The End Times

Vita Nuova

2011-06-08T04:05:00.000-07:00

I've decided to go somewhere else, with as little fanfare as possible. I started the blog in the last year of my GCSEs, & am now about to end my undergraduate career at university; it's been calcified by a sense of futility & loss of purpose for long enough to warrant it.

The new place is here: http://scarlettracery.wordpress.com/

Static Disposal remains what & where it is (a repository for stuff elsewhere online/in print): http://staticdisposal.blogspot.com/

I'll hopefully be archiving the radio-show posts in a different blog over the next few weeks.

No Pasaran

2011-04-02T02:44:00.000-07:00

In lieu of actually writing on last Saturday's march - which I've been thinking about obsessively since, & will probably write something about soon, if I can make the time - some links.

This account by a UK Uncut activist of her arrest & maltreatment gives hints of the return of political policing as the ruling class realises the disruption the anti-cuts movement is causing to its reality-picture. The Guardian's interview with two black bloc-ers, this open letter from Solidarity Federation to UK Uncut and the response from Brighton Uncut, show the extent to which the direct-actionists refuse the 'good protester/bad protester' line currently being pursued by the right-wing & wet-liberal press (& even the BBC), & the extent to which the trade unionists & marchers should equally refuse the government tactic of divide-and-rule. The solidarity that some voices on the left were calling for after the passing of the tuition-fees Bill - most notably, Alex Callinicos - seems to be emerging almost in spite of the divide over tactics. (The fact that the property damaged on Sunday was very much not that of the protesters' class does not seem to have escaped them.) Mark Serwotka, speaking at Hyde Park on Saturday, said that the unions would support the student movement & those engaged in direct action; let us hope they keep their word, & refuse to scapegoat those who, above all, are in the same struggle. On which note, & more eloquent than me, Lenin's Tomb on the march.

Back to the Lab #14 8/3/2011

2011-03-18T12:34:00.000-07:00

http://www.mediafire.com/?d5ot3p9gchc4fn4

Jazkamer - 'In the Days of the Burning Guitar' (Chestnut Thornback Tar (Type))

Bene Gesserit - 'Mickey, Please' (The Minimal Wave Tapes(Stones Throw))

Gal Costa - 'Relance' (India (Elektra))

Group Inerane - 'Ikabkaban' (Guitars From Agadez Vol. 3(Sublime Frequencies))

Nite Jewel - 'It Goes Through Your Head (Dam-Funk Clubdub)' ('It Goes Through Your Head' 12" (Mexican Summer))

Ghostface Killah - 'Black Tequila' (Apollo Kids (Def Jam))

Death - 'The Storm Within' (Spiritual Mental Physical (Drag City))

Deaf Center - 'The Day I Would Never Have' (Owl Splinters(Type))

Lone - 'Aquamarine' (Emerald Fantasy Tracks (Magic Wire))

J.D. Emmanuel - 'III: Focusing Within' (Wizards (Important))

Guest Post: Back to the Lab #13, by Frances Morgan

2011-03-06T09:20:00.000-08:00

Back To The Lab #13 - Frances Morgan Guest Mix by Dboon147 on Mixcloud

Podcast version: http://www.mediafire.com/?v66g247oou7ksi7

Some old pop music from Nigeria, Ghana, Benin, Senegal and Congo

The practice of starting a positive review with a snarky disclaimer is kind of a crappy one, and a habit all writers should try and kick, but it's tempting for sure. That opening paragraph covers your back, and shows you know just enough no to get, you know, too excited about this new thing that actually isn't all that new, I-think-you'll-find. It's quite fun to write, too. Hey, perhaps I'm even doing it now - but not quite as much as the Dusted reviewer who covered the Legends of Benin compilation - http://www.dustedmagazine.com/reviews/5076. "It's like a dude can hardly walk down street without tripping over Obi Dandy’s Reasonably Good Looking Soldier Band Volumes 92 through 142, The Hidden Lost Funk Years", he laments, before going on to give the CD a well-deserved praising, a neat mix of ennui and enthusiasm.

Sure I know what he means (and I don't doubt his own love of Beninese and other African music), but I'm uneasy with his assumption that our attention spans are so shot to shit, and the implication that we're all moving on to the next world music 2.0 sensation now – as if 'African music from the 70s' were some blog-hyped synth band, not the vast output of a really vast continent over an entire decade. Is he, in fact, the bored one? Is this just a projection? I could think about this a lot more, but instead I decided to make a mix for Daniel's show that I hope doesn't display such disaffection, and which contains some right bangers straight off the more recent Analog Africa and Strut comps as well as some old records scavenged from charity shops many years ago and some others that I spent more money on in second-hand shops, like a proper collector (which I'm not).

There are some superstars on here - Tony Allen, Sir Victor Uwaifo, King Sunny Ade, Orchestra Poly-Rhythmo - and some less well-known artists. I've also mixed up the styles quite a bit (warning: this ain't a mix for purists), although the choice falls somewhat in favour of Nigerian music. In a perverse way I particularly enjoyed the slipperiness of trying to get old juju vinyl to fit into a digital mix for a radio show - it's long-form, continuous stuff for parties and dances - and the reminder, in doing so, that not everything can be parcelled up for compilation and re-appraisal. That's my excuse for the crappy mixing, anyway.

But a word in favour of compilations: Samy Ben Redjeb of Analog Africa has done sterling work in compiling music from Angola and Benin that goes beyond crate-digging novelty hunting. He and his label (and the musicians re-releasing their work on it, all of whom I think have been involved in the process as much as possible) deserve more than hip talk about 'saturation', and I've included a couple of favourite tracks from AA releases. The Tony Allen track is from a Vampi Soul reissue and the Orchestre Lissanga track is from a Strut comp. The only thing about mixing old records with stuff from compilations is that you can hear what's been remastered here and what hasn't, but it's up to the listener to decide whether the hiss and crackle (or lack of it) attracts or detracts from their pleasure. I wish I had a remastered CD version of Johnny Bokelo rather than a massively hissy record, actually.

Chronologically, the music is all from the 1970s and 80s. I've kept it to those two decades (and chosen pop stuff, ie mostly electrified rather than traditional or folk instrumentation) just to provide a bit of sonic glue, I guess, but also because that's the stuff that I like the most. There is one older track, though - the opening one, which was recorded in 1959. It's from a great compilation on Rounder Records called Juju Roots http://www.amazon.com/Juju-Roots-1930s-Various-Artists/dp/B00000038C. I included it because it has a cool kazoo solo on it. I also really like the record it's from because the sleevenotes - by Chris Waterman - are excellent, comprehensive and knowledgeable, as all Rounder sleevenotes tend to be.

They're not, however, free from a little touch of snark. The album was released in 1985, not long after King Sunny Ade's breakthrough Island release, and Waterman is aware of this: "The high-tech juju music of Yoruba superstars King Sunny Ade and Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey, 'discovered' and lauded by the American alternative popular music press in the early 1980s," Waterman says, "is the product of some fifty years of continuous experimentation by African urban musicians." I agree: while I'm no expert by any means, we would all do well to know more about what we listen to, where it comes from and why it sounds like it does, if only to stop it becoming just another thing on a list, just another stylistic tick-box. But I also think we need to stop with the snark. There are few things that can't be made a little better with the liberal application of Tony Allen's drumming and a highlife guitar lick or two, and it doesn't matter who heard it all first. Peace and prosperity x

1 JO Oyesiku & his Rainbow Quintette - Baba Oni Taxi
2 Sir Victor Uwaifo - Ebibi
3 King Sunny Ade & his African Beats - Aba ni je dehin/Ma je koju ti mi
4 Cutlass Band - Mede Adagya Boe
5 Gnonnas Pedro & his Dadjes Band - DaDJe Von O Von Non
6 Tony Allen - Progress
7 Orchestra Lissanga - Okuza
8 Johnny Bokelo - Kakese
9 Thione Seck - Aida Soukeu

10 Orchestre Poly-rythmo de Cotonou - Mi Ni Non Kpo

11Uncle Toye Ajagun & his Olumo Sound Makers - Moti Foro Mi L'Oluwa Lowo

See also: Frances' band blog at http://noiseimmemorial.blogspot.com/ and more music/mixes at http://soundcloud.com/noise-immemorial

Back to the Lab #12: 22/2/2011

2011-03-02T14:00:00.000-08:00

http://www.mediafire.com/?rs8kag6b4f2pb7s

Shackleton - 'Undeadman (Mordant Music ReMMix)' ('Fireworks/Undeadman' 12" (Honest Jons))

Panda Bear - 'Last Night at the Jetty' (Tomboy (Paw Tracks))

Horsepower Productions - 'Damn It' (Quest for the Sonic Booty (Tempa))

Effi Briest - 'Rhizomes' (Rhizomes (Sacred Bones))

The Bug - 'Poison Dart (Scratcha DVA Remix)' ('Infected' EP (Ninja Tune))

Amerie/Theo Parrish - 'Just1lovebug' ('Just1lovebug' 12" (Fat Beats))

Blood Stereo - 'The Giving of the Grape (excerpt)' (Your Snakelike King (Pan))

Back to the Lab #11: 15/2/2011

2011-02-22T14:02:00.000-08:00

http://www.mediafire.com/?1fubmq0pojvxijm

Hype Williams - 'The Throning' ('Do 'Roids and Kill E'rythin'' 7" (no label))

Demdike Stare - 'Desert Ascetic' (Tryptych (Modern Love))

Minamo & Lawrence English - 'Headlights' (A Path Less Travelled (Room40))

Stephan Mathieu - 'Minuet' (A Static Place (12k))

Shitmat - 'Aequeosalinocalcalinoceraceoaluminosocupreovitriolic' (Hang the DJ (Wrong Music))

John Coltrane & Jonny Hartman - 'Lush Life' (John Coltrane & Jonny Hartman (Impulse!))

Skull Defekts ft. Daniel Higgs - 'Fragrant Nimbus' (Peer Amid (Thrill Jockey))

Yaaard - 'Remember w/ NKOTB' ('Yaaard/C-Powers split' cassette(Reckno))

Lil B - 'God Kissed Me' (Rain in England (Weird Forest))

Back to the Lab #10: 8/2/2011

2011-02-13T02:39:00.000-08:00

http://www.mediafire.com/?fd1jdes5ck6w08y

Lil Wayne - 'A Milli (Harmonimix)' (white label 12")

Barn Owl & the Infinite String Ensemble - 'Condensation' (The Headlands (Important))

Graham Lambkin & Jason Lescalleet - 'Soap Opera Suite' (The Breadwinner (Erstwhile))

Makoto Kawabata & Richard Youngs - '(Red Stripe)' (Makoto Kawabata & Richard Youngs (VHF))

Paul Flaherty/Chris Corsano/C. Spencer Yeh - 'Revolving Door Assault' (split 7" (Krayon))

Disco Inferno - 'Starbound: All Burnt Out and Nowhere to Go' (D.I. Goes Pop (One Little Indian))

R.D. Burman - 'Freak Out Music' (Psych Sa-Re-Ga! Indian Psych Funk 1967-77 (Stones Throw/Now-Again))

Monkey Puzzle Trio - 'White World' (White World (Slowfoot))

Failing Lights - 'The Comfort Zone (excerpt)' (Failing Lights (Intransitive))

Back to the Lab #9 1/2/2011

2011-02-06T06:32:00.001-08:00

http://www.mediafire.com/?q6erk4e46ea43t9

Iannis Xenakis - 'Bohor' (Electronic Music (Nonesuch))

Sahal Regab & the Cairo Jazz Band - 'Dawn' (Egyptian Jazz (Art Yard))

Jim Ferraro - 'Moonshocked Dudettes' (On Air (Not Not Fun))

Supersilent - '10.5' (10 (Smalltown Supersound))

Seijaku - 'Please Send Me A New Heart' (Mail From Fushitsusha (PSF))

Umberto - 'Someone Chasing Someone Through a House' (Prophecy of the Black Widow (Not Not Fun))

Milton Babbitt - 'Philomel (edit)' (OHM: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music 1948-1980 (Ellipsis Arts))

Back to the Lab #8 26/1/2011

2011-02-06T06:30:00.000-08:00

http://www.mediafire.com/?p0sd346cwumswsb

Bill Orcutt - 'A New Way to Pay Old Debts' (A New Way to Pay Old Debts (Pilalia))

Cindytalk - 'We Are Without Words' (Up Here in the Clouds (Editions Mego))

Richard Youngs - 'Hearts in Open Space' (Atlas of Hearts (Apollolaan))

Arthur Russell - 'Hey! How Does Everybody Know' (Love is Overtaking Me (Rough Trade))

Stephanie Hladowski - 'The Seven Virgins' (Thoughts From Screeching Lake(Singing Knives))

Skullflower - 'A'arab-Zaraq - Ravens of the Burning of God' (Malediction (

Eyyubi Mustafa Sunar Bey - 'Evc Ara Taksim' (To Scratch Your Heart: Early Recordings From Istanbul (Honest Jons))

King Stitt & Clancy Eccles - 'Dance Beat' (Sound System International (Pressure Sounds))

Tim Hecker - 'Hatred of Music I' (Ravedeath 1972 (Kranky))

Back to the Lab #7 18-1-2011

2011-02-06T06:29:00.001-08:00

http://www.mediafire.com/?ghg11q6h91q5qb9

This week's radio show, with several Broadcast tracks, in memory of Trish Keenan.

Broadcast - 'Come On Let's Go' (The Noise Made By People (Warp))

Actress - 'Always Human' (Splazsh (Honest Jons))

LA Vampires ft. Matrix Metals - 'How Would U Know?' (So Unreal (Not Not Fun))

Broadcast - 'Corporeal' (Tender Buttons (Warp))

Keith Fullerton Whitman - 'Side B' ('Variations for Oud and Synthesizer' 7" (no label))

Broadcast - 'Valerie' (The HaHa Sound (Warp))

Joseph Hammer - 'Side B (excerpt)' (I Love You, Please Love Me Too (Pan))

Castevet - 'Grey Matter' (Mounds of Ashes (Profound Lore))

Broadcast - 'Black Cat' (Tender Buttons (Warp))

Broadcast - 'Still Feels Like Tears' (The Future Crayon (Warp))

Back to the Lab #6 11/1/2011

2011-02-06T06:26:00.000-08:00

First Back to the Lab of 2011 finds yr host ridiculously chirpy. Whodathunkit? Up as a podcast atm, will upload to Mixcloud if anyone prefers streaming.

http://www.mediafire.com/?nl2i4u2gb10m2k8

Destiny's Child - 'Bills Bills Bills (Harmonimix)' (white label 12")

Flying Lotus - 'Recoiled' (Cosmogramma (Warp))

Sa-Ra Creative Partners - 'Love Czars' (Nuclear Evolution: The Age of Love (Ubiquity))

Ikonika - 'Fish' (Contact, Love, Want, Have (Hyperdub))

Wiley - 'It's Wiley' (The Zip Files (no label))

Shackleton - 'Something Has Got To Give' (Three EPs (Perlon))

Jacques Greene - 'Baby I Don't Know (What You Want)' (Night Slugs 12" white label)

Sunny Murray - 'Red Cross' (JazzActuel (BYG Actuel))

Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band - 'Moonlight on Vermont' (Trout Mask Replica(Elektra))

Ghosts of my Life/My Alibis #11

2011-01-15T10:00:00.000-08:00

"it was the fear that afflicts most citizens who, one fine (or dark) day, choose to make the practice of writing... an integral part of their lives. Fear of being no good. Also fear of being overlooked. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear that one's efforts and striving will have come to nothing. Fear of the step that leaves no trace. Fear of the forces of chance and nature that wipe away shallow prints. Fear of dining alone and unnoticed. Fear of going unrecognised. Fear of failure and making a spectacle of oneself. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear of forever dwelling in the hell of bad writers." - Roberto Bolaño, 2666

2010: Books

2011-01-04T15:09:00.000-08:00

This'll be short.

In 2010 I read only two books that were published in that same year, and both for review: the Picador reissue of Roberto Bolaño's The Skating Rink and Lydia Davis' Collected Stories. I rather enjoy this fact: uncompelled to keep up with the ebb and flow of hype, guided only by the exigencies of my course and personal whims, it feels better to keep reading as a private pleasure (and, unfortunately, a matter of work) - which was, after all, what made me into a teenage bookworm in the first instance.

Picking modules that forced me to read fiction turned out to be a good idea: the whirlwind rush of Donald Barthelme's Sixty Stories, Margaret Atwood's inhuman horror-novel Surfacing, Anne Michaels' slow and wonderful Fugitive Pieces and The Winter Vault, Iain Sinclair's hardboiled and extravagant Downriver, Oblivion by David Foster Wallace, Tom McCarthy's funny, disturbing and perfectly pitched Remainder, the steely, frightening Berg by Ann Quin (which I first read about in Jonathan Coe's meta-biography of B.S. Johnson, an important book for me, and so a strange sort of homecoming), Julian Barnes' probably over-mannered but still intensely witty Flaubert's Parrot - and my first love, James Kelman, with Greyhound for Breakfast. Lydia Davis was (is) wonderful, but reading 700 pages of her in less than two weeks was a bit much.

Poetry was as slow going as ever, but I did manage to at least get from the beginning to the end of Geraldine Monk's astonishing Interregnum, her sequence about the Pendle witch-trials. Carol Watts' lovely pamphlet When Blue Light Falls, David Morley's Scientific Papers, Denise Levertov's mid-60s volume O Taste and See filled up the rest of my time, apart from the continual dipping in out of collections and anthologies - The Penguin Book of Socialist Verse was my charity-shop discovery of the year; it was read alongside Norton's enormous Postmodern American Poetry, The Reality Street Book of Sonnets, Barry Macsweeney, James Schuyler, Frank O'Hara, Geoffrey Hill and Shelley's collected poems. Hopkins and Keats, as always, never left.

Zero Books' windfall of titles in 2009 sustained me for another year: Mark Fisher's needle-sharp Capitalist Realism, Nina Power's brilliant and scabrous One Dimensional Woman and star turns by Ian Penman, Joshua Clover, Dominic Fox, Chris Roberts, Mark Sinker and Ken Hollings in The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson. Clover's compact 1989 raised the bar for books that take pop seriously, and Penman's Vital Signs, published more than a decade before, raised it even higher. I finally got round to reading Roland Barthes' utterly devastating Camera Lucida, in two afternoons. James Wood's How Fiction Works was suspicious and illuminating in equal measure. I got to read Shakespeare for the first time since A-Levels (excluding the sonnets, although I re-read those too, anyway), with new eyes. And I can't ask for more than that.

2010: Records

2010-12-19T12:32:00.000-08:00

This is starting to become an annual event: the moment when I realise I haven't bought anywhere near enough records this year, and I might have to write a 2010 year-end list, and it will necessarily be horrifically incomplete, my face lighting with shame as I peruse others' lists, noting everything I missed. Then, the moment when I remember that it doesn't matter anyway, mine being one insignificant drop in the ocean of ill-considered opinion that is the internet! The records that I heard of, but didn't get to actually hear (e.g. the Moon Wiring Club and Shackleton albums, the Joseph Hammer and Keith Fullerton Whitman LPs on Pan, Krayon's LPs from Our Love Will Destroy the World and Moon Unit) will have to wait their turn until the mythical moment when I will have money again. So, here are some records I liked - no restrictions on number, no ranking, no consequence:

Oneohtrix Point Never – Returnal (Editions Mego)

Philip Jeck – An Ark For The Listener (Touch)

Actress – Splazsh (Honest Jons)

Flying Lotus – Cosmogramma (Warp)

Autre Ne Veut – Autre Ne Veut (Olde English Spelling Bee)

Ikonika – Contact, Want, Love, Have (Hyperdub)

Big Boi – Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty (Def Jam)

Matthew Dear - Black City (Ghostly International)

Hot Chip – One Life Stand (Parlophone)

Swans – My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky (Young God)

Gayngs – Relayted (Secretly Canadian)

Richard Skelton – Landings (Type)

Wyatt/Atzmon/Stephen – For the Ghosts Within (Domino)

Joanna Newsom – Have One On Me (Drag City)

Xiu Xiu – Dear God I Hate Myself (Kill Rock Stars)

Jailbreak – The Rocker (Family Vineyard)

Yellow Swans – Going Places (Type)

Stellar Om Source – Trilogy Select (Not Not Fun)

Sun Araw – Off Duty + Boat Trip EP (Not Not Fun)

LA Vampires ft. Matrix Metals – So Unreal (Not Not Fun)

v/a – DJ Kicks: Kode9 (K7!)

v/a – Ecstatic Music of the Jemaa El-Fna (Sublime Frequencies)

Field Music – Field Music (Measure) (Memphis Industries)

Autechre – Oversteps (Warp)

VHS Head - Trademark Ribbons of Gold (Skam)

Abe Vigoda – Crush (Bella Union)

Pantha Du Prince – Black Noise (Rough Trade)

Strong Arm Steady – In Search of Stoney Jackson (Stones Throw)

Black Milk – Record of the Year (Fat Beats/Decon)

Forest Swords – Dagger Paths (Olde English Spelling Bee)

Terror Danjah – Undeniable (Hyperdub)

Rangers – Suburban Tours (Olde English Spelling Bee)

The Fun Years – god was like, no (Barge)

Chris Abrahams – Play Scar (Room40)

Emeralds - Does It Look Like I'm Here? (Editions Mego)

Beach House – Teen Dream (Bella Union)

Singles/EPs/etc.

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti – 'Round and Round' (4AD)

Belbury Poly/Mordant Music – 'Welcome to Godalming' 7” (Ghost Box)

Broadcast & the Focus Group – 'Familiar Shapes & Noises' 7” (Ghost Box)

Grouper – 'Hold/Sick' 7” (Room40)

James Blake – 'Klavierwerke' EP (R&S)

James Blake – 'CMYK' EP (R&S)

Girl Unit – 'Wut' 12” (Night Slugs)

Team Brick – 'Hardon For Hadron' 3” CD-R (Journal of the Belge Folk Club)

Astral Social Club – 'Smashed Tractor' 3” CD-R (Journal of the Belge Folk Club)

Forest Swords – 'Rattling Cage' 7” (No Pain in Pop)

Balam Acab – 'See Birds' EP (Tri Angle)

Keith Fullerton Whitman – 'Variations For Oud and Synthesizer' 7” (no label)

Yaaard/C-Powers – split tape (Reckno)

Games – 'That We Can Play' EP (Hippos in Tanks)

Ancients of Days - Reissues and Golden Oldies:

David Bowie - “Heroes” (RCA)

Donna Summer – Once Upon a Time / I Remember Yesterday (EMI)

Sparks – Kimono My House / No. 1 in Heaven (EMI)

Arthur Russell - Love is Overtaking Me / Calling Out of Context (Rough Trade/Audika)

The Ex - 30 (Ex Records)

Shackleton – Three EPs (Perlon)

v/a – Panama! Latin, Calypso and Funk on the Isthmus 1965-75 (Soundway)

v/a – Panama! 2 Latin Sounds, Cumbia Tropical & Calypso Funk on the Isthmus 1967-77 (Soundway)

King Midas Sound – Waiting For You (Hyperdub)

Part Wild Horses Mane On Both Sides – Bataille de Battle (Singing Knives)

Fennesz – Venice / Endless Summer (Touch)

James Ferraro – Marble Surf / Heaven's Gate (New Age Tapes) / Last American Hero (Olde English Spelling Bee)

Roy Orbison – The All Time Greatest Hits of Roy Orbison (Capitol)

Emeralds – Solar Bridge (Hanson)

Bikini Kill – Pussy Whipped (Kill Rock Stars)

Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band – Doc at the Radar Station / Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) / Unconditionally Guaranteed / Trout Mask Replica / Safe As Milk (Elektra)

Pulp – His 'n' Hers (Parlophone)

African Head Charge – My Life in a Hole in the Ground (On-U Sound)

Borbetomagus – Live in Allentown (Agaric)

AMM III – it had been an ordinary enough day in pueblo, colorado (Matchless)

Max Roach – We Insist! Freedom Now Suite (Candid)

v/a – London is the Place for Me: Trinidadian Calypso in London, 1950-1956 (Honest Jons)

Moondog – The Viking of Sixth Avenue (Honest Jons)

Coil – Live 3 / Live 4 / ...And the Ambulance Died in His Arms (Threshold House) / Selvaggina, Go into the Woods (self-released)

Guilty Simpson – Ode to the Ghetto (Stones Throw)

There might be another post about books, as soon as I can recover my list of books I've read this year.

