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. There's lots of very unusual things about the track, which you'll no doubt hear for yourself.

I don't normally offer mp3's up for download, but figured that finally here was something truly worth sharing. The encoding was done at 64kpbs, so please Juan don't sue my ass.....

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