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- Mat

Audio Journal: 04/03/2014 - R5, IndigO2, London

When did teen-rock get so grown-up?

Last night we found ourselves at IndigO2 for a concert by R5. Never heard of them? Neither would I were it not for my seven-year-old eldest daughter's love of two Disney Channel shows - the series Austin And Ally and that channel's film Teen Beach Movie.

Both star a blonde, tousle-haired young guy called Ross Lynch, who as well as singing through both shows also happens to be a guitarist and vocalist in a band called R5, thus named because the group consists of Lynch and sundry brothers (and a sister).

So, at least on 'paper' this all sounds like familiar Disney territory - a young heartthrob, a contract with Disney's Hollywood Records label, a slight whiff of the manufactured boyband (except for the girl, of course). But then there are the following facts that need to be borne in mind:

• They play real instruments, live, with no backing tapes or miming or anything like that
• They have an album's worth of really good, comparatively mature songs that owe more to sun-drenched California than teen-pop
• They rock

Pop music, at its most irritating, has an infectious, subversive quality. It also has the capacity to feel artificial, churned-out on some vast production line under Communist-era-style portraiture of some gurning industry oligarch like Simon Cowell. R5, in contrast to a One Direction or whoever else the kids are listening to these days, feel like a proper band that just happen to have received a massive break thanks to their frontman, who, on the evidence of his onstage demeanour, is more than happy to just be a part of the band rather than accept the nominal limelight.

Ross Lynch's humble role in the band may have, however, been lost on an audience of swooning girls and their mothers. And fair enough. Plus it's sort of nice to see kids following what looks and feels like a proper band compared to some of the horrors available out there.

This was my eldest daughter's first full concert (her first concert proper was the Chili Peppers at Knebworth in 2012, but she fell asleep early on in the set and we left), and also the first concert for our six-year-old youngest daughter. Both had a great time. As did their mother.

As did I.

Audio Journal: 03/03/2014 - Rufus Wainwright 'Vibrate' + 'Live From The Artists Den'

To appreciate Rufus Wainwright's idiosyncratic approach to music, one only needs to listen to the all-too-brief 'Oh What A World' which opened the singer's third album, Want. Here are all the sides of the artist compressed into a three minute curiosity - a bit of Leonards Bernstein and Cohen, a spoonful of Stephen Sondheim, a pinch of George Gershwin, a lot of Judy Garland and a measure of Antony Hegarty and Holden Caulfield. Theatrical, wistful, louche, literate, spoiled, yearning - 'Oh What A World' is all of these things and maybe more, a soaring, triumphant overture for the both throwaway and the earnest.

Not for nothing did Caitlin Moran describe Wainwright as having 'all the quiet don't-mind-me demeanour of a pissed rainbow on a trampoline', but the extravagance for which Wainwright has been known is, save for the poppy 'April Fools' and decadent 'Foolish Love', is either missing from Vibrate or exposed as the mere fallacy of reputation. Instead, the compelling singer-songwriter is allowed to emerge, the sensitive soul blessed with a beguiling voice as comfortable singing about promiscuity, Greek boys and addiction as he is a perpetual romantic yearning for the world to stand still, for love, for appreciation or for the admiration of his father; a self-proclaimed gay messiah capable of giving his old friend Jeff Buckley a run for his money with his cover of Cohen's 'Hallelujah' or singing irreverently about dancing hopelessly to Britney Spears on the whimsical baroque track that gives this best of compilation its title.

In time Wainwright may receive the same critical appreciation that his mentor / saviour Elton John or Billy Joel now humbly accept, and Vibrate will go a long way in raising the profile of one of modern music's most original voices.

Released concurrently with Vibrate, Live From The Artists Den captures Wainwright performing at The Church Of The Ascension in Manhattan, and possibly provides more evidence of the singer's flamboyance than on Vibrate, mostly thanks to a pair of outrageous gold lame slacks, red metal-studded loafers and sideburns that are reminiscent of Travolta in Pulp Fiction. Running through most of his Mark Ronson-produced sixth album Out Of The Game, that album's mature pop leanings transfer far better to a live setting than on record. 'Rashida' and 'Welcome To The Ball' swing with a glam insousiance, while the rueful 'Out Of The Game' (complete with a paper mask of Helena Bonhan-Carter) and the optimistic 'Montauk' finds Wainwright putting his past to bed with a polite sense of humour.

The set also includes 'One Man Guy', originally recorded by his father Loudon Wainwright III, a track which would sound positive and affirming if it didn't have an onanistic undertone, while the dutiful son also tearfully tackles his late mother Kate McGarrigle's 'On My Way To Town'. Ronson puts in an appearance on the synth drama of 'Bitter Tears', but inevitably it's the fan favourites of the stirring '14th Street' and 'The Art Teacher' that are the major highlights.

Vibrate and Live From The Artists Den are released 03/03/2014

Thanks to Louisa

Audio Journal: 01/03/2014 - St. Vincent 'St. Vincent'

Annie Clark, better known as St. Vincent, knows how to make odd records. Her 2012 collaboration with David Byrne, Love This Giant, found her screwball approach to deconstructing rock and pop music blended with rich brass arrangements, Clark's distinctive voice harmonising with the elder statesman Byrne like a sort of bewitching counterpoint to the former Talking Head's own wonky sensibilities.

