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Go to: My Other Blog / twitter.com/mjasmithOnly those emerging from solitary confinement would have failed to notice that The Beatles have had their back catalogue repackaged, remastered and re-released, forty years on from their swansong Abbey Road. In our house we’ve watched three anodyne documentaries on the BBC and have very rapidly got sick and tired of walking into pretty much any shop only to have huge cardboard displays containing the remastered digi-pack albums foisted upon us.
Not only that, but we have the albums – in their last remastered guise – in the house already, relics from the days when my wife and her three closest friends were mad keen on the band as teenagers. We’ve found ourselves asking what the point of a remaster actually is when the material is that old. Surely the nature of recording methods back then means there comes a point where the only way you could improve the sound would be to record the instruments again using modern technology?
Nonetheless, in deference, we decided to have a Beatles-only Sunday and spent the day listening to their back catalogue of 200-odd songs on random play. In doing so, we came to the inevitable and well-trodden conclusion that the John Lennon-penned numbers were always the best. Our kids think the comedy Ringo numbers and the goofy Paul McCartney compositions are the best. We can only hope that they grow out of this and see sense in time.
I mentioned a number of blogs ago that I’d been working my way through a number of boxes of old CDs which have permanent and unfortunate residence in my loft. Returning the box I’ve been working through – which contained mostly dance music and industrial albums – I brought down the next one and alighted upon a copy of minimalist composer Philip Glass’s Low Symphony.
Glass, who just received his first Prom performance and who has of late moved into more accessible territory with soundtracks such as that for the Streep / Kidman vehicle The Hours turned his hand to producing an orchestral arrangement of David Bowie’s seminal Low. This was the first album in Bowie’s ‘Berlin’ trilogy and the first where he worked with iconic ex-Roxy Music keyboardist and soundsmith Brian (Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle) Eno. Working in Berlin’s Hansa Studios, a former Nazi ballroom, the furtive Bowie / Eno collaboration produced a bleak body of songs which would go on to inspire the likes of Joy Division (Joy Division’s original name was Warsaw, named after the track ‘Warszawa’ on Low).
Glass tackles three tracks from the Low sessions, the effect being a typical absorbing set of compositions which find little reference point in the original songs. I don’t listen to classical music generally and have no real understanding or vocabulary when it comes to describing such music, but suffice to say that this is both accessible and challengingly minimal.
Not so for The Arditti Quartet’s tackling of John Cage’s compositions for strings. Cage, a founder of the New York avant garde and a member of the Fluxus movement, is notorious for his work 4’33”, a piece of 'silence' lasting for the title’s four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The deal is that there is no such thing as absolute silence – in performances, whilst the ‘player’ would sit motionless, invariably there would be sound from the audience, a cough or what have you; the absence of complete silence would prove Cage’s notion that although theoretical to achieve, this is an impossibility in reality. Cleverer still, adding up the seconds in the performance length – 273 – and inverting that number, you get to the theoretical lowest temperature achievable, the notional Absolute Zero, a similarly unachievable yet theoretically feasible result.
In any case, Cage was an artistic and leftfield pioneer. His scores for strings dumped the traditional methods of writing notes and octaves, preferring instead to provide actions, frameworks and the musical equivalent of the vaguest stage directions. The result is nothing short of faltering atonal dissonance and only in my broadest-minded moments can I listen to this all the way through. Far better, at least from an accessible entry point to Cage’s work are Boris Berman’s performances of the Pieces For Prepared Piano, wherein Cage offered more specific and prescriptive treatments for the interior of a piano, the end result being a sequence of clanks and scrapings that industrial pioneers like Einstürzende Neubauten wouldn’t find unappealing.
Go to: My Other Blog / twitter.com/mjasmithAnyone who knows me well will know that I’m a big fan of Rufus Wainwright, the talented singer-songwriter son of Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle, and sister of similarly-gifted Martha. I’ve been a Rufus fan since a purchase of the Want collection in 2006 and his music has become a constant ingredient in the balanced musical diet that I find myself listening to as I mature nicely into my thirties. Generally speaking, if I head ‘out there’ into the more experimental reaches of my music collection, at some point I’ll swing back, pendulum-like, to artists such as Rufus, if only for a while before heading into esoteric territory once again.
I haven’t really listened to much else beyond Rufus this week; specifically, the Milwaukee At Last!!! boxset (you can derive much confirmation of Wainwright’s noted flamboyance from those three exclamation marks), comprising a live CD and DVD recorded at the Pabst Theatre in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on 27 August 2007 whilst on tour to promote his 2007 album Release The Stars.
Rufus, who Caitlin Moran described in The Times as having 'all the quiet, don't-mind-me demeanour of a pissed rainbow on a trampoline', has a singularly incredible talent to write heartfelt yet gauche songs filled with metaphor, innuendo and vivid imagery, ranging from the ethereal, maudlin simplicity of ‘Leaving For Paris No.2’ through to the strident near-jazz of ‘Release The Stars’ or the debauched shimmer of ‘Sanssouci’; it’s a rare accomplishment indeed to have such a constant stream of inventiveness from an artist with five albums under his belt.
