Audio Journal : 24/01/2011

SixtyFiveMiles released a new EP on the Cherry Red label last week. I loved their Finnish Tango album and have quietly become a fan of their mature indie pop sound (it's evidently not hard to be a fan when they only have two releases so far on iTunes). 'Mary' is a smart, radio-friendly dispatch with a neat American sound – not a bad trick from a band from the Midlands. The rest of the songs on the EP are good as well, but it's 'Mary' that steals the show here. Ideal uplifting stuff for grey, cold January days. Finnish Tango was an accomplished debut; on the strength of the Mary EP, we can expect yet greater things from album number two.

I've had Monaco's Music For Pleasure on cassette since it was released in 1997. For the life of me I don't know why I was buying anything on cassette back then, but for some reason I did. I think I bought it from John Menzies on Colchester High Street. I mean, how uncool is that? A cassette bought from a crap generalist retailer?

New Order called it quits acrimoniously after the release of 1993's Republic. Themes of disenchantment and disappointment riddled that album, most notably on the delicate 'Ruined In A Day', a bitter song directed squarely at the late Manchester music impresario Tony Wilson, who sold the Factory Records dream – and with it New Order's independence – to the big, evil London Records. New Order promptly split up and went off in different directions – Bernard Sumner hooked up with Johnny Marr and ex-Kraftwerk robot Karl Bartos for a second Electronic album, Peter Hook recorded two Monaco albums and the other two – Gillian Gilbert and Stephen Morris – became The Other Two.

The pleasant thing for any New Order fan was that it didn't matter which spin-off you followed, they still sounded like New Order. Music For Pleasure is a case in point. Songs like the first single 'What Do You Want From Me?' – where vocalist David Potts, from Hooky's first side project, Revenge, delivers his very best pastiche of Bernard Sumner – could have appeared on a New Order album proper, and of course Hooky's bass melodies ensure that the references are constant. As a stop-gap between Republic and New Order's unexpected 2001 reformation for Get Ready, Music For Pleasure works fine; it has a bunch of good songs like the disco-y 'Sweet Lips' (definitely from the early Mike Pickering / M People school of Manchester dance music) or the dance-epic 'Junk', but on other tracks the duo seem to lean into the whole Oasis side of Manchester music which I've never appreciated.

I want to learn yoga. I made this decision some time ago and like most things fitness-related, I haven't done a thing about it. Mrs S does yoga; Daughters #1 and #2 have a book called Itsy Bitsy Yoga (it's for kids) which they enjoy from time to time. The reasons for wanting to learn are thus: first, it's healthy, but that's a boring reason; second, and the reason for mentioning it here, is because Lou Reed is an ardent yoga enthusiast. Or maybe it's Tai Chi – either way, I think if the cantankerous curmudgeon can find solace through meditative stretching, there's hope for me yet.



In 2007, Reed released an album principally designed for his own use while running through his Tai Chi routine. For a man who once sang about the euphoric rush of speed and heroin, that may sound incomprehensibly mild, but suspend any thoughts of incongruity and Hudson River Wind Meditations is quite a beautiful album. Designed to evoke the sound of the breeze along the Hudson outside Reed's Manhattan home, the album is fundamentally intended to be connected to nature; without knowledge of that inspiration it would simply be a really good ambient album, as good as any similar sound work by Brian Eno. (Eno, incidentally, during the David Byrne film Ride, Rise, Roar that I saw last week, said that he felt listeners created too many inadvertent impressions of the 'messages' of songs because of titles and words – the listener's approach to Reed's album is here almost totally informed by the purpose of the music and the title, without even listening to it.)

I happen to think it's a brilliant, if slightly unexpected, inclusion in the Reed back catalogue. I'll place it alongside Stephen Vitiello's recordings from the top of the World Trade Center, which, along with sirens and other city sounds from far, far below, also captured the actual environmental sound of the Hudson air currents buffeting the buildings; which isn't that serene when you think about it.

Audio Journal : 21/01/2011

There is a moment during the the David Byrne film Ride, Rise, Roar, documenting his 2008/9 tour, where his occasional collaborator Brian Eno describes the music they made on the album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. 'Dread and promise,' says Eno sagely, and it is an apt description of that album's music. Earlier this week I was listening to this album and was struck by a peculiar quality to the title track; it simultaneously has an elegiac quality but also a sadness, a reflectiveness that somehow takes the edge of the euphoria. Hearing Eno offering his thoughts on the album's unique quality suddenly made the music make complete sense. Less charitably, Eno further went on to say that words are less important to a song than the atmosphere, something that Byrne seems to bristle visibly at stood next to Eno in the NYC offices of his Todo Mundo business. 'I put a lot of effort into those songs!' he laughed in the simulcast interview from Brixton with Paul Morley broadcast after the screening of Ride, Rise, Roar.



