WOEBOT

Totally T for tremendous documentary about Nu Groove records. Music sounds fucking fantastic.

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I just discovered this very entertaining interview John Prancehall did with Lee Perry. Mad crazy props to John for that.

Posted by WOEBOT at 12:05 PM | Permalink

I'll be here now.

Posted by WOEBOT at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Shanty House - Friday 3rd November 2006, Whitechapel Art Gallery, from 8.00pm

"Shanty House brings a range of global urban music to the Whitechapel – from Baile Funk emanating from Brazilian favelas, to Kwaito the house-influenced sounds of South African townships and Desi, fusing traditional Indian music with Bhangra, hip hop, garage and reggae; from the Hip-Hop of the Deep South Crunk, to Jamaica’s dancehall and London’s Grime.

The opening night will include a performances from Tetine, a Soul Jazz signed Brazilian duo fusing baile funk with electroclash. DJs WOEBOT, Stelfox, Bun-u playing the best in crunk, grime, desi, baile funk, reggaeton, dancehall and hyphy. The night will kick off with a special screening of Resistencia: Hip Hop in Colombia, followed by a Q&A with Director Tom Feiling.

Resistencia: Hip-Hop in Colombia Director: Tom Feiling, 51 min, UK, 2002
Resistencia offers a rare look at the Hip-Hop street subculture in civil war-torn Colombia, while at the same time exploring how traditional Latino music is being infiltrated by rap. Following a summer in the lives of some of Colombia's finest rappers, DJs and break-dancers, the film explores how young Colombians feel about the crisis afflicting their country and the impact it has on their lives. Caught between left wing guerillas and right wing paramilitaries, these youths turn to rap as a way to express their points of view on the realities forced upon them by long-running violence, cultural crisis and the global cocaine trade. Youthful and entertaining, but also angry and enlightening, Resistencia bears witness to how the Hip-Hop culture has a major impact far from the "bling bling" of the U.S. music industry.

Tetine
Eliete Mejorado and Bruno Verner, both native Brazilians who have since relocated to London, created Tetine in São Paulo in 1995 by combining various cultural and artistic currents. Lying at the intersection of performance art, video, and dirty electronica, a Tetine concert comes off as a Latin American version of Fischerspooner, with the raw sounds of baile funk infusing the squelchy beats.

Tetine has also increasingly incorporated the aggressive beats of baile funk into their own more rock-oriented music, which Verner dubs "punk carioca" ... Tetine's forthcoming album, L.I.C.K My Favela (on Slum Dunk Records), draws even more heavily from baile.

DJs WOEBOT Stelfox and Bun-U
Have been DJing a variety of musics at London venues and on radio, with WOEBOT and Stelfox also making huge contributions to discourse through printed and web-based media."

Shanty House on myspace

Posted by WOEBOT at 01:55 PM | Permalink

This is the story of a record dealer called Soufriere1 from Canada.
He's obviously something of an expert.
Possibly a nice dude.
Almost certainly a little flakey.
Maybe something of a rip-off artist.
However things went belly-up.
Maybe owing to personal problems.
Maybe mounting debts.
One can track the fallout across the net:

He defends his use of patois here

More kvetching about the patois and then on...

This is his old eBay feedback where one can see things going wrong.

He gets himself a new eBay alias.

The winning bidder here fucks up his auction of an item. Clock their name.

People complain about his attitude here.

The full tale of woe, some people defend him, but many present tales of being burnt.

Where is he now?
It's a matter of time before his latest eBay alias is cracked.
Certainly if he presents his sales in the same way.
The story is interesting in the way in which it opens up that tension between anonymity and reputation.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:31 AM | Permalink

Ripping Reynolds's classic "Pirate Madness/Ardkore's Firin'" cassette onto a CD last week for artist Matt Stokes gave me the opportunity to check it out afresh. It consists of Simon's favourite bits of Pirate radio lunacy circa 1992. Nutters rushing out of their heads babbling inanities, phone-ins that go disastrously wrong, appalling almost surreal microphone placements and choons which slipped between the cracks. As an item it's somewhere up there with Hugo Ball's Dada manifesto.

What struck me most about it, and this relates to my remarks about Spaceape's MC-ing I suppose, was that the voices of the Disc Jockies and the MCs sounded a million miles different to how people talk today. Compared to today's pirate MCs they sound like medieval rabble. It's not just a case of shifting slanguage either there's something unplaceably foreign and alien, ruff and grimey about the voices. It made me quite emotional, almost in the way of them belonging to a "gone world", in a way that the just the music itself would never do.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:30 AM | Permalink

I was listening to Radio 3 the other day and it was some kind of Desert Island discs. I got hooked in by this fantastic bit of Opera by Donizetti. The man being interviewed was a high court judge who was a key member in an amateur orchestra. The interviewer asked him if he ever enjoyed any contemporary music. I sat on the edge of my seat. The high court judged took a deep breath and said, in all seriousness, that he would occasionally listen to post-war stuff. I dunno, I thought he was going to say he liked Glen Miller or something at the very least. Quite heartened by it actually.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:29 AM | Permalink

Following on from my previous round-up of stuff "wot i got sent" here's another seven CDs which got through the stringent WOEBOT selection process and which are all thoroughly deserving of your attention. It struck me that there's a strong post-dance music thing going on with all these records.

1. Belbury Poly: The Owl's Map

How on earth do Belbury Poly wind up with these extraordinary tunings? I swear you had to actually have lived and made library music in the early 80's to master the zeit-timbres they conjoure up. What no-one has pointed out about Belbury yet (er, at least to my knowledge, gulp) is that they make Techno. Zooming forward into the future as fast as they spin back in to the past (more Wicker-man here than ever before) both axes spinning like gears on a children's toy gyroscope. My Ghost Box tattoo hurt like hell, but now the scabs are falling off it's looking brilliant.

2. A Guy Called Gerald: Proto Acid

This A Guy Called Gerald release on Andrea Parker's Lab Instinct label just made me sigh. It's called Proto-Acid, when as Gerald is at pains to point out, it has no 303s on it. Why the hell call it "Proto-Acid" then? I know as well as anyone else that the early Detroit and Chicago crew were making music at the time of Acid which was factored into what was termed Acieed when it didn't use that particular Roland machine, or more complicatedly used the 303 but didn't tweak it for the corrosive lysergic frequencies which it became associated with after Pierre's defining opus. I suppose the Musique or Gherkin labels would be the archetypes of this. Even if as Gerald remarks: "It’s how I feel house/techno music would have sounded if the whole rave thing hadn’t happened in England" this is a convoluted reading of the history.

Y'see straight away one expects both a retro-tastic adventure and banks of squiggly frequencies; but one gets neither. There's nothing backward looking about this disc at all, this isn't one of those absurd Vibert-style stylistic re-runs, rather it's Gerald rather bossily showing the likes of Villalobos and Hawtin that he can do what they do. In terms of propulsiveness, efficiently and drama he does it better. Gerald performed a similar kind of ram-raid on jungle last year, surely putting numerous backs out with hilariously abusive PR about the scene which needed him to salvage it, but with less successful results.

"Proto Acid" is a curious thing. Twenty four individual tracks, seemingly designed with the mix's arc in mind, are segued seamlessly into a mix just over an hour long. I can't think of another long-player like it in concept? Tracks are just that. One doesn't get locked into individual eddys before being passed downstream to the next, the flow is more akin to being jettisoned at velocity through pipes of different material. As if in brutal contrast to his more recent song-led work there are no verse/chorus structures, the drama is entirely created through dynamics internal to the groove. To switch metaphors to one of driving: we glide through breathy tom-tom-ised gloom of "Auto Rebuild", past the plunging electro chords of "Space 1999" into the trebling percussion of "Droid" never pausing or regrouping. My personal highlight is the quite magnificent, sublime "Merlot Brougham" for which I'd trade all Aphex's dreary Analord stuff (from which same vein it emerges). "Feel the heat" is nearly as exquisite. One just has to flash on "Voodoo Ray" to remember that no-one passes energy around around a static groove with quite the same elan as Gerald.

Remember Gerald's reputation within house music has been tainted. "Voodoo Ray" brought him nothing but misery- he never got paid*, Automanikk was a flop for him at Sony, and it was really "Black Secret Technology" and break-beats which brought money with the fame. However my favorite AGCG moments have almost all been of that rottweiler-packing, uzi-toting brand of house he's peddled in his down-time: "All Night Baby" on Juice Box, "Universe 2000" and "Forever Changing" from 28 Gun Bad Boy, Inertia's "Nowhere to Run" on Carl Craig's Retroactive. So great to hear him rocking at 4/4 with the confidence of a don. U must check this. I swear blind you'll love it.

* Though before he dredges this up again I'd like to remind him that he owes me a couple of hundred quid...

3. Kode9 and the Spaceape: Memories of the Future

The first time I heard this it really rubbed me up the wrong way. Mainly down down to Spaceape's MC-ing. I'm convinced that patois has evolved since the mid-seventies and that no-one actually sounds like this. In One Drop for instance, the MCs manage to sound different to vintage toasters. There must be a degree of quotation in, not so much his lyrics, but in the tenor of his delivery which is defiantly classicist.

Reynolds is right to point to LKJ, Spaceape is very much in his mould, his intellektual bass-heavy delivery pitched up a quarter between MC and mellifluous singjay. I did find this retro element a little off-putting because the chat's covert effect, dread, became a little mannered. I didn't "buy" it. I much prefer the tracks like the excellent "Quantum" when he reigns in the stylisation, stops rolling every "hole" opening every "gate" and sounds, well, natural. It's almost as though expecting one to swallow the Ballard-ian poetry *and* the yard threat is too tall an order.

But recently I've picked it up again and it does work nicely as a mood-piece. It's rich in tone and atmosphere and full of lovely touches like the depressed accordion on "Glass" (like Danny Weed's signature sonic drunk and broke). Also I dig the The Specials overtones as much as the next man. It's a worthy successor to the Burial LP and in twenty years time the two will undoubtedly be remembered as the sound of 2006. Thanks to Steve for sending me a copy, especially given my misgivings about Dubstep.

4. Mordant Music: Dead Air

Baron Mordant has been sending me stuff for a couple of years and each time the results surpass the last. Last year's "The Tower" was good, but in its drive towards austerity was a little thin on detail. Dead Air which I've had since May (gulp) and which has lingered on my desktop like a marshland mist, is on the other hand tailored to perfection.

Interesting how some of the best things this past year (this and the Various stuff) have been faux-dubstep. In the past things like "Fungle" and much Intelligent Techno, in other words where self-styled artistes/auteurs have claimed to better an original genre, it has always been a turn-off to me.

5. Xylitol

Clenching it tight to his bosom. I'm their biggest fan. If I had a label I'd sign them.

6. Sacred Selections

This project was great fun. I got hold of Matt Stokes the artist who did it and he very kindly sent me the sumptuously packaged CD. Qua music its a strange thing, on the one hand the slightly elephantine organs struggle with all needlepoint dynamics of the music (Northern Soul, Happy Hardcore and Black Metal), and on the other the orchestration doesn't really do justice to the breadth of the instrument's sound. Also I'm afraid to say that the recording is very distant (a whole heap better than my dictaphone though) and you really want to have microphones down the pipes to get the volume up-close.

Matt did include an archive recording for the St Matthew's at Westminster performance on the 4th of May, the one I attended, and it's a much better recording and a more confident performance. I sent a copy of this to Simon and I sent Matt a copy of Reynolds's old "Pirate Radio Madness" tape (which I ripped to CD) and also Dj Wrongspeed's "Pirate Flavas". It's all art innit. If I remember rightly Mr. Wrongspeed was at the concert as well.

7. Si Begg: My Style

I don't really know anything about Si Begg, but he sent me this and it's really good Reese-bassline/breakbeat madness.

Posted by WOEBOT at 11:46 AM | Permalink

I'm not exactly certain how I ended up checking out so much Italian Prog this year, and at moments putting together this piece I wondered what the hell I was doing listening to this often difficult music. I suppose I was fascinated with how such an intensely creative, individual music came into ascendence in such a short time-frame (1973 and 1974 if one's being harsh), I also have a missionary desire to redress the disproportionate celebrity Krautrock enjoys in the UK and US but in the process of immersing myself in it I came to really dig it and its nuances.

I wish I knew more about the background to the music, about the "anni di piombo", the Red Brigade, the radicalised campuses, the power of the unions. I suspect that youth made a concerted effort to channel violence in more constructive ways, but I'm afraid (like my German) my Italian is non-existent. I do know from reading interviews with musicians that these years were marked by an incredible degree of cooperation and "healthy competition" between groups. On the other hand with the context melting away, and as a foreigner both in time and geography, one is free to enjoy the music on its own merits. After a good deal of research I cherry-picked these records as being, perhaps, the absolutely best examples of the genre.

Alphataurus: Alphataurus

Alphataurus were either from Genova or Milan. No-one seems to be able to agree. This stunning one-off LP came out in 1973 in a triple gate-fold sleeve. I dig the absurdly portentous imagery but then my taste has been corroded by exposure to all things Prog. Part Black Sabbath with a dash of early King Crimson like a lot of Italian Prog it's probably better to describe it as, get your pen's ready, Symphonic Hard Rock. Amazing crescendos full of bravura, extraneous gamma-ray synths and some of the crispest, most satisfying drum-fills ever committed to tape.

Area: Crac!

A NWW record. Area must be the most typically "Prog" of all the Italian groups, on Crac! they even bought into the classic Prog "egg" motif. That they were theoretically "an international pop group" like wot it says on the cover, with members from Greece, Belgium and France, may have something to do with this. Their self-conscious focus on instrumental prowess (singer Demetrio Statos had a voice which spanned four octaves) and a dalliance with Jazz (later collaborating with Steve Lacy and Paul Lytton) make them appear somewhat like Henry Cow. However, unlike Henry Cow, as well as noodling with the best of them, Area could also write cracking tunes like on this record the insane vampire-funk of "La Mela di Odessa" and "Gioria e rivoluzione".

Balletto Di Bronzo: Ys

Which came up recently in reference to the Joanna Newsom LP of the same name. I first laid ears on BDiB in a double pack of delights which my friend Francesco sent me. The track "Eh eh ah ah" pretty much blew me away. Like a semi-acoustic Slade with floral pretensions there's a mascara'd moonboot stomp to their music which is exquisitely dread, traces as well of Canned Heat's "On the road again" churned into a tremulous fuzz-bass riff. That track isn't actually on this their classic LP. From Naples, "Ys" was released in 1972, my favorite here is the superbly depressed sounding "Introduzione", Gianni Leone having a unplaceably eldritch quality to his desperate vocals. This record is on the famous NWW list.

Banco Del Mutuo Soccorso: Darwin!

Banco Del Mutuo Soccorso: Io Sono Nato Libero

The giants of Italo Prog. I prefer the gentler sounds of "Io Sono Nato Libero" their third LP above "Darwin!", particularly "Non Mi Rompete", though all of their first three records are very good. Banco are still together, still touring and releasing records.

Franco Battiato: Sulle corde di Aries

One can half imagine at Progressive rock meets they have heated discussions about which of Battiato's LPs are the most superior. It's probably a toss-up between this from 1973 and Clic (1974) which garnered a reissue on Island records, one of the very few feats of cross-over that Italo Prog achieved. Clic is a little too anti-septic for my now hoary tastes, and I'm suspicious of anything like Bill Bruford, Peter Gabriel or Robert Fripp's work which dons a smart suit, tidies up the synth parts and saunters into the post-punk vanguard pretending it was now trendy.

Like those mass classroom scraps you had when you were a kid, the lame thing to do when the teacher showed up was to tuck your shirt in, loiter at the back pretending you were just examining the poster with the frog-spawn on it, that in no way were you involved in any kind of debacle. The stupid kids on the other hand didn't notice the teacher had come in, might have still been brawling, perhaps one holding a dustbin in his hand. Clic is a little bit too clean and thus, even though ten years ago we might have applauded it for being presciently new-wave, now I sort of despise it for its sleek textures.

My friend, the scholar Jon Dale gets plenty of props from me, so he can field the occasional catty swipe; he loves it! Jon is something of an authority on Battiato, indeed he was the first person to play me any, but in some way I suspect this may in some way be to do with the fact that FB survived the blood-letting that was punk and went on to do records such as "Cafe-Table-Musik", which Dale incidentally loves. Dale veers away from the unacceptable horror that these Italo Prog records represent and indeed some of the stuff he recommended I check out was rather too tasteful for me. Stuff like Prima Materia recordings and the Die Schnatel label. Ah, the meta-critical, nitty-gritty, bitch-fest that is music blogging! Doncha just love it.....

This record is one I'd dearly love to have an original vinyl copy of, I have instead a 1980s reissue of it bundled with Clic- both LPs tonsured to fit- the cover of which I'm too embarrassed to upload here. I saw a copy recently for $250 and baulked. Of these records I only have the Area, the two Banco Mutuo Del Soccorso, the PFM and the Goblin on vinyl. All the rest are CD reissues. You just couldn't afford to buy this stuff otherwise, but it's also fantastic that they are still available.

"Sulle corde di Aries" is a masterpiece and an essential purchase. Franco's singing is almost in the style of a Franciscan monk layered over these harpsichord and hand-drum grooves which are drenched in echo, hand-triggered bass pulses reverberating over freely-plucked mbira. In many ways it follows the original hairy impulse of minimal music as manifested in Terry Riley records like "Persian Surgery Dervishes" but Battiato's feel for melody and harmony is infinitely superior, one finding oneself adrift on these organic, divinely lyrical tracks is as though one was drifting down-river on a makeshift raft encircled by swallows.

Campo Di Marte: Campo Di Marte

This is a pleasantly gentle record of essentially instrumental, folky suites. Bedecked with flute and coloured with Faust-ian bier-keller scat, CdM's never hard-rocking use of electric guitar reminded me of Television in the way it's even-handed, groove-addicted and textural. Another Italo Prog one-off, by the time UA got round to releasing it in 1973, the band had split up.

Goblin: Suspiria

Nastay. Though occasionally lumped in with the rest of the Italian Prog rock of this era, Goblin are a different creature, though with "Roller" and "Il fantastico viaggio del "bagarozzo" Mark" they made a couple of good Prog LPs, they're not regarded as a Prog act in Italy but rather are associated with Dario Argento's films. What's more Goblin are obviously a studio band, their super-slick grotesquely synth-laden sound wouldn't be possible to execute any other way, while the rest of these bands are almost like live-music vehicles who assembled in the studio to transcribe their performance, a classical music trope that's broadly in keeping with their influences. Still "Suspiria" (1977, way outside of our 1973-74 timeframe) is a great record, and if I didn't include it, about the only record in here that's well-known, everyone would bleat at me.

Le Orme: Felona E Serona

Le Orme whose "Uomo di pezza" is also supposed to be very good, enjoyed something of a profile. Unlike many of these one-shot wonders they had a career. Like PFM they flirted with the US/UK rock machine, for instance "Felona E Serona" was translated into english by Peter Hammill and released on Charisma. There's this very fascinating fetish the Italian bands (and indeed practically every European nation apart from Germany) have with Genesis and Van Der Graf Generator. Someone I'm sure will pull me up on this, but I don't think Genesis circa "Tresspass/Foxtrot/Nursery Cryme/Selling England" were that huge a commercial proposition. It was Zep and Floyd who were the real behemoths. Looking at old interviews with them in the NME they appear to be quite like an aggrandised indie band in stature, nothing like your proverbial Arctic Monkeys though. Equally as regards to VDG, realistically how large an audience could there have been for a band like that, one so deliberately obscure? Yet certainly in Italy VDG were absolutely massive, an export on the magnitude of The Beatles. A recent interview I read with Hammill attests to the ferocity of their adoption. Genesis's reputation on the continent seems undinted too. I believe the Italian bands mapped their image of these groups onto their own expectations. Many tried to crack this market, thinking perhaps they were knocking on the gates of filthy lucre, and the story of what happened to these bands, how they succumbed to disillusion is at once pathetic and sobering.