For her eponymous fourth album, Clark once again dips her toe into the strange funk offered up on Love This Giant, fuses it with dirty electronics and adds in typically oversized riffs that sound totally out of place on what is essentially a precision-honed pop record. Those riffs belong on a Seventies record, filled as they are with garagey jerkiness and hoary levels of distortion, hovering bluntly and somewhat self-consciously above squelchy synths and rhythms that could have been borrowed from a Buck 65 or Money Mark record. Opener 'Rattlesnake' has a bold, clipped sound filled with unexpected left turns and a smooth sensuality that really shouldn't work (but does anyway) while 'Digital Witness' - one of the album's strongest tracks - feels like it should have been part of the Byrne collaboration.

'Prince Jonny' and 'I Prefer Your Love' are without question the album's most prominent pop moments, being minor dramas that sit somewhere between emotional tragedy and the sort of stagey ballads that have quirky off-Broadway musical written all over them; these songs are vivid, emotional masterpieces that showcase the tender heights that Clark's voice can ascend to, as well as highlighting the filmic realism of her lyrics. Elsewhere 'Birth In Reverse' offers a skewed New Wave effervescence mixed in with the sort of clangorous punk riffs that Gang Of Four made their own.

If St. Vincent put her mind to it, she would be more than capable of knocking out glossy pop that would show most chanteuses a thing or two. Instead, she's more comfortable occupying that weird musical hinterland frequented by Björk and Polly Scattergood, and the result is much more interesting as a consequence.

Related: a review I wrote for Clash of St. Vincent and David Byrne at the Roundhouse in London last year can be found here.

St. Vincent was released on 24/02/2014.

Thanks to Matt.

Audio Journal: 07/12/2013 - Christmas songs, Dave Brubeck, Boxcutter, Physical Therapy, Robert Koch

A few weeks back I was tasked with 'sorting out the Christmas songs'. This made for a novel opportunity to be relatively useful in the run up to Christmas; normally, my sole duties consist of fetching in the decorations, helping unpack them, and then putting the empty boxes back again. The request followed the complete wiping of Mrs S's iPod earlier in the year and the slow and tedious process of rebuilding her library again. As with most things - proposing to her, recognising that our cat was seriously ill, any household chore I'm handed - I prevaricated for ages and only completed the task at the weekend, more or less at the same time as the tree was being put up.

We have, it seems, some 260 Christmas songs. These range from what might be regarded as pop staples - Jona Lewie's 'Stop The Cavalry', Wham!'s 'Last Christmas' and so on - some classical and choral things that sound atmospheric and festive but which often get bypassed in favour of more accessible fare, a few lesser well known things by Badly Drawn Boy and Summer Camp, a bit of Rat Pack, Phil Spector's excellent Christmas album, some hymnal Johnny Cash stuff, a glamtastic Showaddywaddy song purloined from my parents' vinyl collection and even a Joey Ramone track. Over time I've added things like The McGarrigle Christmas Hour - a true family affair of Kate and Anna McGarrigle and their sundry offspring, including Rufus and Martha Wainwright and family friends like Teddy Thompson - but my dour Josh T. Pearson contributions seemed to get permanently deleted from her library when it became corrupted, much to her relief.

In spite of that vast library, Christmas listening tends to start with a ritual playing of Blue Christmas, a Mojo covermount CD featuring slightly less optimistic songs from James Brown, Ed Harcourt, Flaming Lips, Otis Redding and many others. It's intentionally a world away from the cheeriness of most Christmas songs, and I think we elect to listen to this at the start of festivities to deliberately steer clear of the season's commercialism-masquerading-as-joy; or maybe because we like to make our own family traditions at this time of year.

This year, in a moment of sentimentality toward Christmas, I decided that I really wanted to find an album of Christmas songs performed in a jazz style. Despite having spent a lot of this year furthering my interest in jazz, I'm still a bit lost in the genre, and it proved to be the case with this search for a Christmas album that there's an awful lot of dross around. In the end, I settled on an album of lovely piano jazz by the late Dave Brubeck.

I knew I was on safe ground with Brubeck; though I detested it in my youth, 'Take Five', the 1959 track he is best known for, has become a piece that I listen to a lot these days. I even have an album on which Brubeck performs 'Some Day My Prince Will Come' from Disney's Snow White, and I felt reasonably assured that him turning his pianist hands to a suite of Christmas songs would be of a high standard, and that's exactly how it turned out to be. One reviewer on Amazon described it as being perfect for nights in front of the fire with a mug of cocoa; I neither have a fireplace nor do I like cocoa, but I completely get where he was coming from, and I can't begin to describe it better myself.

So that all feels terribly grown up and mature. Although I seem to have consumed a lot more Christmas tunes so early in December than is good for me, I've spent the rest of the time listening to various electronica releases that have been fervently landing in my inbox in recent weeks.

Physical Therapy's Non-Drowsy is one such release. A free seven-track EP, the release jump-cuts between a mutant strain of classic piano house and a deconstructed variant of late Eighties percussive acid techno. Listen to the urgent standout track 'Coffee' from the EP here or below.

Another electronica release I've been enjoying is Boxcutter's Gnosis EP. Boxcutter has previously released stuff on Mike Paradinas's Planet Mu imprint, and this release does include moments of frenetic bass wobbles and percussive wackiness that befits a lot of what that label has become known for. That's balanced out by some absorbing ambient passages replete with sky-scouring prog guitar, drawing parallels with some of Krautrock's less motorik moments, as well as some spine-tingling synth hooks along the way.

Also in my eardrums has been Unpaved by Robert Koch, an EP soundtrack to accompany a film by Lukas Feigelfeld. This is my first exposure to Koch's work, and it reveals itself on this release to be a carefully-structured micro-score with ambient reference points and some rather lovely piano. An extract from the film of the same name can be viewed here or below.

