like young pretender Elton John and Pink Floyd's Dave Mason.

8. Some Girls (1978)

A disco record, with reggae producer Tony Visconti at the helm. The Stones do disco! Bianca Jagger, Mick's recent bride, it had troubled many observers to notice, appeared to be breaking up the band. Bianca took a strong lead, casting a spell over the recording process, typically riding into the studio daily on a rented pony. She drafted in Australian Post-Punk stalwart the GREAT drummer Dave Mattacks and added the ailing Louis Jordan to the sax line-up. The process of the LP's recording was a legendarily painful labour with minds and tempers stretched by the demands it made on the band. Setting up their portable Rolling Stones studio, housed in an authentic London Double-Decker bus, in Los Angeles's Times Square, right outside the hip nightclub of the day Studio 54, work on the overdubs was slowed to a painful pace. It took engineer Daniel Lanois 3 years to complete the process as a steady stream of celebrities poured through the cramped space soaking up white powder and hospitality. Their number including Bob Dylan, Halston, Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsburg, The Residents, The Germs, Nicky Siano and The Fantastic Four. Still with results like the uber-boogie of "Sympathy for the Devil" no-one complained!

9. Spiral Scratch EP (1982)

Back to basics indeed! Adopting the pseudonym of The Buzzcocks The Stones recorded this four track in a bedroom in Manchester with the explicit intention of showing the Punks, by now distinctly running out of steam, how to REALLY rock'n'roll. The concept took on like wildfire. Eventually resulting in the steaming "Singles Going Steady" collection of hits from the hilarious accompanying comedy TV show "Never Mind the Rutles". It took Henry Rollins to point out to the whole world what we should have noticed earlier, "Orgasm Addict" was merely "Satisfaction" pitched up four on a technics deck. See also The Homosexuals for more rapacious secret Stones activity, this time with horn-player Bobby Keyes at the helm.

10. Aftermath (1985)

Aftermath indeed! The Stones' final studio LP when after 20 years together they wisely decided to chuck in the towel. A fond looking-back over two decades of life in the limelight. For the heroic lead track "Under my thumb" Jagger used the Fairlight Oberheim sampler to manipulate the voice of his recently departed friend Peter Tosh into a ghostly duet from beyond the grave. On the exquisite adieu "Let it Bleed" fulsome backing vocals were provided by Captain Beefheart's quartet of bad girls the GTOs (Merry Clayton, Anita Pallenberg, Joanna Lumley and Marianne Faithful) firmly putting pay to the rumour that The Stones were a bunch of macho sexist twerps. Denouements in rock as fine as this are thin on the ground.

Special Thanks to Michelangelo Matos.

Sunny Ade.

Sunny Ade gets my vote over Fela Kuti anyday. There's too much redundancy in Fela's music, saxaphones and organs meandering all over the place. Shaggy ain't my thing. While the political ire and philosophical stance of something like "Kalakuta Republic" are rousing, in preference I'll take the sheer sonic thrill of Tony Allen's edge-of-climax drum pans on the more "superficial" dance craze record "Open and Close". That record retains the JB's hyper-tense instrumental dynamics and one-mind co-operation, without degenerating into marajuana miasma.

Sunny Ade's records are more quietly and keenly thrilling than Fela's (all stomp and bluster). The "rush" dynamic centres on the way the pedal steel guitar soars over the busy knitted bed of talking drums, one of the most exciting instrument sounds in music, up there with Thelonius Monk's piano-being-thrown-down-a-mineshaft vamps and Bob Dylan's ham-fisted yet wildly ennervated harmonica. Every time I hear it I get uncontrollable shivers wracking my body.

Sunny Ade probably made more records than Sun Ra. The catalogue numbers of the three I have on his Sunny Alade Records label stretch up to 25 between 1974 and 1981, obviously that doesn't include his manifold international releases and equally constant output since 1981 (22 years ago fer chrissakes!). There's a record out this year, still using the same template, which kicks arse! One thing about Fela, and this is in spite of apologisers for records like "Perambulator" and "Army Arrangement" (the domestic mix natch), is that he only made halfway decent records with the Egypt 80. Juju (and Fuji) bandleaders come into the spotlight from time to time, Ebeneezer Obey, Dele Abioudun, Shina Peters, Segun Adewale and Barrister- but none of their work touchs the magnificent peaks found on Ade's records. A cheap jab at Ade would be to say all his records sound the same. In fact very often the same Yoruban chants, melodies, riffs and songs (even) are recycled. I prefer to see this as an endless evolving quest for perfection, each re-version racking up the tension. The same criticism gets levelled at James Brown, and the closer one tunes in, the greater differences become apparent.

The first Sunny Ade record I bought was "Juju Music", the first in the trilogy he made for Island. It's truly marvellous. There's alot of spite directed at world music stars getting "chi-chi" in Paris, having their fangs pulled out, getting washed out with synthesisers etc. But the work Martin Meissonier did with Sunny Ade is pretty much exemplary. "Juju Music" is one of the most successful "Fourth World" records made. Synths are set to bleep and chatter. Talking drums become chromatic and abstract. The groove elevates off the desert road into a low orbit. Great too is the 12" Waka Mix of "Jah Funmi", even bleepier and more abstract, vocals sucked through the pinprick eyes of the dub. This is apparently available once again on a new CD which has just been reissued, er, you do the work.

"Synchro System" is disappointing. Island didn't get their new Marley (what a dopey idea!) and packed the tracks into twelve small suitcases. SO Talking Heads filched the high concept of "Juju Music" for "Remain in Light", but thats no excuse to turn in a West African Noo Wave "Fear of Music" (yikes, sounds great on paper!) There's a nice Nigerian-only release "Synchro Series", Meissonier at the helm, but which is the same tunes stretched out over half LP sides. And "Aura", well it's very flat, a duff. It's a shame in many ways because drum machines don't NECESSARILY spell the end for African music (there's alot of great African music which uses them and makes a merit of them, one off-the-cuff example being Cheb Khaled's "Hada Raykoum"), it's just that in this instance the musical dynamics are all wrong. I recently heard mention of Ade's Soundtrack to Robert Altman's movie "O.C. and Stiggs" (which he and his band feature in too) which is supposed to be as far out as the aforementioned records. If you think you'd like the Juju Dub sound, also track down the Dele Abiodun "Confrontation" LP on Earthworks.

Which brings me to this. I was trying to fathom how Sunny Ade must have felt being sucked into the spaceship that is the pan-global arm of the record business only to be beamed back down a few years later. Journalists don't tend to talk about industry machinations. What one reads in the press nowadays tends to be "advertorial" (picked up this word yesterday at a celeb hacks picnic, me serving drinks in a tight black suit), writing to give "luft" to a record. One blows a big multicoloured bubble, slips the CD in it at one's last gasp with the tip of one's tongue, and it sails over the city. As a wee kid I was shocked when I found out the opinions expressed by some music writers were not actually their own, but a response to the marketing department or "owed" to the record company. Aw Boo Hoo!* Sometimes though, looking at the real-politik of artist/company dynamics can be very psychedelic. Psychedelic like a walk down the high street. Lets have a look at the cover of these three domestic releases for clues...

Firstly check out the absolutely stunning cover of this record. Voices in my head give me a hard time about being a "record fanboy", but take this exquisite object. Sitting in a bargain bin for £7 sterling. It's come all the way here from Lagos, maybe on an old cargo liner. It's from 1974. I was three then! It's a rich physical object, not pokey undersize and sterile like a CD. Look at Sunny Ade the young buck. This is his first record on his OWN label. He does look slightly cocky, but also tender. An insouciant smile. He wasn't as massive in Nigeria as he would soon become. He looks like he's sitting on a bench on Hampstead Heath. Wearing that cool jigsaw shirt on and natty brown leather boots, western style. He's looking beyond the boundaries of Nigeria already. However it's an image for his home market. "Look at me!", it says fixing the camera/viewer, "I'm International, I'll be a big star, just you see!"

This one is from 1980. We have Ade in ethnic garb, he's "King" Sunny Ade now. Radiating happiness and success. A generous buoyant mini-afro. A huge star at home. Now a figure operating on a cosmic level, as great men and women often believe they are. Eyes now off 45 degrees left, dwelling in the delight of his own status. "Nothing can stop me!", he feels.

Then this, which is widely acknowledged (along with "Bobby") to be his classic recording. It's from 1981. Here at the absolute pinnacle of his success. "Aura" the final chapter of his dalliance with Island comes a couple of years later in 1983. If you ask me though, he's SEEN the future. He knows it's not going to work out on the international level. The smile has gone. His scar fully visible. His hair cut back. His clothes dusty superfly. And his eyes, how different, now turned stage-left back to Nigeria. Wiser. Hurt. Figuring how best to go from here. Crashing down to earth. Sunny Ade has never been a politicised musician (like Fela) but one senses "The Message" hinted at in the title; "There is more to life than this..."

If you get the chance to see Sunny Ade live jump at the opportunity. I saw him in the Queen Elizabeth hall in 1989. The place packed with respectable-looking ex-pats, dressed up to the nines, cooly seated to witness their ambassador. I danced fervently and frenetically through the three hour concert looking for all the world like a spastic insect (hey didn't we all!), attracting many embarassed and disapproving looks, though no-one minded really. Awesome music!

David Sylvian's Haircuts.

The swinging professor swiped at my knuckles with his clear plastic shatterproof ruler: "You're essay is late. TOO LATE!" Before tossing it cruelly in the bin. Finney and Reynolds were smarming away at the front. Finney's desk is SO tidy, he has a dedicated metal tin for his pencil shavings. I was ordered out of class, shutting the mottled glass door behind me. Luka was in the hallway. I can't stand that kid. We're both losers, but hanging out with him just because everyone else hates us, mmm, doesn't seem right. By the way he ignores me I know he's thinking the same thing. What's he doing out here? Only bought in a whole load of larvae in a tobacco tin! The prof shouted, "I told you not to bring bugs to school", Luka cried, he said but they're a beautiful emerald green sir. They'd hate my essay on David Sylvian anyway. No Deleuze and Guitarry. I'd be sent in front of the head Dr. Penman. The Punman, as he's called round the playground. He'd make me stand there, not talk, get his fit secretary to set me some Post-Structural shit to read. Damn those books are hard. It's a shame, cos it was a good piece, well grounded in a thorough understanding of New-Wave History and the relevant philosophical currents. I liked it...

1.Quiet Life.

Early shag. Image of late Bolan or Jagger. Moneyed rock. Tremendous body and bounce. Good platinum bleach, no roots visible.

2.Gentlemen prefer Polaroids.

That heavy fringe, ooh la la! Once again lovely body. Must be using a nice conditioner, perhaps Paul Mitchell. Strong right to left combing. A stylistic negotiation of Haircut 100, punk tonsure and glam. Possible mop-top revival with a twist. Good thorough bleach.

3.Later Japan.

A "confessional" hair-cut. Less Glam than Jeff Lynne. A real low-point. Possibly too much Flux and Mutability. You need a new look David!

4.Ghosts.

Light from above for a superb contrast. Roots showing. More unkempt, possibly been thinned out a bit for that "just-got-out-of-bed" look. Ooh don't smoke David, it does terrible things to your hair...

5.Brilliant Trees.

...like this. Very bad split ends. The difference between the "just-got-out-of-bed" look and looking like you just got out of bed. Possibly keen to let the roots grow out a bit. A new look in the works? Been advised of the damage long-term peroxide application can cause?

6.Secrets of the Beehive.

The first signs of the natural brunette look. Hair tucked neatly behind the ears in a business-like manner. The artist.

7.Dead Bees on a Cake.

Out of the blue a Jimmy Page lord of darkness look. Grunge revivalism. Possibly not washed recently. Crude but effective.

8.Everything and Nothing.

Back to basics again, phew! More of a shear than a cut. You've got to let that thick hair free!

9.Blemish.

Cobain meets suburban hip-hop and........a hat? Grey hairs? Widow's peak peaking?

So there you have it. David Sylvian's entire career in a nutshell. There are the records, but ultimately I believe this to be a more illuminating exercise, above all those LP titles refer to the cuts not the agenda. Just call me Raymonde!

Son et Lumiere Records.

I bought these, I can't remember where, in character as a crazed Black Dog fan. Also because I loved the graphics on the cover. Recently I saw the "Here History Began" one selling for lots of money (blah blah blah, yawn yawn yawn). They both feature the same production crew, Music composed by Georges Delerue and "the harmonious play of light" by Mr. Gaston Papeloux, the technical adviser to the project. They're dated 1961.

This one is the souvenir for tourists attending the light show at The Karnak Temples. I've stayed in Thebes and it's a great place. Big hello to the crew from Thebes!

This one is for the Cairo show. In case you didn't know, a "Son et Lumiere" show is when, at night, these ancient sights are illuminated with garish multi-coloured lights and local unemployed actors perform various historical situations for a gang of goofy tourists. All the while featuring this camp soundtrack, voice of the Gods/Desert, full orchestra etc. Nice!

