WOEBOT

Thanks to SilverDollar for the tapes. Particularly interesting for me was the Logan Sama show Simon taped. Sama has a weekly slot on Rinse 100.3 FM on Friday between 7 and 9 when he plays what are now definitively described as "Vocal" tunes. As an adherent of the discipline of 4 minute concepts on wax, and someone who finds even the best open mic sessions a bit off-putting hearing this show, "the biggest vocal tune show on the FM dial" was quite a revelation.

Logan Sama has quite slyly carved himself a niche as the Stretch Armstrong of Grime. I say slyly because I reckon the grassroots heat around Grime is essentially around the live on-air MC clashes. As I've often remarked, the shops, until quite recently that is, have tended to serve as receptacles for the DJ's 8-bar rhythms, the sub lo backing tracks. For a long time it seemed that only Sticky (no longer a force to be reckoned with incidentally) took the form of the record seriously. But if Grime is to have a future it'll have to address this, note for example Wiley's shift from producing things like the Ice Rink EPs (2 12"s of MCs ride the same rhythm) to his generally more focused auteurish slant of late.

The great thing about the Logan Sama show, and I tried to catch it this Friday but came straight home from work and got stuck into my usual duties, is the sheer brilliance of the tracks. All these tunes he spins are absolutely amazing! In terms of the fecundity of the scene I reckon we're approaching the improbable quality of the hardcore scenius between 1991 and 1993 when "classic" followed "classic" What really caught my ears amongst the selection were an as yet untitled (?) Dogzee tune in which our hero recounts the tale of an evening in which he attends a boring party and necks some LSD. He ends up talking to Freddie Mercury! It's too insane and completely captures the disorientating scrabbling around one does off ones tits at parties. Between this, Dogzee's "STDs" and his "Back to School" we're witnessing someone with a whole heap of range.

Also astonishing is Roll Deep's "Shake Your Leg" which it's too easy to dismiss as a novelty track, a music-hall cum ska pastiche the backing track is luridly psychedelic, evidence of the kind of leftfield chances Grime's producers are willing to take, I guess following the notional signpost of Danny Weed's "Rat Race" rhythm. Danny also did the superb gypsy rhythm off of the Aim High Vol1 comp, so maybe this is one of his? Apparently this will be on the Roll Deep LP.

Picked up some tracks too. Wonder and Kano's "What Have You Done", quite rightly praised to the sky by Kode9 chez lui, the slightly time-stretched agonising diva a handy way of dovetailing Grime's recent R'n'B inflections into rave-tasm. Kano is plump and surly. He's efficient Kano, but he's not exactly colourful. Ruff Squad's "Anna", which has a great, quite blokey tough abstract vibe to it, but not much in the way of a hook, and their "XTC Function out Da Low" rhythm which is nice. Both releases slightly marred by that cheap parping synth sound one gets in Swizz Beatz's productions and a lot of electro. I have a difficult relationship with those tones, and still yet to be convinced by "The Squid." Finally the rhythm to Wiley's "Bastard" which Cameo seemed to think was by Geeneus. And STOP PRESS, presented here as a version screwed down to 33.

As if to show what a complete bunch of lame twats all my fellow bloggers are (puts up fists to enormous throng of encircling 30-something males) I've noticed that since the demise of WOEBOT there have been absolutely no visual paeans to the glory of sleeve art when they WERE all the rage. A few in it's immediate aftermath, but thereafter silence. Pathetic! It's almost inspired me to move back to my old address and keep posting JPEGs in lieu of not having much interesting to say most of the time. Almost.

Picked up two absolutely stunning examples of wondrous sleeve art today. Firstly The Egg's "Civil Service", the close up of, er, an egg, which I was annoyed to not be able to find when I was undergoing my own wee prog odyssey. It's without a doubt the best "pure prog" record I've heard, minimal with rhythms not disorientatingly off-kilter, most usually quiet and tender (none of the on-off gradiosity which I recall Mark Fisher identified as the hallmark of prog). This will be on constant rotation.

Incidentally Mark has been progging it up this week. My first bone of contention (paleontogically speaking of course) with him would be that in spite of Tony Blair declaring himself to be a fan of King Crimson, his band "Ugly Rumours" were almost certainly anything but prog, akin to the pre-Dire Straits incarnation "Brewers Droop" I was saying. Pub-rock with flares. In fact if you had enough energy you could probably spin one of those fashionable forked-roads-of-reality skits which has Mark Knopfler as Prime Minister and Huey Lewis as President of the USA. I mean, for goodness sakes, how prog a name is "Ugly Rumours"? Even Mark Sinker agreed with me, though possibly that was a tactic to create disorder and unrest.

AGAIN k-punk on prog rock (!!!) with reference to Jeff Wayne's War Of The Worlds! Vis a vis prog EARTH to Mark *You're gonna have to lay off the lemurian stuff mate, we're clearly losing you in a haze of evolved symbolism* I bought that record at the time, aged 8 before I had hitched a ride on the express-train of musical hyperlinks, and was profoundly unsettled by it. "No Nathanial", in which the wife of a rector pleads to him not to commit suicide, is for me inextricably linked with (get your hankies out) the trauma of being sent away to boarding school. Burton sounded so crushingly world-weary, so "grown-up".

The other record I picked up today was Pulsallama's 7" on Y records "The Devil Lives In My Husbands Body", which, though it sounds like a Diamanda Galas record, is brilliantly tuneful, it's hilarious dialogue delivered by a B52s-alike Stepford wife. At the end the husband, who has been barking like a dog is sent to a psychoanalyst who concludes that he has Tourette's syndrome "He's going to be barking like that for the rest of his life" and the killer punchline (in a quavering terrified voice) "And our insurance doesn't cover it!" I was hipped to Pulsallama by Stuart Argabright (Hi mate!), and I guess this single with it's completely inspired graphic design, lifting dread from ACDC and Magma:

is in some fashion the mirror image of Vivienne Goldman's "Launderette" which was a London record issued on a New York label. The b-side "Ungawa Pt.II" is an excellent tribal punk stomp in the vein of The Slits and 23 Skidoo. And best of all Stacey "Timbalina" Elkin of the band has a website where you can download some of their tracks: http://www.redlipstick.net/pls.html

Noticed Simon has put out feelers for some rare stuff by namely Donald Knaack and Kenneth Gaburo. Not even a faintest CLUE who these people are. However someone OUT THERE will know all about them. Amazing isn't it. The same thing blew me away when I came out with that list of uber-obscurities I was after the other day, when people who read this blog managed to hook me up with all of them. People still reading this guff, you're nuts.....

It occurred to me just then as I was awaiting the umpteenth Elton John render to congeal that in some way something like blissblog or k-punk (increasingly so) perform excellently as 'hubs.' Then, because I seem to write/think about little else at the moment, it dawned on me too that a magazine like The Wire must have at it's disposal the most awesome resources of knowledge. Resources largely untapped as a result of their narrow remit. In fact I can think of at least three excellent primers they have in the wings/missed out on by "colleagues".

I suppose it's a function of the flexible form of the blogs, with the writer's ability to publish at will (matched by the reader's ability to ignore at will), and the whole healthy bleed between professional writers and punters (like myself) triumphing over the mag format. Plenty of people have gems to offer up to the treasure chest of knowledge.

-

Blah, blah, blah.

Presumably no-one has mentioned that Lloyd Banks of G-Unit looks scarily like Craig David out of a fear of being lynched for being racist ("All black people look the same etc.")

Then I noticed that Dizzee Rascal on the cover of Showtime looks remarkably like Dr.Dre.

Snap!

http://ilx.p3r.net/thread.php?msgid=4940706

Quite a lot of people griping about The Wire here, particularly about them having Derek Bailey on the cover. My favourite comment came from Dave Stelfox who pointed out that it needn't be the mirror image of ILM/YourBlogspot to be a worthwhile entity. I am at sea with the rest of you when it comes to the broad sweep of their coverage. However, I thought Keenan's Derek Bailey article was great. Bailey comes across as a tremendous character; never mind opinions of his music:

"The original be-bop was all over the fucking place. They were always falling off a precipice. You didn't get that in Hard Bop, everyone knew what they were doing. With every music there is an exciting period when it's coming together and no-one has a clue what it's supposed to sound like. That's when it's happeneing. And it's authentic. The only way you can get through stuff is to do it. Once you've learned everything it's over."

That's super insight isn't it. And really applicable to the sceniuses of dance music. It's interesting to note that Bailey thinks Improv is officially over "so codfied and defined that it's effectively neutered." I'm quite impressed that Bailey is dedicated to collective playing too, he's apparently not that bothered who he jams with either as long as they can play their instrument. That runs counter to the high-snob ethos I've encountered in Improv. Bailey's idealogical rift with Evan Parker seemed to founder on EP's increasing reluctance to play with others.

And I liked this:

"Bailey is notoriously opposed to saxaphones and saxaophonists. "You cannot play a saxaphone and make it not sound like jazz," he insists "You simply cannot do it. The guy who has come nearest to it was Anthony Braxton."

Yes, and further, it's difficult to make the saxaphone sound anything else than deeply dreadful. If I was doing a list to match Jess's _your favourite sounds in music_ entitled _sounds you loathe in music_ http://shutyrgob.blogspot.com/2004_08_01_shutyrgob_archive.html#109222635758908172 then I'd put the saxaphone at the top. From "Baker Street", Madness, X-Ray Spex, The Red Crayola and Eurythmics to 95% of Jazz recordings it's a rubbish instrument in most people's hands. I have that key Braxton record "For Alto" somewhere, looked for it forever, and his is indeed an atypical sound.

And again Bailey on Drum and Bass (Was this article a covert stab at Reynolds I ask myself ?!?), particularly on the slightly tepid rhythmic backdrop to his "Guitar, Drums 'N' Bass" record:

"I would have preferred it if it had been much livelier. Where I live in Hackney is where one branch of Drum and Bass, when the called it Jungle came up. They had the loudest stations on my FM band, completely illegal, but they were just down the street from me. So I said to Zorn, "Listen to this shit" how do you fancy a record?".....He'd never heard it so I sent him a copy of some of the stuff that I'd taped off the station and he said, Fine. I said "I'll use these local guys from the radio." And he said, "No you can't, you have to get someone we can hire. I don't know why. The kids down the street were playing some fantastic shit. Very exciting. I used to practise with it. That's how I got into it."

Aaah isn't that so sweet! In his late sixties and still rocking the FM dial! Interesting to note that he WANTED to go with the real thing not the lame copy by Brum's DJ Ninj. Actually I think Bailey might have been under the impression that the guys on the radio were spinning their own dubplates, which can only have partially been the case.

And he's always swearing! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fucking, fuck. Aah, now I feel much better. Think I may pick up that "Ballads" CD. Listened to it when it came out and really liked it, but now I feel I should own a copy.

Congratulations to Susannah at uk-dance who got The Wire job.

Ever since Mickey Tufluv's pioneering "bich-ass-muthafucka" breakthrough piece on DJ Screw:
http://tufluv.blogspot.com/2003_12_14_tufluv_archive.html

------->

I've been keen as hell to get my hands on the original DJ Screw artifacts.
First tactic was ask here what the best Screw was:
http://www.screweduprecords.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=349&PN=2

------->

The poll produced 5 clear winners:

_3 N'Da Morning
_No Drank
_Hard Times
_Killuminati
_Eintein

------->

Unfortunately the Screw shop:
http://www.screweduprecords.com/index.asp
didn't have them in stock.

------->

Through eBay I got in touch with this dude:
DATBOYPOLLO(at)aol.com
who was able to sell me them all.
Marco is sound but drive him down on the price of 3 N'Da Morning (ouch)
Direct from Houston Texas, the source.

------->

Over the past few days I've been listening to little else.

------->

DJ Screw is like Georg Baselitz (geezer who hangs pictures upside_down) he has a pungent iconoclastic trick (the french would say "truck") he slows all the tracks he spins to a molasses-engulfs-mexican-village pace. At once a superficial tactic and a window to a separate universe.

Don't believe Alvin Toffler! Our infolding present is as much a canvas for deceleration as acceleration. Ever waited 10 minutes on a phone tree? Ever spent 3 weeks on a 12 second shot for an Elton John commercial? Ever driven through town in a fast car at 4 miles per hour? Ever spent 2 hours downloading a bootleg application off the internet?

The idea that the future is heralded by quick music is misleading. Jungle reached a speed plateaux c.160bpm arriving at a langorous skanky double-time. Don't forget that the ULTIMATE prodigal future sonic oozed out of Trenchtown's makeshift studios in the 1970s.

