bit more on london versus...

i don't think i've been saying that london is the font of all greatness, obviously there's been times when the rest of the UK has been in the ascendant, but even during say postpunk -- when Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds, despite their own internal rivalries, collectively commandeered the limelight -- even then London held its own with PiL, This Heat, Slits, Raincoats, and so forth (I also think Wire and the Banshees count as London since Watford and Bromley are in London's orbit). it's a self-perpetuating thing, for better or worse -- people just come to london, a high proportion of the best and brightest, and things simply happen there -- like for instance i don't think a single member of the raincoats was from london but that's where they accreted and found a context that nourished them.

my point though was really about dance music -- after about 1990 the capital keeps coming up with the goods time and time again, at least in terms of paradigm shifts -- good records have come from all over the country of course but nowhere else has really created a innovatory New Style... for instance Gatecrasher-trance was based around music from Holland and Germany like Paul Van Dyk, there was nothing sonically local about it

the mystery to me is Manchester -- what happened to it after Madchester turned to Gunchester? ... and what in the last ten years has actually sustained the perennial undying Manc patriotism about itself as the counter-capital.. as far as i can see it's come up with near to nowt in the last decade ... . Badly Drawn Boy... Gomez... Am i missing some obvious cutting edge dance (or other) entity from Manchester?

>it's not as if there are no pirates outside the holy wall >of the M25.

yes it's true there's pirates elsewhere in the UK and elsewhere in the world, but for some reason the concentration of them in other UK cities has never achieved critical mass and become a self-perpetuating new-sound-generating machine like it has in London. i was going to say no other city needs to re-enchant itself through collective audio-hallucination to the same extent (norf souf east and west we've got you locked etc) but manchester is still pretty dreary and inclement-to-the-soul despite the recent facelift...

re. Mark's point about london not being vital in the Eighties and suddenly switching on in the nineties, i don't know if this is quite what happened... i've got hardly any personal experience of london clubland before the 90s, i went to one warehouse party, a few clubs -- but there was a whole proto-rave warehouse culture going back at least as far as this thing in the early eighties called the dirtbox (i think that's the name) with jeremy healey (as in haysi fantazee!) djing (he was actually cool and underground at one point believe it or not). but my sense is that with london's pre-rave club culture and warehouse party scene, there were various flavours but one thing they had in common was they were all based around music that wasn't made in London -- it was all imports -- rap, electro, funk, go go, house -- or old connoiseur musics like rare groove, even a bit of northern soul. there was this massive 'street sounds'/street beats culture in London (as there was in bristol and elsewhere), but almost entirely based around music imported from America.

as far as i know the first stuff that has a real London dance identity is all those DJ records from 87 onwards like s'express, coldcut, bomb the bass, MARRS and also perhaps the renegade soundwave stuff, maybe meat beat too.

there was quite a london-specific reggae scene in the 80s though--all that fast-chat toasting by smiley culture and sound systems like saxon. The DJ records and the fast-chat soundsystem scene are both pre-glimpses of hardcore, if you combine the dj-records' breaks & sampladelia with the gruff ragga chat and b-line presha you get ragga twins shut up and dance rebel mc ibiza noise factory....

so i imagine the eighties in london was actually pretty pumpin', vital in a certain sense but not necessarily fertile in terms of creating new sounds

why london was a little bit slower than the North in terms of homegrown house and warping the detroit-chicago-nyc importz sounds to Uk-specific needs thing i couldn't say, but we're only talking a year or so....

Feels like we're heading towards a faintly querulous deadlock in london vs. provinces so lemme just weigh in with one cheap snipe-

--- doesn't the expression "sent to Coventry" refer to somehow who's been pushed to the cold periphery of a social circle, banished?

(though they did give us 2-Tone and Doc Scott you know so big up alla da Coventry cru)

and a few more sensible points:

in re. the fractured unmanageable magnitude of london as the fantasies about it and the realities of it overlap and clash in friction
>But who has that experience, apart from theorists >like us,

well, how about anyone who's gone on a night bus journey?

it's the hugeness of London, it always blows my mind, the geographical spread of it seems to be on the same order of Sao Paolo or Mexico City, rather than New york which feels compact by comparison

>and are you really saying that this experience is >productive of culture?

yeah -- bringing it back to my favorite subject -- the pirates, it's like a consensus hallucination of london as this electric city -- the superimposed sound-web that connects all these in reality quiet dreary places distributed across a vast area. it's only recently that the pirates have got so specific about this or that particular End. Garage isn't just an East thing, there's pirates all over, in the South, the West, the North... (and not just garage pirates--dancehall, drum'n'bass, etc etc). With Grime sure there's more of a local slant these days, but the overall mythos is still in the lineage of "London massive", "it's a London thing", "London sumtin' dis"

which relates to why i still think it's gerrymandering the vote if you exclude from London's tally of greatness all the sublocalities of the city.. East London is the eastern part of London

I do agree with Mark though that London can be a right shithole a lot of the time. There's been trips back where I've thought "what a dump" -- skies the colour of the interior of a Cornish pastie, sourfaced people everywhere, foul air, traffic like the sluggish pulse of blood through clogged arteries. Large swathes of the city are just humdrum, internal suburbs secreted within the metropolis. Then there's places like Dalston (you can see where TG got their death factory vibe from). Or Southfields, where I went once to interview gabba dj Loftgroover, and where there's this huge rent in the landscape: on one side this vast industrial zone of smokebelching chimneys, freight yards and what i could swear were oil refineries, and on the other side of this fissure these dowdy dejected crescents of maisonettes. You think 'how can people live like this?'...

People are always surprised when i tell them how pleasant New York is as place to live. Well, a huge rat ran across the children's playground in Tompkins Square park the other day but... It's the same latitude as Barcelona. Blue skies most of the winter. Clean (relatively anyway) air thanks to compulsory catalytic converters on every vehicle.

London strikes me as the kind of city where you have to be very young or pretty rich to really get much from it. If I lived there in my present circumstances (neither, and with a 4 yr old) I can easily see I'd probably end up staying in almost all the time and in that case you might as well live in a dormitory town like Berkhamsted or somewhere idyllically English-pastoral like Wiltshire.

It seems much harder to get to the centres of energy in London than it is in New York, say.

Ah, but when you get the centres of energy, they burn so much fiercer than New York's. (Perhaps because all the aggravation of getting to them, and the tension of the rest of their London lives, gives people more to let loose?).

And ah, London, on the rare occasions when the sun does come out... the dream landscapes of Brockwell Park... sigh...

miniscule and tardy contribution to the byrds discussion between worlds of possibility and somedisco--i really like the bass playing on their records, especially 'eight miles high' and younger than yesterday. perhaps not an instrument that you'd first think of in connection with that kind of jangle. and i really really like the basslines on love's forever changes. "you set the scene": dynamic! (good drumming too, throughout) changes and "7 & 7 Is" on heavy rotation here at the moment. that bacharach/tijuana brass move they make is almost roxy-like in its anti-rockism, renders jefferson airplane grateful dead and big brother & the holding company irrelevant before they even exist really, subverts the cliches of "psychedelic" at their very infancy (good cliches, mind). shame about side two of da capo though...

whole heap of new/new-ish bloglinx and updates over there, most already familiar to most... You.... can.... feeeeeeeeeel... the energy .... [extends arms, palms facing down, pulsates hands]... like some huge ever growing pulsating brain that rules from the center of the blogverse* ... a self-organizing, anarcho-rhizomatic, globally-dispersed music (and whatever it connects to) paper with no editor or
publisher -- a radically Deleuzianized NME-when-it-was-good happening in almost-real time -- got the news dept (check), gossip (check), reviews (check), rants (check), interviews (okay not so hot there, give it time), thinkpieces (check), letters page (check)... the pay's not great but you can't have everything...

*--incidentally tom i think blogosphere is jon dale's coinage, or at least that's where i first recall reading it... i can claim blogmos though which i see has caught on like wild fire...]

London (is) massive. While we're lavishing praise on Heronbone, Luka’s last prose-poetical evocation of London’s splendors and subterranean currents really ups the ante in the metropolis versus provinces argument. It’s both a mistake, as Luka illustrates, and also a teensy bit unfair to take London as Capital of Everything Official Bureaucratic Top-Down Arborescent Non-Deleuzian (finance, art, media, government) and then just ignore the eight million or so people who actually inhabit the city and makes their lives and culture there. “London” isn’t a figment, it’s precisely the meta-experience of moving across this huge variegated terrain of villages and zones, trying to fit it all together in your head and make sense of it, the friction and insanity of those crammed multitudes, the inexhaustibility of the city [note 1].

