Audio Journal : 17/06/2011 - 27.06.2011

17.06.2011

In the post: Komputer 'Valentina' 12” (1998) – in advance of an interview with Dave Baker from the band, I thought I'd better gen up on their back catalogue; Perplexer 'Acid Folk' CD (1994) which is a weird way-too-fast bagpipes-meets-acid-house track from 1994 possibly transcending stoopidity by the fact that Ramon Zengler from second-wave acid pioneers Hardfloor was an occasional member; field research for Documentary Evidence as it was released via Mute; Moby and Orde Meikle (from Slam) mix CD from Mixmag in 1992; again field research for Doc.Ev. I had the Moby mix on cassette but can't find it. It includes 'C3 Bells', an exclusive Moby track which I don't think has ever seen the light of day.

18.06.2011

Listened to Cry by Simple Minds while ferrying Daughter2 to ballet. Cry came out in 2002, I think. I hadn't really taken an interest in Simple Minds during the Eighties, and I only got this since Erasure's Vince Clarke wrote a track for the album. I always stuck them in with U2 as 'rock' bands that I'd never learn to love. I hadn't by then watched The Breakfast Club and so I had no particular warmth to something like 'Alive And Kicking', but when I did finally watch that film a few years ago, it made me appreciate Simple Minds for the first time. Cry has some really good electronically-enhanced pop / rock tracks, although in places its 'cleverness' hasn't lasted the passage of time well. I think its release was generally overlooked at the time, which strikes me as a shame. I spent a week in Corfu in 2002 listening to this over and over whilst sunbathing.



Prepared some interview questions for Moby at night (though doubtful this will actually happen) and recorded old vinyl from Bomb The Bass ('Say A Little Prayer') and (Die) Krupps ('Wahre Arbeit – Wahrer Lohn').

19.06.2011

We were off out for a visit to Stowe Gardens for father's day and I took my two lovely daughters to the shops to pick up some lunch for a picnic before collecting Mrs S and heading off. Just lately Daughter1 has started requesting the Glee songs that Mrs S has on her iPhone while they drive to school. One of the songs she and her sister love is a cover of 'Don't You Want Me' by The Human League. The version by 'Rachel' and 'Blane' (I've probably spelled those wrong, but I can't be bothered to check IMDB) is, I have to say, pretty good, though it does re-cast the song as a dancey, Europop track; a bit like a Lady GaGa track, I guess. Having been subjected to this track a few times over the last few weeks, I decided it was high time that I played them the original Human League version from 1981's Dare. Daughter1 loved it as soon as the electropop beat kicked in. It is, and always will be, a fantastic track, and I don't mind if it appearing on Glee brings it to a whole new audience. Daughter1 is the same age that I was when 'Don't You Want Me' was released, so her being into the Glee version has a neat symmetry.

Mrs S played me a couple of tracks that she'd downloaded last week. For someone who describes electronic music as 'plinky plonky' music, she seems to alight upon tracks with an electronic edge surprisingly frequently. One was a track from Battles' new album Gloss Drop ('Inchworm') which has a processed funk sound not unlike a remix of Talking Heads' 'Houses In Motion'. The other was 'Now That I'm Real (How Does It Feel)' by Chad Valley, which is languid, hazy electronic pop in the style of Toro Y Moi. There's a lot of this type of dreamy, unabashed synth stuff kicking about at present, all trading under the banner of 'hypnogogic pop' and it's all – mostly – very good.

In the evening Mrs S and I took ourselves off to the Barbican Centre to watch an acoustic performance from Ryan Adams. I've been listening to Adams's music for no more than a couple of years. It started with 'New York, New York' from Gold, back when I was trying to create a playlist of songs exclusively concerned with New York (I started one for London too). My immersion into his music proper when Mrs S bought Love Is Hell after reading about how good it was, and my interest in his music just sort of grew from there. I never thought I'd ever get to see him perform live, especially since he effectively quit music two years ago because of annoying audience members and hearing problems. Although, it seems, healthy, Adams had a reasonably chequered past and an interview I saw with him showed him to be a pretty troubled soul.