"Felona E Serona" is a lovely contemplative rock record with a moving ecclesiastical bent. The singing, akin to the Battiato is like a canticle, the organ very often haunting and church-ical, the guitars usually acoustic, the bells on Felona too implying a connection to religious music. Again Prog, in the sense that it denotes the obfuscated ornate sound of bands like Henry Cow and Van Der Graf is a misleading classification. There's no getting away from the influence of Classical music on this record, most probably 19th century Romantic music like Puccini, Rossini and Verdi. That's dead Spinal Tap on the one hand, but there's so little here derived from the blues that there's nowhere else these sounds could have originated from. Actually it's the same nationally-determined musical sensibility which makes Krautrock so fascinating.

Metamorfosi: Inferno

I found this suite themed on a trip into Dante's Inferno quite hard work. Not dissimilar at times to Goblin but less slick. A lot of these Italian CDs have been made available via Japan, often in box-xets of mini-LP CDs (never came across this format before-square card cases with CDs in them) and the similarity of this very noir-ish heavy rock to Japanese things like Lost Araaf and Acid Mothers Temple is unmistakable. More than Sabbath, the Italian Symphonic Hard Rock (titters love those words) is the font of that sound.

Museo Rosenbach: Zarathusa

"Zarathusa" is the definitive Italian Prog album. Correspondent Francesco amused me by saying he absolutely hates it, and in many ways it's truly appalling. Portentous, flashy, emotionally over-wrought, the first time you hear it you're struck by Stefao Galifi's ridiculously over-the-top vocals which conjure up package-holiday nightmares of Joe Cocker sound-a-likes fronting bands rocking Italian bars. But given time, and having fully absorbed the context of Italian Symphonic Hard Rock, you find yourself grokking on it. Driving around town with this blaring out of my van I'll confess to feeling like a righteous dude.

Palepoli: Osanna

A furry, long-form freak-out with medieval trappings like Metamorfosi's "Inferno". Terrible flat sound slightly ruins it, even so I reckon Kid Shirt would like this.

Premiata Forneria Marconi: Storia di un minuto

PFM went on to have the largest international profile of all these bands with a brace of records with the most appalling covers imaginable. I think they must have connected with the Italian diaspora. Their early "Storia di un minuto" may be my favorite of all these LPs listed, it's a very lyrical, accessible record with lovely harmonies and melodies, each side put together like a suite. If I told you it reminded me of ELO and Wizzard would that put you off dreadfully? It would. OK.

Quella Vecchia Locanda: Quella Vecchia Locanda

The maxim goes that Germany was filled with bands copying Black Sabbath then Italy was full of bands copying Jethro Tull. Translating as "that old inn", QVL were from Rome and their flute passages apparently give lie to the influence of Jethro Tull upon them. I have a very scratchy copy of Tull's "Aqualung" which I bought for two pounds in the process of researching this piece and I was quite appalled by how conventional it is, like a gruesomely leaden pub-rock band with the most pedestrian third-hand folk flavors. Conversely QVL's "Un Villaggio, un'Illusione" is a masterpiece of prodigious mind-fucking hard-rock with one of thee "ur" churning guitar riffs and fabulous heroic impassioned vocals.

Semiramis: Dedicato A Frazz

Another one-off. Apparently Semiramis were teenagers, a fact which blows my mind given the degree of co-operation necessary to make this music. It's one thing to dole out "Louie Louie"-style 4/4 rawk, quite another to work up a music which ebbs and flows like this, though perhaps I'm being unfair to teenagers? I suppose the Michele Zarrillo's fruity vocals must be a chief attraction, and it looks like he's still got something of a sophisticated, Euro-Pop career going on. To describe the record: plangent acoustic guitar, hard-riffing electric guitar, almost junglistic revolving drum patterns (!), bells and an occasionally off-putting cheap "ballroom" synthesiser.

Tilt: Arti E Mestieri

Thanks to the be-shirted kid for sending this my way via his West Country Progressive alliance. It was on my shortlist, but unavailable to buy. I showed our kid the sleeve which I googled and he quipped: "It's the jazz museli funnel...!" I thought that was very funny. Almost entirely instrumental in a Jean Luc Ponty (here be violins!) and Zappa/Duke fusion-y vein it's not exactly my cup of tea. The drumming is super-human though, birds-wing flurries like Billy Cobham's stuff with the Mahavishnu Orchestra, who would also be an obvious reference point. The synthesiser with the grand piano pre-set a particular low-light, but you have to admire the artistic consistency of this stuff. I think appreciating a sustained palette of sound is probably the key to digging Prog. It often sounds like turd, but if you cut that turd in two and there are no hazlenuts secreted within it, then you've just got to stand back, stroke your chin and admire it.

Un Biglietto Per L'Inferno: Un Biglietto Per L'Inferno

Another NWW record. I never went through that list until recently and was surprised to find how much stuff I recognised in there. Un Biglietto Per L'Inferno is yet another one-off release and it's a super LP, not finicky at all, just righteous rocking grooves assembled fluidly and not with one ear on creating deliberately jarring contrasts (that famous prog cliche). Highly recommended.

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In the course of exploring Italian Prog I found Augusto Croce's excellent Italian Prog site completely invaluable. Also crucial was the peerless Gnosis database. Queerly and synchronously some time in the middle of my investigations I noticed this excellent ilm thread started I believe by the critic Mark Prindle. I came across the dealer Doug Larson through eBay where I made some purchases, and he was very helpful in sorting me out with CDs of this music, and bursting with recommendations.

Posted by WOEBOT at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Walking up Whitecross Street I saw this record in the gutter. I didn't pick it up.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:03 AM | Permalink

This is a very crude mock-up of a record I dreamt I found in the back of a rack upstairs in the collectors bit of the Music and Video Exchange in Notting Hill. It's by Liquid Liquid's Dennis Young. There were three in the set but I only picked up the first one.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:01 AM | Permalink

If there's one record that'll be huge this year it's this 'un. It's already got something of a history attached to it without having been released. At first Pitchfork made a cock-up and left their promotional copy up on a easily-reachable part of their server. Lots of people downloaded it. Then some online outlets made the CD available before its official release which is in November. It was then subsequently made "unavailable" but some of the released copies have found their way onto eBay. I found a dealer offering up a copy but then found the sale terminated before the auction had run its course. I approached the dealer and he told me the record company had asked him to remove it from sale. Yikes. I wonder who in the hierarchy gets the job of net snoop? Is it the office boy or is there a new category of employee to deal with these situations?

As is very well-known, the record has arrangements by Van Dyke Parks, is engineered by Steve Albini and produced by Jim O'Rourke. Er, talk about over-egging the production talent. Presumably Jack Nitszche would have been asked to contribute were he alive and they couldn't get Phil Spector cos he was tied up in legal proceedings. They don't ruin it though. Simon and Carl have had a few words to say about its five, lyrical, symphonic suites. My feeling is that it's dead proggy, which is certified in triplicate and then rubber-stamped by the cover. Kind of like an ever-so-slightly more melodic version of peak-period Genesis.....yet acoustic. The problem with that being that it's a bit long on mewl and thin on hooks. The LP even shares a title with a classic Italo Prog LP by Balletto Di Bronzo. Ys was a mythical city in the Douarnenez Bay in Brittany which was built below sea-level and protected by a dam but which was subsequently flooded. There are clearly resonances here with the levee breaking on New Orleans.

I did prefer single tracks off "The Milk-Eyed Mender" and I miss her sounding like a demented eight-year old (alas we get older) but the suites are growing on me like moss and even though it won't necessarily be my record of the year, it stands an excellent chance. In fact although I have reservations about Devandra, the twin-pronged assault of this and "Cripple Crow" put their nexus at the critical fore-front, in front of Dubstep, in front of Grime, in front of Minimal Techno. Who'd have thunk it?

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Visual post-script:

Have a quick butchers at these two earlier Newsom CDs (not mine I hasten to add), "Walnut Whales" and "Yarn and Glue" which she sold at her early shows.....

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Steve Wright can't resist making a total prat of himself on the introduction, and what's the weird voice-over in the middle of Bartos and Flur's exquisitely funky drumming? It's as though both voices are embarassed by the stark emptiness of the music. By-the-by, just like you, I've always loved the eddying trans-lingual puns of "Fahren, fahren, fahren" in relationship to The Beach Boys (Kraftwerk's avowed adoration) "Fun, fun, fun". Kraftwerk, sighs.

Posted by WOEBOT at 03:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

"The Edit"

When did the remix become the "edit"?

"Er yeah man, we just did an "edit" of weird-disco-staple/improbably-funky-krautrock-track/post-punk-frug-oddity (delete as appropriate)..."

Why this horrible new form? Why does every reissue have to come attached with Such'n'Such DJs "edit"?

The logic is that they're supposed to be inherently more respectful to the original; edits are flushed with neo-rockist sanctity. The DJs seem to suggest they're doing a reel-to-reel-style cut-and-paste of the source material (deprived as they are of the spearate tracks) yunnuh in an "old skool style". Shades of Ron Hardy/Grandmaster Flash. Even when often they're coercing rough old tunes into the 4/4 Ableton Live grid. Yawn.

It's all so pointless, pious and un-inventive.

On DJ Screw

A client asked me to slow down some audio today and upon doing it it really brought home some of the, perhaps under-acknowledged, aspects of what Screw was doing. Within the digital realm, in which I was editing the sound, the waveforms immediately became steppy, the sound taking on the hollow corrupted quality of machine noise. We're all familiar with the occasionally ugly, cheap sound of digital processing. Jungle quite often managed to make a merit of it: "Ba-by-lon-a-fa-all" but usually rubbing it against mountainous drums.

Screw of course, made all his messes in the analogue realm. If you slow a record down, or a tape, or a reel-to-reel, even as the sound becomes weirder and weirder the waveforms still maintain their integrity. You might think I'm pimping some audiophile purism here, but can you imagine wanting to listen to a Screw-tape that was made out of aiffs/wavs/mp3s slowed-down? Gah, it's sound horrific!

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

(This entry has had a re-edit owing to a severe case of oeuf-sur-le-visage.)

In a year in which I've bitterly complained about the reduction in horizons for music there has been a considerable amount of good stuff to listen to. It's almost as though auteurs thrive in those times when a central drift, the absence of which I'm lamenting, is not apparent. We've had notable long-playing wax from Ghostface Killah, Matmos, Hot Chip, Scritti, Scott, Various, Johnny Dark, Villalobos, Luciano, Burial, Lily Allen, Devandra Banhart and The Arctic Monkeys, but they've all been distinguished by their distance from each-other, working apart in different scenes. It's been a year for the Neo-Rockist Pop picker.

It's been a good year for re-issues as well. Floating my boat have been the two exquisitely packaged Music Box records, fully-endorsed and taken directly from Ron Hardy's stash of reel-to-reels, great stuff on the Trunk label, the second No-Wave Sampler on Soul Jazz (hold tight for Argabright's Vol.3), the Broadcast collection of rarities and Martin's "Roots of Dubstep" compilation.

There have been other interesting records as well, and I just happened to have been sent them in my capacity as hob-knobbing blogger. I get tied-up in knots over the promotional stuff I recieve, and let me assure you this is the merest fraction of it. I do listen to everything, but I'm super-conscious about being co-opted or steered (making me the publicist's worst nightmare) so rest assured if I say it's interesting I believe it to be.**

Ike Yard: 1980-1982 Collected

Massive respect to Dan at Acute for making this stuff available once more. I suppose I was a bit-player in the story of the reissue of this material a fact which I find pretty blimmin exciting. Given that the Ike Yard stuff is so spectacularly moribund and bleak, frothing up with enthusiasm about it seems like a direly misplaced reaction. Yet froth I do, even when I could be accused of already having said quite enough on the subject. My feelings about Ike Yard in a nutshell? This was the real No Wave. I get the argument about No Wave desecrating Rock by mimicking it, but had Lunch and Chance jacked into JA dub and NDW they'd have been far more menacing and threatening to the corpus rockisticus. Also I'd like to go on the record to say that New Order quite obviously copped Argabright's moves. This is an essential purchase for 2006.

Tazartes: Check Point Charlie

Morlu's reissue of Ghedalia Tazartes's thrillingly obtuse 1990 record splices in two recently recorded tracks. It is fair, I think, to say CPC is not quite as madly-errant as "Diasporas" "Transports" and "Une Eclipse Totale de Soleil" all classics, but given that Tazartes discography over the past thirty years only amounts to these four and 1997's "Voyage A L'Ombre" well you'd probably ought to check it out. Anyway if you like Tazartes it's all gravy. The drum-machine/accordian/mumbling bits here are brilliant.....

The Beauty Room

Ha! I've always kept faith in Kirk Degiorgio and this utterly bizarre Soft Rock mini-opus sees my stock soar. Yunnuh if it's like okay to use a metaphor borrowed from finance around all you pseudo-commie cunts? I'm gonna fall back on the references game just because this a record you really need to get a handle on and this may be the best way. Here goes: Bee Gees with the tiniest flava of Van Der Graf Generator (honestly!), Nazz, CSN, Donald Fagen and a whole heap of Steely Dan, 10cc, Sergio Mendes "Togetherness", that hinterland between Chicago/Peter Cetera and Soft Soul with commercial ambition aka Withers/Womack/Earth, Wind and Fire, also nuff British klassik loser-MOR with soul-boy ambitions ie Level 42. Suffice to say to make a record like this is a stroke of genius, especially when it's done without even the slightest irony and real class. The chutzpah of the man!

Grizzly Bear: Yellow House

This is nice enough I guess in a breezy Van-Dyke-Parkian/Feelies-Good-Earth sort of way. If there's one record this year that it seems people are desperate for me to like, to tow the line on, it must be this one. I'll admit that kinda made me stick my donkey hooves in the dirt. But it is nice and an improvement on Grizzly Bear's last stuff which man like Derek Walmsley very kindly sent me last year. I think there's some elliptical connection to Animal Collective here, though I can't quite remember what it is, something to do with the producer or summat. Anyway if I'm wrong who gives a fuck anyway? It's a poorly-researched, badly-punctuated weblog and I reserve the right not to read the press info sheets and searching Google for information just bores the shit out of me.

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* Outdoor sleeve photos taken in my local park which has been redesigned by my neighbor and acquaintance Peter Saville!
** I'm still eagerly awaiting the completed Focus Groop's LP dropping and Xylitol's latest offering.

Posted by WOEBOT at 03:20 PM | Permalink

I went to The Green Man Festival over the weekend. The line-up was, to be honest, pretty unremarkable. I just wanted to go to scarf up some excellent food, check out the beautiful countryside and sleep in the van. The festival itself is problematic in loads of ways, most obviously because it is so bloody "civilised", so comfortably comfortable. Most of the people in attendance were in their thirties or forties. There were no pile-driving bpms, no fires made from plastic cider bottles, no proper travelers in squatting out of converted lorries like I remember from festivals I'd been to in the past, no dogs on strings, no day-glo-attired freaks rushing on bad amphetamines, hardly any gross drunkenness.

I thought I'd miss all that more than I did but I was too busy enjoying not being kept up all night by jabbering teds, loos which weren't caked with shit, the aforementioned nosh and the peaceful and unassumingly friendly air of folks. Of the set of festie characters: goths in fancy dress, screw-face pikeys, studded-leather-jacket-clad trad punks, and righteous, drunkenly pontificating students I only had to tolerate the latter (though technically speaking she wasn't a student...)

The Main Stage

The first thing I caught was the last third of Donovan's set. The hits bit. God Donovan is such an eedjut! If you haven't seen him being interviewed on telly, well you've been spared I guess. He has the most absurd, fey, supercilious manner. He almost seems to revel in his own plummy ridiculousness, in the middle of "Hurdy Gurdy Man" breaking into a spoken word skit about his time in Rishikesh with "Four Beatles, A Beach Boy and Mia Farrow". It was (still cringing) one of the most embarrassing things I've ever witnessed. It's almost as though he was trying, by force of character and tenaciousness to his idiot-savant pose, to break through his own bullshit to some transcendental post-societal mores, to some new progressive trope for talking and walking. Let me assure you it wasn't happening for him. But only a fool would diss "Hurdy Gurdy Man" and as for "Season of the Witch" and "Mellow Yellow" we-e-e-l they're rather lovely. Even if his Crown Prince of UK Folk shtick is wrong-headed I really enjoyed seeing him.

That night the DJ Tent was absolutely kicking, courtesy of the brilliant Gareth Cherrystone. Gareth is the veritable boondog, the king of the library breaks bods. Gareth's obscurely-sourced grooves actually emote and connect. He was tearing the house down with these unfeasibly funky hard rock tunes. The only one I recognised being Sabbath's "War Pigs", lord that (brum) drum and bass backing is phenomenal. Other tracks I could only fumble at identifying: a Dylan-meets-New-Orleans hoodoo rock number called "Me and Mr.Horner" something which sounded exactly like The Rolling Stones title vaguely suggested "Smiling Faces" (could have been The Undisputed Truth?). I wish to god I had a tape of his set. Flashos and I speculated about what other tunes he could have spun on a World tip: Quella Vecchia Locanda's "Un Villaggio, un'Illusione" and Gilbert Gil's "Aquele Abraco" tunes which might have really set the fox amongst the chickens.

John Renbourn

John Renbourn's set the following evening was also magnificent. In his early seventies, Renbourn (UK folk stalwart, Pentangle member) busted some fantastic moves. His acoustic guitar sparked like a mountain brook. Raining, ranging and ringing. Renbourn was hugely charming, curmudgeonly, tender. His oeuvre revealed a journeyman's enthusiasm for all manners of music: blues, shanties, hymns, calpysos, bluesgrass all digested with his critical ear but presented so casually within the frame of "here's something an old boy taught me". The crowd adored him like an errant grandfather, loved his stories like the one he told about his neighbor in Scotland. Renbourn: "The weather has been lovely these past few weeks Angus!" Farmer Angus: "Ay, but we'll pay for it..."

...in the rain

There was a glut of disappointing music. Lots of the sort of bands who get saddled with the epithet "Really Good Live Bands", Levellers-a-alike who were plain atrocious. Plenty of worthy but dull things like the woeful Jose Gonzales. This guy sounds bored to sobs. Bored with himself, his own voice and with his leaden guitar work (like pylon cables to John Renbourn's proverbial country stream). Jose's music sounds similar lots of things: Bill Withers, Arthur Russell, Nick Drake circa Pink Moon all with with a dose of flamenco. It's a unique enough fusion but lacks any intensity from Gonzales himself. Reports that he hates performing at festivals only compound the image I have of him as a reluctant (and thus undeserving!) star.

Steve Reid and Kieran Hebden

Something that snuck up on me was Kieran Hebden and Steve Reid. Marcus at Dissensus told me their collaboration was worth checking out and he was not wrong. There's an unusual empathy these two have with each-other, separated as they are by a gulf of years. Their quasi-harmolodic pile-up of heavy synth fx and martial, often Hard Bop-esque drumming is bracing like a storm in the mountains. Hebden, who I've never had much time for, only because he seems like a nice middle-class boy like myself, has acquired something like a midi-patch virtuosity wringing violent abruptly-conjoured stabs from his array of powerbook, mixer and key-pad. Reid, on the other hand, a veteran of the peerless Strata-East stable really sweated and pounded, heavy riddim shaking his tiny wirey frame as he rolled out Liebezeit-esque tom-tom salvos*, delicate hi-hat filigrees and positively thunderous kick-drum. These cats jammed! And the crowd (amazingly) seemed to lap up this near-improv sonic white-storm. Old head that I am the highlight had to be Hebden's almost unexpected hijacking of Rhythm is Rhythm's ambient mix of "Strings of Life", I say almost unexpected because it sort of made explicit the connection running from the Strata East cosmic heavyweights through Defunkt, James Blood Ulmer, Jamaaladeen Tacuma into Detroit Techno and beyond.

In the way of things it might have been that my most cherished musical memory of the weekend was leaving The Green Man behind, setting off up across the Black Mountains in the van to visit an old friend (dare I say hermit?) high in the peaks in his wild hill farm to Led Zeppelin III. Weaving through impossibly beautiful scenery to the tune of "Bron-Y-Aur Stomp".

