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The Mire

Off The page competition winners

Thanks to everyone who entered our competition to win an Off The Page booklet. The question was: which of the Off The Page speakers selected John Cage's "Goal: New Music, New Dance" (from his book Silence ) as their favourite piece of writing on music? The answer was: Matthew Herbert. The first five names out of the hat with the correct answer were: George Hardy, Richard Moss, Suriano Rafael, Philip Rhoads and Lawrence Roberts. Your prizes will be winging their way to you any day now.

The Mire

New Adventures In Lo-fi

Another day, another bumper pack of technicolour LPs, bundled up in cardboard and scrawled with marker pen, arrive in The Wire office from the US. The LP sleeves are homemade swirls of paint and typeface, quickly made and capturing a moment of frantic creation. Before even putting them on the record deck, I have a fair idea as to how these discs might sound: long reverb trails on the guitar, deep hues of fuzz, and an intuitive, lo-fi feel. The explosion of lo-fi rock from the US in recent years has carried some revelatory moments, a fair amount of uninspired dross, but it all fizzes with a certain energy and can-do methodology. It raises a key question, and one which cuts across a great deal of music passing through the office at the moment: is the vogue for lo-fi more than a taste for sonic texture, a fad for scuffed-up surfaces? Another way to...

The Mire

Off The Page: A further digression #4

Once you've popped 'n' locked to this obscure slice of early 80s Transatlantic electro-soul, check for the credits, which harbour an unlikely link to one of the events happening at the Off The Page festival this weekend (and I don't mean Dave Tompkins's talk on the history of the vocoder: the track might be a prime slice of cyborg funk, but all the silicon synthesis is in the low end; the vocals remain strictly carbon-based). Anyway, back to those credits: edited by Double Dee & Steinski, produced and engineered by Adrian Sherwood, mixed by Sherwood and Tom (Tommy Boy) Silverman, issued by Body Rock Records, a subsiduary of Tommy Boy itself, the original channel for technologized R&B. So far so good. But what's that? Hmm, a familiar looking name in the writers' credits. 'S Beresford'. Could it really be? You bet your life it could. But who'd'a thunk it? We all knew he was the...

The Portal

Portal 09/02/2011

February 2011

Resource for music and sound enthusiasts with content focusing on the more experimental aspects of audio production.

The Mire

Off The Page: A further digression #3

The closing event of Off The Page this coming Sunday promises a collaborative and performative lecture by Claudia Molitor, Sarah Nicholls and Jennfier Walshe that will “muse on radical (or irreverent) modes of music notation”. What form this event will actually take is as elusive and mysterious as all the projects initiated by these mercurial composer-performers, who between them incorporate elements of film, theatre and multimedia into aesthetic strategies that playfully subvert the furrowed-brow, testosterone-heavy atmospheres of the kind of 'New Music' scenes they all emerge from. When I asked Claudia for some inside information on her role in the scheme of the thing, she sent me the following photographs. They look a little like images of hennaed hands, but with Persian tracery replaced by notes on staves. The mail from Claudia that accompanied the photos referenced...

The Mire

The Wire Salon: 
How To Wreck A Nice Beach: The 
Vocoder From World War Two To Hiphop

The Wire ’s monthly series of salon events returns after an extended Christmas and New Year break with an illustrated talk by the magazine’s former hiphop columnist Dave Tompkins on the history of the vocoder. The talk will be based on Dave's acclaimed recent book on synthetic voice phenomena, How To Wreck A Nice Beach (available from Stop Smiling Books ) In anticipation of the salon Dave and Monk One have made an exclusive edit of their How To Wreck A Nice Beach mix for The Wire . You can download it here . Also, click here to read Dave's extensive annotated track list for the mix in all its unexpurgated glory . The Wire Salon: 
How To Wreck A Nice Beach: The 
Vocoder From World War Two To Hiphop takes place at...

