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: 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 : 04/03/2011

Last week I found myself at Koko with Mrs S to watch Cold War Kids, fresh from the release of their third album Mine Is Yours.

Cold War Kids were supported by Wye Oak and Wild Palms. Wye Oak are a Baltimore duo of Jenn Wasner on guitar and vocals and Andy Stack on drums / keyboards (he plays drums with one hand and his feet, and plays basslines on a keyboard with his other hand; go figure). Their music has been described as folk, but I don't hear it myself. In fact, I couldn't make out very much thanks to heavy distortion on Wasner's guitar which rendered everything fairly flat and uninteresting. I also wasn't really paying attention, so they may have been far better than I give them credit for. Blame a slew of out-of-hours work emails for that.

Wild Palms are a band I've been aware of for a while but have never seen live. Their début album, Until Spring, is just around the corner and I have a couple of their singles ('Over Time' and 'Deep Dive') kicking about on my iPod. Their début was recorded by Gareth Jones, whose work with Depeche Mode, Grizzly Bear, Interpol and others makes him one of my favourite producers (see my interview with him here). Live, the five-piece Wild Palms are a brilliant combination of angular guitars, odd drum patterns, distortion and squalling keyboards courtesy of their vocalist. Vocalists playing keyboards have been forever tainted by Brandon Flowers of The Killers, but Lou Hill manages to sidestep that image, though his Ian Brown-meets-Andy McCluskey dancing at Koko was a little baffling. Their spiky sound brings to mind the taught post-punk tension of Gang Of Four, who they are also supporting this year. An album review will feature here soon, I'm sure.

I haven't really listened to the new Cold War Kids album, which turned out not to be an inhibitor when it came to this concert as they seemed reluctant to play more than three of four tracks off Mine Is Yours (for a band only three albums into their career, this is a little worrying); a shame in many ways as having now heard it a few times since, there are some good tracks here. Gone admittedly is the sonic adventurousness of their début (Robbers And Cowards), replaced by a MOR musical maturity that Kings Of Leon seem to be aspiring toward, yet never quite achieving. (As an aside, David Keenan, writing in The Wire, accurately described bands maturing as 'shorthand for playing the game by someone else's rules'.)

As it happens, if I'd wanted to prep properly for this gig, it would have been their second album that I should have listened to, as the tracks from that release dominated the set. Stalwarts like 'Hospital Beds' and 'Hang Me Up To Dry' from Robbers And Cowards garnered the biggest crowd reaction, and I could just about hear them above the chattering inchworms stood next to us, making me wonder once again why people buy tickets to gigs and then natter away like they're in a pub.

I remember reading back when Cold War Kids arrived that on stage the guitarist, bassist and Woody Harrelson-meets-Charlie Brooker vocalist Nathan Willett would whirl about the stage like three out of control aircraft independently crashing, or words to that effect. That sense of clumsily working in three different orbits was in full effect last week and how the three musicians didn't get tangled in each other's cables and fall to the floor is beyond me. I came away more than a little impressed with Cold War Kids after this gig, and we're booked to see them again later in the year when they return to the UK.



Elsewhere this week I've been listening to Josh T. Pearson's first single from his début album Last Of The Country Gentlemen, 'Country Dumb.' Pearson's album has been anticipated for years and this Texas-born, preacher's son has a unique sense of countrified drama. 'Country Dumb' is a beautiful, beguiling track which actually brought tears to my eyes when I listened to it this week. As Last Of The Country Gentlemen is released by my beloved Mute Records, click here to read my review over at my Documentary Evidence website.

Audio Journal : 24/02/2011

Depeche Mode are a band that I first heard around the time of Violator; a girl in my class at school, Sarah, had plastered pictures of the band all over her English folder and I assumed they were some sort of New Kids On The Block boyband, though their music didn't exactly sound like 'The Right Stuff'. At the time, 1990, the songs off Violator that graced the charts were annoying to me, 'Personal Jesus' in particular.