Back to the Lab #5 8/12/2010

2010-12-12T09:32:00.000-08:00

http://www.mixcloud.com/dboon147/bttl-5-9122010/

Sadly no cleaning ladies this week, but we do have a special guest mix from Dirty Demos head honcho & electronic composer/improviser Adam Baker.

Raime - 'This Foundry' (from 'Raime' EP (Blackest Ever Black))

VHS Head - 'Remote Control' (from Trademark Ribbons of Gold (Skam))

Adam Baker mix:

Paste - Abuse of Celebrity (7" Fisheye)

The Rebel - Bums On A Rock 3 (7" Flitwick)

Vibracathedral Orchestra - Royal Park 26/09/02 (7" Gold Soundz)

High Places - Universe (7" Caff/Flick)

Kevin Blechdom - Mr Miguel (LP Chicks On Speed)

Ensemble - (LP Rephlex)

Kid 606 - Dodgy (10" 555)

Aaron Dilloway & John Weise - Total Eclipse (7" Kitty Play)

Throats - Wake (LP Holy Roar)

Sun Araw - 'Last Chants' (from Off Duty (Not Not Fun))

Gayngs - 'The Gaudy Side of Town' (from Relayted (Secretly Canadian))

Back to the Lab #4 1/12/2010

2010-12-12T09:09:00.000-08:00

http://www.mixcloud.com/dboon147/bttl-4-1122010/

Abe Vigoda - 'Crush' (from Crush (Bella Union))

Terror Danjah ft. D Double-E - 'Undeniable' (from Undeniable (Hyperdub))

James Blake - 'I'll Stay' (from 'CMYK' EP (R&S))

The Fun Years - 'And They Think My Name is Dequan' (from God Was Like, No (Barge))

Grouper - 'Hold' (from 'Hold/Sick' 7" (Room40))

Stellar Om Source - 'Copper Dream' (from Trilogy Select (Not Not Fun))

Games - 'Heartlands' (from 'Everything is Working' 7" (Hippos in Tanks))

Coil - 'Going Up' (from The Ape of Naples (Threshold House))

Back to the Lab #3: 24/11/2010

2010-11-29T04:01:00.000-08:00

http://www.mixcloud.com/dboon147/bttl-3-24-11-2010/

Strong Arm Steady - 'Two Pistols' ft. Mitchy Slick (from In Search of Stoney Jackson (Stones Throw))

Lindstrom & Christabelle - 'Let It Happen' (from Real Life is No Cool (Smalltown Supersound))

Salem - 'Redlights' (from Salem (Iamsound))

Mordant Music - 'The Hauntological Song' (from Picking O'er the Bones (Mordant Music))

So Percussion & Matmos - 'Cross' (from Treasure State (Cantaloupe Music))

Wyatt/Atzmon/Stephen - 'Laura' (from For the Ghosts Within (Domino))

Evan Caminti - 'Night of the Archon' (from West Winds (Three-Lobed Recordings))

Sun Ra - 'There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You Of)' (from Lanquidity (Saturn))

2010-11-21T03:21:00.000-08:00

"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that accords with this insight. Then we will clearly see that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against fascism [neo-liberalism]. One reason fascism has a chance is that, in the name of progress, its opponents treat it as a historical norm."

--Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History.

Back to the Lab #2: 17/11/2010

2010-11-21T03:07:00.001-08:00

http://www.mediafire.com/?mvwr5sewysj3x0h

Swans - 'No Words/No Thoughts' (from My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky (Young God))

Troupe Majidi - 'Khoudrini' (from Ecstatic Music of the Jemaa El-Fna (Sublime Frequencies))

John Cage/Maelstrom Percussion Ensemble - 'Imaginary Landscape No. 4' (from Imaginary Landscapes (HatArt))

Broadcast & the Focus Group - 'Inside Out' (from 'Familiar Shapes and Noises' 7") (Ghost Box))

Philip Jeck - 'The All of Water' (from An Ark For the Listener (Touch))

Autechre - 'd-sho qub' (from Oversteps (Warp))

Jailbreak - 'Sugar Blues' (from The Rocker (Family Vineyard))

Back to the Lab #1: 3/11/2010

2010-11-06T14:33:00.000-07:00

http://www.mediafire.com/?xyyivjdl4mzupl4

Oneohtrix Point Never - 'Pelham Island Road' (from Returnal (Editions Mego))

Autre Ne Veut - 'Tell Me' (from Autre Ne Veut (Olde English Spelling Bee))

Matthew Dear - 'Shortwave' (from Black City (Ghostly International))

Matrix Metals - 'Tanning Salon' (from Flamingo Breeze (Olde English Spelling Bee))

The Ex - 'White Liberals' (from 30 (Ex Records))

Chris Abrahams - 'Leiden' (from Play Scar (Room40))

Pan Sonic - 'Radio Qurghonteppa' (from Gravitoni (Blast First))

Dillinger Escape Plan - 'Farewell, Mona Lisa' (from Option Paralysis (Party Smasher/Season of Mist)

Black Breath - 'Wewhocannotbenamed' (from Heavy Breathing (Southern Lord))

Oneohtrix Point Never/Antony - 'Returnal (Fennesz remix)' (from 'Returnal' 7" (Editions Mego))

...a public sphere

2010-11-02T03:02:00.000-07:00

An accurate portrait of the author.

Apologies for the blogging interruption - going back to university is unkind on one's time-richness. On which note, this post is also inform the public that I now have a weekly show on the student radio station - called Back to the Lab (ho ho ho) it covers 'experimental' music (whatever that's supposed to mean). It's broadcast on Wednesday mornings, 8-9am, on RaW 1251AM (on Warwick campus) and streaming at the station's website: http://www.radio.warwick.ac.uk/listen/. Playlists will be posted here every week, and, once I've figured out how, there will be a downloadable version posted along with them. So, um, listen please!

A Late Birthday Post/If Not, Winter

2010-10-27T05:49:00.000-07:00

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see'st the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west;

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,

Consumed with that which it was nourished by.

This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

--Shakespeare, sonnet 73.

'The Libraries Gave Us Power'/My Alibis #10

2010-09-12T04:34:00.000-07:00

"to Labour in Knowledge is to Build up Jerusalem, and to Despise Knowledge is to Despise Jerusalem and her Builders"

--William Blake.

A Word In The Ear

2010-09-11T02:57:00.000-07:00

Paul Morley was anomalously great on last night's The Review Show, if only because he was prepared to interrogate the easy, industry-built assumptions of Miranda Sawyer and whale-ish smugonaut Tom Service. He hit on what has been perpetually ignored by the majority of pundits, in the shift away from older forms of engaging with pop as a recorded artefact, as a form of artificial (modernist) enchantment, and its re-attachment to a reality principle. On the rise of the live music and festival industry, particularly Glastonbury:

"We're talking about something that almost doesn't involve music... The way we talk about it, it's almost like the way we talk about the season, with Ascot and Henley, and, again, I think it's about the celebration of an incredible 40 or 50 years in popular culture, and you can get off on it - but what, ultimately does it mean?... where is the disruption and the subversion in the new world? Now the reason I say it is because they're all listening to things and enjoying things that I was 30 or 40 years ago; if I was enjoying things 30 or years before me, I'd would have been getting off on George Formby.... there has to come a moment - and this is why I'm interested in post-Cageian [music] - because we're all looking for the new thing in music to have happened, and we're expecting it to be like the Pistols or the Stones, but I don't think it will be.... that form of music that young people are getting off on now is essentially a stale thing, it isn't liberating."

Of course, he's not wholly correct. My friend Frances recently did a panel with Morley at which he more-or-less slagged off every single young music writer working today, and presumably most of the bands (both disheartening and unnecessary, as Frances and the other writers who worked on Plan B set out to prove). But it does seem that, at the moment when our ways and forms of engaging with pop are dissolving, through over-saturation and the virtualisation and dispersion of music (no longer contained in the artefact of the LP/7"/12", but in single MP3s, store speakers, gigs), fewer interesting things are springing from these new conditions than they should be - and it's necessary for critics and young fans to be able to put the present into the context of a historical sense, and to confront and wrestle with the iron-clad conservatism of cultural life today.

Ten Songs 10

2010-09-08T03:03:00.000-07:00

1. Manic Street Preachers - 'Motown Junk' (from 'Motown Junk' EP (Heavenly))

And here's where we came in - the pristine beginning that even Generation Terrorists arguably spoiled. So many good intentions, and so many of them acted on: the link back to the formal revolution ("revolution - revolution - revolution") of Public Enemy in the opening sample, the shredding guitar tone that predicts the scalping Albini sawtooths of The Holy Bible, the hand screen-printed tees that they'd soon lose to beer-guts, the closing Skids sample that follows "We live in urban hell, we destroy rock 'n' roll" and slows to a burning crawl like rock itself sputtering to death, the absolutely uncompromising bile of Bradfield's motor-mouth screed - words pressed into each other as if, as on 'Yes', he had a dwindling supply of time in which to use them. I remember coming across a copy of the EP at a record fair in Bournemouth and the sleeve: a watch stopped at Hiroshima, a scorched-earth declaration, a Year Zero (or, again, the clocks shot out across Paris at the start of the Commune). The problem with starting out from here is that it's not a mode you can carry on in, and remain alive (cf. the Manics' initial declarations of post-first album breakup), but it's a standard you can't escape, a phosphorus-burn image that haunts you from the origin. Here, compressed into 3 and a quarter minutes (the extra quarter-minute adds to rather than dilutes the excitement) is the itchy, juvenile rage that impelled the Manics' whole career: outstripping their influences (not least with a virtuosity in Bradfield's solo that puts every c. '76 punk guitarist to shame) in the strenuousness of their assault, negating love, hope, community and 40 years of dwindling expectations in pop culture ("I laughed when Lennon got shot"); the contiguity of a working-class culture wrecked by Thatcherism ("Past made useless cos I'm dying now/Communal tyranny a jail that bleeds our wrists"), and pop's failure to deliver the future ("Songs of love echo underclass betrayal"). It's burnt into our bodies now: "21 years of living and nothing means anything to me." Write it bold: NOTHING.

2. Roxy Music - 'More Than This' (from Avalon (EG))

It starts elsewhere: a Tokyo karaoke bar in Lost In Translation, where Bob (Bill Murray) drains a shot and takes the mike. Bob is in the city to shoot a whiskey commercial and escape the wife he's lived with for 25 years; his acting career has long since dropped from its peak; you can see in the lined landscape of Murray's face, the way he can hardly bear to bring his voice above a mid-volume deadpan, the effort he's spent the entire film holding back the years. On the original, Bryan Ferry rides the twitchy percussion and breathy gaps of the rhythm with a silky-smooth, laconic motion which, in its bitten-off syllables and moments elided by breaths, discloses a bittersweet sense of triumph, something Murray's performance amplifies: a revelation of the limits of desire, a truly Nietzschean sentiment - in the eternal return of the film and record, we are brought again to the moment we have always lived, the flick of the eyes towards another person, a breath in their ear, those flatlining vowels, only ascending on the final syllable of the title phrase. The album was Roxy's last, transcending the New Wave pandering of Manifesto and Flesh + Blood, a letting-go of the world Ferry's delicately engineered fame had brought them to: a peace, a final allowance of the moment.

3. Blondie - 'Dreaming' (from The Best of Blondie (Chrysalis))

Blondie are one of those rare bands who had, for a few years, a simply perfect run of singles - every track on their early-80s best of is a single - from 'In The Flesh' to 'Rapture' (excepting 'The Tide Is High', whose bodiless cod-reggae fumbling I've never gotten on with); 'Dreaming' is, to me, the very peak - more compact than the wonderful 'Union City Blue', Clem Burke's precisely hyperactive drumming finessing the rhythm beyond even 'Heart of Glass', Debbie Harry's vocal more animated and hungry in its attack, doubled and supported by the droning keyboards. There's little to the story: a conversation in a restaurant apparently become the dream of a whole life, simultaneously resisted ("I don't want to live on charity") and embraced - "I'd build a road in gold just to have some dreaming". It's perhaps their most mysterious song, the push-pull of desire breaking out on the chorus, Harry's punctum-intonation of the title-phrase pulling us up. Pleasure might well be "fantasy", but records never stop holding power, the truth of a dream - "reel to reel is living verity".

4. James Ferraro - 'Untitled 1' (from Heaven's Gate (New Age Tapes))/'Last American Hero' (from Last American Hero (Olde English Spelling Bee))

Perhaps surprisingly, I've more enjoyed the small fragments I've heard from James Ferraro's infinitely sprawling discography (I've not even checked out his pseudonymous records) than anything he did with The Skaters. Not so much a retreat from noise - the fidelity on his CD-Rs is still delightfully abominable, every shining second of drone encrusted with tape muck - as a channelling of celestial musics - Yoshi Wada, Terry Riley circa Rainbow in Curved Air, kosmiche, one-man synth orchestras like Vangelis, Steve Hillage and Bruce Haack - through noise's means and sensibility, a punk appropriation of cosmic music. The infinite gilded loops of Marble Surf are reprised on the first side of last year's Heaven's Gate: a sound somewhere between slightly sickly, overbright synth, bowed metal and decayed choral samples, spangling with flares of distortion as the sound rises and dips in slow, pulsating arcs, as the tape grinds on, seemingly impelled by a motion alien to humanity, the very movement of the spheres. By contrast, 2010's Last American Hero is almost his Before Today moment: a thick layer of tape-hiss still lays over every queasy, recessed note, but there's a sense of pop accomplishment, and streamlining here that I've found nowhere else in his release. The studiedly thin opening guitar riff loops and loses itself in blobs of sci-fi synth and white-light keyboard drones, until at about 10 minutes what sounds like an keening solo surfaces (inverting the hierarchy of rock); the 12.20 shift, as if someone had taped over the cassette at that point, pulls us back to chiming guitar, and, with the logic of a Beckett play, repeats the movement, submerging it in synthesised choral drones, snaps and flutters playing in the mix.

5. The Long Blondes - 'You Could Have Both'/'Weekend Without Makeup' (from Someone To Drive You Home (Rough Trade))

Of course, you shouldn't trust them. The hype called up Pulp (alongside The Au-Pairs and The Shop Assistants), curdled romance and the nostalgia of ruins - in this case, of Sheffield's provincial utopia (at least two of the members worked in the former polytechnic's art-school library) - but, as the Plan B review by Abi Bliss pointed out, they were all "the right side of 30, with their lives ahead of them and a short enough gap on their CV to go back to the real world if it doesn't work out" (which turned out to be necessary). "The style thing" wasn't irrelevant to me at the time - the video for 'Weekend Without Makeup', flashing up amid the knuckle-dragging boys of MTV2, Kate Jackson troubling the screen with an insouciance both threat and promise, a contrivance of shopworn glamour that suggested a whole hotwired world within short grasp (of course, it wasn't). The performance was a little too clearly 'performance' to overpower (never a problem with, say, Jarvis' icy lothario in 'Razzmatazz'), but it dogs me nonetheless - not least because the late-20s feeling that life is passing you by, that 'Weekend Without Makeup' sketched in such excruciating detail, arrived rather early for me. Where the adulterous whispers and burning regret of 'You Could Have Both' rattled in on overbright guitar scratch and roiling drums, 'Weekend...' is almost classicist in its slightly twangy, picked lead melody, ceding to post-punk scratch on the down-side of the verses and the surging peak of the chorus, the itchy discoid hi-hats and stalking bass the only thing to cut against it. Kate Jackson's voice rides the track's contortions more smartly than the iciness of her front would imply, carrying passive-aggression and disappointment ("Another evening to myself") and knowingly restrained defiance. You can only really hear the tinge of rubbed-off Sheffield accent on the spoken-word section of 'You Could Have Both', a performance equal parts temptation and cynicism ("When I'm around you get by without her even better"), romance and disgust ("Don't talk to me about happy endings/I'm too old for that now"), that gives a shuddering drama to unrequited lust (which we know all about) in its build and tension, the ironic dancefloor-burst of the chorus ("I wanted the world/but some other girl had to get there first"). They never gave me a thing, but pleasure.

6. Moondog - 'Lament 1: "Bird's Lament"' (from The Viking of Sixth Avenue (Honest Jons))

Perfectly condensed, we find here in one 1.45 earworm, the smartness and simplicity and honesty - an honesty that, as in the prefatory comments to 'From One To Nine', doesn't disdain acknowledgement of his own technical apparatus - of Moondog's whole oeuvre. Over restlessly shuffling percussion, a cyclical string figure rendered in slightly darker timbres than you'd expect, and, syncopated, a horn section scribbling over the top, working from a bouncing, jaunty head to quick shrieks, as the tune suddenly pulls to a halt. Lovely.

7. Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - 'Envelopes Another Day' (from The Doldrums (Paw Tracks))/'Round and Round' (from Before Today (4AD))

Two snap-shots from two ends of a career: the grubby smears and motion-blurs of The Doldrums, and the first-love newness of Before Today, the first time the Haunted Graffiti were anything more than a one-man moniker and the first time the aleatory effects of awful fidelity have stopped being a possible tool. 'Envelopes Another Day' stands partly apart from the seething weirdness of the album's first half, its shifting mixes filled with ghost-noises like wind whistling under the door, structures Song subjected to the soldering iron, through having a rock-solid hook and comprehensible flow: the opening Bond theme keyboards give way to a surging chorus underpinned by pulsing bass, Ariel's voice shadowing itself in falsetto, howling halfway between fear and joy of "the great silence". 'Round and Round' (boasting one of the finest fan videos to ever grace this world) has a similarly false intro, launching with sprightly "na na na"s and pert keyboards, lapsing into a white funk bass/guitar chug over keyboard drone. The tension of its verses, spinning out the melody, a schematic of unassuaged desire - "answer the phone/I want to go home" - of relations in stasis, going, with the refrain "up and around/merry-go-round", is only accentuated by the triumphant chorus at 1.53 - "Hold on/I'm coming" the band croons (a Sam & Dave quote?), and we know we can't, through the build-up to the second chorus that explodes into a victorious coda, voices swaying unaccompanied, a breath of pure pleasure.

8. ARP - 'From A Balcony Overlooking the Sea'/Silver Clouds' (from The Soft Wave (Smalltown Supersound))

An object/abject lesson in not trusting press releases (I should know, I've written the fuckers), apparently ARP's tenth album (though almost none of the others are listed in any of his discographies) is talked up as a melding of Cluster, Terry Riley, new age, Eno and A Mountain of One - which, sadly, it is not. The two closing tracks, however, come close to living up to that promise - 'From A Balcony...' is a blatant lift of Eno's 'By This River' crossed with the most languid and keening moments of Another Green World, stretched out to nearly 7 minutes. Alexis Georgopolous keeps his voice soft and low as synths build up over a studiedly primitive drum-machine beat, the sound as warm and gloopy as imaginable - total aural comfort-food. Out of this transparently lovely bed rises at intervals an approximation of Fripp's 'St. Elmo's Fire' solo become a syrupy flow of electricity - like playing in a molasses factory. The following (and closing) 'Silver Clouds' briefly makes good the album's promise: a storm-cloud ripple of oscillators, guitar needling the dark, that could last five times as long as its two minutes, and I wouldn't grow bored.

9. Nugrape Twins - 'There's A City Built Of Mansions' (from American Primitive Vol. 2 (Revenant))

Back on disc one, the Nugrape Twins are singing a jingle for the grape-soda drink that gives them their name. Over much the same piano, which seems to be playing from another room to the singers, whose voices (white, southern, protestant if I had to guess) crack into distortion more often than not, sing The Pilgrim's Progress condensed into less than 3 minutes. Perhaps more so than any of the other tracks on American Primitive (aside from Homer Quincy Smith's cracked organ hymnals or Rev. Moses Mason's overcharged sermon on the flooding of the Mississippi) one gets the sense that the voices here can hardly be referred back to bodies, that the shellac was picking up ether-noise. The experience that elsewhere manifested as disaster songs, murder ballads, tales of alien abduction - a disaster that keeps on going - crops up here, as in Blind Willie Johnson's 'Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning' and 'I'm Gonna Run to the City of Refuge', as a quietly-breathed apocalypse, escape and testament as teleology. It's sung sweetly, unselfconsciously, without much obvious effort, voices slipping out of harmony, the piano pushing through jaunty chord progressions somewhere in that black material is the unconscious. It's hard to make the words out, the voices crumpled by the medium, as if we were listening to a dub record, only the syllables' traces left, but they still chill: "Let Lord Jesus guide me/Safe unto the other side". They've already crossed over.

10. Coil - 'Amethyst Deceivers' (from Live 3 (Threshold House))

What about death, again? 'Amethyst Deceivers' was probably my favourite track on the otherwise less than incredible threnody of The Ape of Naples, but even there it was somewhat overly subdued - too settled, too neat in its aural balance of light (vibraphone) and dark, woody bass. Handy, then, to come across this haunting version recorded live in Bologna, two years before Jhonn Balance's death, caught from the first in a disturbing, ritual atmosphere: Balance's whispered incantation doubled by his own voice and digital rumble and hiss; the familiar double-bass riff starts up now amid queasy, see-sawing keyboard drones and swooping synths that drift and course like smoke-clouds, that get in yr pores, yr lungs. High notes (digitally treated lute?) snap brightly like bone. The "uncanny/familial work of mourning" that 'Broccoli' dramatises is reversed: it is now "our fathers and mothers" who must deliver us up "into the welcoming arms". Balance's vocal doesn't trip to the hammy highs it does on Ape... but stays almost frighteningly level, almost affectless, as if, in fact, it were not him speaking at all, phasing in and out of the spangling noise, only rising above his whispering double on the almost-a capella outro: a voice raging against the end.

Late-Night Hauntology/My Alibis #9

2010-09-05T13:09:00.000-07:00

"he was likely to fall into hopelessness or nostalgia if he did not have practical confidence in the possibility of overthrowing capitalism."

--E.P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary

Looking Back In Anger

2010-08-31T12:39:00.000-07:00

The highlights of last night's concluding episode of BBC 4's In Their Own Words were undoubtedly a 1984 interview of Martin Amis with Germaine Greer, and Salman Rushdie's 1988 combover. (Srsly: he's better off these days without that scrap of hair.) The former was a revelation simply because no book programme or newspaper would employ an interviewer so clear-sighted and prepared to point out and undermine Amis' numerous hypocrisies and crude political/social simplifications, choosing instead to send ego-bolsterers paid to transcribe and kowtow to his ever-expanding sentences. Greer pointed out that the structuring disgust and class-anxiety of Amis' Money are not only impulses directed at the Other, but of self-hatred: "now, in this being rational, you're talking like Martin Amis the writer [who appears as a character in Money], not Martin Amis the real-life person... you've got a certain amount of John Self in you." It was another remark in that interview that marks out the major deficiency of the 'literary giants' of 1970-90 that Gabriel Josipovici castigated a couple of weeks back (in an argument pre-written and argued more convincingly by Hugh Kenner in his '88 volume A Sinking Island), one which arguably preconditions their timidity of form and subject-matter: a belief that poisonous cynicism is the only proper response of art to the modern world. "Probably every writer thinks their period is the nadir of history", Amis said; it remains rather obvious that he thought this, albeit with the proviso of self-consciousness, and the hedge-betting statement: "What we can say is that the world is getting infinitely less innocent". Rushdie, discussing Midnight's Children in the days when he had hair, talked about how the 'optimism' of Indian independence had been destroyed and betrayed - and how, for his characters, optimism was a disease to be caught and avoided. Of course, we know where Amis' stance lead to: the barely-cloaked Islamophobia of The Second Plane, an ugly and seemingly ineradicable misogyny and a spiral of ever-lowering expectations that has produced only one good book in the last 20 years (London Fields, since you ask). The sneering maxim that the only response to belief - in the future, in the barest existence of human love and goodness - is equal scorn against all such belief, that such things belong only to the "innocent" and should be cast aside by the clear-sighted artist, is a choice of enervation, a refusal to face the hard work of happiness. Amis' and Rushdie's 'realism', alongside all that of their generation of writers and intellectuals (most notably, that of Amis' former New Statesman compatriot Christopher Hitchens) is a cloak for ideology, for that naked contempt for humanity that underpins all reactionary thought, the well-mannered nihilism of the neo-liberal ruling classes - the capitalist realism that has little to do with reality, and everything to do with capitalism. The heroic gesture of throwing off illusions, the work of apparent demystification that neo-liberal capitalism sets so much store by, is in fact an ever greater set of scales for the eyes: the illusion of disillusionment. It gives us some idea just how small and paltry their worlds are, and their imaginations. The greater, harder work now is optimism, thinking that we can be genuinely happy: a thought that leads us not to Amis' middlebrow disguised airport thrillers, but to art that genuinely shocks and spooks us, that shakes the frame of our experience, that contains in its matrices the traces of another world.

