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: 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: 30/08/2013 - David Byrne & St. Vincent, MuteResponse

David Byrne & St. Vincent, The Roundhouse 27/08/2013
Source and copyright: Rachel Lipsitz for Clash

One recurring artist throughout the history of my Audio Journal blog has been former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, who I even went so far as to say I had something of an 'artistic crush' on, a comment that I'm still reluctant to retract.

Byrne was in London earlier this week for a one-off show at the Roundhouse with St. Vincent (Annie Clark), with whom he recorded the brass-soaked Love This Giant released by 4AD last year. Despite a couple of previous attempts on my part to catch Byrne in concert, for one reason or another it's never happened. The closest I've come to seeing him in the flesh was last year at the Curzon cinema in Chelsea where he and Matthew Herbert engaged in an earnest debate about the health of what we used to call the music industry; prior to that it was a live video-link chat with Paul Morley from Brixton to accompany a screening of his Ride, Rise, Roar tour documentary, which I watched in a tiny room at Leicester Square's Odeon. Finally getting to see him singing this week was therefore something that I was starting to believe was never going to happen.

I was fortunate enough to review the Roundhouse show for Clash. My review, accompanied by some rather excellent photos from Rachel Lipsitz, can be found here. Byrne and Clark have released a free EP to accompany their tour, featuring some live tracks (including the Talking Heads classic 'Road To Nowhere'), remixes and an unreleased song from the Love This Giant sessions. The Brass Tactics EP can be downloaded below in exchange for your email address.

A few posts back I mentioned that listening to Byrne's conversation with Matthew Herbert had inspired me to start a project called MuteResponse in tribute to the influence of my favourite record label (Mute) and to celebrate ten years of writing my Documentary Evidence website.

MuteResponse will take the form of a twenty-two track double download compilation and will be released in the Autumn. Earlier this week I premiered the first track from the album, which will feature a number of artists similarly inspired by Mute's legacy. 'Clues In The Rain' by Rupert Lally and Espen J. Jörgensen - the first track that I received for inclusion on the project after a campaign for contributions - can be heard below, or head here if you're reading this on email. The full tracklist for MuteResponse will be announced soon.

Audio Journal: October 2012

David Byrne, How Music Works

In October I attended a talk by former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne and electronic musician Matthew Herbert at the Curzon Cinema in Chelsea. Herbert has been churning out electronica since the Nineties, recently made a record comprised entirely of the sounds of a pig from birth to bacon, and was recently installed as the director of the Radiophonic Workshop, a venerable BBC institution best known for producing the early electronic theme music for Doctor Who. Byrne, on the other hand, has just published a book titled How Music Works, and this London date was part of a small global tour to promote the book.

At Herbert's suggestion,the Curzon debate was titled Do We Need Any More Music?, and began with a stark statistic from a friend of Herbert's who works at Apple that 75% of music released on iTunes has never been downloaded once. Not once! The pair then began dissecting music's current ease of production owing to cheap and ubiquitous software, often including so many preset sounds, rhythms and styles that Herbert said it was akin to 'shopping', while Byrne countered that it was more like 'spellchecking' in the way that the software encourages everything to sit neatly on a grid. Herbert somehow kept steering the conversation round to the topic of food (he was clearly hungry); in contrast, one tedious question in the audience Q&A afterwards pondered on the fact that 'Byrne will collaborate with anyone for a packet of Doritos'.

One of the topics that the pair kept returning to was the economics - of lack thereof - in music today, turning their focus on the hairy topics of copyright, declining incomes and illegal downloading. Byrne cited a book by someone I've never heard of, who downloaded his way through college until an epiphany struck him at the Brooklyn coffee shop he worked in once he'd graduated. He began to notice that many of his customers were from local bands like Yeasayer and TV On The Radio, much-feted bands that he'd seen on TV, in the press, heralded as cool and whose records he'd downloaded - for free. He couldn't get his head around why these people had no money, until someone explained that they made no money from record sales as no-one was really buying music, tours rarely broke even and that the financial realities of being a musician today were pretty stark. Byrne never managed to complete the anecdote, but Herbert said we all had a responsibility to encourage scenes to develop.

