it happens for a reason

2006-11-10T03:27:00.000-08:00

LISTENING SINCE PREVIOUS POST:

ROLL DEEP RINSE SET
WILEY- 'TUNNEL VISION VOL.2'
RUFF SQWAD- 'GUNS N ROSES VOL.2'
KOMPAKT- 'POP AMBIENT 2007'
KOMPAKT- 'TOTAL 7'
PLUS DEVICE- 'PUNCTURE'

i realised today that i have never, to my knowledge, heard The Kooks, and i felt oddly proud of myself.

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can anyone confirm my suspicion that the 'mystery producer' behind Plus Device is Jimmy Edgar? it sounds like him, but better, and i'm pretty sure that he played some of the tracks off the recent plus device album at the Glade this summer, although obviously those memories are pretty hazey...
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only really posh men can wear pink trousers and make it look like a deeply conservative choice.

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2006-11-07T13:04:00.000-08:00

LISTENING TODAY:

COBBLESTONE JAZZ- 'INDIA IN ME'
WILEY- 'TUNNEL VISION VOL.2'
MOBB DEEP- 'THE INFAMOUS'
RICHARD HAWLEY- 'COLES CORNER'
JUNIOR BOYS- 'SO THIS IS GOOD BYE'

last night a DJ wore a cravat. it was superpitcher, of course. the dandy's dandy. he looks a bit like i would if i really amped up the innate foppishness that i've been blessed/cursed with.
superpitcher and michael mayer took their 'supermayer' show on the road, doing some back to back business at London's T-bar, which is fast approaching legendary status, on account of it somehow managing to put on the biggest and best names out there (villalobos, ivan smagghe, luciano, dj koze etc) for free.
and the cavenous air conditioning system on the ceiling rattles along with the bass, which is kinda cool.

superpitcher was in an uber-oblique mood when we arrived, playing some of the most abstract techno i've heard- it sounded a bit like a CD player spewing out tiny bits of soft kompakt fluffiness at random. which i don't think it was. i think superpitcher's actually gone out and bought these crazy tunes. good man, although there was no way on earth that we could dance to it. after a while of all that enjoyable nonsense, michael mayer, the older head, sidled up to the decks to commence the back-to-back selection- after this,. superpitcher started to play nice, still plowing a more minimal, awkward furrow than Mayer, but boshing it out happily.

i've seen michael mayer DJ three times now, and this was the first time that i got my head round what he actually does when playing out. i'd always expected him to be nice and dreamy and kompakty. melancholic, misty cosiness for immer and all that. but he's really not at all like that as a club DJ. he just blows yr head off instead. stomping, lairy techno that i half-want to call 'funktional', but then that neologism just makes me feel a little bit ill. he played audion's 'mouth to mouth' (course he did), and sliced us up into little pieces with it, smashing the buzz that burns through the track into screaming noise. in fact, he played so much stuff that sounded and felt like 'mouth to mouth' that a good half hour of the night was spent with me on tenterhooks going, 'this is...this is...!', and then quickly realising that it wan't s audion time quite yet. still, that mouth to mouth sound seems to be the big one at the moment- a knobbly, wacca-wacca bassline and huge sheets of distortion creating vast spaces of gritted teeth, white-heat bliss/pain.

waiting for a night bus after leaving T-bar we wer approached by a homeless man who asked for money by doing some truly excellent deejaying. in a just world, he'd be a star to thousands. our night bus came, and we left without giving him any money, something i've felt guilty about all day.

2006-11-05T12:19:00.000-08:00

LISTENING TODAY:

WU TANG- 'THE W'
ROLL DEEP SEPTEMBER RINSE FM SET AFTER HEADS-UP FROM GUM DROPS.
DIPLOMATS- 'DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY 2'
CHAMILLIONAIRE- 'THE SOUND OF REVENGE'
DOZENS OF BASTARD FIREWORKS LET OFF BY PEOPLE WHO CLEARLY DON'T OWN CATS.
AND, ER, MOZART- 'REQUEIM'
AND ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ELSE (WHAT DO YOU THINK I AM, SOME SORT OF PRICK?)

ok, lets gets started. (i'm anticipating that this post will be a steller example of why you should never 'blog' when yr drunk, by the way. so be warned and be told...)

funny thing about me is i never sleep, cuz sleep is the cousin of death. this means i find fabric birthdays a remarkably easy thing to deal with. walk in the park, dear. it was fabric's 7th birthday the other week, and i went for the saturday with rave-ally #1 jack savidge of friendly fires fame.
it was a long shift. 10 pm start, and we left at 8.30 a.m sunday morning cuz i needed to close my eyes for a long while (that thing about not needing sleep was a lie, although i believe that something along those lines is true of Mr Kelis...)
deeply scary thing about it was that it was going on for 6 MORE HOURS when we left. i think if you were brave enough to hang around till chucking out time (2 in the afternoon), i'm guessing you would have seen a little collapse of western civilisation. if there's cctv in there, pity the poor bastard who has to see it every week. he's probably a serial killer or something by now. so, actually, don't pity him. sick fuck.

when me and jack were hanging round outside in the morning, shielding our eyes from the blinding sunlight and the minicab hustlers, a totally fucked guy stumbled out, his eyes just massive dark rings, his shirt clinging to his body, drenched in sweat. he dropped a huge bag of crack on the floor. classy. (then he picked it up, by the way, luckily. or is, 'luckily' appropriate there?)

anyway, all these craaaazy 'rock n roll' anecdotes have a point, of sorts. which is that i was at fabric for so long that i pretty much haven't listening to music since, until the last few days at least. i was sated, y'see.
best bits? the fact that fabric, for some reason, wasn't full to the brim, and had a lower than usual quota of shirt-off lads on the piss and the pull. the fact that the atmosphere in there was really celebratory (everyone loves a birthday, eh?). the fact that andrew weatherall played Hot Chip and the crowd went mental. that i heard audion's 'mouth to mouth' for the first time (i know, i know, i've been slow on the uptake on this one...what an amazing track. when those buzz-lines start to rise to the ceiling it's shock and awe on the dancefloor. complete sensory overload). oh, and lindstrom melting space-disco into goo and stringing our happy, swaying bodies along for the ride.

but, really, the night belonged to ricky v, this time with SPARKLY minimal scarf. he's such a fitty. honestly, on my mum's teeth, this was the best DJ set i've ever seen. i've seen villalobos twice before and never really been close to being blown away, but this was next level. didn't know any of the tracks he played, of course, but for the time i was there anyway, it was very, very intricate minimal techno, eschewing melody for detail upon detail, warp upon weft (!), of shivery clicks and burrs. totally absorbing, and the most beautifully paced, lovingly crafted set, the fabric soundsytem picking out ever little sound with icey clarity. he pulleda bit of special stuff out for the birthday, i think.

it reached this wonderful place where, despite (or because?) it was the some of the most physical, hard, uncompromising techno this side of Surgeon, it was also weirdly relaxing, an almost ambient bath of rippling sound. gorgeous. before, i'd always preferred villalobos sets when they moved in a more housey, maximal direction, but now i'm won over to his hypnotic ultra-minimal excursions. he really is the best out there, as far i can see...
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'the elvis for kids who don't give a shit about elvis': my younger brother on johnny thunders. read his blog here. (it's well better than this one)

2006-10-17T03:24:00.000-07:00

LISTENING TODAY:
WILEY- 'BASTARD'
ROLL DEEP- 'PICK YRSELF UP
ROLL DEEP- 'REMEMBER THE DAYS'

it's funny how although i don't listen to half as much grime as i did, there are still some times when i need certain lyrics, and i need to go back to it.

"WHEN AM I GONNA LEARN,
MAKING MISTAKES ENDLESS TIMES,
...MY ONLY EXCUSE IS THAT I AM A BASTARD"

"I DON'T KNOW WHY I DO IT TO MYSELF"

"BEFORE NONE OF THIS SEEMED POSSIBLE,
EVERYTHING WAS IMPOSSIBLE...
I WANT TO LIVE IN A PLACE WHERE NO ONE WILL FIND ME"

sometimes that feels right.
'bastard' is an old wiley track, from 2003 or 2004 i think. it was on the lord of the decks dvd. dooggz introduces him as , 'kylie cat'. it's a very odd production, a chicken scratch guitar and halting, stuttering rhythm that sounds cheap and brilliant. i dunno who produced it- i think woebot told me once, but i forgot.

when you hear these old wiley tracks, you can hear he sounds a little like doogz: the influence coming across despite their mutual hatred at that point. in 2005 he sounded a bit like trim. nowadays, he sounds a little like skepta. his voice is not only his voice. his voice is a record of a time in the scene.
wiley IS grime, in so many ways...

2006-10-04T11:42:00.000-07:00

LISTENING FOR THE PAST FEW DAYS:

Ø- 'METRI'
LUCIANO- 'SCI FI HI FI VOL. 2'
JOANNA NEWSOM- 'YS'
CASSY- 'PANORAMA BAR MIX'
V/A- 'MOBILEE RECORDS BACK TO BACK COMP.'
MYMY- 'SONGS FOR THE GENTLE'
LOADS OF OLD GRIME
XIU XIU- 'THE AIR FORCE'
OOIOO- 'TAIGA'
I-F 'MIXED UP AT THE HAGUE 1'
STEVE REICH- 'DANCE TO MUSIC' @ THE BARBICAN.

so it's been two weeks, and now (finally?) the silence is broken. much like, i seem to remember from school singsongs, the morning. i've been in a weird kind of writers-block state. actually, that a sounds way too pretentious thing to say about it. often, here seems to be a place for pretty much aimless rambling, and i'm not sure that such babbling can get 'blocked', in the sense that the 'creative' juices just aren't flowing. (incidentally, whenever i hear/read the phrase 'creative juices' i feel a little but nauseous, so apologies...).
better to say, then, that for the past few weeks whenever i've thought about writing on here for some odd reason i've felt a feeling of dread and discomfort, so i thought i'd fuck it off for the day. and days turn into weeks.

so this is me trying to feel my way back in...bear with me here, it might take me a while to get my sea-legs again. in fact, may be just skim read the whole thing, and if it looks a bit rubbish, well, it probably is...check back in a few days when i'll (hopefully) be up to speed.

anyway...let the practice hours begin!
the list above is a little misleading, perhaps. although i've been listening to odds and ends of all sorts of various bits and bobs, the main focus for the past few weeks has been minimal techno. i don't know what it is, but right now all i want is a bleep and a beat. a funny thing has happened in me. before, i used to LOVE the really slinky, pretty, delicate kind of minimal...y'know, luciano productions, a bit of perlon, alex under, mobilee stuff. and i used to enjoy getting lost in the folds and weaves of the really convoluted, busy stuff...eulberg, villalobos, wighnomy bros. and of course it was fun to bosh away to the full-on stuff- hi, audion. but, for all that, i couldn't get my head around the ultra minimal stuff...the de9 stuff, luciano's 'sci fi hi fi' mix. it seemed that was where minimal techno fell into a ditch of dryness. yuck.
but i listened, and i listened, cuz i'm a stubborn idiot like that who doesn't like people 'getting' stuff when he doesn't...and then, one day, all of a sudden, it fell in to place.

i was running. i always run to music. running without music is masochism, plain and simple. the luciano mix was on my mp3 player, wheeling through the motion...and then the beauty of these pure forms hit me. this is music that isn't 'about' anything at all anymore. there's no emotion, there's no stabs at prettiness, there's no representation. instead, it's modrian-music, just simple, pure forms intersecting in their right ways, and that's all.

i remember a few years back, reading the liner notes to matthew dear's 'leave luck to heaven' album, where he says something like, 'thanks to everybody involved in this music that means so much to us'. and i remember wondering at the time how this music could mean so much to anyone. sure, it was interesting, and enjoyable in places, but who could fall in love with all these clicks and clacks?

well now i think you can. i think it's all about thinking...at it's best, minimal techno sounds like thought processes, like nerve synapses crackling away. i've forgotten way too much of my kantian aesthetics, but doesn't he say something like recognition of beauty is down to how some objects stimulate the 'free play' of the understanding? as much as i understand that, it might be that something of that kind is going on here, with me and minimal techno: music that is absorbing just for this fascination with these elegant solutions, the mathematical harmony.

all of which makes writing about it difficult. how to convey this pleasure that's so far removed from the typical forms of enjoyment in pop music- excitement, e happiness, comforting melancholy...emotion.

i dunno. perhaps that's where the writer's block comes in. but i do love this music. music that is as natural as breathing, that ticks over as you tick over, that can easily permeate yr life if you've got an mp3 player and you let it, providing a pattern of impeccably arranged bleeps and beats to frame yr everyday.

at relatively low volumes, this is, perhaps, truly ambient music: sounds which fall into the background, but structure how you perceive the foreground. minimal techno is often both in stasis, and constantly moving: it changes all the time, but never really changes, it's always moving forward, but it never gets to where its going.

may be i just like circles. but this moving-not-moving means that there'a great deal of 'space' in listening to it- gaps to be filled by your own life, without the music intruding. so i guess ther's two sides to it- on the one hand, minimal can become utterly absorbing, even- as philip sherburne wrote recently- trancelike: you can lose yourself in it. on the other hand, it can lose itself in you, a steady, always-there pulse that seems so right. either way, it's got hold of me now, and isn't letting go...

2006-09-20T03:46:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:

MOBILEE RECORDS- 'BACK TO BACK' COMP.
LUCIANO- 'SCI FI HI FI VOL.2'
JOANNA NEWSOM- 'YS'
HOT CLUB DE PARIS- 'EVERYEVERYTHING'
SOME RUSSIAN FOLK BAND
JOHNNY CASH- 'LIVE AT SAN QUENTIN'
MICHAEL MAYER- 'IMMER 2'
BLOOD ON THE WALL- 'AWESOMER'
MYMY- 'SONGS FOR THE GENTLE'
WILEY- 'TUNNEL VISION VOL.1'
UNKNOWN RINSE FM GRIME DJ
LOCO DICE- 'SEEING THROUGH SHADOWS'
JUNIOR BOYS- 'SO THIS IS GOODBYE'
DAVEY BOY- 'DISCO BASSLINES'

i picked up this 'disco basslines' compilation as part of a little bit of 'research' in the 'bassline house' scene. as far as i can work out, bassline house is mainly a sheffield/north midlands scene, and a recent-ish mutation on speed garage. from the davey boy mix (all 3 CDs of it!), it sounds like what would happen if kids into speed garage got massively into pills. which is probably what did happen. it's odd to hear those skippy beats, those soul diva wails and those elastic basslines with all their associations- glossy sexiness, urban glamour and 'older raver' sophication on the one hand, attitude and creeping bad vibes on the other- wriggling and slinking underneath some of the most day-glo rave stabs outside a Bonkers mix...massive piano loops, rrrrrrrushing organs, the whole bit.

so speed garage has donned the white gloves. sounds brilliant, right? and you know, it kind of is. it's some of the most blatanty, unashamedly ecstatic and druggy music. in places it's a REALLY rudimentary, just a massive kick with some old bashed out piano vamp on top, and the lack of texture, or dirt and warmth behind the digital fingernails, sets it apart from the fibrous goo + glitter of early ardkore: there's really no subtlety whatsoever here. but that's all part of the charm.

so from the evidence of 'disco basslines', bassline house seems like a massive load of fun. but it also seems like a quite fascinating scene- a new kink in the hardcore continuum, a bastion of traditional rave values that has kept its ties to urban, black, american dance music (unlike, say, happy hardcore or hard-style). there's apparently two main types of Bassline house- 'warpy' and 'organ'. so i'm going to try and work that lot out- i'll get back to you!

2006-09-14T14:46:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:

JOANNA NEWSON- 'YS'
WILEY- 'TUNNEL VISION VOL.1'
WILEY AND J5- RINSE FM SET
OOIOO- 'TAIGA'

so wiley has snapped me out of my 'Ys' reveries. this evening i was listening to Ys in the supermarket and it was so nice to wander around the brightly coloured aisles to those songs i ended up spending way more time there than i needed to. weird, huh. oh, how...kooky. talking of which, Little Miss Sunshine is alright, but really all these vaguely alternative american family comedies -hello, You, Me and Everyone we know, hello the squid and the whale- are getting a bit boring, no? and worringly like the cinematic equivalent of The Big Chill.

anyway, i was snapped out of this drifting round the streets to the sounds of harps palaver. news that wiley's tunnel vision was now available for download on his myspace space came, BUT at the same time i got an e-mail from kompakt saying that the follow-up to Michael Mayer's MIGHTY 'Immer' mix was now available to download on the kompakt press site. The original Immer is often called the greatest, mos perfect, techno mix of all time, and deservedly so. i've got a pretty shit computer, getting shitter by the day, buried under viruses. so it takes me ages to download stuff...and so...THE CRISIS OF CHOICE! what to download tonight, immer 2 or tunniel vision 1?

i went for wileykat. first impressions can be unreliable things, but first up this sounds like perhaps the best full length CD to come out of grime. wiley sounds angry and urgent and the beats are nicely cohesive, all sparse and clanging. it's not pretty, but may be it's best to leave all that to ruff sqwad. instead, Tunnel Vision is all focus, focus, focus like only wiley can really do. oddly, the intensity of grime pirate shows hardly ever comes across on mixtapes- too often, MCs sound distracted, flitting between hip hop and grime. but on Tunnel Vision, wiley keeps things simple and it's all the better for it: it's not too different to a wiley pirate show, although it's a lot more polished, obviously, and there's no shouted phone numbers! only downeer of the CD for me is the pay as u go track, and that's only because it's so good that it makes me miss those days.

2006-09-11T13:14:00.000-07:00

LISTENING FOR THE PAST WEEK:

JOANNA NEWSOM- 'YS'
LUCIANO LIVE SET FROM 10 DAYS OFF
EWAN PEARSON- 'DECEMBER MIX'
KOMPAKT- 'TOTAL 7'
DC RECORDINGS- 'DEATH BEFORE DISTEMPER'

for the past week i've mainly been in italy, with no internet access but lots of coffee. i was 'working', such as it is, and in periods like that, away from home with no stereo and no radio, the mp3 player takes on a new meaning; a comfort blanket, a snap-shot of home, a cold-shower to wake you up for a new strange day, a musical coffee and cigarette with which to reflect back over the day's adventures, a friend for cramped and frazzling plane and coach journeys.

or at least that's what it'd be used for as of a few weeks ago, but now things are different. i got a copy of joanna newsom's 'ys'. and, a little bit of techno aside, that's pretty much i've been listening to. and with this record, it seems wrong, vulgar even, to use it anyway- as a comfort blanket or a cold shower or anything else. or, rather, it's impossible to think about it in such instrumental terms. it's an overwhelming set of songs, a record that grabs you and throws you right into the middle of it. listening to it on headphones is perfect.

if you heard her first album and didn't like it, well, that doesn't matter. neither did i. but this is something else. truly, when people look back on this decade in decades to come, i think this one of the albums that they'll pick out. in my less hyperbolic moments, i think it's as good as , and as important as, Spiderland and Loveless. in my more hyperbolic moments, i'm going for Pet Sounds and Selected Ambient Works.

there is so much here; 5 songs unfurling like ribbons making the most beautiful, most delicate sculpture. the harp sounds like a kaleidoscope. i think the strings might sound like the ordered chaos of passing traffic. her voice is a raw nerve-synapse crackle, like i always want bjork to be. and soulful: tear jerkingly, gigglingly, joyously soulful.

i find it hard to process this record. again, there's so much here. it's like the most complicated and most simple record you've ever heard. it's neither happy nor sad. or may be it's both. but it feels more like it's its own world, a totality.
i'll be writing more about this soon. i think a lot of people will.

2006-09-04T13:47:00.000-07:00

LISTENING TODAY:

JOANNA NEWSOM- 'YS'
SKATEBARD- 'MIDNIGHT MAGIC'
SKEPTA RINSE SET FROM LAST NIGHT
UNKNOWN DUBSTEP/GRIME DJ SET FROM RINSE LAST NIGHT (may be kode9?)
RUFF SQWAD RINSE SET FROM LAST NIGHT

have a good carnival, did you? i did- the only one i've really enjoyed truth be told. usually i just find it too much of stress and hassle to have fun, but this year we were sensible and didn't try to do the soundsystem-hopping thing. instead, we hung around sancho panza and wondered at the massive impact that really uncompromising minimal techno was making (people screaming out for the DJ to play some loco dice!) and then checked out some of the soca floats. tune of this year seemed be one that goes, 'looking for some nookie tonight'. it's well better than fred durst's riff on the same theme. there's also this really weird, crazy soca tune doing the rounds (check out 87.5 links fm- london's dedicated soca pirate station), that's all trancey and ravey. which is a good thing, obviously.

rapid's latest productions (as heard on the ruff sqwad show) are getting near to kompakt's old 'heroin-house' (only a few people ever called it that) in their restrained blissiness. whispers, sighs, basslines lolloping to heavenly nowheres- the whole bit. is this still grime anymore? dunno. but this doesn't tick any of the boxes that grime is 'meant' to; it's not angry, or discordant, or even bass-heavy. perhaps it's all the better for it.

listening to this, as well as the very 2-steppy new track ruff sqwad played, and skepta's own foray into warbly, cut up, hyper-feminised, glossy grime (as heard on his set last night), i'm starting to see that all my grime nay-saying of the past few months has been stupid and wrong. i was complaining about the sound stagnating, but people like ruff sqwad and skepta were somewhere else already. moving forwards, never backwards.

a quote from alec empire has always stuck with me; in the sleeve note's to The Destroyer, i think, he says that a true underground is impossible to define, because it's always changing- as soon as you pin it down, it's gone somewhere new. he says that's the greatest thing you can be involved in, and i can imagine that.
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but it's not all melodic grace, fresh like summer breezes, out there on the grime pirates. a dj before skepta and maximum's set was playing the other side of things- the increasingly prevalent grime-dubstep hybrid sound. with this, everything is murky and forbidding, a thundercloud that will never break. beats are reduced to to a queasy stagger, and the bass seems literally of the gutter or even below, sounding like something dredged up, unearthed, rolling around on the floor still caked in grime and cracked with dirt. perhaps i'm not making this sound fun, though? but it's actually really compelling to hear this stuff- the doominess and bleakness are kind of thrilling, in a weird way. and there's a kind of a elegance to it all, tht- in my weirdest moments- seems faintly regal or something.

great stuff anyway. sure it's not the early grime sound of target and jammer and danny weed, but i've come to terms with that now. those days are gone and it seems best just to throw yrself into those dark fugs that the pirates are currently belching out with an open heart.

