Return to the fairground
Mark Fisher
"Minimal, of course, was the straw that overflowed the glass of Red Bull," writes Philip Sherburne in his jeremiad on the state of electronic dance music.
But the problem doesn't really lie with minimal itself. (One difficulty, though, is defining what minimal "itself" is; and it's questionable whether everything now labeled 'minimal' can now usefully be defined as belonging to one genre or sensibility.) As Simon Hampson argued in The Wire 293, it is the position that 'minimal' occupies in dance music, rather than any properties of the music itself, that is the issue:
There's a direct analogy with dubstep - more than an analogy, actually, since dubstep and the empire of minimal are converging, what with Villalobos and Shackleton remixing each other, the 2562 record, etc. What is needed is the confident reassertion of a dance music mainstream. That's related to Simon Reynolds's comments in Philip's piece:
Could minimal be defined as 'devoid of cheese'? Maybe so - but it would be a mistake to equate cheese with a retreat from innovation, just as it would be an error to align tasteful restraint and austerity with experimentalism. Hearing XL's rerelease of The Prodigy's first LP recently, with its its vertiginous jump cuts and bizarre angles, brought this home with E-flashback ultravividness. The barrel organ-like cartoon euphoria of Experience has always sounded like fairground music, and indeed it was at home pounding out from a fairground as it was at a rave. Wandering around a fairground in Kent recently, I kept being drawn back to the ride that was pumping out Bassline House, the genre whose hectic animatronic ebullience is at home in the fairground environment as rave once was. Is it time to forget the austere appartments that minimalism is so often reminiscent of, and return to the fairground?
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non-urban field place
Derek Walmsley
A puff-piece on Radio 4 recently marvelled over the rise of popular music festivals in the UK and beyond. Admittedly, it's nice that festivals like Green Man are taking advantage of outdoor settings for staging music, and certainly the feeling of a return to nature, of reclaiming the land, is a powerful one. However for me it's hard not to see the rise of outdoor music festivals in the UK as a corollary of the decline of urban music venues and the rise in property and rent prices everywhere. As cities grow, urban space becomes prohibitively expensive, and the only leisure spaces are at the peripheries, in temporary zones a day trip away from the city. Promoters turn to the greenbelt to host their events, and music festivals pile the acts high to keep prices relatively cheap. The performers appearing become ever more bland, as promoters focus on providing an undemanding soundtrack to the brief moments of summer reverie we get in the UK. Like out of town shopping centres, we end up with lots of choice in outdoor music festivals, but no real quality.
It's not the only example of live-flight in London music. Grime and garage events almost never happen in the city anymore – the police, assuming a role of 'advising' music venues, create a de facto ban on all but the most selective of these events happening in the city.
When in Blackpool recently, it struck me how much of the economy of modern life these days is predicated on punters paying money just to move around. Large tourist attractions make a lot of their money from meals and drinks, ie the subsistence costs people pay to sustain themselves in these other-places. It's why coffee places thrive in city centres – cities are so unwelcoming and psychologically stressful, you need to pay to go somewhere to chill out, and there's a feedback loop where the less publicly accessible places there are in cities, the more you need these refreshment waypoints and the more they make. Festivals are largely the same – you get sponsorship from a drinks company, and they mop up the refreshment tab. Like a lot of things in modern life, increasingly you don't pay for the actual products you want – ie music – but the delivery systems for those products.
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Ridicule Is Nothing To Be Scared Of (Slight Return)
Mark Fisher
Like
David Stubbs, I'm of course delighted to have been shopped to
the commissars of commonsense who compile Private Eye's Pseud's
Corner. It's always bracing to be middlebrow-beaten; a pleasure I
can expect to enjoy fairly regularly from now on, since, if the
section from the Mark Stewart feature that they selected is
considered fair game, then they might as well open up a permanent
spot for me.
It's difficult to know what the alleged problem is: the conjoining
of politics and music? Well, it's hardly stretching a point to
argue that a record such as For How Much Do We Tolerate Mass
Murder? might, y'know, have had some connection with
geopolitical developments at the end of the 70s. Would the same
objection be made to linkages between politics and other areas of
culture? But of course what is objected to is as much a question of
tone as of content. The default expectation in British media is
that writers perform a homely matiness: writing must be light,
upbeat and irreverent, never taking itself or anything else too
seriously.
The function of Pseud's Corner – to punish writing that in some way
overreaches itself, that gets ideas above its
station or gets carried away – has now been taken up
by online discussion boards and comments facilities everywhere. The
effect on any writer who internalises the critique is to be
intimidated into colourless mediocrity. But the problem with most
published writing today is not that it is 'pretentious', it is that
is unreflective PR hackwork. David Stubbs is right to invoke a
certain Orwell as the patron of bluff, plain speaking John Bull
prose - but the Orwell of "Politics
And The English Language" also attacked the mechanical
circulation of dull, dead language. If only that Orwell
were more heeded. "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of
speech which you are used to seeing in print," he demanded,
optimistically hoping that "if one jeers loudly enough, send some
worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’
heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid
test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal
refuse — into the dustbin where it belongs." Over sixty years
later, such "verbal refuse" continues to circulate with impunity,
and is supplemented by a whole inventory of PR commonplaces and
consumer-affect babble (journeys, rollercoaster
rides). Surely any amount of 'pretentiousness' is preferable
to these soporific linguistic screensavers?
