Sorta vaguely related to the below, I thought i'd come up with a nifty new typology of revivals, dividing them into Revivals that Are Inferior to the Thing They're Reviving and Revivals that are an Improvement on the Thing They're Reviving. Unfortunately I could only think of one example in the second category: 2-Tone vis-a-vis the original ska. Every other revival was just not as good as it's precursor. Any suggestions?

Stubbs's blog off to a terrific start with entries on getting into Pseud's Corner (amazed it didn't happen during the arsequake-era output) and Where Did All the Punks In the King's Road go? Strangely, there are still a fair few of punx in the East Village, maundering around Tompkins Square and St Mark's Place, wearing Discharge and Chron-Gen and Exploited T-shirts, but they're all 16 or 17. The mystery of subcultural persistence, part 17.

Inexpressibly thrilling to learn that Jon Dale's met Maddy Prior!!
That album he singles out, Please To See The King, with Martin Carthy on guitar, is where you can really hear the Steeleye/"Skank Bloc Bologna" connection.

Feeling

v/Vm, Zatsu Ongaku mix-cd
Surprisingly fresh, bits of it anyway

Jason Forrest, The unrelenting songs of the 1979 post disco crash (sonig)
Surprised me by turning out be an Avalanches/Bentley Rhythm Ace for the post-Kid 606 set. Well riffy and fun. (Is it too early for Big Beat nostalgia?). You should really see this guy--aka Donna Summer--live for full ?let me entertain you? impact. He really puts out for the audience. At the end we all got a slightly sweaty hug.

Various artists/mixed by Diplo, favela on blast: rio baille funk 04 (big dada)
brazil boyz on E--or E-musik. well ravey.

Maroon 5, that song
Attack of poptimism continues (even like the Vines 'Ride' single, well the guitar bits not the song) and that jet single still lingering from last year (hey as chocolate watchband xeroxes go it?s immaculate) and several other things on the box. Maroon 5 is in the not-what-Simon?s-sposed-to-like tradition of new radicals ?get what you give? (what ever happened to him?)--shades of jamiroquai, prefab, and even faith no more doing ?easy like Sunday morning? -- love that sinuous, languid, indelible melody -- also the disjunction of the guy looking like a young jon spencer but sounding all bourgie bourgie/kane gang

The Abyssinians and Friends, Tree of Satta (blood & Fire)

really feeling

Infinite Livez, Bush Meat (Big Dada forthcoming)
wikkid brit rap that's not grime shockah. wicked lyrics top flow cool sonix. killer cut: 'The Adventures of the Lactating Man'. Quite an imagination this guy.

Metal Boys, tokio airport
Side project of Metal Urbain/dr. mix, this is Acute?s best postpunk unearthment so far-- chrome-meets-disko veering into almost Daft Punk avant la lettre territory

Kanye West, the College Drop out
obviously he's got a lot more strings to his bow than this, and real musicality, but i think the most interesting thing about KW is the tracks where he uses such large chunks of old soul records that it's really blurring the line between a sample and the whole fucking song. which re-raises all sorts of questions about sampling as artistry/sampler as auteur, where the creativity is in this thing, also question of the continued parasitism (not just hip hop here but d&b/downtempo/broken beat etc etc) on what LTJ Bukem called "the golden age of music" (i.e. the Seventies where most sampled funk'n'soul'n'fusion lickage still comes from) and whether it'll just get utterly depleted at some point, mined to exhaustion. So like for instance when in 'Last Call' the interminable yet sheer genius rambling and un-rapped account of his career tribulations that closes the record ("will it ever end?" you think, then "i don't want it to end") he quotes Jay-Z saying on their first encounter after he's heard some of KW's beats, "oh you're a real soulful dude", but of course the "soul" in question is entirely Harold Melvin's or Bobby Bland's or whoever else in whatever song where it's the entire basis bar the drum programming for that particular beat ("beat" meaning "all the music" in hip hop) . So "real soulful dude" means you've got good taste in soul music, you can rework someone else's soul...