To The Centre Of The City

2010-08-23T06:56:00.000-07:00

The second in an occasional series of posts about the films the author loved.

"There never has been a choice for me."

--Travis Bickle.

"I am such a good man, at bottom, such a good man, how is it that nobody ever noticed it?"

--Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies.

You notice something else: the moment when Iris (Jodie Foster) enters her room in the brothel, and the camera stops up short with her, the 70s bead-shroud between her and us; turning, she calls to Travis (Robert de Niro), who has just barely opened the door a crack, nosing round it like a boy entering some domestic forbidden zone. That hesitation speaks volumes now: of the tenderness that accompanies Travis' almost total emotional arrestedness, of the refusal to face facts that accompanies his misanthropy and boasted realism ("you must see a lot as a cabby?"), and its basis in a sensitivity - of horror, of wrecked nerves - that ends up betraying its object. I watched Taxi Driver more times than I could count between the ages of 16 and 18, and, so my notebooks tell me, took to the self-righteous monologues, as you might expect from someone clumsily feeling their way into writing, reading Nietzsche, Camus, Beckett - "Listen, you fuckers, you screwheads: here is a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit. Here is a man who stood up." It is, of course, one of the most widely well-regarded films of the 1970s, but you wouldn't have known it when I first saw it: almost no young people whom I know have taken to it; these days it's a 'cult' film in the wrong sense, known by only a few, who will obsessively pore over it, quote and re-quote their favourite lines (though the "Are you looking at me?" monologue, from a scene almost entirely improvised by de Niro, retains its currency). When Ian Penman, probably the most perceptive critic of Taxi Driver in his famous 1984 essay on de Niro, says (I can't find the post) that it seems, in retrospective, adolescent and shrill, it is, perhaps this that he means: it rubs against the grain of our adult selves to the extent that we're embarrassed how literally (we) teenage viewers could take these spews of invective and violence.

This is somewhat surprising: de Niro was 32 when he played Travis, and I never, at the time, took him to be what I thought of as a young man. Rewatching, however, you can see the lengths he went to in order to make a character younger than the actor's years - the awkwardness of his posture, shoulders up, head in, hands in pockets, the blank look and hesitating speech, a personality sculpted into harsh and powerful lines out of apparent affectlessness. The first third of the film is almost painful to watch, so gawky is Travis, especially in his dealings with Betsy (Cybille Shepherd), who leans back and receives his naive tributes with an amused confidence so foreign to him. When he rocks up at the cab company, as Penman puts it, he "seems to have awoken from some cultural half-death, a baby yet to learn the city's syntax, its official slang"; with the other cabbies in the diner, he can't join in with the knowing laughs, precisely because he doesn't know, he can only communicate in 'Yeah's and 'No's.

That limbo of half-death, of course, was Vietnam - another detail I didn't pick up until years after I first watched it, perhaps because the name is never even spoken, and nothing mentioned of the nature of Travis' war. The conflict hangs in the background of the film, in its depiction of the Hobbesian life of mid-70s New York, and in the figure of Travis' planned war against "the scum": a man so torn up inside that he can't stop fighting against any target he might seize on - and, in this, a microcosm of America in and after Indochina. (The nature of his enemies - first a senator, then a pimp - is, in a sense, wholly unimportant.) Caught up in the tarnished nobility of the existential drama that occupies almost every frame, I missed out on this: the entire, massively important context of the disintegration of America, in spite of the presence of an enormous, obvious link to it in the form of Charles Palantine. Cambodia/Laos, Watergate, Kent State, the dying madnesses of the 60s (Manson, Altamont), the Weather Underground, Symbionese Liberation Army, the total poverty and civil breakdown of New York (that would form the backdrop to disco, the inverse to the intolerance of Travis' milieu), and the damaged sons, the unlucky ones who didn't come back in boxes (note how the cab drivers refer to the city's rough areas as "Mau Mau land"). There's a reason there's no hauntology of the American 70s: it was already crawling with ghosts, too (sur)real and lurid to fetishise. (Notably, the 70s is the high-point of that great American genres, the splatter-flick: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Dawn of the Dead, Cannibal Holocaust, Halloween, etc.; notably also, the critic Pauline Kael called Taxi Driver a horror film.) Travis' proto-punk mohican is particularly prescient in this respect: the gesture of self-mutilation-as-identity that would proliferate throughout American punk culture, starting in the lowlife strata of New York. Travis represents, in some sense, the evolution of those archetypes of 70s US cinematic masculinity patented by Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson (the latter especially in Five Easy Pieces and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest): "a spoor of doubt, confusion, ambivalence, dead ends. Masculinity was shown to be in a state of confusion and flux: caught between old sureties and new demands, old ideals and new realities... a site of unreliable excess" (Penman). Where Nicholson carries it (on) by an arsenal of twitches, sneers and cackles, de Niro rests it on the quality of his silences, the way his speech switches from inarticulate mumbles, to excessive brightness when speaking to the security guards at the Palantine rally, the way he averts his gaze absent-mindedly when people are speaking to him, the stare that seems not to even be looking at its object. Only occasionally does anger bristle from beneath the blankness, as when Travis grabs Betsy's arm when she flees the porno-theatre -his voice coarsening, shoulders setting. His deepening psychosis is conveyed not by madcap tics but a deepening withdrawal, behind matt shades, weaponry, a tough-guy exterior (assuming, perhaps, the self-reliant personae of western films - Sport and the other lowlifes always call him "cowboy"), ritual - an increasing unreadability. Two moments: in the middle of his self-training, as he watches a soap, the absolutely blank look on his face, the way his arm and leg move to shoot an empty pistol at the set, and rock it on its box, as if the limbs were completely unconnected with the rest of him; that close-up at the climax of the shootout: finger pressed to temple, face slathered with blood, eyes half-closed but sardonic, face split by a grin somewhere between relief, demonic revelry and school-boy pleasure. If the mark of a great performance is the extent to which the actor doesn't appear to be acting, then this is undoubtedly one of them: compare with de Niro in Mean Streets or Goodfellas, and you could hardly tell it was the same actor, aside from the face - he makes himself Travis, utterly.

The references to the Western - America's most persistent myth - aren't coincidental: the film is very often seen as a re-write of John Ford's The Searchers, with its quest for redemption through rescue of female innocence from the 'uncivilised'. Travis draws no distinction between the black characters he regards with such fear - pimps, the petty robber he kills in a grocery store - and the white criminals who populate Iris' world, the latter being racialised, Otherised, by association. As Kilgore (Robert Duvall) in Apocalypse Now would remind us 3 years later, the imagery of the cowboy, the rough-and-ready pioneer, carried a lot of currency among the US forces in Vietnam: American civilisation, founded on mass violence against the Other (the Indian burial ground under the Overlook Hotel), reiterates itself in south-east Asia and, stifled, back on the home front. (Taxi Driver's previous nearest rival for controversial film violence was Peckinpah's allegory of American decline, The Wild Bunch.)

Bernard Herrmann's score (his last - he died before the film was released) suggests another lineage: Hitchcock's channelling of the last major period of American paranoia, the 50s. Psycho, Rear Window and Vertigo dramatised the forces boiling beneath the surface of American prosperity and conformity - Soviet threat, the lacks of an oversupplied world, stifled sexuality - as psychic dissolution, proliferating and oversexualised gazes. Travis replicates Scottie (James Stewart) from Vertigo's obsession with the redeeming female (Kim Novak), in the form of first Betsy, then Iris, an obsession that ends in psychosis and death. The dynamic of Scottie and Madeline's relationship of reiterated in Travis' feelings towards the two women, and in de Niro's screen presence: as Kael points out, sex, in its naked form (excuse the pun) at least, is almost entirely absent (the closest we get is Iris unzipping Travis' jeans), but this total sublimation leaves its negated energy coursing under the surface throughout, a bottled-up force that explodes in the final burst of violence. De Niro as Travis is hardly sexy in the mid-70s Warren Beatty/Robert Redford sense, nor even in the time-honoured James Dean in Rebel..., troubled teen kinda way (if anything, his character is closer to the impotent Plato (Sal Mineo), the unstable gay best friend); he's remote in another sense - recessed, unreachable, the kind of person who, you think, if he could make contact from the deep region of inner space where he resides, break the shield of ego and make contact with the Other, might be OK, a decent human being, even a lover. The tragedy, of course, is that this is always-already impossible: his attempts to connect always go awry - taking in a porn-film on a first date, alarming Palantine with his small-talk, resolving to 'rescue' Iris although she hardly wants to be rescued.

Schrader and Scorsese make it very clear to us that neither Betsy nor Iris can or will fulfil the function that Travis delegates to them, as the component that will make him whole: they are the objects of an impossible desire, a desire that has to hold the Other at arm's length. (The usual whore/Madonna binary structures his entire experience of desire: Betsy is a Madonna whom Travis comes to regard as tarnished ("you're just like the rest of them"), Iris a whore whom he tries to turn back into a virgin.) Travis is a born voyeur, regarding the street-life he sees from his cab with equal fascination and repulsion, Scorsese and cinematographer Michael Chapman slowing and oversaturating Travis' POV shots of prostitutes and couples (and, of course, Betsy). Disgusted by the real bodies of the street-walkers, he nonetheless watches pornography. Scorsese's use of mirrors heightens this distancing effect: glancing into the rear-view as Palantine and a black prostitute go at it on the back seat; being asked by a jealous husband (played by Scorsese), whom he watches in the rear-view, to look at the silhouette of his adulterous wife ("You know who lives there? A n***** lives there"), an action mirrored in the rear-view image of Betsy that Travis gets when she hops into his cab after the final confrontation. (And, as with Rear Window, these scenes of projection implicate us, the viewers: what warped dreams of ours are we seeing played out, too?) For all the positive emotion and desire he expresses, he might just as well be an alabaster saint. And yet, the roughcut presence of de Niro bristles with a sense of warping, of danger and tenderness in equal measure, a sexiness that Travis himself, as Penman points out, seems unaware of. It carries resonance today, after the waning of the film's influence on rock and youth culture: the sense of desperation, of aching distance, of absolute loneliness and hopeful futility that de Niro conveys, is something that is still experienced. (I should know.)

He exemplifies the problem of the character who can never realise his good intentions, who, in spite (or, perhaps, because) of his wish to escape the downward spiral of his existence, never can do so. This relates, of course, to the warped sexuality and the ghosts of violence that drive him towards his end: as Penman notes, Travis' cab is "a diagram of the Freudian instincts: the (super) structure of cab/job gives him an excuse to keep going, working the city, keeping assignations and appointments. Inside, the eyes of this ego are not looking where they're going (which is nowhere anyway, as he does not choose the direction)... Hell - and, in this case, his unconscious - is other people". The unconscious drives (ha!) send him on, again and again, into the world he hates, in spite of his conscious reforming intentions, impelled by the forces inside himself he despises. It is, thus, a drama of impotence and conflicting impulses (Betsy: "I meant about the contradiction. You are that"). Travis' struggle is less against particular concrete enemies than against his own impotence in the face of a world he cannot control, cannot connect with, and cannot stand. His quest is to wrest power for himself, to use "true force" to shatter the world he can't live in. His thorough destruction of shooting-alley targets speaks of more than the wish to practice his aim; when he rocks his TV set back onto the floor, in a shot of sparks and smoke, it is as if the entire world had been snuffed out. He watches a music-show filled with couples dancing to typical mid-70s soft-rock, and the singer's voice asks his own question: "How long have I been sleeping?" - and, when will he awake? His violence, in a sense, is only for himself: when he speaks or acts, in front of the mirror, it's an enaction of narcissism, a spilling of internal rhetoric in order to bolster himself up, a power-play for which he is the only audience (Lacan: it's only at the mirror stage that the infant ego takes shape). It is a function of his unbreakable solitude: when he says, faux-streetwise, into the mirror, "I'm the only one here", we know, as Roger Ebert says, it's "the truest line in the film".

Rewatching, I was surprised by how little time elapses between Travis' first meeting with Sport, and the moment when he shoots him in the stomach. So much of the film is spent building up to what we (or rather I) know is going to happen: that unbearable leer at the police, finger against temple - "poom, poom, poom". Looking back, it seems absolutely crucial for Schrader and Scorsese to leave open the question of whether he survives, and the final scenes are fantasy or reality. Given the amount of (obviously fake) blood he had lost, it seems rather unlikely he would have survived, far less likely that, had he done so, he should be pardoned and rewarded for the murder of 3 men, criminals though they be. It is, perhaps, more rewarding to see this ending as the fulfilment of the unconscious impulse driving his quest: he set out knowing he would be killed, but it appears that he really desired the best of both worlds - the death of his enemies, and the reward of his actions in a continuing life. In this sense, it crystallises the overriding theme of Travis' stymied quest: the choice that the world presents to the living, in which there can be no half-measures - of fulfilment, the everyday happiness and social contact we see in the lives of others, or desolation, and ultimately death. The elect - the invisible church of those with the power to choose - and the majority, who cannot, will not be known until the day of judgement. Until then, we check the mirror, the stirring of the street. We will stop before the door, and wait for a voice.

2010-08-20T04:12:00.000-07:00

R.I.P. Edwin Morgan, 1920-2010.

"I thought of that person,/him or her, as taking me to a country/far high sunny where I knew to be happy/was only a moment, a puttering flame in the fireplace/but burning all the misery to cinders/if it could"

2010-08-19T02:42:00.000-07:00

R.I.P. Frank Kermode, 1919-2010.

My Alibis #8

2010-08-18T11:02:00.000-07:00

"To be asked, as Ian McKellen asked me, whether I was homosexual, was a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water."

--Alan Bennett, Untold Stories.

Ten Songs 9: All-Electronica Special

2010-08-04T06:29:00.000-07:00

1. Balam Acab - 'See Birds' (unreleased)

One of the many things I find myself enjoying against my better judgement: Joe Stannard probably put the case best by describing so-called 'witch house' as "neo-goth for hipsters" - the fetishisation of a suffering, a Thanatic impulse, written in the codeined exhaustion and sonic darkness of early gangsta and chopped-and-screwed hip-hop, to which middle-class white kids can only ever have a distanced relationship, if not one of outright appropriation. They're like the moody kids in school who read Invisible Man because they felt it expressed their Sturm und Drang. But but but: Alec Koone, a.k.a. Balam Acab's, productions really get to me, especially 'See Birds'. The rudimentary nature of its structure - a central, lumbering snare beat and bass-drop woven with surges of vocal and smeared synths turning its cavernous air black, noxious green, streaked yellow, dropping out occasionally to small chinks of light in the form of what might be guitar-plinks - is precisely what makes it so compelling. To a certain extent its bedroom-made origins are still audible in the way the elements don't quite mesh up, the way it seems more intent on holding a mood than sculpting a full sonic trajectory. As with so many of the producers working on what Kev Kharas, in the new Loops, calls "post-genre" dance (Actress, FaltyDL, Joy Orbison, Zomby, etc.), you can hear the imprint of Burial's reworking of 2-step's vocal-slivers, the crucial point of production where rhythm becomes texture becomes text becomes signifier - the hopeless yearning of voices without bodies - and sometimes voices / That, if I then had waked after long sleep, / Will make me sleep again. Music for taking the phone off the hook.

2. DJ Sprinkles - 'Ball'r (Madonna-Free Zone)' (from Midtown 120 Blues (Mule Muziq))

I came across Terre Thaemlitz's house project through Jon Dale, who included this album in his 2008 end-of-year round-up. It's beautiful, sensuous deep house tempered by the rigours of minimal - the intro is just 2 syncopated clicks and languid synth chords, haunted as it crawls on by slivers of diva-vocal and party-shouts - that fearlessly seeks to reconnect with the political roots of house. "House is not universal, house is hyper-specific - East Jersey, lower East side, the West side of Brooklyn" - and the queer communities who populated the early house clubs. There's no disjunct between the bookending monologues and the undisturbed, enveloping passage of the sound: the sound is politics, the politics sound.

3. Autechre - 'd-sho qub' (from Oversteps (Warp))

In what sense Oversteps is a chill-out album, as Nick Richardson claims in the new Wire, I'm really not sure. Certainly, it seems to be the record where the (strange-)dynamic duo have shaken off the alleged curse of abstraction (which was only a curse from a very narrow perspective) - the dub and b-boy electro fun of their roots seems to have finally resurfaced after successive albums slathered with false hope. The heavily reverbed, overbright synth-notes that call to mind steel drums and dancehall riffs, relocated to the bottom of the sea, something the hot-stepping snares and mysterious buzzes and clangs, no stranger to dub mixes reinforce. The rhythmic disruptions that haters have barked on about for years work here as intensifiers, shaking the listener's frames of reference, forcing you to constantly catch at what's going on - as with wonky, which has proved abstraction to be the charm it really is, it's a marker of novelty, of the ability to constantly reinvent itself.

4. Kode9 - 'Black Sun' (from 'Black Sun/2 Far Gone' 12" (Hyperdub))

The farthest yet that Kode9 has gone from dubstep and his exquisite downtempo productions into funky and house, sounds stripped back to bone: the shearing-metal claps, jumping and juddering bass, and reedy, strained synth chord hovering like infinitely sustained melodica. Always trembling on the edge of the void.

5. Shackleton - 'Moon Over Joseph's Burial' (from Three EPs (Perlon))

Is it strange that now, even the Skull Disco 12"s that Shackleton put out, so far ahead of the dubstep pack in their meticulously balanced beat-arrangements and bass weight, seem almost primitive? But they were also prescient: the line that the label's last releases - 'The Rope Tightens', 'Death Is Not Final', with its T++ remix, Appleblim's 'Circling' and particularly the Ricardo Villalobos remix of 'Blood On My Hands' - trod between the space of dubstep and techno's uncanny machine-motion prefigured the fertile hybridity of current UK bass music. So it is that last year's Three EPs, in which Shackleton's techno-fixation found fullest expression, has been one of my listening constants throughout the year, and no more so than this 8 1/2 minute wonder, which summons up precisely what was most strange about those early releases. Beginning with a loop that recalls their sampled Arabic hand-percussion, clipped and multiplied to techno BPMs, it swarms with synth-bleeps decaying almost before they've begun, building up and dropping out with loops of metallic rattling, stray dry clicks and increasingly strong, cyclic bass, until around the 5 1/2 minute mark, it reaches an eerie plateau, its bedrock ghosted by keyboard drone that calls up the snaking Arabic melodies of the early productions. This drops out to stuttering hand percussion and builds up again, and the radiant timbres of sampled voices breaks out over the track, the contrast of textures leaving us in no doubt about the nature of its haunting.

6. Actress - 'Hubble' (from Splaszh (Honest Jons))

I fell down a hole into the future.

7. Zomby - 'Spliff Dub (Rustie mix)'/Joker & Ginz - 'Stash' (from Five: 5 Years of Hyperdub (Hyperdub))

Yes, another latecomer. (Although I didn't learn of it from the Guardian.) I was one of the ones who didn't and couldn't scout this shit out, as no-one wished to offer a guide (Plan B, no doubt, would have managed it, but The Wire were certainly working at chocolate-fireguard levels of helpfulness), and you can't trust Boomkat mail-outs further than you can throw them, and you can't afford 12"s on a student loan. And, uh, yes, it's wonderful in the way that all unexpected pleasures are, but even more so, in operating precisely through an excess that sets the individual elements gloriously skewiff - the way, in particular, that wonky synths bend pitches from the expected, like their generators were dissolving in the heat (cf. dirty south's extrapolation of G-Funk's synth-fetish). Thus, contemporaneous with the stunning splurge of last year's 'Purple City', the first electronic strains of 'Stash', stretched over minimal hi-hats, halfway between Space Invader melodies and theremins, until the drop. Echoing half-step snares provide the architecture for stuttering, malfunctioning bass synth, that, after a minor drop-out, builds up again to swarming blurts of treble, like being caught in a cloud of gelatinous bees. And thus, at the other pole of wonky, the opening moments of 'Spliff Dub', in the dub-abstracted rasta vocal of the original severed and edited into a Burroughsian cut-up muezzin call. Caught up into an interlocking rhythm of fragmentary bleeps, hollow snares, muted kicks and a synth bass slithering like a snake under a rug. It grasps the primitive thrill of arcade game electronics, the ascending note-clusters spattering the backdrop like the perspectival shards of a Picasso. It's that sense of jarring, of multi-directional pulls - something that also crops up in Astral Social Club's best productions - in part a multiple and simultaneous focus on texture and rhythm, of each melting and moulding to the other - the bristling, unnaturally warm timbre of the rhythm synths, like someone briskly brushing your face - that gives it such a stirring, modernist thrill.

8. Belbury Poly & Moon Wiring Club - 'The Young People' (from 'Youth and Recreation' 7" (Ghost Box))

That deliberate stiffness, as if the beat-box were spluttering into motion, the loops not always lining up, the resurrected traces of sounds that have graced earlier records - the overtweaked, fruity analogue bloops, the shimmering metallic ring, backmasking and synths that could be the 'harpsichord' preset. The elements that marked Ghost Box's sonic signature are reprised on the first 7"s of their new 'Study Series', and although the novelty has, to a certain extent, worn off, and it lacks some of the litheness and spring of the early Belbury Poly material, it makes up for it in creepiness and veiled threat - a sense of menace evident in the likes of 'Pan's Garden' and Ian Hodgson's own solo work as Moon Wiring Club. Time is rearranged, through samples, backward tapes and rattling dub echo, to the point where, underscored by sour synths, it seems as if we might be swallowed into darkness.

9. Pantha Du Prince - 'Es Schneit' (from Black Noise (Rough Trade))

Perhaps the lushest, most sumptuous electronic record to come out this year, even more so than the newly tightened and slightly claustrophobic Emeralds album - and the closer as the pinnacle, a wonderful inverse to the intro of 'Behind The Stars', where Pole static and dungeon rattles give way to enervated, menacing funk. Here the rhythm is dependent on nothing more than metallic chimes at a 2-step BPM, wreathed in a halo of light, and the occasional fizzing spark from this anvil collision, bells and trickling chains dancing across a rising synth in the background. The entry of hi-hat and muted kicks after 2 minutes is almost unnoticed, but sets up the whole logic of the track, their syncopation bolstering its trajectory, curving vertiginously as Tatlin's tower. Dissipating into synth-clouds at 4 minutes only confirms the exquisite plateau-state it's reached, regaining momentum, until it bursts into a snow-fall of ambient sound. Summer light scores sound.

10. Downliners Sekt - 'Dirty Meinz' (from 'Hello Lonely, Hold The Nation' EP (Disboot))

Quite possibly the strangest rhythmical construction I've heard all year, and there's been some weird shit come out recently (see Autechre above), found on a recommendation from my friend M. Over nearly seven minutes, the track unfolds - beginning in media res, with digital claps puncturing the air, giving way, with some difficulty, to an awkwardly jumping bass - and systematically deconstructs itself, always holding its elements in suspension and flux, as if afraid to pin down a single note. It feels like the very definition of artificial life, a misty atmosphere where every surface and texture is grey and glinting, synthetic and disturbing to the touch. Different sections of the track - the grey-white bursts of trebly static, the slowly ebbing digital skank underneath and, somewhere distant, the persistent dry clicks of the kick - have, as in Holger Czukay's Canaxis songs, or Lee Perry's dub productions, different textures, as if captured via a variety of media. It extracts and reintroduces not just individual rhythmic elements - making an already lopsided bop squelch, dissolve and frequently mutate - but whole atmospheres, mists of synth and shifts of production that seem to change the shape of the whole landscape.

"People still hate each other, they just know how to hide it better"

2010-07-27T10:19:00.000-07:00

The first in a(n occasional) series of posts about the films of my adolescence.

You don't know till afterwards why you cared. The art that attracts you in your teenage years - when our engagement is at its most fresh and frantic; the art that lays the co-ordinates of your taste - comes, at its best, as a surprise: strange, shocking, shaking, a sensation registering for the first time. But its resonance, unlike its unfolding experience, doesn't come from nowhere: in some sense, you were meant to see, to hear, to read these artworks; there was something in you with which they registered - not simply at the present of viewing, but in the multiple versions of you that reside in your past, and will shift and unspool into your future. Iain Sinclair isn't wrong when he calls films (and, I would add, records) "implanted memories": they come to haunt us anew with the passage of time, unfolding beyond their runtime; you come to recognise that they were a part of you, and you hadn't known it until then.

