Audio Journal : 23/11/2010

I was watching MTV on Sunday night. Alexa Chung was presenting some collection of old videos, all loosely connected by her arch / ironic / disinterested / banal commentary. It was somehow concrete affirmation of why music television bores me to death. She introduced 'I Don't Like Mondays' by The Boomtown Rats and my first reaction was 'Did Johnny Borrell from Razorlight base his look and sound on Boomtown-era Geldof?' The similarities – in Geldof's appearance and in the sound – were uncannily like the stuff that Borrell has produced on pretty much everything but the first Razorlight album.

The second thought that went through my head was a recollection of an evening many moons ago in Colchester. My house-mates Barry and Neil and I descended upon a pub around the corner from our house to play pool. It felt like we were three cowboys walking through the doors of a dusty saloon (an analogy that has been reinforced over time by something elsewhere in the story); the assembled old goats and regulars all turned around as we walked in, and if it wasn't for their general lack of interest it would have felt threatening. Even the big dog sat under one of the wooden chairs couldn't really be bothered to growl. Instead we bought drinks and were just heading to the pool table out back when I spotted a box on the windowsill containing – unexpectedly – a load of old records. If one thing has become apparent through my frequent eulogising of my student days, it's that I spent a lot of money on music, and quite a lot of it from charity shops. Buying vinyl from a pub was, however, definitely a one-off.

While Barry went off to set up the pool table, shaking his head disapprovingly as he went, Neil and I began raking through the cardboard box of records. I came across a perfect condition LP of Ennio Morricone's soundtrack to The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (now the Western analogy makes sense, you see) and Neil found a battered copy of 'I Don't Like Mondays'. I still have the LP; Neil discovered later that the 7" was basically snapped in half and certainly unplayable.

I'd love to say that I'd listened to The Good, The Bad And The Ugly soundtrack this week, but I didn't. So we shall move on from this elaborate and undoubtedly pointless anecdote and focus on what I've been listening to these past few days.

Mostly it's been the new Brian Eno album, Small Craft On A Milk Sea, released on Warp in the last fortnight. I've become used to Eno albums sounding like ethereal stasis – The Shutov Assembly is one of the most delicate, beautiful albums I own, and I sometimes put it on to help me fall asleep on the train to work (hopefully Eno wouldn't take this the wrong way). I know that this isn't the only aspect to Eno, and many times I've listened to albums showcasing a different side to his sound and found myself thinking 'What was that all about?' Nerve Net, for example. I remember borrowing that from Stratford-upon-Avon public library and trying three or four times to get my head around it before giving up, perplexed.

I wouldn't say Small Craft is like that, and, besides, I'd probably find that Nerve Net makes complete sense to me now. But it is different. Perhaps the release of this album on Warp has some significance here; Eno albums have tended to be released on his All Saints label, or self-released as downloads. Warp was initially exclusively a techno label but has since fragmented to focus on an infinite number of musical shards, including electronically-supported rock and lots of other micro-genres too. Small Craft has lots of drifting electronic introspection ('Emerald And Lime'), but it also features spindly beats ('Horse'), juddering rhythms ('Flint March'), distorted guitars and even a blissfully motorik punk freakout that wouldn't go amiss on a Neu! covers compilation ('2 Forms Of Anger'). It is utterly Eno and a perfectly-timed reminder of why he remains so essential, covering as it does so many of the facets that have featured in his work over the past four decades.

Vinyl Corner



'My Definition Of House Music' by DJ Hell (Helmut Geier) was released on the Belgian R&S label and I picked up this repressing in the late Nineties. First released in 1992, the original version features sampled strings and what we used to call Italian house piano riffs as well as squelchy synths. Taking a look at the always useful Discogs website, I found out that the strings were sampled from a David Byrne song. No wonder I like 'My Definition Of House Music'. This is one of those classic 12" singles from dance music's crucial first flushes and it still sounds excellent today.

Not, however, as excellent as the B-side remix by Resistance D (Maik Maurice and Pascal Dardoufas). This mix reminds me chiefly of the simplicity of 'Lush'-era Orbital mixed with the prog-house tendencies of early Spooky. It has a denseness and urgency that the original lacks and a neat suite of 303 bubbles for the quintessential acid house freak out, something that (at least to me) sounds every bit as thrilling as it did in the late Eighties.

