Heatwave
Derek Walmsley
The recent Soul Jazz An England
Story compilation, from some of the people behind London club
night Heatwave, reminded me of some of the excellent 7"s these guys
have released over the years. In particular, this ragga refix of
Kelis' "Trick Me" (already an astonishingly funky track, with its
rhythm that lurks somewhere between technofied R&B; and
dust-caked ska), which I found while looking for records to DJ with
in Brussels as part of The Wire soundsystem the other day.
The precise, gritty ruff-age of the vocals immediately raises the
energy levels of the track. This melding of ragga vocals and
R&B; is like that of old school rapping and disco on Soul
Jazz's fairly recent Big Apple Rapping - when the rough
and smooth go together so well, what's not to like? Anyway, I have
such fond memories of this 7" that I actually found myself running
back to the hotel to get it mid-set, and anyone who's fallen for
the UK/JA crossover of An England Story should surely seek
this out.
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Namings As Portals
Mark Fisher
Speaking of postpunk autodidacticism,
Owen Hatherley picks up on what I too thought was of the most
interesting lines in Mark Sinker's Sight & Sound review of
Grant Gee's Joy Division film:
Sometimes the names condensed more than one reference: 'Colony'
invoked Conrad as much as Kafka's 'Strike Kolony'. Sometimes the
references were unintentional misdirections; 'Atrocity Exhibition'
is surely one of the least Ballardian tracks that Joy Division
produced. In any case, construing these allusions as 'portals' that
led somewhere – rather than as citations in a seamless postmodern
circuit – is highly suggestive. Such portals could take the
listener into formal education, but were also doorways beyond the
school and the university, an alternative curriculum.
(Also well worth looking at on Owen's site:
this essay on Neu!, published in honour of the recently
deceased Klaus Dinger.)
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Satire Is Dead, Again
Mark Fisher
From the team that brought you this:
'Red is more like punk rock, hip hop, this should feel like
hard commerce.'
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Designer Despair
Mark Fisher
Rousing praise for Portishead's latest amidst Simon Reynolds's
latest bumper pack of reflections on Blissblog. I find Simon's
enthusiasm for the LP a little perplexing, although, I must
confess, I've never been that enraptured by Portishead. I became
quickly fatigued wading through the gloopy designer despair of
their debut, and had all but lost interest by the time of the
follow up. The combination of kitchen sink torch singing, vinyl
crepitation, sweeping film samples and brokeback hiphop beats
possessed a certain stylishness, but the appeal quickly palled. It
was the 'stylishness' that was the problem, actually. Even though I
don't doubt the personal sincerity of either Gibbons or Barrow,
formally it all sounded a little pat, a little too
cleverly contrived, a little too comfortably at home in This
Life 90s Style culture. Gibbons's gloom always struck me as
being more like illegible grumbling than the oblique bleakness it
wanted to be. As for the new album, it screams out lack of ideas:
devoid of the vinyl crackle that might have given it some relation
to the 'hauntological now' of Burial or Philip Jeck, I can only
hear it as clapped out coffee table miserabilism ten years past its
sell-by date.
(Meanwhile, I can't help feeling that
Geoff Barrow and arch smugonaut Mark Ronson are right about
each other.)
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Weird coincidences...
Mark Fisher
Further to Derek's
observations on Villalobos's 'Enfants', below ... Even though
the sample is taken from a Christian Vander track, when I first
heard 'Enfants' it reminded me of nothing so much as the piano on
Nina Simone's 'Sinnerman'. It seems that I'm not the only
one to make the association ... If the similarity between the
tracks is eerie, then this only adds to the strangeness of Simone's
already intensely uncanny song, which acquired even more weirdness
last year when it was used by both David Lynch (in INLAND EMPIRE)
and Timbaland (on the first track of his Shock Value LP).
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Nu-linguistic programming
Mark Fisher
Infinite Thought's diatribe against artspeak raises all kinds
of issues. The soporifically ubiquitous language against which she
rails is part of the reassuring background noise in what passes now
for high culture. It is the institutional artworld's revenge on
Duchamp and Dada's idea that nonsense could be revolutionary. But
the problem with this language is its oversignfication as much as
its lack of content, the excess of meaning with which it freights
objects and shows, fixing them into a pre-defined cultural place
via the use of a laudatory linguistic muzak that combines
portentous gravitas with vapid weightlessness: all those
notions that are negotiated with, those
boundaries that are blurred, and everything, of
course, is radical... This is the soundtrack to the
postmodern conversion of events into exhibits, a process so total,
so relentless, that it has become invisible, presupposed. An old
story: those who sought the destruction of the art space and its
prestige find themselves the objects of the latest retrospective
... And just wait for all those May 68 commemorations next month...