"Speed it Up!" It's the cheesiest impact-effect available to the producer. Coleman Hawkins' solos pitched up a few notches become Charlie Parker's aspirational template. James Brown giving "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" the requisite lift by a hike in tempo. Dave Edmunds speeding up Love Sculpture's "Sabre Dance." It's very similar to the cartoon artist's stock tactic of shrinking his drawings on the photocopier to increase their intensity.

Mixing slow is hard. Matching beats with a gulf of time between them is extremely difficult. I always found mixing Jungle much easier than (less forgiving) Techno. And those smudged "awkward" super-imposed harmonies you find in the mix: they're here, only foregrounded by their extended duration. As per Luke Vibert comments about the inherenently avant garde properties of detuned samples held together in a beat matrix. That quavery sound of a mix held in place by the DJ nudging one deck forward, neeling the spindle of the other to delay it. That loping off-centred "parabolic" sound writ large on the Boards of Canada recordings.

Took a break from the super-abstract k-hole trip-hop of 3 N'Da Morning (Screw slurring the intro and zero-velocity shout-outs to m_y__c_r_e_w__f_r_o_m__t_h_e__s_o_u_t_h_s_i_d_e) and listened to Gunshot's "Patriot Games" which seemed ABSURDLY involuted and packed with manic detail in contrast with Screw's anaemicised tundrascapes.

Delight at Screw's obliviousness to the Hip-Hop Nation. You'll hear ESG (No, not the shrill chicks!) Al D, Big Moe, Botany Boys and Mack 10 but only a little outside of the crunk cosmos. Snoop and Too $hort are as big as the names get. So like London's tiny self-obsessed Grime network! Loving especially the extended hand-tailored slow raps of _No Drank. "Aggravated Rasta" and "White Horse" off 3 N'Da Morning pt.1 where the pace lends shaded menace to the electro-flavoured synths and patois stylings. Quite astonished that it's taken me ten years to catch up with this tortoise: that in 1994 when we were hailing Tricky, Goldie and Gerald that Mr. Screw was totally (practically) unknown. R.I.P.

-

I DO have archives!
http://www.woebotnik.com/trash/

-

Hi to John Dubversion who is both writing super stuff here:
http://ill-conceived.blogspot.com/

and also facing unpleasant, unnecessary harassment from the fuzz.
Thinkin' of U dubV.

Hipsters everywhere! Be sure to check the Donna McGhee "blink-and-you'll-miss-it" reissue. Balanced at the fulcrum between Boogie (Disco+Soul) and 80s Soul (New Wave+Soul) this gem of an elpee from 1978 is arranged by Patrick Adams. Almost punk garage in it's grainy low-fi splendour and sporting the lean yet lavish 8'10'' of "Make It Last Forever" whose sultry moans are infinitely more comely than Donna's. BUY BUY BUY.

-

Here's the tracklisting of my recent GRIME04CD:

Ch Ching: Lady Sovereign
Wonky Vocal: Jookie Mundo
People Don't Know: Donae'O
Bang Bang Bang: Jon E Cash/Black Ops
Lethal: Ruff Squad
S.T.D's: Target feat. Dogzee & Syer
That's Me: Flow Dan
Get Over It: Essentials
Girls get lend, to my friend: God's Gift
Don't Watch Me Though: Donae'O
Top Boy: MC Narstie
Straight Version: God's Gift
Torch: More Fire Crew
Bastard: Wiley
Back To School: Durty Doogz
Chosen One: Riko
Problems: Wiley
War Wid: Footsie & D Double E
Serious Thugs: D Double E & JME
Juggling: Terrah Danjah

Not that you're terribly interested. If SDC wants a copy he can have one in exchange for his fave Ruff Squad show. Can't squeeze much time off to surf the airwaves at the moment. Oh and BTW if you got sent one of these by me then please don't fileshare 'em or make too many CD dubs. At least not to your mate with the slsk folder. In spite of what Grasshopper at heronbone said ("Matt's just getting better at buying twelves") I do believe the recorded output of Grime is impoving. This comp is miles better than last year's one. That's good news for the scene's survival, I fear the MC on the airwaves may be a more fragile phenomenon.

-

The blogs are like an effing soap opera at the moment. That's alright! I like soap operas.

Standing in the sun at the window of Glens on the Byres Road watching Daniel Bedingfield noiselessly perform neutron ballad. Turned to the perfectly static hoverfly to my right: "That's what killed UK Garage. Affection for mainstream appraisal is a boom'n'bust cycle my son. They want broad public approval until they realise how naff you end up looking. Same thing with happened with Essex Soul and Level 42."

-

This from VICE UK's review of Dizzee Rascal's "Showtime": "While we don't want to take ALL the credit for Dizzee's rise to the Radio 2 A-list, we'll just remind you we were the first ones apart from RWD to write about him." Splutters. Also yawn. The whole VICE fast'n'loose critique thing has become extremely grating. They need to sort themselves out with some hardcore trainspotter-ish musicological action.

-

Rummaging through my brother-in-law's discarded vinyl in a Glasgow attic and found amongst
the boxes these tasty looking pieces:

_Brooklyn Beats Compilation.
(Featuring "Hot New Trax" by Beltram, Bones, Ralphie Dee, How and Little, Mundo Muzique and Wild)
_Front 242: Headhunters EP.
(Cello-tasm.)
_Earth People: Reach Up To Mars.
(Not as good as I thought it might be.)
_Pearls Before Swine: Balaklava.
(At last! Stand out track "I saw the World"- Sheer Loveliness. Very like Joe Byrd's USA this.)
_KLF: What Time is Love LP.
(With all the diff. versions of WTIL.)

I resisted my inclination to half-inch them. Even the Front 242 which there were 2 copies of.

The other day I went to an interview at The Wire. This was thanks in part to Jim Clarke who drew my attention to a vacancy they were advertising for a web editor. Cheers Jim. Apparently they'd received 80 CVs and were giving only 8 interviews. I was pleased to be taken seriously enough to warrant being summoned; was in truth a little anxious about how I was going to squeeze my duties into an already busy week, but determined to manage should they take me on. I didn't get the job in case you're wondering...

Their offices are tucked behind Spitalfields market, housed in a building called Universal House. This detail never makes the rubric of their address. They feel it might confuse the general public who might assume there was some connection between them and the UNIVERSAL media machine. It did however make discovering their whereabouts doubly complicated. Really how Wire-ish is that !?!

It felt really great to talk to Tony Herrington face-to-face. The mag may have it's detractors these days but let's face it, they're hardcore aren't they! They're doing their thing and surviving. I have a respect for that. Also I have an eternal affection for my own Golden Era of their activity between 1993 and 1996 when KE, SR and IP ran amok. It was particularly nice for me to be able to run a few scripts on Tony pertaining to how I might manage their Website; which I guess doubled as a method of feeling out what possible routes might be open to them. How would they feel about a little lebensraum being granted to coverage of, say, Urban World Music or Country or Metal (Don't mention Grime Matt!) Tony countered by remarking that he'd have no problem whatsoever with that. Actually I was really surprised. He said that with the magazine they're limited by the dictates of space as to what makes the cut, volunteering Grime as something which might be covered. With the website space wouldn't be a problem, he said, and consequently the remit could be broader.

OK so maybe this was disingeneous, after all what defines a magazine EXCEPT what is left out. But I was inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. I think their anxiety about including a greater spread of music stems largely from a distaste of that perennial cultural studies bugbear, the "taking Madonna seriously" syndrome*. However if that means we don't see turgid writing by the clever brigade who've lost touch with the cutting-edge of music then I'm happy. And actually I can disclose that one Mr. X. has had some luck pitching them a primer more in keeping with this particular rhizome than one might expect.

Funny to note that Tony Herrington's greatest reservations with writing on the internet was it's uniformly formal sloppiness. S'funny cos I know at least one other blogger who doesn't sleep if he's got a comma in the wrong place, or at least correctly misplaced. Thanks to Tony and Ben for seeing me.

-

Dan Selzer says:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
my partner and I will be on WFMU tonight from 11pm to
3am eastern time. http://www.wfmu.org

it will be archived, it's OCDJ's show. If you can't
hear it tonight, check it out later, we'll play some
pretty cool stuff, some italo/eurodisco, regular
disco, 80s club stuff, punk whatever.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
That'll be some wkd shit.

Just wanted to take 5 and say how much I appreciate the sentiments issueing from my dear colleague Mark Fisher's writing. I've been very touched by Mark sticking his neck out, not just for me, but in the name of constructive debate. The k-punk blog is without a doubt, the epicentre (the beating heart!) of our network. Authoratitve, lovingly put together and always fascinating, it's as 'important' as it's creator made it.

/// 3 Of A Kind: Babycakes

Thought it was about time I took the bull by the horns on this one. I passed over "Babycakes" when it was out on white, it just seemed such a depressing step backwards. In terms of the routing of the white hot current of the London Underground sound it reminds me of Baby D's "Let me be your Fantasy" which was that moment when Jungle looked over it's shoulder and turned into a pillar of salt, or at least when the distinction between the hardcore revival hordes and jungle's main thrust became evident (Hixxy, Billy Bunter, Kniteforce, Sy choosing to, if not keep moving, then at least to stop flowing). Yeah "Let me be your Fantasy", great tune, fab production but definitely the end of something. It's mainly been down to Silver Dollar Circle's extremely evocative descriptions of "Babycakes" that I've even come back to it, obv it's blowing up on the radio, but it just doesn't really do it for this punter. Those chugging Todd Edwards-style drums, the plinky-plonk harmony that's straight off Tuff Jam's remix of Amira's "My Desire" (definitely ripped off something!), the nearly cloying sentiment recalls the dreamy Doollaly classics but this past is too recent. Hearing it is like being at a club where the DJ has panicked that he's cleared the dancefloor and just slams on a tune he KNOWS will keep the party going, that desperation audible, permeating through the gaps in the track. Not a bad song but I felt kind of cheesed off, coerced even, when I picked it up. So where are things headed?

/// Kano & Sadie: So Sure
/// Shola Ama feat. D Double E: So Contagious

Simon SDC is clearly right about the current sweetening/feminisation of the vibe. It's that same periodic problem that affects the 'nuum which Reynolds has identified time and time again, with the girls being driven away from the dance. The difficulty comes when producers throng back to pre-established modes and screw with the trajectory of the scene. Terrah Danjah, with these two productions, has found a way of bringing Wiley's futuristic innovations into play, creating a super-slinky Grime with nary a touch of 2step in sight. TD's productions have, queerly, the same glistening metallic yet abrasive textures that characterise Steve Albini's. If Wiley has got slightly lost in the cult of his own personality and has partially obscured his studio genius, see also Pharrell, (the latest Roll Deep 'Rollin Deep' EP is a bit wack, having said this the Eskimo Refix is excellent) then TD is making JUST the right moves. "So Sure" is the best thing I've heard in aeons, with a vocal like Brandy's over shards of chrome and "So Contagious" isn't too far behind. The trope is Shawwna and Ashanti's big beat ballads with Kano and D Double posing as Ja Rule and Ludacris (why are those two on every import twelve?) S'nice to see Shola Ama again; not since the days of Taboo and Glamma Kid, had a rough time on coke poor thing.

/// Gemma Fox & 2 Face: Gone

All this Da Vinche stuff is a bit off-putting. He's putting out more records than ESP. But this one is a corker! Totally boombastic salvo riff and (tellingly) the vocal sounds better pitched up to +4 for that quavery edge. You *know* we're stepping back in time! Again this succeeds where "Babycakes" stumbles for the same reasons outlined above. Relentless and pulverising bass tones. Mash up! And catchier than ANY of the American tunes I've heard recently.

/// Sunship: Almighty Father

Talk about throwbacks! What have this lot been up to?! Pimping 2-step presumably. I used to love their productions, particularly "Cheque, One, Two". Very Mantronik. And while this one, with a nasty Lady Saw-style vocal, sounds nothing like Grime ought to in 2004 (!), there's too much vertical drama, it's too funky, is still excellent. On the same label as Sovereign's "Ch-Ching". In the light of the potential commercial reincarnation that these more feminine tunes may bring to the scene it's interesting to notice that the long-dormant deuce magazine (which sprung to life on the Artful Dodger) looks like it might be re-emerging. So where's my subscriptions then geezers!

