WOEBOT

It's five years since I went "online". Firstly there was the the blog TWANBOC which morphed seamlessly into WOEBOT, then there were other adventures: the text-only blog WOEBOTNiK, an audio stream WOEBOT WADIO, the forum Dissensus and last year the vlog WOEBOT.tv.

Doing WOEBOT has had an offline corollary. I contributed to The New York Press, to The Wire for two years, wrote a column for FACT magazine, was invited through the Kosmische organisation to do many shows on Resonance FM. I made lots of real-world friends and got to fraternise with a bunch of other interesting people who beforehand I'd have no excuse to pester.

Over the past five years I've had the most enormous amount of mailbag. Some emails from names I already knew as a result of years of fan-boy excess, but most were from hitch-hikers on the information super-highway like myself. I've got an inordinate amount of pleasure from them all; so thank you to all the people who have ever written to me.

It has long been my plan to call it a day at the blog after five years, but more recently I've decided to draw a line under all my online contributions. This includes Dissensus, which I'll keep running as long as subscribers there can (year-on-year) raise half the site's hosting fees, but which I won't be contributing to. Why am I going "offline"? I think I've explored every aspect of the experience and that now it's time to do something different, not necessarily something public either, the shape of which I'm still figuring out. Rave on!

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:20 AM | Permalink

I don't think I've ever done something quite as bonkers as trying to cover an entire genre of music, but wtf. These aren't all my Jazz records, but nearly. What kind of criteria is that for a piece on Jazz? Well, I'm a ridiculously choosy buyer and also a greedy one. If I'm after something by hook or by crook I'll get it. This should, then, double as a good guide for the uninitiated.

Everything I've learnt about Jazz over the past twenty years I've worked out on my own. This probably translates into a very personal taste. There was a brief period in the early nineties when I fell in socially with a number of Acid Jazz fans (the dark ages, titter) and I suppose that informed me a bit about Jazz-Funk, but in the main my friends avoided the Free and Electric Jazz which exposure to Lester Bangs's writing meant I was more aware of. Sure they paid lip-service to that stuff, but it made a lot more sense within the context of Rock (me, bashful Indie kid at this point of time) than on the dance-floor at The Wag.

DUKE ELLINGTON

Why isn't there a bigger cult of Ellington? It's superficial to have him down as a conventional figure, because he wore a suit, was at one time rendered anachronistic by be-bop/Modern Jazz/Rhythm and Blues/Rock'n'Roll and composed and performed for Presidents (Truman and Nixon). Let's not forget Mingus wept when he was honored by Jimmy Carter!

It's accepted knowledge that his 78rpm-era recordings are what really distinguished him as a colossus songs recorded between 1930 and 1940 like "Mood Indigo", "It Don't Mean A Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)", "Sophisticated Lady", "In A Sentimental Mood", "Caravan", and "I Let A Song Go Out Of My Heart". His longer suites, with the exception of "Black, Brown and Beige" met with mixed reviews and slow sales. These four LPs though are exceptionally lush. No-one does bruised sorrow like his band, the term "Gutbucket" was practically invented for his sides.

Unlike a lot of Jazz where the soloist is over-indulged and the individual's worst excesses are actually celebrated (often staining the music with cheap, fashionable inflections) with Duke's work the orchestration is tightly managed. Furthermore the "Downtempo" quality of it gives it an added relevance. Ellington's music would appeal to fans of the deep-space astral melancholia of Techno or the hollowed-out wallow of RZA's productions.

Before anyone else in Pop music Ellington had a Fourth-World vision. Surely I'm not the only person to be taken off-guard by the phantasmal Ska of "Caravan"! Who knows what went down when Ellington visited Count Ossie in Jamaica, Ossie whose African-styled drumming was the corner stone of Reggae; or indeed when Mulatu jammed with him in Ethiopia?

MODERN 10

Essentially ten records from my collection that don't fit anywhere else in the schema.

I suppose if there's one Bebop record to own it's this. When Oscar Pettiford broke his arm Mingus joined the other performers at the Massey Hall cementing this super-group. Of all the major figures in Jazz Parker's discography has survived the least well, unlike Coltrane or Miles Davis's work there isn't the discretely organised series of 33rpm LPs available to schematise his career; something which makes it harder to get a handle on him.

This disc, the first record I bought when I moved up to Glasgow, has possibly my favorite liner notes ever. Including this haunting anecdote: "...(Perhaps it's only of passing interest, but one sidelight of the trip is that, having arrived at LaGuardia airport, they discovered that only five of their party of seven, swelled by the presence of Mingus' wife and Birdland's Oscar Goodstein, could take the pre-arranged flight, that two would have to wait for a later plane. By some process of figuring they decided to leave to leave Chan and Gillespie behind, then spent many anxious hours in Toronto wondering if they would ever come. For those who knew him, the fascination in the story lies in wondering what Dizzy and Charlie did at LaGuardia airport for those several hours...)

Wasn't Parker supposed to have met Edgar Varese? And didn't Varese offer to tutor him and compose a little something for him? That's up there with the all-time pub discussions I guess. This is a nice record, but it's not one I get a huge amount of pleasure from, its pyrotechnics seem a little mannered. I get that Bebop was the lava which erupted through the tectonic plates of Benny Goodman's swing, and that its wildly deconstructive energy, cult of personalities and embrace of dissonance was the source of pretty much everything that we embrace in music today but even so, there seems something tepid about it- as if by making outrageousness its criteria it was only ever going to be upstaged again and again.

Most of Dameron's milieu, the Hard Bop-era and Swing Bands (other than Ellington) I have a bit of trouble with. They just seem a bit musty and anachronistic; centered around social situations which have long-since dissolved. Today if one arrives at the same junction between Blues, Dance Music and Soul one takes every-which left and right through time and space to one of those other destinations rather than dwell there. However, Tadd's low-key tightly organised charts, like a stripped-back Modernist command-unit division of one of Ellington's orchestras, run counter to the drift of the times.

This is one of Kirk Degiorgio's records. It's a shame the ART hall of fame isn't online any more (for a period it was zipped up and bundled at the foot of someone's web-space) because it was a sine-qua-non snapshot of the best in Jazz-Funk, Fusion and Avant-Garde Jazz. I suspect Kirk's taste has moved on into deeper territories but entry-level surveys (pretty much like this one) are extremely useful.

Tjader was at the height of his career in the late 1950s making Mambo which was (essentially) Jazz played by Latin American musicians and knowingly inflected with the flavors they brought to it. Mambo is interesting because it was an authentic mirror-image of the Exotica of Lyman/Denny/Baxter. It's a passing thought, but perhaps Dubstep is a kind of contemporary Exotica foundered on recycling old Jamaican music? Just swap the Tiki cocktails for hydroponically-grown grass. "Breeze from The East" was Tjader's experiment in incorporating Asian elements in place of Latin American ones. Apparently it wasn't a huge critical success at the time, and ironically pushes him into Exotic territory (especially given the slightly flimsy colorings) However, like Emil Richards and The Microtonal Blues Band's "Journey to Bliss" and Addis and Crofut's "Easter Ferris Wheel" it succeeds in spite of itself. "Black Orchid" in particular is a wonderfully insouciant tune.

I have very mixed feelings about Mingus. His auto-biography "Beneath The Underdog" tells of his life as a pimp, however there's dissent as to whether there's much truth to the story, furthermore it's one of the most tortuously-written, indulgent crocks of shite I've ever struggled through. Mingus, who is also described as "The Angry Man of Jazz", once so badly beat in his sideman trombonist Jimmy Knepper that he broke the poor man's embrochure, effectively ruining his career. This at a time when beatniks like Norman Mailer were proud of their drunken street-brawls and "boxing like men".

I'm also not particularly enamored with much of Mingus's recorded output either. Records like "Ah Um", "Mingus, Mingus, Mingus" and "Oh Yeah" are tedious traditionalist dirges which speciously seek to sanctify and gentrify Gospel and Blues by setting them in Jazz's context of art and sophistry. However, though he might be my Holy Cow, "The Black Saint and The Sinner Lady", notably one of Lester Bangs's favorite discs is truly wonderful and astonishing. The considered fruit of his life-long obsession with Ellington it is one of those utterly essentially discs that sounds astonishing in its own right; a second-line symphony enswarmed by malevolent spirits.

These recordings are from 1942-43 when Monk was still a cult within Jazz. He didn't really make a splash until 1953's "Brilliant Corners". Interestingly his career was more alive than most of his contemporaries by the time of the late sixties, when I suppose it's fair to say wacky was hip (after all this was the generation that tolerated Tiny Tim). Monk wasn't about to "lay" for any horn player, reputedly falling out with Miles who couldn't deal with his discords and wide-open rhythms. If people like Ra for being more than Cosmic Emblem then why isn't Monk hipper?

I'm surprised to hear that in 2007 Sonny is still alive. Coltrane is to the belts of Jupiter in my mind, what Rollins is to Manhattan. Escaping fame in 1959 he spent three years practicing on the Williamsburg bridge.

The remarkable, churning "Turkish Mambo" off this record, piano abstraction built in multi-tracked layers atop what sounds like a wooden drum-machine (but isn't) cropped up recently on a Robert Wyatt-curated compilation. The blind Tristano is sometimes credited with pioneering Free-Jazz a whole decade before Ornette, and if I remember correctly was obsessed with the teachings of Wilhelm Reich, running something of a cult himself. I should very much like to hear "Descent into the Maelstrom" by Lennie which Piero Scaruffi rates very highly.

Not exactly another one-track wonder but "The Plum Blossom" is the track here, played on a Chinese Gobular flute "about the size and shape of a grapefruit" with accompaniment by plucked-strings (the "Rabat"?) and a tambourine-player on tip-toes. One of those utterly exquisite, time-less pieces of music. The rest of the LP is very nice too, very clean and spare.

I'm not usually pre-disposed to the Gospel and Soul-inflected quarters of Jazz, but it's done here with such pathos and cool that you couldn't help be swayed.

Coleman Hawkins was long in the tooth when it came to release this record in 1957 and credited as the inventor of Bebop by Bird (who learnt his technique by copying the Hawk's sped-up solos from records, unaware of the mechanical intervention). My favorite moment on this disc is actually Idries Sulieman's breath-defying solo at the front-end of "Juicy Fruit" a sustained note that contains the germ of The Theatre of Eternal Music.

BLUE NOTE

These two are the sweetest of the Blue Note Soul Jazz records. In the past I've had copies of Lee Morgan's "Sidewinder" (which blew me away when I first heard it) and Dexter Gordon's "Go" but I've shed them in the course of time.

Highly feted, but I prefer Evans's work with LaFaro and Motian. This is just a bit wine-bar-ish isn't it?

It's probably recommended that people check out the lovely "Grass Roots" or "One for One" (which includes "Illusion") before "Point of Departure", Hill's supposed-masterpiece. This is a very strange record. His is a music which is impossible to pin down. It's not emotive, never diverging into the genre's honored avenues of wistfulness or romanticism. It's not Free, quite to the contrary it's tightly organised but then again there's nothing vaguely conventional about it. It doesn't seem to be about zoning on the pleasure centres either. There's a giant question mark hanging over proceedings as gears shift and cogs turn on this organic machine.

Although they gradually side-lined their Free-Jazz (see also Ornette's "Empty Foxhole"), with Alfred Lion and Rudy Van Gelder Blue Note had the two most sensitive studio presences. No other recordings in Jazz sound as fantastic as theirs. Drums and cymbals (in particular) are crisp and rich, the mix is spatially wide-open and the differing timbres of horns are deliciously audible. While this served more generic recordings very well, when applied to Free dates the recordings, arguably a more difficult listen, the pay-off is immediate.

Dolphy's "Out to Lunch" was once described as The Wire magazine's favorite recording (and this in a period when it had moved from its Jazz Rag periphery to being more catholic). It really is a magnificent record, at once funny, serious and strange. Bobby Hutcherson's vibes, an unusual instrument in the "Free" context, might just be the best thing about it.

SUN RA 31

I was surprised to discover I had more records by Ra than anyone else in my entire collection. However, I suppose it's fitting that they form the core of my various scurrilous activities in sound. I'm not going to attempt to summarise Sonny's career here. If you're interested in finding out more about Ra you'd do as well to check John F Szwed's excellent biography "Space Is The Place" or Harmut Geerken's sumptuous "Omniverse". However I would like to attempt a record-buyer's history of Ra.

Mine isn't a particularly impressive Ra collection in many ways. That would be a collection like Thurston Moores's made up of 100% original Saturn releases. Mine discs are a scraggy collection of originals, reissues from various era and bootlegs, but actually I'm very proud of it, because it's the manifestation of twenty years sustained interest, not a weekend's Paypal bashing on the internet.

This one is interesting because it foregrounds the discomfort the Jazz community felt towards the eccentric Ra. Sonny had performed in a conventional capacity as an alumni of his hero Fletcher Henderson's band, but bizarrely enough here he is much later, at the artistic height of his career, not as a leader but sideman on a movie score. Blink and you miss mention of him in the extensive liner notes: "Sun Ra is the pianist and plays some exquisite celeste as well." How is that for being brushed under the carpet?

"Sun Song" an original slice of vinyl, on Delmark records a vehicle for the Chicago-based Jazz Composer Guild notable for "Brainville" and my extremely rare original copy of "The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra" on Savoy with its lovely Disney-esque artwork. Both are examples of how small labels might take a chance on Ra.

These five are all original Saturns acquired ten years ago. For those people who don't know already (who are these people!?) Saturn was Ra's own label.

I visited the Galerie Maeght this Summer. Nestled in the steep hills above the French Riviera it's a quite magical place. It would have been so lovely to see Ra play there. Too bad! These are also both originals, Volume Two is less free and quite brilliant. The context to these releases is France's whole-hearted embrace of the Free thing. See also BYG/Actuel.

In the early seventies, thanks no doubt to the small explosion in Avant-Garde Jazz and most particularly owing to Coltrane's interest in Gilmore, Impulse reissued these four original Saturns, "Fate In a Pleasant Mood" and "Angels and Demons at Play". The weird thing is that the deal must have fallen through in some way, or they may have lost their nerve, because these are all emblazoned with Promotional/Promo stickers. For a very long time these five reissues were the only way one could lay one's mitts on *the real thing*.

1970s Ra repackaged by Y records (home of The Slits and Pop Group), Charly (a cheap reissue of the first volume of Ra's recording for BYG/Actuel) and by the interesting French label Cobra (who also put out some great Lard Free records). You can see the trend here: out labels of the time buying a piece of the Arkestra legacy.

And one which continues into the 80s with Y's release of the totally awesome "Nuclear War" pronounced by Sonny as "Nookerer Wor" and by Blast First's cobbling together of recordings made around the time of "Nights of The Purple Moon". This latter release by Paul Smith from 1989 was my first Ra record, bought on the back of a recommendation by AR Kane in an interview they did. Funny how something like the Blast First release has ended up being more valuable than the now ubiquitous reissues of the original.

The first wave of really proper Ra CD re-issues came in 1992 courtesy of Evidence records. Evidence did a great job, also putting together great liner-notes and finally making the original Saturn releases widely available. Sadly they ended up going bust. I slipped up when I bought the copy of "My Brother The Wind" listed above because it's not Volume 1 you want, but Volume 2. Even as I paid the shady dealer who sold me this copy in the road itself on Berwick Street I was cursing. However Evidence presented the opportunity to score what I was really after.

Hot on the heels of Evidence's collapse at the end of the 1990s, in a climate in which it seemed the vinyl bootleg became wholly acceptable, came a whole string of Ra bootlegs. The quality of the pressing on these is often mixed but nevertheless I was keen to pick them up.

Suddenly it seemed like the sluice gates were opened. I can't think of a more apposite example of the devaluation of a musician's worth than the glut of original Saturn bootlegs that happened in past five years. Are these bootlegs or not though? I can't believe they're licensed! Flashback to original copies of these records framed on the walls of the Honest Jon's shop on the Portobello Road, then flash forward to Ra discs flooding the Music and Video Exchange.

If there is a happy ending in this tale it comes in the form of the quite magnificent Art Yard records who have done the most amazing job at making some of the most in demand Ra rarities, "Sleeping Beauty", "Disco 3000" and "On Jupiter" available once more.

MILES DAVIS 12

This is my favorite of the five LPs recorded with the Coltrane/Garland/Chambers/Jones quintet and I suspect the last. I picked these up in whilst traveling in Nepal and wandered round South-East Asia listening to them. "Relaxin'" is where "cool" strung-out vibes ever so slightly melt into the cosmic jazz trip. The Africanate cover is the first give-away.

The underlying principle of Modal Jazz was to restrict improvisation to a pre-ordained scale. This was a leap forward from the Hard-Bop and Bebop technique of blocking out the available chords for musicians in the introduction of a tune, and greatly increased the options available to musicians. I think Miles, the most technically-understated player of all the famous Jazz musicians, was more comfortable with systems like this than having ideas of instrumental prowess at the centre of his music. With "Kind of Blue" he explored this dual concept of restriction (for example Bill Evans's proto-minimal vamping on "All Blues") and freedom (the empty, wide-open, rolling sound of "So What?") it created.

Modal Jazz was composer George Russell's concept and I suspect, in part, it's a permutation of Schoenberg's 12-tone serialism. It's very much a crude contraction but somehow Minimalism is a negotiation of the two. La Monte Young, whose maxim "draw a straight line and follow it" seems to contain the germ of both concepts, had well-documented roots in Jazz. When based in Los Angeles he played with heavyweights like Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman (who has praised La Monte's saxophone playing) and Don Cherry. "In a Silent way" must be the most perfect imagining of a Minimal Jazz.

"Filles De Kilimanjaro" was made with the Shorter/Hancock/Carter/Williams band. Particularly lovely is Ron Carter's electric bass on the title track, like burnt sugar on cream. Miles's band was practically the academy for Electric Jazz-niks, just as before it had been where Coltrane, Gil and Bill Evans started out.

Two beautiful Mati Klarwein covers (I have a book of Mati's paintings somewhere which I must dig out) and the utterly brilliant "Jack Johnson" LP. "Right Now" off this disc is unhinged straight-for-the-jugular funk rock, and it's a shame that neither John McLaughlin or Billy Cobham really managed to surpass it with Mahavishnu.

The syncretic pinnacle of Miles's music. The "On The Corner" sessions mega-reissue looks interesting enough, but like Holger Czukay's work on Can, it's Teo's edits that form the 21st element. Somewhere floating round the interweb there's a nice little promotional film for the reissue that puts Dave Liebman, Michael Henderson and Pete Cosey in Miles's garden for a seance over the LP. It was Miles's instruction that these cats not play Jazz, and it's mean to cool old dudes, but when they jam at the end of the clip, eek, that's Jazz sure enough. They certainly needed the Dark Magus to hone their chops.

My own memory of encountering "On The Corner" for the first time are crystal clear. I broke out of school aged seventeen and cycled into Slough where I found a copy in Our Price. It clean blew me away and the next day I dragged my Art School buddy round to listen to it. We'd both sunk back, closed our eyes and were floating on its ineffable voodoo. I looked up after side one, ready to high-five, and he'd disappeared having scrawled "demon vibes" (or some such phrase) on the sleeve, as though he'd been sucked into the music's vortex. I suppose experiencing this kind of music in 1988 put me on the right track for Acid House.

The electric Miles LPs were extremely difficult to find in those days, and like Ra the ubiquity of it has now damaged people's ability to take it on spec. I found me cherished copy of "Get Up with it" (both records raved about by Lester Bangs) whilst Eurorailing in Spain.

These last three were the trickiest to find at the time, and all three of my copies are Japanese imports. Actually I side slightly with the Jazz traditionalists over them; a little goes a long way. "Dark Magus" is the greatest (you can see why Jah Wobble liked it, Michael Henderson's bassline on "Wili" is heathen).

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The following four artists form a Miles Davis subsection:

JOHN COLTRANE

Other Trane discs I've had include Africa Brass (sorely missed as a matter of fact) and Ascension (which I could never really dig). Each of these I've picked up for differing reasons. "Coltrane" and "Live at the Village Vanguard" came from my father-in-law's collection. Professor Tony is/was a serious Jazz fan, his other passions being Bartok and Britten. Tony played me his copy of the wondrous "Ole" (with the original cover, unlike my shitty copy, which his son purloined before I had the chance). "Giant Steps" replaces a cassette I bought in India. "Impressions" is a David Toop fave for its shimmering post-ecstacy hymn "After The Rain". "Infinity" I bought for its superb cover and because of wife Alice's profane over-dubbing, communing with dead John.

Trane is a little like Beethoven or Mozart, impossible to critique.

HERBIE HANCOCK

"Sextant" along with Miles's "On The Corner" surely earns the title of most relevant Jazz LP to today's music? "Flood", a Japan-only release should be more widely heard- especially the awesome version of "Chameleon" which throws the tidy version from the Headhunters LP from the bay-door of an orbiting space ship and watches it burn apart in re-entry.

GIL EVANS

The records Gil made with Miles Davis are also excellent: "Miles Ahead", "Porgy and Bess" and "Sketches of Spain". Miles Davis seemed very open to working with white Jazz musicians. Besides Gil, there was Bill Evans, John McLaughlin, Dave Holland and Dave Liebman. I think it goes some way to making clear that (unlike post-"Do The Right Thing" dogma) that Jazz wasn't exclusively a Black music. There were plenty of interesting, authentic voices within Jazz that were White.

BILL EVANS

Miles said of Bill's piano sound that "...the sound he got was like crystal notes or sparkling water cascading down from some clear waterfall." And this may be the key to enjoying Evans's work, listening past the "Jazz" flavor and into the sound itself.

PHARAOH SANDERS

Pharaoh is, like Archie Shepp and Marion Brown, one of these in-betwixt characters. In our loose family tree of Jazz he relates to Coltrane in the way that Trane related to Miles, with the exception that Trane was strongly influenced by playing with Pharaoh (a nickname he got from Sun Ra). Starting out as an adherent of dissonance he also shows a fondness for the mantra. "Thembi" is practically schizophrenic the way he jumps between the two modes. Later on with vocalist Dede Bridgewater he even laid down some smoky R'n'B sides!

ORNETTE COLEMAN

For my money the most interesting Ornette records. "Change of the century" is nice because it has some recognisable melodies and song-forms to hold on to. "The Empty Foxhole" has a typically crisp Blue Note production as well as (take note Punk Rock fans) the talents of his ten year old son Denardo on drums. "Dancing in Your Head" has a great cover and features a snatch of Ornette jamming with The Master Musicians of Joujouka. "Virgin Beauty" is just plain gorgeous. If you get the chance to see Ornette live jump at the opportunity as everything becomes clear upon hearing him play.

DON CHERRY

Check out these wonderfully gaudy covers! They perfectly describe the pungent Fourth World patchwork sounds contained within.

JAMES BLOOD ULMER

SOUTH AFRICA

WHITE FOLKS 13

Well you gotta admit it, that's a pretty serious case for the validity of the contribution of White Folks to Jazz.

FREE 10

RAMSEY LEWIS

These two records on the Chess subsidiary Cadet are essentially vehicles for the greatest Jazz orchestrator there ever was, Charles Stepney. Other Ramsey Lewis releases on Cadet like "Up Pops" sorely disappoint. "Mother Nature's Son" a whole LP of cover versions from The Beatles "White Album" is lovely but "Maiden Voyage" is indisputably the one. I can't think of a record I get more pleasure listening to.

