Ten Songs 5

The recent transmission interrupt has been precipitated by moving back to university, with the subsequent time-drain of having to, y'know, go to seminars and such. That and trying to spend as much time as possible working on what I consider worthwhile projects, on which this blog is a millstone-round-the-neck-shaped time-drain. Moreover, listening to music has become increasingly unrewarding: I've had, for the last few weeks, little real desire to listen to music, except to ward off silence whilst working. Even the most serotonin-charged pop makes little dent in the pretty much constant low-level anxiety, anger and melancholy that makes up my one default mood. For the moment then, expect posting to be decidedly intermittent; 'Ten Songs' will remain a regular feature, but only fortnightly, weekly posting being simply unfeasible.

1. Anne Briggs - 'Lowlands' (from A Collection (Topic))

Nothing but a voice. The debate about the framing of folk-music in the 1950s-60s, in which the likes of Pete Seeger claimed that the guitar (esp. not - heavens forbid - the electric!) was a new-fangled imposition on the untainted voice of das Volk, missed the crucial point. The strangeness of the a capella recordings that make up the majority of this compilation of Briggs' records for Topic is that they sound as if issuing from no cultural origin, the breath of a single human body articulating plaintively phrased dramas of bone, blood and betrayal - an inheritance that hits us with unfamiliar familiarity of the unheimlich. The song itself crystallises something at once inexplicable and ineradicable, its images lingering on the mind's eye like a half-developed photograph: it recounts a dream in which the narrator sees her lover, drowned overseas, emerging to sight, "green and wet, with weeds so cold"; as each syllable emerges, in a voice as pure, silvery and textured as birch-bark, locked into a repeating trickle of sound, peaking on each cycle through the chorus, it seems closest to the hopeless ebb and wash of the sea. It pulls us back.

2. Evangelista - 'You Are A Jaguar' (from Prince of Truth (Constellation))

I've got a review of the whole album in the university newspaper this week, but this deserves attention on its own - the noise-lashed vortex at its centre, a boiling meeting of angular vectors. The record was constructed using Pro-Tools after sessions during which Carla Bozulich was mostly laid up with pneumonia, creating, in this case, a collage of explosive drums from Xiu Xiu's Ches Smith, Nels Cline lending the same noise kick he added to Wilco's last few records (and then some), and Bozulich auto-combusting in the middle, dipping from strangled whispers to the tipping point of a scream. The cover art says most of it: woman, Baphomet, a red landscape out of Graham Sutherland between. Cracking.

3. Otis Redding - 'Try A Little Tenderness' (from The Very Best of... (Elektra))

There are always complications. Following 'Respect' - the most virile and stomping of openers, but inevitably coming across in bad taste, compared to Aretha Franklin's inspired appropriation two years later - is this most ambivalent and low-key of numbers, a song that hardly even be said to peak when it does, opening with woozy horns that cede to almost nothing, haunted by Al Jackson Jr.'s rimshots, and flutters of organ, guitar and sax like the brushings of a moth-wing. The field is left open for a voice broken and resigned, but tweaking each thought into an upward flight as the chorus (which is also barely a chorus at first) hoves into view, the prospect of healing the gap between ourselves - "But when she gets weary/Try a little tenderness" - not even for himself, for whom hope long ago receded, but for all others. As the song builds, the horns punching away beneath the now-thumping drums, he demands we rebuild a life in its integrity of blood and nerve-endings: "Squeeze her/Don't tease her/Never leave her", breaking down into glossolalia. You can hear why it was this song that so deeply connected with the audience at the Monterey Pop festival in '67 - Redding going into strutting paroxysms on stage. "I've got to go, but I don't wanna go". Within months, he would be dead. "The soft words they are spoken so gentle/It makes it easier to bear".

4. Alan Wilkinson/John Edwards/Steve Noble - 'Spellbound' (from Live At Cafe Oto (Bo'Weavil))

The duo of Wilkinson and Noble (Edwards having dropped out due to 'family issues') was one of my highlights of the Colour Out of Space weekend, sending me straight back to the records - no bad thing in this instance, the trio having never put a foot wrong on wax. What they do is, in a sense, completely ordinary - straightahead free jazz powered by the vocabulary of serrated screeches and bang-on-a-can percussion that's belonged to the genre for more than 30 years - but the native, punk-raw excitement they import into the form, the adrenaline delight in forward drive, the perfection with which the parts mesh, the flabless purity and absolute materiality of their sound, makes it absolutely irresistible. The 30-minute-plus main chunk of this live set starts with the buzz-saw of Wilkinson's alto - the sax equivalent to Steve Albini's guitar technique - slashing through the crowd-noise, quickly joined by the sinewy black bedrock of Edwards' bass, Noble's tumble of snare and smashed hi-hat pulling us down into the maelstrom. And although it lacks Wilkinson's decidedly, uh, 'unique' (not really) vocal improvisations, the almost telepathic suppleness with which they collectively stretch and warp the basic material into new shapes, switching one moment from gurgling backdrafts of squeal and shuffling clatter, groaning scrapes of bass, to rocket-propelled flights into the ether, make this a fine contender for my songs of the year. Listen to it burn.

