four favorite riffs

Not actually my four absolute favorite riffs (Lord alone knows where I'd start with that) but four of my favorite riffs, commented on for The Wire's Greatest Riffs feature of  2004 

KING SUNNY ADE -- “Eje Nlo Gba Ara Mi”, “365 Is My Number/The Message” (from Juju Music, Mango, 1982), “Synchro System” (Synchro System, Mango, 1983)

 The riff so good they used it thrice. Actually, that’s an underestimate. This twangy, twinkly rhythm guitar figure, mostly likely played by Ade himself, is all over The Best of The Classic Years compilation of 1967-74 material (notably “Sunny Ti De” and “Ibanujde Mon Iwon”), and I’m told it recurs throughout the man’s vast discography. Whether it’s creative thrift or a Zen-like exploration of the infinite inflectional possibilities within a few chords, who knows? In any given track, this crisp crinkle of scintillating Afro-funk serves a double function, operating as both audio-logo (this is KING SUNNY ADE you’re listening to) and intensifier, its flecked flicker tightening the surface of the music until it’s as taut as a drum skin.

NASTY HABITS--“Shadow Boxing” (31 Records, 1996)

Nasty Habits is the alter-ego of deejay/producer Doc Scott, one of jungle’s under-sung pioneers, and “Shadow Boxing” contains the most gloriously doom-laden and ponderous synth-riff in that genre’s history. Scott’s from Coventry, so it’s tempting to think he must have accessed the heaviness of this sluggish, scowling riff from the harsh West Midlands environment in the same way Sabbath did with “Iron Man,” “War Pigs,” and the rest. More likely, though, is that in the early Nineties Scott had his head rearranged at Coventry’s Eclipse raves and ever since then he’s been chasing down his own ultimate version of the miasmic “Mentasm” noise-riff, as heard on Joey Beltram’s early R&S tracks and Belgian hardcore anthems beyond counting. Beautiful and ominous like a cloud of poison gas looming on the horizon, “Shadow Boxing” is the culmination of a life’s work. Something drum’n’bass as genre most likely will never surpass.

RESILIENT--"1.2" (Chain Reaction, 1996) 

There’s probably any number of fabulous riffs strewn across the discographies of the Basic Channel/Chain Reaction label-cluster (Maurizio’s “M6” and Monolake’s “Index” spring immediately to mind). But “1.2” by the enigmatic Resilient takes the BC/CR approach of miniaturising the riff to the limit. Riffs exist at the intersection of melody and rhythm, the mnemonic and the physical, and the Chain Reaction aesthetic in part involved seeing just how reduced (in terms of notes) you could make a pulse before it became purely percussive, just another beat. I’m not even sure there’s notes as such in “1.2”, it’s more like this spasming ripple of texture. It’s as if Resilient has conducted an archaeology of house music in order to uncover the primordial geocosmic vamp at the genre’s core. The first half of “1.2” consists of a tectonic shudder, a tidal current, that’s so contourless it’s at the very threshold of memorability. Then roughly six minutes in (you do tend to lose track of time) it abruptly shifts gear to a more rapid flicker of amorphous radiance. At which point, the sensation of spongy amniotic suspension quickens to a flooding bliss, overwhelming enough to get your eyes rolling back in your head. You start to see why some wag* dubbed this genre “heroin house”.

KRAFTWERK--“Ruckzuck” (Kraftwerk 1, Philips, 1971) 

Given all the other choices available in the Kraftwerk oeuvre--the regular-as-carburetor pulse of “Autobahn”, the poignant heart-flutter vamps of “Neon Lights” and “Computer Love”, the eerie synth-shivers midway through "Home Computer"--it probably seems slightly perverse to pick the very first song on the very first album. Especially as the killer riff is played on a flute, not a synth. But the whole essence of Kraftwerk’s sound/feeling/Geist--serene urgency, Zen as the art of motorik maintenance--is distilled into Florian Schneider’s rasping flute lick. Or flute licks--at various points, it’s double-tracked so that Schneider is jamming with himself, the staccato patterns dovetailing to funky perfection. Flutes are usually a ghastly idea outside classical music, but here the instrument rocks--indeed, it’s hard to think of another instance of a woodwind being used to such percussive and propulsive effect. “Ruckzuck” is the missing link between Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians and Area Code 615’s “Stone Fox Chase”--i.e. that harmonica-driven theme tune for The Old Grey Whistle Test. * "some wag"--Not sure but I think it was actually Kevin Martin who coined the term "heroin house". Nuff respeck.

ambient faves (2016)

votes for the pitchfork ambient list  

(with my blurbs for charting albums below) 

1/ brian eno - on land

2/ brian eno & harold budd - plateaux of mirrors

3/ aphex twin - selected ambient works vol 2

4/ seefeel - polyfusia

5/ laraaji - day of radiance

6/ Steve hillage - rainbow dome music

7/ cluster - II

8/ manuel göttsching - e2-e4

9/ brian eno - discreet music

10/ aphex twin - selected ambient works 89-93

11/ fripp-eno – (no pussyfooting)

12/ david sylvian - gone to earth (instrumentals disc)

13/ david bowie - low (side 2)

