Audio Journal : 23/11/2010

I was watching MTV on Sunday night. Alexa Chung was presenting some collection of old videos, all loosely connected by her arch / ironic / disinterested / banal commentary. It was somehow concrete affirmation of why music television bores me to death. She introduced 'I Don't Like Mondays' by The Boomtown Rats and my first reaction was 'Did Johnny Borrell from Razorlight base his look and sound on Boomtown-era Geldof?' The similarities – in Geldof's appearance and in the sound – were uncannily like the stuff that Borrell has produced on pretty much everything but the first Razorlight album.

The second thought that went through my head was a recollection of an evening many moons ago in Colchester. My house-mates Barry and Neil and I descended upon a pub around the corner from our house to play pool. It felt like we were three cowboys walking through the doors of a dusty saloon (an analogy that has been reinforced over time by something elsewhere in the story); the assembled old goats and regulars all turned around as we walked in, and if it wasn't for their general lack of interest it would have felt threatening. Even the big dog sat under one of the wooden chairs couldn't really be bothered to growl. Instead we bought drinks and were just heading to the pool table out back when I spotted a box on the windowsill containing – unexpectedly – a load of old records. If one thing has become apparent through my frequent eulogising of my student days, it's that I spent a lot of money on music, and quite a lot of it from charity shops. Buying vinyl from a pub was, however, definitely a one-off.

While Barry went off to set up the pool table, shaking his head disapprovingly as he went, Neil and I began raking through the cardboard box of records. I came across a perfect condition LP of Ennio Morricone's soundtrack to The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (now the Western analogy makes sense, you see) and Neil found a battered copy of 'I Don't Like Mondays'. I still have the LP; Neil discovered later that the 7" was basically snapped in half and certainly unplayable.

I'd love to say that I'd listened to The Good, The Bad And The Ugly soundtrack this week, but I didn't. So we shall move on from this elaborate and undoubtedly pointless anecdote and focus on what I've been listening to these past few days.

Mostly it's been the new Brian Eno album, Small Craft On A Milk Sea, released on Warp in the last fortnight. I've become used to Eno albums sounding like ethereal stasis – The Shutov Assembly is one of the most delicate, beautiful albums I own, and I sometimes put it on to help me fall asleep on the train to work (hopefully Eno wouldn't take this the wrong way). I know that this isn't the only aspect to Eno, and many times I've listened to albums showcasing a different side to his sound and found myself thinking 'What was that all about?' Nerve Net, for example. I remember borrowing that from Stratford-upon-Avon public library and trying three or four times to get my head around it before giving up, perplexed.

I wouldn't say Small Craft is like that, and, besides, I'd probably find that Nerve Net makes complete sense to me now. But it is different. Perhaps the release of this album on Warp has some significance here; Eno albums have tended to be released on his All Saints label, or self-released as downloads. Warp was initially exclusively a techno label but has since fragmented to focus on an infinite number of musical shards, including electronically-supported rock and lots of other micro-genres too. Small Craft has lots of drifting electronic introspection ('Emerald And Lime'), but it also features spindly beats ('Horse'), juddering rhythms ('Flint March'), distorted guitars and even a blissfully motorik punk freakout that wouldn't go amiss on a Neu! covers compilation ('2 Forms Of Anger'). It is utterly Eno and a perfectly-timed reminder of why he remains so essential, covering as it does so many of the facets that have featured in his work over the past four decades.

Vinyl Corner



'My Definition Of House Music' by DJ Hell (Helmut Geier) was released on the Belgian R&S label and I picked up this repressing in the late Nineties. First released in 1992, the original version features sampled strings and what we used to call Italian house piano riffs as well as squelchy synths. Taking a look at the always useful Discogs website, I found out that the strings were sampled from a David Byrne song. No wonder I like 'My Definition Of House Music'. This is one of those classic 12" singles from dance music's crucial first flushes and it still sounds excellent today.

Not, however, as excellent as the B-side remix by Resistance D (Maik Maurice and Pascal Dardoufas). This mix reminds me chiefly of the simplicity of 'Lush'-era Orbital mixed with the prog-house tendencies of early Spooky. It has a denseness and urgency that the original lacks and a neat suite of 303 bubbles for the quintessential acid house freak out, something that (at least to me) sounds every bit as thrilling as it did in the late Eighties.