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talking of grime-dubstep hybrid djing reminds me of the boy better know set i saw the other day. by any measure, it was a tough gig for them- at the new home of london's indie set (that's not a diss), The Luminaire, they were sandwiched between Dylan Nyoukis ( a guy does noise sets by micing up his mouth) and those neo-hippy tranced out folk, Gang Gang dance. (ignore me if i'm rude about GGD, by the way. it's mainly for reasons not related to their music and more related to how they treat lowly music writers. but still, i didn't think i had a ounce of punk rock in my soul until i saw GGD and couldn't help but thinking, however momentarily, 'fucking hippies'. someone described their vocals to me as 'earth mother wails', which made me giggle. still, I do actually really like their music).
maximum played grime-dubstep, bringing things to a boil with duppy (he's got that slimzee-ish thing of looking constantly both forlorn and pissed off down to a tee, by the way). tinchy strider wore massive and very black wrap-around shades and was good as ever. but the star was JME, without a doubt. i've never really been so much of a fan of his on record or on radio: he always seemed a bit too hectoring to me, you know? all that stuff about how he wasn't a dick head in maths and etc. but live, you realise that it's all done through this self-effacing smile. he's probably the most charming performer i've ever seen do a gig- totally engaging. chopping and changing rhythms to stay perfectly at one with the beat, laughing and joking with the audience on the way, he's a star, and the crowd loved it.

2006-08-26T08:27:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:

BLACK DICE- 'BEACHES AND CANYONS'
THE GOSSIP- 'STANDING IN THE WAY OF CONTROL'
EWAN PEARSON- 'DECEMBER MIX'
JOHN TEJADA- 'THE END OF IT ALL'
STEADYCAM- 'KIDNEY ISSUES
V/A -'KOMPAKT TOTAL 7'
MR OIZO- 'LAST NIGHT A DJ KILLED MY DOG'
JUNIOR BOYS- 'SO THIS IS GOODBYE'
GANG GANG DANCE- 'GOD'S MONEY'
NERVOUS RECORDS- 'ON THE UP '94' COMPILATION
V/A -'EYE OF THE TIGER VOL.1 MIXTAPE'
SLEW DEM CREW RINSE SET.
LUCIANO- 'LIVE AT 10 DAYS OFF' SET
GET LOADED, CLAPHAM COMMON

as i step out of my flat, the sound of 'get loaded', the corporate-festival shindig on clapham common is in the air. it sounds like a million people cheering to a drum solo, but i hope that's not what it is.
as i pass the site, which takes up most of the common, just about all i can see over the security fence are those massive inflatable pills on top of the ubiquitous Herbal High stall. those stalls really fuck me off. if yr going to do drugs, at least have the grace to do it properly.

most of clapham seems to be on a permanent gap year, and Get Loaded brings them out in force. they all look like wind surfers. or may be scuba divers. watersports enthusiasts, at any rate. they wear big shorts. very big shorts. and they have hair like adverts.
now i'm tired of misanthropy (it's boring innit). the bill actually looks great- hot club + the slits + the buzzcocks. but as i walk past i decide to drown it all out by listening to ewan pearson's 'december mix'. i love ewan pearson's mixes. he has a taste so scarily, exactly similar to my own when it comes to dancefloor music that i wonder if we would dance in exactly the same way?
i'm going to see him at Cross Central tonight, so i'll watch him like a fucking hawk, and will get back to you with the answer.
'december mix' is much more hardcore than most of ewan pearson's selections. there's no fucking around with this one- he dives straight into boing-boing techy electro, huge + distorted kick drums ruling the place. but he manages to keep it fun, and just pleasantly silly...it's garish, cartoonish music, rather than sternly monochrome bosh.
when i'm feeling kind tomorrow, i'll put up a link to an mp3 to this set.

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some one down the road from me chucked out loads of CDs the other day by leaving them on the wall outside their house for neighbours and friends to take. what a lovely idea. most of it was utter dross- Mail on Sunday 'drivetime classics'...that sort of thing. but their was a little piece of gold hidden away amongst it all- a Mr Oizo album, 'last night a DJ killed my dog'.

mr oizo doesn't get the love he deserves, i think, not even after wiley's best efforts to buck the critical trend with 'flat derek'. it's the old Levi's-curse, i guess. and even now, it's difficult not to listen to music without thinking, at the back of yr mind, 'stiltskin, STILTSKIN!!!', like some horrible smell that just won't go away and ruins it all.
but the guy's been producing some of the best, most innovative house music around. in fact, it's difficult to think of some one so weird, so fiercely avant-gardey in places, who's also so impeccably pop. 'flat beat' is surely one of the weirdest number 1's ever- the most broken and fucked of all anthemic basslines, wobbling around in the gutter. towards the end of 'last night a dj killed my dog', mr oizo explodes into merzbow-ish noise, and it works. beautifully.

another thing i like about mr oizo is the whimsy of it all. i was anti-whimsy for quite a long time, scarred, perhaps, by some of the IDM that i used to listen to a few years back, and the backlash against all that stuff once i got into proper rave. but now i think i've got sufficient distance and (smiles) maturity to deal with a little whimsy now again. i no longer feel i have to prove my credentials by listening to either unself-conscious dance music, or dance music that knows how serious a deal it all is.

2006-08-23T14:27:00.000-07:00

LISTENING TODAY:

STEADYCAM- 'DULL IN MINOR'/'KIDNEY ISSUES'
VILLALOBOS- 'ACH SO'

today i was given the key to the land of milk and honey, the city of god, and the promised land. as the gates opened i sighed, finally at peace, with all my dreams standing there before me.

but let us be serious. what happened is this: i got a password for the kompakt press site. this is an amazing place, where you can download lots of kompakt stuff for free. it also makes me feel very smug and superior, so feel free to give me a good kicking when you next see me. right in the kidneys if you please...

UNCANNY!...the first track i downloaded off the site was steadycam's 'kidney issues', on kompakt bliss-house-disco sublabel K2. my mum was hospitalised for a year with kidney problems when she was 14, subsisting solely on lucozade (they should use her story for adverts). hence, i've always had a certain interest in the renal system. and steadycam's ode is indeed enlightening. wood blocks echo through like smoke rings, and there's the best one note bassline since brutalga square...or even j-sweet's 'gutter', if you remember that one. (why do so many producers make it difficult for themselves? all you need is one note!!). then half way through steadycam throws a kink and a wonk into it, letting the track stumble face down before hoiking it back up again.

over and over. like monkey with a minature symbol ( i like to think it's that spelling they intended. sounds a bit more sinister innit).

'kidney issues' doesn't do the hyperactive fizziness that's big in this post-eulberg + wighnomy world, nor the overwhelmed emotion of the lindstrom neo-disco lot. rather, it's more like a poker flat record- happily industrious music, steadily building up the pieces, with just a hint of brooding darkness. music for even keels and fine sailing. (sorry, i don't even know what that means...)

the other track, 'dull in minor' lives up to its title. it's clunky and has no charm. let us not speak of it again.

i'm going to limit myself to one kompakt release per night, to prevent gluttony spoiling the delights. i don't want to make myself sick on minimal-trance gorges. i'll keep you posted.

2006-08-22T04:55:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE TODAY:

TOKYO ADVENTURES- 'HUNTER'S HANDBOOK'.

happy summer everyone. it's been a long while. too long. how are you? i'm ok, thanks for asking. i've got a tan. sort of. well fit.

munkyfest was a festival that me and my friends from school have been organising since we were 17 (hence the rubbish name). we're now 24, and we've done 8 munkyfests. it started out as tiny party with a few bands and slowly grew and grew to become a little festival that felt like a proper one, with 500 people, two stages, and after-hours acoustic and dance tents. all on a farm with cows staring at us with their kind and stupid eyes. nothing has been so important in my life for so long.

this year was the last ever munkyfest. putting on your own festival, especially without any form of grrr-evil corporate backing is a real effort. there's a slow steady grind the few months up to the event, and then about a week of thinking solely about the festival, every waking minute (and most dreaming ones, too). that starts to send you funny, i find.

so, tired of the stress and mindful that it's always best to go out on a high, we called it a day after this year's munkyfest, on the first saturday of august. the finale was as spectacular and moving as it could be. headliners were the Tokyo Adventures,- lovely people, friends of ours, people who have been with us from the start and have grown as we have grown, and who make wonderful comforting pop music. not only were they playing the last ever set of the last ever munkyfest, they were also playing their last ever gig together: they had planned to split up the moment the last note was played.

after that last note, fireworks flickered and boomed above us, and dozens of chinese lanterns drifted into the air like ghosts. sean, guitarist of the tokyo adventures wrote his name on one, and let it go, traveling up and up, away from munkyfest and away from tokyo adventures to somewhere new and unknown.

after a gruelling day of helping to run munkyfest, which left me felt as if i'd fought a small war, i was too tired and fuzzy to really process what was going on. i stared at the stage and ooohed and aahhed at the fireworks and all i felt was numb and blank. it was over. i couldn't really grasp the magnitude of that for us. sometimes things are just too big for feelings. perhaps the only thing i could grasp was relief. relief that the stress and the tension had come to an end.

all maudlin introspection was quickly put to an end by jack savidge starting his set in our dance tent, which is sometimes called rave generator and sometimes called rave heart. this year we wrote, 'now is the summer of our disco tent' on the back wall. sometimes, if i say so myself, we're amazing. jack was amazing too that night, as were the crowd. he played audion and we went mental. then he played 'falling up' and we marched and screamed with joy.

the days after munkyfest, though, was when the pain of reflection set in. every year days and days are spent clearing the site after munkyfest- every last cigarette butt has to be cleared, pretty much. usually, it's a horrible job, bitterly done through hangovers and muttered curses.

but this year a strange thing happened. i didn't want it to stop. there was always a little more to be done, and i'd search that out and set myself to it. i think everyone was the same. once we left the site after clearing it, that was It, and we knew it. the end. the end of one of the most important chapters of my life, something which has carried me through adoslescence to now. munkyfest was What We Did in summer. pretty much all we did. it was me and my friends' time to be together. sharing in this unexpectedly big thing was our bond to each other.

even now, weeks later, i'm struggling to express to myself and to you the emotional magnitude of this. one thing is this: the minute we walked out of the site for the last time, the final link with our childhoods was broken, forever. i only play music live once a year, at munkyfest. i've had the same guitar amp since i was 16, since i saved and saved to buy it. as i left the site, i packed the amp in the boot of the car, and knew, just knew, that i'd never use it again. it's just another thing to be buried slowly in dust in the loft of my parents' house, my child hood home, along with old school exercise books and battered toys.

another thing is this: we might never create something so wonderful again. many people have said that munkyfest is the highlight of their summer, and this year we tried everything we could to make it far and way the best one ever. looking back on it, we just couldn't have done it any better. but is that it? are our best days behind us now? i don't know. in twilight moments i fear that it could be. the commonest, cruellest thing said to children by adults is that schooldays are the best days of one's life. the fear of the things never being so good again is haunting, debilitating, and here it is again.

so, anyway, i sit here listening to Tokyo Adventures and it isn't just music (is it ever?). it's my childhood, it's my friends, it's the biggest times i ever had, and might ever have.

if you ever came to munkyfest, thank you x

2006-08-13T14:35:00.000-07:00

the festival is over, the emotional wounds are healing, and i'm off on holiday for a week- my struggle with the body searching stanstead customs is but a few hours away. so see you in a week.

2006-08-03T15:02:00.000-07:00

too busy handcrafting a festival out of a farm at the moment to do proper posts here.

go here:

www.munkyfest.co.uk

and here:
munkyfest.blogspot.com

and here
www.myspace.com/lastevermunkyfest

and then, worn out from all this cyberspace journeying and desperate for the open air, come to the festival itself.

2006-07-28T03:44:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:

VARIOUS PRODUCTION- 'THE WORLD IS GONE'
LUCIANO LIVE MIX
V/A -'SUPERLONGEVITY 4'
PASSION FM ELECTRO AND (GULP)...FUNKY HOUSE
FREEZE FM 2-STEP.

not much listening recently. i don't know why. i just want silence while i wait for the rain, which is always hovering around up there but never coming down. as soon as it starts pouring down i'm going to sit inside drinking tea and listening to art tatum and vashti bunyan.

and that's a promise.

there was a brown out in london yesterday because of the heat. we are on our knees out here.

listening to music because it is your job to review it is very odd, i've found. it's not bad, at all, because i'm lucky enough to review stuff for a magazine that doesn't cover dross. but it's very strange thinking: 'i have to listen to this today'. this blog is mainly about the whims and fancies that lead me to listen to particular musics at particular times, but when it's yr job, there's little room for whims- it's all crowded out by duty.

it's a nice little duty to have, though.

this week was the various production album. slightly unfairly maligned, i feel. sure, the 7"s were incredible highs and the album tracks don't reach such individual brilliance (with the exception of 'hater', which was put out on seven inch anyway...). but the album is best listened to as an hour long mood-piece, i think- much like the Burial album. taken together the record's as entrallingly bleak and stark as you'd like, and the sketchy lack of substance to some of the tracks only adds to that effect.

there's still no excuse for that track, 'soho', though: it's like those horrible sub-NIN bands that were everywhere in the 90s, calling themselves 'industrial'. i think one was called Rico: i once saw them at Reading when i was 15 and it was the only time when i've been so angry and disgusted at the sheer conceited shiteness of a band that i've been seriously tempted to throw a beer can at the singer's head (i didn't, by the way)

a band so bad they make people turn to violence!

to stress: this is Rico, not Riko, we're talking about. i wouldn't like to throw a beer can at riko's head, not at all. think of the consequences. i imagine he'd want to take it 'to road'. he wouldn't keep it lyrical. i think it's his birthday today, incidentally.

look, this is is going nowhere, is it? ok, i'm out, off to listen to more perlon...buzz, twang, fizz, clunk (and all of them sexily).

2006-07-25T10:57:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:

CLAUDE VONSTROKE- 'THE WHISTLER'
DANNY WEED- 'CREEPER'
DANIELLE BALDELLI- 'PLUTON'
CASSIE- 'ME AND U'
V/A- 'FEEL THE SPIRIT'
TALKING HEADS- 'FEAR OF MUSIC'
DAVID BYRNE- 'THE CATHERINE WHEEL'
DAVID BYRNE- 'LOOK INTO THE EYEBALL'
UNKNOWN DUBSTEP DJ ON RINSE FM, SUNDAY
AFRICAN POP ON 96.4FM PIRATE STATION
HAWK AND TRAE- 'SWANG'
TRIPLE 6 MAFIA- 'STAY FLY'
SIMON REYNOLDS' 'SCREWED AND CHOPPED' COMPILATION
LOCO DICE- 'SEEING THROUGH SHADOWS'
RICHIE HAWTIN- 'DE9-LITE MIX'
WOEBOT- 'BHANGRA 2006' COMPILATION
JAMES FIGURINE- 'MISTAKE MISTAKE MISTAKE MISTAKE'
MOUNTAIN GOATS- 'TALAHASSEE'
ART TATUM- '25 CLASSIC SOLOS'
DJ PRANCEHALL @DIRTY CANVAS
EARS + SCARE DEM CREW @DIRTY CANVAS
NO-LAY B2B RENEGADE BOYS @DIRTY CANVAS
91.9 PASSION FM PIRATE

so i turn on the radio to accompany me when i'm writing this tune and 91.7fm is blasting out electro-house, pirate style! 4/4 striking right back into the hearts of london's youth. oh happy days...luvvit it like cooked food. why does music, any music, always sound more exciting on pirate radio? (check this station by the way- their tag line is, 'tuff dirty electro soul'. what more do you need to know?)

anyway, let's talk about dirty canvas- stream of consciousness grime reportage, just like the old days. hold tight, here we go...

first things first, dirty canvas is a big deal now! just goes to show, persevere with yr good work and eventually the people will come. you want to know how big a deal it is? wiley turned up. that's how big a deal it is. the whole room froze as eskiboy made his entrance. star aura. the force of personality. wiley has to get massive- i don't believe in Destiny or any of that (for i am a man of science...) but, yunno, he just has to. he's a big deal.

hey how come i never realised how great Ears is before? i'd always had him down as alright, but a little overrated. but oh my gosh no, after seeing him live, the man is underrated, if anything. he was doing this brilliantly weird staccato stuff, fucking around with switching the volume of his voice to produce little echo effects. very D-doubleish, i guess, but from where i'm standing there can alway be more of that. a proper performer too, stalking round the place, spitting his lyrics right in the faces of the audience.

(electro-house pirate set has just dissolved into a mess of droning 303s. i think i can hear the ghost of 'washing up' somewhere in the mix. LOVE IT!)

embarressing thing was, with ears' set, that he kept bigging up 'SDC' and at first i was joking that he must be showing some love for my old SilverDollarCircle blog. but then he kept doing it, and you know there was just that nagging thought of, 'actually...may be he is...nah...but, may be, possibly...'. john prancehall put me out of my rapidly self-delusional confusion by informing me that Ears was there with Scare Dem Crew. ooops. there would have been blushes if i'd externalized any of this at the time.

i am not a big deal.

and then no-lay took the stage. no-lay is one of the greatest of all grime MCs. you will have heard her on Run The Road, where she drops perhaps my favourite grime lyric ever- 'MC'S BAWLING OUT BLOODY MURDER- STOP YER BAWLING CUZ WE FUCKIN HEARD YA!'

no-lay has the most amazing voice. it's so sharp and precise and brutal and angry. but live, in person, she's charmingly and disarmingly modest and shy; she apologises that it's just going to be her, and not the full Unorthodox family on the PAs, and asks us to excuse her if they're not all that. she says that she's scared and nervous: we yell out that she needn't be.

but then she starts MCing, and jesus christ, it's honestly like she's spitting fire out there. smashed-glass streams of words screwed up into little balls and then hurled into the air. she stares dead straight into the lens of the camera that's in the front row and never breaks her gaze, chopping her hands in front of her as she creates her impeccably controlled carnage and madness. that's going to be some film. finally, as the set reaches its peak, she snarls her best known bars, 'yeah we don't wanna clash, that's long, cuz we heard yr tracks and you sound swaggish'. the place goes crazy and in a split second no-lay is screaming, 'PULL IT! PULL IT!!!'

dj prancehall complies, and no-lay cuts the silence with: 'easy peasy lemon squeezy. any riddim i can do that. ANY RIDDIM.'

from then on, point proved, she lets up a bit and it's laughter and coy smiles again. we stumble out into the cloying summer-night air, slightly dazed.

2006-07-21T02:45:00.001-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:

*CLAUDE VONSTROKE- 'THE WHISTLER'*
FREDDY LOVE @ BAR MUSIC HALL, SHOREDITCH
FUCKPONY- 'CHILDREN OF LOVE'
V/A- 'FEEL THE SPIRIT'
EDDY CURRENT 'MIRACULEUSEMENT' MIX
HAWK AND TRAE- 'SWANG'

so, it transpires that THE track of sancho panza, the one i was going on about the other day, is 'the whistler': miraculously, It Happens For a Reason reader Nebbesh guessed what it was from my somewhat tawdry (love that word) descriptions, thus saving me from whistling to the staff in Phonica. you should get this tune. it will make you smile.

--------------
last night we tried to relive the heavenly delights of sancho panza at the glade: Freddy love, one of the sancho panza DJs, was playing out at the Bar Music Hall, at the epicentre of intidatingly cool east london. so we thought we'd pop along and have a little dance.

and...well, i guess there was a valuable lesson in the night: sometimes, you've just got to accept that the party's over. we'd come hoping for the glories of sancho panza, but we were faced with an empty bar in shoreditch. freddy love was still great, of course, focussing on house so old school i have no idea what it was or what to say about it, with little bits of cosmic and italo-disco here and there. even in the cold light of an empty dancefloor, the tunes stood up, and that's testament to the man's impeccable taste. at the end, we had a little dance just for form's sake, but really it was overwhelmingly clear: the fun that was the Glade is over, and real life starts again here.

