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The Mire

Abdul Qadim Haqq

There's a very intriguing interview with UR artist Abdul Qadim Haqq at the excellent Drexciya Research Lab .

The Mire

On The Wire

So any regular readers of the magazine will know who Steve Barker is, but anyone who doesn't live in the UK may not be aware of the extent of his coolness. He recently turned 60 and is a grandfather (sorry, Steve, I've outed you!), but is still incredibly enthusiastic about music and wholly involved with it. He was at that infamous Bob Dylan concert (in Manchester's Albert Hall) in '66, he met pre-fame Bowie and he still manages to help get gigs in China for the likes of Kode9 and The Bug. The reason I bring all this up is because he's been hosting a radio show for BBC Lancashire for nearly a quarter of a century. They regularly get guest mixes in and after Steve provided a brilliant mix of Chinese music for our own Resonance radio show (check it out here) , he asked me to return the favour. It aired this past Saturday, but you can...

The Mire

12 hour party people

Uber Germanist Owen weighs into the debate on minimal: It rather pains me to say this, as Berlin - with its healthy contempt for the work ethic, and its still extant left activism - is a far, far saner city than London, and by several leagues more pleasant, more rewarding a place to live. And yet, when - as seems largely to have happened in much of Mitte, Kreuzberg, Friedrichshain, Prenzlauer Berg - an entire chunk of a formerly working city becomes a playground for an international of 'creatives', something odd happens. One often got the sense in Berlin that whatever was happening, it didn't really matter, nothing was at stake: pure pleasure becomes boring after a while, as does the constant low-level tick-tock of a techno designed seemingly for little else than just rolling along. German techno seems fastidious, but not glamorous. An executive music for people who can make a living...

The Mire

paid in full

The big news Grime-wise in London this month concerns Rinse FM's 14th Birthday party at The End in London on 22nd August – the Pay As U Go Cartel of Slimzee, Wiley, Gods Gift et al, some of Rinse's earliest stars, are reforming for the event. Anyone who witnessed Wiley's performance at one of these events a few months ago will know what to expect in terms of lyrical intensity. But it's especially heartening to see Slimzee out on the scene (the DJ who at one point was banned by an ASBO from being on the higher floors of tall housing blocks). Slimzee's DJ sets were key to the transition between Garage to Grime proper. His abrasive dubplates were as cold and tough as concrete streets – they called out for some human presence, if only to leaven the feeling of sheer loneliness. It was on these kind of tracks that London MCs first began to find their voice, and his Sidewinder...

The Mire

Return to the fairground

"Minimal, of course, was the straw that overflowed the glass of Red Bull," writes Philip Sherburne in his jeremiad on the state of electronic dance music. Scapegoat or no, in the last 18 months, the ubiquitous and yet strangely ephemeral genre has become a lightning rod for every conceivable critique. It's too soulless. It all sounds the same. It's lost touch with the roots of "real" dance music. It might not be surprising to hear a DJ like Diplo tell Pitchfork, "I go to a club in Berlin and I want to kill myself." But even within the scene, everyone complains about minimal, leveling complaints that often seem indicative of a much wider unease. But the problem doesn't really lie with minimal itself. (One difficulty, though, is defining what minimal "itself" is; and it's questionable whether everything now labeled 'minimal' can now usefully be defined as belonging to one genre or sensibility.) As Simon Hampson argued in The...

The Mire

non-urban field place

A puff-piece on Radio 4 recently marvelled over the rise of popular music festivals in the UK and beyond. Admittedly, it's nice that festivals like Green Man are taking advantage of outdoor settings for staging music, and certainly the feeling of a return to nature, of reclaiming the land, is a powerful one. However for me it's hard not to see the rise of outdoor music festivals in the UK as a corollary of the decline of urban music venues and the rise in property and rent prices everywhere. As cities grow, urban space becomes prohibitively expensive, and the only leisure spaces are at the peripheries, in temporary zones a day trip away from the city. Promoters turn to the greenbelt to host their events, and music festivals pile the acts high to keep prices relatively cheap. The performers appearing become ever more bland, as promoters focus on providing an undemanding soundtrack to the brief moments of summer reverie we get in the UK....

