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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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.

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)

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...

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...

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!

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.