Ingram amusingly torn between jealously hoarding his subcultural capital and spilling the beans, but does the right thing. The data will be factored in with the other reports coming in and duly tabulated. One question: just who the hell are Francois Rabbath and Harry Hosono?

Hyperdub agent and CCRU (black) operative Mark Fisher launches a blog. It's called K-Punk and kicks off with a stout defense of “Club Country” against its detractors (Jon Dale, and me, sort of). I do love the tune but even at the time it seemed a bit linear and conventionally single-like coming after “Party Fears Two.” I like Mark’s interpretation of "Club Country" but I always took it as a fairly topical satire/critique of the New Romantics (I think Mackenzie & Rankine actually passed through that world and found it wanting, could be wrong though), this topicality in itself slightly diminishing the song c.f. the timeless mystery of "Party Fears". Lines like “if you stick around, you're sure to be looked down upon” seemed like a jibe at the pseudo-aristocratic poseurs of Blitz and Club For Heroes. Still, Mark’s reading may be the richer one, to see it as applicable to all kinds of self-declared elites, incrowds, and pseudo-nobilities.

In lots of ways Associates were like New Romanticism if it had actually been any good, had lived up to its name: the debts to Bowie and Roxy, the Europeanism, the Teutonicized funk, the androgyny/homoeroticism/male hysteria. (Mind you, there's folks that swear by the second Visage album so maybe I should reconsider that verdict. Anything anointed by Robert "Journeys To Glory Sleevenotes" Elms tends to trigger a knee-jerk spasm of scepticism though--remember the Eighties jazz-revival?).

Scott at Somedisco asked me to elucidate the remark about "A White Car In Germany" doing "for Low/"Heroes" what Isn't Anything/Loveless do for White Light White Heat/Psychocandy". It's an ultracompressed gesture at the idea of works that in strict historical terms are derivative but which actually surpass their predeccesors almost to the point of obliterating them. In other words, the polar opposite of "the pale copy". So "A White Car In Germany" wouldn't exist without Bowie-in-Berlin, but eclipses those records; it's the reverse of dilution, it's distillation/concentration. MBV and Associates both do a simliar kind of thing to their sources, bring out a swoon-swirly delirium that was latent but unrealised. To use Harold "Anxiety of Influence" Bloom lingo, Fourth Drawer/Sulk and Isn’t/Loveless are examples of the successful poem as an "achieved anxiety": after a titanic Oedipal struggle with the ancestor-poet, the influence has been so utterly assimilated and internally alchemised that the poet is able to convince himself (and more crucially, convince everybody else too) that he’s somehow self-begotten, wholly original and ancestor-less. Back in 1982, it never remotely occurred to me that Billy MacKenzie vocally bore any relationship to Bowie; likewise, and weirder still, in 1988, mind and body blown by those two amazing EPs leading up to Isn’t Anything, it seemed to me like My Bloody Valentine were totally self-fathered. Quite a conjuror's trick this, given that only a couple of years earlier I’d actually seen them live, when they were deeply J&MC indebted and seemingly utterly second-rate. (What happened?).

Anyway, a very welcome addition to the blogmos, K-Punk. What with Penman in the fray and in full flow, all we need now is to prod Kodwo Eshun to start one. Petition, anybody? There's a whole bunch of new-ish blogs of note, actually: the self-explanatory (and faintly megalomaniac sounding) World of Stelfox, Nathalie ex-stevienixed’s Parapraxis, the aforementioned and utterly idiosyncratic Somedisco, the Yes-No interlude, Uncarved Chaos who I already linked to over there>>> but the link's fucked, this Howie feller who keeps changing the name of his blog each time, probably a fair few others I'm forgetting.

L'il Kim's new "Elizabeth Taylor as SuperHo" image is a bit disconcerting. Is it just me, or are the track's horn-parps meant to sound like cleavage-induced body-farts?