Fast-forward a years: by 1991 I'd settled upon Erasure as my favourite band. Finding a brochure from the record label called Documentary Evidence in the 12" single of that band's hit 'Chorus', I discovered that Vince Clarke from Erasure had started his musical career in Depeche Mode, before moving on to found Yazoo, The Assembly and finally Erasure. All of a sudden I didn't know what to think – I almost felt obligated to revise my opinion of Depeche Mode and so began tentatively running through their back catalogue. Knowing that Vince had only been with the band for their first album, 1981's Speak & Spell, I figured I'd only want to listen to that. Instead I borrowed their first singles collection from my local library in Stratford-upon-Avon and promptly fell in love not just with the Vince-era singles ('Dreaming Of Me', 'New Life' and 'Just Can't Get Enough'), but the whole lot.

This blog is supposed to be a personal record of what I have been listening to and, accordingly, I don't make any apology for the occasional emotional content or degree of recollection of the text below. It doesn't have the word journal in the title for nothing. However, I surprised myself at just how important these songs – which were compiled for Mrs S as an introduction to the band many years ago – are in my personal history. Those looking for less of an autobiographical post should tune in next week for a return to business as usual.

Nodisco (Speak & Spell, 1981)



I bought a CD copy of Speak & Spell in 1992 and found its distinctive, pure analogue electronic sound highly captivating. Many years before I'd been exposed to 1981's contemporaneous Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret by Soft Cell and Human League's Dare. Speak & Spell sounded utterly different to those other records. Aside from the singles mentioned above, the track that I liked best was 'Nodisco', an arch and vaguely sleazy track whose percussion noises sounded just like Erasure's version of ABBA's 'Lay All Your Love On Me'.

I spent that summer in love with a girl who roundly spurned me.

My Secret Garden (A Broken Frame, 1982)
Pipeline (Construction Time Again, 1983)



I got both of these albums on cassette for my sixteenth birthday. It was something of a Depeche Mode-dominated birthday that year; I got a black Violator t-shirt (long since lost and finally replaced when I went to see them at the O2 Arena in 2009) as well, and possibly a poster. Oh, and I also got a Phillishave electric razor.

'My Secret Garden' remains my favourite track on the mostly fey A Broken Frame, recorded hastily after Vince's swift exit from the band. The track is ethereal and mysterious, developing out of an extended, laconic instrumental section before breaking out into a serene, wry take on synth-pop.

By 1983's Construction Time Again, things had begun to darken in the Mode camp. Martin Gore had developed a new, more complex writing style and new boy Alan Wilder added a new inventiveness to the band's sonic palette. The key track was 'Pipeline', a six-minute track sung by Gore which roundly dumped the confines of electropop in favour of sampled industrial sounds culled from a visit to an East London railway yard; the lyrical theme was the anguish of hard labour, an effective counterpoint to the album's huge single 'Everything Counts' with its cynical Eighties Yuppie greed Gecko-isms. Engineer Gareth Jones, who began working with the band on this album, told me it was an absolute pleasure recording this. You can read more comments from Jones in my Documentary Evidence review of Construction Time Again.

Lie To Me
Somebody (Some Great Reward, 1984)



Sticking with my sixteenth birthday, I bought this the Saturday after, from a record shop in Stratford-upon-Avon called Music Junction, a place sadly no longer in existence where I bought a lot of music during my teenage years. I was on a date with a girlfriend; she didn't like Depeche Mode. No-one I knew did. She dumped me within a fortnight.

'Lie To Me', Some Great Reward's opener was a stand-out song for me from the moment I listened to it. It is one of Gore's most darkly humorous songs in my opinion, Dave Gahan singing about putting someone's leather dress on. That wasn't the reason I liked it, mind. Don't get any ideas. It just felt weirdly nihilistic and savagely dark and I loved it.

'Somebody' is the most perfect ballad Martin Gore has ever recorded; a plaintive love song sung by himself with Alan Wilder on piano, whose lyrics detailed a wish list of all the emotional qualities that he wanted in a partner. I first heard this song on The Singles 1981 - 1985 and loved it immensely. I would wait another eight years to find someone for whom the opening lines applied to: 'I want somebody to share / Share the rest of my life'.