I think I have what can only be described as an 'artistic crush' on Byrne, which as a resolutely hetrosexual person possibly requires some explaining. Over the past few years I have become totally obsessed with Byrne's myriad outputs; his work with Talking Heads (of course), his solo work, his books, instrumental soundtracks, the Playing The Building installation at The Roundhouse and his artwork. For Christmas I received a signed print of his Roots Of War In Popular Song (Forest Of No Return), which has pride of place on my office wall. There isn't a thing that Byrne does that doesn't interest me. When I read Bicycle Diaries I wanted to buy a bike again. This blog partly came about because I liked the open-minded way that his is written.

I was supposed to go and see Byrne at the Royal Festival Hall as part of this tour, but I sold the ticket. It's a funny thing, regret; there are many, many things from years gone by – pivotal moments, opportunities lost and foregone – of far greater significance that I should regret more, but selling that ticket ranks as one of the biggest. Ride, Rise, Roar – though not a straight documentary account of something as mundane as a single concert date from that tour – is probably the nearest thing to a simulacrum of seeing that show I stupidly decided to sell my ticket for. By combining concert footage with behind-the-scenes footage you get to see the process of creating the performances live; it's a more studied approach to the notion, which I admit you wouldn't necessarily consider were this to be a concert film proper.

'Boredom is the great motivator,' said Byrne to Morley after, half jokingly trying to explain why the tour to accompany Everything That Happens Will Happen Today included three individual choreographers, unusual dance routines for what he still describes as a 'pop' show and the whole gang wearing tutus for the incendiary rendition of 'Burning Down The House'; attempting to explain why the shows couldn't be a straight pop concert; explaining why the Hillman Curtis film was a blend of concert footage interspersed with black and white footage of rehearsals, interviews with the three choreographers, dancers, his manager ('I hope this works,' he said nervously of the tour), Byrne himself and others.

In the following interview Byrne refused to draw too many comparisons with his other artistic 'concert' film, the Jonathan Demme-directed Stop Making Sense, though Morley felt it an obvious reference point. The awkward, geeky Byrne of the Eighties is undoubtedly still there – the jerky movements, the jogging to the infectious 'Life During Wartime', the vaguely detached delivery - but the focus of the shows appeared to be as much on the unusual choreography as this nominal front-man role. Everyone wore white. Everyone had to learn the moves. When the various talking heads (pun intended) described the dancers, backing vocalists and musicians on the stage as the 'chorus' you could see what sort of contemporary theatricality Byrne was after; not the over-the-top drama of, say, a Rufus Wainwright, but the distilled interpretation of the music and lyrics. That was best illustrated by hearing one chorographer explain how she built a whole sequence from the line 'The world moves on a woman's hips' from Remain In Light's 'The Great Curve'. I once saw the Michael Clark company do something similarly interpretative with Wire at the Royal Festival Hall in 2000.

Of course it's no substitute for seeing the show I sold my ticket for; hell, it wasn't even a substitute for watching Byrne and Morley speak in person at the Brixton cinema from where they broadcast the interview to cinemas across the country, but I suspect watching Ride, Rise, Roar on a tiny cinema screen in Leicester Square with about ten other people is as close as I'll get for now.

Audio Journal : 17/01/2011

A lot of the music I've listened to the past week has been what I'd describe as 'situational', or 'mood specific'. I think we all tend to put on music to either suit a particular mood or to provide a backdrop to a certain activity, either consciously or subconsciously. Some decidedly conscious examples from this week follow.

On a flight to Edinburgh this week I needed to work on some work for a course I'm doing. Two middle-aged women decided to sit next to me and proceeded to talk and talk and talk as soon as soon as they sat down. I swear they were the only people on the whole flight talking. To block them out but still focus on my studies, I put on Hotel : Ambient by Moby, a collection of absorbing, laid-back tracks released as a bonus disc with his 2005 album that wouldn't have gone amiss as the soundtrack to Sofia Coppola's detached Lost In Translation (maybe I say that because that film was mainly set in a Tokyo hotel); instead she chose My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields. So it goes. The Moby album seemed to work: I could still hear the women droning on, but the music adequately sharpened my attention for the course materials.