A swoony celebration of those sumptuous Associates, courtesy of Astronaut's Notepad. I concur with Jon that after the last bars of "18 Carat Love Affair/"Love Hangover", there's nowt worth bothering with, if cruel truth be told. That "A White Car In Germany" is the Zenith (it does for Low/"Heroes" what Isn't Anything/Loveless do for White Light White Heat/Psychocandy). That "Club Country" is not in the same league as the other singles (still love it though). But wot, no mention of "Skipping", definitely in their Top 5 most voluptuously giddy songs? And I can't believe he doesn't care that much for "Q Quarters", the missing link between Cabaret Voltaire's "Your Agent Man" and the Banshees's "Slowdive".

Okay, people, I need your help here. Digging through some old diskettes the other day I stumbled on this, something I wrote for the debut issue of The Lizard (great lost UK music mag of the Nineties etc), a sort of Stocks and Shares Index of Influences for rock bands. This was late 1994, almost nine years ago, so it is way WAY out of date, obviously. Thought it might be both a gas and informative to update it, drawing on a broad pool of expertise--i.e. you lot. The 'Passe' section is pretty easy: I think we can safely put Gang of Four in there, for instance. 'Hot... For Now', likewise: obvious candidates might be This Heat, Shirley Collins, ragga. The fun categories are 'Tres Hot' (opportunity to show off your uber-hipster metereologist-of-cool grip on the minutest distant-rim-of-the-horizon fluctuations in semi-semi-semi-popular taste, although looking at some of the ones from '94---'Sweetest Girl' era Scritti? The Eagles?? Family????--I can't think what was happening then that made me imagine they were genuine reference points for then-current bands). And funnest still the Rank Outsiders section. The latter is more wishful thinking than anything, what you'd like to see become a rip-off source for new bands. Some of the ones from '94--Frippertronics, Japan circa Adolescent Sex--still haven't had their number come up, more's the pity, although pleasingly "DIY era Scritti" and "A Certain Ratio circa Graveyard and the Ballroom" have, finally. 'Beyond the Pale of Rehabilitation' is also a tricky one, I was quite wrong about ELO, indeed only the other day I got a press release which cited Electric Light Orchestra as a key source for the band's alleged excellence.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

THE LIZARD INFLUENCES INDEX
Financiers speculate in futures; alternative bands speculate in pasts. So here's a Financial Times style index of influences, a table of what's hot and what's not, e,g, sell those shares in Krautrock, BUY BUY BUY late '70s San Francisco art-punk. It's a guide for nascent bands on how to construct an aesthetic from scratch, and a tipsheet for established groups, rockcrits and fans on names to drop in interviews/reviews/conversation, so as to stay ahead in the cooler-than-thou stakes. The table is divided into several rankings of influence, and the comments in [brackets] reveal what each rank really says about you.
________________________________________________________________________
HARDY PERENNIALS
[so obvious that they're actually cooler than the obscurantist stuff--the oneupmanship manoevure used by Stone Roses, Manics, Oasis]
Beatles. Rolling Stones. Sex Pistols.
________________________________________________________________________
PASSE
[exhausted by over-use, ex-cool, and thus middlebrow]
Big Star. Black Sabbath. Led Zep. Funkadelic. Neil Young. Husker Du. Brian Wilson. Nick Drake. Syd Barrett. Velvet Underground. Cocteau Twins. Jesus and Mary Chain.
_______________________________________________________________________
HOT... FOR NOW
[right on the money, but may soon turn middlebrow]
Can/Faust/Neu!. Cheap Trick. Rush. Lynyrd Skynyrd. The Soft Machine. Muzak and exotica. Slint. The Raincoats.
________________________________________________________________________
TRES HOT
[dead-cert cooler-than-thou KO trump manoeuvre]
Cluster *. The Associates. Amon Duul II. Japan circa 'Tin Drum'. Amon Duul. The Groundhogs. Fairport Convention**. Popol Vuh***. King Crimson. early Roxy Music. Virgin-era Scritti Politti. Pink Fairies. Robert Wyatt circa 'Rock Bottom'. The Eagles. Budgie. Blue Orchids. 23 Skidoo. Incredible String Band. Electric Prunes****. early Renaissance/Pentangle. 'Sweetest Girl/Faithless' era Scritti. Brainticket. La Dusselldorf. Chrome. MX-80. John Fahey. pre-synthesiser Kraftwerk. Nurse With Wound. Jimmy Castor Bunch. Family.
________________________________________________________________________
RANK OUTSIDERS FOR '95
[a gamble--could trump all-comers, or just get egg-on-face]
Japan circa "Adolescent Sex". Late T.Rex circa 'Light Of Love'. DIY
era Scritti. Gentle Giant. Renaissance circa 'Northern Lights'. Allman Brothers. Van Der Graaf Generator. Talking Heads. The Sensational Alex Harvey Band. Molly Hatchet. Atomic Rooster. A Certain Ratio circa 'Graveyard and the Ballroom'. Jethro Tull. Man. Foghat. Flesh For Lulu. Frippertronics era Robert Fripp. Bowie circa "Ashes To Ashes". early UFO. Spooky Tooth.
_______________________________________________________________________
BEYOND THE PALE OF REHABILITATION
[terminally square]
Boomtown Rats. Electric Light Orchestra. Elton John. Toyah. Bob Marley. Bread. Bad Manners. Oi! Men At Work. Midnight Oil.
**********************************************************************
NOTES
*/Cluster: just check Main's discography.
**/Fairport: J. Mascis apparently obsessed with Richard Thompson's axework.
*** /Popol Vuh: see Flying Saucer Attack, Stereolab.
****/Electric Prunes: big influence on Spiritualized.

Oops, at least three people inform me that Rough Trade---or at least the Covent Garden branch-do stock a bit dancehall---some comps, even some seven inch singles. One source says he picked up a Clipse track there. Still, neither ragga or street rap are priority enough to figure in the New Releases mass email (unlike, say 'afro and latin grooves' or 'downtempo'). And the main plank of my animus--the peculiar treatment of UKG--still stands. On which tip, the latest New Releases email is really quite surreal. There's only item listed under Nu Skool Breaks (hhmm, vibrant 'n' vital genre isn't it? whereas UKG even in its quietest week would have a couple of dozen new whites out, at least), and it's not even a nu skool breaks track, it's garage. The track is Medasyn 'We Spray' on Casual Records, described as "superb new uk garage from gabriel who is a member of the outfit spektrum (of recent abstract house fave "Freefall"). features mc frost p and zuz rock on vocal duties". (Who are these people? Seriously, am I missing something here?). And then there's this: "if you are feeling the dizzee rascal sound then you have to check this out!". Ah, so they do know who Dizzee Rascal is, are totally aware that some people are feeling that sound and that it's all quite urgent and happening. They just don't happen to stock anything by him or his ilk. But if they did, they'd file it under Nu Skool Breaks! Presumably because two or three years there was a brief moment of faint sonic convergence between the breakstep end of UKG and nuskool such that Rennie 'Stupid Fucking Name" Pilgrem would review the occasional Stanton Warriors or Deekline track in his Muzik column amongst the usual crap...

The Rough Trade test.
Can you spot what’s wrong about this? [And no, I don't mean the missing 'u' in 'varios']

===nu skool breaks===
fink presents sideshow sound of today 12 5.99 two sublime slices of broken beats with a 2 step edge from fink who has previously >recorded for ninja tunes
unknown the lucky ones 12 6.99 super hot bootleg from two of breakbeat's biggest producers
varios - tempa allstars vol 1 varios - tempa allstars vol 1 12 4.99 this demonstrates why tempa is the most innovative garage label. this features three tracks from dj abstract, benny ill vs goldspot and artwork

I’m hardly ever in London these days, but it’s easy to keep tabs on what the world-famous Rough Trade shops are stocking, via their emailed New Releases circular (which I cannot recall ever signing up for, but what the hey…) In the sleevenotes to that Rough Trade Shops 25 years CD, Jon Savage (who used to hang out at the Ladbroke Grove store back when it really was a cultural vortex-- nattering to the staff [he turned Geoff Travis onto the Cabs you know], musicians, fanzine editors, fellow journalists) anyway Jon writes of the stores as they are today: “Whatever it is you want, you can hear it before everyone else, whether it be limited edition 7-inchers, 12" promos, or drum'n'bass CDRs that arrive hot of the press”. And to be fair, that’s very nearly true. But there are some significant exceptions, and the exceptions form a pattern, and you start to wonder....

OK, it’s forgiveable they never stocked hardcore, because nobody but the scene’s own specialists did (actually that’s not true: I used to get 2 Bad Mice and Sub Base stuff and Omni Trio at my local Our Price in Brixton! And you could get hardcore in Virgin and HMV, until early ’93 anyway). But it took Rough Trade a long time to get on board with jungle, and when they finally did (in a big way) drum’n’bass was well on its way to irrelevance. To this day, they still stock d&b to an exhaustive degree, plastic sleeves spilling unmanageably out of the bins. More damning is the store’s total failure to stock UK garage at any point in its six years of existence. By any criteria you want to use--sheer sonic innovation, Black British cred, and (most relevant, from the Rough Trade philosophical standpoint) the DIY/self-released/micro-label nature of the subculture’s infrastructure---UKG qualifies superabundantly. But they will sooner stock some Violent Turd parody-pisstake rip-off-of 2step, or Manitoba’s polite misreadings, or Scud and Something J/DJ Maximum homages/mutations, than the actual fi-real deal thing. Well, slight correction, if you go back to the opening extract, you can see that every so often they DO stock a token bit of UK garage, always the breakstep or dubstep end of things natch, by Oris Jay or Tempa cru ["most innovative garage label" my English ass!!!], one of that lot. But ONLY listed under “nu skool breaks”. What an insult! A ferociously vital, resonant, even epochal sound, interred alongside a stillborn non-scene.

Okay, we all have our blindspots (although RT carry virtually everything else under the sun and uber-comprehensiveness is a central plank of their website manifesto: “we hope to bring you today the sounds that will be heralded by others as groundbreaking and innovative tomorrow”). Still, look at the blindspots, and they form a pattern. Plenty of digi-dub and archival roots, but no dancehall; no street rap but loadsa US undie backpacker biznizz; MC-fronted garage rap, not a sausage, but course there’s a superfluity of “proper” UK hip hop. Now I’m sure I don’t need to spell it out for you, you’re all-too-familiar with where I’m coming from on the polemical tip here. There's a distinct sociocultural bias here, an unacknowledged exclusionary process at work. It's the predictability of the syndrome that is depressing, the way the blindspots just keep recreating themselves along these determinist class-based lines. Plus the fact that Rough Trade are probably right, from a business point of view; they have a very good idea of what their clientele would be interested in, and their clientele would rather buy Prefuse 73 than some Ludacris track despite the fact that the latter creams the former on just about every front, including riddimological invention.

My bet is that you will find the same patterns replicated in hipster stores across the world (They certainly operate in the ones I visit in New York like Other Music---Tower, over the road from Other, has a far superior stock of UK garage CDs, thanks to the efforts of import controlla Paul ‘Sci Fi Soul’ Kennedy.) Is it hyperbolic to think of these sort of blindspots as constituting an unconscious form of cultural apartheid? Perhaps. But while iIn this age of the glorious interweb there may indeed be no such thing as marginal music, there are patently still musics that are marginalized.

All this has an unintended useful side effect, though: what I call the Rough Trade test. If you want to know if a UK dance genre still has da vybe, street-wise, if it’s still got its "social energy" legs, just check see if the Rough Trade shops stock it yet in a designated section of its own. And checking the latest new release list, i can tell you: UKG is still alive and still kickin’.

50 Cent, "In Da Club". Beats: lifeless, leached of colour, yet oddly hypnotic, almost like subdued and slowed-down house music (those stilted, suppressed-sounding strings seem distantly related to "Strings of Life"). Vocal: a nagging dirge-drone, the opposite of those hyperbright vivacious Americanradio voices where ever syllable gleams perkily for your undivided attention, it's as if every potential point of emphasis or accenting is flattened (is it true, he raps that way cos he’s got a damaged tongue from being shot up?!?), but again, oddly mesmerising (perfunctory-as-cool, indifference-as-Zen). Like “Grindin’”, it's one of those nadir-or-the-new thing tracks. Still can’t decide if I like it. Liking it seems beside the point--it just is.