A Question Of Lust (Black Celebration, 1986)

Each successive Depeche Mode became that little bit darker, and by Black Celebration it was hard to see anything at all. Yet in amongst this was another stand-out Martin Gore-sung track, the tender 'A Question Of Lust', a counterpoint to the urgent, harrowing 'A Question Of Time'. Gore really has a handle on writing emotional ballads, and 'A Question Of Lust' is another perfect example. The drums and percussion sound like something Phil Spector may have fashioned from his wall of sound; big, reveberating sounds, dramatic tension and all those sorts of words and phrases.

One day at work many years later I was talking to a guy called John in the lift lobby of our office building. To date, he's only the second similarly ardent Depeche Mode fan I've ever met. I thought I was a pretty solid fan at that point, and in a second John roundly shattered that illusion. 'Life in the so-called space age,' he said. 'What's that from?' I racked my brain trying to find that lyric somewhere in a Depeche song, and seeing my blank expression he decided to put me out of my misery.

'Black Celebration, back cover, right at the very bottom.' He's right of course, and I realised in that moment where he described the placement of the nondescript white text on the rear of that sleeve that obsessive fans can be a bit, well, nerdy, can't they?

The Things You Said (Music For The Masses, 1987)

The year was 1994. It was summer. A girl had just dumped me earlier that day. (There's possibly a theme emerging here.) I listened to this on repeat all afternoon until it got dark. It seemed to suit my mood of disappointment, detailed perfectly a sense of betrayal at learning you'd been led a merry old dance and been made a complete fool of by someone you thought you were in love with. Sixteen years on and it's still what I think of whenever I hear this song, though I have naturally stopped caring about that day and that girl.

Enjoy The Silence (Violator, 1990)

Buying Violator, knowing that I'd detested 'Personal Jesus', almost felt fraudulent somehow. I bought this album on a trip to Coventry with the girl who I was seeing at the time of my sixteenth birthday. Admitting to myself that the sleek, polished sounds of the album were appealing was an uncomfortable move, but I'm glad I did. Violator has now become probably my favourite Depeche Mode album and it's the one I listen to the most overall. I played it to my then-girlfriend who just found it boring.

Violator was a progression again from Music For The Masses. Where Music For The Masses used occasional guitars, Violator sprayed them over the songs liberally. 'Personal Jesus' remains the biggest surprise, what with its overtly religious leanings and ominous blues riffs. Johnny Cash would later record the song with assistance from Depeche fan John Frusciante (ex-RHCP and future Dave Gahan collaborator) on guitar. For me my favourite track here remains 'Enjoy The Silence', a shimmering, upbeat track with a strange and captivating chorus. It is a towering moment in the band's catalogue.

I Feel You (Songs Of Faith And Devotion, 1993)

By 1993's Songs Of Faith And Devotion, I was a Depeche Mode fan proper. I had all their albums and had started collecting their singles back catalogue. When Radio 1 announced a 'Depeche Mode Day' and the premiering of their new single 'I Feel You', I woke up early to make sure I could hear the song before I went to school. I was dumbfounded when I heard the song. There was not a trace of anything the band had done previously at all; no electronics and no reference points to their back catalogue. It was almost like Dave Gahan fronting another band, a band who played heavy rock. It was a million miles (yet only twelve years) from Speak & Spell. I learned to love the song, loved the album and saw them live for the first time during that tour, a tour which saw the culmination of Gahan's drug taking, Andy Fletcher leaving the band temporarily with stress, Alan Wilder almost losing his life when an RAF jet crashed near his car and Gore drinking way too much.

'I Feel You' is a song I always equate with tragedy; the single was released a few days after we learned of the death of a school friend, initially thought to be a suicide bid after getting dumped by a girl but later found to be because of an unknown heart defect; consequently it's hard to separate the song from that event. In complete contrast, the orchestral 'One Caress', a beautiful if black ballad, reminds me of Stephen King's It, which I was reading at the time. That book terrified me and this song still raises the hairs on my arms.

