Ottawa-Gatineau crew: Paid gigs at digital arts blogs don’t come along everyday. I’d love to give it a go myself but time is in short supply these days. Deadline Friday!
This residency is for an emerging critic or cultural journalist from the Ottawa-Gatineau area, who will pen a monthly cross-post for the Vague Terrain and Artengine blogs.
Conceived as a creative space for expression and research into culture and technology the content and direction will be developed in partnership with the editors of both publications. The resident will also travel to Montréal for the 2011 Elektra Festival to post reviews and more from one of North America’s premiere digital culture events. The resident will also receive critical feedback and professional development through the Articulation series at The Ottawa Art Gallery.
I’ll be giving a talk called “Bass: a myth-science of the sonic body” this Saturday at the Electric Fields festival here in Ottawa. Come down if you’re in the area. It’s free. I’ll be walking the walk with the help of the festival’s 4000-watt sound system – audio examples from the dancefloor, the studio, the cathedral and the lab.
Not sympathy in the sentimental sense. Sympathetic vibration has nothing to do with the personal or emotional. For Helmholtz, it meant transduction of energy and resonance induced in a body – a room, a building, a glass, an eyeball – by an external force. At its natural, or resonant frequency, a body ceases to dampen energy and begins to oscillate with it, amplifying it, even to the point of self destruction.
A 40-minute, sub-centric mix, ahead of my talk at this year’s Electric Fields / Champs Électriques festival (more on that soon). So much discussion about bass focuses on dancefloor material, so this mix goes the other direction, collecting a series of low-frequency investigations into industrial and earthly hum, pure tones, pipe organs, peculiarities of bodily resonance, and overlapping fictions of sound and signal. Listen loud. To borrow Eleh’s instruction: Volume reveals detail.
Demdike Stare ‘Suspicious Drone’ (Modern Love)
“…a dense 6 minute opening that chugs along like a malfunctioning mechanical beast, honing in on Lancashire’s dark industrial landscapes.” Following on the heels of labels like Mordant Music, Skull Disco and Ghost Box, Demdike Stare wed body-humming sound system sensibilities and (occasional) frenzied percussion, with smatterings of occulture and Radiophonic hauntology.
Bass Communion ‘Ghosts on Magnetic Tape III’ Original and Reconstruction (Headphone Dust)
Unsettling vibrations, voices in the ether. Bass Communion looks for spectral encounters in the crackle and grooves of manipulated 78rpm shellacs, drawing equally on theories of the infrasonic uncanny and the peculiar phenomenon of EVP. Supplemented here with excerpts and Raymond Cass commentary from The Ghost Orchid: An Introduction to EVP (Parapsychic Acoustic Research Cooperative/Ash International)
Thomas Köner ‘Permafrost’ and ‘Nieve Penitentes 2′ (Barooni/Type)
More of the ice than about it, Köner’s geologic drone work would sit well alongside John Duncan’s Infrasound-Tidal, NASA’s Voice of Earth, and the tremor tones of Mark Bain. The theme is The North, but these aren’t field recordings. Instead, Köner builds his glacial terrain from the shimmer of pitch-shifted gongs. Augmented here by a dark piece from Ruth White, the little acknowledged American electronic composer who’d have made good company for Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. ‘Mists and Rains,’ from the 1969 album Flowers of Evil, sets the Baudelaire poem to an electronic windscape.
Eleh ‘Together We Are One’ (Taiga)
Anonymous and secretive, Eleh is a minor sonic fiction unto itself, its album art drawing on the retina-skewing experiments of Op Art while minimal sleeve notes give faint clues to method and aims. Titles of the first three releases – Floating Frequencies/Intuitive Synthesis volumes I-III – would seem to sum up the project, reputedly based on the layering of outputs from aging audio test oscillators. Subsequent releases Homage to the Square Wave and Homage to the Sine Wave, along with track names like ‘Pulsing Study Of 7 Sine Waves’ (parts 1 & 2), ‘Phase Two: Bass Pulse In Open Air,’ and ‘Linear To Circular / Vertical Axis,’ are nods to both the minimalist tradition and a clinically empiricist attitude toward sonic investigation. But others – ‘In The Ear Of The Gods,’ ‘Phase One: Sleeps Golden Drones Again’ – show a mystical side that revels in the autopoietic strangeness of the subbass encounter.
