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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,...

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.