At some point in proceedings my mind started to race, and I came to two conclusions:

1. Though I write about music pretty much every day, either for my own Documentary Evidence website or for the magazine Clash, I'm not doing enough to support the artform I love the most; and

2. I feel a need to expose my two children to as much varied music as possible.

In response to the point Herbert made around encouraging scenes to develop, I realised that I'm already part of a small scene. Documentary Evidence is a website devoted to the music of one label, Mute, a label that released music by Depeche Mode, Moby, Nick Cave and countless others, whose Blast First sub-label first brought Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. to the UK, and who played an integral role in dance music's development via the Rhythm King and NovaMute imprints, releasing genre-defining works by S'Express, Bomb The Bass, Plastikman and Speedy J. My site has a small and ardent following of like-minded fans, and so I've decided to do something within that scene beyond writing reviews and conducting interviews.

I haven't worked it all out yet, but it's called MuteResponse and I'll post details soon.

As well as curating my own site with more or less daily reviews, from February this year I've been writing occasionally for Clash's website, covering gig reviews and interviews. I've tended to focus on Mute acts because it's my main interest, and that's lead to interviewing people like Dave Gahan from Depeche Mode, Jon Spencer from the Blues Explosion and Chris Keating from Yeasayer. My good friend Andy put me in touch with Clash and through that connection and the stuff I've done since for them, I think I can now legitimately call myself a freelance music journalist, particularly after my review of Yeasayer's gig at The Lexington made it into the magazine edition of Clash in the summer. It doesn't pay a penny, but it's a lot of fun getting to talk to your musical heroes and being on guest lists, and I've learned more about the music industry this year than I ever knew before.

Andy and I have worked on three gigs together - Barry Adamson, Inspiral Carpets and, at the end of October, Crime & The City Solution at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. A few weeks back I got to interview Crime's frontman Simon Bonney. Links to both can be found below. Hopefully it goes some way to allay any concerns that I've simply stopped writing.

Crime & The City Solution: Queen Elizabeth Hall, London 26 October 2012

Crime & The City Solution: Simon Bonney interview

Yeasayer, mentioned above, are masters of songs that I described to the band's Chris Keating as being 'balanced precariously above a chasm between joyous and miserable'. He didn't disagree, and more or less took it as a compliment. In the last week I've found myself listening to Robyn's 'Dancing On My Own' far more than is good for me. I'd never heard the song before, but it was played in a particularly and unexpectedly moving scene at the end of an episode of Girls, a programme that I fully accept is not really designed for me and possibly highlights that I'm far too prudish.

In the scene, Hannah is mulling over a tweet that she intends to send about having caught an STD from a former partner and finding out that her ex boyfriend is gay. She sends a pithy melancholy message and Robyn's song starts playing in the background. She begins to dance - pretty badly, even by my standards - and her flatmate, Marnie, returning from work, joins in. The scene has that joyous sense of expression mixed in with a pretty depressing backdrop. Robyn's smart song straddles that same chasm as Yeasayer in a much more overtly display of visceral, intelligent and savagely addictive pop. It joins the playlist I've yet to make - stuff like MGMT's 'Time To Dream' (a song that eulogises having sex with models and shooting up smack and which leaves you unsure whether you're celebrating that, condemning it or regretting that you can't join in), most of Polly Scattergood's work and loads of other bittersweet songs I seem to make a habit of collecting.

Audio Journal : 21/01/2011

There is a moment during the the David Byrne film Ride, Rise, Roar, documenting his 2008/9 tour, where his occasional collaborator Brian Eno describes the music they made on the album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. 'Dread and promise,' says Eno sagely, and it is an apt description of that album's music. Earlier this week I was listening to this album and was struck by a peculiar quality to the title track; it simultaneously has an elegiac quality but also a sadness, a reflectiveness that somehow takes the edge of the euphoria. Hearing Eno offering his thoughts on the album's unique quality suddenly made the music make complete sense. Less charitably, Eno further went on to say that words are less important to a song than the atmosphere, something that Byrne seems to bristle visibly at stood next to Eno in the NYC offices of his Todo Mundo business. 'I put a lot of effort into those songs!' he laughed in the simulcast interview from Brixton with Paul Morley broadcast after the screening of Ride, Rise, Roar.



