04 | 12 | 08

Rewind 2008 Addendum: The Office Dissonance

We have a high threshold for sonic extremity at The Wire. At the time of writing, someone behind me is blasting out a Puerto Rican noise group from their computer. At times in the last year or so we have – or at least I have – enjoyed field recordings of creaking bridges in Thailand, longform improvisastions for motorised vibraphones , or recordings of a ventilation propellers. Such strange sonic matter is warmly rendered through our appealingly battered old NAD amp, wired up through some arcane scheme to floorstanding speakers scattered around far-flung corners of our open office. It’s rarely less than a pleasure and a privileged to sample such intense music in this environment.

Sometimes, though, someone will be in middle of a phone call when the latest missive from the Michigan noise scene hits the CD deck, or be distracted from an intricate bit of last minute proofing by a 200 word-a-minute Grime MC. Some discs just refuse to be relegated to the status of background music, demanding instead your full and undivided attention, and just can’t be effectively worked to here in the office. Inevitably, then, there are times when discs will get abruptly taken off the stereo here, and it’s an honour of sorts. So as the year draws to a close, it’s only appropriate that The Mire’s contribution to the Rewind 2008 feature of our forthcoming January issue – on sale in all good newsagents in a few days – is a round up of the records which caused such Office Dissonance. This list is, of course, in no way mutually exclusive with The Wire’s Top 50 Records of the Year. In no particular order, then…

Ryoji Ikeda
Data Pattern
Raster-Noton
Ikeda’s eighth solo album was based on work for an installation, using electronic data to generate barcode patterns and audio files of 1s and 0s. This is what data overload sounds like – listening is like plugging yourself into the hidden data traffic of the modern age. It’s also incredibly powerful, physically – the fast-flicking pulse provide a physical jolt which is, in many ways, pure bionic funk. All your cognitive resources are needed to get to grips with these data-packets, and you can forget trying to work during it.

Florian Hecker
Hecker, Höller, Tracks
Semishigure
This record actually made it into my own top 10 of the year. It’s an extraordinary piece of sonic atom-splitting, created by Florian Hecker for a Carsten Höller visual exhibition. Each piece is based around flickering pulses, like bursts from a fluorescent tube, which imperceptibly alter and flit around the stereo spectrum. As Nick Cain’s feature on Hecker elucidated, such experiments are designed to work at the edge of human perception. However, an experiment this subtle needs your full attention. In the office the repeated 20 minute spells of minutely shifting pulses just can’t be focused on.

Stéphane Rives
Much Remains To Be Heard
Al Maslakh CD
A technically extraordinary disc on the excellent Lebanese based Al Maslakh label. Like Seymour Wright, Stéphane Rives’s solo saxophone experiments can make John Butcher sound like Lester Young. The high pitched, sustained, one hour track on Much Remains To Be Heard is right at the upper threshold of hearing. With all the hum and bustle of an office, amid the buzz of printers and computers, locating such precise tones is impossible.

Tetuzi Akiyama
The Ancient Balance To Control Death
Western Vinyl
Only 20 minutes long or so, Akiyama’s primitivist blues guitar on The Ancient Balance To Control Death is rough but not especially abrasive. But it’s his singing on this short album, which like Jandek strays in and out of tune with deliberate freedom, which is often too emotionally raw to attune to in the middle of a working day. It’s raw, soulful, completely unrefined, the blues rendered as a weeping sore. You either submit to it totally, or you don’t listen at all.

Hartmut Geerken
Amanita
Qbico LP
In the true spirit of Strange Strings, Sun Ra collector/obesssive Hartmut Geerken’s Amanita is a double LP of him attempting to play a bandura/’sun harp’ which apparently used to belong to Ra himself. He doesn’t explore it melodically so much as endlessly explore a single note in blissed-out reverie. It suggests a kind of ritual, and for the full effect would probably be best tuned into late at night, in the dark, maybe.

Paul Flaherty
Aria Nativa
Family Vineyard LP

Fearsome/fearless solo sax improvisations. In the lineage of John Coltrane’s “Chasing The Train”, Flaherty starts with one melodic idea, and chases it at maximum speed, wherever it seem to lead him, channeling body and soul into his lines. It’s thunderous, passionate, declamatory. Such commitment from the performer deserves a similar level of engagement from the listener. It’s more or less an ethical issue – when listening to this, it feels wrong to be doing anything other than just listening.

snd
4, 5, 6
snd 3×12″
snd’s electronica is always built from a similarly stripped down pallete, with tight percussion and terse, precise melodic touches. It’s the beats which caused the ruckus with this triple 12″ release, though. Across an hour or so of music, the rhythms are constantly irregular, jumping backwards and forwards with musical jump-cuts. It seems to warp the fabric of time, and it refuses to slip away politely into the background.

