Mordant Music are Jonny Mugwump's special guests playing nonstop exclusives on this week's Exotic Pylon (Saturday night on Resonance FM, 9.30 to 11 PM --also appearing is Joel from Quiet Village celebrating the centenary of De Wolfe)
Tis the season to be hauntological, cos two weeks after that the guest is Position Normal, and two weeks after that it's Moon Wiring Club... more info here on the Pylon schedule for the next few months
(Check out the archive for woebot, stubbs, west norwood cassette library, etc)
Thursday, October 29, 2009
feeling
Very good, actually: Shackleton zone for the most part, but "Regressor" and "Ghostly Hardware" recall also the meteorite-scarred lunar bleakness of Marc Acardipane's ambient gabba mode ("Jupiter Pulse" etc).
I've succumbed to the charms of "Dance Wiv Me". It's a textbook example of that popist precept/procedure, whereby “'importance' and 'relevance' is a scam and a trap" and if you can only "stop thinking about things in those terms, all of music and art becomes far more enjoyable" (Matthew Perpetua). Once you stop thinking about who Dizzee was, what he (and grime) represented--once you let all that go--he suddenly emerges as a top-class entertainer, and "Dance Wiv Me" is revealed as a supremely nifty tune. Actually my favourite bit of that song is not Dizzee's hard chat but the Calvin Harris part: Terry Hall without the scowl.
Much superior to that disappointingly milky, washed-out last album. Mystery with muscle.
Easily my favourite Sun Ra, something I originally taped off Stubbs's vinyl copy in the early Eighties. But wasn't this spacey-keyboards dominated record (recorded live in Milan in the late Seventies, something I never knew) already reissued last year, and as a double CD that time? I'm confused.
Different but holding: feathery songscapes woven largely out of human breath (Aguayo's multi-tracked, vaguely African vocals), the effect is like TV On the Radio both a cappella and in severe dub... or Furious Pig meets the Lyndsey Buckingham of "Trouble".
really feeling
Superb and something of a coup: evenly divided between songs and pure electronic music, largely devoid of samples, this sounds nothing like Dead Air and yet it's still totally Mordant Music. Who else could turn lines like "Norfolk and Surrey/ Estuarial slurry" into a haunting neo-psychedelic ballad?
A fraction of the tapeography of Dolphins Into The Future, my new favourite group. Balearic noise/nu-New Age blissdrone: a smoothie of Boards of Canada and Seefeel , with a booster thimble of Songs of the Humpback Whale thrown in.
A fragment of the tapeography of my new second-favorite group, Ducktails. This, the latest (I think it's the latest, stuff is popping out constantly) is actually a vinyl LP, titled Landscapes and released on the Old English Spelling Bee label. Like most Ducktails, it's largely blissy guitar instrumentals, somewhere between Ariel Pink's more laidback,sundazed moments and a beach bum Galaxie 500, with here and there a glimmer of Durutti. But every so often there'll be a foray into electronic nu-New Age: here, the wondrous light-dance that is "Seagull's Flight"…. check out also, on the Backyard LP, the equally wondrous "Neptune City, NJ".
Ariel Pink has turned out to be one of the most influential underground musicians of the decade, hasn't he?
Very good, actually: Shackleton zone for the most part, but "Regressor" and "Ghostly Hardware" recall also the meteorite-scarred lunar bleakness of Marc Acardipane's ambient gabba mode ("Jupiter Pulse" etc).
I've succumbed to the charms of "Dance Wiv Me". It's a textbook example of that popist precept/procedure, whereby “'importance' and 'relevance' is a scam and a trap" and if you can only "stop thinking about things in those terms, all of music and art becomes far more enjoyable" (Matthew Perpetua). Once you stop thinking about who Dizzee was, what he (and grime) represented--once you let all that go--he suddenly emerges as a top-class entertainer, and "Dance Wiv Me" is revealed as a supremely nifty tune. Actually my favourite bit of that song is not Dizzee's hard chat but the Calvin Harris part: Terry Hall without the scowl.
Much superior to that disappointingly milky, washed-out last album. Mystery with muscle.
Easily my favourite Sun Ra, something I originally taped off Stubbs's vinyl copy in the early Eighties. But wasn't this spacey-keyboards dominated record (recorded live in Milan in the late Seventies, something I never knew) already reissued last year, and as a double CD that time? I'm confused.
Different but holding: feathery songscapes woven largely out of human breath (Aguayo's multi-tracked, vaguely African vocals), the effect is like TV On the Radio both a cappella and in severe dub... or Furious Pig meets the Lyndsey Buckingham of "Trouble".
really feeling
Superb and something of a coup: evenly divided between songs and pure electronic music, largely devoid of samples, this sounds nothing like Dead Air and yet it's still totally Mordant Music. Who else could turn lines like "Norfolk and Surrey/ Estuarial slurry" into a haunting neo-psychedelic ballad?
A fraction of the tapeography of Dolphins Into The Future, my new favourite group. Balearic noise/nu-New Age blissdrone: a smoothie of Boards of Canada and Seefeel , with a booster thimble of Songs of the Humpback Whale thrown in.
A fragment of the tapeography of my new second-favorite group, Ducktails. This, the latest (I think it's the latest, stuff is popping out constantly) is actually a vinyl LP, titled Landscapes and released on the Old English Spelling Bee label. Like most Ducktails, it's largely blissy guitar instrumentals, somewhere between Ariel Pink's more laidback,sundazed moments and a beach bum Galaxie 500, with here and there a glimmer of Durutti. But every so often there'll be a foray into electronic nu-New Age: here, the wondrous light-dance that is "Seagull's Flight"…. check out also, on the Backyard LP, the equally wondrous "Neptune City, NJ".