The TWANBOC Rock Pack.

(in rocking chair on elevated porch, glass of bourbon in hand)

Hi y'all! You can't serve up rock music mixed down like dance. Ugh! (spits out chewing tobacco) Here it is, the TWANBOC Rock Pack! A ready-assembled Jukebox. Hip folk may have these. Just add cold beer, loose women and a turbo hot-rod. Failing that a cup of tea will do. The general idea is to convince dance-centric Europeans of the validity of ROCK! This (ahem) is the quintessential rock experience, proving there's nothing more illuminating in any instance than the real thing. My Dad once took me to Madame Butterfly to impress on me the value of opera. He would have done better to tying me to a chair for The Ring Cycle (the first record he bought as a 12 year old!) Omissions, well yes, but it's about inclusions no? Neal Hegarty and John Spencer have been emailing me, begging to be included, but I'm like CHILL!

1) Numbers: I'm Shy
"Slap that Nu No Wave sticker on it" as lovely Nathalie Nixed might say. This band actually lack No Wave's cold hard abstraction. You'd think otherwise from the PR. Brilliant staccato punk boogie. This is brand new last year. Buy the CD off Tigerbeat or Artrocker.

2) Scars: Horrorshow
This is off the classic FAST records compilation. Victorian gothic post-punk from Edinburgh. Gravediggers to a man. Once again post-punk's fusioneer-ing trans-cultural progadelica is absent. This ROCKS. Scars later did an okey-doke mascara-laden LP. Only noticed today that the lyrics are some 6th form Clockwork Orange drivel. Whatever!

3) Minutemen: Cut
Check my bro' Scott Somedisco's pithy Minutemen review. Cut is my fave track of theirs. Hear what the fuss is all about. Alot of the SST classics are still (somehow) available on CD or LP. Why the Minutemen seem important to me is that they manage to be supremely ARTISTIC without referring to the cliches of art music. No sitars, No studio trickery, just plain 'ol dynamic RAWK.

4) Shellac: In a Minute
Albini's got a firm handle on "The Aesthetics of Rock" As in what makes it function. Post-Big Black his idea was Rock as hard boogie. Hence Rapeman covers of ZZ Top's Just Got Paid. This makes perfect sense. Rock works through IMPACT. Twin that with pared down "turn on a dime" riddim and you're in hog heaven.

I guess we're talking *funk* but outside of Black Rock, self-conscious funk in rock tends to come over lame. As in Red Hot Chili Peppers. Actually I wonder (in turn) whether James Brown thought what he was doing was Rock. Funk is a teleological invention yunnuh. I always liked the argument that Reggae slowed down in response to the American Hard Rock of the seventies. Certainly records like Scratch's Blackboard Jungle Dub are very HEAVY. All this spools down into the issue of Hip-Hop feeding crunchy rock samples into the mix. I don't mean The Beastie Boys coercing Bonham. Diamond D uses plenty of hard-boogying rock breaks.

5) Gary Glitter: Rock'n'Roll Part 2
Just great. There's an interesting connection between this and Konga's leopard-skin Hoodoo Afro-Funk. Same producer. Toop spotted this. Oh and the KLF built blah blah blah.

6) The Waitresses: Slide
Off the superb Akron Ohio punk compilation on Stiff. Great scratch'n'sniff rubber tyre on the cover! Once again serious boogie!

7) Moby Grape: Omaha
Spence's motorcycle wall of death ride. Love the way it all gets skip-py at the end.

8) The Charlatans: Codeine
Not Tim Burgess's outfit....you'll be relieved to know. This lot were hanging in San Fran circa 1966, pre-The Grateful Dead. Seminal Haight-Ashbury stuff. The Charlatans used to dress as period American gents. Handlebar moustaches, wide brim hats and double-barrelled shot guns.

9) Crazy Horse: I'll get by
Crazy Horse's first alluded to in Albini's epochal review of Slint's Spiderland in Melody Maker. Forget Neil Young!

10) Led Zeppelin: When the Levee Breaks
Amplification innit. Is it just me or is this hugely psychedelic music? Harmonicas the size of fridge freezers. Maybe Lester Bangs didn't like it, and yes it's pompous but I think history's been kind to the Zep. I always remember Robert Plant talking about his favourite records in Q (!) and there, spread on the floor was Big Black's Songs about Fu***** and Neu! 75. I said Hi to Jimmy Page in the Windsor branch of Our Price in 1987. He signed my twin-necked strat (not).

(sun sinking behind the desert horizon, silhouetted joshua trees, cicadas) Well I hope y'all enjoyed the Rock Pack. This'll be the last *SPECIAL* for a while. Be sure to come back now! Peace.

John Foxx through a faulty Microscope.

There’s been a bit of to-ing and fro-ing between k-punk and me about Ultravox and John Foxx. Mark rates them very highly. He’s got Foxx figured tightly into the now clearly identifiable k-punk aesthetic. Me, I giggled. Ultravox! I know Conny Plank produced Systems of Romance and a couple of post-Foxx records they did, clearly marking them as HIP (weary of this) but struggled to get Midge Ure’s ugly mug out of my mind. Band-aid! Vienna! I also sniggered because Mark seemed upset/adamant/furious that Foxx “never got his dues”. Actually I have a similar lack of respect for Gary Numan. I don’t care that both have probably got the whole Detroit crew bigging them up. I’m tough like that…..

I thought I’d do my research. It’s not enough to just mock from the sidelines (ever), also you never know what you’re missing. Over the last month I’ve managed to find the Systems of Romance LP and the Foxx Metamatic solo LP. Very cheap!

What greets you immediately is the overwhelming similarity this stuff bears to Station to Station/Low/Heroes-era Bowie. Foxx is very much a Bowie clone and the sound is way indebted to the production Eno did on those records. It is possible that poor Foxx had a handle on the same influences which Bowie did (Anthony Newley, Neu75, etc) and that as an Englishman just ended up sounding the same without the pipes to give it an operatic twist like Billy McKenzie did. I’m not sure I believe that. Bowie was such an awesomely inescapable influence in those days. Even Scott Walker did a Bowie record* With this LP I have a suspicion that someone at Island said: “C’mon lets really escape Bowie’s shadow, return-to-the-source if you like, and go record with Conny Plank in Germany.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with more-of-the-same. If innovation was the only important thing we’d be lumped with 4,000,000,000,000,000 avant-garde records which all sounded the same (except to closely trained ears). Systems of Romance, particularly Quiet Men, Dislocation and Slow Motion (Mark’s fave tracks incidentally) are great electric-blue leather-clad piston-pump steam funk micro-masterpieces. Sometimes I wish they stretch out a bit, certain passages are dying to be fed into an AKAI.

If I’m left with one opinion about the record, however, it’s that it’s a bit stodgy. I can quite see why John Foxx decided to sugar off and make this:

Which is quite stunning in parts, particularly “Plaza”. “Plaza” is great. You want to hear it’s off-kilter slabby analogue textures amplified very loudly. Big like an equestrian statue in Milan. Bowie is still here, but he’s been transcended. Nearly. Possibly Numan too, though no desire is evident to fill every nook and cranny of the sound-space like Gary's. Strangely the tonalities are tres Star Trek/Forbidden Planet. “He’s a liquid” also excellent. And “Underpass”.

One final thing about Foxx. I find there’s this aura about him, constructed by fans, very like that around Peter Gabriel. Interesting to see Peter Gabriel’s III in Reynolds’ list. Thing is Gabriel (like Foxx) is in denial of his historic loci. Gabriel’s III featured all kinds of very “then” figures, like Fripp engaged in a making very “then” music (arty proggy post-punk), but somehow the lead artist, perhaps by being so self-obsessed, cut the work off from the rest of culture. I find this quite off-putting. The other way of regarding this is that in some way these people are SO BRILLIANT they’re refashioning culture in their image, or that they’re leading the pack in some way. You don’t turn such comments on The Beatles for instance. Actually a similar cult exists around another closely concurrent “auteur” David Sylvian, mainly at the hands of Goldie and David Toop, and this (for some reason) I don’t find so creepy.

Actually it’s nice to focus on this era a bit. Critics have failed to get a handle on Electro-clash (I’d recommend Linda Lamb’s Hot Room and Solvent’s My Radio). Maybe that’s because it’s happened outside the existing hegemony of the critical canon (Ha! Ha! Are my night classes paying off?). Of course that’s what makes it both preposterous and fresh at once. It’s always nice in these situations to join-the-dots. After 1987 I spent 6 years joining dots. It can take you to nice places, both in the real and unreal worlds. You meet interesting people and spirits too.

Boris Vian. Who he?

I thought what with Penman perpetually spouting Post-Structuralist thought I’d better swot up a little or get left behind. Stick to the catalogue numbers I hear you say!

My darling beautiful wife, who is a Fellow at Magdalen, Oxford (read “jolly clever”) leant me a book: Twentieth Century French Philosophy by Prof. Eric Matthews. An elegantly written guide to the historical currents of French Philosophy. I started on the chapter Levinas, Derrida and Lyotard but then thought I’d be better getting a bit of a run up, and went back one chapter to the Structuralists. I was quite pleased that I knew a little more than I first thought of this wrecking crew. Saussure (Langue, Parole etc), Levi-Strauss (The Raw and the Uncooked), Lacan (Mirror phase) and Foucault (The Order of Things). So that’s where I am right now. I heartily recommend the book, which is a sort of Idiots Guide on Steroids.

What really struck me however was the photo on the cover. Who were these beatniks? It turned out to be Sartre (and his wife) hanging out with Boris Vian (and his wife). The French are hip like that. Could you see Bertrand Russell chilling with Coltrane, or even Gunther Schuller for that matter? There’s that great line Miles had about Sartre: “Sartre said Juliette and I looked really cool together.”

Here’s the cover of my Boris Vian record, which I picked up in an open-air market in a village in the South of France on my honeymoon for 50F. Not exactly a rare record I’m sure:

I know only a little bit about Vian. He was one of those infinitely connected nodes. Amazing how much we know about Jamaican Culture in Britain but how little about that of our (extremely wonderful and interesting neighbours). If I was the editor of The Wire I’d look into things like this.

Vian was the dude who fixed up all the Jazz for Paris in the 40s and 50s. He brought Ellington over to France. I imagine he probably brought Miles over too. I bet he was sloping around on set of Ascenseur a l’Echaffaud (the film Miles did the soundtrack to). He’s the early reincarnation of that perennial French figure, the Afro-American culture importer. In the late 60s we have Daniel Caux bringing over the Free crew for the Shandar stuff and in the 90s we have Laurent Garnier getting the Detroit lot over. Interestingly one of Daniel Caux’s later enthusiasms was Detroit Techno. He made a TV programme about it. Vian was also a poet.

This record is classic/typical French music-hall stuff. Fais-Moi Mal Johnny is a superbly sexist anthem, featuring a breathless Chiquita screaming for Johnny to “be bad to her” (er like it says in the title). There are also some great baubled stop/start hinkly-dinkly instrumentals which sound like the car on the cover looks. Isn’t it funny to compare Aphex in his tank to Vian in this car?

French Music hall isn’t really to my taste, but I guess it’s fun. The other day at one of my favourite stores Harold Moore Records Barry “Dame Edna Everedge” Humphries had offloaded his ENORMOUS collection of French Music Hall records. Bet you didn’t know he was a massive expert on the subject! So there we go. From Hardcore Theory back to gossiping about transgressive Australians in 5 moves.

10 East-Coast Post-Punk Left-Overs 1977-1981.

Hi! It’s me wasting yet more energy on this pale shadow of real-life intercourse. Force-feeding you casual fellows with my fan-boy drivel. Trading precious gems with anonymous strangers for nuts. Pimping this imaginary identity of mine on the WWW. It’s my birthday today! Blows out one candle and the cell goes black. On a positive note it all works out cheaper than a psychoanalysts bill.

I’ve put these records together because they’re all lesser-known right-coast rarities. This “special-a-roonie” matches the Krautrock one I did a few thousand years ago, and is the conceptual sister of the Launderette spiel. Not necessarily classics but drooly record collector stuff. All have splendid sleeves. I take pride in the fact that I spent under £10 on all of these records, apart from the Y Pants one which was a bit dearer. On topic I’m coming to New York in June so if you fancy buying me a bud drop me a line. I am extremely abnormal.

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impLOG: Holland Tunnel Dive (Lust/Unlust 1980)
As we say in advertising, put your best stuff at the front. Come in with a bang! Stick out yer tits! I’m going to single-handedly take credit for the re-discovery of this record, cos why not? I found it in La Dame Blanche in Paris. I paid 50 francs for it, that’s about $6.4528. At last my research into the lack-lustre Love of Life Orchestra paid off! This release is affiliated with them (more on this later)......

