Theo Parrish

It's hard in the internet era to recreate that excitement of the unknown when you encounter a dusty, entirely mysterious artifact in a record shop. There's no such thing as a rare record these days, with the advent of eBay, and music available in digital forms is so extensively propagated around the internet that it's rare to encounter something you don't know at least something about (even if you haven't encountered it, you can often guess what it's like by a process of elimination.... "ah! so this must be that Scandinavian skwee stuff, as its not on one of the usual Swedish labels...").

However, Detroit producer Theo Parrish (whose Sound Sculptures Volume 1 was reviewed recently in The Wire 291) makes a fair stab at preserving that sensation in a manner that's neither drearily nostalgic nor hermetically self-referential. He's prolific but publicity shy, fiercely pro-vinyl, and shuns all genre terms. Nevertheless, you get the unerring sense in listening to his music that it could be from either the past or the future (or both). It's always familiar, interpolating disco, soul, funk and jazz, but carries only the feel of these musics - the sense of interplay, of elements engaging with each other - rarely the sort of obvious contours that distinguish each of these genres from each other.

It makes the mini-epiphany I had while watching him discuss his work online as part of the Red Bull Music Academy lectures (a strange hybrid of industry self-celebration and occasionally enlightening musician insider talk, which you can watch here) all the more pertinent. Parrish discussed James Brown's "Gonna Have A Funky Good Time (Doing It To Death)", and the track sounds startlingly like a blueprint for his entire oeuvre - elements fade in and out, a crescendo is never quite reached, but there's perpetual motion, perpetual funk. It's very much not the paradigm of a JB track, but instead the kind of thing his band played in concert when marking time – a vamp, basically.

Parrish's music has perfected this sense of always becoming, but never quite being, something fixed, defined. It's why his music has barely changed in 15 years, but when you return to it it seems to have some strange, almost chemical potential in the beats, a volatility that's not quite been resolved, like gunpowder still miraculously potent decades after it was made. Even so, it was a minor revelation to hear "Gonna Have A Funky Good Time (Doing It To Death)" next to his music: the resemblance is startling, as if he's taken the James Brown track and rearranged it for sequencer, synth and drum machine, a timeless variant of the endless vamp.

Heatwave

The recent Soul Jazz An England Story compilation, from some of the people behind London club night Heatwave, reminded me of some of the excellent 7"s these guys have released over the years. In particular, this ragga refix of Kelis' "Trick Me" (already an astonishingly funky track, with its rhythm that lurks somewhere between technofied R&B and dust-caked ska), which I found while looking for records to DJ with in Brussels as part of The Wire soundsystem the other day.

The precise, gritty ruff-age of the vocals immediately raises the energy levels of the track. This melding of ragga vocals and R&B is like that of old school rapping and disco on Soul Jazz's fairly recent Big Apple Rapping - when the rough and smooth go together so well, what's not to like? Anyway, I have such fond memories of this 7" that I actually found myself running back to the hotel to get it mid-set, and anyone who's fallen for the UK/JA crossover of An England Story should surely seek this out.

Namings As Portals

Speaking of postpunk autodidacticism, Owen Hatherley picks up on what I too thought was of the most interesting lines in Mark Sinker's Sight & Sound review of Grant Gee's Joy Division film:

Curtis' own writing was a teen scrapbook of anti-pop titles and sensibilities ('Interzone', 'Atrocity Exhibition', 'Colony', 'Dead Souls', invoke Burroughs, Ballard, Kafka and Gogol respectively, the effect dismissable only if you decide not to see such namings as portals).

Sometimes the names condensed more than one reference: 'Colony' invoked Conrad as much as Kafka's 'Strike Kolony'. Sometimes the references were unintentional misdirections; 'Atrocity Exhibition' is surely one of the least Ballardian tracks that Joy Division produced. In any case, construing these allusions as 'portals' that led somewhere – rather than as citations in a seamless postmodern circuit – is highly suggestive. Such portals could take the listener into formal education, but were also doorways beyond the school and the university, an alternative curriculum.

(Also well worth looking at on Owen's site: this essay on Neu!, published in honour of the recently deceased Klaus Dinger.)

'Other People Went To University...'

I didn't mind being on the dole. I had a lot of time on my hands as a result. Other people went to university, but I read books, smoked cigs and looked around most days. It's good to have a period like that in your life, when you're not being forced to think like others. Don't get me wrong: I had my fair share of dull days and my diet wasn't the most healthy, but I read a lot of good books and wrote a lot, most of which found its way on to our first LP. I didn't think of it like that when I was writing, though. I just felt an urge to write.

If you're a cod-psychologist, I guess you could trace most of the Fall's output back to this period, to the wilderness years, the dole days - back to young Mark laying the hard foundations for the rough and brilliant years that he hasn't yet seen!

Mark E Smith, from a section of his autobiography, which is being serialised in The Guardian this week. Who knows how much culture in postwar, pre-neoliberal Britain depended on the indirect public funding – perhaps the best kind – provided by the dole? Of course, in the wake of Thatcherism and Blairism, today's equivalents of the young MES would find themselves quickly harassed back to work in a cracker factory by a Restart course. (Aptly, one of The Fall's many members was actually an extra in the scenes set in the Restart course in The League of Gentlemen.) The dole might have provided an alternative to university, a time in which proletarian autodidacts could pursue undirected research and engage in rogue reflections, but with the cutting of student grants and the introduction of tuition fees, the pause for thought which existed outside employment and official study is no longer available to many British students either.

Satire Is Dead, Again

From the team that brought you this: 'Red is more like punk rock, hip hop, this should feel like hard commerce.'

Designer Despair

Rousing praise for Portishead's latest amidst Simon Reynolds's latest bumper pack of reflections on Blissblog. I find Simon's enthusiasm for the LP a little perplexing, although, I must confess, I've never been that enraptured by Portishead. I became quickly fatigued wading through the gloopy designer despair of their debut, and had all but lost interest by the time of the follow up. The combination of kitchen sink torch singing, vinyl crepitation, sweeping film samples and brokeback hiphop beats possessed a certain stylishness, but the appeal quickly palled. It was the 'stylishness' that was the problem, actually. Even though I don't doubt the personal sincerity of either Gibbons or Barrow, formally it all sounded a little pat, a little too cleverly contrived, a little too comfortably at home in This Life 90s Style culture. Gibbons's gloom always struck me as being more like illegible grumbling than the oblique bleakness it wanted to be. As for the new album, it screams out lack of ideas: devoid of the vinyl crackle that might have given it some relation to the 'hauntological now' of Burial or Philip Jeck, I can only hear it as clapped out coffee table miserabilism ten years past its sell-by date.

(Meanwhile, I can't help feeling that Geoff Barrow and arch smugonaut Mark Ronson are right about each other.)

Weird coincidences...

Further to Derek's observations on Villalobos's 'Enfants', below ... Even though the sample is taken from a Christian Vander track, when I first heard 'Enfants' it reminded me of nothing so much as the piano on Nina Simone's 'Sinnerman'. It seems that I'm not the only one to make the association ... If the similarity between the tracks is eerie, then this only adds to the strangeness of Simone's already intensely uncanny song, which acquired even more weirdness last year when it was used by both David Lynch (in INLAND EMPIRE) and Timbaland (on the first track of his Shock Value LP).