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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....

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...