Nate Young ‘Under the Skin’ (iDeal Recordings)
If Eleh finds the mystical in impersonal vibration, Nate Young’s Regression is the sound of signal possessed, angry, and on the move. ‘Under the Skin’ is a churning slog – submerged in a liquid-matter mush, broken occasionally by a taught screech, before resuming its subcutaneous march.
Sunn o))) ‘Sin Nanna’ (Southern Lord)
Metal with bass weight, indebted to the gravity-enhancing sounds of Earth. ‘Sin Nanna’ is a largely guitar-free interlude, gutteral chanting like the nightmare version of new-agey Gregorian revival. Elsewhere, 2008′s Dømkirke had the band pulling ungodly rumbles from the massive 16th century organ at Rokslide Cathedral, Norway.
Christian Fennesz plays Charles Matthews ‘Amoroso’ (Touch)
And into the light… A 7″ offshoot of Touch Record’s ongoing Spire project (below) which focuses on organ-based and organ-inspired works. 2300 years on, the pipe organ still mystifies. An acoustic synthesizer, one of the earliest machines, it’s clearly been designed to direct force at the body as well as emit musical notes. “Audible at five miles, offensive at two, and lethal at one,” was the contemporary description of the 10th century organ at Winchester said to require 70 men to operate its bellows. Note the mastering credit on this release: Jason Goz at Transition Studios – the name attached to virtually every foundational dubstep release between 2003 and 2006; dubcutter for Jah Shaka, Mickey Finn, Grooverider, DJ EZ, Mala, Loefah, kode9… London bass flows through Transition.
BJNilsen ‘La Petite Chapelle – Rue Basses’ (Touch)
An excerpt from Spire: Live in Geneva Cathedral, Saint Pierre (2005). From the notes: “In a duet with himself, BJNilsen moved back and forth between organ and electronics. He established a link between the old sound inherited from centuries past and a new one being instantly generated. The organ sound was decomposed and in a way, tortured, in order to get at the core of the sound… BJNilsen’s piece ended with a background organ sound, as if to remind us that after all, even if altered, the organ had remained the core of the entire concept.”
I like abstracty sounds because I come from drum n bass. I like to do different sounds – I don’t like the same sounds. I don’t like nothing straight. If it sounds like someone else’s I’m not in it. I’ve got to be different, I have to be different. I’ve got to dress different, have my hair different, my girl’s gotta be different. How I brush my teeth gotta be different, even how I sleep is different. I snore loud ladies: it’s a problem. (Terror Danjah, 2004)
New bits from the Aftershock genius/rhythmic sadist on Hyperdub and Planet Mu.
If you look up at these slides here on my last videotape, after I’m dead,
it will say one thing on my grave tomb:
As a Ghettovett, I only know serious business.
As the interrogator of Ikonoklast Panzerism,
I don't give nobody no business.
I tell you what is full military information and function
for all integers, all four of them.
There are no pictograms here.
What I draw is architecturally built and will fly
* * *
The Ikonoklast Samurai
Greg Tate interview in The Wire (April 2004) | text version
* * *
* * *
[Beat Bop] was just simply a test pressing with Jean Michel and K-Rob for Jean-Michel’s solo compilation. He wanted say his own verses, me and K-Rob read them and started laughing and we crushed up his paper with the words he had written down and we threw it back at him face first. Then we said we’re gonna go in these two booths, and [I said] ‘I’m gonna play pimp on the corner’ and K-Rob said ‘I’ll play school boy coming home from school’ and then it went on. Jean Michel Basquiat put up the money for it and from there we sung to it. He did not sell it immediately. But when he did sell it he didn’t tell anybody. It was to Profile records. [But originally] it was a test pressing. We were just having fun.
… I didn’t expect anything out of anything. I just used to go over his house and chill. He was an up and coming artist, I was an up and coming artist… well I was an up and coming con-artist. And we just were doing things at the same time. But I didn’t expect it to be anything more than a test a pressing. It was something he wanted to do so we did it. I didn’t like the words he wrote and neither did K-Rob and both me and K-Rob at the time were 5%ers and there was nothing more to say. So we laughed at him. But yet he was paying for it all. I never made a dime of that damn record. I still haven’t made a dime off that record and it sold more than 150,000 copies.
Only thing I can say is he spelled my damn name wrong. I got two “L”s in Rammellzee. Rammellzee is a quantum mechanic equation, you don’t spell it with one L. You’ve seen the cover? It’s spelt wrong.