Audio Journal : 19/11/2010

I had one of those mornings this week where I flicked through the album playlists restlessly in my iPod and couldn't settle on anything. Scrolling down the list, nothing appealed. It's at times like this where I tend to employ the 'playlist roulette' game I've mentioned here before: I close my eyes, drag my finger around the circular wheel a couple of times, then open my eyes again and whatever I've landed on I have to play. Well, today, even that didn't do the trick. I really wasn't in the mood for Ryan Adams, Jesus And Mary Chain and most definitely not The Hives. So I listened to Sparks' 'I Can't Believe You Would Fall For All The Crap In This Song', turned back to Justin Halpern's book Shit My Dad Says, and staved off the decision for a few more minutes.



Finally, a few minutes outside Euston, I settled on Sabresonic by The Sabres Of Paradise (Warp, 1993). The Sabres Of Paradise were a trio, consisting of esteemed producer Andrew Weatherall (he of Screamadelica fame) and two engineers, Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns, who also worked as part of Warp contemporaries The Aloof. This album was one I bought from Time Records in Colchester, a shop where I blew most of my limited student income (clearly I would not be able to do this if the proposed increases to tuition fees had been delivered in the period 1995 - 1998), but for some reason I bought Sabresonic II (1995) first. Consequently, at the time, Sabresonic felt a little light compared to the more expansive follow-up. I've changed my mind on that front now, finding it immersive and eclectic.

The key track for me is 'Ano Electro (Andante)' which is a delicate piece of classic Warp label electronica, lots of deep bass tones and icy melodies. Those icy melodies are something I still find appealing in electronic music, and they remind me, in order, of a) Degrassi Junior High (to this day, I don't know why; I didn't even like that programme when I was a kid and I don't know whether spindly upper-octave keyboard melodies were a feature of its soundtrack or not) and b) Teen Wolf. Teen Wolf was, for the duration of the Eighties, my favourite movie and I watched it most recently before Daughter#2 was born; unlike most things from the time (such as, say, luminous socks and needless saxophone solos), it's still pretty good. The Teen Wolf soundtrack does feature some edgy, minimalist tones in the vein of 'Ano Electro', so at least that comparison makes a degree of sense; elsewhere on the soundtrack, at the very start of the film and over the opening credits, is a fantastic piece of sonic alchemy – the sound of no-hoper Michael J. Fox's basketball bouncing between his hand and the floor of the court, only processed to sound otherworldly and as if heard through water. Perhaps exposure to that sort of sound as a kid is the reason why listening to the likes of The Hafler Trio in my teens was so easy.

So where were we? Sabresonic completed, I alighted upon David Bowie's The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust. Initially, my exposure to Bowie was purposefully confined to the trio of albums produced with Brian Eno in Berlin during the mid-Seventies, but I've since found myself working backwards through Aladdin Sane and Ziggy Stardust. I don't feel terribly qualified to comment on Bowie, mostly as I still feel like I'm only just dipping my toe into his catalogue, but I will say that 'Five Years' is just about the most un-Glam track from the genre, a fragile and Brechtian take on end-of-the-world themes.




I've had La Monte Young's (deep breath) The Second Dream Of The High Tension Line Stepdown Transformer From The Four Dreams Of China sat on my hard-drive for months and have never dropped it onto my iPod. The reason is quite simple: I've only ever read about La Monte Young's music (in The Wire) and when you never actually listen to something you've read about, you form all sorts of impressions about how it might sound, and I didn't want to have those preconceptions proven to be unfounded.

Young is a survivor of the infamous New York art scene in the Sixties, producing drone-based music from a loft with the likes of John Cale from The Velvet Underground and Tony Conrad (also, briefly, a member of the first iteration of the VU); Cale, a classically-schooled violinist first and foremost, would employ the drone methodology on Velvet Underground And Nico on tracks like 'Venus In Furs'. However, while on those tracks it was part of a wider musical template, with Young's music it is all about the drone, his pieces being long-form affairs (The Second Dream is single track lasting 80 minutes) with variations only discernible by intense concentration. It's not dissimilar to staring at a Rothko painting - initially you just see the colour, and then you see the tone and depth of expression.