Audio Journal: 15/11/2013 - Avatism, Colo, Color Film, Hologram

As I mentioned last time, I have only really listened to Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground in the last fortnight, but a couple of other things arrived in my inbox recently which have provided a distraction from focusing exclusively on Reed's passing.

Colo 'Holidays'

The first is an upcoming single from Colo, which is due out in December on Ki Records. 'Holidays' is a simple, understated track somewhere between dreamy instrumental synth-pop and ambient dub, complete with a soulful vocal texture that sticks with you long after the song's finished. It's got a lovely, gauzy, Café Del Mar-at-sunset vibe and it's far too warm for this time of year. Colo's album is due out in March.

Avatism's 'Adamant' hit my inbox a few weeks ago. Avatism is the alias of Italian producer Thomas Feriero and contains thirteen tracks of slick, inventive electronica infused with crisp techno and house beats, clipped and stirring guitar loops (think Morricone in a techno setting), dreamy synths and a warm ambient atmosphere. For those of us who grew up with Nineties dance music it's a dream come true in the context of micro genres we old guys don't understand; one might even describe it as mind-expanding in the right circumstances. A remix EP of tracks from the album has also been released but for the optimal trip pick up the album and eschew that annoying habit of course picking favourite tracks (although, if my life depended on it, I'd say get the monstrous 'Mastodon').

Color Film 'Until You Turn Blue'

Color Film released 'Until You Turn Blue' recently ahead of an LP slated to arrive in March next year. Without knowing it had just been released you'd have sworn that 'Until You Turn Blue' had been released in about 1983, being constructed of jerky guitars, plinky synths and orchestral stabs, fantastic slap bass and the sort of anguished but soulful vocal that seemed to die out in the Eighties (it reminds me a lot of Tears For Fears' 'Broken' from Songs From The Big Chair). 'Until You Turn Blue' was mixed by Gareth Jones, someone who brings excellence to everything he's ever done.

So if all of this was intended to serve as a distraction from listening to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, two nice little tracks served to pull me back in that direction. The first was 'Lou Reed Lou Reed' by The Auteurs' Luke Haines, a reverential bit of glam-infused synth-pop complete with Reed-style guitar riffery and lyrics that trawl Reed's life and image. The second was a haunting version of 'Pale Blue Eyes' by French duo Hologram (Carla Luciani and Maxime Sokolinski). Hologram released their debut EP earlier this year and it was one of the things I listened to most during the warmer months, so hearing their fragile voices, subtle drum machines, gentle guitars and shimmering synths tackling one of my favourite Reed ballads was a lovely moment of serendipity.

Listen to 'Pale Blue Eyes' here or below.

Audio Journal: 08/11/2013 - Lou Reed

Lou Reed, self-portrait from Facebook

My listening habits in the last two weeks centred exclusively on the music of one artist - Lou Reed. In the days following his untimely death it seemed the most fitting thing to do.

I admit that I came to Reed's music relatively late in life; I was aware of his influence, just like I was aware of Bowie, punk, The Ramones and so on, but as with all of those things I just figured it wasn't for me. Until university I only really listened to electronic music - pop, techno, ambient and so on - but after a while I found my tastes becoming more eclectic. A key turning point came toward the end of my second year when I decided to buy a biography of David Bowie called Loving The Alien by Christopher Sandford from the campus branch of Waterstone's. I don't know why, but I suspect it was chiefly to read more about Bowie's Berlin period, whose starkness had a direct influence on the electronic music I was familiar with.

I surprised myself with enjoying the passages on how Bowie's love of The Velvet Underground and its frontman Lou Reed had directly inspired his Ziggy Stardust alter ego. The sections recounting the speed anthem 'White Light / White Heat' from the Velvets' second album were especially vivid, I recall, as was the description of 'I'm Waiting For The Man'. In my head it sounded wild. Raw. Decadent. Gritty. I wasn't then in love with New York like I am today but the idea of Reed singing about buying drugs from a dealer up in Harlem seemed just about the most thrilling thing I'd heard about in my early twenties. It sounded a lot more interesting than the song 'Perfect Day' that I'd first heard the year before on the Trainspotting soundtrack, and which by then had been butchered into an unlikely star-encrusted advert for the BBC. I knew that track was about a heroin comedown and so in its own way it was still 'punk' but 'I'm Waiting For The Man' sounded infinitely more appealing. In my head.

It took over a year before I bought The Velvet Underground And Nico, the album that included that song. I'd travelled from my girlfriend's parents' house in rural Norfolk to North London for an interview with a big pharmaceuticals firm, part of that painful cycle of third year soul-selling, and this one had gone really badly. Back at Liverpool Street station I had hours to kill before a train back to Norwich so I wandered out of the station and found a branch of Our Price (it's now a Specsavers) and came out with a copy of The Velvet Underground And Nico. I studied the sleeve the entire journey back to my girlfriend's house. It felt like I'd taken a leap into a completely unknown world, one that was appealing but one that barely made any sense in amongst the music I'd been consuming up to that point.

At her house I remember putting it on, realising that I knew 'Sunday Morning' from the OMD album Liberator and was blown away by 'I'm Waiting For The Man'; it was better than it had ever sounded in my head. My girlfriend hated it. I think that made me like it all the more. Last week I was given the chance to contribute to a piece on Lou Reed's best moments for a Clash piece; I instinctively chose that track that had first gripped me. Unfortunately someone else got the honour of writing that one and so my piece didn't get used (I wrote about Metal Machine Music instead). Here's what I wrote anyway.

“Like Hubert Selby Jr, Lou Reed always had a penchant for subjects that were completely taboo. This song joyously documented scoring drugs from a Harlem dealer, and would provide the obvious reference point for punk and glam.”