I’d probably side ideologically with the K-Punk pro-provinces line, but if you’re talking about cutting-edge dance music, about scenes and leading-edge genres, well, London’s been runnin’ t’ings since the end of '90, surely that's undeniable. 1990 was when the capital found its rave identity, those first Shut Up And Dance and Ragga Twins releases: house + hip hop + ragga + techno = hardcore/darkcore/jungle/drum&bass/speedgarage/2step/grime. The neverending saga. What have the regional metropolises (good point Luka, they are centres too--no one's bigging up little market towns in Herefordshire-a wedding in which was the specific inspiration for my comment about places in the UK with no black people), what have they actually come up with in that timespan? Sheffield (and Leeds and other South and West Yorks towns) had bleep’n’bass, but that was gone by 91. Manchester: not a sausage really since “baggy,” and even that was a bit of mish-mash, and how much of it really stacks up in retrospect (Northside!?!?), or led to anything else? Gerald, their finest son, got wise and got with the junglist programme and eventually moved to London. Midlands: I like Mark’s Coventrycentric counter-thesis, in fact I think I once used Eclipse/Doc Scott/Absolute 2/the fabulously named Simon ‘Bassline’ Smith against the it-all-started-at-Rage-Fabio-Grooverider version of jungle history. But really the Coventry thing, and Formation in Leicester, and the Bristol guys, are ultimately satellites of the London breakbeat action, outposts of junglizm.

Not saying that there weren't/aren't pumping club scenes all over the country and drug-dance vibes galore; I strongly suspect clubbing and raving's always been more enjoyable and full-on elsewhere in the UK than London (Scotland, phwwooooargh, I glimpsed Pure once, mental, and as for Rezerection... ; Gatecrasher in Sheffield... Liverpool knows how to partay... even the Isle of Wight was supposed to be pumpin' a while back... I still get emails announcing gabba events like Oblivion in Leicester, they always say something at the end like "CAUTION!NUTS INSIDE!)
But why have the provinces and the regions generated so little in the way of a distinctive, groundbreaking new sound? The reason is to do with London’s advantage, its crucial resource: the fact that it has a bigger black population than any other British city, and a white population that has been exposed to black music more extensively and in a longer-running, deeper-rooted way than the other towns in the UK. The other cities that come anywhere near in terms of riddimatic innovation contribution--Bristol, Coventry--are the ones that are mini-Londons in the sense of having substantial Caribbean populations.

I suppose the ultimate argument-ender against any provincialist who lives in London (c.f. Morley, who likes to call London “the Fake”, but has called it his home since… 1979?) is: if it’s so crap and barren here and so great and fertile there, why aren’t you still living in the sticks?

Disclosure of Bias: I only recently discovered that my maternal grandfather, long deceased, was originally from Hackney. Which means Dizzee and DJ Hype and the whole dem lott of them are practically kith and bloody kin! It’s the genes calling me to the music! I'm like 25 percent Cockney! Gorblimey guvnor!

Note 1: One of my fantasies is to do a documentary based around London’s third public transport system after the tube and the buses: the old overground railway system that traverses the city with those grim redbrick Victorian viaducts. All those strange routes that transect South London, and all those weird circular illogical-seeming journeys, like the line that goes from Dalston in a great arc up to West Hampstead/Golders Green in the North and then curls down and round to end up near Shepherd’s Bush -- you wonder what commuter would need to make such a journey from West to East? The idea of this pipe-dream doc is that, because property values are lower where there’s no tube station, following the overground rail network gives you a panoramic view (literally, you're often travelling on the same level as the terrace rooftops) of London’s most disregarded neighbourhoods--the dowdy suburbs concealed within the vast metropolis.

Luka
(delighted and relieved he’s decided to stick around) nails it, so definitively I’m going to quote the whole thing, or almost all of it:

“Boy in the Corner, listened to in isolation, parted from its context, could easily be mistaken for a hiphop album, some of it I’d be comfortable calling hiphop, with a couple of qualifications, but that doesn’t make Dizzee Rascal a hiphop act. It’s possible that he intends to reposition himself as a hiphop act in the future, or his label may be keen to push him in that direction, I don’t know. I know some of his fans and admirers would welcome such a shifting of loyalties. But Dizzee didn’t emerge from the UK hiphop scene, his records weren’t broken by the UK hiphop Djs, weren’t stocked in the UK’s hiphop shops, weren’t played in the UK’s hiphop clubs on the UKs hiphop radio shows. Dizzee emerged from the UK garage scene, and, by extension, from Reynolds’ Hardcore___continuum___. There’s an MC tradition in the UK which operates outside of both reggae and hiphop, although it borrows from and is inspired by both. It was time for this tradition to bear fruit, to produce a form of music based around the MC’s performance, but maintaining a link to the jungle and garage music it grew out of.

…. just having a beat, and a bloke rhyming over the top of it doesn’t make it hiphop. The things which distinguish it from hiphop are, first of all, the music, the rhythms, the sounds, which form the backbone and the background of the music are not simply clones and reproductions of american forms, but the descendants of a separate, though related, family tree. they are a response to different conditions, environmental, economic, social, technological etc and the product of a different ancestry. Similarly with the MC (or the DJ, if you prefer) the flow, the form the performance takes, is not a hamfisted mimicry of american forms, but something which is determined by the regional accent, speech patterns, cadences, and by the form, the rhythms the MC performs over/with.

… what Dizzee does is inextricably entwined with the way he talks, (words take on different shapes, depending on where they are spoken, a word which in america may be elongated, in an english mouth becomes angular. an english Mcs flow is created to accommodate his accent) the language he uses, the way in which the music is used by it’s audience, and what that audience values in it, and the music his flow evolved to fit. the defining grimy rhythms, tracks like war, take them out, eskimo, igloo(devil mix), oi, I luv u, icerink etc, do not sound like hiphop beats and an MC would find it hard to approach them with a flow taken directly from an american rapper. tempos are different, accents and stresses in different places.…

An eucalyptus tree in australia is different to an oak tree in england is different to a palm tree in california. they’re different becuase they evolved to fit different conditions, they’re all trees, but the differences are as important as the similarities.”

That it’s, surely--the last word on this subject.

On the subject of poporn or the pornification of pop, it's well worth having a gander at this piece by Fred Vermorel about biography, which addresses celebrity, personality-as-commodity and the invasiveness of "presence" (celebrities as stalkers, forcing themselves into our private mental space, our dreams and desires). Possibly the missus's finest hour as editor of the Voice Literary Supplement. There was actually an earlier version of this that was really far out but probably too outre for the Village Voice. Renegade biographer and theorist-provocateur Fred's a bit of a god as far as I'm concerned, for Starlust and the second Kate Bush biography and most of all his amazing Vivienne WestwoodFashion, Perversity and the Sixties Laid Bare. It's as much about McLaren as Westwood, and almost as much about Fred as either. Very interesting on the Sixties as way more complex and twisted than the retro-recycled reductions of it. On which topic, viz K-punk's comments, more to say, much more, at some later point...

feeling

troubleman united sampler w/ pixeltan, erase errata Adult remix, the roger sisters, wolf eyes, etc

city rockers singles 1 - 23 (but the second disc's fucked)

babazula/mad professor -- concept's a bit Laswelloid but this is ace 4thworldizm-- Turkish space-rock/postrock/unclassifiable band get dubbed up by the man who improved massive attack's protection no end. www. babazula.com. and their label doublemoon is www. doublemoon.com.tr.

bubba sparxx -- deliverance

richard x presents his x-factor vol. 1. his own tracks like 'just friends' are as good as the SOS Band and Numan ones.

really feeling

matthew dear--leave luck to heaven (spectral, due november). his 34th release this year surely? top tune: "an unbending." if isolee don't hurry up we'll all have forgotten him soon.

kraftwerk--tour de france soundtracks. not bad at all.

vybes kartel--sweet to the belly. #2 single of 03 after 'vexed', if only this went on for 30 mintues instead of just 3

lfo--sheath. despite being named after a contraceptive device (only dutch cap could have been worse) this is in my top 5 of the year, awesome comeback

junior boys--birthday/last exit ep (electroKIN).

not feeling

luomo--the present lover
really tried w/ this one but i dunno this strikes me as a rather sickly confection. is the idea we're supposed to give him kudos for almost being pop? in the main this seems to me as clotted and cloying as junior boys are spare and just-sweet-enough prefab/nile style.

Amen--they wouldn't let it die!

SFJ says Amen wasn't a marginal break in hip hop at all, "Most hip-hop heads, like me, were unimpressed with jungle for a while PRECISELY because we knew that sample. It turned out that holding "Amen" constant for all artists--almost like a rule in sports--and then requiring them to crack it open and chase a diminishing horizon of returns was the BEAUTY of jungle. But dumb headz just thought "We know that
one--come on, dig deeper."

Brandon Ivers, who makes drum & bass tunes and know whereof he speaks, offers a heterodox view to all the misty-eyed mash-up nostalgia, challenging the ideas put across by Remarc in that Knowledge piece about all the science being in the B-lines these days :

"as a producer myself I can tell you that there is in fact another key reason (beyond bass) as to why the breaks aren't as mashed up as they
used to be: Layering.

