A month ago a DJ set by Hieroglyphic Being (aka Jamal Moss) set my world on fire. It was in Berlin, at the CTM festival, and I can’t stop going over it in my head, rerunning the maths to find the multiplying factor. It was the first time I’d seen Moss DJ. It started at 3am, following an impeccable set of tessellated Techno by Kassem Mosse. But Jamal Moss’s set was a different beast entirely: loose, sloppy and incredibly ugly in some parts, but always giddy, impatient and unpredictable. It ran through pitched up and pitched down tracks, and too many genres and styles to count on one hand. At one point it got into a call and response dialogue between New York disco and Krautrock. The mixing was at times slick, incredible (an air raid siren threaded through three tracks, sewing them together). In other places it was a dirty hack made with a blunt instrument.
The constantly changing pace sent me nuts, for Hieroglyphic Being’s disregard for the conventions of what constitutes ‘good’ DJing. In fact the performance capsized all the cliches that have built up around our idea of what makes a ‘good’ DJ set, ie that good mixing is a smooth segue between two tracks; that a set should move through styles in a gradual progression; that bpms shouldn’t ramp up, plummet and shoot up again in the space of three minutes. Moss moved between sections full of sudden schizophrenic cuts from one track to another, and passages where he would let one groove run unmolested for almost ten minutes. Tracks were pulled after one chorus, played backwards, rewound. They were sped up to 170 bpm, then slammed up next to slow 80 bpm funk.
I laughed my way through it, half the time shaking my head in disbelief, frowning, puzzled. Admittedly, it pushed my buttons, that New York disco stuff always does. But it was done with such confident swagger – with Moss resplendent in Battlefield Earth leather chic – that it worked.
Some friends said they were finding it “very challenging”. Why? Because what was expected (even given Hieroglyphic Being’s diverse output) was not being adhered to. Descriptions of the mood in clubs and on dancefloors often resort to religious analogies, and this set required you to make a leap of faith, or find yourself at an impasse with regard to the sheer iconoclasm of it. CDJs are frowned on in some circles, but central to Moss’s set was the way it foregrounded the sound of these tools – the fake scratching sound of the CDJs, the speed shifting (sometimes without pitch control), and brutal use of the fader.
Whereas Kassem Mosse’s set felt like a perfectly calibrated clockwork model (not conventional, but certainly neat and tidy), Hieroglyphic Being’s was the boss-eyed Frankenstein’s monster you fall in love with precisely for his scars and club foot.
One of the central events at the CTM and Transmediale festivals in Berlin just over a week ago was Manuel Göttsching with Joshua Light Show (whose line up now interestingly includes Ana Matronic of Scissor Sisters). The show was introduced by three of the festival organisers. They asked in tense tones that people not move around the seated venue, and also that the audience resisted the urge to film the show on smartphones, as the intention was to attempt to create an immersive experience reminiscent of an original Joshua Light Show performance.
This immediately created a rift between the festival organisers and their audience, not because it was an unfair request, but because CTM and Transmediale had three cameras covering the event (one still photographer, one for the live stream and a secondary video camera). Of these three, the LCD displays of two were in the eyeline of around a third of the audience.
Before I get started though, I’d like to add that this post is not about the ubiquity of the smartphone at live shows, or the proliferation of the amateur documentarist. That’s a knee jerk reaction I’m not remotely interested in. The truly uncomfortable part of the show was when two thirds of the way through a member of Joshua Light Show emerged from behind the projector screen onto the stage.
Picture the scene, it’s a small-ish, reasonably low stage, in a sit down modern theatre. She’s dressed in a black top and sequinned skirt, but wearing a giant cream and metal headset of the sort pilots wear, and is edging awkwardly further towards the spotlight, glittering in the halo from the spotlight focused on Göttsching. Her arms are outstretched, in them is a handheld video camera pointing straight at Göttsching. She draws closer, until she’s obscuring the view of him, and circles slowly, like David Attenborough around a rare tree frog.