I rented a room in a house in Colchester that year with a couple in their forties. Dave was the muso of the couple. I remember coming home raving about having bought the first Velvets album and, from his pile of cassettes in the kitchen, he retrieved a copy of Berlin. He told me that if I loved that album I'd love Reed's solo output. I didn't believe him, much like I didn't believe that the Velvets post-John Cale would be any good, and so I approached it cynically, just as I had with 'Perfect Day'. I concede now that he was right, and I absolutely love those Lou Reed solo records that I own.

In the summer that followed I bought a tiny CD-sized book that was effectively a track-by-track description of every track the Velvets ever recorded. I think I bought it from Athena. I consumed it avidly and it became a sort of buyer's guide for the Velvets' music over the coming years. Better and more comprehensive books have been about the Velvets and Lou Reed, but I still refer to that tiny book from time to time. Right now it's on top of a pile of reading material next to my bed, the product of showing my two daughters pictures of the band after subjecting them to a cheap Velvets compilation I've been listening to in the car since I first saw that Reed had died.

The Complete Guide To The Music Of
The Velvet Underground
by Peter Hogan (1997)

So the past week has seen me listening to more or less everything of Reed's that I have in my collection (including listening to Metal Machine Music as the backdrop to various Tube journeys; it works surprisingly well for that). I genuinely thought Reed would live forever, as I suppose he will through his music and reputation. He had long ago sorted the addictions that had informed his early lyrics and found solace in daily meditations and tai chi (if you think Metal Machine Music is the most unusual album in his back catalogue, try Hudson River Wind Meditation, an ambient album designed to accompany tai chi and meditation). I saw him as the role model for a life I guess I want - namely one of being creative, being centred, living healthily and having a reputation for being monumentally grouchy.

Rest in peace Lou.

- MJAS, London, November 2013

Audio Journal: 01/11/2013 - MuteResponse

MuteResponse #1 - artwork by Espen J. Jörgensen

The idea for MuteResponse came to me more or less exactly twelve months ago.

I was sat in the Curzon Cinema in Chelsea on 24 October 2012 listening to a talk as part of David Byrne's How Music Works book tour. Byrne had selected a different musician each night to join the debate, which for London was curated by Sean O'Hagan. His fellow debater on the health of music and the 'music industry' as we might have once called it, was Matthew Herbert.

The talk was a mix of interview and discussion. Both Herbert and Byrne made entertaining speakers, each possessing an authoritative viewpoint on just how dire it is for musicians trying to earn a crust in today's digital era. In spite of each speaker's self-deprecating mannerisms and an honest raking through of their individual paths to becoming musicians, the evening was a sobering one, and if it wasn't for a call to arms at the very end, I would have left thinking that all was doomed.

In the concluding moments, Herbert emphatically stressed that the future success of music depended on allowing the smallest scenes to thrive and develop. It was delivered with such passion and gusto that it was difficult not to feel compelled to do something with that. But, as people began to file out of the cinema, I stayed back a few moments and wondered how to do my small bit to protect the art form I enjoy so much.

In about half an hour I was stood at Sloane Square Underground station mulling over what I could do. I was listening to, and reviewing, the album Mind The Gap by Metroland that day and had sent over my finished piece to Sven from the duo earlier. Metroland's album reminded me principally of the work by Mute Records stalwarts Komputer, and the confluence of making that connection and Herbert's insistent request for participation came together somewhere on the Tube between Sloane Square and South Kensington and the idea for MuteResponse was born.

My thought process was simple: I already am part of a small scene, though not a musician; that scene consists of a bunch of people who are fans of Mute Records, the independent record label established by Daniel Miller in 1978. I already support Mute's legacy through my website Documentary Evidence which I started a decade ago as a place to write reviews and interviews with Mute artists or those connected to the label; Documentary Evidence was never supposed to be anything other than a place to post my personal views and opinions on whatever Mute release I was listening to that day. I had no aspirations to become a fully-fledged music critic, and I didn't really care if anyone was even reading the poorly-scribed stuff I was sticking up online.

By 2013 I seemed to have accumulated a number of fellow Mute fans who were similarly smitten by the label, but something about what Herbert had said made me feel like I needed to do something more, or, more specifically, to provide a different sort of tribute to the legacy of Mute. So I decided, between those two Tube stations to put together a compilation of artists influenced by the label. The title MuteResponse came to me almost as soon as I came up with the idea for the album. Never let it be said that inspiration doesn't lurk in the dark tunnels under London.

Helpfully, what Documentary Evidence covers has meant that lots of like-minded people send me their music for review. It's a nice problem to have. That made the selection of tracks from some recent releases relatively straightforward, but I also wanted to secure some exclusive tracks, or things that I'd had the privilege of listening to that had for whatever reason never seen the light of day. So I set about a process of asking for permission to use tracks from releases I'd been sent, inviting artists to send over a track for consideration, or trying to persuade people who were sitting on unreleased tracks that were unlikely to ever get released to allow them to be used. That so many people wanted to see their tracks included was a pleasant surprise and consequently the album came together far easier than I ever expected to; so much so that it became evident that it would need to be a double compilation. The first track I received was 'Clues In The Rain' by Espen J. Jörgensen and Rupert Lally, and so, appropriately enough, it is the opening track on album one.

Securing an unreleased track from Vic Twenty was, on a personal level, one of the most pleasing events in the development of MuteResponse. Vic Twenty, originally a duo of Adrian Morris and Angela Penhaligon (Piney Gir) were the first group I ever wrote about on Documentary Evidence after the single 'Text Message' was released on Credible Sexy Units, a new label Mute founder Daniel Miller set up after his main concern was bought by EMI. Adrian sent me a CDr of unreleased Vic Twenty tracks while I was undertaking one of two interviews with him, and I always hoped that 'Christmas In Korea (New Year In Japan)' would see the light of day one day. Now it will, and just before Christmas too.