Animal Collective, Sung Tongs (fatcat)

not really feeling

glenn branca, lesson no. 1 (acute)

rhymes with wanker. (if you're from England where we also say 'garridge'). the one hand giveth and the other hand taketh away, Dan & Todd...

Slow jamz and anti-slow jamz data coming in, full report next week.

At last! My old comrade-in-arms David Stubbs (i always say that, but it really was like we were in the trenches or something, plus his nickname at MM was Wingco so it sort of fits), now the latest recruit to the Wire collective where he is holding down the reviews editor job, has finally built himself a website/blog. The blog bit's not up and running, but there's content on the site (like his classic Reaper series from Uncut of take-downs on Canonical Albums and Artists, what's amazing to me about David is that many of these records/groups are among his absolute favorites, he can just do this thing where he switches off that part of his brain and just goes into total-destruction-mode, it's a bit like being a barrister i suppose, you suspend belief in the guilt or innocence and build the best case, and in this case Stubbsy is Rock's Supreme Prosecutor) and there are grand plans for all kinds of resurrected material from Melody Maker (including the Mr. Agreeable alter-ego) and elsewhere. I hope he exhumes his bilious rants from Deadline magazine (topics include old people, children, and so forth) which i think he actually did under a pseudonym because there were so foreign to his actual liberal-left leaning opinions. And looking forward to his blog commentary. About bloody time!

Kompact versus Rephlex, Volume, last Saturday

What a great night!

In fact, for roughly two hours there, the only thing marring my high was the fact I was going to have to make an embarrassing about-face on the dance-is-it-over topic.

Thank God the drugs (well the Red Bull and cheap champagne--killer combo!) wore off a bit and the music slackened slightly, and so I only have to make a partial retraction.

Well, obviously, the vibe is still there, in certain circumstances, when everything comes together. Objectively I'd say it's on significantly diminished premises, but later for that argument.

I seem to have had the opposite reaction to most everybody else-- I thought the atmosphere was awesome, the space fantastic (sterile?!), great visuals, the crowd good (considering it was mostly undrugged with a few notable exceptions they know who they are heh heh). People openly flouting the smoking laws so yay for that! Something of a reunion aspect (lots of familiar faces from back in the day) and nice to see some new ones (fuckinell, how come no one told me Jess Harvell was so taaaaaaaaaaall).

Ultimately though I felt the music didn’t quite live up to the Killer Vibe and Sense of Event. It was good but it could have been better.

Mostly this relates to the big guys in the main room, Superpitcher and Mr Michael Mayer. I’d hoped my problems with Mayer’s show at APT would turn out to be 95 percent down to that space’s deficits--the overlit and low ceilinged bar-as-dancefloor; the horrible sound system that pipes music out of vents evenly distributed around the room, like hipstermuzak, with no real sweet stereo spots where you can immerse and be crushed in sound. But actually, although massive volume at, er, Volume, improved this considerably, at the end of the day a massively amplified subtlety is still a subtlety, and there’s my problem. All those slow builds and plateau-like tracks make for a bit of a level experience. The Mayer/Kompact aesthetic, it’s a tiny bit too Digweedy for me; chug chug chug, and when the climaxes do come, they’re kind of mild. Someone said to me “Mayer’s tearing shit up tonight” and I thought, ‘has the meaning of the words ‘tearing’, ‘shit, and ‘up’’ changed w/o my noticing?