The New York graffiti artist and B-boy theoretician Rammellzee constitutes yet another incarnation of Afrofuturism. Greg Tate holds that Rammellzee’s “formulations on the juncture between black and Western sign systems make the extrapolations of [Houston] Baker and [Henry Louis] Gates seem elementary by comparison.” As evidence, he submits the artist’s “Ikonoklast Panzerism,” a heavily armored descendant of late ’70s “wild style” graffiti (those bulbous letters that look as if they were twisted out of balloons). A 1979 drawing depicts a Panzerized letter “S”: it is a jumble of sharp angles that suggests the Nude Descending a Staircase bestriding a Jet Ski. “The Romans stole the alphabeta system from the Greeks through war,” explains Rammellzee. “Then, in medieval times, monks ornamented letters to hide their meaning from the people. Now, the letter is armored against further manipulation.”
In like fashion, the artist encases himself during gallery performances in Gasholeer, a 148-pound, gadgetry-encrusted exoskeleton inspired by an android he painted on a subway train in 1981. Four years in the making, Rammellzee’s exuberantly low-tech costume bristles with rocket launchers, nozzles that gush gouts of flame, and an all-important sound system.
“From both wrists, I can shoot seven flames, nine flames from each sneaker’s heel, and colored flames from the throat. Two girl doll heads hanging from my waist and in front of my balls spit fire and vomit smoke…The sound system consists of a Computator, which is a system of screws with wires. These screws can be depressed when the keyboard gun is locked into it. The sound travels through the keyboard and screws, then through the Computator, then the belt, and on up to the four mid-range speakers (with tweeters). This is all balanced by a forward wheel from a jet fighter plane. I also use an echo chamber, Vocoder, and system of strobe lights. A coolant device keeps my head and chest at normal temperature. A 100-watt amp and batteries give me power.”
The B-boy bricolage bodied forth in Rammellzee’s “bulletproof arsenal,” with its dangling, fetish-like doll heads and its Computator cobbled together from screws and wires, speaks to dreams of coherence in a fractured world, and to the alchemy of poverty that transmutes sneakers into high style, turntables into musical instruments, and spray-painted tableaux on subway cars into hit-and-run art.
Rammellzee’s Afrofuturist appropriation of the castoff oddments of technoculture is semiotic guerrilla warfare, just as his “slanguage”—a heavily encrypted hip-hop argot—is the linguistic equivalent of graffiti “tags” all over the mother tongue. In an essay on English as the imperial language of the Internet, the cultural critic McKenzie Wark argues for the willful, viral corruption of the lingua franca of global corporate monoculture as a political act. “I’m reminded of Caliban and Prospero,” he writes. “Prospero, the Western man of the book, teaches Caliban, the colonial other, how to speak his language. And Caliban says, ‘You give me words, that I might curse you with them.’ Which is what happens to imperial languages. The imperial others learn it all too well. Make it something else. Make it proliferate, differentiate. Like Rammellzee, and his project for a Black English that nobody else could understand. Hiding in the master tongue. Waiting. Biting the master tongue.” Wark’s analysis resonates with Tricia Rose’s notion of hip-hop countersignage as “master[ing] the wearing of this guise in order to use it against your interpolation.”
- Mark Dery “Black to the Future” Flame Wars (November 1994)
* * *
‘Atomic Futurism’
* * *
I’m pretty sure nobody heard “Lecture”,” smiled Bill Laswell, a few years ago when I was in his apartment coveting his framed Basquiat Beat Bop sleeve (for Rammellzee Vs K-Rob’s 12″). As Gettovetts’ producer, Laswell had been looking for the perfect loop for the guy who called himself “The #1 Stain On The Train”. Then he found a recording of the Tokyo bullet express – a sure bet. So the podium became a platform and there’s Rammel, arriving, how do you say, too freaking early, holding a purple suitcase full of watches he designed (he attended Fashion Institute of Technology, briefly), none of which could tell time from a hole in a worm – each has an expended 9mm slug burrowing into its face. (“Their crystals hold information from a crushed galaxy,” he’d told me). The beat wheezes into the station and then chugs off and vanishes into a blurring horn, three stops away. An aria wanders the tracks looking for her head, only to find a symphony that’s been out in the sun too long.
That’s “Lecture”. Not quite a first date song, too medieval for the Golden Age of Rap, and certainly in the ‘At Risk’ category for Island Records. Not that a line like “sneeze with me” isn’t catchy as a word virus. And how about that Double Dutch helix: “This twine turns the rope of your mind like DNA codes.”
’87′s awesomely crepuscular track The Lecture opens up the Military Perceptual Complex of MythScience. Rammellzee is no longer a Master of Ceremonies, an MC. Instead he’s an MK3, a Master of Kommand Kontrol Kommunications, a despotic esoterrorist who lectures on ‘Aerodynamics and Quantum physics’. Instead of breaking down information to its simplest atoms, the tunnel visionary systematically encrypts all information: ‘But we want you to understand that the integer is a nation by itself. Its function… leads you into the future.’
… Drawing you into an auditorium where echoes seat your hearing at the back, Rammellzee’s voice arrives from a distant lectern, inducing a powerful sense of being drawn into overlapping systems of privy information: ‘All formation and military function that hold the code to any formation procedure. With. Out it you have no control. You will have no control. This information I cannot really give you. Because I am not the master of its own technique.’
Throughout, the tone of the lecture shifts treacherously from acerbic to drawling to disquieting: ‘As the.. interrogator of Ikonoklast Panzerism I don’t give nobody no business. I tell you what is full military information and function for all integers, all four of them. There are no pictograms here. What I draw is architecturally built and will fly.’ Information and function: as a cryptogrammatology, Ikonoklast Panzerism encrypts all symbols, inducing an overpowering sense of ominous information and conspiracy made audible in Lecture’s keening, multi tracked voices. Horns loom into tonal shadows, shattered by string arrangements that reverse into Varesian shriekbacks which leave space shuddering from the concerted attack impulse.
“On Monday night this past week, old friend and collaborator The Rammellzee passed away at his mom’s place in Far Rockaway. Under an orange moon …
Met Ramm in 1983 in W Berlin, called him up to join Death Comet Crew for our first Ep in 1984, he showed up buzzing and bleeding from working on art pieces. After we tracked “At The Marble Bar” , we went directly to “Exterior Street” and let Rammell blow it to kingdoms come. The live at Danceteria is legend stuff…
… When I look at what Rammellzee achieved with his mind and artwork, in his times. A NY freestyler who surfed through decades down at the Battle Station, did it his way and as much on his own terms as he could. It was always great to see him work, at the same time I knew there was some poisoning due to resins, plastics fumes and so on.
Today I am enjoying Ramm’s art works in the 1990 Art Random Rammellzee “Acts Of Terrorism”, drawings, masks, body armors suits, outlyer of systems, keys to the subways …”
1 hour session from February, opening for Shackleton and Reza Rekta (Anti Social) alongside the Montreal gang: Komodo, Hosta and Bus. Straightforward Ableton set here: Spooky garridge, bassline pressure, 8-bar and early, instrumental grime. Some minor edits. Channeling Slimzee in the last half – lots of favourites on display.
[00:00] Shorty – Listen (Road)
[03:30] DJ Wire – All Alone (Real)
[06:30] KMA – Klean Kards (Locked ON)
[09:45] DJ Faz – Believe (Locked On)
[13:30] Oris Jay ft. MC E-LL – ‘Brand Nu Flava’ (Props)
[14:30] Trevor T – Mind, Body & Soul (white)
[17:20] Jason Kaye – Soundboy (Hotpoint)
[19:40] Sticky – Golly Gosh (Social Circles/edit)
[20:45] Jammin – Go DJ (Bingo/edit)
[22:20] DJ Narrows – Saved Soul (Resurrection)
[24:30] Agent X – Killahertz Alias Rmx (Heatseeker)
[26:20] Dom Perignon & Dynamite – Got Myself Together DnD Mix (DnD)
[27:45] Jameson – Urban Hero (Lifestyle)
[29:50] Dub Syndicate – I Need Your Love Agent X Mix (Unit Five)
[32:30] Corrupted Cru – G.A.R.A.G.E. Narrows Mix (white/edit)
[34:20] Wiley – Before This
[35:25] Eastwood & Oddz – You Ain’t Ready (white)
[36:45] Dizzee Ras – Hoe 3 (white)
[37:30] Plasticman – Cha (Terrorhythm)
[38:35] Donae’o – Bounce Fidgets Mix (Social Circles)
[40:00] DJ Wire – Believe Me DJ Faz Mix (white)
[41:50] Plasticman – The Rush (A.R.M.Y.)