"Most breaks you hear in jungle today are the product of 4-5+ breaks and drum hits layered together. This is quite a bit different from the days of Remarc, where you could get away with simply using a tough amen. It takes a lot of TIME to layer and program breaks like this. It also requires far more
knowledge of things like compression and EQing (otherwise you just end up with a sloppy mess).

"So, once you've spent four hours making this huge layered break, you get a little prideful of it. After all, cutting a break and rearranging it was a way to make a break yours... but layering and all this serves that same purpose as well.

"...and you also want to move on to the rest of the track!

"Moral: Breakbeat science does live on, but it's a lot more transparent than it ever was before.

"Secondly, if you critics out there were actually listening to the new jungle that was coming out, you'd notice that mashed up breaks are back in a big way. Go out to any jungle event... it may not be remarc-level edits, but the days of the roller are definitely OVER. "

And Alan Murphy knocks out a whole essay:

Difference and Repetition: Genealogy of a Drum Break

The Winstons's Amen Brother drum break (along with James Brown's Funky Drummer) is one of the most sampled in contemporary musical history, almost single-handedly (now that would be amazing...) giving rise to an entire drum and
bass genre after fuelling hip hop only a short musical generation before.

The funk drum break was a crucial point in any funky track in the late 60's /early 70's; back in the 50's Art Blakey had given the drums a new prominence in jazz with his fiery, noisy solos setting new precedence for the drum kit (or traps, itself a relatively recent invention partly due to the rise of radio in the early 20th C and the need for the drummer to be able to play various sound effects as well as various drums - previously there was a drummer to play the bass drum, another to play the snare or a separate percussionist to play cymbals etc).

James Brown's mid-60's shift in R&B from the 1 & 3 to the 2 and 4 beat gave birth to a new rhythm - funk - that was a
sexy shuffle (on the good foot) between the straight rock and R&B/soul rhythms of the day. Simultaneously propulsive yet cycling internally, with the added syncopation of ghost/off snare and kick beats between the main counts it seemed to summon up a pre-orgasmic vertigo of endless repetition and relentless forward movement, more in common with Chinese/Taoist sexual practice than the Occidental obsession with climax, the end of desire (an abstract sex machine, as Deleuze and Guattari might have termed it if they had seen James Brown play in Paris in 1971 - between Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus - where a woman from the audience climbed on stage and stripped mid-performance).

Funky Drummer was a culmination of this rhythm, and of the breakbeat. The song seems to be improvised on the spot to fill space on a record or use up studio time, little more than that beat, when James counts down the band to sit out that break, and drummer Clyde Stubblefield just keeps on doing his thang, only more so, little knowing that future generations of samplists were waiting in the wings of history.

The essence of African-American art in the 20th C it has been claimed by Alice Walker, is that it seem relaxed, casual, and sweat-free in order to bely its complexity and distance it from work and the history of slavery; in a word - cool. Tap dance and jazz improvisation epitomised this sensibility which persists right up to Micheal Jackson and Prince, who seemed to glide on a super-human plane while they performed, and a strain of rap's "I don't even need to try to be cooler than you and get paid milions of dollars".

But like Fred Astaire's skeletal elegance Vs. Gene Kelly's muscular athleticism (film-musical dancing a mutation of jazz/tap and Irish traditional dance, whose frantic leg-work with a stiff waist and upper torso implied a sublimation of Catholicism-repressed sexuality; frigid rather than cool), the sweaty, thrusting, hard-working side of funk was the flip-side of cool, and James Brown was "The Hardest-Working Man In Showbusiness", the grunting, sweating sexual alternative to Motown's sweet, elegant, high-pitched R&B love-pop.

The Funky Drummer break combined both of these strains - not breaking a sweat while *working* it - in spades, and like any great drummer, Clyde was able to make every shuffling ghost snare and off-kick subtly, almost musically, different in pitch and timbre so that within the four beats - count 'em, that's all it is, over and over - was a dizzying sensation of rhythmic and sonic variation within a rigid structure, the syncopation fast enough to be just beyond the comprehending brain like a carrot on a stick that keeps the feet dancing and the head nodding while the brain is occupied. Ain't it funky, now?

Amen Brother did something very similar, with just a few more variations on the shuffle-funk theme, but it was the specifics of the recording, the reverberation of the kick drum and compressed hiss of the ride cymbal, that created more low-end ambience and high-end excitation; the drum equivalent of guitar distortion or Hammond organ Leslie speaker swell.

As appropriated by NWA's Straight Outta Compton, Mantronix's King Of The Beats, and Jeep Beat Collective's Mantronix/Amen-sampling Stop Ya Skemes, the break is classic-but-standard, but the high-end layer of cymbal noise generates that extra tension perfect for thug hop or dancefloor frenzy.

The other crucial difference not apparent in these traditional 4-bar sampled versions is where the original break continues with seismic pauses as the drummer stresses the occasional beat and leaves out the occasional played beat, which seem to (but don't) leave out a count and create an unexpected temporary black hole or pressure drop on an off-beat - something it shares with Al Green's I'm Glad You're Mine intro breakbeat, which proved perfect for Massive Attack's dub reggae Five Man Army workout on Blue Lines and was all over Timbaland's earlier reggae-influenced rhythms.

And reggae seems to be the key to the Amen Brother break's ascendancy to the throne of the drum and bass breakbeat science kingdom. Reggae and dancehall culture were writ large all over early jungle's 'Smokin' Joints', all frenzied sped-up dancehall snare-shots and manic bad bwoy chat, so fast that the dub bassline worked at half-speed or was reduced to single 808-style boom-drops.

When Amen's off-kilter beats were - crucially - sped up, then chopped up to re-emphasize that hyper-dub loping off-rhythm and added to the mix, it was like the discovery of Uranium's critical mass as dancefloors were devastated.

Never had club music been reduced to so little - entire DJ sets could be composed of cut-up Amen breaks, bass drops and the occasional vocal sample it seemed; but that hissing, ricocheting, stuttering Amen beat seemed to sound and feel best ON ITS OWN, over and over and over - bring the beat back, indeed, to infinity, always changing, always the same.

reallly excellent piece on Morley's Words and Music written by the really excellent stephen trousse (the great lost Melody Maker writer--there was just that one live wedding present review, wasn't there? but ooh what a review). he seems to find words and music a bit exasperating and hard going. admittedly the list thing does get a bit out of hand, and after reading 90 percent of the book in like three or four days i had to pause for a couple of weeks before taking on the last two chapters with all the footnotes and lists. still and all, a sumptuous lipsmacking word-cake is a sumptuous lipsmacking word-cake, no? strangely (relievingly) trousse's critique doesn't overlap at all with my take, which one of these weeks i will get around to penning. maybe. the really odd thing about trousse's review is the admission early on that he interviewed morley circa nothing and then didn't write it up. (Hate it when people do that). surely in this neck of the woods that's a bit like having an interview with, i dunno, Kafka or Leonardo Da Vinci and then just sitting on it...

refreshingly demystified take on lundun's pirate culcha from Eden at uncarved -- renegade rhizomanticism be damned, the residents of the tower blocks on whose tops the pirates plant their aerials and micro-wave transmitters have a really hard time of it

New blogs of note
Quarks and Charms
by this chap Jonathan JD2 who had the great mini-essay guest appearance on kpunk a while ago on mp3 culture, a conversation i meant to chip into but, ach, the moment passed

the original soundtrack
which is the lovely geeta -- an actual female-gendered person of the opposite sex stepping into this rather boys-ownly hood so that's a cause for celebration in itself, plus she's gotta lotta say, and knows her science so that'll make us fronters hesitate for a second or two before making the old chemical-astrophysical-etc transposed onto music/culture metaphors.

there's some more but i can't remember where i wrote 'em down so later for that

Amen last dribs and drabs.

Nick at Gutterbreakz sez: "all this talk about the Amen break, but no mention of my fave Cornishman Luke Vibert's 'Amen Andrews' project. "

I've been puzzled by the title of those EPs for weeks and only just twigged (being a bit slow on the uptake) that it's a rather labored pun on Eamonn Andrews. Who weirdly, after years, possibly decades, of absence from my consciousness, cropped up last week when I heard TG's early "Very Friendly" on First Annual Report in which he makes a grisly cameo appearance: Ian Brady's hacking the skull of one of his victims and brain-matter splashes on Eamonn Andrews on the TV screen doing This Is Your Life.

Remarc solja Mike P points me in the direction of this resource for jungle samplespotters and breakspotters and also sends through an interesting Remarc interview from Knowledge. Here’s a good bit with Remarc explaining the disappearance of the mash-up Amen-rinse vybe from d&B:

“The attention's been taken away from the drums & into the bass. As much work goes into the b-line now as when we used to sit there cutting breaks up manually. I used to go out and watch people dance to my edited amen - making hand movements to every snare, stutter & stretched crash to precision. Now I see the same thing but to the basslines. Edited breaks added to the energy & excitement of a tune but the b-line does that now, so I don't think it effects the scene or dancefloor too much, but I do feel the edited break thing will sneak back in.”