I think I have what can only be described as an 'artistic crush' on Byrne, which as a resolutely hetrosexual person possibly requires some explaining. Over the past few years I have become totally obsessed with Byrne's myriad outputs; his work with Talking Heads (of course), his solo work, his books, instrumental soundtracks, the Playing The Building installation at The Roundhouse and his artwork. For Christmas I received a signed print of his Roots Of War In Popular Song (Forest Of No Return), which has pride of place on my office wall. There isn't a thing that Byrne does that doesn't interest me. When I read Bicycle Diaries I wanted to buy a bike again. This blog partly came about because I liked the open-minded way that his is written.

I was supposed to go and see Byrne at the Royal Festival Hall as part of this tour, but I sold the ticket. It's a funny thing, regret; there are many, many things from years gone by – pivotal moments, opportunities lost and foregone – of far greater significance that I should regret more, but selling that ticket ranks as one of the biggest. Ride, Rise, Roar – though not a straight documentary account of something as mundane as a single concert date from that tour – is probably the nearest thing to a simulacrum of seeing that show I stupidly decided to sell my ticket for. By combining concert footage with behind-the-scenes footage you get to see the process of creating the performances live; it's a more studied approach to the notion, which I admit you wouldn't necessarily consider were this to be a concert film proper.

'Boredom is the great motivator,' said Byrne to Morley after, half jokingly trying to explain why the tour to accompany Everything That Happens Will Happen Today included three individual choreographers, unusual dance routines for what he still describes as a 'pop' show and the whole gang wearing tutus for the incendiary rendition of 'Burning Down The House'; attempting to explain why the shows couldn't be a straight pop concert; explaining why the Hillman Curtis film was a blend of concert footage interspersed with black and white footage of rehearsals, interviews with the three choreographers, dancers, his manager ('I hope this works,' he said nervously of the tour), Byrne himself and others.

In the following interview Byrne refused to draw too many comparisons with his other artistic 'concert' film, the Jonathan Demme-directed Stop Making Sense, though Morley felt it an obvious reference point. The awkward, geeky Byrne of the Eighties is undoubtedly still there – the jerky movements, the jogging to the infectious 'Life During Wartime', the vaguely detached delivery - but the focus of the shows appeared to be as much on the unusual choreography as this nominal front-man role. Everyone wore white. Everyone had to learn the moves. When the various talking heads (pun intended) described the dancers, backing vocalists and musicians on the stage as the 'chorus' you could see what sort of contemporary theatricality Byrne was after; not the over-the-top drama of, say, a Rufus Wainwright, but the distilled interpretation of the music and lyrics. That was best illustrated by hearing one chorographer explain how she built a whole sequence from the line 'The world moves on a woman's hips' from Remain In Light's 'The Great Curve'. I once saw the Michael Clark company do something similarly interpretative with Wire at the Royal Festival Hall in 2000.

Of course it's no substitute for seeing the show I sold my ticket for; hell, it wasn't even a substitute for watching Byrne and Morley speak in person at the Brixton cinema from where they broadcast the interview to cinemas across the country, but I suspect watching Ride, Rise, Roar on a tiny cinema screen in Leicester Square with about ten other people is as close as I'll get for now.

Audio Journal : 03/05/2010

Two albums in one week from two of your favourite artists is a rare treat, but so it was in April with Rufus Wainwright's All Days Are Nights: Songs For Lulu and David Byrne's collaboration with Fatboy Slim (and just about every female vocalist under the sun) on Here Lies Love.