MACROHAUS made itself felt at APT as a series of lacks and restraints that seemed to physically demand their opposite: slamming, in yer face, full on. Mayermuzik feels like it's on a leash, it veers quite close to trance or even gabba at times but it always checks itself. Then you get the quasi-lumpen impulse--the Glitterband/Quatro electroboogie, the choppy polka beats that always make me think of those toy birds that dip back and forth sipping water, or someone who can’t get the hang of rowing a boat. Yet Kompact never quite leaves the aural nouvelle cuisine zone. MACROHAUS “is” MEATY: Green Velvet “Flash” crossed with Deep Dish/De Lacy’s “Hideaway”, maybe. Not necessarily ravey, but full throttle, to the jugular. I guess my beef with the Kompact sound boils (sustained metaphor ahoy!) down to that anthem-deficit thing again (more on this later).

Here’s my highlights:

The most interesting music of the night
Plasticman and Mark One. Not that huge a fan of the Croydon Sound/Phuture Grime/dark dubstep on record, give or take the odd killertune like ‘Hard Graft’, but this was a real revelation--it sounds so much more overwhelming (no duh) on a big sound system, especially in the more confined and darker space of the Volume second room. Full of intricacies and crannies of dub space, it’s micro-step--but the ‘step’ refers as much to techstep as 2step. It actually reminded me a lot of Photek at his most coldly creative. Like being inside a videogame.

The most exciting music of the night
Well it had to be Soundmurderer, didnit, shame it was only 30 minutes long though. Full on retrojunglizm (whether it was all old tunes mixed or period-styled newies I’m not sure) but significantly mashed more in the deejaying than would have been done back in the day. I forgot to raise my lighter but did get a bit shouty must admit, I hope not embarrassing my companions too much.

The most enjoyable music of the night
Miss Kittin. Some actual Tuuuuuuuune tunes played! I can’t remember any of them (bit mashed) though except the 2step MC relick of Gorillaz ‘Clint Eastwood’--first time I’ve danced to Damon Albarn’s voice--this coinciding with Plasticman in the other room and meaning UK garage was running t’ings for about ooh five minutes. Amd New Order ‘Blue Monday’--bit like if’n Arthur Baker in 1983 had dropped ‘Satisfaction’ or 'I Wanna HOld your hand' into his sets, but the crowd response was cute, like ‘all hail the ancestral track!’. If I’d been more mashed I would have done my ‘WE. ARE. ELECTRONIC. PEOPLE.’ chant.

So yeah a great night (and I didn’t even come down with the usual cold). Big up all cru and roll on the next one.

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

Anthems, then. On ILM I said rather metaphysically that dance isn’t generating anthems cos a culture in retreat isn’t going to have much call for rallying cries.
The real explanation, though, is more prosaic. The kind of music being made now is made by and made for people who have been in this for a while; they’ve grown with the music, they don’t want to hear crass riffs and obvious hooks. Microhouse, especially, strikes me as music for seasoned sensibilities, sophisticates.

But new recruits get pulled in by the most accessible hooky stuff. I just can’t see it as a music that is going to pull in that many new people. It’s not fierce or full-on enough. Some of the riff-patterns in Meyer’s set verged on the imperceptible to be frank, minute fluctuations of texture. Well they don’t call it ‘micro’ for nothing.
I think you can see this de-cheesing tendency across the genrescape. And of course that becomes a self-perpetuating cycle, the neophytes arrive in steadily diminishing numbers, leaving the connoisseurs in an ever increasing majority.

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

A culture in retreat. Well, I promised a fanciful and involved theory last week, so here goes. You know how certain rock bands get “destroyed” by their failure to conquer America--it’s their last chance to really make some money, to pay off their record company debts. A certain Liverpool band had to break America to pay for its cocaine requirements and made a fatally compromised album that lost them their fanbase. Another Liverpool band tried repeatedly to break America and broke up over 1 million pounds in debt, despite selling millions of copies elsewhere in the world over the years. Anyway, pondering the meaning of the word ‘retreat’, it occurred to me that Electronica’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to conquer America was a bit like the Nazi invasion of Soviet Union--a fatal act of hubris. In some weird way I think that was the beginning of the collapse.