/// Jon E Cash/Black Ops: Champagne and Hoes
/// D.P.M. Feat Bruza, Napper and Shizzle: Ave Some of That
/// Dizzy Rascal: Stand Up

Couldn't resist the Black Ops number after it came in for serious scrutiny by SDC. The sex-ism is definitely there, but can't really find it in me to single it out for damnation. Not a great track mind, but I'm partial to their stuff. The brilliant D.P.M. tune is a sloppy cockernee knees up, with an unbeatable chorus "'Ave some of that, get me, get me, 'Ave some of that." The Dizzy record is rubbish! Reverse that Sepultura metal guitar pre-set riff and you'll hear the following words: "mumble mumble crossover mumble."Still no sight of the Ruff Squad releases!

Aaargh! He got me in one! Respekt to MC MC for firin' back.
(Thinks: I really must stop swearing so much!)
http://hemingwoid.blogspot.com/2004/08/suebotnik-small-tribute-to-big-guy.html

-

Thanks to Seb Morlu for providing me with CD-R's of Walter Smetak's two long-deleted LPs replete with photocopies of their sleeves. Gwen Jamois, who has sold them in the past tells me these records are now beyond expensive, entering the terrain of museum prices (wink) I've only had the chance to dip my toe in to the debut on Brazilian Phillips (1974), which was produced by Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, a quite wonderful improbable sound world of Avant-Garde Tropical Futurism.

Kodwo Eshun, who tipped me off about Smetak in the first place last year also draws my attention to improviser Hugh Davis's recent letter to The Wire (August 2004) where he praises Smetak. Davis provides us with some useful links:

www.gilbertogil.com.br/smetak/etaktak0.htm
www.latinoamerica-musica.net/frame.html (select Smetak under "Compositores")

Blissblog on Fonts
http://blissout.blogspot.com/2004_08_01_blissout_archive.html#109180610680722801
Demands some thorough follow up. Scratched my head as to how best to do justice to this turtely EXCELLENT idea. The solution? A slice of ikon-o-graphic 3D, Reynolds declaiming theory over a backdrop of multiplexed (muxed) chron-ik breaks, his diatribe doubled in dynamic subtitling; Arial imperceptibly morphing into Trade Gothic Bold, deepening into Olive Antique Shadow before rupture in a baroque riot of Monster Outline, Grubstake and Mousehole. Giant marching glyphs looming over the camera: melting, throbbing and skidding.

-

Robot@Blogistan
http://83.216.135.129/607
Luv U Bismillah.

-

Shine on SilverDollarCircle
http://silverdollarcircle.blogspot.com/
Respekt mate...

> The fetishising of an "aesthetic essence" (viz the boiling away of the particular to
> establish a GENRE or a MARKETING NICHE or a MOVEMENT or an ATTITUDE
> or TREND) (ie ignoring what may be difft/interestin/exciting abt such-and-such a
> record or song or performance in favour of a general rah-rah bigging up of the specialist
> section of the record shop it's stacked in/section of the musicmag it's reviewed in) as the
> grounding for excellence = the ROCKIST FOE IN PLAIN VIEW."

http://www.freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2004_07_01_nylpm_archive.html#109085365016
663459

Wanted to, extremely belatedly, comment on this point by the esteemed Mark Sinker (He hates me too? Oh well!) I wanted to focus on this remark of Mark's a little bit more. Not in TOO much detail of course cos I'm really thick.

It's a great remark isn't it? If there is anything I'm guilty of as a music fan it's relying on some mathematical formula of my own creation which prescribes what music is "hot" and what isn't. I may be articulating it within the framework of bigging up a Grime record but, ROCK or not, the modus operandi is the same. Rather than denounce Mr Sinker's point as callous rubbish (Preposterous! I cherry pick the tracks I like strictly on the basis of how they appeal to me! Etc etc etc) maybe it's more honest to just agree.

But don't you think its kind of naive to assume that one comes to music without a whole framework of expectations? What one knows about a record's origin, it's producer's biography, its "pedigree" has everything to do with how one consumes it, whether one "believes" it. A pop-theologian might counter with the argument that the general public, that imaginary behind the formation of the chart aren't swayed by such effete elitist ideas, that like unwashed cattle they'll buy what appeals to their "innate" sugary taste-buds, but OF COURSE that's rubbish. The same mechanisms impact on everyone's choices. Car salesmen in Woking bought Gabrielle's "Rise Again" cos she's one soulful chick. Small children bought the McDonalds tune cos it would annoy the aspirational middle-class values they sensed in the dominant culture. Public school boys buying Kylie Minogue her disco flavours. The charts may be a huge mess of signals, but it still constitues signals. It's not just a flux.

In the same piece I thought I saw Mark suggesting the charts was a useful as a roll-of-the-dice music taste: "The charts - in this theology - throw stuff in front of you for reasons which is (in strictly aesthetic terms) merely random, or anyway so scrambled that you can't read back from the ultimate public selection to the formal material choices that went into its making." If THIS is the principle behind liking chart music wouldn't you be better off just making a dada-istic rule for yourself like "I will only listen to records by people whose name begins with the letter A"?

I don't think one has to be so paranoid about the magical properties of the assemblage of signifiers which produce for one a satisfying record. Furthermore approaching music from within the boundaries of preconceptions, which though will often put you in the shit if you value being "at the cutting edge" and often out of kilter with your peers; like being three years late into dance music or missing out being a Hoxton Twat (What you mean I AM a Hoxton Twat!), as a prescription it's both eminently useful and more often than not enables one to practise an open game, to take risks and be adventurous with one's choices on the basis of their semiotic validity, as opposed to being at the mercy of something as empty as a chart or a randomly-generated rule. There's A LOT of music out there!

WOEBOTNiK: Made in (approximately) Two Minutes.

Having loads of fun with CDs. I splashed out and got myself a really decent (ish) CD player, as opposed to the Cambridge Audio 50 quid bit of shite I've had for years. The one Lulu DESTROYED.

Despite the ridiculous, carefully manicured self-image I tender of being THEE vinyl junkie (what nonsense!) I've slowly began to admit to myself that collecting records isn't that important to me. Maybe this is akin to Luke's recent admission that he wasn't so interested in the pirates as a result of writing about them. Maybe one wears these more meaningless obsessions away in the process of writing about them? And more essential ones rise to the surface, like a well-grounded affection for music itself.

Quite a few months back my good man Sermad Buni asked me down to the Vinyl Vultures record meet. These dudes are scary nuts about records. All full to the brim about tales of 4-day taxi rides around the Bahamas and sojourns deep into the lost bins of Europe. There was even a celebrity digger present in the form of Bill "Last Night A DJ Saved My Life" Brewster. Actually I just *knew* what the musical territory was going to be. Library records, Funk and Disco obscurities etc. Just for a giggle I brought my Cold Rush Gabba records down, in part to spin them to Phil Sherberne (yo Phil wazzup!) who was in town. And of course I was greeted with half-cocked eyebrows. Er, Gabba? Well, in my defense, they are VERY RARE records. I do respect these guys, but a big part of me is thankful that other people are going down these long narrow corridors and doing useful things like making compilations, so I don't have to. If I may be a teensy weensy bit critical about the digger culture though, they can harbour an almost innate suspicion of new music. Taxidermists the lot of 'em! I think the experience went some way to making me question the importance of vinyl. I mean, luvvit, but it's only a format at the end of the day. Nice big pictures on the sleeve etc. But...

I just love my CD player. It's a real relief to have separated CDs from the computer's own player. I've got some funky oxygen-free cables, and I've been loving the CD-Rs that I've been getting from friends across the net in exchange for stuff. Really loving these funky silver things with their hand-written tracklistings. There's something deeply personal about them, like a stash of secret wholly personal music that's worthless to anyone but me. I find that attractive. And of course the copies sound as good as the originals (the wonder of 0's and 1's), and cos the original shop-bought CD is a wholly shit, essentially rubbish object then these proliferating copies aren't "delibidinized" in comparison with the original.I even PREFER them to the originals. CDs! I've got racks of 'em.

After my filesharing rants this may sound like rank hypocrasy, maybe it is, and unforgivable in consequence; but really I do insist there's a difference between making a mate a copy of a CD and just blankly offering it up willy-nilly to the whole P2P universe. Though I ask you, if mp3s do prove to be it's downfall, how stupid was the recording industry to invent CDs? The whole principle of digital music and the ability to make perfect replicas! Did they not consider this in the least? Remember how worked up they got about home taping?

Funny to reflect that my Dad had a huge (really!) collection of C90s he made of recordings of concerts on Radio 3. I think my bro got them and either taped over them or chucked them out. Don't think I'm condemning him mind, cos I got Dad's old records (a long time before he died) and flogged them. I kept the Wagner for a bit then relented. That probably sounds really callous (it was a bit, the sort of thing you do when you're young) but at the end of the day it doesn't really matter. Actually I think Dad ended up being more fond of his CDs, and Mum's got those ;-)

Best things I've heard in a while:

Palais Schaumburg - Palais Schaumburg
Everything I like about DNA only more so. Extremely edgy clipped stop/start sound. Full-on "deutsche-angst" vocals but in a very delicate context. Improbable crab-walking spikey bass/drum patterns. But also fidgety Liebezeit-a-like percussion. Snatches of eldritch fairground organ. Existential to the core. Not a pop harmony in sight but insanely catchy. AMAZING essential stuff.

Richard X: Back to Mine
Loathsome series comes up trumps here with Richard's brilliant selection. This surely must be the first place you'll come upon someone making a case for Radiophonica/Library music of the 80s (as in Denton and Cook's "Tomorrow's World Theme") Other highlights being Nivea's "Run Away" a 'lost' Neptunes production which in Rich's words: "The future equivalent of the Southport Weekender will dig up in 20 years time."

Padlock (feat Sly Dunbar, Robbie Shakespeare, Gwen Guthrie, Wally Badarou, Larry Levan)
When SciFi told me his story about waking up one morning and deciding that today was the day he was GOING TO GET THIS RECORD NO MATTER, I was slightly non-plussed. I used to pass it over lots, and then I skipped the bootleg re-issue of it too. Because? Well the supergroup concept and the disco record didn't seem to belong together: one the definition of industry anality, the other's success dependent purely on how it works on the dancefloor/it's tunefulness. I just couldn't see the construct producing anything as spontaneous as was necessary. Fer chrissakes it's even got a celebrity record cover designer in the form of Tony Wright who did Scratch's "Super Ape" amongst other. Eventually I succumbed to a dusty old copy, and cool! Sweeeeet record. "Padlock" itself has a lovely acheing tune: "Gonna padlock my heart" and the limber Compass Point sound goes together with it beautifully. Scary disco heads like Andy Kellman (Yo wazzup Andy?) Phil Wilkins and Joe Estes might like to know I also picked up the Walter Gibbons mix of Loretta Holloway's "Hit'n'Run." How did I do? ;-)

Revolution: The Journey Continues
Had to import this from www.musica.co.za. What joy! Top SA Kwaito DJs like Christo come to the UK to buy Deep House they take it home and, get this, pitch it down! With this stuff it's the boom boom thud that connects it with Mbaqanga. Revolution are two black dudes from the townships. Their last CD (which I played 'Cina' from on that set I did last at Resonance) is called "The Journey" but this is even better. It's very like hearing a set by an African Chris Brann or even Deep Dish, but the flavours are distinctly African: mbira, township rap and choirs over pumping deep house. The CD is one mix of twelve or so tracks, so it really is a journey. Such succullence and also in parts extremely techno-esque abstraction.

-

Big up Gutterbreakz.

Und im augenblick:

http://www.irdial.com/blogger.html

Thanks to Doobie for passing on this excellent article.

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

The Shortwave And the Calling

By David Segal

In a cluttered home office in the World's End section of London, Akin Fernandez is trolling the dial of his newly acquired shortwave radio. It's December 1992 and it's late at night, when the city is quiet and the mad-scientist squawks of international broadcasts have an otherworldly tone. Fernandez, the owner and sole employee of an indie music label, is about to trip across a mystery that will take over his life.

Shortwave signals are bouncing, as they always do, around the globe, caroming off a layer of the atmosphere a few hundred miles above the Earth and into antennas all over the world. Fernandez can hear news from Egypt and weather reports from China. But his browsing stops when he tunes in something startling: the mechanized voice of a man, reading out numbers.

No context, no comment, no station identification. Nothing but numbers, over and over, for minutes on end. Then the signals disappear, as if somebody pulled the plug in the studio. And it's not just one station. The more he listens, the more number monologues he hears.

"Five four zero," goes a typical broadcast, this time in the soulless voice of a woman with a British accent. "Zero nine zero. One four. Zero nine zero one four."

