Quite some time ago, Glen Goetze asked me about sad songs, for which publication I cannot remember,
1. What are your earliest memories of music?
The Beatles's "Yellow Submarine". The Hollies "The Air That I Breathe". Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. Musicals like High Society and West Side Story. T.Rex, Gary Glitter, Sparks, The Sweet.
2. When was the last time music made you cry?
I can't remember. There are certain songs that infallibly make my eyes brim over, like The Smiths's "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out". Often though it's not the emotional content of a song so much as the sheer grandeur of it. I have teared up at certain Kraftwerk songs for that reason, just awe at the majesty,the glory of it. Not just the splendor of sound but the vision and spirit behind "Autobahn" and "Trans-Europe Express" in particular. "Neon Lights" and "Computer Love" are more poignant songs, melodically and emotionally, but I don't think they've have the tear-jerking effect.
3. What connotates sadness in music to you? Is it particular instruments, particular chords, something about the circumstances around the music?
Hard to say. Minor keys, a certain kind of tremulousness of texture. Not so much dolorousness of vocal tone, and not theatricalised grief, on the whole. I'd be more affected, by and large, by the non-demonstrative voice. "Pink Frost" by The Chills is a good example. Rather than the blatantly sad or sorrowful, the most moving songs are often more ambivalent or shaded. Is "Whispering Pines" by The Band a sad song, or just yearning? Is "Solid Air" by John Martyn a sad song, or more pained empathy for a lost and suffering friend?
4. If you really want to wallow in your own misfortune what records do you reach for?
I can't remember the last time I did this, which either indicates that I'm pretty happy, or that I've learned that it doesn't work (like trying to drown your sorrows with alcohol)..
I think if you are really emotionally devastated, you'd probably have a gut self-preservation instinct not to try to make it any worse by listening to depressing music. The truly bad times in my life don't have any soundtrack, at least as I recall those times. Music was irrelevant.
5. Is there any music you can think of that isn’t particularly sad but provokes sad feelings or memories for you? Why?
New Order's "Thieves Like Us" makes me wistful about a relationship that didn't work out, because it soundtracked the short period of intense happiness we had together.
There's probably other examples. Very joyous music like Nineties rave tunes, or certain early things by The Aphex Twin, make me feel wistful precisely because those were such exciting, euphoric times. Any good memory is going to have that poignant twinge as it recedes further into the past, so music that is entwined with good memories will cause you to ache a little bit. Eventually that will mean that most music you love will have a tinge of sadness about it, I suppose.
6. Why is sad music so good?
It's that "parting is such sweet sorrow" thing, isn't it? The rapture that's the same as grief. Feeling something intense, even if painful, is better than feeling numb or neutral.
7. Have you ever considered what kind of music you would want played at your funeral?
No.
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7. updated
I guess back whenever this was, mortality wasn't such a pressing presence in my consciousness, but subsequently I have indeed considered what kind of music I'd like played at my funeral (not that it is imminent - as far as I know, anyway).
Candidates would include John Barry's main theme from "Walkabout", particular tunes (you know them, the obviously best ones) from Budd / Eno's The Plateaux of Mirror, Seefeel "Time To Find Me (AFX slow mix)", Saint Etienne "London Belongs To Me", Henri Sauguet's "Aspect Sentimental", the pretty ones from Aphex Selected Ambient 2, Cocteau Twins "Those Eyes, That Mouth", Tintern Abbey "Beeside", and a whole bunch other similarly dreamy-poignant-ethereal tunes. Other kinds of fave tunes (i.e. jungle, punk and postpunk, Krautrock, Miles) would be too lively, I think.
A record nerd to the last.... beyond the last, even.
No overall single figures springs to mind, I'd have to divide it up into categories and with multiple contenders jostling for the top spot
* Pop Star as Public Figure - Kanye West versus Ke$ha versus Lady Gaga (with the proviso I've little appetite for the audio bar "Bad Romance") versus Drake
* Performer / Vocal Presence - Future versus Ke$ha versus Dizzee
* Beat-maker - Terror Danjah versus Metro Boomin versus Mustard (aka Dijon McFarlane - no really that is his actual name).
* Pop Group in the Bygone and Obsolete Sense - Vampire Weekend versus Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti.
* Endless personal pleasure tinged with awareness of marginality in the scheme of things - Ghost Box versus Moon Wiring Club versus Ariel Pink versus Ekoplekz/eMMplekz
* A Compelling Case to Be Made although somehow I don't quite feel it fully myself - Burial versus Radiohead versus Daft Punk
I have something like 50 books lined up to read (seriously, I do -- I am a nut about buying books). But the ones I’m seriously focused on reading right now are: Tubes: A Journey To the Center of the Internet, by Andrew Blum, and Camille Paglia’s Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars.