Scored in 1962 for eight trumpets, The Second Dream isn't just a single solid drone; it starts and stops frequently but the individual sections themselves are lengthy, each consisting of overlapping, naturally phasing tones, that envelop and cut across one another. Far from sounding dull and cloying, I found this piece of music absorbing and almost relaxing. 'Almost' because very occasionally this can sound sinister, but on the whole it is what one of Young's peers, accordionist Pauline Oliveros, described as 'deep listening'.

Vinyl Corner

For some time now I've been weeding out my old dance vinyl collection, though not, it seems, for profit. In the last few weeks I sold a few 10" and 12" singles to Music & Video Exchange on Berwick Street for a paltry £6.00. It doesn't necessarily feel worth doing, especially since before selling them I'll generally record the songs to MP3 first, which can be time consuming. Also, my kids didn't exactly enjoy walking across London a few Saturdays ago to get to the shop, and I didn't exactly like them walking round the more colourful parts of Soho either.

One of the 10" singles I sold was 'Legend Of The Golden Snake (Version 2)' by Depth Charge, also known as DJ J Saul Kane. (Suffice to say, the rear sleeve has an image on the sleeve which wouldn't have been out of place at the seedier end of Berwick Street.) I first got into Depth Charge when I heard 'Shaolin Buddha Finger' on a mix compilation by The Chemical Brothers, back when the NME still gave away tapes on the cover, and back when The Chemical Brothers were still called The Dust Brothers.

'Legend Of The Golden Snake (Version 2)' is a heavy slab of what used to be called trip-hop, with an infectious speaker-warping dub bassline and lots of odd noises and kung-fu soundtrack melody snatches dropped in over the top. B-side, 'Sex, Sluts & Heaven (Bordello Mix)' is dense and atmospheric, phased in yelps and such like overlaying the bass-heavy groove. Funny, for all my musical taste changes over the years, I've never gone off Depth Charge. I perhaps regret flogging the vinyl copy, so I won't dwell on that too much.

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 : 03/11/2010

At the weekend we watched Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist, a teen romance flick based around two indie kids' love of music. Set in Manhattan / Brooklyn, the film tells the tale of one solitary night in the city – imagine Scorsese's seminal After Hours without the mystery – and Nick's quest to get over the heartbreak from his on-off relationship with a girl (Tris; that's right, Tris), for whom the hapless lovestruck romantic would produce mix CDs. These CDs were routinely binned by the girl, falling inconceivably into the hands of Norah, who, after watching Nick's band The Jerk Offs (himself on bass, his two gay mates on vocals and guitar and a child's drum machine) performing at a club somewhere Downtown, falls in love with him. The plot then follows their on-off attempts to get together while the back story sees them trying to track down the appallingly-named (and hopefully imaginary) cult band Where's Fluffy who are performing a guerrilla gig somewhere in the city.



Okay, so far, so teen flick. Aside from shots on NYC's trendier locations, the key differentiator is the knowing musical backdrop, from the offbeat 8-bit electronic score supplied by Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh (imagine his work for Rugrats, but all grown up), to the soundtrack which features stalwarts of the US current alternative scene like Band Of Horses, We Are Scientists and Vampire Weekend (who turn in the exclusive track 'Ottoman'). Devendra Banhart, making a brief cameo in one scene of the film, delivers a typically oddball funk-folk-unclassifiable song in 'Lover' and the rest on the soundtrack are mostly from bands I've never heard of.

Where the film became fairly cloying with its continual namedropping and attempts to look musically cool (doesn't that just grate? I mean, who would do that?), the soundtrack album is eminently listenable, with lots of interesting and introspective ear-friendly songs perfectly evoking the subtle, heart aching mood of the movie. It has a Richard Hawley track, for example. That said, my favourite track overall is still the urgent dirge-y NYC punk of The Jerk Off's 'Screw The Man' (sentiment of the lyrics most definitely to one side); so what if they're a prefab, made-up-for-this-film band and this is a pisstake, it's a great track which reminds me of The Runaways 'Cherry Bomb' mixed with The Gun Club's 'Sex Beat', two classics from the CBGB era.



Those Brave Airmen are a four-piece band from Stratford-upon-Avon consisting of Dave Johnson (vocals, rhythm guitar), Neil Edden (bass), Gavin Skinner (drums) and Mark Rehling (guitars) who released their debut single on iTunes last week. Entitled 'Pure Evil', the track has an unmistakeable grungey atmosphere and raw production edge, Johnson delivering the lyrics in a style which Eddie Vedder would be proud of and a grinding middle eight interplay between guitar and bass which could last a whole lot longer and never become tiring.