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*Note the back-of-Ege-Bamyasi quality of my photo ;-)

Posted by WOEBOT at 01:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I've always liked Boy George so I come not here to gloat. My, this man's career in the spotlight has been tumultuous! Even since the spectacular fireworks of Culture Club and his very publicly denounced Heroin habit we've had a number of George O'Dowds, the George who slipped into the Acid House slipstream and gave us the More Protein label and MC Kinky, the comfortable, suave, middle-aged man ensconced in his palatial home off Hampstead Heath and finally the New York-based, slightly-deranged, gonzoid individual behind a Broadway flop, the bizarre investigation into a misplaced call to the police (shades of mental instability) and subsequent photo-call street sweeping.

I can't help but wish George, for his own sake, had pushed the pause button five or six years before and didn't go to the States. I know Culture Club were massive over there but that was in the nascent days of MTV, at the height of New Pop and probably the last time British Music made a sizable impact in the USA. As it seems everyone but George knew, the mid-eighties backlash against the supposedly quasi-homosexual values which his era of pop embodied was irrevocable and total.

Even more than a band like REM whose earthy, heterosexual-masculine* Byrds-revisionism came to define the underground (you could even argue the SST school was subsumed within its vision), that Bruce Springsteen encapsulated this return to "real" values. When I see George being made to sweep the gutters of Manhattan I flash on both his failure to understand that America will always seek to punish him for leading it aesthetically astray and also on those early publicity shots of Springsteen walking the streets** of his hood Asbury Park, New Jersey.

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* Ironic in the light of Michael Stipe's sexuality perhaps?
** Notice the guy stooping in the background.....

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I'm an animator, though I don't often get to flex my skills with characters. I'm working on that. Somebody once asked me whether I was down with Disney or Warner Brothers. Without even a moments hesitation, Warners, though Shere Khan in the Jungle book you can't knock that!

I picked up these excellent Tom and Jerry DVDs for my babies and I've been getting as much pleasure as them from them as Lulu and Sam have. This scene from "Puss N'Toots" (1942) is definitely WOEBOT material.

Download it here. You'll need the latest version of QuickTime.

Posted by WOEBOT at 11:52 AM | Permalink

This just in from Gwen at iueke who appears to have recently restocked. Apparently Leslie hand-painted each copy.

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:43 AM | Permalink

I know I've been really skeptical about Dubstep, Martin and Steve must be sick to death of my moaning, but in the past couple of days the output of the DMZ label has been socking my rocks. I have listened to a man-sized share of Dubstep in the past, I don't take a deliberately pugilistic standpoint just for kicks, mine has never been an ill-informed perspective; but nothing with the exception of the tiniest fragments of the music have ever really got me going.

It's like back in the day when I was spliff-toting Jungle evangelist, anything whatsoever within the form, anything with rolling amen breaks at all, I thought was brilliant. The friend who I was living with hated jungle, he used to attend those awful TIP parties where a brand of very electronic Goa Trance ruled the day. Our mutual friend Simon Posford aka Hallucinogen was the ruling lord of the scene. I just thought it was a striktly Public School affair, for LSD-deranged trust-fund kids only, and I was really disparaging about it even as I had to endure my friends mixtapes every night. I got dragged along to one of their raves once, sat screwing my face up in the corner.

The only trance music I could tolerate was by this, I think German outfit, called Kox Box. Really amazing stuff. My friend had to concede that this was indeed, probably, the best thing the scene had to offer. He on the other hand was only really struck by Ruffige Cru's "Terminator", and I guess it had to hand it to him right back...

I don't know why it's taken me so long to discover the DMZ label? Until recently I've had a microscopic Dubstep collection on vinyl: The first Rephlex Grime LP, Kode 9's "Kingstown", Scream's "Midnight Request Line", Martin Clark's "Roots of Dubstep" LP, some stuff that Skull Disco sent me, and the Burial CD. That was it. Small but perfectly formed. But then I started stumbling across this Loefah and Digital Mystikz stuff. I don't like all of it, my favourites are Loefah's "Horror Show", Coki's "Mood Dub", Digital Mystikz "Neverland/Stuck", Loefah's "Goat Stare/Root" and his latest "Rufage/Mud". But that's quite a lot isn't it? Totally eclipsing the amount I previously owned.

I heard "Mud" when I went out with kek-w and I really liked it, though completely gave up the idea of ever being able to identify it. Such a lopsided rhythm and a really unusual feel for space. Unfortunately the rest of the night left me pretty cold, actually colder and colder until boredom set in. People have told me the DMZ night is better, but it's a bit late for all that now isn't it? The vibe probably isn't what it was.

If you'll tolerate an outsider's perspective I'll tell you what I think about Dubstep. It's caught between two "rhythmic pleasure tropes", on the one hand there's the satisfaction inherent in repetition. This is obviously something that the Rhythm and Sound posse excel in, them and Steve Reich. The repetition is lulling and narcotic. On the other hand, a vestige of Two-Step, it's locked into the vertical drama of funk. The problem being that in terms of pleasure-centre rapture ne'er the twain do meet*. The music can't be vertical and autobahn-motorik-horizontal. Therefore the best of this music, and the quality of the DMZ label's music has slowly improved, has in time made a pact with the infinite.

From what I understand the DMZ crew (that's Coki, Mala -together Digital Mystikz- and Loefah), came from slightly outside the scene. I suspect from the Aba-shanti Digital Steppers part of the world. Their tryst with Dub-proper has them keyed into the value of horizontal music. It's funny cos I've always remarked how Dubstep feels empty to me, but this doesn't matter in horizontal music, it's not an issue, vacuity is actually an asset. Furthermore the presence of song-form devices like chorus/bridge/intro only clog up a good riddim. From what I've heard though it doesn't seem like anyone else has a handle on how to create those fascinating, trickily-poised rhythmic patterns that lope inexorably forward like an unstoppable mechanical elephant. From what Gutter played me only the geezer Bounty Hunter can match the DMZ stuff.

Buy DMZ mp3s here...

*Detroit Techno also had the same issues with vertical and horizontal rhythm which it best resolved through rhythmic density (something like Rhythm is Rhythm's "The Beginning" or texturally in the barren timbres of "The Art of Stalking").

** To anyone left in the world who doesn't know by now....

Posted by WOEBOT at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

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Posted by WOEBOT at 04:34 PM | Permalink

1) Richard Hawley "Cole's Corner". This is really nice in a Jake Thackery wordy Northern gloom, delated Morissey, Chris Isaac at the end of the pier kinda fashion.

2) Lily Allen. This is actually half OK. There must have been lots of Reggae in their household. It compares quite favorably in spirit to The Slits and unlike MIA who conjured up roughly the same mirage with a load of bullshit attached, is quite palatable. I wouldn't buy it, but I'd wrap it up nicely and give it to Tom Ewing for Christmas or if my baby girl was seven and I was one of those kinda self-consciously stylish Dad's I'd slip it under her door.

3) Some of the comments here amongst the most inane ever committed in the name of music journalism.

On Yossou N'Dour's "Immigres":

"Without this ... N'Dour wouldn't have met Peter Gabriel, there'd have been no African presence at Live 8. In fact, 'world music' would not exist as a section in Western collections."

N'Dour would never have met Peter Gabriel? And? Yes? Your point here precisely?

Who gives half a flying fuck about the African presence at Live 8? Musically speaking I was quite glad there was almost no African presence at Live 8, because if there had been it would have compromised the event's utter shiteness. I'd have had to taken the whole thing seriously, rather than just outta hand dismissing it like I did. The first time I saw any footage was this year, and boy was I glad for the 365 day buffer. If I'd been able to watch it on Pluto that'd have been slightly more agreeable.

World music existing as a "section" in Western music collections? Clearly fatuous and wrong-headed. I don't know if this makes me detest the Observer's relentlessly middle-brow aesthetic or just people in general.

On Massive Attack's "Blue Lines"

"Without this ... no Roots Manuva, no Dizzee. In fact, there would be no British urban music scene to speak of."

Jesus wept. The very idea of one LP having anything whatsoever to do....actually I give up with this one. Possibly thee most stupid thing I have ever read.

4) Quite a lot of this amounts to Observer bashing, and I thought I'd leaven it with a few words about Paul Morley. When I went to see Chris Bohn at The Wire to try and talk him into running my NDW Primer (back in the day when I gave a toss), he told me I referenced too much other music in my reviews. I always really liked it when you read a review and the reviewer said "like such'n'such rare interesting thing". Sometimes I thought that that was the only good thing about reviews, that and being told whether the record was worth investigating. To be told this was a bad thing, well it went right over my head to be honest. Bohn also seemed to think that this was me copying Paul Morley. Again I was totally baffled because I've never seen anything Morley has written. I've read one very recent piece he wrote about Brian Eno's music being used for a commercial, how we should applaud that, and that is it. I never read the NME back in the day, I was playing with my chemistry set.

I know what Bohn is referring to though because, "Words and Music" (which again I haven't read) is famous for its lists. For eventually dissolving into lists. Also I suppose the rhizome-like thing about references, who knows maybe that passed into the body of Rock Crit via Morley's influence? Maybe I've been unwittingly influenced? Nothing to be ashamed of at all in that, I suppose I may have picked it up as a habit secondhand via Simon Reynolds (who I copped practically everything off I didn't copy from Lester Bangs).

But just for the record, even though I pretty much despise the Observer and Guardian's music coverage I'd like to say that I think Paul is a righteous dude. Frankie was a supremely insane intervention and (the meat of this ramble) he has excellent taste as is visible here in this list, which Tim Finney at ilx amused me by saying was very like my own, if just a shade more middlebrow. I got some cool things out of Paul's list. I found a copy of Kevin Ayer's "Shooting At The Moon" and also Fairport Convention's "Unhalfbricking" which is indispensable. Though Neutral Milk Hotel, which I also picked up on his recommendation, was I dunno, really gruesome and Middle-American in the most banal way. And he was great on Simon's RIUASA panel. And you can see him on the telly.

Posted by WOEBOT at 03:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

I think I've mentioned the dudes behind eBay's hottest and heaviest Bollywood deals, the legendary Bombay Beat before? Well, you could have blown me down with a feather when just the other day I got an email from Holland's Edo Bouman, the man behind the alias, alerting me to two CDs he's putting out. I suppose they amount to recordings of the absolute cream of the Indian Soundtracks that have passed through his hands. I usually automatically delete music industry spam, but trust me people this is extremely different. As soon as I get my shit together I'll be buying these two lavishly packaged, impressively organised babies.

Get them here.

Posted by WOEBOT at 05:44 PM | Permalink

When you have children you find that you listen to their music quite a lot of the time. At home on television, in the kitchen on CDs, on their little tape recorders in their bedrooms, in the car especially. Never buy your children CD players by the way because the CDs get mashed to fuck. I learnt this the hard way. C90s are the only way to go because they're so sturdy, OK the tape can jam in the player but you can always thread it out of the machine and if needs be splice the ends together in the event of a breakage. This is the same reason they're still big in the harsh climatic conditions of The Third World. I expect everyone will be able to cast their minds back to gluing or sellotaping cassettes back together and the ritual of correctly disassembling and reassembling the case itself, each element having to be in precisely the right slot or the cassette will fail to work and the satisfaction of a correctly repaired cassette.

My babies have always had well-stocked collections of music, it's the least I can do, right? But I've resolutely avoided pandering to my own tastes, so no Classical Avant-Garde Music. I've always tried to think what it would be that they'd like. Subsequently we listen to lots of Disney music, the divine Mary Poppins Soundtrack was a big favorite of ours, the Jungle Book Soundtrack, but also lesser drek like songs from Beauty and The Beast and The Lion King. There's a CD by this lady called Vanessa King who runs the London Symphony Orchestra Discovery Workshops which runs out of the converted St. Luke's church beside our house called "Jemma's Journey and Abi's Adventure" which they love, and which is (if you can get past the kiddie flavor) exceptionally musical and charming. Actually if you know someone with small children, or have them yourself I couldn't recommend it highly enough. The furthest I go towards indulging myself is HMV's excellent two CD collection of Children's Classics. Funnily enough the most randomly persistent emails I've got since the dawn of WOEBOT was about these songs, at least until I edited the entry.

Listening to songs like the woman's hour choir singing "All things bright and beautiful" and "The Laughing Policeman" one feels an unbearable nostalgia for times before Rock'n'Roll when life was simpler. I mean, when would a Policeman ever laugh these days? When he busted your big sister's prostitution racket or found that tiny rock of crack you tried to secrete in your shorts? That innocence is long gone. It was funny reading through Joe Boyd's excellent "White Bicycles" recently and his account of Dylan's electrification at Newport, a moment Boyd not inaccurately believes to be the birth of Rock (even if that account hardly does his own reputation any harm...). Boyd remarks that though the crowd, who until that moment had been innocently righteous folkies, were thrilled by Dylan's racket, there was apparently a strong sense in the air that something that something had been lost. I guess I think lyrical obscenity is a good thing and as for sonic barbarity, bring it on baby, but yunnuh a little piece of me would be quite happy without the likes of Chamillionaire (bad example I guess cos it's just so fucking formulaic)

We have lots of tapes by The Wiggles. The Wiggles TV show goes out on Nick Jr in the UK and we've watched it with the kids lots. I like to watch TV with my babies, I don't want to just plonk them in front of it like k-punk's archetypal pot-smoking parents plugging their children into Teletubbies. Consequently I know all about all the programs, Dora, Diego, Little Bill, Little Bear, Charlie and Lola, Boogie Beebies, Bob The Builder, Tikabilla, Balamory, The Tweenies (a personal favorite, it seems I enjoy The Tweenies more than my children), Lazytown (unbelievably catchy Euro-Trance-Pop tunes), Pingu, Clifford the Big Red Dog, Brum, Big Cook Little Cook. I know my shit, I'm telling you. The Wiggles are an Australian invention and Tim Finney and Jon Dale will be able to tell you all about them. It was as though someone re-scripted The Monkees for the under sixes but was sure to leave out anything even vaguely sexualised or culturally surreptitious (we all know what happened to The Monkees right? Head etc)

Conventional post-teen wisdom (which actually I suspect Jon and Tim don't subscribe to...) would have it that The Wiggles are a travesty. But actually I think they're wonderful. Greg, Murray, Jeff and Anthony are so unremittingly good-humoured, so cheerful in such a uncalculated manner, their songs so daftly hooky that I find them irresistible. When we found out in January that they were coming to London I was even toying with getting FACT to let me interview them for the magazine. This morning we all set off in the van to the Hammersmith Apollo to see them play their one and only UK show on their world tour. The last time I'd been to the Apollo was in 1987 when I broke out of school on my own to see The Fall on their Frenz Experiment tour and was sick on booze in the bushes. Funnily enough my wife buys underwear off Brix these days.

The place was packed in a ratio 8:4:1 (children:mothers:fathers) The band were their charming beatific selves and played all the big hits you don't know and I love. Opening with my personal favorite "Rock-A-Bye-A-Bear" and trotting through "Wags the Dog", "Quack, Quack, Quack, Cockeldoodle Do", "The Good Ship Feathersword", "Dorothy The Dinosaur", "Hot Potato". Lulu was having a wail of time, wiggling like crazy. Sam seemed to wail mostly. I sensed the adults around me were surprised when I knew all the words. My own personal highlight came three quarters of the way through the performance when Murray and Jeff ventured into the audience to collect roses for Dorothy the Dinosaur to eat (Ah ha! Your intertextual Rock knowledge just deserted you!) Catherine raced downstairs to the stalls with Lulu to meet Jeff.

Murray, who dresses in red, is about seven foot tall and plays the guitar, started to make his way through the circle. Sam is too young to really appreciate their celebrity, but I used him as an excuse to schlep over and accost him in my usual star-fucked fashion. Up close Murray seemed gigantic, his hands looked like paddles, he was sweating profusely and looked unbelievably stressed-out, a very empty grin plastered on his face, his eyes, bent at the edges speaking volumes. The best I could manage was a very heartfelt: "Welcome to London Murray" to which he replied: "Thanks cobber" (actually he just said "Thank you.") I'll be honest I felt kinda disappointed. This evening I put myself in his shoes. Jet-lagged, far from home, alone in the back of a theatre he wasn't sure how to escape from, without his entourage (the legendary Big Red Car was left at home and they were working a pickup band), unsure as to the degree of cynicism of the adults around him, dressed in his standard-issue red sweater, clutching multiple huge bouquets of roses. Jeez mate, I'd be pretty fucking stressed out as well.

Posted by WOEBOT at 11:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm in an extremely strange place vis a vis blogging at the moment. I'd even go as far as describing it as screwed-up. This may have started with my slightly nutsy decision in the Spring to ration my reading of one or two of my favorite blogs as I found I was checking in to them far too many times. I've gone as far as completely weaning myself off one particular blog I was finding too compulsive, and at once punitive to me as a reader.

At the same time my own output for WOEBOT has become crippled by my expectations for it. These days I only ever seem to write (relatively in blogging terms) deeply researched pieces which require reading books, combing the internet and tracking down impossibly hard-to-find records. The form of these conceptual essays gets more and more convoluted, I've noticed a pattern which revolves around concept pieces grouped around sets of ten exquisitely-curated records. You'll not believe it, but I have (no exaggeration at all) SEVEN of these gigantic pieces in the wings. But as soon as set out writing them, I find myself procrastinating, usually in search of greater detail, more background information, more useful theoretical tools, and ultimately (drools) more vinyl.

More worryingly, I keep finding myself drafting quite large think-pieces (this is over and above the aforementioned SEVEN) but as the weeks go by I fail to have any time to concentrate on writing them to a sufficient standard whereby they're "publishable" I gradually come to the conclusion that it'd probably be more sly and hipper not to venture to comment on their subjects at all. This is compounded by the blogosphere malaise of everyone trotting out their opinions on certain subjects with a intensely competitive desire to be, if not the first to comment on something, then at least to have the definitive opinion about something, the stragglers indulging in meta-critical sniping at the first through the gates. I've even read people attacking other people along the lines of "What right do you think you have to comment on such and such?"

This slightly stifling atmosphere has also driven me into the position of covering terrains which on the one hand I feel people maybe ought to be more interested in, but on the other kinds of music I find my way into precisely because they're unspoiled pastures, and which I then (this really is ridiculous) struggle to connect with emotionally, even as I appreciate their qualities. As a listener this is often an exhausting position to find myself in.

There's another dimension extraneous to all this. I've just worked on the core graphics systems for a certain Music Television Video brand's British *and* American forthcoming "Interactive" Cable channels. This convergence between TV and the web is often fascinating to watch close-up. I left one company where I'd done one, and was hired by another company to do the other. I've been in the thick of discussions with senior executives talking about how they can leverage the kind of hobbyist devotion that this blog represents to drive their channel. I heard a great new phrase at one meeting: "The Reputation Economy", yikes that's scary isn't it? I mean would anyone blog if some idea of their own reputation wasn't at stake? But what if you start to wonder if you care what anyone thinks about your opinion? The whole thing is kinda horrific from the perspective of the Music-Theorist-as-UNIX-programmer shtick.

From my own experience as a writer I'm beginning to suspect that both the career-led drive of "Professional" Music Journalists (I've met one...) a drive founded on the need to put bread on the table, and the accompanying apparatus of an editor to convince and practical deadlines to meet are actually central to the discipline. I already have a job, and I packed in my writing gigs because I didn't have the time, so where does that put me?

Yeah, it's not a pretty sight. At the moment WOEBOT is like the metaphorical Ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail, at once ever more intensely devoted to its own program but at the same time time finding that program impossible to navigate, subsequently threatening to vanish into itself. I'm not actually going to pull the plug, just wondering how the hell I'm going to get myself out of this predicament. Hoping maybe somehow to get some time to actually get all this accumulating garbage off my chest.

Posted by WOEBOT at 06:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I was hipped to Battiato by my friend Franceso at Dissensus. The seventies stuff is amazing, but I'll be going into that in some detail on my forthcoming "Italian Progressive Rock Mini-Primer". However, his eighties work is not without its highlights. "Up Patriot to Arms" is brilliant, but my absolute favourite is the stunning "L'era del Cinghiale bianco", which I was delighted to find a video of on YouTube. YouTube, I mean who needs television?

I can't do the funky YouTube link supported by Blogger and LiveJournal but you can watch it here. Franco must have the most remarkable profile in Pop. You thought Pete Townsend had a big hooter.

