My recent interview in East London with Keith Fullerton Whitman, the starting point for the piece in The Wire 326, meandered down almost as many byways and dead-ends as we found wandering about the canals of East London that morning. In almost all magazine pieces there's interview material which doesn't make the cut, but in this case the extra detail – technical walk-throughs of his projects, reminiscences of eternally unfinished schemes, excited talk of madcap projects in his garage – seemed to present just as compelling a picture of the man as discussing his music, and sometimes a whole lot more fun. It's not just the detail, but the way he tells it – the breathless description of routing options, vocalisations of the sounds, and his engineer's eye for chip numbers and synth esoterica, all give a vivid sense of how the composer/musician connects (and connects with) the elements of his soundworld.

This set of notebooks or appendices can be considered extra technical information for the Keith Fullerton Whitman interview in The Wire 326, a snapshot at an ever-changing constellation of works-in-progress, the love-letters page of a synthesizer fan club magazine, or an intellectual portrait in appropriately fragmentary form. The interview transcript has been edited thematically to present an alternative route through his work. The interview took place in London on 19 October 2011.

The pinball piece (part of a commission for the Kontraste festival, Krems, recorded at GRM, Paris, October 2011)

“The pinball machine thing was a sound that was in the middle of the GRM piece, a crucial bit of that piece where it's all based around these rhythms – lots of field recordings of discrete events where there was a lot of rhythms going at once. So the pinball arcade was a great example. The flipper noises, they're arhythmic, it has to do with a function of the game more than anything musical.

“The sound the game is making is this raw, late 70s, early 80s digital, the TI 76477, the Space Invaders chip. There's this video arcade in New Hampshire where there's like 20 of them all next to each other. And I use this recording, and any time it would cross the threshold of an attack it would go into the synthesizer, it would cut off all the noises between the clicks. It's gating – a comparator – so when it goes over a threshold it turns it on, when it goes below, it turns it off.

“So, I've got an audio editor open in the computer, and all it's doing is playing this mono, 15 minutes, lo-fi phone voice memo recording of the arcade. The phone was taped to the bottom, where the speaker is on this Hyperball video game. It's a pinball machine where you're rapid fire, tsch-tsch tsch-tsch-tsch. It's the noisiest thing I've ever seen in my life, so loud, violent, but weird, 1970s, 80s punk looking, gnarly. It's Bally or Williams, one of those companies.

“That recording, it's coming out of the headphone out of my computer, it's split, even though it's mono, it's going into two, audio input and a comparator in the synth. That's triggering, based on the audio going into the gates, you know the low pass gate. All the synth is really doing is taking the structure of the attacks. It's using the audio, but only over the threshold, so all you're getting is the click of the flipper, and then whatever little bit of the music of the game is going on at that second, so you hear this neoh-neoh-neoh, but all you hear is nip-nip-nip. The attacks are flashing random values from like a sample and hold thing, maybe a series of eight of them coming out of a shift register which is more like a canon generator, so every time there's an attack it pushes the next value down the line. And then those values are controlling, say, the frequency of the filter, it's this quite resonant high pass filter that's ceow-ceow-ceow, moving within that range, there's two of them, one for each channel, hard pan left and right. And then other values are being flashed to control, like, the gain, the placement in the stereo spectrum. So it's really quite an advanced patch that I could never perform that with just two hands.”

Assembling a Tamiya Frog remote control car, 25th anniversary replica edition

“Ah man, I stalled out so heavily on that. Rear tire assembly. The steps are long, there's 16 grand steps but each one is like several maneuvers. That was 15 I think, and 16 is putting the body on. Oh man, so frustrating. It's sitting there, wounded, all but the back two tires. I tested it, the mechanics, the electronics, everything works beautifully, it's oiled. Looks lovely. What a funny, frustrating thing. It's the 25th anniversary of that car, and I'm 38, so I built it when I was 12, 13. You know, it took three months as a pre-teen, and as an adult, it took three days or something like that.