Göttsching ignores the camera, but the audience doesn’t. In those few seconds the atmosphere in the whole room shifts, and there’s a tension in the room. A couple choose this moment for a toilet/bar break. Others shift in their seats, whisper across to one another. The spell is broken.
The images she films are then sent back to the team behind the curtain, where they’re altered and projected live, in glassy fragments among psychedelic lights and swirling ink flows. The effect is definitely not analogue, but it’s also not what’s making me antsy. It’s her presence as a recorder, not the digital nature of that recording that’s making me uncomfortable. I’m already trying to ignore three cameras. This puts it up to four.
This is the first time that Göttsching and JLS have performed together in Berlin, and the show has been two years in the planning. There’s a large portion of the audience that wants to film the show and stick it on YouTube, or just people who want to get a photo with their smartphones, because this is an Event. Joshua Light Show, for those 15-20 minutes, are the ultimate spectator, in a crass display of how our modern recording habits disengage us and can ruin an atmosphere.
The filming also brought up another more philosophical issue, about the cultural currency of AV performance. It’s often the case that even with reasonably ‘big name’ visuals, the musical aspect of a performance is the seller, and those creating visuals are subordinated on the bill. This can usually be explained by the bigger audience for music, and hence, the bigger name gets higher on the bill. But on these terms Göttsching and Joshua Light Show is a rare performance – a conjunction between an audio and a visual arts festival, with Göttsching and Joshua Light Show equal on the bill. In coming out from behind the screen Joshua Light Show are asserting their right to be on the stage (even if it didn’t work, it was a legitimate part of the performance). It’s uncomfortable. Joshua Light Show clearly feel they have the right to be out in front of Göttsching, but the reaction of the audience suggests otherwise.
What Joshua light Show are doing feels inappropriate because at an AV show, the V part of the equation is not allowed to mess with the music. The performer is centre stage, and the visuals are an accompaniment. But visuals can make or break a show (MFO‘s visuals definitely elevated Roly Porter’s performance earlier on in the festival), but they’re often treated with mild suspicion, as if really arresting visuals are some sort of distraction, or a bogus enhancer of the music. After Roly Porter, friends commented on the fact that they weren’t sure if they enjoyed it, because they were worried they’d been sucked into the visuals and weren’t able to asses the performance properly.
In Berlin this week that gap was boldly pointed out to me, and the fact that the digital processes jarred with the aim of the show only added to the discomfort. The way we experience music live is all about sight as well as sound. Great music is not diluted by visuals, and visuals do not cover up for part-baked audio. The two should work together. It’s just a shame that The Joshua Light show misjudged their front of stage intrusion at CTM.
(Despite the requests, one audience member did manage to film sections of the show. Watch a section below.)
Sitting conspicuously at #9 in our 2011 Releases of the Year chart was Lou Reed and Metallica’s Lulu, one of the most hated albums of the year. Reactions to its charting have ranged from noisy retching to charges of conspiracy. What’s struck me, looking after The Wire‘s various digital channels, is the nature of these reactions – it’s not the fact that hardly anyone likes Lulu that’s unnerving, but that the response has been so over the top.
A few readers were bemused by the fact that James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual was our album of the year, but the reaction was rather more considered to say the least. As a result of Lulu‘s Top 10 placing, we have been accused of constructing the chart purely as a hyper-ironic statement, received an email (on Christmas day) that referred to it as a “piece of shit”, and otherwise been variously slagged off. While every music magazine is used to receiving its fair share of beefs, the reaction to Lulu (and its appearance in our chart) has been uniquely venomous.
Interestingly, people seem to think the Loutallica album is objectively bad music; not just something that few people like, but something it is impossible for anyone to like, at all. It’s a bizarre response to a record that is essentially a mix of overwrought beatnik poetry and overwrought Metal riffing, especially in the context of The Wire – there’s really nothing in it that’s so shocking to modern ears it warrants the reception it’s been getting. Why is it legitimate to react to it like this? What’s the key difference between Lulu and other 2011 albums that people didn’t like, the one ingredient that pushed everyone over the edge?