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Dave Tompkins on air
Derek Walmsley
For those missing their regular fix of
The Wire hiphop columnist Dave Tompkins, he did a
great radio show last week, as part of the Finer
Things programme in Poughkeepsie, hosted by another
contributor, Hua Hsu. Great stuff which is heavy on the electro and
vocoder flavours, and every bit as indefatigable and crate-diggerly
as you'd expect from Dave's contributions to the mag:
Part One is here
Part Two is here
If you're still not sated, I'd recommend checking out the mammoth
Miami Bass throwdown he did on WFMU from back in the day. You can
access the archives here.
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Far East sound
Derek Walmsley
Nice article on China's reggae heritage by Dave Katz, author of Solid Foundation. Not only did I not realise that Leslie Kong was of Chinese origin (and he's the guy who recorded arguably the best sides ever by The Wailers, some of the formative documents of roots reggae), but the scale of Vincent and Patricia Chin's VP label was brought home this week, when I realised they're now the people who own Greensleeves. Thanks for Steve Barker for pointing the article our way.
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LFO Peel Session
Derek Walmsley
If you download only one thing today, I'd heartily recommend the LFO Peel Session from all the way back in 1990 that you can find at robotsound. Spine-tingling stuff. Like Peel Sessions from many other electronic types, it ends up somewhere between a studio track and live one – electronic sketches rather than fully fledged dancefloor wreckers. But that's the beauty of it – spare architectural lines, immeasurably expressive. It seems to drip with adolescent yearning – not surprisingly, as LFO were still barely out of their teens. Yet, it seems incredible to recall, they were in the studio with Kraftwerk around this very time (you can find their handwritten account of it in Rob Young's Black Dog Publishing book on Warp Records).
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Derek Walmsley
With a certain synchronicity, just as
Blissblog reminisces about old tapes (with the help of FACT
magazine's Woebot), this item emerged from the postbag at The
Wire – a promo release for the forthcoming Russell Haswell
Editions Mego double LP Second Live Salvage (fearsome,
thrilling noise architecture). The Wire office has
been without a tape deck for a short while, so I had to do my own
salvaging, retrieving mine from the loft to play it on.
I've no idea as to the sonic merits of tape versus CD or MP3. But
in terms of how they are used, and how they embed themselves in you
habits of music appreciation, there's lots to be said for tapes,
specifically self-recorded ones which allow you to write many
times/read many times. Many tapes of mine have changed like a
patchwork quilt as I've dubbed new things next to old, over and
over again. Strange juxtapositions emerge and persist (Black Dog
Peel Sessions next to Will Oldham, Wu-Tang albums from mates
bookended by Seefeel), and they become a living chronicle of
obsessions and listening habits. Compared to the wealth of
once-used CD-Rs which litter my desk, all of which carry a
psychological traces of me wearily inscribing the album name on
them, knowing soon they'll probably be lost among many other once
listened to CD-Rs, tapes are like long lost friends. Of course,
with iTunes, everything is at your fingertips anyway. But
frequently one doesn't want them to be at fingertips. That
conscious decision to access something feels too much like work,
like acting as your own private librarian. Not only that, but
you're at the mercy of the speed of the computer – so it's like
being a librarian but needing someone else to clamber at that
ladder for you.
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Anti-Epiphany
Mark Fisher
Simon's
response to Mark Wastell's Epiphany in Wire 292, fascinating
not because it is a Rashômon-like alternative reading of
the same event, but because - contrary to certain prevailing
hedonic relativist orthodoxies - it demonstrates that there is
something more involved in aesthetic judgments than a mere
registering of sensations. The difference between Mark's response
and Simon's was not at the level of pleasure; it wasn't that Mark
found Parker and Braxton any more agreeable than Simon did. But, in
Mark's case, the initially disagreeable sensations induced him to
take a leap beyond the pleasure principle: a cognitive
act, a commitment, a decision to override the 'anger and confusion'
that the music first caused him to feel.(Simon of course has taken
such leaps in respect of other scenes, other musics.)
The mantra of hedonic relativism has it that 'everything is
subjective', where subjectivity is construed as an arbitrary
set of preferences. But Mark's Epiphany vindicates the view that
certain encounters - events - produce subjectivities, even
as they destitute us, deprive us of old worlds.
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Bing Tha Ruckus
Derek Walmsley
My recent Invisible Jukebox with Wu-Tang
Clan's The RZA (featured in The Wire 292, which has
just hit the streets) involved a train spotter's paradise of
sample-spotting and internet researching as I looked into the
building blocks of the great Wu-Tang albums of the mid-90s. One
sample I missed, sadly, was that "Ice Water" from the RZA-produced
Raekwon album Only Built 4 Cuban Linx featured a vocal
sample from none other than Bing Crosby, singing "White Christmas".
The langorous, grandfatherly "I'm...." from the first
line is cut off just before the second syllable, leaving only a
deep voice and wide vibrato that sounds like it's emanating from
the depths of the pyramids. It's one of the most gothic moments in
the whole of hiphop, using good ol' Bing's disembodied tones as an
unearthly, weirdly non-gendered siren call.
It's odd to think of a sample fiend like The RZA getting a kick out
of Bing's voice, but dig deeper and there's a strange kinship
between the pair. The RZA recently invested a large amount of his
own money in vinyl-to-digital scratch technology; Bing Crosby was
instrumental in developing early tape technology, by investing
$50,000 in the fledgling Ampex company.
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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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