-----------
it was the first of freddy love's 'vinyl factory allstars' nights at the bar music hall: i think they're set to be regular events. i think in a few months this might become quite a big thing: sancho panza has a pretty huge following, and freddy love is offering it for free. so you should go to the next one, and then you can tell your friends that you were hip to it way before them. and there are few better feelings than that.
---------------------
OK! i've been listening to Trae and Hawk's 'swang' so much recently. it is, as Hawk says in his verse, a 'soothing song'. because my emo heart beats (flutters?) so meekly, i kind of want all hip hop to sound this gentle, this pretty. but then i spend most of my life listening to grime MCs go 'ARGGGHHH!!!' so that can't be true.

whatever. one thing that i love about 'Swang' is that lyric of Hawk's, where he goes, 'i'm Fat Pat's clone, his heart beats still through my flesh and bone'. I mean, JESUS CHRIST- what a lyric, what an image, what an idea! With just a few words, Hawk overturns the standard musician's traditional focus on the Individual and originality. He sacrifices his self-hood, and sees his duty as preserving and continuing the work of another. he's just a cipher for someone else. that's pretty radical.

the mythologisation of deceased artists in southern hip hop is quite fascinating, and hawk's verse in 'swang' is a nice example of it. i was talking to dave stelfox once and he was saying how many of the hip hop artists he met in Houston would tell him that DJ Screw was God. i replied that it was interesting that such a thing happens in hip hop, as that kind of boundless praise and awe for an individual is more usual in techno- people saying that jeff mills is some kind of god-like figure on the scene, for example- or house: the whole 'todd is god' thing.

but dave said, no, with the houston guys it's not a metaphor, it's literal: they really do believe that DJ Screw was, and is, a God.

wow.

2006-07-21T02:45:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:

*CLAUDE VONSTROKE- 'THE WHISTLER'*
FREDDY LOVE @ BAR MUSIC HALL, SHOREDITCH
FUCKPONY- 'CHILDREN OF LOVE'
V/A- 'FEEL THE SPIRIT'
EDDY CURRENT 'MIRACULEUSEMENT' MIX
HAWK AND TRAE- 'SWANG'

so, it transpires that THE track of sancho panza, the one i was going on about the other day, is 'the whistler': miraculously, It Happens For a Reason reader Nebbesh guessed what it was from my somewhat tawdry (love that word) descriptions, thus saving me from whistling to the staff in Phonica. you should get this tune. it will make you smile.

--------------
last night we tried to relive the heavenly delights of sancho panza at the glade: Freddy love, one of the sancho panza DJs, was playing out at the Bar Music Hall, at the epicentre of intidatingly cool east london. so we thought we'd pop along and have a little dance.

and...well, i guess there was a valuable lesson in the night: sometimes, you've just got to accept that the party's over. we'd come hoping for the glories of sancho panza, but we were faced with an empty bar in shoreditch. freddy love was still great, of course, focussing on house so old school i have no idea what it was or what to say about it, with little bits of cosmic and italo-disco here and there. even in the cold light of an empty dancefloor, the tunes stood up, and that's testament to the man's impeccable taste. at the end, we have a little dance just for form's sake, but really it was overwhelmingly clear: the fun that was the Glade is over, and real life starts again here.

-----------
it was the first of freddy love's 'vinyl factory allstars' nights at the bar music hall: i think they're set to be regular events. i think in a few months this might become quite a big thing: sancho panza has a pretty huge following, and freddy love is offering it for free. so you should go to the next one, and then you can tell your friends that you were hip to it way before them. and there are few better feelings than that.
---------------------
OK! i've been listening to Trae and Hawk's 'swang' so much recently. it is, as Hawk says in his verse, a 'soothing song'. because my emo heart beats (flutters?) so meekly, i kind of want all hip hop to sound this gentle, this pretty. but then i spend most of my life listening to grime MCs go 'ARGGGHHH!!!' so that can't be true.

whatever. one thing that i love about 'Swang' is that lyric of Hawk's, where he goes, 'i'm Fat Pat's clone, his heart beats still through my flesh and bone'. I mean, JESUS CHRIST- what a lyric, what an image, what an idea! With just a few words, Hawk overturns the standard musician's traditional focus on the Individual and originality. He sacrifices his self-hood, and sees his duty has preserving and continuing the work of another. he's just a cipher for someone else. that's pretty radical.

the mythologisation of deceased artists in southern hip hop is quite fascinating, and hawk's verse in 'swang' is a nice example of it. i was talking to dave stelfox once and he was saying how many of the hip hop artists he met in Houston would tell him that DJ Screw was God. i replied that it was interesting that such a thing happens in hip hop, as that kind of boundless praise and awe for an individual is more usual in techno- people saying that jeff mills is some kind of god-like figure on the scene, for example- or house: the whole 'todd is god' thing.

but dave said, no, with the houston guys it's not a metaphor, it's literal: they really do believe that DJ Screw was, and is, a God.

wow.

2006-07-19T14:29:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:

*THE GLADE FESTIVAL*
SPANK ROCK- 'YO YO'
V/A - 'FEEL THE SPIRIT'
LUCIANO- 'SCI FI HI VOL.2'
DJ HYPE- 'SKA'
ON TOP FM
ROLL DEEP RINSE SET
DIZZEE RASCAL- 'BOY IN DA CORNER'
DIZZEE RASCAL- 'STAND UP TALL'
CHAMILLIONAIRE- 'RIDIN DIRTY'
VITALIC- 'OK COWBOY'
HAPPY HARDCORE ON CHURCH ORGAN, 'SACRED SERMONS': MATT STOKES CD
BONKERS HAPPY HARDCORE
SOUNDMURDERER- 'WIRED FOR SOUND' MIX
V/A- 'POKER FLAT VOL.4'

alright cuzzy? long time no see. i was at the glade festival, you see. and since bishing and boshing it at the glade i've been knocked out with weird dizzy spells and nausea. ooops. we did too much, too young. or may be, we're just getting too old for that kind of malarkey. whatever, i feel rough.

anyway, people writing about how fucked they get is LONG so let's have none of that. on with the music>>>>>>>>>>>

the glade started life as a corner of glastonbury dedicated to bringing back the vibe of the early 90s renegade soundsystems that used to crop up on the outskirts of the festival, before:- as half man half biscuit have it, 'they put out the gun towers to keep the hippies away'.
i actually used to go to glastonbury as a kid and the bits on the edge of the festival were well scary! properly lawless, as i remember.
now the glade is it's very own festival. and, like the organisers say, it's a Proper One. none of that corporate sponsored bollocks. no name prefaced by 'carling'. no slit-yr-wrists-at-the-sheer-nothingness-of-it businessman-'indie'. just loud electronic music, nice people, drugs and sunshine.
now the other side to this great anti-corporate ethos is that there's large swathes of the glade that are, if yr feeling mean (and as it's mid-week, i am), hippy bollocks.
you know the sort: people doing poi, everywhere. fuck loads of 'circus skills'. girls doing that baffling 'techno fairy' thing. people pretending to be native americans when really they're just students from the home counties who have done acid. an impossible amount of psy trance. a scary amount of psy trance with live bongos. a stall called 'funk off n dye' for shit's sake.
ack ack ack!
but, brothers and sisters, let us not dwell on the negative. there are at least two wonderful, even heavenly things about the glade.
first, let's talk about the biggie: the sancho panza tent. i've been to sancho panza at notting hill carnival a few times and, yeah, it's great but nothing you'd want to devote yr life to. too packed, too difficult, a little bit scarily trendy in places. perhaps.
but honestly, i would not be at all surprised if when i die and go to heaven (i am going there, right? RIGHT?), and the gates open, inside it's just the sancho panza tent at glade. forever.
we spent three days there, dancing, swaying, drinking. on the third day, i turned to my friends and said, 'i could do this for weeks, you know...months'. i don't think i've ever been so perfectly happy. the place is turned into a little wonderland, the sun streaming through the purple circus tent, bouncing off the flags and feathers that decorate the place. the crowd is all smiles and open hearted joy. i feel like i'm in some kind of advert. everyone looks so beautiful, and no one looks messy. the crowd is always small and it starts to feel like a family. we exchange smiles regularly. we chat some times. we pop outside to sunbathe with a drink. we discover how good mixing red wine with cranberry juice can be (try it!).

for once, there's such a strong feeling of belonging and acceptance (and i've done sancho panza with no drugs at all on occasion, so it's not what yr thinking!). we're all in it together. we dance more sexily than normal, which isn't much but still. all hips. but innocent hips.

enough about us. the music is stunning. these guys know what they're doing. hour after hour of these marvelously unhurried wiggles and shimmies through balearic, disco, electro house, and a bit of the sexier end of minimal, with little pops like kisses. one tune got played by pretty much everyone in there and i'm desperate to know what it was: a house track with someone whistling a little, almost 'higher states of consciousness' melody over the top. i might go into Phonica and sing it to them for them to identify it. actually, course i won't. that'd be madness. such a scary shop.

best moments of all for me are at the end of saturday night's set, at 4 in the morning, when the DJ drops an etienne de crecy track, one of his really epic, slow-burning ones, and we feel like heroes at the end of a long journey. we get up on to the podium and gaze out of the hands in the air. the sweat drips off the wall, gets in our hair, messes with our gel...(!). the other big moment (much of sancho panza is not a 'moment' but a period of blissed out hazy endless warm bath) is when carl craig's remix of 'fallin up' gets played. the crowd love it, and it's time to reprise those funny marching steps that we did at fabric the other month. it's the perfect track for sancho panza- a tune that feels like it can go on for ever on a soundsystem that feels like it must go one forever.

by the end of the weekend i could swear blind that sancho panza had some special 'softness filter' on their mixer, draping everything with a sparkly fog. i don't know how else they get it all to sound so infinitely gentle, so sensual. this is womb music. (sorry, that hippy bollocks again, yeah?)

so...to say that i recommend going to the the glade for sancho panza is inadequate. it's not just a good weekend. it's the best ever weekend. at the end of one set one of the Stompa Phunk DJs, blows kisses to the crowd and mouths, 'i love you guys!', and, for once, i really feel exactly the same way.

----------
and the other great thing about the glade? the detroit techno. sadly i missed kenny larkin (it was sancho panza duty calls...), but did get to see kevin saunderson, who was magisterial and magnificent. for the first time, i really appreciate just how elegant and textured detroit techno is. i've loved this music since i first heard it, but there, at the glade, it almost sounded like a modern day version of string quartets- so evenly balanced and harmonious and neat, not overpowering or hard at all. beautiful solutions to perennial problems. everything in its right place.

2006-07-12T04:42:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:

TOM TOM CLUB- S/T
CSS- 'CANSEI DE SUR SEXY'
FUCKPONY- 'CHILDREN OF LOVE'
JOHNNY DARK- 'CAN'T WAIT'
LOVE- 'FOREVER CHANGES'
GO TEAM
FRIENDLY FIRES
JAMES FIGURINE- 'MISTAKE MISTAKE MISTAKE MISTAKE'
LEMON RED SOUTHERN HIP-HOP MIX
YUMMY BINGHAM- 'COME GET IT'
LAY LOW F.M
NOZE- 'HOW TO DANCE'
ON TOP F.M
RUFF SQWAD RINSE SET
WILEY- '2ND PHAZE'
BURIAL- S/T
HOT CHIP- 'THE WARNING'
VARIOUS PRODUCTION ALBUM.
CLASSIC 80'S HARD ROCK AT THE OVAL, PAKISTAN VS REST OF THE WORLD TWENTY20.

wow, it's been over a week since the last post. how on earth did that happen? i'm not really sure. buti went away for a few days, and i'm also doing bits of writing for things other things that this blog (i review albums here by the way), so i don't have much time.

not writing on here is weird, cuz it's almost like you have to ease yr way back into blogging (what an ugly word). so, a few brief comments to dip my toe in the water, and then i'll try to build up to a full onslaught over the next few days (they'll be a break this weekend though as i'll be boshing it at The Glade...).

SO/////////////

where is the sports music of today? i went to the Oval the other day, to see the bastardised but tremendously fun twenty20 version of cricket (twenty20 is the 3 minute pop song to test cricket's epic and gruelling symphonies). every boundary and every wicket, they'd play a blast out a bit of rousing sports-rock over the PA. 80's hardrock fits such occasions perfectly- eye of the tiger, obviously, but also 'another one bites the dust', 'under pressure' for those tense moments, europe's 'the final countdown', may be...all horrible songs, but all brilliant when matched with a bit of sporty pomp.
wisely, those in charge of such things stuck to the 80s hair-rock scene in their selection of what to play at the Oval, but- perhaps conscious that, you know, cricket has to modernise and move with the times- they threw a few 90s and 21st century tunes in as well. but here's the dilemma: what to play? musicians nowadays seem to be in a completely different place than that needed to create gruesomely brilliant sports soundtracks. there's lack of hammy macho daftness about musicians today that really compromises them in this regard. and which also means that rock haircuts aren't nearly as fun as they used to be.
as things were, the organisers plumped for the deeply odd but weirdly inspired choice of The Sugababes (you wouldn't think it works, but it does) and the more obvious- but less good- smattering of Prodigy tracks (although the latter did prompt the thought that if geoffrey boycott played 20 years later than he did, he would have to come out on to the field to the strains of 'firestarter', a mental image which made me smile...)

but there's obviously a niche here, waiting to exploited. so to today's youth i say: cast aside yr skinny jeans, yr jerky guitars and yr television albums, and go and write songs that would sound good as a soundtrack to rugby players battering each other. that's what the people need, and that's your pension.

---------------------------------------------------
veterans of the (yuck) 'blogosphere' may remember, should remember, the name of jack savidge, a lovely person who can do a worringly brilliant impression of DJ Assault's voice.
anyway, jack's got a band, called friendly fires:
www.myspace.com/friendlyfires

and good god you should check them out. they''ve got a cover on their myspace uh 'space' of frankie knuckle's 'your love' which should give you some idea of the kind of cool fucks they are. i don't want to spoil the surprise, so i'll just say it'll make you dance in a whole different way from the original, but you'll still definitely be dancing.

jack told me they plan on playing live pretty relentlessly at the end of the summer, so keep yr ear to the ground...

2006-07-04T11:22:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:

HOT CHIP- 'THE WARNING'
JOHNNY DARK- 'CAN'T WAIT EP'

after a month or so of dismissing it as a nice bit of sparkliness, but nothing more, this morning i suddenly fell head over heels in love with 'the warning'. i don't know what prompted this shift in my affections, but it's all gone a bit crazy. i've listened to it 4 times today and i ain't even done yet.

looking back, it all seems so obvious that this was the album for me. hazes and penumbras of talking heads, chicago house, Opiate-ish plinky-plippy electronics, 2-step, selected ambient works, all abound and bound around. what i love about it, i think, is that 'the warning' sounds like dance music falling blissfully asleep on a sunny afternoon, and that's exactly what i want to do right now, and what i want music to sound like right now. dancing in a (lucid, aphex-ish) daydream is a nice idea, and hot chip do it more than well.

at first i couldn't really get past his voice, the feyness of it. but i was wrong and really it's beautiful and floaty. he sings about birds flying around at some point and that's very appropriate. i remember syd barrett sounding like this, but i might have made that up? i like those bits where he softly breathes 'oh' like a lullaby-version of James Brown's percussive grunts and 'urghs'. he has a lovely 'oh'.

i'd love to see them live- i imagine, i hope, that those occasional bursts of electro keyboards are built up, and the skittery beats amped up, and the album changes into dancefloor killers. that MUST be what happens, surely...

i'd also love to hear robag wruhme remix some of these tracks. that'd be a lot of fun, i think- the two's shared love of both fidgety busy-ness and unashamedly romantic pulls at yr mdma heartstrings could mean some beautiful music. so get on it please, robag.

thanks to The Special One (the one that's my friend Louisa and not Jose Morinho) for getting me, as they say, 'hip' to Hot Chip.

2006-07-03T02:50:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:

KSR BURDEN- '430 WEST PRESENTS 'BACK TO THE RHYTHM''
NOZE- 'HOW TO DANCE'
ASSORTED DROSS ON TOP OF THE POPS (INCLUDING PAULO 'NEW LOW FOR POP MUSIC' NUTINI).
THE NEW ROBBIE WILLIAMS ALBUM (HEARD AT WORK)
DJ SHEEN MIX
V/A- 'SUPERLONGEVITY'
NORTH AFRICAN POP ACCOMPANYING BELLY DANCERS AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM.
KEITH FULLERTON WHTMAN- 'PLAYTHROUGHS'
CHAMILLIONAIRE- 'RIDIN DIRTY (UGK MIX)'
LEMONRED HOUSTON HIPHOP MIX
RAY'S JAZZ @ 'RAY'S JAZZ', FOYLES.
LUMINFIRE- 'SEQUIN AMBROSIA' MIX
DERRICK MAY- 'STRINGS OF LIFE'

i was talking about getting a haircut a few days ago, remember? course you don't. that would be insane.
but anyway, i did get my haircut. and yesterday i passed the place where i had got it done, and they were only banging out 'strings of life' at massive volume! what cool fucks. i felt honoured to have given them my custom.

except, when i was in there, they put on that new red hot chili peppers album, which is as wretched as i expected, although that hippy's guitar playing is indeed pretty nice. but- anthony keidis: voice like a punch in the spine.

-----------------
oh and some weirdo put on the whole of the new robbie williams album when i was at work. nutters. it's so bad it makes yr jaw ache. but, pleasingly, there's a real lack of pop tones on there...which i guess is why this album hasn't given rise to songs of the kind of cultural hegemony that he's used to (which is why i'm pleased). robbie williams' songs used to be everywhere. coming from passing cars, played in shops, sung by drunks in pubs. now, people buy the album, listen to it a few times, and that is that. to reprise a recent theme, the songs have gone from the public space into the private space.

this album, despite being a massive success, marks the end of robbie williams' career, i think. it's an album that people have bought out of a sense of duty, or even just out of the sense that it's become a kind of 'done thing' to get his latest releases. and so, millions upon millions have bought it. but i don't get the impression that they've fallen in love with it, or even like it that much.

and next time around, mark my words robbie, the public will not be so kind. the honeymoon period only lasts for one album that doesn't provide the necessary tunes for people to sing along to in their daily lives. he'll be back to playing butlins before he knows it (the liklihood of him doing the graceful, honourable thing of disappearing from the public gaze is brilliantly small, since he crazes and needs publicm attention to a pathological degree).

so, something to look forward to?
------------------------------
yesterday was a disjointed and unsuccessul day as far as music was concerned. obstacles lay wherever i turned. a stiflingly hot, languid sunday...somehow the only thing that seemed right to listen to was a compilation of east african pop made for me by a person called Joe in exchange for some grime tapes. there were lots of slow, treacley songs on there about getting pissed on palm wine. a great compilation. so, this was ALL i wanted to hear. but i couldn't find it. tearing through the shelves of CDs and boxes of CDs in frustration, i still couldn't unearth it. i resigned myself to silence, and resolved, as so often before, to finally, rationalise my record collection.
so, if yr reading this Joe- i'm sorry. i don't know where it is, but yr compilation was a gem.

the afternoon brought a trip to Foyles, after the seeing the tremendous exhibition of Islasmic calligraphy at the British Museum. i've never been to the cafe in Foyles before, but god it's lovely! it situated to one side of Ray's Jazz, a shop within a shop, and you get to stare out onto the Borders opposite and congratulate yrself on being right-on and not throwing yr lot in with the evil (?) corporate giants and their buckets of starbucks slop.

gazing out over london slowly melting into the tarmac, i felt this really strong, sudden, desire to listen to Art Tatum. once again, it seemed like the only thing that would do. and, with ray's jazz right next to me, now seemed a perfect time to stock up on some art tatum records (all my tapes are up north, in the place of my birth).
but then. i realised i was wearing a trilby, partly out of an attempt to keep the sun off me, and partly out of a burgeoning obsession with Geoffrey Boycott. and, obviously, you just can't go and buy jazz records while wearing a trilby. to do so would be to present yrself as an object of (justiafiable) utter hatred from your fellow man. not to mention the feelings of self loathing.
and so, no art tatum.

another failure.

then my stereo spat out the new Hot Chip album, refusing even to consider playing it.

exhausted, i stick on keith fullerton whitman's sine-zen masterpiece 'playthroughs' and go to sleep.

2006-06-30T02:50:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:

ROLL DEEP RINSE SET FROM LAST SUNDAY
NOZE- 'HOW TO DANCE'
V/A- 'SUPERLONGEVITY 4'

wow, i can't stop listening to that roll deep set. the entourage is on fire at the moment. a few months ago they were flirting with dubstep as a (very heavy) counterweight to the liveliness of the eski sound. but now they seem settled in a unique half way house, bobbing around between the kinetics of grime and wobbly lurch of dubstep. karnage and maxi-priest going back to back, playing god knows what by god knows who. they've actually being playing bits and bobs of this dark and dense grime-dubstep hybid stuff for a while- it's not all that new- but sunday night's set really brought it home for me that a new sound has emerged. a sound big on the squealchily aquatic- one track even feautured layers of gurgling 303s. it's all a far cry from the brittle snap of the grime sound of only 2 years ago. things move on, bit by bit, and without noticing it yr in another place entirely...
biggest track of the set for me is that re-fix they do of daniel bedingfield's 'gotta get through this'. i only realised they nicked the bassline of him the other day, despite it being caned on the pirates for many months. it shouldn't work but it does, mightily, with the bassline pitched down and fuzzed up, and with its skip reduced to a stagger. huge track.

skepta's MCing was also a big revelation in a set that pretty much banished much of my pessimism about grime. As i said the other day, he really is up there with sharkey major and d double now. he's always had the lyrics, but now he's got this nervy urgency as well. flicking between his best known lines, quoting himself and others, skepta's so quick and dextrous that i might even prefer listening to him than D double at the moment. flow-dan was also on the set, and was typically great. it's a horrible turn of phrase, perhaps, but he really is a true professional. he knows what he's doing and it's never a let down.

unlike slew dem, who turned up towards the end of roll deep's set (well, chronik and tempa did anyway), and showed what a huge gulf separates them from the likes of roll deep, ruff sqwad, newham generals and may be south agents too. neither tempa nor chronik can MC, they ruin every set they're on, and they're on radio perhaps more than any other crew. not good for grime. i don't understand why they don't get a really rough time of it in the press and on messageboards, but there we go.
--------------------------------------------------
on a different note, i went to the best indian restaurant last night. it's called kastoori and it's in tooting. you really should go there. it's really cheap, and does really great, and very unusual (for a UK indian) food. i went to the waterside inn the other day and i'd say that the food at kastoori was actually better than at that 3 micheline starred place.

