Bring the Noise is published today.

Matt was kind enough to send me a mini-comp of funky house. It was nothing like what I'd expected. It was actually not that far off Tiefschwarz (which I guess explains why in his post Matt used the word "electro-house"). Good stuff (especially Volta's "Robot Needs Oil"), with a real in-your-face, goes-for-the-throat quality--I liked it lots. What intrigued me was that it appeared to have absolutely no sonic connection to the Nuuum, in terms of the constituents of the style. Accordingly, the picture that came to mind listening to it was not a London black-white-all-shades-in-between crowd brocking out, but a much more Euro tableau--elegantly wasted Berliners in a near pitch-black bunker or decommisioned electrical plant.

So is this total dis-placement, this migration to a sound that has no organic roots to the tradition and the locale, is this really--as Matt suggested-- the end of the line for the Nuum? Are all its dialectical possibilities exhausted? Was the Burial album really a funer(e)al eulogy, an outsider's audio-essay written as a tribute to something whose time has now definitively passed? I'm struck again by the sample in "Gutted":

“me and him, we’re from different, ancient tribes… now we’re both almost extinct -- sometimes… you got to stick with the ancient ways… old skool ways”

very nice review of the focus group's new album by mike powell
(i'd have given it at least a B plus if not an A minus personally but that's just me the diehard Ghost Box fan....)

last night actually, i was playing some ghost box for my brother jez, in town from LA this week on a business trip -- he is the reynolds brother who's inherited all of my dad's play-by-ear musical ability, jez plays a bunch of instruments, makes tunes, and has very good ears, so i was well chuffed when five seconds into belbury poly's "the willows" he was like "oooh, what's this? this is good" --- but anyway, but when we got to hey let loose your love, it sounded different to my ears, not worse, far from it, just different: if anything even eerier and more discombobulating. mind you i had drunk a fair amount of wine so maybe my hearing was diffused or something.

the audio-appetitiser for the ghost box entree was a CD-R pairing of ron geesin's Electrosound (the second vol of which is jim jupp's favourite library record if i recall correct) and delia derbyshire/brian hodgson's library outing Electrosonic.

other kookytronic beauts tickling my cochlea recently have been john pfeiffer's Electronomusic, tom dissevelt & kid baltan's song of the second moon (and dissevelt's fantasy in orbit) (the missing link between Meek and Schaeffer, those two), the grateful dead electroacoustic side project Seastones (phil lesh and ned lagin), bunch of others whose titles escape me just this second... really, can't get enough of the stuff