People have asked how I managed to get producer Gareth Jones on board with an exclusive track, 'Summer Solstice 2013'. I first spoke to Gareth (and also Olivia Louvel, and Paul 'PK' Kendall) about the project in the bar after a Simon Fisher Turner and Factory Floor concert at the ICA in March. I've spoken to Gareth a few times over the past ten years but even so, asking him if he was interested in participating was a nerve-racking experience. Nevertheless, he seemed genuinely enthused by being involved. His track was a real surprise - a carefully constructed, many-layered audio collage of London atmospheres - and it is indeed a real coup to be featuring a piece by someone who's name has been attached to many of my favourite records.

It occurred to me early on that one relatively straightforward way of offering a tribute to Mute would be by asking for cover versions of songs by Mute artists. In the end it seemed like the most obvious way to approach it, and therefore the least appealing way to do it; after all, if the whole point of this was to show Mute's influence, it needed to illustrate how Mute's early aesthetic had crept out to infiltrate how people made electronic music; just putting out covers seemed to undermine that somehow. There was just one exception to that rule - an instrumental cover of Depeche Mode's See You' by Dave Fleet. Fleet first sent me a demo of this about two years ago and I was pleased to have been able to encourage him to finish it. We both tried to find a vocalist for the track but finally decided it was beautiful as it was, being a mixture of sensitive orchestrations and whirring electronics. Fleet proved to be one of the most important creative consultants for the project, giving me his opinion on tracks I wasn't sure about, sourcing tracks from Jay Mass / Andy Clark and Simplicity Is Beauty and securing the services of Chris Sharp to master the overall project. In fact, without Dave's support and guidance MuteResponse would have been just another idea that never went anywhere.

Another pivotal figure in the genesis of MuteResponse was Procedure, whose 'Isbjörn' is one of my favourite pieces from the entire project. One day he emailed me asking if I had ever tried contacting Simone Grant, who designed the first sleeves for Mute and whose creative insight informed the distinctive imagery of releases by The Normal, Silicon Teens, Fad Gadget and others. Within 48 hours I'd made contact with Simone and she'd agreed to design alternative sleeves for the project. Other alternative sleeve designs came from Espen J. Jörgensen, p6 from Security, Olivia Louvel and Dylan Fleet.

Let us return to the original reason for doing this in the first place. The idea was to further encourage the development of a small scene, namely artists influenced in whatever bleak way by Mute Records. That was its original stated purpose and I believe it does that effectively, albeit as a very narrow snapshot. However, for me it also highlights more clearly that while the music industry might be broken beyond repair, originality exists in greater abundance than ever before. There are amazing artists out there producing many, many great tracks that deserve far greater exposure than they get, but don't because they're not on a label with a huge marketing budget. It was that realisation that there was music out there that I'd never heard of that made Mute so appealing to me in the first place.

I hope above all that MuteResponse contributes in some small way to raising the profile of the very talented artists who contributed to this project, and whose music deserves far wider appreciation.

MuteResponse is released via Bandcamp on 4 November 2013.

Track lists, artist biographies and the alternative artwork can be found at www.muteresponse.com

- MJAS, Woburn Sands, UK, November 2013

Audio Journal: 18/10/2013 - !!!, The Orb

!!! Thr!!!er

If I was to look at what album I've listened to most over the past six months it will undoubtedly turn out to be Thr!!!er by !!! (you pronounce it chk-chk-chk). Thr!!!er was released on Warp, once the pre-eminent home of UK electronic music, but now much more interested in more eclectic concerns.

I didn't go out of my way to buy this. My family and I were in holiday in New York and we stopped in at Other Music to pick up some CDs that we'd been contemplating buying but hadn't gotten around to. In fact, it had been a while since Mrs S. or I had splurged on buying music, it was chucking it down with rain outside and the staff in the shop were so friendly that we just kept picking stuff up. It was like this last year, and also when we were there in 2005 (apart from the rain). I bought Banks by Interpol's Paul Banks, the debut Chelsea Light Moving album and a second-hand Cabaret Voltaire CD, while Mrs S. loaded up on all sorts of stuff, including the !!! album.

$100 odd dollars and another downpour later, we were sat in our hotel room trying to dry off before contemplating going out for dinner, eating soggy cupcakes from Magnolia Bakery in the Village and a sandwich from Peanut Butter & Company, and Mrs S. put Thr!!!er on. I was hooked from the opening snare hit on 'Even When The Water's Cold' and from that moment on it's been the soundtrack to many a car journey, commute to work or stay in a hotel for work.

I'm not sure totally sure why it's captivated me so. I saw the band live once supporting the Chili Peppers and they didn't exactly excite much, but there's something about the sleek disco-punk-funk on Thr!!!er that has made it a firm favourite. Mrs S tells me that this proves she has better taste than me; I concede she's probably right.

The only thing that's taken the edge of this new-found interest in this band was a recent Daytrotter session which was less slick and more sloppy, but otherwise, if it was possible to wear out a CD like people used to wreck LPs, I'd probably need a new copy now.

Listen to an Anthony Naples remix of the hedonistic and strangely wistful 'Californyeah' from the forthcoming remix EP here and below.

This week I found myself listening to 'Blue Room' by The Orb for the first time in probably ten years. I wasn't a fan of this when it first came out but intrigued me on some level (the weird 'performance' on Top Of The Pops where Alex Paterson and Kris Weston just played chess, the fact that the full length version lasted a proggy forty minutes) and shortly after its release I found myself drawn to ambient music as part of a push to try and find some means of calm in my life. I was a stressed-out teenager with all sorts of angst, and ambient music seemed to overcome that.