Classic OWD sighting--Notorious BIG, “Juicy”, on MTV2's Old Skool slot last night. There he is, grooving away. He's not the only white person in the video of course--there's the maid serving the bubbly, and even more symbolic, the accountants who take care of managing Biggie’s money so he can enjoy spending it the more.

Hip hop may not love you back, whitey, but it loves your dollar. There was something faintly scandalous about the revelation, last year, that 70 percent of rap CDs are bought by white kids. It seemed like the sort of information that really ought to cause hip hop to implode through its own contradictions. It could be the statistics are skewed (presumably white suburban youth have more disposable income than black inner-city youth, probably buy more CDs per capita and make more casual purchases, while urban youth buy a lot more bootlegs and mixtapes and other stuff that’s below the statistical radar). Still and all, it seems like a fucked-up disparity. What are the examples, historically, of a music where such a high proportion of its consumers feel discouraged from participating creatively in the culture they identify with?

I was thinking perhaps my last entry was slightly overstated, and Mike Barthel concurs,
arguing that there’s a new generation who are totally comfortable with being white hip hoppers and who are reasonably accepted, if they have the skills. He says in six years we’ll really start to see the fruits of this, in terms of white MCs. Hmm, six years though, 2009, add it up, you're talking about 30 years since “Rapper’s Delight”, over twenty years since Licensed To Ill… that’s a long time. There were white bluesmen, blue-eyed soulsters, and punk-funkateers way quicker and in way larger numbers. Between Beasties and Eminem, who's there been, of any credibility or any significant success? What’s striking about Eminem is his absolute isolation in the mainstream. I’m sure part of the massiveness of his success, beyond his ability, is that he’s been embraced out of sheer relief: at last one of ours who’s so good he’s undeniable. (And there’s still holdouts among hip hop performers and critics--Armond White for instance--who refuse to give him any props, see him as an Elvis-type appropriator/exploiter/con!). Don’t bring undie, with its slightly larger complement of non-blacks, into this, because undie is irrelevant to the black pop mainstream. And that mainstream is organized around the concealment from one chunk of its audience of the existence of another larger chunk of its audience--the invisible majority of white rap fans.

Now there are lots of good reasons why it is important for hip hop to sustain itself as a cultural enclave where blacks are the overwhelming majority. It’s also possible that white fans prefer it that way, too, that it’s part of the fantasy of real-ness they’re buying into, that double-whammy of exoticism and authenticity. Perhaps that's why studio audiences at BET or hip hop videos with in da club scenes are 99 percent black. (If you see footage of live hip hop shows, though, 50 percent or more of the audience are white, and I'd be interested to know the racial breakdown of BET's home viewership). The pathos-shading-into-patheticness of a figure like Serch with his always-already-hopeless desire to be accepted as “the baddest white MC out there” has a visual echo in the form of that peculiar rap video convention, the one white dude. The first OWD that caught my eye was way way back, in one of the Dr Dre videos, “Nuthin’ But A 'G' Thang” I think. You know it, there's a house party, the fridge is stacked with malt liquor, some Gs take revenge on a snooty black chick with airs and graces by shaking up 40''oz bottles and drenching her in frothy symbolic semen. As the camera pans across the dancefloor, all of sudden, there he is: the white dude, lurking by a pillar. Looking hopelessly out of place and distinctly uncomfortable. It’s like, what’s he there for? Why did they even bother? (Or is he there precisely to be outnumbered?). Look for the OWD, he crops up more often than you’d think. Always on his own.

Serch me. Interesting if excessively long ILM thread sparked by a Sasha Frere-Jones query, itself spun from his EMP2003 paper on Amerindie rock’s gradual disengagement from black music as a source of inspiration or influence. Which is an old SFJ bugbear, going back at least as long as I’ve known him (those good old post-rockin’ days of '95 when there were a handful of ex-Amerindiebands gesturing faintly in the direction of dub, remixology etc) and probably all the way back to his formative trauma (that crux moment when Liquid Liquid was decisively displaced by Sonic Youth as the mold for NYC rock bands). Haven’t read the paper, obviously, but my two word answer to the quandary would be: MC Serch.