THE LAST POETS

They might have a rep as proto-rappers but The Last Poets were practically Jazz incarnate; parts Calloway/Nordine/Gaillard/Baraka/X. In 1994 I went to an interesting gig, portentously described as a "Living History Special" and featuring Jalal Nuriddin of The Last Poets alongside Linton Kwesi Johnson and managed to smuggle my way backstage. I've no idea what I chatted to Jalal about.

STRATA EAST

Jazz proper was supposed to have died at the end of the sixties but in truth that a number of iconoclastic musicians had decided to call time-up didn't mean that a whole movement could be extinguished. There can't be a better example of its rude health than Clifford Jordan's utterly magical "Glass Bead Game".

BYG/ACTUEL

One of the real collectors labels. I've done something on the label before but I'm proud of these discs, the fruit of France's prolonged love-affair with American Free Jazz, most of which I picked up for a few Francs in Paris.

The stand-outs are Don Cherry's lovely "Mu Part Two" and Gracan Moncur's "New Africa", however "monkey-pockie-boo" by Sonny Sharrock (a "Free" electric guitarist who caught Jimi Hendrix's attention, "Hmm sounds familiar" remarked Jimi) is a classic if "difficult" LP.

ROY AYERS

These records are consistently excellent. I think some people find Roy's vibes an acquired taste, an overly pungent symbol of (adjusts beret) Jazz, but when you hear them on "Red, Black and Green" riding up the side, raining over the top and bubbling up from beneath rock hard breaks, literally ringing with possibilities, then you'd be hard-pressed to dismiss them. Ayers also had a knack for dark, strung-out ghetto funk as on the epochal "We live in Brooklyn."

ELECTRIC JAZZ 13

Previously whilst disrespecting my Jazz dance buddies I reinforced the boundary between Jazz Funk and Jazz Rock, but really the distinction is tenuous. In the same way that Funkadelic and even (yes!) James Brown often had a hard rock edge to their music the boundaries are not hard and fast within Electric Jazz. Some discs are funkier, some are more experimental some are more hard-rocking. Some are little more than straight jazz, baubled and modernised through recontextualisation.

The deep Jazz-funk end is best represented by the Mizell brother's productions for Donald Byrd's seminal "Blackbyrd" and Johnny Hammond's "Shifting Gears". Byrd, who by this stage was ensconsed in Academia, took the view that Jazz was originally Dance music and therefore by re-aligning itself with Funk, in adjustment the form was being true to itself. This was heresy to Jazz snobs at the time, though certainly consistent with the soul and gospel-inflectections of his earlier work. Bob James's "One" seems to belong righteously in this context, but cast your mind back to Bob James's first wildly experimental LP on ESP (for a time home to Sun Ra, Pharaoh Sanders, Albert Ayler as well as the Godz and Fugs) and the picture becomes less clear.

Billy Cobham's excellent "Spectrum" LP and Weather Report's "Sweetnighter" (easily their best incidentally) seem to offer up a Hard Funk take on Jazz, but actually there's an almost undisclosed hefty dose of Rock to both of them. William S. Fischer was a staff arranger at Atlantic records and worked for heavyweight talent like Wilson Pickett, Roberta Flack, Eugene McDaniels, Les McCann and Herbie Mann. On this LP of deep, spaced-out funk and electronics he was given a very long lease.

More Electric Jazz of the highest calibre, this time drifting into the shadow of "Bitches Brew".

Marion Brown has LPs all over the shop in this monster break-out! Free records, records with ECM, straighter Jazz etc etc. That's not so uncharacteristic of musicians of his era. Archie Shepp, whose music I've always found quite ugly leaps around stylistically in the same manner. "Vista" is remarkable for Brown's take on Minimalist Harold Budd's "Bismillahi 'Rahmani 'Rrahim" a tune which first appeared on the Eno/Budd record "Pavilion of Dreams". "Sweet Earth Flying" earns distinction as my buddy Gwen's favorite Marion Brown LP.

As for this! One of thee most difficult records to categorise. A Tim Gane of Stereolab fave I suppose it lays the foundation for ECM's early records

ECM

There was a good Dissensus thread about ECM the other day. Before then I always took the line that the early ECM releases were where it was at. However according to Phil Sherburne the Minimal guys are very into the label. Villalobos's recent stuff does have a pellucid low-key quality to it and I've even sought out the Cobblestone Jazz "23 Seconds" LP, Matthew Johnson's recent project and yes it's undeniably there. Proving, if nothing else, that that the later output has a charge. Other ECM Jazz records that are on my shopping list are Bennie Maupin's "The Jewel In The Lotus" (my friend Flashos has advised me that it's "very clean") and Dave Holland's "Conference of Birds", though I suspect rather than more of these early releases, it's sultry Euro-Jazz like Eberhard Weber that's where it's really at.

-

And that's it! To my mind Jazz stops being a meaningful term with ECM. There's a sense that eventually, and finally what is being termed Jazz bears no relation socially, culturally or even musically to what it was in the beginning. It's interesting to try and work out which sort of people were making Jazz (most typically the greatest Jazz musicians were not working class but the educated Middle-classes) and see what sort of music they are making today. So for instance Strata East alumni bassist Bill Lee was Spike Lee's father, Avant-Jazzer Olu Dara's son was Nas and Don Cherry's daughter was Neneh. Nuff said.

Posted by WOEBOT at 12:59 AM | Permalink

On Friday 21st of December at 10.30pm (in the Kosmische slot) on 104.4 FM Resonance FM, I'll be joined by Julian House for a special show dedicated to Ghost-Boxly music. Don't miss it!

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:58 AM | Permalink

Following on from this.

Eno/Schmidt related links contributed by:
Enthusiasm,
Robert Dansby,
and philT.

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:57 AM | Permalink

Gosh! The horrifically ugly sight of media hipsters tripping over themselves to plant their flag in Niche House. Me, I'm interested but just lurking in the shadows. Still feeling pangs of remorse for deserting Grime a couple of years back.....

Following up some of Simon's tips it was a shame to find the older Cameo shows aren't archived. What I did discover inadvertently was that, quite bizarrely, fans (or I dunno maybe the label?) have uploaded many of the big Bassline tracks as YouTube clips.

Incidentally, the latest Cameo show is very good.

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:55 PM | Permalink

There was only one large record label that truly understood Disco and it was Island. OK, it's a broad statement and one could start to get bogged down in nuances. I suppose Casablanca could be classed as a "large" label and it started out signing KISS so you could argue it wasn't a Disco label per se. But really, c'mon, you know what I mean.....

Island on the other hand was a Rock label which grew out of Chris Blackwell's ambitions. Did you know Blackwell set up Trojan as Island's Reggae subsidiary? I surprised myself when I found that out. I didn't know the two had anything to do one another. I suppose they must have split early on. It's Blackwell's roots in Reggae that are the clue to understanding why Island was so successful with Disco.

In Peter Shapiro's quite amazingly excellent book on Disco "Turn The Beat Around" it's clear that Francois K was the real conduit of dub techniques into Disco. He was crazy about the Black Uhuru "Uhuru In Dub" LP on Jammys, and must have moved mountains to turn in his mix of Jimmy Cliff's "Treat The Youths Right". It's hard to imagine who would have been more pleased working with who on Kevorkian's "Snakecharmer" LP, him or the label. Though Larry Levan also got his hand in on the Peech Boys LP and the Padlock project.

Which, given that it's a super-groop effort, really has no right being as good as it is. There's a common sound to many of these records: a pungently bass-heavy, warmly-flowing current with the drums not perched on high-heels but in sneakers. It is as though the North Atlantic Drift was reversed and flowed up from the tropics past Manhattan, rather than down from the pole. It's a sound I find more enticing than the slightly stiff, electronic beats of Prelude or West End's deconstructed boogie. I've never been a fan of the Latin-tinged Salsoul percussion.

Less of the Island fingerprint here, but this is frequently dubbed to pieces.

I've never been a huge fan of this disc. As I think I said once before, the best thing about it are Ian P's liner-notes. There are better Kid Creole/Darnell things are elsewhere. "Wheel Me Out" is fun though Vortex's "Black Box Disco" (heard first here) is its superior twin when it comes to B-Movie Noir samples.

On 4th & Broadway, the Island subsidiary. And it's interesting that this Arthur Russell classic was the first release on the label.

This extremely eccentric slice of Eddy-Grant-style Disco (think BIG CHANT!) was big in Francois K's bag.

My favorite of Grace's records. Rare to find a compilation with this much integrity. Much of the "Gulf-Stream" flavor of the Island sound was to do with the teaming of Sly and Robbie with Marianne Faithful Guitarist Barry Reynolds and French/Benin keyboard-player Wally Badarou. This team were the so-called "Compass Point All-Stars", who if I had any journalistic ambitions at all I'd research. While my colleague Mark Fisher is fascinated with Grace, the icon, it'll always be her beats that I adore.

But the same sound is here on the lovely Blackwell-produced Hi-Tension single, so perhaps it's more to do with underlying principles?

Wicked egg-head Disco. Like Wobble's "Full Circle" LP it doesn't quite hit the mark but makes up what it lacks in tunes with texture. Arthur Russell pops here with the lyrics for "Hold On To Your Dreams".

The "Echoes" ("Mambo" from which was lifted by Massive Attack on "Daydreaming") and "Words of a Mountain" LPs come highly recommended too. Wally plays ace synth on Manu Dibango's undiscovered "Waka Juju" LP too, a WOEBOT fave.

Peter Shapiro seems to prefer "Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places" LP which admittedly has a beautiful Tony Wright sleeve (Wright, another Island peak-period signifier, see the Padlock sleeve and "Super Ape"), but this is far superior. A charming, floridly melodic listen. You know where the later Specials lifted all their ideas from when you hear these Kid Creole records. Like the "Mutant Disco" record this is a Ze release, but really, props to Island for seeing how beautifully it fitted with their aesthetic. I'll never forget Kid Creole singing "Annie" on Top of The Pops!

Wot no Tom Tom Club!

See also.

Posted by WOEBOT at 03:47 PM | Permalink

The Road to the Crater

Look at September, look at October

The other House

Four Years

I discovered these pictures by Peter Schmidt in a slightly rotting folder in the basement. They belong in the inner sleeve of Brian Eno's "Before and after Science", but for a while in the early nineties I had them pinned to my bedroom wall. It was quite satisfying slipping them back inside the record's sleeve. I don't imagine too many second-hand copies of the record still have them contained within.

Eno explains on the rear (of the four offset prints from water colours) that "Peter and I have been working together and comparing notes for some time. In 1975 we produced a boxed set or oracle cards called 'Oblique Strategies', which were used extensively in the making of this record. The temptation when digitising them was to "Auto-contrast" or crush the levels, but really they're very gentle, and that's part of their wistful charm.

They're briefly described in an article in Melody Maker article from January of 1977:

This evening I visited Peter Schmidt (the painter who did the cover for Tiger Mountain and Evening Star, and with whom I published Oblique Strategies). He has just returned from a holiday in Madeira, and we look at the 12 watercolours he made there. The last three of the series are quite exceptionally beautiful - a tiny road winds down the side of an almost vertical mountain whose peak is lost in the clouds.

I walk from Peter's in Stockwell to Victoria station. It is a cold, exhilarating night. I am thinking about writing a song called "Man Making Measurements And Dancing." I can't sleep until 4.00 am because I have a flurry of ideas which won't wait their turn. It is most annoying.

Posted by WOEBOT at 08:44 PM | Permalink

(All the above from my collection)

Here's a very interesting label. Limelight starts out as Mercury records' Jazz subsidiary with fairly straight releases by Oscar Peterson, Art Blakey, Charles Mingus and Gerry Mulligan. The only hint of what was to come seems to be in their championing of Roland Kirk with records like "Rip, Rig and Panic" (named after a Bristolian Post-Punk outfit, teehee) and "I talk with the spirits". A slight digression: I don't know about you but I've always thought Roland Kirk's stuff is over-rated. In the past I've had "The Inflated Tear" and "The Case of The 3 Sided Dream in Audio Color" and despite alluringly psychedelic cover art, they're disappointingly conventional jazz. What is good is "Root Strata"; a disc I first heard in some "soixante-huit"-er's apartment in Paris.

I suspect towards the tail-end of the sixties Jazz sales started tanking and the label was speedily re-tooled as a catch-all "underground" operation. However, its ambitiousness is startling. Firstly they re-release the cream of French Concrete music, all Pierre Henry's major works as well as electronic works by Kagel, Xenakis, Ferrari, Maderna and Berio and complied the excellent survey of Norwegian electronic music "Response". They sopped up some of the most adventurous Electric Jazz (Melvin Jackson's delicious "Funky Skull"), put out home-grown US Electronic Music by (the obligatory) Beaver and Krause and the witchy Ruth White and were a home to rainbow-array of one-off discs by the likes of Spleen "The Sound Of Feeling" (a Folktronic twin to Buffy St Marie's "Illuminations"), the legendary Fifty Foot Hose's "Cauldron" (unquestionably the square-root of US Post-Rock as it manifested in Tortoise, Ui and Pan Am), and The Mecki Mark Men's eponymous LP. It would be quite unimaginable for a record label today with Avant-Garde inclinations to cover such a massive territory. Especially, I'm afraid to say, an American label.

As if to top it all they even carried titles such as these Indian and Iranian records. The first two I have held in my hands in record shops but not bought. I suspect that they're merely okey-doke tokenly-licensed material but, hell, the ambition is there. I suppose three letters make sense of the whole project. L, S and D.

Posted by WOEBOT at 04:40 PM | Permalink

Occasionally my job as Motion Graphics Designer/Animator means there's some cross-over with my musical interests as dramatised here at WOEBOT. Very recently I made live visuals for an event for Kieran Evans, who along with Paul Kelly, made the celebrated "Finisterre" film with St Etienne.

I'd been wanting to see this for ages and repeatedly hassled the dozy in-house runner for a copy of the film. In the end I dug around their server, found it and burnt a copy myself. Finisterre (2003) is a documentary about London set to the music of St. Etienne. Its emphasis is on presenting the side of London familiar to Londoners (if not tourists) and in discovering the eternal in the banal. This translates to designerly-composed stills thick with grime of the improbable and fleeting. The static, impassive lens works beautifully in capturing London's breathless rush, bringing to mind the photograph on the rear of Nick Drake's "Bryter Later", Nick watching the traffic on the Westway speed in and out the lights. Much of the cinematography is ravishing; some of the images bordering on the iconic.

The voiceover by Michael Jayston is immaculate, immediately conjuring up the fusty odor of the past. Phillip Ellsmore's narration on Mordant Music's "Dead Air" had the same effect of plunging one into the nether-world of half-lit memory, of the dog-eared and unseemly. Complimenting this are interviews from amongst others Julian Opie, Vic Godard, Vashti Bunyan and Julian Opie which are refreshing not only for their informality but also because we never get to see the interviewee, the body in question is London.

There are things about the film that don't work: the series of uncomfortable living portraits of kids who, even though their discomfort is fore-grounded, look out-of-place and unfortunately the music of St Etienne themselves. To someone who, though a big fan of Bob Stanley's curatorial work, has never really embraced the band this came over as a series of slightly soul-less, music-by-numbers genre studies. However in all the film is a richly inscribed time-capsule conveying and inspiring an affection for this city which I think I ceased "seeing" years ago.

It's funny to reflect that Jim Clarke was planning on making "Heronbone-The Movie" with our kid Luke Davis what must have been a very long-time ago now. Paul Kelly went on to make "What have you done today, Mervyn Day?" a bid to "capture the mood and look of the lower lea valley area before it is transformed forever". Yeah boys, you missed a trick there.....

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:56 PM | Permalink

Acute Records have cemented their reputation as the world's finest reissue label by putting out The Fire Engines "Hungry Beat" an immaculate selection of the groups three singles and their mini LP "Lubricate Your Living Room".

Selzer and co really seem to be punching far above their weight with this one, the all-powerful Domino only got their hands on a bunch of out-takes. This is utterly essential music, buy a copy today.

Posted by WOEBOT at 04:38 PM | Permalink

Yesterday I put some cork tiles up in my children's playroom so they could pin up their pictures. Because a lot of them needing cutting it was taking a long time and I thought some music might kill the tedium. There was no stereo in there so I logged online with their Mac Mini (they use it to go to the CBeebies site, and my daughter keeps her photos on it).

The first place I went for a bit of the ol' cheeky streaming audio was Blogariddims. Just last week I was freelancing in some design studio or other and found a shared iTunes folder which I was surprised to discover had a couple of Blogariddims mixes in it. The one I listened to was Heatwave's utterly brilliant "An England Story" mix, which is their "personal take on the history of MCing in England" and is quite un-missable. It seems as though Soul Jazz will be releasing an official compilation based on it next year. Slug's Krautrock mix doesn't contain any surprises and also manages to screw up Neu!'s majestic "Leb Wohl" by dribbling Tangerine Dream and Kluster over the top of it (thinks: "mixes" don't always make musical sense). However it is both a nicely personal take on the sound (I would choose totally different tracks myself, but like, so what?) and in its funny way something like a Primer for the totally uninitiated.

I was getting the hang of the streaming audio thing, so my next stop was Mary Anne Hobbs's "Experimental Show" at Radio 1. I'd never heard this before, I think perhaps because I knew exactly what to expect. I dunno, I suppose I feel pretty ambivalent about it. Firstly, it seems like the BBC missed a trick having an 8 foot-tall Amazon warrior covering this music. Isn't it just a little bit like reverse sexism? Surely it would be more appropriate to have some slightly dweeby, middle-class bloke pushing forty presenting (preferably with his own website, you dig). If they'd asked me I probably would have passed, but I can think of a candidate or three. MAH is alright, though she does have a slightly annoying "stoned-wow" delivery. All the artists she discusses as though they're "her boys"; it does sort of come across a bit gauchely maternal. It did make me giggle a bit.

Anyway it's not her fault I find dubstep boring, and I suppose she's doing a good job. But it isn't illegal to have a pop at Radio 1 DJs is it? Even if narrow-casting has meant there are so fucking many of them and it all feels like a bloody cottage industry.....and you're only going to be separated from them by 2 degrees, not the more satisfactory 6. I can do with all the degrees of separation I can get my hands on when it comes to Chris Moyles. On this weeks show I did think Skepta was alarmingly bad! Really if this is the best that Grime can come up with these days it's in deep trouble. Skepta just doesn't have a "voice" like for instance D Double or Wiley do. He also doesn't have any lyrics. And he also doesn't seem to have any beats. A tune I can do without, the rest not. Skepta also kept doing this crucifyingly embarrassing thing, calling MAH "the Grimey Uma Thurman". I put down my saw and cringed, thinking, "Please Skepta, don't say it again," and he bloody did. It was crap the first time.

Looking over the Radio 1 site for more entertainment my eye caught Zane Lowe promising to play the entire of Nirvana's "Nevermind". Just this week I was finishing that show "Six Feet Under" and Nirvana cropped up in the plot-line which got me thinking of them. I have never heard this record. It won't surprise regular readers to know that my brother and I were so fucking hip that we had "Bleach", Mudhoney's "Touch Me I'm Sick" and even the Green River LP before "Nevermind" came out. We were fully switched-on indie kids, with The Pixies first EP ("Caribou" I always loved that track) and Sonic Youth's "Sister" under our belts. We'd seen MBV about two hundred times, Dinosaur Jr plenty, hell I even saw Steve Albini's Rapeman back Sonic Youth once! We'd been into Husker Du for years, Meat Puppets II and even stranger, more obscure stuff like Live Skull and Die Kreuzen.

It was interesting and amusing to read Simon Reynolds's "Sub Pop 200" review in his recent "Bring The Noise" collection because it totally captures our general sense of boredom and exhaustion with Indie Rock of that era. It simply ceased to appear so interesting, just...spent as an idea. In his afterthought Simon classes the review as a "misjudgment" largely because of Nirvana's subsequent meteoric ascent but also because he has a healthy sense of self-critique. But really I'm not so sure. "Nevermind" ushered in a whole load of things which were almost ALL bad. Firstly it destroyed the playful naivety of almost all contemporary rock music. There's no better example of this than Sonic Youth who went straight from being one of the greatest bands of all time (EVOL>Sister>Daydream Nation....you can't touch this) to corporate whores chasing the dream of crossing over. I'm not one to have a go at bands for trying to reach a bigger audience, but they REALLY fucked up. There was something missing in "Goo", nearly a great record, but by "Dirty" I just didn't *believe* in them any more. I don't think I could ever look them straight in the eye after all of that scrabbling around. And that was Nirvana's fault.

And there's more. Not only were Nirvana guilty of fascinating all the borderline Heavy Metal kids and drawing them into the game, they are also the godfathers of EVERYTHING that is bad about Indie rock today. The whole Pop-melodies-meets-crunchy-feedback thing, that didn't come from the Buzzcocks or Husker Du, that came from Nirvana in the sense that they zipped it up/abstracted it so it seemed like a total option, a degree zero of music. It didn't surprise me in the least to find out in the show's pre-amble that Zane Lowe, who here in the UK is the crown-prince of Young Rock on the Telly, had been a Hip-Hop fan in New Zealand before discovering "Nevermind" and it "changing his life". I'm not trying to aggrandise my own cultural choices by framing them beside Lowe's (I am not worthy, tee hee...) but they were precisely the opposite of mine. I had to scoff really, Zane Lowe didn't know "Bleach" till later on! That guy needs a hip operation.

Anyway it was very cool to hear the record, I was really surprised to find how many of its tracks I knew from what must amount to cultural osmosis. Yeah it's OK. The cork tiles look wicked by the way. I went upstairs and stuck on The Meat Puppets "Up On The Sun". Now that IS a masterpiece. If we're going to have whole LP radio shows, AM-style, we ought to have records like that on them I reckon.

Posted by WOEBOT at 04:04 PM | Permalink

Recently I've discovered this exciting and interesting new music format. They are these little silver discs and they are kept in these tiny plastic boxes. (Regains composure) Given that I'm still largely devoted to the long-playing vinyl format, I've found myself mapping my sublimated black plastic desires onto my CD-buying. So for instance, weird electronic music made between 1947 and 1983, you couldn't really get enough of it could you? And as it happens the prices for originals have gone through the roof; indeed if you could find any good examples of the stuff to actually splash your cash on.

Enter the Creel Pone label. Some crazed dude in Iceland who's had the vision to do more than offer mp3s to download or endlessly catalogue and assemble musical phenomena, he's lovingly reproduced the sleeve art of the original records, painstakingly encoded the vinyl, hooked himself up with distributors around the globe and built his own CD label. Genius! But more on the label and its releases in the next week or so.

One of the nice things for me about Creel Pone is the way that its remit brings together a whole load of records which previously were orphans, musical waifs and strays from sound laboratories, library music collections, private press releases and classical music labels. Yet because they're all records of electronic music, they're somehow very special, bold and forward-thinking, in short, in need of a good home. And now that home is Creel Pone. By extension I immediately rooted through my collection and was able to extract the following ten LPs which I guess would be eligible for release on the label. In truth they do verge towards what the hardcore collector of this sort of thing would regard as commonplace. Really! I know for a fact that at least two have been reissued on CD through what might be called "proper channels" ie licensing and the like.