[historical footnote - did not finish, indeed barely ever started, either of these]
- Which book was the last one that profoundly impressed you? Why?
George Melly’s Revolt Into Style: The Pop Arts, which was written at the end of the Sixties and is a very sharp take on the significance of pop music and pop culture in general, and informative too, which lots of stuff on things going on in Sixties Britain that are now forgotten. I was also impressed by the writing style and elegant thinking of Decadence: The Strange Life of An Epithet, by Richard Gilman, while not necessarily agreeing with the argument.
- Is there a book that changed your life? When was that and what did it change?
Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of The Text, as the representative text of a whole bunch of French critical theory that changed my conceptions of what art (including music) was about and how it worked.
- Which book was your favorite when you were a child?
Too many to list really, I was a serious bibliomaniac. But if pressed to pick one, I’d probably go for The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame.
- Is there a piece of classic canonical literature you didn't like at all?
I can’t really think of one that I completely detested and couldn’t see the point of at all. But I was underwhelmed by Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. There’s some great passages of mystical writing in it but overall I found it not very engaging. I got to about 40 pages from the end and then just stopped. Had no interest in finding out how it ended. I don’t know if Kerouac counts as “classic canonical” though.
- Where is your favorite place to read at?
On the sofa, when everyone in the house has gone to bed. When you’re so into a book you willingly give up sleep. There’s been books where I’ve been so gripped, that even though my kids will be waking me up at 7AM, I’ll have stayed up until 2AM.
- Which literary character do you adore the most? Would you like to be him/ her for a day or two?
I’m finding it hard to think of a literary character I adore. I don’t adore Maldoror in Lautreamont’s Chants de Maldoror, but he is pretty charismatic. Same with Des Esseintes in Against Nature by J.K. Huysmans. But neither of them are admirable. They’re not people I’d like to be. Often the most compelling characters are evil, or damaged, twisted individuals, or pathetic. Like in Nabokov's novels: Humbert in Lolita, the crazy professor in Pale Fire, Van Veen in Ada. Or Alex in A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. Or the protagonist of Dostoevski’s Notes From Underground. I wouldn’t want to really be inside any of these guys’s skins for a day, or a minute really.
Favourite Albums of 2010, submitted to some publication or other.
1. Rangers - Suburban Tours (Olde English Spelling Bee)
2. Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - Before Today (4AD)
3. Vampire Weekend - Contra (XL)
4. Gonjasufi - A Sufi and A Killer (Warp)
5. Moon Wiring Club - A Spare Tabby At The Cat's Wedding (Gecophonic)
6. Jim Ferraro - On Air (Muscleworks Inc.)
7. Actress - Splazsh (Honest Jon's)
8. D.D. Denham - Electronic Music in the Classroom (Cafe Kaput)
9. Oneohtrix Point Never - Returnal (Mego)
10. Die Antwoord - $o$ (Interscope)
I think all those albums stand up
Probably the one that has receded a bit for me is the Vampire Weekend.
And Actress, maybe although it mightily impressed me at the time.
I would be curious to relisten to On Air but at the time it was easily my favorite of his many efforts.
Not so long ago I saw a doc on Die Antwoord, which demystified them to their detriment, but reminded me how cool and strange their records / videos were.
Actually looking at it's surprising the proportion of the people on it who have taken a reputational hit subsequently, not for their music, but for other behaviours.
Well, three to be precise, but that's almost a third...
What is the first record you bought in your youth with your own money ?
Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Do It Yourself, 1979
Your favorite way for listening to music ? (MP3, CD, vinyl, radio for example) ?
Radio – London pirate stations in the 1990s, listening to rap or classic rock in the car in Los Angeles today.
The last record you bought?
Last vinyl was Some British Accents and Dialects (BBC, 1971). Last digital was Beatriz Ferreyra, Echos+ (Room40, 2020).
Where do you prefer to be when you are listening to music?
I like to be doing something that occupies me physically but leaves me mentally open to the music – in the kitchen, cooking, is ideal.
A mascot/favorite record to start the day with ?
Sacred, “Do It Together (London Massive)”, 1992
Do you need music for work or do you prefer silence ?
Usually I’m listening to what I’m writing about, but for pure acceleration as the deadline approaches, hardcore rave and jungle tapes that I made off pirate radio in the early Nineties maintain my pace and sustain my spirits.
