In the Unofficial Channels column of the February issue of The Wire, I write about Flokimotheque, a YouTube playlist that revives the perverse poetics of ethnographic surrealism. The playlist contains more than 100 posts that each juxtapose a single still image with a single piece of music. Check it out here to see how prolonged immersion in such a seemingly prosaic process can reconfigure the senses and send ripples across the surface of the Real.

(Of course, referring to any indigenous non-Western music as an ‘alien genre’ is somewhat problematic, as Adam readily admitted, but in this case he seems to be using it to identify highly complex musical forms that arise out of normative social activity – an actually existing practice in many parts of the world, but in post-industrial societies, one which has been annexed from the public sphere by the deleterious forces of the culture industry and therefore rendered alien. Or, as Richard Henderson put it in his Field Recordings Primer in The Wire 168: “What Steve Reich accomplished with elliptical tape loops in concurrent motion on “It’s Gonna Rain”, the Aka manage to do while walking to work in the morning.”)

Towards the end of the subsequent panel discussion, which brought Mira Calix and Nightwave into the debate, Adam took issue with one famous attempt to use this primordial polyphonic sound as a launch pad to the outer limits, dissing Herbie Hancock’s appropriation of it on the remake of “Watermelon Man” on the 1973 Headhunters album.

I was moderating the panel, and over the years have also happened to have spent God knows how many hours traveling the spaceways signposted by Herbie’s 70s music. So while such a public diss would usually have had me banging the offending speaker upside the head with my chairman’s gavel, on the night I let it pass, as it was an aside at most, and to take issue with it would have carried us way off message. But in the cold light of day such an assessment demands some kind of analysis or response, so…

Where Adam experiences “Watermelon Man” as an inert distillation of an ancient and complex and living communal music, I hear an integrated musical performance riven with tension and currents that run fast and deep. (And if Adam really wanted to make a point about how such an alien genre can be killed stone dead by careless sampling, then citing Deep Forest would have rammed the point home more thoroughly, not to say conclusively.)

Adam wasn’t impressed with that album title either (“It’s called Headhunters for God’s sake!”), but I’ve always read it as a sly deployment of the kind of militant semiotics that would be mobilised to fuller effect by P-funk and the Hiphop Nation – as in: Headhunters as proselytizers for a new tribal aesthetix, mind expansion for headz, etc.

Like the music on Herbie’s previous Mwandishi, Crossings and Sextant albums, Headhunters and “Watermelon Man” were the results of a fusion experiment that was itself the product of a unifying Afrocentricism that on the cusp of the 70s was an imperative for many black American musicians emerging from a decade marked by an integrationist civil rights movement on the one side, and the separatist Black Nationalist and Black Arts movements on the other.

Still, Adam’s ethnomusicological disgust hits a nerve in one respect, because Headhunters and “Watermelon Man” were also a stark indication of how Africa was an alien zone even for conscious jazzers like Herbie and his group (an indication of how thoroughly slavery had worked its nihilistic designs on the folk memory of an entire people). Admittedly, Headhunters was a step back from the advances of its predecessor Sextant, which, pace Infinite Music, contains a multiverse of sonic variables and alien timbres which has yet to be fully explored and colonised. But the quantum funk was still going on, and the whole thang was just one component in a wider programme to cauterize some of the psychic vandalism inflicted during the Middle Passage, one which asserted an ancient-to-the-future black identity by getting explicit about the African component of a sound that was mapping the pathways to new worlds.

Maybe it’s a generational thing. Adam is half my age, and from the perspective of a twentysomething 21st century musicologist it might all sound a bit lumpen and prosaic. But to dismiss it as crass, or even exploitative, is to ignore the music’s own temporal-spatial reality and its position within a complex sociopolitical process, one which was further complicated by the fact it was taking place in the context of the mass culture industry. Herbie was signed to Columbia, one of the largest entertainment conglomerates on the planet, with ambitions to follow his labelmate and former employer Miles Davis in breaking out of the jazz ghetto. But following the commercial failure of Sextant, he was under pressure to deliver product that would recoup his label’s investment – which he did: Headhunters shifted more than a million units, which means it landed an alien genre deep inside the collective consciousness of mainstream America with genuine force.

