After that last post I got into an extensive email correspondence with Amanda Brown during which she made some clarifications regarding her 'sex and sexiness' comment and which it seems to me are worth noting here, if only to fill in the picture a little more.

In one mail Amanda states: "I guess when I told Simon I wanted to be sexy and invest in sexiness, I said it because I feel like women are so afraid of that now in the underground. It's like, don't look at me like I'm sexy, look at me like I'm a man. Which we aren't, obviously..." In another mail she writes: "I think it is time for women who don't dress sexy or don't sing about sex or project themselves as sexy to reclaim sexiness, as soulfulness and sensualness."

The message here seems pretty clear: attitudes towards female sexuality that prevail in the underground are as oppressive and distorted (which is a point I made in my previous post) as those that dominate in corporate pop (which I didn't mention at all, as the fact of its industrialised and fascistic porno-projections of what constitutes a desirable female sexual identity should be obvious to anyone who has ever seen a Pussycat Dolls vid), and both need replacing by less uptight, more inclusive attitudes and representations, and that this is the real nature of Amanda's 'investment'. So for her it is political, a consistent polemic that runs underneath all the donning and discarding of stylistic masks and poses that define the shifts in the NNF/100% Silk aesthetic, and I'm talking visually here as much as sonically, from Noise to drones to psych to dub to synth pop to disco to House and so on.

Maybe confusion, or ambiguity, regarding the political dimension of Amanda's artistic project stems partly from the fact she is also heavily invested in this type of conceptual or stylistic mutability, that has fast become the norm in the lo-fi underground of course, and which makes all these musical forms equivalent, invests them all with the same weight, so effectively reducing them to the level of camp or kitsch, ironicizing the fact that once they were not only mutually exclusive but mutually antagonistic, freighted with opposing political, social and cultural meanings and associations (that have now all been screened out). Perhaps it is hard to reconcile a consistent political agenda with an aesthetic that seems so relativistic and post-historical. Or perhaps both myself and Simon (who raises similar caveats in his article) are suffering from a form of generational myopia, two fortysomething critics applying the values of earlier, more ideologically-determined pop epochs, yearning for the old boundaries and binaries around which we used to rally, and which appear to have been so thoroughly dismantled, collapsed by pop culture's own acquiescence to the illusion of neo-liberal 'end of history' propaganda.

In his article Simon invokes the tense conditions that prevailed in American pop culture in the mid-80s, when the Hardcore underground existed in direct and violent opposition to corporate pop, and compares them to the laissez-faire attitudes in effect today, typified by Amanda's comment that she has no issue with the existence of Justin Bieber. (In their interview, and to her great credit, Amanda meets all of Simon's caveats head on, responds to them with extreme good grace, but this comment still feels a bit like Siouxsie Sioux saying she has nothing against Rick Astley. Or Lydia Lunch announcing she is very relaxed about Luke Goss! There's an irony in invoking Lydia here, as she had links to the art world project, and that is definitely the right way to describe it, that I would argue was the moment that US Hardcore went from being a form of active and antagonistic combat rock to being a branch of inert and laissez faire conceptual pop art, ie the release of Ciccone/Sonic Youth's The White(y) Album. It is no coincidence that in Kim Gordon SY included at least one member who had previously worked as both an art world critic and conceptual artist. And as Simon points out, Amanda is typical of the post-SY generation of underground musicians in that she seems to think and act like an ultra-smart but hyper-detached theorist-cum-'audio artist'.)

Here's another, even earlier historical parallel. When the UK's post-punk agitators made the move from DIY messthetix to chart pop aesthetics (a trajectory traced in outline by NNF/100% Silk's recent releases), it was proposed and discussed as a political as much as a stylistic shift, and depending on which side of the divide you were on, was seen as either a retreat from the frontline of the culture wars, or a subversive attempt to plant an entryist cell behind enemy lines. Either way, the argument goes, it had implications beyond the simple question of making aesthetic choices. Now, when a musician like Amanda makes the shift from Noise to dub to disco it feels, as she admits, more like a random stylistic shuffle, a conceptual flick of the wrist, more a consequence of waking up in the morning and thinking, who do l feel like today, Ari Up or Sade? Do I feel like making some animal Noise, or do I want to make some slinky grooves? On one level you could say this is a more liberated, less dogmatic process, a more 'natural' and instinctive way for an artist to go about things. But at the same time you could argue, as Simon does, that it is one that is devoid of any real or wider consequence because it strips music of any meaning or context beyond itself, as it no longer involves the negotiation of any underlying social or cultural tensions, no longer requires any political alignment or engagement, which is maybe why it is easy to miss the political dimension Amanda claims for her project, why that "How Would U Know" vid still feels more like a carelessly provocative 'whatever' moment than a subversive feminist statement.