I showed it to my (even sadder) friend Gwen, who always pretends to have seen every record before, but is sometimes unconvincing, tell-tale signs include an undisguisable curiosity in the eyes. Gwen introduced Autechre to Bernard Parmegiani by the way. I also put it on a tape for Mr. Reynolds which he sweetly told me he played at his Millennium party (a donkey, a duck and a bottle of meths- don’t knock it!), thus time-stamping his introduction to the track. GOTCHA! Simon recently told me he saw it racked up for $40 in NYC. I also sold a copy for a song to Jon at Atlas (Small Fish) Records, another standing stone at the Post-Punk Party.

Here are the lyrics, amongst my favorites of any song EVER, which lace a pre-Night Drive Thru Babylon sub-Suicide grubby synth drum pattern. The speaker is contemplating a plunge into the Holland Tunnel/Underworld. It’s the one of the original modern “death/motor” records, giving Warm Leatherette a good run for it’s money:

No Support,
No Bridges to cross,
No Wood to burn,
Nothing to learn,

No Soul,
No Love,
No Dinner tonight,
No Woman,
No Cry,
No Respect,
No Equal rights,

No Garden to hoe,
No Seed to sow,
No Food in the fridge,
No TV shows,

No Emotion,
No Devotion,
No Trips to the ocean,
No Time to play,
No Lays,
No Way,
No News,
No Blues,
Nothing to lose,

No Soap,
No Car,
No Cigar,

Leaving for the other side
Going to Take a Holland Tunnel Dive
Oh what a ride
Going to Take a Holland Tunnel Dive

And after the WHOOSH of the car accelerating down the tunnel, then you get this improbably placed afrobeat-styled saxophone solo. You wouldn’t like it………;-)

Love of Life Orchestra: Geneva (Lust/Unlust 1980)
While we’re on the subject of LOLO we might as well address the issue. Start sniffing around this era and pretty quickly you come across LOLO. Peter Gordon co-produces Arthur Russell’s Go Bang*5. LOLO are Laurie Anderson’s backing group. Collaborations with David Byrne. David Van Tieghem pops up everywhere. Lower East-side hipsters. I’ve always assumed that this should mean their records are good and so keep buying them, even when they disappoint. I have Geneva, Casino and the Extended Niceties 12”. And they’re all CRAP! Ha ha. Well that’s only semi-fair. Geneva sounds exactly like Tortoise would do if they were naffer. Terrible cheesy synth lines over pub/prog/punk squeezings. There are moments, a couple of nice Reich-ian minimal piano tunes on Casino. But really I’m glad I persist. See Above and below.

Peter Gordon: Star Jaws (Lovely 1977)
On the uptown Lovely records label who also put out sterner avant-garde stuff by Alvin Curran, Gordon Mumma and Robert Ashley. All these 10 Post-Punk records are distinctly European, like an unfunny-era Woody Allen movie. This one is no exception. The killer track on this is the semi-daft ‘Intervallic Expansion’ which floors everyone I play it to and sounds like a Canterbury outfit (think The Soft Machine, Caravan etc) on a Jazz Funk tip. Almost like Teletubbies music (I bet the guy who scored that is some Mike Batt-esque 70s wash-up with a rural studio in Stratford-upon-Avon). The dance guys love this track. Wonderful. Why such terrible inconsistency Peter?

Polyrock: Polyrock (RCA 1980)
I searched for this record for ages and then was disappointed when I found it. I’m actually listening to it now, and its GREAT! That’s nice. The reason for my interest was that Phillip Glass and Kurt Munkasci (his engineer) produce it. I think Phillip Glass is cool, and I hate The Wire’s knee-jerk line that the hairier guys like La Monte and Terry Riley are somehow more valid than Phil. If you want hairy, check out Phil’s heavy early recordings on Chatham Square. I have a number of these and they’re rock hard. I’ve always respected Brian Eno for sticking to his guns and defending Phillip Glass. Glass was the guy who really started pushing the amplified thing and the Rock textures (yeah I know La Monte had a “jet-plane roar” of his own). But unlike La Monte who “drew-a-line-and-followed-it”/”arse-froze in-the-sixties” (depending on which person you believe) Phil moved on. He did a fucking opera! I love that Laurie Anderson story about how after Einstein on the Beach everyone she met was “working on their opera”. I’m well up for any Postmodernism if it serves to deconstruct social and cultural boundaries.

Back to the record in question. It’s like a mildly atonal version of The Feelies “Crazy Rhythms”, and hell it’s good. Which brings me to…..

The Feelies: Crazy Rhythms (Stiff 1980)
This is a really tremendous record and one of the rare instances when my affection for music has infected all my mates. As 19 year-olds we would get really stoned and listen to this, A trip as good as the nascent acid-house. Everyone loved it. I was strong-armed into finding copies for loads of people and spent my life taping it under threat. Later Feelies records are also very good. The Good Earth in particular is wonderful. Amazingly I found a lot of entrenched rockist anti-feeling towards the record. There’s almost no dirty feedback on it. Mercer and Million plugged their guitar straight into the mixing desk, so it has an exquisite up-close ‘headphone’ sound. Maybe this record was also vilified for the band’s preppy look, quite sweetly nutty and in a “real” and “street” way, though surely spawning the likes of (yuk!) Ween. Anton Fier went on arty projects like The Golden Palaminos (never delivered as far as I could make out). A classic!

Pylon: Gyrate (Armageddon 1980)
Pylon were from Athens Georgia, progeny of the same scene that gave us the B52s, R.E.M and Love Tractor (anyone?). There are quite strong comparisons with them and the B52s. Drop the B52s slightly off-putting NOO WAVE personality shtick and mix in a little Neu! and you get Pylon. I’ve always believed (perhaps erroneously) that the New Zealand bunch got as much out of Pylon as they did The Feelies. (Back to work Jon!) Pylon are ripe for re-discovery, the whole day-glo PP zeitgeist is incredibly Pylon. Pylon Pylon Pylon Pylon. Also great is the ‘Cool’ 10” EP and their swansong LP Chomp which I’ve unaccountably mislaid. As with all these records, if they were reissued tossrags like Q and Mojo would give them *** (three stars out of five) and witter on about historical specificity and their status as minor curios. IGNORE. This stuff is awesome. I once sent Pylon a postcard in 1990, I wonder if they got it?

Glenn Branca: Lesson One (99 1980)
Glen’s classics got buried in Ed Bahlman’s 99 personality problems for years. Ascension has just got a re-issue it’s a very STRONG record. It’s a piece of ART, right down to the Longo cover. Also great, a bit less strident and maybe more approachable is Lesson One which is like a cleaner Sonic Youth circa Daydream Nation and the gay twin of Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Trio. Branca is very cool.

Y Pants: Y Pants (99 1980)
Here’s another 99 records classic. The Y Pants are nice. They meet every year on each-others birthdays. They’re New York’s answer to the Raincoats with better production. Instruments used here include Toy Piano and Baritone Ukelele. Branca did this record (not Bahlman) and I believe it’s been reissued with other Y Pants stuff on a CD recently. So check it out….

DNA: A Taste of DNA (Rough Trade 1981)
Utterly brilliant EP. No Wave at it’s most inspired and infectious. Blonde Redhead, the track gets a particular mention……er, because its really good!

Arto/Neto: Pini Pini (Ze 1979)
Subject of a famous anecdote in which Blixa “swamp-rat” Bargeld accosts Arto “then grown-up” Lindsay after a NYC Neubauten gig and screams (distorting smack-tortured face) “I have Pini Pini.” The quote wrongly relayed in one un-namable publication (The Wire) with the record title in question as “Penny Penny”.

What a mad record! Neto (who he?) delivers a bizarre story about a woman (the Pini in question) getting married to a “bull-cow’. All the while Arto is having random epileptic convulsions on his guitar in the background. There’s a secret partner to this record on Marion Brown’s Geechee Recollections LP. Get your coat and get hunting!

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Many records ommitted (wan tes me! you wind up ded!) but the aforementioned deemed apposite. You lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky, people. Altogether to the tune of SPAM: "Blog, Blog, Blog, Blog, Blog! Blog, Blog, Blog, Blog, Blog! Blog, Blog, Blog, Blog, Blog! Blog, Blog, Blog, Blog, Blog! Blog, Blog, Blog, Blog, Blog!"

Sooth.

He’s a crafty old bastard that Reynolds. Tell me the future he says. If I do, can I get an A&R job Simon?

The blissed-out one’s idea of an update of his points-to-the-future article in The Lime Lizard in 1994 has put me in a right spin. Do I ignore the entry (as in: “I’m not telling you!”) but then risk looking the copyist when his collation is exactly the same as mine would have been? Do I trust him to accurately credit my ideas? (Paranoid as ever) Will he be upset if…….I dunno? Do I want to be strong-armed into laying all my best cards on the table anyway?

After thinking long and hard on the matter I’ve decided that I would blog up here my responses. That way no one will be under the impression that any of this comes from him (So difficult to escape your shadow oh master!) Also I’m hoping (raises eyes to the skies and gives supplication) that what was once full, and which thus is rendered empty will again be filled anew. Also, now we’re talking stocks and shares, If I big up my own collection, it can only increase it’s own worth (I’m as crafty as the best of them!) My only restraint here being that I’m not going to name names in many cases, only genres. It’s getting to easy for all you eBay/Gemm jockeys.

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MY 1994 POINTERS:
As a general rule the following prove that it’s never a good idea to believe that culture is capable of much imagination, and that in my case (and please forgive this little arrogance) it’s better to assume that my own tastes are going to be everyone else’s in ten years time. (I know, I know, horrible to say, but in this instance it’s true):

WHAT I SAID:

1) BIG BAND CUT UP.
Now no laughing in the back! I pitched this to every man and his dog. People on the tube. Strangers in the park. I saw some kind of collision happening between Ellington (one of my heroes), Ra and Hip-Hop/Dance Music. Actually the new Herbert album proves me to be a little “on” here as I guess do The Cinematic Orchestra and a few Coldcut things. However all of these are decidedly dreadful and perfect examples of being careful what you wish for.

2) SONGWRITING IN DANCE MUSIC.
Ask Simon. I was hitting him with this ages ago (now buried somewhere in an EEC Mountain size deluge of emails probably). Slightly came to fruition with The Beta Band, Badly Drawn Boy (which went horribly wrong just before the LP, which actually I like in a Nick Drake-y kind of way), Leila (oh no!), Shantel and even The Horrorist (c/o Reynolds)

WHAT I WAS LISTENING TO:

1) POST-PUNK
A Director I worked for gave me his entire record collection (10 boxes, cos I asked, amazing!) It was a perfect time capsule of 1979-1983 full of both hip stuff (Ze, Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Zapp, late B52s, Vivien Goldman, The Associates) and okey doke not bad stuff (Fun Boy Three, Kid Creole, Imagination, Lynx). It mashed up nicely with the Tricky Kid/Massive Attack stuff I was listening too, and really made me dig up my own Post-Punk collection (to give you an idea, 10 of the tracks of Launderette were stuff I owned well before this)

2) AFRICAN MUSIC
That’s a whole other story. One day (maybe in November when I’m off this course) I’m gonna give you the full Director’s cut. We’ll call it “Africa” month.

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OK you smart-arsed git, I hear you saying, that was probably all complete bollocks. We don’t trust you, you, you slimy turd! If you’re so f****** clever tell us where it’s all going to go next, without going crying to your so-called-friend Simon “Celebrity Journalist” Reynolds and cribbing his stuff you pathetic clone. (And you think some people are harsh on me, listen to my inner voice!)

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COME IN YOUR TIME IS UP:

First of all lets mop up:

1) Arthur Russell: A god of course, but bled dry with the exception of reissues of scraps (I have these and they’re not worthy of your attention) and The Tower of Meaning and Instrumentals LPs (the word boring springs to mind).
2) Ardkore: Sad to say but……..
3) Terry Callier: Enough folk-isms already!
4) Lee Perry: There are so many other brilliant Jamaican Roots Producers. Give Lee a rest.
5) The Velvet Underground: The greatest band ever (of course!) but now giving too much weight to diverse stuff like Tony Conrad’s re-hashes, endless Angus MacLise re-issues (I had a MacLise poem read at my wedding, but you know one LP would do), Lou Reed projects and by extention the eighth wave of Velvet’s copyists (now on a minimalist tip).
6) Musique Concrete.
7) David Axelrod.

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LIFE IN THE OLD DOG YET:

1) Post-Punk
2) Disco.

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THE TRAIN IS LEAVING THE STATION.

Retro revivals gathering steam:

1) Blissed Out: Poor old Reynolds, he’s been dreading this. Just look at the cover of the new Jockey Slut, I quote: ”My Bloody Valentine. How the wall of sound space-rockers have shaped today.”
2) Early Dancehall: Soul Jazz have decided early Dancehall is now dead enough to be safe for clod-hopping Beatniks.

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……….IS THE NEW NIGERIA/ETHIOPIA

OK you’ve got the Strut (RIP) Comps and the Shrine Comps and the Fela Kuti Box Sets and the entire Etiopiques series etc etc

1) Mali
2) Guinea
3) Zimbabwe
4) South Africa
Cloudy heads will be unlikey to latch onto the sweet gentle music of the Congo, Senegal and Madagascar. They like it dark, hard and weird.