Numbers in Spanish, in German, Russian, Czech; some voices male, others female. When Fernandez lucks into hearing the start of a broadcast, he's treated to the sound of electronic beeps, or a few bars of calliope music, or words like "message message message." Then come the numbers. A few stations spring to life the same time each night, others pop up at random and cannot be found again.

At first, Fernandez figures it's a prank, the work of radio pirates with a sense of humor. But you need a license for this part of the radio band, and why would anyone break the law just to read digits into the dark yonder? In England the penalties are serious. Where's the comedic payoff?

Nobody has answers. Not the guy who sold him the radio, who claims they're weather stations -- which is crazy, because weather stations don't hopscotch to different spots on the dial, as many of these did. Not a manual he buys about shortwave frequencies, which has a chapter on "numbers stations" and describes them as a riddle that nobody has solved. Not the British Library, which seems to have catalogued every other sound on the planet.

What's with the numbers?
Answering that question, it turns out, would take Fernandez years, and it left him nearly penniless, at least for a while. It also brought him a horde of admirers on another continent, eventually earned him a credit in a Tom Cruise movie and sparked a legal battle with the acclaimed band Wilco.

Fernandez would study numbers stations largely because he couldn't stop even if he tried -- which is to say, he fell into the grip of an obsession. But along the way, by both accident and design, he discovered amid all that static the raw material for a point he likes to make, with characteristic zeal, about the future of rock-and-roll.

That, however, is later. In December of '92, Fernandez is just listening. And listening. He stays up till 4 or 5 every morning, jotting down frequencies and figures, looking for patterns. He keeps a detailed log, not for weeks or months but for years, without a clue about what exactly he is logging. Sometimes Fernandez doesn't leave his house for a week.

"You just get submerged," he says, on the phone from London. "You get immersed in it. There are so many questions and the only answer is to listen more, because no answers are coming from anywhere else."

The Secret Sounds
A few things you should probably know about Akin Fernandez: There's the basic background stuff -- that he's the son of Nigerian-born parents, that he grew up in Brooklyn and moved to London when he was 15 years old. He calls himself a geek. He believes UFOs are real. More mysteriously, there appear to be grooves carved into his clean-shaven head, the origins of which he politely declines to discuss. ("Irrelevant," he says.) He is now 41.

Also -- and this is key -- Fernandez hunts for audible thrills the way a shark hunts for meat, which is to say constantly and ravenously. This makes it a little easier to grasp his passion for numbers stations. They were unlike anything that had ever hit his ears.

And the radio counting wasn't just new to Fernandez, it was beautiful. He's a disciple of an Italian named Luigi Russolo, who argued in a 1913 manifesto called "The Art of Noises" that the bustle of city life and industrial machinery ought to be included in our musical language, alongside chords and harmonies, violins and oboes. This proved a tough sell. In 1914, Russolo held his first concert with noise-making machines he called Intoners and the show ended in a melee: performers against the audience.

"I understand that shortwave noise is a kind of music," Fernandez says, sounding Russolovian. "And to me the numbers brought another level of beauty to the music."

One final thing to know about Akin Fernandez: He's prone to fixations. His first was a collection of Marvel comic books that swelled to 5,000 when he was a kid. In his twenties, he noticed that literary-minded prostitutes in London were advertising their services, and phone numbers, with saucy little poems written on cards glued to the insides of phone booths. ("Once upon a time in Earl's Court / reigned the wicked Love Queen . . . ") For months, Fernandez would mortify friends and family by painstakingly peeling the cards off the glass, until he owned more than 600 of them. In 1984, he published the lot in a volume called "The X Directory."

"My mother came to the book party," Fernandez recalls. "I couldn't believe it."

Numbers stations, with their variety and quantity, triggered all of his impulses to catalogue and collect. The stations had personality, if you listened long enough. One always began with a few bars of "The Lincolnshire Poacher," an old British folk song. On another you could occasionally hear roosters or echoes of Radio Havana in the background, as though someone had forgotten to turn off a mike. One starred a young lady with an exotic accent who dramatically read words from the International Radio Operators alphabet, somehow making inscrutable phrases -- "Sierra. Yankee. November." -- sound life-and-death urgent.

While the rest of London slept, Fernandez chased these voices all over the dial, never sure when or where he'd find one. He wrote down the results in a green book bound with fake leather. A typical entry looked like this:

Sept 6 '93

Freq Time Signal

6.201 USB 12:30 am BIZARRE German Children's Voice

Station starts with beeps, then

GLOCKENSPIEL!! Then count

From 1 to 10 then ACHTUNG!

And message!! [expletive] Hell!!

There are a lot of exclamation points in Fernandez's log.

"You're listening, and all of a sudden you come across a really strong signal," he says. "It's the most chilling thing you've ever heard in your life. These signals are going everywhere and they could be for anything. There's nothing like it."

To pay the rent, Fernandez released music through Irdial-Discs, which by then was part of a small ecosystem of clubs and record shops selling avant-garde music in London. Finally, after three years of wee-hours number logging, he heard about a book called "Intercepting Numbers Stations" by a guy named Langley Piece. He mail-ordered it from a place in Scotland, and when it arrived he sat and devoured it in a sitting. The book confirmed Fernandez's initial hunch -- the stations were no joke.

"They're deadly serious, in fact," he says. "That little German girl reading numbers, she might be ordering someone to assassinate a person with a poisoned umbrella."

Mission: Indecipherable
Let's say you're a spy, out in the field, spying. You need instructions now and then from headquarters, but you don't want to risk exposure by picking up a phone (tappable) or getting an e-mail (traceable). Face-to-face meetings carry their own risks. What do you do?

One solution, dreamed up during the Cold War: Listen on shortwave radio at a predetermined time and frequency for a message that only you can understand. Numbers stations, it turns out, are the one-way chatter of espionage agencies to their spies. This isn't conspiracy theory hokum; it's referenced in a dozen-plus memoirs of assorted ex-spooks and defectors. And though numbers broadcasts might sound low-tech in the age of the BlackBerry, the idea isn't utterly cockamamie.

"In a two-way communication, you have to acknowledge the message," says David Kahn, author of "The Codebreakers," a history of cryptology. "But with a shortwave broadcast, anybody can listen, which means that nobody knows who the message is intended for."

The numbers, Kahn explained, are translated with the aid of what's known as a one-time pad, essentially a dictionary for a language that is spoken only once. Most pads are destroyed after a single use -- some of the Soviet pads, lore has it, were edible -- making them one of espionage's rarest artifacts. In 1988, three were found in a bar of hollowed-out soap when a Czech spy, posing as an art dealer in London, was caught by authorities as he sat in an apartment and transcribed a message sent via shortwave.

For Fernandez, this spy angle was a red rag to a bull. A dozen new questions arose, such as how much was all this costing taxpayers, and what messages were being sent? It irked him, too, that no government official, at least in Britain or the United States, would acknowledge this whole system was in place. He was unmoved by the argument that if the system were acknowledged it wouldn't be secret anymore. It didn't matter to him that the messages were totally indecipherable, or that nobody else seemed remotely worked up about them. The more Fernandez thought about it, the more outrageous it all seemed. British citizens -- and citizens of other countries -- underwriting secret messages, sent to agents, telling them to do God knows what.

"Even if you assume that most of the messages are 'pick up this money' or 'drop off the laundry,' think about what numbers stations represent. The only way a secret like this can be kept is if you live in a society where everybody is obeying and everybody is a little sleepy. But if you're a curious kind of chap you'll wonder, if your government can keep this a secret, what other secrets are they keeping."

If you knew Fernandez back in 1994, there was no talking him out of his numbers addiction. He claims he had a social life through his super-fixated years, but ask for the name of a buddy who knew what he was going through and he comes up empty.

Well, a girlfriend named Anne Marie came by one night and listened and her jaw dropped. More typical, though, was the reaction of a cousin who lives in London, who was perfectly baffled.

"I'd call and he'd say, 'I'm listening to something, do you want to hear it?' " remembers Enitan Abayomi. "And then I'd hear a voice over the radio. And I'd think, so? I just didn't hear what he heard in it. But he's very, very bright, and I often feel like he's leaving me miles behind. So I thought that people with higher IQs than mine might understand what he's talking about."

At some point, Fernandez began to think he'd never kick his numbers habit. It had pushed nearly everything else out of his life. He'd had enough, and in 1997, he tore himself, at last, from his radio. How did he do it?

"The Conet Project," he says.

The Leading Edge of Rock.

In the annals of recorded music, you'd be hard-pressed to find anything rivaling the ambition and absurdity of "The Conet Project." (Conet, a word he heard often on the shortwave, is Czech for "end.") Four CDs with 150 different broadcast snippets from all over the world. More than 280 minutes of white noise, numbers and beeps. Plus a 74-page booklet with background, logs, playlists and a bibliography -- the sort of treatment ordinarily reserved for platinum-selling bands with a massive fan base. Fernandez poured everything he had into "Conet." It sold in the United States for $62.

At Aquarius Records in San Francisco, co-owner Allan Horrocks keeps track of sales of the enigmatic sounds packaged as "The Conet Project."

Randi Lynn Beach - For The Washington Post

"I wanted it to be perfect," he says. "I didn't know what it would do, if it would just sit in boxes, because nobody had done anything like this before. But it was obvious to me that it had to be done."

This is a pretty succinct definition of obsession: a thing you feel you have to do, even though you don't, even if doing it will cost you everything, which is what it cost Fernandez. There were a few head-scratching reviews of "Conet" and sales of about 2,000 copies, modest even by indie standards. Fernandez closed up Irdial, and the last pressing of "Conet" was in 2001. He took a series of jobs that he'd rather not discuss.

"They were jobs," he says. "Just jobs."

That might have been it. But something happened. "Conet" slowly acquired a cult following. A fervent cluster of devotees cropped up in San Francisco, around a store called Aquarius Records, a haven for the musical avant-garde, the sort of place that crows about albums such as "Insect Electronica From Southeast Asia." To Aquarius's owners and regular customers, "Conet" was a little ridiculous and totally irresistible. They posted a chart behind the cash register that tracked the store's "Conet" sales, and asked everyone who bought a copy to pose for a photo. They stopped with a photo of customer No. 386.

"It works in a lot of different ways," says Allan Horrocks, a co-owner of the store. "It's kind of creepy and mysterious because of what it is -- this secret thing that you can't understand. We'd think it was cool if it was just an experimental drone record. But it's more than that."

Much more, actually. "Conet" gives off a whiff of the vaguely forbidden: Maybe the government doesn't want you to hear this. And your parents won't get it. And if you listen today, in the age of Code Orange, it actually sounds a little sinister, with echoes of the "chatter" the Bush administration is always warning us about. What could be more frightening than "chatter"?

"Conet," in other words, delivers a couple of the slightly subversive thrills that rock could once deliver without breaking a sweat. It feels new, a little dangerous, a ticket into a subculture of sorts. That's an experience you don't find in record stores much anymore, in part because rock has been around for 50 years -- and can anything that old really feel dangerous? -- and in part because corporate America long ago figured out there's gold in the underground, and now mines and mass-produces it faster every year. In a way, "Conet" is a measure of just how fringeward you need to head these days to find something that delivers the frisson of the margins.

Which is part of Fernandez's point. From the beginning, his label released what he calls "fine art noise" and "underground dance music," all of it made by a batch of artists you will never see on the charts. To Fernandez, Irdial's niche product occupies some of the only fertile ground left in music. It's his heartfelt belief that rock-and-roll has been dead for years.

"Rock bands now are just following the path that's already been marked," he grumbles. "Right down to the riffs, right down to the production. These people are copying their fathers' record collections.

"I think the truly creative people have left this area. A real artist would look at the canvas and find the corner that hasn't been painted yet. Nobody is doing that. . . . The first thing that anyone in a band with a guitar and drums should do is put down their instruments."

So what's a rock band to do if it wants to keep the guitars and churn new ground? How do you make something so familiar seem daring?

Enter Wilco, a quintet that started as an alt-country act and is now boldly going where no rockers have gone before. Two years ago the group released an album with a song called "Poor Places." It starts as a droopy ballad, but eventually the drums fade, the melody evaporates, and up roars a truly terrifying hurricane of sound. As it builds to a climax, a woman's urgent semaphore peeks through the noise:

"Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot. Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot. Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot."

It's a track from "Conet," the voice of Ms. International Radio Operator herself. The band sampled it and used it to name the album. "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" would earn Wilco its strongest reviews ever -- it was No. 1 that year in the Village Voice national poll of music critics -- and it sold decently, too.