Probably the most famous document of the Scandinavian Avant-garde music scene. Folke Rabe's "Was??" is possibly the loveliest piece of minimalist music there is, and sonically analogous to the back sleeve, a shot of two hippies sitting in a forest, the photo which on closer inspection reveals all kind of things hidden in the foliage...bananas...more bananas...photos pinned to the trees...a gramophone player. Half of this LP has been reissued on Jim O'Rourke's Dexter's Cigar label.

More sheer loveliness on this deeply echoing scape of rolling tablas, infinite flute and undulating analogue synths. Like a number of Library records this one is billed as an aid for interpretive dance. Woops, better keep the electronic quotient up!

One of the very few (the only?) example of Richard Maxfield's music to make it to wax. "Night Music", a darkly synthesized panorama of violently clicking and rasping insects is a bonafide David Toop record. There are great tales of Maxfield who I understand turned Terry Riley onto psychedelic drugs, but who came to a messy, almost classically psychoactive end by jumping out of a window whilst on LSD. The Pauline Oliveros on this is also excellent.

Another very weird Library record for "Radio, Television, Film and Advertising backgrounds." The German Oskar Sala is one of the pioneers of electronic music. Building on the work of Freidrich Trautwein he worked exclusively on their monster synth the Mixtur-Trautonium. Some pieces of Sala's, in the vein of Messaien's "Turangalia Symphony", combined the orchestra with electronic but my LP is solid electronics. And it's a corker!

I first saw this LP in Bristol for something like $40, passed on it, then found it three years later at the music and video exchange for $15. A steal! The Sala record above I bought off that funk stall (the name of which evades me) in Camden market when all anyone was interested in was breaks. Wot a clever dick I am! I popped into Harold Moores yesterday to see if, like back in the day, there were the odd electronic record kicking around. The man behind the counter took no glee at all in telling me the carcass had been picked clean. Pfeiffer was an extremely famous, high-ranking producer of Classical records and "9 Images" (which is like staples and glue compared to most of this extremely advanced stuff) was obviously him being indulged by his bosses.

"Played by IBM 7090 Computer and Digital to Sound Transducer." There's a lot of influence of the Bell Telephone Laboratories on this record, presumably Electronic Music was viewed as relating to Ring(tones) and speech synthesis much as in fashion Haute-Couture relates to Accessories. This record is famous for M.V. Matthews's "Bicycle Made For Two" in which the computer is coaxed to sing the ditty in a unintentionally melancholy way.

I just can't imagine a whole LP of Electronic Music made by women being released in any decade other than the 1970s. This has had an official reissue recently, and even though I sound rather glib, it's a widely respected recording. So there!

A Margouleff, of Tonto and Stevie Wonder fame, oddity. The cover of this is to die for! The very abstract Moog is augmented by the mystical pratings of the most hilarious English luvvie, one Malcom Cecil: "The mother stood sorrowful, near the cross...(big pause, a flick of the fringe)...crying..." This is real Ghost Box stuff I decided.

Drool, drool! A privately-pressed concrete-jazz mash-up library record featuring two of the heaviest Electro-Acoustic Composers of the day.

Ah, now this is a bit of a cheat, for though it belongs here and neatly rounds off my perfect ten, I've actually blogged about it once before. Y'see, much as I'd like to pretend, I don't have thousands of this sort of record. I stopped buying them a while back when I guess I thought I had enough. But like Simon said when I told him I thought I probably had enough Ardkore records: "Does not compute". Even so this and this and this and this and this and this, yeah that might be enough.....

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:54 PM | Permalink

The other day a friend came round to my house and rifled through my record collection. He became very interested in my Cybotron "Enter" LP because, as he pointed out, it was a promotional copy of this legendary LP.

According to my friend, a Detroit Techno fiend had told him (in hushed tones) that the promo of this LP carried (vamps on over-size church organ) a different version of that primal Techno track "Clear".

I had to bashfully admit that I hadn't really clocked this, or must have just taken it for granted. I bought this record around fifteen years ago and, well, I have a lot of other records too.

With great trepidation we lowered the needle to the record however as soon as as the strangulated, strikingly different, "Clear" refrain occurred we knew we were on to something slightly special.

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:22 AM | Permalink

At the Glade Festival this Summer I heard Erik Davis give a talk about Electronic Music. It was full of fascinating insights and mind-boggling historical facts. Did you know that as much as electricity has been quantified and its effects both observed and manipulated, that (even in 2007) we are no closer to understanding what the hell it actually is?!? So for instance while Faraday was able to work out that moving a magnet over a coil of wire causes an electrical current to flow, his theory for what was going on is "off-the-wall" in today's parlance. And no better explanation has been advanced. Electricity truly remains some kind of mystic force, Davis taking delight in exhuming an 18th cult of Electric Christians.

Perhaps in keeping with the less-than-academic context of a music festival Erik's talk was free-ranging and his theoretical derive also took in the pseudo-Magical nature of crystals and their role in channelling Radio signals as well as the relationship between Analogue and Digital. It was at this final point that his talk became more speculative. Erik sees traces of the mystic in both Analogue's wave-like forms and in the principals of Digital music. Refreshingly he didn't come down on one side or the other though I sensed that he perhaps had greater sympathy with Analogue music (in its final manifestation as the vinyl record) as opposed to the Digital.

It was at this point, before legendary Occult Author Graham Hancock took the stage, in the form of a question, that I got to lay my Summer theory on Erik. I paraphrased it but it went something like this (deep breath):

Since the dawn of recorded media, be it Audio or Visual we've had to had to contend with the effect of Analogue generation loss. When we used to see old films on television or old music on the radio we not only had to contend with the "zeit" fingerprint as manifested in the then archaic film or audio process (be it Technicolor or Direct-to-Disc cutting) but also the decay which has occurred as those signals pass down between analogue mediums of recording.

One could argue the toss whether methods of recording have become more "transparent" as the years progress. Though equally one could simply argue that each generation's notions of transparency supplant the previous one in quite random ways, and that this revolves as much as anything around notions of realism. So for example the brittle trebly production signature of Martin Hannett on The Buzzcocks's "Spiral Scratch" was "more real" than, say, Martin Rushent's engineering on Gentle Giant's "Three Friends".

However, what no-one could dispute is that with a correctly-implemented digital pipeline there need never ever again, and let's focus on the history of recorded music (though it applies equally to film and video) be a need for sound quality to degrade. When one copies digital information properly there is a simply an exact copy made of each 1 and 0 in the string.

When I was eighteen I stayed at the house of my friend's father, a famous hippy Earl in Cornwall, and I taped his scratchy copy of Randy Newman's "12 Songs" onto a crappy old C90. That C90 had belonged to my Dad in the mid seventies and had previously had a performance recorded off Radio 3 on it. I had then taped some gleeful punk crud over the top of that, and then finally like icing on the cake, the Randy Newman. The Earl's tape deck was busted and so there was practically no signal at all in the left channel. In those days before I discovered Second-hand record shops that was the only way I was going to be able to hear "12 Songs" and I listened to it all the time. Many of you will have similar memories of how the analogue pipeline, not necessarily compromised, but intruded in your listening experience.

As much, perhaps more than the method of recording, this made things sound old. Even at the most basic level, records got scratchy and started to wear away in the course of time. But with Digital (ta-daah!) time as we once recognised it officially ended. And I'm sort of fascinated with how this apparent stasis of time has thrown the music industry into crisis. There are lots of phenomena one could ascribe to it. The voracious Retro culture (of which I must be a component), music like Amy Winehouse and The White Stripes (who Simon Reynolds once described as like a "cabinet-maker") and maybe even (over-egging it) the death throws of the industry itself- for if there is no past, then can it ever have been alive?

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:37 PM | Permalink

I've completely lost touch with my old buddy from Glasgow Johnny Lyle. We used to DJ together at a night Johnny set up at The Art School. Anyway another friend, who doesn't know him, just sent me a link to a project Johnny's done called "To Have and To Hold" about vinyl. It's very entertaining.

Posted by WOEBOT at 12:26 PM | Permalink

They've done a very brave thing and opened a retail outlet when most shops are shutting down. But what exactly does the new Rough Trade look like?

Turn west off Brick Lane on a Saturday and you're now greeted by this. Once upon a time there used to be one or two people at most lurking here at the weekend.

The shop front.

Presumably this is designed as a notional substitute for the legendary wall of 7"s of the Notting Hill Shop? Laptops ahoy.

From the front of the shop looking backward. Notice the security guard!

From the back of the shop.

The counter, note the de rigeur geek chic (beards and heavy glasses) of the clerks.

What do I think about it? Erm, I like it, it's very impressive. However it's slightly like a mini-HMV and is a little bit anti-septic. Am I allowed to say that?

Posted by WOEBOT at 04:35 PM | Permalink

A piece I've written for Stylus.

Posted by WOEBOT at 08:47 PM | Permalink

In the past I've gone through phases of not liking Neil Young. His voice was always the sticking point. Was it irritating? But then if you remove the voice in your mind, perhaps the backing music isn't so interesting. One has to recognise that in that era of exceptionally polished LA music his whine stands out. So I've come to accept it, love it even.

In my opinion these are the records you want, though "Zuma", "Comes A Time" and "American Stars and Bars" aren't too bad either. The way his career goes is that his debut "Neil Young" didn't quite hit the mark but "Everybody knows this is nowhere", a stone classic, became a heavy-rotation LP on the underground AM radio back in the days when they would play whole albums.

Neil, who had mixed feelings about bands after his experience with famed nut-job Steven Stills in Buffalo Springfield really took to Crazy Horse.

(The first Crazy Horse LP actually might be the best thing here and it's a shame they never topped it. Crazy Horse on the face of look like a normal band, but inspect closer and "woah"- what's old Jack Nitzsche, Phil Spector's engineer doing in there? I always remember Steve Albini's review for Slint's "Spiderland" in the Melody Maker, where he gushingly compared it to "Marquee Moon" and this LP. That sent me scuttling off down the Music and Video Exchange.)

"After The Goldrush" is amazing all the way through. To return to his voice, as an instrument it must be up there with the other great strange voices, like Diamanda Gallas's. He's unable to hold a note without quavering ridiculously, which brings to mind a dear friend of mine who has a condition called Benign Essential Tremor, he shakes gently all the time. The thing about it is that he never occupies one space, and like that visual mismatch when you're looking through binoculars, the effect is quite cosmic, as though he simultaneously inhabits a parallel universe. I always wonder about poor Neil's disabled boy, whether there's some pre-echo of that in his way of singing. Interestingly La Monte Young's thing with singing is that vibrato is strictly a no-no, sacrilege. That's what they heard in Pandit Pran Nath's voice, no quaver at all. Purity.

Young came to hate this LP, but even though it was hugely popular I think it's superb. Highlights have to be "Heart of Gold" and "Old Man". "A man needs a maid" is a rum one though, not exactly politically-correct is it? When Jack Nitzsche went on the rampage in the press, bitterly complaining (quite unfairly in truth) about how badly Neil treated him, he always cussed this song, saying listening to Young play it on stage made him want to vomit. This must date me, but I remember at one of the earliest concerts I went to, perhaps in 1988, an old guy at the concert wearing a Harvest Concert Tour T-shirt. It was really old and worn out. 1988 is now nearly twenty years ago.

After the massive success of "Harvest" Neil famously remarked that he had been in the middle of the road and it had bored him, and now he was headed towards the ditch. These three records are known nowadays as "The Ditch Trilogy". Robert Christgau, who has an amazing, very reliable users guide to Neil Young online likes "Time Fades Away". It is now the only Neil Young LP not to have been reissued on CD in spite of a massive online petition for it to be made available. No diss intended but I'm not so sure it's so good.

This, though is excellent.

The final record in the "Ditch Trilogy", I was really surprised to hear "Revolution Blues", Young's song about Manson (who like many Los Angeles music scensters: Alex Chilton, Dennis Wilson, Terry Melcher had known Charlie), among the tracks John Lydon played on Capital FM. But on reflection it makes perfect sense, the content is suitably nihilistic obviously but he and Rotten are also both unique vocal stylists. That was pretty much what Joe Boyd says about Lydon too.

(sighs) This is right up there with "After The Goldrush" I think. To return to the erstwhile Pistol, Neil's lyrics on the title track have always baffled me. "The king is dead is but he's not forgotten, this is the story of Johnny Rotten," The story of Sid Vicious surely?

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:15 PM | Permalink

After spending a couple of weeks camping in the South of France this Summer I took a trip back on my own through Switzerland. I spent one day wandering Sergius Golowin-style across the Alps above Gstaad, clambering through forests, surveying the peaks and bathing in glacial meltwater, and one day in Geneva buying records. My key find was a store called Stigmate. The stuff I picked up there was amongst the least obscure available behind the counter. Really you've never seen a selection like it in a shop, serious Vinyl Vulture territory. Swiss Progressive Jazz in numbered, minimally-designed boxes with hand-printed booklets .....ahoy.

Which I've put together because they're both Peter Baumann productions. The Tietchens, as I've described his neat 4 minute electronic ditties before, is like the best sino-Grime instrumentals. Conrad Shnitzler's "Con" quite stunning and very under-rated. Why isn't this in all the Kraut Top-tens? People are seriously missing out on this thoroughly listenable, spacious, harmonic electronica.

God I didn't think I'd ever see these on vinyl in a shop! I mean the PFM you can get easily enough on eBay, the Banco is just a reissue and the Orme is slightly annoyingly the English version (with translation by Peter Hammill), but just SO stoked to own copies of these Italian Symphonic Rock classics.

Talking of Peter Hammill, this was a total steal.

Focus Group-tastic sleeve don't you think? A couple of Dollars.

Really nice to have an original of this, which is one of the UK folk bombs. This LP "qua LP" was the one Jimmy Page caned.

Thought I paid a bit much for this but got home and saw it on the wall at Reckless for $100. Nice score Mr. Woebot! In fact this should serve as my entry to the "that voice" canon as prescribed. Julie Driscoll must be the UK's own counterpart to Grace Slick, that she ended up in improv as Julie Tippetts, well it's very appropriate to Simon's dictats. Why? Because the fundamental quotient to "that voice" is, and there's no denying it, is "whiteness", and Improv, well it's this improbable thing, a distillation of Jazz that not only erases Blackness but actually inverts it. There's even something curiously, if not white, then perhaps de-racinated about the Black Improv players.

Yay. It's only a re-issue of this French Prog masterpiece (I have the CD of this too, like the Italian pieces) but super-nice nonetheless.

Ha! So cool to get an original copy of this in Switzerland. "Switched on Switzerland", I ask you! Actually I absolutely adore Switzerland, think I have a slightly Swiss temperament, would do practically anything to move out there. It just aint gonna happen, sighs. This record is hilarious.

Have fallen in love with Analord records, so I got this. What's cool about Analord is how Aphex abandons diachronic musical history for the synchronic. Looking into synths I've come to appreciate the difference between computer sonic synthesis, the "Rompler" style of synthesiser (essentially manipulating samples to create sound) and the older "Analogue" synthesisers. With Analogue synths one is actively shaping the sonic envelope generated by oscillators. It's the difference between carving a statue out of stone and I dunno, ordering a sculpture off a website. There's always something very physical and tactile, very "of-human-dimension" about Analogue electronic music that I find appealing too.

Recently I've tended to find Electronic music made on computers flat, I've even developed a (slightly flawed) theory that after about 2001 when music became made on Computers, rather than old synths and MPCs, that the drama ebbed out of it. It's not just the mechanical means of issuing sound of the computer are inferior, but also owing to the musically antithetical environment of making sounds in the Keyboard/Mouse/Screen environment. I think, and it's not a wholly original point-of-view, that people tend to make very un-dynamic, unphysical music on computers.

The MPC for instance, it's not a word-processor it's this big chunky hand-triggered drum-machine. As for its interface, you're not layering tracks on top of one other as is the dominant visual paradigm in Pro Tools, Logic or Ableton Live, you're building music out of stabs. By definition the music is built on gaps of silence as much as of noise (and don't you know half music is silence!) Computer music to my ears these days, of whatever kind, sounds very much like a endless, unpunctuated, obsessively-tweaked, spelling-corrected trickle.

Sam and I were talking about this, and I asked him to describe how he used Max/DSP, which he's done very eloquently and fascinatingly. I'll be honest and say I'm still not convinced by it as a process but was intrigued to find out from him that quite a lot of the vanguard experimental musicians have abandoned computers. Sam feels that he's persisting where it's unfashionable to do so, and for that he certainly deserves our respect.

This is the odd record out. I got this in Antibes, not Geneva. Another record I keep meaning to write about. The idea is that it's the brother disc to Eno's "Another Green Word". it's Percy Jones fretless bass that defines both of them. Also interesting to view Eno's stuff in the seventies as a strain of Jazz-Funk or Fusion. That's probably a deeply unfashionable view but I think it's bang on. Didn't he do a more explicitly Jazz-Funk record in the nineties entitled "The Drop"? Sad to hear of Joe Zawinul's death.

Posted by WOEBOT at 11:10 PM | Permalink

The latest piece by my colleague k-punk in FACT magazine takes in Social Theorist Thorstein Veblen's concept of "conspicuous consumption". Mark comes up with a stylish twist on the concept to describe the studied indifference London's inattentive club-goers, what he calls "conspicuous contempt". Putting down the piece I couldn't help but mull over (in my traditionally paranoid manner) the ramifications of Veblen's theory. What for instance, from a rather arid Marxist perspective, is a blog like this but an opportunity for the blogger to parade his acquisitions? Even sharity blogs have their intent undermined by the fact that the music being given away is but a copy of the original arcane vaulted vinyl.

Putting together these shots of Phillips Prospective 21eme siecle sleeves that I've scooped since I wrote my first piece on The Silver Records just over four years ago, it seemed really appropriate to reflect on Veblen's ideas. If there are any records which embody the quality of jewels it has to be these. That's ironic in a couple of ways, firstly because when originally released they were put out at bargain prices (rather like the Nonesuch records), furthermore their musical content is extremely obtuse, even punishing. A jewel on the other hand is 'cross-the-board' enchanting, even a child will marvel at a jewel.

Reading Veblen I was surprised to find that his tone isn't particularly self-righteous or pious, and that it's nuanced. I suppose though Marx is a good deal more sophisticated than he's often interpreted, for instance evincing a respect for religion that few people credit. Rather than being a stiffly critical view of Nouveau Riche or Upper-Middle class's lavish "narcissistic" acquistion of goods amassed purely for the effect of demonstrating wealth with the intention of improving their public perception, Veblen's actually quite matter-of-fact, descriptive even.

I thought this passage was particularly interesting: He becomes a connoisseur in creditable viands of various degrees of merit, in manly beverages and trinkets, in seemly apparel and architecture, in weapons, games, dancers, and the narcotics. This cultivation of the aesthetic faculty requires time and application, and the demands made upon the gentleman in this direction therefore tend to change his life of leisure into a more or less arduous application to the business of learning how to live a life of ostensible leisure in a becoming way.

There is a sense that something like the concrete explorations of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales de RTF could be such an acquired taste of the sophisticate, of the "decadent bourgeoisie". Indeed wasn't this the regime's critique of the first wave of fascinating explorations in the Russian Avant-Garde (Malevich, Vertov and Tatlin)? That it was at odds with the success of the project.

I remember visiting East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, wandering around a super-market in astonishment. There was one type of bread available. One type of milk. Sugar. Tinned meat. There seemed to be no room whatsoever for the extraneous, or variety of any kind. In one sense this was laudable, but really what tedium! Capitalism on the other hand works by endlessly multiplying and subdividing the products available. So it is with music, it actually enables stylistic diversity, producing yet more stranger fruit. Rather than shutting it down, by prescribing a model (ie Stalin's Socialist Realism) music seems to flourish within it. Perhaps it's unsurprising how the current financial cataclysm for the Industry seems to have brought musical innovation to its knees. I can't think of a single good thing that has come out of the dalliance of Music with Marxist politics. Certainly not The Redskins but not really even the communal claptrap of the early Amon Duul communes.

On the Malec the treat for me was "Dahovi", "pour bande magnetique" though the rest of the tunes are certainly impressive "contemporary" music. The "concert collectif" is a total gem, incredibly ruff and wild, though sadly my copy (found like the Henry in Montpelier last year) is in terrible nick. "Variations pour une porte et un soupir" is under-rated and diverting though perhaps a victim of its aesthetic strictures.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:46 PM | Permalink

Ha! Look what I spotted on an episode of Tom and Jerry...

Posted by WOEBOT at 08:55 AM | Permalink

One of the reasons you can tell I'm such an interesting guy is that, you know, I'm well into world music and all that. I've got like a mad crazy exploded perspective. It's probably all that Psilocybin I necked. However, I get the distinct feeling that when I'm showing off all my exotic third world LPs that people aren't suitably impressed. I mean, you know, those snazzy pieces on Etoile de Dakar, Edu Lobo and Sunny Ade, they don't barf themselves. Baby the stakes is high! It's not all, well you know.....

These are all Oum Kalsoum records on the Sono Cairo label which I've picked up over the years. As the wiki piece reiterates, Kalsoum was big for Jah Wobble and Led Zeppelin. The LPs* are better than the "best of" CD available at Amazon (full of tiny 3 minute tracks). She could often spin "Enta Omry" out over an hour! So the records are good cos the tracks are longer, and the crowd goes mental too. Funny thing is though there's not a word of English on these covers so these might all be the work of second division Egyptian divas, and I wouldn't know! Just lost in my own little word innit.

*The top one which I found just the other week in a flea market in Antibes in case you were curious.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:13 PM | Permalink

God bless the internet! From this thread started by Luke a link to this absolutely fucking fantastic five hour mix of what we blandly call Mid-period Hip-Hop.

I don't care what the haters say about Flex, he's funny and his style is fresh and raw. I couldn't conceive of a better sonic argument for the joys of this period of music. And he doesn't get too lost in Wu or Public Enemy either. Like he *knows* what really stands the test of time. What is it about PE, one minute I love them, the next I think they sound weak?

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:11 PM | Permalink

Posted by WOEBOT at 08:46 PM | Permalink

From our correspondent:

"arrived about half eleven to what i assume was matias aguayo spinning some slow'n'wonky-techno'n'bass oddness before gui boratto stepped up for his live-set. flawless, crunchy four-four with just about the right dosage of euphoria to keep plastic people sweaty. finished with "a beautiful life" which converted all my non-techno loving friends with it's massive mbv-with-enourmous-bass-drum bombast. an "and now for something completely different" moment when matias aguayo returned to the decks, or should i say deck. apparently only one turntable was working, so he played some traditional chilean music which enjoyably subverted expectations for a kompakt night but also successfully cleared the venue in time for the 2am curfew...

Thanks Peder. Glad you had a good night!

Posted by WOEBOT at 08:44 PM | Permalink

I have two tickets of this up for grabs. I'd dearly love to go myself, I bought them myself, they're not PR freebies. I discovered Aguayo's music just last week and fell madly in love with it. In a deliciously synchronous moment I was walking down the street and found the flyer in the gutter, I got rather ahead of myself buying the tickets though cos we're off to France for three weeks (this flurry of activity will soon abate...)

The only stipulation is that whoever goes (with their +1) has to write a tiny wee review of it for WOEBOT. Drop me a line All gone!

Posted by WOEBOT at 12:09 PM | Permalink

When I was checking out my old copy of Marianne Faithfull's "Broken English" I was inevitably confronted by the 1980s inner-liner adverts for the budget Island classics series. It surprised me how large these records loomed.