The song you feel a bit ashamed to listen to with pleasure ?
I don’t feel shame about liking anything, because – through solipsistic logic – I conclude that if I like it, it must be good. But if pushed, I would admit that enjoying “Rock You Like A Hurricane” by the Scorpions feels slightly embarrassing.
The record that everybody likes and that you despise ?
I can’t think of a record that everybody likes – there’s always a contrarian these days who’ll say “this is overrated”. I’m actually struggling to think of a record I despise. Panic! At The Disco’s “High Hopes” is fairly horrific, but I’m sure many would agree with me.
The records you need to survive on desert island ?
I made it records plural because it’s too hard to pick just one. Miles Davis, In A Silent Way. Joni Mitchell, The Hissing of Summer Lawns. John Martyn, Solid Air.
What cover art would you frame at home like a piece of art ?
Electronic Panorama, a Prospective 21e Siecle series box set released by Philips in 1970. I don’t have it framed but the silver metallic box is displayed on a shelf in our living room.
Your best memory of a concert ?
Daft Punk making their US debut at the Even Furthur rave in the wilds of Wisconsin, 1996.
Do you go in a club to dance, listen to music on a big sound system, to chat up… Or you never go in the clubs ?
I used to go to clubs and raves all the time. But now hardly ever. When I went, it was to dance and to do certain other things people at raves do. But also increasingly I went as a participant-observer, the use the anthropologist’s term. To read the living text of the crowd, decode the rituals.
What is the record you share with your significant other in your live ?
Too many, but among the core shared favorites are Pixies, Cocteau Twins, Aphex Twin, A.R. Kane, Fleetwood Mac, Saint Etienne, Omni Trio, Orbital, Ultramarine.
The track that makes you mad with rage ?
I cannot think of one at the moment. There are tracks that make me rage with madness, in a good way, i.e. Dionysian frenzy – The Stooges’s “TV Eye”, Beltram’s “Energy Flash”, Future’s “Fuck Up These Commas”.
The last record you listened to over and over again ?
Thin Lizzy, “My Sarah”.
The band you wish you have joined ?
Often the bands that do great things that I’d have been thrilled to be involved in creating also have nasty internal struggles and a long periods of misery and decline. So I will say the Wilson Sisters, a very short-lived conceptual outfit started by friends of mine, with whom I did the Oxford pop journal Monitor. But I had moved to London so missed their one and only recording session.
The piece of music that makes you cry ?
The Smiths, “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out”. Runner up: Kraftwerk, “Neon Lights”.
Do you know what drone metal is ?
Sunn O))) ?
Quote the lyrics of a song you know by heart ?
The whole lyric? I’m not sure I know every last word in this, but I know most of it. This is just one bit: “Why in the world are we here? Surely not to live in pain and fear. Why on earth are you there? When you're everywhere, come and get your share. But we all shine on, Like the moon and the stars and the sun, And we all shine on. On and on and on and on.” (“Instant Karma”, John Lennon)
Name three of your favorite songs ?
Sly and the Family Stone “Everyday People”, Foul Play “Open Your Mind (Foul Play Remix)”, The Sweet “Ballroom Blitz”.
Probably
The Beatles ("Yellow Submarine"). Unless we count British children's
TV shows like Andy Pandy and Pogle's Wood.
The song
where you would like to inhabit?
The
second (subaquatic idyllic) section of John Martyn's "I'd Rather Be The
Devil", but I'd need to have gills instead of lungs.
A song
you are listening obsessively on your iPod? (do you have one?)
I do
have an iPod but hardly ever use it. The last song to obsess me was Black Eyed
Peas's "Boom Boom Pow" which came out in summer 2009 but which I only
heard this month -- that got several replays on YouTube.
An
embarassing (or dangerous cultural) pleasure?
I can't
think of anything that embarrasses me.
I suppose I am ashamed of how much time
I waste watching junk TV -- cooking shows, reality-type pseudo-documentaries,
"Best Interior Design/Next Top Model" type contests. There really are
so many better things I could do with my time.
The
song/movie which changed your life (a quote from it).
Sex
Pistols, "Anarchy in the U.K."--no specific line, but the excessive
demand in the song and Johnny Rotten's performance left me with excessive,
unrealistic demands in terms of what I expect from music (world-shaking impact,
breath-choking intensity)
A recent
album/book/movie/author that you consider your personal discovery.
In the
era of webbed music and hyper-hipsterism, it is very hard to be first on the
block with a new group, or a new anything. Generally I am happy to pick up on
things a little bit after the "new thing" hunters get there.