The Orb 'Blue Room'

I distinctly remember buying The Orb's U.F.Orb (which includes 'Blue Room') the day before my father went into hospital for an operation in 1993, and I found myself listening to it over and over in the car in Warwick Hospital car park the next day while waiting for him to come out of theatre. Later I'd turn to Brian Eno's The Shutov Assembly whenever I wanted some form of meditative state to wash over me, but for a long time it was U.F.Orb, and 'Blue Room' in particular, that usually did the trick.

Listening to it now, its forty-minute duration seems over far too quick and it remains absorbing enough across its length to never feel anything other than deeply engaging for the mind.

Audio Journal: 11/10/2013 - X Factor, Erasure, Young Knives, Ejecta

Against my will, it seems that my attempts to avoid ever watching ITV's X Factor have roundly failed, and so it has become the new weekend routine to find myself half-watching however many hours of auditions, emotional wannabes failing to get a break and oddballs who never had a chance in the first place.

The last episode I watched was, I will admit, mildly diverting, but not because of the music. Definitely not. No, in that one Gary Barlow and Olly Murs were attempting to whittle Barlow's team down, and they were doing so on the roof of a building in New York (by my estimates I'd say somewhere in Chelsea) with lots of views of beautiful skylines. So, diverting, yes, but only because I was trying to work out which buildings I recognised.

What did occur to me was that like strands of music, reality shows have their own unique vernacular. Here are some of my personal favourites, often to be heard spilling from the mouths of contestants:

• 'I've got to take it to another level.'
• 'It's an emotional roller coaster.'
• 'She's had a long journey to get here.' (To my abject horror, my eldest daughter actually used this one last week when I was being especially disparaging toward one weeping contestant.)
• 'My whole life depends on it.'

Erasure Snow Globe

On to more interesting things. This week I completed my usual round of reviews for Clash. To use another hackneyed reality show phrase, this month's assignment included a real 'dream come true' in that I was able to review the new Erasure album. This is the first time I've been able to listen to a new album from my favourite band ahead of its release, so it was a bit of a treat for me. It has also meant that I've been in a very festive mood all week, since Vince Clarke and Andy Bell's new offering - Snow Globe - is a Christmas album. It really is a lovely record, and as well as some nice versions of standards, the duo offer up some of their best things they've written together in a long time. Put it on your Christmas list.

Young Knives Sick Octave

The other album I covered this month is Sick Octave, album number four from Young Knives. For this album the trio took themselves off into a disused airbase and experimented with computers, synths, gas canisters and sheet metal to produce something that sounds like it was transplanted from the post-punk hinterlands of the early Eighties. 'Something Awful' from Sick Octave, a track that is anything but awful, can be listened to here and below.

Finally, this week I was sent the debut album from Ejecta, a duo of Neon Indian's Leanne Macomber and Joel Ford from Tigercity. Dominae (Happy Death) isn't out until December and so I shouldn't say too much now, but suffice to say that this New York duo have nailed a downbeat strain of rather lovely electronic pop full of ethereal singing and appropriately vintage synths. Listen to track 'Jeremiah' here and below.

Audio Journal: 04/10/2013 - Julien Beau, Linea Aspera

It's quite a nice problem to have: as a consequence of my writings for Documentary Evidence, I tend to find that once a week someone will send me some music to listen to in the hope that I'll write a review. With Documentary Evidence focussing on Mute, a lot of whose roster produced electronic music of one form or another, the labels and artists that contact me tend to also be electronic in nature. Two recent additions to the inbox were from the Aposiopèse and Weyrd Son Records labels, both of whom were promoting reissues of little-known or ignored releases that deserve a bit more attention.

Julien Beau's Reflet (Aposiopèse) was originally released in 2009 and has been expanded for a new CD-R edition of just sixty copies with several new pieces. Beau hails from Bordeaux where he studied electroacoustic composition, as reflected on the seven tracks of quiet, contemplative sound design presented here. Traditional electroacoustic music, or musique concrète as it is also known, was pioneered in France in the Fifties and Sixties by Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer, and could be viewed as a natural antecedent of the sampling that is commonplace today; technology being what it was back then, musique concrète compositions were generally achieved using recorded tape loops of either traditional instruments or just general sound, which would then be layered and manipulated into compositions.

Absorbing though it might well be, Beau's collection of scratchy sounds, fluff-on-stylus glitches, snatches of quotidian cafe conversations, splintered piano motifs and randomised synth notes does feel a little too studied, like a dry classroom realisation of what musique concrete should sound like rather than evoking something altogether more challenging. The only departure from a template built up from concrete-by-numbers sounds comes when Beau's sonic palette is augmented by woodwind and brass interventions, whereupon his pieces take on a hue of modern composition rather than the assembled collages of sound sources.

Like all the best synth acts in history, Linea Aspera are a duo. Alison Lewis and Ryan Ambridge hail from London and Linea Aspera II, the three track EP that was released on 12" vinyl and download earlier this week by Weyrd Son Records, was originally released as a cassette. Across three distinct tracks they manage to throw in detached punked-up female voices, pulsing 1981 drum machines and all manner of grainy noise and electronic nastiness.