Back in the day when pocket-money was tight they were very affordable ($6) and widely available. That's one things at which CDs have been good, there must be far less quality music which is deleted. It used to be very hard to get hold of even the most mundane old records.

A remarkably high number of these records have passed through my collection, the only ones which haven't being the Robert Palmer, Cat Stevens, Mott and Traffic releases. (sighs) Island, what a superb label!

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:58 AM | Permalink

Here's one for all the Graphic Designers out there. What these records share is that they're at the perimeter of the fringes of Post-Punk, although I suppose any band that cuts an entire LPs worth of material makes some kind of deliberate mark on posterity. However they fall into two camps which are demarcated with crystalline clarity by the record's cover art.

The Red Crayola: Micro-chips & Fish (1979)
Glaxo Babies: Nine Months to the Disco (1980)
The Lemon Kittens: The Big Dentist (1981)

These three could be crudely described as belonging to the hippy-end of Post-Punk. Red Crayola's Mayo Thompson is somewhat like Kim Fowley, a character who seems to transcend geography and history. He/They started off with 1966's "The Parable of Arable Land", signed to International Artists, the same label as The Thirteenth Floor Elevators. The Glaxo Babies, hairy Bristolian Pop Group-a-likes. The Lemon Kittens, perhaps owing to Karl Blake's Prog-inflected Jazz roots also have a shabby, unfocussed quality which makes me think they're closet hippies.

But look at the sleeves, you wouldn't have to listen to the records to guess. Danielle Dax's very amateur drawing of a shrine, the pig-Pollock splurge of "Nine Months to the Disco", Mayo's scruffy theory-heavy collage of postcards. I mean, they're all charming period-pieces but/and delightfully inept, pritt-sticked together on the table in the squat's kitchen. And this motif of the square "frame" on all their covers, s'like deconstruction innit, like a picture frame innit.

Bernard Szajner: Brute Reason (1983)
Paul Haig: Big Blue World (1984)
Eric Random: Time-Splice (1982)
Spherical Objects: Further Ellipses (1980)

Then look at this lot. Again, very peripheral, but kind of cool to boot. They're all resolutely "embracing the future", or at the least their immediate present. The Szajner is quite excellent, his best, tart cold-wave. Howard Devoto does the vocals but he doesn't sound so irritatingly mannered like he does on the Magazine records. Paul Haig, the Josef K guy solo on Disques de Crepuscule, is obliquely chasing the Human League's tail- I reckon they thought this could have been a hit, but b'jesus it's awful. Eric Random's "Time-Splice" must be one of the last attempts at the time to embrace PIL's legacy- to empty out the music rather than inflect it with New Wave Pop. There's a pre-echo of Acid House to the disc, the shots of the band on the rear even look like they're fresh from their own warehouse party. Spherical Object's "Further Ellipses", even though it hails from 1980, like the music of the Diagram Brothers is at that uncomfortable juncture at which Post-Punk bleeds into Indie. Next stop That Petrol Emotion and The Membranes. Notable for the disastrously bad vocals of Steve Solamar. Not hairy, "disciplined", not hippies.

The sleeves are like a parody of Factory's, but where Peter Saville made materials really count for Joy Division, the creamy almost fluffy hard-card of "Closer", the slickly micro-corrugation of the cover of "Unknown Pleasures"- whoever did these sleeves was definitely after the same look for cheap and we all know what Saville's sleeves cost Tony Wilson! But with just the poised font, a cropped photo (two video-stills here, tres moderne), flat colour and nothing else to back it up? It's certainly Minimal lads.

Posted by WOEBOT at 11:11 PM | Permalink

There isn't much in the way of Etoile De Dakar vinyl available. One of my formative vinyl experiences, and one I've recounted here before, is of having some of their material recorded from crackly disc onto tape at a store in the market in Dakar in 1993. You didn't buy the records from stores like this (well I did pick up a Fela disc but...) because otherwise yunnuh there wouldn't be any left to record for anyone else! That didn't stop collectors strip-mining the whole continent though did it?

"Absa Gueuye" I saw centuries ago in Paris but failed to pick up, but I stumbled upon it last weekend at the M&V: Hooray! "Xalis", dig the spectacles baby. "Ndiadiane Ndiaye" is yet more greatness. With the excellent Sterns series of CDs you have it all really (particularly Volumes 1 and 3). The one I've always yearned to find however is : "Tolou Badou Ndiaye", described by Stapleton and May in their landmark "African All Stars" as "Mbalax 1980-style: a minimal and spacy prelude to (Youssou N'Dour's) denser studio sounds of Immigres and Nelson Mandela"

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:07 PM | Permalink

A Night At the Tilehouse: Matias Aguayo
Forthcoming on Soul Jazz. Absolutely spell-binding, exquisite lolloping ambient post-disco.

Mala: Alicia
Lovers-rock Dubstep with startlingly convincing vocals, so good one's convinced they must be sampled.

Black Devil Disco Club: 28 After
Been sleeping on this but it's very special.

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:48 PM | Permalink

Just couldn't resist posting this from the August edition of Uncut. I tried to hold myself back, but really it's too delightful. You'd give your pinkie to be attacked by Rotten wouldn't you?

Where Ben Marshall (nee Stud), the interviewer erred was to say that Simon was suggesting the Pistols were more "important". I don't think that he ever said that, more that they were more "innovative" than The Pistols. I believe for a while Lydon said as much as himself before shutting the whole episode down to concentrate on "TEH BIG MESSAGE". You only have 15 minutes in the spotlight after all. Would the nature TV programmers John works for these days want an experimental musician presenting for them or the anarchic firebrand of Celebrity Big Brother fame? It's quite like the way Macca has in recent years airbrushed his avant-garde past from the official history.

What was I doing reading Uncut? Er, my van broke down (the gear-stick snapped off) and I was stranded for 5 hours in North London waiting to be towed away. Actually it's OK. They had a rock lore pamphlet with this issue which was quite entertaining.

Posted by WOEBOT at 05:49 PM | Permalink

Luke Heronbone's (working) in Australia now, and how we miss the madly-talented, scrawny bastard. However at least he's in touch and writing up a storm.

A few folks were lucky enough to be emailed his work-in-progress for a new book, but for a short sharp fix Robert Love-Ecstasy-Crime from the Starfish has managed to secure some prose which you can check here. Just scroll on down.

Posted by WOEBOT at 05:31 PM | Permalink

Picking up from the Todd Terry Giggles record, when I picked it up I realised I had a bit of a crush on the Cutting Records output. I went through the racks at home and dug out these absolute beauts. Hippest of this lot would have to be Hashim's "Primrose Path" which Kodwo namechecks in the back of "More Brilliant Than The Sun", it rocks a similar vibe to Strafe's "Set It Off" with an electric guitar marooned amid the 808 beats. Actually that reminds me, the Cybotron records have lots of post-Hendrix (perhaps post-Pete Cosey?) guitar on them don't they. Rick Davis of Cybotron was a Vietnam vet and a thing for Hendrix is practically de rigeur if you served there in the Armed Forces isn't it? Funny how electric guitars in Electro don't sound like such a bad idea as they did ten years ago, sort trashy and a bit Shoreditch-ish.

Woah The Imperial Brothers! These two records are poised on the cusp between Rap and Electro with the effect that they come over like a deconstructed Hip-Hop: big, booming, sparse, dubbed-out. So it's no surprise then that James Lavelle gave them the nod in the early days of Mo' Wax. But what's going on with Lavelle and that guy from The Cult? I saw their thing at Glade and it was more baffling than awful, I mean since when did their vein of Toffler-ised Mondo-2000-rock have adherents? I suppose I may have answered that in the last paragraph? Perhaps, like Phil Collins, Ian Astbury has fans deep within "The Game"?

Oh and these two. The Coro a recent admission to the vault. I only regret I don't have copies of the Nitro Deluxe on Cutting, just sandwiched in on various compilations. I suppose I could simply pick 'em up online, but where's the fun in that? Network did very respectable reissues of these in the UK anyway, so I suspect there aren't many imports kicking around. The 2 In A Room LP I picked up in Greenpoint.

Oh and this one! Another one in the Todd pile which escaped inclusion in the Todd-a-thon. Enough already.

Posted by WOEBOT at 05:27 PM | Permalink

It took six and a half hours to drive from London to Berkshire. As y'all probably know Berkshire was hit very hard in the floods.

As we approached where Glade was being held the road conditions started to deteriorate. The entrance was through a village called Thatcham which was submerged in water, precisely how deep we were unsure.

However as we foolhardily drove forth, the van started filling up with water, exhaust engulfed the cabin and we stalled, it became clear that the answer was......too deep. Our three hitch-hikers helped us push it half a mile back out to dry land.

On site the Bangface tent was heaving gently. In general the music was far too quiet and people seemed to, rather than dance, pull one boot from the mud, and then the other, loosely in time with the beats.

The mud was unbelievable. People moan about Glastonbury, but really this was on a wholly different, almost biblical level.

Grass and ecstacy freely available. Neither of which I touch, as my friends will vouch.

Bumped into Mark "Strange Attractor" Pilkington, escorting the mighty Erik Davis, who had been booked to give a talk at the West Coast Neuro-Age Tent. More on this in the coming weeks.

The glamourous backstage environment! Because Sacha was DJ-ing at "The Pussy Parlure", I essentially caddy-come-gogo-dancer, we had backstage passes. Walked past Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy at this very spot. Flashos's set was the best of the whole festival. Seriously. It was the only moment I saw people dance rather than frug.

As we left I took a minute to poke around, trying to locate The Black Dog's dressing Room. They were playing before Derrick May on (refers to appallingly designed pamphlet) the "Vapour" stage. Found Martin in a Portacabin, one end of which seemed to be sinking deep into the mud.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:47 PM | Permalink

• Stretch Armstrong used to be Hip-Hop's pre-eminent DJ. Now he makes Electro House. Go figger.

• Dan Selzer makes good on his promise and kicks off the Acute Blog in fine style.

• The almighty Jess Harvell gets the gig at Idolator. Rejoice.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:05 PM | Permalink

Mahal Rai Banda: Mahalageasca (Bucovina Dub)
From last year on the Atlantic Jaxx label. Gypsy music effortlessly recalling the splendrous elephantine trombone-stomp of Ska. And what's more Bhangra too.

Studio: Origin
Kompis & Erlend Oye: All Ears
Nordic Disco folded into song-form. The rest of the Studio LP disappoints slightly but "Origin" is like rowing a boat into the middle of a lake. Better still from the Off The Wall people is the utterly lovely "All Ears"- this is how I wished The Junior Boys sounded.

Peter, Bjorn and John: Young Folks (Featuring Victoria Bergsman)
Another track from last year, this is on adverts nowadays isn't it? Still I've totally fallen for it, especially Victoria's straight-out-of-bed vocals.

Yo Majesty: Club Action
Thanks to Flashos for the tip here (and elsewhere). Baltimore gal crew sounding as raw as the Scroggins ladies over tiptoeing beats.

Flying Lotus: Backpack Caviar
The third coming of Trip-Hop. Setting new standards in wonk.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:04 PM | Permalink

I'm not certain when the phrase "Todd is God" was coined, I suspect it was after 1993, however I distinctly remember it being the coinage of die-hard House music heads, the Masters At Work contingent, and that it switched me off right away. I don't know about the whole "proper" Deep House thing, I find it a bit boring, excepting one-offs like MAW's "The Nervous Track", and perhaps when things start to get Mauve?

This cult of Todd, with its apparently very shallow roots, managed to blind me to the exact nature of his work. Even when I had a few good examples of his stuff (of the discs below I've had Royal House's "Yeah Buddy", "To the Batmobile Let's Go", the Static and Tech Nine singles, and "Bounce" and "Daylite" for well over a decade) I was unable to grasp the significance of Todd's work, and to get a handle on him. Put simply, the whole UK Hardcore continuum probably owes more to Todd than anyone else. If the equation of Hardcore was House multiplied by Hip-Hop, then Mr. Terry had done his sums years before anyone in Britain.

Early Work (1987)

Obviously the US context of Todd's work gave him a head-start. While we in the UK think of Hip-Hop and House as separate entities in the US they were still intertwined. While the centre-ground of Hip-Hop abandoned Bambaata's Electro innovation; Detroit Techno, Miami Bass and crucially for this context Freestyle kept faith with the Planet Rock. Sa-Fire, The Cover Girls, Shannon, The Latin Rascals as well as less obviously Latino music like C-Bank and Mantronix is the context for Todd's earliest records. Like Lil' Louie Vega, Todd cut his teeth in the Freestyle era. Giggles Shannon-esque "Love Letter" on Cutting, home of classic Electro like Hashim's "Al-Naafiysh" and the Proto-House of Nitro Deluxe, is ever-so slightly grating, and uncharacteristic of his work, but there's Todd, tucked away on the credits.

In stark contrast the Masters of Work records that Todd put out on Fourth Floor that same year are utterly brilliant. People have mistakenly claimed that Todd gave the MAW moniker to Kenny Dope and Louie Vega, however according to Optimo's Twitch: "Masters at Work was originally Kenny Dope's name but he gave it to Todd Terry to use. Todd Terry then introduced Kenny Dope to Louie Vega and they took the name back when they started working together." So now you know.

Pitched somewhere between The Latin Rascal's epic dub mixes and Mantronix instrumentals like "King of The Beats" these tracks both use synth motifs ripped of Jellybean's "The Mexican" - ripping off Babe Ruth - ripping off Ennio Morricone's "Fistful of Dollars". They both cane the "Alright, Alright" refrain from Strafe's "Set It Off" to the extent that each track almost masquerades as a remix of that the original. This tension between original and remix is long-standing in Terry's work. Later on "Weekend" and "Go Bang!" are also ransacked to the degree that the concept of authorship is not so much challenged but systematically turned on its head, indeed there's something very consistent about his work as industry remix whore.

Breaking Out (1988-1989)

It's a miracle how cheap these records are. I've paid no more than $15 for the ones of these I didn't have recently, but mainly in the region of $10. It's equally astonishing how easy they are to pick up when you consider how impossibly hard to find the finest early UK Hardcore has become. Perhaps this has something to do with their almost insouciant Avant-gardism?

Simon Reynolds in Energy Flash brilliantly articulates how much of his work is "jarring because it's like a series of crescendos and detonations, a frenzy of context-less intensities without rhyme or reason." All of these records take decentralisation to disorientating plateaus, functioning on a completely different level to much ultimately song-based electronic music. They're spasmodic mini-master-mixes, almost artlessly reflecting the open-ended dynamics of a DJ mix. In this way they're also strangely unmemorable records, demanding one's attention intensely but in a very localised way, rather like reading The Bible with a magnifying glass.

The Swan Lake, Black Riot and Royal House record came out in the UK on Champion and they benefit from utterly exquisite vintage Trevor Jackson (him of Playgroup) sleeve designs. I've put both sides of these up because they're totally gorgeous, but also because they neatly show how Todd's music was embraced and decontextualised at the early raves in the UK. The pixelated cop on "Yeah Buddy", a sleeve I've cherished for years, is worth a thousand university white papers on Rave in the UK. But there are other indicators of his cross-over popularity here, the totally unavoidable Jungle Brothers remix; How many times did we hear this and Royal House's "Can You Party?" at raves? Also Limelife's Black Box-pillaging "Cause you're Ride on Time", a giant commercial track kidnapped and pimped on the streets of Brooklyn.

Late Period (1990-1993)

At the turn of the decade there was a stark shift in the nature of Todd's records. Where before he'd not worried about how lop-sided his musical structures were, suddenly they become conventional overnight. I suspect there's an element of peer-pressure here, of other artists being disdainful of his (fascinating and inventive) rampaging infantile grooves. The good news was that, for a while at least, he embraced the Mentasm-inflected corpulent sonics of the newly-bastardised Techno. "Fingertrips" still manages to sound raw, is in thrall to Hip-Hop, and forms a bridge to the earlier work. Utterly satisfying, bleak and nasty, it also sports much more space between the ruff beats.

The wondrous Strictly Rhythm records on the other hand, while hard as nails, also possessing a startling depth of sheen. The stabs are in some queer way lustrous, there's a textural richness to sounds like the burbling-sewer bass-line of The Youngbloods "Got Me Burning Up", and the riff on the US Rave mix of Static's "Dream It" is a flickering mirage of mammon in perdition. This is still very much "classic" Todd.

There's lots of wicked stuff on the Sax LP "If You Wanna Ride", "This will be mine" and "The Journey pt.II", but there is an encroaching tedious tastefulness in the form of Jazz-House platitudes. Sound Design is only really worth checking for "Make The Beat Pound", strange to compare these curate's eggs with the utterly successful Royal House and Todd Terry Project long-players. By 1992 and 1993 the broader culture began to show disgust at the excesses of Rave, and older artists like Todd pulling back from the brink of the black-hole into which Darkcore blithely forged forward into, often under the guise of "going underground". He was able to make great records within this new mould, like the brilliant "Bounce" or the equally fantastic "Sume Say Sigh", House tracks which, though bereft of the brutalist palette of Rave or Hip-Hop, were nevertheless supremely dramatic.

It took a gap of 6 years, and Todd's seemingly out-the-blue Drum and Bass LP "Resolutions", and it's welcome acceptance by the Dons of Jungle for him to come to some kind of truce with his early history. Looking back one senses he wished he never lost faith with the Rave.

The New Todd Terry Compilation

An old (but good) Todd Terry Compilation

A good Todd Terry Interview

The Monster Todd Discogs entry

A thread at Dissensus about Todd Terry

With Thanks to E.

Posted by WOEBOT at 12:04 AM | Permalink

How can the ICA justify hosting a festival like this? Where's the art in any of this populist mush?

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Derek is back. Or perhaps he never went away.

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Mark Fisher is teaching a five-day Critical Thinking course at Orpington this week. The advert invites you to acquire some Cold Rationalist intellectual weaponry.

Posted by WOEBOT at 03:59 PM | Permalink

Last night I DJ'd a party for my mysterious and glamorous brother in the countryside. He'd insisted I bring only House music, though I inferred from his tenor that the real agenda was "Not 'Aving It", there were to be "grown-ups" there and therefore my natural instinct to play Ardkore should be suppressed. Accordingly I stretched the remit a bit and bought along some disco as well, Hamilton Bohannon's "South African Man", Manu Dibango's "New Bell", Class Action's "Weekend (the M&M Dub), Cultural Vibe's "Ma Foom Bay" and Padlock. However beyond that, with admirable restraint of ego, I did exactly what I was told and bought House Music.

It was a wicked party, in a marquee under the stars, with bountiful stimulants, beautiful women, and (for which I was partly responsible) a busy little dance-floor. I say partly responsible because from time to time, when his mood dictated I was elbowed off the decks by my bro. And why ever not?!? It was his party! Anyway I hope I'm continuing to convey my almost transparent degree of cooperation. What did amuse me a little was given my closely prescribed musical parameters I half expected he'd adhere to them himself. Not a bit of it!

What I wanted to mention however was a phenomenon which I hadn't experienced to such a degree. I've been playing parties and clubs for nearly twenty years now, and yes from time to time people would come and ask me whether I had such-an-such a record. It's par for the course really isn't it? Also the inappropriate requests: Queen? No, terribly sorry I'm afraid etc. However at this party, which believe me was happy and lively, the dance-floor was quietly bustling, I had a constant stream of people cajoling, threatening, huffing, and sulking with me; of people going through my record box and hooking out stuff for me to play (this happened two or three times), people insisting on different genres of music, either by describing them by name or inferring them by making clucking sounds, one guy gesticulating at me with his two tiny dancing fingers demanding deeper music, girls asking for Rick James and Stevie Wonder and perhaps most remarkably a girl who kept on insisting that I download a Justine Timberlake song onto my brothers laptop and play that. The whole, never-ending experience was utterly wearing and eventually I gave in, politely telling one particularly persistent girl that she was "really doing my head in". Most weirdly the party seem totally unaffected.

I thought the request for the download was the most globally illuminating, because of course our relationship to consuming music has fundamentally changed. Even back in those days when we used to complain that "oh everyone is a DJ these days" there was the idea that it might be an interesting thing to do to graciously submit yourself to another person's tastes and whims. In fact, doing just that is key to the pleasure of the dance-floor. You let yourself go ferchrissakes! What it really reminded me of was that most wretched thing ever, last year's iPod Rave at Paddington Station. The contentment! We can all listen to exactly the music we want to. In isolation.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:10 PM | Permalink

Prompted by this excellent, fascinating article at Rolling Stone there are threads discussing The Record Industry's decline at ilm and Dissensus.

Just yesterday walking from the Seven Dials to Soho I was flabbergasted to see that the gigantic FOPP on the corner of Shaftsbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road had closed. I believe this has something to do with its sister company (which had been selling Imported CDs at reduced prices, thereby undermining the arrangements of the domestic market) finally being shut down by litigation. However the view from the street is simpler, another retail outlet gets nailed.

People probably don't know FOPP's background as a Glaswegian record store. I first visited the store in 1990 when they had a branch in Glasgow's city centre on (was it?) Renfield Street. I remember buying a Charlie Parker record from them which I still have somewhere. When I ended up at University in the city I would obsessively visit their Byres Road branch, often 2 to 3 times a day, as it was sandwiched between my flat and lectures. I remember wishing I would catch staff on different shifts. In those days they had big posters in the window which were collages of amazing, fabulous and exotic record sleeves. It was an immaculately conceived 'all-points-of-the-compass' buyers guide, perhaps a little like my WOEBOT 100, but one which you had to figure out yourself. For example, the cropped-out black dude with the Chinese hat playing an African flute in a cliff-top overlooking the sea turned out to be Pharaoh Sanders on the cover of "Thembi".

In the beginning the emphasis was never on bargains, though in time as the store began to expand that was how it came to be. To be honest, in a curmudgeonly way, I slightly disapproved of their stacks of classics-on-the-cheap. But, quite like the posters had done, nosing around the store was often illuminating as to what might be worth checking out. I'm sorry for the directors of the business who must be soberly surveying their shattered dream, one which had grown so far and which had shown so much promise.

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Postscript: It turns out there was quite a lot more to this than I was aware. Two WOEBOT readers who've contacted me worked for FOPP on the shop-floor (one in Scotland and one in England) and they haven't pulled any punches in describing how they believe the company ran itself into the ground. Tsk.

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:04 AM | Permalink

I've written about a couple of these records in the past here, however I couldn't resist bundling them in again to make that perfect 10.

Ananda Shankar: Ananda Shankar (1970)
Ananda Shankar: Ananda Shankar and His Music (1975)

The revelation for me was the Ananda Shankar. I've seen his records around for years. The resurgance of interest in him came with Talvin Singh and his Anokha club in the mid to late nineties. I went to Anokha in Hoxton Square once and it was rubbish. The problem was the tuning, not the beats. Convincing fusions always happen at the axis of the tuning. That there's a Tabla pattering away in the background means next to nothing if the harmonies are mushy and Western. Given that Ananda was the patron saint at Anokha, I wrote off his stuff as tepid exotica.

How wrong could I have been? The debut on Reprise is tuff. Typified by the majestic "Sagar" a West-Coast Cosmic-Country epic draped in reverberating sitar, Ananda finds a shared nook in the scales of the Honky-Tonk Blues and the Hindustani Alap. And there's nothing limp about it at all, this is bad bwoy music. The cover versions on the debut are also fantastic: "Light My Fire" and "Jumping Jack Flash" ring with dread vibes, the sitar steals the melody and rides it like a jockey on a donkey.

