The Mire

Anti-Epiphany

23|05|2008

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...

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Bing Tha Ruckus

19|05|2008

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

28|04|2008

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

14|04|2008

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

14|04|2008

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

09|04|2008

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

07|04|2008

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...

04|04|2008

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

04|04|2008

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

03|04|2008

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

26|03|2008

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

18|03|2008

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

20|02|2008

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

19|02|2008

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

19|02|2008

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...