At various moments on "Yankee" you can hear lead singer and co-songwriter Jeff Tweedy struggling with the where-do-we-go-now question. And he finds an answer, or at least part of an answer, in the same place as Fernandez, way way out there, in the ionosphere. Which is apparently where you wind up now when you seek the unpainted corner of the musical canvas.

It's enough to make you think that what's left of rock's frontier isn't very pretty; there isn't even music playing there. At some point -- after punk crested, perhaps, in the late '70s -- innovation in guitar pop became a matter of creative arithmetic. Blind Willie McTell plus Led Zeppelin times garage rock equals the White Stripes. The Velvet Underground plus the Cars divided by an intercom system equals the Strokes. But this has limits, too. The Strokes' second album, "Room on Fire," is just a rehash of their first. It's redundant and kind of gutless. It's everything that Fernandez hates.

"Conet" ultimately defines the crux of rock's problem in middle age. How do you double back without seeming timid? How do you roll forward without seeming incomprehensible for its own sake? On the Record Though Fernandez and Wilco might sound like kindred spirits, they never exactly cozied up. The band didn't pay for that "Conet" loop, and in 2002 Fernandez sued.

For years, it's been Irdial's policy to post free downloadable versions of every song in its catalogue. (Head to Irdial.com to download any Irdial title, including the entirety of "Conet.") But Fernandez makes a distinction between personal and commercial use of his work. If you're going to make money from his labors, he thinks he should share in the wealth. At minimum, he thinks you should ask nicely. In 2001, he granted Hollywood director Cameron Crowe the right to several "Conet" cuts for use in the film "Vanilla Sky," free of charge, because Crowe requested permission. The cuts are heard in those arresting moments when Tom Cruise shows up in Times Square and discovers that he's all alone.

Wilco, the band's lawyers would eventually explain, figured there was no copyright on sound that anyone could have heard on the radio, that obviously wasn't a song and that hadn't in any way been artistically altered. Whatever the merits of the case -- and Fernandez says the law in England is clearly on his side -- Wilco settled out of court, saying it preferred to skip a drawn-out fight. That was in late June. The band's label sent Irdial-Discs, aka Akin Fernandez, about $30,000 to cover his legal costs, plus a royalty payment several times that sum. See if you can guess what Fernandez did with the money.

Today he is married, to Anne Marie, the one person who seemed to grasp the lunacy and charm of numbers stations, and they are raising four children. Some family men might take a windfall like the Wilco loot and renovate the house, or take the kids on vacation. Fernandez didn't do that.

"The kind of guy who releases 'The Conet Project' isn't the kind of guy who goes on vacation," he says.

How about a new car?

"Absolutely not," he says.

Fernandez revived Irdial with the money, and he re-released "The Conet Project." New copies went on sale July 13 and the sales chart at Aquarius Records is back in action. In just a few weeks, the store has already sold 120 more copies.

"Conet," of course, will never earn a profit, but that was never the point. Fernandez calls it a total artistic triumph because it's in the Library of Congress, because it's in the British Library and because numbers stations are less of a mystery than when he first ran into them, 12 years ago. In 1998, a U.K. government spokesperson acknowledged for the first time that shortwave radio is indeed used for espionage.

"These [numbers stations] are what you suppose they are," the spokesperson told the

Daily Telegraph, in a story that was prompted by the release of "Conet." "People shouldn't be mystified by them. They're not, shall we say, for public consumption."

To the untrained ear this might have sounded like an unremarkable brushoff. To Fernandez, it sounded a lot like "uncle."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So that's what happened to Irdial! Remember that slightly crazed sleeve insert they did on CD -vs- Vinyl which caused so much controversy?

One of the things I've been picking up a lot of at the moment is *early* Ardkore Techno. Naturally I have ridikulous amounts of what you could call early Jungle, I'm always thrusting that HUUUUGE list of my records down people's throats; but this is an ever so slightly different zone, though one which, if you know what you're listening to, is clearly definable. I'm talking about all the Bleep'n'Bass stuff (Forgemasters, Ability II, Rhythmatic, Unique 3, the brilliant Original Rockers LP - Bleep'n'Bass was the one special replete with RealAudio stream that I didn't do at WOEBOT), the Belgian stuff (absolutely LOVING the 80 Aum stuff at the moment, particularly Incubus), the early Mover things ("Into Mekong Centre"), the Lenny Dee releases on Nu Groove, records like RAC's "National Breakdown", Eon and Ubik's tracks. I guess the XL and R&S stuff belongs in here, though maybe not the (more self-concious) WARP records. When you follow this trail and you come up against Psychotropic's "Hypnosis" you've come too far and you're in Jungle. The thing about this stuff is that it's STILL dirt cheap, it's been frog-leaped by people buying the Ardkore stuff. Maybe wisely, ha ha!

1991, of course, was the time when Techno and Ardkore "proper" were inseparable, when Fabio was sharing the bill the Colin Faver. There is a real directness to this music which is very refreshing. I remember a little later Techno heads (I guess perversely) decrying Ardkore for it's rhythmic panache saying "You know if you listen closely to Techno you'll find the rhythm is far more sophisticated," but the "early Ardkore Techno" period is almost, by definition, before people could and would say such things. There is a thuggishness to these plodding 4/4 rhythms laced with geriatric breakbeats that you just _know_ is completely moronic. It's certainly before you could make arguments for the "artistic qualities" of rave. You could just pull that gormless mouth-wide-open expression, freeze your neck and gaze blankly into the distance nodding to it in the comfort that that is exactly what everyone else will be doing. Like a rave storm trooper.

I was quite chuffed to pick up (on separate occasions recently) the Automation EPs. I know nothing about these records or their maker, though actually their anonymity is quite appealing in this context. There's a bit of writing on the back of the Red EP that says it all:

A BIG SHOUT OUT TO ALL THE HARDCORE-HEADS OUT THERE.
WE'D LIKE TO THANK CHILLIN FM, INNOCENCE FM, KISS FM AND A MASSIVE SHOUT-OUT
TO COLIN DALE AND COLIN FAVOR FOR OUR FIRST AIRPLAY. HARDCORE RULES.

Ha ha ha ha ha. I find that well funny, (regains composure) sorry maybe that's lost on anyone else. The labels all have this black lino-cut head with a plug in it with rays coming out of the plug. One is red, one is green and the other is blue. I'm guessing there is a yellow one somewhere but, truth be told, I can live without it, they're not AMAZING these records. Still I like them. The track I'm listening to at the moment has a Wil-E-Coyote sample on it ("Charly" style). There are quite alot of Classical "Pops" samples like William Tell Overture and Swan Lake, there's heaps of Mentasm sounds (very "overdriven" bass lines) snatches of 303s. If I had to compare them to one tune it'd be the DJ's Unite track, some tunes on here like "Drone" on the Red EP are nearly as good as that epic (coughs) only not quite...

Ditch the elaborate post-rationalising and go find your own subcultures.

Jealous people stop hating on Reynolds.

(Fade up. Somewhere in the middle of Carlin's 500 questions for music bloggers. Ingram spotlight in large leather armchair, mostly shielding face.)

C: Which NME jounalist famously remarked that he preferred a Tight Fit single to Led Zepellin's third album?

I: (Grips forehead). Pass.

C: Who sang (rather cheekily: "Jack? I'd rather Fleetwood Mac!"?

I: (Face brightens.) Oh yes I know this. The Reynolds Girls.

(Audience sighs, coughs, shuffles.)

C: (Drolly) Bringing your score up to 6. Gothic plainchant chanteuse Kirkby and pop siren Bunton share this first name. What is it?

I: Pass.

C: Which svengali was behind the maverick ZTT label who released recordings by artists such as Propaganda, Art of Noise and Frankie Goes to Hollywood?

I: Er. Oh shit! It's on the tip of my tongue.

C: I'm going to have to press you Matty Lad.

I: Ian Penman?

C: Wrong answer. The correct answer is of course Paul Morley.

I: (Tuts.)

C: Which former British free-jazz singer coached the Spice Girls?

I: Pass.

C: What is a "punctum"?

I: Oh hell, you were talking about this recently... I'm sorry, pass.

C: Who wrote the excellent "Words and Music: A History of Pop in the Shape of a City" ?

I: Pass.

C: On which Roy Harper LP did Linda and Paul McCartney sing backing vocals?

I: Pass. (mumbles to himself). Not doing well here.

C: Which artist recorded LPs entitled Bullinamingoase, Stormcock and Flat Baroque And Berserk?

I: Pass.

C: Which 1970s album by conceptual rocker Todd Rungdren anticipated the, quote "Junior Boys Sound" unquote, by a cool thirty years?

I: Damn. I know this... Sorry, pass.

C: Which is the best Kate Bush LP?

I: (quickly) The Dreaming.

I: Sorry that is the wrong answer. The correct answer is Hounds of Love.

C: Jimi Hendrix and Peter Brotzmann both recorded a song by this name. What is it?

I: "The Star Spangled Banner"

C: No the correct answer is "Machine Gun."
Which former record-label boss was described thus by Brian Eno: "The greatest thinker / writer / social critic / tv presenter since Plato / Keynes / Duchamp / Betjeman'

I: Pass, sorry.

C: Which British free-jazzer appeared on Nick Drake's "Bryter Later" LP?

I: Pass.

(Ingram takes a sip on a glass of water to steady his nerves)

C: Which Peter and Michael track, a ham-fisted, if charming portrait of folk-artist Lowry was number one in the charts for 7 weeks in the 1970s?

I: Pass.

C: What was Lonnie Donegan's debut LP entitled?

I: Pass.

C: Which British free-jazz label issued classics by Keith Tippett, Chris McGregor and Marc Charig?

I: Pass.

C: Here's a dance music question you may do better at.
Which disco diva featured on Black Box's Italo House masterpiece "Ride on Time"?

I: Gloria Gaynor? No, oh shit, it was Loretta Holloway.

C: I'm afraid I'll have to take your first answer. Which incidentally was incorrect.

(Carlin shuffles cards. Frowns.)

C: In the immortal phraseology of the ILM message board: Mike Skinner, classic or dud?

I: Dud?

C: (Grins.) I ask the questions round here. I'll take that as a pass...
What is deterritorialisation when it's at home?

I: This is supposed to be a music quiz!

C: The question stands.

I: Pass.

C: What is the connection between Girls Aloud and junglist Boymerang?

(Pause. Ingram looking pale.)

C: C'mon Matthew you MUST know this one..... Moving swiftly on.
Who composed "Music On A Long Thin Wire?"

I: (Sighs). Pass.

(Fade down)

Found out some great little anecdotes reading that Barry Miles biography of Paul McCartney. BTW Just because it was authorised doesn't make it untruthful. Apple records lost a spectacular amount of money, notably through their shop which was both a thoroughly bad business idea AND abused mercilessly by not just the shoplifting public but also contributing designers like The Fool. Badfinger and Mary Hopkin can't have brought that much in either. According to Paul the only reason they ever made made any cash was owing to what he describes as "good housekeeping." He takes credit for ensuring that Apple was fully trademarked and copyrighted.

When Steve Jobs set up _his_ Apple, McCartney came knock-knocking. "You can't call your company Apple mate! That's our name." So they settled out of court for a quite handsome sum, with the proviso that Apple computer had nothing to do music.

When Apple subsequently put a sound chip in their PC, McCartney comes knock knocking again. This time the sum is substantially larger and THAT'S why Apple records is in the black. I must confess that I find the idea of one of the figureheads of the counter-culture (you can't knock that pygmies!) endorsing "good housekeeping" extremely salutary and cheering.

Then just today a colleague at work informed me that the Macintosh system sound named "Sosumi" was Apple's cheeky rejoinder to Macca. "So-sue-me." Geddit!?! Geddit!?

I've never really had much time for the cult of the obscure, so when Reynolds has a go at Keenan (clash of the titans innit, the figureheads of the two hegemonies of underground music "locking horns like moose") for championing scantily released music I kind of giggle. Vis a vis Reynolds' turntabilist antics and their potential significance, I remember Ian Penman making a very similar joke about his solipsistic bedroom guitar antics in relation to Loren Mazzacane Connors. Punster laughing out loud that maybe he should be headlining festivals in the German lakes, giving interviews etc. Maybe he should be. Funnily enough just last week I found a tape I'd made in 1992 which has me plucking one note on a violin in time with a metronome for about half an hour. Rubbish of course but I really enjoyed listening to it, had a bit of fun weaving a validating dialogue around it.