5. The Specials - 'Nite Klub'/'Ghost Town' (from Singles (2-Tone))

Two contrasting notes from the sharp ends of a short career, but both concerned with the same thing. Which is a problem: The Specials are seen not as the white-hot heart of 2-Tone's pop explosion, but as an 'issue band', addressing 'social problems', a case for Arts Council funding. Witness the persistent use of 'Ghost Town' on documentaries about the Brixton riots, as if the band were capable of anything so crudely direct. Raymond Williams' theory about history's presence in texts - that the form and texture of a work is directly related to the historical formations of which it is a part - applies to records too: the very smell and feel of Coventry's first years under Thatcherism pervade the songs. 'Nite Klub' pulses with sick energy, Terry Hall's exaggeratedly flat white-boy vocals straining against the fidelity, the ironically gospel-ish backing chorus and cheap organ driving it on, the opening club chatter ("We got busted!") versioning Roxy Music's 'Remake/Remodel' for less salubrious environs, a hedonism deprived of glamour and the benefits of pleasure: "I can't dance in a club like this/The girls are all slags, and the beer tastes just like piss." 'Ghost Town' is the same dancefloor after the destruction of Coventry's industrial base, dust and shadows filling its seedy corners. The city had been, during the boom years of beat-pop, the country's centre for bicycle and car manufacture - Britain's motown, with The Specials as Coventry's Cybotron. A slowed-down skank emerges from what sounds like police sirens, Jerry Dammers' organ and the horns stalking the beat as Neville Staples' vocal introduces the violence - "Too much fighting on the dancefloor" - that announces the carny screech of the chorus. Hall can briefly remember, to the sound of overbright trumpet - closer to the radiophonic synths that accompanied the "psychedelic daymares of More Specials" (Neil Kulkarni) - the "good old days before the ghost town", before being plunged back into the trauma. The dub echoes that pile up on Rico Rodriguez' trombone solo only add to the sense of being trapped in the spectral after-image of a city, punctuated only by boiling violence - "Why must the youth fight against themselves?" - the wind howling down the streets announcing the police sirens that were even then filling Toxteth and Brixton. The single, its 7" cover adorned with skeletons at desultory leisure, also including 'Why?' and 'Friday Night and Saturday Morning', was the perfect, final expression of a world burnt out into shadows: the total impasse, the dead end, the cycle of traumatic behaviour. There was nowhere to go from here - New Pop, in all its ambivalence, would be just around the corner.

6. Brian Eno - 'King's Lead Hat' (from Before and After Science (Virgin))

One of the strangest points in a career full of anomalies - the only contribution Eno made to the post-punk sound under his own name (as opposed to his production on Bowie's Berlin records, Remain in Light, etc.), and a total contrast to the becalmed mirror-sea plateau of the second side of this record (the last song-based one before the beginning of Eno's Ambient series with Music For Airports). It is, indeed, a tribute to David Byrne's band, and is hence suitably slippery and twitchy: a churn of _ guitars and whipcrack snares girded by queasy, grating synths, random bar-stool piano like a rain of nails from a window. Eno's spluttering, anxious vocals are strange when teamed with the anagrammic wordplay of the lyrics, which so obviously betray their origins in word-games and free-association, an absurdity that seems more than appropriate given the sample of Kurt Schwitters earlier in the album, but also makes for a delightful chorus: "King's lead hat puts the poker in the fire/It will come it will come it will surely come!"

7. Pens - Hey Friend! What You Doing (De Stijl)

The whole of the debut record by this all-girl London trio - 14 songs in 28 minutes - is in fact shorter than the Wilkinson/Edwards/Noble track listed above. This is, lest we forget, A Good Thing - not because it's illegitimate for a song to go over 2 minutes, but because their Huggy Bear-inflected noise-pop becomes so much more awesomely pure and concentrated as a result. De Stijl releases mostly noise records, and you can see why they were involved in releasing this: thuds, rumbles and blasts of shredded guitar whirl in fragments, treble amped to speaker-bleed, behind vocals that recall the young Viv Albertine (in all her glory) shouting down a wind tunnel. I was caught by my neighbours dancing in my front-room bedroom to this record, and remain unrepentant.

8. Yin Carrizo - '20 de Enero en Ocu' (from Panama! 3 (Sound-Way))

Of course, nostalgia reissue culture should = NO, but it's impossible to be mad when the results are just this good. And in any case, it's not as if Panama was ever part of the accepted history of Western music - like Sound-Way's excellent compilations of West African music, this material has the unmistakable scent of freshness and lurid novelty, steamy funk bent sideways by the rich seams of native Panamanian music. Although I might have picked any of the 23 tracks on this album (or anything off the previous two volumes), but the cross-cut bounce of tipica percussion, rolling away between madly wailing accordions and the punctuation of Carrizo's hollers on this cumbia piece gets me every time. Like an entire house-party squashed into one closet.

9. Broadcast & The Focus Group - 'The Be Colony' (from ...Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age (Warp))

If it was inevitable - Broadcast's visual identity has been formed by the artwork of Ghost Box's Julian House for years, before the label's founding - there was no way of predicting how excellent this collaboration would turn to be. The 50-minute EP itself is best thought of as a hauntological Donuts, distorted fragments of song reappearing and swirling throughout like the spangle of light through decayed film, but this particular song is the most fully-realised - more purposeful, rich and well-structured than the often somewhat bitty Focus Group albums, devoid of the rawness that arguably robbed Tender Buttons of some of its spooky charge; a structure of samples that seems to swim and melt away as soon as the mind tries to grasp it, the central element of Trish Keenan's voice itself sounding as if extracted from some forgotten library record/folk soundtrack, cycling guitar chords and tootling ancient keyboards working around her refrain: "All circles vanish, all circles vanish..."