In another email Amanda refers to the response (or lack of it) to the image of her on the cover of the Psychic Reality/LA Vampires split LP: "When I was topless on the record with Psychic Reality no one said a word - it was the most silence I've experienced - but that shower scene in the video (in which I'm OBVIOUSLY not topless or naked at all) has got a lot of comments, mainly because I'm joking or mocking. On the record cover I'm serious and I think people hate that, or at least don't want to talk about it because it's odd or frightening."

But unlike the shower scene in the "How Would U Know" vid, which flirts, in a very conceptual pop art kind of a way, with a typical and titillating contemporary soft porn scenario, that cover feels more like an atavistic throwback, an anthropological relic, that is undoubtedly powerful and self-determining (rather than odd or frightening - unless those qualities amount to the same thing when it comes to women taking ownership of their own images) but only limns female sexuality on its way to implying another kind of archaic experience (which is something it shares in common with the cover of The Slits' Cut, which is one obvious precedent). As Iggy Pop put it in The Wire 189, talking about what he learned from studying anthropology at the University of Michigan in the 1960s: "In Stone Age or primitive societies when people get out there or get musical they also get naked." Which is the other reason I didn't mention it, because it already feels more like an archived historical artefact than a part of Amanda's present reality, ie a visualisation of the raw, primal, red in tooth and claw vibe of Pocahaunted and the early LA Vampires sides, and so not an image that would sit too well with the music on a record like So Unreal, which as Simon suggests feels lush and groovy, more mid-80s Compass Point than late 70s Cold Storage, and whose cover, appropriately enough, features Amanda dressed up like Madonna circa Desperately Seeking Susan.

Maybe if she had switched those two covers, so Amanda-as-Madonna was wrapping the feral distorto Goth-dub of her side of that split LP, and Amanda-as-Ari Up was wrapping the seductive 'n' sensual metropolitan synth pop of So Unreal, then that would have set up more of a dialectical dynamic, ruptured the conceptual consistency to allow us old timers to glimpse, if only for a moment, the political agenda beneath the vertigo-inducing aesthetic shifts.

Tony Herrington 17|04|2011

Tags: 100% Silk | LA Vampires | Music discussion | not not fun | Think pieces | Uncategorized

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.

Tony Herrington 17|02|2011

Tags: off the page | The Wire | Uncategorized

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 want one) but can't make it to the actual event itself.

All you have to do to win one is tell us which of the Off The Page speakers went for John Cage's "Goal: New Music, New Dance" (from his book Silence) as their favourite bit of music writing. Was it Matthew Herbert? Jennifer Walshe? Or Christian Marclay?

To enter, send your answer to tony@thewire.co.uk with 'Off The Page competition' in the subject line. Closing date: this Friday 11 February.

Tony Herrington 07|02|2011

Tags: events | off the page | The Wire | Uncategorized

Martin Archer, the Sheffield based improvisor, composer and owner of the Discus label, has started an avant community choir project called Juxtavoices in South Yorkshire, and is looking for more eager voices to swell its ranks.

Choir membership is open to any singer irrespective of training, ie no previous experience of either group singing or improvising is required. The repertoire mixes simple scores and instructions with improvised elements, which often allow the choir itself to determine the shape of the music as it progresses. Rehearsals begin with workshop style exercises which are designed to encourage the choir's confidence in using non standard techniques, including improvisation.

The choir meets once a month in Sheffield, and the objective is to be in a position to perform and record in 2011. The choir currently has 25 members, including a large slice of Sheffield's leftfield music, visual arts and literary communities, but is looking to double that number.

Anyone interested in joining should contact Martin via huckleberry [at] discus-music.co.uk or via the Discus site

Tony Herrington 06|07|2010

Tags: Uncategorized

[Reciprocess: +/vs.], which was compiled to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Marseille-based BiP_HOp label and was given away exclusively to all The Wire’s subscribers with copies of the March 2009 issue, has been nominated for Compilation of the Year in the sixth edition of the Qwartz Electronic Music Awards.

The nominations for the awards were chosen by a jury that this year included Gudrun Gut and Alejandro Jodorowsky. Since 1 December the public (that's the rest of us) has been able to listen online and vote on the jury’s nominations. The winners will be announced in April 2010 at a ceremony in Paris.

To hear the nominations in all categories and vote on them go to the Qwartz site.

[Reciprocess: +/vs.] takes the form of an 80 minute piece of music assembled by BiP_HOp label boss Philippe Petit. The piece includes input from a host of underground musicians, including Cosey Fanni Tutti, Simon Fisher Turner, Eugene S Robinson, Jason Forrest, Lydia Lunch, Jean-Herve Peron, Jesu and others.

