"Tis no man - tis a remorseless writing machine" (1-3)

Mvuent, who blogs as Aloysius, returns - after a long silence - to his "audio animation" series Esoteric Experiences At Home and abruptly finishes it with a flurry of posts, topped by a "retrospective" on the entire series in the form of colloquy with fellow Dissensian Luke Davis. 

That conversation nods to the tradition of endings to books like More Brilliant Than The Sun and Neon Screams - instead of a conclusion, the author clarifies their thoughts via a more colloquial exchange with a sympathetic interlocutor (although it may actually be an imaginary exchange, a disguised auto-interview - Luke insists that he never spoke with Kit Mackintosh for their "dialogue"). 

Although the end of the blog series, this might actually be the best starting point: read the scintillating after-thoughts, then go back to the beginning and gird up thy brain for the epic series, which ranges across a vast span of music, from composers like Francois Bayle, Michel Redolfi and Laurie Spiegel to producers like Eon, Luke Slater, Trevor Horn, Sacred Tapestry, Autechre, and The Caretaker. 

It is a commitment, but one absolutely worth making - indeed it's essential reading for anyone interested in electronic music, synesthetic listening, and how to write about sound-shapes in motion rigorously, but without reduction or getting lost in technicalities. Hopefully a down payment on a book, it's a flashback to the golden age of  blog series and macro-essays by such as K-punk and Rouge's Foam. It teems with arresting images and suggestive concepts ("the sound character" -a quasi-living entity that inhabits a soundworld; "fog of war"; "a consilience of imagination").

Here are some tasters: I have separated the imagery from the pieces of music they evoke, so that you can enjoy them as pure language.  

"Passage through an area guarded by 'stone bees', whose undulating buzz reverberates eerily through the caverns"

"It's as though the bells have sunk beneath dark underground waters."

"Subtle fluctuations of volume heighten the euphoric feeling that you’re not just hearing but actually moving through them, like an airplane caressed by clouds"

"The central sound character cycles through all sorts of tactility transformations, melting, smoldering, and brightening at various stages of the journey. By the final minute, it’s charged to a triumphant energy apex."

"...  a parallel world in the uppermost frequency range. Sound characters heard in the main dimension can be faintly heard passing through the upper world. About halfway through, a rapture occurs. Every sound character shoots up one by one. After a moment of lower-world silence... the miracle is reversed: characters can be heard swooping down from the heavens." 

"It's as though the seas and birds have turned into gold"

"A kind of harpsichord machine gun is being fired off to adjust ozone conditions."

"The sounds of ballroom performance transform into gust front wind and a cacophony of unvoices"

"... reimagines its weathered materials so vividly that they're transfigured into poetic sound climates"

".... you finally set foot in this landscape of inner sublime"

For sure, there's an "ear of the beholder" aspect here, as there is with any verbal evocation of sound. But the balance of precision and poetic puts me in mind of Gaston Bachelard's inventories of  imagination and taxonomies of tropes  -  the same heightened attentiveness to movement, space, and light,  applied not to literature but to electronic mindscapes. 

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A playlist for the second half of the series (i.e. the April posts) - designed as a resource for readers rather than a continuous listen. 

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Another Dissensian - who may or not wish to be identified by the forum alias or  real-world name -  has launched a promising new blog: L.S. Trackhead

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Finally, truly a remorseless pitching machine, Kieran Press-Reynolds drops new pieces (with more to come in the weeks to come)

At the New York Times, a piece on the "influencer horror videogame" Content Warning

Talking about shitpostmodernism with Emilie Friedlander + Andrea Domanick at The Culture Journalist 

Bladee's Cold Visions as Pitchfork's Best New Music

A survey for The Face of internet rap's underground genre sprawl

A No Bells celebration of the return of Bushwick club Rash, which had been razed by an arsonist with probable hate-crime intent

Nia Archives debut album, appraised for Pitchfork. 

Futuromania - out today!

The UK edition of Futuromania is out today on White Rabbit ! 

Via select record stores, comes with a limited edition freezine of bonus pieces! 

Check out this radio show about Futuromania I pulled together for NTS - also available at Soundcloud and Mixcloud. 

