Monday 12 May 2008

Most incorrect

Some people really should learn to speak & spell before they pick on their poor old PC. Rob Pearson is 1 such slapdash cunt, epitomising all that is ave\rage about yesterday's today's music scene with childish rave turds that would make the rhumba pattern on my Yamaha Gash-20 blush. In this circus of detritus watch with horror as twopenny synths tootle, plod and fart there way through pointless bath exercises.

Only kidding;) For a first stab this is all rather fine indeed. 'Smoke and Lasers' seems to have an innate knowledge of how a French-disco-house banger should boom-tis. It is my sincere hope that this incantation belies future jewels from a young manc house maestro with a penchant for plucking his 'one string bass' from the coffin of Armando (RIP) and then whacking it off with the Wrath of Zeus. But Cry-no-more (sic) second cut 'Effective' (and it is a right cut) is Proxy-set to be planted plum-square between Turbo, 'tubes and Stu Allen's Hardcore hour on Piccadilly Key 103. High praise indeed. Open your ports and get incorrect!

http://www.myspace.com/correcteffect

From new to old lets return briefly, before leaving earth, to familiar stomping grounds with some out-of-the-box configurations from server-side depressive and co-blogger Bob Swans. Italo gold! Only now that little bit golder thanks to Bob. Surely this will be the Summer of Kosmiche?

http://www.zshare.net/audio/1185008680930a02/

xxxsss

Monday 14 January 2008

Goodbye 2007 – You are now leaving Lazytown

Now is the season when pop cartographers attempt to chart the swell of the year just passed, yet unfortunately when doing so they almost universally make the same error; considering a period of time, or duration, to be distinct from locations in space.

This is not to say that the year of pop music releases should be understood in terms of geographical location, although this approach may produce a far more revealing and entertaining result than the routine ‘Best of…’ (for this phrase try substituting ‘Top sellers’, they are more often than not interchangeable). The approach I am suggesting is a little more sublime than this.

Time is essentially a measurement of a body’s journey through space, so the two dimensions are inextricably linked by the concept of movement. I would suggest that for an empirical approach to art and science movement implies investigation, experimentation and experience of the new. Culturally the notion of ‘movement’ or of a ‘movement’ has most commonly be associated with a collective effort, whether a migration in space or through ideological landscapes to a ‘new’ position. Therefore to make a significant assessment of any period in history (whether last year, last century or the time it has taken me to write this article thus far) we have at our disposal two interdependent criteria:

a) What was previously unknown that has now been revealed and to whom?
b) How widely has the effect of this revelation been felt in society?

These two criteria are not only related by their contextual interpretations of ‘movement’ but also work together closely to clarify the notion of which artistic endeavour (within and around a given temporal and spatial frame and tied to a matrix of economics/politics/culture etc) has changed how we interact with each other by providing new ideas and channels of communication.

What is new? Some say there is ‘nothing new’. I would agree then pirouette daintily and retort that everything is new, for everything is to some extent personal therefore individual and ipso facto unique. However this as a yardstick is useless and I may as well beat myself off with it, my onanism being intensely personal and quite utterly selfish of course. The ‘onani-point’ if you will is the critical mass of self-indulgence where what is undeniably personal and unique (and yet common to all in their private moments) becomes thoroughly disinteresting (perhaps even repugnant) and ineffectual socially. Why else would a man (whose lang it sadly still is) be 'naval gazing' unless frozen into indecision and repulsion by the abdominal harvest of his own blasted seed? Perhaps the measure of what is new is some kind of ratio between how seemingly incomprehensible a cultural product is and yet to what extent it inspires or is inspired by a social movement and the size and/or growth of that movement. And thus with a hop, skip and a tiny girlish leap we meet our second criteria; that of cultural emergence and social pregnancy.

Now you are gently holding the tools I have given you, caressing the warm steel absent-mindedly and wondering what to do with them (and how you got to be in a place like this.) Let me guide you with my voice as your voice, softly, into a position where we can enter the social.

2007 in part played host to a number of intriguing sonic parallels best viewed as mini-battles…or rather just Battles (and the mini-Battles around them), a band who more than summed up the efforts of many esteemed peers this year (-ish) by racing in to the milieu at Olympian speed to claim their prize of ‘the greatest record’, far ahead of the pack, and then racing out again, leaving little to hold on to in their wake.

It almost seems that this moment or paradigm is kissing cousin on the spiralling parabola of rock history to the mid 1970’s where the ‘great’ or critically well-received albums are belched forth by the behemoths, shitting planets. Complex music made by superstars or super-groups (but nowhere near as rich or well-known due to the state of the music industry today and culture as a whole) while the lesser firmament is littered with low-grade replicas.