The Nazis did real well at first, drove deep into Russia (this would be Prodigy, the Chemicals, Underworld in '97). But the supply lines got too long, there was a punishing winter, and then Stalingrad--in this schema, the failed campaign for Fatboy Slim’s You’ve Come A Long Way Baby. I would single out Spike Jonz and his fucking terrible video for “Praise You” as the turning point. (Get Joy on this subject and you will hear a rant, she loves that song, and Jonz just made a joke out of what could have been a glorious redemptive anthem, a ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ or ‘Beautiful Day’ if done right). Oh Fatboy did alright what with the songs in movies and on TV commercials, but in the deepest and realest sense he lost: he never became a household name or star, not even on the Moby level. Astralwerks now is like some Wehrmacht division stranded and surrounded in the Ukraine: you can only stave off the inevitable for so long.

The last gasp for Anglo-Euro-tronica, that would be Daft Punk. The Battle of the Bulge, in my schemata. D Day had happened, but the Germans unexpectly pushed back and looked like they might drive the Allies back to Normandy and another Dunkirk. They’d never win the war but they could dream of fighting on, forever. If the WW2 film I dimly recall from boyhood corresponds to historical reality at all, then the Wehrmatcht were so short of fuel their first goal was to capture the Allied gas depots, while all along their advance back into French territory they had to siphon fuel from the tanks of abandoned Allied trucks and armored vehicles. That’s Daft Punk, siphoning from America’s FM rock radio memory-banks in the hopes of infiltrating some house music into the US pop mainstream. Brave try, not a hope in hell. The writing was on the wall.

In WW2, the Soviet Union engaged something like 70 percent of Axis troops and suffered the most casualties, 20 million, something like 30 or 40 times the Allied losses. Okay, then, in my strained and deranged analogy, who’s the Red Army? Black American music. Hip hop and R&B. Between ‘91 and ’97, I really thought us Brits (and some of you EC lot) gave hip hop a good run for its money. We were more sonically advanced, and the whole rave thing mattered almost as much. It was a close as we were going to get to something as important and life-forceful as rap.

But around ’97, just as we started to flag, hip hop and R&B just surged forward again. I'm talking about the commercial mainstream street stuff of course. By and large, since then it has simply been better than electronic dance music--better on everything level -- just as, and probably more, inventive sonically, and it had personality, and an indelible, perennial connection to real-world stuff. How could trance, or nu skool breaks, or whatever you want to come up with, compete? That’s why even if Basement Jaxx could make the most fantastically excitement-crammed records of their genus ever (and they have, several times now, or so some claim), in America they’ll always sell less than, oh I dunno, Juvenile’s fifth, inspiration-sapped album, or Nelly’s nephew. As for poor old Armand Van Helden…. he knows the score.

The exceptions? Well 2step and Grime are nothing if not attempts to keep up with and assimilate the innovations of Black America. Plus you could see the London pirate continuum as Britain's own little internal Red Army of a black population--the equivalent of Tito’s partisans, perhaps.

(Jamaica? The People’s Republic of China).

Yeah, the Red Army, that’s what Black America is. You cannot stop them. I vaguely recall Julie Burchill in her Stalin-groupie mode going on about the Russian masses, the unstoppable force of "that deep moral fibre". Moral fibre's not exactly the word that springs to me when you think of rap but this is pop music so the values are inverted: in these terms, thing of whatever the energy is that makes Bling or Crunk. English people had to neck loads of E and other mindbending substances for ten straight years just to have the same kind of life-force that Black Americans generate just through living in America and dealing with all the shit they have to deal with!

Okay, then, who’s Stalin? Timbaland, obviously. I never want to read another word about him (give it a rest Sasha!) but he’s pretty much the One who turned everything around in ’97. Interestingly he did it by being almost as good at being a Nazi (electronica, remember = Axis powers) as the Nazis were. He may even have ripped a few ideas off "us" (still not convinced by the he-got-it-all-from-dancehall argument, just don’t hear it to be honest). Jungle never happened in America. Except it did: that was “Get UR Rinse On”-- sorry, “Get UR Freak On.”