When I first saw Ghost World, films weren't shown on TV as soon as they'd finished their theatre release (my taped copy has adverts for a showing of Bring It On the same week), and Channel 4 still sometimes showed interesting movies. I'm convinced I was still in 6th form, but couldn't say which year. (I know this only because I remember reading the comic book by Daniel Clowes a year or more later, when I'd graduated and was unemployed over the summer.) This was only just after we'd switched to a DVD player, rendering useless all of the VHS-taped films I'd gotten into the addict's habit of watching (Vanishing Point, 8 1/2, Taxi Driver, The Man in the Moon, etc.) It became one of my staple films to bore friends with; I watched it repeatedly (by) myself. Which is surprising: the only things that really registered were Enid (Thora Birch) and Rebecca's (Scarlett Johansson) sense of disdain for the claustrophobia and stupidity of high school, something which occupies only about the first 5 minutes of the film; neither could I feel smug about getting the film's reference-points (I didn't listen to jazz then, nor to very much blues), although the comic book, with its repeated references to Sonic Youth and the Ramones, did rather better for that.

In a certain sense Ghost World is an answer to the high school film, with its flattened emotions and caste-system certainties that in fact reflect the narrowed worldly parameters (and straight-up thickness) of teenagers - the anti- or post-high school film, beginning where they end (prom and graudation). Enid and Rebecca mirror this in the narrowness of their friendship: at the beginning it really is just the two of them, against the world, united in a negativity that Rebecca seems to be already slipping away from. They're thrust into a(n adult) world that has no place for them, that fulfils none of the promises - of freedom, of empowerment, of satisfaction, outside of the cloistered world of high school - that it advanced, that can only make demands. Teenage disaffection turns, in Enid's case, to bafflement and a disgust, tempered by cynicism, that eventually tips into despair at the absurdities that adults advance upon them as the preconditions of carrying on living - as in her one day of employment on the popcorn stand: "You don't criticise the feature!" "What, it's my schtick?" "A world", Camus writes, "that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger." Thus Enid and Seymour: united by a sense that the world will not accommodate them, that it has systematically refused them any possibility of a relationship with it; that it is not as it should be. (Whereas Rebecca, with her well-adjusted good looks, is perfectly able to slip the role she had as one half of Enid's disaffected pact and assume another, as the cute coffee shop girl - as the Wikipedia article on Ghost World puts it (euphemistically), she "matures into a sensible young woman".) The overlit suburbia the girls drift through is recognisably the world of Daniel Clowes' comics - the estranged expanses of Ice Haven and David Boring, normal and conformist to the point of breeding malign weirdness, where inexplicable things occur and patches of grotesquerie break out like rashes (cf. the 'Satanist' couple in the cafe in Ghost World), colonised by anonymous strip-malls, multiplexes, chain coffee-stores, fake 50s diners. To such an unsatisfying phenomenal world, Enid and Seymour are ghosts: observers, unable to participate in its life, who are themselves seen only out of the corner of one's eye - remember how they only come into contact with Seymour by pranking him, accidentally seeking him out; cut up outside Wowsville, he hurls curses at the driver, a sign of a man perpetually ignored - "this kind of thing must happen to him all the time".

There have, of course, been more than enough documents of teenage alienation - the nineties, when Daniel Clowes first drew and published Ghost World (serialised in Eightball), was chock full of them. But Ghost World is set apart by the dryness and the economy of storytelling Terry Zwigoff brings to it, that neuters any tendencies to, on the one hand, sentimentality or self-pity (about the vanishing of youth, the 'preciousness' of adolescence, etc.) and, on the other hand, stupidity in its relation to the adult world, neither accepting any quarter with it nor elevating its protagonists into heroes for resisting it. It's unsurprising that Clowes apparently wanted, in his artwork for the comic, to make the same subtle use of period signifiers as Catcher In The Rye - Enid possesses the unclouded vision and snappiness of mind, but also the same dispassion and sense of unfillable lacks as Holden Caulfield, but transposed into a female protagonist. Years ahead of indie movies that allegedly confronted the disappointments of real life (cf. Lost In Translation, 500 Days of Summer, etc.) Ghost World denied any sense of resolution or easy happiness to its characters, whose not-altogether-comfortable worlds become (as you would expect, in the nature of drama) upset, but don't reconstitute themselves in anything but the most unsatisfying forms - Rebecca as the conformist barista (though she seems unperturbed by that life, her rightful inheritance in a sense), Seymour, bereft of both Dana and Enid, Josh denied the ambiguous possibilities of a relationship the comic suggested, and Enid departing for what might well be the afterlife. Ghost World is the only film I know of where the characters remain, by the end, unredeemed. There's a terrible and brilliant clockwork logic by which all of the characters' possibilities of escape, of happy resolution, crumble away in interlocking patterns - of how they drift apart. It was only in the months, and years, after leaving school, abandoned to the same hopeless drift, coming back to it, that I grasped what freighted Enid's arc - that she was, as Anwyn says, speaking of Salinger's characters "struggl[ing] in every chapter... against their fear of becoming the person that might say: yes, this will do." Unlike most teen-angst films, it admits of the adult world, with all its frustration, impotence, guilt, disappointment but also its possible (if frequently strangled) possibilities and elations - of life not lived alone, of love not empty. (Enid's complaints about "extroverted, pseudo-bohemian losers" ("You guys up for some reggae tonight?") are, as I've learned at university, absolutely correct).

And of course, Ian Penman is absolutely correct about Thora Birch: she's not only far more interesting in her role than Scarlett Johansson, but far sexier - "And?, in real life?, that imperious cool bitch act of Enid's? It would totally have boys and men (and cats and dogs and eunuchs and aliens) totally at her big booty big booted feet." (My friend J., after he lost his virginity in Amsterdam, related the anecdote to me with the words "and she looked just like the girl in Ghost World". To which I answered "Wot, Scarlett Johansson?" At which point we both frowned.) One of the greatest and saddest ironies of Hollywood in the 00s has been the disappearance of Birch and the rapid ascent of Johansson (whose subsequent work, Lost In Translation aside, gives me little reason to feel she's receiving her just deserts in this): Johansson, pale, affectless and boyish with her shorts and throaty voice, made a template for every female cipher in the next decade of indie cinema (most of them played by her), where Birch, over the course of the film, constantly slips between subtle emotional gradations, conveying the sense of a girl unable to find what she wants, what possible identity or role she might adopt. She plays deadpan, cynical, defiant ("It's obviously a vintage 1977 punk look, dickhead"), desolate, overenthusiastic, whimsical (the delightful scene at Anthony's and afterwards), frustrated, tender and all the degrees in between. Her relationship with Seymour seems so believable precisely because of the sense of shifting and often paradoxical affections she conveys; you feel, indeed, that this is an substantial, autonomous person on screen dealing with the real flux of life and self. She condemns in advance the lifeless adolescents of Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park and the marionette MPDGs who would soon populate indie cinema like a plague of boils. Enid's disaffection is also possibility - the opportunity and wish for authentic life so quickly and cruelly closed down. She's also the subject, as IP notes, of one of the great scenes about the power of music, as Skip James' eerie, androgynous voice rises up behind her through thick crackle, and, each time the track comes to its end, without saying a word she puts the needle back to the start - and almost the only scene to do so (convincingly) with a woman, "rather than some nerdy fanboy collector guy", refuting the idea, so often pushed in film, that music is a substitute for life, rather than another part of life - its richness, pain and possibilities. And love. Always love.

Bookmarked/Commentary Pages/Honest Work

2010-07-24T12:30:00.000-07:00

"This [a hop-field and sand-mound] was the spot where I was receiving my education; and this was the sort of education; and I am perfectly satisfied that if I had not received such an education, or something very much like it; that, if I had been brought up a milksop, with a nursery-maid everlastingly at my heels; I should have been at this day as great a fool, as insufficient a mortal, as any of those frivolous idiots that are turned out from Winchester and Westminster School... I went to return it my thanks for the ability which it probably gave me to be one of the greatest terrors, to one of the greatest and most powerful bodies of knaves and fools, that were ever permitted to afflict this or any other country."

--William Cobbett, Rural Rides.

2010-07-23T02:10:00.000-07:00

R.I.P. Robert Sandall (1952-2010)

I was only ever familiar with Robert Sandall as a broadcaster - more specifically, as the co-presenter of Radio 3's Mixing It, the new music show which went out every Friday evening, and which functioned not so much as a gateway to experimental music, as the drug itself in its purest form: absolute musical crack. He and Mark Russell presided over a weekly slew of strange, frightening and wonderful records with gentle sardonics, wisecracks, and deep knowledge and open-mindedness, that changed forever the places I put my ears (this was where it all went wrong, in other words). The program's sudden and mysterious cancellation in 2007 was a disgrace to the BBC's public service remit, and though he and Russell did a couple of shows on Resonance based on the old format, it didn't stick (no doubt partly due to Sandall's apparently long-term ill-health). A deeply unfortunate loss.

Results/Incoherent Threats

2010-07-20T12:00:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: personal post, do not read if you're easily bored and/or dislike self-centred whining.

*****

I must be happy, he said, it is less pleasant than I should have thought.

Well, seeing as I blogged my A-Level results all that time ago, in a rather melodramatic fashion, I figured I should do so again for the end of the second year of uni, in part as it gives me an excuse for another one of those boring posts where I discuss university. So, an overall First for this year, with Firsts in three modules, and a mid 2:1 in the other. I was hoping for an overall First in that last module (on 20th century avant-gardism), and thought I did rather better in the exam than I evidently did, which is disappointing, but feh, etc. To reprise the question: was it worth it? Certainly more so than last year, when I wore out myself getting results that didn't, in fact, count. And this places me in a good position for next year, and afterwards: the final grade calculation allows students to discard their worst module result out of the eight they take over the last two years; aside from one (on critical theory), next year's modules hopefully will cause fewer problems.

I suppose I won out, after a fashion. In case you didn't know, or didn't guess from the posts on here, most of my first year was pretty unpleasant - not in any particularly interesting way, but simply in the sense of being bogged down by constant, low-level misery, a seemingly impenetrable isolation that soon ceased being helpful or even conducive to productivity. My reaction to abandonment among my alleged peers, the accelerated, vicious revelry of the fresher period, the destruction of every part of what (I thought) had been a stable, responsible adult life was to retreat - the only option, in retrospect. If I had made the decision to rectify my position earlier, I might have avoided the problems of this year - in which I ended up living in a situation conducive to no-one's comfort. The barely improved isolation of the suburbs in Coventry - a city beautiful for its traces, and its sense of community, but notable for the fact that almost none of my close friends lived there - at least gave me the chance to concentrate on work, which explains the (academic) successes. But the fact remains that I am, after a fashion, happy. Not to give the impression that carrying on is some kind of heroic achievement (though there have been times, in years now gone by, when getting out of bed was a full-blown mission), but I'm glad to have been able to do so.

I was not one of the care-free ones, not before university, not during it and not now: not one of those who drank themselves into laughter, who harbours memories, who went on road-trips, who slept their way through the club, who ascended to positions of (minor) power through sheer socialising (there are plenty of them). I'm not one of those happy to specialise myself out of existence, those for whom learning is a matter to be dispatched before moving onto 'real' interests (e.g. trash TV, banking, interning for Vice, etc.), those prepared to allow a vicious and irredeemably stupid oligarchy to systematically destroy what I set my life by. In the years to come, there will be no memoirs, no reminiscences centring on now - except in the sense that life catches up with you, not in the form of cataclysmic events, but in spite of you. One day you find, not that the world has settled into the patterns you wanted, but that you know how to engage with its flux, its impossibilities, its necessities and incomprehensible content. I'm still here, in spite of the biters and haters, in spite of me, and I'm not prepared to stop it.

Perhaps my best years are behind me, when there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back.

Reborn In The Rhythmachine

2010-07-17T13:47:00.000-07:00

she recorded the video for her single, Tightrope, in the Palace Of The Dogs. A sanitarium that she insists exists (though it appears to be fictional according to the power of Google), the Palace allegedly housed the likes of Charlie Parker and Jimi Hendrix, and, by her own admittance, herself. "I was a patient there," she announces, but archly refuses to say any more. "I can't really talk about it cos it still exists, and I've signed a clause where I can't disclose information, but I recorded music there so …"

We should keep in mind Kodwo Eshun's insistence that Sun Ra's claims to be from Saturn should not be taken metaphorically, but as a form of counterfactual truth, a hyperstitional weapon against hegemonic social 'reality', and an official history that posits black people as its pitiful objects, not the subjects of change.* The line about the working-class provenance of her uniform - one hardly expects to see this kind of thing in the Guardian! - puts us in mind of others who subsumed their identities in pursuit of collective myth-science, the dispossessed regaining agency through creation: Drexciya, Underground Resistance, Mantronix, Public Enemy, Andre 3000's designation of himself as a "blue-collar scholar" - and note how every one of the potential insane in the video for 'Tightrope'** also wear the uniform.

*Adding only further fuel to my argument that We Were Right, we should note that Plan B took notice of, and got excited about Janelle Monae long before the rest of the music press (minus the hip-hop mags, of course).

**Almost entirely off-topic, but it should be noted that the official End Times verdict on 'Tightrope' co-star Big Boi's album is that it is "boss", and an essential purchase, above and beyond the aforementioned 'Shine Blockas'.

UPDATE: firstly, we discover, via an interview, that Ms. Monae very much knows her black sci-fi - most obviously Octavia E. Butler. Secondly, we find, via Ubuweb's wonderful Twitter feed, this 1980 documentary on Sun Ra, which emphasises the extent to which the Arkestra was a communal venture, in which the music supplanted and empowered the individual band-members.

Ten Songs 8

2010-07-07T09:07:00.000-07:00

1. Dexy's Midnight Runners - 'Let's Make This Precious' (live on The Tube, 1982)

It's been so long since my last update that the occasion for the picking this song - the fuckin' turning of the year - has been and gone. And now it's July. Nonetheless: I still had rather a lot of alcohol in my system when, on New Year's morning, I was flushed enough with optimism to find myself humming this. (About the last time I felt optimistic.) The studio version doesn't have a patch on this live TV rendition, delivered by perhaps the punchiest line-up in all of post-punk and New Pop: the culmination of Kevin Rowland's speed-freak push for the limits of Northern Soul, for a purity and drive that threatens to cancel out the body, turning soul into pure spirit. The relentless backbeat - even the organ is in a hurry, and knows exactly where it's going - is topped with horn-charts that threaten to blow the roof off; the drop-out at 1:53 (and it's indicative that Rowland talks about recorded music - "spin me a record that cries pure and true" - rather than other human beings at this point) is so obviously just a build-up to another climactic high it barely feels like a breath of relief before the handclaps and organ come back in. "First bear your heart and cleanse your soul": this is the point where Rowland's self-erasing megalomania met musical rigour to match and convey it; the moment where the idea that the urgency that gives a human life meaning - the heartbeat-rush of passion in the face of death - became indissoluble with music. You believe, coming away, anything is possible. Nietzsche would have been proud.

2. Toro Y Moi - 'Human Nature' (unreleased)

To say I missed the boat with the whole 'hypnagogic pop' thing - or whatever it's being referred to as these days - would be making a massive understatement. The fact is that I take little to no notice of what's going on in the music world these days, unless it's a new Xiu Xiu album or something: after Plan B closed I was deprived of my main source of information, and soon afterwards I stopped reading The Wire, simply because the writing was so uniformly unenthusing (after Mark Fisher left as acting deputy editor, so did half my favourite writers) and, um, I had better things to do with my time like, y'know, my degree. (In fact, I believe the issue including David Keenan's article on h-pop was the last that I bought.) ANYWAY (sorry for boring you all there): I still have my ears, and I still hear a track once in a while - in this case, after Joe Stannard posted the video on Facebook. After Jackson's death, it's doubly haunting to hear such a delectable cover of perhaps his last sincere sex-ballad before the descent of the post-Thriller period. The sparse space of Jackson's original becomes a pool-side shimmer of synth, over the almost archaic piston-pump digital kick and hi-hat, little snatches of detail - nagging wriggles of guitar, swarming synth-arpeggios that go almost unnoticed in totality of synthetics - and the voice almost subsumed in the haze, an architecture as intricate and fastidiously constructed as any Timbaland production, but out-of-focus. The vocal is almost studiously thin in comparison to Jackson's precision, laconic in the midst of the track's suspended, non-climactic drift. An act of love.

3. Drive Like Jehu - 'Here Come The Rome Plows' (from Yank Crime (Swami))

Begin with one shock. Repeat.

4. Ikonika - 'Fish' (from Contact, Want, Love, Have (Hyperdub))

The strangest thing is hearing records anew: I've had the Ikonika album for months, but it was only when my friend M. put (I think) 'Yoshimitsu' on at a party that my head turned. (It's partly because I tend to listen to records while working, with only half an ear on the stereo, but that's by the by.) Anyway, I've only just noticed how damned fun this track is - the rave-arpeggios of 'r.e.s.o.l' aside - the point, perhaps, where Ikonika most shrugs off the doubt and melancholy that runs through the record like a grey rock-seam. The opening sci-fi blare of the synths is quickly reinforced by crisp, popping kick/snare patterns and a bass presence as thick and all-encompassing as Burial's. The electronics split and detune as if Abdel-Hamid were cranking the pitch control with one hand on the keys, finally exploding into splurges of treble notes and Space Invaders bleeps. It's always apparent the powerful hold Abdel-Hamid has over the well-built architecture of the track, layers dropping out and expanding to suit different possibilities of dynamics and texture to pull the listener towards the end: the dry pops of raw electricity it ends with point towards the difficulties of the rest of this fascinating record.

5. Big Boi feat. Gucci Mane - 'Shine Blockas' (from Sir Luscious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty (Def Jam))

The video, of course, is punctured by an absence: in the course of the two years it took for this album to be produced and released, Gucci Mane was imprisoned for parole violation and then violating the terms of his probation; he flashes up as a series of photos, but nothing more. It's perhaps appropriate: Big Boi, outside of the influence of Andre 3000, seems to drift, as he did on his half of Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, back from the psychedelics of their most powerful collective work to the locus classicus of whips, drinkin' and ballin', the Real of the street. This is perhaps the strangest track to emerge out of that cloud of concerns, its mid-tempo bed of clicks buffeted from both sides by Gucci's smeared, clipped moans and sudden surges of drum-machine, points of light blinking through the blinding illumination of the keyboards - the shine of success that haters threaten to block, and which oscillates between reality and potential, bright actuality and far-off future. As in another celebrated track laying at the edge of hip-hop, you can feel impacted in the filigree electricity of the production, the inhuman nag of the percussion, the joy, anger and melancholy of a life consumed entirely by the grind and flow of cash - a life that, since the crisis, has been increasingly fraught with doubt. Big Boi's flow is less pointedly staccato than usual, slipping around on an unstable but perfectly calibrated production track; the celebrations are edged around with doubts - "we choose to lead not follow/It's a hard pill to swallow/Better yet prescriptions spill, cos there might not be tomorrow".

6. Flying Lotus - 'Do The Astral Plane'/'Sateliiiiiiiite' (from Cosmogramma (Warp))

From one end to another: if, in 'Shine Blockas', the weightless production is the utopian element cutting against the celebratory and struggling materialism of the raps, the incredible, baroque production of Cosmogramma is hip-hop as Afro-futurist escapism, outward-bound flight, as the bent-sideways funk of 'Do The Astral Plane' (compare with Boxcutter's celestial party joint Arecibo Message from last year) and the wheedling voice, amid hovering bass and a beat that ticks like a speed-freak's lip on 'Satelliiiiiiite', prove. (An off-topic aside: the only thing surprising about the resurrection of The Funk in wonky and its associated musics is how long it took producers to clock the pleasures of dirty south's boot-shuddering bass and slippery electronics. What are they, eunuchs?) I can't help feeling that the kinship between the two productions highlights the very falsity of the underground/mainstream binary that lets this be put out on a nerd-tastic label like Warp rather than, say, Def Jam: the combined space (in every sense) and rococo density of Fly-Lo's work, and that of his hip-hop contemporaries, is irresistibly gorgeous, but what it cries out for is an MC; that's precisely what made Outkast's Stankonia, cLOUDDEAD, Madvillain, Sa-Ra or Jneiro Jarel's Shape of Broad Minds project so compelling - the crossing of psychedelic currents and electric voice-play. ALL THAT ASIDE: 'Astral Plane' builds up from minimal foundations - pops, clicks, voice smeared into synth, scat-syllables - until a bumping kick/snare, honking, hot-stepping synths, shaker and a clave rhythm enter, the whole being scattered with trumpet wrapping around the contrails of bass, resembling nothing so much as one of Walter Gibbons' more built-up mixes (excepting the electro 'clink' that also filters through the production of 'Shine Blockas', and the digital cuts). 'Satelliiiiiiite' possesses the menacing presence of the earlier 'And the World Laughs With You' (what Kid A should have sounded like) and 'Mmmhmm', and, indeed, the later, crackle-ridden 'Recoiled': an enormous, swollen bass presence, metal and shaker rattling with nervous trouble, dotted with lounge-synth blurts, a DJ Screw voice sputtering into an isolated whine - "Sit up on my satellite/Get it right, get it right" - that dies out even further, into nearly 2 minutes of lounge funk, smooth bass resounding in an empty cosmos. Stranger and stranger.

7. Locrian - 'Ghost Repeater'/'Procession of Ancestral Brutalism' (from Drenched Lands and Territories (both At War With False Noise/Basses Frequencies/Small Doses/Land of Decay))

I don't know. It feels kind of dumb to enjoy extremity: I should have grown up by now, and have moved on to subtler, more adult pleasures than the overwhelming grind of sonic weight and texture (cf. Borbetomagus' negatively sublime Snuff Jazz). Nonetheless, I love these guys: Locrian are an improvising trio from Chicago whose work extrapolates from the chainsaw treble of black metal towards the miasmic drift of dark ambient and noise; both of their CD albums - 2009's Drenched Lands and this year's Territories, featuring Nachtmystium's Blake Judd and Yakuza's Bruce Lamont - capitalise on the experimental promise of Sunn 0)))'s Black One, featuring slow-moving dronescapes that crackle with menace, building into huge, shredding assaults. Both 'Ghost Repeater' and 'Procession of Ancestral Brutalism' evolve over 10 minutes, black metal riffs bursting out of the fog of noise with nothing to drive them on, the inhuman, abjected hunger of BM finally palpable, harried and buffeted by blown-out keyboard and spectres of voice, and exhausted percussion, somewhere between the ritualism of Xela's In Bocca Al Lupo and the despair of Khanate. On 'Procession...', what sounds like shortwave hiss gives way to a raging riff at about two minutes that eventually explodes into something off the last Wolves in the Throne Room album, but still wears a sense of enervation. Hails, etc.

8. Arthur Russell - 'Soon-To-Be-Innocent Fun' (live, from Terrace of Unintelligibility (Rykodisk))

"He looked like a farmer." It can't have been because Arthur Russell wore plaid shirts - although we do see him, in Matt Wolf's documentary Wild Combination, blue-plaid-shirted against a cerulean background with recording equipment - as we also spot Robert Wilson, who basically ended Russell's potential career in the avant-garde, after the debacle of 1983's Medea, adorned in one. A late photo shows Russell in an Oskaloosa cornfield, the maize-leaves brushing his acne-scarred cheeks, the sky behind him redolent of the blue expanses of 'Let's Go Swimming'. The camera, in Phil Niblock's film of Russell performing songs from World of Echo, is close up against that face, lit in shards of red, green and white, moving over the body of the cello as he works percussive brushes and shading strokes verging on the metallic out of the strings. He introduces the song in a whisper, and hardly moves above it throughout, the words - never, even on his disco records, particularly clearly enunciated - droned, smeared, muttered, clipped, tweaked into falsetto, in unexpected ways, like a courting boy too shy to know what to say. The shuffling motive movement of his cello, the mantric repetition through chorus and verse structure, suggests the grooving energy, the loops, the eternal return of disco, but reduced to a shadow, to a private voice echoing out of the dark. It's the intimacy, the (allegedly) childish open-heartedness of 'The Letter' or 'A Little Lost' - "The rain falls for three hours", the lover and loved inside - turned to a bare series of gestures abstracted by dub echo, of "blushes and blurs" (Jon Dale), another attempt to re-enchant the world. The light shows up his scars again - ravages that, if you didn't know, might be taken for the wasting effects of the AIDS that claimed him a few years later. We remember, for a moment, he was just an awkward country-boy.