Carlos Giffoni
Adult Life
No Fun Productions CD
This was perhaps Carlos Giffoni’s warmest (most mature?) albums yet, with steady humming synths drifting in and out of chorus to hypnotic effect. Late at night and loud in the office it sounds fantastic, and just moving around the room creates different acoustic effects. All this compelling world of detail is lost if you’re stuck at a desk.

Atom™
Liedgut
Raster-Noton
Uwe Schmidt’s first major solo release in quite a while, Liedgut took on several hundred years of German-Austrian romantic musical/philosophical heritage and attempted to render it digitally, with elegant music box melodies and graceful, waltzing structures. Given this grand historical sweep, it’s strange that a mobile phone interference sample made it in there. It’s impossible to work to it without subconsciously wondering if an important phone call is about to arrive.

< STOP PRESS OFFICE DISSONANCE EXTRA>

Mohel
Babylon Bypass
Tyffus

Just in. Finnish free jazz, featuring Sami Pekkola amongst others, with repeated crashing waves of free blowing. It starts loud and gets louder. Actually terrific to work to, but impossible to have on while you’re conducting a telephone conversation.

Derek Walmsley

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06 | 11 | 08

The Wire presents The Scope

Still suffering pangs of remorse over the death of Karlheinz Stockhausen earlier in the year? He’s certainly still in our hearts here – we even have a framed picture of him in the office, which we keep in a special place where we contemplate his ideas and legacy. So, inspired by the works of the man himself, we’re hosting a free, special, multi-media happening at the Southbank tomorrow. Think we’re joking? This is Stockhausen – we are, of course, deadly serious. Art collectives are being mobilised. Concepts are being discussed in high-level meetings. Way out sounds will be dropped. In fact all the events will build on the ideas of Stockhausen, and it promises to be a great night:

The Wire presents The Scope
A free, late-night event as part of Klang (see UK Festivals) programmed by The Wire with performance by a crew of laptop technicians led by John Wall plus an Improv session with Pat Thomas, Mark Sanders and John Coxon bookending a rare screening of The Brothers Quay’s In Absentia (which visualises Stockhausen’s music), as well as the sounds of Radio Cologne in the lobby. London Purcell Room, 7 November free

Live art is by Contemporary Art Collective and DJing are Ed Pinsent and Philip Sanderson or Resonance FM. Stage times are roughly as follows – John Wall around 10pm, FURT are playing around 10:20, then after the film screening we’ll have John Coxon, Pat Thomas and Mark Sanders doing a piece for two pianos, percussion and electronics.
The Scope

Derek Walmsley

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31 | 10 | 08

Tales From The Bog

Funky may be the new disco, but that’s not stopping anybody from jumping on the bandwagon. Seems like all it takes is for Kode9 to publicly announce his approval and every blogger is a convert.

Skream, on the other hand, was recently overheard giving the thumbs down to Rinse’s new Funky club night, Beyond. But before we could jump to conclusions about the crown prince of Dubstep disapproving the new old dance permutation, he quickly corrected us. Seems his disdain is just for Beyond and not for Funky. In fact, he tells us that he’s got a new project in the works called Funky Junkie, a collaboration with noted Funky-man Geeneus. But Skream, darling, haven’t you heard Geeneus’s remix of “Night”? It’s crap.

Now, before you all start wondering about a possible rift in the Ammunition camp, let’s talk about real catfights. Apparently, the minimal techno scene in Berlin isn’t quite as cosy as we thought it was. A little bird tells us that Perlon and M-nus may have been having a little tiff for yoinks. It may or may not have had something to do with M-Nus ‘licensing’ tracks from Perlon without permission. Naughty naughty. Still, Perlon may be having the last laugh as it turns out we weren’t the only ones who enjoyed M-Nus’s hairball-inducing photoshoot for Contakt. Richie may make some good music, but that doesn’t mean he has any taste.

Finally, in a real WTF moment, we’ve been informed (belatedly, why are we the last to find out about everything?) that Russell Haswell’s partner is Amanda Donohoe. She of television fame circa LA Law, etc. Apparently, she also used to go out with Adam Ant, so maybe she just likes moody musicians?

p.s. We love disco.