Rather than be sucked into a schoolboy (ooh! that verb and noun was a little close) recital of cosmic giants (in a manner far less entertaining than Bill and Ted’s project show), now might be the time to leverage 2007’s discarded and ironically referenced fil-o-fax with the a la mode GPS functionality of my cellular device. A Tale of Two Cities no less. Oi! Oi! London this is New York (on the shuttle bus to Oxford so spysies yr arses)!

‘Battles the band are Brooklyn-based boys in a borough that’s making a big noise right now’ – Casey Kasem 'America's Top 40'. This is partially to do with an influx of artists and students and other undesirably honky types to what was once an almost exclusively African-American area.

The consequences of this gentrification, I mean ‘regeneration’ (do your research and take your pick!), is a subject for a cultural commentator more knowledgeable about the locale then yours truly. However this demographic re-organisation seems to be a contributory factor to the fostering of an intriguing musical ‘un-scene’ in the area. However such geographic determinants need to be handled carefully and can be deathly in the hands of our pop cart’ pushers. Announcing a scene or movement based on where the music is being made is even less reasonable than constructing a cell for artists due to a quirk of style. The point gets stretched and uncomfortably tight for those moving within. An artificial skin of words and money, it wraps up the art as a product but suffocates and kills what’s inside, taking away its life force, the ability to be heard and to do anew.

An article imaginatively titled 'Brooklyn Rocks' (yeah dude! wow! like totally) on MTV.com beautifully shows off the Emperor’s New Clothes that this bastion of resolutely mid-brow psychoanalTV attempts to drape around the Brooklyn ‘scene’ and themselves. The irony is piercing as the pop pusher or (their editor) attempts to drape an all-encompassing veil across the time and space these artists inhabit while the facts revealed and the interviewees clearly indicate that the major connection between these musicians is a desire to buck commercial imperatives and packaging and do their own wilfully diverse, experimental and free-for-all thing.

This paradox of a movement based on a desire to be different than, rather than share an identity with, your fellow traveller is perhaps the definition of our political and cultural zeitgeist. The socio-economic geography of Brooklyn is merely one spot of fertile soil. The paradox o’erbrims this frame and extends globally. This no-sound sound can be heard for miles around. The echoes of Battles, Dirty Projectors, Yeasayer, Grizzly Bear and (your own Brooklyn reference here) shimmers in the centrifuge of bands that have passed through my own almost invisible gyrations (have booked, could have booked, should have booked – Hot Club de Paris, A.P.A.T.T.T, Safetyword, Foals). Yes the duplex superstructure is decorated with hints of Talking Heads, sprinkles of Television, Pere Ubu spare parts, feints past Progressive Rock, nods headed near jazz bigotry and a severe ticking off with the US (then UK) hardcore punk/independent music of the 80s/90s. Like then the ligature yoking these kooky kids together in their flirtation with sex and death is freedom and ‘math’: technical and emotional intelligence. In that sense this is a spring sacrifice rather than a wintry exhumation followed by a midnight danse macabre as such perfected by the grave robbers of Big Music. It is the next instalment of a quest to incorporate the 'try anything' attitude within the 'no bullshit' punk ethic that has necessarily led to the drawing upon more complex, studied musical forms and styles that were packaged out of the original punk product in the first place. Just asIndiana Jones isn’t only an archaeologist, this is much more than academic.

At least one band in this matrix has proven this theorem repeatedly in open conflict, combining experimentalism with rampant popularity, despair with success, ugliness with polished veneer. And if we cull the Britpop blip that blights their formative moments, Radiohead are perhaps the only 'big' band around to have consistently stayed true to the sonic experimentation (if not political and cultural rigor) of their forebears. Their passage reiterates with each step the point that geography, like calendar time, are on their own inadequate measures of a cultural transition, that you don’t need to hang out in a cool city scene to be a great artist (although leaving nearby must help!) and that significant growth occurs over time with a repeated, perhaps seemingly inexorable, series of revolutionary sparks, rather than as one great leap forward. ‘In rainbows’ is their latest step up and for reasons both good and bad, the most important record of the century thus far (according to the compass and set square I demanded you jab into your eyes and ears near the inception of this diatribe). Yet like the subjects of urban gentrification and punk this is yet another bridge too far for us this evening.

Yet the twin filters of geography and time can as easily became a forked tongue divining the negative elements of the most powerful musical currents.They tom-tom out the entry point for attacking the other predominant wagon train of the past few years, a period that has scene (sic) a sudden and sickening lurch towards vast, mass production and uniformity even amongst the so-called 'underground'. Don’t worry everybody! I’m raving not drowning.

It seemed like it happened overnight but the bun was already in the oven. You can’t blame Daft Punk for the conception and you can’t knock The Klaxons for the execution either. Both make music in hyperspace with extra-terrestrial vision and humour compared to the sludge now clogging the blogosphere. Before we knew it the three-odd year pow-wow between me and my DJ compatriots about the 'French Sound', 80s pop and street dance suddenly became the application of attempts to replicate the Ed Banger bass lines worldwide. Rather than an international network of paradoxicists generating an unfathomable advertising conundrum, we are tasting the fruits of a Flat Earth policy.