Things
your children should read, listen and see?
The Wind In the Willows by
Kenneth Grahame.
Beethoven's
Pastoral Symphony.
The Railway Children.
If I say
television: is there a sitcom or something unexpected you can’t stop to watch
at?
Peep Show.
Music:
the playlist/soundtrack of your life, in 5 songs.
The
Slits, "So Tough"
My
Bloody Valentine, "Slow"
Orbital,
"Chime"
Omni
Trio, "Renegade Snares (Foul Play Remix)"
Ariel
Pink, "The Ballad of Bobby Pyn"
The
ringtone you have on your your mobile phone, now?
The
standard one it comes with.
What do
you think of people who obsessively wear earcuffs while walking or other?
It's
not how I would choose to live. I don't like to be insulated from the outside
world. I was never a big fan of the Walkman and the only time I use my iPod is
on long train or bus journeys, or late at night when I want to read while
sitting on the sofa (rather than attached to the stereo via headphones).
A quote
from a song to tell someone: you love him/her; you want to leave him/her. And a
song (quote) to convince someone to stay with you?
"It's
only me/Who wants to wrap around your dreams"--Fleetwood Mac,
"Dreams"
"Lovin’
you...isn't the right thing to do"--Fleetwood Mac, "Go Your Own
Way"
"I can still hear
you saying/You would never break the chain"--Fleetwood Mac, "The
Chain"
Your
relationship with new technologies: do you have a Blackberry/iPhone, you are an
email addict, what’s your opinion about Facebook or similar?
No
Blackberry, no iPhone, only shaky command of my mobile phone to be honest.
Email, addicted, yes of course. Facebook--coming up with clever comments on
stuff is too much like work for me. I'm on it but I hardly ever update or leave
anything comments. Twitter is another step in the ephemeralisation of
everything: I can remember magazine articles and music paper record reviews
from 30 years ago; I can remember certain blog posts and online essays from 7
or 9 years ago. But do people remember a Tweet for more than a day?
A stupid
thing that you cannot stop to do online. Or a digital gaffe.
Saving
articles and blog posts "to read later". "Later" never
comes and I have a folder called Reading Matter with a couple of thousand files
inside it.
Have you
read books on kindle or some e-readers?
No.
What you
would have want to learn to do in life?
Practically:
Drive a car (I've just moved to Los Angeles so this is essential). Play a
musical instrument. Learn how to make beats. Learn how to beat-match as a
deejay.
Existentially:
Be more patient. Waste less time.
What did
you learn from a book/movies/music about: sex?
There's
no substitute for hands-on experience.
Do you
read magazines?
Yes,
but not as much as I used to.
What did
you save/hated of our last ten years culture, the so called Noughties, Anni
Zero.
Love:
Music's inexhaustible capacity to come up with the unexpected, the revelatory,
unknown pleasures (Dizzee Rascal, Animal Collective, Ariel Pink, Ghost Box,
Vampire Weekend...). Blogging as a rebirth of music journalism.
Hate: The effect on the internet on my attention span, which is
shot to pieces (see above, about magazines). The wars and the propaganda
machine that attempted to justify them. Still waiting for the future/the 21st
Century to start, the first ten years just seem like the Nineties continuing.
Twitter as the slow erosion of blogging
A word
that you love. A word that you hate.
Joy
Root
canal
Were
would you go for a “cultural” tour? 3 places
Places I've never been -- Tokyo, Bombay, Beijing.
If you
would have to write an autobiography, what could be the firts line? And the
dedication?
I will never write an autobiography. But the dedication would
be "For Jenny and for Joy".
I'm not sure what the logic was exactly but as tie-in to Shock and Awe, iD asked me to list my seven favorite / life-changing clubs / nights-out-dancing. No I don't quite understand either but a fun and easy exercise so why not? I included raves as essentially very large, roof-less clubs. Listed in chronological sequence rather than ranked according to life-changingness.
1. Progeny, Brixton Academy, London, October 1991
"Orbital entrance with their live techno performance (then a rare thing) and the immortal tingle-riffs of "Chime". But at this irregular rave organised by The Shamen, it's the born-again rapture of the audience - blissed out girls blindly carving shapes in the air, shirts-off and shadow-boxing boys lustrous with sweat - that really turns me into a rave convert."