And that, in a way, reminds you of just how disappointing Milwaukee At Last!!! is – not that I didn’t want this; I’ve been waiting for an audio recording of a concert on this tour since seeing him live in Oxford in 2007. Simply, it reminds you that it’s about time we had an album of new material from Rufus, but distractions such as his recent opera (in French to purists’ horror) have taken precedence. In the meantime I’ll be looking forward to Not So Silent Night, the Wainwright-McGarrigle family Christmas concert which for this year decamps from Carnegie Hall to the Royal Albert Hall in December.Although Milwaukee At Last!!! has pretty much been the only thing I’ve listened to this week, I did find the time to listen to ‘In Your Heart’ by Brooklyn’s A Place To Bury Strangers, released on my favourite record label Mute (I love that label so much that I maintain a tribute site). This is the first time I’ve heard this band, and from what I can tell they seem to blend synths, guitars and drum machines together to create a modern reflection on the more urgent side of Jesus And Mary Chain.Of principal interest was the remix by Vince Clarke, he of fellow Mute acts Depeche Mode / Yazoo and Erasure fame. Erasure remain my favourite act of all time and I’m not at all bothered today to admit that, and Vince Clarke’s particular brand of electronic mastery is entirely responsible for my deep love of electronic music. Having recently decamped to New York, and with Erasure on hiatus while singer Andy Bell completes his second solo album, Vince has strapped on his disco boots to remix a number of artists of late – Franz Ferdinand’s ‘No You Girls’ got a seminal Clarke treatment, as did The Presets and girl-pop group The Saturdays. Vince, by his own admission around 1996, wasn’t terribly good at programming drums and percussion, something he seems to have overcome given the steady 4/4 bass-heavy grooves he adds to all of these remixes, ‘In Your Heart’ included.
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
Ordinarily, this blog has been about things I like. This week, however, I feel compelled to depart from that ethos after watching footage of The Killers from the BBC's coverage of the V Festival in Chelmsford.
Like many others, I was suckered in by their debut album with it's Anglo / Eighties influences, but it's an album that hasn't stood up to the ravages of time. But it's watching them perform live where I have the biggest issue. From Sam's Town onwards they may have perfected a more stadium-friendly sound, but in Brandon Flowers they have a perenially weak frontman with little rock 'n' roll persona and a terrible predeliction for feather epaulettes. I had an online spat of sorts with a fellow tweeter about my feelings toward the band, so I thought I'd best finally check out Sam's Town, which a colleague gave me a copy of when it was released but which I just couldn't bring myself to listen to – the press releases that proclaimed it to be influenced by Bruce Springsteen just made me want to cry. Having listened to it, I can honestly say that I will not be changing my opinion of this Emperor and his new clothes anytime soon. I feel about as indifferent toward The Killers as I do about Oasis calling it quits.
A band much more deserving of the hype surrounding them is Arctic Monkeys, whose Reading set from the following week was astounding. Their new album, Humbug, is totally worthy of all the plaudits being heaped upon it and yet Alex Turner and co remain as unassuming as ever. There's no trace of ego here (take note Mr Flowers), and in 'Crying Lightning' the band have produced a song that could usurp 'I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor' as their finest track ever. Then of course there's their cover of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds' 'Red Right Hand', which is rendered perhaps even bleaker and more terrifying than Cave's original.
One of the most impressive things about Arctic Monkeys is just how polished their live sets are. They never make mistakes and the songs – intricate though they often are – sound just like they do on their albums. In that way, they remind me of Kings Of Leon, who I honestly think are the best live band on the planet. Their Reading set was typically excellent, and I'm glad that they delivered the awful-but-crowd-pleasing 'Sex On Fire' with an evident distaste. Apparently they weren't happy with their performance, though I fail to see why.
Nerd-rockers Vampire Weekend are on the cusp of releasing their second album, and tracks like 'A-Punk' had an afternoon Reading crowd pogoing like Zebedee. I think I liked the band before I heard them: intuitively, if a band is centred in New York chances are I'll like them (glib and shallow though that is). Add to that songs which deal with two of my favourite topics – architecture ('Mansard Roof') and the correct use of grammar ('Oxford Comma') – and it's fairly obvious why I'd like them. Bring on album number two, I say. Meanwhile, I'll be checking out their side-project Discovery. (Anyone similarly interested in the correct use of grammar should check out the Apostrophe Protection Society website).
I’m currently listening to Narcisstika by Toykult, a band I’ve never heard of before. They briefly started following my tweets this week, so I thought I’d check them out. Reverbnation have been giving their new album away and I thought ‘What the hell? It’s free’. Described as ‘rock electronica’, it reminds me of bands I used to listen to like Cubanate or Parallax who melded heavy guitars with electronics to fantastically bleak effect. Electronic sounds have come a long way since those two bands adventurously deployed them, the effect of Narcisstika being a sequence of edgy, jarring beats, twisted sounds and warped vocals all melded together in a rapidfire blur, as best illustrated by my favourite, ‘Automatic Addict’. Get a copy here.
Gang Of Four are listed as one of Toykult’s influences, and coincidentally I bought their classic Entertainment! album this week. Gang Of Four, along with bands like Wire, The Pop Group, Mekons and others, epitomised the post-punk sound which has had a strong bearing on modern bands like Franz Ferdinand. True UK punk really only lasted a couple of years (it’s a shame no-one bothered to tell Sham 69), rapidly fragmenting into a sound that incorporated other influences. In Gang Of Four’s case that influence was a combination of arty knowing and funk – their lyrics read like a dystopian Nietzschean self-help book while their basslines wobble around like a punk-weaned George Clinton.
The Rumble Strips, whose debut album Girls And Weather failed to live up to expectation and just reinforced the narrow-minded view that they were Dexy’s clones, have returned with a confident new album, Welcome To The Walk Alone. The album is glossily rendered by producer du jour Mark Ronson with plenty of strings and less emphasis on the horn section that made the Dexy’s comparisons so easy. The effect is something I can only describe as how Elvis Costello might have sounded if Phil Spector had ever produced an album for him. For all the strong new material, my favourite song is ‘London’ which I first heard at an NME gig in Northampton a couple of years ago.
I should give a quick plug to Those Brave Airmen, a four-piece band formed by some of my old school friends. Their MySpace page includes four of their songs, which are anthemic heavy guitar tracks with a grungey vibe. My wife, who is something of an expert on such things, says they remind her of a band she used to like called Live.
Finally, I’ve been listening to So Damn Happy, a live album by Loudon Wainwright III which effortlessly blends together emotional, folksy numbers with more humorous tracks. ‘Heaven’ has the audience in stitches, detailing as it does a debauched vision of the afterlife while ‘Primrose Hill’ movingly recounts the depressing story of a homeless London busker. I don’t know how Wainwright can so easily blend together such apparently conflicting themes, but he does and it’s brilliant.
‘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.
Though often broad-minded, this blog has generally been about that which can be described, however loosely, as music. But what is music? Is music art? Is music played without regular instruments actually something that can be adequately described as ‘music’?
Such are the questions that go through your mind if you should find yourself at Playing The Building, the installation by elastic-limbed ex-Talking Heads front man David Byrne at the Roundhouse in Camden until the end of the month. Playing The Building finds an old pump organ, fully gutted and kitted out with various electric switches in the centre of the historic venue, those switches in turn being connected by coloured wires to various hammers and compressors attached to the beams, hollow pipes and girders of the building. People visiting the installation are allowed to sit at the keyboard of the organ and play the keys, causing drones, clicks and whistles to fill the circular structure. In short, visitors are literally able to play the actual structure of the building.
In 1979 the Roundhouse, after incarnations as a turning shed for locomotives heading in and out of Kings Cross, a gin warehouse, a radical hippy hangout and a theatre, found itself a mecca for punk bands, especially those visiting from the CBGB scene in New York. One such band was Byrne’s Talking Heads, who played the venue that year. Thirty years on, Byrne’s art school tendencies and music have come together in this installation, which was first created at Färgfabriken in Sweden and most recently the Battery Maritime Building in Manhattan.
Time pressures meant that I only stayed for about twenty minutes when I visited last Monday, which effectively precluded me from joining the lengthening queue of people looking to play the Roundhouse. But I did grab a photo and three minutes of audio from two teenagers playing together at the organ. Apologies for the sound quality, but I only had an old Nokia with me. Better clips from earlier incarnations of the installation can be found here.
Download : two teenagers Playing The Building (10/09/2009) / .mp3 / 1.4mb
Incidentally, New York punk lost one of its pioneers last week. Willy Deville, who in the incandescent scene that burst forth in Manhattan’s Lower East Side recorded rockabilly-inspired punk with Mink Deville passed away last week. His ‘Spanish Stroll’ from his 1977 debut Cabretta has been in the eardrums a lot since died, as has his urgent, intense ‘Soul Twist’.
Is it punk? Is it art? Is it music? I found myself listening an album that I know, categorically, only around four people have ever listened to. Jason Gets His Fingers Burned was recorded by my good friend Matt Handfield and myself one evening in 2001 under the name Handfield / Smith. Matt played guitar while I processed his riffs and strumming in real time using various effects.
The result is a 45 minute jam with discernible melodies contrasted with lots of feedback. It was my vision to create something like how I thought the album Metal Machine Music by Lou Reed (this must be New York week, sorry) might sound; having listened to MMM since, I can confirm that it sounds nothing like it, but even though I’m normally extremely self-deprecating about any music I’ve ever made, it still sounds good to me. We planned a follow-up, which in my head was called Grow Beards. Handfield has now actually grown that beard, whereas I’ve stopped making music altogether in favour of listening instead. We coulda been huge in the alt.noise scene.
The second track on JGHFB was a noodling guitar passage that Matt created the same evening and which I then later remixed offline. You can find it by doing the right click / save as thing on the link below.Download : Handfield / Smith 'Tsm / Dog Soup (Tsm)' / .mp3 / 4.1mb