The Mire

Ridicule Is Nothing To Be Scared Of (Slight Return)

Like David Stubbs , I'm of course delighted to have been shopped to the commissars of commonsense who compile Private Eye's Pseud's Corner. It's always bracing to be middlebrow-beaten; a pleasure I can expect to enjoy fairly regularly from now on, since, if the section from the Mark Stewart feature that they selected is considered fair game, then they might as well open up a permanent spot for me. It's difficult to know what the alleged problem is: the conjoining of politics and music? Well, it's hardly stretching a point to argue that a record such as For How Much Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? might, y'know, have had some connection with geopolitical developments at the end of the 70s. Would the same objection be made to linkages between politics and other areas of culture? But of course what is objected to is as much a question of tone as of content. The...

The Mire

Dave Tompkins on air

For those missing their regular fix of The Wire hiphop columnist Dave Tompkins, he did a great radio show last week, as part of the Finer Things programme in Poughkeepsie, hosted by another contributor, Hua Hsu. Great stuff which is heavy on the electro and vocoder flavours, and every bit as indefatigable and crate-diggerly as you'd expect from Dave's contributions to the mag: Part One is here Part Two is here If you're still not sated, I'd recommend checking out the mammoth Miami Bass throwdown he did on WFMU from back in the day. You can access the archives here .

The Mire

Far East sound

Nice article on China's reggae heritage by Dave Katz, author of Solid Foundation . Not only did I not realise that Leslie Kong was of Chinese origin (and he's the guy who recorded arguably the best sides ever by The Wailers, some of the formative documents of roots reggae), but the scale of Vincent and Patricia Chin's VP label was brought home this week, when I realised they're now the people who own Greensleeves. Thanks for Steve Barker for pointing the article our way.

The Mire

LFO Peel Session

If you download only one thing today, I'd heartily recommend the LFO Peel Session from all the way back in 1990 that you can find at robotsound . Spine-tingling stuff. Like Peel Sessions from many other electronic types, it ends up somewhere between a studio track and live one – electronic sketches rather than fully fledged dancefloor wreckers. But that's the beauty of it – spare architectural lines, immeasurably expressive. It seems to drip with adolescent yearning – not surprisingly, as LFO were still barely out of their teens. Yet, it seems incredible to recall, they were in the studio with Kraftwerk around this very time (you can find their handwritten account of it in Rob Young's Black Dog Publishing book on Warp Records).

Essay

The Primer: Field Recordings

June 2008

An occasional series in which we offer a beginner’s guide to the must-have recordings of some of our favourite musicians (and music). This month, Richard Henderson enters the preternatural realm of field recordings. This article originally appeared in The Wire 168 (February 1998).

The Mire

With a certain synchronicity, just as Blissblog reminisces about old tapes (with the help of FACT magazine's Woebot), this item emerged from the postbag at The Wire – a promo release for the forthcoming Russell Haswell Editions Mego double LP Second Live Salvage (fearsome, thrilling noise architecture). The Wire office has been without a tape deck for a short while, so I had to do my own salvaging, retrieving mine from the loft to play it on. I've no idea as to the sonic merits of tape versus CD or MP3. But in terms of how they are used, and how they embed themselves in you habits of music appreciation, there's lots to be said for tapes, specifically self-recorded ones which allow you to write many times/read many times. Many tapes of mine have changed like a patchwork quilt as I've dubbed new things next to...

The Mire

Anti-Epiphany

Simon's response to Mark Wastell's Epiphany in Wire 292, fascinating not because it is a Rashômon -like alternative reading of the same event, but because - contrary to certain prevailing hedonic relativist orthodoxies - it demonstrates that there is something more involved in aesthetic judgments than a mere registering of sensations. The difference between Mark's response and Simon's was not at the level of pleasure; it wasn't that Mark found Parker and Braxton any more agreeable than Simon did. But, in Mark's case, the initially disagreeable sensations induced him to take a leap beyond the pleasure principle: a cognitive act, a commitment, a decision to override the 'anger and confusion' that the music first caused him to feel.(Simon of course has taken such leaps in respect of other scenes, other musics.) The mantra of hedonic relativism has it that ' everything is subjective ', where subjectivity is construed as an arbitrary set of preferences. But Mark's Epiphany...