Audio Journal : 04/10/2010

Take a four-piece band, take away the singer after a supposedly acrimonious split, cleverly change the band's name so it both references the absence of the singer and yet remains broadly identifiable as the same band, add a load of guest singers and the passing of about five years after the 'split' and release a new album. That's the formulae in theory. In practice they're 1) Talking Heads - David Byrne = The Heads; 2) (1996 - 1991) + (Michael Hutchence + Shaun Ryder + Richard Hell + Debbie Harry etc) = No Talking Just Head.



I've had this album on my Amazon wish list for ages, and always saw it as a low priority item in my trawl through the Talking Heads / David Byrne back catalogue; plus I've never been that struck on Tom Tom Club, the band that Talking Heads bassist Tina Weymouth and drummer Chris Frantz formed whilst still in Talking Heads, and whose success far outstripped the parent band; plus it never stays in stock for long.

There are undoubtedly elements reminiscent of Talking Heads – the funk edge and the distinct 'alternative' / 'college radio' sound; but in other ways it's a little like watching Rock Star: INXS, with various singers trying to fill David Byrne's shoes; only that doesn't work as an analogy since Michael Hutchence actually appears on 'The King Is Gone'. Considering the main reason for buying this would be because you're probably a Talking Heads fan, the best tracks are those which don't attempt to ape former glories. The opener 'Damage I've Done' (with Concrete Blonde's Johnette Napolitano) sounds like Wir's 'So And Slow It Grows' with a distorted, urgent chorus that creates something both fragile and tense simultaneously. 'Never Mind' (featuring original NYC punk Richard Hell) may sample the drums from the Eno-produced cover of Al Green's 'Take Me To The River', but the track positively swings under Hell's slightly creepy poetry. Another good track is the collaboration with Happy Mondays / Black Grape's Shaun Ryder which sounds to me like Dos Dedos Mis Amigos-era PWEI. Overall, this album works best when you try not to compare it too much to early Talking Heads glories, leaving you content to acknowledge the odd discernible echo of the elements that made that band so vital.



Happy Mondays turn up on the compilation Zero, which is a collection of tracks produced by auteur Manchester producer Martin Hannett; anyone who's seen his portrayal by Andy Serkis in Michael Winterbottom's Twenty-Four Hour Party People will recall Hannett as an odd mix of madcap scientist and musical rebel, ordering Joy Division drummer Stephen Morris to 'play faster, but slower' when creating the band's seminal 'She's Lost Control'. His unique treatment of drums and grinding bass appears throughout Zero, cropping up on tracks from Wasted Youth through The Psychedelic Furs and on to the starkly minimal 'In A Lonely Place' by New Order. This compilation is an essential purchase even if just for Jilted John's self-titled single and its 'Gordon is a moron' refrain. In 'Eleven O'Clock Tick Tock' there's also a brief reminder that U2 could have mined the post-punk sound successfully without turning into stadia dinosaurs.

Clearly forever to be associated with the punk of Buzzcocks (their first, self-financed single 'Boredom' is included here) and the post-punk of Basement Five, Joy Division and Magazine, Zero nevertheless highlights that Hannett worked just as successfully with leftfield indie pop bands like The Only Ones and Kitchens Of Distinction, while work with VU chanteuse Nico and her Invisible Girls on 'All Tomorrow's Parties' highlights a softer, more austerely-layered style. Happy Mondays' joyous 'Wrote For Luck' points to the producer's relevance right into the baggy / Madchester scene of the late Eighties and early Nineties, sadly coinciding with his death in 1991 from heart failure, induced by spiralling drug and alcohol use.



Underworld have come a long way from their early Eighties electronic pop work as Freur (their 'Doot Doot' single is totally of its time, but as relevant for the New Wave period as 'Rez' would be for the early Nineties dance scene), and Athens, a compilation released on !K7 last year highlights a totally different side to the duo of Karl Hyde and Rick Smith. For many, its the urgent strains of 'Born Slippy (Nuxx)' that they see (wrongly) as synonymous with the Underworld sound, and so Athens will disappoint anyone expecting an hour of shouted 'Lager! Lager! Lager!' laddishness, highlighting as it does Hyde / Smith's interest in, wait for it, jazz.