'I guess our influences are far ranging although the 90's grunge sound is definitely one we've all grown up with and enjoy,' Edden told me by email. 'It's not really a conscious decision, it's just the way that we sound together on that song.' Other Those Brave Airmen tracks cover different territories - slower, faster, harder, softer. Describing their eclectic live sound, Edden says 'I like to think that seeing us is a bit of a mixed bag – almost like seeing a covers band, but with originals – there's something in there for everyone.' What's not to like?

Download 'Pure Evil' from iTunes here.

Audio Journal : 27/10/2010

On Saturday my colleague Ian and I found ourselves in a dirty corner of Shoreditch to watch the legendary industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle at the cavernous Village Underground, more of an art space than a gig venue. The fourpiece band – Chris Carter, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson and Genesis Breyer P’Orridge – delivered almost two hours of ear-shredding noise, electronic experimentation and even a naked stagediver during the encore. Those intrigued by the event and wishing to read me compare their sound to a Jubilee Line train at full speed can head over to Documentary Evidence where you'll find my review proper.



Tonight though Mrs S and I went to the Scala in Kings Cross to watch the infinitely more hearing-friendly ex-Libertine Carl Barat. Mrs S swoons whenever said singer is mentioned and has been gushing about his Brechtian debut solo album since it was released earlier this month. And it is indeed a good album; it's not The Libertines, and thankfully it's a world away from the coke-fuelled disaster of Dirty Pretty Things' sloppy second album. More theatrical and ambitious than any of the songs written for either of his previous two bands, Carl Barat is a work of some confidence from indie rock's mumbling troubadour. (I couldn't understand anything he said on stage tonight; I gave up trying after a while; even Mrs S, doe-eyed and smitten though she was, said we needed subtitles.)

Barat and his band were supported by Swimming and Heartbreaks. The former were probably only about 17 (which made me feel really old) and they looked like an after-school band practice, featuring a guitarist who had all the poise and clumsy gracelessness of the lanky kid in class who started shaving before anyone else. A blend of guitar fury and electronics, they didn't really move me, in much the same way as Delphic don't move me, and their keyboard / laptop kid bore an unnerving resemblance to Chesney Hawkes. Heartbreaks were better – frantic thrash indie-pop euphoria with a vocalist whose style aped vintage Costello. They also featured the most stylised Mod drummer avec obligatory Weller haircut, and the quiff count was unseasonably high. I liked them. The only dud song, bizarrely, was their first single.

Barat, on the other hand, proved that he doesn't need Pete Doherty at all. The Libertines festival reunion shows at Reading and Leeds, just ahead of Barat's debut album, looked set to overshadow his first solo release. There is no denying the deep love and affection shared by Barat and Doherty, and it's a theme that runs throughout his simultaneously-published Threepenny Memoir. Freed from the conflicting personalities of Dirty Pretty Things and Pete's bumbling 'is he a poet or a singer? An artist or a sad, washed-up mess?' meanderings, Barat proved himself tonight to be an accomplished and confident frontman (until he spoke and you couldn't fathom a word he said).

Tracks which initially don't make sense on the album like 'The Magus' and 'What Have I Done' shone tonight with a circus-like mysteriousness, while the album's clear highlight, 'So Long My Lover' – easily the most beautiful, emotional song I've heard outside of a Rufus Wainwright album – was rendered even more plaintive live, his girlfriend / mother-of-their-unborn-child Edie Langley and her two sisters sprinkling McGarrigle-like folksy harmonies behind the song's world-weary acquiescence. I damn near sobbed my heart out; always a sucker for a moving chord change and a theme of unrequited love, me.

Then there were tracks from The Libertines' and Dirty Pretty Things' quartet of albums, all of which – predictably – prompted the most enthusiastic and raucous crowd response. 'Up The Bracket' was probably the best track of the lot, the only disappointment being the absence of Gary Powell's intricate yet powerful drum work. But though they were always half his anyway, performing the songs without Doherty found him owning the songs completely, and it left you wondering why Pete's contribution was as highly regarded as it was.

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 : 27/09/2010

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

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



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

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



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



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