Audio Journal: 15/11/2013 - Avatism, Colo, Color Film, Hologram

As I mentioned last time, I have only really listened to Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground in the last fortnight, but a couple of other things arrived in my inbox recently which have provided a distraction from focusing exclusively on Reed's passing.

Colo 'Holidays'

The first is an upcoming single from Colo, which is due out in December on Ki Records. 'Holidays' is a simple, understated track somewhere between dreamy instrumental synth-pop and ambient dub, complete with a soulful vocal texture that sticks with you long after the song's finished. It's got a lovely, gauzy, Café Del Mar-at-sunset vibe and it's far too warm for this time of year. Colo's album is due out in March.

Avatism's 'Adamant' hit my inbox a few weeks ago. Avatism is the alias of Italian producer Thomas Feriero and contains thirteen tracks of slick, inventive electronica infused with crisp techno and house beats, clipped and stirring guitar loops (think Morricone in a techno setting), dreamy synths and a warm ambient atmosphere. For those of us who grew up with Nineties dance music it's a dream come true in the context of micro genres we old guys don't understand; one might even describe it as mind-expanding in the right circumstances. A remix EP of tracks from the album has also been released but for the optimal trip pick up the album and eschew that annoying habit of course picking favourite tracks (although, if my life depended on it, I'd say get the monstrous 'Mastodon').

Color Film 'Until You Turn Blue'

Color Film released 'Until You Turn Blue' recently ahead of an LP slated to arrive in March next year. Without knowing it had just been released you'd have sworn that 'Until You Turn Blue' had been released in about 1983, being constructed of jerky guitars, plinky synths and orchestral stabs, fantastic slap bass and the sort of anguished but soulful vocal that seemed to die out in the Eighties (it reminds me a lot of Tears For Fears' 'Broken' from Songs From The Big Chair). 'Until You Turn Blue' was mixed by Gareth Jones, someone who brings excellence to everything he's ever done.

So if all of this was intended to serve as a distraction from listening to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, two nice little tracks served to pull me back in that direction. The first was 'Lou Reed Lou Reed' by The Auteurs' Luke Haines, a reverential bit of glam-infused synth-pop complete with Reed-style guitar riffery and lyrics that trawl Reed's life and image. The second was a haunting version of 'Pale Blue Eyes' by French duo Hologram (Carla Luciani and Maxime Sokolinski). Hologram released their debut EP earlier this year and it was one of the things I listened to most during the warmer months, so hearing their fragile voices, subtle drum machines, gentle guitars and shimmering synths tackling one of my favourite Reed ballads was a lovely moment of serendipity.

Listen to 'Pale Blue Eyes' here or below.

Audio Journal: 08/11/2013 - Lou Reed

Lou Reed, self-portrait from Facebook

My listening habits in the last two weeks centred exclusively on the music of one artist - Lou Reed. In the days following his untimely death it seemed the most fitting thing to do.

I admit that I came to Reed's music relatively late in life; I was aware of his influence, just like I was aware of Bowie, punk, The Ramones and so on, but as with all of those things I just figured it wasn't for me. Until university I only really listened to electronic music - pop, techno, ambient and so on - but after a while I found my tastes becoming more eclectic. A key turning point came toward the end of my second year when I decided to buy a biography of David Bowie called Loving The Alien by Christopher Sandford from the campus branch of Waterstone's. I don't know why, but I suspect it was chiefly to read more about Bowie's Berlin period, whose starkness had a direct influence on the electronic music I was familiar with.

I surprised myself with enjoying the passages on how Bowie's love of The Velvet Underground and its frontman Lou Reed had directly inspired his Ziggy Stardust alter ego. The sections recounting the speed anthem 'White Light / White Heat' from the Velvets' second album were especially vivid, I recall, as was the description of 'I'm Waiting For The Man'. In my head it sounded wild. Raw. Decadent. Gritty. I wasn't then in love with New York like I am today but the idea of Reed singing about buying drugs from a dealer up in Harlem seemed just about the most thrilling thing I'd heard about in my early twenties. It sounded a lot more interesting than the song 'Perfect Day' that I'd first heard the year before on the Trainspotting soundtrack, and which by then had been butchered into an unlikely star-encrusted advert for the BBC. I knew that track was about a heroin comedown and so in its own way it was still 'punk' but 'I'm Waiting For The Man' sounded infinitely more appealing. In my head.

It took over a year before I bought The Velvet Underground And Nico, the album that included that song. I'd travelled from my girlfriend's parents' house in rural Norfolk to North London for an interview with a big pharmaceuticals firm, part of that painful cycle of third year soul-selling, and this one had gone really badly. Back at Liverpool Street station I had hours to kill before a train back to Norwich so I wandered out of the station and found a branch of Our Price (it's now a Specsavers) and came out with a copy of The Velvet Underground And Nico. I studied the sleeve the entire journey back to my girlfriend's house. It felt like I'd taken a leap into a completely unknown world, one that was appealing but one that barely made any sense in amongst the music I'd been consuming up to that point.