2006-06-27T02:28:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:

DIGITAL MYSTIKZ- 'MISTY WINTER/CONFERENCE'
VARIOUS ANALORDS
VARIOUS PRODUCTION ALBUM
LILY ALLEN- 'SMILE'.
HOLY SHIT- 'STRANDED AT TWO HARBORS'
THE STROKES LIVE ON 'LATER'
CAT POWER LIVE ON 'LATER'
MANDY- 'BODY LANGUAGE MIX'
'CORDIAL DANCEHALL' MIXTAPE
DEPECHE MODE COMPILATION
V/A- 'EUPHORIA; OLD SCHOOL CLASSICS' COMPILATION
PAAVOHARJU- 'YHA HAMARAA'
HOT CHIP - 'THE WARNING'
SEAN PAUL, HEARD ON TUBE FROM GIRL'S MP3 MOBILE PHONE.
REINHARD VOIGT- 'TRAX'
DIN S.T- 'CLUB GOODS'
WELSH MALE VOICE CHOIR LIVE @ 'ABBEVILLE FETE'
SAMI KOIVIKKO- '100 MINUTES' MIX
ROLL DEEP SUNDAY RINSE FM SET
NEWHAM GENERALS SUNDAY RINSE FM SET
BURIAL- S/T
RAW FLEX 103.6 FM

tell you what i love, at the moment. i love those mobile phones that broadcast mp3s. i like it when people play those on the tube and on buses. it fills me with hope and gladness that people care about music so much to want to show the music that they love to the wider world. that they choose that way to express who the are. with the advent of walkmans making the 'ghetto-blaster' quickly obsolete in the 1980s, we retreated into our own musical worlds. music was a private affair, which we were careful not to let others intrude on, nor let intrude upon others.

late capitalism. the all-consuming fear of 'harassment'. personal space. private space. zizek. (and, may be, 'etc')

but now, with these mp3 mobile phones, we are out in the open again, together. music as part of the public space, the life of the polis. if music isn't about self-expression, if it's not about relating to others, then we've lost something big. music has to be communal, otherwise we're cut adrift, forgetting the original meaning and purpose of music as focal point for public life. the development of recorded mediums for music as been a curse, as well as blessing, i think. we can now hear more music than ever before, but more and more we choose to listen to it alone. thankfully, now, there are small strikes against our little boxes of enclosed privacy. these mobile phones are just one example. the welcome innovations in car-stereo speaker systems are another.

what's more, i love the crapness of the sound quality of these mobile phones. so tinny, so distorted! to see people who are so into music that they are still willing to listen to their favourite songs even when swamped in trebly crackle always brightens up the morning tube journey to work, a time that otherwise can suck the hope and life out of you. death to hi-fi fetishist boredom!
these people, glared at as an intolerable nuisance by many, have, i think, got it so right. whereas those glaring faces, invariably bordered on each side by ipod wires forming a white halo of 'cool', haven't.

-----------------------------------
it was a busy weekend so i decided to take friday night off. to my horror, one thing led to another and i ended up watching Later With Jools Holland. i've always been kind of fascinated with this programme, in that it has such depth and breadth to its awfulness: the fact that jools holland has no talent for presenting tv programmes whatsover, and actually seems to be getting worse and worse. the 'jam' sessions. the almost painfully cringesome interviews. the way the audience have to sit around tables drinking beer as if they're in some trendy dive and not a shed the size of an air craft hanger. the token fashionable and young musicians that are dragged on, to get the official seal of approval from the establishment, their reputations thereby ruined, as a million parents tell their offspring, 'oh, yes, i do like that lot you were just playing. jools [it's alway first name terms, isn't it?] played them the other week'. the sheer, horrible fucking muso-ness of the whole thing. and, of course, the boogie pissing woogie piano.

so, i was feeling humbled and ashamed, watching this dross on a friday night. then the strokes came on and i got ready to feel my shackles get raised. i've always felt this weird kind of rage towards the Strokes. fucking hipsters. the consciously elitist tyranny of Cool.
You know.
so i was all looking forward to screaming some of my favourite swear words at the TV, but then they came on and...i just couldn't. and i even felt sorry for them. they looked so sad and kind of embaressed (an embaressment which went beyond the usual, and to be expected, shame that everyone has after being subject to an introduction by 'Jools').

they're getting on for thirty now, and yet they still have to dress up in their little leather jackets and their hi-top converse, and pretend that it's still the 70s and that they're really quite tough kids from New York that are don't belong anywhere but the Mudd Club. being stuck to a silly dress-up game you did when you were young and that seemed cool back then...it must be fucking soul-destroying. poor bastards.

and then my mood brightened, as i realised that since i felt sorry for the Strokes, i must feel superior to the Strokes, and that was exactly what i wanted. lovely. and, you know, the song that they played wasn't at all bad. a bit motorik-y, nicely minimal. thrum and hum. and he's really got quite a nice voice, hasn't he? i like a kind of a droning quality to voices. like john peel's. so, i was proved wrong, against all my pride and prejudice. a lesson learnt.
-------------------------------
skepta on sunday night's roll deep set---- so big. he's up there with D Double and sharkey major right now, definitely.
---------------------
lily allen- heard her for the first time on sunday. her music is very boring and sadly no self-conciously Lahn-dahn accent is going to make it not-boring. oh well, another expectation raised by the music press dashed. still not as disappointing as the Long Blondes, though.

2006-06-23T03:27:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:
SOUNDMURDERER- 'WIRED FOR SOUND' MIX
DIGITALISM- 'ZDARLIGHT'
MILKY GLOBE- 'ODE TO A BEAT BOX'
SHUT UP AND DANCE ON ORIGIN 95.2FM
DJ GEORGIE B ON RAW FLEX 103.6 FM
LAURENT GARNIER AND JEFF MILLS- 'I LOVE TECHNO LIVE MIX'
DIGITAL MYSTIKZ- 'MISTY WINTER/CONFERENCE'
BURIAL- S/T
FILASTINE- 'BURN IT'
HOLY SHIT- 'STRANDED AT TWO HARBOURS'
NOBODY AND THE MYSTIC CHORDS OF MELODY- 'BROADEN A NEW SOUND'
SMOG- 'DONGS OF SEVOTION'
MASTERS AT WORK- 'KINGS OF HOUSE'
RICHIE HAWTIN- 'DE9 TRANSITIONS'
JEFF MILLS- 'THE BELLS'
LITTLE RED TOE/FOOT FOOT SPLIT 7" ON NOT NOT FUN RECORDS
JME- TROPICAL MUSIC TRACKS.

hey, check out all that indie up there^. that's where breezing through rough trade on yr lunch break gets you. some lovely stuff there, though. nobdy and the mystic chords are like neil young trying to be animal collective, and nowhere near as grotesque as that sounds. Holy Shit is ariel pink's 60s-ish beat-pop side project, like the beatles if they were any good (joke! - don't hurt me woebot!).
not not fun are, my ultra-cool friend miranda assures me, the greatest record label in the world. i've never heard their stuff till yesterday. with them, it's the kind of deal where you have to send off a letter to america to get their music, and really i'm just too lazy. but rough trade are somehow lucky and blessed enough to pick up a few of their spectacular, beauteous hand decorated split 7"s.
very large.
and you know the one i bought really is pretty great. a bit twee for me on one side, but the flip, with Foot Foot stumbling around in the darkness and coming across like a less brain-frying Vanishing Voice, puts a smile on that face of mine.
but it's the tapes they put out that are really enticing. check this stuff out. you seem to get little magikal, occult looking objects with many of their releases. lots of wicker seems to be involved. ruff. i've decided that i need some of these in my life, as tim westwood would say. i don't even care so much what they sound like, i just need them. but i'm sure they'll sound nice...i'll keep you posted.

------------------------------
i had a haircut yesterday, and the floppiness is gone, so i can now interview grime people without feeling so embaressed at my patent indie heritage. will they see right through my tactic? course they will.
--------------------------------

i write a Phd thesis. that's mainly what i do, aside from writing the odd bits about music. writing a thesis is odd, especially one on the shifting and unstable sands of philosophy. there's always a worry that all this work and argument is built on a foundation of nothing, and will come crashing down any moment. it's exhausting. and part of the thesis did collapse this week, leaving me to sift through the rubble and ashes in the vain hope that something, somewhere could be built up into something usable again. dark rings appeared around my eyes.
also my girlfriend was away this week, so it's all been a bit anchorless for me.
but this blog is about music, so the whole point of this little pseudo diary entry is not to moan about my life, but to somehow link it back to that list up there^.
that's where the tired sounds of Burial come in. when i feel sad i don't want comfort, so much, i want hardness, purging all of the badness out with no mercy. and Burial, for all the twilight dreaminess, isn't particularly wistful. there's a tough, nervy energy in the beats, and the rips and howls of the synths. it doesn't gaze at its shoes. it gets on the night bus, london flickering by. gotta keep moving...
staring down soot-caked tube tunnels, the thesis churning over in my mind, under flickering strip lights, listening to Burial, trying to match how i feel with its resolve...

but more than that, i've wanted to run round the Common till i feel sick, listening to jeff mills play techno at uncomfortably loud volumes. may be that's aiming for a sort of oblivion (but a healthy oblivion!). i've listened to soundmurderer's jungle mix over and over, in the hope this storm of information will somehow clean my head out.

and i guess it's all worked. after all, here i am, feeling so light-hearted and listening to indie.
----------------------------------

2006-06-20T15:32:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:
BURIAL- S/T
SHAM 69- 'HURRY UP ENGLAND'
RACIST IDIOTS SINGING 'I'D RATHER BE A PAKI THAN A SWEDE'
WOEBOT- 'NOIR DESIRE MIX'

Not much listening, you'll note, and the only respite from world cup inspired shiteness has been the lovely, complementary pair of dark and slinky 2-step ghosts, from Burial and Woebot.

go here for some of my recent reviews. i should point out that the whole thing about burial's album being a requiem for the lost sounds of pirate radio etc. was written before i read simon reynold's great review for OMM... i don't bite nothing, honest.

2006-06-19T02:37:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:

V/A- 'LONDON IS THE PLACE FOR ME'
ROBAG WRUHME- 'WUZZELBUD KK'
BURIAL- S/T
RICHIE HAWTIN- 'DE9 LITE MIX'
DIGITAL MYSTIKZ- 'MISTY WINTER/CONFERENCE'
TWENTY SIX FEET- 'TWO HOURS OF PASSIONLESS TANGO'
THE ZUTONS NEW ALBUM (HEARD AT WORK)
AUDION- 'SUCKFISH'
MASTERS AT WORK- 'KINGS OF HOUSE'

on saturday i was cooking the evening meal after a day at work, listening to audion's magnificent album of nasty boom-b0om (to nick a phrase coined by a friend). audion is an alias of matthew dear. so there i was, chopping shallots and wondering whether Rose wine would be good in a risotto (Rose is THE drink this summer, get to know), thinking about matthew dear's music. specifically, thinking about his hi-hats. they're so good, i was thinking: he does hi-hats better than anyone else in the world. yep, it's the almost 2 steppy swing he gets in them,the thought went on, that's what makes them so special.
by now i was getting close to talking to myself. so the internal monologue continued: it's also the crispness of the hi-hats that make them so special, that snappiness to them, the bite. the hi-hat's on 'leave luck to heaven' are even better, i thought, but these ones are still pretty good.

i could listen to matthew dear's hi-hats all day, i said to myself.

and then it hit me. i was spending an evening obsessing about matthew dear's hi-hats, and considering devoting a whole day to listening to them. fuck's sake, how did it ever come to this? this is serious. i would say i need to go out more, but i think the opposite's probably true.

2006-06-16T09:16:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:

BURIAL- S/T
WIGGLE- FABRIC MIX
MOUNTAIN GOATS LIVE SET
FILASTINE- BURN IT
HOME MADE HAPPY HARDCORE MIX- ESPECIALLY, BANG- 'SHOOTING STAR' OVER AND OVER
DELIA AND GAVIN- REVELEE + REMIXES
VILLALOBOS- FADUTRON/CHROMOSOUL
YUMMY BINGHAM OVER SOME SHOP'S SPEAKERS.
DIGITAL MYSTICZ- MISTY WINTER

first things first, i finally got the burial album. i've already written one review of it today (for fact magazine, if yr interested), so i can't be bothered doing it again right now, so i'll just say: wow...the hype is true, definitely.

--------------------------
its been a few months now since i started this little blog-project, so i thought i'd look back and re-cap a little. what really jumps out to me, looking back over the previous posts, is how little my listening varies! i'd always imagined myself as someone stuck in the unsettled listening habits of somehow overloaded by music: swamped and constantly diverted by the latest downloads, without the time or energy to really give individual releases the time and attention they deserve.
but this blog reveals the opposite to be the case, if anything: it seems that actually i tend to stick with the same peices of music for weeks if not months, and only slowly move on. i'm pleased about that, although i guess it makes things less interesting for you readers, perhaps. i'm glad that i spend so long on individual pieces of music, because it does mean that cerain songs, certain albums, have defined, and are defining particular periods of time for me.

it's this connection between song and time and place that's very easy to lose in this age of constant downloading, the interminable and, perhaps, futile search for the new. i thought i'd lost this connection, but it seems not. so spring 06 will always be about 'ach so', for me, and seems like summer '06 might be very much about Burial.

the main reason that my listening habits are so narrow, i think, is that my mp3 player can only store about 10 albums. this seemed a downside when i first got it, but now it seems like a godsend. i dread to think what i'd be like with an I-pod with a huge memory. the problem with endless choice is that you're always choosing, never committing, and committing is what loving music, or anything, is really about.

---------------------
yesterday was a great day. we went to the Waterside Inn for lunch (lovely food but scarily expensive), England won against the Soca Warriors, and on the walk home from the tube, the sky a watery pink, i listened to Bang's 'shooting star' over and over again. if there's one song that is guarenteed to get me to well up with tears of happiness, it is this. happy hardcore at its best, or how i like it, has a profound effect: the best rave producers always tint the euphoria with sadness, so that yr overwhelmed with emotion- its way of hedging bets so that if the one doesn't get you, the other will. there's also a confusing conflict between emotions -the feeling of not knowing whether to laugh or cry. And, also, the lack of specificity - i know i'm feeling something, but i don't know quite what- that helps the emotions to defy any rationalisation or control.

you could see this as a very knowing tactic, almost cynical in its premeditated bringing on of the rush; a strategy honed through years of trial and error. but it's almost to impossible to have that attitude when your in the ecstatic throes of the music itself. everything might be fake and shallow from the outside, but from the inside it never feels that way: it feels like a shining, millennial truth. with happy hardcore, as with the drugs that are its companion.

-----------------------------------
i've fallen into a routine recently of getting off the tube on the way home a stop early, so that i get to walk past clapham common duck pond glittering in the evening sun. i've also fallen into the routine of listening to villalobos' 'fadutron' and 'chromosoul' while i do this. the 12" release that these two tracks are featured is often seen as the high water mark of villalobos' phase of impenetrable minimalism, his writing of grating and clanging atonal odes to ketamine. but the more i listen to this pair, the more straightforwardly pretty they seem. villalobos is at his best when he's like this, i think, and it can be easy to forget that he does lushness as well as those more famed for it, from luciano to superpitcher: 'dexter' 'easy-lee' and the whole of 'ach so' are all pieces of simple and elegant beauty, above anything else.
'fadutron' does indeed begin with some ultra-minimal explorations that can be hard to stomach on a nice day and nice walk home, but that's just the prelude for villalobos' closing meander, where a nicely silly melody comes plink-plonking in. i love villalobos when he's like this- when he almost makes his machines whistle, care free, as they work. and behind this little bit of whimsy, villalobos then adds the quacking of ducks and the cheeping of birds! from the claustrophobic grind of the opening stages, we're suddenly right out in the open, with the track skipping along contentedly.
the other track, 'chromosoul' begins with a thrilling swirl of dubby clinks and pings, like liquid diamonds. that's villalobos as his most pretty. from then on, the digital dust settles, and he's right back into the hardness and the inertia of the beats that keep his tracks always, no matter how far out he gets, tied to 6 a.m dancefloors. but vilalobos wraps the beats in this wispy pillow of almost deep-house basslines, which always remain slightly hidden, like the ripples on the surface of water from movements in the depths.

at its heart, villalobos' music is pretty uncomplicated. for the most part, it's just nice. there's pretty often a fluffiness there: hands in the air moments are always suggested, if never truly arrived at. there's much else going on besides, of course, but that's not what yr looking for, walking round the duck pond at sunset.

2006-06-13T02:34:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:

SLIPMATT AND BROCKIE- 'ABSOLUTE OLD SCHOOL CLASSICS'
LUCIANO- 'SCI FI HI FI VOL.2'
WIGGLE- FABRIC MIX
GET PHYSICAL RECORDS- 4TH ANNIVERSARY COMP.
M.A.N.D.Y- 'BODY LANGUAGE MIX'
FILASTINE- 'BURN IT'
BANG- 'SHOOTING STAR'
FORCE AND STYLES- 'HEART OF GOLD'
Q-TEX- 'POWER OF LOVE'
MARTIN JAY SUNDAY SOCA SHOW ON CHOICE FM.
VARIOUS DANCEHALL PIRATES
VARIOUS HOUSE PIRATES
I-ROBOTS- ITALO ELECTRO DISCO UNDERGROUND CLASSICS
VILLALOBOS- 'ICH SO'
VILLALOBOS- 'CHROMOSOUL/FADUTRON'
THE SOUND OF WILLOW AGAINST LEATHER, DULWICH CRICKET CLUB.
N DOUBLE A PIRATE SET BANGING OUT OF A PASSING CAR
CAT POWER- 'THE GREATEST'
THE VICE CHANCELLOR OF MY OLD UNIVERSITY SPEAKING LATIN FOR OVER AN HOUR.
V/A- 'SUPERLONGEVITY 4'
WOEBOT- 'NOIR DESIRE MIX'
JEFF MILLS- EXHIBITIONIST'

as dizzee predicted all those years ago, it's going to be a hot summer. already is, in fact. over the weekend, even the bits of it where i wasn't sat in a black suit and black graduation gown for hours, we had suffocating bear hugs of heat, the smog turning the london horizon a sickly yellow-brown.
forays were occasionally made to the outside world, to get supplies, or to try and get a tan, but mostly we sat in the cool shadows of the house, listening to the radio, cooking and making salads, watching the world cup.

i love the world cup as i love all international sporting events. i even got quite passionately emotionally involved with the Curling in the winter olympics this year. one thing that's particularly great about the world cup this year is that Trinidad and Tobago are in it (although perhaps not for much longer, if England have their way...). this means that there's an overload of soca tracks about football at the moment, trinidad and tobago being the home of soca. martin jay ran through them on his essential sunday evening soca show on choice fm (96.9 fm). it's been my first weekend of listening to soca for about a year (you really can't listen to it in winter- the day-glo exuberance of it is just exquisitely depressing when it's pissing down with rain outside and it's going dark at 3pm...).

as a soca '06 novice, it's all a bit daunting, really. each year, i forgot how full-on and crazy soca is, constantly going higher and higher into frantic and brilliant kitsch and cheese. really quite absurd. and so: ultimate summer music, of course. much like 90s ardkore records got bringing on the mdma rush down to a fine art and exact science, soca records are pretty ruthlessly clinical in their evocation of good times in sunshine. these guys know what they're doing.

the wealth of soca tracks soundtracking the T&T world cup campaign clearly reveals the superiority of those nations relative to england. they sing along to the mighty Maximus Dan's heart-swelling song of world cup pride and hope, and we get fucking Embrace. and idiots still singing that Baddiel and Skinner shit. really, the problem's right there isn't it?: embrace and david baddiel vs. maximus dan. it's almost enough to make you want to support trinadad and tobago on thursday. almost.

---------------------------

2006-06-09T07:36:00.000-07:00

LISTENINCE SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:
DELIGHT FM TAPE
WOEBOT- 'NOIR DESIRE' MIX
FILASTINE- 'BURN IT'
V/A- 'ITALO SESSIONS 2'
V/A- 'I-ROBOTS: ITALO UNDERGROUND ELECTRO'
DELIA AND GAVIN- 'REVELEE REMIXES'
PHILIP SHERBURNE- 'SCHAFFEL IS STRONGER THAN PRIDE' MIX
MOUNTAIN GOATS LIVE RECORDING
V/A- 'SUPERLONGEVITY 4'
MANDY- 'BODY LANGUAGE VOL. 1 MIX'

i'm with Woebot here: carl craig's remix of 'revelee', nice as it is, doesn't really hit me where i want it to. which is a disappointment after the scary monster of goodness that was his mix of 'fallin up'.
but the baby ford mix of 'revelee' is a pretty gigantic. as minimal and grinding as you like, but never boring cuz it's sheer evil as well. that growling, anti-music bass! those shivers of frosty synths! yes yes a thousand times yes...

I find MANDY's widely-held-to-be-seminal 'body language to be very odd. when i first heard it, i was taken aback, in a bad way, by how tepid and grown-up it sounded, after the OTT high-camp theatrics of get physical's '2nd anniversary' mix, the latter being a record that's so full on it's actually a little hard to deal with in places. but in a good way, of course.
but 'body language' seems to go up a few notches in intensity and exuberance every time i put it on. it's weird, almost like it's been sitting there in our kitchen growing all this time. it's one of the few records i've heard that sounds steadily more and more all sugary poppy-surface fun, the more listens it gets: it doesn't reveal hidden depths so much as hidden, glorious and rushy shallows.

ok i'm going to my graduation ceremony now. it's only been FOUR years i left my alma mater...

