In April 2002 Jake Walters photographed Alice Coltrane at her home in Santa Barbara for the cover of The Wire 218. One of the extended family members hanging out at the shoot was Alice's teenage nephew, Steven Ellison. Ten years on, and Ellison is now better known as Flying Lotus, patron saint of downtempo beat makers, and now Jake has photographed him for the cover of the forthcoming October 2012 issue of the magazine.

So we couldn't resist a pose with a copy of that issue graced by the numinous presence of his late, great Aunty Alice, and here it is. The October issue, complete with more images from Jake’s shoot, will be on sale from next week and on its way to subscribers from the end of this week. The digital edition will be dropping in from the ether on Tuesday.

Jennifer Lucy Allan 05|09|2012

Tags: alice coltrane | Flying Lotus | The Wire

Is the term remix redundant? Music has been begging, borrowing and stealing since day one. But does a remix denote more about the working process than the actual nature of the track? When so much is on long term loan, where's the dividing line between say, a prodigiously used sample and a remix? Is 'remix' just a label that's used top-down, from label to listener, to make sure you're accessing an audience efficiently?

Perhaps the trouble is that remixes are often half-baked, passed around on short deadlines to every Tom, Dick and Harry with a URL, touted as 'exclusive', when it's one from a bag of ten or more quick-fix mixes that add a lazy beat or beefed up production to give a track a longer shelf life. (The plague of bad blog-House mixes that were recycling Pitchfork-hits for desperate music bloggers got so bad The Hype Machine built in a 'no remixes' functionality.) It's the churnalism of music production.

Of course it's not always like that, but it can feel like finding a needle in a haystack. The good ones often catch you off guard by changing everything about a track, a drastic restoration or rebuild that changes how you thought and felt about something, a sweet vocal line looped into a frightening verbal tic, a tiny synth line scrubbed clean and brought to the fore, massive and shining.

From these thoughts I'm led to the entry-level philosophical puzzle of Theseus's ship. It asks: if you change every plank in Theseus's ship from oak to teak one by one, then at the end, is it still the same ship? Applied: if you replace or change every element of a track, is it still the same track? (...And if Theseus asks Wiley to change the planks, who owns the ship when the job's done? Theseus? Or Wiley? – Leaving aside the fact that Wiley would probably take the credit for it floating.)

From Ancient Greek puzzles there's only one small step to Mark E Smith, naturally: If you change every member of The Fall – is it still The Fall?

Talking to Nik Void for a feature in this month's magazine, I was struck by the way she talks about how Factory Floor pass on their records for remixing so readily (to Chris Carter and Stephen Morris, among others). For her it's about a continuation of ideas, giving someone what you've done and seeing what they will do with it – orphaning your own work so it might see something of the world, if you like.

Void said: "We like giving our stuff to other people to see how they develop it further, just letting it go."

"Just letting it go" – is this the nub of the issue? When you slap a bunch of names on something, notions of authorship, ownership, rights, and the ego of the creator all come into a power play. An artist gives someone a track and asks them to remix it. Is the track, as Nik Void suggests, a collection of ideas passed from one person to the next? Or (philosophically speaking not – God forbid – legally) does the original work belong to one person, passed on to someone else to be reworked (but not re-authored)?

And what about Tom Moulton mixes, Theo Parrish's Ugly Edits, and the rest? The waters are muddied, and in certain areas (the stuff that would once be tagged Ambient Techno for example), there can be a disjunct between what's called a remix and how a track has been constructed and reconstructed. Music is so tied up in ideas, concepts, and the sonic properties of equipment, that it might often be more correct to talk about something's continuing life cycle than it is to call it X's remix of Y by Z.

The term remix isn't really doing its job. In the same way that genre tags are in many ways redundant, maybe the term remix is limp and ineffective too. Genre tags act as vague signposts, but they can't draw a map. A remix can tell you who's been on the buttons, but won't give up the story of what really happened behind the desk.

Jennifer Lucy Allan 29|05|2012

Tags: genre | Music discussion | nik void | remix | rework | The Wire | Think pieces

A month ago a DJ set by Hieroglyphic Being (aka Jamal Moss) set my world on fire. It was in Berlin, at the CTM festival, and I can't stop going over it in my head, rerunning the maths to find the multiplying factor. It was the first time I'd seen Moss DJ. It started at 3am, following an impeccable set of tessellated Techno by Kassem Mosse. But Jamal Moss's set was a different beast entirely: loose, sloppy and incredibly ugly in some parts, but always giddy, impatient and unpredictable. It ran through pitched up and pitched down tracks, and too many genres and styles to count on one hand. At one point it got into a call and response dialogue between New York disco and Krautrock. The mixing was at times slick, incredible (an air raid siren threaded through three tracks, sewing them together). In other places it was a dirty hack made with a blunt instrument.

