Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 26/10/2009

Go to: My Other Blog / twitter.com/mjasmith

I have a habit of repeating myself throughout this blog, so apologies for that. One such thing I often find myself saying is how much Robert Fripp redefined the way I listen to guitar music. His Love Cannot Bear: Soundscapes – Live In The USA is a good example of this. Fripp, the backbone of the band King Crimson has, over time, developed techniques that allow his guitar to trigger electronic sounds – often dubbed Frippertronics – from a bank of equipment which fully disguises the fact that a guitar prompted the sound that emerges. The result is a serene suite of electronic atmospherics which allowed me in the past to bridge the gap between the apparently limitless possibilities of the synth and the enduring versatility of the humble electric guitar.

Fripp frequently played on records produced by Brian Eno, and the two have collaborated on a number of influential duo albums. Eno’s Desert Island Selection, a companion CD album to the vinyl More Blank Than Frank comprises tracks culled from his back catalogue and sees Eno’s progression from post-Roxy glam oddness on Here Come The Warm Jets to the pioneering ambience of Music For Airports. I already own More Blank Than Frank on vinyl, which I bought many years ago in Barcelona. I’d like to say that I was in the city on some sort of Hemingway-inspired bohemian backpacking expedition, but I wasn’t. Regrettably, whilst there’s a bit of cross-over between the two albums, the best track on More Blank Than Frank – ‘King’s Lead Hat’, an anagram of Talking Heads, who Eno produced – is absent here. ‘I’ll Come Running (To Tie Your Shoe)’ and ‘Here He Comes’, close second and third are here however.

One of the defining artistic collaborations Eno developed was with David Bowie, who began working with the producer when he uprooted to Berlin in the mid-1970s. Low is an album which found Bowie in introspective mode, Eno and others (including Robert Fripp) adding texture and colour on what has become an influential piece in the more experimental territories of Bowie’s back catalogue. Low has a reputation for being bleak and dark (it was a major influence on Joy Division, a band who made the words ‘bleak’ and ‘dark’ very much their own), but I don’t really hear that. The first half is made up of electronically-augmented leftfield pop while the second half is broadly instrumental and more like what you‘d expect from Eno.

David Bowie once had a very public spat in a New York restaurant with the imperious erstwhile Velvet Underground singer / guitarist Lou Reed which is well documented in Christopher Sandford’s Loving The Alien biography. Lou Reed and his former Velvets song writing partner John Cale reconciled some of their personal and artistic differences to record Songs For Drella in 1990. ‘Drella’ was a nickname adopted by Andy Warhol, who was by 1990 three years departed of this earth. Warhol, the sui generis poster boy for pop art, was responsible for launching the Velvets into the art and rock world’s conscience, ‘producing’ their debut album in the only way he knew how – by letting the tapes run and just recording whatever racket the band wanted to make, much as with the lo-fi hands-off way in which he produced his videos. The Velvet Underground And Nico was derided at the time by the establishment as being under-produced and, like much of the mainstream art world perception of Warhol’s work at the time, lazily crafted.

That backlash to someone who’s influence has been rewritten and made large over time is a theme that emerges in Songs For Drella. The album is basically a mini-operetta by the two musicians biographically detailing Warhol’s life from his upbringing in blue-collar Pittsburgh, his early employment as an illustrator for a shoe firm, through the speed- and heroin-addled craziness of the Factory, the development of Warhol’s signature repetitive style, his near-fatal shooting by Valerie Solanis, the creative void after and his ultimate corporeal decline. Cale and Reed take it in turns to deliver the songs, including one piece where Cale perfectly apes Warhol’s introspective and scattershot tonality on a piece which sees him read from the artist’s journals, a piece in which he mourns the loss of Factory stalwarts like Billy Name and curses those who he feels have disappointed him, such as Ondine and Reed. Reed responds on the final track ‘Hello It’s Me’ wherein he finally offers a heartfelt apology for neglecting their friendship, reaffirms his love for Warhol’s work, and sticks the boot in with a few feelings that he won’t let lie.

Reed and Cale both collaborated with Factory girl and Warhol muse Nico on her album Chelsea Girl. Nico possessed a leaden Teutonic intonation which can make listening to her singing somewhat uncomfortable. Me, I’ve gone from detesting the intrusion of her voice on the Velvets’ debut to finding new depths in her style, and so it was with the latter view that I approached Chelsea Girl, the title track of which explores the madness of the Hotel Chelsea wherein she reels off accounts of morally reprehensible behaviour by the Factory cast and crew. (I should at this juncture point out that another album I’ve been listening to over and over this week is Love Is Hell by Ryan Adams, which also includes a song about the Chelsea; more on that album below.) The entire feel of the album has a low-key Greenwich-Village-café-on-a-Sixties-Sunday-afternoon sort of vibe, with lots of flute and strummed acoustic guitars. Occasional strings colour the atmosphere tenderly.