2006-06-06T13:54:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:

FILASTINE- 'BURN IT'
VILLALOBOS- 'FADUTRON/CHROMOSOUL'
VILLALOBOS- 'ACH SO'
V/A- 'SUPERLONGEVITY 4'
MICHAEL MAYER @ STATIC LIVE RECORDING
SOCA PIRATE RADIO STATION
DELIGHT FM OLD SCHOOL GARAGE SET
NEWHAM GENERALS ON RINSE FM
SKEPTA, FRISCO AND PRESIDENT T ON RINSE FM
VARIOUS UNKNOWN PIRATE STATIONS PLAYING HOUSE
TROPICAL TRACKS (BOY BETTER KNOW)

this summer the london pirates seem to be awash with weird, fractured house with sexy, groaning bass. i don't know where this stuff is from, what it is, or when it's from, but it's absolutely fantastic. i'll tape some so you can give it a listen.

4/4 might just be where it's at in london in the coming year i think. may be people want to dance again? in particular, check JME's Boy Better Know Record's foray into splintery, blissy todd-esque 2-step, released under the 'Tropical' name. music for holidays and sun. it's been too long, london...

also making me happy is the return of the mighty Delight 103.00 fm. the most fun and most ramshackle and chaotic garage pirate of them all. if yr lucky enough to hear a so solid kids set, where they do phone-ins so that aspiring MCs can spit their biggest bars live on air, you'll see what i mean.

last night they were playing a join-the-dots mix of skeletalgrime, whumpy grimey ukg from south london's finest Bigshot, speed garage, dark 2-step and todd edwards. really, that's how things should be, isn't it?

2006-06-04T02:05:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:

GALOPPIERENDE ZUVERSICHT- LIVE RECORDING FROM KONTROL, 2004.
WILEY- '2ND PHAZE'
WRETCH 32- 'LEARN FROM MY MIXTAPE'
RENATO RENALDI- 'HOARSE FRENZY'
VILLALOBOS- 'ALCACHOFA'
MAGDA- LIVE RECORDING AT TECHNIQUE
MESSIAEN- 'LOUANGE A L'ETERNITE DE JESUS'
VARIOUS TEKKNIK MIXES
HOME MADE R N B COMPILATIONS
FILASTINE LIVE AT GRAMAPHONE, EAST LONDON
DJ/RUPTURE LIVE AT GRAMAPHONE, EAST LONDON
HEATWAVE DJS LIVE AT GRAMAPHONE, EAST LONDON
TOXIC DANCEHALL DJS LIVE AT GRAMAPHONE, EAST LONDON
V/A- 'SUPERLONGEVITY 4'
KATHRYN WILLIAMS- 'LITTLE BLACK NUMBERS'
GEOFFREY BOYCOTT GOING, "BOWLED, BOWLED, BOWLED"
V/A- 'TECHNO RAVE'
EWAN PEARSON- 'SCI FI HI FI VOL 1'
LUCIANO- 'SCI FI HI FI VOL 2'
SUPERDISCOUNT 2
MICRO-HOUSE FROM A PASSING CAR
DANCEHALL EVERYWHERE OUTSIDE NOW THE SUN IS OUT AND SUMMER IS HERE.
ROLL DEEP 'CREEPER VOL. 2'
CARL CRAIG REMIX OF DELIA AND GAVIN'S 'REVELEE', HEARD IN SOUNDS OF THE UNIVERSE RECORD SHOP.
V/A- 'MOTOWN CLASSICS'
V/A- 'TROPICALIA'

apologies and a thousand 'sorry's for the lack of recent posts. this slackness has to stop, otherwise this blog will have no point, so from now on i resolve to post here at least every two days. if i happen to fail in this you may freely call me a wasteman without running the risk of me calling out your name and merking you in a clash. that's fair, right?

---------------------
anyway, enough of the silliness, let's get down to work. so my girlfriend woke up at dawn yesterday, for no reason, just 'cause, that's when her body wanted her to wake up. this morning I wake up at dawn, for no reason, just 'cause. it's spectacular. 5 in the morning, tucked up in bed as opposed to trudging home from a club, is Very Large. golden light streams through the curtains and it is impossible not to feel a surge of hope.
i go back to sleep.
then wake, at nine, at try to work out what to listen to. i toy with the thought of michael mayer's sleepy heroin-house all time classic 'immer' mix but decide that's more a late night thing- listening to it now would be like getting drunk before noon. decadent but also wrong. i wonder about listening to some silly hiccupy house, may be akufen or dandy jack, and think that that'd be nicely rousing but not quite right.
so i settle on renato renaldi's 'hoarse frenzy' which i got on a recommendation from Selectadisc who called it 'beautiful', and so i bought it because i think i don't own enough beautiful things.
it is beautiful, and it's perfect for this powder blue start to a sunday. it evokes a sense of place and time perhaps more than anything i've ever heard. loosely, it's a avant/alt/weird-folk album, one sprawling piece stretched out over a CD. running throughout are field recordings- birds- sparrows, i'm guessing- tweet and chirp pretty much constantly. floor boards creek with padded footsteps. phones ring. wonderfully, in an act of genius, the record starts with renato tuning his guitar for say about 2 minutes while the birds sing. listening to this record, yr right inl the sunlight, the soft air, the life of the italian town outside the tape deck it was recorded on. sounds echo like they echo on warm summer days. everything sounds gold and pastel. like a sunday, slowly waking.

his vocals are beautiful and alien. they appear only a few times- everything, apart from the birds is a fleeting moment on this record- but when they do you are taken aback each time. i don't know what language he is singing in, or even if he is singing in a language. he sings with a croak, cracking sounds apart and then smudging them together. that's an ugly way of putting it, but i don't know how else to describe the rawness and weirdness of the beauty in his voice.

this is a frustrating record, and that frustration is asborbing, and holds you in to the record. out of drones and hiss and elegant confusion a moment of gorgous, tactile loveliness- or flowery melody or a perfect sound- will flit in, only to disappear in a matter of seconds. so you sit in this old italian house as the day starts, the sparrows cheeping outside in the yard, as all these little bits of busy sound pop in and out, saying hi and saying bye.

--------------------------------------
at a friend's house last night i noticed that someone had constructed a poem on the fridge using those word fridge magnets. it was great and it made me laugh. here it is (it's best read imagining that yr seeing it stuck piece by piece on a fridge):

"some evil science has created
a were-whale
it is human by day
but after a time
must live beneath the sea

how sad.

hardly an easy life"

-----------------------

i saw dj/rupture and filastine live on friday. both great, of course. filastine plays intricate north african (i think) hip hop. dj/rupture is the best dj in the world. whispers on the night were that filastine's album is album-of-the-year material. i've got a copy and so will listen to it tonight and get back to you, eh.
also Very Large on the night were the heatwave DJs who played killer selection of dancehall classics- so classic that even I knew a lot of them and i really know nothing about dancehall. it made me realise that i need to make it Heatwave again really soon.

------------------------------
Wretch 32's 'learn from my mixtape' is symptomatic of three trends in grime at the moment, two good, the other bad. the first good news is that there is now pretty much a true mixtape-culture in grime, and that's sorely needed what with the grime pirates being so depleted. a few years ago a new exciting MC would have to be on radio for months and months before anyone took notice. now they can just put out a mixtape, get it in Uptown and Rhythm Division, and they're the new star. this is what's happened with Wretch 32: he's been on the 'Fuck Radio' series of mp3 sets, but i think very, very people would have taken notice before the release of his mixtape. his crew, Combination Camp are pretty much unknowns. but now, after 'learn from my mixtape' everyone's talking about him. mixtapes are introducing an egalitarian cut-throat competition among MCs- suddenly, anyone can get their music out there without waiting to win over radio bosses. and i guess competition, as we're so often told, raises standards. the time when roll deep could dominate grime because of their position on Rinse has gone, i think.

the bad news is that Wretch 32 isn't an exciting MC. i am confused as to why there's so much hype about him. to talk about his CD is to fall into Mojo or Q-esque reviewspeak: it's 'assured', 'polished', 'rounded', 'solid'. all very nice, but really what is the fucking point. it is boring music. previously, grime has never boring: it might on occasion, or on many occasions, been infuriating, or one-dimensional, or unenjoyable, or callous, or cynical, or even kitsch. but it was never, ever dull. suddenly, that's changed.

wretch 32 isn't the only boring MC, but his success reveals a big shift in grime. right now, some of the biggest new MCs have all the clever wordplay, all the neat metaphors, you could wish for but there's none of the vitality that used to carry grime. a couple of years ago not every big MC was a great MC-some could hardly MC at all- but they were all larger-than-life characters. they were performers above everything else. now, many MCs are very far from being performers, and instead we get this worthy workaday dullness that washes over you.
it used to be that when you played grime to someone who hadn't heard it before, you'd get a shocked reaction- they'd love it, they'd hate it, they'd not understand it, they'd feel uncomfortable with it, they'd find it funny, whatever.
i can't imagine playing wretch 32 to someone would get much reaction at all. and there's the problem. this just is not very exciting.

which is not to say that grime's not exciting. great things are happening all over the place. but now, for the first time, there's corners of grime that are neither particularly good, nor particularly bad, just middle of the road boring- in that respect grime has become like all over genres. and that to me seems like a big change.

but there's a second bit of good news to finish on. the production on 'learn from my mixtape' is stunning. chunky bizzle takes care of much of it and i waxed about him on here just a few days ago so i'll keep it short now. let's just say that the white-hot melodicism and spaciness of the production on this mixtape make me very, very excited about where grime's going. one track in particular- i'm guessing it's by ruff sqwad affiliate Merlin- stands out; a snippet of guitar fuzz, a buzzy tomas andersson-esque electro bassline, and a snow-shower of darkcore synth, built around this bucking, wild-eyed rhythm.
great times ahead, definitely.

2006-05-31T02:24:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:

WINSTON RILEY PRODUCTIONS- 'DANCEHALL TECHNIQUES'
V/A -'FOLK GUITAR'
SILVER JEWS- 'BRIGHT FLIGHT'
WILEY- '2ND PHAZE'
ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA- 'GREATEST HITS'
BEACH BOYS- 'PET SOUNDS'
BASEMENT JAXX- 'SINGLES'
LUCIANO- 'SCI FI HI FI VOL.2'
RICHIE HAWTIN- 'DE9 LITE MIX'
DJ BEN- 'REMEMBER OLD SCHOOL MIX'
MICHAEL MAYER- 'LIVE AT STATIC'
RENATO RENALDI- 'HOARSE FRENZY'
UNDERGROUND RESISTANCE- 'X-101'
JOHN TEJADA- 'THE END OF IT ALL'
M.A.N.D.Y LIVE AT PLUG CLUB, SHEFFIELD.
MR SCRUFF LIVE AT PLUG CLUB, SHEFFIELD.

friday night was a classic case of the school boy error of peaking too early and peaking wrongly. by the time M.A.N.D.Y came on were we all in a seriously bad way making frequent trips to the toilets to try to empty our stomachs of the pestilence. we can laugh about it now though, because we're laidback and, yes, 'chilled', like that.

once someone at work did a little dance next to me in front of the customers to mungo jerry's 'summertime' which was playing on the stereo. obviously i was appalled by such beahviour and backed away as she tried to get closer, clearly intending that we were to dance together for the pleasure of the customers. so daft. anyway, this moving and backing away went on for a little bit until she made a last ditch effort and laughed forcefully, 'c'mon, CHILL OUT!', all the while doing this stupid dance, with me standing totally still in front the customers, and wanting to kill her a little bit.

which is just one reason while you'll never (i hope) see mungo jerry's 'summertime' in the list of listening up there ^.

but, regardless, M.A.N.D.Y. From what i could tell, through my sick ears and body, he was playing quite hard, quite minimal set. no gushy 'mandarine girl' -style electrohouse bliss here. may be electro house is going to get more minimal and minimal techno's going to get more muscular and the two will become one, as the spice girls prophesised. who knows? as richie hawtin is fond of saying, techno is a constant adventure, an unfolding narrative and you never know which way it's going to turn. 'cept you do, really, if yr clever and perceptive enough, which i'm not.
anyway, look, MANDY (don't watch the full stops) was good, and different to how i expected. so there you go.

-----------------------------
on sunday morning, listening to underground resistance's mighty, MIGHTY, 'x-101', i had a pining for dark and nasty techno, the kind which actually scares you as it echoes and thuds round clubs. the kind of techno which has an element of horribleness to it, and that's a good thing. the kind that's as brutal and inhuman and impressively destructive as dynamiting mountain sides. then i realised that i don't really own any of that stuff, apart from the odd bit of underground resistance, of which 'x-101' is probably the most extreme, and therefore best, example.
but then, but then...luciano's 'sci fi hi fi' mix got put on the stereo and my pining was answered, a little. on the basis of the first 2 episodes, the 'sci fi hi fi' mix series on Soma is turning out to be pretty much essential- ewan pearson's inaugural one is like the pinnacle of gorgeous electro house.
luciano's mix is equally good, but in a very different way. it's nothing like his records, which are delicate little flowers of fragments upon fragments of melody on chinks upon chinks of beats. no, with his sci-fi hi-fi mix, luciano crafts minimal techno into this head-caving whipping sound where even the inevitable (it is minimal after all) space and vacuums sound fearsome. at points it sounds almost like the creaks and groaning squelches of psy-trance. it's far from the usual sensual pops and kisses the perslon/cadenza lot usually come out with. it's actually quite nasty. which is just what i wanted.

2006-05-26T03:23:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:

DJ BEN- 'REMEMBER OLD SCHOOL' MIX
WIGGLE- 'FABRIC MIX'
THEO PARRISH- 'FALLIN UP, CARL CRAIG MIX'
WINSTON RILEY PRODUCTIONS- 'DANCEHALL TECHNIQUES'

the rain is over and the the sun makes the grass on clapham common glitter. the cricket has gone well, and we're about to go home to make a silly amount of cakes. we're in good moods. and so, we listen to Dj Ben's 'remember old school' mix of cosmic disco, north african pop, and gorgeously kitsch 80's plasticy pop over and over. we decide that why we like dj ben is that he sounds like dj/rupture, but a dj rupture for our (currently) fluffy and sentimental hearts. dj/rupture is a dizzying spiral. dj ben is a slow, swinging swirl.

this came to pass, of course, because of the inspiring report from woebot of the recent Baldelli DJ set at plastic people, something which i'm still cursing myself for missing. so a flick through i-tunes brought up a few 'afro-cosmic' mixes that i'd forgot i even had. that's the great thing and the bad thing about these times of downloading- you can have it all, but then you don't even care enough about it, don't even notice it.

but now we care about the dj ben mix, very much. the most inclusive, hopeful dance music ever. at some point, i'll put it up on a download site so you too can share the joy. for now, though, go to

www.dj-ben.de

he's got some new mixes up there, but i've not heard them yet.

ok i'm off to sheffield for the weekend. see you monday x

2006-05-24T11:21:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST

WILEY- '2ND PHAZE'
RECORDING OF MICHAEL MAYER LIVE AT STATIC
DJ BEN- 'REMEMBER OLD SCHOOL MIX'
RAINBOW BRIGHT- 'THE ROLLAH'
MATES OF STATE LIVE AT GARAGE, LONDON
HOT CLUB DE PARIS LIVE AT GARAGE, LONDON
THE HEADCOATS- 'ELEMENTARY HEADCOATS'

------------------------
wiley's '2nd phaze' has had 2 lives. it's first life was as a rumour, a myth, over a year ago now. whispers about it being the definitive grime statement, a devastating showcase of wiley at the top of his game, were passed around messageboards and internet forums, by those who'd heard it, and probably plenty who hadn't. this was going to erase all those post-'treddin' doubts. this was what we'd been waiting for.

its second life is right now. it trickled out with no hype, into one, and only one, on-line record shop, by passing the usual niche grime channels of Uptown and Rhythm Division. few people even knew that it was out, and even fewer had much to say about it. we weren't even sure if it was meant to be an album or a mixtape. from the sublime to the ridiculous: wiley had done things his way, as always, and we were left confused.

but what to say about it? again, it's a two-halves thing. at first, it throws itself at you, fireworks of ideas spilling everywhere. the first 5 tracks are a definitive grime statement. it's all here, everything that's ever made you love grime, as wiley tears through it with deadly urgency. he's been waiting too long and all that's been pent up is released, finally. 'intro' has the obsessive intricacy in music and words that only wiley can really pull off- it even switches to a whole new sound 30 seconds in, wiley's boredom threshold is so low. he's got a lot to do. 'eskiboy', 'gangsterz' and 'you're not real' have all been caned on the pirates for so long that they're old friends, but here they sound vital and fresh. only here, heard together in breathless sucession, do you really get a true sense of how good these tracks are, of just how completely wiley has mastered his art. 'stormy weather' has come in for flak but it's a perfect example of that woozy style that Target pioneered, a sound like bits of mist, roughly stitched together.

and then something odd happens. wiley seems to lose interest, his job done and point proved, and the psychopathically intense focus is lost. half finished and sketchily thought-through ideas, irritating joke tunes, the sound of lads trying to make each other laugh, and slushy R n B with choruses too much like lumpy syrup all clutter things up.

there's still bits of genius dotted around, of course. 'johnny was a bad boy' is blackhole-absorbing, a wasteland frozen by the low howls of square wave bass and littered by skittery beats blowing through. 'icepole remix' is the end-point, the logical conclusion, of the path that wiley first set out on all those years ago with 'eskimo': everything- the MCing, the beats, the divebombing gloops of synth- have been honed into icicles and arranged into surgical strikes. 'i like the way' is gleefully leery, sounding like a sean paul track staggering home blind drunk, with wiley not being able to help himself from growling 'hnnnrh' like some over-sexed pantomime villain.

but as great as these tracks are, jaws don't drop anymore, once the initial focus has been lost.
or, at least, they don't until 'friday night', perhaps the best track wiley has ever recorded.
it all begins unpromisingly. first there's the title. yr expecting another boring clubs n drink n girls by-numbers filler track. as the track starts an AM-rock guitar riff shimmers in, and yr worrying that wiley's been plundering Magic FM for ideas again. but, again, wiley's half-good/half-bad dialectic kicks in and all the doubts are blown away. firstly, this is a club n drink n girls tune. but it's the true and brutal side of all that, not the rapper's fantasy. wiley sounds tired and crushed, despite his cracked announcement that he's still 'confident with the flow'. he wanders round the club as a ghost, feeling 'hollow inside', observing all with a weary scientific eye. he feels too old for this, he shouldn't be here, he should never have come. he's on the outside of this, and on the outside of where he wants to be in his life and career, but can't give either up. so it's the same cycle, for ever. Or until something happens. it's important that one of wiley's last lyrics on the album is, 'let's not forget that i'm ageing'.

and the AM-rock riff is the perfect worn out and faded neon backdrop, promising a good time that's long gone, that's history. Rapid, from ruff sqwad, embellishes it as starkly as he possibly could, just a little roll of pattering beats, a few clicks of fingers, and a soul sample groan for the chorus.

it's the most severe and truthful song i've heard in years. it cuts through all the bullshit, to the core of things, and says what it needs to say, without once flinching.

for this track alone, '2nd phaze' is a major, major event. even if wiley isn't making it one.

2006-05-22T14:27:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:

VARIOUS PRODUCTION- 'FOLLER/HOME' 7"
AZTEC MYSTIC- 'AGUILA'
PATRICK CHARDRONNET0 'LEDGE'
V/A- 'POKER FLAT VOLUME 4'
WILEY- '2ND PHAZE'
OLD RUFF SQWAD RINSE SET
DOMINIC A
CHUNKY BIZZLE
SATIE
FEMI KUTI
KODE 9- 'DUBSTEP ALLSTARS VOL.4'
PHILIP SHERBURNE- 'SCHAFFEL IS STRONGER THAN PRIDE MIX'
HOT CHIP- 'THE WARNING'
ARIZONA AMP AND ALTERNATOR- 'S/T'
ARTIE SHAW
V/A '100% NEW BEAT' TAPE
RUFF SQWAD- 'NO BASE' EP
THE NOISETTES
POLMO POLPO- 'LIKE HEARTS SWELLING'
FAT TRUCKERS DJ SET AT T-BAR
MOUNTAIN GOATS LIVE RECORDING
THE KNIFE- 'WE SHARE OUR MOTHER'S HEALTH' (TRENTEMOLLER MIX)
LUKE SLATER- 'I CAN COMPLETE YOU'.

no one told me that Hot Chip were so fey! jesus! nice though. nice and messy. but all those prince comparisons had me itching to hear some junior boys-esque sighing sexiness. but no, it's all too cardigan-wearing to be really sensual. which is no bad thing, for i'm wearing a cardigan while writing this (it's a sexy one though, trust). but after the first initial shock at the feyness, the sheer INDIE-dance of it (much more indie than 'proper' indie-dance ever was, right?), it's a great record. i just wish it was the junior boys. which, after woebot's teaser, just makes johnny dark's record even more urgent for me...

------------------------------------
also Urgent and Key is the fact that dj rolando's got a new mix out. his 'nite life' mix is pretty much perfect. he shows you the links between deep house and detroit techno, and that's pretty important. to me, anyway.