In the mid-90s I interviewed Herbie, when he was staying in the surreal opulence of the Park Lane Hotel overlooking Hyde Park in central London. I’d requested the meeting to talk specifically about that amazing sequence of records he’d produced in the lead up to Headhunters. I was eager to find out what had been going on in his head when he and his group of furthermuckers (© Greg Tate) had retrofitted their instruments with cyborg prosthetix and devised that technologised jazz-not-jazz-almost-funk that felt so harmonically expansive and rhythmically advanced, not to mention mythpoetically charged and quantum physically mysterious. Naturally he was affable and charming and fielded my questions with good grace, but it was ultimately a dispiriting experience. Basically, he wasn’t interested, seemingly regarding the music as at best misguided exhuberance, at worst hubristic folly. (The transcript and that of a second interview conducted by phone a few months later were eventually folded into an article, all 7000 words of it, on what became known as the Mwandishi group that appeared in The Wire 174.)

As a musician, Herbie was living a weird dual existence by this point, pushing an airless heritage industry version of the kind of acoustic jazz which characterised his mid-60s breakthrough albums for the Blue Note label, as well as a form of hi-tech industry fuzak so sinisterly corporate that even now it makes James Ferarro’s Far Side Virtual sound like Dock Boggs plucking a banjo in a sharecropper’s shack (but I suppose that’s all part of the conceptual smarts of Ferraro’s guerilla hack of a record).

Appropriately for someone who could command such lofty accommodation, he was dressed like the CEO of a Dow Jones listed company just over for a weekend shopping trip to Harrods – his sports jacket, slacks and loafers combo probably cost more than I made in a month (but did he still have all those dashikis and kaftans he used to wear in the 70s, maybe hanging neglected at the back of a closet somewhere in his LA condo? I don’t know, I neglected to ask). A friend of Sting, Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder, recipient of various Grammys and MTV Awards, his position in the upper echelons of Entertainment USA Inc was secure, and he wasn’t about to rise to the bait of an offay journo from some obscure UK music zine who wanted to know if he’d ever felt like an extraterrestrial (seriously). In the article, it was left to other members of Herbie’s group, trumpeter Eddie Henderson in particular, to articulate the music’s affective power, its alien heat and infinite potentiality.

All of this only encouraged a creeping and somewhat perplexing notion that Herbie had always been the most conservative member of every group he fronted, but had still somehow found himself at the controls of some of the most significant departures in post-war black music, and not just with regard to those early 70s records either

If you know Sunlight‘s boogie down productions, or the future shock electro of “Rockit”, but are hazy on the backstory, check the playlist below.

And wonder what it must be like to be a musician who has this kind of history, but whose reality over the last two decades or more seems to necessitate the denial of a past in which any of it actually happened.

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 some scathing reviews, 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 Sound magazine, whose office is just across the corridor in the same building as The Wire‘s. They think Lulu is a joke too – obviously)

And with that thought I commend to you The Wire’s Top 50 Releases of the Year for 2011, which arrives as a consequence of a democratic process in which an electorate made up of the magazine’s staff and contributors were franchised to vote for their top ten individual releases of the year across all known forms of sound and music activity, votes which were then collated into the chart that is enshrined in the annual Rewind feature in the new January issue.

(By the way, that’s ‘Releases of the Year’ as opposed to ‘Records of the Year’, as with previous Rewind features, a release being classified here as any self-contained audio entity, be it a vinyl LP, 12″ EP, cassette, CD, download, mixtape, etc. We made the change in a spirit of ‘all formats acknowledged’ democracy, but while a few up-to-speed contributors took us at our word and ran with it, submitting Web 2.0-driven charts containing YouTube uploads and tracks given away via Twitter, the bulk of the electorate continued to cast their votes for old fashioned albums, records or otherwise. And as a footnote to this aside, we ourselves obviously forgot that spirit when we were writing the cover lines for the January issue itself, which still bears the legend, ‘Records of the Year’. LOL.)