9. Owen Pallett - 'Lewis Takes Off His Shirt' (from Heartland (Domino))

A "nerd-fox" (Miss AMP), no doubt, and one whose almost-ridiculous compositional nous constitutes much of what gets the gentlemen and ladies hot - "if he can do that with a violin, imagine what he can do with", etc. Heartland, the new album under his own, more copyright-friendly, name, is an enormous buzzing hive, a legs-and-groins scrum of love, and 'Lewis Takes His Shirt Off' perhaps the most finely-honed thing on it, a high-BPM electro-pop track whose rhythmic undercarriage is closely threaded with chortling and sighing woodwinds and brass, and girded with strings. The lyrical humour that marked the Final Fantasy albums - I doubt there's anyone else with the cojones to name a record He Poos Clouds - and usual nonsensicality sticks around at least in part - "A hegemony armoured with a thousand-watt head and seven inches of echo". But it's the drastic, ascending pull of the track that keeps the listener gripped: "I keep up my velocity".

10. Oneohtrix Point Never - 'ǂPreyouandiΔ' (from Returnal (Editions Mego))

How to parse that title? 'Before you and me'? 'Prey you and I'? Or perhaps 'pray', as in something like 'pray, let us go then, you and I'? It matters, after a fashion: what sets Oneohtrix Point Never apart from many of those currently dabbling in revenant forms is the attention to his work's sensual properties, the fealty it holds to the textural pleasure of pop, the magnetic pull it encodes between 'you' and 'I'. His videos might suggest postmodern terminal decline, play in the ruins of culture, but they also access pop's anti-entropic charge, its powers of disturbance and resonance - as in the track that samples 'Lady in Red', schmaltz turned, via detournement, into a lonely cry echoing into the distance - these fragments I have shored against my ruins. So it is with the final track on the new album: far more reliant on the sampler than the work on Rifts, its first seconds flush with micro-samples like Oval glitches, fractured splutterings of sound, the thump and crumple of flattened percussion and digital flutters coalescing into something straddling the border between chorale and synth-scape, neither quite voice nor electronics, as undisturbed and immersive as the earlier 'Pelham Island Road'. In his pop, you can see every fracture, and hear every pleasure.

My Alibis #7

2010-06-30T04:46:00.000-07:00

"The conditions governing your life have been codified and set down in a little book, but no one has ever given you a copy, and when you have sought it in libraries, you are told that someone else has it on extended loan. Still, you are free to seek love to the best of your ability, or to wash your clothes in the machines that stand with their round doors temptingly open, or to buy something in one of the many shops in this area - a puppy perhaps.... Not that you are indifferent by nature - you want nothing so much as a deep-going, fundamental involvement - but this does not seem to happen.... Full of good will, you attempt to pretend that you do not feel this way, you attempt to keep the level of cheerfulness and hope approximately where it has always been, to keep alive a sense of 'future'. But no one is fooled."

--Donald Barthelme, 'Daumier'

A Short Rant About Book Design

2010-06-30T02:33:00.000-07:00

I'm as much of a sucker for Penguin's history of paperback designs as the next man, but, like a lot of others, I find their habit of redesigning their books seemingly every other week rather annoying. This is not least because most of their recent redesigns have been completely out of keeping with the best qualities of their design history - about the only one that has pleased me was the series with covers by prominent comics artists. It occurred to me this morning that there are 4 series, which I tend to buy when I come across them (to say I collect them would imply a dedication I don't have), to whose properties Penguin should just stick forever:

1) the Penguin Modern Classics series with concrete-grey spines and back-covers, white lettering and geometric arrangement of central images that resist such rationalising tactics (cf. this)
2) the classic blue-cover Pelicans, that formed the basis for pretty much the entire aesthetic of Ghost Box (the only one of these I have is my copy of Marcuse's Soviet Marxism) (cf. these)

3) the Penguin Science Fiction series, already noted by pretty much every blogger ever, but particularly the 60s covers, from when Brian Aldiss was editing the series, with surrealist deathscapes enclosed by Marber grids

4) the first incarnation of Penguin Modern Poets, which I still regularly come across in charity shops, my personal favourite volume being the Ashbery/Harwood/Raworth (sadly not on Google Images, though this is).

Everything else can fuck off, frankly.

While we're on the subject of design, am I the only one who thinks the Faber Poetry Firsts series is pretty pointless? Firstly, if you're going to reissue old single volumes, why not just revert to the old Faber design template, which was superior to the duo-chrome ugliness of their recent publications? Secondly, if you're going to bestow nice new hardcovers, give them to books that are exciting - no-one needs another edition of Larkin's Whitsun Weddings in this world, nor of Ariel, no matter how wonderful it is; if it wasn't for the presence of Alice Oswald's Dart (about the best poetry collection Faber have published in the last 10 years) you'd have thought they hadn't released a decent book in decades. The whole enterprise, arriving at a time when Faber are publishing about 2 new poetry collections a year, smacks of the most blatant laurel-resting.

The Second Option

2010-06-23T15:27:00.000-07:00

"to be consistent, an 'honest' liberal democrat will have to admit that the content of his ideological premise belies its form, and thus will radicalize the form (the egalitarian axiom) by way of implementing the content more thoroughly. (The main alternative is the retreat into cynicism: "we know egalitarianism is an impossible dream, so let us pretend that we are egalitarians, while silently accepting the necessary limitations...")"

--Slavoj Žižek, First As Tragedy, Then As Farce.

Foison

2010-02-23T09:48:00.000-08:00

I've already noted this on Twitter - although I suppose not everyone can see that - and most of the contributors have posted about it as well, but Plan B has turned 5 years and 46 issues of work into a free torrent downloadable at its former website.

Autobiography

2010-02-23T01:39:00.000-08:00

The two of Alan Bennett's recent monologues for the BBC findable on Youtube - the other is on 'Mixing' - constitute, for me, a kind of deflected autobiography. And, like autobiography itself, Bennett's work is, for me, something of a guilty pleasure; indeed, it's his work outside his plays - the monologues, autobiographical sketches, the diaries that appear, like a much-needed indigestion pill, in the LRB just after Christmas - that always pleases me the most, and that I'm most familiar with. One of the reasons I like Bennett (and, indeed, perhaps the reason there's so much affection for him in the literary establishment) is his refusal to become, in old age, a political stooge, his position of soft-voiced resistance and keeping-up of a quaint old-leftism, rooted in the working-class politics and culture of mid-century West Yorkshire, a world as comforting in the fact of its existence as that mellifluous voice - one of factories, metropolitan concert halls and strenuous self-education, suits and bicycles. When asked (or not asked) about politics, he repeats anecdotes, talks about his life, guides you slowly through the landscape and atmosphere of this other world that engrained in him its values. My own parents came from a not-dissimilar background: rural mid-working-class, born in two tiny villages in the New Forest, an area that, like the nearby Isle of Wight, never seems to have left Bennett's 1940s. They seem to have both ended up in the position of Bennett's parents - wanting and failing to be "a bit more like other folks", raising a son (though not a daughter) who turned out "a bit shy". ("They [were] able to blame their shyness... on 'not having been educated'. I've nothing to blame it on at all, except possibly them.") It occurs to me occasionally that their nostalgia, of the usual fairly conservative kind - my father, an aficionado of steam-engines and earthmovers, looks back unconsciously, in a confusion straight out of Raymond Williams, to the era of Fordist capitalism and 'the old way of life' in agriculture - is, if they could only see it, the same as that of Bennett, that they have the same things invested in the past - that they should be seeing, as Bennett sees in his quasi-Benjaminian tour of Leeds' County Arcade, a future worth preserving.

My Alibis #6

2010-02-23T01:29:00.000-08:00

"When it came to work he became a practical, hard German taskmaster; when it came to living, he acted the part of a pure German dreamer. He persisted in this conduct and remained single"

-- Yukio Mishima, Forbidden Colours (trans. Alfred H. Marks)

Junk-Habit/Economy of the Confession

2010-02-14T12:20:00.000-08:00

"you don't take painkillers to eradicate pain; you cultivate pain in order to get painkillers. The last thing you want is a cure or resolution to those aches and pains. You take more and more time dwelling on the pain, holding it close, cultivating it, quizzing it, stroking it... and less and less time doing whatever it was you used to do, all that annoying stuff takes you away from you and your dear dear sweet singular pain, and pain relief."

--Ian Penman, 'Notes Towards A Ritual Exorcism Of The Dead King' (from The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson, ed. Mark Fisher)

Energy Fools The Magician

2010-01-26T10:58:00.000-08:00

Two films, watched the same night, have had me musing: Nowhere Boy, former YBA Sam Taylor-Wood's tasteful-not-tasteful biopic of the young John Lennon, and the long-overdue Arena film on Brian Eno (as has been pointed out, he's been doing the theme music since its inception, and is a far more interesting case than most of those profiled in recent years). Nowhere Boy was not precisely what you would expect from what was essentially a 'Beatles prequel' - there were no "hints of future greatness", save for a handful of cheering audiences for The Quarrymen and a halting exchange between Lennon (Aaron Johnson) and the scrawny, timid McCartney (Thomas Sangster) about "writing our own stuff"; much more foregrounded were the fecklessness and scabrous humour of Lennon, which would of course characterise his peak Beatles songwriting, and the crackling tension between his wiry-fierce aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott-Thomas) and his manic-depressive mother, Julia (Anne-Marie Duff). It's through the latter that he comes into contact with rock 'n' roll, and, of course, sex - or, rather, the two are discovered to be inextricably intertwined: sex cannot exist without pop, and vice versa. A wonderfully obvious montage, after Lennon acquires some Screamin Jay Hawkins vinyl on the Liverpool docks, articulates this: the boy and his mother listening to the 45 in her sitting room, she languidly lighting a fag and lying down on top of him on the couch, intercut with Lennon, uh, trysting with a young woman in the woods. The oedipal overtones (augmented by Julia's new husband, played sternly by David Morrissey) are trowelled on so thick it's almost laughable. Compare with Eno's anecdote about hearing doo-wop and R&B records through the jukeboxes in his home-town of Woodbridge, surrounded as it was by USAF airbases: "'Life's Too Short' by The Lafayettes, which wasn't a doo-wop record... really meant a lot to me. The main rhythmic element in it is just someone playing rimshots... you have this very sparse background feeling, and this urgent singing over the top. I was always impressed by music which I couldn't penetrate the mystery of."

Lennon and Eno are, in a sense, representatives of two alternative paths through pop: both are 'working-class heroes' (although Nowhere Boy highlights the extent to which Lennon's life with Mimi was as petit-bourgeois mittelbrow suburban as could be; Eno's father, at least, was a postman); making, in part, the same discoveries, one leads to 'Love Me Do', the other to 'Another Green World' (or, alternatively, 'Remake/Remodel'). Although that polarisation isn't necessarily valid: as Michael Bracewell made clear in his Roxy book, Eno was as plugged into the white heat of the mid-60s as anyone else, probably more so than the Carnaby Street oligarchy that fed into the British hippy movement. His education at Ipswich and Winchester brought him into contact with the boiling crucible of ideas that were the new British universities in the late 1960s, and which have since been disappeared in most accounts of the decade: cybernetics, Fluxus, post-Cageian electronic music, anti-psychiatry, (pseudo-)Situationism. These are points of convergence: these ideas were not (or not by any means solely) the preserve of the British upper-middle class intelligentsia, but being thrust into the hands of working-class youths escaped into alternative education - the same ones who were buying and appreciating pop records. (Bracewell records that, at the same time, Bryan Ferry and his classmates in Newcastle University's Fine Arts Department, under the direction of Richard Hamilton, were making paintings influenced by adverts and pop-single sleeves.)

In the documentary, Eno lists 'Tomorrow Never Knows' as one of his favourite productions: the point where the technocratic forward-drive of the Wilson years reached its culmination, consciousness becoming-electricity. The studio becomes a portal, through the hidden realms of technology, into the depths of human consciousness, but a consciousness embodied in machine-sound (it's interesting that Lennon's first, distorted words are "Turn off your mind" - brain become tape-machine), ferro-magnetic roll and synapse-flash. What Eno found fascinating was that "that piece of music didn't exist before it entered the studio"; the astounding tumble of a drum loop, the cracking-star spurts of backwards guitar and vocal, the weird, wavering textures that existed outside of melody or chord progression, could not have been brought into existence without the studio - and, importantly, a boom climate amenable to innovations in recording hardware and musicians spending vast amounts of expensive time in the studio. It was an approach that would lead, via Another Green World and Music For Airports, to the exotic studio-hothouse growths of Remain in Light and My Life In The Bush of Ghosts.

It was, of course, something that had been incubated in high modern art for years - Stockhausen (whose mixing-desk inner-spaceflights would come to The Beatles via McCartney), Schaeffer and Henry; but also Cage - in Geeta Dayal's book on Another Green World, Harold Budd recalls a performance by Cage and David Tudor: "It was heavy anti-academic, anti-Germanic, anti-European modernism, which at the time we were all scared to death of; we were all scared to death of Boulez and Stockhausen"; where the high-art heroism of the Darmstadt clique closed art-making off to all but the alleged visionaries, Cage was the supreme enabler. It was through a combination of his education in cybernetics and experiencing Cage that Eno came to processes as the main focus of his art-efforts: he recalls mathematician John Horton Conway's 'Game of Life' - "you can make games that end within 6 or 7 generations, or, by changing maybe one square, a game that can create millions of cells". The joy of systems is that, from extremely simple premises, they can create, with little input, incredibly complex and felicitous results - the prime example being Fripp and Eno's two mid-70s records in which, following (unconsciously? It can't be said to matter...) the methodology of Pauline Oliveros' I of IV, tape-machine output is fed back into the input in a delayed loop, creating constellations of splintered and glistering tones.

The best argument in Howard Goodall's otherwise risible documentary on The Beatles a few years ago was that part of the band's musical importance consisted in making-pretty and making-popular the grating techniques of the unwashed and unglamorous avant-garde. Aside from the ridiculous aesthetic judgements involved - no-one could ever accuse, say, Varese's Déserts a piece of music horrid to the ears - there is a sense in which the leap from the tape-loops of Gesang der Jünglinge to 'Tomorrow Never Knows' was a leap from a cloistered (but wonderful-sounding) modernism to a popular modernism that didn't know it was either popular or modernist. (You certainly can't say that the 'pressures of the market' created any dilution of the sound's daring and radicalism; in many ways, it was braver than the mere consolidation of musique concrete many electronic composers were engaged in at that time.)

In that sense, Nowhere Boy represents a kind of pre-history of all this: it takes a massive effort of imagination to jump from the Teddy Boy-suited Lennon and his ill-matched band banging out skiffle numbers to 'Tomorrow Never Knows' (and an even greater from the gangly, modest George Harrison (Sam Bell) auditioning at the back of a bus, to the patchouli-stinking Hare Krishna of just ten years later - where did it all go wrong?), and it's quite precisely that gap which represents perhaps the most tantalising potentiality. In the background of Goodall's argument is the fact that high modernism was, for almost all of the mid-century, stalked by a vernacular culture that was completely comfortable with innovation, velocity, strangeness, overlapping, in part, with the working-class culture that provided the basis of the British labour movement. It's in the background of Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy, in which the children of the tenement-and-factory culture he profiles are castigated for their "vulgar modernism" - smoking, listening to pop records, movies and coffee-bars, general aping of Americans. The world of Penny Lane back-to-backs nostalgically recalled in The Beatles' late singles was one in which they only partly resided - theirs was the generation that broke with the older working-class culture. And indeed, one of the fascinating things about the world of Nowhere Boy is that the lithe, dynamic young things on screen (the film is Austen adaptation-obsessed with the period detail of Teddy Boy style) were working-class - that autonomy and avant-garde status had been wrenched from the petit-bourgeois stratum that had been bohemia's breeding-ground.

If the history of modernism is a history of cross-transmission, from Picasso's African masks onwards, then 1950s Liverpool is a perfect modernist node: there's a scene where Lennon and his friend Jack (Eric Griffiths) pocket a bunch of jazz 45s, brought into the shop via the city's position as an import hub from America, and wander down to the docks, where they trade for a Screaming Jay Hawkins single apparently originally gotten from an American GI. The docks, the gateway to the black Atlantic that birthed the R&B they crave, swarm with people, including several Teddy Boys. The internationalism of the previous generation (dockers refusing to unload arms ships, 'Aid For Spain', the International Brigades) transmutes into a particular amenability to cross-fertilisation. What's floating in the background, as Lennon watches newsreel footage of Elvis Presley at the cinema, girls' screams drowning out the commentary, is Suez and the death-knell of the old Britain of the century's first half: Presley's debut album and the British retreat arrive within 7 months of each other. And what's lurking round the corner, as Lennon, newly enrolled in art-school, prepares to set out for Hamburg, is Macmillan's reluctant concessions to global political reality and the white-hot technocracy of the Wilson years - no coincidence that Wilson would, in 1965, present The Beatles with MBEs. Modernism, both films suggest, was always up to things that none of its alleged pilots really knew about: possibilities more widespread and wondrous than any of them guessed at - possibilities we can still learn from, take hope from.

Lipstick Traces (On a Cigarette): The End Times' 2009

2009-12-23T04:02:00.000-08:00

It's said every year, but: it's been a strange year. Outside: an economy sent into recession last year reaching a parlous plateau (my disappointment of the year (or one of them) has to be not seeing bankers hung from lampposts); Labour's tenuous hold on power being slowly eroded (next May = a likely repeat of the polling day scene in London); the Obama administration (I watched the inauguration, half-drunk, cautiously elated, in the student union pub) compromising in the face of the most vicious right-wing assault since McCarthyism; a string of deaths capped by that of J.G. Ballard, and finished by that of Jack Rose at the disastrously young age of 38. Inside: the magazine that had been a continual presence to me for nearly 3 years, the first place to publish my inanities, and that represented the best hopes for the music press, shut down. My fiction and poetry were published for the first time. University, until then a catalogue of misery and resentment, began to be, well, wonderful. We enjoyed some marvellous spells of early summer weather. I painfully, by trial and error, had to figure out where my priorities lay. Despite wussing out on nearly all festivals or possible holiday destinations, I did make my first trip to Brighton (no easy thing with this bloody public transport system), for a brilliant weekend at Colour Out of Space. I went on my first proper adult holiday. For that matter, I became an adult (well, in terms of US drinking laws, anyway). I made my first attempt at living in house-close proximity with other people – an experiment which has, in my opinion, turned into a near-total failure. I began work on my first viable (by which I mean “will actually be finished at some point”) major writing project. I drank both too much and too little. Hearts stirred; unstirred. I read some books, listened to some records, and danced once or twice. I stopped writing my diary. The same, I suppose, as every other year. It was good, but could have been better. It was also not good, but could have been worse.

Anyway, ENOUGH SELF-INDULGENCE.

I mentioned records above, and, in spite of my self-promises not to get too far out of the loop, I've spent most of the year out on the far edges of knowledge – I no longer even buy The Wire, and hardly have time to scout around music-review websites. Most of the year I had little time to even listen to records. Much of December, therefore, has been spent alternately scrutinising the eerie depths of the memory banks for things that I liked and searching out releases from every nook and cranny that I might have missed. In short, the list below is a bit rushed. It's noticeably poor in pop and hip-hop records – I've really fuck-all idea what's going on in the charts, saving the Xmas dash-to-the-finish (about which I remain distinctly ambivalent). Even the list of old music I've listened to this year is impoverished compared to last year's – you would have thought that living on student loans would necessitate charity shopping for CDs, but my budget seems not to have stretched even that far.

New Musical (H)express: A Year in New Albums (20)

Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca

Sa-Ra Creative Partners – Nuclear Evolution: The Age of Love

Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion

Richard Youngs – Beyond The Valley of Ultrahits / Under Stellar Stream / Like A Neuron

Astral Social Club – Octuplex

Sunn 0))) – Monoliths and Dimensions

Evangelista – Prince of Truth

Speech Debelle – Speech Therapy

Cobalt – Gin

Wilkinson/Edwards/Noble – Live At Cafe Oto

Pens – Hey Friend! What You Doing

The Flaming Lips – Embryonic

Alasdair Roberts – Spoils

Broadcast & The Focus Group – Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age

DOOM – Born Like This

The XX – XX

Micachu and the Shapes – Jewellery

Antony & the Johnsons – The Crying Light

Ben Frost – By The Throat

Various Artists – Five: 5 Years of Hyperdub

Honourable Mentions

Team Brick – Alogon

Skullflower – Malediction

Mordant Music – Picking O'er The Bones / SyMptoMs

John Butcher – Resonant Spaces

Belbury Poly – From An Ancient Star

Juice Aleem – Jeruselaam Come

Flower-Corsano Duo – The Four Aims

Caroline Weeks – Songs For Edna

Polwechsel & John Tilbury – Field

AMM and John Butcher – Trinity

Absu – Absu

Current 93 – Aleph At Hallucinatory Mountain

David Daniell and Douglas McCombs – Sycamore

Lokai – Transition

Emeralds – What Happened

Fever Ray – Fever Ray

Little Boots – Hands

Zu – Carboniferous

Wolves In The Throne Room – Black Cascade

Extra Life – Secular Works

St. Vincent – Actor

Black To Comm – Alphabet 1968

Dam Funk – Toeachizown

Our Love Will Destroy The World/Bark Haze split 7”

Astral Social Club/Glockenspiel split 7”

Sunshine Republic – 'No Mo Homo Than A Bomo Bro Show: Live At The Topless Sausage Party 2009' 3”

Golden Oaks Three Billion – Weekend Picnic CD-R

The Dust of the Archive: Reissues, Rediscoveries, Golden Oldies

A Handful of Dust – Now Gods, Stand Up For Bastards/The Philosophick Mercury

v/a – Panama! 3

The Mike Westbrook Concert Band – Marching Song Vol. 1 and 2

Richard Youngs – The Naive Shaman / Airs of the Ear / River Through Howling Sky

Can – Monster Movie

Pulp – Intro: The Gift Recordings / Different Class / This Is Hardcore

Robert Wyatt – Nothing Can Stop Us / Old Rottenhat / Dondestan (Revisited) / Shleep / Cuckooland

v/a – The World of Arthur Russell

Otis Redding – The Very Best of Otis Redding

Brian Eno – On Land / Discreet Music

Coil – ...And The Ambulance Died In His Arms / Musick To Play In The Dark Vol. 1 and 2 / The Ape of Naples

Burial – Untrue

Diana Ross and the Supremes – The Very Best of...

Aretha Franklin – Respect: The Very Best of...

Blondie – The Very Best of...

The Ghost Box catalogue: Belbury Poly – The Owl's Map, The Focus Group – Hey Let Loose Your Love/We Are All Pan's People, The Advisory Circle – Other Channels, Mount Vernon Arts Lab – Séance At Hobs Lane

CBSO/Simon Rattle (comp. Benjamin Britten) – War Requiem

The Specials – Singles

Anne Briggs – A Collection

Kid Creole and the Coconuts – Tropical Gangsters

v/a – Going Places: The August Darnell Years, 1976-1983

Scatter – The Mountain Announces

Elvis Costello and the Attractions – Get Happy!

Kate Bush – The Dreaming

Various Failures: The Top 10 Records I Should Have Bought in 2009, But Did Not, For A Variety of Reasons, Mainly Financial

Andrew Chalk – The Cable House

Bill Orcutt – New Ways To Pay Old Debts

Shackleton – 3 EPs

Leyland Kirby – Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was

Bastard Noise – Rogue Astronaut

King Midas Sound – Waiting For You

Nadja – When I See The Sun It Always Shines On TV

Part Wild Horses Mane On Both Sides – Live In Salford

Mika Vainio – The Black Telephone of Matter

Moon Wiring Club – Striped Paint For The Last Post

Films (even more incomplete than the others, because I'm shit at organising myself to see films)

The Wrestler

Bright Star

Broken Embraces

District 9

Synecdoche, New York

Let The Right One In

In The Loop

Books

One would think, given that my studies involve reading books, that I would have read rather a lot of books this year. And I did – just not necessarily the ones I desired to read. At the very least, it becomes rather difficult to get a hold on contemporary literature when one generally has to choose between buying books and eating that week, or between reading for work (not necessarily unpleasant, but aggressively compulsory) and reading for pleasure. Having said that, we all know that reading is far from a race (especially given the sheer fatness of many of the more acclaimed works released this year) and, barring the total disintegration of print culture within the next twelve months, the books will still be there, waiting for me to catch up with them.