Here's an interview I did with Metal magazine's Lainie Wallace about the book. 

Here's a chat I had with Moonbuilding's Neil Mason. 

And here's a conversation with Bill Proctor for his electro-history podcast Spacelab 

Watch this space for news about more podcast appearances, webzine and radio interviews, and  upcoming events. 

US edition  out May 7 via Hachette

Futuromaniac playlists -  Spotify -   Spotify (long mix) -  Tidal (longest mix)

About the book: 

Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines & Tomorrow's Music Today is a celebration of music that feels like a taste of tomorrow. Sounds that prefigure pop music’s future - the vanguard genres and heroic innovators whose discoveries eventually get accepted by the wider mass audience.  But it’s also about the way music can stir anticipation for a thrillingly transformed world just around the corner: a future that might be utopian or dystopian, but at least will be radically changed and exhilaratingly other. 

Futuromania shapes over two-dozen essays and interviews into a chronological narrative of machine-music from the 1970s to now. The book explores the interface between pop music and science fiction’s utopian dreams and nightmare visions, always emphasizing the quirky human individuals abusing the technology as much as the era-defining advances in electronic hardware and digital software. 

Futuromania is an enthused listening guide that will propel readers towards adventures in sound. There is a lifetime of electronic listening here.

WHEN MATTS MAKE BOOKS / BOOKS OF NOTE

A mate of mine - a Matt of mine, even - Matthew Worley has a new and excellent book out in a week's time: Zerox Machine: Punk, Post-Punk and Fanzines in Britain, 1976–88. Via Reaktion Books.

Here's what I was happy to offer by way of an endorsement: 

"Intensely researched, teeming with insights and fresh connections, Matthew Worley’s book is the definitive study of punk and postpunk fanzine culture. If you want to know why zines mattered - why zines got people so excited - this is where you should start” 

So definitive and encompassing is Zerox Machine that there is a chapter towards the end in which Monitor is covered, with quotes from myself and David Stubbs.  

Release rationale: 

Zerox Machine is an immersive journey through the vibrant history of British punk and its associated fanzines from 1976 to 1988. Drawing on an extensive range of previously unpublished materials sourced from private collections across the UK, Matthew Worley describes and analyses this transformative era, providing an intimate glimpse into the hopes and anxieties that shaped a generation.

Far more than a showcase of covers, this book examines the fanzines themselves, offering a rich tapestry of first-hand accounts, personal stories and subcultural reflections. Through meticulous research and insightful analysis, Matthew Worley captures the spirit and essence of British youth culture, not only shedding new light on a pivotal movement in music history but crafting a unique alternative history of Britain in the 1970s and ’80s.

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Another recent book of note  is  Switched On: The Dawn of Electronic Sound by Latin American Women.  

Published by Contingent Sounds out of Berlin and co-edited by Luis Alvarado of Buh Records, a Peruvian label that specialises in reissuing Latin American avant-garde and experimental music, this  book represents a double decentering of the received narrative about electronic music history: it focuses on the Latin American contribution, and further focuses on the role of female pioneers such as Beatriz Ferreyra, Graciela Castillo, Hilda Dianda, Jacqueline Nova, Jocy de Oliveira, and Nelly Moretto, among many others.

Release rationale: 

"The official history of 20th-century avant-garde electronic music has been predominantly narrated from the point of view of Anglo-American and Western European experiences and largely remained focused on its male protagonists. To destabilize this history, this editorial project presents a collection of perspectives, essays, interviews, archival photos, and work reviews centered on the early electronic music production by Latin American female creators, who were active from the 1960s to the 1980s. The book also brings us closer to the work of a new generation of researchers who have focused on offering a non-canonical reading of the history of music and technology in Latin America. The publication is the record of a new vision, an account of the condition of being a woman in the field of music technology at a time when this was a predominantly masculine domain.... 

"The texts that make up this publication are organized spatially and conceptually, rather than following a chronology. The selection of female composers profiled sheds light on a variety of relevant aspects: key musical contexts, experiments with technologies (such as tape, electronic synthesis, the first commercial synthesizers), diverse formats (i.e., radio art, electroacoustic pieces, installation, multimedia, theater, film, etc.), intertwined with themes, such as migration, memory, identity, collaboration, interdisciplinarity, social engagement, the acceptance of electronic music, etc. Moreover, the framework of this editorial project opened a space for intergenerational dialogue and a meeting of aesthetics, as many of the authors gathered as collaborators are composers and sound artists themselves....