Anyway, sitting conspicuously at the top of The Wire’s Releases of the Year chart for 2011 is James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual, by dint of the simple and maybe even bleedingly obvious fact that more staff and contributors voted for it than any other release issued this year. But what does that mean exactly? Because when you look closely, the individual wills that gave rise to such an outcome (The Wire‘s contributors say James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual is the best thing released this year) start to appear rather peculiar in relation to it, ie: out of an electorate of 60 voters, only seven actually voted for Far Side Virtual in their individual top tens – that’s less than 12 per cent of the total electorate; and none of those electors who did vote for it actually had it as their individual top release of the year. Yet all are now implicated in a process that fetes a release that almost 90 per cent of them didn’t vote for, and who knows, wouldn’t even give storage space to. Because Far Side Virtual is that kind of release: you either swoon over the conceptual audacity of its deadpan appropriation of late capitalist-era corporate mood Muzak, or you think it’s the worst record Dave Grusin never made.

But that’s democracy for you.

Now you could say that the triumph of such a potentially divisive release (which is playing now via my laptop’s internal speakers and sounding like the kind of background noise your Second Life avatar might screen out as it moves through a simulacrum of the 21st century mediascape) is entirely appropriate in a year in which the abundance of choice brought on by digital technology reached such a tipping point as to make genuine consensus impossible. (That or the fact that there was no single ‘flagship’ release issued this year that cut across aesthetic divisions sufficiently to unite large portions of our cussedly diverse electorate, although admittedly this usually only happens in a year in which Robert Wyatt has put out some new music.) But what kind of authority does it bestow, when something can achieve such (ahem) high office on the back of such a miserly mandate? A highly compromised one you might think. (Is any of this sounding familiar?) But how was such an outcome arrived at? Well, brushing ethical issues aside, but in a spirit of transparency, though at the risk of dishing out too much information…

The Wire‘s Top 50 Releases of the Year chart is collated, or assembled into consensual reality, by way of a two-tier process. The number of individual voters voting for a particular release is the most significant factor: the more voters that vote for a release the higher up the final collective chart it will appear. In addition to this, a basic points system is used to allocate a value to each individual vote in each individual chart. So if a voter votes for ten releases, the tenth placed release in that chart receives 1 point, the ninth 2 points, the eighth 3 points and so on up to ten points for their number one choice. If a voter only votes for, say, five releases rather than ten (as some of our contributors did, obviously becoming paralyzed part way through the patently absurd process of having to isolate just ten individual releases from the mass of new music issued over the past 12 months), their top vote only receives five points, their second four and so on. These points are then applied to any release which two or more voters vote for. So if two voters vote for Release A, with one putting it at number one out of ten, the second at number ten out of ten, that release will have a total score of 2/11, ie two votes and 11 points. Likewise, if two voters vote for Release B, both putting it at, say, number six out of ten, that release will have a score of 2/12. So Release B will be higher up the final chart than Release A. However, at the end of the count, if Release A and Release B have the same number of votes and points, then a third tier comes into play: whichever release receives the highest placing in any of the individual charts that included it, then that will prevail. If even after this process both Release A and Release B have the same score, the returning officer can toss a coin and to hell with democracy.

And that’s it.

More or less.

However.

At such a level, the example given above seems a reasonable outcome or compromise, but it’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which such a system starts to break down catastrophically. For instance, say 59 out of 60 voters all vote for Release A as the number one release in their individual top tens, that would give it a score of 59/590. But if in those same individual charts all 60 voters voted for Release B as their tenth release of the year, it would receive a score of 60/60. In other words a release that all the electorate thought was the tenth best release of the year would trump a release that all but one of them (there’s always one) thought was the best release of the year.

In such a situation, there might be a case for moving the electoral system over to a wholly points based system, in which case Release A would trump Release B by the massive margin of 530 points. But then so to would a release that only seven out of 60 voters voted for, rather than 60 out of 60, if say, all seven voted for it as their number one in their individual top tens, thus giving it a total points score of 70.