The Mire

Off The Page: A further digression #1

It's by way of some sweet synchronicity (as opposed to careful programming) that appearances by Robert Wyatt and Scritti Politti's Green Gartside will top and tail the Off The Page festival in Whitstable this coming weekend. Way back in the days of North London’s burgeoning post-punk underground, writer Ian Penman was a regular visitor to the now legendary squat Green shared with the other members of Scritti Politti, and he has recalled how Wyatt's Rock Bottom and Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard albums would reverberate through that famously squalid Camden house night and day, insinuating themselves into the occupants’ addled but expanding collective consciousness. And sure enough, in 1981 when Scritti’s still sublime sounding “The ‘Sweetest Girl’” single was released by Rough Trade, who should pop up playing piano but Old Rottenhat himself. What Green and his comrades recognised in Wyatt's music was a shared belief...

The Mire

Off The Page: A further digression (in the form a competition) #2

Everyone attending this weekend's Off The Page festival will get a free copy of a special souvenir booklet that has been produced in a one-time-only hand-made edition of just 200 copies. For the booklet, all the festival’s speakers, delegates, guests, etc were asked to select a favourite piece of writing or thinking on sound or music. The resulting selections range from the philosophical musings of Ernst Bloch to a poem by Philip Larkin, David Bowie prognosticating on the future economy of music to Ian Penman riffing on Bryan Ferry, Lester Bangs hymning Van Morrison to Alex Ward analysing Derek Bailey. The booklet in which all these and more are now reproduced has been designed and assembled by The Wire 's art director Ben Weaver. We are holding back five copies of this one off document in order to offer them as prizes in a competition, just in case you want one (and believe me, you...

The Portal

Portal 07/02/2011

February 2011

Explorative audio lab and sound design studio, with examples of their experiments with contact mics and circuit bending alongside their commercial work.

The Mire

The Grime Historian

I've been alarmed recently to see how Grime's history is fading away, at least in the digital domain. Aficionados are probably familiar with how some of the most important tracks never even got a release. "Headquarters" by Essentials, the original version of their track "State Your Name", is a paradigm case, a posse cut Grime track where each MC would state their name and location before spitting 16 bars of lyrics – when time came to release the track commercially, the track's big name MCs such as Kano and Crazy Titch mysteriously disappeared. Perhaps it was contractual obligations, but either way, commercial releases seemed just an echo of the real music. In retrospect it's easy to see why - some tracks were just CD-Rs sent to DJs to play on air, or in the case of Essentials, thrown into the crowd at shows. This stuff circulated quick, but old tracks would get left on old harddrives,...

The Mire

Tape Crackers

I'll be doing a Q&A with film maker Rollo Jackson and pirate radio tape hoarder Michael Finch at the screening of Jackson's film Tape Crackers at London’s ICA tomorrow. The doc is an oral history of Jungle, told through Finch’s tapes which he recorded while growing up in Islington, North London, but it's also an untold (or more accurately unheard) history of UK underground music of the last 10 years – Jungle, Garage and Grime are all knitted into the story through the MCs and DJs who manned the decks and mics. Movers of the underground today such as Riko Dan and B Live are on some of the tapes played in the film. The D90s might be dusty but this music still sounds ultra-crisp. Warning, may contain: late days of Dream FM, middle days of Kool FM/MC Ruff and DJ Uproar on Dream FM/MC Fize and DJ Swiftly/Riko Dan on Pressure FM/Evil...

Interview

Local Hero

January 2011

The unedited transcript of Biba Kopf's interview with Robert Wyatt. A feature based on this interview appeared in issue #163 of The Wire

The Mire

RIP Rolf Julius

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="460" caption="photo by Jens Schumann"] [/caption] The artist Rolf Julius has died. According to the label Western Vinyl, "Julius had a chronic illness, which we were aware of, but his sudden passing on Friday 21 January was unexpected." Julius was born in Germany in 1939 and studied fine art in Bremen. In the mid 1970s he began using sound alongside his visual practice. Later he moved to Berlin and became an important figure in that city's budding sound art scene, participating in Für Augen Und Ohren (1980), one of Europe's first major sound art exhibitions. Over the course of a 30 year career Julius's performances and low-volume, minimal sonic sculptures and installations developed an approach highly influential on a younger generation of sound artists.

The Portal

Portal 14/01/2011

January 2011

A transcript of an interview with Ornette Coleman by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida...