Audio Journal : 27/09/2010

Fans of electronic music / dance music read on; those not that bothered can skip to the end (if you want some tracks by me) or hit delete. Your choice.

I go through phases of eschewing and then returning to electronic music. I have a wide interest in electronica of all hues and variations – from Eighties synth-pop to often erratic, deconstructed soundscapes. Two recent purchases in the latter field were ANBB's Ret Marut Handshake (Raster-Noton, 2010) and Iconicity by Incite/ (Electroton, 2010).



The former is a collaboration between Alva Noto (an alias for electronic musician and artist Carsten Nicolai who runs Raster-Noton) and Blixa Bargeld. Bargeld is the stimmung of cult Berlin noise-merchants Einstürzende Neubauten who has more recently developed processed spoken-word performances ('rede') into his repetoire alongside his day job fashioning unexpected sounds from guitars and detritus in Neubaten. Nicolai on the other hand is the poster boy for lowercase glitch-based electronics, notable for early works based on the error sounds made by skipping CDs. The combination of two mavericks on Ret Marut Handshake finds Bargeld's voice surprisingly suited to Nicolai's cracked electronics, leaving you feeling slightly cheated that they only crafted five short tracks. The album is named after Ret Marut, a shady, chameleon figure that Bargeld found intriguing. One can only hope for more from this unlikely pairing.

Iconicity by Incite/ (the back-slash is not a typo, such keystrokes being pretty commonplace in the outer reaches of electronica) is also a short-form release; a 3" CD-R in a tiny transparent DVD case with the typography appearing to float over the box, an image doesn't really do this justice. Iconicity is interesting, absorbing electronica in a similar vein to the ANBB release above, though sharing much more in common with the sort of warped, distorted beats and odd time signatures of Autechre.



If skeletal beats and broken electronics aren't your bag, Jarl & Fotmeijer's Lifesigns (Innertrax, 2010) might be more your thing. Lifesigns captures the essence of the minimal, arpeggiating Detroit techno of the early Nineties laced with grid patterns of upbeat 4/4 beat alongside stasis-dominated ambient passages. The most insane thing of all is that the duo / Innertrax have elected to release this album free. I almost feel guilty downloading it it's so good. Those who don't share my sentiment can locate it here.



And so, finding myself once again enthused by these music forms as I frequently am, I'm making available three of my own electronica compositions, via my revived Nominal Musics label. You can get the Elliptic Paraboloid EP by Sketching Venus here.

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 19/10/2009

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

Though perhaps not as radical or aurally challenging as some of their earliest work, Einstürzende Neubauten’s Ende Neu (1996) still finds the Berliners hammering away at steel, deploying compressors and all manner of junkyard mechanics to produce their highly individual artistic sound. Frontman, vocalist and guitarist Blixa Bargeld, more recently departed of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds, holds the lot together with vocal deliveries that transcend the German language’s supposed lyrical limitations, and on the highly un-Neubuaten string-soaked tracks with Meret Becker, shows that the gradual progression of Nick Cave’s writing while Bargeld was on board – from Old Testament fervour to romantic wonder – was not wasted on Blixa‘s own writing. Nevertheless, despite those stretching tracks, my favourite tracks are ‘Installation No.1’, with its vocal of ‘Disobey / It’s a law’ and the frantic, dystopian opener ‘Was Ist Ist’.

When I was a subscriber to The Wire magazine – a music magazine, not a monthly publication based on the cult US TV crime drama – they would rave about the elusive, illusory character Jandek, a prolific artist reclusively skulking on the fringes of alternative music. His music was always on my list to sample at some point, but I simply never got around to it. This week, UbuWeb, the go-to site for all things alternative, sent round a link to a blog containing 31 Jandek albums, from the early 1980s through to Skirting The Edge, released this year on Jandek’s own Corwood Industries label. I figured the latter would be a suitable entry point to his music. Essentially, Skirting The Edge is four tracks of vocal musings over incandescent acoustic guitar, with a bleak tone throughout. ITunes labelled it as ‘lo fi’ when I added it to my library, which is probably right, given its raw production aesthetic.