It is no surprise that the spiritual home of this grand evaporation is next door neighbour to the palaces of speculation and exchange: The City of London, where life is abstracted and refractionated into wealth and power at the expense of others. A member of the ‘Blank Generation’ once commented upon the commercial success of the Sex Pistols in comparison to his own N.Y.C. peers suggesting that success in London, unlike New York, meant success country-wide and ultimately worldwide fame. London, unlike New York is the pre-eminent image-factory within the markets it trades (music and perhaps fashion). And from the 'reinvigorated' East London the lines of transport are mapped by blogs, Logic and Ableton, killing vital enzymes, straightening rare flowers and desertifying enchanted forests with the sameness of this week's sine wave. The technology is not to blame; it merely ploughs stress furrows into exotic and diverse fields which are then reverse-irrigated with the same near-worthless currency.

If we resolve not to sell a million (or even not to have a million 'friends' on MySpace) and to incite spontaneous, irresolvable surrealism rather than to excite the empty ‘I’m crazy me!’ self-abandonment of the ‘clubber’ then the technology can be sued to tear escape routes in 'the Fabric' and create air pockets in a world upside down. Sadly though, it seems we are dancing deaf and dumb to ‘The Only way is Up’. I don’t care if it is retro-pop-rave and I don’t care if it was really Coldcut: IT IS A FUCKING RUBBISH TUNE.

So finally can I put my balls where my mouth is and make a tip for 2008? Italo-disco and a general re-interpretation of ‘the dance’ perhaps? There has already been a pre-mature pop with 'Minimal Techno' which in the main has left us feeling a little bit wet but generally empty, bored and unsatisfied. Music, on a sub-atomic level, is like all good fucks: a desire to get back to the source (definitely featuring Candi Staton). Great music can be experimental, danceable and pop. But this is another story and I’m tired darlings. Let daddy just whisper before tucking you in: Hercules and Love Affair (Brooklyn again but a different planet!), the Chromatics and DFA (obviously). My god ever since we named the NymphoYouthClub in honour of this city, its rhythm still wont let us go to sleep.

Before I go though, a final look at our pop cartographers. Thanks to our sometimes complex, but I hope somewhat pleasurable, bedtime story we have shaken them out of their ivory closets and they now appear to be wandering confused in the interzone between geography, metaphysics and history. Watch sympathetically as these naïve birds attempt a quantum leap or two. Yet the wings of these fluffy signatories are yet unformed and they flap helplessly. They are caught in the hapless dialectic endured with a tetanus smile by admen everywhere, oscillating between denial of the past and an illusory future dripping with nostalgia. Remember the depth of their reportage and grasp that these people are hardly journalists despite their passport).

The real tragedy is that these self-made retards may never fly, abandoned as they were at a young age by their mother of invention. The words they spill are fine and, as there is nothing else on sale that salutes my eye, I could just grab them but first I need to see the goods. I need to feel the classical material. In short truly Great Music (and Great Art of any discipline) should be a touching of history’s cloth, whither the robe of the church’s high priests, first-hand close-up, or the seat of one’s own pants.

‘In the black all I could see was an equals sign flashing, line over line, minus on top of minus, and it froze me, dead in my tracks…’

Tuesday 1 January 2008

Good mourning Captain

Download or listen to Simon Saint-Simon's New Year cure, the 'afternoonAfterPill'.

Happy New Liar you all! For the sake of the olden face etc!

Come on now stop messing about and take your medicine.

The 'afternoonAfterPill' was designed with you in mind. Bitter-sweet it intends to encapsulate the tragedy of your gunpowder lives while at the same time giving the necessary day nurse headjob to get you out of bed and face the the new dawn fades.

So it goes.

You French opened your silky corrugations to the midnight movements of a dark stranger. V good landing, well executed. You are now pregnant with the alien race.

Right now you wished you had a dog. Long walks. The beach. All in all the Old Earth deemed not good enough by a flick of the switch at 12. A light going on in the bald economics of a lady's undergarments. Expunged vicariously with an empty rumour.

Explain yourself sir and extricate yourself from the mess you have left. If you can.

Tracks from 2007. But not all of them.
Songs made with guitars. Quality not quantised necessarily. Plus a drum machine or twice..
An indie compilation LP. No less. Like those (Shoe)'Shine' albums but with good bands and organic emotions I suppose. The past 20 pop years has been music made by New Labourers. Can we start again?

Every beginning is an end. Onward Christian soldiers. We must rest upon the scorched earth of heaven.

happy 2009
xxx
sss