Edited by: Luis Alvarado and Alejandra Cárdenas

Composers and sound artists featured in this historical account include: 

Alicia Urreta, Beatriz Ferreyra, Elsa Justel, Eulalia Bernard, Graciela Castillo, Hilda Dianda, Ileana Pérez Velázquez, Irina Escalante Chernova, Iris Sagüesa, Jacqueline Nova, Jocy de Oliveira, Leni Alexander, Margarita Paksa, Marietta Veulens, Mónica O’Reilly Viamontes, Nelly Moretto, Oksana Linde, Patricia Belli, Renée Pietrafesa Bonnet, Rocío Sanz Quirós, Teresa Burga, Vania Dantas Leite, among others.

Playlist at The Wire magazine

YouTube Playlist 

bloggige

Underway at Aloysius, a thoughtful series of posts exploring the sorts of spaces and ^scape routes that electronic music opens up (electronic music taken as everything from Luc Ferrari and Francois Bayle to Aphex Twin and Psyche). The series starts with Creative Mode On,  establishes Music As Diegesis,  enters Zones Without People,  gets Super Hostile vs Super Docile , traces Palimpsestscapes, and today contemplates Vanishing Visions and Unknown Memories.  (And here, already is another episode: Transfigured States).

Opening statement lays out the terrain -  "the internet makes a sort of engagement with music possible that’s incredibly expansive in its reach yet utterly introverted in its nature" - and subsequent posts unravel the implications of this tendency toward sonic solipsism combined with infinite extension of the listening self, examining different modes of listener projection (embodied performance versus nonhuman expanses) and so on. As well as analysis and speculation, there's also some terrific synesthetic evocations, e.g.

"Right out the gate you’re assailed by an industrial-machine drone of suffocating pressure. Layers constantly fade in and out, but through these changes in color and intensity this force never dissipates; at times it disconcertingly resembles the human voice. At intervals it lets up for just long enough to allow various species of feral mechanical creatures to burst in, snapping and barking in their own dialects. You soon find that these chrome and gunmetal hell-creatures are capable of accelerating into near-unfollowable flashes of violent, unpredictable movement.... Through all the fluctuations that follow, you never get more than a few seconds to relax; even at its most subdued the piece bristles with tension and inhuman malevolence. On three occasions, descending swarms of nanobots envelope you then evaporate into trails of steam." 

More tasty bloggige - Woebot with an appreciation of Neil Young that takes issue with the widespread viewpoint that "his bruising, ragged, noisy rock music" in the Crazy Horse mode is the good stuff and the more tender, plaintive side is sappy and commercially pandering. There's fascinating stuff about Young's medical history and psychology I didn't know... as you'd expect Matt folds ol' Neil into his ongoing preoccupations with health, spirituality and the counterculture, acclaiming him as "the pre-eminent psychic and spiritual musician of our times". 

Because he's been in the news as a culture-warrior of late, I recently found myself playing Young for the first time in.... quite possibly a couple of decades actually. And I think I largely agree with Matt's take. The full-blast Neil w/ Crazy Horse live experience was one of the most purely powerful rock shows I've ever experienced. But I've never once returned to Arc-Weld after the first and only play. While excited to pick up Live Rust on vinyl cheapish back in the '90s, it never became a regular listen like Rust Never Sleeps itself. That said, probably my faves, the songs I would go back to over and over, combine the pained plaintiveness and the ragged rawness: "Powderfinger", "Cortez the Killer", "Southern Man". 

Futur choc

 Excited to announce the publication of two books in translation!

       
 

On November 16th, Audimat publish Le choc du glam, the French version of Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, translated by Hervé Loncan. More information here. 

On November 19th, Minimum Fax publish Futuromania, a collection of my writing about electronic music (dance + non-dance), translated into Italian by Michele Piumini. More information here. 