2. Castlemorton Common, Malvern Hills, Worcestershire, May 1992
"Anarchy in the UK, for real. Hordes of urban ravers join forces with cavalcades of hippie travellers in their caravans and trucks, and the result is an instant city - estimated population 40,000 - springing into existence in a remote rural part of the West Country. Causing consternation across the nation and ultimately leading to the Criminal Justice Act, the free party - instigated by soundsystems like Spiral Tribe and Circus Warp - rages for eight days. I'll never forget the ashen light of dawn rising after the first night - and the hairy drive back to London, with my friend Samantha nearly falling asleep at the wheel several times..."
3. Labrynth, Dalston, East London, 1992-93
"A catacomb of garishly painted caverns and corridors, with a deceptively halcyon outdoor garden, and a murky and jostling main floor, the Labrynth was my favourite club ever. It's where I witnessed hardcore rave turn to the dark side: hands-in the-air choruses and happy pianos gradually, insidiously eclipsed by scuttling 'n' seething breakbeats, foreboding bass-tremors, macabrely witty horror-movie samples, and shudders 'n' shivers of clammy synth-slime. What I remember most about Labrynth is that you never once saw the DJs - they were tucked away in the corner somewhere out of sight. Instead, the stage was occupied by the ravers themselves: a crammed, teetering front row of kids facing the crowd from out of which they'd climbed. The crowd literally became the star of the show."
4. Even Furthur, Wisconsin, USA, May 1996
"Anarchy in the USA, for real. Hordes of candy-ravers and gabba warriors - most from the nearest cities, Milwaukee and Chicago, but others who'd flown or driven from every corner of the nation - descend on a scouting camp in a remote rural part of Middle America. The chaos was partly chemical and partly weather induced. Sporadic rain turned the dancefloors into swamps full of puddles. Along with the mud and the screams of acid freak-outs that intermittently pierced through the trees, what I remember most vividly is Scott Hardkiss dropping his skin-tingling, never-to-be released remix of Elton John's Rocket Man. And the debut US performance of Daft Punk, then barely-known but already a fully-formed juggernaut of joy."
5. Club Voodoo, Bayside, Queens, April 1998
"NY's compact but fanatical hardcore scene congregated for the birthday bash of Brooklyn techno warlord Lenny Dee - and for the US debut of The Mover, just one of the aliases used by the German producer Marc Acardipane (whose 1991 track We Have Arrived pretty much invented gabba). He played a searing, stampeding set that drew on an arsenal of tunes by himself and allies like Renegade Legion and Miro, all released via the Frankfurt label cluster PCP / Cold Rush / Dance Ecstasy 2001. The strobing riffs of Apocalypse Never and Torsion seem to swarm through the ravefloor like a cloud of poison gas. Then the fire marshals arrived to shut down the party for being dangerously overcrowded."
6. Drive By, New York, 2000-2001
"I went to a bunch of UK garage clubs in London but I never had as good a time as I did at Drive By, the hub of NYC's intimate 2step scene. The parties took place at various locations, but my favourite was the Frying Pan, a boat - moored off the Hudson River at the Pier 63 quayside - whose interior was fantastically corroded (it had been sunk for several years, then refloated and repaired). Unlike the UKG vibe of snooty exclusivity, Drive By's atmosphere was friendly and fervent, with a striking dearth of designer labels and not a drop of ostentatiously swilled champagne; the dancing too was more fluidly nubile and expressive. The mismatch that had always pained me during my UK excursions - the gap between 2step's frisky euphoria and its audience's screwface cool - was gone. For once, instead of being a pale copy of the UK original, the US transplant was like a corrected and perfected version."
7. Hard Summer, Los Angeles, August, 2012
"EDM is rising to a peak, its take-over of the USA seems certain. I visit LA's premier EDM festival - two successive weekend nights, drawing fifty thousand - more as an anthropologist than a participant. (I also have my 17-year-old niece, a bit of a handful, in tow, which means I have to be the responsible, surrogate-parent). Despite these constraints, the two nights are both big fun and a revelation, reminding me that the music is always changing, that it will always have a surprise or two up its sleeve. Such as the retina-blitzing bombast of Skrillex and his headlining concert, which shows the extent to which electronic dance music has become a fully integrated audio-visual spectacle. While also showing that this doesn't always have to be a degrading (d)evolution, a travesty of the original spirit. For sure, things have come a long way from the darkness, the tucked-out-of-sight DJs of early rave clubs like Labrynth. But the music is still all about the rush, it's a celebration of noise and sensation and excitement for its own sake. And when Skrillex flips the cameras onto the fans and then projects that teeming throng of faces and hands, that glittering constellation of held-aloft phones, onto his towering video-screens.... well, once again, the audience is the star."
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”.
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.
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.