Probably the best-designed book to come into my hands this year was the hardback of Iain Sinclair's Hackney, That Rose Red Empire, and the contents match in their fractal sprawl, their connection of micro and macro – its chaos-sowing subversion and hard-boiled humour, its generous sense of a loamy build-up of voices and history, of the nose-against-the-brick particularity of place. Although I'm getting increasingly tired of the literary and cultural theory I've been reading for my module on avant-garde literature – all those turgid, curdled sentences, with little actual trace of the affects they purport to investigate – Zero Books have delivered some serious spurts of excitement in exactly that form, with an extraordinary run of books mostly from bloggers round about this neck of the woods. Of the ones I managed to read – books by Nina Power, Mark Fisher and the anthology of writings on Michael Jackson still await my perusal – Owen Hatherley's sardonic, brilliant, and steely Militant Modernism and Dominic Fox's crushing and incisive Cold World both had me scribbling YES in the margins. And although it technically came out last year (my hardback copy did, anyway) Philip Hoare's Samuel Johnson Prize winner Leviathan was, if not as brilliant and resonant as England's Lost Eden and Spike Island, still quite magical in its encyclopedic grasp and evocation of every aspect of whales and whaling, and the sheer slow, swelling drama of its writing. Promising to take it slower, I read less poetry than I might have, but still managed to get through two excellent pamphlets from a stunning run by Midlands-based Nine Arches Press – Tom Chivers' haunting and terrible email prose-poem meditation on the ghosts of Newgate Prison, The Terrors, and David Morley's multivalent sequence on domestic violence, childhood enchantment, death, nature and the Roma circus, The Night of the Day. (I probably would have enjoyed Chivers' debut collection from Salt, How To Build A City, too – but see above for reasons for not buying.) Meanwhile, Bloodaxe delivered more of the goods, handing over the UK edition of W.S. Merwin's The Shadow of Sirius, and, though it technically came out last year, I also really enjoyed Maura Dooley's entrancing, sensual and politically caustic collection Life Under Water.

As for old stuff – and yes, I have been keeping track – probably the best thing for me was finally getting round to reading the holy triumvirate of E.P. Thompson's monumental The Making of the English Working Class, Raymond Williams' materialist history of the rural in English literature, The Country and the City, and the extraordinary history of power-rupture in the English Civil War, Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down. Taken together, there was a sense of the gaps in a vast buried history being filled in – a history in which I myself had a stake. A very different subject, and very difficult to get hold of, but Kodwo Eshun's More Brilliant Than The Sun was equally inspiring – as a brilliant example of music-writing that traces large rhizome-networks without sacrificing intensity, a frighteningly accomplished and uncompromising style that refuses to leave fealty to the excitement of music in its marvellous and infinitely complex materiality. W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, although only doubtfully deserving the 'best book of the 90s' epiphet, was a melancholy reflection of my own near-winter greyness, its sadness and surprisingly total (for a relatively popular work) refusal of consolation almost guiltily exquisite. At the other end of the scale, Kenneth Pople's definitive biography of Stanley Spencer was gripping and life-affirming in its account of its subject's hugely encompassing life, strange, almost monomaniacal manipulation and brilliant art. Reading it whilst I was visiting Cookham in the blooming height of summer, running into Spencer's daughter Unity on the train back to Maidstone, it was difficult not to feel almost overtaken. (Speaking of which, Mark Musa's translation of Dante's Paradise polished material rather less promising than the other volumes of the Divine Comedy until it shone: “(a loving jubilee of light with light”.) I didn't read anywhere near as much fiction as I would have liked, but Angela Carter's wonderfully handled, disturbing The Magic Toyshop (read for a module on literary theory) and Margaret Atwood's flinty, magnetic Cat's Eye were deeply pleasant. Being compelled to read the Romantics brought me up against some of the most enchanting stuff in the language, much of which I'd simply never had the chance to investigate in any depth before: Coleridge, Clare – whose work, in the light of The Country and the City and Iain Sinclair's Edge of the Orison, seems more throat-swellingly fraught than ever – and Keats, the significance of whose work I hardly feel I'll ever get to the bottom of. And, just for sheer pleasure, Derek Mahon's Selected Poems was always welcome.

Postscript

All those who made 2009 not merely liveable, but good, most probably know who they are already. Those who made it harder than it needed to be – I’m looking at you, Capital, privatised public transport, TV-schedule programmers, Guardian Music editors, connoisseurs of froideur, gentrifiers, the Student Loans Company, and enemies of socialised medicine – will have already received my bile. Consider the books balanced for this year. We live, not unwillingly, in hope.

Ten Songs 7

2009-12-11T12:57:00.000-08:00

1. Orange Juice - 'Falling and Laughing' (from The Glasgow School (Domino))

Am I even allowed near this? One gets beyond a certain age, and affectation becomes a whole lot less easy - if I were 17, had the toast-rack-ribbed whippet physique I had back then, and was not, as I had been, a social outcast; if I could go back to being a sexless teetotaller with a penchant for exiling himself to corners, this might be easier. As it is, the alternative rock masculinity this first release by Orange Juice minted has passed me by - just as one can't read Catcher In The Rye after a certain age. The studiedly thin, over-trebly guitar tone, the awkwardness of the bass and guitar's interactions, Edwyn Collins' apparent refusal to play the square-jawed lead, his voice sliding into all the unexpected positions, leaves the song floating free - of the acceptable aggression, harshness and melody-aversion of punk and post-punk, and of the clumpy stomp of the 60s beat-groups and pub-rockers Orange Juice admired (am I the only one to hear distant echoes of Wilko Johnson? Or, indeed, the none-less-masculine slur of Elvis Costello in Collins' wail?) - something more abstract, almost weightless, its structure almost strategically collapsing (a problem that would be shored up by the consummate professionalism of Jonny Marr when The Smiths took them as their template). It's almost impossible not to feel embarrassed, as by an old photograph of oneself, in the presence of Collins' pretended innocence, wilful disempowerment - "Avoid eye contact at all costs... All I'm saying/Is I'm alone" - just as it's impossible not to be charmed by the arse-backwards romance of his position, the ridiculous (but all too common) psychology he dramatises - the male subject overtaken (by a love that, notably, is free of sexuality, at least for the moment), as he simultaneously rejects it, the guitars rearranging into a distorted stomp as he disintegrates - "I want to take the pleasure with the pain". Not as if some of us have a choice.

2. Bikini Kill - 'Rebel Girl' (from Pussy Whipped (Kill Rock Stars)) / Le Tigre - 'Deceptacon' (from Le Tigre (Wiija))

If the measure of a song is how whether it inspires co-ordinated dance-routines then 'Deceptacon' is a masterpiece - as Anwyn has remembered, Le Tigre gigs saw break-outs of such frenzy; my friend S., on whom I had a massive crush, has a youtube video of her and housemates in such a routine. She was the first person I met at university to identify as a feminist, and, though more tentatively on both our parts, as queer. Dousing her, in our conversations, drunk or sober, with my ill-considered opinions, was, I thought, less an imposition and more the enthusiastic education of a fellow-traveller - two years younger than me, barely out of school, I felt both protective and jealous: she had ahead of her the time I'd lost. Mingled with the frustrated dreams, sweaty against the interior of my skull, was the thought that love (as I put it rather grandly at the time) could not exist without mutual recognition undistorted by the unreal ideological substitutions and manipulations of patriarchal capitalism. Sex free of the oedipal baby-feeding complex that was the result of the 60s. Wishful thinking: it's something I've yet to find outside of pop records, though one does catch its shadow out the corner of one's eye, more and more so these days. Thus, in Bikini Kill's 'Rebel Girl', between the martial drums and barely controlled cracked-string assault of the guitar, Kathleen Hanna's voice not even snotty, beyond mere defiance or disgust: "The revolution's coming, in a kiss/In her kiss I taste the revolution!" A self-assertion writ in raw electricity, vocal cords twisted with lust for a world yet to come ("I wanna try on yr clothes, yeah!"), smashing apart any notions of angel-in-the-house tastefulness or mere aping of male rock - no men, content in their tepid pool of testosterone, could do this, this repeated adrenaline surge bitten off in less than 3 minutes. 7 years later, and 'Deceptacon' is ramming you up against the wall of the discotheque: Hanna spieling in a distorted speed-freak squawk like she's racing the bass-line to the end of the song ("I'm outta time, I'm outta fucking time"), machine-gun strafed by the synth, punctured by temporal disruptions as brilliant as the Bomb Squad's scratches on 'Night of the Living Baseheads' - the shouts of "One, two, three four", the guitar flurry that sounds almost sped-up on the turntable, the chorus that drops out to just hi-hat, snare and voice. As it simultaneously demolishes the ethic of unproblematic hedonism - more often than not capitalised on as an excuse for phallocentric pleasure ("Let me hear you depoliticise my rhyme") - it affirms the dancefloor and dance - it's certainly impossible to imagine not at least wiggling in one's seat (something the DFA remix, slowing the song to an alter-1977 disco swoon, confirms) - the discotheque, in the arc of bodies, the contact of skin on sweaty skin, nerve on nerve, as a space of resistance. As Hanna sings later in 'Hot Topic', "So many rules and so much opinion/So much bullshit but we won't give in".

3. Richard Youngs - 'Cluster To A Star' (from Under Stellar Stream (Jagjaguwar))

Perhaps the most evocatively minimal Youngs has gotten since 1998's Sapphie (excluding, of course, the improv albums): brooding bedrock of bass drone, low curlicues of organ, star-shine of metallic ring in the background, voice. And God, what a voice. Youngs seems to do essentially the same thing in every vocal performance (again, minus the improv records): a coppertone trawl through a series of refrains whose imagery and sound overlap like Venn-diagrams, each repetition placing a very slightly shifted emphasis, like a jazz soloist approaching, hitting and cycling back towards the same set of chord changes. His judgement of the abstract weight and feel of sound, inherited from experimental music, remains as impeccable as, say, Morton Feldman's (though his is far less of a barely-there high-wire act). And though the sense of clean, biting freshness in his work, his frightening work ethic (it's no wonder 'Arise Arise' sounds partly like a motivational song: "Arise the slack sun... Arise procrastination"), might erroneously persuade us to lump him in with the cold-baths-and-bare-knees brigade, the voice here, as on the similarly bare River Through Howling Sky, is freighted with both wonder and a deep, cosmic loneliness - at seeing the curve of the earth repeated in the faces of friends, and of knowing that is all we have.

4. The Jesus And Mary Chain - 'Upside Down' (from 'Upside Down/Vegetable Man' 7" (Creation))

It was in one of those Mojo top 100 lists - in this case, the greatest moments in the history of the guitar, or something similarly ludicrous. (Looking back, I'm unsurprised there was no mention of Bailey, Rowe, Sharrock, Masayuki Takayanagi - though they did mention U2's Boy, of all things...) It is, of course, completely incoherent, anticipating the solipsistic burial of the mumbling self in shoegaze; it's hardly even, as the blurb suggested it was, a brilliant pop song coated in feedback, although what you can hear of the melody suggests they'd have made a good West Coast pop-punk group. But merely by their context the electric-air wails of amp-splintering feedback - which no-one would bat an eyelid at in a Merzbow song - become as exquisitely dirty as mainlined exhaust fumes.

5. Ben Frost - 'Leo Needs A New Pair of Shoes' (from By The Throat (Bedroom Community))

In spite of what you might hear, no, it really isn't as bad as all that. Not at the moment, at least - the short, sharp 'Through The Glass Of The Roof', following this, asserts the primacy of nastiness, but that doesn't make this the next Pita album. Rather, distortion, glitch, the burr of hacked-up circuitry, stalks the album like a malevolent shadow: here, it hangs, almost as an undertone, beneath the thicket of banjo and icy cascades of piano and Nico Muhly-esque strings, until, at 3.49, the first sandpaper trickle of granulated synth drops in - sudden, lowering almost to a subliminal flow, dropping out again as the strings rise and flit about. We're suddenly well aware of how lost we are, and alone, should the surroundings turn against us. The sawing grain of cello, the dark voice of the wind looming up out of the forest, and then - teasing it out for another two minutes, leaving us waiting, in its gradual subsidence, for the other shoe to drop.

6. Chic - 'Good Times' (from Chic's Greatest Hits (Atlantic))

A song that actually seems more familiar from sampling than from first-hand listening - but that's unsurprising. The only Chic songs in my childhood accompanied drive-time disco slots (multiple plays of the short version of 'Le Freak'), and, I thought, Celebrations adverts (only years later did I find out this was in fact Kool and the Gang) - hence I never heard anything less than innocent in them. When I first heard the middle-eight bass-line and group chant severed by scratches, cut with fragments of other voices in 'Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel', as a 15-year old barely acquainted with black music, exiled in the suburbs of a provincial south-coast town, it seemed impossibly strange and glamorous, the audio-remnant of a world accessible only through records (although the idea of liking pop music-as-such was just as strange to me at the time). I now can't listen to it without hearing those cuts, without knowing what would be extrapolated from this eight supremely finessed minutes by the poor kids in the next borough. I remember reading a Mojo article interviewing Bernie Edwards and Nile Rodgers, a scattering of clues I'd only later be able to divine: the social milieu of New York's disco-districts, the influence of Roxy Music, the sense in which they were inheriting a tradition of sonically and rhythmically innovative black music (James Brown's iconoclasm, Norman Whitfield's Motown productions, Funkadelic, electric Miles), the sweet tang of freedom hot and close as discotheque sweat. And none of this is irrelevant as the song locks into a groove as inevitable, as clockwork-perfect, as anything more outwardly 'respectable' (Neu!, Harmonia), the bass progression so flush with a Zen rightness that you wish it were your own heartbeat, pulling you ever onwards, through guitar, laser-slashes of strings and group vocals placed seemingly by maths (droppin' science indeed) - almost as if the body's movements that would inevitably follow were pre-programmed into its composition. It is, indeed, an invitation to the dance (prefacing as it does the LP's closer, the even more stately 'My Feet Keep Dancing'), a declaration that all is well in the moment of flux that is dance, the life you (by which, as always, I mean I) were always exiled, thought you would never know - "Don't be a drag/Participate".

7. Sparks - 'Number One Song In Heaven' (from No. 1 In Heaven (Virgin))/'Lighten Up Morrissey' (from Exotic Creatures of the Deep (Lil' Beethoven))

The other part of that utopian-sex equation (see above): machines. The neurotic precision of the Mael brothers' hits - glam-pop engines fine-tooled to a manic perfection - seems to have inevitably guided them to the alter-human intensity of disco - and, more particularly, the machine-divinity of Giorgio Moroder's arpeggiated synthscapes, whose work on Donna Summer's 'I Feel Love' had long since put him at the centre of the trans-Atlantic disco world. The centrepiece of their album with Moroder is both an interesting deviation from, and absolute realisation of the Sparks aesthetic - a song so dense with puncta it's like glancing, for a second, the Platonic ideal of the pop song, from the irresistible escalator of the central synth-pattern, the lights-up blare from the synths as it approaches the chorus, Russell's nuts-in-vice falsetto, turning to a literally angelic glide over the trembling lights of the song's final minute, a sky streaked by laser-beams of electronics. (Lest we forget, Dante's description of the sun in heaven, ascending with Beatrice: "an endless jubilee of light with light"). Then there's the Eco-friendly meta-textuality of the song, reminding us, as the needle counts down the grooves of the record, that what's being transcribed to air is literally top of the charts in paradise, enriching earth by osmosis: "The song filters down, down through the clouds... In cars it becomes a hit/In your homes it becomes advertisements/And in the streets it becomes the children singing". At the middle eight, the synths break down into subaqueous swarms of single notes, a demonstration of how "Gabriel plays it"; Ron Mael, all three of him, turns to the camera, a delicious asynchrony between the drum-machine pounding and his handclaps (presaging, perhaps, the handclaps that would fill the electro productions Moroder spawned, and on to house) - in bursting out of the fourth-wall templates pre-created for it, pop fulfils the Nietzschean dictum "Become what you are", crystallises the out-beyond-the-stars drive so many of these records encode. Like 'I Feel Love', it is the kind of record that makes you take pop at face value, that forces you to believe that these sounds, taking over your body and night-thoughts, are important. The fact that, though the Maels themselves are oddly sexless, they did all this in the company of the producer of perhaps the most sexually alchemical records of the 20th century, in whose hands the synthesiser became an orgone accumulator, is itself significant - and who can deny the final-minute soar of voice and synth, almost melding together (the old myth of subject-object in congress), as like standing on the edge of getting it on? I'm put in mind of my friend L.'s recent remark that sex was "like being told 'Welcome to the human race'". Hence, on the same album, 'Tryouts For Human Race': a menacing synth cascade out of a slightly jazzier John Carpenter film, Russell desperate and hunted, Ron impassive, more synth than man - "We're just a gleam in lover's eyes, steam on sweaty bodies in the night... Pressure building, gettin' hot, give it, give it, give it all you got/When that love explosion comes, my, oh my, we want to be someone". The knowledge that not everyone makes it, and that the price of inconstant vigilance is exile - years stacking up with the dust in the bedsit, the cats the only living thing within contact: "One of us might make it through, the rest will disappear like dew". And thus also, the counterweight: the spectacularly flippant first single from Sparks' don't-call-it-a-comeback album, reminding us that gloom only begets more gloom, that we remain alive by the knowledge that human life is a comedy. Oh yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.

8. Astral Social Club - 'Smash Crater #1' (from ASC/Glockenspiel split 7" (Krayon))

More of the sodding same. And we love it: Neil Campbell's mxmlst techno solo project continues to spill forth goodness, perhaps even more frenetic, and more centralised, than the swarming, sprawling overloads of Octuplex earlier in the year. Dropped, as usual, in media res, and cutting out as if the track were merely one excerpt from an infinite strip of sound, we're confronted with a liquid piston-pump of a central beat, increasingly layered with what sound like Oval-glitches slipping in yr right ear, sub-aqueous arpeggios of detuned synth, and, over all, a miasma of noise that sounds like he close-miked a children's waterpark slide. What's remarkable is, firstly, the way in which these apparently disturbing ingredients gel into a composition as tight, as pop, indeed, as this turns out to be - it's obvious that it's the same artificial intoxication behind the bent synths of wonky and this - and secondly, the sense of multiple perspectives mashed together in one sonic artefact - that what we are hearing is both a towering kinetic sound-sculpture, and a microscopic look at tiny processes; the minds-eye picture is of cell-reproduction, the flood of chemicals and creation of energy. Every time we listen to it, the ear focuses at different moments on varying layers and points of sound. The flip by Glockenspiel, an almost-ambient piece very different from what we've come to expect of them, is also extremely fine.

9. Robert Wyatt - 'Old Europe'/'Tom Hay's Fox' (from Cuckooland (Domino))

The first taste of Robert Wyatt I ever heard was on a Rykodisc sampler free with a magazine when this album was first released - the relatively sedate and straightforward (in surface at least) 'Lullaby For Hamza'. Of course, relistening it becomes more obvious just how much darkness lurks the surface of mere melancholy, the horror intensified by being backgrounded; in that sense, it was a kind of prequel to Comicopera's Otto Dix diptych, 'A Beautiful War' and 'Out of the Blue'. After the austerity of the 'truth-telling' records of the 80s, the lush thickets of horns and woodwinds, shuffling through their usual elegant two-steps, were rather comforting by comparison. Indeed, the second track from Cuckooland is all about that sense of comfort: the mid-century black-and-white Paris of be-bop, Gauloises, "Juliette and Miles", "the strains of a ghost saxophone" - the exoticism of a world existing in photographs and imported records. But also a world now consigned to memory, the mood indigo of regret and remembrance - "I'll be dreaming again/Always dreams of yesterdays" - for a man stranded in a present dominated by the Iraq War. Over as languid a shuffle of brushed snares and piano as one can get without their being actually horizontal, Gilad Atzmon's tenor doodles verging-on-cheesy licks. Wyatt is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a crooner in the classic mould, his voice too flattened and attenuated for even the role of the smoky-voiced older gent, but that's the point: voice doubled, he sounds like a half-heard record hissing in the corner of the room, his luxuriant nostalgia tinged by doubt, by the present darkening the corners, as his cornet and Atzmon's saxes engage in an ever more frenzied dance. A darkness that slips into full view just afterwards: 'Tom Hay's Fox' opening with piano that seems to resonate from the bottom of a well, a whoosh of forlorn synths, and, eventually, Wyatt's chilling, exhausted mutter, a character escaped from Beckett's Endgame. "The alley's never been blinder. What light there is, is too diffused to indicate any direction." Old Europe may be a bone-heap, but at least represents a semblance of humanity (as Marcello Carlin noted at the time, France's refusal to participate in the Iraq War seems to have been in the back of Wyatt's mind), a world, in his memory, undarkened by the dust of bombed houses. A world in which we may still find "the ghost of two people in love".

10. Wham! - 'Last Christmas' (from If You Were There... The Best of Wham! (Epic))

The winter nights seem to recede, one by one, back into eternity. The oversized jackets, the red hat, closer to a tea-cosy, pulled down over ears too big for the head, hands red and aching as soon as you hit warmth. The suburb lying still, frost building up on the car like a horn skin. In the back garden, the pond a white sheet, fish translucent, suspended. When I came back to university after the Christmas holidays last year, every body of standing water was locked in place, white and solid (traffic cones and shopping trolleys, detritus from student hijinks, stuck in the sheet, snow piling around them). I had been glad to see the back of 2008: an anti-climax of a year, in which I'd been reduced from a responsible adult to a barely-functioning recluse - thwarted, frozen by frustration, and now returned to "this inanimate cold world." One wonders, still, whether there was any world waiting beyond those frozen moments - whether the promised thawing, the green of spring was not, in the end, the spectre of an addled brain, there and gone again.

I remember nothing of the Christmas number ones of my childhood. The only records my parents owned were tapes in a box, bought in their younger days; their choice of local radio station meant the same bouquet of (semi-)oldies in constant circulation, the debris of the recent past, back before it came into its hipster-nostalgia cache: the cheesier end of disco, novelty pop (Renee and Renato, Xmas no. 1 1982), The Human League, Kylie, Bananarama, Soft Cell, Madness, Spandau Ballet. Almost nothing from the latter half of the decade slipped in. My mother was, in particular, a massive fan of Wham! and George Michael - and so, every year, there was this: the half-cheery nodding-dog synth-riff, the snow-cushioned drum-machine, the cheddar-whiff of chimes on the chorus, George Michael straying, as usual, nearly the wrong side of 'operatic'. When it was first released, my parents - married at about the age I am now - were still in the better half of their 20s, living in a town they'd only known, from their tiny village, as the weekend destination for thrills. I was four years away, not even a twinkle in the eye. I can see what attracted them: Wham! had been, since their first single, 'Young Guns (Go For It!)', the half-unwitting spokesmen for yuppie-culture - bright, brimming, a choreographed advertisement for get-on-yr-bike positivity. (Think of all those exclamation marks!) 'Hotel Tropicana', flooding a wholly ersatz brightness and material excess into the charts of the Thatcherite deep winter, foreshadowed the polyester suits-and-cocaine City culture that followed the stock market boom. And, playing the Typical Pop Band - and if there ever was a pop band who could claim to be typical, it was Wham! - there was the Christmas Single. I can almost picture my parents - young, working-class, aspirational - slow-dancing to it in their poky flat in the glow of their undersized tree.

There's a tearing bittersweetness to the narrative, even down to the video: the fit of passion, in the close warmth of the ski lodge and the shortness of the season, sundered "the very next day". And now, the two of them trapped again - proximity, the possible spark of contact, only heightening the fact of distance: "I'm hiding from you/And your soul of ice". And, underpinning it all, the knowledge that the heart deceiveth above all things: "Now I know/What a fool I've been/But if you kiss me now/I know you'll fool me again". Almost blatantly Petrarchan in its fire-and-ice tropes, its twisted contradiction, it emerges in spite of itself as a map of damage done by desire, by lost opportunity: "A man under cover, but you tore me apart". Christmas comes only once each year: we can count each step towards the grave in Yuletides, each one slipping visibly by. Total entropy - the world's energy dwindles to nothing: we're two years and a long way from the hopes of New Pop. 'Last Christmas' came second in the Christmas 1984 charts to the first Band Aid single, the solidification of spectacular power that would culminate in the vast non-event of Live Aid; one can almost hear, in the glossy hiss of the synths, the world ossifying - as striking miners huddled around braziers, houses frozen for lack of the very thing they hauled from the ground. How many radios in pit villages, steel towns, dead blots on a ravaged landscape, were playing this?