Da Missus on the most heartwarming docu-soap on TV, Family Business--days in the life of lovelorn porn mogul Seymour Butts.

Talking of Kanye, I've been meaning to do something on "Slow Jamz" (luvvit luvvit, who doesn't?), cos that whole slow jamz genre, I've a bit more time for it than you might imagine (someone recently said to me '"oh i thought you only liked things that hurt your ears!", where do they get these ideas from?), inevitably perhaps leaning more to the 70s stuff in that list --Al Green obviously SUPREME GODHEAD INNIT, Minnie Ripperton for sure, Marvin yeah (although 'Got to Give it Up' is the one 4 me, never really got on with Let's Get It On, while What's Going On seems like a bit of a worthy snooze these day)--plus lots of other stuff not listed in the song like detroit spinners, chil-ites, barry White, rose royce, harold melvin, stylistics etc... whereas by the 80s and 90s the Melisma Effect and the Quiet Storm Snooze Effect are both kicking in a bit: Luther's okay (more in Change than solo though), Anita B now I'm really thinking I might have to revise the longstanding Bakerphobia given how many of my fave jungle tunes are based on her vocal licks, Jodeci's good, but by the time we get to Keith Sweat Ready For The World and all that post-Boyz II Men bizniz, well yeah the tolerance's wearing thin, it's a bit syrupy (a rockist can only change so many of his spots you know) ... BUT ANYWAY what the song made me think about is that as much as I love a bit of soul balladry, I've never actually used it as it's intended to be used, i.e. smooch music, get your ladeee in the mood. Cos the kind of chicks I've dated (actually you know what I've never actually asked anyone on a 'date' date, much more involved and tortuous courtship is more my style), the kind of girls I've gone out with/stayed in with (including the current occupant of the position), frankly, if i'd put on a slow jam type record the effect would have been emetic rather than aphrodisiac, yagetme? Which got me wondering: what are the white equivalent of slow jamz? More specifically what are the white alt-rock equivalents of slow jamz? Now I'd hazard a guess that if you're of a certain age, and U.K. based, Cocteau Twins circa Head Over Heels and Sunburst and Snowblind might have been a bit of a mood-setter, a seduction soundtrack.... 4AD in general probably ("I'm gon' play some Dead Can Dance/you're gon' slip your gloves off").... also in this sensuous/sensual vicinity A Kiss In The Dream House.... verily a Let's Get It On for a proto-Goth generation. But after that I'm blanking a bit in terms of the mid-Eighties. The next one that flushes memory's cheek so to speak is MBV--pretty much the entire body of work really--the You Made Me Realise (esp 'Slow') and Feed Me With Your Kiss EPs, Isn't Anything, "Soon", 'To Here Knows When'--they were pretty explicit about it really, kind of mono-focal on the lyrical front. And the Pixies, actually. Nineties, again, becomes a blank.

Also curious if any one has any ideas relating to (or even actual experiences relate-able about) music that's least likely to have an aphrodisiac or sex-congenial effect: the anti-slowjam. Yeah some would say the entirety of indie rock but that's clearly not the case. Personally I'd nominate Camper Van Beethoven, Phish, and The Grateful Dead (not I hasten to add based on any real-life experience, I wouldn't have the first two in the house no thank you). But you know what, I'm sure people fuck to anything if both parties dig it enough. Still if anyone has stories of soundtrack misjudgements at a critical moment... Anonymity guaranteed if so desired!

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

As a sidenote, the king of slow jamz in the U.K. used to be this guy Robbie Vincent (maybe he still is for all I know), he had Radio One's "proper black music" show, on Sunday evenings if I recall correctly--this is back in the Eighties--where he'd play stuff like Maze (the real "only black music is good music" import buying Brit connoisseurs choice in those days) and jazzfunk and maybe if you were lucky a bit of Loose Ends or Zapp -- but anyway whenever he was about to play a smoochable slow number, he had this catchphrase: "light those candles... open the freezer door". And I always had this mental image of this smooth operator type guy opening the freezer door, but not getting a bottle of bubbly out, just leaving it ajar and the room getting gradually colder....