The triumph of Far Side Virtual on such a low mandate is unusual in the history of The Wire‘s Rewind charts, with past Releases (or Records) of the Year usually having to garner votes from at least 25 per cent of the electorate. But even in years of low consensus we have tended to sideline any ethical concerns over the fairness of what is a mutated form of first-past-the-post as opposed to an alternative system that is possibly closer in spirit to a crude form of proportional representation. But for the sake of argument, if a purely points based system had been used to calculate this year’s chart, the top ten would look like this:

1. The Beach Boys The SMILE Sessions
2. James Ferraro Far Side Virtual
3. Michael Chapman The Resurrection And Revenge Of The Clayton Peacock
4. DJ Rashad Just A Taste
5. Rustie Glass Swords
6. Laurel Halo Hour Logic
7. Lou Reed & Metallica Lulu
8. Eliane Radigue Transamorem – Transmortem
9. John Wall & Alex Rodgers Works 2006-2011
10. Hype Williams One Nation

As opposed to the actual Top Ten, which looks like this:

1. James Ferraro Far Side Virtual
2. Rustie Glass Swords
3. Eliane Radigue Transamorem – Transmortem
4. Hype Williams One Nation
5. The Beach Boys The SMILE Sessions
6. Michael Chapman The Resurrection And Revenge Of The Clayton Peacock
7. DJ Rashad Just A Taste
8. Laurel Halo Hour Logic
9. Lou Reed & Metallica Lulu
10. John Wall & Alex Rodgers Works 2006-2011

So the same ten releases would still appear in both charts (albeit in a wholly different order), which means, for instance, that a points based system wouldn’t necessarily allow any of the lower placed entries in the Top 50 to suddenly storm the top tier (although it might in another year).

The collating of our 2011 charts was potentially further complicated by the fact that this year we asked the electorate to vote in a second chart, their personal Top Ten Archive Releases of the Year (replacing the previous A-Z lists of reissues and compilations, which, as remains the case with the annual genre charts, were compiled from the individual nominations of certain contributors, rather than a universal hierarchical voting system, which is why they were presented alphabetically, and why the genre charts still are).

The main Rewind chart commemorates music issued for the first time in 2011, whether it was ‘new’ music or ‘old’ music (which accounts for the #3 slot being occupied by an Eliane Radigue synthesizer piece that was realised in 1973 but only released this year). The Archive chart commemorates music that had been previously issued in one format or another prior to 2011, and that had then been reissued at some point in the past 12 months, whether as a straight like-for-like re-release of an original document, or as part of a single-artist anthology, or a generic or curated compilation, etc, etc. To complicate matters further, music or releases that had previously appeared only as bootlegs were not counted as having been previously issued, and so if they were put out in 2011 in some kind of ‘official’ or sanctioned capacity were considered as being issued for the first time, which accounts for the placing of The Beach Boys’ 1966 SMILE Sessions, one of the most bootlegged ‘records’ ever but only issued officially for the first time in 2011, at #5 in the main Releases of the Year chart. Again, if you scrutinise both charts closely (and no doubt plenty of you will) you can identify examples that don’t easily slot into this rationale, such as our top two Archive Releases of the Year themselves, Dust-To-Digital’s box set of John Fahey’s early recordings and Albert Ayler’s Stockholm, Berlin 1966. Neither of these is a straight reissue of an earlier document, and both are split more or less evenly between previously unheard and previously issued material. So why are they in the Archive chart? Because it felt right that’s why. And because all democratic voting systems are full of holes, so what you gonna do?

Despite directions on how to ‘correctly’ vote in both charts, many of our contributors, being for the most part a bunch of unclubbable mavericks (which is just the way we like them), ignored all such entreaties and voted for first time releases of old music in their Archive charts, and vice versa. At which point, the chart return officer (yours truly) consulted the electoral reform society (whoever was in the Wire office at the time) and a decision was arrived at: if a voter voted for a release in their main chart, but whose status meant it should actually have been voted for in their Archive chart, that vote was moved across to the correct chart, and vice versa.

But if you are of the opinion that such distinctions are completely arbitrary and that all the year’s releases should be judged against each other, then if you combine the votes cast, and points applied, in both the main and Archive charts to get 2011′s ultimate Releases of the Year according to The Wire, you would get a top ten that looked like this:

1. John Fahey Your Past Comes Back To Haunt You: The Fontone Years (1958-1965)
2. Albert Ayler Stockholm, Berlin 1966
3. James Ferraro Far Side Virtual
4. Bill Dixon Intents And Purposes
5. Rustie Glass Swords
6. Theo Parrish Ugly Edits
7. Eliane Radigue Transamorem – Transmortem
8. Hype Williams One Nation
9. The Beach Boys The SMILE Sessions
10. Michael Chapman The Resurrection And Revenge Of The Clayton Peacock

I have it on good authority that many alt.music operations out there, from high-profile independent retailers to print and online magazines, compile their end of year charts via a form of tyranny, imposing the corporate will on their respective electorates via repressive dictats and vote rigging (at least The Wire doesn’t actually tell anyone what they can or can’t vote for).