I watch the video again. Outside, a slate-grey sky unleashes rain. The reported snow coating the south-east has avoided Bournemouth, where, my sister in Switzerland and my alleged friends here refusing to answer my emails, I'll be spending Christmas with my parents. I'll also be spending it mostly drunk, probably. I can't help thinking of that unintended stolen glance next to the tree, the careless whisper of that verse: the look at the crowded dinner-table, the loss regretted before it even came to be, the future, in scenes that might or might not be fantasy towards the end, that never was, or will be. Not this year, nor last year. Next year, perhaps. For now, we listen.

Ten Songs 6

2009-11-20T00:30:00.000-08:00

1. Lord Beginner - 'Mix Up Matrimony' (from London Is The Place For Me: Trinidadian Calypso in London, 1950-1956 (Honest Jons))

With the Windrush came joy, flooding the veins of an England dried-out and bomb-dusty, as the black-and-white photos accompanying this magnificent compilation attest, singers like Lord Kitchener, Young Tiger and, here, Lord Beginner, their dapper threads and nonchalant grins a-swim in an ocean of greyness. A before-the-fact spit in the face of the Enoch Powells of this world, this cheeky 78 from 1952 sees and embraces the new state of affairs, Beginner with a vocal so confident it should leaning on a bar, nursing a rum and coke, over a tangy swing of a rhythm: "Mixed marriage is the fashion, and the world is saying so/Lovers choose a partner of every kind that they know". He's not above a good dirty joke, as the piano rises (!) and taps all over the chorus: "The organs are always playing/And the preachers are saying:/Let's operate and amalgamate". (In this it presages other fruitful infusions over the next four decades: the Brotherhood of Breath, dancehall, London Posse and Brit-hop, garage. The future, in which "racial segregation go to hell", wouldn't come, but, in these grooves, we get the infusion all the best pop donates. "Life is short, so we mean to embrace".

2. Max Roach - 'Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace' (from We Insist! Freedom Now Suite (Candid))

1960, and it's all breaking apart: anti-colonialism in African countries is succeeding, the conservative consensus is breaking down in America, and the civil rights movement is in full swing. On the front cover, beneath a banner headline, Max and two of his sidemen are being reluctantly served at the bar by a man whose white soda-fountain uniform pins him in the 1950s they, in their eminently sharp suits, are leaving behind. Their look at the camera is one of defiant insouciance: "And what do you want?" Well? Sandwiched between the tense jubilation of 'Freedom Day' and 'All Africa's incantatory celebration of black independence, this 'Triptych' squashes its sentiments into scat from Abbey Lincoln that anticipates the glass-shattering psychic torture of Patty Waters' version of 'Black Is The Colour Of My True Love's Hair'. Over the low, sputtering rumble of Roach's drums, she keens, pressing forward as if just trying to progress in the face of overwhelming odds, to assert the presence the voice most clearly indicates - until we're subjected to about thirty seconds of screams so visceral you can feel the straining ache of the vocal chords, the lungs creasing and almost collapsing, life expended - the whole blood-in-mouth history welling up behind her, imprinted on the breath. And all this time, Roach's drums are going Napalm Death, cymbal spray flaying the skin just as horrifically. 'Peace' comes as suddenly as 'Protest' began, less suggestive of its own name, than of exhaustion, the scraped-bare tabula rasa for something else - hope never being an easy thing.

3. Andrew Paine/Richard Youngs - 'English Channel' (from English Channel (Sonic Oyster))

Picked up at the Colour Out of Space weekend, this 27-minute live improv piece is probably the quietest and most spooky of the various Paine/Youngs duo albums, at the polar opposite to the prog homages of their Ilk project and the likes of Earth Rod. Even during the opening minutes, when the two are simply rustling and rattling bells and other objects, interspersed with low whispers of flute (shakuhachi? but that's rather higher...) and occasionally the two voices rising in wordless exhalation - Youngs' copper-tawny strain against Paine's rather rougher burr - one imagines ghost-tones - as if from a half-heard record playing somewhere in the dark off-stage - floating around the main action. The sparseness and relative simplicity of the improvisation - both may be doing funny things with their mouths, but let's be honest, neither of these guys are Derek Bailey - is both part of its charm, and a counter-tactic: like a carpet sagging under the weight of a bowling ball, the sense of depth increases around these details by virtue of their very nakedness. And there always seems to be more sound than two men can reasonably make at once without amplification. From the interlacing of these small-instrumental textures, flattened out into quivering planes and small wells of colour, it builds up an almost oppressive atmosphere, the ear on the watch for every little tingle of sound. We hear.

4. Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band - 'Sunshowers' / Machine - 'There But For The Grace of God Go I (12" version)' (from Going Places: The August Darnell Years 1976-1983 (Strut))

The argument that New Pop was in some sense a reactionary backlash against the true forward drive of post-punk always runs up against certain problems: the records. ABC's The Look of Lovein the UK - the reconstitution of the joy of pop at its most 60s white-hot (with Brechtian intertitles to cover its back); Kid Creole & The Coconuts' Tropical Gangsters in New York - the spiritual successor to Remain In Light's reconnection with love. And whilst the scorched-earth negation of No Wave is all well and good - no problems about post-modernist recapitulation or complexity - it isn't all that conducive to the business of living. Which is something some of us are, at present, sunk in. Therefore, looking back to Year Zero 1976: the rainsong and ticking metal percussion of 'Sunshower', uncannily African (or Caribbean) guitars and the blossoming expansion of the voices layering up on each other. Every touch of brightness is added: aching violin, vibraphone dotting the verses, piano on the come-up, the handclaps that burst in like tropical birds out of the bush, the way the voices scale back to the child's chorus taking up the same refrain. "Sunshower's just a sign of the power/Of loving you, oh baby". Three years later, and Darnell is at the beating heart of a disco scene that had, at least within the prescribed geography, scrambled and dissolved the social boundaries of late 70s America; Machine's 'There But For The Grace of God Go I' obviously belongs to the New York of Larry Levan, Arthur Russell and Donna Summer (along with her synth-svengali, Moroder), straddling the line between disco and the nascent electro sound, and pointing, in its hammering piano line, quasi-gospel vocals and propulsive rhythm, towards house. The chorus, a firecracker-soaring towards the stars, is the equal of that of Arthur Russell's 'In The Light of the Miracle' in transcendent joy. Its kitchen-sink tale of escape to, and away from, the suburbs, of the corrupting influence of rock 'n' roll, kicks up against the wedding-cake-thick intoxication of the guitars and synths scribbling all over its grooves. The narrator's acknowledgement that this might have been a self-portrait ("There but for the grace of God go I") undercuts the morality-tale, admits that a world "with no blacks, no Jews and no gays" would, in fact, just be a world without life. A world without this.

5. The Knife - 'We Share Our Mother's Health (Radio Slave's Secret Base Remix)' (from 'We Share Our Mother's Health' 12" (Rabid/Brille))

I'm half-ashamed to admit I'm playing catch-up. Having no real interest in the 'end-of-the-decade' nonsense retrospect-fest, I thought I could easily escape having to spend scribbling and discarding lists on the corner of newspapers and down lecture note margins. I'm a compulsive list-writer (yes, cliché, but what can you do?), but the idea of ranking, of being arrogant enough to declare that, out of all the hundreds of thousands of albums released over the last ten years, these ones are the absolute best (and no disagreement) - that I find deeply disagreeable. At the very least, you would think I'd have to have been buying records for a decade in order to evaluate a decade's contents - the last time I estimated it, I thought my first record came into my hands in 2004. But: a) I was sucked into compiling a list for the university newspaper, and b) it turns out I've actually been buying music for 8 years. Hence: no excuses, and listening back to try and figure out whether there was actually anything worth keeping released this decade. Tentative answer (contra other positions) = yes. (Completely instinctual, irrational, unargued, irrigorous, uninformed, warped by optimism. But, whatevs.) For example, this. One of the hardest tracks on the album, a hammering piece of neo-brutalist electro in the midst of a windswept desolation, its synths prickling like hydrochloric acid on the skin, the sci-fi darkness of the voices warped further by the distortion that makes them sound as if resounding from the depths of a digital wood. Take this harrowing oddness, and subject it to almost total fragmentation, the up-tempo beat the only thing holding it close to the fabric of the original, a plateau of cold, blank, abstracted paranoia such as has hardly been heard since Ricardo Villalobos' Shackleton remix a couple of years ago.

6. Kanye West (feat. The Game) - 'Crack Music' (from Late Registration (Roc-A-Fella))

About the only positive memory I have of the 6th form Xmas Ball, roughly 3 years ago, consists of my dancing to 'Gold Digger'. I've still no idea how I neglected to hear any of the rest of the album at the time, given Kanye's ubiquity, although the black depressive cloud that hangs over that period might have something to do with it. In any case, I doubt that I'd have known what to think about this - I still find middle-class rappers with perfectly ample record sales discussing their careers as crack dealers faintly amusing, although the records/rock analogy is drawn explicitly here (and recapitulated by Jay-Z later in 'Diamonds From Sierra Leone' - "I sold kiloes of coke, so I suppose I can sell CDs./I'm not a businessman/I'm a business, maaaan"). Over bare-bone snares worthy of J. Dilla, gospel-fragments (see RZA's production for Ghostface Killah's 'Black Jesus') and synth-squiggles somewhere between trumpet and grime strings draws links between the wars in Iraq ("George Bush got the answers") and on drugs, the synths wavering and spilling into a sour, paranoid hornet buzz in the background. Kanye and The Game's tone hovers between confident 'we-made-it' aggression and regret that the victory at living should come at so high a price: "Give us this day our daily bread/Give us these days and take our daily bread".

7. Elvis Costello and the Attractions - 'I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down' (from Get Happy!! (F-Beat))

Yeah, this guy again - same album, another soul cover, amped up to the usual amphetamined tempo. I'm really not so sure why Simon Reynolds dislikes it, but it may well be that I'm easily pleased. Or it may be the usual self-pity (both mine and Declan's) leaching out again: "I'm a man who's been hurt a little too much/And I've tasted the bitterness of my own tears/Sadness is all my lonely heart can feel". (Although I keep hearing that last line as "silliness...." Slurred Irish accent/self-reflexivity - who can tell the difference?) In the corner for the defence is also the video, featuring Elvis and the boys jigging awkwardly in some strange Mediterranean setting, as if fighting off the joy the track's groove brings, up against the belted-out lyrics, eminently suitable for maudlin bawling, once you've worked them out from Declan's slur: "Simple though love is/Still it confused me/Why I'm not loved the way I should be... I've roomed with fear/I've dealt with despair". (It is, in fact, a remarkable doppelganger to my own drunken dancing - I've even been told I remind people of Costello. This can only end badly...)

8. The Advisory Circle - 'A Clear Yarn Warning' (from Other Circles (Ghost Box))

An eerie audio drama whose power proceeds from dislocation, the cobwebs hang between the edges of the razor-edit. "Now gentlemen, a telephone call is enough. Thanks for listening."

9. Ghostface Killah - 'Camay' (from Ironman (Razor Sharp))

Ironman could well be The RZA's peak as a producer, not least for the consummate skill with which he utilises the sample-as-alien-artefact. On 'Black Jesus' and 'Motherless Child', black voice (fragments of soul paroxysms and humming, and a gospel choir, respectively) is disassembled by non-synchronous looping, chopmarks and vinyl crackle marking it out as the product of a different world - but a world whose distance from the one of crack-dealing, shootings and "plucking roaches out the cereal box" that Ghost and Rae inhabited is poignant in its shortness, the fragile dignity of the old African-American communities curdled into the guilty confidence of the prodigal son. The entire album is replete with such tea-spitting moments, but 'Camay' is the one I keep returning to at the moment - the restaurant smoke-haze of bass, sparse shaker and piano randomly plopping like raindrops (the paranoid pianos of so many of RZA's productions returned to the cocktail lounge), and, above all, the Percy Sledge sample, interrupting himself, voice ramming up against voice, on the chorus. Sliding between the intimate boisterousness of Ghost and Cappadonna's entreaties, the subconscious slipping through, a tender falsetto thinned to a ghost from the back the brain: "Love was never going to say/Goodbye/Just another helpless fool in love is what I am". We feel the intoxication, and know that's all we, too, are.

10. Marnie Stern - 'Don't Stop Believin' (Myspace demo)

There's a couple of facebook groups circulating in response to the X-Factor cover of Journey's 'Don't Stop Believin', currently planned to be slotted into the top of the Christmas charts - one to get Rage Against The Machine's 'Killing In The Name' to Number 1, and another to get the original of the song to the same position. Both are idiotic, based as they are on rockist notions that music played by 'real bands' (generally of white men) is somehow a rebuttal of top-down capitalist monoculture, an 'authentic' response to Simon Cowell's cultural gerrymandering. We should keep in mind that, as Greil Marcus' frequent scorn for Journey throughout In The Fascist Bathroom makes clear, the kind of bovine rock they represent was, until recently, in exactly the same position of dominance. And, as any hip-hop fan can tell you, it's all product, baby. Marnie Stern in fact constructed a better response, ahead of time, posting this demo cover on her myspace earlier in the year. Her deconstructed Van Halen storms of finger-tapping almost become Summer/Moroder synth arpeggios, tipping into ragged distortion before the familiar drums and bass melody pull us back to the song as we know it. Memory does the rest: the guitar flourishes that arrive a minute into the original are multiplied across the song's body, the lighters-aloft step-up of the refrain imported to the whole thing, reconstituting it as a fulfilment of the song-as-ideal, the potentiality the original had as a pop fragment - an acceleration into song. "yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

Ten Songs 5

2009-11-18T14:49:00.000-08:00

The recent transmission interrupt has been precipitated by moving back to university, with the subsequent time-drain of having to, y'know, go to seminars and such. That and trying to spend as much time as possible working on what I consider worthwhile projects, on which this blog is a millstone-round-the-neck-shaped time-drain. Moreover, listening to music has become increasingly unrewarding: I've had, for the last few weeks, little real desire to listen to music, except to ward off silence whilst working. Even the most serotonin-charged pop makes little dent in the pretty much constant low-level anxiety, anger and melancholy that makes up my one default mood. For the moment then, expect posting to be decidedly intermittent; 'Ten Songs' will remain a regular feature, but only fortnightly, weekly posting being simply unfeasible.

1. Anne Briggs - 'Lowlands' (from A Collection (Topic))

Nothing but a voice. The debate about the framing of folk-music in the 1950s-60s, in which the likes of Pete Seeger claimed that the guitar (esp. not - heavens forbid - the electric!) was a new-fangled imposition on the untainted voice of das Volk, missed the crucial point. The strangeness of the a capella recordings that make up the majority of this compilation of Briggs' records for Topic is that they sound as if issuing from no cultural origin, the breath of a single human body articulating plaintively phrased dramas of bone, blood and betrayal - an inheritance that hits us with unfamiliar familiarity of the unheimlich. The song itself crystallises something at once inexplicable and ineradicable, its images lingering on the mind's eye like a half-developed photograph: it recounts a dream in which the narrator sees her lover, drowned overseas, emerging to sight, "green and wet, with weeds so cold"; as each syllable emerges, in a voice as pure, silvery and textured as birch-bark, locked into a repeating trickle of sound, peaking on each cycle through the chorus, it seems closest to the hopeless ebb and wash of the sea. It pulls us back.

2. Evangelista - 'You Are A Jaguar' (from Prince of Truth (Constellation))

I've got a review of the whole album in the university newspaper this week, but this deserves attention on its own - the noise-lashed vortex at its centre, a boiling meeting of angular vectors. The record was constructed using Pro-Tools after sessions during which Carla Bozulich was mostly laid up with pneumonia, creating, in this case, a collage of explosive drums from Xiu Xiu's Ches Smith, Nels Cline lending the same noise kick he added to Wilco's last few records (and then some), and Bozulich auto-combusting in the middle, dipping from strangled whispers to the tipping point of a scream. The cover art says most of it: woman, Baphomet, a red landscape out of Graham Sutherland between. Cracking.

3. Otis Redding - 'Try A Little Tenderness' (from The Very Best of... (Elektra))

There are always complications. Following 'Respect' - the most virile and stomping of openers, but inevitably coming across in bad taste, compared to Aretha Franklin's inspired appropriation two years later - is this most ambivalent and low-key of numbers, a song that hardly even be said to peak when it does, opening with woozy horns that cede to almost nothing, haunted by Al Jackson Jr.'s rimshots, and flutters of organ, guitar and sax like the brushings of a moth-wing. The field is left open for a voice broken and resigned, but tweaking each thought into an upward flight as the chorus (which is also barely a chorus at first) hoves into view, the prospect of healing the gap between ourselves - "But when she gets weary/Try a little tenderness" - not even for himself, for whom hope long ago receded, but for all others. As the song builds, the horns punching away beneath the now-thumping drums, he demands we rebuild a life in its integrity of blood and nerve-endings: "Squeeze her/Don't tease her/Never leave her", breaking down into glossolalia. You can hear why it was this song that so deeply connected with the audience at the Monterey Pop festival in '67 - Redding going into strutting paroxysms on stage. "I've got to go, but I don't wanna go". Within months, he would be dead. "The soft words they are spoken so gentle/It makes it easier to bear".

4. Alan Wilkinson/John Edwards/Steve Noble - 'Spellbound' (from Live At Cafe Oto (Bo'Weavil))

The duo of Wilkinson and Noble (Edwards having dropped out due to 'family issues') was one of my highlights of the Colour Out of Space weekend, sending me straight back to the records - no bad thing in this instance, the trio having never put a foot wrong on wax. What they do is, in a sense, completely ordinary - straightahead free jazz powered by the vocabulary of serrated screeches and bang-on-a-can percussion that's belonged to the genre for more than 30 years - but the native, punk-raw excitement they import into the form, the adrenaline delight in forward drive, the perfection with which the parts mesh, the flabless purity and absolute materiality of their sound, makes it absolutely irresistible. The 30-minute-plus main chunk of this live set starts with the buzz-saw of Wilkinson's alto - the sax equivalent to Steve Albini's guitar technique - slashing through the crowd-noise, quickly joined by the sinewy black bedrock of Edwards' bass, Noble's tumble of snare and smashed hi-hat pulling us down into the maelstrom. And although it lacks Wilkinson's decidedly, uh, 'unique' (not really) vocal improvisations, the almost telepathic suppleness with which they collectively stretch and warp the basic material into new shapes, switching one moment from gurgling backdrafts of squeal and shuffling clatter, groaning scrapes of bass, to rocket-propelled flights into the ether, make this a fine contender for my songs of the year. Listen to it burn.

5. The Specials - 'Nite Klub'/'Ghost Town' (from Singles (2-Tone))

Two contrasting notes from the sharp ends of a short career, but both concerned with the same thing. Which is a problem: The Specials are seen not as the white-hot heart of 2-Tone's pop explosion, but as an 'issue band', addressing 'social problems', a case for Arts Council funding. Witness the persistent use of 'Ghost Town' on documentaries about the Brixton riots, as if the band were capable of anything so crudely direct. Raymond Williams' theory about history's presence in texts - that the form and texture of a work is directly related to the historical formations of which it is a part - applies to records too: the very smell and feel of Coventry's first years under Thatcherism pervade the songs. 'Nite Klub' pulses with sick energy, Terry Hall's exaggeratedly flat white-boy vocals straining against the fidelity, the ironically gospel-ish backing chorus and cheap organ driving it on, the opening club chatter ("We got busted!") versioning Roxy Music's 'Remake/Remodel' for less salubrious environs, a hedonism deprived of glamour and the benefits of pleasure: "I can't dance in a club like this/The girls are all slags, and the beer tastes just like piss." 'Ghost Town' is the same dancefloor after the destruction of Coventry's industrial base, dust and shadows filling its seedy corners. The city had been, during the boom years of beat-pop, the country's centre for bicycle and car manufacture - Britain's motown, with The Specials as Coventry's Cybotron. A slowed-down skank emerges from what sounds like police sirens, Jerry Dammers' organ and the horns stalking the beat as Neville Staples' vocal introduces the violence - "Too much fighting on the dancefloor" - that announces the carny screech of the chorus. Hall can briefly remember, to the sound of overbright trumpet - closer to the radiophonic synths that accompanied the "psychedelic daymares of More Specials" (Neil Kulkarni) - the "good old days before the ghost town", before being plunged back into the trauma. The dub echoes that pile up on Rico Rodriguez' trombone solo only add to the sense of being trapped in the spectral after-image of a city, punctuated only by boiling violence - "Why must the youth fight against themselves?" - the wind howling down the streets announcing the police sirens that were even then filling Toxteth and Brixton. The single, its 7" cover adorned with skeletons at desultory leisure, also including 'Why?' and 'Friday Night and Saturday Morning', was the perfect, final expression of a world burnt out into shadows: the total impasse, the dead end, the cycle of traumatic behaviour. There was nowhere to go from here - New Pop, in all its ambivalence, would be just around the corner.

6. Brian Eno - 'King's Lead Hat' (from Before and After Science (Virgin))

One of the strangest points in a career full of anomalies - the only contribution Eno made to the post-punk sound under his own name (as opposed to his production on Bowie's Berlin records, Remain in Light, etc.), and a total contrast to the becalmed mirror-sea plateau of the second side of this record (the last song-based one before the beginning of Eno's Ambient series with Music For Airports). It is, indeed, a tribute to David Byrne's band, and is hence suitably slippery and twitchy: a churn of _ guitars and whipcrack snares girded by queasy, grating synths, random bar-stool piano like a rain of nails from a window. Eno's spluttering, anxious vocals are strange when teamed with the anagrammic wordplay of the lyrics, which so obviously betray their origins in word-games and free-association, an absurdity that seems more than appropriate given the sample of Kurt Schwitters earlier in the album, but also makes for a delightful chorus: "King's lead hat puts the poker in the fire/It will come it will come it will surely come!"

7. Pens - Hey Friend! What You Doing (De Stijl)

The whole of the debut record by this all-girl London trio - 14 songs in 28 minutes - is in fact shorter than the Wilkinson/Edwards/Noble track listed above. This is, lest we forget, A Good Thing - not because it's illegitimate for a song to go over 2 minutes, but because their Huggy Bear-inflected noise-pop becomes so much more awesomely pure and concentrated as a result. De Stijl releases mostly noise records, and you can see why they were involved in releasing this: thuds, rumbles and blasts of shredded guitar whirl in fragments, treble amped to speaker-bleed, behind vocals that recall the young Viv Albertine (in all her glory) shouting down a wind tunnel. I was caught by my neighbours dancing in my front-room bedroom to this record, and remain unrepentant.

8. Yin Carrizo - '20 de Enero en Ocu' (from Panama! 3 (Sound-Way))

Of course, nostalgia reissue culture should = NO, but it's impossible to be mad when the results are just this good. And in any case, it's not as if Panama was ever part of the accepted history of Western music - like Sound-Way's excellent compilations of West African music, this material has the unmistakable scent of freshness and lurid novelty, steamy funk bent sideways by the rich seams of native Panamanian music. Although I might have picked any of the 23 tracks on this album (or anything off the previous two volumes), but the cross-cut bounce of tipica percussion, rolling away between madly wailing accordions and the punctuation of Carrizo's hollers on this cumbia piece gets me every time. Like an entire house-party squashed into one closet.

9. Broadcast & The Focus Group - 'The Be Colony' (from ...Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age (Warp))

If it was inevitable - Broadcast's visual identity has been formed by the artwork of Ghost Box's Julian House for years, before the label's founding - there was no way of predicting how excellent this collaboration would turn to be. The 50-minute EP itself is best thought of as a hauntological Donuts, distorted fragments of song reappearing and swirling throughout like the spangle of light through decayed film, but this particular song is the most fully-realised - more purposeful, rich and well-structured than the often somewhat bitty Focus Group albums, devoid of the rawness that arguably robbed Tender Buttons of some of its spooky charge; a structure of samples that seems to swim and melt away as soon as the mind tries to grasp it, the central element of Trish Keenan's voice itself sounding as if extracted from some forgotten library record/folk soundtrack, cycling guitar chords and tootling ancient keyboards working around her refrain: "All circles vanish, all circles vanish..."