The obvious answer to that is Lou Reed himself, who has been (intentionally) whipping audiences into a hate-filled frenzy since at least the mid-1970s, and even once released a live double album, Take No Prisoners, full of obnoxious crowd baiting routines (sample line: “Give me an issue, I’ll give you a tissue, and you can wipe my ass with it”). But that can’t be the whole story. There’s also the attitudes of Metallica fans to take into account. And of course, the ever present trolls.
Perhaps because there’s been little consensus on what’s definitively great this year, there’s relief to be found in a consensus on what’s terrible. In some ways that happens easier online – the balance of negative and positive in comments sections, YouTube and sometimes on Twitter tends towards the former. Add the objections of Metallica’s more conservative fans to the group going way off message, stir it up via a YouTube preview and a set on Jools Holland, add somescathingreviews, and hey presto, Lulu‘s branded as safe to hate.
But not all zines, papers or sites thought Lulu was awful (although it garnered 1.0 ratings and “one of the worst albums ever made” type assessments). Ultimately, the reaction to it is a testament to Lou Reed’s ability to still get up the noses and under the skin of even the most open-minded listeners. He’s probably laughing his head off at it all this very minute.
(The above image comes courtesy of Rock Soundmagazine, whose office is just across the corridor in the same building as The Wire‘s. They think Lulu is a joke too – obviously)
Indiana based label Auris Apothecary is only a record label in part. A package sent from them recently contained cassettes and CDs, but also a small spice mix, a tin full of dirt, and a small wax sealed scroll printed on acetate.
Sitar Outreach Ministry’s Spring Of 1970, a two track cassette, is wrapped and bound in a dried sunflower leaf. Unwrapping it made a dirty mess on the floor of The Wire‘s meeting room, and coated my hands in a dusty organic scuzz. Wrapped like it was, once I’d starting tearing layers of green leaves away, I’d never be able to wrap it up neatly again. I had to tear it apart piece by piece, and now I’ve got a plastic bag full of crackly old leaves that smell like earth, and a cassette in cardboard case, and I’m not really sure whether to chuck out the leaves or not.
This packaging challenge is something that’s been explored by other artists and labels: Entr’acte’s vacuum packs, and Dreams Of Tall Buildings‘s plaster cast William Morris box. The packaging must be destroyed for you to access the music, forcing the listener/owner to choose between the physical artefact and the cultural artefact, between being a listener or a collector.
But there’s more than that simple dichotomy at work in Auris Apothecary’s releases. The packaging that I find most compelling is the one I find most crudely titled. Unholy Triforce’s Sandin’ Yr Vagina is an “anti-cassette” (Auris Apothecary makes a number of different “anti-cassettes”, including one nailed into its plastic casing). It’s filled with black sand, the holes plugged with Scotch tape, and bound in black emery board. Silly? A bit. But interesting too: the sand poses a direct risk to your cassette player – play this tape, and you’ll almost definitely ruin your machine.
This is all part of the plan. Dante Augustus Scarlatti, Auris Apothecary founder says: ”We spend countless hours perfecting each fold and drop of ink on our releases, part of the absurdity in what we do is that we also promote absolute destruction – sonically, physically, socially, spiritually and mentally. If that happens to entail destroying part of the package we worked so hard to make, it was all part of the greater plan and should be considered an acceptable casualty in the pursuit of understanding.
“Anti-cassettes are our extension of that idea, promoting physical alteration to a degree that it would appear unplayable or damaging to perform in its presented state… They are obstacles designed to provide tangible insight into otherwise abstract concepts, and we encourage the listener to perform whatever tasks are necessary to hear the audio. They also represent a basic test of logical reasoning, serving as a mental measure of common sense. If you believe it will damage your equipment, why would you play it? Wouldn’t it make more sense to solve whatever is preventing it from playing correctly?”
The cassette is given an agency it doesn’t enjoy otherwise. Playing this tape, it’s your machine that becomes the transient, finite thing in the equation, not the music. It’s a direct opposite to the current discussion about the direction of music consumption. This cassette leaves reminders of itself everywhere – there are still grains of black sand on my desk.