Live, he turned out to be far more light-hearted and self-deprecating than I had expected, despite his history of on-stage volatility, and in spite of his guitar refusing to stay in tune. It felt like a complete privilege to have seen him perform his songs so utterly stripped back, in spite of the vastness of the Barbican's main auditorium. And he only lost his temper – mildly – once.

20.06.2011

Continued the Ryan Adams mood by listening to his punky Rock 'n Roll album whilst driving to and from a meeting. I could have listened to some of the more fragile, acoustic type songs he played the night before, but you can't drive to those. And besides, I wanted to try and preserve my memory of his performance as long as possible. Alas, it's too late and I've forgotten most of it.

21.06.2011

Finished off two reviews for Documentary Evidence today; a piece I pulled together six years ago on Modey Lemon's fantastically acid-fried 'Sleepwalkers' EP but never posted, and the review of Perplexer's 'Acid Folk'. I thought acid-house-meets-bagpipe-folk-music would sound naff, and it really does. Listened some more Ryan Adams.

22.06.2011

Mrs S and I went to London today, ostensibly for yet another Kings Of Leon concert at Hyde Park, but the best part of today was buying records in Rough Trade East (me: Bush Tetras double A-side 7”, 1979 New York 'no wave' CD; Mrs S: Bon Iver) and Fopp (me: Yeasayer; Mrs S: PJ Harvey, Tom Petty, Queens Of The Stone Age).

Maybe it was the mud. Maybe it was the audience. Maybe it was going to Ryan Adams on Sunday and the fact that most other concerts after that would have been rubbish anyway. Maybe it was the support slot from Paul Weller, who I don't really like (the Brendan Lynch dub mixes of some of his tracks notwithstanding). Whatever it was, Kings Of Leon completely bored me, and we left after about seven songs, though they were mercifully the old ones, the ones before the abysmal 'Sex On Fire'.

23.06.2011

Wrote a review of Bomb The Bass' 'Say A Little Prayer' which I'd bought as a 7” from CD Buttek beim Palais in Luxembourg last month. Listened to more Ryan Adams.

24.06.2011

Watched the film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's The Informers. It opens with 'New Gold Dream (81 - 82 - 83 - 84)' by Simple Minds played at a party and it made me want to find my greatest hits CD, or buy the movie soundtrack, or both.

It turns out that it's not actually on Glittering Prize (though it clearly should be), and the soundtrack CD is ridiculously overpriced. Another great song on the soundtrack is Devo's 'Freedom Of Choice', a really perfect New Wave tracks; in the movie Chris Isaak plays a drunk dad trying to engage with his disinterested son. He puts on the radio in the back of the limo they're sharing and on comes this Devo track. He starts tapping along and says the track's 'cool', which of course renders it totally not cool.

Post-film, I decided not to consume more TV and stuck on Pop by U2, probably because I was aware on some subconscious level that they were just about to take the stage down at Glastonbury. Pop was released in 1997, the same year as Depeche Mode comeback, post-heroin album, Ultra. At the time I was sharing a house in King Stephen Road, Colchester with Neil, Barry and Craig. Neil was a U2 fan; I was a Depeche Mode fan. There was a bit of media-fuelled competition as to whether U2's 'Discotheque' or Depeche's 'Barrel Of A Gun' would get to number one in the ye olde UK singles charts. As if there was actually a competition – Depeche would never, ever score a number one in Blighty, whereas U2 had a slick, Flood-produced electro-rock single and a video that had the band ripping off the Village People. Was I annoyed that Neil's band won the 'competition'? Not at all. Was I disappointed when U2 remixed Flood's intricate synth-augmented originals for their second best of compilation? Absolutely. I thought it was an act of extreme cowardice. Neil told me later that they didn't play any songs from Pop at Glasto. Cowards.