Both albums, coincidentally, are 'tributes' of sorts to women. In Wainwright's case that woman is a character played by actress Louise Brooks in the 1929 movie Pandora's Box, but also serves as a tribute of sorts to his mother, the late Kate McGarrigle, who passed away at the start of this year; whereas Byrne's album depicts the life of shoe-addicted dictator's wife, Imelda Marcos and juxtaposes that with the life of Estrella Cumpas, the woman who raised her.

Both also have their origins in theatre. Byrne's project with Fatboy Slim was originally conceived as a performance (albeit in nightclubs), while Wainwright's recent opera success with Prima Donna and love of all things Wagner has informed much of his work; the live performance of All Days Are Nights I went to on 13 April at Sadler's Wells saw Wainwright performing the entire album, almost faultlessly, in a 17ft ball-gown as a song cycle with the express request to the audience not to applaud until he had left the stage; theatrical indeed. As an album, All Days Are Nights sits neatly into Wainwright's opera-inspired oeuvre, and despite being just the man and a piano, is his most dramatic album to date. Mrs S says it's dreary, and at times it is certainly more plaintive and reflective than previous albums (check out the takes on three Shakespeare sonnets), but it is also by subtle shades uplifting and humorous (as on the most upbeat piece 'Give Me What I Want And Give It To Me Now' or the positively euphoric start to 'The Dream'). My personal favourites are the opener, 'Who Are You New York?', a ruminative long song to the City itself, and 'Martha', a song whose lyrics comprise the answer machine messages left by Rufus to his sister while their mother's illness worsened; it also signals the recent tentative reconciliation, through grief, of Rufus and his father Loudon.

Perhaps not as instantly, and bombastically accessible as previous Wainwright fare, All Days Are Nights is probably the most authentic, personal album Wainwright has produced thus far. Previous albums have always featured pieces for piano only, and in the live setting are always firm favourites with the audience (especially when Wainwright messes up, plays the wrong section or ad libs theatrically – think of an extremely camp Les Dawson); in an odd sense, the scaling back of the instruments to just a solitary piano ties in neatly with the reconciliation with his father, who has made it his business to produce album after album of music consisting of just his voice and a guitar.

David Byrne and Rufus Wainwright have worked together once before on a song, and that song was also theatrical in origin. 'Au Fond Du Temple Saint' appeared on Byrne's 2004 album Grown Backwards. The former Talking Heads front man's voice may have not been perfectly matched to Wainwright's dexterity on this piece from Bizet's Les Pêcheurs de Perles but all I wanted was a segue in this blog from one album to the other, and that seemed to work. Plus, more earnestly, the idea of Byrne tackling an opera track would – when watching the videos for 'Road To Nowhere' or 'Once In A Lifetime' – have seemed nonsensical; however, Byrne was an art student before starting Talking Heads and his interest in all manner of art forms is manifest (check his blog for the proof). And so I stand by my segue. The other possible one would have been Martha Wainwright, who is one of the female vocalists employed by Byrne on this project.

Of this album, critics have dubbed it the most accessible David Byrne album he's produced since the Talking Heads days, thanks to the input of Fatboy Slim, but I'd disagree; yes, it's more obviously 'pop' than other Byrne albums, but with the exception of albums like My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts (with Eno) or Big Love: Hymnal, Byrne is no stranger to traditional song structures, albeit conceived with his typical vision and the odd Brazilian flavour here and there. Plus Talking Heads weren't exactly what I'd describe as 'pop' anyway.

It certainly sounds more like a Byrne album that a Fatboy Slim one, but it serves to remind that Norman Cook is a brilliant producer as well as a purveyor of daft chart-bothering fare. The sound leans to a glossy funky disco blend, which apparently has something to do with Marcos' fondness for Manhattan nightclubs, although I don't know anything about her so can't say if I just made that up or not. I opted for the limited edition version – two CDs, a DVD and a 120 page book detailing the background to each song (which, hands up, I haven't read completely yet therefore this review isn't as well informed as it could have been). The lyrics for each, according to Byrne's typically exhaustive introduction notes, were centred around actual Marcos quotes (so shouldn't she have a writing credit?).