10. Elvis Costello and the Attractions - 'Gettin' Mighty Crowded' (b-side to 'High Fidelity' 7" (F-Beat))

One wonders a little about the logic behind this, the most overtly R&B-fuelled period of Costello's career, the attendant album (Get Happy!!!) released a year after referring to The Genius as "a blind old nigger". Like the music, hate the people - hmm. Nonetheless, this cover of Betty Everett's moan of resignation delivers the goods, amphetamine-boosting the tempo to 'Northern soul stomp', Steve Nieve's uncomplicatedly pumping organ and Pete Thomas' drums keeping up the pace, the smell of sweat, spit and sawdust fairly peeling off the multi-throated chorus. One for a wedding disco.

"Robinson told me about his dream"

So, I watched London again the other day. I had bought a copy because it was pertinent to my current writing project - references to the Robinson films are threaded throughout - and it would be easier than getting it out of the university library every time I needed to check a piece of dialogue, or an image. I first read about London in Iain Sinclair's essay 'Cinema Purgatorio', included in Lights Out For The Territory . Watching it again reminded me, in certain ways, of the experience of watching Bela Tarr's later work, particularly Satantango (although obviously not in terms of length). The rhythms and technique of filming Keiller uses are so utterly alien to the world of Hollywood cinema - and its protrubing bunion, the British film industry - as to be almost incomprehensible at first: the shot is framed, and then the camera lingers, unmoving, for what seems forever; we seem almost to be regressing to the earliest days of cinema, when a camera was simply set up and entire scenes filmed in one static take, or audiences thrilled to simply see street traffic re-presented to them; one has to become slowly acclimatised to this sense of tempo, until, eventually, it feels completely natural. Indeed, there's something of that quality in certain moments - as when, inspecting the bomb damage in the insurance district, one or two of the crowd turn to look at the camera glued to them. The film's framing device performs a strange transformation of the material, of the fabric of everyday life being filmed: the ostensible reality of verité cinema is enlisted in the service of a narrative. It reminds me, in that sense, of Sebald's Austerlitz, or, indeed, Sinclair's own Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, records of fictional events in surroundings that are all too real.

The fact that both Robinson and the narrator are invisible - and, as regards the actual camera watching real people in the street, non-existent (there is no-one stood behind it but Keiller - and that Robinson's 'researches' - first into "the problem of London", then, in Robinson in Space, "the problem of England" - take him further and further into a geography of absences and ghosts - Montaigne, Defoe, Horace Walpole, Poe, Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Apollinaire's sojourns in London - seem significant. Robinson and our narrator are Proustian ghosts at the feast, waspish, melancholy and bickering lovers. Robinson, withdrawn into his flat ("Apart from his academic work, he hardly leaves... except to go to the supermarket"), is an at best reluctant participant in the modern world, disgusted by the rotten stupidity of those who returned the Tories in 1992. "It is difficult to recall the shock", the narrator tells us, "with which we realised our alienation from the events that were unfolding in front of us", as Major waves to the crowds, the environmental noise muted, the whole vulgar scene seeming disconnected, at one remove from the splenetic commentary of the narrator. Indeed, the geography of their drifts - the lines they take, criss-crossing the map of the capital - is illusory, non-existent; the investment we feel in the narrative of their drift, the sequence of sensation and history as they move through each topography and territory, is fictional. London becomes, through Robinson's hyperstitional schemes, a ghost of itself: "London was the first metropolis to disappear."

The fact that London is so concerned not just with architectural space in the accepted sense (of individual buildings), but the overall effect of buildings together, of positioning, spaces - the Richmond Hill fields, Twickenham canalsides, the "packhorse road to Bristol"; later, the Stowe ornamental gardens and St. George's Hill golf-course in Robinson in Space - the whole notion of psychogeography, as experienced by the flaneur, is almost belied by its methodology. The central paradox of London is that of a film so possessed by the act of walking, that never seems to move. Instead of the imposed motion of the tracking shot, or the short take and jump-cut, each shot swims with an external life, the chiaroscuro of people moving around, of the grey depths of Thames water roiling, of light shifting on the mud of the Channelsea river. These instances, these lingering visions of an unstill stillness, seem to multiply as Robinson and the narrator travel up the River Brent, seemingly never getting closer to solving "the problem of London", when everything seems, for a moment to resolve, before Keiller jump-cuts to another movement. They point towards the paradox of Robinson's position: private visions that suggest a shared dreaming, in space (it's unsurprising that Robinson is nostalgic for the age of collectivist architecture, in the form of "Goldfinger's Alexander Fleming house"). He is a recluse who declares himself "an enthusiast for public spaces", who considers a ranting, bowler-hatted banker, "a man after his own heart, a man of the crowd". After shots of public space overtaken by commercialisation and reactionary stupidity (Smith Square and Downing Street after the Major victory, the Trooping of the Colour in the "acres of space in the centre of the city" occupied by the monarchy, the Lord Mayor's show, the roadside McDonalds with the huge inflatable Ronald on the roof), there is the bonfire in Kennington Park, the flames framing the silhouettes of people conversing, laughing, strings rising on the soundtrack, a public space, like the Notting Hill carnival or Brixton market or Southall earlier in the film, suddenly flickering with an egalitarian life - the free and easy metropolitan life "enjoyed by the peoples of the Continent". It's these moments, more than the desolation, the presence of the past in the film, that are most poignant. In that sense, it is a film about the revolutionary impulse, the impossible (and hence wholly necessary) hopes it embodies, in recession; Robinson's position could be summarised by a variation on Marx's aphorism: I am no-one and I should be everyone.