Last year, for a change, I did "Atemporal Faves". The idea being to reflect the way that I'm more like a regular listener these days, a civilian, drifting across the archival space of streaming services, YouTube, and my own collection. As a result, what brings me delight in any given year will include some new records, as well as relatively recent releases (things from the year before, or the year before that, that I'd only just gotten around to hearing). Then there'd be new-to-me old stuff: reissues, but also just things from long ago I'd never heard before. And the final category: old favorites rediscovered, things heard once or twice long ago but returned to for a deeper listen with a different head.
A true reflection of a year's listening would be weighted to the not-now. Hence, Atemporal Faves.
Well, as it happens, I did hear more new releases in 2023 that I liked than has been the case for a while, most vaguely situated in "experimental pop" / electronic music on the edge of the dancefloor / electronic music with a song or vocal element. Some are mentioned below; others are not, even though they impressed me on a first listen. The problem I find is that there's so many things jostling for attention - newer new things, plus the endless variety of archival attractions - that often I never make it back for that second listen. Maybe the solution would be to have a system, a list, that ensures you make that return visit. But that would put everything into the category of work; listening would be trammeled with a sense of duty - something I'm inclined to avoid as much as possible.
In the jumble below, I've tried to stick with what stuck - songs and albums where it wasn't a question of conscientiously returning for another go, where I was irresistibly pulled back.
Various - Cease & Resist - Sonic Subversion & Anarcho Punk In The UK 1979-86
The song I played most in 2023 was "Girl On the Run" by Honey Bane - a very old song that I'm not 100% I ever heard before. I think I would have remembered - it's almost impossibly exciting. The bass playing alone!
The backing band on "Girl on The Run" is Crass - sounding better, musically, than on their own stuff. But Crass sounded just great on the song that I played second-most in 2023: "Bloody Revolutions". That's a very old song that I know very very well - my brother had a copy, played it incessantly - but I hadn't heard in it decades.
Both tunes appeared on this splendid compilation of anarcho-punk Cease & Resist - I blogged about it here, although the post quickly becomes a run-through of Honey Bane's career. As for "Bloody Revolutions", that got blogged about here, although the post largely focuses on the searing stridency of Eve Libertine's vocal.
June Tabor – "While Gamekeepers Lie Sleeping", "Heather Down the Moor", "The Scarecrow"
Thinking about it some more, the single song I played most in 2023 might actually have been "While Gamekeepers Lie Sleeping" - played in two forms: sung live in a TV studio, and also on record. Right close behind "Gamekeepers" would be "Heather Down the Moor". "The Scarecrow" - haunting and harrowed, as opposed to frolicsome and gamboling, as with the poacher and nookie-in-the-bracken songs - also got loads of spins. "Gamekeepers" and "Heather," though, are the ones I would so love to be able to sing. If I could, I'd sing them exactly as June does, every last skip and ripple. Paean here.
Lil Yachty, "The Ride", Let’s Start Here
"The Ride" is the most ecstatic piece of new music I heard all year. I know almost nothing about Lil Yachty, about his journey up to this point. Nor have I bothered to find out much about Let's Start Here, apart from picking up that it was a big career swerve and that it involves someone from Chairlift. Who I remember quite liking back in the whenever-it-was - early 2010s? - but feel reasonably confident in the belief that nothing in their past suggested they'd ever be capable of producing something as abandoned and let-loose as "The Ride". Let's Start Here has loads of other great moments ("pRETTy") but it's this song that really sends me.
Big Thief - "Simulation Swarm," "Little Things," "Blurred View"
Indie gets ever harder to define. You can sort of smell it, as a sensibility - but the sonic parameters are wide and getting wider. It doesn't necessarily involve guitars anymore, at least as the dominant musical texture. Much of what's called "indie" nowadays sounds more like singer-songwriter music. "Indie" perhaps is less a genre than a demographic, one that reconstitutes itself year after year, and that has abiding needs. Writerly lyrics are prized, sensitivity is the supreme value. It's music for the gentle people, which sometimes is the same as the genteel people. Idealistic, and consequently disillusioned - but it doesn't rail directly against the state of things hardly ever (that would be too aesthetically clumsy). Unlike R&B and Top 40 pop, it's rarely explicitly sexual (if it goes there, it's done poetically, tastefully). It's not built for a dancefloor - although people who love it will dance to it. A lot of the time it's about sadness, feeling hurt by life. But it can also brim over with bliss, try to capture fleeting moments of magic, when life becomes dream-like.