Posted by WOEBOT at 08:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

k-punk

Blogistan

The Original Soundtrack

Worlds of Possibility

Blackdown

I wanted to stretch this into a links bar extravaganza, but really how often is it you come across this kind of thing? To do it comprehensively would be artificial. These three on the other hand I stumbled upon quite unconsciously in my day-to-day and reminded me of some of my favourite bloggers.

-

*News Flash*

Just found a couple more of these on my phone. Maybe this post is going to be work in progress. I had a great mpc one squirrelled away somewhere.

Posted by WOEBOT at 01:41 PM | Permalink

“It Is What It Is.”

To the casual spectator Techno’s raison-d’etre looks to be relatively uncomplicated. Its sleek surfaces appear to communicate with great clarity. Most saliently Techno seems to be a music defined by its own production values. The “classical” electronic sound of the contributors to this compilation resembles nothing so much as the exquisite car design of Italian stylists Bertone and Pininfarina or perhaps Marcel Breur’s and Eero Aarnio’s stylised retro furniture. Techno’s sonic palette approximates materials such as quartz, black silicone, titanium or borosilicate; quintessentially hard and cold. Its sound, like these substances, beautifully sculpted into practical form. This concept of the music posits the musician as “Master Designer”, at heart a craftsman. Upon talking to the musicians it appears the truth is somewhat different. Shakir of Detroit’s The Stranger is “programmed on the K2000 as though I was riding the music”, straight off the bat in other words. Equally Balil’s lovely “Glass Dual” is built from an old midi pattern.

On the face of it Techno’s prime historical moment has passed, its futurity partially eclipsed by Drum and Bass, even as today futurity in music is perhaps no longer as important it once was. Degiorgio seems to agree, but his agreement problematises this: “With Jazz, in the early seventies, there was less money to be made, artists would be playing in smaller clubs and recording for independent labels. Labels like Strata East.” Strata East could hardly be conceived as cul-de-sac and it would be churlish to suggest that this later music means less to us today than that of its forebears. Ed Handley remarks: “We never really cared about being cutting-edge, we didn’t even perceive what we were doing as cutting-edge.” Indeed what kind of music would pride itself as being definitively contemporary? Conversely Shakir claims that all he cares about with his tracks is that, “they’re in key and that I’m going to be able to enjoy them in 5 years time.”

It’s ironic that such a “timeless” music’s finely wrought moodscapes seem to describe memories and romantically recall long-forgotten emotions. Are these tracks designed to evoke? Ed Handley concedes that the music can perform a cathartic function, voicelessly expressing melancholy, but Shakir and Kirk quite austerely conceive it as formal expression. One’s tempted to conclude that here is evidence of what must be Techno’s defining characteristics: its inscrutability, its opacity and its mysteriousness.

Matthew Ingram.
London, 5th May 2005.

Kirk Degiorgio/ART

Posted by WOEBOT at 03:13 PM | Permalink

Even if you occasionally struggle to listen to Avant-Garde music it can make a fascinating read. It struck me recently that these two books are conceptual twins. Both written with the close co-operation of their subject (a unique qualification in both their cases). The Oulette, which came to me via a recommendation of David Toop's, is almost certainly "OOP". However the Matossian, which is absolutely fascinating, gripping even, i've noticed has just been reprinted. Definitely worth picking up a copy if you come across it.

Posted by WOEBOT at 11:20 AM | Permalink

Super-nice elegantly-styled email from R Stevie Moore (scroll down for the scoop on the saga)...

    ·.·´¨ ¨))  -:|:-
       ¸.·´  .·´¨¨))
           R. Stevie Moore
      ((¸¸.·´  ..·´
     -:|:-  ((¸¸ ·.·

...reminding me of Penman's occasional missives (both parties flattered? ok good...)

I herewith make this special offer. The first ten people who buy RSM's classic Phonography CD and produce the requisite Paypal receipt get a free copy of my Noir Desire Mix in the mail to boot.

Posted by WOEBOT at 02:39 PM | Permalink

I asked Lloyd for the track listing of his earth-shattering Mix 2, but all he'd give me was this succession of deliberately obscured-by-crop scans (which I've shrunk down and rendered into a gif).

Once again for the slackers. Here is the URL for the dl. Believe the hype.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

One of the things that bugs me about the web is how it attracts congenital cowardice. There's a load of people out here (not you naturally dear reader) who haven't really taken the bull by the horns, who are lurking out here, making their claim on turf no-one in their right mind would want.

A distinct strain of internet-approved music has emerged over the past few years, a music which gets the seal approval from your Pitchforks and Styluses is feted on the blogs. Take for instance the new Carl Craig remix of Delia and Gavin's "Relevee", I've been whipped up into a froth of expectation waiting for this by net-related hype. It arrives this morning and I slap it on the decks, and man I feel nothing whatsoever for it. Partly, I'll freely admit, because I've heard a million old records like this before- could compile a whole CD of similar retro-synth throbbings from the seventies and eighties (this time with feeling...). Why are people working themselves up into a feverish excitement about this? The answer, because they haven't done their own fucking researches and they haven't the hard-bitten soul to feel what it is they're missing out on. They don't begin to grasp the connection of the ear to the third eye. They're a bunch of pussies in short.

All of which brings me to the crudely constructed website of my dear old friend of fifteen years Dr. Lloyd Beryl. It's one of those isolated occasions when I sense something overwhelmingly other entering into the gene pool. Lloyd is, I'm sorry to tell, a man with pain in his heart, a man who can hear at a deeper frequency. Listening to his Mix Number Two, which comes in two parts is one of those salutory "Thank-Christ-I'm-not-alone-in-this-world" moments. It's not the tunes so much as what is communicated in the assemblage's pretzel logic, in the cracks. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is true scholarship.

What Lloyd wants out here in this desolate place I don't know.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Oi Lata! That's no way to treat your vinyl, lady!

An unapologetically random selection of records. A bunch of the earliest 1960s ones I found in a job-lot in Spitalfields market about ten years ago. Apparently this era stuff is what all the big guns and hipsterati collectors are now looking for.

I keep my eye out for tasty looking primers because this is such a vast uncharted territory, the excellent "Golden Voices from the Silver Screen compilations", a three-part collection compiled by Ben Mandelson for Globe Style records to accompany the "Movie Mahal" Television series narrowly missed inclusion here, but it's obviously a Western concoction, not the real thing like these records.

I picked up my original copy of the legendary "Hare Rama, Hare Krishna" (India seeing itself through a glass onion...) in Frome in Gloucestershire for a pound. Shalimar is not an original, and its awesome, though I've actually seen the reissue go for loads of money on eBay. The Nav Keetan I found in Glasgow for two quid. Bobby is a seven inch that my good friend Flashos gave to me (genuflects).

One thing that always strikes me upon finding this sort of material in the UK is that if wasn't any good at all, no-one would bother importing it, hence my old attitude of "buy-on-sight" upon encountering it.

Posted by WOEBOT at 01:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

What with the issue of download ethics blowing up left right and centre (for the umpteenth time) I mopped the sweat from my brow when it transpired that my Noir Desire 2Step mix, which I've only been offering as a CD to mates, contains a tune by Luke's friend Lee of the Anything Can Happen blog who I've had a pint with in the past. Begging a copy of the mix Lee said:

"You've got one of my tracks on your mix! Big up for the inclusion. I did that track with Recki B (the other young offenda) and a guy called Lingo who was a mate of ours and a DJ on Passion 91.8. CKP came on a DAT tape from Ramsey (although I did meet CKP a couple of times, thoroughly nice chap)."

I'd scooped the track up on the basis of this review by Tim Finney at Dissensus:

"Young Offendaz - Flava: There's this idea that goes about that in the year before grime coalesced 2-step got really tired or conservative or uninteresting. I don't have a sufficiently encyclopaedic knowledge of the scene to confirm or deny this categorically but in late 2001/2002 I did hear heaps and heaps of tunes that I loved, lots of them with a really warped and druggy vibe. My favourite was Babu Stormz's "Electricity", which came out around the same time as "I Luv U" and which I've never heard since, but this track from late 2001 is a handy substitute: rough and riffy, with these disconcerting eastern twangs and the James Brown tic from the Think break, cut-up female vox and a slightly unhinged dancehall DJ whose chatter phases in and out, stereopanning unnervingly."

Lee was chuffed with Tim's description:

"Is Tim F Tim Finney? If so it's also great to have a lovely description of the track from him."

The Ardkore Continuum coming straight back at ya via Australia, lands on your lap.

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Thanks to being linked by the excellent Voltage Controlled Technicolor I've stumbled into a netherworld of really extraordinarly high-class "whole LP" mp3 blogs. A million miles from the established, tired circuit of mp3-blogs with their piecemeal single-track offerings (Ha, neo-Rockist to the core I'll always love the long-playing 7+ song configuration!) these museums of arcana have grown spontaneously out of the esteemed Soul Strut Boards (a similar turf to the Wax Poetics journal, hip-hop breaks and then some) and the also excellent Vinyl Vultures Forum, in a similar way that ILM spawned authoritative "heavy" blogs like Church of Me and Skykicking.

The phenomenon is extremely recent, most of these sites are only one or two months old. While one's guaranteed some will fall by the wayside quite quickly, with the obscurity and excellence of the music they're sharing it doesn't seem to matter, like the appearance of manna in the desert one is simply grateful. Again unlike most mp3 blogs, where the content is copied from CDs which are commercially available or repackaged from Soulseek forays, these blogs tend to offer music which has been ripped from vinyl from their owner's cavernous record collections and uploaded onto Rapidshare. Nine times out of ten this is music which simply isn't available in any shape or form so how illegal it is to present it is moot. Wasn't there some landmark ruling about works of art no longer available in the public domain being legally distributable in this fashion?

Of the fifty or so blogs I looked at, these were the most excellent (in alphabetical order):

Brazilian Nuggets

Some fascinating stuff here, recently careening out of Prog Rock period and into a folk phase.

Flashing back to some of the remarks about my top one hundred records: "Oh this is just willful obscurantism! etc", comments which made me roll my eyes in exasperation, this ring of blogs should underline the canonic centrality of the choices I made. They *weren't* obscure records! I ought to add, however, that when it comes to the hardcore vinyl culture as it manifests in a purism centered around Library Records, Soundtracks, the most left-field of break samples, Eastern European Progressive Rock Turkish Psych and Brazilian obscurities I'm slightly skeptical. The music I've gravitated towards always enjoys some connection to the rays of the zeit. Often I feel slightly bored by the occasionally hermetic and insular culture of wax and its total failure to grapple with new music. Certainly when I went to one Vinyl Vultures meeting I didn't notice anyone particularly excited to hear my bag of (impossibly rare!) Cold Rush Gloomcore classics (titters). Sniping aside, the opportunity to savour the rarities these collectors are offering up is not to be missed. The price is right, innit.

Posted by WOEBOT at 01:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Who says buying on the internet is impersonal, lacks that magical geographical aspect? Last Friday I heard back from GEMM after ordering my copy of "Phonography". They were requesting that I send a cheque to California so they could forward it to the dealer who lived, um, about two streets away from me in Islington. No, GEMM, we said. I called Andrew of Retro Vinyl and we fixed up a time. The towerblocks around us have stunning views. It always makes me laugh how people who pay a fortune to live in the Barbican complex, in er, towerblocks, somehow manage to behave haughtily to people who live in council property. Certainly it's *because* the difference is so slight that they go into class-emphasis-overdrive. Anyway, whatever.

Andrew was on something like the 53rd floor. He has a huge amount records. Two whole rooms, though only a "3 by 6" of stuff he wasn't selling. Geeta, who came round the other day made a remark to me about how few records I had. Mark Sinker and I kinda chortled. It was one of those conspicuously de-masculinising moments. I don't think I've got a small record collection (blushes), it measures up I reckon. I know Twitch has lofts and lofts of stuff, but he's a big name DJ. Likwise Weatherall, who apparently has stuff filling the kitchen, the hallway, the bathroom etc. DJ Spooky apparently has an entire room. Reynolds allegedly has a whole room too; although when I visited Simon last he only had two small shelves on view. I was devastated naturally, too polite to remark (gulp) "Oh master, is that all of which we speak..." It's quality not quantity cloth-ears! (mumbling) I've sold on twice that amount..... Anyway, Andrew has lots of records. Was listening to The Cure and commented: "Does this qualify as a guilty pleasure?" "Probably" I replied. I wonder if he wasn't a little nervous of meeting a freak from the web? I'm so entirely used to this nowadays.

I picked up "Phonography", which is stunning. Plied full of Beatles-y harmonies it featuring stunning musicianship. RSM is quite self-consciously a maestro, maybe that's why he records alone here? Brazenly show-off guitar runs, nifty drum-fills, production wizardry too. There are some fantastically catchy numbers, my faves being "Goodbye Piano", "California Rhythm" and bizarre interludes (RSM introducing himself as he has a piss and double-tracking himself in dialogue with himself). In fact it reminded me a great deal of Todd Rungdren's "Something Anything" another virtuoso one-man band performance, but for the power-pop in a phone-booth atmosphere (which Todd struggles against and RSM embraces) and it's "classic rawk" flavours rather than anything else. Given that it was recorded between 1974 and 1976 it's presciently new-wave; new-wave being less about Punk (this is the science bit) more about galvanised, authetically modernist Pop. Do RSM and yourself a favour and buy a copy here. Trust me, it's totally excellent.

As I was leaving I poked my head out of Andrew's window, and lo, in the shimmering distance, just past the football pitches, through a gap in the trees, beside the glinting silver car I could see my house.

Posted by WOEBOT at 12:40 PM | Permalink

As a critic (or, seeing as how I don't have a professional gig anymore, to be more accurate one imbued with a critical inclination) you'd think I relished going out of the way to be unpleasant about other people's hard-wrought work. Not so in fact, it hardly ever occurs to me that someone might be upset by my opinions. I suppose I tend to wax positive and carefully pick my targets (like Goldfrapp or the Black Eyed Peas who are so clearly beyond worrying about guttersnipes like yours truly). However occasionally something like MIA really gets my goat, and even though she's at the bottom rung of the ladder, a worthy enough individual in many ways and from the perspective of political-correctness not someone you go out of your way to slag off, I just can't help myself. Tee hee.

My writing off R Stevie Moore was a case in point. Here's the most respectable kind of artist. A one-man cottage industry devoted to his vision. So actually I felt pretty shitty when he discovered my remarks at Dissensus and (gulp) actually linked to them from his news page. Blimey I'd be mortified if MIA ever emailed me. To be fair to me the mp3s at the website which are supposed to entice you further into Moore's vision are plain terrible. And dammnit he needs to get his presentation sorted! I mean I know it's a superficial observation and we're only supposed to care about the music (bullshit IMHO), but yunnuh there's amateurishness and there's amateurishness and SRM could learn a bit from his disowned protegee Ariel Pink's graphic sense, uncompromisingly crude as it is too.

Just recently I discovered this 12" from 1982 or 1983 (I'm guessing) in a record store and, well, I absolutely love it. Stevie had this new-wave thing going. "Manufacturer" and "Dance Man" sound like The Stranglers and Elvis Costello, but in a deliciously gonzoid, slightly seedy way. RSM, enchantingly, sounds like an old man playing the young man's tunes. The effect is one of at once familiarity and discomfort, like perhaps your uncle making a pass at you. Or summat. This mustiness of bygone eras is compounded by RSM's brazenly 1950s Rock'n'Roll influences. If you grew up in the United Kingdom in the 1970s (well, anywhere for that matter) you'll remember the pervasive odor of Presley's rotting corpse, cropping up in the most unusual places like in the music on Children's TV (presumably made by hacks out of touch with the zeit) and with pop hangovers like Shakin' Stevens and Showaddywaddy. Thinking about it now, twenty year-old rave music must sound like todays teenagers to be similarly anachronistic as music from 1956 did in 1976.

The flipside of this excellent EP is, improbably enough, a rather daring ambient melodic suite. So big up yourself SRM if you're reading this, and yes I'm looking forward to the copy of "Phonography" I was delighted to find on GEMM.

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Thanks to Dissensus's Noel Emits for providing me this mp3 of my last Kosmische radio show which accompanied my post on Underground NDW. Lots of folks emailed me asking for the CD I posted out to the faithful last November and I'm afraid I had to disappoint them on principle.

This set would have been available to download from Resonance's archives, but I understand things went a little pear-shaped there. Offering it up now, therefore, I am only furthering the service they would/should have provided. With any luck I won't be the subject of a witch-hunt by a gang of militant greying German New-Wavers.....

Posted by WOEBOT at 04:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Baldelli flicking through his tracks.

I was working late last night when at ten o'clock I glanced at my calendar. It hit me like a brick! I was supposed to be down at Plastic People with two imaginary friends (I'd bought three tickets in a fit of largesse) dancing to the legendary Afro-Cosmic sounds of Daniele Baldelli! I got on my bike and made haste to Plastic People, a venue I usually have a habit of appearing far too early at. I've done this twice, showing up early for Target at FWD last year and for a BASH a few weeks back; giving up and going home in a fit of impatience.

The venue, which if you haven't been there before is tiny with an excellent crisp sound-system, was half-full with a curtain drawn around the dance-floor. There must have only been 60 or so people there but everyone was dancing to the languid loping analogue sound of classic-era Afro-Cosmic. The music was exhilarating, and I was devastated to learn from my colleague Tim Lawrence (author of the landmark "Love Saves The Day" disco tome and joint-manager of the David Mancuso vehicle, the Lucky Cloud Soundsystem) that Baldelli hit the decks well over an hour before. There's nothing quite as awe-inspiring as hearing the fat organic sounds of disco being mixed together, the tension between rhythmic perfection and collapse so dramatic. It's like the difference between hard-won yogic nirvana and the supermarket of LSD-fuelled transcendence.

Quite quickly the groove became more mechanised, which was a shame. However, not before Baldelli treated us to a suite of hard-rocking guitar numbers. You could throw the average clubbing crowd with something like this, the sinewy Baldelli striking rock-star moves behind the decks like a misplaced Osterburg Jewel, but the faithful took it in their stride, grooving out of the daft nihilism of the whole thing. Baldelli does take you to some kitsch places, a huge throbbing cover-version of Tina Turner's "Better be good to me" was one excellent example. Lord knows what any of the tunes were, one or two members of the crowd seemed to herald the mnemonic flourishes of some tracks, the only exception to this being some dippy modern B52s remix (Fred's plain bark unmistakable...) I was boogying away regardless. Baldelli seems to have all his music ripped to CD, with only a few records in evidence, flicking deftly through Case Logic folders of tracks.

In time the beat became flesh once more, and we were treated to a retro come-down. I supposed the evening was marked by my regret at having missed more of the fluid pulsating sounds from earlier in the evening. But hey, I missed clubbing in the Italian lake resorts in the mid-seventies too.

Posted by WOEBOT at 04:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A Nick Kilroy original entitled "Dark" from the Zabriskie Point website

If there's any label which I feel a kind of emotional entanglement with it's KIN. I let Nick Kilroy Kin into my heart when that was obviously a risky thing to do. The first time we met Nick confessed to having slept rough for years while he took smack. Even if I had dabbled in narcotics myself (checks watch, nearly a decade since I touched a thing...) I was a family man. I wasn't dissuaded because Nick was such a passionate, charming character. I've achieved enough, what with Anil Bawa and my memorial skin and symbolic fights with VICE UK to feel that I've done Nick's memory justice. In spite of Dee, Nick's partner, courageously continuing to run the label, I think I've earned my right to be dispassionate and objective. However, even the fact that this certainly ain't my exclusive (see k-punk's excellent press release here, I'm frothing with enthusiasm for Johnny Dark's record.

Certainly as Mark points out there are resonances of 2-step here but in actual fact Johnny's palate is infinitely more localised. To categorise something as 2-step actually denotes a dazzling heterogeneity of styles (in the way neither Grime or Dubstep enjoy much internal variation). This majestic EP owes nothing whatsoever to hyphenated soul of MJ Cole and The Dreem Teem, little to the bleak skank of 500 Rekords and Kronik, not much to the cheerfully surreal skip of the Dubaholics and Y-Tribe. No, Johnny is hooked on the then-anomalous, permutated, register-defying basslines of KMA ("Cape Fear", "Kaotic Madness"). Those basslines were literally "baffling", baffling as though you'd been physically manipulated by gigantic rubber/foam paddles, baffling in the sense that they at once thicken out the bottom-end AND ride slickly up the sides of the track, like a malign froth, and spill into the riff. Darkside Garage was a tiny proposition, but there were also the Skycap records. Everyone knows the skittering "Endorphin" but that tune is a subtler proposition really, an invitation to the spasticised charleston rather than a (pulls showerface) black-hole of dance-floor dread. More obscure is Skycap's later remarkable "Darksky EP" (2001) with Sky Joose pulls very similar moves to Johnny on "Can't Wait". "Never Happened" and "It's too close". The early Menta/DND tunes are probably also worth mentioning in conjunction.