Much more to say on is-it-me-that's-over-it-or-is-it-over (including the unfurling of a rather involved and slightly fanciful Theory) but right now I'm just feeling real psyched for Kompact versus Rephlex tomorrow at Volume. So maybe I'll be back next week feeling all re-engaged. If you're going and see a vaguely British looking chap with a walking stick standing in between the two rooms looking paralysed by choice, that'll probably be me. Come say hi and waft your drug exusions my way.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Talking of rave-era sonix having a more exciting half-life in rap & R&B (and I should have said dancehall too, obviously), there's a bit in Britney's single that's basically nu skool breaks, only roughly 1000 percent better.

What with 'Toxic' at number 2 and Usher at #1 in TRL, I seem to be having an attack of poptimism. Might have to buy 'Yeah'. Saw it on vinyl in this local dj equipment/hip hop store on 7th between 1st and A. They also had some kind of bootleg LP of the original tunes that Kanye uses on his most famous tracks which i almost bought. Curious to hear Chakha's 'Through The Fire', I wonder if it might not be disappointing and somehow flat-seeming on its own, at the original speed. Still she did some blinding stuff back in the day ("I Know You Live You" etc) so who knows.
(Doesn't she look luminous in that poster at the end of the video?).

jane dark aka joshua clover has a blog...

Just got back from Miami a few days ago--and yes, that is on the early side, if I’d been down there for Winter Dance, but I wasn’t: it was a family mini-vac. We left town just a day before the droves arrived. Totally coincidental, of course, but I can’t help finding an inadvertant symbolism in it. It seems all too apt a signifier for my disengagement from dance culture.

Is it just me that’s over it, or is “it” actually over? I can never decide. Some months ago Philip Sherburne stoutly defended dance culture's continued vitality contra an Alex Petridis obituary for same in Tthe Guardian--and much as I admired Phil’s rigour and passion I couldn’t help feel that Petridis was only pointing out the bleedin’ obvious. There’s evidently micro-scenic motion worth monitoring and I enjoy reading the sonic-shift scrutiny from Phil, Finney, Tufluv, Ronan, et al, but…. the burning urgency to go and check out the recommended records, in store or in situ, just isn’t there. And as much as that might just be me, in my heart of hearts I feel it’s an appropriate response to an objective deficit of…. whatever it is that makes things matter, or made this thing matter in first place. Dance may not be a lost cause exactly, but equally, neither is it a cause in any sense anymore.

Sonically, it’s a movement that isn't really moving: people scrabble around to shuffle together some fresh-seeming (meaning slightly-less-stale) combination of established elements from the last 20 years of electronic dance music's rich history(probably the most disheartening dance experience last year for me was watching Luke Vibert live dusting off the 303 again--acieeeeeeeeezzzzzzzzz). With all the period sounds being juggled and obscure archival sources coming in and out of favour, it's at the point of there being a 'record collection dance' just like there's been 'record collection rock' since the Jesus & Mary Chain. Retro-Dance to match Matt's Retro-Rock TM. (For what it’s worth, I think electronic non-dance is probably in even less impressive shape--when was the last really head-rearranging new sound to come out of IDM?).

(Grime exempted from all the above 'cos it's not dance music).

The only people left who really care are either deejays (amateur as well as professional), druggers, or those with some kind of business or career stake in it (including journalists). The punters, the general populace, aren’t there in anything like as much force anymore, and neither are the fashionistas, those fly-by-night types who actually provide vital grist to the vibe-mill. As well as being a bit more demonstrative and lively on the floor than your true school scene-guardian types, the trendhoppers are a bit like opportunist life forms, parasites whose buzzing presence indicates that here is a flourishing source of cultural nourishment. They’re a signal that this is the place to be. At the moment the best that dance culture(s) can hope to be is a place to be, one of a number of leisure options on the urban menu.