“Just lacking the finger strength to do the penultimate step. Oh my god, so frustrating. And I had everyone who had strong hands come up to the house for like two weeks. OK, just, tire, this thing inside, the hub, put it in there, do it. Ply them with tequila and whiskey, get the internal strength going ... nothing. It's physically and physiologically impossible ... And the other route was ebaying vintage assembled tires from the 80s. I went to three or four hobby shops in the interim to find assembled tires or different tires, slightly more pliable, nothing. The only thing I found were these foam tires, but that's not the original. The idea is it has to be the thing, you know, it has to be this absolute recapturing of this youthful energy in this present thing.

“You know, the thing that I built to go on it was this synthesizer controlled by the servos. Originally I was just going to build a remote controlled synthesizer. It's quite an advanced thing, it's a trigger control that goes both ways, front and back, and then a steering column, but then there's also switches, so it sends, like, six or seven commands over one radio frequency. So the idea was the trigger was going to be LFO, speed, and then this was going to be oscillator speed, frequency, and then the trigger here, so you could actually play 'zing, zong zang' notes, and then have the switches be the shape of the trigger, ramp up, ramp down. So you could sit in the audience and have it go through a computer system, where, boom!, you could trigger a note and have nice quantised gradation, have control of the pitch, and build like a maze of all these individual things to fit into a tape delay.

“And then I thought, I could just have the thing that's controlling the mechanics control the car as well. It's a 9.6v giant battery pack putting on quite a lot of juice, quite a lot of amps, so you could power a speaker with the same battery that you're powering the car with, so why not just put the circuit on there? The same voltage that powers the car, can also power this EXAR 2206 chip, it's like a little digital oscillator chip that's got an FM input built into it and stuff. So it was really great, it was like two chips and a board, a couple of resistors and power.

“So now I have this awful, wounded, like a bird with a broken wing, sitting on my kitchen table, like a constant reminded of failure. It's so sad. And the funny thing is, after I came up with the idea of the speaker, you know what would be hilarious – we paint it like a jamiacan soundsystem, like a truck with the speaker built in? I could do dub sirens, I would have a little Jamaican car that would drive around and make dub sirens.”

“I was aware of those instruments, the Publison (DHM 89 B2 rack unit / KB2000 keyboard), the Coupigny, and I had read quite a bit about them before I got there. The Coupigny - all those analogue sounds in those early Parmegiani, François Bayle pieces, or there's a late Schaeffer piece [Le Triedre Fertile] - having experience with the Buchlas and the Serges, I was like, OK, this is maybe kind of a take on that, but it's coming from more of a scientific thing. It's like a machine shop, a machine you'd see in the dentist or something like that, these giant knobs. I figured out what it was, it was some LFOs and oscillators, it's a pin matrix like a VCS3, you had quite flexible routing options for how everything is talking to each other.

“So the Coupigny, a lot of these low range passes sound just kind of muddy, br-br-br-br, pulse wave. And then I would bring them up to 2 or 3k and that was gorgeous – oscilators that are very closely tuned, moving through ranges where you get this kind of sideband woi-woi-woi-woi kind of stuff happening? That's it, that's your François Bayle sound. That's just a fascinating group of sounds, and that's what this one machine does quite well. It doesn't do basslines, it doesn't do leads, these 1980s constructs of what synthesizers do. It's a scientific machine, it's meant to generate a tone, and then you can control how it's routed. There's a group of capacitors and resitors sitting in a box, you just turn it on and it makes a feedback loop and makes its sound.

