Audio Journal : 15/02/2011

Tom Tom Club's début album was released in 1981. The band consisted of Tina Weymouth (the sexiest bass player the music industry has produced) and husband Chris Frantz (a drummer by trade) with assorted other musicians and singers, including two of Tina's sisters. Weymouth and Frantz's day-jobs were in Talking Heads, producing the funk rhythms over which guitarist Jerry Harrison and de facto leader David Byrne would add their own similarly vital ingredients. Recorded in downtime after Remain In Light, Talking Heads' fourth album, Tom Tom Club's success outstripped Talking Heads significantly.



In some ways it's not hard to see why Tom Tom Club were successful. The lengthy 'Wordy Rappinghood' and 'Genius Of Love' are big pop tracks, but to me feel like novelty pieces. The rapping on the first piece is frankly cringe-worthy at times, though I really like the hip-hop groove. 'Genius Of Love' was performed as an intermission by Tom Tom Club during Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense and I've removed it from that album's playlist as I really don't like it.

The remainder of the album – with the exception of the dreadful cover of 'Under The Boardwalk', which sounds like a bad pairing of Bananarama and August Darnell – is better, principally because the band stop trying to sound like they're aping Grandmaster Flash. 'L'Elephant' is my stand out favourite, but with good reason. When I first heard this solid funk groove I thought it sounded familiar, then it struck me that the main elements of the backing track cropped up on Talking Heads' Remain In Light CD/DVD reissue as an unfinished demo. Then again, reading This Must Be The Place – The Adventures Of Talking Heads In The Twentieth Century by David Bowman, most of that track was written by sometime Bowie / Talking Heads / Zappa / King Crimson guitarist Adrian Belew anyway. 'As Above So Below', which Belew also claims he wrote whilst recording with the Club, though he didn't receive so much as a mention, is my other favourite song here.

Iggy Pop's Lust For Life is an enigma of an album. Produced by David Bowie and released in 1977 sometimes it feels like a confusing amalgam of some of the releases Bowie himself would release – the closing track 'Fall In Love With Me', for example, has a disco-funk stomp, a more clarified take on the sound the Thin White Duke would make (but not remember making) on Station To Station; 'Tonight', with its watery keyboard melody has all the grace and poise of Bowie's '"Heroes"' and his own distinctive backing vocals give the track a melancholy depth. In many ways Iggy doesn't seem to know where he fits into all of this, a malleable, jerking puppet for his master to direct as he sits fit. Iggy's plight was proven by 'China Girl', a track written for him by Bowie (admittedly not on this album), which Bowie released later himself and had a lot more success with. Perhaps the vilification Iggy has faced since he took the insurance advert gig isn't fair after all. It's hard to be hard on the youthful, beaming Iggy on the front cover.



I don't listen to this album very often, and consequently every time I do it feels like I'm hearing it for the first time. Aside from the obvious songs (the glam-tastic rumble of 'Lust For Life', whose profile received a shot in the arm thanks to Trainspotting, the wry 'Passengers'), the rest never sound familiar at all. Sometimes it reminds me of a less goofy take on the first New York Dolls album, and its themes are clearly pretty dark and decadent ('Sixteen' is just plain lewd), but sometimes those guitars do sound a bit ELO (as on the louche 'Success').

When Antony Heggarty and his Johnsons won the Mercury prize a few years ago, there were sighs of consternation that he wasn't British enough; he was born British, true, but he'd lived in the States for years. Possessing a voice that evoked the depth and colour of Nina Simone with the theatricality of a Brecht / Weil composition, people were quietly in awe of this figure, and that voice, which had come up from the murkiest Manhattan depths thanks to patronage from the likes of Lou Reed, and was now receiving critical public acclaim.

His is not a voice I can listen to too often; it's not that I don't like it, it's more to do with the songs themselves. One could argue that his songs are plaintive, almost euphoric in their transcendence, but they are also very dark; if I wanted music to be depressed by, an Antony & The Johnsons album would be my first port of call.

The reason for mentioning Antony is because of an album by a band called Hello Lovers entitled Gone With The Wind. I didn't buy this; it was mistakenly packaged in with something else I'd bought. I know nothing about them and I've tried to listen to the album a few times but kept giving up – because of the singer's voice. His voice is like Antony's but bigger, less subtle, more prone to jazzy switches in key, from baritone to soprano, and it's hard to warm to. It's a shame, because the music itself, a fusion of Satie-esque piano motifs, mournful violins and café jazz styles, is really beautiful. Mercifully there are a couple of good instrumental tracks which offer relief from that voice.