I suppose the comparison is begging to be made with this quite excellent EP and Sound Murderer's Bad-bwoy Jungle revisionism. There's the unexpected gesture of Americans choosing to telescope in on obscure, neglected strands of UK Dance music. The key difference between the two is that the Dark is stunningly-good. Trading hard on 2-step's helium-pitched vocals Johnny rubberises the KMA bassline, but still it see-saws and roves; the music springs immediately to life. Although these endlessly restless tracks immediately conjure the quivering varispeed utopias of the Cocaine fiend, I prefer to think of them, rather than amphetamine-fuelled, as over-oxygenated: the body, accelerating, burning brighter. These tracks will have you twitching.

As invitingly improbable as the German Something J/DJ Maxximus's "Mercedes Bentley vs Versace Armani" as improbably inviting as The Soft Pink Truth's classic "Do You Party", both similar examples of orphaned electro-pfunk this EP deserves to be massive. My only reservation is with track 4, "HCD2" a remix of The Junior Boys "High Come Down" which prompts me to think that Johnny may indeed be better off without Jeremy Greenspan's occasionally irritating vocals.

Posted by WOEBOT at 11:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

My old mate Flashos (genius, legend etc) has asked me on to his Resonance FM show this evening.

Tune in between 6pm and 7pm to 104.4 FM. GMT bizniss striktly. Don't miss us!

-

***NEWS FLASH***

And when we've finished clowning about it looks as if the Ghost Box massive have the slot immediately after us from 7pm to 8pm! How hauntological is that! You're going to be sorted mate! Get yer C90s out!

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:45 AM | Permalink

In my recent gloom-laden prognosis I forgot to mention Hot Chip, who along with Various Productions embody the new touchy-feely side of Hoxton music. How strange that the coke-zone should start to defrost and actually begin producing tender music of depth? Good music in other words.

Hot Chip might not actually be from Hoxton anyway, from the lyrics of "Playboy", the highlight of their excellent debut: "Driving in my Peugeot, 20 inch rims with the chrome now, blazing out Yo La Tengo, driving round Putney with the Top down." "Coming on Strong" (2005), which blissblogger passed on to me at the end of last year, is a very depressed record full of the woes of middle-aged bachelors. It seems this is a gang of average, overage boys, stuck sucking their youth while girls with ticking biological clocks, or ambitions for more than kraft dinners and roach-strewn ashtrays, pass them by. But the gloom is brilliantly undercut with genuine humor. They bullishly profess to have liked Prince since they were seven (just the kind of goofy pigeon-chested gag I adore) and there's the recurrent theme of the ridiculousness of middle-class white blokes identifying with Crunk culture (hammered home until the joke actually starts to gently open up the ridiculousness of that culture, period). Even the clumsy falsettos and the straining ambitiousness of two and three-part harmonies is gently self-mocking.

The latest record is a huge leap forward in production and ambition. Gone is the edge-of-squatland Young Marble Giants-esque shamble and in its place a much flashier self-confident sound. The vocal harmonies are even self-assured! I was really chuffed to discover a copy of "The Warning" (2006) on vinyl, these may still be kicking around, grab one if you can, the photo above isn't actually of my copy which is black as night with embossed shapes, but a scan. Also I dropped my camera in a Chinese restaurant at the weekend and it's reet fucked-up. There's a whole raft of exquisite pop tunes on this, absolutely essential, LP. "The Warning", "Over and Over", "Breakdown" and "Careful" are all astonishingly hooky. If I had to peg the sonic, I'd say hot dang at last someone has picked up where The Beta Band left off on the truly wonderful "Hot Shots II" (2001) before they lost all their confidence in the face of a nation of wretched derivative Indie-Rock and blew it with "Heroes to Zeroes" (2004).

There is just one shadow casting itself over Hot Chip, and that's (whisper it) The Squeeze. That's right, there's something ever-so-slightly "reliable Lunden" about them, but as long as they keep the sonic freaky, like on the Acen-influenced neo-Ardkore of "Careful" well it's cool with this cat.

Posted by WOEBOT at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Not just one:

Permanent Condition

not even simply two:

Awesome Tapes from Africa

but three:

The Hiplife Complex

The last two by Brooklyn's own Thursday Born.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:12 AM | Permalink

A series of pipe organ recitals featuring experimental transcriptions of underground music

Northern Soul
Thursday 27th April, 2006 at 7 o'clock
St Paul's Chruch, Bedford Street, Covent Garden
Music selected by: Ali Duff, Tam McClymont, and Alan Watson
Transcribed for the organ by: Andrew Macintosh (Royal College of Organists)
Performed by: Daniel Moult (St Peter's Church, Eaton Square) and William Whitehead (Royal Academy of Music)

Entrance is free.

-

This doesn't sound exactly original (let's not forget Jeremy Deller) but the idea of Sy selecting Ardkore classics for transcription to church organ. Well, that'd be unmissable! I'm going to try and make this.

Posted by WOEBOT at 12:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Nick Gutterbreakz has sent a copy of his Birthday mix to quite a few people. And me. I respect the way NIck, like Johnny Prancehall, has whole-heartedly embraced a genre. I think he was more than slightly nervous that I might, in his words: "throw it in the bin in a fit of rage." But how could Dubstep, such unassuming, polite music invite such a reaction?

There's almost nothing unpleasant about the array of exclusives and dubplates Nick has assembled. Especially to an old raver like myself who is extremely comfortable with its sonic language, the bass troughs, the trotting half-speed jungle drums, the discrete reggae samples. Unfortunately this changes nothing about how I feel about the music. Even despite the presence of a few stand-out tracks: Headhunter's fabulous "Final Cut" (superb riddim tricknology, exquisite poise), the Tektonik track with the deftly-manipulated sitar and the LTJ Bukem aqueous stylings of Scuba.

Earlier on the blog I made a remark about the Frankenstein-ian qualities of the music. I half admit I expected someone to detourn my remarks, spin them into a Zombiest manifesto, hail the music's hollowed-out qualities. It's that "shell-like" ghostly feeling of the shuddering cavernous half-step that is its most alluring feature, and the most noticeable shift in its character over the last couple of years. In the past I used to complain it needed vocals to fill its vacuum, but it's clear that hole is destined to remained unfilled. Better to accept it for what it is.

I'm making it sound good! The thing is I don't find anything to latch on to in the tropical tundra. Dubstep, unlike Gloomcore, is always warm and that works against it I believe. Actually the thought I keep coming back to is Marx's. Marx famously remarked that in the future everything would become pregnant with its other: low-fat cheese, low-alcohol beer. Dubstep is like Rave music without the Dionysian hook, I guess (and now I maybe being slightly mean) that's why its appeal lies with the Old Raver demographic regardless of race or sex. Just clock the pictures at Grievous Angel and you'll know what I'm talking about.

If the bad news is that curmudgeonly naysayers like me are complaining that the music doesn't emote, the good news must be that this music is destined to be huge. It's got a startlingly pan-global roster of artists (scratches head- all this from something which grew out of London Pirate Radio!) and it'll presumably lock into the enormous IDM audience of The Aphex Twin's by merit of its discrete take on race as much as anything else. Also now with the highly-touted, and lets face it good, Burial CD
it has its calling card.

Posted by WOEBOT at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

These 7"s have been around around for two years, they're by the mysterious Various Productions. Marcus first pointed me in their direction in February. XL snapped them up in the end. It wasn't until a interview with them in the (excellent) last edition of FACT that I pulled my finger out and tracked down some of their vinyl. You'll only find stuff at Boomkat, and I wouldn't sleep on the current reissues because they'll be like gold dust.

Obviously the sleeve art is winning, but their crisp pellucid grooves are intriguing too. They've pretty much abandoned the cause of superficial coherency. My batch of four contains a Missy Elliot bootleg, the hollowed out half-speed half-step drunken folk chanson of "Hater", the morris-dancing hip-hop collage of "Biker Walk", mandolin-mania on "Home" and the albino Grime pastiche of "In This". Still, there's an unmistakeable sonic fingerprint. It's refreshing to hear bohemians not cleaving to movements, feebly trailing behind black music, but relishing in their cultural status as privelleged orphans. Not seismic, but exceptionally pleasant.

LP due in the Summer apparently.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I was rooting around trying to get some advice on this thread as to a good stacking system of boxes for my squares.

My previous shelving unit, in its tenth year, had by then given way to the stress. I had to wedge a specially-cut piece of wood between it and the wall of the sitting room as the weight of vinyl had collapsed it sideways against the wall, breaking many of the vertical supports. In an earlier attempt to make it a safer addition to our living-room furniture I'd dismantled it and drilled rawl-bolts into the wall, devising a system using four nautical eye-hooks to attach it to the wall so as to prevent it toppling outwards. I've always feared that, symbolically, the stack would come tumbling down like the walls of Babylon and crush one or other (or both) of my children. I had a little life-script all drawn-out in the event of this happening (in spite of my best attempts): compliant divorce followed swiftly by the sale of the guilty records followed by the default desert hermit existence. Eventually the horizontal slats started to snap under an amalgam of gravity and black plastic, and I made haste to replace my old rig.

The good news was that Spybox boxes have succeeded where my last system failed. First I ordered 15, then 25 more, then two more (cos my maths was so bad I hadn't realised I needed 6 x 7). I tried adding another layer on top but eight high is a tad unstable, and then I'd be back to square one and sleepless nights. They boxes aren't that cheap, but they're extremely solid and Spyder (think: old skool rural raver) goes out of his way to be helpful with delivery and awkward customers (like yours truly). For a month or so my room had the not entirely unpleasant whiff of a chicken-hutch, but that has now subsided. My records are now housed in my study, not the sitting room which I guess designates their present social signification.

Posted by WOEBOT at 04:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I'm having a bit of a yard sale at eBay.

Each of these ten records are doubles of ones I already own, eight of which I picked up on a recent trip to France at prices that were so low it was ridiculous not to pass. They're all absolutely wonderful. Endorsed, seen.

As many of my fellow bloggers are aware, I've made a habit in the past of handing on doubles as gifts. Since I wasn't sure exactly who would want these, I thought I'd have some conceptual fun and present them for sale. In the spirit of this blog they are all being offered up at precisely the same price I paid for them.

While I'm on the "selling vinyl" tip, I ought to draw everyone's attention to the newly-instituted website of my chum Gwen Jamois. Gwen is probably Europe's pre-eminent dealer. I imagine iueke.com will be an eye-opener for some people. It'll put these humble offerings into perspective at the very least!

Posted by WOEBOT at 07:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The previous entry might well be my last dump of printed matter. I thoroughly enjoyed enjoyed writing for FACT and The Wire but quite suddenly came to the conclusion my job was done. I'd like to thank Sean Bidder, Joe Stannard at FACT and David Stubbs, Louise Gray and Chris Bohn at The Wire for having me over the past couple of years.

Is there really so little exciting going on in music? I've been stuck contemplating this for weeks. Certainly whatever groove I had established for my own tastes that sustained me so well over the past few years kind of faltered on January the first. It's OK, I've been in places like this before, doldrums, and like getting a flat tyre on the motorway and being forced to contemplate roadside fauna and unnecessarily dysfunctional relationships, it can end up being an interesting place to be, a worthwhile place in retrospect. People felt this way in 1975 and some super music was made that year.

However if one's taking a strictly negative point of view - 2006(!) must be the worst most depressing year for music, I dunno, maybe EVER! The "Energy Flash" of Acid House which Grime for was for some time the last living manifestation of, finally flickered and faltered. I say "living" to distinguish Grime from Dubstep, which I'd argue is the first properly retrogressive manifestation of post-Acid dance music, it's Frankensteins monster, dead flesh propelled by a wholly artificial electricity. I know there are legions who enjoy the music, there are even articles like the new Burial CD, which are perhaps richly deserving, but for whatever reason it fails to enchant me.

Then there is the Indie axis, why sure, the Arctic Monkeys ARE sort of wretched. I guess I like them because in these times of over-inscription, of weighty codification, they represent a signal. I don't think you could argue that the musical pre-history of The Arctic Monkeys had any great significance to them, in the way history is so clearly important to something like Burial (even if he struggles to negotiate/negate that...) Like The Sex Pistols, who chromatised the most utilitarian and pedestrian of music, trad "Rock'n'Roll", and burnt through it, at least with The Arctic Monkeys there's a sense of a burgeoning elan vital. It's that which is cruelly absent from so much in 2006.

On a positive note, there are things which are good, great even; perennials like Ghost Box for instance. There's also the challenge for me of having to re-evaluate my own tastes. I've been following tips from Simon Silverdollar and have been checking out some Microhouse TM. I've been listening to Nathan Fake's excellent "Dinamo", Luciano's "Sci-Fi Hi-Fi" (which I was pleased to see a friend had done the sleeve for), checking the ultra-lush production of Villalobos "Ach So", picking up "Alcachofa" three years after I passed it over. My collection of this music in the past amounts to the Michael Mayer Fabric mix, Matthew Johnson's "Pipeline" and a couple of CDs Tim Finney burnt me a very long time ago. It's really nice. It doesn't quite set my heart aflame, but it'll do.

Likewise if over-inscription is the mantra of the times, then it's surely right to get my head around Prog rock. There's more posts forthcoming about further aspects of prog. My current pet theory is that in many ways the cul-de-sac I've arrived at has been a case of choosing Beefheart over Zappa. I reckon that may be the key musicological choice. I think you could trace the critical appeal of Rave music, at least in the way Simon Reynolds constructed it, to that crossroads. "Our" path stems from Lester Bangs's tradition of musical integrity and 'orrible prole racket. I've never gelled with Zappa, even though I've copies of "We're Only in it for the Money" and Freak Out" kicking around, but you couldn't deny his centrality to Prog rock. Zappa is like the strange attractor of Prog. So I picked up "Apostrophe" (the second time I've owned this) and am determined to get something out of it. When you've thought yourself into a corner, y'see, you have to work your way clear.

One final thought. Simon wrote very recently of the queue's around New York wholefood store Trader Joes. I have to admit I thought his angle was kinda nuanced. I reckon there's a sense that Simon is actually not wholly dismissive of that in the way that Mark Fisher seems to wholeheartedly deplore it. The case study you have to examine is the Third World. Revolutionary Art-Strikes in Third World culture are extremely rare (I get sick to death having to explain to tedious people what is meant by this, you know what I'm fucking talking about aight...). There's the Kalakuta republic (a one-man revolution essentially), there's Tropicalia and that's pretty much it. If day-to-day existence is a struggle people don't go Castlemorton-curazy. I read Bataille's "Accursed Share" too, and how I understood it (as an ethnographic study) was that what is abandoned is "the cream", the surplus in other words. In almost everywhere in the world apart from the disgustingly affluent US and Europe, there is no surplus. The hedonism of the sixties, for instance, was nothing if not a reaction to what appeared to be a never-ending prosperity.

I don't think people feel they have a tenth of the security they used to. Mark Fisher is ever-so slightly patronising about a generation of youth who haven't been inculcated with the same post-sixties values that he and I have through exposure to left-thinking university culture and the flaming rock press. From this point of view, crucially a global one, I think (fear) that actually we're entering a period of normalcy.

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)

I liked this. I came across it down a tube escalator on a Monday but wasn't quick thinking enough to take a snap. The following day I was ready with mobile in hand. I only hope it wasn't a promotional gimmick for some Indie band.

The next day I tore it off the poster, damaging the sticker. Stupid. I regretted interfering. I had half-planned to try and stick it back on the Thursday but by then my attention had wandered.

As I've mentioned before I used to exchange pleasantries with Joe circa 1989 on the Portobello Road. I have no idea what he'd do if he was in Frank Sinatra's shoes.

Posted by WOEBOT at 06:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm playing a wee gig on Sunday evening at Hoxton haunt The Old Blue Last (on the decks between 8.30 and 10). Equal billing with Sacha the Flasher. It'd be well cool to see you there!

Posted by WOEBOT at 05:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Recently someone made the mistake of taking me to task for the amount of effort I'd put into my top 100 records post. Like, what fucking business was it of theirs? I was on the point of cussing them out, but to be fair it was within the context of a lot of other nice remarks and in the end I decided to forget all about it.

I was annoyed because, to me at least, my time is valuable. I'd scrimped and saved those hours. When you have two babies (and no childcare), a partner you cherish and silly amounts of work, it's difficult to find the time for something as questionably valid as blogging. Though, of course, I do firmly believe in blogging. One of its indisputable advantages is that you can do it to your own timetable, in those dead hours.

I've been meaning to spread a little love since I started doing this again. My links-bar is a briar patch at the moment. It should perhaps represent what I think are the best blogs out there, whereas currently it's as much to do with showing gratitude and respect to individuals who've helped me out. Nothing wrong with that I suppose. I just wanted to take the time to single the following blogs out for some love because, simply, they are wonderful:

Blissblog
Every time. I know I'm not alone in treasuring every single word that gets posted here.

Beyond The Implode
Martin amazes me. He seems to overflow with this fabulous imagery. Fecund.

Gutterbreakz
I'm always touched by Nik's rabid devotion to Dubstep and I cherish those old-time specials he does.

Heronbore
The sleeping giant.

Kid Shirt
Love, love, love this blog. Love the guy too. What a great voice!

k-punk
I bow down before Mark's genius and learning. There's no competing with him on the theoretical front and these days I don't bother trying. Compulsive stuff.

Blackdown
Martin's taken to blogging like an eagle to flight.

Prancehall
Makes me laugh every time. John is a funny, funny bastard. MPC's comments box is a riot as well.

The Pillbox
Give thanks! The Pillbox is just superb these days. Again, and whould've thunk it, his comments box is a gas.

Uncarved
The man with the 1,000 year plan.

Worlds of Possibility
I have such profound respect for Jon's knowledge and taste. So great to see him blogging again!

It's just a shame ol' Silverdollar isn't cranking it out it still! Things are going to be busy here over the next fortnight as I'm starting a ten part thing on French music. I'm afraid it has to be in parts because they're all like discreet units. Modular innit, so don't accuse me of "rationing it like a tinker" or I'll lose my cool.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:14 PM | Permalink

Goldfrapp on the other hand I've never even half tolerated.

In case people haven't noticed they're not pure pop fun along the lines of Girls Aloud or Rachel Stevens. They're archetypal Observer Music Monthly fodder (see Mud Hut Woman). They started out working the post-Tricky John Barry thing, and seeing as that didn't quite pan out, converted to Hoxton Art Disco with just that littlest bit of extra irony to make sure sure you understood they weren't in fact making functional dance music, that you could reliably invest money in their album and play it at dinner parties.

"Ride a White Horse" is a travesty because they're trying to glorify the entirely crap activity of taking cocaine and (perhaps more crucially) because they are who they are, they come over like Marks and Spencers.

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Silverdollar on "Stop Making Sense"...

Posted by WOEBOT at 04:55 PM | Permalink

So far I've tolerated Black-Eyed Peas. But now, I'm afraid, the time has come to single them out for ridicule and vilification.

What's their stranglehold on the UK charts all about? Are they big in America? Some part of me suspects that they're not, and that they function as a surrogate Pop R'n'B, an R'n'B even less challenging than R'n'B proper, which let's face it isn't that grueling a listen to begin with. From this perspective I don't see the need for an alternative to R.Kelly and Missy Elliot. Can we think of acts like this in the past who re-branded Black Americana for the UK audience? Tina Turner, I suppose. She was always bigger here than in the US.

Is The Black Eyed Peas appeal to the mainstream audience based on the fact that there are white people in the crew, as well as black folk? The 4 step skin colour gradient between Will, Apl, Taboo and Fergie (I've done my research...) might almost have been devised by marketing committee; the focus on the woman Fergie conceived to ensnare the largest audience demographic, her appeal constructed as it is poised between sistahood and pan-racial sexual desire. Maybe these aren't such mysterious questions at all?

