Books of Note

Far be it from me to encourage you to buy any music book this year that isn't called Still In A Dream.... 

But I concede that there are some other interesting music books out there. A couple of which I have blurbed. 

There's ex-Contortion Adele Bertei's No New York: A Memoir of No Wave and the Women Who Shaped the Scene. 

About which I offered: 

"Adele Bertei rips up the history of No Wave and starts again, recentering the women: fearless artists and confrontational performers who put body and psyche on the line. Written with feral elegance and a keen cinematic eye, this mash-up of memoir and cultural history feels like time travel: an entire era of the New York underground brought back to vivid life." 

No New York is out now on Faber & Faber,

Here is Bertei being interviewed by The Quietus's Elizabeth Wiet. 

Another is Daniel Dylan Wray's  Groovy, Laidback, & Nasty: A History of Independent Music in Sheffield 

About which I offered:

"From '70s postpunk through '80s synthpop to ‘90s bleep techno and beyond,  Sheffield has long been the U.K.’s unacknowledged capital for futurist pop.  Finally the city finds the champion it deserves in Daniel Dylan Wray. A rich blend of urban history and music chronicle, Groovy, Laidback, & Nasty tells in vivid detail the story of a place, a people, and a succession of innovative sounds that would change pop again and again."  

Groovy, Laidback, & Nasty is out in early May on White Rabbit 

And there is a third book deserving of your attention: Ben Cardew's Space Age Batchelor Pad Music: The Story Of Stereolab In 20 Songs

That's out in late April on Jawbone Press

Here's an extract from Space Age Bachelor Pad Music at The Quietus to whet your appetite. 

Goodness me, I almost forgot - I have a book out that isn't called Still In A Dream, or at least, the paperback edition has just come out    

Older eyes will recognise the graphic design's nod to this best-seller of the 1970s

RIP Charles Ball

[from the Rip It Up footnotes blog]

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.