“I imagine folks view [the cassette] too often externally and write it off, thinking it’s created as an art-object that holds no audio value. We present a challenge, and we hope people attempt a solution. But that’s not to say that we don’t entirely condone people destroying equipment by shoving a sand-filled tape into their perfectly-functioning tape players.”
The music lives on to destroy another machine, and will (presumably) change from one play to the next, depending on the dispersal of sand on the tape and in the reels, and the hardiness of the machine you’ve chosen to sacrifice next. This cassette is put together to be a mechanical aggressor (which probably explains the title), hell bent on ruining your listening for years to come, as you hoover grains of sand from your Walkman.
Internet radios spider the internet for stations: algorithms track down broadcasts. Spinning a dial means I don’t head for a particular target, I browse. Channel surfing by location, I stumbled (and stuck) to South Korea. Not regional or national stations, but ones that seem to be broadcast from a user generated platform a little like Fnoob, and are called things like Coffee, Music, And Emotion, Little House Under The Stars, and Lamp Of Love. I say seem, because I don’t really know much about these stations.
What I do know is that these stations are solely interested in a type of seriously emotional manufactured pop: tales of teenage heartbreak, epic adolescent sagas, and intense melancholic ballads. At least, that’s what it sounds like. My radio only goes so far in translating the Korean text (and Google hasn’t proved much more useful), so ticker lines and track names get scrambled from Korean into Wingdings-like lines of symbols and letters, with only the station name staying intact.
Sung in my mother tongue I’d be far less interested in these cheesy ballads. Obscured by a language barrier the vocals are removed of the lazy romantic cliches I’m presuming make up the lyrics. Predictable, reliable, and stripped of potentially alienatingly bad lyrics, I really enjoy these stations – the warm intensity of the I-Really-Mean-It key change that suggests a statement of everlasting love; the same chord changes in every track, and a vocalist that always fits the same sonic box.
The tracks all sound the same, and in part it’s this consistency that appeals. They wouldn’t stand up to close listening, and further investigation might reveal an unsavoury production line of pop artists, or just a lot of terrible albums. I listen to this only in the context of my radio, because it’s a mood I tune in to, not a collection of artists whose back catalogues I’m interested in. Even so, I don’t seem to have a choice: Coffee, Music And Emotion is as impenetrable online as it is on my internet radio (unless of course, you speak Korean).
A little like Rollo Jackson in Tape Crackers (if you swap out the Jungle and inner city tower blocks for South Korea’s bedroom broadcasters) I don’t know the artists being played, and I don’t know who’s playing them, just the station name and when to prick up my ears for the key change, and that’s the way I like it.
At this year’s Mutek, the series of A/V performances (as well as Amon Tobin’s bombastic stage spectacle) were notable for treating visuals with an extra gravity that isn’t often extended to VJs and A/V artists. Across the festival schedule, visuals were brought to the fore and rendered in pin sharp graphics.
Here’s a clip of Purform, whose set was most collaborative, with the audio visual elements merged into a coherent package, where neither medium is the prime mover. It’s this duo that got me to thinking about the effect of hi res visuals on the audio in an A/V show. Here, the monochromatic visuals were rendered across a three screen array.
The effect of these super hi-res visuals is a sort of synthesthetic illusion, whereby the audio is exaggerated because of the visuals. There’s a phenomenon like this in consumer technology: people watching a higher resolution screen think that they are hearing better quality audio than those watching a lower resolution screen, even when the audio is identical. The same phenomena seemed to be happening in the context of the A/V shows too, particularly at Amon Tobin.
Tobin’s stage set up was one of the centre pieces of the festival: 3D projection mapping onto a stage set constructed from giant white stacked cubes. The visuals run the gamut from abstract lights and animated graphics to Transformer-like robots and enormous spaceships in starry skies. The extravagance of this spectacle appeared to give the booming of the bass an extra dimension, and at the very least the sound for Tobin was noticeably better than for other artists in the same venue.