“The Publison is an effects box, first and foremost, that's all it is – a digital delay line with a pitchshifter built in. Cheap, early granular, before we really knew what that was. Homemade granular, or boutique granular. So that was like, I bet sustained sounds will sound great. Big, complicated, two octave wide chord of reed sounds, like saw tooth kind of sounds. And I put that in there and of course immediately reducing the bit rate to the range in which it works, 5k, 10k. That sounded great, cut off all the high end. And then as it's jumping around in the buffer, you know, maybe a second worth of audio stored in there, it really accentuates little bits of where the harmonics are meeting each other within it. So it's just this little bit frozen, just this little bit frozen. And then as it starts jumping around and scaling through them, you're really accutely aware of the harmonic strata of this rich recording in there. I was like, this is really useful, because it puts a laser-like focus on individual harmonic components of this one static seeming sound, but in the act of freezing it, it creates this other harmonic on top of it, and you freeze it and the most pronounced thing is this eleventh or twelfth harmonic way up there, its way out of the range of the instrument. Really fun, and like the act of using it is fun, it's like using a toy or something.”

The recording set-up for the Generator and Generators albums

“I found a quick cheap and dirty way to make these neat little canons, little Bach-like motor rhythms, very straight, 16th note, 8th note, pulsing, beautiful sounds. It's a very small part of the patch, it's just like four oscillators, the slow one doing the rate of the melody and the other one doing the clocking of the melody, going through a quantiser. Simple, just a few modules. And then I play with that for a few weeks, and I'm getting good results. Detuning each oscillator so there's static intervals in there, like static third, static fourths, octaves of course. And then I got to a set of rules within the piece the more I played with it.

“It was almost like the exploration itself dictated the piece more than I was as a composer. I was sort of thinking what kind of results can I get from just using this very simple small thing. And then I found a way to have the whole thing be in this loop where the first oscillator the pitch was being analysed, and then was controlling this whole other group of things, so it's taking the seed from this one reciprocal thing, and then feeding it into another patch, and that got really interesting. Sort of like, this is going half the speed of that, so it's kind of accurately tracking this, but not successfully, so you get this ghost in the machine thing, where little bits of that were just off. Or it was maybe making a bad decision guessing what that was doing, feeding like polyphonic material into a monophonic pitch shifter. You play an octave pedal and you start geting those blrlr-blrlr-blrlr kind of things? OK, this is really cool!

“And then very slowly built it from one tiny little case with just eight modules, then one suitacase, then two suitcases, and then it just got ridiculous. In one year it went from the string quartet to like the Vienna Symphonic version of it. It's no better, it's just gets more complicated with the same tonality. And then I had drums, I was having this kick drum every ten beats, and hi-hat every, like, 17.... it was getting like prime number things, it was getting Prog. It was Pentangle turns into Genesis.”

Soundtrack commission for Deepak Chopra’s computer game Leela

“They just asked me, out the blue. We know you're into acoustics and tuning systems and all this stuff, and we like your music. One of the producers, this guy Lewis, had heard maybe the live guitar CD, the Recorded In Lisbon one. And I think he thought that would be a good starting point to talk about music for this one level of the game, which was the crown chakra at the end of the game – the actual, ultimate, you've achieved enlightenment. There's no goals of the game, but there's seven chakras, and you've achieved enlightenment by the seventh.

“I gave them this folder of everything I was working on just as examples. He pointed to this two minute segment of the Lisbon thing. Like squarewave, pulsewidth modulation, there's a little bit of psychoacoustics, and then this guitar overlay, like, sparkling. I spent months like almost trying to deconstruct my own music and redo it, but in a way that would make sense in the tuning scale of the root frequency of this particular chakra. It's neat, because some of the sounds are in Just Intonation, and sound of them are in equal. So when you first hear it it's really disorientating, especially because one sound comes in, and another comes in in a completely different tuning. There's these static notes but the harmonics are so prevalent that it's really constantly buzzing, almost heterodyning. and the frequency of the hereterodyning is the root frequency of the chakra.