Byrne adds backing vocals to a number of tracks and delivers the superb 'American Troglodyte' himself, but in truth this is a vehicle for the assembled ranks of female vocalists, each hand-picked to provide a depiction of Marcos / Cumpas according to the theme of the song. So you get the likes of Tori Amos, Santigold, Cyndi Lauper, St. Vincent and Florence Welch (who, sans Machine, delivers the gorgeous title track). At 22 tracks it requires quite a commitment on the part of the listener, but it makes most sense when heard in a single sitting. I was really excited about this release, and suffice to say I wasn't disappointed.

Vinyl Corner



LFO 'Tied Up Remixes' (Warp Records 12”, 1994)

Some people know the Warp label as the home of leftfield bands like Grizzly Bear, Battles and Broadcast; others remember when it was the principal go-to label for the leftfield electronica of Aphex Twin, Autechre, Sweet Exorcist and the duo of Mark Bell and Gez Varley – LFO – whose Steve Wright-bothering sub-bass anthem 'LFO' kicked the Sheffield label into existence.

From humble origins as a behind-the-counter indie label at a Sheffield record store, Warp has become a well-respected, broad-minded label that's also branched out successfully into film, examples including the new Chris Morris movie Three Lions and the excellent documentary A Complete History Of My Sexual Failings.

Label owner Steve Beckett mentioned in a recent Esquire interview that after a while he began to find the slew of acts producing electronica in the Aphex template – which could be summarised crudely as distorted beats and glacial synths – wearying. He began to turn his ears towards the kind of alternative rock music being produced by the likes of Jason Pierce's Spiritualized; as such, this out-of-print Warp 12", remixed by Pierce, could well represent the point the label began to think more eclectically.

Pierce's nine-minute mix is a beautiful thing, a phasing and shifting drone work that has little or nothing to do with the harshness of the original. I'd call it 'ambient', and it does share much with Eno's brand of 'discreet' music, but it also has a depth best observed by listening on headphones.

The B-side, a remix by LFO of their 'Nurture' is more dancefloor-focussed.

I sold my copy of this recently to someone who, coincidentally, works at Warp.

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 09/11/2009

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

So where were we?

Ah yes. The last album I wrote about two weeks ago was Love Is Hell by Ryan Adams. This album has remained on relatively constant play during my week off, but has been joined by other Adams albums, namely 2003’s Rock N’ Roll (purchased on a late evening shopping spree at Sister Ray on Soho’s Berwick Street) and Gold (2001). The former is, as its name suggests, a pretty intense and rocky album in a post-Strokes sense, whereas the latter is much more country, like an MOR Bright Eyes. Like much of Adams’ work, evocative images of New York pervade the songs, though few are as overtly joyous about the city as Gold’s ‘New York, New York’.

The trip to Sister Ray also yielded David Byrne’s Live From Austin, Texas album, a live set from Byrne in 2001 wherein he sings plenty tracks from the Talking Heads days as well as songs from Rei Momo and Look Into The Eyeball. He even manages to throw in a surprisingly good cover version of Whitney’s ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody’ whose strings lend the track a golden-days-of-disco feel. On later tours he’d go on to tackle Beyonce’s ‘Crazy In Love’, most notably accompanied by San Francisco’s Extra Action Marching Band at the Hollywood Bowl. The vibe here moves from the Latin rhythms that Byrne has embraced for many years to string-soaked pieces like ‘The Great Intoxication’. Good though it is, it does make me rue selling my ticket to his Royal Festival Hall performance earlier in the year.



Way back in my teenage days, I owned the first two Nine Inch Nails albums – Pretty Hate Machine and The Downward Spiral. It was a logical next step into darker musical territory from bands that I still listen to, specifically Depeche Mode and Nitzer Ebb. Typically, I’d only really ever listen to those two albums when I was in a negative state of mind, and so when life turned broadly more optimistic I gave them away. I downloaded a couple of tracks from The Downward Spiral a few weeks ago and was surprised at how very tame, and to my mind camp, the NIN sound actually was. Positing that view on Twitter, one of my followers told me to check out Ghosts, the instrumental collection put out by Trent Reznor a couple of years back.