Andy Warhol designed the homoerotic sleeve to The Rolling Stones’s Sticky Fingers, from which the hits ‘Brown Sugar’ and ‘Wild Horses’ were culled. Growing up at a time when the Stones were well past their peak and already on the mega-tour circuit which positioned them as greedy old dudes on a tour bus, I completely overlooked the powerful and sometimes challenging sound they perfected earlier on in their career; so I‘ll readily admit to being late to the party when it comes to albums like Sticky Fingers, where my favourite tracks are those – like the best Velvet Underground tracks – that deal with the darker side of life – ‘Sister Morphine’ is one long homage to chemical dependency while ’Can’t You Hear Me Knocking’ lurches perfectly from bluesy soul-rock to honky-tonk jazz via some Bitches Brew-esque percussion.



‘Sister Morphine’ was co-written with Marianne Faithfull, who also provided backing vocals on Ryan Adams’s Love Is Hell. All I will say about Love Is Hell is that very occasionally an album comes along which makes you think to yourself ‘You know what? If I never listened to another album again after this I wouldn’t mind.’ Love Is Hell is one of those albums. It’s moving, uplifting, bleak, disturbing all at once and I can honestly say I’ve heard nothing else like it. I must have listened to it a dozen times and counting and I’ve only owned it for a week.

There will be no Audio Journal next week as I need a break from turning this out each week. Instead I’ll be putting the finishing touches to a piece for My Other Blog about – I kid you not – teenage girls eating Pot Noodles on the train at 8.50 in the morning. Oh, and probably listening to Love Is Hell over and over.

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 19/10/2009

Go to: My Other Blog / twitter.com/mjasmith

Though perhaps not as radical or aurally challenging as some of their earliest work, Einstürzende Neubauten’s Ende Neu (1996) still finds the Berliners hammering away at steel, deploying compressors and all manner of junkyard mechanics to produce their highly individual artistic sound. Frontman, vocalist and guitarist Blixa Bargeld, more recently departed of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds, holds the lot together with vocal deliveries that transcend the German language’s supposed lyrical limitations, and on the highly un-Neubuaten string-soaked tracks with Meret Becker, shows that the gradual progression of Nick Cave’s writing while Bargeld was on board – from Old Testament fervour to romantic wonder – was not wasted on Blixa‘s own writing. Nevertheless, despite those stretching tracks, my favourite tracks are ‘Installation No.1’, with its vocal of ‘Disobey / It’s a law’ and the frantic, dystopian opener ‘Was Ist Ist’.

When I was a subscriber to The Wire magazine – a music magazine, not a monthly publication based on the cult US TV crime drama – they would rave about the elusive, illusory character Jandek, a prolific artist reclusively skulking on the fringes of alternative music. His music was always on my list to sample at some point, but I simply never got around to it. This week, UbuWeb, the go-to site for all things alternative, sent round a link to a blog containing 31 Jandek albums, from the early 1980s through to Skirting The Edge, released this year on Jandek’s own Corwood Industries label. I figured the latter would be a suitable entry point to his music. Essentially, Skirting The Edge is four tracks of vocal musings over incandescent acoustic guitar, with a bleak tone throughout. ITunes labelled it as ‘lo fi’ when I added it to my library, which is probably right, given its raw production aesthetic.

On to slightly more accessible things, this week I downloaded the eponymous debut from The Little Death, or, more appropriately, The Little Death (NYC) as there are apparently two bands with that name in existence. It’s tempting to describe the band as Moby’s low key side-project, as he is indeed a core member, providing guitars across their debut album. In truth, The Little Death is principally a vehicle for vocalist Laura Dawn, who has appeared live with Moby and contributed vocals to at least one of his albums. The overall sound is one of soulful blues, as filtered through a bunch of musicians living in New York. Gutsy female vocalists aren’t ordinarily my thing, but on this album I’ve found it pretty engaging. My favourite songs are the upbeat tracks ‘Mean Woman’, ‘Hurricane’ and ‘Love Or A Gun’.

From the blues I moved effortlessly to ambient electronica, as crafted by Sheffield’s Richard H. Kirk, founder member of Cabaret Voltaire, one of the bands – like Neubauten – who were grouped together under the banner ‘industrial’. Virtual State (1993) was released on Warp Records and contains lots of trademark Kirk elements – burbling synths, African percussion and distorted samples of speech covertly culled from radio frequencies. This was an album I used to stick on whilst at university to aid concentration while doing my coursework, and consequently hearing it again this week left me feeling rather queasy as I recollected hours spent poring over balance sheets and econometric calculations.