“We analysed this harmonic so the beat frequency was the actual root frequency of it. It had to be a lot of Max. A lot of IRCAM high end spectral analysis, we're talking like floating point digits of like five values past zero, and figuring out, charting it out on a blackboard, and then finally, it's going to be exactly right. And I got it and I nailed it. And then on top of that there's a lot of analogue synthesizer, and the frequency of that pulsing is a sub-sub-sub octave, 1/32 below the root. Way down at the point where you're hearing it more as rhythm that an a picth. And then there's a lot of guitar on top playing this sparkling, Playthroughs-like floating bandpass fizzle.“

The Krems commission and Francois Bayle's acousmonium sound diffusion system

“The first six minutes of that sounds very done, I'm very confident that the last day I was in the studio, it like sculpted this six minutes. Everything lines up beautifully, it's great. there's drama in there, there's a narrative, it's very apparent that it's these sounds coming in this order because they're different clases of sounds, different ranges, and then it completes one solid image of all five, low, low-mid, medium, mid-high, high, at once, coming out of different speakers. And then they all every couple of seconds synchronise. But the rest of it's like, yeah, there's a lot of, like, this sounds cool, there's one of a fan, ventilation fan on the top of a building, doing this beautiful, slightly detuned major sixth kind of drone, and that's being gated by another class of sound, fireworks in the distance going off, and it's using the rhythm of that to control this static bah-bah-bah kind of thing. And then it goes into other things, barring the rhythm of this with the sound of this, not vocoding, just doing it, this gating this. I don't think I'll ever finish it. And it's arbitrary, the commission was for a 30 minute piece, and it's 30 minutes two seconds. What you have is akin to an orchestra of speakers.

“It's really all about particular frequency ranges that are best represented by each kind of speaker. The trees, the elements on it are only about two inches in diameter, subs are about 18 inch. So it's all about finding a way to compose that makes sense of each set of frequencies. I thought about the piece from the top down, like, hi-hat sounds are going to be high frequency coming out of small speakers, the bass elements generated by the synthesizer trying to track the pitch of the hi-hat will be this super bassy sound, so that should go to the subs. The whole process was really about categorising each particular sound in the entire piece and thinking about where it was going to take place. I had to do all this assigning of stuff from the get-go, even when I was just recording I was making notes, like, these fireworks sounds, this big bassy brrrggghhhhhh, they're going to come out of the subs. And they can also be doubled coming out of the directional, because they're fireworks, so they have to be in your face. The drum sounds can be different, they can be farther away from you, but stuff that's loud has to be right there. All the Publison and Coupigny sounds are more ethereal and more mid range, so they can kind of go up, the speakers kind of go up at the ceiling. It's really kind of massing in the ceiling of this giant church, with this huge ceiling, 100ft high arches. That stuff can live up there. But anything that's present and punctual and pointillist has to live on the ground.

“It was one of the few times in my life where I had a very strict idea and all this research on the Acousmonium. It was such a great experience, knowing enough about the technical side to be able to prepare the music side of things so that it made sense. Obviously it's something that I lionise, the GRM thing, the sound. The ability to walk into this very high tech space and kind of pull it off, that was also really a big ego boost. They were like, you know what you're doing, just do it. They don't know me, they don't know anything about it, they were just like, I'm a weird heavy metal guy.”

Derek Walmsley 08|02|2012

Tags: GRM | Keith Fullerton Whitman | Think pieces

The last thing we need is more record lists, right? Well, maybe. No doubt we suffer from a glut of rock-lists. Glossy consumer mags use lists of all types as selling points ("you need these in your life"). When it comes to UK music monthlies, it usually means the same old rock albums, reinforcing the canon with each iteration. Books and websites are now adding to list-fatigue: sites divide lengthy lists-of-the-best-ever into several pages, thus increasing their click thrus but making for fractured reading (the very opposite of what a list should do); meanwhile, those godawful 1010 Records To Hear Before You Expire books conflate musical experience with the dying of the light.

Of course, the idea of a record list is inherently problematic. It immediately raises questions: records of what type, and limited in what way? What and whose criteria are we judging by? The very existence of a historic list presupposes a musical 'record' of some kind, which rules out the vast majority of music experienced by homo sapiens since time began.

