RIP SPOT

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."

Henry Rollins in the Guardian, on Spot: 

"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."

An interview with Spot and Joe

le hardcore ne mourra jamais

Break out your Harraps French-English Dictionaries - unless of course you are Francophone already - in readiness for the release in a week or so of Hardcore, a collation of my writings on the hardcore continuum, published exquisitely by Audimat Editions and translated by the fearless Jean-François Caro.

(Ha, I just realised that if you say "Hardcore" in French, it sounds phonetically as ardkore - my preferred demotic rendering). 

Below is the release rationale, en Français: 

Jungle, ambient jungle, techstep, speed garage, darkcore, grime, dubstep, funky… Depuis le début des années 1990, une série de styles musicaux s’est répandue du Royaume-Uni jusqu’aux dancefloors du monde entier. Ces musiques électroniques ont pris forme autour d’une passion pour la basse, les breakbeats, les sonorités issues du dancehall et le fracas des samples d’orchestre. Alimentées par les drogues (ecstasy, kétamine) et longtemps indissociables des radios pirates, elles composent ce que le critique britannique Simon Reynolds (Rétromania, Le choc du glam) a nommé le « continuum hardcore », pour mieux insister sur leur histoire commune. Dans ce livre, Reynolds revient sur ses propres expériences pour nous faire (re)découvrir une foule de maxis et de morceaux légendaires ou oubliés. Il revendique leur radicalité contre le mépris de classe, écoute les rapports féminin/masculin se transformer au cœur des infrabasses, et les réinscrit dans les trajectoires de la diaspora anglo-jamaïcaine et le multiculturalisme anglais. Avec son écriture à haute intensité, entre essai et reportage, cette anthologie inédite constitue un hommage sensible à l’énergie de la rave ainsi qu’un manifeste en prise sur l’innovation et la catharsis des dancefloors, à l’heure où les sonorités hardcore reviennent exorciser l’« anxiété généralisée » d’un capitalisme passé en mode turbo.

Vous pouvez acheter le livre ici

                                                        "Massif de Londres!"

                                                 "Big up ta poitrine Georges Kelly!"

RIP Tango

Tango interviewed by Droid five years ago and written up for Blog To the Old Skool 
















three years of nuumvolution across three remixes - 91 - 92 - 93








on the ones and twos with Ratty

lord of the universe

Acen's "River Deep, Mountain High" *

The second-best version:



The best of the rest










The best version again - i.e. the first video, the one at the top with the amazing female dancers - the "Monolythikmaniak Mix"  - only this time without the annoying hiss and the abrupt too early cut-off



* in the earlier Blissblog post I nominate "Window in the Sky (Kingdom of Light Mix)" as the 300th best hardcore tune of all time (this being an unfinished, indeed barely started project - the #300 tune entry was the only installment of it, I'm ashamed to admit).  Having already planned for "Trip to the Moon" to be #1 (ah, but which mix, which mix, eh?), and "Close Your Eyes" at #150, the circularity would place Acen Razvi at the centre of the Canon, its spine). 

At that point I'm not sure I'd heard the "Monolythikmaniak Mix" - or if I had, it hadn't really registered with me - but if I was to re-embark on that lunatic List, I'd be placing that mix high, much nearer the top. Which would mean that "Window in the Sky" appeared twice. (Not a unique occurrence, actually - three, possibly four, mixes of "Renegade Snares" would have to feature, obviously...  and at least two of "Open Your Mind").  

Somewhat unusually - given rave's general tendency towards the purely sonic, its downgrading of the visual component in pop's audiovisuality - this was a dance track whose glory was opened up for me by that promo video when I came across it a few years ago. (Who knew there were actually a fair number of rave promos made back in the day?) . Above all  it was those astounding dancers....  the chaste frenzy of their movements transmitting and incarnating the sheer ambush of rave -  its "something new under the sun" quality -  just as forcefully as Acen's beats and vamps. 

"hardcore will never die, say scientists"

(via man like jack jambie)

What the?

                     

"at least fifteen years" says tutorial dude, speaking in 2009....  actually, it's now, in 2012, twenty one years since the Dominator/Mentasm  hoover riff was invented, using the Roland Alpha Juno 2 / Eric Persing "What The?" synth patch

It's like a twelve-bar blues shuffle in E at this point  




Not as blatantly recycled as the tracks above but definitely Hoover-esque - finds fresh life from a seemingly stale formula



Did I post this already? I can't remember (maybe on the Energy Flash blog) - at any rate, here's "rave slime" scholars EVOL and their Horde of Hoovers mix earlier this year for FACT



105 tracks in just under 49 minutes!

EVOL's Roc Jiménez de Cisnero told FACT, “The majority of the tracks belong to a very specific timeframe, namely the golden era of European rave and hardcore around 1990, 1991 and 1992, when the hoover sound was wildly popular and its potential was being explored. Despite quickly becoming a gimmick across the scene, and one that spawned countless shit tunes, the hoover was at its peak in the very early nineties, and the productions of that time set the gold standard for years to come. Hoovers survived as a cliché but hardly evolved after that.”

Still yet to hear EVOL's Wormhole Shubz: Finitude and Homeomorphism in Postulatory Rave Synthesis, which is "a deconstruction of rave culture icons under radically different compositional strategies"  and comes complete with a CD booklet featuring an interview with Eric Persing.

Oh wait, there's some excerpts on the site if you scroll down a way - the second track sounds like the erratic flight path of a bee suffering from alcohol poisoning

triffic 91 hardcore set from DJ Dara  (of  NYC jungle scene / Breakbeat Science cru renown), first aired on Jungletrain and now up at 320 Kbps c/o Blog to the Old Skool, with a tracklist