---------------------

Dust.
and even more urgent is the fact that chunky bizzle's releasing a mixtape this summer! in my grime-doldrums (which i'm clawing my way out of, slowly) 2 things were big helps. firstly, the fact that 2nd Phaze was going to drop any time soon. and secondly, that chunky bizzle, whose tracks kept on and on floating through the heat on pirate-radio smog last summer, could point the way forward, could be the saviour. chunky bizzle produces grime like no one else- yawning canyons, sleepy hollows, haunted by ardkore and kanye, tunes stretched out in the sun with beats as nothing but garnish. it's n
it's crazy that it's even called grime, in a way- it's so dreamlike and gentle. it's not grimey-- it's dusty. but, with grime, it shares a willingness to switch focus from the beat to the feel:- these are tracks to be draped over MC's words. one of grime's big ideas has always been to let MC's take care of the beat.
but chunky bizzle departs from almost all grime- except perhaps ruff sqwad and target- in favouring slow squiggles and clouds of melody over darkness. chunky bizzle, however, pushes things out further into weightlessness and blissiness than even ruff sqwad. it sounds like a park in london at the height of summer, ringed by roads melting in the heat.

even better, though, his mixtape is called 'i'm an 80's baby'. chunky bizzle wrapping up 80's pop glossiness in patina and fug is almost too exciting. perhaps the continuum is about to get an ariel pink moment? let's dream.

to hear what i'm talking about (although he hasn't posted his best tracks),
got to
www.myspace.com/chunkbeezey

2006-05-19T02:42:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:

OLD ROLL DEEP RINSE SET
WILEY- '2ND PHAZE'
WRETCH 32- 'LEARN FROM MY MIX TAPE'
LOGAN SAMA- KISS FM SET
RAMONES- 'IT'S ALIVE'
JENNY LEWIS AND THE WATSON TWINS- 'RABBIT FUR COAT'
MAGIK MARKERS LIVE IN KILBURN
BARR AND CORSANO LIVE IN KILBURN
BIRDS OF DELAY LIVE IN KILBURN
TEMPERATURES LIVE AT KILBURN
NATIONAL SCHOOL LIVE ON A BOAT
INCREDIBLY LOUD CLASSICAL MUSIC IN VAUXHALL STATION
WIGGLE- 'FABRIC MIX'
RENATO RINALDI- 'HOARSE FRENZY'
THEO PARRISH- 'FALLING UP (CARL CRAIG REMIX)'
ALEX UNDER- 'Las Bicicletas Son Para El Verano (Alex Smoke's Rusty Bike Mix)'

apologies for the silence. i've been out and about seeing live music. last night it was the formidable national school (nee Vegetables) on board the good ship 'battersea barge' (which is actually in vauxhall). i am now a total convert to gigs in boats. and drinking in boats. ANYTHING in boats. you get the prettiness of the river with all its twinkly lights, and you get the excitement of being/pretending to be an old sea dog. that's a Big Look, whichever way you cut it. so, get yrself down to the battersea barge, if you please.

---------------------------------
the other gig i saw this week was an upset the rhythm party of noise in Kilburn, the furthest North i've ever gone in London i think. north london, unlike south, is weighed down by history and civilization, you can feel it as yr walking around, whereas south always feels like it's clinging onto the fringes of the city, like it's only just got here and could go at any moment.
so upset the rhythm are DIY noisy/post hardcore gig people. i'm glad that i've found out about them as i spent much of my youth- not enough of it, but still a fair bit- going to DIY gigs in basements and top rooms of pubs in liverpool and manchester and sometimes Leeds, where you'd pay almost nothing to get in, where there'd be stalls selling enticing vinyl, and it wasn't clear how we had all come together for this, and you could never work out what these impossibly cool people did when they weren't at gigs cuz they seemed removed from the boredom of everyday life and wrapped up in this self-sustaining culture, and odd bands that sounded like no one else would play on stages made out of crates, and all the equipment would be bruised and antique, and it was like being let in on a secret, every time.

but in london, that doesn't seem to happen, not so much. but upset the rhythm are bucking the trend. there was a lot of noise at this gig. some of it was pink clouds of noise, gently ebbing away, from Birds of delay. some it was fractured grits of noise, from Temperatures. this seems to be what the kids listen to nowadays, this free noise. i don't know, may be 4 years ago i had the patience and the will to understand this, but i'm not sure i do now. as i get older, more and more i just want to dance.

but i did see the greatest drummer i have seen- chris corsano. apparently he's some kind of living legend. he looks impossibly young, like ian mackaye in the minor threat days, a look of cultured honesty. he's played with all the top boys of improv, i think. nels cline, thurston moore, various old people who play saxophones and probably, definitely, call them 'horns'.

you know.

anyway, at the gig, in kilburn, he was playing with Barr, who's like anticon but not as mathematical. barr talks about his life and his fears in this shower of consciousness in a voice that is, we decided, Very American. he's great, and engaging, and seems to have this innate sense of rhythm so it's like HiphopNotHiphop---riding the beat but in such a weird way that made me thinking of flyfishing, you know when you throw it out in a vast, looping arc and then pull it back in. at the end of the gig you want to be Barr's friend, but i think hearing him on record, in my house, would make my head hurt a little.

but we were talking about chris corsano. his drumming is astounding. it's kind of free-jazz drumming i guess, but really fluid and delicate. it's so milky. it's like his music is like breathing for him. or like a conservation, a proper one, with Barr. i hate it when people talk about improv music being a 'conversation', but this really was. apparently he does solo sets with a bin full of crazy toys and contraptions and electric things that whirr, and he pulls them out of the bin at random and constructs something beautiful. apparently those sets are out of this world.

magik markers were the last band on and it all fell apart. they have two guitarists and neither guitar worked properly, and one didn't work at all. it was like seeing a couple who you're friends have a fight in front of you. it all got too awkward so we left.

-------------------------------------
two people who i think are probably geniuses in housey minimal techno at the moment are Alex Smoke (of the lushy 'chica wappa'), and alex under. they have joined forces, kind of, for alex's under's 'Las Bicicletas Son Para El Verano (Alex Smoke's Rusty Bike Mix)'. and it's lovely. it's like a mini dj set, with all these different elements spinning around and being slotted into the pattern one by one. and it has this giddy, hyper-sensitive jittery happiness to it that i like, because it reminds me of that feeling you get just before you're amount to embark on a big night.

---------------------------
i need to hear that carl craig remix of the delia and gavin tune
------------------
wiley- '2nd phaze'. BIG. will write about it very soon, once it's all been digested.

2006-05-15T14:50:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:

JENNY LEWIS AND THE WATSON TWINS- ‘RABBIT FUR COAT’

PANTYTEC- ‘MAY BE’

LOGAN SAMA KISS FM SET

SANCHO PANZA- ‘CARNIVAL MIX’

DANNY WEED AND MEGA- ‘COKE DRIVE’

PERSIL

THEY CAME FROM THE STARS I SAW THEM

TOKYO ADVENTURES

VOO

--------------------------------

oh, the cricket, the cricket. Dear me.

-----------------------

ANYWAY, a record that I love at the moment is ‘rabbit fur coat’ by Jenny Lewis and the Watson twins. Getting the facts out of the way quickly: It’s an alt-country record with nice tunes. Now on to the fun stuff; this music is so stately! Elegance is so important in music. People might not think that grime, the music that I spend most of my time listening to and thinking about, is elegat, but it is to me. It’s all about beautifully simple solutions.

‘rabbit fur coat’ is elegant in a different way. I don’t know if any of these songs are in 3/4 time or not, but I’d want to waltz to this record, if I knew how to waltz. As things are, it makes me want to sit outside in a sunset sipping long island iced teas and chatting about the day gone as the dust slowly settles back down on London. I love the way the singers glide and swoon in this gorgeously refined way. This is straight-backed music, done up to the nines, with a honeysuckle gentility to it. It’s music which makes me look forward to getting older.

But going to the other side of things, a few weeks ago at Fabric when I saw a group of Spanish shirts-off and shaved-head hard looking guys sing along drunkenly to Pantytec’s utterly wonderful ‘may be’, I thought it was pretty cool. In the UK, minimal techno/micro-house is a pretty niche, studenty, middle class interest, and it was interesting to see a little bit of how it’s received on the continent, where it’s much a bigger thing: hard music for cross-section dancefloors to go crazy to. As a middle class student, I have a stupid thing of thinking that the things that I like are somehow validated when people who aren’t middle class students like them. So, Perlon is hereby validated in my bourgeois-angst ridden mind…

‘may be’ is the latest Pantytec single (pantytec is sammy dee and zip). It starts out as a typically sexy and obtuse perlon cut, full of sugary but metallic ripples, sticky gurgles, and showered kisses of sound. Then, out of nowhere, a drunken trombone comes in and the track changes totally, into this stumbling journey home singalong. Smiles all round. You should buy it, you know.

----------------------------------

like lying on a beach you don’t really want to be on: Pandarescue on Ariel pink. It’s wonderful writing.

2006-05-13T01:20:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:

PANTYTEC- 'MAYBE'
GET PHYSICAL RECS- '4TH ANNIVERSARY MIX'
TRAUM RECS- 'INTERKONTINENTAL 3'
LUCIANO- 'BLIND BEHAVIOUR'
ARAB STRAP- 'FIRST BIG WEEKEND OF THE SUMMER'
SKEPTA- 'STUPID' 12"
RUFF SQWAD- 'NO BASE' 12"

what i love about get physical records is that you know that they're always going to go for maximal fun. they're going to camp it up, and go dirty where needs be, to keep you smiling. sometimes, most times, i don't want innovation or difficult and deep genius, i just want something to make me and friends smile, sitting around the kitchen. (2nd anniversary mix is better than the 4th, though)

skepta's new EP is crazy. it's like a mischmasch of all his previous big tunes, strung together onto this constantly mutating helix. very large.

ruff sqwad's new EP is a delicate heart-murmur with no bass.

skepta's new EP also features the stoney and eerie howling at the moon track which roll deep always play. even larger.

ruff sqwad's new EP has exhortations to 'drop the bass, COME ON!' which are much appreciated.

fuzzy techno for breakfast courtesy of Traum's techno interpol. as comforting and gently formal as Test Match Special.

it's the second big weekend of the summer.

i work on saturdays.

i need to go to work now.

2006-05-11T14:38:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:

WILEY- AVENGER/FLAT DERIK
LOADS OF OLD WILEY WHITE LABELS
VARIOUS PRODUCTION- 'HOME' 7"
THE JUAN MACLEAN- 'LESS THAN HUMAN'
KODE 9 AND SPACEAPE LIVE AT WORKER'S PARTY
LEAVING THE FOLD LIVE AT WORKER'S PARTY
DIZZEE AND NEWHAM GENERALS RINSE SET FROM LAST WEEKEND

so despite the end of the grime honeymoon (similar thoughts and concerns voiced here and here) i've been on a bit of a spending spree for grime records today. i only rarely buy grime records, as i tend to think that somehow they sound a thousand times better when they're coming out of pirate radio, but today i picked up wiley's new 12 on Dumpvalve, and ordered some new terror danjah, ruff sqwad and skepta stuff from rhythm division.

i say 'despite the end of the grime honeymoon', but i think may be the 'despite' might be better replaced by 'because'. i have two ideas on this. firstly, my recent purchases could be the equivalent of those tell-tale signs of infidelity; unusually generous gifts from yr other half. perhaps i'm somehow trying to make amends for what feels somehow like a betrayal? or, secondly, perhaps its more akin to those clamourings to experience all you've missed that you can get once you realise that you'll never be in a particular place again, like the last days of University when, finally, you do all the tourist stuff that you spent 3 years trying to avoid. perhaps this burst of buying records right now comes from the worry, or-more worringly- the realisation, that i might not be a true 'grime fan' for much longer. perhaps i'll be leaving this plac soon. perhaps i want to fill in as many gaps as i can before i move on.

but i'm overreacting. i'm not moving away from grime, not really. i'm just trying to understand what i think about it now, which i've never had to do much before, as my love for the music used to be so immediate, and so clear.
the end of the honeymoon.

those who say that the recent drop in enthusiasm for grime is just hipsters moving on to the next trend are at least partly wrong. for me and i think for many others its more complex and confusing than that: it's about trying to figure out how and where this thing fits into yr life right now, this thing that's been such a big part of yr life for years, that you've invested yrself in. i've changed, yeah, but grime's changed too.

but back to the point- wiley's 'avenger'. the a-side's OK, but i prefer grime tracks when they're fireworks, whereas this one's a ticking bomb. the b-side 'flat derik' is lovely though, with a bassline like little black holes torn into the track.

2006-05-09T13:31:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:

MAGDA- LIVE AT TECHNIQUE, 2005
WOEBOT- 'BHANGRA SELECTION 2005'
SKREAM- 'AUGUST 05 MIX'
BANG- 'SHOOTING STAR'
DANIELE BALDELLI- 'PLUTON' (LOVELY COSMIC DISCO DOWNLOADED FROM THE MIGHTY ALLSEXISTAPE.BLOGSPOT.COM)
DANNY WEED- CREEPER.
DARKBOI, VORTEX, GRIMINAL ETC- 'UP AND COMING VOL. 1'

tired, so tired. but i must stay awake for Lost, as i am addicted. so till i can get my fix, why don't i inform and entertain you with a fireside chat about some music?

i didn't used to like Magda at all. she's part of M_nus, richie hawtin's label. she also has nice hair. when i heard her sets before, either recorded MP3s, or live at fabric, they were so dry and clicky that i couldn't really cope. (techno is a good lesson against the lazy gender stereotyping of female= soft and emotional- two of the biggest female DJs and producers, magda and Dinky, do some of the most relentlessly minimal and machinistic stuff out there. is machinistic a word? or...a neologism? let's hope its the latter. always forwards, never backwards as the saying goes...) .
so. but then i stumbled across this great mix, which you can download for no money whatsoever here:
http://www.technique.org.uk/music

and oh gosh, i should have been paying more attention to magda, it seems. this mix, a live recording of a club set, is almost embaressingly sensual, which is how i like my techno. heavy breathing and weird, cut up grunts and hiccups feature heavily and nicely messily. i also love the chicago-y, jack-y moments, with those hollow, cantering melodies.

i worry that i love techno too much actually. i think what happens is that when you listen to a lot of it, it actually reconfigures yr mind somehow, and from then on, yr thoughts beat at 120 bpm, so to speak...listening to techno, or more widely any house-derived 4/4 music, starts to be as natural as breathing. when i listen to techno, even techno that i don't really like, i still think: this is how things should be. i worry about this because, left to my own devices, i can easily spend hours listening to interminable techno mixes and, really, that can't be healthy.

but that's life as a man-machine. god i wish i was a man-machine. and Kraftwerk feel the same way

(about me, that is...).

---------------
today i listened to danny weed's 'creeper' to remind me why i started on my obsession in the first place.
-----------------
But really it's all about
bang- shooting star

the most beautiful track to be played at the overwhelmingly beautiful happyhardcore church organ recital last week. a track that stopped everyone's (understandable) laughter, and made the crowd glance into each other's increasingly teary eyes...
if you haven't heard this, and you aren't downloading it from the link above, then you are needlessly denying yrself joy.

ok! off to go and watch Lost.

till tomorrow...

2006-05-08T14:55:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:

PANTYTEC- 'MAYBE'
DOMINIK EULBERG- KREUT AND FLEUCHT MIX (SPELLING? WHO CARES)
JENNY LEWIS AND THE WATSON TWINS- 'RABBIT FUR COAT'
PAAVOHARJU- 'YHA HAMARAA'.
JOHN MAUS- 'SONGS'
TRACY AND THE PLASTICS' CULTURE FOR PIGEON'
V/A- 'STUDIO 1 SCORCHER'
DIZZEE AND NEWHAM GENERALS ON RINSE LAST NIGHT
ROLL DEEP ON RINSE LAST NIGHT
GLAMMA ON RINSE TONIGHT
MAGDA- LIVE RECORDING FROM TECHNIQUE, 2005
LIL WEAVAH- THE STREETS MIXTAPE.
FORCE AND STYLES- HEART OF GOLD
JOINING OF THE CLANS- BRAVEHEART
BANG- SHOOTING STAR
SUPERTHRILLER AND CUBAN BROS LIVE AT LOST VAGUENESS BALL (BOTH WANK)
CAT POWER- THE GREATEST
OLD NASTY CREW DEJA VU SET.
SLIPMATT AND DJ VIBES- 'BATTLE OF THE DJS MATCH 1'
JUNIOR BOYS- 'LAST EXIT'
VARIOUS PRODUCTION- 'IN THIS' 7"
UNDERGROUND RESISTANCE- 'WINDCHIME'
SKREAM- 'AUGUST 05 MIX'
BUN B- 'DRAPED UP + DRIPPED OUT' HEARD FROM PASSING CAR
PERSIL SONGS ON MYSPACE
DANANANACKROYD SONGS ON MYSPACE

so i guess the pattern is that there generally won't be posts on here over weekends. just too busy i'm afraid. but on weekdays, i'm all yrs...

------------------
and so, with a car slowly passing by, glinting in the sun, windows down, banging out bun b's 'drapped up and dripped out', summer arrived in london. it's that simple sometimes. quick and neat.

like a good haircut, i believe.
-------------------------

----------------------------
grime sounds very new and it sounds very old. it sounds like antique computers which have gone wrong, while trying to conduct orchestras. and sometimes it sounds dusty and fizzy with the warps of age.
blah blah blah. what's better to say here, though, is that grime isn't as good as it used to be. not nearly as good. i only realised this properly when i was on the rwdmag forum and picked up an old Nasty set from the deja vu days. and it just brought it home- things really were better in the old days. listen to a roll deep set now and a nasty set from 2003 and there's no comparison. this has saddened me for a few days. but there it is.
it's not just the NASTY MCs that wereand still are, peerless and perfect. it's those old grime productions- old jammer and wiley and danny weed and dizzee and slimting beats that were so brutally stripped down and up front and instant.

i remember reading something on techno years ago that said that techno music was like an ice berg- most of it was hidden below the surface, but that was what was keeping the whole thing going.

and i think grime is like that now. it's all atmosphere, hints, and density now. the old grime thing of being so shockingly, punch-in-the-face brazen about the sound, to the point of being cheap and tacky (these are good things) doesn't exist so much today.

i think the new haunted weights and wastes of grime were really pioneered by dj tubby and newham generals, but that kind of sound, the meditations on the sinister and the sublime, and rattling, door-slamming clangs of beats, is pretty much everywhere if you listen to the pirates today, especially on roll deep shows. i think it's probably the biggest thing that dubstep has given grime- the sonics of the two scenes are very different, but the feel of them, and their approaches, are getting very similar. grime used to kick out of your speakers, and now it sneaks up behind you.

i think that's the progression, and yeah i think it's a progression for the worse. not that i don't love the music. i always will, and that's the problem. i don't think i can ever leave this behind, no matter where it goes, and no matter how much i don't want it to go where it's going. i'm beginning to understand those people who were into jungle and then followed it into techstep, and felt alienated and confused by where the music had travelled to, but just couldn't let it go.

------------
and all this change is recent grime sounds is especially odd, as now more than ever grime MCs want to be crunk MCs.
may be that's what dizzee wants to be as well, i don't know. he made a surprise guest appearance on rinse last night. it's always a thrill to hear dizzee on pirate radio. obviously. but once again he was eclipsed by newham generals. particularly Footsie, bizarrely. i don't know what's happened to footsie, but he's suddenly unstoppable. i can't really get into dizzee's new flow. it's so blunt and ugly, all blocky where he used to be angled. but still, it's THAT VOICE. and it's dizzee. so, i had to listen. and i loved it. obviously.

-------------------------------
and one last thing briefly- check out glamma's show, 9-11 pm rinse 100.4fm on mondays. tonight he did this insane instrumental mix that sounded like 10 orchestras crashing into each other for an hour. he does frantic, heart in the mouth grime mixes better than just about anyone. just like grime used to be, perhaps.

ok, i'm going to bed. night night x x

2006-05-04T14:23:00.001-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:

WILEY- 'JOHNNY WAS A BAD BOY'.
WOODEN WAND AND VANISHING VOICE- 'BUCK DHARMA'.
'SACRED SELECTIONS': HAPPY HARDCORE PERFORMED ON CHURCH ORGAN IN ST MATTHEW'S CHURCH, LONDON.

today summer tapped london softly on the shoulder. office blocks exhaled thousands of workers into parks. parks had trees with leaves so green they were surreal. the brunswick centre has been cleaned and sat gleaming in the sun, looking like a collection of space age beach huts nestling on huge concrete dunes.

----------
i saw happy hardcore performed on church organ today. i can't really explain how good it was. i'll write about it in a few days. i'm still reeling a little bit. big up matt stokes.

--------------
'buck dharma' by wooden wand and vanishing voice is the sound of dying embers. and beautiful women who terrify everyone. and long shadows. their music glows and drips. it sounds like the confusing end to confusing parties. they make you feel happy and vaguely nauseous. listening to them, my eyes feel heavy and minutes slow down. their music is very close and drifts into the distance. they make me think of electric and wet air before storms.
so, they don't sound like today. but close. and they sound like i wish today would have been.

2006-05-03T02:35:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:

DJ/RUPTURE- 'THUGGISH PT. 2 COMPILATION'
LUCIANO- 'SCI FI HI FI VOL.2'
SCRATCHY, MAXIMUM AND KARNAGE RINSE FM SET.

last night Scratchy taught us the correct way to say 'radio'. you've got to put a 'g' in it. so it's 'ray-dgio'. that's how you do it. i've never heard scratchy host a pirate show before; as in not just MC on it, but properly host it, telling listeners what the tracks are, sending shout outs to the extended rinse family and keeping the links alive, fielding missed calls and texts from listeners. not many people are actually good at this. Riko is the undisputed master, comign across like a grime john peel, with this easy relaxed chat about what's going on with him, football, and food. like with john peel, when riko hosts a show you just end up wanting to be mates with him. Fuda Guy's also good, because of the insane amount of enthusiasm that he has for EVERY SINGLE track that's played. it's like he's constantly awe struck at the brilliance. so, as you can imagine, i like him.

and yesterday we learnt that Scratchy's great at hosting too. he's funny. he makes up words (like 'fenergy', chrsit knows what it means...) and isn't afraid to come across a bit silly, trilling 'bree bree!' across every track. it reminded me that one of the best things about pirate radio isn't merely hearing all these intense, hardcore tracks. it's often more about just being entertained and relaxed by idle chatter and the sense of fun. it's about having a good time. with grime, that can sometimes be easy to remember. but at its heart, pirate radio is about a group of friends getting together and making each other laugh. just like Chris Moyles, then. but not shit.