Consider the self-hatred involved in that “Pop Goes The Weasel” song/video (the one where 3rd Bass give a verbal and physical beatdown to Vanilla Ice for discrediting da cause of authentic whiteboy rap), consider the soul-contorting pressures on any non-black American understandably driven to engage with hip hop, patently the most significant and exciting form of American popular music these last 25 years. Why would anybody want to put themselves through all that agony, and then risk the gauntlet of derision and non-acceptance? Much easier to steer clear, stick to a race (no pun intended) where the odds of a non-ignominious outcome are tilted in your favour.

And if indie whitey stays well away, this is also partly a response to not-so-subliminal messages emanating from the music. Unlike the earlier black forms like blues/soul/funk, which were massively appropriated and adapted in their own time by white musicians (some of who even made significant contributions), hip hop has always projected a much stronger sense of "hands off, whitey---we own this shit’. This leaves white Americans--especially the more P/C conscious types in the cadres of independent music--wary of trespassing upon what everyone agrees (and not without justification) is African-American cultural property. It’s all very understandable, on both sides of the divide.

It must be quite tough, being a non-black American whose primary musical identification is with hip hop (a sensible thing to do, given its ubiquity, ascendancy, and impeccable edge factors both aesthetic and sociocultural). The contradictions and conflicts must gnaw at your guts and tie your mind in knots. That's why you get the overcompensation syndrome, from the extremes of wigga-ism to the way those who write critically from that problematic place often become like over-vigilant custodians, warding off improper developments like jungle or The Streets. In Britain, it’s always been easier because the music came originally as an import and thus equally at-one-remove whether you’re Black British or white. So in Massive Attack, 3D and Tricky were both coming at the music from an equally “inauthentic” position; in the realm of Brit B-boys who became junglists, pasty-faced Doc Scott was no more an outsider than Dego MacFarlane. Plus, it's almost like we in the UK are operating out of view, the hip hop culture guardians aren't watching (don't give a toss, frankly--that US isolationist, world-unto-ourselves thing), so we can take some liberties, mess around more. Ironically, the statement "I love hip hop" can trip off the white Brit tongue easier, precisely because there's an intrinsic detachment and distancing for even the fiercest UK believer in Hip Hop As Cause; not belonging is the ground on which it's all built. Here in America, so much closer to the action, where the stakes are much higher and the question of who belongs and who doesn't becomes urgent and painful, to utter the statement "I love hip hop" as a person of non-black color immediately opens a can of worms. Because it's not at all clear the feeling is reciprocated.

Ian Penman enters the blogosphere!!! The Pill Box is a chance to eavesdrop on of one of our great minds thinking aloud---at the moment, mostly on matters (geo)political rather than musical/cultural. A full-on IP website is on the cards, he says, containing more essayistic writing; I hope he'll delve deep into what must surely be a Lester Bangs-scale trove of unpublished works, "director's cuts" that exceed the printed version by a factor of five, random aphorisms, prose-poetical meditations. Can I put in a plea for fragments from his unfinished book on Roxy Music? (Or was that just a rumour?). For now, though, The Pill Box---one to bookmark and no mistake.

Now that the disabling rollercoaster of shame and dread of the last three weeks has slowed down a bit, and in the lull before "we" invade Syria, it seems like a timely opportunity to whack out a quick round-up of the best of the year so far. Don't know about you but it feels like 2003 has barely started, admittedly there's been the all-eclipsing current events to distract, but still, by this time last year we already had The Streets. When is the first real blockbuster of 2003 going to arrive? Anyway, here's my picks, new and old.