25.06.2011

A few weekends ago we watched a Foo Fighters documentary. After, I tweeted words to the effect that I still found proper rock music intimidating, that Dave Grohl came across as a really nice guy, but that I ultimately didn't like the Foo Fighters. Mrs S subjected me to their best of album today, which reinforced just how little I like their songs.

It's funny how you alight upon certain things, musically or otherwise. We came upon a CD of early Lonnie Donegan tracks whilst wandering around a French market at Waddesdon Manor on mother's day. The sound I heard coming out of the tannoy CD player at the music stall was a sort of big-band be-bop, which to me sounded like the sort of jazz that appears consistently in Woody Allen movies.

I had a fixed impression of Lonnie Donegan as a banjo or ukele player, which is true. I also thought that he only played cheesy, humorous songs such as 'My Old Man's A Dustman', and that's probably also true, but he first cut his teeth as part of a jazz group led by Chris Barber and often featuring the vocals of Ottilie Patterson. Hence the unexpected big band sound. On most of the tracks you can barely hear Donegan's banjo (and what's a banjo doing in a jazz band anyway?), although there are a handful of tracks where they are his own, non-Chris Barber recordings, such as 'Rock Island Line' (a track I only know as a Johnny Cash song) or the blues track 'Diggin' My Potatoes'.

The point is, I would never have even looked at this CD if it wasn't for having heard it playing, and because of its branding – as a Lonnie Donegan CD – I'd have completely ignored it. As it happens, that old-fashioned, big band standards sound has been played a lot in our house since we bought this.

26.06.2011

More Glee songs in the car.

27.06.2011

Stayed overnight at the Novotel in Edinburgh. The nice, simple touch in this hotel is that you can connect your iPod to the TV in your room and listen to songs through the TV. The TV in my room was obviously broken somehow and the screen filled with static as soon as I stuck a song on; the static lines would change their pattern when the beat of the music changed. It was quite cool, if a little reminiscent of Poltergeist.

The songs I was listening to were recorded from the double 12” single of Underworld's 'Born Slippy', released in 1995. Everyone knows the version of 'Born Slippy' which Danny Boyle included on the soundtrack to Trainspotting. That wasn't the original version, and no-one seems to remember that at all. It was an instrumental drum 'n' bass track, a world away from the euphoric 'Lager! Lager! Lager!' stomp of the NUXX version used in Trainspotting.



I remember getting pretty excited about 'Born Slippy', and I recall going into the Music Junction in Stratford-upon-Avon on the Saturday before it came out, just to check if they were going to be stocking the single. The two guys who worked there were your archetypal Nick Hornby High Fidelity record shop workers and they knew how much I wanted that single. They told me that not only were they going to be stocking it, but that it was tucked away in the store room already; not only that but that they'd been listening to it. It really wound me up, and since I've always revelled in smug satisfaction when I've received a promo in the post, or received something before it's officially released.

Audio Journal : 11/11/2010

I wrote about Underworld's 2009 mix compilation Athens a few weeks ago. I first got into Underworld in 1994 with Dubnobasswithmyheadman, their third album, an album which saw them becoming courted by the indie music press, presenting as they did an amalgam of trendy dance music with sporadic deployment of treated guitars. It seems that, musically, 1994 was something of a pivotal year for me, looking back, and Dubnobasswithmyheadman was at the forefront of my developing eclectic musical pallette.

Second Toughest In The Infants, the eagerly-anticipated 1996 follow-up and 1999's Beaucoup Fish continued the bleeding-edge appeal of the Karl Hyde / Rick Smith / Darren Emerson unit. Emerson departed soon after Beaucoup Fish and the duo forged ahead without him, releasing 100 Days Off (2002) and Oblivion With Bells (2007), as well as a best-of and a live album, living proof if required that dance music artists also need to follow the well-worn path of miscellaneous albums of non-new material to pad out the sales. In fairness, they also released a load of online-only material too.