2006-05-01T14:02:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:

A PARTY SPENT IN A BLUR OF SUGABABES, ALTER EGO, MATTHEW DEAR AND OTHER DANCE HITS OF TODAY.
SOME BACH. DUNNO WHAT, OBVIOUSLY.
BEANIE SIGEL, 'FEEL IT IN THE AIR'
JENNY LEWIS 'RABBIT FUR COAT'
GNARLES BARKLEY- 'CRAZY'
AN ALT.COUNTRY MIX AT WORK.
GALOPPIERENDE ZUVERSICHT- LIVE RECORDING FROM KONTROL, 2004
PIER BUCCI- 'FAMILIA'.
SKREAM, 'AUGUST '05 MIC'
DIGITALDIGIT- OLD SCHOOL RAVE MIX.
DJRUPERT- 'UNDERGROUND HOUSE MIX'
CAT POWER- 'THE GREATEST'
CAT POWER- 'DEEP INSIDE (PEEL SESSION)'
JOHN MAUS- 'SONGS'
RICHIE HAWTIN- 'DE9-LITE MIXMAG MIX'
ROLL DEEP- 'IN AT THE DEEP END'
MY FRIEND WILL TRYING TO DO 'MICROTONAL' VOCALS OVER BREAKFEST.
*A FANTASTIC ELECTROHOUSE TUNE IN WHICH MALE AND FEMALE VOCALISTS DUET, WITH A LYRIC OF 'MAKE IT RIGHT, MAKE ME FEEL...' IF ANYONE KNOWS WHAT THIS TRACK IS, PLEASE GET IN TOUCH, CUZ IT'S GORGEOUS*

you may not know this (why would you?), but i have two brothers. My older brother gets paid for doing posh things to chemicals. my younger brother is at school, and he does exams and stuff. both brothers are better than me. for partial proof, go to my little brother's blog and observe how it better than this blog.

-----------------------------------
it's been a frantic bank holiday weekend, with little time for listening to music properly, and certainly no time to write on here. one thing i've been loving recently is richie hawtin's 'de9-lite' mix for Mixmag magazine. i'm no fan of the magazine, to say the least. and i'm not a huge fan of richie hawtin, either. may be i just got into techno to late to really 'get' the whole mystique about him. and me and jack saw him at fabric once and i thought he was gash. it was a b2b with villalobos. ricky V was left holding the pieces as richie H went on these interminable ultra-minimal bouts of harshness. i don't like the really boshy stuff. i'm too nice, coddled, bourgeois and emo.

and i found the last de9 release, 'transitions' to be pretty dull. i like minimal techno when it's all slinky and silky and sexy and feminine. but 'transitions' is a dry-as-a-bone, furrowed-brow mix that's as studious as they come. and not much fun. it builds and builds slowly, imperceptibly which is all very nice and graceful but it's not going to get you shaking a leg. and i'm not sure about the point of techno that doesn't make you want to dance.

but anyway, back to the Mixmag mix. It's great! even the sleeparchive track, which richie hawtin describes as a 'mind game' not a 'dance game' (alarm bells!) is actually a beating heart of dancefloor fun. the last two tracks- by man of the moment Alex Under and Loco Dice- in particular are astounding: skewed, thrilling techno that plunges through twists and turns, leaving you dizzy. i think the 'lite' format works well for richie hawtin. the full-fat version can just get too wanky, too caught up in the planning and the concept. whereas , the mixmag mix has a feeling of excitement and spontaneity to it. it gets straight to the point. sometimes simplicity- just banging it out- can be best.

but, i'm still not sure why he's officially regarded as a Techno God.

-----------------------
so, Gnarles Barkley, 'Crazy'. so, so, so. i'm not sure about this one. sure, it's pretty and breezy and it sounds of summer. but when i hear it i get this weird feeling of emptiness. likes there's just a hollowness at the centre of it. each and every little bit of it is great, but when it's all put together there's something missing.

i don't know exactly what that something is, but here's my suspicion: i think Gnarles Barkley, deep down, might think that they're not 'just' a pop band; may be, even, that they're somehow above pop. but that kind of attitude is fatal in pop music. it's all or nothing. any glint of self-consciousness, or doubt about the worthiness of yr station, detroys the fantasy, utterly. pop should be brazen and so self-confident that it's actually weirdly ego-less: there can be no shame in pop. 'crazy' is a pop song, but i'm not sure that it was written and performed by people who would be happy to said to be writing pop songs. and that may be the emptiness at the heart of it.
but, as i said, that's just a suspicion. something's missing, though, definitely.

2006-04-27T01:57:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST
PIER BUCCI- FAMILIA
DJ BOSSMAN RINSE FM SET (INC. NEW RAPID PRODUCTION, (CALLED 'LONELY PEOPLE'?))
GALOPPIERENDE ZUVERSICHT- LIVE RECORDING FROM KONTROL, 2004

first things first: the new Rapid production played on bossman's show last night. honestly, without any of the usual hyperbole, this is a new high for ruff sqwad. it's got that drifty dreaminess of 2004-era ruff sqwad, but without the tinniness and cheapness of those early tunes: this one is lush like a symphony. it starts off with all these overlapping vocal wails and sighs froma lady, jigsaw pieces shifting into place but never quite getting there. Bits and bobs of strings underlay all the vocal carry on and you have that nagging feeling of...i know this, i know this. the strings are so familiar but recast and reconfigured so that, really, i don't know this. then, finally, after a good while of playing around with all the interlocking drama, Rapid lets the secret out, as a distorted, digitally fractured voice groans, 'all the lonely people, where do they all come from...?', and Rapid drills into the track with an evil one-note bass line. and then you realise that the cut up vocals previously was actually someone singing the same line. and then, quickly, we're back to the busy melodies of the verse.

there's so much going on in this tune, and it's put together so neatly and elegantly. the one element which isn't neat and elegant, luckily, is the beats: 'luckily' because of one Rapid's best tricks has always been to make his beats fizz and crackle with distortion, and throw in liberal keith moon-style drum rolls wherever he can; both things help to make his productions sound more organic, even more human.

it's probably the first time since, oh i don't know, may be sharkey major's set for mac 10 last year, that i've got the feeling from listening to the grime pirates that i used to get routinely in 2002-2004. like woebot, i was beginning to worry that those particular synapses were burnt out, although i'll always love the music, and i'll always be interested to hear new developments in it. but hearing this Rapid production brought it right back to me: that thing of actually staring at the radio in shock and awe at the brilliance that's almost casually, nonchalently, broadcast from it.

------------------------------

there was a lot of nice words written about Galoppierende Zuversicht in various places last year after they played Mutek, and there was a sense that they were beginning to be properly hyped, but that seems to have died down a little bit now. perhaps because they don't really release many records. and they don't release many records cuz they think that you've got to see them live: you can download live sets of theirs from

http://www.bruchstuecke.com

G.Z (i can't be bothered typing out the whole name, sorry) are especially intringuing because, like Pan Sonic (and aphex, if you believe him), they make their own instruments- weird synths with loads of buttons and switches that look like unimaginable sounds are going to be expelled from them, in unimaginable ways. but listening to G.Z previously i've been a little disappointed by how conventional they can sound. i guess a lot of their stuff sounds to me like minimal, pared back electro, but with good blurting, rolling basslines. one thing they do that's nice, though, is that they let their home made, feral, drum machines break out of boom-chk-boom-chk 4/4 bosh and clatter away happy in a hundred different ways.

so, i'm on the tube after a longish day, listening to this live set from G.Z, getting steadily more frustrated with it. G.Z like to mutate their tracks constantly, but right then it just sounded like that was detracting from any momentum or dynamics- there's a kind of wandering, gently probing, feel to their shifts and changes that cuts off any possibility crescendos or any old fashioned break downs. it all sounded worryingly musicianly- was this techno musicians...jamming? ack. please no.

but then i'm nearing the top of the escalators out of the tube, and just as the early evening sunlight begins to blind me a sample of 'disco infern---' starts repeating, half-maddeningly, and it all makes sense, ridiculously suddenly. the set kicks into life, and from then on in the journey home is a joy, to the point that my smile probably had passers by thinking that i was One To Avoid. the rest of the set is pinging, bleeping, gurgling, mess of fun and now the constant mutations sound playful, rather than po-faced: The sounds they use, and they way they use them, are kind of naive- not in a nostalgic Plone-ish way- but in the way that early rave was: the excitement of musicians being like 'check-out-this-sound! and-this-one! and-this!' is everywhere.

i can't wait to listen to it again tonight: i feel like i used to when i was 15 and had bought an album that i really loved and often used to set the alarm early so that i could listen to itagain even sooner. i think i might be very happy at the moment, actually. happy summer every body (let's just say it's summer, ok? cut to the chase. Spring is long, in both senses).

2006-04-25T14:04:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE PREVIOUS POST:

LOGAN SAMA KISS FM SET FROM LAST NIGHT.
KODE 9- 'DUBSTEP ALLSTARS VOL. 3'

so it seems that i'm getting into dubstep. or, i'm trying to. the words written about dubstep are just too enticing to resist- gutterbreakz, automatic for the people, grievous angel, k-punk, and the dissensus dubstep crew make it all sound too tempting. and then blackdown comes with the Burial interview, and that's it, i've finally cracked and am on boomkat with my credit card out before i really know what i'm doing.
so, the end result is that i'm now the proud owner of kode 9's mix on Tempa (it was difficult choosing between this and the Benga CD after nick gutta's stunning rhapsody to the latter, but in the end the prospect of all those new skream dubs on the kode 9 cut clinched it...).

i've never really 'got' dubstep before. the closest i came was last summer, driving around in melting heat, with a youngsta rinse tape banging out as loud as i could manage. getting swamped by the bass in that little metal box kind of made the music make sense. but i could never really get that feeling of excitement back- the initial shock and joy of the dense, shuddering bass was a one time only thing.

or so i thought, until now, until the kode 9 mix. but it's actually the bass which grabs me least about this mix. i find all those sub frequencies difficult to grasp on to- i want them to be there, obviously, but i want much more. i've never been much a bass junkie- bass is more a backdrop to me, i guess. not the main event. i think this is why i find much dubstep alienating.

i don't know if kode 9's mix marks a big step forward in terms of the dubstep scene's sound, or if this kind of stuff has always been around and i just having been paying proper attention, but there is certainly much more than bass going on here. as on 'request line', many tracks foreground melodic drama that all sounds so spacious and lush. and the beats aren't the draggy halfstep lurches that i remember from previous attempts to check dubstep out, but flick between lovely dextrous pitter-patters and hyped up stabs that i could really see crowds dancing to, rather than just nodding heads. the deathly dark paranoid edge of much dubstep also seems to be toned down here- there's even a sensousness, a straight pleasure-centric easy liquidity to some of these tracks. people on dissensus have been chatting about the 'spirituality' of the contemporary dubstep sound, and now- finally- i can see where they're coming from.

sorry i was so late!

the one thing that i'm not too sure about here, though, is the MC:- Spaceape. much of dubstep is a subliminal, quasi-ambient sound, as are Spaceape's half-whispers. so it fits well i guess. but i'd like to hear the MC give an up front structure and rhythmic foundation to these tracks. just about all my favourite moments in grime are those bits where a really spacey, almost beatless track is playing, and then an MC comes on and makes his (or her) words the heart beat of the song, with the track weaving around them as atmospherics, as incidental music to the drama. it's those contrasts- between gentle, almost effete, music and MCing that never holds anything back- that can make grime the most exciting music on the planet. i think that's why i loved ruff sqwad so much when their productions were really swirley and light, but the MCing (then as now) were anything but.
so: Trim or Wiley for the next dubstep allstars mix, please!

2006-04-24T13:19:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:

LAMBCHOP- 'NIXON'
LAMBCHOP- 'HOW I QUIT SMOKING'
KODE 9- 'DUBSTEP ALLSTARS VOL. 3'
JOHN MAUS- 'SONGS'.
ERIC SATIE- 'TROIS GYMNOPEDIE'
THE FREE DESIGN.
APHRODITE'S CHILD- 'FOUR HORSEMEN'.
FLAMING LIPS- 'AT WAR WITH THE MYSTICS'.
JOSH WINK- 'HIGHER STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS'.
RICHIE HAWTIN- SOME REMIX OF A SYSTEM 7 TRACK.
V/A- 'SUPERDISCOUNT 2'.
TALKING HEADS- 'STOP MAKING SENSE'.
SMOG- 'DONGS OF SEVOTION'.
SMOG- 'KNOCK KNOCK'.
LOVE- 'FOREVER CHANGES'
STEVE EARLE- VARIOUS TRACKS
JOHNNY CASH- 'LIVE AT SAN QUENTIN'
JOHNNY CASH- 'LIVE AT FOLSON PRISON'.
SEPULTURA- 'ROOTS'.
DJ ATA AND LUCIANO- LIVE RECORDING FROM LOFT, 2004.
GALOPPIERENDE ZUVERSICHT- LIVE RECORDING FROM KONTROL, 2004.
KID606- 'RESILIENCE'.
TWO HOME MADE R n B COMPS.
TWO HOME MADE ELECTROHOUSE COMPS.
BELLE AND SEBASTIAN- 'IF YOU'RE FEELING SINISTER'.
ROLL DEEP- 'IN AT THE DEEP END'.
DJ TARGET ETC. - 'AIM HIGH 2'
SCORCHER, GHETTO, SLICKS ETC. 'FUCK RADIO VOL.2'
UNKNOWN DANCEHALL PIRATE STATION (GENESIS FM, MAY BE?)
DANNY WEED- 'SALT BEEF'.
DJ SLIPMATT- 'RAVIN MAD'
TECHNIK- 'SWEDEN MIX'
LUCIANO- 'SCI FI HI FI VOL.2'
RICHIE HAWTIN- 'DE9-LITE MIXMAG MIX'
VARIOUS ROLL DEEP AND RUFF SQUAD RINSE FM SETS
SKEPTA, WILEY, TRIM ETC- 'DUPPY VOCAL'.
MASTERS AT WORK- 'KINGS OF HOUSE'.
UNDERGROUND RESISTANCE- 'TRANSITION'.
DAVE CLARKE- 'WORLD SERVICE 2'
LUOMO- 'VOCALCITY'.
MOUNTAIN GOATS LIVE RECORDING.
STEELEYE SPAN
FAIRPORT CONVENTION
JENNY LEWIS AND THE WATSON TWINS- 'RABBIT FUR COAT'
CAT POWER- 'THE GREATEST'.
EWAN PEARSON- 'SCI FI HI FI VOL. 1'
VILLALOBOS- 'FOR DISCO ONLY'
VILLALOBOS- 'ACH SO'.
DJ RUPERT- 'UNDERGROUND HOUSE MIX'
ED SEGAL- 'COLOGNE TECHNO MIX'
MARIAH CAREY- 'WE BELONG TOGETHER'.
CANDICE- 'MOVE UP TO MY BUMPER'.
THE SKATALITES.
CLOUDEAD- S/T.

that's all i can remember.

so, i'm back from holiday- holidays this year were in the wilds of the north. first the lake district, then the isle of mull, off the west coast of scotland. the latter is just about the only place that looks great in pissing grey sheets of rain. the water some how makes the colours of the landscape ultra vivid, and there's this stately riot of deep reds and sunset yellows all over the hills.

it's very difficult and boring (for all concerned) telling people how a holiday was, so i won't bother. too much and too little happens on holidays to make recounting them worthwhile.

but i did learn two things, while winding my way back to london on a train through the scottish highlands. the first is that listening to grime really doesn't work in such an environment. the second is that listening to country music REALLY worked. its magical. the landscape matches the open, romatically sad sounds. i think country music is actually really big in scotland, actually. and now, i may be know why.
----------------------------------
this evening, inspired by geeta's words on Satie and food, i decided to listen to 'trois gymnopedie' while having dinner, which just so happened to be all white food- bread, cheese, humous. satie would have approved. and, yeah, it was lovely. because i'm young, naive, and uncouth, it made me feel quite sophisticated, which i'm not used to (i'm used to pissing off my housemates by listening to grime or rave in the kiitchen).

i've liked satie for a while. i remember first hearing his music on radio 3, when they were broadcasting this insane piece of his, which is just 18 notes on piano, repeated continously in the same order for an absurd amount of time, like 9 hours or something. radio 3 broadcast the whole thing, after the witching hour and into dawn. there were interviews with the various pianists after each had finished his or her shift. all reported odd, trancelike states and disorientation. what was particularly unsettling about the whole thing is that the notes are in such an order, and in such a rhythm, that even after hearing them for over 3 hours, i still couldn't predict what was going to happen next- it's like the piece was constructed to evade memory. so you know that all this is the same, over and over, and you know it so well, but actually you're still lost- you can't hum it, couldn't sing it. yr always outside the music, and it's always leading you, even though it shouldn't be, not after 3 hours.

other bits of satie i've heard having been so affecting, nor as frustrating. but what i like most about satie is the banality of it. 'banal' doesn't have to be a derogatory term. there's this bit on david byrne's great film, 'true stories', where he points to a suburban housing estate and says to the camera, 'look at it. who can say it isn't beautiful? bricks, sky, ...'.
and it is beautiful. in the same way that motorway bridges are beautiful. and runways. and the striplights of petrol stations at night. and sinks. and urinals.

i like looking at all these things, because of their banal, formal blankness. there's a complete, whole, emptiness to them, and a corresponding lack of engagement from those who look at them, that's such that they often have a ghostly, ethereal beauty:- they're not of this world, they seem devoid of any humanity, and that means that they can be little pieces of the sublime surrounding us. like david byrne said, 'heaven is a place where nothing ever happens'.

perhaps staring out to sea on a grey day is the same thing. may be in all these things, there's just a longing for peace. and may be when we say peace, we mean- on some level- a kind of boredom. i don't know.

anyway, this is all just to say that that feeling of beautiful, inhumanly simple blankness is one of the reasons that i like to listen to satie. and why eating white food on a white plate might actually be very appropriate when listening to his music.

-----------------
i'll leave you today with an mp3 of a song that we spent much of the holiday singing along to drunkenly. it's from vangelis' old prog band. it's totally ridiculous. and as far as post-pub fun goes, it's perfect.

and the chorus. oh my word, the chorus. all together now:
'THE LEADING HORSE IS WHITE,
THE SECOND HORSE IS RED
THE THIRD ONE IS THE BLACK
THE LAST ONE IS A GREEEEEEEN'.

so rousing.

aprodite's child- 'the four horsemen'.

2006-04-10T04:36:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:

ROLL DEEP RINSE FM SET FROM LAST NIGHT
NEWHAM GENERALS RINSE FM SET FROM LAST NIGHT
LORNE 'KSR' BURDEN- '430 WEST PRESENTS BACK TO THE RHYTHM' MIX.

just a quick one cuz i'm off on my holidays in half an hour (i predict that we'll play sizzla's 'spring break' a LOT on these holidays).
roll deep last night: not as dubsteppy as last week's set, so that blows my theory of a massive shift over the the south london sound out of the water some what, but still loads of half-steppy riddims. the music's getting slower. some great new tracks by Target too:- he seems to have rediscovered his dark side. one of his in particular sounded like a big brother to wiley's 'colder'; deadly string stabs over reptilian beats. quite chilling. there was also a bonkers new roll deep track, with trim reciting his own version of that nursery rhyme about the cat and the fiddle. the beat is this evil mix of dark belgium-esque groaning, whooshing synths, and an occasional fairground-ish flurry that sounds like an old ardkore record that been left to decompose for 10 years. Huge tune. another one to look out for is wiley and riko's 'knives and guns', a conscious grime cut produced by geeneus. geeneus is one of my favourite grime producers (check out the head-fucking classic 'Detroit') but he's not all that prolific, sadly. on this track he comes like target on 'pick yr self up' or 'runway', with these lovely wistful melodies. i haven't heard riko for a while, so it's great to hear him on record again.
another conscious grime track to check out is ruff sqwad's 'breathe', which is about young people getting murdered, and it sounds really desperate and impassioned. it makes for uncomfortable listening, but it's well worth trying to hear: speaking their minds with no filters, ruff sqwad do what grime does best here.

anyway, roll deep last night. wiley was on form, to the say the least. loads of new lyrics, remixes of old lyrics, and this amazing urgency from him through out the set. discarda was funny as always. i'm not sure if he's intentionally funny though. but his ray winstone-ish blare always raises a smile; 'it loose, LOOSE, cannon, CANNON!!' etc. i love that. Trim was ultra-oblique, so that was great: lots of twisted, circling word play and he seems to be going back to his original rasp now. god's gift made a rare appearance, but his trad. lyrics about straps and macs sounded old-fashioned next to the fireworks from wiley, trim, and skepta.

so, a really good set: this one had the feel of those legendary roll deep sets from winter 2004-2005, where there was this overwhelming sense of purpose and authority to them: i get the feeling that roll deep are re-grouping for yet another big push forwards, just as they did over a year ago. with wiley's and skepta's albums soon to be released, i guess all the effort and intensity of last night's set makes sense.
--------------------
ok, so i'm off on holiday now, and i'll be back in 2 weeks: no post till then, sadly (or not, depending on yr view). have a good easter, everyone.