But in light of all of the above, can you blame them?

It might be a city built on sand but going underground in Berlin lands you between a rock and a hard place: on one side, the raw, existential rock-soul-noise drummed up by Einstürzende Neubauten and any number of unstable units permed from the small pool of artists, chancers and nay sayers they started out with in early 1980s West Berlin; on the other, the precisely calibrated monochrome Techno ricocheting off reinforced concrete walls in subterranean bunkers and abandoned industrial plants in the lawless grey zones opened up in the Eastern sector when the Berlin Wall was breached and brought down in 1989-1990.

Of course, much else has happened before and after and around these two black hole energy fields in the 30 years since Einstürzende Neubauten launched in 1980, especially after the Wall came down and made Berlin the default destination for outsider types from all over the world, among them former DDR artists like Carsten Nicolai and Rammstein, the latter conceivably being the biggest German group in the world. But none of it is so deeply rooted in the city and its ongoing endtime dramas of total war, destruction, occupation, cold war division and reunification as the music Neubauten hammered out on old West Berlin’s foundations, or the Techno scene that stealthily colonised wastelands of ruin after the collapse of the DDR.

With so much to tell about themselves and where they come from, these two grand narratives continue to overshadow all the city’s other smaller, yet no less revealing stories. The good news is you can find many of these untold stories in Danielle De Picciotto’s Berlin memoir The Beauty Of Transgression. An American artist who drifted into West Berlin via Cologne in 1987, she has been a shyly reluctant protagonist yo-yoing back and forth from the sidelines to the dead centres of all the great and small histories she has been actively involved in; and her diaristic accounts of them patchwork together an extraordinarily vivid and comprehensive portrait of Berlin city lives, her own and other creatives. These were frequently eked out in impoverished conditions, albeit ameliorated by a support network of scene bars and clubs and galleries either offering waitressing work or free drinks to artists on the other side of the counter.

De Picciotto is one of the very few people granted free passage between the city’s rock and a hard place. Shortly after her arrival in Berlin she became partner to Dr Motte, with whom she helped launch Berlin’s Love Parade. Another enduring friendship through the book is with Dimitri Hegemann, founder of the Tresor club; though Motte participated in The Untergang Show where Neubauten et al announced their existence, and Hegemann was the organiser of the early 1980s Industrial/Noise showcase Atonal festivals, the respective scenes gravitating around the city’s rock and a hard place rarely had anything to do with each other.

As an artist without a clearly defined portfolio, De Picciotto has worked for 30 plus years on both sides of the divide, only for her contributions to go largely unrecognised. She has acted as fashionista, dresser, stage designer, events organiser, exhibition curator, film maker, adviser, musician, vocalist and more; much of the time, her energies have been expended in the service of making others look good, or in creating costumes and backdrops for the memorable happenings that advance Berlin’s reputation as a laboratory for louche, decadent art experiment wherein the usual laws of gravity are suspended and hierarchies of high and low culture are turned upside down.

Unfortunately it’s not to easy to upturn or overthrow that other hierarchy, which seemingly only permits women to act in a supportive capacity to the more serious work of men; it’s unsurprising but no less shocking to see such a hierarchy repeatedly reasserting itself in the supposedly more enlightened Berlin underground circles De Picciotto passes through. And that’s despite the presence in these pages of so many extraordinary women, among them Gudrun Gut, who also moves freely between rock and Techno circles. Working with Gut and others, Picciotto grows optimistic about the changing status of women in the underground. But her relationship and eventual marriage with Einstürzende Neubauten’s Alexander Hacke quickly shattered any dream of sisterhood when she found herself the target of murderous envy from the more extreme female fans clammering for the group’s attention. Happily, their relationship has held true, with De Picciotto and Hacke now equal partners generating a series of mixed media projects incorporating literature, music and film, and pitched beyond the long shadows cast by Berlin’s rock and a hard place.

