RIP Keith Dobson of World Domination Enterprises, possibly the most exciting live band I have ever seen still to this day, and creators of the immortal "Asbestos Lead Asbestos".
Lovely bloke and he had the gift of the gab so fun to interview.
Keith - who once went as Kif Kif le Batteur - had a long history with countercultural music going back to the ebb days of the actual counterculture - he drummed in the Gong-like festival band Here and Now.
Then Keith plunged into the whole DIY culture with the cassette label Fuck Off Records and his band The O12, when the credo was "bad music is soul music".
Then, using the same fell-into-its-own-weird-unique-tuning-stayed-there guitar as in O12, he formed World Domination Enterprises with himself snarling at the mic' and hacking at his axe, Digger pummeling the drums like a caveman, and Steve Jameson (who died six years ago) on dub rumbly bass.
Big up to Chris Scott of Monitor who turned me onto World Dom in the first place.
World Domination Enterprises were on the cover of Melody Maker at least once - David Stubbs did the honors.
Here's some of my own Melody Maker ravings about WDE
World Domination Enterprises featurette
summer 1986
live at The Underground, Croydon
Melody Maker, early 1987
with their pals MUTOID WASTE COMPANY 100 Club, London Melody Maker, November 21st 1987
Let's Play Domination Melody Maker, April 16th 1988
World Domination live at Hungarocarrot, Budapest summer 1988
The photo catches Keith's gold tooth nicely
Here's Stubbs remembering a jaunt to the Soviet Union with WDE
And a piece at the Quietus by Wyndham Wallace about Keith's whole story
Well, you learn something everyday and I didn't know that the O12 did the original version of "Asbestos Lead Asbestos" in 1984
Not Damo-specific although he appears here and there, check out mash-up-ologist Tom Caruana's Can-tribute-via-loop-distillation release Inner Space - there's an instrumental version and then one (the primary one in fact) which uses these de facto Can breakbeats as a base for rappers to do their thing.
Jump to 40.09 for the Vit C meets MC merger (in this case Denmark Vessey)
"Vitamin C" is used in the first episode of Baz Luhrmann's early days of hip hop drama The Get Down - you see a graffiti-daubed subway train rattling along an overground / overhead track and the hypertense rhythm engine rattles and clicks along with it.
Check out also Woebot aka Matthew Ingram's Damo-endorsed video "Vitamin C" which uses the tune as its intro and outro, but is also a lovely bit of edutainment on the subject of asorbic acid - its discovery and its properties.
Stunned, heartbroken, by the news about Neil Kulkarni.
I never met Neil in the flesh but I feel like I did, his personality is so vivid in his writing, and as a social media presence and podcaster. By the time Neil started coming down to Melody Maker from Coventry, I would have been mostly in New York. I did have some lovely phone conversations with him when getting him to review rap records for Spin (his opinions annoyed some of my staider colleagues - mission accomplished!). But mostly I know him through his writing and his presence on Facebook, where he'd be chatting about the stuff of everyday life as much as music ( he was enormously knowledgeable and opinionated about crisps, for instance! And one of his last tweets was a photo he took of a large Swiss roll someone mysteriously left on a stairwell banister).
As a music writer, Neil Kulkarni is one of the greats - the kind of stylist and personality born for (and born in) the UK’s weekly music press. Like many readers I expect, my favorite Neil mode was the rant – these were things of great rhythmic beauty, deadly in their accuracy - incendiary devices that incensed their deserving targets. The energy he could transmit through words was extraordinary. But Neil wrote in many other modes beyond the polemical and shouty - ruminative and tender, for instance, in the pieces for The Quietus that evolved into Eastern Spring: a 2nd Gen Memoir,his 2012 book for Zer0.
"Life force" is a phrase I keep seeing in tributes. I so wish I’d felt the heat of it up close and in person, but it blazed through his writing. It seems inconceivable that this fire has been extinguished, way too early. The world feels colder today.
My heart goes out to Neil's daughters, partner, and family; his friends; his colleagues past and present; his bandmates; his students; and his fans and readers.
Close friend and fellow Chart Music podcaster David Stubbs has started a Go-Fund Me for Neil's children.
Neil aged 18 going on 19, in 1991, just before starting to write for Melody Maker.