And not just any old jazz, but the interstellar strains of Alice Coltrane and Mahavishnu Orchestra; the out-there sounds of Sun Ra are sadly absent but would've dropped in just as well. There is a liberal sprinkling of jazz-funk-disco fusion and jazzy techno, all of which makes little sense in the context of the well-established Underworld sound until the segues into their own 'Oh' and the Eno / Hyde collaboration 'Beebop Shuffle', whereupon you start to appreciate that there really is a jazz looseness to their sound, whether that be in the sounds that float in and out of their tracks or the stream-of-consciousness (improvised?) vocal riffing from Hyde. All that said, this compilation works best – like No Talking Just Head – when you suspend any attempts at comparison with other reference points in the Underworld back catalogue.

Audio Journal : 08/03/2010

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

This week I've mostly been listening to Goldfrapp's 'Rocket', the first single to be taken from their new album Head First. A return to electronic pop after an experiment with Wicker Man-esque folksy mysticism on their last album (Seventh Tree), 'Rocket' takes the Eighties preset keyboard sound of Van Halen's 'Jump' and hitches it to a high-energy beat and a singalong chorus to create a perfect pop track which could easily grate after a few weeks of repeated listening.

To stop that from happening I've also been listening to Wild Palms' '...Over...Time...' a single that was released on the Popular Music label last year. Wild Palms are a four-piece London band producing clipped, funky rock tracks with a whiff of Durutti Column, Devo or Talking Heads. A stellar cover of Bjork's 'Human Behaviour' is available for free download here.



At the weekend I watched the BBC Arena documentary on Brian Eno. Eno's 'Another Green World' is the title music for the BBC's long-running occasional high-brow arts documentary series, so it seems fitting that they would finally turn their attention to the enigmatic Eno and his wide-ranging interests. During the hour-long programme he spoke about his love of gospel music, choral music, Darwinism, art and science. I didn't get most of it, but it was fascinating to see Eno conjuring improvised ambient tracks effortlessly from his Mac.

I have an enduring love for Eno's music, but actually own depressingly little of it. However, I do have a number of records produced by Eno for other artists – the aforementioned Devo and Talking Heads, plus Bowie, U2, the last Coldplay album and James. James are still most famous for their massive hit 'Sit Down'. At school, when 'Sit Down' arrived in the depths of the Madchester / Baggy scene, I couldn't have hated it more. Everyone was wearing those ubiquitous James 'flower' T-shirts and it all seemed so irritating. Perhaps it was just because I wasn't in with the cool kids.

A few years later, my friend Rachael played me Laid when it was released. The jangly, semi-acoustic Laid was produced by Eno, and I really loved it. I was, in truth, most attracted by the production credit, having spent the previous couple of years borrowing CDs from Stratford-upon-Avon Library's seemingly limitless collection of Eno albums. The follow-up to Laid, the now rare-as-hen's teeth Wah-Wah was even more up my street. Essentially a loose collection of jams recorded during the Laid sessions and re-processed into complete tracks by Eno, Wah-Wah was a departure for James but utterly in keeping with the Eno spirit. Whiplash, which followed also saw Eno helping out on curiously electronic-embracing James (the track 'Go To The Bank' is one of my favourite, out-of-character James tracks), while Millionaires (another Eno production) was a return to the stately Eno rock productions of The Joshua Tree and "Heroes".

I really only fell for James big-style when I saw them perform three songs on Jools Holland to promote their Best Of compilation in 1999. They played 'She's A Star' and 'Runaground', both of which were overshadowed by the towering grandiosity of 'Sit Down', and after almost a decade of detesting that track I finally fell in love with it thanks in the most part to Tim Booth's vocals. This week I've listened to Gold Mother, which birthed 'Sit Down' to remind myself of just how good that song really is. A musician acquaintance once said to me that James tracks always have a plaintive, emotional quality because of the way their choruses use minor chords; I don't know if that's true, but 'Sit Down' now stands (or sits?) as one of my favourite tracks of all time to sing along badly to at high volume.