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……IS THE NEW BRAZIL
Argentina.

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RETRO DANCE.

OK so you’ve found all those old Ardkore records….now what?

1) Early UK Garage.
Time marches on…
2)) Late Chicago.
After Acid, before Relief.
3) Gloomcore.
This one is going to keep fingers dusty!
4) Early New York House.
As per my entry in the Gangsta Techno thing.

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SO HIP MY FINGERS ACHE TYPING IT

1) Vanity 6 and early Prince
2) Bleep’n’Bass
3) The Associates
4) The Minutemen
5) Glen Brown
6) Gil Evans (toss away your Ra!)
7) Early Einsturzende Neubauten.
8) Early 80s Conny Plank (I have a new cache of this stuff, snicker….)
9) Rock on 99 Records (as in NOT dance)
10) Francois Rabbath
11) Harry Hosono.
12) The Black Dog (the early work, am gonna work on Ken to get this reissued)
13) DJ Premier
14) Egyptian Lover
15) Juice Box
16) Retroactive
17) Field Recordings (the height of capitalist-commodity-feitishisation-sickness i know!)
18) Bollywood
19) Classical Music
etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc

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WHO I WILL ALWAYS HOLD IN THE HIGHEST ESTEEM DESPITE THEIR ENDLESS FLOGGING TO DEATH AT THE QUALITY END OF THINGS/PERENNIALS:

1) Jimi Hendrix (as I was saying to Michelangelo the other day…..)
2) Can
3) Neu
4) La Monte Young (How art thou guru?)

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How do I feel? Naked! Spent! Fragile! In need of a stiff drink! I’ve held a bit back just so I can go, aaah but that was one of the things I didn’t mention. There are also going to be things I’ve completely forgotten about, I’ve only been fairly rigorous putting this together. I only hope all you other saddos are as generous to Reynolds with your nest-eggs as I’ve been and so I get some shit back in return. As I was whingeing to Tim, it’s all give-give-give at TWANBOC!

The Other.

“All three of Lewiston’s Bali albums contain versions of kecak (pronounced ‘ket-chak’), the percussive chant of massed male voices which is the island’s musical signature in the minds of many listeners. Though kecak accompanies a depiction of a battle scene from the Ramayana epic, it is of comparatively recent vintage. Kecak’s first appearance in the 1930’s was inspired by a German artist named Walter Spies. According to Lewiston, “He noted the tendency of moneyed visitors of the day, such as Charlie Chaplin, to zone out when presented with an all-night recital of shadow puppetry or dance. Spies suggested to his Balinese friends that a condensed piece that was representative of the island’s arts might go over with greater success, He was fascinated with the ‘chak’ chorus of sanghyang dedari, a ritual in which two prepubescent girls entered trance states and became spirit vessels for heavenly maidens.” So it was that a dance of exorcism featuring a crowd of 200 men arrayed in concentric circles, hunched over in imitation of monkeys became simultaneously one of the islands most accessible and thrilling musical experiences.” Richard Henderson excerpt form an article on the Nonesuch Explorer series The Wire May 2003.

Richard Henderson is no slouch. He has a great handle on the genre of field recordings. However in the re-telling of this story (which I’ve heard before) he doesn’t really go for the jugular. The essence of the tale is of the foreigner re-fashioning another culture’s musical heritage with the express intention of giving the tourists what they really want. It’s when set against the backdrop of colonialism and “The Other” that the story gets its pungency. The music of Bali is generally very polite “ultra-culture”. However, the 1930s tourists (and presumably those since) want to see a “primitive” culture. The Balinese obliged and redesign an innocent sounding piece (two prepubescent girls singing in hocket) into a Hollywood-esque “bones-through-the-nose” monkey dance starring 200 men. In consequence the foreigners get their fix of the Heart of Darkness.

I’m actually not so cynical as to view Walter Spies as an exploiter, a vicious 1st World manipulator. I believe the Balinese saw the remake as an effective way of stimulating the tourist trade. Although on the other hand it’s reminiscent of other German interventions like Fritz Lang’s obscure homo-erotic Gaugin-esque South Seas movie “Tabu” (the photos of the Balinese dance in question have a strong art-deco look too!), Leni Riefenstahl’s portraits of the Nubians, and er…..the invasion of Poland.*

Reading the story again made me flash on one of the other great head-turners of field recording lore, which in conjunction with the Balinese story will tell you more than you’ll ever need to know about culture, authenticity and desire. It’s from a recording made by Colin Turnbull who, along with David Lewsiton, was one of the great British ethnomusicologists, entitled Music of the Rain Forest Pygmies of the North-East Congo. I’m going to quote from the sleevenotes:

“The single recording of the Twa pygmoids, south of the Ituri, in the Kivu mountains, is a final example of acculturation at its most unexpected. With the help of a Watussi friend, I located some of the Twa, who long ago had common origins with the Mbuti of the Ituri. Their music however was almost pure Watussi. After pleading for a really old song, one of the great religious songs of the past, an ancient lady finally agreed, but with hesitation, saying it was so old and highly sacred.” To the tune of Oh My Darling Clementine.

*Hey we invaded Iraq!

Crusties laugh last.

World Domination Enterprises: “Lets Play Domination”.

For me that’s the pinnacle of anarcho-squat artistry. This 1988 LP popped recently into my head by way of personal recollection of hustling my way backstage to meet The Doms in the late eighties. It’s cover, a boardroom style montage of the band in acid-house neon, was put together by artist Slim Smith. Maybe a pseudonym derived from the Studio One crooner, either way squarely hinting at the perennial adherence to Reggae of those folk with dogs on strings. I actually saw a show of Slim Smith’s at a squat warehouse art happening in Camden a few years later. Low Production values were in evidence.

I’m in no way trying to kick start the “blissed-out” revival by foisting this on you. That’s the league of A.R.Kane, Loop and My Bloody Valentine that, yes, Reynolds was championing back-in-the-day, although if my memory serves me correctly Simon had World Dom pegged as “Arsequake” his brilliant coterie of artists employing sphincter-rupturing bass frequencies, top of the chart being, natch, The Butthole Surfers. Indeed, I’m gonna remind him here (he’s such a tirelessly voracious modernist that I bet he never checks his back-pages) that he once reviewed a live show World Dom did at a tube station. I think I dropped my rattle after reading the review.

Actually this record is the Grandaddy of the kind of squat Jungle/Ardkore/Ragga mash-up practised by DJ Scud and his crew (check last years Roots, Rock, Ravers EP) and now The Bug (Kevin Martin’s avant-ragga record which this piece is also an arse-about-tit review of). Lets Play Domination was light years ahead of it’s time. Sure there were other crusties on the dub tip, the awful Rhyth-mites (way too straight a reading fellows) and if you went to On-U gigs you found the audience was 95% white rastas drinking cider; but World Dom deep-fried their riddims in white noise till the edges went crispy, taking the Metal Box template and stripping the P.I.L. collage of any ironic post-modernism, serving it up as headfuck noize for its own sake. Actually maybe they had more common with The Ruts, more straight-forward barrelling. That’s just what Scud does, yunnuh mash-up the place to mentasm-tastic bad ass bass.

There’s a hell of a lot more to the record than dub. Lots of covers got fed into the blender, U.Roy’s “Jah Jah call you”, L.L.Cool J’s “I can’t live without my Radio” (my secret party trick is that I can deliver this whole track, stand me on the table with the salt and pepper and make me sing for my supper) and Lipps Inc’s ace “Funkytown”. However unlike Will and Gareth, Keith Dobson could also pen crackers like Asbestos Lead Asbestos. But mainly it’s the SOUND. Denatured disembowled grumbling out-of-tune bass, skeetering rattling rolling drums all topped with post-Gang-of-Four/Chic ice cold chicken-scratch feedback guitar. Naturally Keith’s troubled vocals got lashings of echo, though listen to the studio masters (no I haven’t……….yet) and you still can’t understand entirely what he’s saying, he’s gargling mice. They did a live dub LP after this “Love from Lead City”, which my bro had a copy of.

Which brings me to The Bug’s “Pressure”, in which I detect a touch of the free-festival. Firstly check John Eden’s great interview with Kevin here. Straight up I like the fact that Martin is totally aware that this is NOT a real ragga record. Indeed the cast of chatters is (to be very cruel) a bunch of “renta-raggas”. I used to have that Daddy Freddy/Asher D LP on Profile and also the Daddy Freddy LP in red and yellow (matched the wall-paper). Freddy had the reputation of being the fastest ragga chatter in the world at one stage. That’s like Alvin Lee of Ten Year’s After being the celebrated as the fastest guitarist in the world. Completely missing the point. Daddy Freddy was always a fusioneer, never really a chatter from the yard. His other fusion stuff? Well he did Daddy Freddy’s Echo Chamber with Beats International (Norman Cook’s pre-Fatboy Slim outfit) which I used to play out pre-ragga-jungle, I used to like that track. Though even then (and actually I wince when I admit this, cos it shows what an absolutely pathetic hipster I was even then) I tippexed the Beats International logo off the front of the 12” ha, ha. He also contributed to the Mango Volume 2 Ragga Hip-Hop record. Well Freddy’s up for this project with Kevin, and I think (uncruelly) he’s well cut out for the job because clearly Martin needed to rely on open-minded contributors. The others, Roger Robinson, Toastie Taylor, Paul St.Hilaire, Wayne Lonesome etc I’ve never heard of. This is because no-one has heard of them. But they do a bloody good job. Apparently Martin’s got something lined up with Cutty Ranks (giggle at John going “Fuck!”), but in truth Cutty’s vocal chords are like spent knicker elastic these days (though I wouldn’t say that to his face, wink). I bet the Cutter is more open to UK producers than most, after all his massive “Stopper” was the work of the UK-based Fashion imprint.

The real point is that AT LAST someone has had the guts and brains to do a Ragga influenced record. Shit I was gonna have to roll up my sleeves, get personal with Pro-Tools and record my own bloody one. See we’ve had (since P.I.L’s Metal box in 1979) nearly 25 years of art rock influenced by reggae and not a single attempt to get to grips with Ragga. And you know what a lot of that fake Reggae has been bloody brilliant, and doesn’t in the least detract from the original. Kev’s riddims are extremely interesting, and he’s totally upfront about them not being “for real”. I’m only hammering away at this because this is the first hurdle suckers are gonna have to leap. He’s actually grasped how Ragga’s rhythmic inflection differs from Reggae’s. Well done mate.

While I’m trying to draw a line between this and the World Dom record, the best tracks on Pressure are actually not in-yer-face at all, but rather quiet, nodding and slinky. There’s a strong influence here of the Rhythm & Sound Tikiman stuff. Tikiman was also another “renta-ragga” and those 10’ EPs differed by sticking to digi-dub as a rhythmic template, but you know what, I loved them. It’s a hipster’s escape clause to say something works better as something else (Undie as Art-Rock, etc) but when the artist in question (ex- God rocker and the perpetrator of Techno-Animal’s Re-Entry) is clearly a bit of an old shapeshifter then I think it’s excusable. So here it is the best Techno record you’re gonna hear all year.

Gangsta Techno.

Without further ado I give you...........the TWANBOC Gangsta Techno Megamix. I've been fulminating over this for weeks now and have only now (literally) cleared a space on my desk and dusted down the 1200s. So if you don't do mp3s maybe now is the time to start. I reccommend Winamp if you're from the Darkside, iTunes if you're on the Mac (bless!)

0.00. Little Lenny: Bum Flick (Shocking Vibes)
Just to get you in the right frame of mind

0.34. 4 Most Poets: Reasons 2 B Dismal (Nu Groove)
If you ask me the next Retro hot-spot will be early Strictly Rhythm and Nu Groove. Also labels like 4th Floor, Atmosphere and Bonesbreaks. Early stuff by Lenny Dee, Joey Beltram, Critical Rhythm, Bobby Konders, the Burrells. This stuff is TOO HIP!

2.58. Eddie "Flashin" Fowlkes: Goodbye Kiss (Metroplex)
The grimiest nasty bit of junk to come out of Detroit. BOOO YAAA! From 1986. Thats fucking ages ago.

5.04. A Guy Called Gerald: All Night Baby (Juice Box)
Juice Box (sighs).......Midst his revival as a gun-toting Junglist (we're talking 28-Gun Bad Boy Era Gerald here) the big man looks up at Manchester's grey sky. The clouds part and God winks at him. Gerald rushes home and lays down this utterly presicient writhing bitch of a jacktrack. This is no Ricky Rouge stuff (his smooth Chicago alter-ego on Juice Box) this is a bit of "pure-blooded-Rottweiler-knawed" BLAADCLAAT Gangsta Techno.

