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The Mire: Tangents, threads and opinions from The Wire HQ

Happy 15th

Derek Walmsley

What better way to celebrate London radio institution Rinse FM's 15th birthday than with this legendary grime set from 2005? Logan Sama's last show went down in underground history not just because it featured around 20 guest MCs (take that Wu Tang!), but because of the truly incredible amount of special, one-off dubplates Logan cut for the occasion, with dubs of Vibez Cartel over Danny Weed rhythms, and all sorts of mad mash-ups. It's an incredible listen on so many levels - Wiley and Ruff Sqwad unexpectedly appear around half way though, as if drawn to the studio by the subsonic shocks extending through East London. You can also see the set on the extra DVD with the Rinse FM six CD set, but somehow it's better just heard. The set can be downloaded here, and was uploaded by blackdown and forwarded on by Dan Hancox.

Derek Walmsley

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Below The Radar & Into The Vortex

Nathan Budzinski

CORRECTION!!!
As posted here last week, The Wire will be joining forces with one of London's top music venues The Vortex to present an unmissable lineup of new music in October (with appearances by The Band Of Holy Joy, Richard Youngs & Heather Leigh Murray, Alasdair Roberts and The Caretaker amongst many others). But, well, in our haste to let everyone know about it, we posted the title Below The Radar.... which has actually now been taken up exclusively by our brand new subscriber-only download series, Below The Radar (click to find out all about it)! So now with great pleasure... and even greater resolve than before, we can reveal the new and true event title [queue drum roll]...

INTO THE VORTEX

9, 10 & 11 October... Stick it into your diaries now and stay tuned for further information!

Nathan Budzinski

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Toshiya Tsunoda

Derek Walmsley

Very interesting little piece from Toshiya Tsunoda about his approach to field recording, on the Erstwords blog.

Tsunoda's approach is very specific to him, but for me his comments cut through a lot of very wooly thinking which is written about field recordings. A lot of stuff intends to document/preserve certain environments, but apart from the moral dimension of this (obviously to the fore in times of climate change) it seems a rather conservative with a small c aesthetic. Who's to say what is to be preserved and what isn't? That very few field recordists come up with a compelling answer to this question makes me wonder if many of them aren't just landscape painters for a new generation.

Derek Walmsley

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Who'd'a thunk it?

Tony Herrington

Congratulations to the family man of UK Noise, Dylan Nyoukis, on his recent elevation to the avant garde pantheon. Ubuweb has just added a pile of tracks by Dylan to its already monumental library of 20th/21st century avant audio. The tracks feature this doyen of the DIY underground in various guises and combos, including Blood Stereo (a duo with the missus, Karen Constance).

Tony Herrington

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People get on board

Derek Walmsley

Somehow I'd missed until David Stubbs mentioned it that the longrunning US soul show Soul Train is now up on You Tube. It might have only happened recently, but if you're in the UK this is like a portal opening up into 70s Black America – Soul Train has only ever been glimpsed here in occasional clips in documentaries. They're currently putting up classic old shows recently. When I talked to Jeff Mills a while back, he mentioned the kids doing a soul train in the classroom, and I didn't quite understand what he meant, even though I knew of the show – some sort of conga line? But I guess he meant the communal dance at the end, where over some ridiculously funky tune the audience line up to take it in terms to bust their moves.

This sort of audience participation is really unfamiliar to British (and especially English) types. People clap the beat out precisely, and cheer the breakdown in a Kurtis Blow track without prompting. No fourth wall between audience and performer. The camera doesn't cut away from the dancers or edit the footage in ridiculous ways, it lingers on them. Uptight Englanders look away now.

The kind of seriousness with which the main man introduces the segment – "We now turn our attention to the soul train" – give it a life of its own. That kind of autonomous zone was kind of unheard of on UK TV, where the biggest televisual pop medium was Top Of The Pops, where you had watcher and performer with little in between. (a notable exception – BBC2's Dance Energy show in the rave era). I'll be eagerly soaking these up in the next few days. It's strange, though, considering online media-overload, how fresh and unfamilar this medium, a staple of US TV for decades, somehow feels ...

