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The Mire

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,...

The Mire

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...

The Mire

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...

The Mire

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

The Mire

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.

The Mire

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...

The Mire

... 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,...

The Mire

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...

The Mire

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...

The Mire

Cocaine rap blues

A new album in the office from the Re-Up Gang, the Clipse affiliated hiphop project. Cocaine rap is the hole this stuff gets pigeoned into, and the sleeve is predictably dusted with white powder. Despite, or perhaps because of, the lack of supposedly serious content, the lyrical form is often that much more impressive – shorn of conventional narrative and characterisation, the syllables and rhymes become super tight (you don't get many couplets like "I still feel belittled sittin' here spittin' riddles/Amongst clown ass rappers who tend to give me the giggles" anymore) Nonetheless, I was devastated this week when one Clipse rhyme turned out to be not half as imaginative as I'd built it up to be. One of their rhymes started off something like "just waking up in the mondrian" . Amazing, I thought, this line which subtitutes the almost-soundalike "mondrian" for "morning" , thus giving this vivid feel of the primary colouredness of a...

The Mire

minimal markets

Can't remember which album it was of the many that cross my desk, but it was weird to see a shout-out on a fairly mainstream dance release recently expressing solidarity with those who have been sticking with it through "tough times in the last year" – presumably a reference to the economic climate. It's a strange idea to me that the perceived success or otherwise of a music venture should be predicated on such a fickle factor as economic confidence. This may have been just an aside on an inside sleeve of an album, but it seems to acknowledge that this is first or foremost a business venture, that they are speculating to accumulate. When I first used to glance at the credits, acknowledgments and copyright info on CD sleeves, I imagined more of a cottage industry model, where the names that were namechecked were simply those responsible for getting those notes in the air and sticking them on a 5" silvery...

The Mire

Silt Deposit

The reactivation of the Siltbreeze label has brightened up the office this year. Tom Lax, the boss of the label, brought his evidently bottomless 7" record bag to the WFMU studios recently . The fluff build up on the needle reaches dangerously high levels at points, but it's essential listening if you want to reach the dark, fuzzy place they're coming from.

The Mire

This Is The End

I'm pretty melancholy to see The End nightclub is to close . Unusually for this kind of news, it's not a financially dictated decision – the management just feel that after 15 years they want to move on. For those who don't know The End, it's down a dead end alley in central London. Once you're in and down the main staircase, there's a bar on one side and the main room on the other. But the main room isn't a large open space – it's divided by a central partition into two long tunnels, and with the lights from the DJ end rather dim at the far end of the room, you can feel completely lost in the gloom down there. You're never submerged into a large crowd because of the way the room is divided up, you just feel scattered amongst small groups of ravers. At the back of the room is a second set of speakers,...