7.50. New Horizons: Slamdown (500 Rekords)
From the epochal Scrap Iron Dubs No.1 EP the mutha.....brings to mind cruising in a SUV through a deserted dockland industrial estate.....er......in Jamaica.

11.47. Armand Van Helden: Witchdoktor (Strictly Rhythm)
From Armand, that rarity, the American B-Boy who likes house. Even more transgressive than an American Indie fan liking Hip-Hop ;-)

14.25. Mood II Swing: I see you Dancing (Groove On)
To briefly cool your fuddled heads. This is Gangsta Techno as in SHWAGGERING and SHEXY like a Rose Royce tune. (Hi Luka!)

17.00. Steve Poindexter: State of Shock (Chicago Underground)
Impossible to know which one of Poindexter's tunes to put on. Check his trademark whistles. NASTY. From 1991....and compare it to this.....

20.17. Youngster and 116: Baby Pulse (Promo)
......which sounds so incredibly Chicago. Right down to the backspins, brittle clackety clack 808s, and "Baby" vocal hook. Slightly kicked myself that I didn't squeeze Wizzbit's Jam Hot in, which is even more Chi-town-esque. But hey that's how it goes when you're on da flow.

21.56. Armando: 1991 (Muzique)
And just to ram the point home (crikey this is becoming yet more didactic than a Derrick May mix) here's Armando from my fave Chicago label Muzique, who only ever put out blinding records.

23.12. 2nd II None: Bulldozer (Road)
Brilliant haunting Techno inna UK Garage style. Sounds like Mayday's Phantom or some such except it's got that RUDE edge, slightly blistering basline, not speccy. Hard to imagine an MC on this one though.

25.45. Wiley: Igloo (Promo)
From the don himself, proving this Gangsta Techno conjecture of mine (WHICH I SEEM TO NEED TO HAVE TO REMIND SOME PEOPLE WAS MY FECKING IDEA, AND IF IT NEEDS TO BE WIDELY DISTRIBUTED SHOULD BE DONE WITH MY FECKIN NAME ATTACHED) is not so peripheral. Wiley is getting his chops from Ragga. That rhythmic inflection is pure Batty Rider. Gangsta seen!

27.18. Coda: Bassline FM 1st March 2003 (Home Recording)
Just to clear the smoke from the room, and to remind everyone that the UK Garage here is really intended as nothing more than a backdrop to a bit of lyrical MC-ing. This is a great likkle bit, not from one of the big shows (hey don't be fooled by Luka's Radio Times-style listings, take the plunge, turn that dial) it's often the small crews where things are happening. Suprisingly mellow.

So there it is. Can I dress up like DJ Rupture and make like I'm famous, or should I stick to typing? Tell me. On second thoughts, diss me and I'll clean my gun pon your nose.

Can I park my Helicopter in your Fridge?

German music seems slightly off the agenda. The avant-garde inclined press who once touted it with ferocity are now vaguely abashed at its CONTENT. They presumably were excited by the fragile links to Darmstadt and concrete and didn't hear what the rest of us did. ATMOSPHERE. Furthermore the corpse of Krautrock has been flogged and flogged and flogged. The canon has been masterfully established by the likes of Julian Cope (albeit a very ROCK vision of this UN-ROCK/NON-ROCK/ANTI-ROCK) and you can get all of the stone tablets of Krautrock so depressingly easily. Don't think this is a snob talking. The sheer effort it took me to hunt down those holy grails before they were reissued en masse on CD and LP was Sisyphus-ian. It actually imparted to the music the mystery and power that was it's by right. I think people who can so casually pick this stuff up to keep one of their edges sharp need alot more imagination than I did to grasp this shit. I have experienced fewer depressing things in my life than seeing Neu! records on sale (reduced) in the window of hip boutiques.

With a view to re-mysterialise this music I've put together a list of 10 awesome Kraut records from my kick-arse archives didn't get trampled on in the goldrush, records alot of people may not know exist, records which I was often stumbling around in the dark when I picked up, records which didn't make Cope's (excellent) Krautrocksampler.

1. Phew: Phew

Phew was a Japenese chick who was flown to Germany in 1981 and put together with Can's Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit and genius producer Conny Plank. Clearly an attempt to reconstruct the original Can dynamic, with Phew as Damo. They made one record together on the PASS label which was, very early on (1991?) reissued to synch up with the release of a newer Phew record on Mute. That more recent LP was only OK. I have also seen a greyish black covered mid-period Phew record. Her eponymous debut, which I paid £4 for because the cover was mashed up (like I care!), is fucking fantastic. The production sound of this record is perfect. Like a Brancusi or a Ming Vase, it's perfect. Clean. Deep. Resonant. Tracks like Doze and Signal are often built on nothing more than a wobbling bass and cavernous chiming percussion. Phew herself is compelling.

2.Les Vampyrettes: Les Vampyrettes

Conny and Holger had a two oldtimers thing which must have run concurrently with the Dieter Moebius/Plank team. Called Les Vampyrettes. I wonder if there is more material by this group than this 12" which is certainly one of the most crucial records I own. This is a KILLER. If I played you this record you would turn to me and say "WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?" Biomutanten which fills only 2 centimeters of a whole12" side (now THAT'S style!) has strapped to it the largest bassline of any record I own. This bassline would crush Dillinja on his Vespa, this bassline would flatten Glen Brown's studio (except Glen never had his own), this bassline would give the Butthole Surfers an on-the-spot enema. Possibly the greatest record ever.

3.Michael Rother: Fernwarme

Why, when you are the greatest band the world has ever known, do your solo projects end up so spotty? I wished I could find some spark of the mighty Neu! on some of Dinger and Rother's solo projects. I have all the La Dusseldorf records, Dinger's band with his brother, even the terrible Los Individuellos (50p!), and his stuff never gells. Possibly slightly on the first La D. LP. This Rother LP is, in my opinion the best you're gonna get. He's pared up with Jaki Liebezeit, on "shlagzeug", to use Captain's Beefheart's phrase "I love those words". This record has a couple of quite sparkling tracks with dreamily hooky melodies, production still pleasently raw. Later Rother stuff vered into a bizarre New Age meets New Romantic hinterland.

4.Popol Vuh: Seligpreisung

Ha Ha! The greatest Popol Vuh record! Not re-issued, only saw it once and paid dearly for the pleasure of it's company. It's on the Kaiser's wunderbar Kosmische Kouriers label and always makes me think of Tom Verlaine's Television, such is the telepathic communion within the group. That's not something to be sneered at. Tanz on this LP is quite exquisite.

5.Manuel Gottsching: E2-E4

OK not an obscure record. Indeed the market was briefly flooded with reissues about 5 years ago. Naturally being either a very sad man, or incredibly hip, depending on what day you ask me about myself, I had this along time before. My copy has magic powers. It's really in here because Manuel Gottshing's later waveform pre-frippertronic guitar stuff gets pretty short shrift from old Cope-y. I have the GREAT Ash Ra Tempel IV Inventions and Dimensions LP with Manuel looking superbly goofy on the cover and I love it. And Cope don't. OK you know about the Sueno Latino>Derrick May Sueno Latino Remix>Carl Craig Sueno Remake. OK you know it got played in the Loft and about the whole dance-community's fawning realtionship with it. Its still a very lovely thing.

6.Roedelius: Jardin au Fou

Possibly the best record on the spotty Sky label (those Cluster and Eno things are OK though) this is a very gentle and lyrical record. Very un-elekronik like Cluster's stuff but quite charming. It has Roedelius making like Satie in a foggy orchard. Pastoral. Unpsychedelic. But Mysterious.

7.Deutshe Amerikanische Freundshaft: Die Klienen und Die Bosen

Not everything here could be strictly termed a Krautrock record. Krautrock is after all beards and VWs. But where do you draw the line? This LP may indeed be that line. None of the any other D.A.F stuff does much for me, including their kool Der Mussolini 12". But this record is a blinder, despite being pun(k)y it is also HAIRY. It's produced by Conny "The genius" Plank (who if you didn't know, dummy, produced for both Kraftwerk and Neu! as well as Bronx hip-hoppers Whodini fact fans) It's a forebodeingly intense record which flits from raw garage-punk with drum machines with tunes like Das Nacht Arbeit, the true blueprint for both Alec Empire, Big Black and The Jesus and Mary Chain (they loved this record) to stunning lopsided metronomik rock like Kinderfunk (one of my personal favorites). I like as well the fact that D.A.F were pupils of Joseph Bueys, surely one of the last century's coolest people.

8.Emtidi: Saat

I don't know much about this record. Its a Diter Dierks/Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser thing. It's on their Pilz label. It's a bit hippy dippy. Lyrics about "sitting on the grass on your arse". Included in herein in a deliberatley non-canonical fashion. Don't buy it. Buy some other queer German record you don't recognise. See if you can find anything by Gruppe (cos I can't) or anything decent by Floh de Cologne, or maybe Wallenstein made a good record? OPEN YOUR MINDS!

9.Konrad Schnitler: Gelb

Now this WAS a find! Gelb was put out by Konrad Schnitzler (ex-Tangerine Dream) in 1974 with Blau and Rot. Each were editions of 500. I've heard Blau, which people whisper about under motorway flyovers and on the "zug". Its not as good as this. All the arguments about Detroit being a satellite of Cologne make sense with the first un-named track off this record which I SWEAR sounds precisely like "The Beginning EP"-era Derrick May. In other words like his best stuff. I should have asked Derrick whether he had heard this when he used to ring me up (had to drop that one in). Maybe Juan has a copy.

10.Eroc: Eroc

And finally. I was really suprised to see that this has been reissued. It's been swilling around rather pathetically in a few bargain bins because nobody knows what the fuck it is, and they have all the Amon Duul, Can, Faust, Neu!, Harmonia, Guru Guru, Cosmic Couriers records they're ever gonna need to impress their mates. It was on Brain. Eroc was in some other band before, which I can't for the life of me remember was called. Norderland off this LP sports the most Wagnerian production of any track I know. It would be hilarious if it wasnt so staggering overpowering. Its sounds like a Avalanche in slow-motion destroying a tiny Alpine village.

So there it is, Pearls before Swine as usual. Some of these records it's not even worth dreaming about finding. Though you may get lucky on eBay or Gemm (which is quite astonishing if you haven't already checked it). If anyone of you so-called pros even dreams about ripping any of this shit off me I'll track you down and trample all-over you, and guys and gals if you see anything about these records ANYWHERE hereafter, just remember you heard it from the big daddy first! Auf Wiedersein!

Reggae Compilations.

This piece goes out to Paul Meme (find his bitchy letter to me in the archives). Paul gets his wrist smacked for describing TWANBOC as the true global villain, practically calling us a slave trader, coming on all Naomi Klein with a degree in reggae, when he wouldn't know his Channel One from his Studio One. His mum makes him wear earphones at home, she says turn down that racket Paul, he says, aw mum it's The Stranglers they're brill. He didn't have the courtesy to reply to my generous email or even my blog entry. So here by way of a mammoth fuck you to Paul, is a mini-guide to Dancehall Reggae Compilations. That'll learn him.

I love compilations. Especially if they're well put together. There is a certain kind of compilation which serves Jamaican music extremely well, one which is designed as a mop-up of the biggest recent hits from the yard. Often this is curated for the foreign market as a means of giving New York and London diaspora (especially, though not exclusively) a snapshot of what's happening back home.

The original model is of course Trojan's Tighten Up series, which went through upwards of 15 volumes. Its only real competitor being Syd Bucknor's Pama label with it's brilliant Hot Numbers Comps. With the success of Roots in the late seventies these round-ups must have seemed a bit anachronistic, especially when album-length reggae was being so excellently serviced by Island. The aesthetic of the "one-hit-wonder" which, while still dominating Jamaica, was abandoned abroad for a focus on particular Artists.

As soon as things went underground again (Lloyd Bradley gives the twin dates of Bob Marley death and Lee Perry's torching of The Black Ark) then the comp became valid once more.

Maybe the first Reggae comp in the form in which it exists today is the first Greensleeves Sampler. It featured Eek-A-Mouse's Wa do dem, Yellowman's Zugungzuguzungguzeng (draws breath) and Scientists Dematerialise. All licensed from different Yard labels.

The really dominant Dancehall reissue label throughout the 80s and up untill the early nineties was Jet Star. Their Reggae Hits compilations, divided one side chat, the other side lovers, were massive. Jet Star also issued 12"s of the tracks they licensed. You bought the comp, then went out and hunted down the real killa tunes, and then shopped the comp down at the M&V. This tended to be alot of work, and with the same tracks being issued by Jet Star on the single, the collector's instinct of wanting all material in it's original format and label was sort of pointless, though granted the better frequency response of phat 12" vinyl was sometimes seductive. Nowadays I just buy the comps, fuck it eh! It sometimes feels like a more genuine response, rather than faking proximity to the source by doing too much groundwork. Groundwork for me involved among other things taking the trip to Halfway Tree, Kingston myself in 1991 and visiting Jet Star in 1994.