Hopping between fashionable Indo-Hop, sanitised Fugees re-licks (some people dislike The Fugees on the same grounds, but me I have a soft-spot for Wyclef) and now retro Electro. It's with "My Humps" that I've gotten got the hump myself. All those other tunes were harmless enough I suppose, catchy pop music but this is really appalling. Call me old-fashioned but I've never liked the term "Shorty" meaning girl (look it up). There's just something at once demeaning and also teeny-cloying about it. That's slang that doesn't work. "Bitches" on the other hand, "Bitch" works excellently, if you're a woman I imagine it's a good term to get working for you. There's an excellent Sa-Ra track doing the rounds as a bootleg at the moment called "Bitch" and they really have fun with the word:

"Baby we can get freaky,
we can get buck wild,
I can do you nasty,
even doggy style,
you can have some fun with me,
I can scratch that itch,
I don't want to wife you,
but could you be my bitch"

At which point a woman's voice cuts in with the hook: "B-i-i-i-tch!", with a mixture of full-finger up-yours insouciance and how-dare-you puffed-up outrage. One of the things I like about these lyrics is that they promise sexual gratification to the woman on her own terms. The man has to work. As well "Bitch", when used in the right way of course, is empowering to women. Plenty of women use the word to describe themselves don't they? It has a nicely self-aware deconstruction of the war-of-the-sexes embedded within it too.

If slang is going to work it has to perform a meta-dissection of language; cut to the shit and re-motorise vocabulary. It's nothing as crass as street-signifier really, when it reaches that level it's usually worn out and the smart people are looking for new words. Like "Showerface" in Grime, I'll bet that's all worn out by now. Which brings me to what must be my least favorite lyrics of all time:

"My hump, my hump, my hump, my hump,
My hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump.
My lovely lady lumps (lumps)
My lovely lady lumps (lumps)
My lovely lady lumps (lumps)
In the back and in the front (lumps)"

I've done a little research on this and it seems people really do use the word "humps" and it's loathsome, but "lady lumps", jesus what a completely revolting phrase. I mean, "Booty" has a lovely full-some ring to it, "Booty" is about glorious in-your-face nudity, about hourglass buttocks busting the seams of tight jeans. It's akin to a Fugs-ian, counter-cultural call for hot, sweaty, *natural* sex. But "Humps" and (worse, I mean gravy has lumps...) "Lumps" are all about the body being uncomfortably fettered. OK, I can appreciate the "perv" angle, as much as the next red-blooded individual, but I just don't think it can be celebrated in the same way. Just like "Shorty" there is a gormless infantilism to the phrase "Lovely lady lumps" which really pisses me off as well. Grr.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Recently in that Underground NDW piece I was slagging off Abwarts.

Unbeknownst to me a track I'd been digging for ages, with its terrifically rousing "Stalingrad! Stalingrad!" slogan-chant, cue images of speed-addled, militant German youth marching at the Russian Bear to avenge the deaths of their fathers, was nothing other than Abwarts "Computer-Staat". This, with its stirring exploding tank graphics on the rear, must be the most expensive 7" I've ever bought.

If people have been struggling to get hold of NDW, I noticed man like soundslike1981 was offering a cool-looking mix for DL at Dissensus. Hunt around the Events, Releases and Mixes forum.

Rock, innit.

Posted by WOEBOT at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

One of my (surely hundreds of) gaping holes in understanding 80s music has been not knowing about The Fire Engines. I discovered the Postcard label last year, I'd always avoided Orange Juice, and had a bit of fun catching up; checking out "Poor Old Soul" and Josef K's "Chance Meeting" for the first time. I have to confess to being just a wee bit non-plussed though, and with hindsight it must be that The Fire Engines gave that era an essential lustre, like Dylan gave the music of the other early folkies. The Franz Ferdiand hype? Well that wasn't really persuasive for me, though on second thoughts I ought to have paid attention a whole lorra lot earlier.

I found these two, which contain nearly identical material, with just enough difference to warrant having them both, in a record store for what I thought was a real bargain. Scanning GEMM it appears that people don't actually pay very high prices for them. Weird. "Spass" was destined for the American market, an alternative to the mini-album "Lubricate Your Living Room" but supplemented with all of their singles. You can pick up an excellent Fire Engines compilation at Domino which is great but makes the odd weird choice like not including the string quartet-led version of "Candyskin", the string quartet Bob Last amusingly described to Simon as "not as expensive as you'd imagine". OK, enough spotter-ism already.

How on earth did a band from Edinburgh produce such a ferociously iconoclastic record? That may be the Glaswegian in me, but really? On the Scottish cultural horizon I reckon there are only two similarly intense gestures. Robert Louis Stevenson's "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" and Irvine Welsh's "Trainspotting", but no music. This is some vanguard stuff! So oblivious to geography and time that that they half seemed to believe it was joke music almost begins to make sense, were it not for the fact that its track-marked feistiness is so bloody-mindededly serious.

The Fire Engines make a racket like a corruscated, trebly Contortions, except that they ditch James Chance's embarrassing "nigger" stylings (sorry, hate to use that word, but it's intended pejoratively) and come out the other side sounding bleaker and more funky. Like a lot of modern rock, here is music which is defiantly drum-led, on the sleeve Russell Burns get the "lead" credit. Gnarling, insectoid, tooth-ache guitars, seem to grind away at their own axis, grooving around a handful of keys not really going anywhere, narcotically repetitive. Bass doesn't duck 'round the back, but pitched up, throbs in the same tonal centre, kind of like the quasi-bass lines Michael Rother laid down on guitar for Neu! David Henderson's twitchy yelps remind me of an anaemic Lux Interior, again bereft of ham hoodoo. In some ways I can't think of a better example of the qualities of rock. Grooving ain't a trivial thing y'see, its an uber-meta grasp of the internal dynamics of life itself, beyond and above the crude fumblings of theory.

I was playing "Lubricate Your Living Room" to a friend and he started laughing. "Sounds like pub rock", he chortled. Well I guess it does, if the house-band was The Velvet Underground. But what's wrong with that rough corpulence anyway? I mean, how much more cosmically illuminating is raving on e to being drunk in a bar? Genuinely. There's an unequivocal justness to "Everythings Roses" the divine head-cratering roll of those guitars that's unspeakably lovely and how relevant is which particular channelling of electricity? Isn't fetishising synths as wrong-headed as fetishising guitars?

All of which brings me to the Arctic Monkeys LP. In heretically admitting to *really* liking an Indie Rock record Simon has called what must be the first stylistic shift since "the blogs" started. I suppose all that we're left to see is whether anything subsequent scene-wise it can live up to "Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not" cos it's a super record. Two tracks in particular are stunning: "I Bet You Look Good On the Dancefloor" and "Still Take You Home", with no sign of the cloying "compressed" pop-music-played-on-guitars sound which characterises a lot of Indie. Oasis is about the only fair comparison to make, but Arctic Monkeys don't irritate in the way Oasis used to. A song like "Bigger Boys and Stolen Sweethearts" (on the I Bet You Look Good On the Dancefloor EP), there's no way Noel could write something as emotionally vulnerable as that and, as Simon remarks, the rhythm section is fabulous.

Denigrating new Indie Rock in the light of the old has run its course, and comparing something unimpeachable like The Fire Engines with The Arctic Monkeys (OK the latter may never be as blank-eyed or gnawingly splendid) but really how "original" were The Fire Engines? They weren't original at all! They were third generation VU-copyists! And yet 26 years later they smell as fresh as wet paint. My point? It's what you bring to the table that matters.

Posted by WOEBOT at 01:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I've had a strongly folk-themed week in a "bloke-in-a-media-bubble" kind of way. I've not exactly been writing slogans on my acoustic guitar or smoking gitanes in coffee shops. Not been protesting about Pershing or Cruise. I've had plenty of baths. I just bought this CD box set in a record store and went to a concert.

The box set is awesome, but CD one is so flipping great that I've got stuck on it (spangly troubadour bizniss), only just venturing onto the second disc. It's been put together by this guy David Wells, and greater authorities than me have made assurances as to its comprehensiveness. Highlights thus far have to be The Ian Campbell Folk Group's cover version of "Dirty Old Town". Did you know Ian Campbell was Ali and Robin of UB40's father? There's some kind of micro-history/theory right there. People complain about "Dirty Old Town", about how it's all worn out. But I remember liking The Pogues's version, and I heard The Dubliners version recently as well and I liked that too. The whole poetry of it I find irresistible, the idea of the smell of the spring wafting into the city, the natural's casual, ever-so-subtle victory over the man-made.

Also I like the Hamish Imlach. I'd *always* wanted to hear some Imlach ever since John Martyn spoke about him in the same breath as Skip James. I believe Martyn took lessons from him. There's a funky quality to "Clive's Song", Imlach leans into some notes, pulls back from others. Last night I heard the faintly awful act King Creosote (yeah I'm sorry I didn't like them, let's hope they don't get upset like ol' R Stevie Moore) and then one song caught my ear, and even though the vocalist sounded like a janitor from a sitcom I found myself digging it. Then it slowly dawned on me that it was Imlach's "Cod Liver Oil and Orange Juice". Wow that's a nice tune.....

The rest of the evening was a huge downer. I just hated Adem, god what plodding and caterwauling! Max Richter who produced the new Vashti LP was horribly precious with his laptop and string quartet, like an updated Philip Glass, not nice. Apologetic yanks Currituck & Co emerge from the Devandra Banhart hegemony. I guess they were OK, they did a post-Patty Waters take on Nina Simone's "Black is the color of my true love's hair" forging some nice bits of almost soukous-y guitar scaffolding. They triumph for me cos I have more truck with the The Wire-ish vision of neo-folk than the fRoots thing. Even if Devandra Banhart does next to nothing for me whatsoever.

Looking forward to the old people I was a bit mystified as to where Bert Jansch went? I fear he may have played a very early set. Mike Heron I was really pleased to see on stage. He carries a huge grin which is obviously tempered by a whole lotta livin'. Most of these other folky dudes were a bunch of pussies. If you've nothing but an acoustic guitar and some congas to prop you up you need to have something pretty flinty to offer. Too many of them make what Flashos, in his infinite wisdom, described as "crying music", it's all very well making music which makes people cry but only a weed would start off with the assumption that he wanted his audience to cry. It has to be unintentional. Mike, who I now suspect to be Vashti's husband, was joined by his daughter Georgia, and they were OK until the last track The Incredible String Band's "The Hedgehog's Song" when sparks flew, and they rocked.

I was beginning to dread Vashti's performance. I needn't have cos she was great. What a lovely, bewitching, almost hilariously modest lady. The volume dropped about 10 decibels, everyone playing as quiet as they could. The new songs were nearly the equal of the old ones. Fun like Vashti performing the song Jagger and Richard wrote for her with a little wiggle. Actually prompting me to really invest in my Vashti as Rolling Stones-in-a-separate-universe idea. I love Vashti with a passion. People have criticized me recently for forsaking Nick Drake for "A Diamond Day", I have this to say to those people: You're a bunch of emotionally stunted cloth-eared clods.

Posted by WOEBOT at 06:05 PM | Permalink

At last one of these London Tube Maps relexifications that actually works conceptually. I always thought The Great Bear was a missed opportunity. Download it here.

Posted by WOEBOT at 01:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I've been putting an article together on Prog Rock for FACT magazine, and in the process of getting stuff together I picked up these two from the collectors section upstairs at the Music and Video Exchange. It was a little reckless of me, but I was completely sold on the cover art. What great covers!

Sad to report that, unlike what is suggested, Quintessence are not the British incarnation of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, but a motley bunch of post-Moby Grape plodders attired with a gossamer-thin skein of eastern mysticism. I should have trusted my instincts when I noticed one side of the elpee was dedicated to a live performance at Exeter University. Wow, cosmic!

And Camel are not an electro-fixated, synth-addled power-prog outfit as is perhaps hinted by the banks of ARPs and EMSs listed impressively at the head of their personnel break-out, but something like your breathing soft-rock nightmare.

There are though, as I discovered and share in the piece, plenty of Brit Prog splendours. Pick up a copy if you can. You can even subscribe here...

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Having knocked my Top 100 list just before Christmas, I very nearly pulled the plug on it, deciding it would be more fun to run as a limited edition pamphlet. Beautifully laid-out and mailed off to nobs-in-the-know. I reasoned I could suck up to Paul Morley and post him one. Anyway I'm glad I didn't cos one month later there are still nice bits of feedback trickling in.

Ironically, or maybe not, I got the hardest time at Dissensus, but the list got picked up by a whole raft of other boards, the excellent Black Cat Bone, Death Valley Driver, DJ History and a few more besides. I also got a link from Large Hearted Boy, who given the traffic he inspired, must be some kind of heavyweight (excuse the pun). I was also amused, and covertly flattered that Large Hearted Boy referred to WOEBOT in the plural though, as it's rumoured of Jared Diamond, I was a commitee masquerading as an individual. No. I, WOEBOT, just am that marvellously educated, discerning, trendy, intelligent and generally fantastic.

One of the most interesting spin-offs came via Opinionated Diner who has done his own Top 100 twelve inches. As a project I think there's a whole lot more sense in it than my kind of vainglorious stab at encapsulating musical culture "in toto". There's a one or two things in there that made me look askance (Lionrock? Dave Clarke?) but you've got to hand it to him that's a pretty fine breakout. These charts, although they're a bit nerdy, are always extremely useful, and as I remarked at Dissensus, there's no point whatsoever trying to be objective.

Opinionated Diner's list made me flash on these two compilations (see jpegs above) that I came across in a record shop and earmarked for possible future investigation. Googling them I came across a review by none other than eagle-ears himself Jess Harvell at Pitchfork about three hundred years ago.

Posted by WOEBOT at 07:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I was going through my collection on Sunday night, piecing together some info for my latest FACT article, and I kept coming across Folkways records, you know the way something suddenly catches your eye. And once again, what a very bloody strange label it was.

Progressive Bluesgrass! This is hot actually.

The Ituri Pygmies! Well it follows as naturally as A does from B.

Poets read their contemporary Poetry! (confesses - I only know Amiri Baraka of this lot...)

Religious Music of India!

(straining belief) A composition of Agitprop Music for Electromagnetic tape by Ilhan Mimaroglu!

Haitian Voodoo Rites! Verna Gillis is the man incidentally. Classic behind the scenes world music dude.

Harry Smith recording Indians singing under the influence of Peyote, a three-disc box set this one. You knew about the Anthology, but this?

-

Anyway it came to mind as well that the blissblogger sent me this really cute thing for Christmas, the scan doesn't do it justice because it's a record label which some artist has cropped out of the centre of the record itself. Like a coaster, except it sits on my mantelpiece. Simon also sent me a copy of this great document, a Vanguard sleeve insert which he'd scrawled hilariously and polemically on top of "the world that bastard Dylan destroyed- FOREVER the fake neurotic!" Which reminded me of this comment I made on this thread.

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Vendredi 27 Janvier.

Le Triptyque
142 rue montmartre
75002 Paris

DJs !! JERRY DAMMERS (The Specials/2-Tone/Brixton) - Mr SACHA (Brixton/UK) ROLLS AYER CREW !! puSHER mix (Quiet The Cat) - MOLIA 75 (mac cam) L’Angleterre n’a pas connu d’artiste capable, depuis Jerry Dammers, de squatter les charts avec des hymnes festifs et engagés de la trempe de « Ghost Town », « Too much too young » ou « Nelson Mandela ». Légende du ska, symbole de la lutte anti-apartheid, le fondateur de The Specials et du label 2-Tone sera le grand invité de cette « Far End Night » spéciale Brixton et nous réserve une communion par la danse à grand coup de soul, de rocksteady, de punk funk et de early reggae. Avec également nos résidents Sher et Molia ainsi que Mr Sascha pour un clash Paris-Brixton.

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My old sparring partner Sacha is playing a special one off gig with Jerry Dammers this coming Friday in Paris. This'll be an aural feast for vinyl afficionados, they'll both be dropping some heavy Library bizniss alongside "de soul, de rocksteady, de punk funk et de early reggae." Jerry provided a very large proportion of the sleeves for Johnny Trunk's recent fabulous "The Music Library" tome as well as the hilarious introduction and my friend Sacha was the uncredited invisible hand behind a good deal of those plates. Seb, Guy, Patrice, Etienne, Jean-Rene, Gwen - you'd be mad to miss it!

Posted by WOEBOT at 02:47 PM | Permalink

This is a bit of fun! I had to provide my colleague Dave Mandl with a single black and white graphic for his magazine "The Brooklyn Rail" who will be publishing the "Greatest 100 Recordings" piece, and in the process created this monster.

If you've an A3 (or A4...) Colour Printer kicking around you might have some fun with this. Graphics Professionals may need to tweak the levels/hue/saturation a bit for optimum results. But still, it's better than a punch in the face!

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:28 AM | Permalink

I’ve discovered Pepe Bradock a few years too late, which truth be told is how I usually discover most things. It was Panash, his 2004 collaboration with Jackson which I came across at the end of last year, that alerted me to his work. Bradock’s micro-celebrity precedes Jackson’s. The earliest release of his I can trace is the “Un Pepe En Or Vol.1” on kif records from 1997 ("Lara" off which is pretty straight noodling French House) Part of Bradock's charm is how few records he puts out, contrary to the typical knock-em-out factory production line attitude of most House producers servicing the dancefloor, he seems to relish taking his time on a record. Obviously there are arguments against this kind of approach but within its context it's refreshing.

From "Intrusion"

With the foundation of his own label Atavisme this studious technique has extended to the packaging and identity of the records. Bradock has extensively used the artist Numero Six to develop "concepts", worked out in a combination of sculpture, illustration and graphic design to counterpoint his spooky, lushly-textured, soft-edged deep house. Part of me finds Six's work (like Bradock, about whom I can discover nothing on the internet) faintly revolting. There's some element of it which reminds me of "Delicatessen" or Marc Caro's other famous film "La Cité des Enfants Perdus" the over-ripe camembert aesthetic of which I find difficult to bear. But, interestingly, it does connect strongly with the artwork of Progressive Rock.

From "6 Millions Pintades"

Immediately this has become the context within which I've been understanding Pepe's quite unabashed "Progressive" House. Obviously France has a rich tradition of Progressive synthesizer music. Currently rocking my socks is a Lard Free "April Orchestra" library record from 1976 (I understand their later work becomes more and more synth based- presumably as Gilbert Artman was deserted in his own group, lol). Other documents include Richard Pinhas's "Rhizosphere", Heldon's "Allez Teia" (yet to check this, but have it on good word) and the elegant electronic watercolors of Pascal Comelade circa "Detail Monochrome".

From "Burning/Deep Burnt"

One of the striking parallels between this largely abandoned backwater of music, passed over in favor of Krautrock, and Bradock's is the comfortable, unquestioning relationship it has with American Jazz. It's not just the use of similar tonalities and chord patterns, but also the occasional saxophones and in the case of what is often described as Bradock's high-point "Deep Burnt", a sample of Blue Note stalwart Freddie Hubbard's "Little Sunflower". I guess this is something which is audible in French music from the 1950s to the present-day. While we in the UK connect more strongly to the Electric Blues and the Blues, in France (and there is some vestigial connection to my Beatnik-AvantYob theory here which states categorically no French people are AvantYobs, that needs working out) Modern Jazz is the sun.

From "The Forbidden Fruit EP

All of the Atavisme EPs are worth investigating, though Panash is perhaps the highlight and the perfect entree for those fans of the post-PIL "Death Disco" strain of Techno. I'm also grateful to Dave Stelfox for hipping me to the astonishing 'Brad Peep' remix of Iz and Diz's "Mouth" which as Dave correctly observed, out-hiccoughs Herbert and which you can hear a sample of at the Atavisme website.

From "Panash"-Imagery by Jackson/Bradock

Posted by WOEBOT at 05:22 PM | Permalink

This, the Psychic TV Testcard, from Jon Eden:

"used at the beginning of their videos, performances etc... :cool:

designed by Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson I think, who knew a bit about telly cos he directed loads of adverts..."