That's all good then. But of course indie has often been the lamest, take-this-to-the-knackers-yard-already sound around - and it's been like that for the past 30 years! Now and then, though, you'll hear something so surprisingly musical - so musically surprising - that questions of relevance become irrelevant. From the year before last year, listened to incessantly through 2023, "Simulation Swarm" and "Little Things" slipped past my barricades. For that I must thank my youngest son Eli, for playing within my earshot music I might otherwise never have heard, out of sheer prejudice.
Feeble Little Horse - "Picture", Girl With Fish, Hayday
After reading the two big end-of-year articles about the shoegaze resurgence I did something foolish and piled every 2023 / 2022 release mentioned into a gigantic playlist and then played it all the way through. Which took a couple of days. Probably not the fairest way to give these groups a chance. Any distinguishing qualities they conceivably possess got a little smushed.
Out of all that saturated redundancy, just a few caught my ear as really having any reason to exist: Zoon, I liked a lot, and some bits by Hotline TNT. Jane Remover and Yves Tumor had their moments.
But the group I liked the most was the one I already knew through Eli playing a tune or two: Feeble Little Horse. The first time that name flashed up on the car stereo I laughed out loud - such a ridiculously echt-indie name for a group, yet also so right for this fragile, jelly-legged sound. I really like the droopy vocals, the curling girly melodies, the drifting off-tune guitar-tones, the shapely shapelessness of the songs. You have heard it all before, except you haven't, quite, heard it exactly like this.
Alongside "Simulation Swarm", "Picture" might be the most sheerly beautiful, subtly inventive song I've heard in a couple of years.
patten, Mirage FM
I mentioned that there were a lot of art-pop / experimental pop / edge-of-dance things that impressed me on a first listen but I never went back to. Mirage FM was one of the much smaller number that drew me back. It's a crinkly, spangly sort of sound poised pleasantly on a cusp between eeriness and ecstasy. Some tunes, like "Forever" and "Alright" reminded me of a less groove-functional, unsteady-as-she-goes Todd Edwards. A commenter at the Retromania blog said Burial - same difference, really! This album is an extension of the vocal science / sample-choir aesthetic, but employing the latest technology, generative AI.
Listening just now, again, I suddenly wondered whether I would have guessed that, if I hadn't read about the text-to-sound technique involved before I ever listened. Maybe I would have just taken it to be an extreme use of Melodyne or some other vocal design tool pushed to the absolute limit? I am not sure with AI-created music that I am able yet to hear the sort of oh-yes-that’s-what-they-are-using aspect that you get when you heard something that was e.g. pushing Autotune to its limits. (Something similar happened with the last Holly Herndon album, where my favorite track turned out not to involve machine-learning or Spawn at all but older forms of vocal processing).
Perhaps it's a case where actually knowing more would enhance the experience, not diminish it. So with Mirage FM, rather than simply presenting the outcome of the process for our disoriented delectation, it might have been more intriguing to know the precise instructions given to Stable Diffusion that resulted in the raw material of each track's make-up, and trying to identify the correlations.
(This flashes me back to my thoughts about sampling in Energy Flash - that if you used the sampler in such an extreme, abstractified way that the sample source was unrecognisable, you might as well be using synthesis.... that what was idiomorphic about the sampler was the distortion or stretching of the known as opposed to the obliteration and obscuring of it .... "known" not necessarily meaning that you recognise it as a quote or citation, but that you recognise it as belonging to a genre or originating in an instrument. The analogy here would be the hall of mirrors, where what makes it unsettling is the grotesque deformation of the human face and form... if it was just a formless blur of flickering color, that wouldn't be perturbing)
Gamble appears to have reverted to the gaseous abstraction of his pre-polemical work - at least, I didn't glean a sense that there was a political point being made here, even obliquely. If so, all to the good, I think. Four years since the infamous article, I have moved further still from thinking there's much point to politicking-through-music. Preaching to the converted, critiquing for the predisposed - these are just points on a spectrum.
Here, I seem to be part of something called The Aesthetic Turn. But really I have been there for a while. (It's also a return to how I felt about music in post-postpunk times). My gut feeling is that whatever it is music does for us, it's not really about education, enlightenment, "moral rearmament". But nor is music a particularly good vehicle for making us better informed. There are after all a superabundance of avenues and mechanisms out there to achieve that - whatever use being informed actually is, on its own.
But music - music has other things to offer.
(What about the other arts - film, literature, visual art? I recoil similarly from the overtly didactic and sententious, while acknowledging that there are books, movies, paintings, that have made me think - think differently. And I suppose music has done that, in tandem with the discourse around music - the writing, the arguing. Then again, I wonder whether I would have found a way to those sort of thoughts anyway. (Hence "critiquing for the predisposed").