Swamp Thing

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27 | 10 | 08

Braxton Competition

Amongst other goodies in The Wire 297 was a piece on Anthony Braxton’s Arista recordings, where some of his wildest projects were bankrolled by a major label hungry for the new thing of the New Thing (it was probably the most complex feature I’ve ever subbed on the magazine, where Bill Shoemaker patiently unfolds these densely layered constructions).

Mosaic have kindly given us one of these great box sets of the Arista years, and there’s a competition on our site to win it:

We’d like you to draw a diagram in the style used by Anthony Braxton to name his compositions graphically. The diagram should be describing a piece of music for any combination of instruments or elements. The main aim is to produce a diagram that looks like it might have been rendered by Anthony Braxton to name one of his compositions. The more imaginative and wild the better. Remember this is the musician who scored pieces for orchestras and puppet theatres, as well as for multiple orchestras located on different planets and in different galaxies.

If Anthony Braxton spent the 70s scoring pieces for celestial orchestras, I think you owe it to him to have a scribble with a pen and paper. More info is here

Derek Walmsley

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22 | 10 | 08

Doom's Pastoral Palliative

Re Derek’s post yesterday:
As an uplifting balm to soothe the terror of their doom laden Clearspot last night, Resonance FM is broadcasting the work of artist and shaman Marcus Coates. “Pastoral Spirit” will apparently include a choir singing birdsong along with performing a variety of animal calls. Will the concrete hardened city worker find the same solace in Coates’ channeling of relaxing ambient nature as the residents of Linosa Close did?

Clearspot: GMT 8pm tonight

Nathan Budzinski

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21 | 10 | 08

prediction of doom

Great sounding show on Resonance FM tonight:

What better time than during the biggest ever economic collapse to explore the strangely comforting tones of Doom Metal? With leading band names like Earth, Om and Sunn, this drone laden branch of heavy metal cultivates an elemental niche where aficionados enjoy artistic creativity predicated on electric guitars and a world rendered absurd.

It’s on their Clearspot slot, at 8pm GMT.

Derek Walmsley

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20 | 10 | 08

refrains of rai

It’s hard to resist an album called 1970′s Algerian Proto-Rai Underground. You’ve got the promise of some strange prototype of unheard urban music; the North African connection, only a decade and a bit after Algeria emerged from French rule; plus, the idea of pop operating through underground channels, which sounds a contradiction in terms for Westerners, but is less improbable in the Middle East and North Africa (I’m reminded of the electronica underground in Iran, for instance).

The music is almost as exciting as the title. One refrain on the album is particularly familiar to fans of 90s rave, with one track using a version of the “We are IE” vocal, which found its way, twisted via rave speak, onto Lenny De Ice’s proto-jungle classic “We Are E”. I’m not sure what the vocal is – it’s found across a lot of Rai music, with what sounds like the same lyrics and the same melody. Whatever, the refrain is certainly spine-chilling, and so memorable that the dancehall/urban/mixadelic website weareie, who curate the excellent Blogariddims series, grabbed it for their name (which puns on the Irish connection of the people who do the site).

The audio meme of this vocal secretly linking rai and rave sent me on a frenzy of googling and downloading, trying to figure out other versions of the refrain. I eventually remembered Cheb Mami had done a particularly good track which had it in; a pop song which is like an excerpt from My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, with the kind of eerie vocal that graced “Boat Woman Song” from Holger Czukay’s Canaxis.

Maybe it’s the one Lenny De Ice sampled, but in any case, the track is mindboggling in its own right. The time signatures are so fluid I can’t follow them at all, and yet it’s entirely second nature to Cheb Mami himself. Some amazing fusions happened when francophone African musicians had to figure out what they were doing on the fly in Parisian recording studios; Cheb Mami’s stuff is some of the best I’ve heard. It’s instantly resonant, but complex and elusive too… much like that vocal refrain itself.

It’s well worth checking out – and stands its own next to almost any other tune from anywhere on the planet. Cheb Mami- “Douni El Bladi” [RE-UPPED 24/10/08)

Derek Walmsley

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13 | 10 | 08

… or exchange?

I got a nostalgic rush when a promo CD of the new Streets album came into the office – not a reaction to the CD inside, but the slipcase, which is from (presumably purchased, but who knows?) Music And Video Exchange, the dusty and sprawling Notting Hill second hand record emporium where I used to work for quite a few years. The red sticker in the corner, where they reduce the prices month by month, is the giveaway. As it happens, I’m not the only Wire writer who has passed through its, er, hallowed doors.

