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The Mire

Weird coincidences...

Further to Derek's observations on Villalobos's 'Enfants', below ... Even though the sample is taken from a Christian Vander track, when I first heard 'Enfants' it reminded me of nothing so much as the piano on Nina Simone's 'Sinnerman'. It seems that I'm not the only one to make the association ... If the similarity between the tracks is eerie, then this only adds to the strangeness of Simone's already intensely uncanny song, which acquired even more weirdness last year when it was used by both David Lynch (in INLAND EMPIRE) and Timbaland (on the first track of his Shock Value LP).

The Mire

Nu-linguistic programming

Infinite Thought 's diatribe against artspeak raises all kinds of issues. The soporifically ubiquitous language against which she rails is part of the reassuring background noise in what passes now for high culture. It is the institutional artworld's revenge on Duchamp and Dada's idea that nonsense could be revolutionary. But the problem with this language is its oversignfication as much as its lack of content, the excess of meaning with which it freights objects and shows, fixing them into a pre-defined cultural place via the use of a laudatory linguistic muzak that combines portentous gravitas with vapid weightlessness: all those notions that are negotiated with , those boundaries that are blurred , and everything, of course, is radical ... This is the soundtrack to the postmodern conversion of events into exhibits, a process so total, so relentless, that it has become invisible, presupposed. An old story: those who sought the destruction of the art space and...

The Mire

new build music

Walking out of Kode9's DJ set at the recent BLOC weekender in Norfolk, all of us there in The Wire's chalet were saying more or less the same thing- noone else plays the kind of music Kode9 currently plays out. There's very little of anything approaching dubstep in his sets: instead, there's what sounds like speeded up crunk, Southern hiphop reedited into ever sharper shards, all kinds of ghetto funk given technofied refixes, neo-soul taken at breakneck pace. Both Kode9 and Hyperdub seem to be going in the opposite direction to what you might associate with dubstep: the music is getting quicker, sharper, more synthetic and fractured. Watching his set, I wasn't sure whether to dance or to just marvel at the way he's able to splice these musical genres together. The breadth of music traversed was enough of a rush on its own. It strikes me that few artists are able to speed music up and retain the funk...

The Mire

Haynes

The other night I saw Velvet Goldmine for the first time. I seem to recall that when it came out ten years ago, it looked quite cool, but folks who had seen it hadn't been too positive about it. I hadn't thought much about it in the interim, but not too long ago I came home and my flatmate was watching it. I caught the part where Ewan MacGregor plays Iggy Pop on stage and was immediately interested. Ewan is fully convincing and his screen character Curt Wild (geddit?) has even more extreme added twisted back story (one can only hope that Iggy didn't have it so bad, but maybe if I ever get round to reading his biography, I'll find out just how close it is). It made me want to see the rest of the film and when I found out that writer/director Todd Haynes had done this movie I made it a priority. I'd recently seen Haynes's...

The Mire

more is less

First up in April's office ambience was Ricardo Villalobos's "Enfants", a minimal Techno masterpiece comprised solely of a metronome-like hi-hat and beat, rolling piano and samples of a children's choir. The music is derived, oddly, from a piece by Christian Zander of Magma, and it becomes a matter of fascination trying to spot where the loop of singing starts and finishes (I still haven't managed it). The treatment is so simple and elegant that, despite running for all of 17 minutes in its full version, you yearn to play it again as soon as it finishes. The 12" was hammered repeatedly in the office in the run up to the April issue. Personally, I could happily hide myself away with this record for a day or two to try and discover its secrets. It exemplifies a trend that has developed in my listening habits over the last year or so: as the amount of music easily available grows exponentially,...

The Mire

in search of space

Over the last three years, Dopplereffekt - whom common consensus suggests is Gerald Donald, originally once one half of Detroit duo Drexciya- has quietly reorientated his electronic muse, turning away from the physicality of electro and towards the quietude of deep space. His albums Linear Accelerator and Calabi Yau Space are the closest contemporary electronica has to a true music of the spheres: vast, echoing spaces, with cold, pristine tones unspoilt by human hands, and elliptical melodic orbits strangely akin to the use of the Blue Danube in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey . These albums are love-letters to technology: eulogies to massive man-made marvels such as the nuclear particle laboratories housed underneath the French countryside. Given his love affair with technology, it's perhaps not surprising that Donald himself is an elusive character, never having given an official interview. Live dates are few and far between, and often unpredicatable affairs. Which makes a recording of an...

The Mire

spirits rejoice

DJ Rupture's blog has a new track to download from The Wire ex-cover star Wiley, who is going through another of his purple patches of frenzied activity (last seen around the time of 2006's five – or was it six? - editions of Tunnel Vision mixtapes). "Spirit In The Beats" also features Flo Dan, here in more lyrical mode than his more ranting recent outings with The Bug. The track is decent enough, but it's the reference to "spirits" that makes the hair prickle up. Spirit is a recurring obsession of Wiley's. On the classic "Boogieman" from many years ago with Trim, he "breaks the doors down and lets the spirits in" ; on a recent freestyle on a Maniac beat, it was a reference to a burned out car and "spirits leaving the vehicle" . In an interview many years ago, Wiley says regarding estranged ex-Roll Deep member Dizzee Rascal that "my...

The Mire

spirits rejoice

DJ Rupture's blog has a new track to download from The Wire ex-cover star Wiley, who is going through another of his purple patches of frenzied activity (last seen around the time of 2006's five – or was it six? - editions of Tunnel Vision mixtapes). "Spirit In The Beats" also features Flo Dan, here in more lyrical mode than his more ranting recent outings with The Bug. The track is decent enough, but it's the reference to "spirits" that makes the hair prickle up. Spirit is a recurring obsession of Wiley's. On the classic "Boogieman" from many years ago with Trim, he "breaks the doors down and lets the spirits in" ; on a recent freestyle on a Maniac beat, it was a reference to a burned out car and "spirits leaving the vehicle" . In an interview many years ago, Wiley says regarding estranged ex-Roll Deep member Dizzee Rascal that "my...

Essay

Derek Bailey remembered

January 2006

A full collection of tributes to the late musician, including a number of pieces which were not published in the magazine.

Essay

Dub Drunk

Web only Epiphany by The Wire's intern Imogen Decordova

Interview

Joanna Newsom

Unedited transcript of Rob Young's interview with Joanna Newsom, following the release of her second album Ys