Useless (Ultra, 1997)

Post-heroin, post-near-death, post-Alan Wilder, Depeche Mode returned in 1997 with a much more Violator-esque album – much more electronic and less out-of-character than Songs Of Faith And Devotion.

By 1997 I was at university and it wasn't a great year overall. This song soundtracked my personal disenchantment at not being able to save a certain person from themselves and their troubled thoughts, and the line containing 'All my useless advice' has a definite poignancy. Elsewhere that year Nick Cave And The Bads Seeds' 'Into My Arms' soundtracked the rare moments of optimism. On the positive, the girl that I'm referring to didn't dump me, but two years later we would mutually call it quits. 'Useless' could well be an apt description for three pointless, uniformly wasted years, come to think of it.

Dream On (Exciter, 2001)



'Dream On' was the first single from 2001's Exciter. Arriving on waves of almost Latin guitars and a conspiratorially-delivered vocal from Gahan, it was an unusual song which would later be overshadowed by the much more upbeat, dance-floor friendly 'I Feel Loved' which received a sterling remix from Armand van Helden.

I promised there would be no more heavily autobiographical episodes after this post, so here are my final words: I chiefly remember listening to this singer whilst preparing for my wedding to Mrs S. It's not my favourite track from Exciter, but I find it hard to separate the song from those positive days.

She hasn't dumped me. Yet.

Audio Journal : 30/08/2010

With the summer all but over, this is the third and final of my summer albums, and I promised it would be divisive.

Perhaps that was overstating it. This is just an album from my favourite band, Erasure, my fandom of said band having garnered much derision over the years. You know the sort - 'Oh, you like them? Really? Them?' or 'So you like Erasure... Are you gay?' That sort of rubbish. I've said it before, here and elsewhere, and I'll say it again. Erasure – the duo of singer Andy Bell and ex-Yazoo, ex-Depeche Mode electronic music guru Vince Clarke – are, and always will be, my favourite band. And for the record, I'm not.

The Innocents occupies a special place in my musical collection, as it was the first Erasure album I heard. I'd seen them on Going Live, loved the massive hit 'Sometimes', but was just at the cusp of starting to spend my pocket money on music; until Erasure my record buying was scattergun at best (Fat Boys? Really?). After hearing The Innocents I said with absolute conviction that they were my favourite band. When they released the follow-up, Wild!, I began collecting their back catalogue, first tentatively and then obsessively. By the time of the last single from Chorus in 1992 I owned every single and all but one limited edition release.

I'm not sure that would have happened if it wasn't for my dad coming home from work one day brandishing a tape of The Innocents a colleague had made for him. I seem to recall it was just prior to our annual Whitsun trip to Southend, and I spent the majority of that holiday on the beach listening to this on my Walkman over and over, while wearing cheap sunglasses (so I could stare at older girls in bikinis; I was 11. The most remarkable part of that is that the weather was actually good enough in May for girls to even weak bikinis). Hence why I always associate it with the warmer months.

Considering their repute as a pop band, it's not a particularly upbeat album. Songs like 'Chains Of Love', 'Weight Of The World', the Motown-esque 'Heart Of Stone' and my personal favourite 'Phantom Bride' are optimistic on the face of it but are laced with a sense of defeat, sadness and world-weariness. Only the gospel sounds of 'Yahoo!' could conceivably count as 'upbeat'. Sometime Pet Shop Boys producer Stephen Hague produced the album, which explains why the album has a less prominent electronic angle, more of an organic feel.

The album spawned three much-loved singles, the aforementioned 'Chains Of Love', plus 'Ship Of Fools' and 'A Little Respect'. The latter's defiant stance in the face of adversity was covered, improbably, by Wheatus as a teen-rock anthem.

Read more about The Innocents at my Documentary Evidence site.