The complaint about the camera's lack of movement recalls Sheila Rowbotham's recent remarks on Comrades, which I also saw last week. But, in saying that Douglas' compositions cannot " capture the radical turbulence of a trade unionism that reached out not only to the skilled but to the unskilled, women and children alike", she misses the point: the poignancy, the pain of these men's lives, and the collective totality of the labour movement, resides in the interstices between these pictures that linger in the mind like an image on silver bromide paper, that accumulate in layers. "Robinson believed that, if he looked at it long enough, he could cause the surface of the city to reveal to him the molecular basis of historical events, and in this way he hoped to see into the future." Psychogeographic exploration is an attempt to alter the fabric of reality, of the history that brought us to where we are now - hence Robinson's efforts to construct an alternate history "in which the 19th century never happened"; it is an act of vision that is also an act of revolution. Robinson and the narrator, consigned to chasing spectres, hemmed in by a built environment squashing them out, cannot manage it any longer; but, in that impulse, the potentiality of the creation of another world remains.

Ten Songs No. 4

1. Juice Aleem - 'KunteKinteTarrDiss' (from Jerusalaam Come)

After finishing Kodwo Eshun's More Brilliant Than The Sun, this comes as a pleasant surprise: emerging from Birmingham, from his own world and environment and networks, with an aesthetic already iron-forged, another seismic triumph for Big Dada in the British hip-hop stakes. The vein of righteous anger that runs through so many of these songs, like 'BRIGHTON' through a stick of seaside rock, reaches its apogee on this: telescoping together the astral-Afro futurism of Sun Ra and the justified vitreol of the Rastafari end of the Jamaican inheritance, here he is a black Dr. Who, "straight back from the future, back from the past", landed in Britain '09, the scene set by the fragments of dubbed rude-boy vocals and white 50s voices straight out of the first hip-hop productions (The Hellers' Life Story sampled on 'Adventures on the Wheels of Steel'), the spooked edge of a sound from a time out of joint. With judicious, relentless pacing, he lashes with verbal fire all those prepared to lose their self-respect and forget their culture - "Since when the fuck was it cool to be a rent boy?!" - the Jamaican inflection rising in his voice as if it were a guilty reminder of their origins, vocodered on the choruses into the electro Voice of Doom. Social justice is theological justice is sonic justice: the white hegemony of history ("Show me yr white Jesus, make me take off the safety") is reverse-engineered, the illusory pseudo-world of capital disappeared, the people called to regain the "New Jerusalem mothership connection". The glad day is always heard ahead of time.

2. Sa-Ra Creative Partners - 'Traffika' (from Nuclear Evolution: The Age of Love)

It gets impossible to tell whether or not this is cynical, celebrating the decadence of typical gangsta-made-good narrative ("Cocaine is running through yr brain, in New York city!"), or condemnatory, setting the sins of drug-running against the proferred escape of cosmic Afro-futurism, so animated is it by the electro-narcotic power of its production. It's probably the most exuberant song on this 2-disk set, aside possibly from 'Cosmic Ball', abetted for nearly its entire length by the Gary Bartz Quartet, liquidised and etherised with omnipresent synthetics; they've certainly no objections to narcotics, but perhaps get their kicks from elsewhere.

Edit: oh fuck it. I've nothing useful to say about this. I just like it, that's all.

3. Can - 'Yoo Doo Right' (from Monster Movie)

Do I have to write about this one? It's just that I have nothing especially clever to say about it. You sure? Alright, fine. It sees the band at its most deceptively simple: a caveman-primitive groove, as if the rhythm section of Jaki Liebezeit and Holger Czukay were playing at 33rpm to the rest of the band's 45, but one that can suddenly mutate or drop out altogether, its combination of perfect mindlessness and intelligent subtlety presaging techno. It can keep going, you imagine, forever, and keep surprising and entrancing you for that long as well, always evading critical analysis. Malcolm Mooney's vocals - what Frances Morgan calls his "Gnostic gospel" - are just as brilliantly meaningless: "Drum beat twenty-four hours a day"; Michael Karoli's guitar moves, seemingly without warning, from rhythmic support to grainy, technicolor abstract noise. Sublime.

4. Diana Ross & The Supremes - 'Stop! In The Name of Love' (from Motown Forever)

Kodwo Eshun's wrong: it's not merely the case that the mnemonic of the sample makes the rest of the original track from which it was strip-mined boring. Admittedly, the chorus of this song, which I first heard as part of Steinski and Double Dee's 'Lesson No. 1 - The Payoff Mix', is a punctum of stunning proportions - but that's not to denigrate the totality of the song, which reprensents one of the most finely honed products of arguably the greatest pop machine of the 20th century. The surprisingly middling tempo, the rhythm converted further into timbre by dots of glockenspiel and tambourine replacing the snare, the high organ droning away underneath like a half-heard cry, and the breath-machine of vocals: the tinge of vulnerability in "Haven't I been good to you", echoed in the voice of a conscience knowing it won't be heard - "Think it o-o-ver". And then, surging into desperation on the chorus, hands out, the organ jumping, the nagging mnemonic chattering away in the background like the voice of guilt - "Baby baby baby" - and the constant dilemma of the economy of desire: "But any time that we are together/I'm so afraid of losing you forever". There is no escape.

5. Electrelane - 'I've Been Your Fan Since Yesterday' (from home-made compilation/Singles, B-Sides & Live)

For the smell of salt air, and everything else left behind.