[44:10] Geeneus – Da Journey (Dump Valve)
[47:00] Geeneus – Say It (Dump Valve)
[49:15] Dexplicit – UK Ravers (Social Circles)
[52:00] Charmzy – Dan Dana (Black Ops)
[53:25] Shackleton – Stalker Gangsta Refix (Mordant/edit)
[65:10] DJ Oddz – Bump Dis (white/edit)
Ekoplekz is Nick from Gutterbreakz blog, and this limited-run, paint spattered CD-R (designed by Woofah contributor 2nd Fade) was the best thing to land in my mailbox this spring. Regretfully, when it arrived, I was in the final weeks of my first term of teaching and I simply didn’t have time to give it the review it deserved.
A bit of background: Nick has a history of supporting bedroom producers with a bit of skill and a lot of imagination. His reviews at Gutterbreakz helped launch more than a few dubstep careers. After that, he set up the short-lived Bleepfiend netlabel with the aim of digging up and releasing long-forgotten, pre-PC electronic music – home studio material from the era of 4-tracks, MIDI cables, little LCDs, and running out of memory. Most recently, though, he’s turned his attention to his own music, apparently spurred by his acquisition of a peculiar old box called the ‘P15 Ekosynth 15′ (so rare it’s not even listed at VSE). Over the years I’ve heard a number of decent tracks by Nick – mostly in dubstep and techno territory – but with Ekoplekz, he’s really begun to carve out his own musical world.
Word of the project first trickled out in late-January, via a self-deprecating email that warned: ‘if you don’t like sallow-faced, impoverished, unglamorous, lo-fi electronic music of a distinctly late-70s post punk variety then this probably isn’t for you.’ Within two months, not only had the music been committed to CD, it was getting airplay on Resonance FM and picking up a string of very complimentary reviews and mentions from folks like Woebot, Simon Reynolds, John Eden, Kidshirt and Prince Asbo. I’ll leave the descriptions to them because, frankly, they’re more attuned to the important reference points than I am…
Uncarved: ‘”Hole in my sound” catches Cabaret Voltaire at their eeriest. “Rebus Neu”is like Throbbing Gristle doing background music for Dr Who circa Tom Baker… [But] that this is no mere pastiche of the bands he loves, it has an identity all of its own and must be the product of many hours of tinkering away with the kit. If Nick is unlucky he’ll be lumped in with the Hauntologists – he deserves better than that.’
Kidshirt: ‘it’s like some Radio Repair-Shop version of Steve Reich.’
‘Confidently tentative,’ you could say about the album as a whole. It’s a potential recipe for noodly disaster, but instead we get 29 brief, purposeful (and I’d say joyful) electrostatic dub experiments at the edges of lo-fi industrial-funk. It may harbour a deep affection for Cabaret Voltaire et al. but it also manages to sound more immediate, more mutant, more lovingly crafted than so much irony-couched or DAW-glossed music at the moment.
Volume 2 is already in preparation, and will hopefully be ready in September, marked by a special ‘semi-live’ performance on Resonance FM. More details on that nearer the time.
In the meantime, there is an interim mini album available to download free on Soundcloud, featuring half-a-dozen tracks I recorded back in March, mainly experiments with the P15 Ekosynth which I bought just after finishing the Volume 1 sessions. These tracks appeared on a very limited cassette called “Doctrine 789305″ which I only gave to a handful of close friends, but other than that I have no further plans to use them, so I thought I might as well share them with anyone who might be interested.
Congratulations to the Woofah crew on issue #4. Now under under new Droidian management with John Eden in a Putin-like “background” role. Two favourites from this issue: Wayne Marshall on “Sci-Fi Reggae” is a solid crash course on Afrofuturism. Emma Warren gives a rare peek into the ultra secretive world of UK dubplate cutters. And, of course, “Hot Gal Commandments.”
This is one of the best magazine in print. Bug your newsagent to stock it: http://www.woofahmag.com/
Someone else is doing a bunch of dubstep stuff now under the name Autonomic, which is weird but whatever. Just saying, lest anyone should confuse us. I made a lot of friends under the name. I also did a lot of music and writing under it.
You might remember Mr. Bump from early on in the Blogariddims series – bottom-heavy, a bit rowdy. He dredged up those old swung beats with the rude basslines and sugary vocals – dance tunes – back when everyone was half steppin. Next came a very brief but thrilling career as a pioneer of the UK Funky thing in North America. Road trips, thronging dancefloors, specials from the likes of Sticky and Lil Silva. But Bump is fickle, and just as things were picking up, he went into deep hibernation. Rumours followed: solder addiction, more important things to do…
But just when it looked like he’d disappeared for good, up pops Bump on a bill with his old Skull-and-Bones buddy in Montreal, care of Komodo Dubs. Feb. 20, 2010 at Société des arts technologiques (SAT), Montreal.