The AntiVJ/Murcof collaboration benefited from a similar synesthetic illusion: flexing, angular, monochrome noodles, designed to react according to the frequencies Murcof was pushing, stretched their vibrating coils into the foreground of the broad screen, gave the bass an extra dimension, feeling like it got deeper into my head. It reminded me of the the Lustmord show at Unsound Festival in Krakow last year (also performed at Unsound New York), where curling smoke trails spiralled into blackness.
Whether the brain’s mixing up of good sound and good visuals is a real effect in A/V performances or not, generally speaking visual artists at Mutek were treated as legitimate acts alongside their musical collaborators. This doesn’t happen often – one reason suggested to me has been that great audio visual shows are suspicious: the more paranoid among us immediately ask what the visuals are distracting us from in the music, like the card trick that distracts you from the fact you’ve had your wallet nicked. Are the bright lights just a diversion from what’s going on somewhere else in our senses, or are we just too used to music being performed with little or nothing in the way of visuals to be comfortable with it being done really well?
Kenneth Goldsmith’s Epiphany in the May issue of the print zine is the first in a series of essaysabout digital cultures and their effect on the music industry: what they mean for listeners and creators, the change they bring about in cultural currencies and obsessions, and the moral and monetary issues surrounding freebies and filesharing.
The discussion continues in the current June issue with a response to Goldsmith’s piece from ReR label head Chris Cutler. Both essays, and all forthcoming essays, will be published online. Traditionally, this goes against the rules of digital publishing: replicating content online for free devalues the print zine, meaning readers are less likely to shell out for the hard copy. In effect, we’re filesharing our own content. So why are we doing it?
No other content from The Wire‘s printed page – bar our monthly listings – gets uploaded to the site (archive editorial content is drawn from back issues that are sold out). However, the subject matter of the essays by Goldsmith and Cutler demand that we make an exception. What’s the point of an essay about the effect of the internet if we hold it back from the online communities that are part of the digital paradigm shift we’re discussing?
Writing about the impact of new technologies on the economy of music too often boils down to one of two things: a new tech or digital sales pitch heralded as the saviour of the industry or (as is more often the case) its imminent demise. The reality is not so simple. The digital landscape is inherently fragmentary, meaning we’re all looking on this scene from a different angle: what’s destroyed one has often brought another success, and so keeping these essays within the confines of the magazine limits any hope of turning snapshots into a coherent picture.
In short, this is not a discussion that belongs on the printed page, but one that should be a part of the digital cultures it examines.
A couple of weeks ago at Future Human’s Sonic Boom event the discussion drifted onto the subject of value, originality and use of presets in music making. Matthew Herbert decried the use of presets in music. “I find it so depressing that so much stuff is still based around drum machines,” he said. “There is definitely something very valuable in the democratisation of the tech that allows people to engage in trying their hand at music… but presets are absolutely the wrong way to go – it just feels like a supermarket.”
The implication is that music made with presets has little value, and later in the discussion Herbert questioned the point of making it at all. While from the point of view of the artist as a creator and a creative, he talks sense. It’s reductive in so far as it almost eliminates the listener from the equation. How well can most listeners really pick out a preset? If listeners can’t, (or the more likely case: they just don’t) pick out presets, then is it only for the good of the artist to shun the 808?
Adam Harper, who was also on the panel, said: “There are lots of different ways of being original and lots of variables through which one can be original, so if you’re using these presets, but you’re using them in a rhythmically different way, then that counts as relatively original.” Harper pointed out that Chicago Footwork uses TR808 drum samples, but does so in a rhythmically original way: “It’s more about the form of the rhythm that the sound of the timbres, so there are different dimensions,” he said.
Originality is more complex than steering clear of presets, and has more to do with context – after all, an objective originality is impossible to verify. Perhaps what Herbert means is an originality of approach, in which case Harper is right to point out that the use of 808s – or any other preset sample – doesn’t eliminate the possibility of creating something original.
Two of Dust To Digital’s recent releases, Rev Johnny L Jones The Hurricane That Hit Atlanta and the book and CD bundle Ain’t No Grave, a bio of Appalachian preacher Brother Claude Ely, are two parts of a lineage. If Brother Claude Ely is the raw material, red raw vocal chords stripped by screaming, Jones is a mark further along that lineage, watered down – but not to its detriment – where sermons are songs (in the conventional sense) with electric guitars.