(But what about "Bloody Revolutions"? Surely that's a case of music-as-politicking-as-excitement-as-potentially-lifechanging.... I guess, but I think the lyric content of the song - which I don't necessarily agree with anyway, anymore than I agree with Crass's "if voting changed anything they'd ban it" / "doesn't matter who you vote for, the government wins" worldview - the lyric content is a means to the excitement. It's their belief that fuels the engine, their fiery fervour that ignites the spark. The disconcerting thought here is that the conjunction of politics and pop has done far more for pop than it has ever done for politics. Listening to "Anarchy in the UK" and "God Save the Queen", even now - it feels like the world is shaking to bits. But step outside the space of the recording, and, nearly fifty years on, King Charles III sits on the throne and it's a horde of anarcho-fascists who "wanna destroy" and are doing a pretty good job of it right now.
Tom Caruana – Inner Space – Instrumentals
An "idiomorphic" use of sampling, one of many types, here - a tribute through distillation / intensification. The source honored: Can. There's actually a non-instrumentals version of this with loads of rapping on top; it works, and is actually the primary version of the project. But I prefer the mental instros. Blogged here.
King Krule – Space Heavy
Saw him by chance (I was there to interview Dry Cleaning) at Primavera late in 2022 and found it, at top volume, borderline unpleasant, yet also oddly gripping. This album, more subdued and whatever the opposite of in-your-face is, has some wonderful moments. "Seaforth" and "If Only It Was Warmth" remind me a bit of A.R. Kane - the woozy, mumbled vocals, the barely-there feeling.
Alwin Nikolais - Choreosonic Music of the New Dance Theater of Alwin Nikolais +++
Best of this year's bounteous crop of Creel Pones. The first disc of this whopper falls into that small category that makes me so happy: Creels I discovered all by myself, well before the label reissued them. Choreosonic Music of the New Dance Theater I found in a yard sale at the East Village apartment block over the road from us. Just $1! Here's something substantive I wrote about Nikolais from a few years ago.
My students often introduce me to things I have never heard of. That's not surprising, given how much music there is out there, and how young people get into things laterally (you would be shocked by the extent to which they don't read music journalism, like, at all), through word of mouth and the kind of social media they favor and algo-driven nudges. However I was really surprised when one of my very-American students brought this Dawson tune in for a class we did on innovation in lyric writing: something so utterly British in its reference points and overall flavor. I guess the malaise the song anatomises is a transnational affect, even if the particulars are extremely UK-specific. In that respect, it's as harrowingly funny as Dry Cleaning.
Jabu - Boiling Wells / Various - Always and Forever (Do You Have Peace)
Trip hop seems to be having a moment... These artists aren't exactly making trip hop, but they are very Bristol - either actually from the city or from a Bristol-of-the-mind. There's that distinctive blend of sensuality, sparsity and sadness. "Dubby" - not in terms of specific techniques applied, but in a quality of subtraction, a not-all-there feeling. Echoes of A.R. Kane in moments here too.
Vanishing Twin, Afternoon X
Sometimes I think Vanishing Twin are just the Scarfolk of music - meticulously executed derivativeness. But they derivatate so consummately, mining this sweet seam between Broadcast, Belbury Poly, Stereolab, that I can't help being seduced.
Patrick McNee and Honor Blackman, "Kinky Boots"
What would you call this genre of dinky-yet-demented, fusspot-arrangement style of comedy-pop? I can't work out what it is sourced in.
Much the same applies to this quite-different-sounding near-contemporaneous boot-themed tune.
Mozart Estate Pop-Up! Ker-Ching! And The Possibilities Of Modern Shopping
Some of Lawrence's funniest lines and catchiest tunes since that first Denim album.
I worship Neu! and I worship Cluster (up to and including Zuckerzeit) but for some reason I've never fully clicked with Harmonia. It washes past me a bit. But then suddenly this year the golden rolling grandeur of "Walky Talky" ran me right over.
Headhunters – "God Made Me Funky"
One of the things about recorded music I love is when you can "see it" - diagrammatically, as blocs of sound distributed across space - but it also has this totally somatic and haptic impact. This perfectly produced funk track works simultaneously as a mechanism whose moving parts you can gaze at in an almost distanced way and a seething fever reaching into your body, coiling its tightness inside your insides.
Much the same applies to the next pair of tunes - digitalized funk delirium.
Brown & Rhymeside - "Maniac Drummer", "Break Exploitation"