 

Electronic Folkways

Here's a piece I enjoyed doing for NPR Music - a piece I had been wanting to do for a while - on the  streak of electronic, experimental, and unclassifiably oddball records released by Folkways alongside its much larger and image-defining output of American traditional music and field recordings from around the world. The peg is Smithsonian Folkways's recent vinyl reissues of Craig Kupka's New Age classic Crystals: Music for Relaxation 2 and Ann McMillan's musique concrète gem Gateway Summer Sound: Abstracted Animal & Other Sounds.  McMillan is sadly no longer with us but I interviewed Kupka and Richard Carlin, who worked alongside Folkways founder Moe Asch in the later years of the label.






                                           

you know the score

I really enjoyed contributing to the Pitchfork lists of The 50 Best Movie Scores of All Time and  The 50 Best Movie Soundtracks of All Time. The original plan was for a single unified list but there were so many suggestions from the electorate that it got split into two, although the distinction between score and soundtrack can get blurry with some films having a mixture of all-new and preexisting musical elements.

For Scores, I wrote about Blade Runner, Walkabout, and Solaris.

For Soundtracks, I wrote about Performance and McCabe & Mrs. Miller.

In these lists, there are lots of films with great scores and soundtracks I'd forgotten about, and  many that I didn't know at all -  loads here to investigate and read about.

Quite a few of the ones I voted for didn't make the cut - below are some faves that did not get ratified by the electorate.

BEDAZZLED – Dudley Moore

As well as starring as the hapless Stanley Moon, who sells his soul to the devil for seven wishes, Dudley Moore -  being a jazz pianist, songwriter and arranger of considerable talent -  wrote the score to this Sixties Brit caper, variations on a theme that are rendered by turns insouciant, idyllic, poignant, and snazzy. There’s also a pair of brilliant Sixties pop parodies: “Love Me” (performed by Moore with moist passion) and “Bedazzled”, on which Peter Cook deadpans his disdain and indifference to all amorous advances - ‘you fill me with INERTIA”.

RIP Stanley Donen, the director.

FORBIDDEN PLANET – Louis and Bebe Barron

For one of the superior science fiction movies of the 1950s, this husband and wife team created the first entirely electronic score in movie history: an abstract, virtually atonal sequence of drones, shrieks, groans and pulsations that seem to reverberate from the coldest, blackest recesses of deep space. But because the Barrons were credited ambiguously with "electronic tonalities", they were cheated of a chance to contend for an Oscar for Best Soundtrack.

THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN – Gil Melle

A sci-fi thriller about scientists investigating a lethal super-virus of extraterrestrial origin in an isolated white-walled underground laboratory gets an appropriately chilly and sterile-sounding score from jazzer turned instrument-inventor. Melle used found industrial sounds like jet propulsion lab blasts and roars and  transformed them by tape-editing. 

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK  - John Carpenter

One of the director/composer's best, ranging from bloodcurdling, borderline-abstract sequences like "The Crazies Come Out" to more melodic synth-pulse propelled tunes like "Orientation #2," which glides along like an empty monorail car coldly surveying the ravaged city below.

BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS – Stu Philips & Bob Stone, et al

Russ Meyer’s mischievously over-the-top camp satire of the rock biz and Los Angeles decadence gets an equally ersatz superb set of songs. Performed in the movie by the fictitious all-girl group The Carrie Nations, the vocals actually came from the off-screen session singer Lynn Carey, a blue-eyed soul powerhouse. There’s also contributions by “real” psych pop group Strawberry Alarm Clock and a kitschy theme song by The Sandpipers,

LOGAN’S RUN – Jerry Goldsmith

Partly orchestral, partly synth, the veteran movie composer’s O/S/T is particularly stunning on the icy electronica of “Flameout” and “Fatal Games” and the pulsating pornodelia of  "Love Shop," which scores a sequence in which the hero and heroine's escape through a strobe-blitzed brothel of the future.

THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY – Francis Monkman

Formerly of prog rock group Curved Air, Monkman whips together an unexpectedly jazzy and funky OST for this Brit gangland thriller – at its most strutting and flamboyant on the main theme, which bookends the movie and accompanies the abrupt downfall of Bob Hoskins’s East London mobster to make for one of cinema’s most exhilarating outro sequences.