Vinyl corner

Space were a three-piece band from Marseille whose biggest hit was the instrumental 'Magic Fly' (1977), which I appropriated from my parents' music collection when I left home. Not to be confused with the band of Scouse reprobates who had hits in the Nineties with songs like 'Female Of The Species', this Space were exponents of a short-lived 'space disco' scene.

Led by the upper-octave monophonic synth melodies of Didier Marouani (also known as Ecama), along with bandmates Roland Romanelli and Jannick Top, 'Magic Fly' is essentially a Giorgio Moroder-esque high-energy disco track propelled by a thudding proto-techno beat. Sure, it's more Käse than Kraftwerk, but it's difficult not to like it. The B-side 'Ballad For Space Lovers' is more sedate and altogether more Prog-tastic.

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 : 28/09/2009

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

Only those emerging from solitary confinement would have failed to notice that The Beatles have had their back catalogue repackaged, remastered and re-released, forty years on from their swansong Abbey Road. In our house we’ve watched three anodyne documentaries on the BBC and have very rapidly got sick and tired of walking into pretty much any shop only to have huge cardboard displays containing the remastered digi-pack albums foisted upon us.

Not only that, but we have the albums – in their last remastered guise – in the house already, relics from the days when my wife and her three closest friends were mad keen on the band as teenagers. We’ve found ourselves asking what the point of a remaster actually is when the material is that old. Surely the nature of recording methods back then means there comes a point where the only way you could improve the sound would be to record the instruments again using modern technology?

Nonetheless, in deference, we decided to have a Beatles-only Sunday and spent the day listening to their back catalogue of 200-odd songs on random play. In doing so, we came to the inevitable and well-trodden conclusion that the John Lennon-penned numbers were always the best. Our kids think the comedy Ringo numbers and the goofy Paul McCartney compositions are the best. We can only hope that they grow out of this and see sense in time.

I mentioned a number of blogs ago that I’d been working my way through a number of boxes of old CDs which have permanent and unfortunate residence in my loft. Returning the box I’ve been working through – which contained mostly dance music and industrial albums – I brought down the next one and alighted upon a copy of minimalist composer Philip Glass’s Low Symphony.

Glass, who just received his first Prom performance and who has of late moved into more accessible territory with soundtracks such as that for the Streep / Kidman vehicle The Hours turned his hand to producing an orchestral arrangement of David Bowie’s seminal Low. This was the first album in Bowie’s ‘Berlin’ trilogy and the first where he worked with iconic ex-Roxy Music keyboardist and soundsmith Brian (Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle) Eno. Working in Berlin’s Hansa Studios, a former Nazi ballroom, the furtive Bowie / Eno collaboration produced a bleak body of songs which would go on to inspire the likes of Joy Division (Joy Division’s original name was Warsaw, named after the track ‘Warszawa’ on Low).

Glass tackles three tracks from the Low sessions, the effect being a typical absorbing set of compositions which find little reference point in the original songs. I don’t listen to classical music generally and have no real understanding or vocabulary when it comes to describing such music, but suffice to say that this is both accessible and challengingly minimal.

Not so for The Arditti Quartet’s tackling of John Cage’s compositions for strings. Cage, a founder of the New York avant garde and a member of the Fluxus movement, is notorious for his work 4’33”, a piece of 'silence' lasting for the title’s four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The deal is that there is no such thing as absolute silence – in performances, whilst the ‘player’ would sit motionless, invariably there would be sound from the audience, a cough or what have you; the absence of complete silence would prove Cage’s notion that although theoretical to achieve, this is an impossibility in reality. Cleverer still, adding up the seconds in the performance length – 273 – and inverting that number, you get to the theoretical lowest temperature achievable, the notional Absolute Zero, a similarly unachievable yet theoretically feasible result.

In any case, Cage was an artistic and leftfield pioneer. His scores for strings dumped the traditional methods of writing notes and octaves, preferring instead to provide actions, frameworks and the musical equivalent of the vaguest stage directions. The result is nothing short of faltering atonal dissonance and only in my broadest-minded moments can I listen to this all the way through. Far better, at least from an accessible entry point to Cage’s work are Boris Berman’s performances of the Pieces For Prepared Piano, wherein Cage offered more specific and prescriptive treatments for the interior of a piano, the end result being a sequence of clanks and scrapings that industrial pioneers like Einstürzende Neubauten wouldn’t find unappealing.