Posted by WOEBOT at 08:01 AM | Permalink

Seeing as how this has come up (swift thinking blissblogger...), I've dug out a copy of it. Described on the back as "Six instrumentals in praise and celebration of mid-morning television made and played by Stuart Moxham and Phillip Moxham", even more than the "Final Day" 7" or the "Colossal Youth" LP it's a bonafide slice of British Proto-Nerdtronica (see also Joe Meek) because of course the boys have been abandoned by Alison Statton. Her work with Weekend gets pretty short shrift (cos of their connection to the Wag Club Indie Soul Boy scene) but check out "Drumbeat for Babies" (slsk massive get busy) -that's a monster track. I was interested to see generally maligned individual Gilles Peterson making sense of the post-punk revival in some chart or other by giving some early Weekend stuff the thumbs up.

And (doh!) nearly forgot this, which came up very recently here. Jon Dale mentioned in an email to me that his "mum says I used to sit and watch testcards for ages as a kid" and I wonder if that wasn't as much to do with the drone accompanying the Test card (Dale's tastes are well documented). Sweet Exorxist made the connection between the Test tone and the bleep, with the visual dimension an ancillary factor for Jarvis Cocker to peg a pop promo onto.

Posted by WOEBOT at 05:22 PM | Permalink

TV Zeit

I got this nice graphic insert with my copy of The Advisory Circle's "Mind How You Go" with this image on it:

I wouldn't want to second guess Julian but I reckon test cards must be the inspiration behind it. It's kind of an apt symbol within what Simon is calling "hauntology", because it represents a TV which is both switched on and off, at once dead and alive.

Fittingly I've spent all week building graphics for a TV show which builds historical "trees" out of BBC TV programmes, tracing the paths of actors, directors and writers through the years. Whilst hunting the web for information I came across this great website: "The Test Card Gallery", and naturally enough thought of The Ghost Box massive.

Here are a few of my favourites:

...very "Dada" spooky and mute...

...nice bit of visual corruption...

and this one which has a wicked eighties feel to it:

The purpose of the test card is to let technician dweebs like me to check the luminance and chroma values on monitors and to eyeball any "artifacts", which are televisiologic graphical mis-representations. Bugs. In the use of one as an icon I guess there's an allusion to the kind of behind-the-scenes occult-ish quality of technical knowledge and the mysteriousness of it to outsiders. On reflection it's strange that the BBC technicians of this time were so unmediated that they were allowed to hijack the beeb's output and bewilder the populace with this bizarre constructivist imagery. It's not the sort of think you'd see nowadays is it?

The Advisory Circle's "Mind How You Go" shares all those things we love about Ghost Box, who have rightfully provided the blogosphere (and beyond) with a poster act unrivalled since Nick's The Junior Boys. Listening to it I was struck quite forcibly, not with a tangled web of half-baked pseudo-philosophical thoughts and maze of musico-cultural references (the usual reaction...) but of a recollection of a person. That person was Steve, the polytechnic student who rented a room off my parents when I was five years old living outside Stroud in Gloucestershire, who gave me a textbook on Paleontology and who would play me Jean Michel Jarre's newly-released "Oxygene". Steve seemed impossibly tall and hairy, but I still liked him a great deal.

I'm extremely keen that Jim and Julian take my advice and approach Radio 4 Somerset with Belbury Poly's "Farmer's Angle". Beyond irony, it'd make the perfect soundtrack to some agricultural news program. The Hyperstitionists say that it's better as a "imaginary" soundtrack, but I think it'd be a superb "front-page" conceptual coup to have it blaring out of the combine-harvesters.

Posted by WOEBOT at 04:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Posted by WOEBOT at 01:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Geeta gave the Blissblogger, Gutterbreakz and me a nice little write up at Flavorpill and as a result Plucky New Yorker Alyce Santoro got in touch with a link to her Sonic Fabric mini-site, which is all about this cool material she's made from audio cassette tape. A timely idea in the light of the current surge in interest in C90s. Maybe I should try and hook her up with Sharon at My Woebot T-shirts (part of the global WOEBOT/Blissert conspiracy) and get them to make me my own WOEBOT T?

Posted by WOEBOT at 11:21 AM | Permalink

Came across this browsing through a junk insert from a newspaper. S'funny how the mainstream represents vinyl as manifestly, unequivocably outmoded, when for so many of us it's the cutting edge. It's that same curious impulse which manifests itself in middle-aged people "regretting" the fashion they chose to wear when they were young. Why do people have such difficulty connecting with their previous selves? It's as though they're locked in a permanent process of brain-washing. Some would blame capitalism, me I just think people can be lame.

In this device's favour it does offer 78 rpm which is incontestably bordering on the recherche (at last Jim Clarke can play that Vincent Gallo 12"), but I'd bet good money on almost no-one who buys this owning anything other than 33s and 45s. More prosaically I suppose what happens with record players these days is that the needle or the cartridge break and the owner never gets round to getting it fixed.

Discovering this advert coinciding with me overhearing a snippet of a Radio 4 programme with Stephen Fry talking, his tone pure young fogey, about his love of the "gramophone record", again as if vinyl were some neolithic phenonenon. I wanted to link to the show, but can't seem to dig it out of the Radio 4 archives, my questions on the Radio 4 forum (don't laugh) falling on deaf ears.

Posted by WOEBOT at 06:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Amongst many other things, our babies got toy instruments for Christmas. Lulu is generally less interested in them than Sam, who loves them to bits. He has a tiny guitar, and he peels off to a bean-bag and plays it, singing along as only a one year old can. I should add that, although I really adore these instruments (and indeed the entire toy instrument oeuvre-General Strike and beyond) I haven't been hot-housing. When Sam first saw the guitar in a shop with my wife, he wept when she wouldn't buy it for him, and then carried on weeping the entire morning until she she asked him if he'd like it. Then he stopped.

The red piano got damaged on the plane back from Glasgow, I've had to glue it back together, but it's fine. Quite co-incidentally we discovered the batteries on the Chicco electric "synthesiser" had worn out, so that needs fixing too. Dads out there will know about the crucial fatherly role of repairing broken stuff. The Chicco is a great little thing, you can half kid yourself that you've mastered tunes like "Baa Baa Black Sheep" and "Frere Jacques".

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Heads should check out this Great 2Step thread at Dissensus wherein, amongst others, Tim Finney and Matt Mason drop some scary science.

Part of the reason I started the thread was I was gearing up to do a Christmas 2Step mix. However I deliberated and decided that my really extremely respectable collection of 2Step wasn't what it should be. Furthermore I've taken a tape measure to and it and isn't the apocryphal 2 feet deep, but a (coughs) slightly more modest ten inches. Yeah, don't scoff, I use the same line trout fishing.

(sticks out chest) I could still pack a mighty mix but it'd rely a good deal on a comp I've already cc'd Jon Dale and Simon, and even though I've probably 10 more tracks to add to that, well it wouldn't quite be the heavyweight survey it needs to be to meet my high standards. Natch.

My other idea was to do a DJ Wrongspeed-style collage from of my radio recordings made back in the day 1998-2000 (see the jpeg above), but to be honest, shamefully, I don't have the time. When I've put a bit more work in I'll offer up a really proper mix, and then we'll see who the daddy is ;-)

Posted by WOEBOT at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Over the moon to see that The Books "Lost and Safe" has been made LP of the year by The Wire. It's a really lovely record and Nick and Paul can justifiably pat eachother on the back.

I must have pestered poor Chris Bohn with about three hundred emails over six months before he let me do my piece on them and I probably ought to thank Rob Young for mangling my doggerel into something approximating a proper piece. I'll get the hang of this writing lark sooner or later.

It's worth taking 30 seconds to remember that if it hadn't been for the omnivorous Nick Kin, who dumped "The Lemon of Pink" on me amongst about 3 gig of other mp3s, then I'd never have had the pleasure of checking out their music.

Posted by WOEBOT at 04:46 PM | Permalink

I've been ever so slightly embarassed by the Blissblogger's evaluation of me as an optimist and consequently feel duty bound to address some of his points about the state of Grime. See, when it comes to sensing a sea-change, be it a dip in energy or a subtle curdling of atmosphere one has to give Simon props. He's got it right time and again. Also, if one accepts the accepted model of the "Ardkore Continuum" as it stands, refuting the demise of Grime is almost like denying the existence of entropy. The rule of thumb seems to be that any musical development along the Pirate Radio axis, has a maximum of four years at the cultural cutting-edge before lapsing into formulaic patterns and micro-historical repetitions (like Jungle's vacillations between the tropes of Happy, Jazzy and Dark, or Techno's endless re-repeats of Acid). However, let us not forget that some generic formats have ended up, not as straight-jackets but canvases, spaces within which possibilities seem ever-present, but not suffocatingly multiplicitous. Hip-Hop for instance. Or Dancehall.

When Simon bemons the scene as being "like an endless fuck with no climax", I can't help but reflect that I'd *never* imagined that Grime would blow up. I can't imagine a world in which, in its current form, that it would ever reach beyond, er, London. I've always been totally comfortable with it being "a permament underground" (more or less as Martin points out). This is not to say that I haven't relished "Pow" and Dizzee's success. As for Simon's assertion that its energy and quality is tied up with its "explosive, hungry-to-conquer, extroversion", well there's no denying that that's one of the things that separates it from UK Rap. That it threatens to be "another UKrap scene on the top of the one we already got" is a scenario which I most dread. I've noticed Logan Sama taking a pretty much an identical stance to me here, hoarsely calling for out distinction between the scenes. However I've always believed that Grime's essential form *is* (like Hip-Hop and Dancehall's) flexible, permeable, and changeable. It fundamentally differs from UK Hip-Hop, because American music is irrelevant to it, and this is what will lead it to prosper.

I've been moaning as much as anyone about the dearth of good releases, but, all told, the tracks compiled here in tandem with my earlier snapshot of the scene this year point conclusively to a scene which even though it is treading water, and coping with the diminishing horizon of expectations, is producing powerful music. Danny Weed is going from strength to strength, Trim has emerged as a force to be reckoned with on vinyl, producers P-Jam and Statik have made an impression, SLK are proving to be no one-hit wonders, the Essentials' Young Dot and DJ Eastwood (who produced the Sick Sense Crew track) have emerged as new talent and Wiley's still cutting it as an MC and a producer. For all the creative low-points: Ruff Sqwad dropping the ball with "Cuckoo", Terrah Danjah falling out of view, Bruza failing to deliver anything to match his early promise, there are still other Ruff Sqwad tunes where they've worked wonders, and Aim High Vol.3 and the Newham Generals LP in the pipeline. Optimist it is.

Posted by WOEBOT at 07:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I found this record six months or so ago in the now defunct Reckless shop in Islington and I paid a miniscule $5 for it. Sonton, as I found out recently in Johnny Trunk's mighty survey of Library Music, was a heavy-hitting German Library collection with nuff distribution power and marketing muscles. The Sonton covers in the tome are quite as fantastic as this one. What really sold me on the disc was a loop on the fist track which I immediately pegged as being archetypically Basement Jaxx-ish.

The economy of loops is a strange thing. The entire record might be drek, but so long as there is a nifty drum-break it's worth money. Or some money anyway! Man, Madonna sampling Abba's "Gimme, Gimme, Gimme (A Man after Midnight)" on "Time Moves Fast", that's a total no-brainer innit. I've caned that track at weddings for years, real dark nordic power to it.

Sacha, my best-friend and celebrated dealer, came round the other evening, and he mentioned he was visiting the Jaxx to sell them records. He was also apparently quite low on stock, so I did what I never usually do and gave him the Sonoton "Disco" record to sell to them, pointing out the sample.

Round at Felix and Simon's gaff, Sacha produces the disc. "This", he declares, "is a totally Basement Jaxx record!" Cue baffled expressions, raised eyebrows etc as the tune spools into the room. He has to GIVE the record to them, throwing it into the deal. I was gutted when he recounted the story to me, but slowly (as ice thaws) I've come to see the funny side of it.

Given their total disinterest in it I've decided to offer the loop here for everyone's amusement. Was I really so far off the mark? Can anyone make a better track with it than the Jaxx could? If so I'll host the result.

Posted by WOEBOT at 02:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

STOP PRESS!

I'm on Resonance FM tomorrow night Tuesday 13th December at 10.30 pm doing my NDW Selektion thing.

There will be added extras like Monopol (see above), Alu (c/o Bas Van Hoof) and, I dunno, Kosmonautraum. Whatever I can squeeze in. Tune in and hear me faffing about.

Posted by WOEBOT at 04:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

It's been a fortnight or so since I made my contribution to Blackdown's yearly round-up. On Friday I was in Glasgow for the day. I walked from the centre of town all way to the Byres Road end of the Great Western Road so as to drop in on one of my favourite stores Defunkt, only to find it had shut down.

The outfitters who were cheerfully converting it into a clothing store slightly jeered at me. Told me I could have the racks if I liked. Trainspotter. Another one bites the dust? Maybe not. I was pleased to discover this morning that Peter who ran the store has downsized and is working out of Glasgow's Savoy Centre.

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:09 AM | Permalink

Eyes practically popped out of my head when I came across this in one of London's emporia. OK it was the Reckless dance division on Berwick Street, practically soul boy hipster central. And they're cool, friendly dude hipped me to Patrice Rushen's "Feels so Real", and this is obviously a joke. But nonetheless!

And notice the geezer who's scrawled "if you wrote this you're a cunt" on it in biro. Guffaw. It's the textbook London dance-music style war on a record sleeve. Folk who live abroad and all those folks who are hip to the Ardkore 'nuum may be oblivious to this dialogue. On the ground things like Grime, "Chav music", are viewed with real disgust. I've been hanging out online for so long that I kind of forgot how little people think about this music. Quite heartening really!

Posted by WOEBOT at 06:29 PM | Permalink

This post has taken a little longer to materialise than I'd originally planned. I wrote to Sa-Ra a week ago. They have a contact form on their quite minimal website. I clicked it and spewed out about seven questions. Not quite as hopeless as you'd maybe suspect as I noticed that other internet bods had had some luck getting hold of them. Maybe my tone was a bit too free-wheeling, shucks, I dunno? Perhaps it's a good thing, as now I'm free to be as critical as the subject demands.

Before I start heaping praise on the project then, it's a good idea to start with my reservations. I dunno, this whole music business CV shit they peddle, man it makes me want to puke. I just don't care about their past licking the balls of major industry "talent", about their engineering gigs and whatnot. That all three of them have this kind of past, well as far as I'm concerned it doesn't translate into tasty supergroup action. As if being a supergroup was some kind of boon anyway! Supergroup, yuk. Like a gigantic flashing pink neon sign: "Supergroup"

This tendency naturally connects to the phenomenon of the guest spot, hence Pharohe Monche and Jay Dilla on the worst tracks on 'The Second Time Around". If they ever get round to making their LP it'll be wall-to-wall Beyonce. Ditto the "Dark Matter and Phonography CD", it's nothing but a resume of their remix work. I've noticed that one or other of them (or is it all of them, sloppiness triumphs) have been signed up to A&R for the re-congealing Rawkus records, hmm looks like the typical Sa-Ra industry insider shenanigans. They'll get lost in it. Their genius will get lost in a maze of demographic profiling and market stats.

Also Kanye. The Kanye connection. Kanye gets quoted on the sticker on the sleeve. Kanye etc. Kanye has lost it. The second LP? Rubbish. Man, what a disappointment..... I heard Kanye on the Westwood show the other day, wow what a fucking embarassment. Like watching two guide dogs waltzing. Please stop freestyling! Please stop trying to appear modest! Just...stop!

Having said all this, I just adore Sa-Ra. They've truly managed to transcend all their own bullshit. In spite of their insistence on how brilliant they are, they've managed to be brilliant. Their recent pinnacles "Intoxicated", "Second Time Around", "Glorious" and "Hanging by a String" have outshone everything else made in the past year.

"Intoxicated" is so sublimely slight you almost hear past it the first time around. Since when has Hip-Hop managed to sound so strange and tender? Chugging into frame on a Trans-Europe-Express drum pattern, geijin bamboo synth, muted push-me-pull-you group harmonies quivering out of earshot. Grown men going "ooh oh ooh oh". Sighs.

I've gone digital before on how stunned I was by "The Second Time Around", this track literally wobbles out of the speakers, stands upright in the sitting room quivering like steel jelly, clopping doubled drums. The lyric is interesting too in the vapid context of a lot of Platinum Hip-Hop, the message is sensuous and dirty not so pornographic and clean.

"Glorious", well I have Jess to thank for alerting me to this, though I suppose like the Russian fishing trawler I am, I would have hoovered it up sooner or later. "Glorious", again the voices perfectly pitched under the beats, instrumentalised and doubly so by distortion. I swear that's a Maximum Joy bass-line, but the chorus (blinks) strong shades of Duran Duran's "Notorious". Drones cycle up and down the soundscape.

"Hanging on a String" just so mentally decomposed. Any more disintegration and we're into Mark Stewart and The Mafia territory. The drums come in and they're *supposed* to hold it together, but instead they just kick it even further out of shape. Literally hanging together by a thread. It's at moments like these that I ponder the Sa-Ra/Sun Ra connection.

There are many other great great tracks: "Birds", "Daylight", "Jumbo", "Love Stomp", "Rosebuds" and "Space Theme". Really special stuff. My man gumdrops at Dissensus holds a candle for "Butterscotch", "Downtown", "Hollywood" and "Bitch", however these tracks haven't had an official release yet. I spoke to the guy at Honest Jon's and he's pretty sure they have only been available as a CD-R which apparently some DJs have managed to get hold of, and which has presumably been cc'd to mates. Their catalogue IS a bit of a mess. The great Cosmic Dust and Cosmic Lust EPs are only available as super-expensive Japanese imports. What's the deal there? Anyway track breakouts bore me, so I'll leave it at that.

So what are Sa-Ra up to? If you wanted a really crude snapshot of their sound it'd be as follows: like "Juicy Fruit"-era Mtume, very Marcus Miller-period Miles (think "Tutu" and "Man with the Horn") a little 1980s George Duke..... Do you get the gist? That's right, it's a re-vivification of the 80's post-cosmic Jazz. That time when the heavy hitters abandoned concept LPs for some commercial Jazz-Funk action. Everyone knows Mtume right? Well Mtume started out with Miles on "Get Up With It" then went solo on straight up cosmic Jazz like "Rebirth Cycle" (pyramids on the cover...) before penning groovy Jheri-curl-tastic LPs like "Juicy Fruit", "You Me and He" and "Theater of the Mind". Still shades of the cosmic present, albeit transmutated into slick paens to the orgone. Good shit.

My theory, and I put this to Sa-Ra (in my, ahem, unanswered email) was that they were using this music to reverse engineer the trajectory of the capitalistic Hip-Hop hegemony, using it to open a wormhole in time, a metaphorical illogical but lateral step backwards, by way of an escape route in much the same way that a Queen in chess may advance forward, yet also retreat diagonally. Anyway we'll never know what they thought about that, but if Afro-American music gets yet more cosmic please feel to write to me and tell me how clever I am.

The other 80's current is the New Wave inflection present in Sa-Ra's music. This gives their oevre a zeitgeisty feel which it appears Kanye is only just wising up to (via Catchdubs). The whole miscegenation aspect of this is really appealing vis-a-vis SFJ's fetishisation of Liquid/Sugarhill 1980's New York. Skin colour not such a big issue. I like to flash on Bootsy digging Devo (true), Bernie Worrell playing with Talking Heads and the first Prince LP. Old Skool New Wave Funk.

People say their sound owes something to Jay Dilla's. I'm not qualified to comment just yet. Certainly Dilla's fluidity in the face of Techno and Disco sorta indicates this might be right, but (again still awaiting concrete evidence) I suspect the comparison may be superficial.

Will Sa-Ra be massive? Will they be the next Timba-tunes in the absence of Lil' Jon managing to pull off the feat? Hmmm. I dunno. I suspect not. In interviews (with more levelheaded journalists) they talk about wanting to operate at a Coldplay 'cross-over' level. However the problem seems to be that their music kicks off when they're at their most care-free and introspective. Whenever they "go for it" (and this is usually sign-posted by the presence of those characteristic guest artistes) they stumble, become tedious and generic, like on "Double Dutch". "Fish Fillet" and "Thriller".