Conventional wisdom is that Ananda's "Ananda Shankar and his music" LP is superior, though this is typical hipster false consciousness at play. Recorded in India, not Hollywood, with local chops it's within a whisker of being a straight-up Bollywood LP. There's nearly as convincing Rock-Raga on a hundred Soundtrack LPs- though perhaps nothing as savage as "Streets of Calcutta". The record is also haunted by the spectre of Ennio, for example on the gently ululating vocal of "Cyrus", again slightly separating it from local produce. Nevertheless for me it's the debut which is interesting.

Emil Richards and The Microtonal Blues Band: Jouney to Bliss (1968)
Bill Plummer and the Cosmic Brotherhood (1968)

Of course the Alice Coltrane records were in the Impulse frontline, however dig a little further back and you'll discover these. I was hipped to the Emil Richards by Tony Wilds at the quite stunning Hip Wax site. In fact if I recall Tony had a couple of copies of this beauty left. I suppose to call this Indo-jazz is some kind of misnomer. Emil Richards is, after all, principally famous for his vibraphone work. Folks might also want to check out his "Stones: New Sound Element" LP (in this instance hipped to me by ilm's Milton Parker). The vibes's instrumental counter-part is more precisely something like the Balinese Gamelan, the record's general tenor Greenwich Village does Jazz. "Journey to Bliss" the LP is an utterly perfect, daringly light-footed, intricately woven mesh of percussiveness. Even the guitars chicken-scratch and the wurlitzer dodges breaks. The pinnacle of the LP must be the sublime "Mantra" which is your every fantasy of leopard-skin loin-cloths brought luridly to life. "Journey to Bliss" the six-part track itself is more obviously Indo-jazz thanks to some charmingly out-of-tune meandering sitars. But how close the aesthetic of something like is to La Monte Young's early work!

Not nearly as splendid as the Emil Richard's record is Bill Plummer's "Bill Plummer and The Cosmic Brotherhood." Bill, armed with his twin bass concept, played on The Rolling Stones's "Exile on Main Street" fact fans. My friend Christian found a copy of this in a store in Edinburgh in 1992 and we laughed long and hard at Bill on the cover. "Journey to The East" is, however, sort of wonderful and crops up frequently on Jazz compilations. Also, close your eyes and check Bill's cover of "The Look of Love" and the similarity to Ananda's cover-versions is undeniable.

Dewan Motihar Trio/Irene Schweizer Trio/Manfred Schoof/Barney Wilen: Jazz Meets India (1967)

The fruit of a World Jazz festival co-ordinated by legendary German Music Journalist Joachim-Ernst Berendt, this particular LP (there were others in the "Jazz Meets The World" series on MPS) was amongst the most successful. Recorded in 1967 what is perhaps most remarkable about is the protean Krautrock elements therein for The Irene Schweizer Trio who take care of the rhythm section on the LP contains none other than Mani Neumeier on drums and Uli Trepte on bass of Guru Guru. Mani is interviewed extensively in Berendt's liner-notes, discussing the Tabla "the most perfect percussion instrument created by man" and his own invention the "Mani-Tom". There's another Krautrock connection as playing cornet and trumpet beside Barney Wilen is Manfred Schoof who was of course Jaki Liebezeit's boss.

It seems wholly appropriate to me that Indo-jazz, this almost imagined music, almost like an exercise in musical R&D, should play a part in spawning Krautrock but also (and very convincingly) Minimalism and Avant-Disco. Avant-Disco I hear you chafe! I'm sorry but Arthur Russell is nothing if not a re-incarnation of the likes of Emil Richards and Bill Plummer, a beatnik plundering the orient. Let's not forget Russell's training with Ali Akbar Khan- sort of like the logical extension of the whole trip, a hardcore hipster's Indo power-move and his work with Allen Ginsberg.

The Indo Jazzmen: Ragas and Reflections (1968)

This is a curios one, essentially an exploitative take on the Mayer/Harriot records, it manages to be rather sublime, possibly even superior to what it's plagiarising. Saga was a dodgy London-based record label.

Shankar Jaikishan and Rais Khan: Jazz Raga Style (1968)
T.K Ramamoorthy: Jazz Jazz Jazz (1969)

My babies! The entirely Indian side of the coin. Amongst my most obscure and treasured records. The latter I discovered about four years ago and I've caned its quasi-Led-Zeppelin-esque grooves for a while now. The former is more of the same kind of shenanigans which I've picked up subsequently. Proving once and for all how all manner of music falls into this bizarre terrain.

Joe Harriot and John Mayer: Indo-Jazz Suite (1966)
Joe Harriott-John Mayer Double Quintet: Indo-Jazz Fusions (1967)

Innit.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:46 PM | Permalink

I was delighted to discover I hadn't sold this in the great Middlebrow purge of 1996. Are there any other sixties icons who ended up making bona-fide Post-Punk records? I suppose McCartney's "Temporary Secretary" and Jagger's "She's The Boss" could plausibly be termed New Wave records, but they're very much of the chipper MTV-friendly variety. "Broken English" taps into precisely the same Cold War alienation and personal-as-political undercurrents that distinguish the tuffest work of This Heat and Gang of Four. Perhaps it was her marriage to Ben Brierly of crap punk group The Vibrators that keyed her into the zeitgeist? Though somehow that seems unlikely. Her cover version of "Working Class Hero" is surely her argument that these same strands were alive in the counter-culture.

Where did that voice emerge from? It wasn't simply procured by dragging herself through the gutters of Soho sleeping rough as a smack-head, it must have been there all along, hidden. I can't think of a better example of Barthes's "grain of voice"; this utterly distinctive heartless, art-less croak evokes a recognition in one that is beyond language. It's the undisguised sound of wantonness and perception in collision with fag damage (note the glowing ember on the sleeve).

They showed a documentary about Marianne on ITV the other night with her being interviewed by Melvyn Bragg. There wasn't nearly enough archive footage, some (but not all) of the recent concert film was embarrassing, the pace dragged and poor old Melvyn looked somehow deflated. However Marianne was cool. She said quite a few striking things, notably about drugs and alcohol, and on stage when she got over the discomfort of being an old dame really burned brightly. Aged 19 I used to think the shots of the woman on the sleeve were of someone impossibly ancient, but in 1979 she was only 33. Is that young?

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:51 PM | Permalink

I first heard about Mingering Mike in an issue of the magazine waxpoetics. The story goes that two crate-diggers Dori Hadar and Frank Beylotte found a very large collection of home-made LPs (with hand-drawn LPs DIY-shrink-wrapped and even vinyl-replacement cardboard discs with grooves drawn on them) at a flea market in Washington. There's a selection of these artefacts by the imaginary Soul Star here at Mike's site.

Hadar and Beylotte initially broke their story at a long-deleted thread at The Soul Strut Forum, home of the heaviest Funk, Soul and Jazz collectors; deleted because the two had pangs of remorse about making Mike's stuff available before establishing contact with him. However, now with Mike discovered and firmly on side, a whole book of his work has been issued. It's a beautifully put together, quite fascinating document.

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:09 AM | Permalink

In my recent deeply unpopular Funky House diatribe I noted that in the face of the shrinking market-place for Dance Music there has been a contraction in the genre-naming. Where once we might have a hundred fairly clearly delineated Micro-Genres now we simply have "House". A walk through London's few remaining record shops bears this out. The category of House has swollen in size, even occasionally swallowing whole other genres like Funky, Minimal and Electro House, while at once the overall terrain has contracted.

In many ways this could be gratifyingly viewed as a return to a normalcy, to be a manifestation of what "we" always knew. In the same way that Billy Joel remarked "Next phase, new wave, dance craze, anyways, It's still rock and roll to me", at the end of the day the multifarious strands of Acid, Hardcore, Garage, Gabba, Jungle, Illbient, Dubstep, Techno and (for a while) Grime were simply House music. This was the gist behind the Shanty House concept, though truthfully that entity owes almost nothing to House and everything to Hip-Hop.

I like canonical engineering and there isn't enough of it about these days. From the perspective of the consumer it's generic individuation that makes buying records fun. It's depressing to be confronted by a morass of blandly un-placeable music. I really admire exercises like Harold Bloom's "The Western Canon" and F.R. Leavis's "The Great Tradition". It's not just the critic's job to dissect, it's a crucial task to re-imagine and assemble. My recent idea has been, in the absence of any other strong generic competitor to it, to try and extract from within the tradition of House-music-proper a strand of what I'm calling "Mauve House". If the methodology used in tackling the pyramidic proliferation of dance music genres, used to be naming each subset, nowadays a more appropriate approach might be like filleting a joint of beef, that's to say stripping out one strand from the carcass.

Mauve House is, I believe, the truest manifestation of House music. In the same way that if you met God you'd be overwhelmed by his strangeness* what I'd describe as the true House music might appear marginal and curious. More heretically and illogically it's New York, not Chicago, that is the spiritual home of Mauve House. Birthed by Arthur Russell, and carried into the world by Underground Solution's "Luv Dancin" and Todd Terry's "Bango". It's the early output of Strictly Rhythm and Nu Groove records that most perfectly encapsulates the Mauve House aesthetic: minor-key, rhythmically improbable, with even Techno by Joey Beltram and Lenny Dee infused with the half-lit, gentle presence of Soul.

Isn't this what's implied by "Deep" House? I'd argue that Deep House is implicitly tied in with Chicago (even if it's not from Chi-town), with being "down with the programme". Deep House is equivalent to Detroit Techno purism. Even though, and now we move forward in time, one subsequent label's output, that of Clubhouse Records perfectly fits the bill of both, though what follows it wouldn't. In fact subsequent Mauve artists are round pegs distinguished by their inability to fit into square holes. The second wave came from all over the place: Miami's Murk, refugee from Detroit Marc Kinchin, and Holland's almost forgotten René et Gaston.

Todd Edwards must be the archetypical Mauve House artist. There's always been something deeply unconventional about Todd's melodies and harmonies to the degree that his mass appeal to the UK Garage Underground always baffled me. Todd acts as a conduit of Mauve House into the UK underground in the form of 2-Step. There seems to be a slight confusion about 2-Step at the moment which I'd like to clear up if I could. Joe Goddard of Hot Chip just did a "Twenty Best...2-Step records" for the always excellent FACT magazine. I'd link it but it's not online yet. It's a great break-out of very good records but almost none of them are 2-Step records, they're mostly early Grime MC tunes. Anything before So Solid or PAUG is 2-Step, anything after is Grime or Dubstep avant-le-lettre. Not to say that people didn't continue making stuff within the 2-step idiom, after all there's "Babycakes". Maybe this'd be better expressed with an equation: if either the Hip-Hop or Dancehall element or a combination of the two eclipses the House element then it's not 2-Step. Up until the year 2000 Locked On probably encapsulated the 2-Step sound. People have always scoffed about the idiocy and inappropriateness of UK Garage somehow claiming descent from the Paradise Garage, but I dunno, I hear it.

It's curious how often the "auteurs" of House music, in a sense those who dare to tread a path outside of the utilitarian dictat of the dancefloor have ended up making eccentric music which sounds Mauve. In the mid-nineties Mood II Swing made an improbable sonic pact with Berlin while Matthew Herbert strived to literally tear up the music's fabric while strangely (at his best) being recognisable within it. Around the same time two artists with a unique, skewered vision of House revived the fortunes of Detroit's Planet E, Moodymann and Recloose.

Very little of the Minimal House, obsessed as it is with stripping out "flavor", could qualify as Mauve house, however the intimate bedroom-disco quality of Isolée's music instantly mark it as Mauve house. Today the spirit of Mauve House is embodied in the beats of Jackson and his partner in crime Pépé Bradock. It's a shame to have to play gatekeeper but (disappointingly) none of the Funky House I've heard recently cuts it, let alone makes it Mauve.

*That's something that's borne out the recent excatations of the early gospel. Innit.
**I don't mean the over-exposed belting of Otis and Aretha, but rather the troubled blue vision of Bobby Bland and Ann Peebles or even the liminal voice-as-texture stylings of a thousand Disco renta-divas.

Posted by WOEBOT at 04:11 PM | Permalink

Mordant Music: The Tower Parts VIII-XVIII

It seems like ages since I was sent the first "Tower" CD. Bleak is the operative word here: repetitive synth dirges and Loop-(the band)-like growling/prowling slow-burning guitar strum.

Mordant Music: Carrion Squared

40 miniature drones commissioned by the Boosey and Hawkes library label. Perhaps not as satisfying as The Tower? My favorite MM stuff is quasi-Techno (eg "Plant Room") that's why I enjoyed stuff on here like "Deportivo Suppressant".

You Are Hear Compilation

Imagine if rather than burn up a compilation of your favorite tunes you: set up a radio station, invited artists to record sessions over a four year period, combed through the live studio recordings for the best performances and then (with the backing of the National Lottery) released a CD into the shops? Quite a lot more work. Although I gravitated towards the Xylitol-like electronic recordings here (Jim Backhouse is one half of You Are Hear), stuff like Asja Auf Capri, Vanishing Breed and Carter Tutti, I also enjoyed the idea of Resonance FM's Hanway Street studios imparting some atmosphere to all the live elements of the tracks. Special mention must go to Momus's "Going for a walk with a line" which was great.

Battles: Mirrored

There's not a great deal I like about this I'm afraid, though marginally less off-putting their first low-key release. One of the things that is made a lot of with Battles is their instrumental virtuosity. The cover shot of all the band's gear laid out, kind of comically, like an rock arsenal underscores this. As you'd expect all the tracks sound like "jams", there's no real compositional meta-structure which betrays the absence of thought. Post-Rock was never Prog. It was about deconstructing rock.

On a more positive note I'm very much looking forward to WARP's new signing Flying Lotus.

Black Moth Super Rainbow: Dandelion Gum

One of Simon's faves this year I wholeheartedly recommend this for instant purchase. Daft-punk-fixated stoners play taught Crazy Horse-style Hip-Hop-friendly breaks in real time with attendant Mellotron.

John Eden: Best of 2006

Absolutely "W" for wicked selection of JA Dancehall tracks which was enough to convince me (where many others had failed) I'd been seriously missing out. Not commercially available. Beg John for a copy!

RVNG Presents Justine D

From the same people who bought us the legendary Crazy Rhythms CD another mix-illogical classic.

Mount Vernon Arts Lab: The Seance at Hobs Lane

This reissue is certainly a fitting release for the Ghost Box label.

Andrew Pekler: Cue

With tracks conceived around Library records strap-lines. For example take the words: "Driving piano-led theme, w/ uplifting feedback sweeps and coda" and work forwards from there. This, appropriately enough, is somewhat like a groove-laden Focus Group.

Connect_icut: 'Moss' and 'They showed me the Secret Beaches'

Aka Blogger Sam Macklin. Hesitant and tender glitchwork which remind me, not unpleasantly, of the sort of discs I used to have to review at The Wire. Sam's stuff is pitched somewhere between the electronica with spirit of Coil's "Musick to play in the Dark" and Fennesz's modernist abstractions.

DMX Crew: Snow Cub EP

Of all the electronic records here, the one which leapt most dynamically from the speakers was this vinyl EP by DMX Crew. Ed doesn't march under the banner of "analogue" but nevertheless none of these tracks have been near a computer. It shows. There's an urgency and physicality to the sound of these razor-sharp, old-skool genre moves which, in spite of their sonic familiarity, is immediately engrossing.

Robert Logan: Cognessence

This is kind of awesome. The last word in studious electronica's re-imagining of Grime and Dubstep. At moments it is preposterously architectured, like a housing estate built by Iannis Xenakis hellbent on fully exploring the possibilities of concrete.

Charles Cohen and Ed Wilcox: Those are pearls that were his eyes

A truly lovely improv recording that I keep returning to. Made fascinating by its unusually sexy instrumental palette. Comparable to many heavyweight 1970s and 1980s records, its exquisitely rich production sets it heads and shoulders above many of them.

Lullatone: Plays Pajama Pop for You

I've had this sitting on my desk for ages now and I only just managed to check it out. The logical extension of the Indie fascination with all things cute and Japanese. Reminiscent of Satie but also of artists like Roedelius and Klimperei. Simply charming!

Posted by WOEBOT at 05:07 PM | Permalink

I'm on Resonance FM tonight between 9.30pm and 11pm and I'll be playing some treats.

Thanks to the Kosmische Possee, who it seems have taken me under their wing permanently, I'll get to play a show every six weeks. What I want to do most of the time is have a guest along. It's more fun that way. I have three people pencilled already.

Posted by WOEBOT at 01:39 PM | Permalink

There's a load of mixed sentiments about the blogosphere in two recent interviews with Simon Reynolds for his excellent collection of essays "Bring The Noise". I feel a little uneasy taking up the thread of his objections here, I mean are we joined at the hip or what? But seeing as how Simon quite explicitly laments the halcyon days of inter-blog banter I suppose tackling this was reasonable enough.

In his FACT interview with k-punk, Simon is fairly unequivocal at laying the reason for the dearth of vital energy in music at the feet of the internet:

"The web has extinguished the idea of a true underground. It’s too easy for anybody to find out anything now, especially as scene custodians tend to be curatorial, archivist types. And with all the mp3 and whole album blogs, it’s totally easy to hear anything you want to hear, in this risk-less, desultory way that has no cost, either financially or emotionally."

Reading this I felt like I was dodging bullets, if not exactly taking one in the neck (not being a scene custodian, phew!). Even if you take the position of not downloading music, if as a music buyer you rely on eBay and GEMM, there is an implicit disconnection from the grassroots networks that used to contain one's consumption of music. The barriers once erect, if not demolished, have been lowered. Simon's is such a well-worn unequivocal statement as to be almost transparent.

I admit to wriggling in the noose here but there might be sticking points. Myspace has thrown up some interesting phenomenon, eroding insurmountable obstacles to the will-to-glom in otherwise hopelessly disconnected and fractured networks. It has created scenes where otherwise there would be none; for instance the healthy collectives of Gypsy music. An institution like The Wire magazine could be seen as proto-web, relying not on hegemonies bound by geography, but by forming a focal point for like-minded individual across the globe. As such it managed to survive the extinction that befell many other mags earlier on this decade. Much of the cultural impulse behind blogs like WOEBOT and the sharity mp3 LP sites works on a similar premise to The Wire. Of course, infintely more than the press, the web is the perfect vehicle for narrowcasting. But crucifying the net itself for being the perfect utility to channel what are indubitably swelling currents in society is unfair. Indeed there's an irony in recognising that by "Underground" here Simon means an alternative consensus.

I'm not sure if what Simon regards as the "Underground" doesn't by definition (cf Dick Hebdige) require a greater investment in fashion and style, music and literature than will ever be available through the internet. Scenes require talismans. If you're socialising at clubs or festivals, and these will always be the degree zero of any vibrant music scene, you need the right junkets. Though equally this applies if you're inviting people round to your house. Showing some girl your Arctic Monkeys mp3 just won't wash. The other night I was in Hoxton upstairs at The Old Blue Last. You'd have to be both blind and ignorant not be able to pick up on the deftly-tailored styles, musical and otherwise, on the vibes of the whole scene. It was the same at the Grime raves I used to go to (and I imagine it still is). One shouldn't go looking for the "underground" from within the context of the internet and equally one shouldn't be disappointed by music being used in a utilitarian fashion in the hood.

There's also a couple of things I wanted to pick up from Simon's interview at Ballardian:

On Blogs: "Now I’m significantly less excited, while still finding more to read and be inspired by in the non-professional blog world than in music magazines. What I enjoy most, and what has dimmed quite a bit since ‘the golden age’ a few years ago, is the conversational aspect – people riffing on other people’s riffs, that whole argumentative side. But with a few exceptions people seem to have retreated back into a more solitary, monologue-like thing."

Guilty as charged. Quite a bit of that original discursive energy from these parts went into Dissensus, where enough of it for my tastes survive. I suppose I got a bit burned out by the orgy of interlocution and went back to mono-blogging. I also have to admit a bit of a distaste for the "link-me-link-you" motor at the centre of the Technorati blog economy, and quite often that's what is at stake with hyperlinks, even if Simon to his credit is oblivious of this. The move away from inter-blog banter was concomitant with the balance of my writing shifting from exposition to research and that leads me to the last point of Simon's I wanted to look at, about theory:

The only music blogs I can think of that go for real hardcore theory are k-punk and… that’s it really. There are blogs that are primarily philosophy and/or art blogs who also deal with music now and then, like Sit Down Man, You’re A Bloody Tragedy or Poetix, but I don’t think people would think of them as music blogs. Actually k-punk isn’t just a music blog either, although music is a privileged area of culture for Mark. You get music blogs that do music criticism in a high-powered form or go deeply into the minutiae of subgenres and esoteric knowledge. But I can’t think of that many who are applying concepts from critical theory.

I’d make a distinction here between theorising about music and using critical theory and applying it to music. The former goes on a lot, obviously – and you could argue that any critical position is at some level theoretical, it relates to an idea of what music should be and how it works. But there is plenty of theorisation about music going on. What I don’t see a lot of is people using ideas from critical theory or philosophy and so forth and using them to explicate pop music. Even I don’t do nearly as much as I used to. But I certainly still generate theorems and analytical ideas that go beyond the thumbs up/thumbs down consumer guidance aspect.

This is bound to be a more introspective and self-serving observation than usual, and I'd like to apologise in advance for that, but when the shift occurred in the nature of WOEBOT, essentially when I worked my way to the bottom of my then-existing collection, and the blog started to be almost like a diary of my day-to-day searching and researching rather than objectively poring over the past, then it simultaneously became less theory-orientated. It became less about perspective because, working so close to the coal-face, that perspective was something of a luxury. Whatever theory I've picked up has almost exclusively, even though I've labored at times to disguise this, been gleaned from music journalism. As soon as I set off on my own travels unaided then there has been no hiding my general, not necessarily disinterestedness, but discomfort, with theory. Stuff I picked up and read more recently, Badiou and Spinoza, (unlike the Virlio, Rorty, Deleuze, Popper, Bhaba, Gilroy and McLuhan I'd read in the past) just didn't seem to have any bearing on music. I am aware that Simon himself has less room for theory in his writing than in the past.

I've moved to a position of being very focussed on history, on tracking currents within music with micro-precision, quite like someone in information technology might track flows, but usually with the explicit aim of trying to tease out new possibilities for the stultified present. Even though this has quite occasionally led to, perhaps amusing conflagrations with my peers; I can see that to quite a lot of people it might be very boring. Except to point out crassly that the stats on the site last month showed over a million hits, I wouldn't really know how to defend myself.

Posted by WOEBOT at 01:04 PM | Permalink

And finally. The Future Sound of London have a particularly bad rep these days, their post-Papua New Guinea brand of Intelligent Techno is generally viewed as being the least salvageable strain of dance music of its era. This might have something to do with designer Buggy G Riphead's rococo sleeves of the period. Reminiscent of the corniest visual excesses of Prog, in fairness these only reflected the unrestrained sonic orgy unleashed by extended sample-lengths within the music itself. By the mid-nineties music technology had reached a point whereby dreamers like Cobain and Dougans actually got the kit they were after, and moved from that fruitful (but technically frustrating) position of being limited by their hardware's capabilities.