The constantly changing pace sent me nuts, for Hieroglyphic Being's disregard for the conventions of what constitutes 'good' DJing. In fact the performance capsized all the cliches that have built up around our idea of what makes a 'good' DJ set, ie that good mixing is a smooth segue between two tracks; that a set should move through styles in a gradual progression; that bpms shouldn't ramp up, plummet and shoot up again in the space of three minutes. Moss moved between sections full of sudden schizophrenic cuts from one track to another, and passages where he would let one groove run unmolested for almost ten minutes. Tracks were pulled after one chorus, played backwards, rewound. They were sped up to 170 bpm, then slammed up next to slow 80 bpm funk.

I laughed my way through it, half the time shaking my head in disbelief, frowning, puzzled. Admittedly, it pushed my buttons, that New York disco stuff always does. But it was done with such confident swagger – with Moss resplendent in Battlefield Earth leather chic – that it worked.

Some friends said they were finding it "very challenging". Why? Because what was expected (even given Hieroglyphic Being's diverse output) was not being adhered to. Descriptions of the mood in clubs and on dancefloors often resort to religious analogies, and this set required you to make a leap of faith, or find yourself at an impasse with regard to the sheer iconoclasm of it. CDJs are frowned on in some circles, but central to Moss's set was the way it foregrounded the sound of these tools – the fake scratching sound of the CDJs, the speed shifting (sometimes without pitch control), and brutal use of the fader.

Whereas Kassem Mosse's set felt like a perfectly calibrated clockwork model (not conventional, but certainly neat and tidy), Hieroglyphic Being's was the boss-eyed Frankenstein's monster you fall in love with precisely for his scars and club foot.

Jennifer Lucy Allan 28|02|2012

Tags: berlin | Clubs | ctm festival | Gigs | Hieroglyphic Being | Music discussion | The Wire

One of the central events at the CTM and Transmediale festivals in Berlin just over a week ago was Manuel Göttsching with Joshua Light Show (whose line up now interestingly includes Ana Matronic of Scissor Sisters). The show was introduced by three of the festival organisers. They asked in tense tones that people not move around the seated venue, and also that the audience resisted the urge to film the show on smartphones, as the intention was to attempt to create an immersive experience reminiscent of an original Joshua Light Show performance.

This immediately created a rift between the festival organisers and their audience, not because it was an unfair request, but because CTM and Transmediale had three cameras covering the event (one still photographer, one for the live stream and a secondary video camera). Of these three, the LCD displays of two were in the eyeline of around a third of the audience.

Before I get started though, I'd like to add that this post is not about the ubiquity of the smartphone at live shows, or the proliferation of the amateur documentarist. That's a knee jerk reaction I'm not remotely interested in. The truly uncomfortable part of the show was when two thirds of the way through a member of Joshua Light Show emerged from behind the projector screen onto the stage.

Picture the scene, it's a small-ish, reasonably low stage, in a sit down modern theatre. She's dressed in a black top and sequinned skirt, but wearing a giant cream and metal headset of the sort pilots wear, and is edging awkwardly further towards the spotlight, glittering in the halo from the spotlight focused on Göttsching. Her arms are outstretched, in them is a handheld video camera pointing straight at Göttsching. She draws closer, until she's obscuring the view of him, and circles slowly, like David Attenborough around a rare tree frog.

Göttsching ignores the camera, but the audience doesn't. In those few seconds the atmosphere in the whole room shifts, and there's a tension in the room. A couple choose this moment for a toilet/bar break. Others shift in their seats, whisper across to one another. The spell is broken.

The images she films are then sent back to the team behind the curtain, where they're altered and projected live, in glassy fragments among psychedelic lights and swirling ink flows. The effect is definitely not analogue, but it's also not what's making me antsy. It's her presence as a recorder, not the digital nature of that recording that's making me uncomfortable. I'm already trying to ignore three cameras. This puts it up to four.

This is the first time that Göttsching and JLS have performed together in Berlin, and the show has been two years in the planning. There's a large portion of the audience that wants to film the show and stick it on YouTube, or just people who want to get a photo with their smartphones, because this is an Event. Joshua Light Show, for those 15-20 minutes, are the ultimate spectator, in a crass display of how our modern recording habits disengage us and can ruin an atmosphere.

The filming also brought up another more philosophical issue, about the cultural currency of AV performance. It's often the case that even with reasonably 'big name' visuals, the musical aspect of a performance is the seller, and those creating visuals are subordinated on the bill. This can usually be explained by the bigger audience for music, and hence, the bigger name gets higher on the bill. But on these terms Göttsching and Joshua Light Show is a rare performance – a conjunction between an audio and a visual arts festival, with Göttsching and Joshua Light Show equal on the bill. In coming out from behind the screen Joshua Light Show are asserting their right to be on the stage (even if it didn't work, it was a legitimate part of the performance). It's uncomfortable. Joshua Light Show clearly feel they have the right to be out in front of Göttsching, but the reaction of the audience suggests otherwise.

What Joshua light Show are doing feels inappropriate because at an AV show, the V part of the equation is not allowed to mess with the music. The performer is centre stage, and the visuals are an accompaniment. But visuals can make or break a show (they definitely elevated Roly Porter's performance earlier on in the festival), but they're often treated with mild suspicion, as if really arresting visuals are some sort of distraction, or a bogus enhancer of the music. After Roly Porter, friends commented on the fact that they weren't sure if they enjoyed it, because they were worried they'd been sucked into the visuals and weren't able to asses the performance properly.