The Jet Star Reggae Hits series soon ran alongside New York's Profile label's Dancehall Reggae compilations which were fucking great, put together by Bobby Konders, with a strict all killer no filler aesthetic. These were the years of Shabba Rank's ascendancy, when Hip-Hop was rubbing shoulders with Ragga. Also springing up were Greensleeves Ragga Ragga Ragga compilations which outshine their slightly spotty Mid-Price Reggae Hits series.

The absolute unquestionable don of Dancehall Reggae Compiling is the VP label. This is run buy the very senior Clive Chin, veteran of the great Impact label (who are being given the retro rub-down by Soul Jazz as we speak). The Strictly the Best compilations kick arse. You do have to be slightly careful as at the moment they're alternating volumes between the lovers (on even numbers) and chat (on odd numbers). So for example volumes 25, 27 and 29 are packed full of wkd sonx (as Bobby Gillespie would say) and surreal chatty nonsense, and 26 28 and 30 are a wee bit glutinous. VP also put out the yearly Reggae Gold compilations these are good, but too slim to really capture the excitement up close and are (once again) often too strongly pitched towards the lovers stuff for my tastes (the odd track can be nice though). And if that wasn't enough, slightly off the subject here, VP have also recently put out two completely incredible retro dancehall comps under the moniker Dancehall 101. These are essential purchases and piss on the Greensleeves Best of Early Dancehall comps, (which admittedly cover an earlier period). Once again in two volumes with a bloke leaning on the front of a car on the sleeve. I thought these were very lacklustre.

Compilations rock, and for musics which revolve around the "scenius" dynamic, as a format they just can't be beat. Don't be a scaredy-cat, jump in!

6 Great Mid-Period Hip-Hop LPs.

So here it is, the first proper guide to Hip-Hop's golden era put together by an avowed outsider, ahem. Why is it that people assume they can "get down with the programme" without looking like a complete tosser (Jennifer "from the block" Lopez, Tim "diggity" Westwood and not a few hip-hop hacks, you know who you are)? Its wickedy wack old bean......

So firstly it should be stated that the true medium of Hip-Hop is the 12". End of story. However unlike other 12" dominated genres like Disco, or Jungle, or Detroit Techno there are bundles of truly great Hip-Hop "elpees" which aren't chockablock full of filler or lame attempts to master a variety of different genres (step forward practically every dance artist who ever made a long-player). In spite of this, one of the main reasons I put this list together is that I get sick of hearing people reccommending long-playing drek by Jay Z (he's a great singles guy notwithstanding) or even 80 minute turds by the combined uber-gang of Mannie Fresh, Timbaland and The Neptunes (these dudes make hot singles and placate the industry with nearly-all-filler LPs, the only exceptions being Missy Elliott's 1st and 3rd LPs and Lil Wayne's "Tha Block is Hot")

All these records are sort of findable. Many of the ones I've purchased have been re-issues, hey I'm as lame as you are, and I won't be offering a companion CD to this article with the express intention that if you don't own any of these records you bloody well ought to shell out and support the artists, who unlike the platinum gang, are probably right back where they started from. This is quite explicitly a buyers guide. My only caveat being that the bootleggers are doing a good trade with this stuff. Oh and don't you dare slsk this stuff....I'll haunt you.

Anyway without further ado here is the list:

1. Black Moon: Enta da Stage (Wreck 1993)

Number One! This is a fucking great record for which the word gruff was practically invented. Not as immediately hooky as others in this list, it's "deep" heavy shit which should appeal to those after a true sonic fix. Strictly middle frequency stuff, not that the bass doesn't go boom, the production is as furrowed as the brows on the cover. Like some of these other records it's dominated by gruff male "hunched" yob-gang rapping. That's immediately a problem for some twee liberals, but so what, they're not a bunch of effete pansies, get over it. I don't hear sexism, maybe war between the sexes.... The disc was produced at D&D studios (generally viewed as the home of hip hop) where DJ Premier produced his slew of classics. Built at a time when the resources of Jazz-Funk samples must have appeared infinitely fecund. You can almost hear Da Beatminerz palpable excitement at these mahagony off-key breaks. It's suffused with sensi (smoked like a salmon), tinged with dancehall reggae (Black Moon occasionally flip into patois), and bolstered with low frequency bleeps. I could practically write an entire book about this one record (entitled "No Moon more Black"), I haven't even started talking about what they actually say...........

2. Diamond and the Psychotic Neurotics: Stunts, Blunts and Hip Hop (Chemistry 1992)

Number One! The best kept secret indeed! Diamond's loops and breaks are both deliciously scrumptious and pack more crunch than a transit full of frosties. I confess I'm not really a lyrics man. If you weren't born and raised in the States you'd be very hard pushed to get what he's going on about most of the time: "I shoot it like a Jammy in, girls get the pantys in, even with a fanny in I might win a grammy and, maybe I won't so I'll chill like the pope, see I'll never mope cos I know my shit is dope, like colombian fishscale, ask my man Ishmael, Diamond D got props like a Cop." OK it's fairly clear: metaphorically speaking he's a decent shot and the ladies like him, he might win an award for his music, but he's philosophical about it, having the cool demeanour of the catholic leader (who like Diamond is also purported to smoke pot), he knows his records are good, in fact they're even as good as excellent super-strong imported south-american marajuana, if you want a character reference just ask his friend Ishmael (who pipes up) "Diamond gets as many nods of respect from his colleagues in the field of rap music as a policeman has notebooks, aviator glasses, walky talkies and doughnuts."*The point is that this "ultra-compressed" poetry flows wonderfully over hard-rocking breaks, if the ideas pitched and poetic flow is moving slow enough for you to actually pick up whats being said then its a bad rap. As far as I can see its about turning language into sound, and to be honest as a foreigner and outsider I think you're uniquely placed to really get this back from hip-hop. You're not mired down in basketball gags, you just nod your head to the hypnotic flow. This record is my favourite for this kind of surreal obfuscation.

* Please will no swanky yankies try and pick up my mistakes.

3. Showbiz & AG: Runaway Slave (Payday 1992)

Showbiz and AG were affiliated with Diamond's Digging in the Crates collective, shortened to D.I.T.C. There is another famous D.I.T.C. LP by Lord Finesse. I've heard it and I don't rate it. I have the Fat Joe one "Represent", thats alright. Digging in the Crates is the act of thumbing through second-hand records. We mentioned earlier that the records in this window of time are the results of sampling a certain kind of music. No it isn't Jazz rap, as Sacha Frere Jones joked (the only person to write about Hip Hop with any style, excepting the original shaolin David Toop) that if critics had paid attention to hip hop five years previous and the records it sampled then, they could have called it TV Rap. Well that's a bit of a conceit. Being a nobber record collector I know that you travel through the field of music in the same way as you cross a terrain, that's to say from connected node to connected node. This lot went from James Brown to Tower of Power, The Delfonics, John Handy, Flaming Ember, Kleer, George Duke and Billy Cobham. (All get sample dues on the Diamond LP). This is the window of time I'm referring too when i say (rather drily) Mid-Period. Quite quickly these guys ran out of sparkling hooky loops. They ended up ploughing through library records for breaks (hey great no sampling fees!) just because everything else has been bled dry. Signs of change? RZA going digital and ditching his Stax box-set and of course Timbaland. Runaway Slave, Great record by the way.

4. Gang Starr: Daily Operation (1992 Cooltempo)

May this serve as lesson to anyone a liitle too eager to write something off. I had an itinerant 1991 and therefore turned to tapes for my kicks. Three were on heavy rotation, a Charley Lee Dorsey comp (with nutty liner notes by Joe Strummer), The Ragga Twins "Reggae owes me Money" and Gang Starr's "Step in the Arena". That's a great record, quite clean in a way though. I remember my bro buying "Daily Operation" and thinking ("been there done that") and just ignoring the thing. Well guess what, I done screwed up. Just as mainstream interest in Gang Starr dried up so did Premier really master his art, bad timing Premo! The sheer style Premier brings to this record floated a thousand brilliant 12"s and the careers of Jeru the Damaja (whose "The Sun Rises in the East", distinguished by "Come Clean" nearly made it onto the Nearly list below), MOP, Nas and a raft of others. This record is a stone classic and "Hard to Earn" is great too. Premier is an effortlessly brilliant producer. His genius lies in his approach, not his raw materials, which means that practically every track is a winner.

5. A Tribe called Quest: The Low End Theory (1991 Zomba)

Once again wedged in the 1991-3 window and (like all of the LPs) sporting connections to the others. Exactly the same thing happened with this record. I had the (inferior) Daisy Age debut and overlooked this while my bro' picked it up, bastard! Possibly the biggest of these records commercially (Quest surfing the Jazz rap wave) and maybe the daddy. Ron Carter of CTI fame even lays down bass on "Verses from the Abstract"- but hey don't be fooled, this record isn't remotely "loungey" it's real skull cracking stuff. Best track "Show Business" with Diamond at the helm. Look out for a cameo by the nascent Busta Rhymes then of Leaders of the New School (whose TIME LP was also in the nearly Nearly list).

6= Main Source: Breaking Atoms (1991 Wild Pitch) / Ultramagnetic MCs: The Four Horsemen (1993 Wild Pitch)

A head-to-head here with these two on the WIld Pitch label. Would the person who stole my Wild Pitch singles comp kindly return it to me? Number 6 "joint" because they both score a 70% hit rate to the other records 95% (thats still awful high) but such is the kick of their greatest tracks that all is forgiven. The Main Source LP is loveable for the wounded masculinity of "Looking at the front door" and the storming "Just Hanging Out" with the Large Professor's gourgeous bouncy loop of Sister Nancy's "Bam Bam" and alot else besides. All these dudes know their ragga, just remember Shabba Ranks was riding very high at this stage, booming from all the best jeeps. The violent red, gold and green righteousness of reggae might have seemed a credible influence/direction following the daisy age dalliance. Those colo(u)rs, just look at these record covers!

Finally the Ultramagnetic MC's "The Four Horsemen", a nasty, sick, evil, fucked up record. This, I reckon is the point zero of Lapdance culture (not exactly something to celebrate but we can't avoid it vis "In da club"). I hear you with your Blowflys and 2 Live Crews, but maybe they're parochial sensations, also maybe they're nice people. Kool Keith is clearly not a "nice" man. This is somewhat different from these other records which all have a warm heart. Fans of concussive PCP Gabba, 4Hero era-Darkcore, and Sheffield Bleep and Bass should go straight to side D and the 4 track mash-up. It's hard to hear the joins on this killa symphony, the stabs seem slightly different track by track but thats the only clue you get to the cues. Keith goes yadda yadda in his bitchy whinge threatening rappers with just about every preposterous insult his stinking mind can concoct. Aaah lovely you've gotta hear it!!

So thats it. In true hip-hop style (indulge me readers) I'd like to give a shout out to a few people. Firstly Big Johnny Lyall from back-in-the day (now the Monarch of Scottish Hip-Hop and man behind the Scratch club, Johnny owns an original copy of the Main Source LP!) also Neil "Babes" (former UK Subbuteo champion and now watch that centre-forward digit on the 1200s! Neil hipped me to the Black Moon) and last but not least Phal "Bust-it-out" Cullum (keep rocking the funky breaks bad bwoy!). (weeps) I love you guys! (draws breath) I'm gonna wind it down before I get too carried away. So in conclusion I give you:

The "Nearly" List:

(Those records not quite hot enough to make the TWANBOC top 6, but which nonetheless are groovy) bear in mind this is a fraction of the possible candidates. Submit your faves and I'll blog 'em up baby.....

Del the Funky Homosapien: No Need for Alarm(1993 Elektra)


Better than his Daisy Age debut (that old cliche). King of the West coast Hieroglyphics crew and latterly Gorillaz MC (oh no!). This album fits our time period, has some ace tracks, but not enough. Cullum, who has the patience of a buddhist monk, will tell you I'm quite wrong. Features mysterious Parisian Toure.....

Souls of Mischief: 93 til Infinity (1993 Zomba)


More Hieroglyphics crew. Worth admission for the title track alone, a built on a 33rpm Billy Cobham track played at 45, but then you're wandering around a deserted cinema. Nah, its pretty OK.

KMD: Black Bastards (1993 Subverse)

Not as good as their Daisy Age debut, the brilliant "Mr.Hood" (I bought it the day it came out- haters!) but still pretty cool. This was bootlegged for years. The story goes that the record company freaked when they delivered it, dropped KMD and canned the LP. Doh!

Freestyle Fellowship: Inner City Griots (1993 Island)

This is any interesting record. Emblematic of this fecund moment of time. Freestyle Fellowship were a kind of improvising outfit, shades of The Last Poets. There is a touching/brave grassroots community feel to the record. Take those earlier comments about Reggae (vis routes from Aquarian rap) and times them by ten, not nihilistic like the Ultramagnetics record but in many ways as dark and foreboding. The rap on "Six Tray" has a Cronenburg/Crash styled theme, which is doubly dread in its context. These are AvantYobs with their faces pressed against the glass.

