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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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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