Having moved my gaze away from Underworld after Beaucoup Fish, I became quite excited about their new album, Barking. This album, their eighth, was named after the frequent appearance of dogs in their lyrics / imagery ('Dogman Go Woof' being an early, non-album single, plus they named tracks like Second Toughest's 'Sappy's Curry' after greyhounds raced at Essex dog tracks), and also the fact that Barking, Essex is Hyde's adopted home. In getting enthusiastic about the new album from two of my 1994 heroes, I overlooked the sticker on the front which advised that this album included a number of collaborations with other producers – über-cool names that didn't mean anything to me, with the exception of long-standing collaborator Darren Price, who remixed a couple of their singles, and whose releases on NovaMute are still lurking in one of my record boxes, somewhere.

Collaborations at this juncture in a band's career, whatever the genre, can be interpreted as either rejuvenating or an indication that the band have run out of creative steam. I honestly don't know which category Barking falls into. There are some excellent tracks here, the junglist 'Scribble' and 'Between Stars', the collaboration with Price. Opener 'Bird 1' has a minimal pulse and dynamic forward motion and providers a real, if updated, reminder of why Underworld were always so essential.

Some of the other tracks are harder to digest. 'Always Loved A Film' has a 'hands in the air' euphoric chorus, lots of 'Heaven's and 'Can you feel it?'s, and whilst it's joyously upbeat, it doesn't sound like Underworld to me, at least not the Underworld I remember. It sounds like the sort of pop-trance issued by Perfecto in the mid 1990s, the sort of music that Underworld provided the effective antidote to back then, while 'Diamond Jigsaw' sounds like 'Swamp Thing'-era Grid, or the most recent Goldfrapp album, Head First. I love that album, and it's pop-dance credentials are beautiful in their brazen-ness. But Underworld were always more sophisticated than that. And don't even get me started on the final track, 'Louisiana'. Depeche Mode fans will be used to the sections of their concerts where Martin Gore delivers a couple of songs, usually just with a piano accompaniment; it's what we expect from Gore – it's not what we expect from Underworld, tender and fragile though this song might be.

Vinyl Corner



A trawl through the sale racks in Brick Lane's Rough Trade East yielded 'For The Love Of Others' by Piney Gir, released in 2009 on Damaged Goods. Piney – real name Angela Penhaligon – first came onto my radar as part of electropop duo Vic Twenty and I did an interview with her back in the day, just as she was releasing her superb Peekahokahoo solo album. Since those electronic days, Piney's gone off and moved into more countrified territory and I haven't listened to her for a while.

'For The Love Of Others' is delicate Bacharach-tinged country pop. It's sweet, flavoured with Piney's honey-coated tones and beautiful, soulful vocal harmonies, with layers of horn accompaniment. It reminds me of the tracks by Kimya Dawson on the wonderful Juno soundtrack, with just a bit more knowing maturity.

On the flip, Piney tackles the Jungle Book standard 'I Wanna Be Like You', approaching one of Paulo Nutini's best-loved covers with an easy listening / jazz club vibe. There's also the miniscule 'Brady's Bluff', featuring lots of delicate vocal harmonies and gentle acoustic guitars and a neat little chord change right at the very end.

Audio Journal : 04/10/2010

Take a four-piece band, take away the singer after a supposedly acrimonious split, cleverly change the band's name so it both references the absence of the singer and yet remains broadly identifiable as the same band, add a load of guest singers and the passing of about five years after the 'split' and release a new album. That's the formulae in theory. In practice they're 1) Talking Heads - David Byrne = The Heads; 2) (1996 - 1991) + (Michael Hutchence + Shaun Ryder + Richard Hell + Debbie Harry etc) = No Talking Just Head.