I wasn’t prepared to commit myself to buying the $250 box set, and anyway, the thought of two and a half hours of bleak instrumental music wasn’t terribly appealing, so I opted for the free nine-track download and have been pleasantly surprised. The sound veers from basic instrumental tracks which, were they to have vocals, wouldn’t have sounded out of place on The Downward Spiral to more esoteric ambient tracks sprinkled with some nice Satie-esque piano. It’s totally recognisable as a Nine Inch Nails album, without the despair-inducing lyrics. So thanks @shreenas for recommending that to me.

Cezary Gapik started following me on Twitter in the last fortnight. Gapik is a Polish electronic music composer, much of whose material is available gratis via his MySpace. I downloaded The Limestone EP, a collection of six short tracks containing lots of sonic adventure using synths, found sounds and field recordings. I’ve been inching back into this sort of music lately, and Gapik’s music has a particular sonic depth which perfectly suits where my ears are at just now. Fans of textural ambient noise will not be disappointed.

Disappointed you should expect to be, however, if you decide to visit the British Music Experience at the O2. If you want a condensed, anodyne history of British popular music from the 1950s to the present day, I have no doubt that you’ll enjoy it. The exhibition is short-sighted in its ambition, focussing only on the most successful artists of the day and more or less casting the more influential, but marginal players to the sidelines as it tries unsuccessfully to present half a century‘s worth of music in a single exhibition.

So it is that the Pet Shop Boys dominate the 1980s display but the litany of other – and better – synth bands get overlooked. The only things I found of any major interest were Bernard ‘New Order’ Sumner’s lyrics to ‘Blue Monday’ and a selection of Bowie’s scribbled verses, both of which showed the two songwriters to have terribly childlike handwriting. There are lots of interactive displays, but overall I was just bored. Even the punk section, focussing principally on – you guessed it – the Sex Pistols felt diluted and sanitised, bereft of any of the bile and venom with which UK punk arrived in the seventies hinterlands. Definitely one to avoid.

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 05/10/2009

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

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

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



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

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

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



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



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

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 17/08/2009

Though often broad-minded, this blog has generally been about that which can be described, however loosely, as music. But what is music? Is music art? Is music played without regular instruments actually something that can be adequately described as ‘music’?

Such are the questions that go through your mind if you should find yourself at Playing The Building, the installation by elastic-limbed ex-Talking Heads front man David Byrne at the Roundhouse in Camden until the end of the month. Playing The Building finds an old pump organ, fully gutted and kitted out with various electric switches in the centre of the historic venue, those switches in turn being connected by coloured wires to various hammers and compressors attached to the beams, hollow pipes and girders of the building. People visiting the installation are allowed to sit at the keyboard of the organ and play the keys, causing drones, clicks and whistles to fill the circular structure. In short, visitors are literally able to play the actual structure of the building.



In 1979 the Roundhouse, after incarnations as a turning shed for locomotives heading in and out of Kings Cross, a gin warehouse, a radical hippy hangout and a theatre, found itself a mecca for punk bands, especially those visiting from the CBGB scene in New York. One such band was Byrne’s Talking Heads, who played the venue that year. Thirty years on, Byrne’s art school tendencies and music have come together in this installation, which was first created at Färgfabriken in Sweden and most recently the Battery Maritime Building in Manhattan.

Time pressures meant that I only stayed for about twenty minutes when I visited last Monday, which effectively precluded me from joining the lengthening queue of people looking to play the Roundhouse. But I did grab a photo and three minutes of audio from two teenagers playing together at the organ. Apologies for the sound quality, but I only had an old Nokia with me. Better clips from earlier incarnations of the installation can be found here.

Download : two teenagers Playing The Building (10/09/2009) / .mp3 / 1.4mb

Incidentally, New York punk lost one of its pioneers last week. Willy Deville, who in the incandescent scene that burst forth in Manhattan’s Lower East Side recorded rockabilly-inspired punk with Mink Deville passed away last week. His ‘Spanish Stroll’ from his 1977 debut Cabretta has been in the eardrums a lot since died, as has his urgent, intense ‘Soul Twist’.