People don't make music like this any longer; by which I mean the dark electronic stuff that rose out of punk in the late Seventies through industrial units like Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire and many others. Factory Floor, who just delivered their debut album for James 'LCD Soundsystem' Murphy's DFA label are seen as the heirs to that post-punk electronic fusion throne, but Linea Aspera sound like they really should have existed thirty-two years ago. 'Vultures' may be the most authentic, impressive, understated piece of noisy synth pop I've heard in a long time. I'd go so far as to say it's so Mute it hurts, right down to the edgy siren sound on 'Royal Straight' that sounds like it was lifted directly from Fad Gadget's seminal 'Back To Nature'. Their EP can be streamed here and below.

Audio Journal: 27/09/2013 - Eighties Film Soundtracks

The Secret Of My Success poster

This week saw me celebrating my birthday, and on the evening of said day I decided to watch the 1987 movie The Secret Of My Success.

There were essentially three reasons for choosing that film. The first was that it starred Michael J. Fox. The second was that it was set in New York, and I probably spent as much time as I did on the film's flimsy premise as I did trying to identify the skyscrapers in the vicinity of the Pemrose Corporation's Midtown offices. The third reason for choosing this above any other DVD from the box was simply because it's an Eighties film, and for some reason, probably because I grew up in the Eighties, I'll naturally gravitate to films from that era if I'm feeling aware of the passage of time; it could easily have been Back To The Future, The Breakfast Club or Ghostbusters. They're all in the box, but for that evening it was The Secret Of My Success that won the day.

Everything about The Secret Of My Success screams Eighties, and by that I don't just mean the suits and haircuts. There's a plot line involving a huge dose of corporate greed and unbridled ambition (think Wall Street without the insider trading and with madcap antics), an obligatory and arguably unnecessary romantic interest, the bad guy and the improbable triumph of Fox over said bad guy in the hastily concluded, feel-good final moments. The other Eighties quality was the soundtrack, lead by Night Ranger's gutsy, upbeat and overblown title track (I actually really like it for precisely those reasons; sadly it's not available from iTunes). Here's the video.

It occurred to me that Eighties soundtracks do generally have a distinctive quality that time-stamps them every bit as well as the fashions and story lines - the other options all have big, memorable songs on their soundtracks, for example. By coincidence, earlier this week I completed an interview with Rupert Lally who, in addition to his solo releases or work in collaboration with Espen J. Jörgensen and others, enjoys a parallel career as a composer for film, TV and a Swiss dance company. So, as an unplanned extension of that interview I decided to ask him about what made Eighties soundtracks so distinctive.

'Eighties film soundtracks were revolutionary for two main reasons,' Lally advises. 'The first was their use of songs, and the second was their use of synthesizers.'

'There were examples of movies using songs before the Eighties of course. That started with the Elvis and Beatles movies, but these were closer to the tradition of film musicals. The idea of constructing a soundtrack for a non-musical movie using primarily songs began in the Seventies with soundtracks such as The Graduate and Midnight Cowboy. Both of these are templates for the sort of soundtrack that would rise to prominence in the Eighties because they are a mixture of score and songs with, in the case of Midnight Cowboy, the composer John Barry co-writing some of the songs. This is a very important ingredient to the success of those Eighties song scores, in that most of the time people like Giorgio Moroder, Harold Faltermeyer or Keith Forsey (who scored The Breakfast Club) would not only write the score but also write or co-write the songs.' Indeed, Forsey was one of the two songwriters for 'Don't You Forget About Me' by Simple Minds, the unforgettable title track for The Breakfast Club, while David Foster, who provided the soundtrack to The Secret Of My Success, co-wrote the Night Ranger track above.

'In retrospect this was the beginning of a very slippery slope with studios using soundtracks to help sell a movie,' rues Lally. 'Eventually, the harmonious relationship between songs and score began to disappear as the time frames to produce a score became shorter, and at the same time the score composers' participation with the songs became nonexistent.' That breakdown would lead to the type of soundtracks offered today which are more like pastiches of Now! compilation albums with a few exclusives thrown in if the studio can be bothered.

Turning to the use of new technology, Lally is more enthusiastic. 'Synths had been used to score films well before the Eighties too, with scores to films like The Forbidden Planet being one of the earliest examples. But the idea of a totally electronic score being accepted as standard practice for a mainstream film didn't develop until the Eighties for two main reasons. First, synthesizers became cheaper and therefore available to the average musician. Second, the invention of home video resulted in such a massive demand for product that low-budget or independent companies, who didn't have the budget for an orchestral score, would happily hire a guy or gal with a few synths to create the soundtrack. This studios were able to thrive in a way that they hadn't since the drive-in movie theatres started to go out of business.'

So if you ever wondered what makes Eighties soundtracks so memorable, that's why.

Rupert Lally on Eighties film soundtracks

At the end of my interview with Lally he described his favourite electronic music records. Here he does the same for Eighties movie soundtracks.

Vangelis Blade Runner

This is such a beautiful score on so many levels. The choice of sounds is very orchestral - Vangelis uses very few timbres here. Then there are those wonderful brass and pad sounds from the Yamaha CS80, a Fender Rhodes electric piano, a heavily processed grand piano, sampled timpani and percussion from an Emulator and a live gong; occasionally he'll add a saxophone or Mary Hopkin's very pure sounding voice, but otherwise that's it. It creates a feeling of an ensemble. Supposedly he performed the score live to tape watching the film on screen whilst he played, creating much of it on the spur of the moment; which to me only enhances it's greatness.

Maurice Jarre Witness

This is another benchmark synthetic score for me. Jarre apparently used four session synthesizer players in a little quartet and recorded them playing all together for the this score, which is probably why, despite being wholly synthetic, it has the feeling of chamber music at times.