6. Charles Mingus - 'Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting' (from Mingus In Antibes)

One of my finest finds, as far as secondhand CDs go: picked up at Birmingham's The Diskery, a bootleg version of this astonishingly fine set from possibly the best of Mingus' 60s line-ups, including both sure-touch drummer Dannie Richmond (whom Mingus famously bullied and bent into the role) and Eric Dolphy on alto sax alongside Booker Ervin. I first heard of this through, as always, Marcello Carlin (scroll down to entry for June 17, 2004), and Dolphy's solo on here - preceded by Mingus' exhortation "Talk about it Eric!" - is as brilliant as it seems. Curson and Ervin aren't quite as bad as Marcello makes out - the former's hummingbird trumpet flurries are really rather nice - but Dolphy, in the midst of an already loose structure held together by the rhythm section, getting increasingly agitated and aggressive as it goes on, knocks them into an amorphous cocked hat, the other horns scaling riffs in the background as he stabs the air with lusty honks and screeches, a vertiginous explosion that eventually bursts out of its context, previewing the kind of full-register runs and abstract clucking noises that Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders will be making in 5 years' time. Mingus's shouts of "Woo!" as he enters the final moments, before dropping into Richmond's brief solo, are wholly justified. That, at about 10 minutes in, it suddenly dissolves into a cacophony of falling screeches, only to come back together into the central riff, is some testament not only to Mingus's tight organisation, but the stunning thinking of these players.

7. Golden Oaks Three Billion - 'Tequila Sunscraper' (from 'Weekend Picnic' CD-R)

I happened to see these gentlemen - a trio of Jefferson Starship, from local noise wrecking-crew Sunshine Republic, Alan James Read, boss of noise label Krayon Recordings, and bass clarinettist Jerome Richards - play an impromptu basement set a short while back, which ended with the latter smashing his instrument for no apparent reason. That performance was considerably harsher than this: a near-narcotic drift through the same warm, supernaturally bright territory as Emeralds, or Birchville Cat Motel's Gunpowder Temple of Heaven, dusted with snaky, insinuating trails of clarinet. Lovely.

8. Blackpepper - 'Vqarekk' (from 'Vqarekk / Colour/Color' 7")

It's excellent to see DirtyDemos so productive again, and nice to see new product from Jason Kerley, whose Blackpepper alias has so far had so little in the way of recorded evidence. This, the a-side from the new 7-inch, is a lithe and heady piece of decidedly non-pomo jungle that harks back to the rave-stabs and rhythmic convolutions of the first Rufige Kru 12"s, before mutating into first something briefly resembling LTJ Bukem, then equally briefly one of the more 8-bit-infected wonky artists. In short: CHOON.

9. Xela - 'In Misericordia' (from In Bocca Al Lupo)/Philip Jeck - 'Below' (from Stoke)

Horror music: the really malevolent thing is not what is there, but what isn't. 'In Misericordia', from one of last year's most criminally underrated albums (alongside Burial Hex's similarly spooky Initiations) is the calm before the storm of closer 'Beatae Immortalitatis', whose tearing noise and explosive percussion are foreshadowed by the soundcloud that smothers this song, manifesting the low-level unease that dominates the album, buzzing like a hornet swarm enclosing your head. 'Below' translates the dark, ancient grain of In Bocca Al Lupo into mechanical parataxis: the Freudian slip in the turntable, the fatal compulsion-repetition, the crackle and drag of memory painfully audible in the static, the increasing degradation of the sitar sample at its centre, disrupted by what sounds like automated scratching.

10. Skullflower - 'Drenched In Moonsblood (Waxing Gibbous)' (from Malediction)

The seventh trumpet
sounding the depths of black fog.
(Not a "prose poem".)

What Keeps Mankind Alive

"I am left alone
With no echoes to the amen
I dreamed of. I am saved by music
From the emptiness of this place
Of despair. As the melody rises
From nothing, their mouths take up the tune,
And the roof listens. I call on God
In the after silence".
-R.S. Thomas, 'Service'

Ten Songs No. 3

In case you haven't guessed by now, this is a weekly feature. A kind of personal Top 10 for the week, although the ranking doesn't necessarily imply relative value judgements.

1. Sunn 0))) - 'Alice' (from Monoliths And Dimensions)

"A gentle collapsing" - Talking Heads, 'The Overload'

2. Robyn - 'With Every Heartbeat' (live at The Wiltern, Los Angeles, from Robyn Live In LA)

Before you ask: yes, I am the archetypal sad bachelor - threadbare dressing gown, glass of whisky, thick glasses, the cat sleeping on yesterday's newspaper beside me, getting vicarious pleasure out of the young, successful and glamourous, whilst pretending to be a pop-culture connoiseur. So, on Thursday evening I was watching this live recording of Robyn on VH1. Her live set-up was excellent: basically The Moritz von Oswald Trio, but better, her tiny frame squashed into a black bodysuit beneath a black cloak, set against that slash of peroxide hair, kohl-black eyes set in delicate Swedish skin (OK, that just sounds creepy...) And this was the penultimate song before the encore. And and and and... and I maintain that this song is to the latter half of the 00s what 'Can't Get You Out of My Head' is to the first half. It may well be what this decade is remembered for. She's stood at the mike, centre-stage, and that kick pattern starts, and after a minute, two minutes maybe, the arpeggios start layering. The syllables, breath and colour plastered between the breaks in the beats, an incantation with the twinge of fragility tugging in the vocalese stretchings of each word, that you can see her straining to make ("We can make it bet-ter some tiiiiii-ime", and you know that time will never come), its humanity articulated in the first-love thud of synthetic percussion (one of her besuited backers came up behind her and started playing what may as well have been Linn syn-drums, bringing to mind some other culprits we know). And then, the moment that everything drops out, and the clear sky fills with the technicolour contrails of disco-strings, shamelessly and acrobatically dipping and swelling, and the vocal comes back between showers of synth: "And - it - hurts - with - ev-e-ry - heart-beat", Robyn hands-on-chest pumping in time as the kick comes back in, and and and and and and. And life, for 5 minutes, will never cease, and the light will never go out.