Tony Herrington 01|07|2010

Tags: Alejandro Jodorowsky | BiP_HOp | Gudrun Gut | Qwartz Electronic Music Awards | Uncategorized

Following its reissues of Robert Wyatt’s UK solo albums, the Domino label is about to release His Greatest Misses, a 2004 Japan-only compilation. If you're looking for a one-stop comp that distills Wyatt’s unique essence, this is it, right down to the sleeve art, which reproduces a number of cute crayon drawings by the six year old Robert. It pulls key tracks from all the solo records from Rock Bottom (1974) to Cuckoo Land (2003), plus it contains a number of Wyatt’s inspired cover versions, including "At Last I Am Free", originally written by Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers for Chic's 1978 C'est Chic album.

In his glittering history of disco, Turn The Beat Around (Faber And Faber, 2005), Peter Shapiro devotes a whole chapter to illuminating the ambiguous emotional and socio-political currents that run beneath the sophisticated, aspirational vibe that describes the sleek surface of Chic's music, that make Chic into a much more complex proposition than you might at first think, something more than just amazing grooves, irresistible hooks and inspired arrangements, as if we needed pop to give us anything more than that.

Running for more than seven minutes, "At Last I Am Free" is an extended modern R&B ballad, an epic metropolitan soul mantra (Chic could write those as easily as they could knock off devastating disco grooves), played at “a crawling tempo”, as Peter describes it, with the Chic singers, Alfa Anderson and Luci Martin, “sounding alternately like zombies and angels”.

What a strange song for Wyatt to cover, you might think.

I like cover versions that subvert or detourn the originals in some way (as in the kind of covers discussed in The Wire's Remake Remodel feature in issue 261), but Wyatt's version is a bit different, a cover that plays it more or less straight, but which ratchets up the complexity of pop in rare and precious ways, not least of which is that it's a cover by a musician who was supposedly the ultimate in gritty, engaged political art of a song by a group that was supposedly the ultimate in vacuous escapist pop. But as Peter's book tells us, Chic were far more than that, and Wyatt has always been a musician willing to ride roughshod over the knee jerk expectations and prejudices of his audience and the media.

A very bitter wind blows through the song. The chorus couplet haunts me: "At last I am free/I can hardly see in front of me". The lyric sounds like it is describing a particularly devastating break up narrative, but it's also hard not to hear it as a comment on the failure of Amerikkka to deliver on the promises it made during the heyday of the civil rights movement. That's one reason Wyatt covered it, I guess, as a statement of political solidarity. The other reason he covered it would be rather more prosaic, I suspect: Wyatt knows a great pop song when he hears one, and this is up there with the best of them. The combination of the melody line and the chord sequence beneath make it into a classic heartbreaker of a tune, but combine those qualities with the complex of emotions encoded in that couplet in the chorus and you have an example of a pop song that digs deep to access some kind of existential truth about the unbearable sadness of the human condition.

No shit.

I actually prefer Wyatt’s version to Chic's. It replaces the lush orchestration of the original with a very minimal arrangement that exposes the stark sentiments in the lyric more effectively. In place of the undead or ethereal spirits, Wyatt sounds more like an inspired pub crooner, bringing tears to the eyes of the denizens of the snug, as he warbles with heartbreaking sincerity thru a glass bottom phut cig (as Mark E Smith, another great snug (non-)singer-philosopher made good, once put it).

The Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser has also covered the song. But I don't like her version much: the arrangement is too sugary-sweet and over-produced (like most Cocteau Twins tracks) and Fraser's performance tries too hard to ring every last drop of tragic emotion from the song. I'm guessing I might be out of step with the zeitgeist here, as we are slap bang in the middle of another 80s revival (cf minimal wave, chillwave, glo-fi, and so on and so forth: seriously, I've not heard this many new tracks using that blissed out chorus effect on the vocals since PM Dawn), but for me her version is too arch and knowing and too calculated to affect. It reminds me of something John Cage once said, when someone asked him why he didn't like to be moved, emotionally, by music. I don't mind being moved by music, Cage quipped, I just don't like to be pushed.

Tony Herrington 03|05|2010

Tags: At Last I Am Free | Chic | disco | Domino | His Greatest Misses | Peter Shapiro | Robert Wyatt | Turn The Beat Around | Uncategorized

“Will anybody under the age of 40 get that joke?” asks David Toop in the new March issue of The Wire, referring to the title of FennO’Berg’s In Stereo album. I’m a long way over the wrong side of 40, but still I ain’t laughing, mainly because, as David hints in his review of the record, In Stereo represents something of a muted return on the part of the original Powerbook trio. But the appearance of the album, not to mention its rather humdrum punning title, sends me back to a couple of unvoiced, and quite possibly half-arsed, notions that were prompted by the release of one of 2009’s most audacious records of digital sound processing, one which wipes the floor with In Stereo in terms of its conceptual rigour, and which happened to contain a pun in the title that could be got by at least three generations of electronic music aficionados.