The next night, turning down the temptation of a second night out with colleagues in Edinburgh, I returned to my hotel room to check on the day's emails. For this I chose LCD Soundsystem's This Is Happening, just because it had a fairly upbeat edge. I often find that if I'm trying to focus on getting a lot of stuff done quickly, listening to something quite fast-paced will generally help. The warped, elastic not-quite-acid-house motorik electro of 'One Touch' and the inimitable ersatz post-punk of 'Drunk Girls' seemed to provide the perfect soundtrack to sorting through the day's messages.

Returning to my studies that night, I first stuck on a collaboration EP between LA Vampires and Zola Jesus. LA Vampires evoke the casual nihilism and violence of the shady blood-suckers depicted in the second half of Bret Easton Ellis's The Informers. The work of Amanda Brown, LA Vampires have no website, eschew Facebook and Twitter and are about as mysterious as the vampires of the book that inspired this music, the sound being a heavily processed dub reggae, augmented here with the mostly wordless vocals of Zola Jesus (Nika Rosa Danilova). I've had this for a while and it suits a particular mood; I'm not sure that was studying, but I used to revise to King Tubby at Uni, so it was a (dub) echo of those days that prompted the choice.

After that, I stuck on Luke Slater's 7th Plain's My Wise Yellow Rug, a collection of extraterrestrial electronica released in 1994. I was attracted to this album when I read a review in the NME that described one of the tracks as being like Vangelis's theme for Blade Runner as covered by Vince Clarke, and being a long-standing fan of the latter, I was down the shops like a shot to get a copy. It came in a cardboard packet with a Magic Eye picture on the front. I'm colour blind and so struggle to make out what it is, but the main thing that night was that it proved conducive to studying. I wound down to sleep that night with Nico's Chelsea Girls, until her Marmite voice began to grate.

Vinyl Corner



Steve 'Silk' Hurley 'Jack Your Body' (7", London Records, 1986)

The thing I most remember about this song was the video, and not in a good way. I seem to recall that there was a tendency to match early dance music tracks with goofy videos almost entirely derived from clips from old black and white movies, cartoons etc - fragments clipped from other sources recontextualised alongside other bits of filmic detritus. A bit like sampling really, just with film. Whilst quite clever and arty and a load of other highbrow adjectives, to me it was just cheesy.

I'm not sure I necessarily liked the song at the time either. That said, I was ten in '86 when this got its UK release, and dance music interested me pretty much from the time such radio-friendly transmissions began to appear in the charts. Picking this up many years later I found the 'Jack-jack-jack your body' sample torridly dated but the Chicago house groove quite appealing. There is something enduringly interesting about the simplicity of early dance music – something which got forgotten about somewhere along the lines with a switch to density and high gloss production; a style which the Berlin school distilled back to its minimal pulse almost in parallel. There isn't a lot to this song at all – a simple bassline, a simple melody, an 808 rhythm and the odd sampled vocal refrain.

It's still a good track even if for nostalgia purposes alone, though I'd have preferred it if the dub on the B-side had dispensed with the vocal riffs completely. But let us not forget that as it was released in 1985 it's just about one of the oldest house records there is. A reminder once again that dance music didn't start in the fabled acid-soaked summer of love, 1988.

Audio Journal : 07/01/2011

The holiday was spent, as usual, with me hardly listening to any of my music, although I did spend some time with a Depeche Mode playlist I made a few years ago. I got some new music for Christmas which will probably get covered here in coming weeks – History by Loudon Wainwright III, Hudson River Wind Meditations by Lou Reed, The McGarrigle Hour from Kate and Anna McGarrigle and their various talented relatives and friends (Loudon, Martha, Rufus etc), Station To Station by Bowie, and one album which I'll come to further down this page. Mrs S, on the other hand, rediscovered her love of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

The Chili Peppers are a band that she was into as a teenager at the time that Blood Sugar Sex Magik was released, and then promptly forgot about them. That interest was rekindled at the time of By The Way (her joint favourite album with Blood Sugar...) and started a passionate love affair that lasted until just after the birth of Daughter#1 and the simultaneous release of the bloated, patchy and horrendously-titled Stadium Arcadium double album. The single 'Snow (Hey Oh)' from that album is the one Mrs S always think of as the soundtrack to Daughter#1's first few weeks and it still evokes fond memories and emotions whenever we listen to it now, nearly five years on.