And Peter Maplestone the bashment bombardier down there in Australia suggests that Mantronix’s "king of the beats" has this “cut up 16th note shuffle” that makes “it a key precursor to jungle I reckon”

that’s all folks…

… course Dizzee & all that lott I’m sure are totally unaware of all this feverish bloggoid discourse around them… and probably just as well…

… the most striking thing about the Mercury result, what with Ms Dynamite last year, is that it’s the second year running that someone who’s not only UK “urban” but who came up through the pirates has won it. Which suggests that it’s actually some kinda objective fact that pirate radio/h-core continuum is actually the UK’s leading edge, this nation’s saving grace…

… “objective”, maybe, but far from accepted. My God those comments from the public are kinda scary--fear, condescension, “it’s just not music”… it’s easy to forget that most bits of the UK don’t have any black people or Asians…

… feeling oddly vindicated in my grime-as-digital-folk theory by learning that the Mercury panel includes Colin Irwin, Melody Maker’s folk music expert in days of yore. He used to write about Martin Carthy and such, and now his own personal Mercury fave is… Dizzee Rascal! Blew his socks off apparently. (Fall fiends might want to search out a great piece by Colin on the band making Hex Enduction Hour in Iceland, it’s on the web somewhere… look for early cameo appearance of Einar from the Sugarcubes)

… Simon Frith, you my nigga 4 life…

"....there's bare people I gotta thank--everybody at my record label XL, big shout to my old crew Roll Deep, massive massive respeck to all the pirates for the support, especially Rinse runnin' tings for years, erm, shouts to alla the E3 crew, my Hackney peeps, Bow peeps, oh yeah and big BIG shout to all my soljas out there in the blogosphere...."

Sub Low Pressure. Was the title of an email from the mysterious Androbot
which goes:


NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory detected sound waves, for the first time, from a super-massive black hole. The "note" is the deepest ever detected from an object in the universe.

"In musical terms, the pitch of the sound generated by the black hole translates into the note of B flat. But, a human would have no chance of hearing this cosmic performance, because the note is 57 octaves lower than middle-C (by comparison a typical piano contains only about seven octaves). At a frequency over a million, billion times deeper than the limits of human hearing, this is the deepest note ever detected from an object in the universe."

More at NASA

And in spiritually if not literally related news, there's this
(via Eden @ Uncarved Org) and there's this (courtesy of Mark P) on the phenomenon of infrasound (one of TG's old obsessions) and "vibe".

Sick of the Sixties? It’s interesting to see Mark K-Punk in his stuff on Roxy Music railing against the Sixties because I was just about to do a little post on that decade: the gist of it being the idea that the differences between the pro-pop and pop-sceptic camps seems to have a lot to do, ultimately, with whether the entire cultural project of the Sixties ever meant anything to you. Not just the Sixties per se, but its inverse reflection (“punk”--underneath the rage and nihilism, still burns an idealism and an excessive expectation vis-a-vis music that are pure 60s--and look at the involvement of all those 1968 veterans w/ the Sex Pistols, Clash, etc), and its subsequent echoes and reinvocations: postpunk (which is nothing if not a second stab at counterculture, or for its critics, Sixties-style “hip capitalism”--they used to slag Rough Trade as ”hippies” and they were, in the best sense), or the blissrock/neopsychedelia of the late Eighties, or rave. If any of this touched you--either the Dionysian side of the Sixties-and-its-sequels, or the Edenic, back-to-the-garden side--then you’re bound to chafe a little at the idea of pop as pure product and celebrity, the porno-consumer-spectator model of interaction w/ music, slumped in the sofa with a remote in your hand.

(An aside: the classic porn-pop reaches consciousness and rubs it in your face moment: that first Jennifer Lopez single where the whole concept of the video was her as wank fodder, internet porn. Kleenex strategically placed next to the computer etc).

Of course there were many, many Sixties, including some-- Warhol, Pop Art, also Motown. Spector--that lend itself to the pro-Pop version of things. It was a fabulously complex, contradictory era. Radical feminism, Archigram, the Dutch Provos, McLuhan, Situationism, John’s Children and The Eyes, Blow Up, Joe Orton, Performance, communes, al the Prospective 21st Siecle type electroacoustic/concrete type stuff that Matt's just celebrated, the New Wave of science fiction (Ballard and inner space), Yoko, early Pink Floyd, The Doors (who I will persist in finding absolutely glorious… Heard “LA Woman’”on the car radio recently and thought of the cool fools who think they can see through or look down on Jim and his minions. This music is LAUGHING AT YOU!). No, no, it wasn’t all all Mary Quant and miniskirts and The Knack (and how to Get It) --which I still love--and the Beatles monkeying about in a field in A Hard Day’s Night.

(Talking of which a big round of applause for me for putting Ron Geesin in the Uberhipsters Index--there's a massive feature on him in this month's Wire. And it's a cool snapshot of Ladbroke Grove in the late Sixties and early Seventies too)

Of course I don’t remember the Sixties-as-THE-SIXTIES, being a child, apart from ‘Yellow Submarine’ on the radio and watching the moon landing while on holiday in Swanage. But as soon as I became “conscious”--1978?--I was totally fascinated by that decade. Bought ‘Playpower’ by Richard Neville. Even hung out a bit with the sad hippie contingent at my college who in 1981 were still listening to Incredible String Band (which I jeered at--not to their faces, of course--but it’s fabulous, they were right). One of them rushed round to borrow Playpower one morning cos it’s got the classic recipe for orange-and-sugar that’s supposed to wash LSD out of your system, one of them was having a seriously bad trip.

I bet if you scratched a bit below the surface Roxy would turn out to owe more to the Sixties than is immediately apparent, and not just Velvets and Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Eno, after all, with his debts to Fluxus, Cage, Steve Reich and the minimalists. He was obviously very taken with Syd Barrett and talked a bit later circa Talking Heads/My Life in the Bush of wanting to reinvent a form of psychedelia. There’s bits on the first Roxy album that sound like King Crimson. “For Your Pleasure” the title track is psychedelic as fuck. Manzanera’s playing throughout those first three albums is pretty trippy. And wasn’t he in a band called Quiet Sun? There was some crossover with the Canterbury contingent, and Soft Machine was one of the original all-night-rave, UFO/24 Technicolor Dream freak scene bands, alongside Floyd.

My researches into industrial took me back to Bomb Culture, by Jeff Nuttall, possibly the definitive book on the (British) counterculture, written in the summer of 1967. He writes about the sickness of the Sixties, the orgiastic violence in the music--which he diagnoses as symptoms of the insanity of living with nuclear destruction over our heads. It wasn’t actually that bright and optimistic. Maybe 1965-67, Ian McDonald’s lost wonderland, twas bliss to be alive in that dawn, etc. But mostly it was kind of a dark decade.

Amen to that. Mail bag absolutely bulging, who knew this would be the hottest topic yet in blissblog’s short life! Tons of emails telling me that the two most famous pre-jungle uses of Amen are Mantronix’s “King of the Beats” (must dig that out, got it on tape somewhere) and NWA's "Straight Outta Compton". Thanks all.

Matos and Harvell go one better with near-simultaneous emails about this site where you can find a longer list of hip hop uses of Amen. To whit:

2 Live Crew's "Feel Alright Yall"
3rd Bass's "Wordz of Wisdom"
Brand Nubian's "The Godz Must Be Crazy"
Deee-Lite's "Come on In, the Dreams are Fine"
Eric B & Rakim's "Casualties of War"
Heavy D's "Flexin'"
Heavy D's "MC Heavy D!"
Heavy D's "Let it Flow"
Lifer's Group's "Jack U. Back (So You Wanna Be a Gangsta)"
Maestro Fresh Wes's "Bring it On"
Mantronix's "King of the Beats"
Nice & Smooth's "Dope Not Hype"
NWA's "Straight Outta Compton"
Salt-N-Pepa's "Desire"
Scarface's "Born Killer"
Schoolly D's "How a Black Man Feels"

There's also a really barely-scratching-the-surface list of Amen as used in jungle, and bugger-all on its appearances in drill & bassl.

So basically the consensus seems to be that it's a fringe breakbeat in hip hop history.

(Incidentally, when exactly was it that (mainstream) hip hop stopped using breakbeats, like, pretty much altogether? Cos you hardly get them anymore, right? That's why "Made You Look" stood out.)

Back to the mysterious properties of Amen, Derek Walmsey suggests: “It's the SOUND of the break, the production which is the thing, isn't it? Not the actual playing”.

And Ryan Kuo digs up this from some discussion board, as said by a fellow going by the name of Alpha Omega:

"The thing about the amen break is :=...COMPRESSION-however they compressed it, it's caused the frequencies to become huge & whatever way u process the break u will hear a different set of frequencies come out, probably the only break in the world that has that capability.”