Audio Journal : 19/11/2010

I had one of those mornings this week where I flicked through the album playlists restlessly in my iPod and couldn't settle on anything. Scrolling down the list, nothing appealed. It's at times like this where I tend to employ the 'playlist roulette' game I've mentioned here before: I close my eyes, drag my finger around the circular wheel a couple of times, then open my eyes again and whatever I've landed on I have to play. Well, today, even that didn't do the trick. I really wasn't in the mood for Ryan Adams, Jesus And Mary Chain and most definitely not The Hives. So I listened to Sparks' 'I Can't Believe You Would Fall For All The Crap In This Song', turned back to Justin Halpern's book Shit My Dad Says, and staved off the decision for a few more minutes.



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.

Audio Journal : 31/05/2010

Work from home playlist

Two unusual things about today – one, I worked from home and two, I had the house to myself. Here was today's work from home playlist, three albums selected at random to help me concentrate and be more productive.

The Orb Live '93

I first got into The Orb about a year after they released U.F.Orb. Before that I didn't really get the point of ambient music and I also thought The Orb in particular were just a huge joke. Their 'performance' of a hugely compressed single version of 'Blue Room' on Top Of The Pops saw the duo of Dr. Alex Paterson and Kris 'Thrash' Weston sitting either side of a chess board bathed in blue light, and I just didn't get it. Later I realised that there was humour inherent in their chill out music – that's what happens when you work with Jimmy Cauty from The KLF – but it wasn't meant to be a joke.

By 1993 however, I'd just finished my GCSEs, a lot of family stuff was kicking off, mild teenage angst was developing and I needed to find some way of calming down. U.F.Orb was the antidote. I bought it on cassette the day before my father went into hospital for an operation, and spent the entire length of his op sat in the family car listening to the album. It spawned an ongoing love of textural ambient music, but nothing – even some of The Orb's later output – ever came close to hearing that album for the first time.

The only thing that topped that album was seeing The Orb live at Warwick Arts Centre in 1995 with a school friend. It was an incredible evening, though possibly not as incredible as the people stoned out of their nuts found it. I genuinely regarded that concert as my musical coming of age, much more affecting in many ways than any of the usual landmark life events that ensued.

The problem is that I don't remember much about that night beyond the fact that in the post-concert DJ set I shook Dr. Alex Paterson's hand and gave him a massive thumbs up. The closest I can get is this 1993 live compilation which draws together tracks from various performances, including a seminal 'Tower Of Dub' – ex-PiL bassist Jah Wobble's low-slung dub rhythm pushed to levels that I recollect when played 'live' (by way of a sampled loop) back at Warwick Arts Centre made me think my chest was going to cave in.

Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works 85 – 92

Hooked on ambient music as I became in 1993 after purchasing U.F.Orb, it didn't take long before this album fell into my mits. Aphex Twin, by the time of this collection on the Belgian R&S label, was already established as a electronica enigma, a musical auteur who claimed not to have heard any of the music that his music was compared to; he made music in his shed, in Cornwall which at the time wasn't exactly regarded as a techno centre.

Richard D James, Aphex's given name, had a particularly unique take on the ambient genre. In few cases on Selected Ambient Works do you find the wispy, pulsing electronica which characterised vast swathes of this particular substrata of electronic music. Instead you get heavily reverb-ed slowed-down 'ardcore beats, icy synth lines and Willy Wonka samples. It prefaces the Warp label's fascination with clanging distorted beats and provides the bridge between the likes of Autechre with the industrial music of Cabaret Voltaire; not that James would have claimed to have consciously known this.

Warp released Selected Ambient Works II a few years later; it had no track names, just images reflecting each of the tracks. I borrowed it from the library the same day as I borrowed Brian Eno's The Shutov Assembly. I remember thinking that both albums sounded pretty much the same.

David Bowie Christiane F. - Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo



I had never considered buying Bowie until I read Christopher Sandford's Loving The Alien biography at University in the mid-Nineties. I don't think I've ever elected to read about an artist before actually having any of their music, but something about the book in the campus's branch of Waterstone's caught my eye and I decided I'd give it a go.

What emerged was an attraction to Bowie's 'Berlin' period – the trio of albums Low, Heroes and Lodger – which were produced by Bowie and Eno while the erstwhile David Jones was a resident in the city. I think it was an interest in Berlin as a cultural influence, and the influence of Low on Joy Division, more so than Eno's engagement, that hooked me in to that trio of albums. I bought the trio of albums over a period of a couple of years after reading that book and initially found them confusing, challenging listening experiences. In a bizarre way I didn't feel like I was entitled to listen to Bowie; I didn't understand his vernacular.

Since then I've moved either side of the Berlin period, specifically the Velvets-influenced Ziggy albums, but it's to the Berlin albums that I always return. This soundtrack album effectively works as a greatest hits of the period, drawing together album tracks and sundry oddities; the best of these is '“Helden”', a German version of the mighty '”Heroes”', in my opinion one of the most uplifting songs ever recorded.

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.