Long before their profile as Q-man's electronic music, in the years from 1989 to 1993 before they signed to Virgin, TFSOL put out a whole slew of wild music on the Jumpin' and Pumpin' label; a weird abandoned interzone between Ragga Ardkore and Intelligent Techno. A great deal of these tracks are seriously 'avin it though certainly not all of them are by the egghead duo. Jungle misfits Genaside II put out a handful of classic lumpen breakbeat tracks on the label (think the Jungle Brothers with bad vibes and no rapping: "Death of The Kamikazee", "The Alchemist" and "The Motiv"), there are EPs by Flag (later The Jimpster), and Adrkore refugess like DJ Freshtrax and DJ HMS. Indeed, in the absence of evidence, logic dictates that it wasn't their label as such. Quite soon it established itself commercially with a series Rave Hits compilations, however their man Riphead's really very appealing, uniformly 8-bit, cyber-punk sleeves makes it feel thus. Also I suspect that the two must have acted in the capacity as unofficial A&R men in these early days.

Brian and Garry's tracks made under aliases like Yage, Smart Systems, and Indo Tribe like "Owl", "Drive", "Tingler" and "Coda Coma" inhabit a wonderfully improbable terrain. As ruff as the those most vicious urban Ardkore they have hidden depths, deliciously echoing bottom-ends, exquisitely crafted bleep-sequences and four dimensional breakbeats. Indeed it's the use of breakbeats that singles them out from the rest of Techno's slightly pious re-workings of the glacial Detroit sound. Definitely worth investigating.

Posted by WOEBOT at 04:18 PM | Permalink

From what seems like beyond the dawn of time, these records came out in 1989. Produced by Nigerian ex-pat Tony Addis and recorded at his Addis Ababa Studios (unfortunately not in Ethiopia). They represent a "House-ification" of Jazzie B's Africa Centre vibe. House became an unwitting agent of deconstruction and the results were fascinatingly unstable, throwing up all sorts of imminent possibilities. Bang The Party's "Bang Bang Your Mine" is a Jamaican-inflected take on tracks by Chi-Town House divas like Jamie Principle. Their revisions of House music found favor with Derrick May and Kid Batchelor's utterly wonderful "Release Your Body" ended up with a Mayday mix and a release on the Rolls Royce of Techno labels Transmat.

The signposts North, East, South and West are yet more nuttily prescient. "Rubba Dub" from the "Back To Prison" LP with its slow, echoing, displaced power-drill break-beats is what a dose of inspiration would have done to Trip-Hop. "Righteous Rule Dub" must be one of the best contenders for thee Ur-Dubstep track, maybe I'm showing my age (remembering the crazy old record dealer who tried to sell me Sequence on Sugarhill as Techno), but I can't hear the difference. In fact the Dub angle to the Warriors Dance stuff is well-documented, David Toop mentioning the label in his iconic A to Z of Dub in the May 1994 issue of The Wire.

Most interesting to me in 1992 was the recontextualisation of African music within Black Techno that was manifest on No Smoke's "Koro Koro" and their International Smoke Signal LP. For the first time there seemed practically nothing tackily "tribal" about the use of a sample of African (Bambara) singing. In Senegal we were told that "Koro Koro" meant "underground" and adopted it on all our flyers.

My pal Marcus at WARP forwarded an email from his tape enthusiast friend talking about some of his recent acquisitions, and I'll hope they won't mind me quoting it: "And my absolute favorite is that Soul All Dayer Of The Century album (also 1987) which has got Mike West on it as part of Beatfreak Sound mixing "Singing In The Rain" with digi reggae and DJ Ron cutting Pablo Gad's Hard Times into Planet Rock at half time to it. It is actually as close a moment to the birth of the idea of jungle as I've heard." Marcus paraphrased this is "jungle without the drum and bass" and that neatly encapsulates the vibe of the Warriors Dance stuff.

Posted by WOEBOT at 06:27 PM | Permalink

What a very strange outfit Holy Ghost Inc were! They first drew media attention in a very early Mixmag magazine feature on Intelligent Techno along with Mixmaster Morris, The Future Sound of London and Earth Leakage Trip (!) This was before WARP's canny yet elegant re-packaging of The Aphex Twin, The Black Dog, Autechre, B12, Speedy J and Richie Hawtin in the Artificial Intelligence series. Poor old Holy Ghost Inc though, they really missed the boat. It took until Tresor released a couple of their LPs "The Mind Control of Candy Jones" (1996) and "The Art Lukm Suite" (1997) for them to escape internal exile on their own label. If I remember those LPs were well received but fell through the cracks.

Quietly Holy Ghost Inc managed to put out a whole brace of classics which were, seemingly oblivious of their over-arching label identity, adopted by hilariously disparate scenes. Perhaps most improbably their foray into deep house "Walk On Air (Sun and Moon mix)" was picked up by David Mancuso and became that hallowed thing, a "loft classic", even going so far as appearing on Nuphonic's brilliant 2nd box-set compilation dedicated to enshrining Mancuso's vision. And it gets weirder, none other than Sven Vath was the most celebrated champion of the drone-Techno masterpiece "Mad Monks on Zinc" although it was also played to death by the London Techno Jocks Andy Weatherall, and "The Colins" (Faver and Dale). Given the generic breadth to this music that this already suggests, I suppose it's nothing short of remarkable that "Nice One Boy!", "Magnet" and "Psycho Missus" were staple choons on the Ardkore-dominated pirate airwaves.

This might imply that there was a stylistic breadth to their work. Not so! Each of these different tracks were but subtle tweaks on their sonic blueprint. Some are "heavier" the beats accented with harder breaks, some are "warmer" scored with piano riffs and featuring vocals but they all share similar sonic signatures, most notably stroboscopic riffs (often chopped-up vocals). However, What's instantly recognisable about Holy Ghost tracks is their extremely unusual feel for space-time. They appear to be more blank-eyed, more focussed on the infinite horizon than any other electronic music of their era, even their break-beats obey gravity. "Minimal" might be a misnomer given the hefty punch of these tracks, but they do succeed into tapping into that oneiric trance-like state independently of whatever mix they're embedded into, and usually it's "in the mix" that you'll find such states fostered. Only the Basic Channel tracks, which were released later, managed to cultivate the same atmosphere. Given their washing up on a Berlin label I suspect that Germany was listening closely.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:36 AM | Permalink

In 1992 Miami's Murk records blew up. Everywhere you went all manner of DJs were playing their records. At Techno club Pure I remember Derrick May caning Interceptor's "Together". House DJs like MAW and Junior Vasquez, catering for a scene just warming up to soft lushly emollient textures (Deep Dish and Wamdue were just around the corner), flipped over their belting-raw analogue b-lines and brittle punchy drums. Allegedly the Progressive House scene also embraced the records. Not only were their tracks rough, they managed to pull off the difficult feat of simultaneously sounding expensive. Murk was the aural equivalent of a Hummer.

The voices on Coral Way Chiefs "Release Myself", Funky Green Dogs from Outer Space's "High Up" and Intruder's "U Got Me" weren't those of saccharine divas or weedy geezers. Anonymously tagged as George Pugh or Mark M, but more often than not not even listed on the label, these were vocals in the grand tradition of disco. Closest in quality to those of the Loretta Holloways and Darryl Pandys of this world, the kind that people unfavorably compare with the beyatch Madonna*, these were voices with grain: worldly, sleazy and wide-girthed. Paired with Ralph Falcon and Oscar Gaetan's superbly hooky bass-lines and their quirky taste for samples (the 40-foot tall Manu Dibango on "Some Lovin" the ESG "Moody" riff on "Reach For Me") and the results were gigantic.

Murk busting out of Miami was the key to their misfit status within Dance Music. Apparently the duo fell back on their imaginations when it came to making House music, they'd never visited the Warehouse of The Paradise Garage. Succeeding in much in the way that Southern Hip-Hop did early this decade by sounding fresh by merit of getting it slightly wrong. House wasn't supposed to be this raw.

*who ironically they ended up remixing upon personal request...

Posted by WOEBOT at 12:23 PM | Permalink

Simon Reynolds made the single most perceptive remark made about the spectacularly intense evolution of dance music through the 1990s. Actually he might have been talking more specifically about Hardcore and Jungle, but YES, the journey was more interesting than the destination. Or indeed the destinations, because that's what we have with today's practically static genres. I'm finding Funky House interesting in 2007 because, as I said a couple of months ago, it seems content with the vaguest generic specification.

Musicians go on about not wanting to be pigeonholed. In the past I would tend to think to myself, c'mon kids, get with the program, but there is a balance to be struck. In its defense, generic music is never purposeless. It aspires to be listened-to and to be cared about. It can be made sense of within a field of music, and can be enjoyed for its own particular nuances within that field. However it seems like finally the whole world has grasped this fundamental truism and metaphorically-speaking we are left with a few big walled cities on a barren plain.

I hated Fungle, the music by Squarepusher, Spring Heeled Jack and Plug. Its claims of "outdoing" Jungle seemed hilariously wrong-headed. But over the last couple of years it has been the Dubstep fusions which have been most entertaining, not the real thing. The sublime tom-tom techno of Shackleton, Mordant Music's radiophonica and Various Productions deliberately ill-fitting "un-urban" chansons have bucked the trends for art music feasting on the body of utilitarian dance, by actually excelling their host.

Dance music in that decade was moving so fast sonically that more than a few entities were able to hitch a ride as fellow-travellers without there being a need to haul them out of the train. There was so much noise, so much flux, that if a record had a 4/4 beat people generally didn't ask questions. This week starting tomorrow I'm going to briefly focus on four of those entities.

Posted by WOEBOT at 06:16 PM | Permalink

I started listening to a lot of Donovan's music earlier in the year. I found a copy of the "Hurdy Gurdy Man" LP, and given how beastly I was about him here, I suppose it's surprising I picked it up.

"The Hurdy Gurdy Man" (Germany 1968)

The LP is a start-to-finish treat. Poised at the succulent junction of Pop, Folk and Jazz it is blessed with Donovan's preternatural knack for crafting catchy hooks, yet is at once decidedly un-poppy and beguilingly over-cast. The story of the song "Hurdy Gurdy Man" could be a microcosmic study of the pitfalls of the man's career. It's a defiantly heavy tune. Donovan's quivering phrasing of the lead vocal is twisted, even unhinged. It's one of the classic encapsulations of the souring of the hippy vibe, its drums are utterly savage (indeed are all the drums on this remarkably Hip-Hop-friendly LP), and yet it ends up being appropriated my Nigel Planer of 80s comedy act the Young Ones, Donovan seemingly complicit in his humiliation. There's not a bad track on the record, which is strafed with droning harmoniums, break-neck beatnik tabla (the Celtic Fringe weaving into the North African continuum) and brightened by John Cameron's (later of "Kes" notoreity) chamber-jazz orchestrations.

On one level Donovan's career was a disaster. His discography must be one of the most fractured ever, unlike that of his contemporaries The Rolling Stones and The Beatles, who managed to release commercially-tangible coherent LPs. Working with producer Mickie Most, who was famously disdainful of anything but the 7", Donovan compounded the chaos by endorsing different versions of LPs for the US and UK ("Mellow Yellow" for instance was combined with "Sunshine Superman" on one LP in the UK), in the case of "From A Flower to a Garden" putting out two LPs in a box-set replete with engravings and then allowing Clive Davis to split the double into two discreet offerings, an acoustic and electric set with them being released independently on its tail. The "Hurdy Gurdy Man" LP itself wasn't even available in the UK! The three records I've chosen here the ones you want.

"Mellow Yellow" (USA 1967)

You might shirk a little when you hear "Mellow Yellow", like I do, it's too cheery and has been used on too many adverts. But did you know it was orchestrated by Most's man, and soon-to-be Led Zeppelin bass-player John Paul Jones? The rest of the LP though is delicious. My personal favorite being the porous, almost electronically-abstract, "Sand and Foam" in which a seemingly incapacitated Donovan reflects, like a mottled mirror, the bleaching sunshine of Mexico. It contains one of my favorite lines ever: "Grasshoppers creaking in the jungle of the night, microscopic circles in the fluid of my sight". It's a shame that his previous years LP "Sunshine Superman" isn't better really, it falls prey to whimsy, though the title track is scorching. I'm almost ashamed to admit I first knew it as a Husker Du song.

"A Gift From A Flower to a Garden" (UK 1968)

Donovan's masterpiece is "From A Flower to a Garden". Talking to John Tobler he makes some serious claims for the packaging itself, supposedly it employed revolutionary printing techniques and was (by Donovan's account) the first box-set. I'm not sure to be honest, I can't believe neither Classical music (which exhibited a great fondness for the format) nor Moses Asch at Folkways didn't pip him to the post. Notwithstanding this the first "electric" LP is fabulous, sounding less like a period-piece than almost anything other I've heard recorded that year. "Mad John" must surely have been covered by The Happy Mondays?* "The Land of Doesn't Have To Be" is like riding a beam of sunlight, its organ ravishingly solarised; Donovan's vocal tics throughout are endlessly fascinating. "Wear Your Love like Heaven" is, well, just plain groovy. The acoustic LP, billed as songs for children, is lovely too, and certainly not different enough to merit being hewn off.

In recent years Rick Rubin tried to pull off "the Johnny Cash effect" with Leitch, but to no commercial avail. Donovan did the maddest thing at the end of the 1960s, jumping on a plane to Thailand and dropping-out with unnerving recklessness. I suspect he permanently lost touch with his muse at this point. Apparently his fleeing fucked up a tax dodge which his accountant had constructed for him, and effectively cost him a million quid. Lennon didn't really "drop out" did he? Next time you see archive footage of Donovan with The Beatles at Rishikesh, or escorting Dylan round London, don't scoff. I've come to the realisation that his queer manner, what comes across as supercilious arrogance, is but an awareness of his divine talent.

*Shaun Ryder married Donovan's daughter.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:56 PM | Permalink

The last in the current series of WOEBOT.tv is now up. "Last in the current series" is code for "never say never"- it's been a lot of fun to do, but unbelievably hard work. Around episode two I thought, oo-er, I've really bit off more than I can chew with this. I decided at that moment that twelve episodes would stretch me to breaking point. Six seemed like a very respectable compromise, and I set about trying to define what the footprint of a commissioned series would be with just six shows: A smidgen of theory, some retro-fetischism, an interview with a hot artist, a bit of musical tourism, a seasonal survey and a tour of someone's record collection.

As far as getting the show commissioned, I haven't really girded my loins and tackled that yet, however (and I can't believe there's much harm in telling, and I do so more out of trying to keep face, out of self-justification rather than pride) I have had the same people behind Dub-plate Drama rep the series to one of the chiefs of Music at Channel 4. I'm not sure what's happening with it right now, but in many ways I feel that even getting that far is pretty good, it feels like that was my best shot. In these instances one's not supposed to be subdued, the idea is to glow with self-promotional confidence, but I can't believe I'll have any luck.

I did have some disappointments in the course of the show. It was pretty sad not to be able to get more than a phone interview with Juana Molina; I mean! Also, I had an entire show, a feature on the club Love Saves The Day get flushed down the loo. I had some footage I shot at the night, the opportunity to use some really nice photos, co-opertion with the team behind the night, but I really needed an interview with David Mancuso to seal the deal. Without it there just wasn't a film there. Mancuso actually agreed, but at the last minute, I think either on the day, or the night before, decided he didn't want to do it. Part of it is the fact that people (and perhaps especially musicians) are extremely reluctant to get in front of a camera, the other was that I just didn't have any clout. At this juncture I'd like to extend my most heartfelt gratitude to Keith for agreeing to do the last show. He really didn't need to bother.

Finally, I'm a bit short of cash (winks), and this is duplicating what I put in the email mailout, but if you've enjoyed the series perhaps you'd like to buy a T-Shirt? I'm chucking in a FREE DVD with all the shows on it at high-resloution.

Posted by WOEBOT at 05:59 PM | Permalink

I'll have to confess that my Animal Collective groupie credentials were beginning to wane. I thought they'd let Arcade Fire mess with their mojo on "Feels" and actually Panda Bear's "Young Prayer" was the last thing I picked up from the camp. But given the mind-boggling power of "Person Pitch" I'm happy to admit I've stalked Noah across most of the western hemisphere.

No he doesn't actually know me, but I've thrust myself on him on a number of occassions. I first bumped myself into them at this set they did in the Rough Trade store in May 2003, blimey that's four years ago! I'm re-upping that bit of video here.

Later that year I inveigled my way into the playback party for "Here comes the Indian", once again accosting Noah. I also confess to ogling other celebrities at this event. Then a year or so later I shamelessly thrust myself at him at a gig they were playing at in Shoreditch. "Hi Noah! It's me!", "Er, have we met?" I've yet to camp outside his house and go through his rubbish, but at this rate anything is possible.

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:13 AM | Permalink

Buy Panda Bear's "Person Pitch" here. When you've listened to it 100 times download this mix.

-

Tracklisting:
The Linden Singers and the New World Show Orchestra: Jericho
Duke Ellington: Caravan
The Mighty Sparrow: Rope
Van Dyke Parks: Your Own Comes First
The Beach Boys: Let Him Run Wild
Eden Ahbez: Eden's Island
Putiki Youth Choir: Kau Rongorongo
Harry Hosono: Honeymoon
Julee Cruise: Rockin' Back Inside My Heart
Wally Badarou: Vesuvio Solo
Aksak Maboul: Scratch Holiday
Mouse on Mars: Stereomission
Blackbeard: Reflections
cLOUDDEAD: Unknown
David Fanshawe: Crucifixus
Les Troubadours du Roi Badouin: Kyrie
The Beach Boys: Hymn

Posted by WOEBOT at 09:08 AM | Permalink

I've been wanting to post these for ages! Not terribly much to say about them. Did you know that WOEBOT probably gets linked more because of the images I put up than for any other reason? I think that's quite nice really. I put up bigger and better sleeve shots than anyone else, and (sticks out chest) I'm proud of it.

Er, what should I say about these? The greater proportion of these I picked up in Paris. This series of LPs are without a doubt the best collection of Concrete (Avant-Garde music even?) available. The production is richer and more beautiful than their predecessors The Silver Records. There's a couple I'd still like to get yet, Jean Schwarz's "Symphonie" (which Gwen promised to get me...but failed miserably) and now Ivo Malec's "Sigma".

The Bayle is exquisite, it may seem offensively pedestrian of me to say, but it's almost ambient in its leanings. Parmegiani's "Dedans Dehors" is my personal favourite, perhaps less impressive than "De Natura Sonorum" but ravishing and fascinating, it's one of the only Avant-Garde records you could imagine playing to small children and them being engaged by it. The Mion was the first one I had, off Gwen in 1996, I subsequently tracked down and read Henri Michaux's book of the same name which I bought a translation of from George at Shakespeare and Company in Paris. George's daughter Sylvia Beach had translated it and we had a little chat about that. Chion's "Requiem" is supposed to be the square root of the Nurse With Wound records, Michel Chion is an interesting character, he wrote a very good book about David Lynch.

Posted by WOEBOT at 02:39 PM | Permalink

Yay. This is a bit of a fun. A whole catalogue of record covers and records (and a few CDs and cassettes as well) made by "artists".

The first problem being that the images are too small.

But its full of top scholarship, like this sleeve Salvador Dali did for onetime jazz journalist Jackie Gleason.

There's quite alot of this sort of thing. Monochromatic art gallery edition artwork. But Hermann does belong in here rightfully doesn't he!

But then it veers towards this stuff. I mean, Phillip Corner is a Minimalist musician, but does that necessarily make him an artist? And Joey Ramone wasn't?

And this, I mean, lovely cover and groovy band, but what on grounds does this merit inclusion?

I've never seen this one before! There are hundreds of moments when I thought Schraenen was going to miss something and he didn't. An impressive proportion of these are included.

This Andy Warhol sleeve for Diana Ross is too delicious.

Raymond Pettibon gets a look in, but maybe not a whole load of other auteurs of the record sleeve....because at the end of the day that's what he is. But I quibble!

It was nice to see this by Scottish Musician and Artist Alan Davie, a show of whose I saw a long time ago on Sauciehall Street.

Posted by WOEBOT at 03:35 PM | Permalink

I'll try and brief because these things can be boring. You've got all the famous Krautrock records, where do you go from there? I started researching this about six months ago, on a mission to show how German Prog was indivisible from what we know as "Krautrock" but I ended up confirming to myself the value of that seemingly arbitrary category.

Can, Faust, Neu!, Amon Duul, Popol Vuh, Ash Ra Tempel, The Cosmic Jokers; these bands really do embody what is most special about German music of the 1970s. All I've been able to do is discover how some tendencies, the influence of Folk music and crucially of Jazz are more important to the picture than the traditionally Rock-ist view would allow.

AR Machines: IV

AR Machines is the vehicle of Achim Reichel, who used to be in Germany's Beatles clones "The Rattles". This is probably his finest record. There's a similar tone on this to the muzzy-folk big-beat of Faust on "So Far". Indispensable.

Broselmaschine: Broselmaschine

Peter Bursch has a reputation as an excellent acoustic guitarist. He's written a famous teach-yourself book for the instrument. This was his band's debut, and along with Emtidi's "Saat" and Hölderlin's "Hölderlins Traum" is one of the "legendary" Kraut-folk LPs on the Pilz label. This record does get a tiny bit blanched-out, a bit derivative of the British Folk Revival, but something like "Gedanken" has enough in the way of bad-tripping on the Rhine, of wilting flowers, to fascinate. Nice.

Brainticket: Cottonwoodhill/Psychonaut

I'd been put off this for years by assuming it was that essentially unavoidable thing: German Prog (Triumvirat, Passport, Wallenstein). Actually it's deranged blues-rock; heavy without ever rocking-out, intensely structured, never devolving into improvisational whimsy. If it wasn't cloaked in Gong-like garb it'd be a front-runner for inclusion into the premier league. Great.

Floh De Cologne: Fliessbandbaby's Beat-Show

I've always wanted a Floh De Cologne record! Thanks to Gareth Cherrystone's excellent wide-ranging Krautrock article at FACT, I got my pointer. Gareth nails its attraction with a description of their "great repetitive riffs", clearly a bunch of politicos seizing guitars for propagandist aims, they nevertheless churn out great bierkeller pfunk. Groovy.

Kosmische Sampler

Bit of a cheat seeing as how it's a sampler of famous Kosmic stuff on the Ohr label: Popol Vuh, Klaus Schulze, Ash Ra Tempel and Tangerine Dream. But it's this archival concision of having just these "top boys" (so many Krautrock compilations are sullied by the addition of crap rock like Jane), and the ability to hear the Kosmic music manifesto spun out across the work of these four bands that makes this such an exquisite document. The packaging is an utterly beguiling re-tool of Escher as well, the gatefold sleeve opening out into a four page booklet. Yum.

Agitation Free: Malesch

Michael Hoenig and the boys' Egyptian road-trip. I've remarked before how the budget travel industry grew out of the expanded horizons of hippy culture, anyway the Germans have always been prodigious travelers. In India, besides the natives, I mainly came across Germans and Australians. There's but the very slightest influence of Egyptian music on this though, some snatches of ethnographic recordings, a smidgen of percussion. It's headphone tourism I suppose. Some lovely riffs here though, like it's successor "2nd" it's at its best when the band is in Quicksilver Messenger mode, like on the fab title track for instance. Nice.