Just because they look appear be a Jazz-Funk/Nu-Soul outfit and Gilles Peterson likes them, you'd be wrong to write 'em off. Most interesting crew in the world.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:37 PM | Permalink

I've mentioned occasionally before that my Grandfather Michael Ingram was a celebrated collector of Drawings and Watercolours, mainly Dutch Old Masters and English Watercolours. Grandad died this Summer after having been uncomfortable for a long time. Why this isn't "off-topic" for WOEBOT is, of course, that we shared collecting as a pass-time. My Grandad was, perhaps like me, always keen to share his interests with other people. Over a period of twenty years I spent many, many afternoons going through his drawings with him. We'd sneak in "just another box" before having tea.

His pictures were broadly regarded as the finest private collection of their kind in Britain, and he was regularily visited by the leading lights of Sotheby's and Christies who presumably were not just on fact-finding missions, but were also keen to secure the collection for their respective auction houses. Whilst there are are many pictures contained within it which are famous (works by Constable, Gainsborough, Turner, Samuel Palmer and Girtin) my Grandfather championed relatively obscure characters like John Scarlett Davis and E.T.Davis and had a particular fondness for the work of amateurs like The Reverend Wlliam Bree and Brabazon.

Although it's scarcely reasonable to draw the comparison, I've often thought his fondness for the cheaply and quickly executable media of watercolour and pencil drawing, the quite specific temporal window during which it was seized upon and mastered in England, and the fact that it was often roving amateurs who took to the task, mirrors my own love of Ardkore. He would often buy pictures decades ahead of the curve for pound or two, pictures which will now sell for unfeasibly high sums of money. If only the Ardkore I spent equally small sums upon were quite as profitable (give it time.....) Grandad's other arch collecting trick was his ability to discover important work in unusual places, he once discovered a Rowlandson in someone's loo and bought the picture off them during lunch.

If anyone in London is interested, and this is the other "point" of my post, they should know that his collection (or at least that larger section of which hasn't been claimed by the family, I took a modest five pictures away which I've always particularly liked) can be viewed at Sotheby's (34-35 New Bond Street) this week between Monday 5th and Wednesday 7th. The auction takes place on 8th December.

Posted by WOEBOT at 12:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

For years I moaned on and on about how the wonderful "Bird In Hand" from Lee Perry's masterpiece "Return of The Super Ape" was a cover version of a Bollywood tune. Without further ado I give thee:

Talat Mahmood and Shamshad Begum's - "Afsana mera ban gaya"

Just discovered more info myself here.

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:05 PM | Permalink

Photographer: "OK guys. Smile! (bulb flashes) Right lets try that again. Er, Dan, could you you know (shakes his shoulders) relax a little." Dan: "Like this?" Photgrapher: "I guess that'll have to do... (bulb flashes).

It's the backroom boys Mike Simonetti (Troubleman) and Dan Selzer (Acute) in the limelight. They wish they never came up with the idea of a Feelies pastiche record cover, just want to get back to the record store, back to the bid. Anyway, who cares what they look like? What you ought to care about is that with this collection (which has already snaffled some publicity off of Blissblog) they've made the best and most seductive mix CD this year. Head over here for the tracklisting, spiel and to pick up a copy for a measly $3 plus shipping.

Not only is it packed with totally amazing, fabulously catchy, super-rare choons like Amin-Peck's "Girls On Me", Vortex's quite stunning "Black Box Disco" and Klein & MBO's gourgeous 'The Big Apple" (all of which you'll wonder how you ever managed to survive without...) it also has a few tracks *everyone* knows and loves, which means HEY PRESTO a CD you can play to your girlfriend/wife/dog, it's practically a "Just Add Water" recipe for the best office party ever!

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Last week I spent 3 days helping Troy Miller put together the graphics for the forthcoming Practice Hours DVD. I met Troy when I went down to Rinse FM in the Summer. We got chatting about techy video stuff and I offered to help out for free on the Motion Graphics. That's what I do for a living you see, graphics for Channel 4, T4, MTV, Sky, Title Sequences, Pop Videos, Commercials, in essence whizzy surreal eye-candy for Telly. Flash stuff.

Troy has spent the entire year getting together the interviews for the double DVD set. I'll repeat that, an *ENTIRE YEAR* on this *DOUBLE DVD* set. He had so much quality footage that it had to go on two discs. I've seen quite a bit of the video and there's brilliant stuff in there. It's a true survey of the Grime nation, peopled with a surprisingly high quotient of new unknown faces as well as all the big names. That filled me with hope for the music actually, that there are people coming through. Punters are going to have a load of fun watching these discs.

The job was a challenge cos although I've done lots of high-end stuff, I'd never turned my hand to any DVD Menus. So I had to understand how that all worked. Which I did. It was also a challenge because this was a Grime DVD, for Media Gang who (with the Conflict DVD, Practice Hours, Aim High Volume 2 and Run The Road 2 DVDs under their belt) must surely rank as the "market leaders", and I couldn't deliver no wussy Ice Cream commercial graphics. Street, raw, inflected by video game graphics but also just a likkle bit Pop-Arty. It had to look ruff and, well, grimey. I wanted my graphics to look like a million dollars (well, a few thousand quid at the very least), and when you look at this DVD and compare it to its competitors Box Bloody Fresh, Risky Roads, Lord of the Decks, well I like to think my small contribution has helped Practice Hours raise the game.

And naturally my own involvement got me thinking a bit. I'll always remember Alex Petridis's comments way back in April last year, about Grime's "comically polarised fan base" and well, enjoy a laugh at his expense really. It's been truly cool watching Riko and Plasticman become bloggers, witnessing Martin Clark and Chantelle Fiddy embracing the net, hanging out with Logan "The Ice Man" Sama at Dissensus, checking the Prancehall man playing an opening set for Ruff Sqwad, seeing Dave "bun-u" Moynihan arranging the awesome Dirty Canvas night. What a strange trip it's been!

But a caveat. I read Eno quoting Robert Wyatt recently and it seemed very appropriate to to this situation: "Wyatt always says that the most interesting period in any ethnic music is the first couple of months that the middle classes get hold of it, and then they ruin it after that. For the first short while they put a tremendous amount of energy and resources behind it and then it flourishes but then it dies from its own dinosaur proportions." Substitute the odd term here and there and voila. Grime and the bloggers. It'd be extremely easy to disown this culture, and I'm as guilty as the next man of having felt a bit negative about Grime recently. Internet critics dem have a sweet tooth. It's especially easy for the more superficial individual to find something they come in close proximity to to be delibidinised. I'm not telling people to disown their critical faculties, but yunnuh, have patience. Sincerely I believe this music is not going away, and that, unlike Jungle it won't wither creatively. Have faith people!

Posted by WOEBOT at 12:52 PM | Permalink

Probably against my better judgement I've just opened one of these fellers. MT3.2 has this authentification system which means you have to sign up remotely with Typekey before you can call me a cock. Obviously I'd appreciate not being called a cock, and unfortunately unlike Dissensus (where it really was quite difficult to "say my name") it's not so difficult here. Some people may find authentification tiresome, and that may mean less comments, but to be honest I can live with that.

A few rules of engagement (really talking to himself here), I won't be poking my nose in more than once a day. Sanity dictates innit. I'll be shutting the boxes after a while because that cuts down on the spam like wot poor old Paul Meme is struggling with. And, of course, if people routinely upset me (skin has got measurably tougher when it comes to online discourse) then I'll chuck 'em out and delete comments at will. If you can't stand my guts (reflects: I *must* have got less objectionable as time has gone on!) then please avoid me and my sorry ass.

People are encouraged to use readily identifiable monikers and not bask in obscurity.

Posted by WOEBOT at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

So Ariel's "House Arrest" is around the corner, just about to get re-released by Todd at Paw Tracks. But what about these two babies? I picked them up at the Pink gig at Scratch this summer, classic ruff and ready CD-R bizniss from a guy with a stall, and it must be said that "Scared Famous" is the best of the lot. Better than "The Doldrums" and maybe even better than "Worn Copy."

The tunes are amongst Ariel's best, "Beefbud" is just perfect: Ray Davies dematerialising as he skiffles sideways. As people must have noticed all this music is reissued recordings, originally made, I dunno, a year or so ago, when Ariel must have been in the full throes of the starry dynamo. It reminds me, in a way, of how Radiohead turned one lot of sessions into "OK Computer", "Kid A" and "Amnesiac" and dined out on the vibe. Who knows what Mr. Pink's new stuff will be like?

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:01 AM | Permalink

Picked up this great magazine the other day in the bookshop outside Tate Modern. It literally leapt out of the window at me. What it represents is a particularly fecund moment in the lifetime of the British Avant-Garde, a moment so fraught with promise, that it still haunts music today.

While American music is covered splendidly, there's stuff on Steve Reich, Alvin Lucier and Morton Feldman, it's viewed here through a British prism. Michael Nyman, who performed the key conceptual round-up of the Minimalists with his seminal book on Glass/Reich/Riley/Young, speaks to Steve Reich and Gavin Bryars interviews Morton Feldman.

The Brits could be grouped on an incline ranging from their proximity to the Avant-Garde and their notional "austerity" to their degree of involvement in Pop Culture thus: Cornelius Cardew > Portsmouth Sinfonia > Gavin Bryars > Michael Nyman > Paul Burwell and David Toop > Tom Phillips > Brian Eno.

And maybe it's this interface with Pop which went on to ensure the continuing resonance of the era? For this we have to thank Toop who took these ideas into Post-Punk and framed his writing about Hip-Hop within Cardew's conceptual framework (non-musicians, transgressive social re-organisation and open systems) and most especially Eno because of Obscure Records. Though of course part of the reason the music expanded beyond the boundaries of the hermetic world Avant-Garde music is usually happy to occupy was, not only that it was pungent with ideas and possibilities, but also that ideas of musical democracy were key to its fabric/rubric.

I've gone and scanned in the Eno article and uploaded it here, it's not the most interesting piece in the volume (a quite dry look at the actual limits of probability imposed by Cardew's score of "The Great Learning") but it's interesting from the perspective of its progeny, from the pen of self-professed "Rock Star".

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:14 AM | Permalink

It's one of my peridodic bugbears, people confusing UK Hip-Hop with Grime, and it's a conflation that almost always happens the closer one gets to mainstream Journalism. So I wasn't at all surprised to clock this on the BBC News site. In character as Colonel Outraged I wrote them a little note which, seeing as how I'd be extremely surprised if they published it, I'm reproducing here:

"Your reporter has made a classic error of trying to compare unlike with like.

Like your reporter, the UK Urban Industry has made the silly mistake of thinking that if it brands Grime as the UK’s “own version of Hip-Hop” that they will be able to sell it more easily. If Grime didn’t have its own roots you’d find this exercise would kill it quickly, however it will continue to slowly prosper and grow regardless."

Kinda testy of me I suppose. I wonder what will happen with Grime? It still hasn't lost it's grip on the underground like Jungle hade done by 1996 which means it's had an impressive five years in gear since So Solid's "Oh No" in 2000. Putting together my Grime breakout for the second half of this year has proved to be very tricky.

Posted by WOEBOT at 01:30 PM | Permalink

Some parts of London have a reputation for being mediatized. There's an unwritten rule that dictates the way people in Soho and Notting Hill Gate are supposed to behave around famous people. The rule is that you look once and then look away. You're not supposed to approach famous people and ask for their autographs. I suppose the assumption is that you're working in the same business as them and that you should both understand their need to go about their daily lives unbothered by intrusion. Also you should be cool enough to be blase about their presence. It always fascinates me seeing things like The Beatles being mobbed at Heathrow, or Bowie greeting hordes of fans at Kings Cross Station as the Thin White Duke, the crowds of fans in Leicester Square greeting Britney, and even things like shops dedicated to selling autographed pictures of stars; because there is such a stark contrast to these famous people's reception to the way they're handled in the "mediatized" environment.

And don't think for even half a second that I'm being disparaging about the "common" reaction "normal people" have. Cos I'm much worse than most. My pulse races when I see a celebrity. I'm quick when it comes to spotting them (even really obscure people, like ancient soap stars everyone has forgotten about and who look thinner and haggard) and I'll be honest, I'm enthralled by their auras. On the one hand it's a strictly visceral reaction to the materialisation of deity, on the other there's a more intellectual curiosity. Seeing Celebrities up close gives one the opportunity to examine and appraise them to try and figure out the mechanics and psychology behind their self-creation, I suppose in part to claim those tactics as one's own, but also so as to deconstruct one's own manipulation by this voodoo we call culture. I know it might seem trivial and intrusive, but hey I am trivial and intrusive.

This weekend I had a couple of close brushes with famous people that I couldn't help but feel were illuminating. Waiting to push Dooey on the swings I noticed the little boy who was being held by the woman beside me was quite divine looking, wearing the cutest hat. Dooey and I cooed over him, and then I noticed that the woman was Stella McCartney. Immediately I got stressed out. She deserved to be left to enjoy her precious time with her son in peace. So I clocked her once, she was wearing a fabulous bell-shaped grey long-coat and then looked away. But then I'm stuck standing beside her for 5 minutes as we swing our children. Dooey screaming at me, "FASTER", and then becomes oblivious to me working away, except when I tickle her. And I can't help but absorb what's going on beside me. Stella calls her baby "Milla"- is delighted by how scrumptious he is, takes photos of her on her mobile phone, screams "Mare" for her sister to come over.

Later I couldn't help but reflect on her character. She was very firm with the baby that it had had enough time on the swings, that other people needed a turn. This was done with great force, very vocally and demonstrably, you'll laugh but it felt resoundingly like a cosmic point was being made about equality. "Blimey". I thought, "I'd better get Dooey off the swings." Where's that come from, that drive? The cynic might say that it's over-compensation for being spectacularly wealthy and influential. Like the way Madonna grinds humility into poor wee Dolores. But it's also extremely honorable and high-minded, maybe in the way you'd consider "The People" if you were the daughter of the figurehead of the counter-culture. You think I'm making this up? Making broad sweeping theories on the basis of practically nought? Well there was this too, on the way out of the park we bumped into her again, buying poppies off a slightly doddery ex-serviceman with real verve. That confirmed my judgement, I thought.

I've made a bit of mileage out of "Media Butchers" before, got a few laughs out of my mates. If you missed the gag the first time around, here's the coup: Why does everything have its own Media profile as an adjunct? What's wrong with being a plumber, why do so many people in London (especially) become "Media Plumbers". Plumbers to the rich, with articles on them in The Observer. Hence "Media Butchers". I know two "Media Butchers" and I was visiting one the same afternoon I was, like a creep, Stella-watching. Dooey was an my shoulders, then she wanted me to carry to her in my arms so I could point out the cuts of meat to her and in the transition she dropped Corolle her dolly. A very nice young man craned over and picked the doll up. "Say thank you to the nice man, Dooey" I said, and she did. Americans will now feel at sea, because Will Young is anything but known off these shores, but to clue them in a little, he won one of those TV Pop Stars competitions, then rather bravely came out of the closet.

I reckon Will Young is, in the vein of many politicians, your classic "baby-kisser". He's great at buttering people up. He clearly recognised the girl behind the counter too, and asked after her. I noticed Will also looked quite gauche and ill at ease, and no that that wasn't because I was examining him. He's not a supremely confident bloke, feels quite exposed in everyday situations. Wasn't that nice of him to pick up Dooey's doll? Outside I told Dooey who he was (blank expression) and was kind of sad to reflect upon the fact that when she's older he may just be an inconsequential footnote in the History of Pop. It's not like having met The Beatles as a child quite is it?

Posted by WOEBOT at 01:00 AM | Permalink

Download Flash Beagle

Posted by WOEBOT at 12:21 PM | Permalink

I've been following Bhangra quite closely for a few years now. In 2003 the Dr. Zeus record grabbed me by the ears, not much really took me last year though there were flashes of brilliance like Specialist 'n' Tru-Skool's "Word is Born" (which I only caught up with earlier this year- and I noticed Blackdown was enjoying recently) and other stuff like Swami's "Desi Rock" CD (imagine a Desi-styled Chemical Brothers LP), Indy Sagu's "Club Cheelay" and the DJ Vix record (which was solid but not spectacular). Nothing really matched the height of Dr. Zeus's "Unda The Influence". If you haven't heard that make sure you hunt a copy down.

This year though two records have really established modern Bhangra's syncretic power. The first, Northern Lights "Sparked" is scarily good. These are two producers from Glasgow (the home of Tigerstyle), I wonder if Keith from Optimo knows about them? I'll wager he doesn't. Anyway there are three stunning tunes on it: "Janaab", the standout, moves about like a piece of Internal Affairs-era Reinforced records Darkcore, the speed at which the dhol is pitched is exactly at that forbidding tempo that the drums on "Ghosts of My Life" and the original version of "Drumz" roll. The way the beats pause, pick up and regroup before marching forth again, it's simply breathtaking. To boot "Janaab" has this chilling Reese undertow bassline, and is as usual topped with superhuman "glistening" vocals. So anyway, blah blah blah, buy it. Check the link to the Punjab 2000 site on the sidebar where you can get it and this:

Which proably ought to come as no surprise. He's done it again. If "Unda The Influence" was the template for post-roots Bhangra, the way to effortlessly match dholkey with breakbeat, the lead Northern Lights followed, then this is the next step. What's characteristic here is the almost contradictory way the music has become more rootsy (Harmonium, Algoza, Tumbi in effect) and more sinewy and electronic. Rather than settling for Bhangra's usual cast of thousands when it comes to singers and MCs (which serves RDB very well), he's done the entire record with Lehmber Hussainpuri, who is THE voice of Bhangra. Kind of like a self-styled "masterclass" on how to produce and sing in tandem, like those Opera workshops you used to catch occassionally on BBC2 with Kiri Te Kanawa- the suggestion of this carried through in the CDs title, with its hint of a super-session. I've counted no fewer than 5 stunning tracks on this. Again, buy it.

Although there are are other hotly-tipped records this year, Punjabi MC's "Steel Bangle", Unleased's "Sangra Vibes", Aman Hayer's "Groundshaker", Jazzy B's "Romeo and DJ Sanj's "AMW 3", take my advice and ignore them all. These two are the only records you really need. Music this good tramples all over the barrier to critical reception which can hinder one's enjoyment of stuff like Favela Funk, Kwaito, even Dancehall. The "I really like it, but..." factor. It'll have your spine tingling, your hair sticking on end and you gripping the seat of your pants.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:28 AM | Permalink

Just finished tidying up the old individual page archives and adding a few links. Linky linky.

Thanks to Anil Bawa for helping me knock the CSS into shape.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:12 AM | Permalink

Did you know Sweet Exorcist made a video for "Testone"? I didn't.

It's extremely long, quite amazingly rough round the edges (from a TV nerd's perspective...) and if I was being cruel I'd have to say, fairly terrible. But hang on, don't let that put you off checking it out. It's a real period piece. What is remarkable is quite how sexless it is. If theres a girl in a pop video these days she's usually smeared in baby oil. Even the model looks baffled as to how they direct her: "What you mean you don't want me to get my kit off?"

I crushed it as much as I could but its still a humungous download.

Posted by WOEBOT at 11:28 AM | Permalink

I've really enjoyed putting my energy behind Dissensus, but I think it can stand on its own two feet now. Plenty people there don't know or care who I am, and that's just fine. I plan to keep it afloat as long as people visit the site. I'll also been in there as much as usual, but I think I may start a few less threads. Hopefully people wont mind me clawing back and archiving some of my better rants here as I've done.

At the moment this blog is made up of those rants, and articles and reviews I've done for FACT magazine and The Wire. Essentially its a bit of a repository, though I do intend adding other stuff here. I'm making no promises as to the quality of what gets posted here. It'll probably be an extremely low-key. if regularily updated affair. Also don't go expecting much, if any interblog banter. One thing the experience of running the forum has taught me is that I'm pretty useless at engaging in discourse (unlike masters of the art Fisher and Finney), I'll be cheerfully ploughing a lonely furrow- much as I did at Dissensus in fact ;-)

The links bar business really represents thanks to people who have stuck by me through the process of running Dissensus, which has been, although almost entirely positive, pretty stressful. I'd especially like to thank Simon "blissblogger" Reynolds for mucking in and supporting the endeavour, lending it more kudos than it would have had without his support.

Posted by WOEBOT at 02:20 PM | Permalink