The thing is, I have to admit, my love affair with (that old cliche) "socio-culturally significant music" is on the wane at the moment. Isn't that what's at the heart of Reynold's attack on Keenan? That what he's championioning is inneffectual because it's obscure by definition. The common counter-attack of the poor noise-nik (and I'd hazard a guess what Keenan's own would be should he choose to enter the fray, to his credit that he doesn't in one sense, it'd be like entering someone else's gladiatorial arena with only Jon Dale on trident to help out) is that their music is the anti-capitalistic McDonalds-slaying force. The Ying to the Yang. The cape-shrouded other. It'd probably be the yob's riposte that those same qualities of sonic revolt are present in Crunk and Grime; that HIS music is at once commercial and avant-garde. Boomshanka. Check-mate.

However, brushing aside the pieces for a second, it seems to me that the champion of obscure music would do better to dwell on the fragile qualities of their proposition. Obscure music's greatest asset is ATMOSPHERE, an ATMOSPHERE that often ripens with time. This isn't the ATMOSPHERE you get listening to an old ABBA record (though that'll have one) it's something more rarefied. This dovetails with that Johnny Trunk review I just did. I don't think the Japanese Avant-Rock groups or the Folkies can do battle in any proper sense. All these hopeless one-offs, clumsily charming losers are putting down their overalls and delivery bags to deliver snapshots of what it means to be them, then. What's valid in those frail, epheremal visions is the antithesis of what music made for the spotlight contains, alot of energy for sure (energy wanes), but often a dearth of ATMOSPHERE.

Thanks to people who have given links to this blog. I'm afraid the txt format means I can't reciprocate with traffic or the ol' "Technorati Peek-a-Boo" and since I dropped my /webstats/ I have no idea how many people tune in anymore or where they come from. This may no longer be the kind of blog which gets mentioned in magazines (blissout/catchdubs/fluxblog all garnering praise in the reinvented CTCL "Plan B," wot no mention of their own Jon Dale's blog!) but it's a mite less stressful than being a chatshow host/website designer. Big up to all the crew:

(SR/LD/MF/JC/JH/JE/PM/JD/GD/SH/OC/MC/DS/PS/SFJ/MM/EM/SN/GL/NK/TE)

Rather than do the back-handed compliment review thing for The Wire I stuck my neck out and penned this about the Johnny Trunk record, was *JUST ABOUT* to send it to them when (er woops) found some twit named Ken Hollings had already reviewed it (probably in the late 90s). My spiel is better.

-

JOHNNY TRUNK
THE INSIDE OUTSIDE
TRUNK RECORDINGS JBH008CD

You inevitably arrive at The Inside Outside with a head full of scripts. Johnny Trunk is the man behind Trunk records and responsible for notable re-issues such as Basil Kirchin's "Quantum" and Jon Cameron's OST "Kes." Johnny has a soundtracks-only show on Resonance FM. But you'd be wrong if you had his own music pegged as either reverential or slavishly 'breaks-oriented." One might expect as much from one of the diggerati.

The whole record is characterised by charming whimsicality and a casual creative fecundity. Like such notorious predecessors as Position Normal and De La Soul, Johnny is mining old records not just for loops but for atmospheres. He shares with outfits like The Focus Group (the project of Stereolab sleeve designer House) an intense affection for the mustiness of early 1960s Britain, an universe populated by Diana Dors, British Jazz musicians in session for KPM, Gainsborough Studios, Donald Cammell, and shoe-string sonic pioneers like the Joe Meek and Delia Derbyshire; an unintentionally seedy world and a brazenly cheap mirror-image of American glamour. Trunk takes delight in this fustiness and spiv-ery.

There is precious little sonic pressure in the tracks here, which flow in a manner akin to the liminal grooves of discarded library records. Tunes like "Sister Woo" would have had their samples (what sounds like a Bacharach loop) stripped clean of off-kilter wobble and polished into chrome turd in lesser hands. Johnny makes it stutter and lurch drunkenly like an accountant in a Soho basement. With "Asylum" and it's lopsided kick-drum, discordant pianner and plaintive flute things just get odder. While not crackling quite as shamelessly as the Position Normal oeuvre here's something as seductively pointless. There is also much in the way of sheer loveliness here. For example "Nine Bob Note" and it's delicate backwards-bossa flecked with glockenspiels and cor anglais, drums and bass compressed into billowing feather-soft cushions. Likewise the exquisite "Deep In a Dream" which displays a truly musical lightness of touch, harps, flutes and fluttering tom-toms spun together from disparate samples with elan, the track twisting gently in time. Also "Zeus" with it's sepulchural hushed choir and after-image strings.

Of course you expect a little Jazz-Funk-styled 'Trip-Hop' action, and in "Curl One Out" you get it, but the territory is always thankfully close to Wagon Christs's similarily 'second-hand and proud' "Throbbing Pouch." It comes as a surprise that this most cravenly backwards-looking nexus of the obscure record collector could produce something as fresh and light.

-

Do you hate reviews in blogs too? Well fak off.

-

I met Trunk the other day and he was well cocky so let's hope he doesn't read this.

Re: SOUL JAZZ. All sorted. Can I crawl back under my stone again?

Recently I visited a favorite dingy subterranean record store and asked the assistant behind the counter whether they had one particular record in stock. While they didn't have that recording, they did have one of the same group's earlier records which turned out to be one a friend had recommended. The assistant pulled it out from the wall of paper behind him and handed it to me.

In my hands I held a dark green velvet sleeve with the band's name embossed in gold upon the cover, the limited edition piece was numbered with an imprinted black stamp on the rear. Opening the sleeve I found, beneath the hand-printed liner insert and rice-paper tissuing a nested gatefold format which opened out to reveal two slabs of black vinyl both of which had cuts across their circumference so when abutted they resembled (with their white labels) a figure of eight. As I was I remarking aloud that, as they stood, these records would be impossible to play, that the needle would fly off their edge, the assistant produced two smaller yellow sections of vinyl which (nearly but not quite) fitted into the holes of the larger records.

The assistant then took one smaller yellow and one larger black section placed them together in a clear shallow plastic tray the size of a twelve inch record (this plastic dish in some ways resembled the lids which cap cream pots in super-markets). Handing the assemblage to me I was distressed to find the vinyl crumbling into jigsaw-shaped pieces between my fingers.

-

SOUL JAZZ have hunted me down nearly a year and a half year after Paul* laid in to me when he'd assumed that because I didn't like the 100% Dynamite series this meant I was both a snob and a racist. I didn't like 100% Dynamite because I thought they lacked proper liner-notes and I thought that Blood & Fire and Pressure Sounds made a better job of making stuff available to the public, managing to be at once both populist and yet still succeding in offering solid information up to collector geeks. I went on, in subsequent weeks to say how much I liked their Studio One series (then just picking up steam) and later on praised their shop to the skies.

The bloke who is sending me rude emails telling me I'm a racist declaring that I ought to get out more often hasn't even bothered to check out the links to the entries I sent him which would effectively clear my name, he just goes on heaping me with insults. Actually I've decided I don't care, and that it goes with the territory when you hold strong opinions. I put a few moments more thought into it this afternoon. The Tighten Up Trojan releases never used to have liner notes and neither do the current crop of VP and Greensleeves comps. The crucial difference here, I've decided, is that they didn't/don't need them; that contemporarily repackaged material doesn't demand it. On the other hand if you're digging up old Jamaican tracks, and you're serious about making Reggae available to the 'General Public', then you ought to provide liner notes. They needn't be dull, they can be a crap newsprint insert but you need 'em.

*For the record the Meme-ster wrote a sterling rant to them in my defense. Big up.

-

http://shutyrgob.blogspot.com/
http://beyondtheimplode.blogspot.com/
http://john_mpc.blogspot.com/
http://dripdropdrap.blogspot.com/

Was in Rough Trade in Covent Garden and saw that the Hoxton Electro thing is still in force down there. Ever since pre-Ministry Fischerspooner (ha remember them!) and that Felix Da Housekatt LP I've had the genre ear-marked as "probably worth checking out if there weren't so many other more interesting things to investigate" and "music made by people too similar to myself (white, middle-class, over-educated, over-privileged with too much time on their hands) to necessitate taking seriously." It kind of flitters before my eyes: City Rockers, Tiga, Anthony Rother, Ivan Smagghe etc. All probably quite excellent stuff, er, except that in spite of living one minute from Hoxton (been here since 1996) it means nothing to me.

Is this a fault on my behalf? I think the "genre" has good things about it. As an electronic music ditching the muso baggage and aligning itself closer to cocaine, fashion and club dynamics than sonic experimentation it's doing healthy things. Music which is later rehabilitated by muso gits like myself is often originally 'superficial' and socially mechanical. Or at least that's how it used to be in the days before there was a cluster of academically-inclined fruits ready to praise The Sound of the Pirates.

Then there's the residual anguish I have about being an old raver. Am I dismissing this genre fallaciously cos I think it's a rehash of better music from better days? You can just FEEL the creeping gentrification of the whole dance music explosion. Naturally "Energy Flash" (as Simon said as much in it's outro) was the first manifestation of this. It's just a matter of weeks before those day-glo smiley-face compilations of old-skool rave anthems DO garner lush repackaging in leather-bound CD cases and Q magazine is full of interviews with Carl Craig and The Prodigy. As a critic (flourish of horns) I fear being roped into praising it, and as much as I relish getting stuck in to Desi, Kwaito, Grime and Funk I still worry I'll that at heart I'll always be a raver. Old swampy. I guess you can't shake off those drug-impressions. "I got high in 1992" or more accurately in my case "I got high roughly between 1987 and 1996."

But there is so much in the electro revival that I find puzzling, unenthralling even. Why do these people fetishise the eighties? Strange how the eighties, in their hands, reads as _shallow_? What was shallow about the eighties, I don't get it? Mark Fisher please talk to these people immediately. Also why don't these people design their record sleeves properly so they look sexy? All electro-clash records look like shit. Maybe Electroclash's pinnacle of achievement is at the axis of mainstream entryism with the jolly "The Show" and "Some Girls"?

Five out of seven!
(The Peixe and Smetak extremely recherche)
You people rock!
The internet rocks!

Dale at Worlds of Possibility greeting my "conversion" to NWW somewhat over-enthusiastically. With a big grin on his face. Ha ha, told you so Ingram! (Only joking Jon!) Actually I think I've been quite consistent, if you wanted to check out my earlier comments they're probably up there somewhere. However, in this game it's good to be wrong and it's good to pick up new things, to put your preconceptions to the test. Funnily enough me old mucker Sacha who just came back from France (he thinks I've stopped blogging!) told me of this great NWW LP that he picked up, and that was a first for him whereas I've already a couple of their lesser recordings under my belt. I was like, Sacha, that is sooo last week!

Jon's done a nice thing on Coil too. You couldn't want for a better, more passionate, articulate advocate. I was at a party the other night and I didn't know anyone. I asked the host if there was anyone there who was into music (easy conversation isn't it?) and he said: 'Why don't you go and talk to Jon Balance over there on the sofa?' 'Oo-er missus,' I said. 'Is there anyone else?' Yeah Coil. Blah blah blah. Time Machines, Love's Secret Domain, Musick to play in the Dark, Horse Blinkin' Rotovator, Scatology. Really! Enough! Buy a book! Buy a Reggae record! Leave it out aight.....

Friend of WOEBOT Sacha Dieu will be doing a Clear Spot on Resonance Fm, today Monday 19th of July from 19h00 till 20h30 (UK time).

-

- David Jackman/Organum.
Thanks to Jim Backhouse for promising to get me this. Organum IS David Jackman. He's a geezer who emerged from Cardrew's Scratch Orchestra and part of a small nexus which also loosely included NWW and Morphogenesis. Morphogenesis was a nutty avant-garde collective which featured both Roger Sutherland (who wrote the excellent, but critically lambasted 'New Perspectives in Music' book) and Michael Prime (who got picked up by The Wire a while ago). Apparently in 1988, according to Craig Appleby, Stapleton was 'feeling' Jackman's stuff. Vis a vis my organic Avant-Garde micro-theory it's a very interesting connection. Sutherland's vision of the A-G is (I think suitably so) extremely occult-tinged. For example the hippy-avant Taj Mahal travellers figure highly in his cosmology as does Bernard Parmegiani. The thing about Parmegiani is that his whole concept of the continuum and mutability of sound, pairing together and mutating into one another similar sounds (swarming bees > clustering electronic glitches > rain > violin sounds > etc > etc) is pointedly psychedelic; it's an aural hallucination of divine sounds communicating to us through the filters of material existence. Parmegiani foregrounding the means of their transmission. This 'filters' thing is something I often used to dwell on, always connecting it to the "interfering" objects which musicians of the Third World often affix to their instruments or use to break the tone's clarity. Springs and rattles affixed to the necks of lutes, split reeds in wind instruments etc. Also by extension Miles Davis's loose skin from his lip occluding his embrochure on "L'Ascenseaur au Echaffaud" and John Cage's nuts and bolts in his prepared piano. I guess Morphogenesis and it's ilk probably didn't get proper dues (as per academification and revisionist simplification of modernism) but right now this nexus seems interesting. Looking forward to hearing some Organum.