Is it punk? Is it art? Is it music? I found myself listening an album that I know, categorically, only around four people have ever listened to. Jason Gets His Fingers Burned was recorded by my good friend Matt Handfield and myself one evening in 2001 under the name Handfield / Smith. Matt played guitar while I processed his riffs and strumming in real time using various effects.

The result is a 45 minute jam with discernible melodies contrasted with lots of feedback. It was my vision to create something like how I thought the album Metal Machine Music by Lou Reed (this must be New York week, sorry) might sound; having listened to MMM since, I can confirm that it sounds nothing like it, but even though I’m normally extremely self-deprecating about any music I’ve ever made, it still sounds good to me. We planned a follow-up, which in my head was called Grow Beards. Handfield has now actually grown that beard, whereas I’ve stopped making music altogether in favour of listening instead. We coulda been huge in the alt.noise scene.

The second track on JGHFB was a noodling guitar passage that Matt created the same evening and which I then later remixed offline. You can find it by doing the right click / save as thing on the link below.

Download : Handfield / Smith 'Tsm / Dog Soup (Tsm)' / .mp3 / 4.1mb

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 10/08/2009

‘You’ll love this,’ said my father, handing over a CD of At The Foot Of The Mountain by Eighties comeback kids a-ha. I looked at the front cover and thought to myself how odd it was to be receiving music recommendations from my parents. ‘It’s like Depeche Mode,’ he added. Though sceptical I thought I’d listen to it, you know, be charitable, and write here scathingly about how unbelievably naff it was and add it to the blogosphere.

Unfortunately, I can’t do that, much as I’d like to. Okay, so it’s not all to my taste – and some of the songs veer into Take That-style pompous balladry, while Morten Harket’s lyrics are occasionally horribly twee – but my dad was right in places about the Depeche similarities. More specifically, the 1981, Speak & Spell, Vince Clarke-era synth pop sound best evidenced on the track ‘Riding The Crest‘. So overall, I was pleasantly surprised, however, if you want a genuine modern take on the 1981 sound – as deployed on Soft Cell‘s Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, Human League’s Dare and the aforementioned Mode LP – you are advised to check out Vic Twenty’s excellent Electrostalinist, described by Daniel Miller (producer of Speak & Spell and founder of Mute Records) as ‘too 1981’. And he’d know. (My interview with Adrian Morris of Vic Twenty is available here).

Elsewhere this past week I’ve been listening to In Sides by Orbital, the fourth album from the Hartnoll brothers. I’ve probably listened to it more in the past week than I have since it came out in 1996, as my cumbersome triple vinyl edition has been languishing in a record bag since pretty much the week it was released. Though not as good as their second album (colloquially known as The Brown Album), it’s a definite improvement on their third (Snivilisation), being six tracks of decent but not self-indulgent electronica.

The 7” box this week turned up something that I’d never listened to before, the single ‘Less Of Me’ from Guildford band Fourth Quartet, now sadly defunct. Released in 1998, it’s lo-fi post-rock with a slight tilt toward Radiohead introspection. Highlighting its indie credentials, the single comes in a handmade, stapled sleeve. They went on to record one album, which after finally listening to this after owning it for 11 years, I might attempt to track down.

Also defunct are the band Action Plan, who supported Razorlight and who had the potential to make it big; two singles in and the dream abruptly ended, leaving a few concert appearances and a smattering of recorded songs as their only legacy. After seeing them at The Garage – my favourite London venue by far – I downloaded their online demo, which was fantastic. Very Pixies-esque and reminiscent of Mute band Foil (also, it would appear, lost for good).

Other stuff in the eardrums this week includes a bunch of songs downloaded legitimately – the upbeat Low-life remix of Moby’s ‘Mistake’ being one (download it here), a new track by David Byrne and Dirty Projectors (get it here) being another – the debut single ‘Fake Blues’ by excellent New Jersey band Real Estate (some free demos, including an early version of the single are available at Stereogum), and the breakthrough album Sally Can’t Dance by Lou Reed.