Danielle De Picciotto’s The Beauty Of Transgression: A Berlin Memoir is published by Gestalten. She’ll be reading from her book, with music supplied by Alexander Hacke, at the Idler Academy, London at 7pm, 2 December.

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.

Gould was known as one of the greatest interpreters of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. But he famously retired from live performance and instead spent long hours locked away in a studio, discovering ever more minute scales of perfectionism while cutting together choice recordings of his playing in an effort to create the most honed versions of the Variations.

He made the Solitude docs using what he called a ‘contrapuntal’ editing technique which mixed together multiple voices. It can sound noisy with the voices cancelling each other out in a kind of disorientating babble. But sometimes certain words and phrases leap out in quick succession, “endless”, “ice”, “nothing”, “year after year” etc, creating a montage of verbal images.

At first it sounds odd that these intimate and warm voices are talking about such an expansively inhuman and cold place. Further into the recording a voice says: “You can’t talk about the North until you’ve got out of it.” And here’s where the listener’s journey enters into a more fictional space, the idea of The Idea Of North. Not only is the doc about hearing first-hand accounts of what the ‘real’ North is, it’s about remembering it, re-imagining it and re-telling it from a distance.

Throughout the hour long broadcast the sound of a train rumbling along leads the listener towards this idea of North. There aren’t any noises of nature like biting wind, wolves howling or footsteps crunching in the snow. Just the muffled sound of the Muskeg Express chugging its way further north along the tracks. The voices could have been recorded anywhere, but Gould places them inside the sonic and psychological space of a train. It’s a space loaded with symbolism about fate, destiny, migration and nationhood (much like radio is too in the latter case). This mental space is also akin to that of Gould’s perfect Goldberg Variations: it’s a close, intimate and even claustrophobic space where one can focus intensely to the point of an epiphany (or hallucination). And though the people in the Idea Of North go to lengths to debunk myths about the north and of a macho ‘northmanship’ seducing travellers further and further north, the doc still creates a fantastical space, or at least a space where most anything could happen. For Gould, the north, is “a convenient area to dream about, spin tall tales about, and in the end, avoid.”

In his book The Spiritual History Of Ice: Romanticism, Science, And The Imagination, Eric G Wilson writes about this blurred borderline between real and imagined spaces: “Fantastical worlds can become real in two ways – in the systems of the tyrant or the visions of the liberator. Likewise real spaces can become fantastical in a twofold fashion. On the one hand, a tyrant might fictionalise a physical space so that he can exploit it [...] On the other hand, a liberator might transform a humanised region into the sublime laws sustaining the cosmos. A poet might release chthonic energies underlying city grids.”

Mercator's Septentrionalium Terrarum descriptio, map of the Arctic, 1595 (click to enlarge)

The Idea Of North documents first hand experiences with the real north, but it also documents Gould’s journey towards a productive north, mapping a place of serenity and contemplation over vast and empty tundra. Surrounded by frozen calm, Gould’s single-track journey is drawn towards an imagined centre point where the constraining delineations of reality cease and imagination can take over. It’s at the centre of the world where the mind can focus on smaller and smaller points of attention, tapping into the creative chthonic energies emanating from the magnetic zero degree. But for Gould it’s a place best visited rarely as an obsessive mind is easily subsumed by this vast fantasy, no matter how far away the body is.

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.

Not many mixes demand to be prefaced by an hour long documentary, but this is an exception. The BBC radio series Legends Of The Dancefloor: A Piece Of Paradise featured a four hour radio broadcast from the Paradise Garage’s second birthday, recorded by the young Lenny Fontana and on his dad’s reel to reel tape deck back in 1979. Tucked away on the BBC radio schedules in July to run through the night, it almost passed me by, although perhaps I thought that a four hour recording from the Paradise Garage was just too good to be true.

Amazingly, the set is just as good as you might hope, so much so that it begs the question of how the hell it came to light in the first place, and how it remained hidden for so long. The broadcast was accompanied by an hour long chat between Mike Morin and Lenny Fontana, the latter of whom recorded it from local radio as a teenage disco freak before he was even frequenting the club.