The Deeply Dysfunctional Stereolab Sleeve Tearer.

For the past six months a visit to the Camden Music and Video Exchange always meant confronting the trail of damage of North London's own "Ripper". A quick inspection of the Stereolab/Duophonic bin would reveal that some sicko had been tearing expensive second-hand Stereolab LP's in the top right-hand corner. Usually this was a gash an inch deep into the likes of "Emperor Tomato Ketchup" (on red vinyl). Record sleeve after record sleeve ruined. The staff told me they had to hook them out and sell them at reduced prices, now resorting to only putting a white sleeve in the bin, lambasted with taunts to that elusive ripper. I pressed them for any anecdotes, were there any suspects? One guy was apparently in the frame, but they "didn't want to cast aspersions." Quite right this loser could turn nasty! Leaving the shop I felt a distinct unease behind the counter.....come on, it wasn't me!

Are you an AvantYob or a Beatnik?

I was going to build this piece out of responses to The Astronaut's Notepad's enthusiasm for what Jon describes as AvantFolk. Still waiting for Jon's comps to arrive, I wandered down to Rough Trade and checked a couple of the records out, the one by the No Neck Blues Band and the Jackie O Motherfucker record. I liked them, the music is a folky free-jazz low-fi rock mash-up, very droney and stretched out. What was really salient, to my mind was the way they've chosen to record themselves. It sounds like the band is crouched in one corner of the recording studio and one mic is pointed in their general direction. The model? Sounds like an ethnographic recording of a tribe of hairy refuseniks, the CD is an aural document, the recording of a lifestyle in opposition to Global Capitalism. Maybe what is at the heart of this approach is a belief that to enter into the mechanics of recording is to enter into into the same machinations as perpetrated by the state. They may be right? But perhaps to even record and market your "product" you're entering the same arena, especially now as so many of today's tiny-indies are distantly owned by the big record labels. It's the same political conundrum which many a group has got themselves appealingly screwed-up about.

Jon's piece was characterised by a nervousness about what he may feel is Beatnik music. Music which gives a damn, which wears it's heart on it's sleeve, which tries to battle through the minefield of contradictions. Beatnik music is of course more than that, it comes with a whole baggage of cultural markers. Beatnik music has as it's mirror image music which we could term AvantYob, both essentially have as their target a notion of mainstream society. Lets break out both the cliches:

Beatnik-------------vs------------AvantYob
-----------------------------------------------
Bourgeois-------------------------Prole
Conscious-------------------------Unconcious
Constructive----------------------Destructive
Refusal----------------------------Ignorance
Literate----------------------------Illiterate
Meditated -------------------------Instinctive
Audible----------------------------Noisy
Harmonious----------------------Cacophonous
Angelic----------------------------Diabolic
Celebrity--------------------------Scenius
CD/LP-----------------------------12"/7"

I just find it amazing how clearly music can be slotted into one or other of these categories. The notion of Beatniks being Celebrities and AvantYobs not, might seem to be a contradiction. In some ways it is, but the true AvantYob is just one interlocking gear in a machine. Some AvantYobs, when they become famous become apologists, forever trying to illustrate how they slot into the scene. The AvantYob is often turned into a celebrity by the lazy Beatnik Music Press transposing it's value system onto the AvantYobs. Fame can be thrilling for the AvantYob, but as soon as they forget their implication in the machine they wither like flower without soil, the Beatnik, on the other hand can flourish. Having said all this you can't keep a good AvantYob down, and there is such a thing as grassroots celebrity, in which AvantYobs emerge as "figureheads" by virtue of being so feckin' brilliant. All this relates to Brian Eno's now "well kicked-around" notion of "Scenius", the AvantYob is one element in the scene sharing a group responsibilty for the generation of the genre so DON'T THINK Bob Marley, THINK everyone in Kingston, Jamaica popping down the recording studio after a hard days work to cut a 7" like the one they heard at the dance last week.

Beatnik------------vs-----------AvantYob
--------------------------------------------
MC5----------------------------The Seeds (Garage Punk)
The Clash----------------------Eater (Punk)
Parliament---------------------James Brown (Funk)
Bob Marley--------------------Big Youth (MC Reggae)
Led Zep------------------------Black Sabbath (Brum Metal)
Sonic Youth--------------------Dinosaur Jr (US Hardcore)
Fela Kuti-----------------------King Sunny Ade (JuJu)
The Prodigy-------------------DJ Hype (Ardkore)
Def Jux------------------------WuTang (Horrorcore)
(Delftones)--------------------Slayer (New Metal)

I'd like to steer well clear of any value judgements attached to either AvantYob or Beatnik. I don't think it's at all helpful, there are very good arguments for both positions, and wonderful music arises from both. Really what interests me is the exclusivity of each position. I really don't think you can be both. A very few people have made a decent stab at being what I now officially dub YobNiks TM. The YobNik TM is essentially a compromised but still fascinating character. You couldn't say the YobNik TM succeeds in all his ambitions, but he or she manages to tick quite alot of all the boxes. I've thought about this for days and all I can think of are Goldie, Mark E Smith and Jimi Hendrix. That's a pretty queer gang, and they'd probably have difficulty together at a dinner party. Jimi I'm least certain of, he's probably the greatest Beatnik ever. But in a real sense they are also characters who want it all desperately. They want the whole cake and the plate. Maybe the YobNik TM holds the key to the future?

How I feel about music at the moment right now is that I know I hopelessly skewered in favour of the AvantYobs. Its a tough time for Beatnik's right now, mainly because being a political radical ain't what it used to be, it's not enough to wave your copy of No Logo and stroke your beard chaps. Sometimes I think groups like Ultra-Red and Beta Bodega are as about as hard as being a Beatnik gets these days with all their cross-border grassroots activities, but we're still a long way from 70's Germany and Amon Duul harbouring members of the Baader Meinhof don't you think? It's also possibly down to a general smartening up of culture, maybe you don't get the kind of anti-social excess practised by the Beatniks of yore. The Deleuzian idea that aspiring to be an AvantYob, ignoring mainstream culture and concentrating on generating one's own personal positivity will contribute to undermining Global Capitalism is a liberating one. But of course we're a bunch of Beatnik wannabe Avant-Yobs reading all this into the dionysian activities of the subculture.

Which brings me to my final point. What are you, are you a Beatnik or an AvantYob? Like me I imagine you're a Beatnik, with your face pressed tightly against the glass. Because if you were a true AvantYob you wouldn't be reading this bollocks.

Latin Rascals.

My esteemed colleague Dr. Lloyd Beryl of Aberdeen (fellow graduate of Edinburgh's Pure Academy of Ambient Nosebleed, feat.Trainspotting) gave me a perfect prescription a couple of weeks back in the form of deephousepage.com. I had been before, but in the era of bounty that was Audiogalaxy had been a bit blase about the abundance of riches there.

My first target were the Latin Rascals mixes on page one, and get all four (WKTU, NY 1985 .859 and (better) 98.7 KISS FM,  NY 1985 .863). PC users choose the mp3 icon and "Save target as" Mac users (doh!) drag the mp3 icon to your desktop to initialise download. Who said I was a smug elitist snob?!

The Latin Rascals were Tony Moran and Albert Cabrera, a Latino Electro remix outfit from NYC circa 1985 (think Mantronix and Chris Barbosa's Shannon, see also Babie+Keys and Amaretto). They're often namechecked as "The Kings of Edit" by the Bay Area BOMB scratch crew and DJ Shadow, but don't let that put you off (ouch!)

This music while incredibly modern, direct from that state of mind called the future, sounds like MOR electro and saccharine pop have been beamed to the Rascals on their urban moonbase in the 23rd century who've then beamed it back to eighties New York. They've twisted those knobs labelled Spangle, Contrast and Drama clockwise and the (possibly indistinguished, but fruitily tacky) pop is stretched across digital canyons and peaks, sometimes the pop is completely lost in an abstract desert of huge drums. One of their favourite tricks being to hook a vocal snatch, pitch a loop of it up or down 15 times in an arc or just let it repeat. Breathtaking stuff and take note fans of 1997 era Glossa-Garage (Dem 2, Todd Edward etc etc)

I've only got one Latin Rascals record "It must be you"(1989) which was pegged by Music and Video Exchange as "early Todd Terry", cos of course that's where Todd emerged from, and he does one okey-doke mix on it. It features one amazing riotous stomp of a breakbeat track (assistance by Little Louie Vega) which is just so liquid and flexible it's in the proto-jungle category. Once again, so dramatic!

The Clash.

The Clash were the second greatest Rock'n'Roll band ever. Second to The Rolling Stones. The Beatles of course weren't a rock'n'roll band- they were a pop group. The Clash run a very poor second-place. They made three good albums (“The Clash”, “London Calling” and “Combat Rock”) to The Stones's six (go figure). They make up good ground as a singles band as is attested by something like “The Story of the Clash”.

What's Rock'n'Roll? Essentially bastardised blues. Amplified (Led Zeppelin), sped-up (The Stones) stretched out (The Grateful Dead) freaked out (Captain Beefheart), or elaborated upon (Eric Clapton). I would say that Chuck Berry was not a rock and roller - but a bluesman. Likewise Bo Diddley. Likewise Jimi Hendrix. True innovators all of them, but working within the possibilites of the Blues.

Rock'n'Roll is fake blues, in which the potent cliches of the Blues become exaggerated to accommodate unsubtle aspirations. The Blues itself has none of the cloying warmth and predicatability of Rock'n'Roll. It's become a commonplace utterance to comment of the blues as anthologised by Harry Smith that it couldn't be weirder or colder- but this assumes that once you move beyond the scratchy 78s and out of the Delta that Blues ceases to be a powerful music. Not so, much by Howling Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters or Fred McDowell has a still depth we're more accustomed to hearing in the freezing wastes of Krautrock. Interestingly (and not at all ironically if you know your onions) Krautrock, particulary the work of Neu! stands time immemorial as the anti-rock. In the short history of amplified guitar music you could draw up a sliding scale of influence which would have “Blues-influenced” at one end and Neu! at the other. Neu! function as a kind of strange attractor, most people seem oblivious to their presence but dig a little deeper and there they are. Their most obvious conduit being David Bowie.

Rock'n'Roll was bonkers and could be measured in quality by the distance it travelled from the blues. Led Zeppelin win points for defacing their own image of it, Captain Beefheart wins points for chucking it out of his pram. In many ways the whole affair is an embarrassment. Through the same logic Canned Heat are the worst Rock'n'Roll band ever, such is their assumed proximity to the source. That makes sense. My attitude towards the whole Rock'n'Roll thing is pretty ambivalent. It still remains, however, the best music to get drunk and cut loose to, perhaps by virtue of its "unrealness". It’s too easy to view the title “Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band” as an oxymoron.

If there was any real musical target for the 90s it was rock. It was irrelevant to ravers and anathema to the new-music fans (Wire readers). I can't think of any Rock music in the 90’s with a hip cachet. Madchester was white funk with a dose of Krautrock so we can exclude that. A lot of critical energy that decade was expended in trying to contextualise a space for Rock within the new hegemonies and hierarchies of music appreciation (someone stop me!). This was motivated by the a desire to rationalise the pleasures it produced within more current modes so as to preserve it's memory. Don't throw away all those records and waste all that time, money and effort! Both the Carducci and the Reynolds models sought to build bridges between old and new music. Reynolds tried to imagine a way in which Rock could be "new", Carducci tried to rationalise the music to make it politically relevant. Carducci viewed Black Flag, the american Hardcore band, as a model of cooperation and musical democracy and Reynolds suggested a new lineage of Post-Rock, virtually the antithesis of Carducci's vision, a new tradition of nerds using the studio as an instrument epitomised by Brian Eno. Essentially they were both saying the same thing “Yikes!” The point was of course that Rock was essentially pretty daft. It's silliness was it's motor. Like the journalist Chuck Eddy said, it was "stoopid". Stoopid like Funkadelic and Black Sabbath.

The Clash were the last Rock'n'Roll band by virtue of lasting longer than The Pistols. The Pistols said they killed Rock'n'Roll but “as any fule kno” P.I.L's Metal Box killed Rock'n'Roll. The Pistols were in fact, in their pure “Chuck-Berry-icity” the very epitome of Rock'n'Roll. They may have even been more Rock'n'Roll than The Stones. But wait, I hear you say, if The Clash were the last Rock'n'Roll band, what does that make The Vines and The Strokes.

The last Rock'n'Roll record was The Clash's “Cut the Crap” (ha ha). There was in fact no Rock'n'Roll after this point. The latest wave of Rock music can be dated back the 'orrible Oasis or the quite good Nirvana. This is the era of Retro RockTM, defined not by artists reinterpreting Black music but by reinterpreting "Classic" Rock’n’Roll. Right from the outset we get diminished returns. The archetypical Retro RockTM relationship is what Noel Gallagher has with John Lennon. It's also the relationship The Strokes have with The Ramones, the relationship The Beta Band have with The Beach Boys, the relationship The White Stripes have with The Stooges. I tend to think there are trace elements of Neu! in Nirvana through their relationship with post-punkers like The Raincoats and Steve Albini.

