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.

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.

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.

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 o