At her house I remember putting it on, realising that I knew 'Sunday Morning' from the OMD album Liberator and was blown away by 'I'm Waiting For The Man'; it was better than it had ever sounded in my head. My girlfriend hated it. I think that made me like it all the more. Last week I was given the chance to contribute to a piece on Lou Reed's best moments for a Clash piece; I instinctively chose that track that had first gripped me. Unfortunately someone else got the honour of writing that one and so my piece didn't get used (I wrote about Metal Machine Music instead). Here's what I wrote anyway.

“Like Hubert Selby Jr, Lou Reed always had a penchant for subjects that were completely taboo. This song joyously documented scoring drugs from a Harlem dealer, and would provide the obvious reference point for punk and glam.”

I rented a room in a house in Colchester that year with a couple in their forties. Dave was the muso of the couple. I remember coming home raving about having bought the first Velvets album and, from his pile of cassettes in the kitchen, he retrieved a copy of Berlin. He told me that if I loved that album I'd love Reed's solo output. I didn't believe him, much like I didn't believe that the Velvets post-John Cale would be any good, and so I approached it cynically, just as I had with 'Perfect Day'. I concede now that he was right, and I absolutely love those Lou Reed solo records that I own.

In the summer that followed I bought a tiny CD-sized book that was effectively a track-by-track description of every track the Velvets ever recorded. I think I bought it from Athena. I consumed it avidly and it became a sort of buyer's guide for the Velvets' music over the coming years. Better and more comprehensive books have been about the Velvets and Lou Reed, but I still refer to that tiny book from time to time. Right now it's on top of a pile of reading material next to my bed, the product of showing my two daughters pictures of the band after subjecting them to a cheap Velvets compilation I've been listening to in the car since I first saw that Reed had died.

The Complete Guide To The Music Of
The Velvet Underground
by Peter Hogan (1997)

So the past week has seen me listening to more or less everything of Reed's that I have in my collection (including listening to Metal Machine Music as the backdrop to various Tube journeys; it works surprisingly well for that). I genuinely thought Reed would live forever, as I suppose he will through his music and reputation. He had long ago sorted the addictions that had informed his early lyrics and found solace in daily meditations and tai chi (if you think Metal Machine Music is the most unusual album in his back catalogue, try Hudson River Wind Meditation, an ambient album designed to accompany tai chi and meditation). I saw him as the role model for a life I guess I want - namely one of being creative, being centred, living healthily and having a reputation for being monumentally grouchy.

Rest in peace Lou.

- MJAS, London, November 2013

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 16/11/2009

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

M and I went to see Kasabian at Wembley Arena on Sunday night. Wembley is quite possibly my least favourite venue, a feeling that was enhanced on Sunday by public transport issues and further compounded by not being especially bothered about seeing the band. M’s a fan, whereas I can’t seem to get past front man Tom Meighan’s laddish persona or Serge Pizzorno’s adoption of every rock pose in the Spinal Tap rulebook.

All that said, the most recent Kasabian album, West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum is a great album, as are their previous two come to think of it. As a live band, they’ve obviously more than mastered the dark art of stadium histrionics, which I often find irritating, but you have to concede they do it very well. So it’s fair to say, once I’d got past Wembley’s consistently terrible sound and the band’s onstage aloofness, I was really, really impressed… eventually.



The band arrived on their ephemera-cluttered and asylum-themed stage with the ‘Underdog’ B-side ‘Julie & The Moth-Man’, an upbeat crowd-pleaser which betters a number of tracks on West Ryder. The trouble was that the song packed such an instant sonic punch and required so much energy from the band that it took them several songs to get anywhere close to that song’s impact again. Consequently the single ‘Underdog’ fell flat, as did ‘Where Did All The Love Go’, one of my favourite tracks from the album. All was well by the crowd-sung coda of the anthemic encore track ‘L.S.F. (Lost Souls Forever)’, which carried on out of the stadium, into the Underground station and probably all the way to Baker Street. Even The Mighty Boosh’s Noel Fielding put in a typically creepy, elastic-limbed performance to a rapturous audience reception.

That reception was rightfully not extended to the second support act, Reverend & The Makers, a band who seem to rely on their front man’s aggressive, crowd-baiting arrogance and drunk-bloke-on-a-night-out posturing in the absence of a clear sonic identity. I wouldn’t say that their songs were necessarily bad, and they certainly seem keen to mine the same cocky electro-rock seam as Kasabian, but in comparison they are undoubtedly a much more mediocre offering. That, combined with the front man’s sub-Gallagher attitude and the skinny girl who seemed to be performing some sort of trite exercise routine behind her keyboards, and you get a band that will always be second on the bill.