Were The Clash stoopid? They certainly didn't think they were. Perhaps unintentionally. In fact they were awesomely earnest. The first time I met Joe Strummer was at the Rock against the Rich tour. I paid for my Tour T-shirt with my Coutts cheque book and wore it around my public-school. There can be no more goofy thing than that, perhaps with the exception of being a Public-school educated Diplomat's son throwing the gig in the first place. There is one dopier thing, which would be to sign over your share of profits to your record company so as to keep things punky (oh dear The Clash!)

Were they Blues derived? The Clash tried to fashion a Rock'n'Roll in the same manner as their Rock forebears, with the exception that they used different source material. Country (Joe Ely), Reggae (Mikey Dread) and New Orleans Soul (Lee Dorsey) all got the nod. Perhaps they were Rock's first real syncretists? Although I have always thought how Rock’n’Rollish they made Reggae seem, while the tendency nowadays is to view it as a kind of systems music.

Where did The Clash stand in relation to Neu!?! Well if Keith Levene, and his icy chops, had stayed on board they may have stood a chance at attaining the same kind of immortality afforded P.I.L. but I just can’t imagine the band holding together.

Joe was The Clash and I’d like to think that all the things I’ve said about his band actually said rather wonderful things about his personality. He had a surfeit of good humour and generosity. He had an uncomplicated, direct world view and was happy to get stuck in there and not worry too much about the contradictions in life which can grind the best of us to a halt, someone with a lot of love in his heart. The Clash were a band exhibiting that one quality which is most easy to criticize, faith. I will always remember, aged 18, cycling down the Portobello and Joe (who recognized me from gigs and lurking on the All Saints Road) waving at me. I felt I had cheated him. But how can you cheat someone who was (as described by Lester Bangs) a fake?

A Potted History of UK Bounce.

What’s that? You want to know about the history of UK Bounce. Well pull up a chair and I'll tell you all about it. You have to go a long way back to the actual point zero of Brit-Bounce. It was those Shut up and Dance fellows who started it all off as we know it. We can ignore that Streetsounds UK Electro compilation because, well, its not got that distinctive UK flava, its still very Kings Road B.Boy. We're going to ignore Derek B (though he had a few hits which were rated in the US including "Rock the Beat") and Normski (don't laugh, besides shacking up with Janet Street-Porter, strangely apt name, he also raps on that Reese track). No, PJ and Smiley (SUAD) are the godfathers. A track like “Rap's my Occupation” sounds 10 years ahead of its time. They also produced a whole raft of stuff with a similar aesthetic for people like Ade, Nicolette and The Ragga Twins. Its Ardkore with vocals, early enough for rapping and songs not to be swamped by drug-noise.

And lets also not forget the Tribal Bass stable, Rebel MC’s label. Rebel MC is playing for SchoolDisco.com nowadays (nothing wrong with that, good gig I imagine). Anyway the Rebel was the (reluctant) pop face and a few MC gangs, like the Demon Boyz and Blapps Possee lurked in the background. The Blapps Possee's “Don't Hold Back” is pure UK Bounce, in fact I even heard it played at the start of some chaps set last week.

Finally I guess you could lump in Genaside II, they also had a yearning to be a rap crew. Heck they ended up hanging out with the RZA, although the evidence musically is less strong (kind of rests on “Narra Mine”).

To be honest I think we all thought these acts were a bit quaint. Memories of hip-house were still fresh (there's a genre ripe for rediscovery) and while we could just about stomach Fast Eddie (now delivering Pizzas in Chicago, nothing wrong with that, nice work if you can get it, handy moniker etc) a whole gang of UK Fast Eddies was perhaps not such an enticing solution. I guess the point was that these were all guys and girls who couldn't cut a tree as straight UK Rappers. They probably would have soldiered on like London Possee in terminal obscurity surviving on mentions in Public Enemy's global round-up liner notes. There just wasn't the market for it; everyone would always buy the American variety, so just like The Ragga Twins (“Reggae owes me Money”) they sold out into Rave. Except that that didn't really work out either (despite producing some wicked tunes).

And then it goes quiet (or gets too noisy?) for nearly ten years. You have rapping in the UK but you hear it in the Dancehall and on the Pirates but nowhere else. Of course that’s the axis from which it emerged (vis a vis the Jamaican model of music), so its not gone but its withdrawn like a Virginia creeper from a tower block. Ardkore produces some truly lunatic rapping, but in the spirit of that music its regressed to Hugo Ball-style babbling ("having a vindaloo in the loo doing a poo poo" etc) There are only a handful of rap tracks amongst the millions of Ardkore records, and if anything Ardkore is skewered towards Ragga chat, its a sonic bias, largely to do with Ragga's terror-inducing alienation effect. What are these scary fellows jabbering about, crikey?

Come 1994 and Jungle and we start to see the emergence of celebrity MCs like Det, Navigator and 5-0 However these guys still weren't actually saying anything, merely pushing the party along, bigging up the DJ and giving shouts out to all the sexy ladeez. Det and Navigator made it onto a few comps, but nowhere near a 12". The comparable trope here is US rap before "Rappers Delight", where it exists but nobody's thought anyone would want to buy a whole record of it.

Then, my chickadee, Jungle turned into Techno in 1997 with the atrocious Tech-step and completely lost its humour, sex appeal and popularity. The story goes that the bad-bwoy swagger the basslines and the charm migrated to garage, while in truth it took a very long time to infiltrate. We patiently sifted out the more rootical tracks and gradually as the elements of street music seeped back into the disco and so did the rapping.

Lazy (and ill-informed) commentators credit Oxide and Neutrino with defining the UK Garage Rap revolution, sure “Up Middle Finger” is a classic, but “Casualty” was more innovative for its stentorian electro bassline than for anything else. For me O&N will always be The Prodigy of UK Garage (nothing wrong with that, a few more miles on the clock and they'll be hanging out with Oasis and bagging stray All Saints), as for their connection to So Solid, oh yeah well whatever.

In my humble opinion UK Bounce was flowering in a whole host of beds. Notably on labels like Red Rose records ("A little bit of Luck", "Troublesome") who I fancied as the new Suburban Base and Kronik records ( “G.A.R.A.G.E.” and now the home of Genius Cru) In the hands of Zed Bias (“Seven Wonders”, “Neighborhood”) and with artists like Teebone (“Get Down”, “Fly Bi”). However Teebone does sound distinctly (ahem) old skool, a voice in tradition of the Jungle MCs phat, rolling, confident and masculine- not in the least scrawny like your proverbial Dizzy Rascal. Also, with the exception of “Troublesome” (worth hunting down) the other tracks were really 2 bar loops of raps, not your full flow.

Of course the real light to the touchpaper was So Solid Crew’s "Oh No"- caned to death on the pirates. After that everyone else took a little while to catch up. I'm of the opinion that 2001 was the poorest ever year for the Ardkore continuum, and up to this point I'll admit being totally unimpressed by the idea of UK Garage Rap (Reynolds was trying to pitch it to me as long ago as “Fly Bi” - I mean c'mon: " the F the L, the F the L the Y, the F the L the Y the B the I" ) Perhaps in this deathly year Ardkore finally petered out, and now we're living in the UK Bounce era. Some of my colleagues have playfully alluded to So Solid being the new Sex Pistols and UK Bounce as being the new punk. It’s more accurate (and less rock-centric) to compare it to “Sleng Teng” and the birth of Ragga, or “The Message” and the birth of Hip-Hop, or “Mentazm” and the birth of Rave. To my mind the significance of the movement lies in the fact that we've never had UK rappers before on record and now well, we have a deluge.

Last year we had stacks of MC tracks by the likes of East Connection, Dem Lott, Roll Deep (and its constituents), Heartless Crew, MC Dynamite, Dynamite MC (!), Stush, MC Dappa and Hyperactive, Pay as you go Cartel, Genius Cru, More Fire Crew, So Solid Crew, Musical Mob, Tubby T etc etc etc. Musically the pointers are more Dirty South (Ludacris, Mannie Fresh) and Swizz Beatz than Timbaland (who will always be an R&B producer, his stuff is too disco-ified for these artists to aspire to), hence UK Bounce. And also Ragga but finally for its rhythm tracks more than the vocal delivery (Dave Kelly, Lenky, Patrick Roberts, Lloyd James etc)

Did I say Bounce not Hip-Hop, well yes I did. New Orleans bounce (my fave example of which being DJ Jimi's "Where they at?") is dance music, not for the old head-nodding crew. It's interesting to note how close UK/JA/USA have become. I can't think of a time when they've been so synched up. Now with tracks like Roll Deep's “Regular” slowing right down to the same tempo as Ragga and Platinum Rap, who knows the yanks might become as casual as we are with geographical specificity and start playing UK Bounce over there, not that I really care (lord knows they're playing ragga! The Neptunes certainly can't get enough of it)

My hopes for 2003, more of the same please only different. Lets keep that tempo dropping too. I hope that answers your questions. Now if you don't mind I've got to fit these new wide rims on my bimmer.

Shandar Records.

Very heartening to read the excellent article on Daniel Caux in the last Wire magazine. Maeght sounds like a cool dude, hanging out with Sun Ra and Matisse. Apparently only "hardcore record-collectors" own the records. I dunno if I'm one of them. All the Shandar records I bought on the cheap out of the weird bin. I'm most fond of the La Monte Young "Dreamhouse" record which I paid a meager £15 for in Camden (what were they thinking?) I used to put it on in my basement where I was storing a friend's 10K rig. You have to turn down the treble (for some sonic/mathematic reason) but then when you wander around the room- in this case quite a large space, the drone changes pitch according to air pressure. It’s a very psychedelic sensation- you can end up in one position moving your head up and down listening to it. It’s a great record to play your mates. My old pal The Black Dog used to really enjoy it. Once upon a time when I rang the MELA institute (to offer La Monte and Marian a room on their imminent trip to London) I actually spoke to La Monte at great length. In fact I spoke to both of them, because like your grandparents they both answer the phone simultaneously and talk at once. La Monte, who is clearly a hip record collector, wanted to know how much I'd paid for my copy of Dreamhouse. I felt quite terrible having to admit (I mean lets not undervalue it), he was amazed, "you did well there chuck". I felt duty bound to let him know that I paid £100 for my copy of his black album, which I found in a dusty basement in Cannes. That store has since closed down- I was back there this summer hunting in vain.

Anyway back to Shandar. Of course the other great La Monte Young record on Shandar is the Pandit Pran Nath LP. This is a wonderfully powerful, with an alap which seems to go on forever. The tambura, which La Monte plays, is mixed really high and it sounds like the national grid. La Monte actually chose the key C for one of his pieces on the basis that that’s the tuning of US electric power. The only other record I know with the Tambura mixed so high is that yellow Pannalal Ghosh LP, there the flute melts into the drone, kind of like the Velvet Underground's instruments all mash up with each other (that’s what Eno liked about the Velvets). Pran Nath sounds mature and exceptionally confident. I think he sounds thin on the Earthgroove LP on Douglas, and I've never really liked the melody on the Ragas of Morning and Night on Gramavsion. Of course the true Indian music enthusiasts have no truck with Pran Nath. They all prefer other Kirana vocalists. But Pran Nath was an outsider, like Fela Kuti and Mulatu- a transnational if you like and they often encounter hostility at home.

Other Shandar records I have? I have the Steve Reich Four Organs. It has an exquisite cover photo by the Canadian Michael Snow of a lapping sea in black and white. Michael Snow made a famous art film of a slow zoom across a sitting room from the window to the wall. I think it's an hour long. Saw it at film school sitting on an uncomfortable plastic chair. That’s a nice record. It’s got quite a harsh sound. Cost me a tenner.

The two Sun Ra LPs are also lovely. I got the first one from Italy, which is only OK, the second is dreamy with two outstanding lopsided grooves. I don't have the Albert Aylers or the Cecil Taylors. I dunno about these guys. Cecil Taylor is an admirable figure but I think his music sucks. Ayler is a queer cat. I know Lester Bangs adored Spiritual Unity on ESP, but I can't get with it. Have you heard New Grass on Impulse? Its kind of ghastly- a real case of a record company scrabbling around to cash in on a hip artists credentials by trying to sweeten the music. The same tactic worked for Impulse on Archie Shepp's Attica Blues but not here.

I have one terrible LP on Shandar the Francois Tusques LP. I got it in Bristol from another recently closed-down record store. I was accused by the owner of being a chequebook socialist of buying out community jazz (ha ha). Its a clinker- one of those Free-Jazz holy grails. I could probably make a good return on my initial investment (tee hee). Lastly I am the owner of one Shandar CD the Charlemage Palestine Strumming Music. I did see the LP once in La Dame Blanche in Paris but it was excessively expensive. Hey it’s a great CD.