In response to the BBC’s Synth Britannia documentary, it would be all too easy at this juncture to prattle on about all the bands that I like from the synth-pop era, but I won’t. I was castigated by a reader a couple of weeks back for the admission that Erasure remain my favourite band, so let’s not even go there. Instead, in deference to the influence of the humble synth on popular music, I’ll mention a single released about fifteen years ago by Node – U2 / Depeche Mode / PJ Harvey producer Flood and Suede producer Ed Buller and a couple of others – called ’Terminus’ which saw the duo setting up massive modular synths on the concourse of Paddington Station. One can only imagine the reaction of travellers heading to the South West upon hearing the sounds the duo coaxed from their monolithic walls of dials, switches and cabling, but no doubt it was as similarly divisive as when Kraftwerk’s ‘The Model’ first graced the charts.

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 12/10/2009

Go to: My Other Blog / twitter.com/mjasmith

Last week was spent listening – mostly – to music that prompts recollections of events, people and situations.

The first was Possessed by the Balanescu Quartet. Possessed is effectively a collection of classical arrangements of Kraftwerk songs – ‘The Robots’, ‘The Model’, ‘Autobahn’ – and a handful of other arrangements, including ‘Hanging Upside-Down’ by David Byrne.



I saw the Balanescu Quartet perform live at the Patti Smith-curated Jimi Hendrix tribute, the last event to take place at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank before it closed for a swanky refit. They performed four classical adaptations of Hendrix tracks, their version of ‘Foxy Lady’ being the best of the bunch; they certainly providing an accessible counterpoint to other acts on the bill, chiefly Red Hot Chili Pepper bassist Flea who provided ten minutes of looping bass and trumpet that bore little relation to any of the Hendrix back catalogue.

Alexander Balanescu is not simply known for these arrangements of music from other genres; he is an accomplished composer whose scores have adorned film and television soundtracks, but Possessed is what it is – an accessible classical album, but one that fans of Kraftwerk can listen to comfortably, hearing the tracks almost as remixes rather than re-arrangements.

This album has a tragic poignancy for me. The first time I listened to this album was on the Underground. I was stuck on a train a few feet below the streets around Kings Cross, having just left the bright platforms of the Tube station. The train stopped and just sat there, sporadic announcements from the driver that we’d be sat there for a few minutes more and that we’d be on the move very soon.

Me, I couldn’t have cared less. I was enjoying the album and the delay simply meant that I’d be late for work, which at the time was no bad thing. In the end, the train pulled forward to a disused platform beneath Pentonville Road, whereupon we were evacuated up into the bright lights of the early morning. It was only at this point that the chaos, panic and devastation of that day, 7 July 2005, became evident. The album played on in my ears but I just wasn’t listening to it anymore.

Listening to Possessed this week was the first time I’ve attempted to listen to it since that day.

Another album prompting memories to resurface is Warp Record’s Artificial Intelligence II collection of ‘ambient’ electronica from the likes of Autechre, Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H. Kirk, Speedy J and Link. It was the summer 1994 and I’d just been unceremoniously and unexpectedly dumped by a girl. I spent the afternoon laid up on my parents’ sofa listening, initially, to the Depeche Mode song ‘The Things You Said’ on repeat, the accusatory disappointment of that song perfectly matching my despondency. After ten or twelve listens I decided to put something else on; it was a close call between the embittered rage of Nine Inch Nail’s The Downward Spiral or the much more chilled Artificial Intelligence II compilation. The latter won the afternoon, leading me to a more logical and calm state of mind.



While we’re heading down musical memory lane, I downloaded Radio Musicola by Nik Kershaw this week, the Eighties doyen’s third album. I bought this on cassette from Cash Converters in Colchester in 1997, the day after my first Valentine’s Day ‘with’ my ex-girlfriend. For some reason, we’d decided to spend the evening apart. So I went out into Colchester with my housemates, drank too many Moscow Mules and, well, it didn’t end terribly advantageously. The next day, bleary-eyed, my friend Neil and I went into town late in the afternoon and bought a load of second hand tapes from Cash Converters, one of which was Radio Musicola. While not as good as Kershaw’s first two albums, it nevertheless remains a pop gem. But it definitely sounds better when you’re not hungover.