3. Mike Westbrook Concert Band - 'Marching Song' (from Marching Song Vol. 1 & 2)

You don't need me to tell you.

4. Beyonce - 'Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)' (from I Am... Sasha Fierce)

This is what I miss out on by not listening to the radio. More fool me. Talk about auto-theorising pop: the video shows Ms. Knowles engaging in dance-moves more cyborgian, more body-negating, than anyone since Grace Jones; the bizarre electronic gauntlet-thing she's wearing by the end of it - which, according to Zone Styx Travelcard is, in a marvellous piece of circuitous (ha!) coincidence, a homage to Michael Jackson before-the-fact - I at first mistook as a robot arm. (The video for the last single, 'Sweet Dreams', pulls in (unconscious?) references to Metropolis and Helmut Newton. I mean, really...) Rather like the last 50 Cent song I heard (yes, I am that far behind things), the production is light year's ahead of the sentiment (I'm unsurprised to find that the same team was responsible for Rihanna's 'Umbrella'): electro's arcade-game myth-science telescoped into the 21C., a hail of bleeps over relentlessly staccato clicks, the chorus joined by what sounds like a cyborg crunking. Needless to say, I've got it on repeat right this second.

5. Gowns - 'Mercy Springs' (from Red State)

After being reminded by a facebook status by F. the other day, I listened to Red State on the way to Brownsea Island. It was chilly as we started crossing Poole Harbour, but the sun picked up as we came in. There were cormorants perched on harbour markers and the rocks by the east end of the island, spreading their wings to look like revenants from prehistory. And, long after the blurred illumination of 'White Like Heaven', this springs into ear-view with pitch-black oscillator rumbles and the half-heard voices for four minutes. The bad-trip atmosphere turns deadly, slashing guitar and drums exploding from the swamp, ending with a coda of electromagnetic ghost-voices that sound like a premature end: "Take all shine out of me".

6. The xx - 'Crystallised' (from xx)

I approach this with caution because, in case you didn't already know, this kind of subtlety often passes me by. Mild dyspraxia (and hence autistic-spectrum status) and years of isolation during that period when you're supposed to, uh, 'grow up' mean that I'm mostly emotionally illiterate when it comes to pop. If it doesn't have loud or weird noises, my attention begins to drift. Hence why I so much admire the likes of Lauren Strain or Petra Davis, who's written on the group, who are able to articulate shades and colour where avant-blockheads like me see monolithic black, or whatever. So sue me if the first thing I thought when I heard this was: Young Marble Giants. That is, if they had grown up on post-Timbaland R&B. There's such a quiet pull to the song, even down to the way they use samples of minimal, ticking percussion instead of real drums. As with YMG, it's almost as if they're challenging us to think them dull - slightly more self-conscious than YMG's quality of sounding like an overheard private conversation; there's a slithering obliquity to it that suggests emotional states more complex, more interstitial than their voices suggest, complicated again by the understated confidence of the backing, its layers perfectly pleated together - a world where everything hovers on the brink of resolution. "Go-o-o slow."

7. Pulp - 'Babies' (from Intro)

Alternative blogosphere orthodoxy states this is one of the ones you're not supposed to like - too indie-ish, no acid/techno influence (although the bloops dotting the track like paint-flecks on a Jackson Pollock canvas, and the rising white-light synth on the chorus and the ends of the verses owes some allegiance). But I can't say that I care: this is one of those perfect moments of pop alchemy when everything falls into place just so, the push-and-pull of sex so perfectly mapped by Cocker's lyrics (and not just the lyrics, even down to the meaningless "My God!", "Alright!" and "Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah!"), the obsessive interest, the power of teenage carnality balanced against the distance of retrospection (something that will crop up again in 'Disco 2000'), the stench of 70s interiors, the smallness and sordidness of it all against the melodrama of Cocker's delivery (cf. the ice-cold provincial cabaret lothario of 'Razzmatazz'). And all this buttressed by the interlocking architecture of the track, the bass propping up strata of electricity from Candida Doyle's synths (cf. Stereolab's 'Wow and Flutter'), the irresistible pull of that guitar...

8. Wolves In The Throne Room - 'Ahrimanic Trance' (from Black Cascade)

From the Pacific north-west's finest practitioners of ecological black metal, the point where their landslide noise becomes both most punishing and most ghostly. For the first half, the guitars deliver a relentless mid-range scree (they're remarkably robust for black-metallers - no under-nourished Norwegian lo-fi screech for them), Nathan Weaver's contorted screech sounding like a man emptying out his organs. Then, they stop, crack and buckle into a mist-filled ambient interlude, before rudely dropping you into an even more harsh environment. When that in turn tails out into an extended outro of spectral distortion, hi-hats picked out in the fog, closer to the breakdown of Sonic Youth's 'The Sprawl', you know you're in special territory.