Audio Journal : 08/03/2010

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

Vinyl corner

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

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

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 15/02/2010

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

While tidying up the office, I came across a single by a band called Nemo from 2003 entitled 'Piccadilly In Sepia'. Nemo, which does sadly rank (in a post-Disney sense) as among the worst band names of all time, developed out of another band (Spectacle), some of whose members Mrs S went to school with. The lead track is a precise slice of authentic electronic pop that could have been released anytime between now and 1984, its chorus of 'Piccadilly in sepia / We are naked on the underground' containing the sort of Nitzschean attempts at seriousness that littered a number of classic 80s tracks, although the idea of us all being starkers on the Tube is somewhat disturbing. For all its lyrical faults, 'Piccadilly In Sepia' is a brilliant, brilliant and sadly overlooked synth pop gem.

I caught the DLR into the City at the weekend. The driver-less trains always remind me of the track by Komputer 'Looking Down On London'. Komputer, a duo of Simon Leonard and David Baker were formed out of the anarchic electronica act Fortran 5, ditching the amusing Orb-esque samples in favour of Kraftwerk synth purity. In doing so they headed back to their roots as synth duo I Start Counting, whose two albums (Fused and My Translucent Hands) were underground classics. If you sign up to Komputer's mailing list, you get a free mini-LP to download (Intercom), containing five tracks of icy, retro electronica.



If Komputer, in adopting Kraftwerk's electronic template, are retro in their aspirations, Raymond Scott's music could be described as pre-retro and authentically pioneering. Scott, who was variously a classical and jazz musician, moved into electronic composition and synth module development with his Manhattan Research, Inc. enterprise in 1946. In the process he developed new instruments which would go on to inspire the likes of Bob Moog to develop their own, genre-defining synth kits.

Arriving at a time when electronic composition was primarily the domain of scientist egg-heads and Hollywood sound effects departments, Scott's diverse synthetic palette found an ideal home as the backdrop for futuristic TV and radio spots in the 1950s and 60s; a compilation of some of these commercials and other Scott pieces was released as Manhattan Research, Inc. by Basta in 2000. Scrape your way past any kitsch connotations from the use of spoken sales pitches for bygone products and visions of a wonky future from the likes of the Bendix Corporation, and what you're left with is sixty-nine tracks of elaborate electronica that directly prefaces today's pop flirtation with synthetic sounds.

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 08/02/2010

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

Earlier this week I took a listen to Poppy Nogood And The Phantom Band, a 1968 piece by esteemed and influential minimalist composer Terry Riley. Riley, a member of La Monte Young's Theatre Of Eternal Music, along with Marian Zazeela, Tony Conrad and a pre-Velvet Underground John Cale, left the dronescapes of the Theater in 1965 and carved out his own niche as a composer.



Poppy Nogood And The Phantom Band consists of five pieces, all segued together seamlessly into a single, evolving piece. Layers of arpeggiating horns and fat synth tones add colour to what is a shifting, deep soundscape that has similarities with In C (1964), Riley's most famous composition, but with perhaps less of that piece's abundant euphoria. Poppy Nogood And The Phantom Band is an altogether more atmospheric and menacing composition, occasionally brooding but intensely fast-paced in its shifting sounds.

From the minimalism of Riley to the dub-inflected sampleadelica of Renegade Soundwave. Renegade Soundwave first emerged from the dark depths of South London in the late 1980s, releasing tracks such as 'Biting My Nails' and 'Probably A Robbery', songs which were based heavily on borrowed sounds with a gritty, knowing savvy and occasional bursts of urban humour. Their first album, Soundclash dropped neatly into the late 80s love affair with the dancefloor; it was followed by a companion dub album which dumped some of the pop elements in favour of a raw edginess otherwise hidden under the surface of the parent album.



The latecoming follow-up, 1994's Howyoudoin? took the Soundclash ethic and added seriousness and guitars, producing the strummed guitar-dub classic 'Renegade Soundwave' as well as one of the most malevolent bad-trip tracks in 'Blast 'Em Out'. Howyoudoin? was also followed up with a dub companion, which again pared the tracks back and added new dimensions. After that, nada. Renegade Soundwave famously fell out with their label and despite a valedictory 2CD compilation, all but bit the dust. Gary Asquith from the band co-runs the label Le Coq Musique, and I'm hoping to interview him for Documentary Evidence soon.