I've had this album on my Amazon wish list for ages, and always saw it as a low priority item in my trawl through the Talking Heads / David Byrne back catalogue; plus I've never been that struck on Tom Tom Club, the band that Talking Heads bassist Tina Weymouth and drummer Chris Frantz formed whilst still in Talking Heads, and whose success far outstripped the parent band; plus it never stays in stock for long.

There are undoubtedly elements reminiscent of Talking Heads – the funk edge and the distinct 'alternative' / 'college radio' sound; but in other ways it's a little like watching Rock Star: INXS, with various singers trying to fill David Byrne's shoes; only that doesn't work as an analogy since Michael Hutchence actually appears on 'The King Is Gone'. Considering the main reason for buying this would be because you're probably a Talking Heads fan, the best tracks are those which don't attempt to ape former glories. The opener 'Damage I've Done' (with Concrete Blonde's Johnette Napolitano) sounds like Wir's 'So And Slow It Grows' with a distorted, urgent chorus that creates something both fragile and tense simultaneously. 'Never Mind' (featuring original NYC punk Richard Hell) may sample the drums from the Eno-produced cover of Al Green's 'Take Me To The River', but the track positively swings under Hell's slightly creepy poetry. Another good track is the collaboration with Happy Mondays / Black Grape's Shaun Ryder which sounds to me like Dos Dedos Mis Amigos-era PWEI. Overall, this album works best when you try not to compare it too much to early Talking Heads glories, leaving you content to acknowledge the odd discernible echo of the elements that made that band so vital.



Happy Mondays turn up on the compilation Zero, which is a collection of tracks produced by auteur Manchester producer Martin Hannett; anyone who's seen his portrayal by Andy Serkis in Michael Winterbottom's Twenty-Four Hour Party People will recall Hannett as an odd mix of madcap scientist and musical rebel, ordering Joy Division drummer Stephen Morris to 'play faster, but slower' when creating the band's seminal 'She's Lost Control'. His unique treatment of drums and grinding bass appears throughout Zero, cropping up on tracks from Wasted Youth through The Psychedelic Furs and on to the starkly minimal 'In A Lonely Place' by New Order. This compilation is an essential purchase even if just for Jilted John's self-titled single and its 'Gordon is a moron' refrain. In 'Eleven O'Clock Tick Tock' there's also a brief reminder that U2 could have mined the post-punk sound successfully without turning into stadia dinosaurs.

Clearly forever to be associated with the punk of Buzzcocks (their first, self-financed single 'Boredom' is included here) and the post-punk of Basement Five, Joy Division and Magazine, Zero nevertheless highlights that Hannett worked just as successfully with leftfield indie pop bands like The Only Ones and Kitchens Of Distinction, while work with VU chanteuse Nico and her Invisible Girls on 'All Tomorrow's Parties' highlights a softer, more austerely-layered style. Happy Mondays' joyous 'Wrote For Luck' points to the producer's relevance right into the baggy / Madchester scene of the late Eighties and early Nineties, sadly coinciding with his death in 1991 from heart failure, induced by spiralling drug and alcohol use.



Underworld have come a long way from their early Eighties electronic pop work as Freur (their 'Doot Doot' single is totally of its time, but as relevant for the New Wave period as 'Rez' would be for the early Nineties dance scene), and Athens, a compilation released on !K7 last year highlights a totally different side to the duo of Karl Hyde and Rick Smith. For many, its the urgent strains of 'Born Slippy (Nuxx)' that they see (wrongly) as synonymous with the Underworld sound, and so Athens will disappoint anyone expecting an hour of shouted 'Lager! Lager! Lager!' laddishness, highlighting as it does Hyde / Smith's interest in, wait for it, jazz.