The set and the documentary has now been unofficially archived on the web by Belfast disco freaks Iso Disco and also on Soundcloud by DJ Mixes – now the recording is out of the bag it would be a shame if it were to disappear into the mists of time once again.

What’s the set like? Well, the sound quality is fairly good, but more importantly it’s the early years of the Paradise Garage, so the relationship between the DJ and the audience was still in the honeymoon stage, and you can hear the crowd responding to the music and the sense of community. Live PAs come from Sylvester and Loletta Holloway, voices that are so familiar frozen on their landmark records that it’s genuinely startling to hear them singing in the moment. You can also hear better than ever Levan’s style on the decks. He was not a technically dazzling DJ, but he knew his records so well that the verse of one could segue into the chorus of another. The sensitivity to mood and theme makes the experience something like film or theatre.

Perhaps in a way this mix is too good to be true, because when you’re at a club you don’t tend to listen forensically for four hours non stop – you tune in and out, you socialise and experience the space. But listening to it now, 30 years later in the comfort of your own home, it’s like discovering a lost brotherhood, a better, fairer society from times past.

Is this perhaps evidence of a radical change of direction at talkSPORT? A station which has, in the past, stirred controversy when shock-jock James Whale told listeners which way they should vote in the London Mayoral elections, or when presenter Adrian Durham hinted Russian football player Andrey Arshavin shouldn’t be allowed be allowed back in the country after helping secure Russia the Fifa World Cup for 2018? The station does seem to have been going through something of a renaissance, perhaps an age of enlightenment, recently, scooping Station of the Year and Programmer of the Year titles at the annual radio awards. But the chat on talkSPORT is more or less the same as ever: why the English Premier League is the greatest in the world, is Wayne Rooney a good role model for kids, and should a foreign manager be in charge of the England football team. It’s the background sounds that have changed.

So, if you’d have tuned into the [Mark] Saggers And [Mickey Quin] Quinny show before the UK/Ukraine Haye versus Klitschko fight last week, behind their competition to win a signed pair of The Hayemaker’s gloves was “Nite Flights” by The Walker Brothers (Scott Walker’s hopes for the big fight, as an American living in London, were hard to gauge). Listening to George Galloway talking about a possible amnesty for asylum seekers you might have heard the analogue nostalgia of Ghost Box’s Advisory Circle between the callers. There’s more: a sick El-P beat last heard on Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein behind Hawksbee and Jacobs, Not Not Fun Italo revivalists Umberto, Demdike Stare. Most remarkably, a summer giveaway to win 250 quids’ worth of vouchers for UK DIY chain Wickes was soundtracked by Germanic Detroit Techno fetishists Dopplereffekt. Somehow I’m finding it hard to imagine Gerald Donald of Dopplereffekt, on his brand new decking, flipping the sausages on a gas-powered grill.

It’s an odd meeting of worlds – esoteric strains of underground sound culture filling in the gaps between soundbites of “GAME ON! and “The lads are focused and giving 110%”. In truth, it’s all sewn together so skilfully that you can hardly notice the joins, and the energy of these pieces of music is pretty much dissipated by the reassuring pitter-patter of seasoned sportscasters. The music perhaps just becomes a kind of pacifier – after all, the one thing you should avoid on radio is dead air, and these pieces of music are the padding that keeps things comfortable. But 4/4 Techno beats, 70s Italian soundtrack fare and fourth world sampling have more juice and punch to them than drab muzak, even if it’s put in the service of pumping you up for the Merseyside derby or backing advertorials for Sky. talkSPORT is a no-nonsense commercial operation, squarely in the business of selling sport as pure entertainment. Yet it’s also a comparative minnow struggling to defend it’s patch on the radio dial, and if this means its producers and backroom staff find ad hoc ways to spice up their broadcasts, then that might be something fresh on the dial after all.

[MP3s]
The Walker Brothers on Saggers And Quinny
Cannibal Ox on Hawksbee And Jacobs
Umberto with George Galloway
The Advisory Circle on George Galloway
Dopplereffekt on Saggers And Quinny
Demdike Stare behind George Galloway