Tributes from his friends and editors and colleagues are too numerous to list here, but here's a few to start with
Simon Price meets the moment with this loving portrait at The Quietus
Derek Walmsley, who worked with Neil at the Wire, remembers him at his blog Slow Motion
The fourth release in Blank Forms Editions’s initiative to chart the ever-expanding musical practice of Catherine Christer Hennix, Solo for Tamburium captures the composer’s most recent major work. Hennix plays an instrument of her own creation, a keyboard interface controlling a suite of eighty-eight recordings of precision-tuned tambura, creating a sweeping and continuous flow of rich harmonic interplay. This piece, documented in Berlin at MaerzMusik 2017, carefully draws upon the fundamental perceptual effects of sound, forming an exacting and cathartic electronic drone. Densely-layered timbral textures and continuous overtone collisions create a maze-like sonic landscape, thrusting the listener into what Hennix calls divine equilibrium or a distinctionless state of being.
Since the late 1960s, Hennix has created a massive and innovative body of work spanning minimal music, computer programming, poetry, sculpture, and light art—pushing the technical and conceptual boundaries of these media toward singular ends. She was part of the downtown music school in New York and has worked extensively with some of its key figures, including Henry Flynt and La Monte Young. In the ’70s, Hennix studied the nature and use of harmonic sound as a disciple of Pandit Pran Nath, a master of the Kirana tradition of classical Hindustani music. The exceptionally designed tamburas of Pran Nath were central to her intensive investigations, as was the devotional practice of carefully tuning and sounding the instruments in a continuous and even flow—both have guided her work with sound ever since.
In 1976, at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, Hennix presented a pair of groundbreaking works that came to define her ensuing practice. With the Deontic Miracle—a group composed of Hennix, her brother Peter, and the Swedish percussionist Hans Isgren—she performed a series of modal compositions for Renaissance oboes, sheng, and harmonic feedback distortion. On this same occasion she premiered an equally significant body of solo work for keyboard, including the only public presentation of The Electric Harpsichord (1976), a piece that marks the beginning of Hennix’s characteristic style of playing, where dense sonic textures gradually emerge from the multilayered interplay of harmonic construction and dissolution.
Solo for Tamburium represents a pointed revisitation of her endeavor to map the non-gravitational harmonics of modal musics—among them raga, maqam, and the blues—onto a tuned keyboard. Since the debut of this piece in 2017 she has continued to develop the work, reshaping and presenting it in a variety of contexts, including at Blank Forms in New York and the Bourse de Commerce — Pinault Collection in Paris in 2022. For Hennix, to approach modality as a dynamic process is ultimately a contemplative practice. Through it, embodied attunement to harmonic vibration gives rise to epistemically transformative states, opening new ways of knowing and being.
This is my fave Groundhogs tune - when I first heard it, something about its wiry angularity reminded me of, well, Wire. Then years later I read somewhere that the Groundhogs was one of the only bands all the members of Wire liked.
Now this one is the Stone Classic - simply one of the greatest hard rock songs of the '70s. Fantastic production.
Tony McPhee #3 also did this potty solo album with berserk synth. Love the record cover.
Joe Carducci writes of the late legendary SST Records producer-engineer SPOT:
"I hate to type out the words but... SPOT passed away after 10am today/Saturday (Mar. 4, 2023) at Morningside Healthcare in Sheboygan, Wisconsin....
"SPOT didn't dwell a lot on his personal history but I believe he was born in Los Angeles, grew up in the Crenshaw neighborhood, moved to Hermosa Beach in the mid-70s, moved to his favorite Black Flag tour stop, Austin Texas, in the mid-80s and then to Sheboygan to be near his favorite Celtic music scenes in Milwaukee and Chicago. His father was Claybourne Lockett who was a Tuskegee Airman who flew British Spitfires and Spot told me once his mother was Native American and from New Orleans...
"SPOT was a musician and writer and photographer who spelled his name in all caps with a dot in the middle of the O. His principal sideline was as a record producer-engineer and an architect of the natural approach to recording a band in the punk era. He started in Hermosa Beach playing and recording jazz and he took the primacy of live jazz playing into recording bands against prevailing attempts to soften or industrialize a back-to-basics arts movement in sound.
"When approaching the mixing board SPOT would assume an Elvis-like stance and then gesturing toward all the knobs he would say in a Louis Armstrong-like voice, "This is going to be gelatinous!"