Daughter#1 was relatively well-exposed to the Chili Peppers (and the parallel solo albums of the band's now second time ex-guitarist, John Frusciante) quite a lot during her time in the womb. The track 'I Would Die For You' from By The Way was the one song Mrs S would play over and over while pregnant and a few days after we found out we were going to be parents Mrs S and I went to the Borgata hotel and casino in Atlantic City to watch an intimate performance by the band along with around five hundred other people, an event that totally ruined seeing them at Earl's Court the following year. Once you've seen a big band play a small venue you can't go back.

A book that Mrs S got for Christmas re-ignited her interest in the band, who are scheduled to release a new album this year, ably assisted by Frusciante's replacement, Josh Klinghoffer (who was brought into the band by his predecessor to add extra guitar to the Stadium Arcadium tracks on that album's tour, and who has been a long-standing musical partner of Frusciante). Consequently we spent a good chunk of New Year's Eve watching old RHCP performances instead of the garbage on TV. Since then the band have rarely been off the house iPod, and it's nice to see Mrs S falling back in love with them all over again. She even played some of their old videos to the impressionable Daughter#1. 'What did you think of the Chili Peppers then?' Mrs S asked. 'They were....really....noisy,' she replied, proof, if required, that familiarity with songs developed in the womb doesn't change a child's fundamental insouciance. She just wants to listen to Rufus Wainwright, which is okay by me.

The album I found myself listening to often during the holiday was Angelo Badalamenti's soundtrack to David Lynch's Twin Peaks. For reasons that I still don't understand – possibly my long-standing aversion to hype – I didn't watch Twin Peaks when it was first on; school friends discussed it avidly the day after an episode and yet the whole thing would just go completely over my head. Later I became something of a David Lynch fan after exposure to the twisted Eraserhead, but still for some reason I never watched Twin Peaks.



When the Horror channel started showing every episode late last year I figured it was about time I finally checked this out, and at last I understand what the fuss was all about; I was totally hooked. The mystery, intrigue, the faint whiff of Dynasty / Dallas piss-taking and the brilliantly loopy FBI agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) all add up to something pretty addictive and I'm vaguely reluctant to get around to watching the final three episodes, simply because I know then it's over.

The soundtrack grabbed me from the first episode. The electronic strings of Badalamenti's 'Laura Palmer's Theme' were familiar to me from Moby's 'Go', which sampled those strings and set them to a thudding 4/4 beat, never for one second losing the drama and lingering darkness of Badalamenti's piece. My favourite piece on the soundtrack is called 'Audrey Dancing', a wonky ersatz jazz number dominated by an off-kilter vibraphone riff and some skronking synthetic sax, used in the programme whenever something amusing or plain mysterious is happening (i.e. it gets used a lot each episode). The Julee Cruise songs I could live without (I'll stick with A.C. Marias for my ethereal female vocalist thanks), but do they effectively compliment the slightly surreal atmosphere of the programme.

Vinyl Corner



Sharks In Italy 'Time (Is Ours)' b/w 'Dancing' (7", 1984, Clay Records)

A Google search on the Eighties band Sharks In Italy produces one discogs.com entry for the Canadian release of their solitary album, and nothing else apart from some images of pontiffs and sharp-toothed and menacing great whites. I'm not terribly surprised; Sharks In Italy's 'Time (Is Ours)' found its way into my parents' collection thanks to a loose extended family connection to the singer, Sandy Reid, and consequently I figured that this was a 7" that only existed in the collections of random Stratford-upon-Avon friends of the band. I've had to scan the sleeve myself and everything, for Heaven's sakes. I'm not sure my parents ever played it while I was around, buying it more out of local duty rather than musical interest, but its existence has taken on an almost mythical importance to me; an importance which I fully expected to be shattered when I finally listened to this after New Year as part of a process of recording my parents' vinyl collection.

It's brilliant. If the recently-departed John Hughes had wanted another fey English band in the mould of Psychedelic Furs to populate more soundtracks to films of teenage classroom emotion and angst, he would have been well-advised to include 'Time (Is Ours)' or its equally excellent B-side 'Dancing'. Nice synthetic-sounding drums, shimmering, watery guitars, subtle keyboards and a euphoric Andy 'OMD' Humphries-esque vocal from Reid makes this overlooked gem suddenly one of my favourite Eighties-songs-I-didn't-actually-hear-in-the-Eighties.

You'd agree, if you could actually get your hands on a copy.