Asked about why they started calling him ‘The Hurricane’, Jones says: “The hurricane starts off slowly, slowly slowly, and as long as there’s the process, the faster, the faster, the faster she gets, and when she gets a certain speed, that’s when she’s dangerous.”
Listening to the two in sequence, this idea of a snowballing force is better applied to Brother Claude Ely than Jones, but it’s the idea that connects them: the sermon as a cumulation of dynamic energy. The final track on the CD with Brother Claude Ely is a 40 minute long sermon on how “lingerin’ could be your doom”, which swells from a fairly vanilla reading to loud, fierce preaching, exploding in its final minutes into a terrifying, rhythmic screaming, where an extra syllable is added on every beat – “that thing that was keeping me from the Holy Ghost-ah” – that snags, picking you up and pulling you downstream, past where the words cease to be clearly distinguishable; past the content to the pure propulsive rhythm of the voice stretched to a base squall.
Johnny L Jones isn’t so exhaustingly intense – he’s not after putting the fear of God in you so much as he is after using song as a means of worship. All the same it contains that dynamic, tempered and vocally refined so it retains the richness and melodiousness of his voice, and leaning more on a call and response than a syllabic marker, but it’s there, and it lulls and rolls you past rationalism and reason into the hands of God, just like Brother Claude Ely is terrifying enough to make you put up your hands in surrender and book yourself in for a baptism.
Daphne Oram (1925-2003) was a pioneering British composer and electronic musician. She was the creator of Oramics, a synthesis technique which used visual images to create electronic sounds. She is credited with creating the very first piece of commissioned electronic music for the BBC in 1957 (the score for Amphitryon 38) and was instrumental in the formation of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, becoming its first director in 1958.
Leaving the BBC less than a year later, Oram founded her own electronic music studio where she produced the electronic soundtrack to the 1961 horror film The Innocents, as well as various concert works and compositions. After her death in 2003, the British improvisor and instrument builder Hugh Davies inherited her archive of papers and tapes. Following Davies’s death in 2005 the collection was accessioned by Goldsmiths, University of London.
The Sounds Of New Atlantis: Daphne Oram, Radiophonics And The Drawn Sound Technique will include a presentation by Dan Wilson tracing the evolution of the philosophies behind Oramics, and Daphne Oram’s progress in reconciling the physical and metaphysical aspects of sound; a biographical sketch in the form of a presentation by Jo Hutton, looking at Daphne Oram’s role at the BBC in developing electroacoustic music and radiophonic art in Britain; a joint presentation by Mick Grierson and Chris Weaver on the evolution of the Oramics machine, its potential significance as one of the first British computer music systems, and the plans for its future conservation, plus a video presentation by Graham Wrench, the former RAF radar engineer responsible for building the first prototype of the Oramics machine. London Cafe Oto, 7 April, 8pm, £4.
Read
The Oram Collection website, run by this month’s salon guests. Includes scanned archived press cuttings.
Daphne Oram An Individual Note Of Sound Music And Electronics, introduced by Oram as a “sniffing the air in all directions to see whether we can catch a scent or two of intriguing interrelationships between electronics and music”. Out of print, but PDF available here.
A month ago a DJ set by Hieroglyphic Being (aka Jamal Moss) set my world on fire. It was in Berlin, at the CTM festival, and I can’t stop going over it in my head, rerunning the maths to find the multiplying factor. It was the first time I’d seen Moss DJ. It started at 3am, following an impeccable set of tessellated Techno by Kassem Mosse. But Jamal Moss’s set was a different beast entirely: loose, sloppy and incredibly ugly in some parts, but always giddy, impatient and unpredictable. It ran through pitched up and pitched down tracks, and too many genres and styles to count on one hand. At one point it got into a call and response dialogue between New York disco and Krautrock. The mixing was at times slick, incredible (an air raid siren threaded through three tracks, sewing them together). In other places it was a dirty hack made with a blunt instrument.
2009