Finally, a few minutes outside Euston, I settled on Sabresonic by The Sabres Of Paradise (Warp, 1993). The Sabres Of Paradise were a trio, consisting of esteemed producer Andrew Weatherall (he of Screamadelica fame) and two engineers, Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns, who also worked as part of Warp contemporaries The Aloof. This album was one I bought from Time Records in Colchester, a shop where I blew most of my limited student income (clearly I would not be able to do this if the proposed increases to tuition fees had been delivered in the period 1995 - 1998), but for some reason I bought Sabresonic II (1995) first. Consequently, at the time, Sabresonic felt a little light compared to the more expansive follow-up. I've changed my mind on that front now, finding it immersive and eclectic.
The key track for me is 'Ano Electro (Andante)' which is a delicate piece of classic Warp label electronica, lots of deep bass tones and icy melodies. Those icy melodies are something I still find appealing in electronic music, and they remind me, in order, of a) Degrassi Junior High (to this day, I don't know why; I didn't even like that programme when I was a kid and I don't know whether spindly upper-octave keyboard melodies were a feature of its soundtrack or not) and b) Teen Wolf. Teen Wolf was, for the duration of the Eighties, my favourite movie and I watched it most recently before Daughter#2 was born; unlike most things from the time (such as, say, luminous socks and needless saxophone solos), it's still pretty good. The Teen Wolf soundtrack does feature some edgy, minimalist tones in the vein of 'Ano Electro', so at least that comparison makes a degree of sense; elsewhere on the soundtrack, at the very start of the film and over the opening credits, is a fantastic piece of sonic alchemy – the sound of no-hoper Michael J. Fox's basketball bouncing between his hand and the floor of the court, only processed to sound otherworldly and as if heard through water. Perhaps exposure to that sort of sound as a kid is the reason why listening to the likes of The Hafler Trio in my teens was so easy.
So where were we? Sabresonic completed, I alighted upon David Bowie's The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust. Initially, my exposure to Bowie was purposefully confined to the trio of albums produced with Brian Eno in Berlin during the mid-Seventies, but I've since found myself working backwards through Aladdin Sane and Ziggy Stardust. I don't feel terribly qualified to comment on Bowie, mostly as I still feel like I'm only just dipping my toe into his catalogue, but I will say that 'Five Years' is just about the most un-Glam track from the genre, a fragile and Brechtian take on end-of-the-world themes.
I've had La Monte Young's (deep breath) The Second Dream Of The High Tension Line Stepdown Transformer From The Four Dreams Of China sat on my hard-drive for months and have never dropped it onto my iPod. The reason is quite simple: I've only ever read about La Monte Young's music (in The Wire) and when you never actually listen to something you've read about, you form all sorts of impressions about how it might sound, and I didn't want to have those preconceptions proven to be unfounded.
Young is a survivor of the infamous New York art scene in the Sixties, producing drone-based music from a loft with the likes of John Cale from The Velvet Underground and Tony Conrad (also, briefly, a member of the first iteration of the VU); Cale, a classically-schooled violinist first and foremost, would employ the drone methodology on Velvet Underground And Nico on tracks like 'Venus In Furs'. However, while on those tracks it was part of a wider musical template, with Young's music it is all about the drone, his pieces being long-form affairs (The Second Dream is single track lasting 80 minutes) with variations only discernible by intense concentration. It's not dissimilar to staring at a Rothko painting - initially you just see the colour, and then you see the tone and depth of expression.
Scored in 1962 for eight trumpets, The Second Dream isn't just a single solid drone; it starts and stops frequently but the individual sections themselves are lengthy, each consisting of overlapping, naturally phasing tones, that envelop and cut across one another. Far from sounding dull and cloying, I found this piece of music absorbing and almost relaxing. 'Almost' because very occasionally this can sound sinister, but on the whole it is what one of Young's peers, accordionist Pauline Oliveros, described as 'deep listening'.
Vinyl Corner
For some time now I've been weeding out my old dance vinyl collection, though not, it seems, for profit. In the last few weeks I sold a few 10" and 12" singles to Music & Video Exchange on Berwick Street for a paltry £6.00. It doesn't necessarily feel worth doing, especially since before selling them I'll generally record the songs to MP3 first, which can be time consuming. Also, my kids didn't exactly enjoy walking across London a few Saturdays ago to get to the shop, and I didn't exactly like them walking round the more colourful parts of Soho either.
One of the 10" singles I sold was 'Legend Of The Golden Snake (Version 2)' by Depth Charge, also known as DJ J Saul Kane. (Suffice to say, the rear sleeve has an image on the sleeve which wouldn't have been out of place at the seedier end of Berwick Street.) I first got into Depth Charge when I heard 'Shaolin Buddha Finger' on a mix compilation by The Chemical Brothers, back when the NME still gave away tapes on the cover, and back when The Chemical Brothers were still called The Dust Brothers.
'Legend Of The Golden Snake (Version 2)' is a heavy slab of what used to be called trip-hop, with an infectious speaker-warping dub bassline and lots of odd noises and kung-fu soundtrack melody snatches dropped in over the top. B-side, 'Sex, Sluts & Heaven (Bordello Mix)' is dense and atmospheric, phased in yelps and such like overlaying the bass-heavy groove. Funny, for all my musical taste changes over the years, I've never gone off Depth Charge. I perhaps regret flogging the vinyl copy, so I won't dwell on that too much.
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