On to slightly more accessible things, this week I downloaded the eponymous debut from The Little Death, or, more appropriately, The Little Death (NYC) as there are apparently two bands with that name in existence. It’s tempting to describe the band as Moby’s low key side-project, as he is indeed a core member, providing guitars across their debut album. In truth, The Little Death is principally a vehicle for vocalist Laura Dawn, who has appeared live with Moby and contributed vocals to at least one of his albums. The overall sound is one of soulful blues, as filtered through a bunch of musicians living in New York. Gutsy female vocalists aren’t ordinarily my thing, but on this album I’ve found it pretty engaging. My favourite songs are the upbeat tracks ‘Mean Woman’, ‘Hurricane’ and ‘Love Or A Gun’.

From the blues I moved effortlessly to ambient electronica, as crafted by Sheffield’s Richard H. Kirk, founder member of Cabaret Voltaire, one of the bands – like Neubauten – who were grouped together under the banner ‘industrial’. Virtual State (1993) was released on Warp Records and contains lots of trademark Kirk elements – burbling synths, African percussion and distorted samples of speech covertly culled from radio frequencies. This was an album I used to stick on whilst at university to aid concentration while doing my coursework, and consequently hearing it again this week left me feeling rather queasy as I recollected hours spent poring over balance sheets and econometric calculations.



In response to the BBC’s Synth Britannia documentary, it would be all too easy at this juncture to prattle on about all the bands that I like from the synth-pop era, but I won’t. I was castigated by a reader a couple of weeks back for the admission that Erasure remain my favourite band, so let’s not even go there. Instead, in deference to the influence of the humble synth on popular music, I’ll mention a single released about fifteen years ago by Node – U2 / Depeche Mode / PJ Harvey producer Flood and Suede producer Ed Buller and a couple of others – called ’Terminus’ which saw the duo setting up massive modular synths on the concourse of Paddington Station. One can only imagine the reaction of travellers heading to the South West upon hearing the sounds the duo coaxed from their monolithic walls of dials, switches and cabling, but no doubt it was as similarly divisive as when Kraftwerk’s ‘The Model’ first graced the charts.

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.

Audio Journal : 26/05/2009

A fairly typical journey to / from work:

In the car on the drive to the station

Talking Heads Sand In The Vaseline (disc two). The second part of their comprehensive retrospective includes selections from Stop Making Sense, through Little Creatures and their swansong, Naked. Aside from the usual favourites ('As She Was', 'Road To Nowhere', 'Nothing But Flowers') you also get two comparatively little known gems, 'Sax And Violins' and 'Lifetime Cracking Up', plus the final Talking Heads track, 'Popsicle', which joins together all their various facets – weird lyrics, clipped funk grooves and eighties keyboards.

On the train to work

Neu! Neu! 75. A bootleg bought in about 1997 from a charity shop in Colchester. At the time this Krautrock album was out of print, hence the need for a bootleg CD. I remember at the time being really pleased at having found this album, but actually quite disappointed when I listened to it. After it had launguished for a decade in the loft, I took another listen and thought it was... okay. Just okay, nothing special. 'Hero' is a good proto-punk track though.

On the Tube

Kraftwerk Radio-Activity. A conversation at work about how Coldplay ripped a section of 'Computer Love' drove me to dig out and dust down my Kraftwerk CDs. 'Radio-Activity' finds the Germans on the cusp of perfecting the electronic beats that would propel much of their later work, and has a much more concept-y, experimental feel than their subsequent albums. I still think the updated version of 'Radioactivity' from The Mix is far superior to the melancholy original available here.

On the train home

Throbbing Gristle The First Annual Report AKA Very Friendly. Another bootleg, and a purportedly mythical lost first album. Grainy sound quality, edgy and unsavoury at times (the first track, 'Very Friendly', is about the Brady / Hindley murders), if this really is the first utterances of the nascent post-Coum Transmissions TG then they set their uncompromising industrial art-punk stall out very early on.

Walking back to the car

System 7 Alpha Wave (Plastikman Acid House Remix). The hippy-tinged System 7 original I can live without; Richie Hawtin's twenty-minute 303-dominated mix is essential. If you only own one acid house track from the period after 1988, make it this one. The track length may seem quite challenging, but its subtle changes and minimal techno purism mean it could easily last double the time without remotely sapping at your energy.