Apart from being genuinely funny, not to mention an accurate indicator of what the actual music might sound like, as an album title, Acid In The Style Of David Tudor was a genius piece of sloganeering on the part of Florian Hecker. Talk about encapsulating the complex social and aesthetic evolution, not to mention the psychological make up, of an entire scene in one fell swoop. I didn’t know he had it in him, but Florian nailed the trajectory of a generation of current electronic music practitioners, who came of age in the long 80s afterburn of Industrial culture, were animated by rave’s psychotronic machine music and the systematic praxis of the first wave of post-war electronic music pioneers, and are now forwarding the march of digital sound out of the basements and the clubs and into the private gallery spaces of the 100 mile city.

In this regard, Florian himself could the archetype, the classic case study. But I suspect that Peter Rehberg and possibly also Christian Fennesz might recognise aspects of their own back stories in such a formulation. Jim O’Rourke too, if you factor out the rave connection, although Jim is perhaps more an example of those other dominant models in contemporary experimental digital sound work, the autistic autodidact, the perverse polymath. Certainly the music these three make together on In Stereo sounds like it could have been produced by individuals who once stalked the warehouse parties of Northern Europe in TG inspired leathers and combats but now slouch around the bright white interiors of sonic art biennials dressed in Paul Smith suits and charcoal grey shirts buttoned to the neck, no tie.

But there was an irony at the centre of Florian’s concept, in that David Tudor beat him to it by about three decades. Tudor’s 1976 piece Pulsers was described by the composer as an exploration of “the world of rhythms created electronically by analog, rather than digital, circuitry”. More to the point, it sounds weirdly like Marshall Jefferson, the Acid pioneer, getting to grips with the idiosyncracies that had been accidentally hardwired into the Roland TB-303, the Acid Machine itself.

In the sleevenotes to the 1996 Lovely Music CD Three Works For Live Electronics, which contains a version of Pulsers that was originally released on LP in 1984 and was assembled and mixed by Tudor with Nicolas Collins, John Cage’s favourite piano player writes: “With analog circuitry, the time-base common to the rhythms can be varied in many different ways by a performer, and can eventually become unstable.” Jefferson’s first record proper, released in 1985 (a year after Pulsers) under the name Virgo, was titled “Go Wild Rhythm Track”, so I reckon Chicago’s experimental House authority could get to that.

Several minutes into Pulsers, a tape of Takehisa Kosugi improvising on an electronic violin is inserted into the mix, and all of a sudden the track sounds more like Henry Flynt jamming with the Drummers of Burundi. But play the first few minutes of it back to back with Sleezy D’s Marshall Jefferson-produced “I’ve Lost Control” back to back with any of the tracks on Acid In The Style Of David Tudor and don’t tell me you can’t hear some occluded synchronicities rearing up to wipe the smirk off Florian Hecker’s face (unless that irony was intended, of course, in which case Florian is even smarter than I thought).

Tony Herrington 19|02|2010

Tags: Uncategorized

The Wire will be in active attendance at the Club Transmediale festival in Berlin in February. On 3 February Tony Herrington will be moderating a panel on Interface and Instrument Design: How Technology Affects Music featuring Takuro Mizuta Lippit, Robert Henke, Yutaka Makino and Christopher Salter. The panel is at 19:00 at the HBC venue. On 4 February, Tony Herrington and Biba Kopf will host the magazine's weekly show on Resonance FM live from the festival. Finally, on 5 February The Wire Sound System will play a late night listening set at the WMF Lounge between 23:00-03:00.

In the meantime, the festival has released the CTM.10 Audio Compilation as a free download. The compilation features tracks by Hildur Gudnadottir, Aoki Takamasa, Guido Möbius, Glass Candy, Etienne Jaumet and Scuba, among others, plus a trailer for the film Making CONTAKT about Richie Hawtin's CONTAKT project.

Tony Herrington 18|01|2010

Tags: Uncategorized

Edited highlights of The Wire's Into The Vortex festival will be broadcast on Resonance FM between 10pm-1am GMT on 3 January 2010. The festival took place last October at East London's Vortex venue and featured live sets by Richard Youngs & Heather Leigh, Astral Social Club, Alexander Tucker, Alasdair Roberts & Gordon Ferries, Thomas Ankersmit, Broadcast, The Caretaker, The One Ensemble and The Band Of Holy Joy.

Tony Herrington 22|12|2009

Tags: Uncategorized

Bologna's Netmage festival has posted various film clips online of works by artists appearing at this year's event, including Cluster & Canedicoda, Carlos Casas, Rachida Ziani & Dewi de Vree and André Goncalves. They are worth a look, if yr interested in tracking current trends in AV culture, electronic arts, gallery films, etc.

Tony Herrington 21|12|2009

Tags: Uncategorized