On the train this past week I’ve listened to Grinderman’s eponymous debut. Grinderman is essentially a Nick Cave side-project, featuring a slimmed-down Bad Seeds and Cave himself on guitar for the first time. Described by Esquire magazine as ‘one of [the] five best mid-life crisis albums‘, the sound of Grinderman is the closest the latter-day Cave has managed to get to reclaiming the ur-punk nihilism of his earlier band The Birthday Party, the overall sound being one of atonal thrashing and noisy blues. My favourite track is the wild garage rock assault of ‘Honey Bee (Let’s Fly To Mars)’ with insectoid sibilant rasps from Cave in the style of The Cramps’s sadly-departed Lux Interior on the similarly bugtastic ‘Human Fly’.



Tom Waits’s Asylum Years was a weekend purchase, and provides my first immersion into the barrel-aged jazz torch songs of Waits’s seventies output on Asylum Records. Tom’s vocal sound is one that initially made for uncomfortable listening until I finally cottoned on to his Louis Armstrong-esque depth and tone. It is truly for artists like Waits that the oft-misused term noir was designed for, his emotionally-wrought songs clashing effortlessly with nocturnal tales of schlepping round New York’s seediest neighbourhoods, while all along you feel that a glass of bourbon was never far from Tom’s microphone stand. Next stop, Swordfishtrombones.

Magazine cover CDs are usually put together with a slapdash, unit-shifting mentality, but not The Velvets Revolution compilation given away with this month’s Uncut. The CD consists of fifteen artists supposedly influenced by The Velvet Underground and for once – with probably one exception from Espers – the tracks really do capture the spirit of the band Uncut are trying to draw comparisons with. It’s worth buying the magazine anyway for the profile and focus on the band, but the CD’s tracks from the likes of Suicide, Loop and the Brian Eno / Phil Manzanera project 801 all evidence the wide-ranging impact the Velvets have had on modern music, whether that be dirge-like scrapings (Fursaxa), motorik ‘Sister Ray’-inspired punk (Thee Oh Sees) or genteel Nico / Moe Tucker balladry (Hope Sandoval & The Warm Intentions).

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 24/08/2009

‘I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar’ is potentially the most evocative lyric of the Eighties, but the Human League story didn’t start with Dare, the album that ’Don’t You Want Me’ was taken from. Dare was in fact their third and there are few indications on their previous two – Reproduction and Travelogue – that point to the glossy pop brilliance that producer Martyn Rushent would lend to the 1981 album. Travelogue includes a track called ’Gordon’s Gin’ which may inadvertently allude to the lyric above, but aside from a turgid disco track the earlier albums are mostly spiky and experimental.

According to an Amazon review of one of the League’s first two albums, the sound of the early trio of Martyn Ware, Ian Marsh and Philip Oakey was more like fellow Sheffield band Cabaret Voltaire or the Cabs’ counterparts Throbbing Gristle. This is the kind of lazy music journalism that gets my goat. Sure, the sound of the first two albums is more out there, more gritty, but I own every Cabaret Voltaire album and those two Human League albums are really tame in comparison. All the reviewer has done is looked at who else on the nascent electronic scene came from Sheffield and namedropped casually. As for the TG comparisons? Well don’t even get me started.

Rant aside, Reproduction and Travelogue have some good songs. The enduringly minimal early cult electro of the Mantronix-esque ‘Being Boiled’ is included as a bonus track on the former, while the latter includes an electro-glam medley of Glitter’s ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’ and Iggy’s ‘Nightclubbing’ which predates and predicts Goldfrapp’s dabbling in the genre circa Black Cherry. Marsh and Ware left to form Heaven 17, Oakey recruited Susan Sulley and Joanne Catherall, recorded ’Don’t You Want Me’, defined the synth pop sound of the early Eighties then rapidly went downhill. I interviewed Martyn Ware a few years ago – my interview is here.



Music recommendations often come from unlikely places. In a recent profile, one of my fund manager colleagues was asked what he was currently listening to. He namechecked a band I’d never heard of, Datarock, which piqued my curiosity and so I took a listen. The consistently time-robbing website rcrdlbl.com has a couple of free Datarock songs, one of which is ‘True Stories’ whose lyrics are entirely made up of Talking Heads song names and whose clipped funk vibe authentically evokes the distinctive sound of that band. The Norwegian duo are clearly off their (data) rockers, and may be a huge joke, but I remain intrigued. They remind me of The Hives crossed with Daft Punk, but don’t ask me why.

Although terrible quality, I’ve been listening to a couple of sonically intriguing downloads from the expansive UbuWeb archive. One is the seven-minute track ‘Loop’ by a very early Velvet Underground (although it seems to just be John Cale). In ‘Loop’, which is essentially a pure noise feedback piece that was originally released as a rare flexi-disc, you really hear what attracted Andy Warhol into the band’s orbit originally; it’s rock ’n roll music reduced to its basest elements, justifying the band’s reputation as NY punk’s guiding lights. ‘I’m Sticking With You’ it ain’t.

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.