And an enjoyable one still for sure. We got a tiny tantalising taste of it in Miami, because our hotel does this Sunday night thing called Soiree in its sandfloor back garden area. With 8 speaker stacks distributed amid the palm frond foliage, pumping out the music into a darkness flickeringly illuminated by a wood fire…. well it was quite vibey I must admit. Unfortunately Kieran couldn’t stand it, something about the music really freaked him out, the tribally percussion and deep bass pulsing through the murk. He clapped his hands over his ears and started screaming “don’t like it don’t like it.” We had to beat a fast retreat, Kieran howling all the way (“he only likes UK garage” I said in fake-explanation to one alarmed-looking woman). I thought maybe it was just amplified surroundsound in the dark he didn’t like, but turns out it’s specific sounds that frightened him, as I discovered by chance shortly after our return when I happened to play M/A/R/R/S’ “Pump Up The Volume” (on a Colourbox best-of I’ve had for years but never played). It was the same reaction-- except this time he put a pencil in each ear hole (we were doing drawing) and started shouting “I hate this, turn it off. TURN IT OFF!!!!”. The M/A/R/R/S track was pretty much in the same sonic vicinity as the house being played in Miami--pumping dark-bass, ripples of percussion. This got me really curious and I asked what specifically scared him about the music and he said “those sounds”--referring I think to those kinda phased door-slam noises that recur throughout ‘Pump Up the Volume’ and sort of recede back into the mix. The thing that seemed to really unnerve him was sounds panning or moving from front-to-back within the stereofield--something presumably hugely exacerbated in Miami by the octophonic sound system and darkness of the hotel garden. Strangely, though, he doesn’t mind dub and loves drum & bass, both full of eerie spatiality, so go figure. (Maybe he just doesn't like house music).

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

It's ironic that dance culture recycling its own past highpoints and potent cliches is so vibe-deficient, when tiny shards of rave sonix have such a vibrant half-life in R&B and rap. Viz:

B-Boys On E, Slight Return: Usher, "Yeah"
The synth vamp could be off a Dance Ecstasy 2001 track or Da Hool's "Meet Her At the Love Parade". The laser-scything video could have been shot at Twilo. The groove even reminds me a tiny bit of Timo Maas 'Doom's Night' rmx. Tuuuuuuuuune.

YO NICHOLAS CORCORAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[everyone else please ignore]

really pleased to hear from you, i keep replying but the emails get bounced back repeatedly, give me a shout via someone else's e-ddress maybe?

and forgot to mention
twista feat kanye west & jamie fox, "slow jamz"
luuuuuuuvvit, more on this later

"dude", obviously

feeling

that beenie man single

j-kwon, "tipsy"

switchfoot, "made to live" (for the lyrical echoes of "i don't live today", the jagged riffage... shame about the band's name though and that annoyingly ubiquitous effect on the lead singer's voice)

wiley, treadin’ on thin ice
pick hits: ‘pies’ and ‘goin’ mad’

deadbeat vs. stephen beaupre, it’s a crackhaus thing

remarc, unreleased dubs 94-96


really feeling

ying yang twins, "salt shaker"
level pegging with kanye ‘through the wire’ for single of 04 even though they both came out the end of last year... a 30 minute version would be bleep'n'bass heaven

broadcast comp 12.03 (selected and programmed by julian house)

linda perhacs, parallelograms


really really feeling

junior boys, last exit
yeah i know join the fucking club,….
pick hit: tk #2 ‘bellona’

the streets, a grand don’t come for free
pick hits: "could well be in", "blinded by the light", "i wouldn't have it any other way", "dry your eyes". pickest hit/anthem of 04 so far: "get out of my house". love the way mike skinner takes the halting Anglo speech rhythms thing to even further extremes of unwieldy-yet-strangely-funky. this applies to the album as a whole but is especially potent here. the chorus lick will take over your brain (it's enjambent, innit) and the girl rapper is this year's Unidentified "I Luv U" Chick Who Steals The Show.