Here’s an 80-minute live set from Bump’s triumphant appearance at MTL Funky back in April (later featured on Kuma’s Art of Beatz radio show out of Vancouver). Some rare bits, dubs and custom edits in the mix. The recording’s a bit crunchy in spots and some good bits got lopped off either end (Heatwave ‘Do You Mind’ reggae refix, Crazy Cousinz ‘Go,’ and a dark stepper by Restless 1). Toronto Funky’s MC Plain English gets on the mic at about 28min. It was big night…
TRACKLIST:
[00:00] Terry Hunter – Flying
[01:00] Lil Silva – Different (special)
[04:00] Kenny Dope – Do It (O Gutta Rmx)
[06:05] Perempay & Dee – Buss It
[08:45] Addictive – Girl Like Me (DJ Naughty Mix)
[10:45] Donaeo – Devil in a Blue Dress Instr.
[13:00] Donaeo – African Warrior Instr.
[15:10] Sticky – Jumeirah Riddim (special / Bump edit)
[17:55] Sticky ft. Simi & Lady Chan – How Very Dare U (special)
[20:50] D Malice – Monopoly Refix
[21:20] Princess – Frontline
[22:50] Lil Silva – Season
[26:30] NB Funky – Riddim Box
[28:30] Geeneus – Into the Future
[31:45] Kode9 & LD – 2 Bad
[33:35] Crazy Cousinz – Inflation
[36:30] Cooly G – Dis Boy
[37:50] Swift Jay – Toppa
[40:20] NB Funky – Compromise
[42:00] Grievous Angel – Loser Refix (special)
[44:15] DJ Gregory – Klappa
[46:30] Geeneus – Yellowtail
[49:00] Roska – Climate Change
[50:00] Lil Silva – Funky Pulse
[52:00] Hard House Banton – Reign
[56:45] Dj Gregory – Don’t PAnic (Karizma Dub)
[57:15] Lighter – Skanker
[58:50] D Malice – My Joy Refix
[62:45] Fingaprint – The Print
[64:00] Fingaprint – Takeover
[66:15] Tadow – Jump Up
[68:00] Tadow – Cowboy
[69:30] Hard House Banton - Sirens
[71:40] Wookie – Loco
[72:45] Dennis Ferrer – Touched the Sky (Quentin Harris Dub)
[75:30] Roska – Gone to a Better Place
[77:20] Roska – Elevated Level
[78:45] Aaron Carl – Oassis (Nick Holder Dub)
[80:00] Ear Dis – I Feel
[81:55] D Malice – Keep On (Bump edit)
Very promising looking new magazine in the works. The Queitus – “[catering to] the intelligent music fan between the age of 21 and 73″ – is set to launch a print version in the next couple of months. For now, they’ve got an already impressive blog where Melissa Bradshaw’s unleashed this gem on Sonic Warfare.
Exceedingly literal example of SF Capital from Native Instruments with their new ‘Sonic Fiction‘ soft synth. Finally, someone has translated Eshun’s Afrofuturist conceptronics into something we can all buy enjoy: a feature rich, user friendly addition to NI’s prosumer-oriented Kore Audio platform. Developed by Jeremiah Savage… “SONIC FICTION uses concepts and scenarios from the world of science fiction as its creative source.” According to the literature, “Jeremiah’s passion for the philosophical hypotheses in the best of sci-fi literature and film translates into 100 evocative, otherworldly and yet always highly-playable instruments, with 800 individual sound variations.” Deep. If only Sun Ra had had ones of these.
I got hacked a couple of weeks ago, which has set me back a bit. That Mr.Bump/Funky post and others are coming but I had to do a lot of damage control after an iframe injection attack that left all of my sites quarantined by Google/Firefox. The good news is that the blog and Dark Disco were easy to rescue, but I ended up destroying Riddim.ca in order to save it. Long story, but it’s currently being rebuilt (something I wanted to do anyway) and should back online by the New Year at the latest, possibly with a substantial ‘director’s cut’ of my Dusk & Blackdown interview for Woofah #3, plus some vintage mixes and scans.