This 'nu-language' is more than a matter of institutional inertia.
It is an expression of an interlock – a synergy – between
art, business and promotion. At the End of History, all language
tends to the condition of PR . And lurking not far behind all this
is the spider bureaucracy, now rebranded as 'administration', since
funding bodies require artists – practitioners - to
themselves internalise and proliferate nu-language. This can't be
attacked at the level of discourse alone – as IT suggests,
nu-language itself puts into practice the occlusion of objects
under referent-free discourse – but, by keeping faith with the
events of the past and anticipating events yet-to-come, criticism
can surely play a part in the attack on nu-linguistic
programming.
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new build music
Derek Walmsley
Walking out of Kode9's DJ set at the recent
BLOC weekender in Norfolk, all of us there in The Wire's chalet
were saying more or less the same thing- noone else plays the kind
of music Kode9 currently plays out. There's very little of anything
approaching dubstep in his sets: instead, there's what sounds like
speeded up crunk, Southern hiphop reedited into ever sharper
shards, all kinds of ghetto funk given technofied refixes, neo-soul
taken at breakneck pace.
Both Kode9 and Hyperdub seem to be going in the opposite direction
to what you might associate with dubstep: the music is getting
quicker, sharper, more synthetic and fractured. Watching his set, I
wasn't sure whether to dance or to just marvel at the way he's able
to splice these musical genres together. The breadth of music
traversed was enough of a rush on its own.
It strikes me that few artists are able to speed music up and
retain the funk when they're remixing; it's much more common to
slow beats down, to straighten them out and explore the spaces
within (think of screwed and chopped hiphop, triphop etc.) It's a
much more difficult feat to speed music up and yet find a way to
still make it successfully mesh with other styles, to engage the
body. To do so is like trying to tinker with an engine while with
someone stepping on the accelerator. Perhaps understandably, remix
culture is more about breaking music down than building it up. It's
perhaps only Kode9 and Surgeon who've I've really felt they we able
to do this the other way round.
As Kode9 himself has suggested, the relationship between dance
genres (and their tempos) and the body is a deep and complex one
(think of how techno and house have subtly different emphases
despite fairly similar tempos, and yet they seem to 'work' entirely
differently). Splicing the DNA of dance genres is a bit like
playing Frankenstein. I'm still seriously impressed that it ends up
creating something so graceful and exhilarating, rather than some
disfunctional mutant that only a drugged-up crowd would enjoy.
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Haynes
Lisa Blanning
The other night I saw Velvet
Goldmine for the first time. I seem to recall that when it
came out ten years ago, it looked quite cool, but folks who had
seen it hadn't been too positive about it. I hadn't thought much
about it in the interim, but not too long ago I came home and my
flatmate was watching it. I caught the part where Ewan MacGregor
plays Iggy Pop on stage and was immediately interested. Ewan is
fully convincing and his screen character Curt Wild (geddit?) has
even more extreme added twisted back story (one can only hope that
Iggy didn't have it so bad, but maybe if I ever get round to
reading his biography, I'll find out just how close it is). It made
me want to see the rest of the film and when I found out that
writer/director Todd Haynes had done this movie I made it a
priority. I'd recently seen Haynes's Dylan 'biopic' I'm Not
There and found it flawed, but really brave and very good.
That plus Time Out some months ago had a cover feature
of their top 50 rock flicks (or something like that) and Haynes's
barbie-casted Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story had
come out on top. Synchronicity!
Today, having watched Superstar on the internet (the
only way to see the short film, as its distribution suffered after
Richard Carpenter sued), I can now say I've seen Haynes's
music-inspired films (all within two months of each other) and it's
an interesting trajectory. Superstar (which is
Haynes's second film released in 1987) is certainly the most
straightforward, even with the barbies. It's an easy narrative
punctuated by ominous foreshadowing and illuminatingly preachy text
concerning anorexia. Given the primary device, it can't help but be
tongue-in-cheek ("No, we can't eat at The Source! hahaha"), but I
found it a sympathetic portrayal of Karen's self-cancellation. One
might assume (as Richard Carpenter probably did) that by using
dolls Haynes was making fun what must have been a tragic and
difficult situation, and while it may have actually been borne of
financial necessity, it makes for some tender homage in a form
similar to children at play. The love of children is not usually
duplicitous, and similarly that affection is revealed, as in the
lovingly rendered barbie-sized sets and costumes.