Hans-Joachim Roedelius: Durch Die Wuste

The Roedelius cult, honorable initiates being electronic music guru Jon Leidecker and label boss Seb Morlu, have it that this is one of the man's greatest solo efforts. It's a mixed-bag of driving rock, synth and drum work-outs and ambient interludes, that perhaps hasn't quite arrived at the low-key as modus-operandi of his later stuff. On the plus-side the variety is engaging. Not bad.

Xhol Caravan: Electrip

If you skirt the origins of Krautrock, more often than not you'll find practitioners involved in Jazz. Jaki Liebezeit was a member of Manfred Schoof Free-Jazz quintent, and Mani Neumeier and Uli Trepte (the square root of Guru Guru) were in swiss pianist Irene Schweizer's Trio. This excellent Xhol Caravan LP, often described as Proto-Kraut, comes on like an electrified version of Dave Brubeck's "Take Five", all weird shuffling near-Chamber-Jazz riddims. Brill.

Yatha Sidhra: A Meditation Mass

This is a revelation, I was stoked to be able to score an original vinyl copy with the LP's name die-cut from out of the gatefold cover, revealing an illustration from the Tibetan Book of The Dead, right there a delicious mash-up of Pop Art and hippy spirituality. On first few listenings this glid right past my ears, but slowly the tom-toms acquire a totemic weight, the flute (again from within the Jazz idiom) becomes grave. It slowly dawned on me that this melancholic, metronomic music is precisely the sound Neu! would have made had they not been fired up on amphetamines. Fantastic.

Embryo: Rocksession

My LP doesn't have its cover unfortunately. I don't have any other Embryo LPs, there's a good history at Gnosis and a nice fan's perspective at this guy's site. What one's listening to is the interface between the heavyweight German Jazz/Fusion label MPS/Saba and German rock. Like Embryo, characters such as Niagara's Klaus Weiss and Wolfgang Dauner (who would probably be in here if I liked his stuff) also straddle the divide between German Jazz and Rock. I suppose the equivalent axis in Britain is the Keith Tippett/Soft Machine nexus. To be honest I don't know what all the fuss is about with this band. OK they have chops, and I'm sure there are breaks to be sampled here, but unlike something like Hatfield and The North who really made electric Jazz their own, this doesn't have any atmosphere. Pleasant enough, I suppose.

So, yeah, there it is.

Posted by WOEBOT at 05:29 PM | Permalink

Sure, the LP is out. But don't miss this mix which is being hosted by the Barcelona-based Online Radio site Musicvictem. There's some just wonderful stuff in there, unreleased Ghost Box things, Ray Cathode's amazing "Waltz in Orbit" (a legendary BBC Radiophonic single by Beatles producer George Martin), the likes of Caravan, Bill Fay and Harmonia which all throw different lights on the Ghost Box catalogue.

There's even a selection from Lubos Fiser's Soundtrack to "Valerie and her Week of Wonders". In refuge from the rain at The Green Man festival I saw this projected in a dark and musty marquee. This movie is bananas, utterly dream-like. The soundtrack has just been reissued by Andy Votel's Finders Keepers label, and I suspect they probably masterminded that projection off some Czechoslovakian Betamax cassette.

Posted by WOEBOT at 04:03 PM | Permalink

I picked up the reissue of P.I.L's "Second Edition" from, fittingly enough, the Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street when it came out in 1987. I think it was Loop who turned me on to the LP. I was listening to their brilliant "Heavens End" repeatedly; I must have seen them live about 5 times.

But until the other day I've never had a copy of, you know, the beast, Metal Box. I've come across it from time to time, and passed. That's the thing when you get older isn't it, you have a bit more money, and you finally pick up the things you wanted when you were younger. Apparently that's what has happened all down the 'nuum too, fans reaching back five years and picking up the legendary records they never had the funds to collect when they were teenagers.

It's a shame that the record doesn't have an edition number, like The White Album, because you can't start a thread on a forum entitled: "What's the serial number of your Metal Box?" The critics say the low-end on it packs a punch, and they're not lying. Wobble's bass is like an oil tanker. The deck upon which the band is playing. There are lovely things about the format of the three tinned twelve inches*. Possibly the nicest is the end of "Death Disco".

On the twelve inch this is a very long track, but on Metal Box it cuts at the lines "Words Can Not Express" and then that section loops. The bass does this funky little Nile Rodgers-esque run and repeats four times. In tandem the synth trills cheaply like off a Freeze single. It's the only remotely Disco-like bit in the whole song, which is widely-known to be about the death of John Lydon's mother.

However the clincher is that straight after this craftily constructed, almost humorous coda, comes another loop. This time however it's as blank-eyed and bleak as it could possibly be. Cutting perpendicularly across the track's rhythm and even mocking the frivolity of the preceding cycle, it's built using the run-out groove of the vinyl itself. All one hears is Lydon going "aaahess", no sense at all, and the needle stuttering in the groove. Genius, and one of the great run-out grooves of all time, up there with "A Day in the Life" and "Madonna, Sean and Me". Needless to say this doesn't make it to "Second Edition" or the CD reissue. Listen to it here.

When I got home, I scratched my head, and realised with satisfaction that I also had a couple of other early Metal Box-era P.I.L twelve inches. I paid nothing whatsoever for these slabs of noise. It was nice to put them in a little pile together and kind of fondle them all. The first, the "Death Disco" twelve inch, is the full-length studio version of the track that's cropped mid-way on the LP. The b-side called "Megga Mix" is a re-working of "Fodderstompf" from the first LP. Apparently the whole first LP was re-worked this way, but this is the only track that ever saw the light of day. That's sort of intriguing.

The other Metal Box-era twelve inch is "Memories", again with exquisitely bleak artwork made up of photos taken of Lydon and Jeanette Lee by Dennis Morris. "Memories" is a stronger mix than the version that appears on Metal Box, the b-side a version of "Graveyard" with vocals on, which to my mind is inferior to the instrumental.

*There's a bad thing too. It's bloody difficult to get the records out of the tin.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:19 PM | Permalink

Even though I suppose I could have claimed some edge on the hipsterati, what with liking Gorillaz "Demon Dayz", I completely failed to get The Good The Bad and The Queen. I was turned off by the Dadrock PR around the group. The legends of rock super-group thing is, on paper at least, a yawn. I listened to the record at a post at the Rough Trade shop and didn't hear what Barney Hoskyns and Simon Reynolds were raving about. Persistent I downloaded it off Soulseek but failed to get past the second track. However driving up to Glasgow in my van tout-seul, the songs on a loop, a full ten hours on the road and it really sunk in.

I first listened to it before Birmingham right after The Cosmic Joker's "Galactic Supermarket" and that record's clangorous, echoaic, seemingly illogic cacophony worked perfectly as an intro to TGTBATQ. Albarn and his crew have made a very Krautrock-ish sort of record. The LP's quite remarkable highlight "Herculaneum" for instance sounds like a cut off Harmonia's "Deluxe", the choir even sounding like a tape-loop on one of Klaus Schulze's Mellotrons. There's so much begging to be said about this track. As its towering production engulfs Albarn, his voice reduced to a sonar pulse flickering from its depths, one is presented at once with a metaphor for London as Atlantis (the LP is littered with with references to the Thames, tidal waves, submarines etc) and a picture of Damon, Dennis Wilson-style, trying to drown his ego. I suppose that's quite a self-important parrallel to make, between the fate of the world and one-self, but he doesn't seem to present it in a way that's arrogant, merely as the matter-of-fact reflection of the global in the personal.

There's been this same tension in the Gorillaz work, with Damon sinking himself further and further into the mix, taking an unassuming third place to Jamie Hewlett's drawings and Dangermouse's beats, but regardless his personality rises spectrally above that project. In contrast, Nick Cave's ensemble, the gruesomely unattractive Grinderman thing (eugh, lose the moustache Nick), seems like a calculated move. What I keep wondering is how Albarn ended up so seeming so unhappy, even, perhaps by meriting of whining like a curr, sounding like Thom Yorke on "The Bunting". I've seen him up close in recent years too and that bore out my impression that he's, well, slightly sad. Maybe there are personal reasons, but equally perhaps he just feels publicly stigmatised. After all, in spite of the Gorillaz success, he's been widely loathed and ridiculed; that's bound to affect a person. I do think it is ironic that with TGTBATQ he's created just the sort of LP that Noel Gallagher would give his right arm to have made.

Tony Allens' is a very interesting presence on the record. You'd think his Afro-Beat chops would have been used to propel the band, that they'd sit squarely at the back of the band, but not at all. His contributions are almost always textural, and are positioned right at the centre of the gigantic ensemble sound, perhaps even more central than Damon. On a track like "Kingdom of Doom" he's all but inaudible. I don't think this is just a case of the band failing to get behind him, it's a very interesting production choice.

I just loved this record. Yes it was nice to flash on things I've enjoyed in the past in a renewed, but more complex way, records like (crucially) Madness's "Rise and Fall", which we caned as kids, and Big Audio Dynamite's first LP but also hip stuff like Vivienne Goldman's "Lauderette" (the key "messed-up" London text) and Patrick Fitzgerald. But mainly it's just such a delicious sonic feast, I can't wait till I get my greasy mitts on the vinyl. I saw this funny thing on The Antiques Roadshow the other night, some Glaswegian dude playing his collection of Singing Bowls in the Kelvingrove art gallery. When he starts to scrape, you just hear this rusty scraping sound, but in a minute or so this great pulsating cloud of harmonics starts to hover, almost menacingly in the air. TGTBATQ is like that, by the end your head is ringing.

Posted by WOEBOT at 06:49 PM | Permalink

Former Germs drummer and legendary Avant-Garde Record Collector Don Bolles is in trouble. Read on:

This past Wednesday night Don Bolles suffered a bizarre and unfortunate interception with the Newport Police Department. He was stopped for a broken tail light. We believe his unconventional looks and old army green van made him the victim of police profiling in this very affluent, quiet town. They searched his van. The only thing they found was a bottle of Dr Bronner's soap. If you are a good friend of Don's, you know this is the only cleaning agent he uses for every thing from tooth paste to laundry detergent. The police ran a drug field test on the soap and it came up positive. Dr. Bronner's is made with hemp seed oil. Maybe this is the reason behind the arresting officer's error. I spoke with someone who is familiar with forensic drug tests. They said the field test is not absolutely accurate. There are two other drug tests that need to be conducted on the soap. Also, the drug they are ascertaining that Don is in possession of is unusable in a soap base. He is being charged with a felony. His bail is $25,000. He could get up to 20 years in prison. This is very serious. Through a bail bonds company it is 2,500 dollars. Currently we have roughly 1,000 dollars. He is now being held at the Orange County jail. This is not a safe place for Don.

With all my heart I do believe Don is innocent. I talked to the Police yesterday at the holding facility. Their attitude was harsh. This is truly a horrible and sad incident. I spoke with Don a number of times. He is in utter disbelief that this is happening to him. We are asking friends if they could make a contribution of 10-20 dollars or more to help get him out of jail as soon as possible so he can seek legal assistance. Please make contributions to the paypal account below. Also, if anyone knows of a lawyer that can donate their services, please contact me as soon as possible. I spoke with criminal lawyers yesterday and their fees are unbelievably high. Please repost this on your bulletin if your network of friends can help. - Nora

Paypal and contact email:deernora@yahoo.com

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

I've had a burgeoning fascination with a certain nook of British music at the very tail-end of the 1960s. This must have something to do with having recently read four books which leave perpendicular tracks across the territory. Joe Boyd's recently published "White Bicycles", Ian Macdonald's "Revolution in the head", George Melly's under-rated "Revolt into Style: The Pop Arts in Britain" and Nik Cohn's unimpeachable "AwopBopaLooBopALopBamBoom".

Julie Driscoll, Brian Augur and The Trinity: Streetnoise (1969)

Cohn remarks right at the tail-end of his classic book (tellingly on page 228 of 229):

"During the same period there also emerged Julie Driscoll and Joe Cocker and The Incredible String Band. Julie Driscoll is a skinny girl from east London and she toured the circuits for years without getting anywhere in particular, until autumn 1967, she suddenly got herself a Jimi Hendrix hairstyle and called herself Jools and was launched as a new ultimate in London dollydoom, deadpan and strange and very freaked.....Joe Cocker was a fat ex-plumber from Sheffield and I liked him very much......Finally purely in my role as a chronicler, I should note the existence of the Incredible String Band, a folk duo whom several English critics described as the best songwriters since The Beatles. This mention made I will make no further comment."

There's a great sense with these paragraphs of the book's author standing at the very precipice of the 1960s, and without the benefit of hindsight, trying to offer up a definitive view of the decade. These acts merit inclusion on the same criteria that much of the rest of its contents do, that they were the manifestation of the buzz on the ground, but Cohn hasn't had a chance to digest them.

Melly's take on precisely this same era is also caught up in rabidly trying to codify an era which has yet to be inscribed in history. He surveys a broader view of the scene from the "extreme avant-garde fringe" (The* Pink Floyd and the Soft Machine) to the "Rabble Rousers of Quality" (The Cream and Jimi Hendrix). Melly also includes Driscoll and The Incredible String Band:

"But I could never see the point of the other great Underground rave of the period - Brian Augur and the Trinity with Julie Driscoll ('Jools' to the vast army of the uninitiated). She looked fey and sexy in the proscribed outer-space manner and swore a great deal if the dots in the interviews she gave were anything to go by, but she sang in such a cool little voice that I suspected it was to hide a total lack of any feeling at all.....There were other tendencies sheltering under the Underground's umbrella. The folk-poetic strain held its own headed by the Incredible String Band."

The Incredible String Band: The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter (1968)

I think Melly too, good critic that he is, is reacting to the groundswell of hype pumping these artists. There is a sense of a vacuum opening up in the music scene, one being created at once by the death of the counter-culture and the inexorable demise of The Beatles. Paul McCartney made "The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter" his favorite record of 1968 and also arranged a "a session" with Brian Augur that same year. You get the sense that Paul felt these artists were snapping at his heels. But with hindsight who for a second would put ISB and the Oblivion Express on the same pedestal as The Beatles?

AMM: The Crypt (1968)

After "Revolution 9" and the rest of The Beatles experimental output British musicians must have felt there was suddenly a proper audience for the outre. "Czechoslovakia" from Streetnoise for instance has a widly avant-garde "free" section, no doubt intended to depict the chaos as Soviet tanks entered Prague. Julie Driscoll took the these tendencies further, married Keith Tippett and released the Prog-Jazz LP "1969".

McCartney had connections to another "free music" project. He'd tapped a coin against a radiator at an AMM get-together and even before "Revolution 9" with the unreleased "Carnival of Light" The Beatles had attempted a free music of their own. Ian Macdonald complains:

"The major discovery of his interaction with the mid-sixties classical and Jazz Avant-Garde was 'random' - the realisation that chance elements, with which The Beatles had already casually toyed, could produce striking results when actively sought after. The difference was that AMM - following the contemporary ideal of transcending the ego specialised in a sensitive form of collective improvisation in which players not only listened intently to each-other but interacted spontaneously with everything around them, including their audiences. In "Carnival Of Light", The Beatles merely bashed about at the same time, overdubbing without much thought, and relying on the Instant Art techniques of tape echo to produce something suitably far-out."

White Noise: An Electric Storm (1969)

The search for a "far-out" music which was "workable", in the way that the uncompromising AMM and Tippets projects could never hope to be, also made the scene ripe for another record which aimed to tap the freak market. The £3000 that Chris Blackwell gave to David Vorhaus, Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson to concoct the White Noise LP was just such a probing bit of music industry research and development. The agent of change here was, not a revision of Folk, the aleatory, or Jazz but electronics and studio manipulation.**

Although it may seem wrong-headed and cruel, and please bear with me, it'd be tempting to view each and every one of these records as a failure. Not only did none of them sell many copies, they seemed to have no immediate cultural impact. The ISB's glorious "Hangman's Beautiful Daughter" might be the exception, reaching number 5 in the charts, but what followed it was some kind of disaster as Joe Boyd explains:

"(after the band refused to take the stage in the rain) We knew we had blown it; the extent of the error became clear in the months to come as the Woodstock film reached every small town in America and the double album soared to the top of the charts. Had they played in the rain that night, would they have made the cut in the film and on the record? I had nightmares about the might-have-beens: the ISB gloriously recapturing the acoustic spontaneity of their early years, their songs and voices perfect for the magical first night, their careers transformed by the exposure."

Boyd also discusses their later doomed trajectory, the blame of which he partly lays at the feet of L.Ron Hubbard:

"Scientology is not designed to engineer timidity....The group refused to contemplate the notion of failure and "U" (their stage musical) went ahead full-speed. The fact that it was a disaster artistically, critically and financially failed to dent their confidence, but it hastened my search for new challenges."

Brian Augur also seemed unable to capitalise on the momentum he had attained with Julie Driscoll. The Oblivion Express records of the 1970s are solid enough, loyal organ-led amplified Jazz, but they're nothing whatsoever on the glittering trans-generic triumph of "Streetnoise".

King Crimson: In the Court of the Crimson King (1969)

In his wrap-up Melly touches on another band who for me embody the very whiff of this era, the early King Crimson:

"Mainstream Underground music is for the most part the tough prolonged blues-inflected style with its roots in the Britsh Blues revival on the one hand and American acid/rock on the other, It's been comparatively static now for the last eighteen month - only the heroes change..... Currently (August 1969) they include Jethro Tull, the Family and this month's big deal, King Crimson; but in six months?"

It's surely King Crimson who provided the signpost to an ambitious music with a broad appeal. It was Prog's re-tooling of Classical music which provided the route forward to those "grown-up" music fans. I spent a lot of time last year praising Prog, and that probably disguised just how horrific I still find the music of Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Yes, Genesis and Jethro Tull. Perhaps it *was* the wrong path? Notwithstanding that I find it strange how accurate a picture of the entire music-scape of 2007 just these five records present. Listened together furthermore, they present a fantastic aural hallucination of what life must have been like in England, London even, at the cusp of the 1970s.

* The definite article is charmingly anachronistic doncha think.
** Not forgetting McCartney's trips to see Derbyshire at the BBC.....

Posted by WOEBOT at 04:03 PM | Permalink

It's been with not inconsiderable relish that I've been listening to Funky House recently. It does amuse me that nearly everything that's used to describe it pejoratively is used as a compliment when used to refer to other genres. Martin Clark for instance has made great play of it being geographically rootless, and this has been widely picked up by just about every other commentator. But hang on a minute, we're supposed to applaud Dubstep when it hails from Canada or New Zealand or somewhere else notionally "Global", but that very same quality in Funky House makes it despicable? Come on! They're both equally "underground" a phenomenon, though don't think for a second I'm making a case for any music on the strength of that, though I suppose Dubstep might sell marginally less.

Does anyone remember the heyday of early Acid and chart-busting Pop-Rave, when Belgian proto-Gabba jostled in the mix with Italian Piano House, London art-squat-wannabe-house and Chicago hip-house? Back then the music's origin was generally seen to be totally irrelevent. So why is it so important today? The audience for House has dwindled to such a degree that, like in 1989-90 the same wildly divergent strands aren't once again forced to share the same stage. Some would argue that the proliferation and endless multiplication of dance music genres has reached a point where the sense in the generic distinctions has actually started to break down. This probably happened five years ago in truth, but nowadays, really. Funky House is interesting in this context because it's quite self-consciously an umbrella term to draw together a mongrel coalition of Electro-Techno-Disco-House whose sole shared agenda which is to drive the dance-floor. That motorising ambition isn't to be sniffed at in an era when it seems nobody is dancing. Back in the day people really danced. Hence the "Funky" appendage I guess, inspiring folk to frug off their inertia, cynicism and self-conciousness.

I couldn't argue an aesthetic case for 90% of Funky House, but even that faintly crap 90% (consisting as it does of fifth generation Strictly Rhythm off-cuts) is about, ooh, lets say 1000 times more interesting than most Dubstep just by merit of having a pulse, by aiming to be entertaining. Most current dance music has died a death of good taste and assumed sophistication. The Kompakt thing for instance, Jesus that sleek Mittel-European noodling is boring, you can't imagine people losing control or getting sweaty can you, they might spill their Martinis, get a cocktail stick in their eyeball. They're all too busy networking and taking photos of one another. No wonder most kids want to listen to guitar music!

The best Funky House is mucky stuff like Dirty Old Ann's "Turn Me On" (Phunkk Mob Remix), a hoarse knackered old diva (I think it may be a remix of the Three Degrees) over a colonically challenging electro bass-line. The tune rolls at, I dunno I guess about 140 bpm, a totally no-nonsense butt-shaking kind of tempo. Production has got so large on these records that the bass has real girth and it needs that kind of low-level velocity just to fit on the groove. And there's none of that twatting around with the lower frequencies either, that woah check out that bass-line geezer rubbish, the bass rolls at an ultra-satisfying pitch where it's crisply audible, its edges are punchy and focussed. Something like Leonid Rudenko's "Summerfish" (Scandall Sunset on Ibiza Mix) is another fantastic example, it's a completely addictive euphoric groove.

The bass-line on another of my favorite tunes Robot Needs Oil's "Volta" is another lesson is the joy of bass as lead instrument. I can't help but admit that the reason this rocks my soul is that it uses exactly the same kind of divinely instantaneous riff that lit up the great old Acid House tracks. The early A Guy Called Gerald tunes spring to mind immediately, especially as the way the hook is passed back and forth across various palettes. Remember those old intensifying climaxes that used to get so boring in dance music? Well Funky House has ripped up the rule book and nowadays these interludes are scripted with delicious inventiveness, spiraling into billowing gaseous clouds, tunes turning inside out, divas bursting out of imploding stars. Wilder & Clarke's "Stand Up" (featuring Katherine Ellis) on which the absurdly fruity choir of multi-tracked gospel delirium sits atop an insanely rough electro bass-line, undercutting all one's textural expectations, is practically a dictionary of these effects. Funky House at its best makes a complete mockery of the portentous riddimic theorising of Dubstep or Micro-House by actually out-stepping it in practice without resorting to drawing the listener into a state of emotional torpor. Tocadisco's splendid "I like it Loud" with it's idiot James Brown vocal hook, is infinitely more engrossing than almost all Techno made of the same base material.

It seems like last year was some kind of watershed. Primarily owing to the entropic subsidence of the initial energy flash of dance music. The end of the dance music continuum as a history which had internal consistency happened with Bruza's "Get Me" (2005) which surely must mark the apogee, and thus conclusion of Grime's aesthetic evolution. Grime being the final chapter in Acid House. What this also signaled was the end of one's ability to use the critical narrative around Acid House to generate useful meanings or allow one to make aesthetic predictions or judgments.

The generational loyalty to Dubstep (or Micro-House) is akin to clinging onto the Raft of the Medusa, even as planks are breaking away from the wreckage. The amusingly tipped Blog House phenomenon is just another example of how historiography in the form of crash-course histories of House has artificially created a new generation of aimless fans. To stretch my nautical analogy further, this is like charting a schooner to drop you off on the Raft of the Medusa. It's tempting to include here The Wire magazine's endorsement of Dubstep into the litany of crimes committed in the name of specious, bourgeois, pseudo-historical engineering**. Funky House, this utterly a-historical, response-centered music might be the antidote to the tedious over-inscription that has stripped everything from dance music which once made it innovative, interesting and fun, a chastening return to the fundamental pleasure principles.

* Something like the Burial LP for instance is a purely retrograde move.
** Dry-docking the raft of the Medusa and treating its timbers.