Ariel Pink has turned out to be one of the most influential underground musicians of the decade, hasn't he?
Friday, October 23, 2009
the thing that struck me about this (snd I'm all for hype, so that wasn't it) is that the voice of the journalist (Kiran Sande) and the voice of the artist (Jam City a/k/a Jack Latham) are virtually indistinguishable.... thoughtful, super-informed about music history, eloquent.... this seems to be the norm with the nu skool producers coming out of the Garage Continuum (copyright Pitchfork, no comment), they really do know their history and are incredibly articulate and precise about placing what they do in some macro-context, mapping out the flow of influences... which in this case (and increasingly) extends beyond nuum to other zones of the past (other nuums) as well as other zones of the globe (kwaito in Jam City's case) ...
this virtual indistinguishability of tone and discursive mode, it feels like a pretty new development. maybe it's exacerbated by interviews being done by email, therefore thought-about-over-time, written up nice and proper, not having the chattiness and fumbling of a spoken interview, but i don't think that's really it... interviewing artists from the nuum in my experience (which is grime and all stages prior to that), even or especially in written form... there's generally something of a idiolect gap, a marked difference in ways of talking ... this nu-skool of producers in lots of ways is the real blog-house, or blogger-house...
There's a whole axis that's emerged in the last several years, coalescing to some extent out of and to some extent off the back of, the nuum .... postdubstep some call it (ugh) although it's also (as with Jam City) postgrime and post some other things too... but what it really is, this fuzzy region that's sort of blurring the edges of, overlapping and encroaching,the nuum... it's the nu-IDM, i think. (The give-away: Brainfeeder, which virtually is Braindance, as per RePhlex's slogan)(Hyperdub as the new RePhlex? Planet Mu as the bridge between RePhlex and Hyperdub?). But crucially it's IDM, reformed. IDM, with most, if not all, of the blindspots removed. IDM, if it actually was serious about the "dance" bit of Intelligent Dance Music. IDM, hip (acutely hip) to where the real energy centers are. IDM, with none of the parody-it snark/goofiness of drill'n'bass/squarepusher/kid606 (if anything, gone the other way and a wee bit too earnest and reverent). So many of the right moves are made, and so many of IDM's faults reformed, that you can't fault this zone of music really. And I don't. I enjoy a lot it (Jam City mix, very nice). Besides, this is my class,isn't it... where I belong.
And yet...
One of the places where a difference comes through, persists, is actually in the names. "Jam City", it just doesn't quite cut it. (As for Joy Orbison...*) Whereas Ill Blu, or Roska, or Crazy Cousinz, or Perempay, these monikers are in the tradition of Rufige Kru and Boogie Times Tribe and Masterstepz and Dem 2... It is now probably pretty easy to get the music right, you can break down and isolate the formal features of all kinds of real-energy-center type musics and come up with nifty rearrangements of them. But it's the peripheral stuff (names, titles, etc) that is actually where that sort of scene-genealogical transmission of vibe still occurs.
* "Joker" (which has pedigree as slighty used jungle producer alias) and "Cooly G" are right on the edge, name-wise. And right on the edge, musically, come to think of it.
this virtual indistinguishability of tone and discursive mode, it feels like a pretty new development. maybe it's exacerbated by interviews being done by email, therefore thought-about-over-time, written up nice and proper, not having the chattiness and fumbling of a spoken interview, but i don't think that's really it... interviewing artists from the nuum in my experience (which is grime and all stages prior to that), even or especially in written form... there's generally something of a idiolect gap, a marked difference in ways of talking ... this nu-skool of producers in lots of ways is the real blog-house, or blogger-house...
There's a whole axis that's emerged in the last several years, coalescing to some extent out of and to some extent off the back of, the nuum .... postdubstep some call it (ugh) although it's also (as with Jam City) postgrime and post some other things too... but what it really is, this fuzzy region that's sort of blurring the edges of, overlapping and encroaching,the nuum... it's the nu-IDM, i think. (The give-away: Brainfeeder, which virtually is Braindance, as per RePhlex's slogan)(Hyperdub as the new RePhlex? Planet Mu as the bridge between RePhlex and Hyperdub?). But crucially it's IDM, reformed. IDM, with most, if not all, of the blindspots removed. IDM, if it actually was serious about the "dance" bit of Intelligent Dance Music. IDM, hip (acutely hip) to where the real energy centers are. IDM, with none of the parody-it snark/goofiness of drill'n'bass/squarepusher/kid606 (if anything, gone the other way and a wee bit too earnest and reverent). So many of the right moves are made, and so many of IDM's faults reformed, that you can't fault this zone of music really. And I don't. I enjoy a lot it (Jam City mix, very nice). Besides, this is my class,isn't it... where I belong.
And yet...
One of the places where a difference comes through, persists, is actually in the names. "Jam City", it just doesn't quite cut it. (As for Joy Orbison...*) Whereas Ill Blu, or Roska, or Crazy Cousinz, or Perempay, these monikers are in the tradition of Rufige Kru and Boogie Times Tribe and Masterstepz and Dem 2... It is now probably pretty easy to get the music right, you can break down and isolate the formal features of all kinds of real-energy-center type musics and come up with nifty rearrangements of them. But it's the peripheral stuff (names, titles, etc) that is actually where that sort of scene-genealogical transmission of vibe still occurs.
* "Joker" (which has pedigree as slighty used jungle producer alias) and "Cooly G" are right on the edge, name-wise. And right on the edge, musically, come to think of it.
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