THX 1138  - OST by Lalo Schifrin; “sound montages” by Walter Murch

Schifrin’s orchestral score for George Lucas’s dystopian movie is somber and impressive in its own right. But what really makes THX such a compellingly total audio-visual experience are Murch’s sound design, effects and underscores: sourceless shudders and judders, abject squelches, android death-rattles, shearing-metal groans, and, not least,  the electronic garbling and distortion applied to the voices of the bureaucrats who surveil every citizen constantly.

Here's some other faves that did not get the nod.

Stalker

The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle
Rosemary’s Baby

Liquid Sky

Dark Star

Zardoz

Barbarella

Klute 
Gregory’s Girl
The Draughtsman's Contract
The Parallax View


And these are ones I voted for that did get ratified 

Under the Skin
Dazed and Confused
The Good the Bad and the Ugly
Taxi Driver
2001, A Space Odyssey
The Wicker Man
Suspiria
Midnight Cowboy

When Mates Make Books - summer book bonanza

The first time I met David Stubbs - I cold-called at his digs after spotting his flamboyant and acerbic prose in the Hertford college paper -  was to recruit him for our fledgling magazine Margin. But all the while I was pitching the idea of him contributing, one eye was greedily scanning the row of LPs that took up most of a wall  - easily the largest and coolest collection I'd ever seen - and mentally filing records to borrow, once a decent period of acquaintance had elapsed. I could see names on the LP spines that I'd only read about then - like Faust and Can and Sun Ra. Names I'd never heard of.  Releases in strange and elaborate packaging.

As I got to know Stubbsy over the ensuing months, I realised that this was one precociously hip cat.  When I had been buying Tubeway Army singles at WHSmith and listening to Kid Jensen's homework-hours slot on Radio One, Stubbs was mail-ordering items from the Recommended Records catalogue and taping Stockhausen concerts off Radio 3. Indeed my first real exposure to  avant-garde electronic music was borrowing a cassette of something like Hymnen that he'd recorded off the radio - I can still picture Stubbs's left-hand scribble on the inlay card. I couldn't make head nor tail of it, but for David this was terra cognita, just one of several regions of outermost sound he'd explored while still in his teens.

Even more than his Krautrock epic Future Days, Stubbs's new tome Mars By 1980 (great title!) is the book he was born to write. The scope runs from the Italian Futurists to the digital maximalist everyday of the 21st Century - the journey of electronic sound from heroic vanguard to current omnipresence - via Pierres Henry and Schaeffer, David's teenage fave Stevie Wonder, Suicide and synthpop, Delia D and J Dilla, and much more besides.

The preface hooks you straight off with a flashback to the flash-forward of "I Feel Love" in 1977. Evoking the future-rush of hearing the Moroder-Bellote-Summer track -  Number One in the UK for a whole month - Stubbs remembers the feeling as -

"like first contact: the slow opening of the spacecraft door, the blinding shaft of green light.... Pure, silver, shimmering, arcing, perfectly puttering hover-car brilliance... Keyboards are played with unheard-of, bionic, rotor-blade capability. It glides the way scissors do when you achieve that perfect synergy between mind, hand and blade, cutting through the dreary brown curtain of 1970s entertainment and revealing space. Space 1977. No exhaust, no vapour trails, no strings, no frills, this is take-off. People will be left behind, people will be laid off. May you never hear rock music again...  There is something coolly indifferent about this sonic craft, indifferent even to Donna Summer as it glides onwards and upwards, for minute after minute, powered on something far more durable than mere human stamina. Even as the record fades away, you sense it is still out there, puttering pneumatically away, cruising at cirrus level." 

Sentences that give me the same electric tingle as when I first encountered David's prose in the Hertford college paper  - most likely a dandyish disdainful diatribe about the conservative musical fare on offer at student parties, where there was a distinct deficit of DAF and Thomas Leer!

Mars by 1980 is out in a month's time.