McCoy Tyner's Tender Moments was released in 1967 on the Blue Note label, still the coolest jazz label in the world. Tyner is best known as the pianist in tenor saxophone legend John Coltrane's classic quartet (alongside Elvin Jones on drums, and Jimmy Garrison on bass), recording the watershed album A Love Supreme and Coltrane's sublime take on 'My Favourite Things'. Tender Moments might sound like a collection of mushy piano tinklings perfectly suited to the run-up to Valentine's Day, but it's anything but. This album is a fine collection of intense but accessible jazz workouts, interspersed with sprinklings of ruminative piano. 'Utopia', for example, has an cinematic grandeur that wouldn't sound out of place on Bernard Herrman's final work for the movie Taxi Driver. This album would serve as a suitable entry point for anyone looking to get into Sixties jazz but not yet patient enough to go all-out improv.

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 01/02/2010

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

I find myself struggling to think what to write about this time around.

I suppose I could write about the new Nitzer Ebb compilation, In Order, which was released a couple of weeks back as an iTunes exclusive. Nitzer Ebb were exponents of a type of music which was often described as 'industrial' but was more accurately described as 'electronic body music'; effectively, it was a very aggressive form of synth pop as espoused by the likes of Front 242, Cubanate and early Die Krupps; Nitzer Ebb, from Chelmsford in Essex, were lumped into the same bracket, though they derived more influence from their more successful Essex brethren, Depeche Mode, whose Alan Wilder produced their seminal 1991 album Ebbhead. They released one more album (Big Hit), before imploding, finally getting back together last year for a tour and a new album, Industrial Complex. In Order was an attempt by their former label (Mute) to compile a huge chunk of their B-sides and remixes into one mammoth 60-track download-only compilation.



Listening to that this week is one of the principal reasons for not knowing what to write. With 60 tracks to digest, it took me pretty much the whole of the week just to get through it. Suffice to say, it's brilliant, but I was a fan already and so was inevitably very biased. I'll spare you a track-by-track account of its highlights, but few tracks have – for me – come close to the incandescent rage of the live version of 'Getting Closer' from the 'Godhead' single.

I could also mention the new single from New York's White Rabbits, 'Percussion Gun'. This is a track that needs to be heard to be believed, and I've attempted to describe why this song and this band are so exciting in my small Documentary Evidence review. Cick here to go there. Once again, it highlights the seemingly infinite number of bands to emerge from the New York / Brooklyn / Jersey area. As someone said, go to Brooklyn Heights and throw a stone in the air, and chances are it'll hit someone in a sleek and essential band from the area.



Both of these things aside, probably the best thing to grace these ears in the last week or so was equally the most unexpected. My friend and colleague Martyn found ourselves in Heidelberg, Germany on a work trip, and decided to head out for dinner in the town. We chanced upon an excellent little traditional pub, wherein, over beers and authentically rustic German fare we enjoyed pianist Rudi's versions of German standards and the odd Broadway show tune to appease we tourists, all delivered with pomp and aplomb at the pub's old upright Joanna. Of course, you had to be there, and the music is almost entirely indivisible from the setting and the experience, but take it from me, it was brilliant. Read more about Roter Ochse here.

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 21/12/2009

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

I have two other music-related projects aside from this here blog, one of which – my Nominal Musics label – sits in a state of permanent hiatus. The other, Documentary Evidence, my unofficial Mute Records tribute site just sit there, waiting for me to get around to turning some much-needed attention toward it.

This post will, eventually be about the Depeche Mode concert I attended at the O2 Arena this Wednesday; but before we get there I'm going to spend a bit of time telling you about Documentary Evidence.



Documentary Evidence grew out of a simple passion, that passion being for collecting records; specifically, those releases on a label called Mute Records. Following a particular artist, or genre, is fairly commonplace; following an entire record label's output is the exclusive reserve of a particular niche of train-spotting record collectors, yours truly included.