Audio Journal : 22/06/2009

In the last week I think I've bought or received more new CDs than during the whole of the rest of 2009. This, I should stress, is not 'new music' as generally I can't keep up that these days. I don't listen to radio, I don't read music magazines and instead rely on my wife, who does both of those things. Anything new I've got into over the past two years has generally been because of her recommendation.

One of the new bands she's been buying songs by is The Virgins, whose debut album has been in heavy rotation on my iPod ever since she bought it last week. The Virgins are a New York four-piece making upbeat Eighties-esque New Wave rock that's undeniably retro by way of influence, but quintessentially modern - and New York - in its sound. Listen for yourself at their MySpace page. If it was possible to wear out songs on an iPod like you could with vinyl records, my copy would be wrecked now after the past week's worth of play. I implore you to check them out.

Another thing filling my earphones over the past seven days was Trees Outside The Academy by Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore; I know I'm becoming something of an unashamed SY bore, but Moore's 2007 album confounds expectations and is quite beguiling. Anything anyone in that band produces is always excellent anyway, but this was much softer than expected.

As with SY, I know I have prattled on about David Byrne here far more than is objective, but I bought his Big Love: Hymnal album last week on a rare splurge at Rough Trade East and thought it was quite beautiful too. The album contains instrumental songs crafted for the soundtrack to the US series Big Love which has something to do with Mormons, but all I know is that the songs here are uplifting and 'spiritual' I guess.

I've somehow managed to squeeze in a couple of listens to the album Strange Weirdos, a selection of songs by Loudon Wainwright III used in or inspired by the (surprisingly mature) Judd Apatow comedy Knocked Up. I'm gradually working my way around the Wainwright family, starting with Rufus - still far and away the best singer in the music business today - and now his father. Ordinarily Loudon's folksy songs may not be everyone's cup of tea - I'm still getting used to them myself - but these tracks are highly accessible and quietly moving. The cover of Peter Blegvad's 'Daughter' gets me every time; appropriate given that it was a Father's Day gift.

Finally, I attempted to visit the exhibition of Moby's inchoate drawings at the Neu Gallery last week, but got thoroughly lost in the East End. My soundtrack for the experience was White Light / White Heat by The Velvet Underground. It just seemed to lend itself to the surroundings.

Audio Journal : 11/05/2009

The big musical event last week was a trip to the O2 to see Razorlight. I've lost track of how many times my wife and I have seen the band, and the concert last week certainly wasn't one of the best. This could have been because we had seats way up in the heavens whereas normally we get standing tickets or it could have been that the band were bereft of the drummer that has been such an important part of their sound on stage. Either way, a good night out, but it turned out that the best bit wasn't Razorlight but The Howling Bells, who provided support. I'll be taking a closer listen to them over the next few weeks.

I found myself listening to a punk compilation this week (F**k Art Let's Danse - which, as names go, makes no sense at all). The basis of the compilation, undertaken by Clash biographer Pat Gilbert, was to point out to people that punk wasn't specifically a UK phenomenon – a notion that I find hard to believe anyone needs education of, as I thought everyone knew punk originated in the States. Licencing costs presumably meant that Gilbert couldn't secure tracks from the most important UK punks, leaving us with the second-tier ranks of UK Subs, The Adverts and The Slits, whereas the US punks are well represented with good demos and live tracks from CBGB stalwarts such as Patti, The Ramones and Television. Best of all are the US bands that came before punk, and were perceived to be an influence – specific highlights being 'Step Inside This House' by 13th Floor Elevators and everyone's favourite garage anthem, 'Louie Louie' by The Sonics.

David Byrne, a CBGB survivor from his Talking Heads days, released a new live EP this week, including songs from his most recent collaboration with Brian Eno (Everything That Happens Will Happen Today). You can listen to this here. Easily my favourite singer these days, no question.