NEW
Junior Boys, “Last Exit” (forthcoming in some form via Nick K’s new label KIN).
I’d heard some Junior Boys stuff (one of the duo, Jeremy Greenspan, is sibling-ly connected to CCRU cru) and liked it quite a bit but it wasn’t until hearing this track on its own in the middle of a bunch of other unlike stuff (on a Nick K 2step-flavored comp) that it really BLEW ME AWAY. By some distance my favorite track (outside gutter-garridge) I’ve heard this year. In fact, it makes a good companion piece/contrast with the likes of Dizzy and Kano and Nasty Crew, it’s like a whole other direction 2step could have gone: androgynous, fragile, exquisitely tender (the tremulous chorus whispers "I'll catch you if you fall"). 2step infused with the subtle melodic grace and glistening delicacy of Prefab Sprout or The Blue Nile. Yin to gutter's yang-overdose.
DJ Scud and Panacea Present The Redeemer, Hardcore Owes Us Money (Position Chrome). SoundMurdereresque spirit of old skool homage but expressed through all new tracks, and pitched slightly earlier (92/92 not 94, hence the titular nod to the Ragga Twins). A sample-crazy barrage of diva versus raggamuffin vocal-licks, oscillator riffs and death-ray zaps of sick noize over more up to date post-techstep growly b-lines and linear jacknife beats running at 170 + bpm. The most flat-out fun thing Scud’s done.
Animal Collective, Here Comes The Indian (Paw Tracks)
The crew that brought you Avey Tare & Panda Bear, on a new offshoot of Carpark Recordings. The most untaggable thing I’ve heard since Position Normal. People say ‘This Heat’, which I can hear but it’s like This Heat fused with Incredible String Band and The Godz. Psycho-acoustica. “Panic” would fit onto that outer-limits vocal box. The Campfire Recordings thing on Catsup Plate also good.
Data 80, “Baby I Can Forgive” off Data 80 (Force Inc).
Hakan Lidbo’s one of those second-order talents, he’ll never be an innovator, but here his supplement to the Daft Punk bliss-text almost surpasses the digital lovers. The whole album’s good but this track glistens and pulsates in the most eerie, bewitching way.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “Y Control” off Fever To Tell
As above, I like the whole record but this is the one that really gets me--something in the way it moves.
The Mover, Frontal Frustration (Tresor)
Fanatics: 2017. Dilettantes: nil
Crossbones, 2003 prerelease sampler.
Been hearing about this cru for a while, finally got to hear them: that unheard of rarity, Brits who follow the dark gospel according to Acardipane, making doomcore and throwing way-way-WAY underground parties (although they’ve now stopped apparently since the squat-rave scene got taken over by ketamine and crack). Artists with names like Face Hoover, Kenny Kramp, Floorkiller Project, and The Chicken Farmer, serving up phuture techno the way you like it.
Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft, Funfzehn Neue Lider (Superstar)
People don’t appear to rate this comeback too highly, but it seems to strike a pretty good balance between keeping-what-was-great and updating-for-a-post-techno-universe. As house-inflected EBM goes, this is a good stop-gap until the next Green Velvet album.
Dizzee Rascal--“I Luv U/I Luv U (remix)/Vexed” (XL)
Best single of last year and front runner so far, given thin competition, for best single of 2003. Come on people!
Soft Pink Truth, Do You Party? (Soundslike)
Dinky, Black Cabaret (Carpark)
Eighties, done right.

RETRO
Bad Company, Shots Down on Safari plus Best of the Bad Mix
The Motorhead of drum’n’bass. Before last summer's DJ Marky "LK" single the only outfit in ooh 4 years that came even close to coaxing me back into the fold of the faithful.
Factrix, Artifact (Storm Records/Tesco Distribution)
Along with London and Sheffield, San Francisco was one of the hotbeds of early industrial music. Allies and sometimes collaborators with the likes of Mark Pauline and Monte Cazazza, Factrix obviously shared some of the same thematic preoccupations and sonic techniques as their contemporaries Cabaret Voltaire and TG, but they had another, appropriately West Coast dimension, a dark psychedelia most evident in the trippy soloistic guitar playing of Bond Bergland (later of the superb Saqqara Dogs). This double-CD is a splendid addition to the mini-boom in archival industrial.
The Passage, Pindrop/Degenerates/Enflame/For All and None (LTM)
Underrated Manc postpunk outfit, lyrically slightly didactic for modern tastes but interesting use of electronics and percussion.
Lory D, Sounds Never Seen (Rephlex)
The Italian Acardipane? Not quite, but close enough.
Ultramarine, Companion (Every Man & Woman Is A Star Versions) (LTM)
Faces you already love, from a slightly different angle.
Fred Frith, Guitar Solos (ReR Megacorp)
Maybe I should have taped all of David Stubbs's Recommended lps when he left his entire record collection in my bedsit during the summer of 83.
Minny Pops, Sparks In a Dark Room/Secret Stories (LTM)
He had stuff by these Dutch electroquirksters too and all--what was I thinking?
Casino Vs Japan, Go Hawai
A sketch for Whole Numbers, but a lovely one.
SoundMurderer, Wired For Sound
see yesterday's entry.