I was in the the other day, selling old CDs into the shops to exchange for other stuff. My plan to invest in valuable classical vinyl, in the hope that it will hold its value when the economy goes into total meltdown, was thwarted, though. Their classical shop due is to close any day, and the racks were empty. I wonder, though, with an upcoming recession, if second hand emporiums will soon be booming again, packed with fresh stock from cash-strapped punters.

The beauty of MVE was that you came at music culture backwards. You’re surrounded not by usual music that is pushed at you, but the stuff that gathers together at the margins. Outdated music was often more poignant than music which still held its popular currency. In most MVE shops, records never went below 50p – even at that price, the assumption was that someone would have a use for it, even if the root of that use was as kitsch, sample fodder or curiosity value. This was where you found new uses for music. The process is rather like musical compost, biodegrading in its own filth, but providing all sorts of vital micro nutrients to other growths. I used to greedily suck up cheap old jungle compilations, packed with fat hits but with zero cool quotient; hit-it-and-quit-it dancehall 7″s which had been cheapily pressed up in the thousands and were now sitting around gathering dust; random white labels, noone knowing what the hell they are except for a catalogue number; quasi bootleg jazz compilations which nonetheless provided strange trawls through the oeuvres of the likes of Billie Holliday and Charlie Parker.

Recycling all these vast swathes of music culture, you get that sense of the street finding its own use for things, as the saying goes; what The Streets has to do with it, I’m not so sure.

Derek Walmsley

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09 | 10 | 08

André Avelãs

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66l_9KUODrc]

Didn’t manage to get this posted in time for anyone near London to be able to get to the show unfortunately (my apologies) but André Avelãs’s exhibition in the IBID Projects space in East London was a good example of the sculpture as musical instrument approach to sound art.

The small gallery space was filled with a low level whine that sounded as if the air conditioning had gone dangerously awry, the atmosphere having something toxic about it, making the room foggy in the same way a fire alarm can cause a blinkered panic or loss of peripheral vision. The cause of the whine was a number of large balloons deflating slowly throughout the day, their leaking nozzles hooked up to small whistles and a Hohner Melodica. The result being a constant feeling of, well, anxious deflation – the composition a prolonged entropic sighing glissando, though the sight of the giant balloons with “HIGHLY FLAMMABLE” hand stencilled onto their surface offset the droning with a cartoon quality.

With work like this I always wish to see them in some form of a performance. Why create these interestingly odd sculpture/instrument hybrids, then let them idle away their time in the relatively sober environs of a contemporary art gallery? Though, a show he was in as part of last Summer’s Tuned City festival in Berlin looked interesting, much more active and dirty.

Nathan Budzinski

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24 | 09 | 08

Approximately Boundless

You’re seemingly more likely to encounter the Finnish underground in some dusty dive in East London than in Helsinki. Few artists on labels such as Fonal or Ektro seem to do many gigs in Finland, aside from a few sporadic appearances, and even people into folk/psychedelia in the country tend not to know much about them. Meanwhile, cheap air fares from Finland to the UK have ferried such acts to London on a regular basis. Musically it’s a fantastic arrangement for us, although a paradoxical one.

On my last trip to Finland I finally found these artists’ work on their home soil – in a museum. The Finnish Design Museum was running a New Nordic Design exhibition, a rather wide and woolly selection of works of which the Finnish underground stuff was certainly the most original. Paavoharju, the group who put the ‘freak’ into ‘freakfolk’, had built a strange DIY shelter filled with empty beer cans, magazines and homebrewed alcohol – like a makeshift den in the woods transposed into an pristine exhibition space. Islaja, meanwhile, had a Super-8 type film of darkened woods and the outdoors, her face flashing into frame in the torchlight – a highly evocative bit of work, somewhere between Margaret Tait and The Blair Witch Project.

It’s a bit dispiriting that the ‘wildness’ of the Finnish underground has itself become a kind of commodity to the design world, and that it should be encountered in a museum, the precise antithesis of the kind of naturalness that’s the inspiration for good Finnish DIY stuff. For me, the obvious platform for Finnish underground music would be outdoor gigs, something that’s extremely popular over there. Considering how much blandly pseudo-academic outdoor sound art there seems to get art funding, surely there’s space for Kemialliset Ystävät to play a gig on an island by a Finnish lake, or Lau Nau or Islaja to do their wood-folk thing actually in a wood? Maybe someday.

For now, events like the Approximately Infinite Universe tour, which has just completed a successful UK tour, selling out at the ICA, will have to do.

Derek Walmsley

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