Yet lists are worth celebrating, especially now. Lists are rarely about completism. Only a tiny minority of those who read a record list attempt to collect ’em all. Instead, a list provides a rough-and-ready survey of how the land might lay, and what waypoints on the map might be significant at the present time. Like an old style maps with sketchy outlines of countries and continents and uncharted waters beyond, they are open to correction by the user. And like the notion of music genre, the flaws and exceptions of a list are as important, notable and (crucially) useful as the inclusions. The very idea of a list of records is an acknowledgment that we're in a state of constant change.

A select few lists have been crucial in The Wire's world, and several others have been crucial in setting the agenda since the internet expanded the music world. The Nurse With Wound list is still a thing of wonder with over 200 way-out records (Airway, Brainstorm, Come…) that, contrary to rumour, do all genuinely exist. Thurston Moore's Free Jazz list for Grand Royale magazine contained such obscurities – private press releases, European releases by US exiles, loft sessions – that at the time I thought it could be some kind of jazz head’s wet daydream. "Seeing as there’s no “beginning” or “end” to this shit I have to list as many items as possible," Moore wrote, suggesting that free jazz, far from dead, was still resonating in global after shocks. Alan Licht's minimalist top 10 ("I like minimalism because it ROCKS.") was crucial because it posited minimalism as the hidden wiring of whole swathes of underground music. His original list mentions Niblock and Palestine, but in a third instalment for Volcanic Tongue (which goes all the way up to eleven) he knitted in Harry Pussy and Earth to the minimalist pantheon.

Two record lists stood out in the early internet era, and became, if not bibles, then certainly user's guide to the hidden depths of record collecting. Kirk DeGiorgio's Hall Of Fame (which has more or less disappeared from the internet, but can still be just about browsed here) was a list of primarily soul, funk, jazz and disco, but its forensic ear for producers, engineers, session men, arrangers, songwriters and other unsung heroes meant it elevated David Axelrod, Arthur Russell and George Duke to visionary status in their knitting together of black music, white music and everything in between in the 1970s.

Woebot's 100 Greatest Records Ever, is wonderfully playful despite (or because of?) its pompous title. His list makes a mockery of the idea that the album is king, with white label 12"s from Ruff Sqwad, and places Joni Mitchell and Pere Ubu next to Acen and David Lewiston as the true geniuses of modern music. Woebot's list is rough and opinionated, making you alternately snort with derision and wonder where the hell he found such riches.

Consumer guide record lists can weigh you down, but a good list should open things up. The lists above are about sharing the riches. One of my best musical experiences ever was a week-by-week record swapping session with a close friend, working the way through our respective top 50 albums. This is what the best lists do – facilitate an intimate engagement with someone's world. Despite the proliferation of lists, we need good ones more than ever.

Derek Walmsley 26|04|2011

Tags: Alan Licht | Kirk Degiorgio | Nurse With Wound | Think pieces | Thurston Moore | Uncategorized | woebot

I came a little late to Rephlex's recent compilation of late 1980s/early 90s recordings by UK crew The Criminal Minds, but over the last couple of weeks it's completely blown me away. The comp spans their early hiphop recordings through to the vital Eureka! moment of the breakbeat and a little way beyond. There's so much to take in: the density of the music, the abrasive grain, like tarmac grazing your flesh, the cheap thrills of messing around with samplers, and a gawky sense of yoof-telling-the-truth about tough times in the UK (which actually seems more resonant in these recessionary times than, say, five years ago). The friction comes as hiphop meets the brutal torque of hardcore and early rave, with just about enough lyrical flow to stop the whole machine from overheating. The energy, physically and mentally, is amazing, several notches up from much of what emerges from the UK underground these days.

It sent me back to what I knew of UK hiphop in the rave and immediately pre-rave era. UK hiphoppers couldn't win: put on a US accent and you sound like a fake, rap in a UK accent and it sounded ridiculous. George Mahood, ex of Big Daddy Magazine, pointed me in the direction of the Aroe & The Soundmakers' two comps of UK hiphop, the Crown Jewels Volume 1 & 2. Mindboggling as these comps are, with incredible rarities and one-offs from some seriously obscure crews, it's frustrating that they're essentially mixtapes. Surely this era is ripe for rediscovery now? Estuary English even has a real nice flow to it, for me at least (do excuse the pun). It's high time a UK record label stepped up to the plate and properly compiled and documented the music of this era.