9. De La Soul - 'Me Myself and I' (from 3 Feet High and Rising)

The lapses into naivety ('Tread Water', schoolyard tales like 'Jenifa Taught Me') are more than excused by the wonderful concatenations of samples, the bouncing, overbright architectures of the backings, the primal joy in wordplay, the absurdist pleasure of the between-song skits (you can really tell how young they were when this was recorded). Particularly, here, it's the squiggling earworm of a synth and the cut-up 'ahahahahahaaaaa' on the chorus, essentially breeding wonky 20 years before the fact, creating everything gangsta should have been (note the p-funk/Ohio Players quality of the synths, later re-deployed on Dr. Dre's first solo productions), already passing the mid-80s future the mid-90s boom-bap revivalists wanted to preserve.

10. Robert Wyatt - 'N.I.O. (New Information Order)' (from Dondestan (Revisited))

I'm still not sure I agree with Jon Dale about Robert Wyatt's 'solo solo' records. They feel curious in comparison to the group works: more 'serious', slightly austere, in some cases ('Worship') oblique to the point of attention-drift on my part; there's a bare, what-you-see-is-what-you-get quality to them. (Am I wrong in attributing this to the post-punk effect - demystification, the interrogation of the audience-performer, the flat absurdism of Art & Language? It was certainly in the air when Wyatt recorded the singles that made up Nothing Can Stop Us, and the ex-punks recognised Wyatt as one of their own...) Rock Bottom and Shleep - even the at-times-terrifying Comicopera - still feel more comforting, more profound. Nonetheless, there's something very poignant about the jaundiced sarcasm of this song, not least because of the delivery - the electronically-stretched "freeeeeee" in the middle, the sadness of his voice muted from the likes of 'Sea Song', over splashy cymbals and hovering organ, the bass a malevolent presence in the background. This morning, as I was walking by the sea-front, there was a wargames demonstration going on out in Poole Harbour, as part of the Bournemouth airshow, faux-marines skidding around in dinghies, larger ships looming further out, towards the site of the eventual surf-reef. It was perhaps the most absurd thing I've seen all summer, scarily banal. "Save a bomb on Union flags./Privatise/the sea/Privatise/the wind."

Events

2nd Birthday and Ishihara present:

Sideshow Showroom

Friday 21st-Saturday 22nd August, at the old car showroom next to the Winchester, Poole Hill, Bournemouth.

12 noon-6pm:

Art by Roy Brown | Laura Burchett | Anna Chrystal | Liam Diaper | Fordvogeltechnik Research Laboratory | Harriet Fleuriot | Paul Hartley | Liam Herne | Jake Hitchens | Paul Hurley | ishihara | Jason Kerley | Bill Leslie | Adam Lewis – Jacob | Melinda McCheyne | Peter Morphew | Sebastian Pape / Dave Walker | Andrew Stacey | Jane White / Amanda Byrom | Max Galbraith | Jake Hitchens

Friday, 8pm till late:

Max Pashm
Yarrd!
The Holy Roman Empire
Little Boat
No Context
Colours
DJs: DJ Reebok Pump, Sheep in Wolves Clothing, Planar

Saturday, 8pm till late:

Dr. Meaker
Kayaking
One Man Destruction Show
Kertz
Blackpepper
DJs: Dj Ibiza Sunrise and Dj Ayia Napa STD, Planar

£5 entry both nights

***

Club Anemone presents:

WHALEBONE POLLY
ROZI PLAIN
DIRECTORSOUND
THE POWDERED COWS & THE TOY THROAT ALARM CLOCK

Tuesday 8th September, 7.30-11.00
The IBar, Bournemouth
£5/£3 NUS entry

***

Krayon Recordings presents:

Skitanja
Infinite Light
Serfs
Vanessa Feltch
Awake
Turtledoves

Sunday September 20, doors 6pm
The Winchester, Poole Hill, Bournemouth
£5 entry

Ten Songs No. 2

1. Burial - 'Etched Headplate' (from Untrue)

A conversation with T. the other week reminded me that I still hadn't heard the second Burial album. Of course, anyone in the least still interested in crackling melancholy as opposed to toxic-technicolor synths is outmoded, dead, living-in-the-past. Apparently. There's much less of a sense of science-fiction desolation than on the first album, now flooded by a real, familial grief - when the sample at the beginning mentions "hardcore", it's very different from the "ancient ways, the old skool ways" on Burial's 'Gutted'; "he's not setting out to hurt people. He's got a lot of love in him". Now, even the streaks of voice from 'Archangel' have devolved into blurs, high feminine syllables like gas escaping over barely-there tinkles of percussion, pulverised by what would be hoover bass if it weren't so amorphous, erected like walls to either side of the main track. It's impossible to tell whether, on the chorus, the voice is saying "I can't take any more of this life", or "your life" - the object of desire indistinguishable from the subject, sound and body smashed by a desire unfulfilable in a world as cold as this.

2. Tricky - 'Aftermath' (from Maxinquaye)

"It is the LP's pivot in more ways than one, in which all voices become equal in the endless replay/relay of the technological ether; in which anything can come back to haunt you, in which anything can become haunted. Just as Voodoo redeploys harmless images of Catholic saints, so Tricky plus Martika [sic] plus Mark Stewart use a David Cassidy lyric, no less, to essay ontological uncertainty: 'How can I be sure? In a world... that's constantly changing?'... 'Let me tell you about my mother'... 'Ghosts'... Replicants? Electricity has made us all angels. Technology (from psychoanalysis to surveillance) has made us all ghosts. The replicant ("Your eyes resemble mine...") is a speaking void. The scary thing about "Aftermath" is that it suggests that nowadays, We All Are. Speaking voids, made up only of scraps and citations... contaminated by other people's memories... adrift..." - Ian Penman.