Ingram, now reneging unreservedly on his vow to take a six month break from the blogosphere (hooray!), goes all Krautrocksampler with this appreciation of neglekted kosmische klassiks, komplete with scanned in album covers. 500 % in agreement re. his controversial inclusion of that DAF album. But wrong, quite wrong, to diss La Dusseldorf. The first Dinger Bros. album is of a piece with Neu! 75 and even Viva has its charms. Better than any of post-Neu! Rother's "Neu Zeit" waftings at any rate, although I don't think I've heard the one Matt cites as an overlooked gem.

SoundMurderer, Wired For Sound (Violent Turd)
Is this the greatest jungle mix-CD ever? (Meaning, obviously, therefore the greatest dance music mix-CD ever?). DB's History of Our World Part One (but that's not focused only on jungle like this is), or something by DJ Hype might pip it to the post, but only by a whisker. Sixty --that’s SIXTY!!!--tracks of 94-style pure ragga-jungle, from Kemet Crew to L Double to Marvellous Cain, in a little over sixty minutes. An awesome barrage of Amen snare-rushes and sublo rootical bass-sway, sound-against-sound bashment battle cries and roots-era sensi-paeans. Listening to this stuff for the first time in a while, it’s hard to imagine how anyone who heard this music in its time could fail to feel it as a call, an energy signal, and respond accordingly. “Quite liking” jungle, “enjoying a bit of it now and then” seems somehow an inadequate response to a sound so total.

The sixty tracks are divided into three megamixes, the third veering off towards techstep/dark d’n’b 95-96 vibe, still exciting, but the first two are the shit. The most exciting shit, like, ever? Still sounds more far out than anything that followed in dance music (or anywhere else really), no matter how everyone from splatterbreaks Scud-types to your drill’n’bass Squarepusher types to Hrvatski 'n' the Kid tried to make it fiercer and more mashed. Talking of the Pusha, he actually appears at the very end of the second megamix, with his junglizm parody ‘Full Rinse’ (feat MC Twin Dub--ho ho ho, very satirical you sad little man, you’re not even a footnote m8 you will not be remembered, truly shameful that even for a little while back there you were more known than Bizzy B or Remarc [the latter has about five top killatunes on Wired For Sound), although that-ranted, the Pusha track actually fits fairly well with the general vibe of total over-the-topness and doesn't stick out overly.

Ragga-jungle original 12”s go for vast amounts these days, they’re almost as collectable as the ‘ardkore/darkkore stuff. That’s another reason this CD is toppermost, I have silly amounts of jungle on vinyl and even more on CD, but most of the tunes on this I’ve not got. Though the bulk of them are familiar, stirring somatically encoded memories in my sinews and reflexes, neuromuscular scars from nights of thunder and joy. If this CD (originally a mixtape apparently) has a fault, it’s too unrelentingly mash-up. SoundMurderer has spliced together the most intense drum-loco breakdowns and house-of-cards-tumbling bridge bitz, it's pretty much continuously one long amen-rinse orgasm. If it was actually to be a recreation of "how it was", there’d be a tiny bit less rinse and a lickle bit more roll: some slow’n’sexy wind-your-waist interludes, cool down the dancehall vibe for a bit before re-escalating. Still this isn’t a time travel trip, it’s a rereading or re-rending, and the aspect of non-fidelity is what makes the record thrilling and valid beyond being a trip down memory lane: it’s a tribute that intensifies and exaggerates the thing it’s paying homage to.