Sub-bass! Gunshot’s album Patriot Games pictured them sitting intently facing each other in a circle, holding mics, as if they're about to become blood brothers, or head off on some kind of a suicide mission. Nuclear war is referenced everywhere, in titles and samples from the movie War Games – perhaps surprising, as by 1993 and with the Berlin Wall a fast-fading memory, the UK wasn't in imminent danger of apocalypse (check out Gunshot's "World War Three", where the "Three" sample is from De La Soul. You can almost see the daisies wilting in the radioactive fallout). But that threat of apocalypse is echoed elsewhere, in The Criminal Minds' 2000 AD-style artwork and titles like "A Taste Of Armageddon" (whose samples are ripped from the darkside of the charts: Duran Duran's doomy, fatalistic bad-romance ballad "Save A Prayer" and Adamski's "Killer").

It's not reportage but a form of gothic – I can't find a single reference to the Gulf War (still fresh in the memory) anywhere in Patriot Games, but instead the album seems stuck in some kind of extended Cold War shellshock. You get a sense of lingering militarism everywhere – of US military bases in mainland Europe, of political subservience and impotence, of Chernobyl blowing up and blowing the bad dust in. Both groups reference a "reign of terror" (Gunshot sampling that line from TCM’s original track), but it's never clear who is doing the reigning.

Another theme which TCM and Gunshot share is the Old Bill. The police versus the people was another hidden war in the UK, with the silent majority happy with the boys in blue, who it later turned out were involved with low-level torture (in Northern Ireland), miscarriages of justice (the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four) and corruption. Blacks accounted for only around 5% of the population in the 1980s, so if you were white you were probably relatively sheltered from the stop-and-search and regular harassment which led to riots in Brixton and Tottenham in the early 80s.

The police references in Gunshot and TCM are to "Illegal Procedure", "Rough Justice", "Interception Squad" and Flying Squad – forces within forces, a police state which still maintains a semblance of normality. Gunshot kick against this by bigging up pirate radio and, in a skit which begins the album, tuning into the police frequencies. There's an echo here of Bomb The Bass's "Beat Dis", Tim Simenon's chart-topping sample/scratch fest which gave a kick start to both hiphop and house in the UK, with its barked introduction/call to arms "keep this frequency clear".

In Gunshot's great scheme of things, the effect of police harassment and living in fear is anomie – not the kind of psychology you usually associate with hiphop. MC Mercury's first line in "25 Gun Salute" could be straight outta Gravediggaz: "from the brink of madness comes one...". He trumps this in ”Social Psychotics“: "it's like I've got 12 voices singing in my head". Another Mercury line, "psychotherapy is needed for Bexleyheath" (the latter a Kent suburb of London), sounds faintly absurd, but accurately illustrates a particular kind of British small-town mentality where it's quietness and conservatism and your mum and dad who eventually fuck you up.

Gunshot described what they did as hardcore rap, which resonated nicely with what was gestating in rave at the time, and they painted themselves at outsiders – "some try to ban us/for cavorting round the hardcore banner". Whether they really were outsiders or not is a moot point, considering that they were widely discussed as the next big thing in UK hiphop for many years in the early 90s. But that's not necessarily important: anomie and outsider status becomes a fuel for the UK hardcore hiphopper. UK hiphop couldn't borrow funk and soul, and it had no real coherent community, so it had to take the sense of dislocation and find merit in that. The idea of UK hiphop being reviled had some truth in it, but it also becomes a convenient foundational myth which helps sustains the intensity of the music. This is where Gunshot, for instance, join forces with Napalm Death. Like grindcore, the shock value is a way to try and jolt UK society out of complacency.

This kind of shock value feeds into the brilliantly cartoonish samples of TCM. Why did no-one think before of putting Bernard Hermann’s Cape Fear theme under a fat hiphop beat? (On "Urban Warfare" they stick the "Death March" from the Star Wars soundtrack under an even more stoopidly fun rhythm).