"His recorded work as player and producer is listed at discogs.com. I'll be going through his writing with an eye toward publishing a collection including his writings on jazz for the Hermosa Beach free weekly. He spent recent years writing the novel, Decline and Fall of Alternative Civilization, and producing a radio-like dramatization of it which is online. Last year he posted new SPOT music at his bandcamp page. In recent weeks I read off lists of the names of his well-wishers to him and SPOT nodded at the mentions of his friends from around the country and the world."
"Spot had a very old-school way of recording: fewer microphones, less mixing, everything live, like he was cutting a Charlie Parker side. My favourite album he did is The Punch Line by Minutemen, from 1981. They were very argumentative, so Spot would go: “OK, that’s the take. Shut up,” and they were smart enough to listen.
"I’ve never met anyone like him. He would go around for days wearing roller-skates. When Black Flag recorded Damaged, Greg Ginn wanted to hear what it sounded like in the studio, so Spot picked up Greg’s guitar and while the band were playing he absolutely nailed the track Damaged II, which is like math rock. Greg was an astonishing guitarist, but he was totally shut down. It was hilarious. The chess master got checkmated."
Well, this is getting a bit tedious - colossi collapsing left right and centre. One a week at least, and at one point back there it was one a day more or less (more o' loss).
Still, on the sunny side, supplies are nowhere near running out. Still a lotta icons, music giants, legends, in the stockpile of the living.
In his later years, my dad was an obituarist - the main thing he was writing was pieces about deceased notables. I wonder if this fate will befall me? Elegies and eulogies are bound to increase as a proportion of the output. Not such a dire fate really - in fact it's a rather satisfying line of work, if usually gruelling (done overnight, mostly). People appreciate them.
(Here's a piece I wrote about the art of the posthumous paean , tethered to the passing of David Bowie, a few years ago.)
Burt Bacharach! What can you say? Such tunes, such arrangements, such wit and elegance.
I appreciate the look of the man almost as much as the music - the sweaters, the hair, the smile, the twinkle.
wonder what Burt thought of the Stranglers' version?
Burt disliked Love's version, said they'd got the rhythm wrong.
And it seems like almost every morning there comes the answer - yet more sad news
of another legend, who filled our lives with beauty and illumination, who's passed, and too often, passed earlier than we'd have expected.
Today’s sickening blow is Alan Rankine, who has died aged 64. Slightly older than
Terry Hall. Both were just four-five years older than me (how weird to think of
them creating these amazing records in their early twenties, recalling how barely-formed I was at that age).
Alan Rankine - gentle man and genius musician. I
had a lovely time interviewing him the couple of times we spoke. He was the music director and effectively more than half the backing band for one of the towering singers of our time, Billy Mackenzie,
someone else who left way too early. Not that he "backed" Billy: it was a partnership, a made-in-heaven musical marriage, a shared vision.
In particular, Alan was an inventive and
thrilling guitarist - an exemplary exponent of that clean, cold Scottish sound
that abounded at the turn of the Eighties - Skids, Scars, Josef K, Altered Images, Simple Minds et al.
The Associates! One of the sounds of our generation.
Sights
too- remember, ooh gosh,that swoony string of Associates appearances on Top
of the Pops in 1982. The mischief, the panache!
Remember, too, the record covers -what a handsome pair Alan and Billy made together.
RIP and condolences to family, friends, fans. To you and to me.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Here's some of the many opportunities I seized to write retrospectively about The Associates. There is also the chapter and a half in Rip It Up and Start Again, a tidied transcript of the first of those two conversations with Alan that appeared in Totally Wired, and the sleeve note for last summer's's deluxified reissue of Sulk, for which I spoke with Alan a second and, as it now turns out, final time.