- Guerra Peixe
Legendary Brazilian orchestrator. Did the Moraes/Powell Afro-Samba record. No takers yet.

- Walter Smetak.
Swiss-born Brazilian instrument maker. Word-of-mouth tip from Kodwo. No takers.

- Linda Lewis (esp. 'Lark')
Thanks to Joe Estes.

- Mark Wirtz Productions.
German (?) producer who worked out of Abbey Road Studios. Responsible for Keith West's "On a Saturday." Tipped off by Nick Wrigley. No takers yet.

- Pyrolator (esp. 'Ausland' and 'Inland'. Tried ordering these TWICE online...)
Thanks to Baz Van Hoof who is spinning me off some Der Plan, Abwarts and Palais Schaumberg as well. I had PS "Luna" at on stage and have unnaccoutably sold it. Check out Baz's great top 40 European LPs in (where else!) the k-punk comments box:
http://www.abe1x.org/movetype/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=3414

- Gunshot (esp. 'Mind of a Razor'; I only have 'Colour Code')
Thanks to Adam Levine (aka Nordicskillz) who's also chucking in Hijack's "Horns of Jericho."

-

Cathy at http://eyelet.blogspot.com/
Nordicskillz at http://www.taksi.blogspot.com/

WANTED!
CDs of music by the following, copies is fine:

- David Jackman/Organum.
- Guerra Peixe
- Walter Smetak (Anything at all...)
- Linda Lewis (esp. 'Lark')
- Mark Wirtz Productions (esp. Compilations)
- Pyrolator (esp. 'Ausland' and 'Inland'. Tried ordering these TWICE online...)
- Gunshot (esp. 'Mind of a Razor'; I only have 'Colour Code')

REWARD!
CDs from me. Whatever you fancy.

///Lady Sovereign: Ch Ching
Absolutely excellent. The main mix is really stretched out, much of Sov's banter goes into the accappella. Unlike Shystie (whose voice is just WRONG for grime, sorry but sound-wise it's in _the wrong place_ and quite ugly if you ask me) Sovereign, who I've never heard before is excellent. Squeaky white Ragga chiquita, an MC Kinky from the blocks. On (what must be) a major label and still brilliant.

///Ruff Squad: Lethal
I haven't heard their highly-rated show, but Ruff Squad are perhaps a *little* over-rated. Last years 'Tings In Boots' only made it onto my years-end round up because it was just SO basic. This is the same riddim as their 'Pied Piper' isn't it? Granted it's a good track, great thud on the drum and kazoo synths trailing around in a sinister fashion, but.....

///Jon E Cash/Black Ops: Bang Bang Bang
Great stuff from Jon E Cash. The Black Ops are a little thuggish, not quite nimble enough. The charm of fat hip-hoppers (Chubb Rock, Biggie, Diamond D) is how agile they can be; like watching an elephant figure-skating innit. Built on a churchical alternating 2-note salvo. Played it to a mate who thought it was leaden compared to God's Gift on Str8. I like it though. That God's Gift on Highly Flammable is a clinker, terrible sonix.

///Bruza feat Footsie, Triple Threat and Shizzle: Bruzin'
Disappointing on Aftershock. Very routine Terrah Danjah production and flat chat. Bought it nevertheless; label fetish kicking in (Pros and Cons etc).

///Nikki Slim-Ting feat Jookie Mundo: Wonky
Nikki Slim-Ting was in the studio on the Box Bloody Fresh DVD and I thought the track he was having D Double version was really ropey, Grime-by-numbers. This is much MUCH better. Funny little metronomic bleep paired with great slabs of bass. Jookie smearing it all over the canvas. Ich-Ne-San-Sche vocoder in the riddim bringing a nice Kraftwerk flashback.

///DJ Target feat Dogzee and Syer: S.T.D's
There's so much wiggle in Target's beats, plenty of evidence for this on the excellent Aim High Comp. But (blushes) what a rude track! Also unsure of how much I want to know about the ins and outs of Doogz's urinary tract... But nonetheless great blustery bug-eyed vibe. And, I guess, in a sense, a valuable lesson for da kids. Bwoys and Gyals.

///DJ Target: Aim High Music Presents Vol. 1
Excellent round up of Target's productions. Two major hits with 'The Chosen One' and 'S.T.D's' Yep this is shaping up to be another imprint to watch. Particularly liked Flow Dan's 'That's Me' which has him snapping his fingers and leaning into the mic. Riddim courtesy of Missy's 'Pass That Dutch' (er, I think...) curling this likkle phrase round in tiny orbits: "That's Me, Sell Drugs, Sex Gals, Smoke Weed" perfectly capturing the infolding feedback loop of stoned life. Also Donaeo on the mad gypsy riddim with the accordian.

Matt Johnson walks into his local music store:

"Excuse me, do you have the the The The record?"

Matt Johnson walks into a restaraunt and sits down:

"Can I look at the the menu?"

I remember Ken Downie (aka The Black Dog) playing me some huge soft-edged Basic Channel-styled astrolabe grooves quite like harder-edged versions of these NWW tracks; long-form stuff. I've always kicked myself that I didn't offer more encouragement for them, they quite took me be surprise. I don't imagine the trax ever got released. Ken almost certainly knew about 'Soliloquy for Lilith.'

Been absolutely ADORING Nurse With Wound's 'Soliloquy for Lilith.' Before you ask, no I haven't given up on Garridge. I just found a copy on vinyl this weekend. Gleefully showed the purchase to a friend who nearly stymied my enthusiasm for it before I'd even had the chance to listen to the darned thing. Actually it was a bit of a punt; I've recently found that 'Homotopie for Marie' one too, and was pretty underwhelmed. The first reason being that many of the supposedly alienating 'super obscure' samples on it were from ethnographic records I own, plus actually I don't like composers making things 'dark' by using Third World samples. Not that these samples made up the bulk of the record, but what was left wasn't that enticing. Added to which NWW's debut LP, the one with the list of obscure records on the back is absolute rubbish (didn't Stapleton confess as much too?); the chances of this one excelling had to be pretty remote.*

But joy! It's completely superb! It's six sides of slow rotating drones are more like super oilagenous drum-less grooves, reminiscent of, amongst other things the B-side of Basic Channel's 6th record and Thomas Koner's 'Permafrost.' NWW's vision is much grander however (love writing reviews for these old records!) his is a very organic Minimalism, you COULD see it as existing in quite stark contrast with the ferocious Modernism of Phillip Glass's 'Music for Changing Parts', Jon Gibson's 'Two Solo Pieces', Charlemagne Palestine's 'Strumming Music', La Monte Young 'Black Record' etc, except that (and people seem to have forgotten this) Minimalism was essentially extremely baroque, opiated and suffused with influence from Indian classical, Plainchant and Tribal music (the latter is cheesy term I know, but encapsulates the community aspect of Third World music as well as it's geography). That's part of the problem with the austere reading of Modernist culture at the moment, it fails to tease out, to acknowledge the richness of the culture. All the Maths and Science was then in effect often as a result of occult number theory (La Monte/Catherine Christer Hennix) or out of a fetishism for ancient culture (Xenakis), not simply for it's qualities of abstraction. Off the top of my head I can only think of Roland Kahn and Charles Dodge who were pimping the Maths for purely mechanistic effects.

This is handy too, because it enables us to see Stapleton, not as an inferior copyist but as someone ploughing his own rich groove. Listening to the record super loud I discovered the staircase in my my study throbbing in time to it's ultra-bass tones. That makes me well keen to hear his 'Marie Celeste' record another exercise in atmosphere; all those creaking timbers. Sadly 'Soliloquy for Lilith' doesn't appear to widely available any more, I couldn't find the CD, though I'm sure some dude will straighten me out.

*Though natch the Stereolab 'Simple Headphone Mind' collaboration rocks.

Seen from the window of the train bound south from Victoria to Romford. Facade of building emblazoned with man-size font, white-on-black paint chipped and worn away by the years:

"THE MUSIC ROLL EXCHANGE"

Just the other day I heard Hendrix's "Burning of the Midnight Lamp" and flashed back to the feelings I had when I first heard it, aged possibly 14 or 15. Do you remember that age in your life when some music sounded almost overwhelmingly alien, so threatening, liscentious and radical? Sounds that seemed to be the manifestation of unattainable states of mind, of philosophies cryptically obscure? Of course at my age, our age, we're so blase, so unshockable and impermeable, our emotional retinas toasted to a crisp that such a profound response is rare. I still look for sounds which generate the kind of effect that the Hendix tune did but, sighs, they're thinner on the ground and have to work immeasurably harder than they once did.

Hearing "Burning of the Midnight Lamp", it's churning phases and oral fretwork brought back those feelings that the track had originally instilled. This in exactly the same manner that friends can reactivate the e-rush by listening to old rave records. I'll probably pick the Hendrix record up again, it was off that Smash Hits one, I sold it ages ago, and I'll play it over and over again untill (inevitably) it ceases to generate the same psychic reaction. It's power worn away.

I've done the same things before with old poptones, tracks specific to one particular period of my life, usually latched on to in a brief glinting happy chink in my childhood. I'll play them over and over again until I've milked those same vibrations dry and their force dissipates. We all do it don't we.

BTW Hendrix's "Easy Rider" and "Dolly Dagger" choons!

-

Looking through my old cassettes and found one from 1998 I'd labelled "Raggage." That's exactly what all the new Grime is like! Versions and Patois ahoy. There's a neologism I can actually dig! And it's mine (or at least I think it is...) Coining genres is something which, as a rule, I make a pig's ear of.

-

Derek Walmsley of the Poplife blog has not one, not two but THREE reviews in this month's The Wire. Nice interloping deek!

-

Jim Clarke email me or you die.

I've been so engrossed at work that I haven't been able to make it down the shops. I've worked the last two weekends too. Squirrelling away cash I guess, vainly trying to allieve my neurosis at imminently becoming a father of two. Two children! How did that happen? I'm clearly still a child myself! (You're gazing at the evidence) BTW the only reason I'm finding time to type this is I'm mid-render, hands are tied etc.

So I turned to the net, and decided to order some vinyl and CDs off it. It's supposed to be such a great idea, so simple, but shopping online is so fucking convoluted. In fact it's about a million times more strenuous than digging around in musty basements.

Obstacles to my objects of desire include GEMM's appalling layout (designed by monkeys surely), the purveyors of DJ Screw's mix CDs at the Screwed Up Shop (who NEVER answer emails though you can get a discount if you are a US serviceman, touch of Hendix in 'nam there), er the purveyors of DJ Screw's mix CDs on eBay (who've clearly been supping that codeine; "Sorry kid, what was it you ordered?"), the South African-based Kwaito exporters (no actually they're really efficient) and primarily Catherine's VISA card (don't trust myself with one) which is choked with our holiday expenses. Dunno why I even started trying to buy stuff online! With that last one I pretty much stumble at the first hurdle.

***NOTE TO GOOGLERS***

I do not have the All Aboard Compilation! Instead buy the HMV "Chilrden's Classics" Volume One and Two. If another person emails me about "All Aboard" I'll scream.

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

Seems like yesterday was the day in which everything was turned upside down!

My old mucker Matt Moore scuppered me by identifying the compilation which I have that Terry Scott "My Brother" track from. It's called Children's Classics. I bought it for Lulu a while back and ripped it to disc cos she mangles all her CDs something 'orrible. Here's the track-listing:

1. Laughing policeman - Penrose, Charles
2. Ugly duckling - Kaye, Danny
3. Robin Hood - James, Dick
4. Right said Fred - Cribbins, Bernard
5. Hippopotamus song - Wallace, Ian
6. Banana boat song (Day O) - Freberg, Stan
7. Goodness gracious me - Sellers, Peter & Sophia Loren
8. Bee song - Askey, Arthur
9. Who's afraid of the big bad wolf - Pinky & Perky
10. I know an old lady - Ives, Burl
11. My boomerang won't come back - Drake, Charlie
12. Teddy bears' picnic - Hall, Henry
13. Nellie the elephant - Miller, Mandy
14. Sparky's magic piano - Blair, Henry & Ray Turner
15. Owl and the pussycat - Hayes, Elton
16. Ernie (the fastest milkman in the West) - Hill, Benny
17. Buckingham Palace - Stephens, Anne
18. Windmill in old Amsterdam - Hilton, Ronnie
19. Grandad - Dunn, Clive
20. My brother - Scott, Terry
21. Morningtown ride - Seekers
22. Gnu song - Flanders & Swann
23. Two little boys - Harris, Rolf
24. Runaway train - Holliday, Michael

Yeah, and it's wicked. I'll admit I adore it. Matt says:

"Nothing could touch the ecstatic exuberance of Nelly the Elephant, the tongue-in-cheek elegance of the Gnu Song or the sheer bowel-weakening terror of Runaway Train.