Is this the technically-sussed explanation for the explosive quality of the break, which the junglists then literalized and intensified by smashing it to polyrhythmic smithereens?

Ingram takes a heterodox line (I should really get one of those comments boxes but Mark F’s always complaining about Enetation isn’t he--what does that name mean BTW? Sounds like a really unpleasant medical process, or something that happens during giving birth). Matt suggests:

“wasn’t amen, in some senses a sad thing? All those earlier tracks had a million different styles of drums appended to them… what about that "sweet soul brother" james brown break that dillinja uses on "tear off your chest"? Really improbable, kind of delisingly weird. And then amen and....uniformity”.

Which is true to an extent: there was a point in ’94 when the overload of Amen-and-ragga-vocals was oppressive, on the dancefloor you couldn’t hear anything else, pirates were only slightly better, but it helps to explain why ambient-jungle seemed like a good upshot, and Speed as a crucial initiative. I think what happened is that syndrome of an emergent purism I’ve talked about before (e.g. things like gabba that are tilting into the future even as they narrow their focus to a bullet point, as opposed to retro-oriented purisms that conserve and curate. The first is like culture-warrior biznizz, the second like the "taste police"). So hardcore starts as this open field, this possibility-space, all kinds of quirky beats and not-fully-integrated experiments, but then the genre begins to coalesce as a defined identity, discovers its true self, hones down to an essence. And that’s Amen, “the genetic drumcode of the junglist generation” as I put it in the Remarc sleevenote. Where I also say:

“Someone who should know better once described "Amen" as jungle's default option--but that's like saying the Bo Diddley beat, or the twelve-bar blues shuffle, is something people fall back on when their imagination fails. Actually "Amen" is jungle's highest common denominator: its hard core….”

(The someone who should know better is actually Douglas Wolk, writing in the Voice about Hvratski’s Oiseaux album, which is based entirely around making sweet dirty unusual love to the Amen break, fucking with it in every imaginable way. And when I say "should know better" I mean Doug’s a very sharp commentator so it was a tad disappointing to read him dismissing Amen. But perhaps you’d have to have been on a jungle ravefloor in 94/95 in the strafing crossfire of an Amen tear-out to really know about the true power of this particular “potent cliché”).

This topic’s exhausted, so I don’t think I’ll bother putting up the whole Remarc sleevenote--you should just buy the album, it’s great (“Soundmurderer”, “RIP”, “Thunderclap”-- have beats ever been more mashed, rinsed, shredded to fuck, and still funked?). Should be out round about now. My copy arrived yesterday. Credits contain a reference to me alongside “Mike P’s soldiers”…

Amen Brotherhood. Man like Ryan Jon Kuo, he say: “Fracture & Neptune have a forthcoming track on Outsider entitled "Colemanism" which is a homage to the amen, of course. I was wondering where that title came from. Not sure how you'd feel about the retro horn stabs and bass licks thrown in there (they're also from "Amen Brother"), but that amen is sure chopped to goodness!” He also says that there’s a lot of sliced-and-diced rinsin’-like-94 jungle in the pipeline from labels like Inperspective, Offshore, Bassbin/Breakin, Outsider, which overlaps with “the ragga-breakcore axis of Rewind Records/Mashed Up”.

There is a certain sense in which the entire genre of drill’n’bass is just a footnote appended to 94-jungle’s metatext exegesis of those few bars of Coleman’s playing.

I wonder if Coleman the Creator is still alive, and if so, if he even knows the extent of his Achievement? Some very specific decisions he made---more like almost-involuntary reflexes, ingrained in his sinews and ligaments after years (presumably) of playing and practise---went on to become the foundation of an entire genre. A movement, a way of moving through the world. Those snares and ride-cymbals splashes and little pauses, they became woven into the nervous system of a
people. They're certainly part of the fibres of my being. And yet it was probably just an utterly unremarkable session (a B-side after all) for the Winstons, and a break Coleman could play in his sleep.

I’m really curious about the pre-jungle history of “Amen”. I’m not one of those Shapiro/Tompkins-type breakologists, obviously, but I can’t recall hearing “Amen” in any famous hip hop tunes. It’s a bit too uptempo and surging, really, it doesn’t have that slow-and-low quality. It’s not even funky really, but has this odd uptight frantic energy, which is obviously why it grabbed the junglists’ physio-imagination.

For those not heartily sick of the Amen overload I will shortly post here the sleevenote to Planet Mu’s anthology of tracks by Remarc--one of Amen’s greatest exegetes--which is due out any week now.

I applaud the proliferation of the "dead shark eyes" meme. (Weird to find myself in accord with Auspicious Fish, albeit via Marcello). Perhaps it will have this viral avalanche effect and suddenly the Beyonce CD will drop off the album charts like a stone. One can dream. I'm actually enjoying "Crazy In Love", even those horny horns, but really only in the way one perks up when a really well choreographed and energized Gap commercial comes on TV. There was a review in the Voice of the Beyonce album and it boiled down to 1/ boy she's hot (and the writer was female and a mum!) 2/ boy, she's obviously getting a lot of nookie at the moment. That's the whole sales pitch isn't it? But when she's working that booty she's not thinking about sex with Hova or with anybody--just about shifting units. "Shark eyes," you said it bro': the undersea killing machine, or unscrupulous realtors a lan Glengarry Glen Ross, either way fits.

Can I just say, apropos of nothing really, that Christina Aguilera, whose "Genie" I really liked actually, these days looks like she's been slow-baked after being coated in a mixture of chip fat, sweat wrung out of Andrew W.K.'s t-shirt from the "Party Hard" video, and sex secretions? She's the Sunday Sport of the now-pop, the downward pressure on every female popstar to shed a bit more dignity and principles. What was it Morley said? "Pole-dancing pop fiasco Christina Aguilera".

Taylor Parkes wrote a really good article for Bang that got killed on the pornification of pop, and I was going to ask him if he wanted to post it up here but then I find out he's put it up himself--scroll down to the very first post--on what appears to be his new blog.

Technicolor on insufficient love for Gerald Simpson. Weeeeeell, Black Secret Technology got rave reviews at the time (including one by me in MM, plus a good sized feature) and there’s at least a page on it in Energy Flash (w/ stuff on ‘Voodoo Ray’ in the Madchester chapter, and for pretty much anybody in the UK at a certain time “Voodoo” is up there with “Strings of Life”). But yeah, the whole artcore project has suffered a bit from historical revisionism, I suppose. I mean, would anyone now step up to the mat and make a strong case for Timeless? BST stands up a lot better, as does 4 Hero’s Parallel Universe. And Jacob’s Optical Stairway is the "great lost artcore album" as far as I’m concerned. But it seems like there was a tiny historical window where album-oriented atmospheric d&b was a really good idea (people I wish had made their move at that exact right moment: Dillinja, Danny Breaks, Doc Scott, Hyper-On Experience/EZ Rollers, Blame, Hidden Agenda, Dave Wallace...). And then it became not such a good idea. I bigged it up out of loyalty but I don’t really rate Foul Play’s Suspected that highly; the EZ Rollers album was a washout. Reece, Photek, they’re all moldering on history’s trashheap. Some of these people waited way too long (Peshay, Adam F, Source Direct, Nookie) and most made their debut and then… nothing. Omni getting to Album #5 (I did not know that) is remarkable: Haigh really is Mr. Music. Although there was a Foul Play Productions album, recorded by John Morrow after Steven Bradshaw died, which I still have somewhere, kept out of sentimentality.

Related thought: why is Omni sheer godhead but Nookie doesn’t quite make it to the pantheon? Exact same constitutents--divas, piano, euphoria--but with a couple of exceptions, it’s just a little too much on the moist side. Hardcore can get too happy, you need that hint of darkness. Those exceptions: Nookie rmx of Tek 9’s “Slow Down” on Enforcers #8, and the soul-smashing divagasmic Cloud 9 track ‘You Got Me Burnin’ Up’ (the Ray Keith & Nookie Remix, mind). There’s a mix by DB on History of Our World Part One that goes back and forth between the original ‘Renegade Snares’ and ‘You Got Me Burnin’ Up’” that just destroys. Mighty mighty stormclouds of joy. Omni and Nookie both show how much
jungle takes from house as well from techno/hip hop/reggae. Actually the Cloud 9 Volume 3 EP’s pretty good--‘Mr. Logic’ etc.

The other day I was wearing an ancient, wash-faded Photek T-shirt when we went to the local English-style fish’n’chipperie, where the staff are all Brits. This lad recognized the logo, triggering a long conversation about D&B. He wouldn’t stop, it got a bit irritating after a bit, me trying to get some mushy peas into my mouth, and he’s rabbiting on about his baptismal experiences at the Eclipse (he was from Coventry I think). At any rate, one interesting tidbit: Neil Trix of FBD Project semi-fame (well some of us remember “Gestures Without Motion”) is, he claimed, making bhangra these days, and working with Panjabi MC. I wonder if it’s true.