Mute Records was started by Daniel Miller in the late 1970s, quickly establishing itself in the post-punk anti-corporate, independent musical landscape as the place to go to get your fix of leftfield electronic pop and more challenging, noisy music. Miller himself released several records in the early days of Mute, including the very first release as electro-punks The Normal with the JG Ballard-referencing 7” single of 'Warm Leatherette' and 'T.V.O.D' (see my review here); he also hinted at one of his ambitions by recording quirky synth pop as Silicon Teens, a fake group consisting of Miller and an array of analogue synths covering Fifties rock n' roll numbers.



Mute's future was assured when Miller signed Depeche Mode to the nascent label, securing Miller's first hits with their second and third singles, 'New Life' and 'Just Can't Get Enough'. No sooner had Mute established itself than Depeche Mode's core songwriter, Vince Clarke, quit the band just as they were gearing up for a lucrative US tour. Just as things looked to turn sour for Miller, Clarke formed Yazoo with Alison Moyet and, after a few abortive side projects, Erasure with Andy Bell, while Depeche Mode continued to develop a dedicated fan base in the UK and abroad, and Mute went from strength to strength.

The success of bands like Depeche Mode and Erasure allowed Miller to recycle the label's profits into developing artists from other, more esoteric areas, such as Nick Cave – a cult figure who has only comparatively recently has gained more universal recognition – or Laibach, or Nitzer Ebb and countless other examples of bands operating just underneath the collective consciousness of the charts (see here for a less-than-complete list). The label reached a new level of success with Moby, whose Play was arguably the biggest success the label had scored (with the exception of Depeche Mode's albums), quickly leading to Miller's label getting snapped up by EMI and ending that particular stage of one of the UK's longest-running indie labels.



I had a resolutely pop music upbringing; the first band I really, really liked was Erasure. I've said it before, and I'll say it again that I still think the duo of Vince and Andy are still the best synth pop duo there has ever been, knocking spots off those irksome Pet Shop Boys, but I'm biased. Less logically, I also have Erasure entirely to thank for getting me into the wider Mute roster, and sub-pop music generally.

I bought my first 12” single, 'Chorus' by Erasure in the summer of 1991, from Woolworth's in Stratford-upon-Avon. As I took the black vinyl disc from its sleeve, a square pamphlet fell out. That pamphlet was titled 'Documentary Evidence' and something about it fascinated me; it was basically a brief biography of Mute Records by The Wire's Chris Bohn (writing as Biba Kopf) with a full list of all the releases that the label had put out up to that point. With the exception of Depeche Mode, who up to then I didn't really like, and Renegade Soundwave I hadn't heard of any of the bands listed in the booklet; I had no idea at all that music was made that didn't appear in the charts; I thought I must have just missed them or not taken any notice.



So from that point on I began avidly collecting releases from Mute, both new and old, and I'd say conservatively that 75% of my entire record collection is made up of bands and artists connected to the label. It got me into punk (both US and UK), noise, techno and rock and has cost me an absolute fortune over the years. So it was in 2003 that I decided to set up a website specifically as a tribute to the label, and I decided to call it Documentary Evidence.

Documentary Evidence contains biographies of Mute's artists, reviews of releases and live performances and occasional interviews with artists or people connected to the label, including Barry Adamson, ex Human League / Heaven 17 member and Vince Clarke collaborator Martyn Ware and Wire / Githead front man Colin Newman. I've barely touched it in the last eighteen months, but that will change in 2010 with a new interview and plenty of new reviews and biographies.



To kick things off I've added a review of the Depeche Mode concert at the O2 Arena last Wednesday, which if I remember correctly was what I said the point of this blog post actually was. You can find it here. Feel free to look around the rest of the Documentary Evidence site.

Next week's blog will be written by my good friend Neil Cullimore. Audio Journal by Neil Cullimore will feature a review of Ned's Atomic Dustbin's gig at the O2 in Shepherd's Bush as well as an interview with Jonn from the band. I'll return with more musical ramblings in 2010, as well as news of a new and totally gratis Nominal Musics release.