kinda sorta feeling (a bit)

tortoise, it’s all around you


not really feeling

pluramon, dreams top rock

New York Fauna and Flora Report
(formerly known as 'biting luka stylee')

So i'm staring vacantly out the window across the street and my gaze settles on a man who is restraining a large plastic bag by holding it down against the sidewalk, a plastic bag that appears to be pulsing and seething with eerie HP Lovecraftian energy-shapes. Wha... ?!? My eyes 'correct' what I'm seeing into something that makes sense: obviously he's just trying to stop a plastic carrier bag from blowing away in the violently gusting wind. Except it's not windy. And why's he now carefully scooping up the bag, and with a fist tightly gripping the neck to keep it shut, swiftly moving to bundle it into the back seat of a car, where someone lurking inside takes it? All this done with a furtive, surreptitious, but practised air. Now I really see: it's a bag full of pigeons--for some reason they favor that corner patch of sidewalk--which he's cunningly trapped, presumably with birdseed. But what does he want with a dozen or score of New York city pigeons, those proverbial rats with wings? He's clearly not doing this in an official capacity, unless the city's Pigeon Population Control Squad has plainsclothe undercover agents. As the car drives off with a distinct hint of getaway haste, I'm just hoping he's not in the restaurant business.

Well the great café wars of feb 2004 have subsided a bit...

that's probably the first time I’ve felt like I’ve been living outside the UK too long… must have that missed the meeting where it was decided Pret a Manger was pure evil... the phrase "only in england" does spring to mind just a bit, as in "only in england" could such a modest advance in the direction of edibility be regarded as some sort of class treason ... a slight whiff of inverted snobbery c.f M.E. Smith and his "wholemeal bread tastes like dust" ... reminds me just a tiny tad of those SWP types who would rail against vegetarianism as bourgeois-bohemian lifestyle politics, cuz real proles eat bangers and fish fingers and have arteries as hard as their politics ... and Beautiful South, man, that's wounding, but whatever their audience sees in them Paul Heaton always struck me as a bitter drinker and batter eater type (interviewed the BS once believeitornot, they took me to the most depressing redbrick bungalow-style pub in Hull)

BUT ANYWAY

what i'd rather address is the concept of standardisation, and specifically ponder aloud as to when that started to get deemed a bad thing... presumably this comes out of that postwar 'admass' critique (was that JB Priestley? Richard Hoggart?)... although john 'the intellectuals and the masses' carey goes on about high-culture types sneering at canned food and similar mass-manufactured stuff much early in the 20th Century... but i'm sure there was a time when standardisation equated with the notion of high standards, an aspiration to a certain quota of quality. That positive meaning of 'standard' endures in the way a lot of Indian restaurants are called Standard, and frequently have
standardised menus with the same dishes…. Quality here is equated with non-individuality, the absence of quirky personal touches….

You get a weird after-echo of this idea in the way UK garage slang uses the word 'standard' as a superlative or expression of quality, as in "standard bizness"-- the suggestion being of a routine excellence, something you can turn on like a tap... or perhaps can't turn off... couldn't do inferior work if we wanted to ... this similar maybe to the way "safe" used to be used to mean "fine" or "jolly good"

("safe" and "standard" and "decent" as praise words seems to somehow capture the entire essence of modern Britain, in the same way that the expression "mustn't grumble" would have caught the soul of an earlier Britain)

I'm sure this ought to be the point where I refer to Wiley's "Pies"

gigging regular in the East Village

OM TRIO

no kidding!

some sort of New Agey jazz-fusion entity w/ Buddhist overtones it seems

i might just go and see 'em, just for the perversity