Ingram surpasses himself. When I saw these iridescent silver covers I almost drooled onto the keyboard. Absolutely no idea there was a whole series of these things. I actually have a Prospective 21 siecle, not one in Matthew's list. It's Pierre Henry's Voile D'Orphee/Entite/Spirale. Possibly my favorite album sleeve, least ways that's what I told Julian House for his record cover book forthcoming, the only real rivals are DJ Trax's 1 Man 1 DJ EP for Moving Shadow and 2 Bad Mice's Hold It Down/Waremouse EP ditto. Matt tells me the Henry is worth around 250 dollars. That's roughly 160 times what I paid for it. Picked it up for 1 quid at a jumble sale, the school at the bottom of Warnborough Rd, Oxford, must have been '82, '83. Didn't really know who Pierre H was, just liked the cover. There was a fair bit avant-classical floating around those days, must have been 60s type clearing out their attics. Stuff you see now on the high on the wall (out of grab-and-run reach) at Other Music, going for sixty, seventy dollars. WHY. DIDN'T. I.BUY.MORE.OF.IT.WHEN.IT.WAS.GOING.CHEAP.THEN?!?!?! is the gritted-teeth question. I was on a grant or on the dole, is the answer.

For those about to brock (out), we salute you.
Kodwo pips everybody to the post by digging up this morsel of data on the Creator of jungle's foundational breakbeat, "Amen":

The Winstons:
Little known Washington DC group. Members were Ray Maritano (sax), Sonny Peckrol (bass), Quincy Mattison (guitar), Richard Spencer (vocals), and Phil Tolotta (keys). They had a hit with "Color Him Father" in 1969, but they will forever be known for the flip side, "Amen Brother." The source of so many drum and bass songs that an entire subgenre called "Amen breaks" has been created, G.C. Coleman's drum solo has been chopped up by dozens of producers.

G.C. COLEMAN: ALL HAIL THE ORRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRIGINAL JUNGLIST!!!!!!!!!!!!!.

PS. "Dozens of producers"---understatement of the millenium!

Nurse with Trio. Lickle bit more and then finito , promise(unless somebody wants to furnish me with all this early Haigh material, oh go on...)

Man like Eden, he scan/send an interview with Haigh from the great post-tekno samizdat-zine Autotoxicity, issue #2, '97. The discography at the end, unhelpfully devoid of labels or dates, features three more Haigh pre-Omni releases:

Notes From the Underground LP
Theme From Hunger EP
Extracts from Rosa Silber LP

The interview isn't exactly revealing, but Haigh does say:

"For me there is a direct link between the postpunk era 77-78 and the post dance era 94>>. After the three chord thrash days of 76-77 people began to experiment with sounds, textures, technology and rhythm (PiL, Pop Group, Pere Ubu, Magazine, Cabaret Voltaire etc). Today's drum & bass has the same sense of experiment and exploration, without becoming self-indulgent, still retaining its fundamental drum & bass edge."

Which is sound except he said it in '97 when it all went pear-shaped for d&b w/ the vibe migrating to speed garage. Plus you can see the seeds of his downfall in another remark in the interview where he says he's interested in d&b as music but "not particularly interested in the scene as such".

I say "downfall" but the two Omni albums after Haunted Science I haven't even listened to, I confess. For all I know they may have redeeming features. Haunted Science turned out to be a lot better than I initially thought. I feel a bit ashamed about not even checking the last two lps, considering the incalculable bliss Mr. Haigh's brought to my life (but that's just my inconstant popist side coming out I suppose). Maybe I'll get that Omni Best-Of that just came out, just for sentimental loyality. Haigh is one of those guys who's got the music in him so it's hard for me to imagine Omni #3 and #4 are totally devoid; for the same reason, I really would like to hear the early stuff. LAYLAH heads I'll make it worth your while, honest!

Renegade Snares. No, not more on Rob Haigh--I'm talking about the most-excellent drummer in Lighting Bolt, at NorthSix the other night. Couldn’t decide if he was the reincarnation of the drummer in the Winstons, or the reincarnation of Mitch Mitchell from the Experience. Of course neither of them may actually be dead, but you catch my drift.

Does anyone actually know the name of the drummer in the Winstons? I’ve googled Amen many a time but never ever come across the chap’s name. He’s probably living in penury somewhere and we should all send him 100 dollars each for the immense pleasure he’s unwittingly given us over the years. 1000 dollars in my case.

The bassist in Lightning Bolt is also terrific, how does he do that thing where it sounds all plucky-plangent and semi-acoustic?

I’m wondering if “Reoccurring Dreams” by Husker Du was an important track for them. Along with Blind Idiot God it’s one of the few ancestors I can think of for their supercharged abstract-hardcore instruMENTALISM. Sometimes I think the world is divided into those who think “Reoccurring Dreams” is godlike genius versus those who think it’s ten minutes of jazzwank and who much prefer the pseudo-anthemic semi-tuneful concision of “Turn On the News”, the track that immediately precedes it on Side Four of Zen Arcade. The “Turn On the News” bods are just plain WRONG. But when Lightning Bolt started one song with a heavily mangled (by talkbox?) chant that went “impeach Bush! impeach Bush!”, it’s like they'd fused the topicality of “Turn On” with the blazing majesty and nonspecific yearn-rage of “Reoccurring Dreams”. There did seem to be something intangibly “political” about the whole gig, about the crowd that’s gathered around them.

Wolf Eyes also kinda interesting--they seem to relate to Whitehouse/TG like ARE Weapons relate to Suicide. One of the guys does these both arms upraised and fistclenched triumphalist gestures that look like the pics I’ve seen of William Bennett in aktion. Then when he put his glasses back on after the show he’s looked like your regular dorky guy. Another Wolf Eye looks a bit like a partially melted Vincent Gallo.

I like Jim O’Rourke’s waistcoat.

Omni With Wound: addenda

Man like Andy Cumming, he say: "a quick perusal through the index of England's Hidden Reverse.... finds no mention of yer man Rob”. No room for “dancefloor plodders” in my book says D. Keenan! (Sorry Jon).

Man like Francesco Brunetti, he further says: “Truth Club are cited a couple of times quickly, and Trevor Reidy of Truth Club worked with Stapleton and Foetus on NwW 4th lp Insect and Individual silenced (1981 if I remember well; " a dreadful record, a pile of shit, I burn the master very soon after I made it, I'll never put it on CD
(Stapleton))”.

Man like Jim Backhouse, he say: “wasn't the 23 skidoo / ronin proto
jungle track 'paradox' by jailbreak (1st release on ronin) -- if i remember rightly it was crap though, and it came out about the same time as the first suad / ragga twins records too, so don't know if they can take credit for the first ever breakbeat house track any more than porridge can for inventing acid house”. And: “I've got one great track by rob haigh /sema on a compilation Miniatures, with nww, organum and other grey post-industrialites on it -- kindof satie-esque piano with rumbling drones and a cheap drum machine rattling in a neighbouring room”.

Incidentally, there’s distorted kickdrums that sound almost gabba-esque albeit way-slower or even a bit “I Luv U”-like all over NwW’s Second Pirate Session. And that title--ardkooooore, U know the score! And how about the track entitled “Sugarbush Vs. The Swinging Snares”?

Lone White Guy Strikes Again. Never noticed it before but there is a classic one in the R. Kelly 'Ignition (remix)' video (one of the very few Kelly songs I’ve liked actually) and instead of being a subliminal thing they make it into a major feature of the promo. The Lone White Guy--looking exactly like the popular stereotype of a bespectacled rock critic actually (he resembles a cross between Michael Azerrad and Lou Barlow) hits the floor and starts throwing these wack (if concerted and earnest) R&B type dance moves, surrounded by a circle of black folks staring in mingled amazement and amusement (among them a second white guy hovering in the background with an ambivalent expression on his face, as well he might). So here the LWG syndrome reaches a kind of self-consciousness. Seems like quite a rich text for a reading in terms of inclusion/exclusion effects, cultural ownership, the wigga, concepts of natural rhythm versus white dis-embodiment. Also the victory of pop-ism and post-Timbaland R&B: even the guys who look like they grew up on (or are even members of) Sebadoh, like they write/read Pitchfork, can't resist getting down to our stuff!

Rob Haigh’s Pre-Omni Trio Discography: A Start

Blimey, Rob was busy in the years before the release of that first Omni Trio EP on Moving Shadow (confusingly titled Vol. 2 -- which is a weird echo of TG starting with Second Annual Report). Below is just his industrial-era output--info provided by
Francesco Brunetti, an expert on that music. Grazie!