14/ mixmaster morris - flying high

15/ the orb - adventures beyond the ultra world

16/ edgar froese - aqua

17/ klaus schulze - mirage

18/ ralph lundsten - cosmic love

19/ seefeel - quique

20/ brian eno - music for airports

might have included if i'd heard them then

ernest hood - neighborhoods

k.leimer - music for land and water

michael turtle - phantoms of dreamland

arnold aard - electro-sonnances

ron nagorcka - loveregana: music from a tasmanian forest

knud victor - ambiances / images

kankyo ongaku compilation

angel rada  - upadesa

runners up/edge cases (e.g.with song element)

hugo largo - drum / meddle

spacemen 3 - playing with fire 

ar kane - 69 

eno - another green world

eno - before and after science

oneohtrix point never - rifts

budd / fraser / guthrie / raymonde - the moon and the melodies

other contenders

zoviet france, moon wiring club, focus group,ingram marshall, catherine christer hennix, jon hassell, thomas koner, huerco s, celer, dolphins into the future, orphan fairytale, cocteau twins,global communications, ann southam, other eno / budd / cluster / harmonia / laraaji / fripp-eno / seefeel, kwjazz, laurie spiegel,the caretaker, roj, ryuichi sakamoto, nik pascal, virginia astley,matsuo ohno, michel longtin,craig kupka, david pritchard 

Aphex Twin, Selected Ambient Works Volume II (Warp), 1994

With Selected Ambient Works 85-92, Richard D. James established “ambient techno” as a viable concept rather than a contradiction-in-terms.  But soon this serene offshoot of banging ravefloor music became its own New Age-y cul-de-sac.  Bloody-minded as ever, for his early ’94 follow-up, James switched from chill-out to chilling: ominously featureless soundscapes woven from abstract textures and eerily fixated pulses. Gone, for the most part, were those lovely Aphex melodies shimmering like dew-drops on a spider web. The project’s forbidding aura was intensified by the absence of track titles: all 24 tracks were identified only by texture-swatches (such as lichen or weathered stone) as if to deliberately exacerbate the listener’s sensation of being lost.  There was beauty here still, but of a peculiar and unsettling kind: the opener, for instance, modulates a voice into a baby-talk squiggle, then ripples it through hall-of-mirrors echo.  James trailed the project – which proved as influential as its predecessor had been, with similarly mixed results –by talking about the inspiration he’d drawn from experiments with lucid dreaming: techniques that allow the sleeper to steer the storyline of a nocturnal adventure. True or not, the effect of this music feels exactly like being inside a dream – not necessarily idyllic, more like the kind whose strangeness haunts you long into your waking day. 

Brian Eno, Ambient 4: On Land (EG), 1982

The climax of Eno’s supremely fertile New York period, On Land is ironically an attempt to leave – psychologically - the very city in which he’d produced so much astonishingly innovative work.   The working title Empty Landscapes reveals just how oppressive Eno had come to find Manhattan’s hyperactive bustle. Drawing on inspirations from film (Fellini’s Amarcord) and art (Pierre Tal-Coat’s pastoral paintings) Eno was above all working from personal memory: faded impressions of the unpopulous East Coast of England where he’d grown up. Some tracks are named after places (Leek Hills, Dunwich) he’d frequented as a child, while another (“Lantern Marsh”) gets it title from an evocative name he’d seen on a map. Aiming for “a nice kind of spooky” and a “feeling of aloneness,” On Land pushes much deeper into abstraction than Music For Airports: Eno drastically processed the instrumental sounds until unrecognizable and wove in natural-world timbres such as stones and frog noises.  The glinting, amorphous result has barely any ancestors in music. On Land was a deeply conceptual project: Eno wrote 25 thousand words of notes to articulate what he was trying to do and invented a three-speaker system that listeners could set up to intensify the feeling of sonic engulfment.  But On Land ultimately works on a purely emotional level: a heartsick 34-year-old expatriate mentally prepares himself for the homecoming that will follow in a few years.  “On Land” is only a missing consonant and a shifted vowel from “England”.

 

Laraaji, Ambient 3: Day of Radiance (EG ) 1980

Serendipity was in full effect the day Eno strolled through New York’s Washington Square Park and came across Laraaji playing his plangently chiming autoharp.  The actor-musician had already released one album, 1978’s Celestial Vibrations,  but the note inviting him to make a record that Eno dropped into his busker’s hat gave Laraaji access to a much larger audience.  Born Edward Larry Gordon, Laraaji had explored the concept of cosmic music for some years using electrified and adapted versions of the zither and hammered dulcimer. He believed that these and similar metallophonic instruments like gongs induced a trance state that broke down the self’s boundaries and unloosed the bonds of Time.  Not that the first side of Day of Radiance is relaxing, exactly:  “The Dance” seems to flood your mind with almost-painful brightness. But the flipside’s two-parter “Meditation” gently unspools folds of glimmering texture in a slow-motion cascade.  Although Radiance was a career highpoint, Laraaji would record a bunch more wonderful albums (including Flow Goes The Universe for Eno’s latterday label All Saints). The fact that Laraaji’s other main occupation is working as a laughter therapist reminds us of the higher purpose – at once practical and mystical – behind Radiance. This is music for healing and making whole.