And not just any old jazz, but the interstellar strains of Alice Coltrane and Mahavishnu Orchestra; the out-there sounds of Sun Ra are sadly absent but would've dropped in just as well. There is a liberal sprinkling of jazz-funk-disco fusion and jazzy techno, all of which makes little sense in the context of the well-established Underworld sound until the segues into their own 'Oh' and the Eno / Hyde collaboration 'Beebop Shuffle', whereupon you start to appreciate that there really is a jazz looseness to their sound, whether that be in the sounds that float in and out of their tracks or the stream-of-consciousness (improvised?) vocal riffing from Hyde. All that said, this compilation works best – like No Talking Just Head – when you suspend any attempts at comparison with other reference points in the Underworld back catalogue.

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 14/09/2009

Growing up in the Eighties, you couldn’t help but be touched in some way by the birth of dance music. Chart hits by the likes of Black Box, S’Express and M.A.R.R.S. are probably responsible for many a current dance music producer discovering the genre. As a listener, I’m no different. Those songs paved the way for me getting into the likes of The KLF and Moby in the early nineties, and my deep passion for more esoteric techno and electronica which really started in earnest with Underworld’s Dubnobasswithmyheadman.



Between 1994 and 1998 I really immersed myself in techno and all its spin off genres, accumulating a collection of albums, 12” singles and mixtapes which has lain dormant for over a decade. Not being the most gregarious person, I never really went to clubs, at least not the types of places that would play the stuff I wanted to hear, and instead just listened at home intently.

Over the weekend, perusing the contents of my iTunes shopping basket I noticed a couple of Underworld mixes of Spooky’s ‘Schmoo’ which I’d tried to track down back in the day to no avail. Listening to those two Underworld remixes this past week – and the intriguing new Toykult album a week or so ago – has once again encouraged me to listen to whatever dance music I’ve had lying around in my iPod and I’m even contemplating heading loftward to dig out more old CDs.

So I’ve found myself trawling through my Orbital singles collection, reminiscing about how good songs like ‘Halcyon and ‘Sunday’ are; listening to Plastikman’s edgy minimalist techno on Musik (the track ‘Marbles’ is ten minutes of spiky acidity) and delving into stuff salvaged from a couple of old compilations – The Science Behind The Circle and The Serious Road Trip. Artists as diverse as David Holmes, Laurent Garnier, Egebamyasi, Higher Intelligence Agency, Loop Guru and Andrew Weatherall have graced my eardrums, bringing with them a range of genres from urgent acid house through to chilled-out sounds incorporating Indian samples and percussion.



Feeling that warm and slightly fuzzy feeling of rediscovering something long forgotten, I even went out and bought Mixmag. Mixmag seems to be the only surviving dance music magazine; my old favourite, Muzik, seems to have bitten the dust many years ago. What surprised me the most was that it really hasn’t changed at all.

Sure, there seem to be less proliferation of genres as things like jungle and garage have moved out of favour, but essentially the key cornerstones of club music – techno, electro, chill-out / ambient and house – are all there. And modern dance music doesn’t sound that dissimilar to how it did when I was an avid listener, as evidenced by the eleven free tracks I downloaded from the Mixmag website (the key track of which was Rex The Dog‘s Yazoo-sampling ‘Bubblicious‘). About the only thing different from when I bought dance music magazines was a proliferation of pictures of half-dressed, sweaty girls in clubs and a rather odd – and unnecessary – fashion section.



I find dance music really hard to write about hence why I haven’t really focussed this week on any particular artists or tracks. My wife says this is because it all sounds the same, which I totally disagree with. This week I feel like I’ve resolved my issues with dance music and I expect I will be listening to much more over the next few weeks. Right now, after a week of largely instrumental music, I think it’s high time I listened to some singing again.

Back when I was making music, I adopted the moniker Scanlines and recorded several tracks that had a techno vibe. Among the last tracks I ever recorded was this one. It’s sat on my hard-drive since about 2001 and no-one’s ever heard it before. Enjoy.

Download : Scanlines 'Polarity Flicker' / .mp3 / 5.1mb