The Mire

Bing Tha Ruckus

My recent Invisible Jukebox with Wu-Tang Clan's The RZA (featured in The Wire 292, which has just hit the streets) involved a train spotter's paradise of sample-spotting and internet researching as I looked into the building blocks of the great Wu-Tang albums of the mid-90s. One sample I missed, sadly, was that "Ice Water" from the RZA-produced Raekwon album Only Built 4 Cuban Linx featured a vocal sample from none other than Bing Crosby, singing "White Christmas". The langorous, grandfatherly "I'm...." from the first line is cut off just before the second syllable, leaving only a deep voice and wide vibrato that sounds like it's emanating from the depths of the pyramids. It's one of the most gothic moments in the whole of hiphop, using good ol' Bing's disembodied tones as an unearthly, weirdly non-gendered siren call. It's odd to think of a sample fiend like The RZA getting a kick out of Bing's voice, but...

The Mire

Theo Parrish

It's hard in the internet era to recreate that excitement of the unknown when you encounter a dusty, entirely mysterious artifact in a record shop. There's no such thing as a rare record these days, with the advent of eBay, and music available in digital forms is so extensively propagated around the internet that it's rare to encounter something you don't know at least something about (even if you haven't encountered it, you can often guess what it's like by a process of elimination.... "ah! so this must be that Scandinavian skwee stuff, as its not on one of the usual Swedish labels..."). However, Detroit producer Theo Parrish (whose Sound Sculptures Volume 1 was reviewed recently in The Wire 291) makes a fair stab at preserving that sensation in a manner that's neither drearily nostalgic nor hermetically self-referential. He's prolific but publicity shy, fiercely pro-vinyl, and shuns all genre terms. Nevertheless, you get the unerring sense in...

The Mire

Heatwave

The recent Soul Jazz An England Story compilation, from some of the people behind London club night Heatwave, reminded me of some of the excellent 7"s these guys have released over the years. In particular, this ragga refix of Kelis' "Trick Me" (already an astonishingly funky track, with its rhythm that lurks somewhere between technofied R&B; and dust-caked ska), which I found while looking for records to DJ with in Brussels as part of The Wire soundsystem the other day. The precise, gritty ruff-age of the vocals immediately raises the energy levels of the track. This melding of ragga vocals and R&B; is like that of old school rapping and disco on Soul Jazz's fairly recent Big Apple Rapping - when the rough and smooth go together so well, what's not to like? Anyway, I have such fond memories of this 7" that I actually found myself running back to the...

The Mire

Namings As Portals

Speaking of postpunk autodidacticism, Owen Hatherley picks up on what I too thought was of the most interesting lines in Mark Sinker's Sight & Sound review of Grant Gee's Joy Division film: Curtis' own writing was a teen scrapbook of anti-pop titles and sensibilities ('Interzone', 'Atrocity Exhibition', 'Colony', 'Dead Souls', invoke Burroughs, Ballard, Kafka and Gogol respectively, the effect dismissable only if you decide not to see such namings as portals). Sometimes the names condensed more than one reference: 'Colony' invoked Conrad as much as Kafka's 'Strike Kolony'. Sometimes the references were unintentional misdirections; 'Atrocity Exhibition' is surely one of the least Ballardian tracks that Joy Division produced. In any case, construing these allusions as 'portals' that led somewhere – rather than as citations in a seamless postmodern circuit – is highly suggestive. Such portals could take the listener into formal education, but were also doorways beyond the school and the university, an alternative curriculum. (Also...

The Mire

Satire Is Dead, Again

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

The Mire

Designer Despair

Rousing praise for Portishead's latest amidst Simon Reynolds's latest bumper pack of reflections on Blissblog. I find Simon's enthusiasm for the LP a little perplexing, although, I must confess, I've never been that enraptured by Portishead. I became quickly fatigued wading through the gloopy designer despair of their debut, and had all but lost interest by the time of the follow up. The combination of kitchen sink torch singing, vinyl crepitation, sweeping film samples and brokeback hiphop beats possessed a certain stylishness, but the appeal quickly palled. It was the 'stylishness' that was the problem, actually. Even though I don't doubt the personal sincerity of either Gibbons or Barrow, formally it all sounded a little pat, a little too cleverly contrived, a little too comfortably at home in This Life 90s Style culture. Gibbons's gloom always struck me as being more like illegible grumbling than the oblique bleakness it wanted to be....