As a pre-pubescent child you listen to music as pure sound - an eternal NOW devoid of history / context / genre."

As I type this I can imagine Reynolds on the point of picking up pen to commend Matt's remarks. Queerly it's Coldcut at their most psychedelic who give me a fix closest to those that these tracks do. They have this unique ability to tap into that Roald Dahl circa Charlie and The Chocolate Factory/Chitty Chitty Bang Bang* vibe; shades of Wacky Racers and Heath Robinson too. Don't ask me how I made this synaesthetic jump.

I also got dropped a line by man like Jim Eaton-Terry, who suggests that Elizabeth David is probably Elvis in my cookery cosmology. He also quite rightly takes me task over Nigella. Jim points out that: " How To Eat is one of the all time stone classic cookbooks." Fair enough blud. I'd follow that by by grudgefully conceding that "How to be a Dosmestic Goddess" is also well solid. I'll have to revise my placing of Nigella. Let's think, someone who blew it big time, how about Lee Perry pre- and post- Black Ark incineration?

Finally, almost forgot to admit that I found myself listening to Lloyd Cole today. You start to enjoy it, and your critical faculties recoil in horror.

WOEBOT: Keepin' it real.

*Yeah I know Ian Fleming wrote the book, but Dahl wrote the screenplay.

Aynsley Harriott has this particular show he does called 'Aynsley On The Road' and the programme is punctuated by these amazing tableaux in which he cooks along to a pop song. He's out amid the redwood trees with a couple of mounties dancing to something like Queen's 'Another One Bites The Dust' as he flash fries turkey escallops on a barby.

My all-time favourite of these has Aynsley on a boat at night in Sydney Harbour as fireworks go off in the background. He's prancing extravagantly to The Lighning Seeds "You Make It Happen" and dousing sliced tropical fruit with alcohol. It is probably the most awful and hilarious bit of TV ever, and thus in consequence the best pop video yet made.

It's always fun to witness a colleague letting off a bit of steam, and Mr Agreeable is one of our treasured geysers (geezers), old reliable innnit. The other day he was taking out controller of BBC2, a Jane Root, for daring to suggest that one of her great regrets was that she failed to secure Jamie Oliver for another TV series. Scoff!

Everyone hates Jamie Oliver don't they. He just stands for everything crap about yoofTV, all that's empty and godforsaken about safe middle-class culture's meaningless obsessions, he's practically the antithesis of everything that alt culture stands for, made worse by his co-opting of drab super-bland shite like Jamiroquai, The Doves and Toploader. He's just a bit too far right of that invisible line which exists just to the right of the Mercury Awards.

But of course he's OK isn't he? He's alright! Cheeky bloke! A cut off the mockney block, it's not like he's pretending to be less classy than he is (like Guy Ritchie for instance). He's done some quite good things I reckon, that restaurant '15' he set up is still training unemployable dufuses, setting them up with careers for life. While he'll not quite make it into the >heronbone< canon of people so awful they're magically exhilaratingly wonderful (like Tim Westwood and Brian Sewell),he's still OK. I've even bumped into him myself on a couple of occasions and he was polite, courteous, friendly even. His crime, is of course, that he's a celebrity chef.

But why are celebrity chefs reviled, and celebrity DJs revered? OK, let me rephrase that, why does alt culture despise celebrity chefs and laud it's DJs? I think the chefs, on the whole are much more worthy recipients of adulation. They know a lot of recipes, they're often staggeringly kinetic charismatic figures in their kitchens inspiring awe and trepidation in their workers, they actually produce something of enormous sophistication, something of sensual power. Whereas the DJs (straw man I know) just spin a few records their mates gave them, often too lazy to reach beyond the narrow circuit of record companies who pump them material.

Over the years I've become something of an expert on celebrity chefs and it's struck me that there are a lot of parallels between theirs and the world of music. Robert Carrier, now he's the don. He's like The Beatles. I don't know why I'm finding myself in this position always defending The Beatles at the moment. I think it must be because, essentially, they represent a music that is an undeniable source of power. I get tired, and a bit bored, always reading about such and such obscure musician with their seminal influence on culture. Yawn. Gimme beef and spuds! The Beatles mate! Yeah! The Beatles weren't some sideline to the main cultural spectacle, they ate the whole culture alive, ingested it. They were HUGE! Isn't that fascinating? How could that not be fascinating? Also, you can't knock The White Album...

The thing about The Beatles was that they changed everything. Before them it was Alma Coogan and Frank Sinatra, shit in other words, old school pantomime, and after them it was in your head, coursing through your veins, waking you up at night. Do you really think Reggae would have changed music had it not been for The Beatles? Just like Robert Carrier. Robert Carrier sold French cuisine to the Brits like The Beatles sold electric Rock'n'Roll to the world. He was the don dada.

Then you have Keith Floyd. Keith Floyd is I reckon like Neil Young. Well maybe he was like The Rolling Stones in the seventies and then in the nineties he became like Neil Young. I always thought that his kicking alcohol and doing that series on Indian food and vegetarianism was like, booyackashak, Neil Young twinning up with Sonic Youth and Arc-weld. Radical reinvention that you just couldn't have predicted. Delia Smith she's like Bob Dylan (no she's NOT like Siouxsie Sioux), she had the archive shit going full on, Delia studied those ancient English recipes like Dylan absorbed the Appalachian ballads. She would be someone like Shirley Collins (yeah the Alan Lomax connection would have served me well) but for the fact that she ripped it all up with her Summer Collection in the 80s, that was radical noggins. That was like Blood On The Tracks baby, the master is here, step back all imitators: "We deliver the ku."

Of course Delia's football team makes her look a little like Elton John, but her Christianity, ah you gotta hand it to me, that makes her look like Bob Dylan again. And of course her retiring to a state of nun-hood like she did for a few years, well that makes her look like Bob Dylan too.

Rick Stein! The man! There's a big place in my heart for Rick Stein. He's like second-rank isn't he. When it comes to fish Rick is the daddy. The things he can do with scallops! Rick's big thing is sourcing the ingredients proper, and in that sense he's quite like my man Kirk Degiorgio and his synths, equally he could be like Harry Partch, cos he was an instruments man. Actually Harry Partch is probably more like Hugh Fernley-Whittinstall (a friend of the family, I saw his lovely Mum just the other day), cos Hugh actually grows his own stuff in that little Kitchen garden of his. If he spliced a few genes together and made a carrot that tasted like a courgette then he'd REALLY be like Harry Partch.

Nigella Lawson. Oh dear, don't start me. She's a total interloper, very shallow talent, rode into the limelight on Nigel Slater's coat-tails. Slater, who reacts to tungsten lighting like a Yorkshire pudding, and is better as a journalist. Slater is like Lester Bangs when he was playing in The Delinquents. Him on TV, it's like a hack's jolly. Nigella is like Peaches, she's pathetically pimping her not-quite good looks in an arena overstuffed with so many unattractive male specimens. It's almost as if you see the competition spluttering, "But it's not fair!" The way she provocatively nuzzles strawberries is like Peaches snogging audience members. The cooking, like the music, is totally superfluous, a botched together make-do snapshot of stolen gestures and ideas.

Gary Rhodes, aah I had plans for Gary! He started off so promisingly in the eighties, somewhere betwixt Tom Robinson and Nigel Kennedy. I have an image of him eating cockles in his mohican at an East End Café indelibly burnt in my memory. This was punk cuisine! But, regrettably he's become yet more and more anally retentive. The way he strokes pork joints and gently handles cauliflower, yikes. Maybe he's like Phillip Glass, starts off brash and iconoclastic but becomes gradually homogenized and incorporated into the dominant culture at an imperceptibly slow pace. You never saw it happening.

The super-cool, behind-the-scenes, indisputable rulers of the current crop of celebrity chefs are of course Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers of The River Cafe. They're like Lou Reed and John Cale those birds. It's definitely a case of psychological domination of the field. They may have performed the same trick with Italian cuisine over here, that Carrier did with French cooking. Everyone nicks their stuff like the 80s saw every band in the UK nick The Velvet's.

Anthony Worrall-Thomson, I dunno I give up, he's like Aerosmith. Aynsley Harriott, Harry Belafonte of course! What does strike me as somewhat curious is that British Cuisine has failed to have a dance music revolution. British Cuisine is indelibly Rock. Jamie Oliver you see, he's just another chapter of Rock'n'Roll. If Gary Rhodes was New Wave, Jamie is like Nirvana. Likewise the excellent Giorgio Locatelli, you can smell the leather trousers in his closet. Where are all the disco chefs? Most worrying I think it may suggest that Dance music failed. Dance music failed to radicalize the mainstream. Dance music failed to ring the changes, it was like a dream in the way conversely The Beatles singlehandedly DID signal something new.

For the first time ever I've had the super-scary jukebox on my computer spooling out into a room of other people. Damn there's some strange stuff amid that 71 gig of data! Lots of things I 'acquired' I've subsequently never got round to listening to more than once. Stuff by Choclair, DJ Seduction, Doris, ECC, Gigolo Tony, Hal Blaine, Hedningarna and J.B.Lenoir. That's just C to J! And just so much Reggae, a relic of my insane year-long CD copy session; I have 96 I Roy tracks and one by I Roy Junior. Also some super dreck: Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" (fist punches sky!), Mike Oldfield's "Moonlight Shadow" (take me back baby!) and Terry Scott's "My Brother" (it's not mine I promise). Funnily enough though, I'm really struggling to programme a sufficently svelte set.

Nick Drake's "Sunday" is terrible.

At the mercy of a collegue's iPod.
It's not all bad news.
Heard Galaxie 500 again for the first time in ten years.
First time on a stereo that is, cos Jim used them on his short movie.
"Don't let your youth go to waste."
That's Jonathon Richman that is!
Met Richman in 1988 and feverishly shook his hand.
He was rather blinded/puzzled by my shm-indie adulation.
But there's a nakedness to that Modern Lovers stuff.
Also saw Galaxie 500 back in the eighties.
Upstairs in the Subterranean Club beside Grant Hart and we talked.
Grant dismissed the band as a "one-trick-pony."
There WERE kind of limited.
But I was pleasantly surprised to hear how well they've aged.
That first record on Rough Trade was the one.
Damon and Naomi now isn't it?
Plagueing poor old Robert Wyatt.
Also listened to Yo La Tengo.
Yikes.
Always thought they looked fabulously unappealing.
But then I found that Hubley's dad was a member of that crucial animation collective UPA.
"Gerald McBoing Boing."
Big finger to Disney.
Cut-out style.
Yeah and I was quite enjoying the music too.
Quite why The Wire like them I dunno?
It's very mellifluous...
But then suddenly I heard something familiar.
"Now what does that remind me of?"
Lloyd Cole and The Commotions!

Boum? Funky? Funky Do Morro?

Dodgy Download Area: http://www.evil-wire.org/~ampere/mp3/funky/
Forthcoming Compilation: http://www.haaksman.net/d_bio.html

And apparently feted by Kodwo Eshun!

Dave Moynihan mentioned in an off-hand manner in hyping his 'Hat on the Wall' night that he'd just come back from Brazil bearing Favela Funk. Quick as you like I emailed him offering all manner of bounty in exchange for a CD of the stuff. Dave has cherry-picked his fave tunes from native comps with names like 'Funk Neurotico' and has parcelled them on without much in the way of track names, not that I care an awful amount.

This stuff I've decided is the missing piece in my vision of what I'm dubbing "Shanty House." Shanty House is the new strain of post World Music engaging in the same cultural and social dynamics that have given us Crunk and Grime in the first world and Dancehall in JA. Detractors might bemoan the need to give Favela Funk, Kwaito and Desi a brand name. However, like it or lump it these forms are always going to exist on the peripheries of most