Slick segue ahoy - there is a character in the new novel by Bethan Cole (old mate from the glorious  2-step dayz at the turn of the millennium) who is writing a book about the early development of electronic music in the decades after World War 2 -  musique concrete,  Oram & Derbyshire, etc - and another who soundtracks run-way shows using Ligeti and Cornelius Cardew. Bethan tells me it is a  modern morality tale, set in the early 2000s - a critique of celebrity culture and fashion, centred around the rivalry between two designers.  The Glide of Swans is available from Barnes & Noble and other online retailers. 

"Mate" is probably stretching it  - we've never met, we've also sparred a few times - but cordial email acquaintance Dan Hancox has written a vivid and serious study of grime, stretching from its earliest stirrings through to its unexpected love-fest clinch with Corbyn, and making all the right (i.e. Left) connections to urban politics, race, class, gentrification as social cleansing etc.  While I can't resist wryly noting the Nuum-iness of using a lyric from a jungle classic to title a grime tome, Inner City Pressure is the perfect title: as Goldie recently commented at a deejay event, "what we did with beats and sounds, the grime kids are doing with words.”  Or to put it less snappily, grime is the product of the same long-running political impasses and social blockages that shaped jungle, and it's powered by the same rage to live.  And, as we approach the end of this century's second decade, grime  seems to me unchallenged in its stature as the most impressive thing that the U.K. has come up with during the 21st Century, in terms of sono-social energy - just as jungle was the most impressive Britmusic phenomenon of the Nineties.  Inner City Pressure is out in a couple of weeks. 

Another cordial email acquaintance. So far I have just skimmed Will Ashon's Chamber Music but I hear very good things about this experimentally structured celebration-analysis of the Wu-Tang Clan debut, which evokes the world that produced the album, the world that is the album, and the ways the album changed the world.  Out this autumn on Granta.

Another book by an Oxford friend from the early Eighties. (Indeed this features an introduction from one David Stubbs). Back then, Steve Micalef never used to talk much about his days at the epicentre of punk (as Steve Mick of Sniffin' Glue, inventor of the Bin-Liner etc), which frustrated those of us for whom 76-and-all-that was legendary if recent history. Indeed Micalef liked to say that punk got boring very quickly and boasted of having been the first  front-line punk to depart the scene.  Still, nostalgia claims us all eventually... A collection of verse reminiscences and what looks like original diary entries in scribbled handwriting, The Punk Kings of Dyslexia is an appetiser for a full-blown memoir of his mid-Seventies youth that Micalef - nowadays a poet, still a wit and bon vivant non pareil - is hatching... advance glimpses of which are wonderfully vivid and funny.

I've yet to clap eyes on a copy of All Gates Open, but looking forward very much to reading Rob Young's new Can chronicle, written with the close involvement of Irmin Schmidt.

An acquaintance... but one, uniquely, that I've rubbed shoulders with in two different hemispheres, James Bridle - coiner of the optimistic-aspiring, looking-for-future concept The New Aesthetic - comes with an unexpectedly ominous and glass-nearly-empty view of  the Information Age (just check that subtitle "Technology, Knowledge and the End of the Future") in New Dark Age, on Verso - which I am looking forward to reading.

Talking of dark futures and sad presents... not out until November but advance notice of this huge compendium via Repeater of our late friend and much-missed colleague's work - K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher 2004-2016, which is edited by Darren Ambrose and for which I wrote the foreword. If anybody in the UK or US (or indeed elsewhere) wants to host an event celebrating Mark's life and work, now would be the time to start getting things in motion.

Another friend and colleague, but thankfully a far from late mate  (well, except for rendez-vous and appointments maybe ;) ). The republication by Verso in rebooted / expanded / updated form of  More Brilliant Than The Sun, the masterwork by Kodwo Eshun, was already once prematurely flagged up in this blog about a year ago. But now it appears to be definitely coming out in October. A completely different vision of music and cultural temporality, proposing a discontinuum rather than the roots 'n future / "neither vanguard nor tradition but both" way I see and hear things - but seductive and mind-shaking nonetheless. (Re)read it with or against the sociohistorical Inner City Pressure  (I've long thought grime was the Problem for the More Brilliant viewpoint, the upshot it couldn't explain or assimilate to its system without misrepresenting - and trap may pose similar difficulties and challenges). Or indeed (re)read it with or against Chamber Music.