It's just a short step from here to the sampledelic bombast of Acen's rave classic "Trip II The Moon".

Ferreting around on YouTube and checking out Aroe & The Soundmaker's comps yielded loads of great moments, and the dividing line between hardcore and hardcore rap is so thin as to disappear entirely. These tracks are so grimy and abrasive you begin to wonder, fancifully, if it's down to the records they sampled being that much further from the epicentre of funk and soul. You can almost see gaudy record covers emblazoned with James Brown Twenty Golden Hits (Includes Funky Drummer).

But more likely the abrasive, inventive grain of the beats is because it was the sampler talking here. UK hiphop was a music of kids in bedrooms working without the benefit of soundclashes, communal events, any real heritage of funk/hiphop/soul, or even an accepted dialect to rap in. Being outsiders, self-declared or not, sent them back to their bedrooms with even more determination. The sampler is the ultimate translator for hiphop – everyone understands a ridiculous beat – and this is the one thing they could excel out.

Derek Walmsley 11|03|2011

Tags: Aroe & The Soundmakers | Britcore | Gunshot | hiphop | Music discussion | The Criminal Minds | Think pieces | UK hiphop | Uncategorized

Still in the electro zone following Dave Tompkins's The Wire salon (see The Mire passim), I find myself slipping through wormholes of sample sources, song theft and shout-out references. Today in the office we're booming Zapp & Roger's "So Ruff, So Tuff":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eksaGYygLsw

Which sends me back to a personal favourite, Ronnie Hudson And The Street People's "West Coast Poplock", which borrows a chunk of Zapp, and adds the iconic lyric "California knows how to party":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmJXjDhpA_s

Documentary evidence of real-life poplocking to Ronnie H can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02HxXrVlr2U

The Hudson lyric was later, of course, borrowed by 2pac's "California Love", which featured Zapp's Roger Troutman:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWOsbGP5Ox4

Which melded it with the sample from Joe Cocker's incredible track "Woman To Woman":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PmRNUToamI

A track which itself had been sampled by the Ultramagnetic MC's late 80s track "Funky":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wq_C01YkmnM

In a neat reversal of the usual magpie sample theft of hiphop, Zapp & Roger did their own version of "California Love" later:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMa62lS0iVI

This much I knew already – funnily enough from the soundtrack to the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas computer game (whoever compiles those soundtracks has got a seriously great record collection). But what I didn't know till now, thanks to a bit of googling, was that "West Coast Poplock" itself borrowed it's main riff from Booker T And The MG's "Boot Leg":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZK2t1YnDPs

And that track has its own hiphop history, having been borrowed by Cypress Hill:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8at2twL6gBI

With this dense web of connections, moving both back and forth along the timeline, "West Coast Poplock" seems something like the keystone of hiphop, a crucial multi-way node in rap history. But perhaps out there is the another track which has even more points of connection – the Higgs boson of hiphop, connecting everything to everything:

Whatever it is, my guess is that DJ Funktual in Fort Lauderdale, Florida has already found it. His long running series of ten-minute shows on YouTube breaking down who-sampled-what are compulsive viewing, and take you as close to the sheer time-shifting delight of finding these connections as anything out there:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfqlG8gSkeA

Derek Walmsley 02|03|2011

Tags: 2pac | Booker T And The MGs | Cypress Hill | Dave Tompkins | DJ Funktual | Joe Cocker | Multimedia | Roger Troutman | Ronnie Hudson | Think pieces | Ultramagnetic MCs | Uncategorized | video | Zapp

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 read this is that lo-fi is just a kind of backyard exoticism, a mindless delight in an 'other' which happens to come from a fucked-up effects pedal. On a practical level, lo-fi can blur the most ugly playing into vaguely graceful shapes, like a blob of vaseline on the lens.