10. Elvis Costello and the Attractions - 'Gettin' Mighty Crowded' (b-side to 'High Fidelity' 7" (F-Beat))

One wonders a little about the logic behind this, the most overtly R&B-fuelled period of Costello's career, the attendant album (Get Happy!!!) released a year after referring to The Genius as "a blind old nigger". Like the music, hate the people - hmm. Nonetheless, this cover of Betty Everett's moan of resignation delivers the goods, amphetamine-boosting the tempo to 'Northern soul stomp', Steve Nieve's uncomplicatedly pumping organ and Pete Thomas' drums keeping up the pace, the smell of sweat, spit and sawdust fairly peeling off the multi-throated chorus. One for a wedding disco.

"Robinson told me about his dream"

2009-09-05T14:50:00.000-07:00

So, I watched London again the other day. I had bought a copy because it was pertinent to my current writing project - references to the Robinson films are threaded throughout - and it would be easier than getting it out of the university library every time I needed to check a piece of dialogue, or an image. I first read about London in Iain Sinclair's essay 'Cinema Purgatorio', included in Lights Out For The Territory . Watching it again reminded me, in certain ways, of the experience of watching Bela Tarr's later work, particularly Satantango (although obviously not in terms of length). The rhythms and technique of filming Keiller uses are so utterly alien to the world of Hollywood cinema - and its protrubing bunion, the British film industry - as to be almost incomprehensible at first: the shot is framed, and then the camera lingers, unmoving, for what seems forever; we seem almost to be regressing to the earliest days of cinema, when a camera was simply set up and entire scenes filmed in one static take, or audiences thrilled to simply see street traffic re-presented to them; one has to become slowly acclimatised to this sense of tempo, until, eventually, it feels completely natural. Indeed, there's something of that quality in certain moments - as when, inspecting the bomb damage in the insurance district, one or two of the crowd turn to look at the camera glued to them. The film's framing device performs a strange transformation of the material, of the fabric of everyday life being filmed: the ostensible reality of verité cinema is enlisted in the service of a narrative. It reminds me, in that sense, of Sebald's Austerlitz, or, indeed, Sinclair's own Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, records of fictional events in surroundings that are all too real.

The fact that both Robinson and the narrator are invisible - and, as regards the actual camera watching real people in the street, non-existent (there is no-one stood behind it but Keiller - and that Robinson's 'researches' - first into "the problem of London", then, in Robinson in Space, "the problem of England" - take him further and further into a geography of absences and ghosts - Montaigne, Defoe, Horace Walpole, Poe, Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Apollinaire's sojourns in London - seem significant. Robinson and our narrator are Proustian ghosts at the feast, waspish, melancholy and bickering lovers. Robinson, withdrawn into his flat ("Apart from his academic work, he hardly leaves... except to go to the supermarket"), is an at best reluctant participant in the modern world, disgusted by the rotten stupidity of those who returned the Tories in 1992. "It is difficult to recall the shock", the narrator tells us, "with which we realised our alienation from the events that were unfolding in front of us", as Major waves to the crowds, the environmental noise muted, the whole vulgar scene seeming disconnected, at one remove from the splenetic commentary of the narrator. Indeed, the geography of their drifts - the lines they take, criss-crossing the map of the capital - is illusory, non-existent; the investment we feel in the narrative of their drift, the sequence of sensation and history as they move through each topography and territory, is fictional. London becomes, through Robinson's hyperstitional schemes, a ghost of itself: "London was the first metropolis to disappear."

The fact that London is so concerned not just with architectural space in the accepted sense (of individual buildings), but the overall effect of buildings together, of positioning, spaces - the Richmond Hill fields, Twickenham canalsides, the "packhorse road to Bristol"; later, the Stowe ornamental gardens and St. George's Hill golf-course in Robinson in Space - the whole notion of psychogeography, as experienced by the flaneur, is almost belied by its methodology. The central paradox of London is that of a film so possessed by the act of walking, that never seems to move. Instead of the imposed motion of the tracking shot, or the short take and jump-cut, each shot swims with an external life, the chiaroscuro of people moving around, of the grey depths of Thames water roiling, of light shifting on the mud of the Channelsea river. These instances, these lingering visions of an unstill stillness, seem to multiply as Robinson and the narrator travel up the River Brent, seemingly never getting closer to solving "the problem of London", when everything seems, for a moment to resolve, before Keiller jump-cuts to another movement. They point towards the paradox of Robinson's position: private visions that suggest a shared dreaming, in space (it's unsurprising that Robinson is nostalgic for the age of collectivist architecture, in the form of "Goldfinger's Alexander Fleming house"). He is a recluse who declares himself "an enthusiast for public spaces", who considers a ranting, bowler-hatted banker, "a man after his own heart, a man of the crowd". After shots of public space overtaken by commercialisation and reactionary stupidity (Smith Square and Downing Street after the Major victory, the Trooping of the Colour in the "acres of space in the centre of the city" occupied by the monarchy, the Lord Mayor's show, the roadside McDonalds with the huge inflatable Ronald on the roof), there is the bonfire in Kennington Park, the flames framing the silhouettes of people conversing, laughing, strings rising on the soundtrack, a public space, like the Notting Hill carnival or Brixton market or Southall earlier in the film, suddenly flickering with an egalitarian life - the free and easy metropolitan life "enjoyed by the peoples of the Continent". It's these moments, more than the desolation, the presence of the past in the film, that are most poignant. In that sense, it is a film about the revolutionary impulse, the impossible (and hence wholly necessary) hopes it embodies, in recession; Robinson's position could be summarised by a variation on Marx's aphorism: I am no-one and I should be everyone.

The complaint about the camera's lack of movement recalls Sheila Rowbotham's recent remarks on Comrades, which I also saw last week. But, in saying that Douglas' compositions cannot " capture the radical turbulence of a trade unionism that reached out not only to the skilled but to the unskilled, women and children alike", she misses the point: the poignancy, the pain of these men's lives, and the collective totality of the labour movement, resides in the interstices between these pictures that linger in the mind like an image on silver bromide paper, that accumulate in layers. "Robinson believed that, if he looked at it long enough, he could cause the surface of the city to reveal to him the molecular basis of historical events, and in this way he hoped to see into the future." Psychogeographic exploration is an attempt to alter the fabric of reality, of the history that brought us to where we are now - hence Robinson's efforts to construct an alternate history "in which the 19th century never happened"; it is an act of vision that is also an act of revolution. Robinson and the narrator, consigned to chasing spectres, hemmed in by a built environment squashing them out, cannot manage it any longer; but, in that impulse, the potentiality of the creation of another world remains.

Ten Songs No. 4

2009-08-28T13:23:00.000-07:00

1. Juice Aleem - 'KunteKinteTarrDiss' (from Jerusalaam Come)

After finishing Kodwo Eshun's More Brilliant Than The Sun, this comes as a pleasant surprise: emerging from Birmingham, from his own world and environment and networks, with an aesthetic already iron-forged, another seismic triumph for Big Dada in the British hip-hop stakes. The vein of righteous anger that runs through so many of these songs, like 'BRIGHTON' through a stick of seaside rock, reaches its apogee on this: telescoping together the astral-Afro futurism of Sun Ra and the justified vitreol of the Rastafari end of the Jamaican inheritance, here he is a black Dr. Who, "straight back from the future, back from the past", landed in Britain '09, the scene set by the fragments of dubbed rude-boy vocals and white 50s voices straight out of the first hip-hop productions (The Hellers' Life Story sampled on 'Adventures on the Wheels of Steel'), the spooked edge of a sound from a time out of joint. With judicious, relentless pacing, he lashes with verbal fire all those prepared to lose their self-respect and forget their culture - "Since when the fuck was it cool to be a rent boy?!" - the Jamaican inflection rising in his voice as if it were a guilty reminder of their origins, vocodered on the choruses into the electro Voice of Doom. Social justice is theological justice is sonic justice: the white hegemony of history ("Show me yr white Jesus, make me take off the safety") is reverse-engineered, the illusory pseudo-world of capital disappeared, the people called to regain the "New Jerusalem mothership connection". The glad day is always heard ahead of time.

2. Sa-Ra Creative Partners - 'Traffika' (from Nuclear Evolution: The Age of Love)

It gets impossible to tell whether or not this is cynical, celebrating the decadence of typical gangsta-made-good narrative ("Cocaine is running through yr brain, in New York city!"), or condemnatory, setting the sins of drug-running against the proferred escape of cosmic Afro-futurism, so animated is it by the electro-narcotic power of its production. It's probably the most exuberant song on this 2-disk set, aside possibly from 'Cosmic Ball', abetted for nearly its entire length by the Gary Bartz Quartet, liquidised and etherised with omnipresent synthetics; they've certainly no objections to narcotics, but perhaps get their kicks from elsewhere.

Edit: oh fuck it. I've nothing useful to say about this. I just like it, that's all.

3. Can - 'Yoo Doo Right' (from Monster Movie)

Do I have to write about this one? It's just that I have nothing especially clever to say about it. You sure? Alright, fine. It sees the band at its most deceptively simple: a caveman-primitive groove, as if the rhythm section of Jaki Liebezeit and Holger Czukay were playing at 33rpm to the rest of the band's 45, but one that can suddenly mutate or drop out altogether, its combination of perfect mindlessness and intelligent subtlety presaging techno. It can keep going, you imagine, forever, and keep surprising and entrancing you for that long as well, always evading critical analysis. Malcolm Mooney's vocals - what Frances Morgan calls his "Gnostic gospel" - are just as brilliantly meaningless: "Drum beat twenty-four hours a day"; Michael Karoli's guitar moves, seemingly without warning, from rhythmic support to grainy, technicolor abstract noise. Sublime.

4. Diana Ross & The Supremes - 'Stop! In The Name of Love' (from Motown Forever)

Kodwo Eshun's wrong: it's not merely the case that the mnemonic of the sample makes the rest of the original track from which it was strip-mined boring. Admittedly, the chorus of this song, which I first heard as part of Steinski and Double Dee's 'Lesson No. 1 - The Payoff Mix', is a punctum of stunning proportions - but that's not to denigrate the totality of the song, which reprensents one of the most finely honed products of arguably the greatest pop machine of the 20th century. The surprisingly middling tempo, the rhythm converted further into timbre by dots of glockenspiel and tambourine replacing the snare, the high organ droning away underneath like a half-heard cry, and the breath-machine of vocals: the tinge of vulnerability in "Haven't I been good to you", echoed in the voice of a conscience knowing it won't be heard - "Think it o-o-ver". And then, surging into desperation on the chorus, hands out, the organ jumping, the nagging mnemonic chattering away in the background like the voice of guilt - "Baby baby baby" - and the constant dilemma of the economy of desire: "But any time that we are together/I'm so afraid of losing you forever". There is no escape.

5. Electrelane - 'I've Been Your Fan Since Yesterday' (from home-made compilation/Singles, B-Sides & Live)

For the smell of salt air, and everything else left behind.

6. Charles Mingus - 'Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting' (from Mingus In Antibes)

One of my finest finds, as far as secondhand CDs go: picked up at Birmingham's The Diskery, a bootleg version of this astonishingly fine set from possibly the best of Mingus' 60s line-ups, including both sure-touch drummer Dannie Richmond (whom Mingus famously bullied and bent into the role) and Eric Dolphy on alto sax alongside Booker Ervin. I first heard of this through, as always, Marcello Carlin (scroll down to entry for June 17, 2004), and Dolphy's solo on here - preceded by Mingus' exhortation "Talk about it Eric!" - is as brilliant as it seems. Curson and Ervin aren't quite as bad as Marcello makes out - the former's hummingbird trumpet flurries are really rather nice - but Dolphy, in the midst of an already loose structure held together by the rhythm section, getting increasingly agitated and aggressive as it goes on, knocks them into an amorphous cocked hat, the other horns scaling riffs in the background as he stabs the air with lusty honks and screeches, a vertiginous explosion that eventually bursts out of its context, previewing the kind of full-register runs and abstract clucking noises that Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders will be making in 5 years' time. Mingus's shouts of "Woo!" as he enters the final moments, before dropping into Richmond's brief solo, are wholly justified. That, at about 10 minutes in, it suddenly dissolves into a cacophony of falling screeches, only to come back together into the central riff, is some testament not only to Mingus's tight organisation, but the stunning thinking of these players.

7. Golden Oaks Three Billion - 'Tequila Sunscraper' (from 'Weekend Picnic' CD-R)

I happened to see these gentlemen - a trio of Jefferson Starship, from local noise wrecking-crew Sunshine Republic, Alan James Read, boss of noise label Krayon Recordings, and bass clarinettist Jerome Richards - play an impromptu basement set a short while back, which ended with the latter smashing his instrument for no apparent reason. That performance was considerably harsher than this: a near-narcotic drift through the same warm, supernaturally bright territory as Emeralds, or Birchville Cat Motel's Gunpowder Temple of Heaven, dusted with snaky, insinuating trails of clarinet. Lovely.

8. Blackpepper - 'Vqarekk' (from 'Vqarekk / Colour/Color' 7")

It's excellent to see DirtyDemos so productive again, and nice to see new product from Jason Kerley, whose Blackpepper alias has so far had so little in the way of recorded evidence. This, the a-side from the new 7-inch, is a lithe and heady piece of decidedly non-pomo jungle that harks back to the rave-stabs and rhythmic convolutions of the first Rufige Kru 12"s, before mutating into first something briefly resembling LTJ Bukem, then equally briefly one of the more 8-bit-infected wonky artists. In short: CHOON.

9. Xela - 'In Misericordia' (from In Bocca Al Lupo)/Philip Jeck - 'Below' (from Stoke)

Horror music: the really malevolent thing is not what is there, but what isn't. 'In Misericordia', from one of last year's most criminally underrated albums (alongside Burial Hex's similarly spooky Initiations) is the calm before the storm of closer 'Beatae Immortalitatis', whose tearing noise and explosive percussion are foreshadowed by the soundcloud that smothers this song, manifesting the low-level unease that dominates the album, buzzing like a hornet swarm enclosing your head. 'Below' translates the dark, ancient grain of In Bocca Al Lupo into mechanical parataxis: the Freudian slip in the turntable, the fatal compulsion-repetition, the crackle and drag of memory painfully audible in the static, the increasing degradation of the sitar sample at its centre, disrupted by what sounds like automated scratching.

10. Skullflower - 'Drenched In Moonsblood (Waxing Gibbous)' (from Malediction)

The seventh trumpet
sounding the depths of black fog.
(Not a "prose poem".)

What Keeps Mankind Alive

2009-08-23T14:39:00.000-07:00

"I am left alone
With no echoes to the amen
I dreamed of. I am saved by music
From the emptiness of this place
Of despair. As the melody rises
From nothing, their mouths take up the tune,
And the roof listens. I call on God
In the after silence".
-R.S. Thomas, 'Service'

Ten Songs No. 3

2009-08-21T15:59:00.000-07:00

In case you haven't guessed by now, this is a weekly feature. A kind of personal Top 10 for the week, although the ranking doesn't necessarily imply relative value judgements.

1. Sunn 0))) - 'Alice' (from Monoliths And Dimensions)

"A gentle collapsing" - Talking Heads, 'The Overload'

2. Robyn - 'With Every Heartbeat' (live at The Wiltern, Los Angeles, from Robyn Live In LA)

Before you ask: yes, I am the archetypal sad bachelor - threadbare dressing gown, glass of whisky, thick glasses, the cat sleeping on yesterday's newspaper beside me, getting vicarious pleasure out of the young, successful and glamourous, whilst pretending to be a pop-culture connoiseur. So, on Thursday evening I was watching this live recording of Robyn on VH1. Her live set-up was excellent: basically The Moritz von Oswald Trio, but better, her tiny frame squashed into a black bodysuit beneath a black cloak, set against that slash of peroxide hair, kohl-black eyes set in delicate Swedish skin (OK, that just sounds creepy...) And this was the penultimate song before the encore. And and and and... and I maintain that this song is to the latter half of the 00s what 'Can't Get You Out of My Head' is to the first half. It may well be what this decade is remembered for. She's stood at the mike, centre-stage, and that kick pattern starts, and after a minute, two minutes maybe, the arpeggios start layering. The syllables, breath and colour plastered between the breaks in the beats, an incantation with the twinge of fragility tugging in the vocalese stretchings of each word, that you can see her straining to make ("We can make it bet-ter some tiiiiii-ime", and you know that time will never come), its humanity articulated in the first-love thud of synthetic percussion (one of her besuited backers came up behind her and started playing what may as well have been Linn syn-drums, bringing to mind some other culprits we know). And then, the moment that everything drops out, and the clear sky fills with the technicolour contrails of disco-strings, shamelessly and acrobatically dipping and swelling, and the vocal comes back between showers of synth: "And - it - hurts - with - ev-e-ry - heart-beat", Robyn hands-on-chest pumping in time as the kick comes back in, and and and and and and. And life, for 5 minutes, will never cease, and the light will never go out.

3. Mike Westbrook Concert Band - 'Marching Song' (from Marching Song Vol. 1 & 2)

You don't need me to tell you.

4. Beyonce - 'Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)' (from I Am... Sasha Fierce)

This is what I miss out on by not listening to the radio. More fool me. Talk about auto-theorising pop: the video shows Ms. Knowles engaging in dance-moves more cyborgian, more body-negating, than anyone since Grace Jones; the bizarre electronic gauntlet-thing she's wearing by the end of it - which, according to Zone Styx Travelcard is, in a marvellous piece of circuitous (ha!) coincidence, a homage to Michael Jackson before-the-fact - I at first mistook as a robot arm. (The video for the last single, 'Sweet Dreams', pulls in (unconscious?) references to Metropolis and Helmut Newton. I mean, really...) Rather like the last 50 Cent song I heard (yes, I am that far behind things), the production is light year's ahead of the sentiment (I'm unsurprised to find that the same team was responsible for Rihanna's 'Umbrella'): electro's arcade-game myth-science telescoped into the 21C., a hail of bleeps over relentlessly staccato clicks, the chorus joined by what sounds like a cyborg crunking. Needless to say, I've got it on repeat right this second.

5. Gowns - 'Mercy Springs' (from Red State)

After being reminded by a facebook status by F. the other day, I listened to Red State on the way to Brownsea Island. It was chilly as we started crossing Poole Harbour, but the sun picked up as we came in. There were cormorants perched on harbour markers and the rocks by the east end of the island, spreading their wings to look like revenants from prehistory. And, long after the blurred illumination of 'White Like Heaven', this springs into ear-view with pitch-black oscillator rumbles and the half-heard voices for four minutes. The bad-trip atmosphere turns deadly, slashing guitar and drums exploding from the swamp, ending with a coda of electromagnetic ghost-voices that sound like a premature end: "Take all shine out of me".

6. The xx - 'Crystallised' (from xx)

I approach this with caution because, in case you didn't already know, this kind of subtlety often passes me by. Mild dyspraxia (and hence autistic-spectrum status) and years of isolation during that period when you're supposed to, uh, 'grow up' mean that I'm mostly emotionally illiterate when it comes to pop. If it doesn't have loud or weird noises, my attention begins to drift. Hence why I so much admire the likes of Lauren Strain or Petra Davis, who's written on the group, who are able to articulate shades and colour where avant-blockheads like me see monolithic black, or whatever. So sue me if the first thing I thought when I heard this was: Young Marble Giants. That is, if they had grown up on post-Timbaland R&B. There's such a quiet pull to the song, even down to the way they use samples of minimal, ticking percussion instead of real drums. As with YMG, it's almost as if they're challenging us to think them dull - slightly more self-conscious than YMG's quality of sounding like an overheard private conversation; there's a slithering obliquity to it that suggests emotional states more complex, more interstitial than their voices suggest, complicated again by the understated confidence of the backing, its layers perfectly pleated together - a world where everything hovers on the brink of resolution. "Go-o-o slow."

7. Pulp - 'Babies' (from Intro)

Alternative blogosphere orthodoxy states this is one of the ones you're not supposed to like - too indie-ish, no acid/techno influence (although the bloops dotting the track like paint-flecks on a Jackson Pollock canvas, and the rising white-light synth on the chorus and the ends of the verses owes some allegiance). But I can't say that I care: this is one of those perfect moments of pop alchemy when everything falls into place just so, the push-and-pull of sex so perfectly mapped by Cocker's lyrics (and not just the lyrics, even down to the meaningless "My God!", "Alright!" and "Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah!"), the obsessive interest, the power of teenage carnality balanced against the distance of retrospection (something that will crop up again in 'Disco 2000'), the stench of 70s interiors, the smallness and sordidness of it all against the melodrama of Cocker's delivery (cf. the ice-cold provincial cabaret lothario of 'Razzmatazz'). And all this buttressed by the interlocking architecture of the track, the bass propping up strata of electricity from Candida Doyle's synths (cf. Stereolab's 'Wow and Flutter'), the irresistible pull of that guitar...

8. Wolves In The Throne Room - 'Ahrimanic Trance' (from Black Cascade)

From the Pacific north-west's finest practitioners of ecological black metal, the point where their landslide noise becomes both most punishing and most ghostly. For the first half, the guitars deliver a relentless mid-range scree (they're remarkably robust for black-metallers - no under-nourished Norwegian lo-fi screech for them), Nathan Weaver's contorted screech sounding like a man emptying out his organs. Then, they stop, crack and buckle into a mist-filled ambient interlude, before rudely dropping you into an even more harsh environment. When that in turn tails out into an extended outro of spectral distortion, hi-hats picked out in the fog, closer to the breakdown of Sonic Youth's 'The Sprawl', you know you're in special territory.

9. De La Soul - 'Me Myself and I' (from 3 Feet High and Rising)

The lapses into naivety ('Tread Water', schoolyard tales like 'Jenifa Taught Me') are more than excused by the wonderful concatenations of samples, the bouncing, overbright architectures of the backings, the primal joy in wordplay, the absurdist pleasure of the between-song skits (you can really tell how young they were when this was recorded). Particularly, here, it's the squiggling earworm of a synth and the cut-up 'ahahahahahaaaaa' on the chorus, essentially breeding wonky 20 years before the fact, creating everything gangsta should have been (note the p-funk/Ohio Players quality of the synths, later re-deployed on Dr. Dre's first solo productions), already passing the mid-80s future the mid-90s boom-bap revivalists wanted to preserve.

10. Robert Wyatt - 'N.I.O. (New Information Order)' (from Dondestan (Revisited))

I'm still not sure I agree with Jon Dale about Robert Wyatt's 'solo solo' records. They feel curious in comparison to the group works: more 'serious', slightly austere, in some cases ('Worship') oblique to the point of attention-drift on my part; there's a bare, what-you-see-is-what-you-get quality to them. (Am I wrong in attributing this to the post-punk effect - demystification, the interrogation of the audience-performer, the flat absurdism of Art & Language? It was certainly in the air when Wyatt recorded the singles that made up Nothing Can Stop Us, and the ex-punks recognised Wyatt as one of their own...) Rock Bottom and Shleep - even the at-times-terrifying Comicopera - still feel more comforting, more profound. Nonetheless, there's something very poignant about the jaundiced sarcasm of this song, not least because of the delivery - the electronically-stretched "freeeeeee" in the middle, the sadness of his voice muted from the likes of 'Sea Song', over splashy cymbals and hovering organ, the bass a malevolent presence in the background. This morning, as I was walking by the sea-front, there was a wargames demonstration going on out in Poole Harbour, as part of the Bournemouth airshow, faux-marines skidding around in dinghies, larger ships looming further out, towards the site of the eventual surf-reef. It was perhaps the most absurd thing I've seen all summer, scarily banal. "Save a bomb on Union flags./Privatise/the sea/Privatise/the wind."

Events

2009-08-20T17:49:00.000-07:00

***

Club Anemone presents:

WHALEBONE POLLY
ROZI PLAIN
DIRECTORSOUND
THE POWDERED COWS & THE TOY THROAT ALARM CLOCK

Tuesday 8th September, 7.30-11.00
The IBar, Bournemouth
£5/£3 NUS entry

***

Krayon Recordings presents:

Skitanja
Infinite Light
Serfs
Vanessa Feltch
Awake
Turtledoves

Sunday September 20, doors 6pm
The Winchester, Poole Hill, Bournemouth
£5 entry