Theo Parrish
Derek Walmsley
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 listening to his music that it could be from
either the past or the future (or both). It's always familiar,
interpolating disco, soul, funk and jazz, but carries only the feel
of these musics - the sense of interplay, of elements engaging with
each other - rarely the sort of obvious contours that distinguish
each of these genres from each other.
It makes the mini-epiphany I had while watching him discuss his
work online as part of the Red Bull Music Academy lectures (a
strange hybrid of industry self-celebration and occasionally
enlightening musician insider talk, which you can watch
here) all the more pertinent. Parrish discussed James Brown's
"Gonna Have A Funky Good Time (Doing It To Death)", and the track
sounds startlingly like a blueprint for his entire oeuvre -
elements fade in and out, a crescendo is never quite reached, but
there's perpetual motion, perpetual funk. It's very much not the
paradigm of a JB track, but instead the kind of thing his band
played in concert when marking time – a vamp, basically.
Parrish's music has perfected this sense of always becoming, but
never quite being, something fixed, defined. It's why
his music has barely changed in 15 years, but when you return to it
it seems to have some strange, almost chemical potential in the
beats, a volatility that's not quite been resolved, like gunpowder
still miraculously potent decades after it was made. Even so, it
was a minor revelation to hear "Gonna Have A Funky Good Time (Doing
It To Death)" next to his music: the resemblance is startling, as
if he's taken the James Brown track and rearranged it for
sequencer, synth and drum machine, a timeless variant of the
endless vamp.
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Heatwave
Derek Walmsley
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 hotel to get it mid-set, and anyone who's fallen for
the UK/JA crossover of An England Story should surely seek
this out.
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Namings As Portals
Mark Fisher
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:
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 well worth looking at on Owen's site:
this essay on Neu!, published in honour of the recently
deceased Klaus Dinger.)
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Satire Is Dead, Again
Mark Fisher
From the team that brought you this:
'Red is more like punk rock, hip hop, this should feel like
hard commerce.'
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Designer Despair
Mark Fisher
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. As for the new album, it screams out lack of ideas:
devoid of the vinyl crackle that might have given it some relation
to the 'hauntological now' of Burial or Philip Jeck, I can only
hear it as clapped out coffee table miserabilism ten years past its
sell-by date.
(Meanwhile, I can't help feeling that
Geoff Barrow and arch smugonaut Mark Ronson are right about
each other.)
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Weird coincidences...
Mark Fisher
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).
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Nu-linguistic programming
Mark Fisher
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 its
prestige find themselves the objects of the latest retrospective
... And just wait for all those May 68 commemorations next month...
This 'nu-language' is more than a matter of institutional inertia.
It is an expression of an interlock – a synergy – between
art, business and promotion. At the End of History, all language
tends to the condition of PR . And lurking not far behind all this
is the spider bureaucracy, now rebranded as 'administration', since
funding bodies require artists – practitioners - to
themselves internalise and proliferate nu-language. This can't be
attacked at the level of discourse alone – as IT suggests,
nu-language itself puts into practice the occlusion of objects
under referent-free discourse – but, by keeping faith with the
events of the past and anticipating events yet-to-come, criticism
can surely play a part in the attack on nu-linguistic
programming.
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new build music
Derek Walmsley
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 when they're remixing; it's much more common to
slow beats down, to straighten them out and explore the spaces
within (think of screwed and chopped hiphop, triphop etc.) It's a
much more difficult feat to speed music up and yet find a way to
still make it successfully mesh with other styles, to engage the
body. To do so is like trying to tinker with an engine while with
someone stepping on the accelerator. Perhaps understandably, remix
culture is more about breaking music down than building it up. It's
perhaps only Kode9 and Surgeon who've I've really felt they we able
to do this the other way round.
As Kode9 himself has suggested, the relationship between dance
genres (and their tempos) and the body is a deep and complex one
(think of how techno and house have subtly different emphases
despite fairly similar tempos, and yet they seem to 'work' entirely
differently). Splicing the DNA of dance genres is a bit like
playing Frankenstein. I'm still seriously impressed that it ends up
creating something so graceful and exhilarating, rather than some
disfunctional mutant that only a drugged-up crowd would enjoy.
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