Nurse With Wound
---keyboards on Spiral Insana
---appears on Sylvie and Babs

Diana Rogerson
unspecified contributions to albums by
Steve Stapleton's wife
---UDT 017 - Diana Rogerson - the inevitable chrystal
belle scrodd record
----UD 021 - Chrystal Belle Schrodd - Belle de Jour

Robert Haigh releases on United Dairies

UD 026 - Robert Haigh - valentine out of season
tracklist
A1 Open Minor Number One
A2 Blue In Season
A3 Ritual To Revolution
A4 Another Career
A5 Automatic Study Number One
A6 Automatic Study Number Two
A7 Impromptu
B1 Developing In Blue
B2 Senecio
B3 Open Minor Number Two
B4 Ritual To Romance
B5 Berceuse
B6 Automatic Study Number Three
B7 Automatic Study Number Four

UDT 034 - Robert Haig - the best of (only in
cassette).

A track by Truth Club appeared on the first United Dairies compilation
UDT 02 - Various Artists - Hoisting the Black Flag
(features NWW, Whitehouse, Mental Aardvarks, Truth
Club, David Cross, Hamilton and Duarte)

Robert Haigh releases on L.A.Y.L.A.H. Antirecords

LAY 09 ---Robert Haigh - "Juliet Of The Spirits" (12")
LAY 21 ----Robert Haigh - "Music From The Ante Chamber" (12")

compilation track “Music For Piano” on The Fight Is On
(L.A.Y.L.A.H. Antirecords) (also included with
coil/hafler/nww/lustmord/organum)

Rob Haigh as member of bands

The Truth Club -- Sleight b/w Looking for Lost Toy (Le Rey Records)

Sema with Robert Haigh - Three Seasons Only
(Le Rey Records, LR102 ) 1984
01. Empire of Signs
02. Three Seasons Only
03. Two Feats of Klee
04. Tod Dokstader

I wonder if this is all of it. (And of course if any of it is any cop). Before he went breakbeat, Haigh had a transitional period of making house tracks, so I'm curious if any of this stuff was released and what it was like.

Also curious to know if Haigh makes any appearances in England's Hidden Reverse, and whether Keenan realises who he is? 'Cos I seem to remember Keenan making a disparaging comment about Omni Trio. Actually, maybe it was his mate Jade Gordon in Obsessive Eye (yeah another great lost zine of the 90s Jon, i will photocopy you the other issues when I next come across them--Dave Howell now is part of the Fatcat team I believe), it was about how Omni was lite-weight bizniz c.f. Keiji Haino. At any rate this unexpected convergence of the universes of Keenan and Reynolds is like a rift in pop-historical space-time. Although come to think of it, a lot of industrial pierced-dick types ended up making techno-ravey stuff, didn't they, so maybe it's not so odd (remember psykick warriors of gaia? Greater Than One mutating into the ravetastic G.T.O, John & Julie, Church of Ecstasy, and then into gabbanauts Technohead? And wasn't Rising High full of ex-industrialists?). Most of the sigil squad ended up doing the whiter-than-whiter Eurotechno/trance/hardtekno stuff, though, or Drum Club area, rather than junglizm. Although 23 Skidoo claim they released the first breakbeat house track ever--title and artist elude me just now--on their label.

More than ample consolation for the non-arrival of a new Isolee album: Villalobos, Alcachofa, (Playhouse). Sooooooooo good. So thickly, gloopily, pendulously textured it's like the music's going in two directions at once--like the vertical axis is almost overpowering the horizontal, forward-through-time axis.

The secret connection between Nurse With Wound and Omni Trio.
"Many people play with us, sometimes as many as ten a session. The principle contributors are members of Truth Club, Fote, Foetus and Whitehouse. David Cross of King Crimson fame also joined us for a while"--Steve Stapleton, 1982. Truth Club was Rob Haigh's band. I found one of their singles. Not great. I wonder if it was him who jammed with NwW. Anybody know?

Ad hominem and how. This has got to be the most no-holds-barred, below-the-belt blitzkrieg of a takedown I've ever read. Beyond Burchill even. I mean to say, I find the guy's shtick a bit irritating, and the thought has crossed the mind that Spin should go ahead and rename itself McKlostermann's Monthly Concern and be done with it. But still, this goes all the way through schadenfreude, past empathy, and onto letters of condolence to the nearest and dearest. Makes the review New York Press did of Generation Ecstasy look like milk and cookies. Cover story and all--headline 'Please Kill Me'.

The assassin Mark Ames is the author of To Russia with Love, "an autobiographical collectoin of essays about Russian whores", so possibly deserves some unforgiving scrutiny himself.

Talking of Coil, here’s young Jess Harvell chipping in with some interesting comments on the topic of second-wave industrial and the wheat-and-chaff ratio thereof. But what’s this? The first civil words I’ve had from his direction in many a moon! “….As much as I've given him a hard time on ILM of late (not without good reason in some cases, mind you, but ILM seems to bring out the absolute worst in me at times)…”. Why, that’s almost an apology! A partial retraction--but of which bits, I wonder? The bit where he lambasted me for opinions he himself espouses (“i think hip-hop and r&b ARE pretty poor right now”--just one of numerous comments to that effect)? The weird theory he’s been touting that I never gave two shits for hip hop (seriously not-true, that one--I don’t want to get into reeling off all the rap groups I reviewed and/or interviewed from 1986 onwards, but suffice to say I was no stranger to London’s import stores and for quite some time believed rap to be WAY more futuristic and exciting than house music). Is it that thing where he deploys my critique of Meltzer against me (devilishly cunning, but I can’t help thinking some form of citation is in order)? Or is it just the repeated calls for Blissblog to shut up shop and me to shuffle off to some assisted living facility?

“ILM seems to bring the absolute worst in me”. Well, you’re not not alone there, mate! Mind you, I’m sure it would have the same effect on me if I still participated. It seems like an almost structural thing inherent to online forums and discussion groups. I noticed it first with a mailing list I used to contribute to occasionally, ukdance. The most pugnacious voices inevitably tended to dominate, and debates were always escalating into acrimonious slanging matches; the "winners" were those with the stamina and thick skin to outlast everybody else. Given my natural bent towards combativeness (discursively anyway) and imperiousness, and knowing I could hold my own in any scrap and then some, I realised if I hung around I could seriously rub folks up the wrong way.

We all know how things written in email sound colder and more bombastic than when said on the phone or in person, and how misunderstandings can develop when utterances aren’t enhanced and/or softened by facial expressions, gestures, real-world presence. Online forums that happen in near-realtime seem to have all the negative side-effects of email plus some unique defects of their own. You have the rapid-response element (where you might blurt out something you’ll later regret) but enough of a time-delay such that you can really hone your comment to make it extra-punchy or acerbic or devastating. And the person at the receiving end can of course reread the comment and get more and more offended by it. Then you get the long term syndromes of bad blood and people in fixed adversarial roles.

The interplay between blogs can be prone to some of these things--there are spats, obviously, offence is taken now and then--but not to nearly the same extent it seems. The time intervals involved seem to be short enough for genuine interaction and discursive back-and-forth, but long enough that ill-considered remarks usually get self-censored. There also, at least in this neighbourhood, seems to be a code of civility--almost exaggeratedly so (which is why it can seem incestuous to some folk, I guess). It’s interesting how Mark K-Punk has fallen into this role of “perfect host”, joining most conversations and invariably pushing them to the next level, making introductions (I’ve lost count of the number of new blogs he’s alerted us to), and generously paying compliments to one and all.

“A good argument” is one of the great pleasures in life--for this opinionated fucker anyhow--but it’s a real delicate thing to pull off without one of the parties getting injured. Even now, in person and in print, I’m still got much to learn about the art of arguing hard while still dropping those signals that indicate respect for one’s adversary. It’s a tricky balancing act, though: too much geniality and agree-to-disagree, and there’s no sparks, no energy, no sense of anything at stake. But too much ferocity, and you might win the argument but lose the friendship, or poison the collective pond.

Anyway, if that is an olive branch, when the check for your latest Grime piece comes through maybe you could burn me off one of those CD-Rs we were talking about…

A really excellent album--REWIND RECORDS: Soundmurderer + SK-1 (Rewind/Rephlex). Soundmurderer’s own tunes, ragga-rinse like some neverending ’94, as good as the real-deal old skool biznizz. GET MASH UP.

And there's a parallel discussion of the SFJ/Timberlake piece going on at the rantscentral sector of Onetouchfootball, in which my old comrade-in-arms David Stubbs (Arsequake Division, 5th Regiment) says the following:

"... it's not that pop music in itself is inherently objectionable, it's that there is so little of it that's any good nowadays. Hence the alacrity with which Popists like Paul Morley have seized on Kylie's "Can't Get You Out Of My Head" like a lifeline. I disagree with E10, I think it's a great record but in recent memory it's a solitary pearl in pop's stagnant ocean (and, arguably, the only decent record the grossly over-indulged Ms Minogue has ever made).

As to why that's the case I'd only mutter vague generalisations here about a paucity of magic, of dreamers, of androgyny, of guilelessness and simplicity in modern pop, which is presently over-determined by ruthlessness, materialism, studied gender apartheid, an almost joylessly anti-romantic, slickly functional attitude towards sex and sexuality - all reasons I can only admire but not really like Beyonce, btw. But that's just one guy's semi-coherent opinions first thing in the morning.