3. Public Enemy - 'Night of the Living Baseheads' (from It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back)

One of my favourite memories is of the one time I DJed, back in the days when I actually had friends in Bournemouth, and dropping this. The percussion and piercing sax loops, occasionally cutting out into torrents of scratched voice-fragments and crackly samples, are as beautifully and intricately sculpted as any symphony; indeed, it exceeds and rejects standards of 'musicality', a vector to another and wholly stranger realm of sensation.

4. Frank Wright - 'One For John/China, Part 2' (from JazzActuel, disc 2)

Thurston Moore and Byron Coley may not be able to write for shit, but they know a good record when they hear it, damn them. One of the best songs on a fine boxset, a firestorm of sound from Muhammad Ali's torrential drums and Bobby Few's piano, both of which have ceased, by this point, to be anything even vaguely resembling rhythm instruments, and become sound-sources and massive timbre-generators in their own right. Wright and Noah Howard on the horns recreate the Trane 'n' Pharoah double act with stunning aplomb.

5. Kate Bush - 'All The Love' (from The Dreaming)

You know, I'm still pissed off at Michael Bracewell describing Kate as "pop's equivalent of the mad girl in the attic" exuding "a mixture of mawkish sentimentality and ultimately seductive melodrama" in England Is Mine. Patronising much? (Then again, Lord alone knows why he's allowed to write about music - all his other descriptions in EiM are dull, and his Wire review of the Joy Division reissues two years ago managed to make even them sound unexciting.) This is from one of the albums Bracewell passes over in silence, presumably because it's too 'eccentric' for his delicate taste. The verses are as strange and delicate as an exotic spider's web, Bush's voice, a fragmented whisper, weaving a Gothic monologue ("The first time I died/Was in the arms of good friends of mine") among empty spaces dotted with a choirboy's eerie ululations, piano and radio crackle that anticipates the Burroughsian disco of 'Waking the Witch' three years later.

6. Tony Oxley Quintet - 'Stone Garden' (from The Baptised Traveller)

First, a rhetorical question: WHY IS THIS OUT-OF-PRINT, AND NOT AVAILABLE THROUGH SHARING BLOGS? No doubt it's available on some torrent somewhere, but I always feel vaguely ill when using those things, so this is the only song I have from this album (via the always excellent Destination:Out). It's still indisputably wonderful, though: a combination of the most exciting edge-of-the-seat powers of free-improv, from a line-up containing most of its luminaries (Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, Oxley), and the tenderness and melodic capability of the best of British jazz (Kenny Wheeler, who'd later help to define the ECM sound, contributes some extremely sharp and malleable flugelhorn). Such a beautiful sense of space, texture and motion.

7. Scatter - 'She Moves Through The Fair' (from The Mountain Announces)

"Scatter’s version of ‘She Moves Through The Fair’ and Directing Hand’s of ‘Lowlands’, both songs of death, haunted by the ghosts of the loved, are heartbreaking, as mysteriously sad and resonant as the photograph in Ted Hughes 'Six Dead Men'; ‘She Moved…’ is savage in its building intensity, Finnish expat Hanna Tuulikki attacking the lyrics like an ecstatic text, chomping words into ululating syllables, Neilson’s free percussion erupting all around as massed stringed instruments build a laminate wall of noise... the ghosts of the past reiterating in the future of avant-garde art bleeding back into the present."

8. C. Spencer Yeh/Ryan Jewell/Jon Lorenz - 'Untitled' (from Krayon 7" 'Live At the CAC 7.21.08')

Seeing as Krayon haven't labelled the two sides of this single, you're never quite sure which you'll get before you drop the needle. Which is actually rather marvellous - a simple aleatoric tactic worthy of Cage. One side, though, is distinguishable by a thin band of denser grooves near the centre. What it represents, after several minutes of menacing insectoid scrape and chatter, is a minute-long blow-out that, if like me you've been turning the volume up in order to hear more closely, will pierce you through the skull.

9. John Coltrane - 'Love/Consequences/Serenity' (from Meditations)

Well, after Rashied Ali's death, I had to listen to it again - the only studio recording made by the sextet line-up, including Pharoah Sanders, before the departure of McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones, who objected to having to play above the young firebrand percussionist. In contrast to the relentless assault of the first side, it moves from a pleasant Jimmy Garrison bass solo to Trane picking up the melody, so intimately played you'd think the sax was right up against your ear. And, gradually, the luxurious draperies of piano and minor percussion gestures build up behind him as the horn grows sharper and more piquant. The perfect structural support of Jones and the almost textural approach of Ali offset each other as Sanders joins in with Trane's almost effeminate flutters of breath and the song builds into a rave-up of stunning proportions. (Also recommended is Interstellar Space, the last full studio recording made by Trane, a decidedly astringent duo album with Ali.)

10. AMM - 'Metamorphic' (from The Nameless Uncarved Block)

I think is the one I was listening when this gestated. The strange, groaning emptiness of its soundworld certainly made the isolation of Warwick seem more bearable at the time: clouds of metallic colour, steel and verdigris; the sudden rattling bursts of Eddie Prevost's snares and Keith Rowe's alien howl, the perfect touch of John Tilbury. It all seemed to hold together with the rightness of organic sound. It was hard to believe the outside world shouldn't sound like it. ("The music's different here, the vibrations are different. Not like Planet Earth. Planet Earth's the sound of guns, anger, frustration. There was no-one to talk to on Planet Earth." - Sun Ra.)