With Velvet Goldmine (1998), the on-screen rock stars
aren't at all veiled mirrors of their real life counterparts, but
in this case Haynes makes his own story using real characters
instead of relying overly on their real-life stories, as so many
young children are given readymade characters (like Barbie and GI
Joe) complete with a look and a backstory to make their own
adventures with. My main beef with this vastly entertaining and
rather beautiful film is Haynes still felt the need to retain lip
service to an overarching plot, which plods along between the
lavish set-pieces that are full of wit and insight not least
because of constant references to and quotes from Oscar Wilde,
which in itself ties the set-pieces together better than the
'plot'. One short scene of Curt Wild and Brian Slade (David Bowie)
musing on their love is acted by dolls in one child's voice and
intentionally cliched dialogue making it an oddly touching and
innocent portrayal of such a moment: gay hedonist rock star love.
Ten years later and Bob Dylan becomes the fetishised pop star in
I'm Not There, made up of vignettes close
and inspired to his life, the viewer's knowledge of which making
the lynchpin that allows the film to roam plot free. Losing that
structure seems to release even more ideas from an already
imaginative director and perhaps obsessive fan. The life of Dylan
is such a rich tapestry to draw from and Haynes really does that
justice. He keeps a few stylistic choices (making some scenes
deliberately stiffly acted, which can be a bit jarring when it's
not done humourously), but it's an incredibly engaging way to tell
a story and kind of makes you feel as though you're learning
something about the subject as well – getting a sense of that
elusive charisma that made them something special in the first
place.
Turns out Haynes's first film is actually about Rimbaud, who is a
poet I had recently decided to investigate. Synchronicity has
dictated my next foray.
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more is less
Derek Walmsley
First up in April's office ambience was
Ricardo Villalobos's "Enfants", a minimal Techno masterpiece
comprised solely of a metronome-like hi-hat and beat, rolling piano
and samples of a children's choir. The music is derived, oddly,
from a piece by Christian Zander of Magma, and it becomes a matter
of fascination trying to spot where the loop of singing starts and
finishes (I still haven't managed it).
The treatment is so simple and elegant that, despite running for
all of 17 minutes in its full version, you yearn to play it again
as soon as it finishes. The 12" was hammered repeatedly in the
office in the run up to the April issue. Personally, I could
happily hide myself away with this record for a day or two to try
and discover its secrets. It exemplifies a trend that has developed
in my listening habits over the last year or so: as the amount of
music easily available grows exponentially, a reaction is a
corresponding fascination with singular pieces of music, whose
multiple layers can be unpeeled onion-like. Minimal Techno 12"s on
the Cadenza label have tracks that run for well over ten minutes on
each side, with endless tricks of perceptual acoustics that you
have to listen to and relisten again in order to grasp.
I can hardly remember the last time I listened to a recent album
more than 20 times, but I'm probably close to it with this 12".
Whether this yearning for simplicity is a lifestyle matter, like
the desire to have all your record collection on one handy Mp3
player, I'm not sure. But there is a desire to have more-of-less
that my obsession with this track reflects.
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in search of space
Derek Walmsley
Over the last three years, Dopplereffekt -
whom common consensus suggests is Gerald Donald, originally once
one half of Detroit duo Drexciya- has quietly reorientated his
electronic muse, turning away from the physicality of electro and
towards the quietude of deep space. His albums Linear
Accelerator and Calabi Yau Space are the
closest contemporary electronica has to a true music of the
spheres: vast, echoing spaces, with cold, pristine tones unspoilt
by human hands, and elliptical melodic orbits strangely akin to the
use of the Blue Danube in Kubrick's 2001: A
Space Odyssey. These albums are love-letters to technology:
eulogies to massive man-made marvels such as the nuclear particle
laboratories housed underneath the French countryside.
Given his love affair with technology, it's perhaps not surprising
that Donald himself is an elusive character, never having given an
official interview. Live dates are few and far between, and often
unpredicatable affairs. Which makes a recording of an excellent
recent Dopplereffekt set in Sweden, downloadable
here, even more valuable. It's not clear if the material is
actually performed live, but the material, drawn mostly from the
material from 2007's Calabi Yau Space, is clearly in a
constant state of evolution: the music now incorporates lingering
electronic grace notes of almost heartbreaking melancholy, and
subsonic shudders that hint at ghosts in the machine. It's an
essential document of an electronic artist who currently seems
light years ahead of the pack.
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