Some other things on my iPod this week – ‘Horchata’, the new song by Vampire Weekend which they have punted for free this week (verdict : more of the same, only with bigger production and strings); In Rainbows by Radiohead (not a fan of the band per se, and I’m glad I only paid a couple of quid for this when it was made available as a ‘pay what you like’ download, but it is good); and Howyoudoin? by dub-influenced Sarf Londoners Renegade Soundwave. I don’t know why, but I stuck that last album on my dad’s car stereo one Saturday afternoon on the way to pick up my mother and sister. He balked at the messy, sample-heavy songs, but I insisted on listening to it. He turned to me when we were sat waiting at a red light and said ‘I don’t think your mum would like this,’ as the apocalyptic bad-drug-experience (but never exactly precautionary) account detailed on ‘Blast ‘Em Out’ started its slow and edgy journey out of the speakers.

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 05/10/2009

Go to: My Other Blog / twitter.com/mjasmith

I would describe my approach to music this past week as ‘restless’. I haven’t been able to listen to one band or style of music for very long, which has created a rather odd, disjointed play list for the week.

I started the week listening to some ‘arty’ music, namely The Knee Plays by David Byrne, musical compositions – principally for horns – written for a play by Robert Wilson in 1984. It wasn’t at all what I expected, but then again I’m coming to be continually surprised by Byrne’s eclectic output. Broadly instrumental like last year’s Big Love: Hymnal album, the brass instruments are occasionally complemented by Byrne reading in a flat, robotic monotone. From The Knee Plays I moved on to some Philip Glass violin pieces, driven by an ambition to listen to more of his works after immersing myself in his Low Symphony last week.



I stumbled upon my Inspiral Carpets album collection this past week. The Carpets, now seemingly permanently defunct, produced four albums of spiky organ-embellished indie pop that transcended the rest of the overrated ‘Madchester’ scene that sprang up in the late 1980s. Whereas at the time their quirky, pseudo-Animals type sound earned them a reputation as oddball leftfielders, with time their songs are found to have an earnestness and depth which few would have bothered to have noticed at the time. The track ‘Two Worlds Collide’ from Revenge Of The Goldfish, with its world-weary chorus of ‘What have I done with my life?’ remains my favourite Inspirals track.

I also listened to a Luke Slater DJ mix on the train home one night while frantically sending emails from my BlackBerry that had two effects – firstly, and positively, the music made me type faster and secondly, I was left feeling light-headed like I’d drunk way too much coffee.

As I write this I’m listening to One Of Our Girls (Has Gone Missing) by A.C. Marias, aka Angela Conway with production assistance from Wire’s Bruce Gilbert among others. Conway now makes films, which is a shame, as this single album from 1991 has an ethereal vocal quality while arch-sound smith Gilbert (who is, along with Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Robert Fripp entirely responsible for redefining how I listen to guitar music) adds obscure textural backdrops. I always think of the song ‘There’s A Scent Of Rain In The Air’ whenever I smell that freshness that prefaces a downpour. More on this album at my Documentary Evidence site.



Elsewhere, I watched the BBC Imagine documentary on Rufus Wainwright’s first opera which had Wainwright play a new piano song, ‘Zebulon’. Effectively a conversation after many years with an imaginary childhood friend and confidante, the track has a plangent Rufus expressing his sadness at his mother’s illness, and points to a more sorrowful sound on his next album. Rarely, I also found myself listening to Gideon Coe on 6Music, who played a Peel session by Glaxo Babies, a band I’ve never heard of. Their session version of ‘Who Killed Bruce Lee?’ is a Gang Of Four-esque number which was adorned by seemingly random, skronking, James Chance-style saxophone, an element missing from the vaguely inferior studio version. Speaking of sprawling music, I listened to Locust Abortion Technician by Butthole Surfers, one of the more challenging bands on the SSR label to emerge from the States in the 1980s.



Finally, They Might Be Giants, that quirky pop duo who scored an unlikely hit in the shape of ‘Birdhouse In Your Soul’ in 1990. Since then I’ve always had the band on my list of acts I’d like to listen to more of, though so far this has only extended to the aforementioned song, ‘Istanbul (Not Constantinople)’ and the delicate postcard pop of ‘New York City’, a love song which also lists all the major well-heeled landmarks of Manhattan. So, I was pleasantly surprised a few weekends back, watching Mickey Mouse Clubhouse on Playhouse Disney with my two daughters, to find that TMBG had done both the title music and the song ‘Hot Dog!’ (see video below, or for those reading this on email, click here). So, er, ostensibly for the girls, I downloaded ‘Hot Dog!’ this week and have no qualms in saying that it is a delightfully infectious little song that worms its way, like all the best kids’ songs, into your brain and refuses to budge. Not that I would, for example, listen to it on the train into work. Never. Honest.