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:37 PM | Permalink

This set contains an unfailingly excellent selection of music, however it's a more muddled proposition as far as provenance is concerned. Ibrahima Sylla, the man behind the collections, is one of the giant behind-the-scenes figures of African music. He was supremo of the legendary Syliphone Conakry label of Guinea, one of the peerless labels on any continent. The original Editions Syliphone sell for huge quantities nowadays. The quite superb second volume of this collection, with its frequently politically-inflammatory, heavy, almost "garage-band-like" recordings, is drawn from his extensive back catalogue.

I think it's quite appropriate that the discs covering Senegal and Mali are presented alongside this material. For one thing the same ethnic groups co-inhabit these three closely-grouped countries. National boundaries are but lines drawn on the map in comparison to the strength of the tribal affiliations of the Bambara, Peulhs, Dogon, Manding etc. There's a distinct continuity of sound between the three sets as well. The Afro-Cuban influence tends to be heard most strongly in the Sengalese music, residing as that country does at the Westernmost point of the continent. The same kinky horn parts, when they wind up in Timbuktu, are distinctly weirder-sounding.

In contrast the music on the Malian disc sounds bizarrely more "American" (peculiar to ascribe regional ethnicity to that country). As is well known, the Mississippi Delta Blues has uncanny resonances with the music of the desert griots. If I might be permitted to digress briefly, I always remember with great satisfaction mis-hearing a dancehall track in on the radio in Dakar (the capital of Senegal) confusing it with an indigenous song merely on the strength of the familiarity of its tuning within its supplanted context, quite like passing through a mirror backwards. The 1970s-era, amplified desert rock of Mali often manages to resemble the electric blues juggernaut of The Grateful Dead or The Allman Brothers Band, guitar solos to boot, albeit in a fascinatingly bizarre fashion.

Sylla licensed the Malian material from their government in 1987. This amounted to to two volumes of five LPs which the Malian goverment curated for the "First Young People's Artistic and Cultural Biennale of 1970". Before you reach for your gun, it ought to be stressed that the Malian Government undertook a courageous experiment to record this music. Without their efforts there would be no Radio Mali and precious little music recorded at all. Mali's legendary Rail Band were the exception to the rule in that they weren't managed by the Ministry of Culture but by the Railway Board of Mali. The quality of the material on the Mali disc is fabulous though this will be the second time Sylla has released it. Previously it was to be found on the double CD collections "Banzoumana" and "Sira Mory".

The Senegalese discs showcase music influenced by the ideas of "Negritude". This movement, spearheaded by Leopold Senghor, sought to redefine a Modern African culture. As the 1970s progressed, Senegalese musicians sought to mute the influence of imported forms like Rumba and Salsa and to focus more on the music of their own heritage. It would be a simplification to say this was a drive towards "folkiness" in the traditional Western sense, as it went hand-in-hand with a self-consciously experimental attitude towards intra-african fusion (this is marked in the Malian recordings as well, on which young people from very different ethnic backgrounds sought to create a manageable fusion) as well as embracing modern recording techniques. A project like America's legendary cross-Latin fusion project Grupo Folklorico Y Experimental Nuevoyorquino would be a very good comparison.

The cuckoo here is the collection of Congolese recordings. Drawn from a much smaller pool of artist's recordings, miles away from the other three countries in the Central African belt. It's a quite charming collection, if consisting of a safer, distinctly Afro-Cuban vein of music. Regardless of this anamoly, I thoroughly recommend all four discs and they're available at Sterns.

Posted by WOEBOT at 03:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I said I'd done loads of research on Glitter, but actually I just bought these CDs off Amazon. I wanted to check out Glam because scenius-wise it's up there with Ardkore and the best of them. It seems to make a lot more sense to reference Glam with regards to it than Nuggets-era proto-punk. It's hard to think of anything grubbier than Pop music which failed to be popular, another thing the arse-end of glitter shares with Ardkore, yet it's that alchemical mud-to-gold moment that fascinates, when the most unlikely of sonic circumstances fuse unexpectedly offering up sudden glimpses of the sublime. Granted, it doesn't happen terribly often. Wouldn't you say picking up bits and pieces of Glam from Oxfam seems about a thousand times more refreshing an activity than buying minimal-synth obscurities off eBay?

Velvet Tinmine (RPM, 2003)

The first of these compilations through the gate and the best. Something like Iron Virgin's "Rebels Rule" for instance is up there with the absolutely best of Glam Rock, namely Gary Glitter's "Hello! Hello! I'm Back Again", his "Rock and Roll Part Two", T.Rex pre-1973, Ziggy, and Slade's best (let's not forget Lester Bangs was a fan of Noddy's crew). Velvet Tinmine is also particularly good at taking on board the, shall we say, sexually complex. I'm in thrall of Shakane's "Love Machine" with it's wonderfully dejected chorus: "I am just your love machine, baby, you don't how hard it's been, you turn me on when you when you want me, when you don't I'm not your scene." Also oddities like "Morning Bird", with a drum machine that reminds me that it's the fuzzed-out bargain-basement glam-(gloom?)-stomp of some quarters of the forthcoming Focus Group LP that switched me on to this trip in the first case.

Glitter from the Litter Bin (Sanctuary 2003)

Like Velvet Tinmine, this involves St.Etienne's Bob Stanley again, though this is on the Sanctuary label, rather than RPM. RPM's Mark Stratford alluded to some friendly rivalry between the two in an email to me. Yes, ME. They talk, I listen. Unlike Velvet Tinmine which seems to have Stanley's quirky taste writ large all over it, this must have been a contract job for him. There are many good tracks, but it in general it's more straight-forwardly raunchy, notwithstanding Billy Hamon's hilariously camp "Butch Things". In his liner-notes Stanley amusingly thumbs Junk Shop Glam's defining moment: "Mud's performance of 'The Cat Crep In" from the film Never Too Young to Rock, in a transport cafe".

Glitterbest (RPM, 2004)

There's an amazing amount of music with pre-punk resonances being made under the auspices of Glam. It's where all the T.Rex-style talk of "Revolution" conjoins with Punk's barely less cosmetic revolt. A lot of it, like Trevor White's "Crazy Kids" off "Glitterbest" is all about, you know, brokking out in the playground. Dem grown-ups just don't unnerstan. The comic thing is that, lacking the venom of punk, this music sounds incredibly like Guitar-Indie circa 2007. The New York Dolls-ish swagger of it (Rolling Stones beaming back across the Atlantic) making the music sound even more like Razorlight. Quite a few transatlantic accents here as well. That's hardly a compliment is it? But it does give some historic perspective to current Indie Rock which sounds mostly like it was the virgin-birthed progeny of the marketing department. I suppose this kind of revisionism also serves to demolish any sort of idea of rupture in history at all. In some ways it'd be more fruitful to actually question what made something like Punk differ; though it's all quite fun in a sloppy, cheerfully crap sort of way, and the liner-notes are insanely thorough.

Boobs (RPM, 2005)

With all of RPM's comp's bleeding into each-other stylistically, the handclaps here must denote "disco", likewise there is an anthemic quality to the tracks selected for this particular CD (stand-up and stomp "Motor Boat" and "Natural Gas"), riffs strut. Occasionally it gets a little bit Freddie Mercury (those radio-frequency-compressed vocal harmonies on Angel's "Good Time Fanny") even a bit Rocky Horror Picture Show on Screemer's admittedly great "Interplanetary Twist". But there are maybe just enough touches of the improbable to compensate, like the insane, monocled, fox-hunting purr of the lead-vocalist of the Boston Boppers. You were conceived behind the speakers.

Posted by WOEBOT at 06:31 PM | Permalink

Will this be the third cover I've seen for this or just the second? Certainly the best so far, though the others were lovely as well... If you believe what the Ghost Box site says this will, AT LOOOONG LAAAST, be available on 21st March. It's turning into "Smile" or something this record I think. Someone should just break into Ghost Box HQ, beat them in, steal the reel-to-reel and put it out. All profits paid directly eBay, just cut out the middle-man, right? Seriously, they'd be doing a everyone a favour.

Posted by WOEBOT at 01:32 PM | Permalink

I'm a big fan of Edu Lobo's. He's one of the artists who I've suddenly discovered I have a lot of records by. He's sort of snuck up on me. There's a good bit about him at the always excellent Slipcue site. Chronologically then.

Edu Lobo/Tamba Trio "Arrastao/Reza" (Philips, 1965)

Sort of flies in one ear and out the other. Sophomore effort. My friend Flashos bought me this single.

Edu Lobo "Edu" (Philips, 1967)

This on the other hand is fucking fantastic. Edu really hits his stride. What I like about Edu is the tenor of voice. He's not wallowing in himself like Jobim. He shares the same sophisticate inclinations, not for nothing did I describe him once as "the Brazilian Bryan Ferry" (who incidentally has just released an LP called "Dylanesque"- what do you make of that Mark?). There's a very self-assured masculine gentility to his voice that I really respond to. Hell, I wish I was that person: cool, tough, sophisticated and kind all at once. Rather than being a slightly hysterical nut-case I guess! Still we've a way to go before his classic records.

Edu Lobo "Sergio Mendes Presents Edu Lobo" (A&M, 1970)

OK, a bit of a step backward. Sergio tries to sell him to Hollywood. I guess it only happened because Edu had so much talent. Sad when he starts to sing in English on "Crystal Illusions" and "To Say Goodbye". Still there are some lovely tunes here, some exquisitely shaded melodies and the playing is typically wonderful, breezy and light-of-touch. Perhaps unsurprisingly there are quite a few tracks here which are duplicated on the Brazilian records, but on the other hand there are touches of the experimentation that characterises his next three sublime classics.

Edu Lobo "Cantigua De Longe" (Elenco/Polygram, 1970)

Shivers. Lobo on the flight home sitting in Business Class with his shades on. This is his black and blue riposte to the barbecue and cocktail lilt of LA bullshit. It's back to basics baby, let's-get-down-with-the-fucking-programme time. Strictly speaking there's no such thing as a depressing Brazilian record, but this is as over-caste as it gets. Lobo as Dark Magus, it's even arguable that by getting fellow countrymen Hermeto and Airto on-board, fresh from Miles's "Live Evil" sessions, he's consciously reflecting back that spooked third-world voodoo.

Edu Lobo "Misse Breve" (EMI/Odeon, 1973)

You need this LP, the former and latter but "Misse Breva" is certainly my favorite. I hope I'm conveying the centrality and importance of Lobo's work. Occasionally I fret that people might think WOEBOT is deliberately obscurantist. Actually I have no truck whatsoever with that instinct. I see these mp3 blogs dedicated to chasing down these narrow blind alleys (deep into the recesses of that ruddy Nurse With Wound list) and I sigh. It's amazing how the obscurantists have managed to overtake the mainstream! Votel and Finders Keepers, the daring Mr Trunk, The Wire magazine, the Vinyl Vultures family- they all do amazing work, but sometimes I fear that the opposition has grown too strong, perhaps at the expense of a balanced perspective of the field of music.

With the slow discrediting of Post-Modernism we've lost one of the great qualities of music journalism, that (for instance) David Toop was able to close "Ocean of Sound" by discussing Kate Bush and the then commercially-orientated David Sylvian (scoffs). Part of the fun was rubbing the mass-market icons against the unknown soldiers, in highlighting their shared agendas.

Pop-ism makes a cruel joke of this in the manner of cultural studies, by decontextualising the popular and subjecting it to dissection against its will. I'm sure Marcello will forgive me for bringing up the, admittedly highly-amusing, incident of the aghast Girl's Aloud being read one of his reviews of them. Still it's robbery isn't it? I recall with genuine fondness a Wire magazine which would run, straight-faced, with Michael Jackson on the cover.

Here at WOEBOT I've always tried to look at what I thing is *significant* music. I'll grant that may be a huge flaw, for instance it can mean I slide into a barometer of "what's-hot", but I'd rather that than any other criteria. Anyway, Edu because he's an all-conquering genius. "Misse Breva" effortlessly manages that almost off-hand trick of the greatest Brazilian music, to be at once experimental and accessible. Perhaps experimental is the wrong word for the just plain inventive palates of elaborate orchestration. Never obtrusive, the meshes of baubled rhodes, berimbeau and arabesques of acoustic guitar often form improbable patterns even as they pulse forward. Perhaps most remarkable are the Catholic devotional tracks which have the splendid feel of horror film out-takes. Is it actually possibly to talk about Christ with any true sincerity in pop music? The best stuff, Al Green and Prince, always imparts a spectral, occasionally perverse tone to the standard message. However, you don't need to be a card-holding Current 93 fan to appreciate the bizarreness of the transubstantiation, especially within the Catholic context when, yes siree, that wine actually turns into blood.

Edu Lobo "Limite Des Aguas" (Continental, 1976)

I'd always wanted this but it was often very expensive but just recently picked it up at the Reckless records liquidation for half-price. I suppose it's the third-part of Edu's triumvirate of superb LPs. Don't let the disappointing cover put you off. Slightly fuller and more burnished than the last two, the eighties are coming, with a distinct Jazz-Funk inflection it's still chock full of undeniably catchy songs.

Edu Lobo "Tempo Presente" (Philips, 1980)

I always liked the cover to this, but it's a bit disappointing really. From here on in, and you can just tell by their sleeves, Edu's record's get slicker and emptier. Edu and Tom is supposed to be a return to form, but I wouldn't risk it myself.

Posted by WOEBOT at 11:31 AM | Permalink

What is it with people and the archiving of these shows? Every other email I get is gently chiding me for not making them available. I fibbed recently when I said I was worried whether the bandwidth could support having them all available at the same time. It'd probably be OK, even though since January we've traded 1.5 terrabytes. The truth is I don't want everything laid out on a table. I don't want people to be able to own them just yet. I actually went the Flash route because I didn't want people downloading QuickTimes and storing them on their hard drive. Remember all those mp3s you downloaded which you said you'd get round to checking out one day?

Of course they could still be available to watch without them being downloadable, and here's my other reason for not having archives. If I ever do manage to get a TV channel interested in giving me a graveyard slot, like 2 am on BBC4, then the shows I've already made will be an asset. That is except if everyone in the universe who might be interested in them has already seen them. I know this might appear to be a insanely vain fantasy, but TV is what I do for a a living. And having a show like this is, well, it's been something like an ambition.

If I don't get anywhere at all with commissioning editors (surely the likely outcome?) then either I'll package up a cheap DVD of 10-12 episodes, a season, lol or I'll make sure everything is put up for people to see. If you're at all anxious at missing out an episode, simply subscribe to the mailing list.

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Original drawings.

I had the idea for the Methuselah show three years ago, it came as one of those appalling sitting bolt-upright, sweat-on-the-body, eyeballs-bulging out nightmares that one has from time-to-time. My fevered brain had them as a combination between Aum Shinrikyo (that Japanese Cult who released the Sarin nerve gas into the subway) and every band of shock-rockers you ever knew- Joy Division, Marilyn Manson, Throbbing Gristle and The Sex Pistols. In my dream they actually gigged on top of towerblocks, though this is one thing I left out of the animation. Just a little too tasteless I thought. The music was to be a totally crass irrelevance, my notes from the time say: "Rod Stewart, China Crisis, T.Rex and Mud's "Tiger Feet".

I did a load of research into Glam Rock and Glam-related-rock, the fruits of which will emerge here later. I checked out Slade, Mud, Gary Glitter, Sweet, Alvin Stardust, Mott the Hoople, Angel, Steve Harley, Cherry Vanilla, Wayne County, Girlschool, Hell, Iron Virgin, Kiss, Renato Zero, The Rubettes, The Runaways, Sailor, The Skyhooks, Smokie, Suzi Quatro, Sweet, Wizzard and Jobriath. So, amazingly cheesy stuff. I don't want to give too much away on my thoughts about Glam cos I'll definitely be coming back to this. For the film I decided this just wasn't right. Glam just has too much warmth. I really needed something bleaker, empty like a US suburban shopping mall, so I turned, not to Heavy Metal, but Hard Rock.

Simon, who has been firing on all cylinders in his pieces at Blissblog on Metal was suggesting we might perhaps be on the same page with regards to looking at Metal this February. I don't see Methuselah as being a Heavy Metal band actually. I see them as being the definitive *Hard Rock* band. What's the difference? I'd be very hard pushed to say actually, it's probably more of a case of where the band's cultural allegiances lie than to do with their music per se. For instance both Zep and ACDC strongly refuted being Heavy Metal bands. Ultimately though, Hard Rock is distinguished by never losing touch with the notion that it is amplified blues. Metal is actually a progression from that point forward. Metal actually might be a more interesting phenomenon for that very fact.

When examining the Hard Rock angle I explored a lot of band's work: Foreigner, Ted Nugent, Cheap Trick, Blue Oyster Cult, Aerosmith, Nazareth, Bad Company, Free, Deep Purple and ACDC. I also looked at two bands which people occasionally class as Heavy Metal: Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. My feeling is that neither the Sabs or Zep are actually Heavy Metal bands. They're both heavily blues-influenced and they both are "on the same page" as the rest of Pop/Rock culture. I think perhaps Metal becomes Metal when that schism is unavoidable, when Metal becomes a self-sufficient universe outside of and beyond the particular musical universe I live in. When Kerrang and Donington become the whole world for Metal fans. Of course, and here's the rub, Metal fans are actually quite catholic, they'll tell you they like Jazz-Funk and Zappa and Techno. It's just that everyone on this side of the great divide isn't open to their music. I think perhaps the crux is that there's some kind of conceptually different approach to the way Metal and non-Metal fans categorise music. On "our" side perhaps we are more comfortable with this rhizome, this plateau of inter-connection, while Metal fans are more open to digesting "in rupture", less bothered about reconciling competing philosophies to understand music.

For me Led Zeppellin are the one. To Simon's quote about Metal, elucidating as it does the mainstream critical view about Metal: "its inertia is its success is its intertia" I'd like to add the classic disparaging quote which was (by Rolling Stone?) appended to (I'd still argue Proto-Metal) Led Zep, that they were a manifestation of "internalised violence". S'funny because they're both extremely arch, po-faced, aspiring-to-be-intellectual put-downs aren't they. Giggles.

The great book on Zeppelin, and indeed probably the greatest book about a rock group, is Stephen Davis's "Hammer of the Gods". If you haven't read this, I urge you to get a copy as soon as possible. It's a veritable chocolate box of delights, that is until the current edition's appended afterthoughts kick in (the Unledded Tourzzzzz) and the tension drops palpably. Stephen Davis is an interesting guy because he also penned the fantastic "Reggae Bloodlines" book, the tenor of which reminds me a lot of some of the breathless "hip-outsider" discovery of Grime of a few years back. Obviously not your stereotypical metal hack though innit.

"Hammer of the Gods" is, of course the Ur-text for the Methuselah cartoon. Indeed I pieced the music together for the soundtrack partly from recommendations I got from it. Davis refers to Heart's "Barracuda" and Billy Squier's "Lonely is the Night" (why hasn't this been sampled to death?) as "little Stairways" so I chopped up loops from them and added my own vocals on top. I like the fact that they're cheesy suburban version of Zep, cos that chips away at the mystique. Much more suitable for the deliberately nihilistic tenor of the film. Other tracks I used were Deep Purple's Proto-Speed-Metal "Highway Star" and, for the airplane bit, Sailor's euro-disco classic "A Glass of Champagne".

I read this as well for research. But, written by the roadies (whose names I used in the animation), it's pretty dire. I know what Simon's referring to about the "idiotic and horrendous" behavior in Metal with this. I mean, Hammer of the Gods actually succeeds in making the debauchery queerly cosmic in its dionysian way.

And now, well, you're just going to laugh, cos I really pushed the boat on the research and skimmed this as well! I always remember my Maths teacher telling me how he respected Lemmy cos he was obviously an intelligent guy.

Ha! This is ridiculous! Well I can explain. I got this one and the Sabbath book, and the Quo book and the Bon Scott book for $8 in HMV. $8! I must be the only person alive interested in this shit! I haven't read the rest yet. But I may one day.

So why does this kind of rock'n'roll debauchery interest me? I suppose, truthfully, being a father of two, loyal husband and reformed drug-abuser (winks) there's practically none of this sort thing in my life at all. Though I hasten to add I don't miss it one iota. It seems surreal and hilarious to me. But equally this way of living has been discredited by the broader society as well hasn't it? Slightly off topic, Acid House seems the last time when kids went crazy. As for Rock groups, outside the 70s and probably some bits of the 80s they've never really behaved like this since have they? Sure there are bands who live quite dangerously, but they're quite a long way from the edge aren't they?

Posted by WOEBOT at 10:59 AM | Permalink

I don't actually pick up the OMM, but my wife does like to get the Observer on Sundays from time to time. Actually make that "tries to read the Observer" because invariably we've children crawling on our heads and she probably only gets to look at the recipe bit.

When I do get look at the OMM I usually try and find things Simon Reynolds has written, I'll clock the body and feel an admixture of despondency and frustration at the middlebrow tenor (before reflecting that it's generally quite a solid and positive sort of mag), then finally I'll read Paul Morley's entertaining column.

Morley is almost guaranteed to be having a pop at music bloggers. This is four years after we ceased to be newsworthy. Three out of the three pieces I've seen written by him feature some kind of grumbling about or insulting of we. The latest piece is almost entirely about online music criticism. It's quite hilarious really.

Maybe Paul has failed to get that round-robin email by editorial which dictates that under no account should the conventional press write about forms of the internet which challenge the print hegemony? The petry dish guy got it. I suppose I'm glad he still does.

Posted by WOEBOT at 12:41 PM | Permalink

The TV show is up and running now and the mailing list is in place. I've no less than four episodes "in production" (trying to make this sound as pseudo-professional as possible, winks). I never said I'd kill the written blog and actually there are things that I just couldn't possibly squeeze into the format, no matter how hard I tried.

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Just recently I acquired my beloved Granny and Granddad's record collection. 95% of it is is what I'd term "hardcore" classical recordings of Janacek, Belioz, Bruckner, Purcell, Monteverdi and Handel. What really enchanted me however was the errant 5%, recordings that could only possibly have come from their collection, which betrayed perhaps more accurately, who they were.

This is the odd one out as, shamefully, I stole it from their attic about ten years ago. I very nearly included it in my Un-Ra piece of a couple of years back. Recently I saw this priced high on the wall of Haggle Vinyl. Super cover-art innit.

My Grandparents lived in the Cotswolds. It seems like everyone and their dog has the weird Folkways records, but recordings like this? One for the Belbury Poly massive.

Tank-top, Galway!

We woz definitely a patriarchy.

Dorothy Ashby she ain't. My super-lovely aunt used to play the harp.

Alan Wicker style. Comes with a wee booklet.

Love the generation-wide ethnographical interest evident here. Nowadays no-one seems to give a hoot for this sort of thing. A tourist memento I suppose, though I don't think they ever visited New Zealand. Probably my Granny's record this one...

Shelley, Chatterton, Swinburne, De La Mere, Owen all in this nifty box-set.

Cheesy-listening.

A Reader's digest release no less.

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I suppose these represent the final remnants of my Grandparent's estate. My aunt started upon twisting my arm to take the records away, unclaimed stuff was to go to the charity shop, before realising that I was actually quite keen on having them. I tend not play up the WOEBOT shtick around my family. All of the above which serve to remind me, in the most heartfelt way imaginable, how great and good my Grandparents were.

Posted by WOEBOT at 12:53 AM | Permalink