In Berlin this week that gap was boldly pointed out to me, and the fact that the digital processes jarred with the aim of the show only added to the discomfort. The way we experience music live is all about sight as well as sound. Great music is not diluted by visuals, and visuals do not cover up for part-baked audio. The two should work together. It's just a shame that The Joshua Light show misjudged their front of stage intrusion at CTM.

(Despite the requests, one audience member did manage to film sections of the show. Watch a section below.)

Jennifer Lucy Allan 14|02|2012

Tags: art | CTM | events | Gigs | joshua Light Show | Manuel Göttsching | The Wire | Think pieces | transmediale

Kenneth Goldsmith's Epiphany in the May issue of the print zine is the first in a series of essays about digital cultures and their effect on the music industry: what they mean for listeners and creators, the change they bring about in cultural currencies and obsessions, and the moral and monetary issues surrounding freebies and filesharing.

The discussion continues in the current June issue with a response to Goldsmith's piece from ReR label head Chris Cutler. Both essays, and all forthcoming essays, will be published online. Traditionally, this goes against the rules of digital publishing: replicating content online for free devalues the print zine, meaning readers are less likely to shell out for the hard copy. In effect, we're filesharing our own content. So why are we doing it?

No other content from The Wire's printed page – bar our monthly listings – gets uploaded to the site (archive editorial content is drawn from back issues that are sold out). However, the subject matter of the essays by Goldsmith and Cutler demand that we make an exception. What's the point of an essay about the effect of the internet if we hold it back from the online communities that are part of the digital paradigm shift we're discussing?

Writing about the impact of new technologies on the economy of music too often boils down to one of two things: a new tech or digital sales pitch heralded as the saviour of the industry or (as is more often the case) its imminent demise. The reality is not so simple. The digital landscape is inherently fragmentary, meaning we're all looking on this scene from a different angle: what's destroyed one has often brought another success, and so keeping these essays within the confines of the magazine limits any hope of turning snapshots into a coherent picture.

In short, this is not a discussion that belongs on the printed page, but one that should be a part of the digital cultures it examines.

Jennifer Lucy Allan 26|05|2011

Tags: Chris Cutler | collateral damage | Kenneth Goldsmith | Music discussion | The Wire | Think pieces

Daphne Oram (1925-2003) was a pioneering British composer and electronic musician. She was the creator of Oramics, a synthesis technique which used visual images to create electronic sounds. She is credited with creating the very first piece of commissioned electronic music for the BBC in 1957 (the score for Amphitryon 38) and was instrumental in the formation of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, becoming its first director in 1958.

Leaving the BBC less than a year later, Oram founded her own electronic music studio where she produced the electronic soundtrack to the 1961 horror film The Innocents, as well as various concert works and compositions. After her death in 2003, the British improvisor and instrument builder Hugh Davies inherited her archive of papers and tapes. Following Davies's death in 2005 the collection was accessioned by Goldsmiths, University of London.

The Sounds Of New Atlantis: Daphne Oram, Radiophonics And The Drawn Sound Technique will include a presentation by Dan Wilson tracing the evolution of the philosophies behind Oramics, and Daphne Oram's progress in reconciling the physical and metaphysical aspects of sound; a biographical sketch in the form of a presentation by Jo Hutton, looking at Daphne Oram's role at the BBC in developing electroacoustic music and radiophonic art in Britain; a joint presentation by Mick Grierson and Chris Weaver on the evolution of the Oramics machine, its potential significance as one of the first British computer music systems, and the plans for its future conservation, plus a video presentation by Graham Wrench, the former RAF radar engineer responsible for building the first prototype of the Oramics machine. London Cafe Oto, 7 April, 8pm, £4.

The Oram Collection website, run by this month’s salon guests. Includes scanned archived press cuttings.

Daphne Oram An Individual Note Of Sound Music And Electronics, introduced by Oram as a “sniffing the air in all directions to see whether we can catch a scent or two of intriguing interrelationships between electronics and music”. Out of print, but PDF available here.

The Story Of The BBC Radiophonic Workshop, 2008 article from Sound On Sound, complete with photos and diagrams of how the Oramic system worked, plus Graham Wrech: The Story Of Daphne Oram’s Optical Synthesiser.

BBC tribute to Daphne Oram, notable for the embedded audio interview with Oram from 1972.

Oramics, a short film by Nick Street, which gives a glimpse of the original Oramics synthesizer from 1957.

The Alchemists Of Sound, BBC4 documentary about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Available on Maldoror42 YouTube channel in six parts.

Oramics CD listing on Paradigm Discs with MP3 samples.

Daphne Oram obituary from 2003.

Regular contributor to The Wire Ken Hollings’s essay on the broader topic of “The British Space Programme As Musical Exploration – The Untold Story” from 2010, which takes a sideways look at the history of British electronic music, including Daphne Oram.

Jennifer Lucy Allan 25|03|2011

Tags: Daphne Oram | events | oramics | The Wire | the wire salon