Derek Walmsley

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The Middle East Coast

Derek Walmsley


Occasionally records pop up on email lists which, simply by virtue of their titles, beg to be heard. Raks Raks Raks: 17 Golden Garage Psych Nuggets From The Iranian 60s Scene certainly hit this mark. Indeed, at one point you wondered whether it was too good to be true; the title ticked so many boxes (garage, psych, Iranian, 60s…) you wondered if it was designed by some enterprising committee of music forgers. Indeed, there's virtually no independent info about the artists online. But not only does this stuff sound completely of the time, but after a bit of contact with the compilers there's a fascinating story behind it. Released on the Raks Discos label, it's a long running labour of love for Dutch and Turkish collectors, who jointly sent some responses to my questions.

The first question was how the hell they got wind of this music. "Knowing the fact that under the Shah's rule, that Iran had a relatively liberal entertainment scene, I always thought that there had to be music from the 60s and 70s which was influenced by the western rock and pop, crossing with local music." The last decade has seen some impressive Turkish psychedelic rock come to light, and it was in this context where they first came across Iranian material. Digging around for Turkish rock in the late 90s in Istanbul, they found a green vinyl disc on a label called T4 by a group called The Rebels: "When listening to it with Turkish friends they pointed me at the strange rhythm. ‘I saw her standing there’ the Beatles tune received a rhythmic workout that sounded more than impossible for European bands." But tracking down records in Iran itself proved extremely difficult for a number of reasons: language barriers, the government suspicion of pre-revolution culture, the collapse of the vinyl record industry, the difficulty of getting people to trust tall, caucasian record collectors, etc. Finally, in the mid-2000s, learning Persian started to unlock some of the secrets of records they were finding in junk shops.

Before the revolution, the Shah’s rule was supported by the West, and certain areas of society were almost slavishly anglophile. "Most usually the people involved in the scene were youngsters from the urban middle class with good education and who could have access to buying electric equipment and drum sets which were expensive posessions and very hardly available to non-professional musicians. The bands are mostly from Tehran, the capital city, followed by Isfahan, Tebriz and Shiraz which had liberal families." Although 60s music was not large commercially, it was nonetheless a busy little scene: "Only a couple of bands, such as The Rebels and The Golden Ring captured the interest of the record buying public with one or two records. Other than that, all other bands have been poorly self-produced with very low sales. It's obvious they were favored more by live audiences." The scene was helped by vinyl records being extremely easy to produce: "Iran was never part of the worldwide copyright networks, pre and after revolution, which helped the prices of the phonogram discs to be very cheap coupled with the fact that Iran being one of the prime producers of petroleum products, such as vinyl."

Nonetheless, the vinyl industry eventually collapsed, and the years of internal strife and external conflict pushed the 60s music scene to the back of the collective cultural memory. "The 1979 revolution changed a lot of things, music being one of them. Shah-era music, save for instrumental classical or religious music, was banned and especially items with female singing on them were confiscated wherever possible. As we said, vinyl was out of the window as early as 1976 anyway. The first years of Islamic rule were incredibly harsh which also surprised a lot of locals who did not think it would be this hard. Add to that the devastating eight years of war with Iraq, nobody cared for the recent musical past in those years and it has always been forbidden to sell these materials at any shop."

The music itself is almost impossible to dislike: rattling garage tracks with mostly Persian lyrics, lightly wayward tuning but a very slight sense of drone. For me it's more surf influenced than genuinely psychedelic, but it’s got a certain grit which is nothing like the candy pop confections of the West Coast surf guitar scene. The collectors describe themsevelves as interested in "that fantastic moment the ‘new’ music entered countries that do not come up in our minds as we are referring to early rock or garage music", and Raks Raks Raks certainly has an intangible weirdness – not quite Western, not quite Eastern. The music is almost as strange as the story of how it was unearthed.

Derek Walmsley

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