As a side note, it's worth noting that criticism can be complicit in obscuring what's going on in lo-fi music too. There's a swarm of stock ideas that music writers reach for when they hear lo-fi methods and cheap reverb: ideas of distancing, haunting, ghosts in the four-track, some of which stick, others of which have become lazy rhetorical flourishes.

This explosion in the last few years isn't simply down to Ariel Pink, but many of the albums that come through the office echo the lo-fi dynamics of his amazing run of homemade CD-Rs from the 2000s (House Arrest being the one that turned my head around). So these questions about the potential worth of lo-fi methods sent me back to his work to try and recover what's fresh about them.

The way you work with a 4-track is to record tracks, bounce them down on top of each other, overdub more to taste, and then the whole thing is pretty much set in stone. Once you've bounced down tracks you can't rework them, and tape bleed means the elements blend into each other. But this whole mass can be worked with as malleable blob of rhythm and form, with tracks EQ'd together, and sped up or slowed down en mass. The attack of the drums, the fizz of the percussion, they can be squeezed and moulded away from the usual physical constraints of whacking real drums in a real studio. You lose all sense of actual physical scale, of large events versus small events, and it all becomes flow. When you'd expect a guitar solo, a pure ejaculation of distorted tone is all you need.

All this is a way of saying that the formal flow of Ariel Pink's older work is, for me, far more exhilarating than in his later, more hi-fi work. Tracks have rhythms that work because of the way the 4-track blends it all together – whacked biscuit-tins become huge splashes of noise, mouth sounds create intimate percussive shifts.

Ariel himself sounds like a different person on each track, and sometimes within each track. From gravelly growls to pristine helium vocals, the 4-track blends them all together. Sometimes there're no actual words being sung. On "Hardcore Pops Are Fun" and "Interesting Results" he's actually commenting on the production process itself – "going through this big transition phase... here we go again... I'm not going to try any more.... it may not be much but let's see what you got." There's no static protagonist stationed in the words, but a burbling inner monologue reveling in a state of total sensational flux.

What I dug from revisiting Ariel's methods was how amazingly malleable the lo-fi process is. Ambiguity of sound and lyrics is a springboard for formal innovation rather than just a reverse-snobbish taste for abrasive sounds, or a way to mask shoddy playing. Every single track on House Arrest sounds completely different, a line-up of imaginary groups, a process which resembles plastic sculpture more than it does the step-by-step process of the usual recording studio.

There's absolutely no denying that Ariel Pink's work is retro to the max, and for some the mere echo of 80s pop music immediately causes a gag reflex to kick in. But the music of that decade was so ambitious and chaotic that there's still enough gold among the shit for a canny operator to recover and remould. These kind of methods in the hands of new players like Hype Williams, Matrix Metals or LA Vampires are still valuable tools.

Derek Walmsley 16|02|2011

Tags: Ariel Pink | LA Vampires | Lo-fi | Matrix Metals | Think pieces | Uncategorized

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 spirit is with him, his spirit is with me".

There's various ways to interpret such references. There's a kind of comic book resonance to the way he uses it, as if he believes he has a non-material doppleganger, a sort of uber-Wiley who's all-seeing, all-knowing. Such a fantasy seems to fit: in the ultra-material world of grime, where everything is cold hard concrete or cold hard cash, it's not surprising that an MC invokes a spiritual side-kick. Dizzee Rascal had a track about being "here, there... everywhere": a yearning to turn urban chaos into some sort of cosmic order.

What really strikes a chord is that "spirit" seems something of a grimey-counterpoint to hiphop's painfully overused category of "soul". For American music, soul (as a concept and genre) is so tired it has nothing to do with James Brown and Bobby Byrd: it's simply a prosaic, statement of 'this is who I am' individualism. Grime very rarely mentions soul: by invoking "spirits" instead, it taps something much more uncanny and chaotic. It reminds me of one of the true reasons grime felt so fresh, a few years back: it suggested urban poetry where the slate had been wiped clean of all hiphop's tired, burdernsome political and [a]moral ideology.

Derek Walmsley 19|02|2008

Tags: download | Music discussion | Think pieces