2006-04-09T09:35:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST.

THE EVENS- LIVE AT REGENT HALL, LONDON.
MASTERS AT WORK- 'KINGS OF HOUSE'.
RHYTHM AND SOUND- 'WITH THE ARTISTS'.
TINCHY STRYDER- 'I'M BACK YOU KNOW'.
ROLL DEEP- 'IN AT THE DEEP END'.
THREE OF A KIND- 'BABYCAKES'.
EINMUSIK- 'JITTERY HERITAGE'.
THEO PARRISH- 'FALLIN UP (CARL CRAIG REMIX)'.
PAUL SIMON- 'GRACELAND'.
RICH BOY + PITBULL- 'GET POPPIN'.
v/a- 'SUPERDISCOUNT VOL. 2'
DJ HECTOR AND OTHER MINIMAL TECHNO DJS- LIVE AT T-BAR, LONDON.
SON HOUSE -'THE COMPLETE DELTA BLUES'.
TIMBALAND- 'INDIAN FLUTE'.
LUCIEN N LUCIANO- 'BLIND BEHAVIOUR'.

apologies for the lack of recent updates: it's been a hectic weekend, for sure. friday night was given over to seeing The Evens at Regent Hall. the evens is the new band formed by ian mackaye of fugazi/minor threat and amy (don't know her last name, sorry) from the great Discord band, the Warmers. ian and amy are, i think, husband and wife. which is always lovely in a band (cf. mates of state). it being a Dischord gig, things were off kilter in many, many ways. most importantly, it was held in the huge salvation army church on Oxford street. there's no bar. there is, however, a cake stall selling rice krispie cakes for 50p. there's no support act. or rather, the support act is ian mackaye playing us his Three Stooges new orleans big-band CD- 'it's a great record', he says. it is. there's the tiniest PA i've ever seen at a gig, and ian and amy drink out of thermos flasks through out the night. it's a little like sitting in on a band practice, with ian taking generous amounts of time out to chat with the audience. and when he does chat, and tell jokes, and relate anecdotes, he's the nicest uncle you ever wished you had. of course, there's quite a bit of political oration going on too: the political subtext of almost every song is relayed beforehand. that can get a little wearing. we know george bush is a bad man: we wouldn't be at the gig if we didn't.

but, anyway, the music. now, the evens have been described by quite a few people as folk-pop. i don't hear this at all, going by how they sound live. to me, it's very similar, almost eerily so, to early fugazi- the fugazi when the minor threat lineage still bobbed up in cascades of fast and righteous power chords. even amy's wonderfully soulful backing vocals take up a similar role to Guy's in Fugazi: the high-pitched vulnerable counterpoint to that famous bark from ian mackaye.

i'd forgotten how much i love that sound, the sound of ian mackaye's voice. fugazi were a very important band to me, in my mid to late teens, for any number of reasons. firstly there was the political stuff, of course. and the DIY ethic. and the inspiring idea that people in music could actually just be really nice, normal people, not cuntish rockstars. but equally if not more important was the way fugazi opened me up to a whole range of new sounds. as a teen into mainly punk, metal and latter-day industrial, i had that traditional pathological hatred of 'indie' sounds (with the exception of Talking Heads, but that's another story). but fugazi broke through that- fugazi was acceptable to punks. how could anything featuring ian mackaye not be acceptable to punks? but after taking the time and effort to like fugazi, the anti-indie position was unsustainable. so sonic youth, and mogwai, and pavement, and slint, and papa-m, and bonnie prince billy, and all the usual ones were quickly added to my record collection (actually, i hate calling it that, a record 'collection'...). and then i started buying magazines like The Wire to read about these bands, and that meant reading about dance music from Simon Reynolds, and getting into jungle and techno, which led to getting into grime. and all this started, really, with fugazi.

but that is, perhaps, just boring personal history. the point, if there is one, is that fugazi was hugely important to me growing up, and me and my friends used to listen to them a great deal. i remember GCSE study leave was largely spent hanging round friends' houses, listening to 'red medicine' (and learning how to smoke). and because we listened to them so much, and so intensely (the kind of intensity which only comes with really trying to make yourself love something), and because they were our very first introduction to all these new weird sounds of the post-punk scenes, they moulded what i came to expect from music: what i thought, and think, music should sound like. this was something i'd forgotten, or taken for granted, until i saw The Evens on friday. from the first 10 seconds or so of music, it just sounded completely natural to me: when i hear ian mackaye play guitar, or sing, that's like the baseline for me: that's the given: what other bands, for various reasons, depart from.

so that was odd. because objectively, this is odd music. one thing that is very distinctive about both the evens and fugazi is that the constantly shifting dynamics. they never go quiet-loud-louder. rather, volume and intensity and emotions ripple up and down in every bar of music. everything sounds unsettled. which, somehow, means that everything sounds very sure, solid and real. i guess they play music like life is lived. up and down, all the time. (i don't mean up and down as in happy and sad here, although that's part of it, i guess).

And yeah, i love ian mackaye's voice. i like the way it's so stern and disciplined, but around the edges there's a kind of slurred sloppiness to it as well. i could listen to it all day, although it would slowly drive me crazy at the same time. so, the evens was a great gig, 'though any gig with ian mackaye singing and playing guitar would be a great gig for me. but The Evens went above and beyond, because they had singalongs, and almost an villalobian (sorry) hypnotic pitter-patter to the drums, and yearning cut-glass vocals from amy. seeing this band would be a good idea, you know.

-------------------------
talking of villalobos (when i am not?), i'm starting to think that luciano's not getting the props he should compared to Ricky V. we went to a (little bit rubbish) minimal techno night yesterday, and so consequently i'm recovering today- and 'blind behaviour' by luciano turns out to be perfect for that. it's infinitely gentle 4/4 for those days when yr heart's still beating at 128bpm from the night before but you want to be coddled back into the normal, non-bosh, world once again.

i remember talking to dave stelfox ages ago and he was saying that he rated luciano above just about anyone else, cuz of what he could do with percussion. and i never really appreciated that until today. jesus christ, there is some insanely good music on 'blind behaviour'. here's a florid simile: the beats are like chandeliers or something- there's such a delicate depth to them, and an elegant complexity. todd edwards aside, this is perhaps the most tingly, glittery, pleasurecentric music out there. perhaps luciano's poppy accessibility is one reason why it's generally villalobos who gets all the mentions whenever there's reference to techno's crazily inventive vanguard. but luciano is pushing things forward just as much as villalobos. and he's making you smile while he's doing it.

another thing i love about luciano is the way you never really get a complete melody from him- instead you get these little glimmers of a tune, fragments and clusters of just a few notes that are left hanging. that's a lovely, understated way of going about things.

2006-04-06T13:41:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:
WOEBOT- 'BHANGRA 2005 SELECTION'.
LOADS OF R N B, MOSTLY YUMMY BINGHAM AND VARIOUS TIMBALAND PRODUCTIONS.
LIGHTNING, GRIMINAL, DARK BOI, DDARK, VORTEX ETC- 'UP AND COMING VOL. 1'
SLICKS- 'NO BASS RIDDIM'.

i think the yummy bingham thing might be getting towards the obsessive stage. but she's got my favourite voice in the world at the moment. and the jagged, kind of minimal, nursery-rhyme style melodies that she specialises in is a MASSIVE look (like 50 cent but not, y'know, a dickhead).

i'm still reeling, psychologically, from seeing 'tropical malady' last night. crikey.... what a, uh, humid, film. it's very sticky, and close, uncomfortably so at times. there's lots of shots of fizzing neon lights and skies even fizzier with masses of insects, and both are very appropriate. and after seeing it you can almost pretend that its summer over here and not the slow crawl out of winter. with that in mind, i want music that makes me think its summer right now, and that's where this Bhangra compilation that matt woebot did for me a few months ago comes in. we cooked to this tonight, and it was great, as the sunlight streamed in, weirdly smoky and fuzzy (actually i think its just the dust round here...). the more i listen to this bhangra selection, the closer the parallels to ruff sqwad seem. which is good, cuz i love writing about ruff sqwad. but there are genuine affinities in the sounds, i think: the collapsing, weaving, beats that work almost more as texture than rhythm in many places; the love of stirring, strident, brass and strings; the use of rapidly repeated 'heys!' and shouts as the building block of many of the beats; the spidery and florid guitars that are way removed from any rock tradition.

my two favourite tracks from this compilation are posted below as mp3s. the first of them, by dr zeus, is my favourite piece of production on the whole CD; love, love, LOVE the 'fill in the gaps' construction of it. all little feints and parries. YES. and that guitar is so delightful! a shy smile of a melody, the whole way through. i think the vocalist on this track is pretty amazing too. i find it hard appreciating just how good these guys are sometimes, as they're singing in a way and in a language i'm not used to, so sometimes its easy to get distracted and disoriented by the novelty of it all. but yeah, the vocalist on the dr zeus track is huge. the way he keeps tight to the beat and then occasionally just breaks out to one side, almost dragging the beat along with him, bringing the song to (even more) life is a big wow. it reminds me of wiley on 'gangsterz' on those moments where he spills out of the one line flow, and crams the words in.

the second track, by northern lights, is my favourite song on the compilation overall. it's also, predictably, the raviest and most maximalist (is that a word? no?). i've had this song in my head in the hours since i heard it today and its not even maddening yet. its got perhaps the most elegant beat on the CD, and there's something fantastic, and fantastically hard to grasp, going on in the bass of the rhythm- these waves of whumps, gulps, and wobbles. and densely strummed acoustic guitars generally sound great in dance music: basement jaxx know this. i dunno how you dance to this stuff, but it must be great fun. the best bit is the end, in which the synth takes over the melody till the fade. i wish that bit went for, oh i don't know, 10 minutes or so. but that might be cuz i've been listening to too much villalobos recently...

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dr zeus- 'das ki sohniyeh'.

northern lights- aasiq dig dig

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i'm starting to think that slick's 'no bass riddim' might be the best ruff sqwad production ever. what way for slick's to start a career on the buttons! 'no bass' has pretty much everything i love about ruff sqwad: it sounds blissy and hopeless at the same time. the lack of bass is clever, cuz ruff sqwad are at the best when they sound light and dreamy. and they haven't sounded like that consistently for a good year and a half; 'anna' and 'underground' marked a shift to a harder, darker sound that they're only just coming out of now. and with its delicate, hauntological melodies, and smeary bits of vocal samples, 'no bass' feels like (if not sounds like) ruff sqwad's most ardkore, most acen-ish moment yet. which is a good thing, obviously.

2006-04-05T14:10:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST.

BEANIE SEGAL-THE B.COMING
ANDREA PARKER- 'NOBODY'S PERFECT' MIX
JAMES HOLDEN- 'BALANCE 005 MIX'

hey here's how pathetic i am. when my girlfriend goes out at night, leaving me at home, as she did last night, i often feel this weird urge to do something to assert my uh 'masculinity' in some way. its stupid. last night i was tempted to get drunk and watch the football, but i couldn't be bothered. so i decided to get drunk while listening to ghettotech really loudly instead. andrea parker's brand of ghettotech, showcased on the 'nobody's perfect' compilation of singles she has released on her label, touchin' bass, is odd, and engagingly so. there's no sex in this music, not even dirty, unsensual sex. instead, its a dead-eyed faceless BOOOOOM and that's pretty much it, bar fantastically rickety 808 snaps and the odd, half-hearted mutterings about 'freaky bitches' and the like. unlike the haunted bass meditations of dubstep, the 'touchin bass' bass is a sleek, gun-metal grey mechanical hum, like the wiley-bass pitched down into the fathoms. there's not much soul here, not much at all: the emphasis is firmly on the 'tech'. but my word, its strangely addictive, listening to this steady robot grind.

for some reason this music reminds me of hospitals. albeit very dark, echoey hospitals. more surgical than Surgeon.

and, yeah, its good to get drunk to.

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perhaps because of the stupid drunkeness, however, i was kept up most of the night with excruciating stomach cramps. fire in my belly, and not in a good way. as a result, i was feeling delicate today, and whenever i feel truly delicate, some fluffy prog-house from James Holden is about all i can stomach. yeah prog-house is a dirty word, but some times only shamelessly epic warm-bath synth washes and mammoth break downs will do. everything in its right place. when things are obvious, they are also comforting. james holden does this kind of stuff well, because in most places he's just close enough to the cologne neo-trance style for you to forget that, well, yr really listening to prog-house, and to pretend that yr listening to some trendy hipster music instead. but stupid hipsterish concerns aside, 'Balance 005' is a genuinely great record. so yeah, seamless mixing and sequencing, yada yada yada, but that stuff's not so important. what's good about this record is that is sounds like, to quote nathan fake, the sky is pink (big up nathan fake for the best, most perfectly accurate track title ever!). and, to take this a bit further, pretty much all the tracks here sound like coming up, under a pink sky, on stereotypically amazing drugs. which helped, today, to calm my fragile body and my bruised synapses.

2006-04-04T01:51:00.000-07:00

LISTENING SINCE THE PREVIOUS POST:

LUOMO- VOCALCITY.
YUMMY BINGHAM- 'COME AND GET IT'.
SOME RUBBISH LOUNGE-JAZZ RADIOHEAD COVER (WHAT IS IT WITH RADIOHEAD COVERS THEY'RE EVERYWHERE AT THE MOMENT!)
GHETTO, SLICKS, SCORCHER, MERKSON- FUCK RADIO VOL. 2
ROLL DEEP RINSE SET FROM LAST SUNDAY
FEB. 2006 RUFF SQWAD SET COURTESY OF JEZMI @ DISSENSUS.

apologies for the tha lack of posting yesterday. 2 days in and it's already gone to pot ha ha. the reason for my absence was that i was seeing 'who's afraid of virgina wolff', which turns out to be a long and gruelling play. so it was straight to bed for me afterwards, instead of writing here. (you should see this play btw. kathleen turner is excellent in it and the actor who plays her husband in it is like an older david byrne).

anyway, enough excuses. who heard roll deep last sunday? oh my diddy it was a weird one. there seems to be a massive conversion to dubstep going on in their ranks if this set is anything to go by: there was a full 20-25 minute section consisting solely of dubstep selections from dj maximum. and, what's more, proper dubstep, rather than 'grimm' : heavy on the reggae samples,- i think i even heard the ghost of horace andy wailing away in there some where (i know he's not dead, but still)- and with a liquid ease of movement about it, quite removed from the lurch of, i dunno, youngsta's sets or something. and even when they moved away from the dubstep, almost all the grime tracks they played were really heavy, bassy cuts: more akin to what dj tubby plays on the newham generals shows than the typical eski sound.

if this is more than a one-off, then it could have pretty huge implications for grime: where roll deep go, other's follow. and roll deep, on this evidence, seem to be becoming interested in leaving the very physical mid-range melodic brutalism behind, and moving in to more heady, gloopy bass meditations (wiley has already been MCing on kode 9's rinse show of course). i imagine jammer and lewi white would be well up for going down this route as well. so, perhaps things are going to get a little less dirty south and a bit more south london from now on in grime. i guess it could be a natural progression. these guys aren't getting any younger, and there is perhaps a natural age limit at which you no longer want to go on radio and shout yrself hoarse over dystopian computer game madness sounds.

and the roll deep MCs sound good over this kind of stuff. Trim's at his skewed, alien best when he has a lolloping bass heavy track underneath him- Request Line is a perfect compliment to his MCing. Flow-dan's got dub deejaying in the dna of his MCing, and slots in perfectly to dubstep tunes- the added edge that comes from also having a grime background helps to lift and energise the tracks as well. and wiley can often sound a little uncomfortable on the really full-on grime cuts; he lacks the quick silver dexterity of some one like ghetto or manga to keep up with the twists and turns. whereas on the tightly controlled and non-exuberant dubstep tracks his rigid, stern flow sounds very natural, and gives structure to the spacier tracks. and he comes from a reggae sound system back ground: i guess he was always going to make his way back to the sub bass frequencies eventually.

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walking through london at sunset while listening to Luomo is pretty great: that time of evening when there's a very soft, dreamy light goes well with the half-submerged vocal whispers of 'vocalcity'. things going down, down, down, into the night...

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god i love Yummy Bingham. partly because of her name, obviously. if and when i get another cat, this name is the number one contender for it. but i also love her voice; there's this kind of teenage freedom and rawness to it that i haven't heard in much R n B. 'come and get it' is my favourite song of her's that i've heard. if this was made 40 years ago, it'd be a soul classic. as it is, she our generation's aretha franklin, and i'm glad we've got our own aretha franklin. i love the horns on 'come and get it', because i love walls of sound. and i love her singing on the tune, because she sings in the joyous high register that sounds likes she just singing in the shower for herself.

2006-04-02T10:07:00.000-07:00

LISTENING TODAY:
VILLALOBOS- 'ACH SO'.
PAAVOHARJU- 'YHA HAMARAA'.
EWAN PEARSON- 'SCI FI HI-FI VOL. 1'
GENUWINE- 'PONY'.
THE STREETS- 'WHEN YOU WEREN'T FAMOUS' AND THAT RADIOHEAD COVER WITH THE SAXOPHONES THAT'S PLAYING EVERYWHERE NOW (BOTH HEARD IN TOPSHOP WHILE SHOPPING WITH MY GIRLFRIEND).
CALIFORNIA RAMBLERS- '1920'S FLAPPER PARTY'.
TONY VIBE FREEZE FM TAPE FROM LAST WEEK.

Morning all. i'm back you know. this blog will last for 365 days. the aim is to post every day about the music that i have heard that day. even if i don't manage to post every day, each post will record all the music that i have heard since the last post. each post will begin as this one does, with a list of the music that i heard that day. so, without further ado...

before today i used to listen to villalobos' new EP/album/whatever you want to call it 'ach so' in the depths of night. seemed appropriate. late night = time for convoluted techno. or so i thought. however, the best way to listen to 'ach so', i found today, is outside, in early morning sunshine. immediately, the music sounds...happy. simple, uncomplicated happiness. may be ricky V isn't some kind of alien at all. may be he's just a normal guy you wants some pretty sounds to listen to while he pops down the road for his sunday papers. the first track in particular, with those loping oriental strings, and the skittering skimming-stone beats, is the sound of an early sun-lit morning. the sound of things that are bracing but gentle. and the third track, with old modem sounds twisted into the shape of bird song is a techno dawn chorus.

rising out of the usual murky villalobos sound, which is generally like a mad scientist's laboratory sinking into mud, this is a gorgeous release, aiming for the clouds above: everything sounds much lighter, fleeter, more brittle than usual. i guess it's really like 'easy lee' extended out into into 40 minutes*, although there's nothing quite as poppy as 'easy lee' on 'ach so'...i can't imagine these tracks turning up on too many mixes. but taken together, each of the four tracks taking up a whole side of vinyl to itself, a structure of moods is gradually built up, and villalobos finally achieves what he seems to always have been aiming at: a self-contained, totally immersive world of sound. my favourite track is the final one, where he revisits the kind of aching beauty of 'dexter' and has fun with making this aphex-ish foggy melody flit around the track, rising and falling in pitch, dropping out and then drifting back in. listening to villalobos is sometimes, or rather often, a bit of a hard slog, but it's worth it just for moments like these, where all that time you've spent trying to get into where his head is currently at pays off, and, yeah, it is a lovely view.

today was a blustery day. apparently the 'perfect storm' is hitting the east coast of the UK as i write (the meteorological feature, that is, not that rubbish film with Marky Mark in...). i highly recommend listening to 'ach so' on head phones outside on such a day, when the music mixes with the linen-y sound of the wind hitting yr face: its very dramatic, and it sounds totally right, what with villalobos' music sounding all wind-eroded anyway.
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today i went in to Harold Moore's Records, which i originally found out about on a heads-up from Woebot. it's just down from Liberty in london: i think the street is called Marlborough Street, but i might have made that up. anyway, if you want to be tempted to spend a huge amount of money, you must visit this shop, and go down in to the basement, where Harold presides over the vintage records, wearing a cravat and a velvet jacket. he's awesome, and a lovely guy. it's maddeningly difficult not to come away with loads of records on a trip to Harold Moore's; today we were tempted by all sorts, from 13th century chants, to a boxset of recorder music, to a vera Lynn double pack...on and on it went. we settled on an album in the sale, by the California Ramblers: it's a compilation of 1920's dance music, the kind that played a 'flapper parties', apparently. obviously i know nothing about this kind of music, and so am not really qualified to comment on it, but to these ears it's quite delightful stuff. i like the way the guitars sound thick and scratchy at the same time, and i like the decorum of the melodies.
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oh, that new Streets songs is gash isn't it. he really, really, shouldn't try to write tunes.

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* do you know the story of 'easy lee' by the way? it's a lovely one. apparently it was composed after one of those infamous 'Perlon Parties' in Berlin, the ones that last an absurd amount of time, like 3 days or something. at the end of it, villalobos and luciano (i think) took refuge in a relative's old country house on the edge of town, and it was the height of summer, everything insanely green and lush. as their minds and bodies were gradually cleaned out in the summer garden, villalobos started singing into a vocoder and recorded the results on his laptop ( i imagine these techno guys take their laptops everywhere...). and that's the vocal on 'easy lee'. next time you listen to it, imagine villolobos and his pals, tired and happy, waiting for their strength to return in this shimmery, buzzing verdent garden. it'll make things make sense.

to make things more poignant, the house was being sold at the time, and so villalobos realised that it was the last time he's ever see this garden. joy, drugs, and a tinge of melancholia = rave classic. obviously.