.... far from critics being "afraid" of pop, there's been a long tradition of Popist critics who've used bright, shining examples of the genre as a stick with which to beat grey, moribund, complacent rock (indie, dinosaur, whatever), or even as a form of self-flagellation. Morley himself was the first - in the early Eighties he provocatively remarked that a remix of a Tight Fit single was superior to Led Zeppelin III, thereby driving away the remaining rump of NME's hippie readership.

Since then, numerous crits have invoked pop against rock for various reasons - sometimes out of robust populism, sometimes as indie-kid baiting (Steven Wells is a past and persistent master at this), sometimes revelling in the irony of being in the wrong job - Caroline Sullivan, mystifyingly, has spent a career writing about rock music, even though her true love and, as it turned out, true vocation, was singing the praises of the Bay City Rollers.

It's a tendency which has, if anything, has been over-determined and certainly has no natural constituency among the kids, as MM discovered first in the mid-Eighties and then in its latter days when it attempted, twice, to "Go Smash Hits", like that's what people wanted from a weekly inkie."

Much more to say on this topic, but first...

A burst of discursive activity from Jon Dale, now at a new home. And apparently, in weird synchronicity, he was already planning to do something on Coil--the Good Stuff, so that should be interesting.

Matthew (I thought you were on holiday, mate, and computerless?) uses a quote from the great Robert Wyatt as a springboard for some alternately hilarious and provocative speculations.

Why's there no such thing as "socialist rave"? Maybe 'cos you can imagine the DJ booth as a pulpit, but never as a lectern.

I do know a few SWP and ANL types who were/are serious ravers/junglists/garagists though--and would go through interesting intellectual acrobatics in order to connect their two fields of passion.

Wyatt's Rough Trade labelmates The Red Crayola--whose Mayo Thompson had a fair few chinwags with Robert the Stalin fan I'll wager--did a whole album, Kangaroo?, based around the humourous notion "what would a socialist pop song sound like?". The results, songs like "The Milkmaid" and "The Tractor Drivers", while appealingly daft, show why the idea of Soviet rock'n'roll is an oxymoron. (That's one of the oddest things about A Clockwork Orange--the idea that the USSR would have this huge influence on Western pop culture such that the youth would speak pidgin Russian slang. But then nobody ever accused Anthony Burgess of being in touch with pop music).

Below, Nietzche diagnoses "indie guilt" over a century avant la lettre. Quote courtesy of Mark at K-punk (who himself beautifully expresses the neither pro nor anti but just plain indifferent feelings that most Now Pop inspires--at least in him and me). Now let's hear from Friedrich:

"In our youthful years we respect and despise without that art of nuance which constitutes the best thing we gain from life, and, as is only fair, we have to pay dearly for having assailed men, and things which Yes and No in such a fashion. Everything is so regulated that the worst of all tastes, the taste for the unconditional, is cruelly misused and made a fool of until a man learns to introduce a little art into his feelings and even to venture trying the artificial: as genuine artists do. The anger and reverence characteristic of youth seem to allow themselves no peace until they have falsified men and things in such a way that they can vent themselves on them --- youth as such is something that falsifies and deceives. Later, when the youthful soul, tormented by disappointments, finally turns suspiciously on itself, still hot and savage even in its suspicion and pangs of conscience: how angry it is with itself now, how it impatiently rends itself, how it takes revenge for its long self-delusion, as if it had blinded itself deliberately! During this transition one punishes oneself by distrusting one's feelings; one tortures one's enthusiasm with doubts, indeed one feels that even a good conscience is a danger, as though a good conscience were a screening of oneself and a sign that one's subtler honesty had grown weary; and above all one takes sides, takes sides on principle, against 'youth'. --- A decade later: and one grasps that all this too --- was still youth! (Nietszche, Beyond Good and Evil, 31)

I think it's also about two different ideas of what youth is -- youth as young adulthood
(well adjusted, enjoyment-oriented, confident, fully sexualized, but also complacent and lacking in romance/Romanticism) and youth as adolescence (awkward, inadequate, maladjusted, but also full of wild dreams and excessive expectations). It's this second 'youth'--excessive Romanticism and the distorted polarized purist worldview that results--that Nietzche is talking about that is then renounced loudly.

Tom Ewing recently described his experience of the contemporary pop paradise as "being sixteen again, but without the hang-ups". But the hang-ups are actually the good stuff, or at least the seeds of glory. Adolescence without hang-ups--what's the point? This is why I believe Pop-ism is a lot closer to Hornbyism than it may realise. It's an oddly self-cornering ideology, progressively eliminating more and more of what actually is good and worth celebrating about pop (freak characters, innovator producers, sonic weirdness) as rockist criteria, residues of crypto-auteurism that must be purged. The trouble with this line of argument if pursued to the bitter end is that all that's left is entertainment as its own justification, showbiz criteria, "I like what I like". Nothing against entertainment, we all need it, and come Friday night I don't nip over to the video store and get out a Godard, i have just about enough mental strength left to cope with the repartee on Sex and the City. But there are good reasons why there's been a massive discourse around rock and rock-related popular musics, and there isn't one about, say, Andrew Llloyd Weber musicals, or why TV criticism isn't as heated and urgent as writing about popular music. Various things have been at stake in that "rock &..." discourse, most of them falling into categories marked either "art" or "folk"/"the social". Pop-ism is a subset of that massive discourse, derives its energy from and most of its polemical point in relation to that discourse; it's not the opening up of some new discursive space. And it's quite a tradition in itself--dating not just back to Morley circa New Pop and his "Tight Fit's single is better than Led Zep III" quips (which successfully goading the Jam-and-Bunnymen loving NME readership) or Vic Godard talking about preferring Radio Two to Radio One and wanting an audience of middle-aged people, but all the way back to moves made by Nik Cohn in the Sixties. I would almost say it's a structural position in the discourse--an option available to uber-hipsters who want to distance themselves from middlebrow peers (although to be more charitable there's perhaps also a genuine yearning to leave behind the game of hip altogether). At any rate there's always been an equivalent available of the Missy Elliott > Radiohead argument, and there's usually been someone making that point. Except that now of course singling out Missy Elliott as great is itself deemed auteurist/rockist...

In the great Sasha Frere-Jones versus Alex Ross debate re Justin Timberlake, for all the power of SFJ's argument, I find myself emotionally more in sympathy with this chap (link via rockcritics daily). By which I mean to say: Justin Timberlake's not an underdog. Pop is the overlord right now. (And is actually aligned with, connected in real ways with, forces that are rampaging over everything). Likewise with Pop-ism: its victory is complete (Pitchfork; last year even my mate Craig "I-Sound" Willingham, DJ Scud's right hand man and manager of uberhipster record store Mondo Kim's, put Timberlake in his Top 10 of 2002). But, as history shows time and again, an ideology's point of greatest strength typically precedes the fall. The cycles shift, and I wouldn't be surprised if somebody started to renew the anti-pop critique; if a new and improved rockism didn't rear up from some quarter.

Anyway, for those who reckon they got me pegged as a closet rockist, check this: jan 86, reviewing the june brides live for Melody Maker: "There is a current argument that the real pop is not the glossy, colourful substance that fills our charts, but the jangly likes of the Shop Assistants, Woodentops, Go-Betweens, Junes Bridges, etc etc. Real pop, in other words, descends entirely from the Velvet Underground. Well, I have a place in my heart for this spindly breed, but what irritates me is that its supporters are invariably such snobs. You can never persuade one of them that, say, the sumptuous, magisterial 'Slave to the Rhythm', or the shoddily dynamic 'Rebel Yell' are glorious pop too. You just know they can't even perceive the magic in something like 'Don't Stop Til You Get Enough'". I'm not bringing this up to say "been there done that" (well, not entirely) but to make another point--later in 86, writing a thinkpiece called "Younger Than Yesterday" and various sequel features, I investigated deeper into the scene of groups like June Brides, Talulah Gosh, Pastels, Beat Happening, etc, and discovered that while I still preferred the sonix of Janet Jackson and Mantronix, I was in a lot of sympathy with the reasons why these kids had built a whole culture (the shambling/cutie movement) based around studied innocence, lo-fi naivete, and purist white-only musical sources: it was a revolt against the hypersexuality/glamour/black music-based nature of mainstream pop, which in turn connected to that Eighties yuppie culture of aspiration/health & efficiency/self-realisation. In lambasting the straw man of indie snobbery (which typically seems to be also a form of castigating an earlier version of themselves, more earnest and hung-up--somewhere there's a great Nietzche quote somewhere about this, about how reacting against your youth so stridently, "that too is youth") the Pop-ists have forgotten the original salience of the indie critique, why it was a necessary and good point to make.

Elidor's Robin Carmody back in the fray with new blog The House At World's End. Promised future item on "fascist hip hop" sounds intriguing...

forgot to mention that it was about ten degrees cooler up there

(jeez the insect bites though)