I prefer this original wiry and emaciated-sounding single B-side version of "It's Better This Way" although the Sulk maximalist version certainly shows off Alan's potential to be a full-blown guitar hero
Once again, this time the studio version, for my absolute favorite "Skipping", or equal absolute favorite, alongside "Party", "Q", "White Car" and "No"
postscript
Roy Wilkinson has a very nice tribute to Alan Rankine on the Facebook Associates group, including a cool bit about "Party Fears Two" and this morsel, which made me want to listen to Alan's solo music:
I feel very fortunate to have done two in-person interviews with Alan. The first was in 1987, for Sounds magazine, talking about his second, post-Associates solo album She Loves Me Not. Alan was living in Brussels at the time. His first solo album, the impressive The World Begins To Look Her Age (precognitive title alert?), had been released on the Belgian label Les Disques du Crépuscule. In my mind, Alan was occupying a landscape established by one of The Associates richest concoctions, Skipping from their great album Sulk: “Ripping ropes from Belgian wharfs / Breathless Beauxillous griffin once removed seemed dwarfed.” (The Beauxillous griffin/griffon was a linguistic twist from dog-lover Billy – a spin on a Belgian breed, the Griffon Bruxellois). What I recall from this interview is Alan being very cool, handsome and quietly authoritative. I asked him if he missed anything about his native Scotland. He thought for a moment: “Just a pint of milk – in a bottle, full cream, a pint of milk you can drink in a one-er.”
From Roy's second Rankine interview, for Mojo, here's a nice bit on "Party Fears Two"
“Bill and I came up with [Party Fears Two] as far back as 1977. We were in Linlithgow, hungover, Sunday morning, one of the first things we did together. I came up with that lead keyboard line on the upright piano in the front room at my mum and dad’s. It’s just one of those special things that come from who knows where. It just happened. I never contrived to write that melody, it just happened. We both just looked at one another – like it’s really good. We didn’t record it [at that point]. We didn’t need to. Once you’d heard that could not forget it. But this was 1977 – punk. It just wasn’t right to emerge at that time, so we filed it away. Then we recorded a demo in a session in Willesden where we worked through the night. [At that point] it was called I Never Will, with different lyrics. Billy seemed to struggle for ages with the lyrics for a long time. It is a pretty unusual song. It starts in G major, but half way through the second bar of the intro it’s changed key. It changes from G into C then back into G again. Then, with the verse, it’s changing into B minor, then E minor. Then E major. It’s modulation but if you’d said to me that something was modulating that much in that short a space I would have said you’re crazy, but it just works. When that sort of thing’s working it’s when you’re not noticing it – Penny Lane by The Beatles modulates seven times…”
Rankine did a lot of producing while living in Belgium - people like Paul Haig and Anna Domino. This record with Tuxedomoon ally Winston Tong is said to be more like a full-blown collaboration than mere production.
According to No Wave journalist Roy Trakin, who wrote for Soho Weekly
News and New York Rocker, “a very important hidden figure, who nurtured
the scene and almost singlehandedly championed No Wave back at a time no
one else got it, was Charles Ball of Lust/Unlust. He was like an Alan
Lomax in the swamps, documenting the scene with field recordings.” Ball
had worked alongside Terry Ork at Ork Records, the pioneering New York
independent label that put out Television’s first single. Trakin
describes Ball as “a real heavy thinker, into French polemical film
makers, a real Godard freak”.
Speaking from his home in Florida in (I think) 2003, Charles Ball told me: “I’d spent a year
translating Jacques Revet’s film criticism. I was big into French New
Wave. I read a lot of Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse. Also the Situationists.
And Lacan. Coming from a film and structuralist perspective, I was very
familiar with Roland Barthes and all that kind of thing.”
The name
Lust/Unlust came from this sort of reading.
Ball had left to start his own production company, which is really what
Lust/Unlust was, more than a label as such. Ultimately he let the
artists choose the names for their labels so it looked like he had a
whole stable of different record labels to his credit. The first
Lust/Unlust release was a Teenage Jesus & the Jerks single; Lunch
called her sub-label Migraine. Ball appears to have been a gifted
producer, like Martin Hannett, exploring the potential of the first
generation of digital reverbs.
Charles Ball: “It allowed you to do
things that you could do before like flanging but go much further with
it--you could actually designate a room where the reflections would
suddenly become being harmonized--a pitch up above what the original
was. When I tried to do a mix I tried to make sure something was
changing throughout.” On one Mars EP, he used binaural recording, mixed
to simulate the spacing of your ears. “I also added on digital delays
and reverbs so there was both the exposed physical space if you were to
listen on headphones which sounds uncanily like someone’s behind you or
placed somewhere in space, and then all these artificial space and
unreal space added by the digital delay. Some of the guitar solos I have
on that record are just really extraordinary, it would start like it
seemed like you were seeing the amplifier and then suddenly you were in
some kind of room or chamber that’s psychological.”
Some of Lust/Unlust releases:
Ball also told me he was sitting on an archive of No Wave field recordings, live performances he'd taped.