In the meantime…
Two debut books coming in the next month from k-aliased CCRU alumni whose writing has left a mark on my thinking over the last few years. In Capitalist Realism (Zero Books), Mark Fisher questions why we can more readily imagine the end of the world than an alternative to capitalism, while Steve Goodman begins from a very broad definition of Sonic Warfare (MIT Press) to examine constellations of sound, affect and power. I’ve been especially anxious to see Steve’s book in print, as my doctoral work covers related conceptual territory (not too related though – I’ll admit to a sigh of relief after scanning the index) and we’ve had various, usually too-brief, discussions about this stuff in three different cities since I first met him at FWD» in 2005. For the curious, MIT has generously posted two sample chapters (titles like ’1993: Vorticist Rhythmachines’ bode well) along with back and front matter. Both books can be pre-ordered now.
Stand up bit of archival work over at Uncarved. I love this kind of thing – unearthing and scanning in old fragments from before the www info deluge. John really nails that feeling you’d get when an unexpected bit of print could open you up to a whole new realm of music and ideas. There was more detective work – more suspense and surprise. Instead of wiki and an evening’s downloads, I’d pore over pieces like this, extracting whatever clues and partial leads I could. Sometimes it would take years to sort out connections or hear things I’d read about. Other times it would be some massive, sudden revelation via print or tape. I’d be hard pressed to get sentimental over anything in my browser bookmarks but I’ve got 20-year-old clippings I treat like gold.
‘Not an album’ from Sam Shackleton but a coincidental set of ‘EPs’ packaged together by German techno label Perlon. The following is not a review.
A1 (No More) Negative Thoughts
B1 Let Go
B2 It’s Time for Love
In some other version of now, it was Mala’s ‘Conference’ not Coki’s ‘Haunted’ that proliferated like rhythmachinic spam filling up the shops and forums. There, it’s all about delirious, teasing rhythms, percussive texture, weird incantations, flailing arms in dark rooms decorated by chthonic slide projections. Ongy bongy, etc. Space with your weight. Shackleton is iconic of the whole thing and ‘Splash‘ goes for £100 on Discogs.
Several years on from the first Skull Disco releases, ex-pat Shackleton keeps a studio in a former East German broadcast centre. Like fellow travelers Mordant Music, his idosyncratic catalogue is easy to see as a genre unto itself. Its sounds and themes are nurtured and re-crafted from record to record but they never settle. A languid rhythmic psychedelia – first fully explored in 2007′s ‘You Bring Me Down‘ – has become his specialty. ‘Let Go’ sees him back in 140bpm territory, beats halting and skipping, almost Jungle-like, around an agitated bass pulse. It’s hazy, radios are squealing, and something keeps attacking from above. Down in the runout groove German cartoon men talk about pants.
C1 Mountains of Ashes
C2 There’s a Slow Train Coming
D1 Moon Over Joseph’s Burial
‘Moon Over Joseph’s Burial’ – Skull Disco’s conceptual start point was the intergenerational necrorave – dig up your kin and get down. ‘Moon…’ goes deeper. Loose earth, lost footing. Tricky slopes from a pitchbent organ. Rhythms from bones and trinkets. Viscous drips that chatter across long corridors before flooding forward, leaving all the percussive bits to slosh around in a subterranean tide. Scrapes and struggle. Body-swelling pressure. “Oh… oh .. oh. ..” a step out of time and repeating vacantly. A mournful chorus responds but it’s out of reach and its song makes no sense anyway. Altogether it brings to mind a mind lingering longer than we’d like to think – after the end – shuttling between earthly ego panic and uneasy calm: Joseph perched at a threshold between the corporeal and a none-too-inviting Something Else. Dim panic and glimpses through decomposition, and then it’s over, constantly, forever. Liminal calm in lockgroove catatonia.
E1 Asha in the Tabernacle
F1 Trembling Leaf
F2 Something has got to Give
“He’s got the whole wide world in his hands…,” pitched down like a chorus of Jolly Green Giants. What do you make of ‘Asha in the Tabernacle’? ”Sense it, know it, let it be.” It’s another disorienting micro-epic: trip-you-up drums and bass, breathy pads in distress, and rapturous chants. Somethig big is happening but we’re not meant to know what it is. On the F-side, ‘Something has got to Give’ amplifies the tension and the noise. More voices, more difficulty breathing, then quieter, into Photek-like suspense scene of reverberant percussion and an insistent, muted throbbing. Recommended!