Giorgio Moroder Cat People

A great, pulsing score from Moroder, which, according to Paul Schrader (the director), was achieved by Moroder recording layer after layer of synths onto multi-track tape and then fading the different layers in and out during the mixing process. There's a great use of the (co-written) song 'Putting Out Fire' by David Bowie too.

Harold Faltermeyer Beverly Hills Cop

This choice will probably get a few groans, but forget the familiarity of the main theme [the ubiquitous 'Axel F']and watch the movie again paying special attention to the score. The mood that Faltermeyer (who also wrote some of the songs) manages to create from such minimal ingredients is very impressive. The theme is used again and again in the film in many different ways, and in that sense the score takes a very traditional approach to film scoring using untraditional means.

Brad Fiedel Terminator

People always forget that the first Terminator film was an extremely low-budget movie. Using little more than an Emulator sampling keyboard, a Prophet 10 synthesizer and a DMX drum machine, Fiedel created this (still) iconic score that suggests the relentlessness of the Terminator using repetitive rhythms and sampled clanging metal.

Wendy Carlos Tron

Carlos is a classically trained composer, and her scores reflect this - her score for Tron almost borders on opera at times, which for me is a love / hate thing. There is no doubting this scores' incredible power however.

Arthur B. Rubinstein Wargames

At first listen, it's difficult to believe this score is really the work of one person, but it is. From the militaristic Brass music of the opening credits, to the synth pop songs underscoring the youthful Matthew Broderick playing in the video arcade, to the beautiful solo piano theme for Professor Falken, Rubinstein wrote them all.

Ennio Morricone The Thing

I had to have at least one John Carpenter score in here and even though Carpenter didn't write this one himself, his influence is clearly apparent. The feeling of impending doom is apparent from the first bar of the opening theme.

James Horner Gorky Park

Horner has become a little bit of an in-joke in the scoring industry for his ability to keep using the same melodies and motifs in many of his scores. However, at the beginning of his career he was the king of creating scores for independent movies that belied their low budget roots. His use of a cymbalom alongside synths and a brass ensemble is both startling and incredibly dramatic.

Hans Zimmer Black Rain

Like Horner, Zimmer's familiarity has led to people dismissing his work at times, which is wrong because his early scores like this which blends pulsing synths, orchestra and traditional Japanese instruments, were revolutionary. He still has the ability to surprise even today - take his score for The Dark Knight for instance - plus he began his road to Hollywood mega score-dom as a synth programmer working in a little studio in my home town of Brighton, and for that, if nothing else, he has my undying respect.

Audio Journal: 22/09/2013 - Gary Numan, John Lennon McCullagh, FTSE, Metamono

FTSE (Sam Manville)

Last week I was asked if I wanted to contribute to this month's New Wave section for next month's Clash magazine. This basically involves writing a 350-word piece on some hot new up and coming band or artist. I wrote one a couple of months ago on the band Benin City so I thought I'd throw my hat in.

However, writing about new bands is, at least for me, a challenge. As this blog will attest, I spend most of my time listening to stuff that's, if not old, then something I'm passionate about in some way or know something about. For Clash this month I wrote a piece on the new Gary Numan album, which is a good case in point. I may not have followed Numan's career that closely, but 'Cars' is definitely a major influence on being in love with electronic music - as a five-year-old kid I distinctly recall watching him perform that on the Old Grey Whistle Test with my father, either when I was on my way to bed or because I couldn't sleep and had come back into the lounge. Irrespective, something about that song crept into my consciousness and the seed for my love of electronic music was planted. So with that prior impact in mind, I was really pleased to be writing about Splinters, his new, good, and very bleak album. I was less confident writing about ex-Creation Records svengali Alan McGee's new signing, the fifteen year old troubador (and audaciously-named) John Lennon McCullagh; however, McCullagh's debut album is massively inspired by Bob Dylan, right down to the protest themes, folksy guitars and harmonicas, and I know enough about Dylan to have nailed that review without breaking too much of a sweat.

But the New Wave piece did inspire a certain element of panic. After agreeing to do it, the editor sent through a list of bands and asked which I'd like to cover. I looked down the list and didn't recognise any of them. I had no press release to refer to, no music to listen to, and while I could have done a cursory Google search to find a YouTube clip or streamed track, I simply didn't have the time to do that. The deadline was keen and so I glanced at the list and picked the one name that grabbed me - FTSE. The reason I chose that, for those who really know me, was probably self-evident: I may act like what I do every day is listen to and write about music, but the reality is I work for a big bank in the City of London, and that's what pays the bills. So I saw the name FTSE, laughed inwardly at the cross-reference between my day job and this article and then found myself interviewing FTSE's Sam Manville for the piece.

FTSE make music that leans heavily into soul, R&B, hip-hop and drum 'n' bass - none of which are typical concerns of mine - but those influences are linked together by electronics that eschew the sheen and polish of most mainstream pop through Manville's interest in sounds that just aren't perfect, perhaps are a bit hissy or wonky, creating dark interstitial moments that disrupt his otherwise commercial sound. Though he was tight-lipped on his influences, one that crept out was David Byrne - you can imagine that any doubt I had about writing about some young gun dissipated at that point - who he singled out precisely because Byrne doesn't possess what anyone could describe as a 'perfect' voice. Manville is about to release his second EP and he's clearly going places. Here's 'St Tropez' from that EP. (Click here for those on email.)

Returning to electronic music, this week I've been listening to music created using analogue synths, those great beasts that were less instruments and more science kits, involving lots of knobs, filters, patch cables and a lab coat to make sounds from scratch. A lot of my listening has been taken up with the debut album from Metamono, which this trio will release in October. You can read a bit more here and you can listen to the track 'Linger Langour' from With The Compliments Of Nuclear Physics on that link.