Ah, yes. Kraftwerk . They were the ones who created Autobahn , right? They were the original electro-poppers who scored a massive hit on both sides of the Atlantic with their ode to the joys of motorway travel, rendered in a futuristic Beach Boys fashion. Amazing sound. Astonishing achievement, blah, blah, blah.... Meanwhile, back in Blighty, a group of anonymous session musicians were recording an album's worth of cover versions every four days for [...]
We can look back now, from the crunched-time of 2088, almost a century to the day from the so-called second Summer of Love (itself a spawn of earlier, soft-time), to consider that Western Civilization's treatments of 'drug music' has progressed on a similar span to our own; one of echo and regurgitation, of considered length and of appropriation, most notably that of the now dead cultures of Magic and Voudon. Our ancestors drug music, we can see now, attempted to see parallels where there were none. To begin with, we need to understand that music and [...]
A chance remark, pulled from Kidshirt on acting and later reinforced by a throwaway comment about authenticity on Blissblog got me thinking... People review films and criticise acting; they say the actor has failed to come to terms with the demands of the part or that they've got an accent wrong or that, somehow, the part is too big for them to play, that they lack the depth of character required for the part, leaving the audience member hopelessly adrift, sucked out of the cinema's imposed reality tunnel and forced to consider [...]
Updates are going to be less regular for a while because I have a new toy to play with: Ableton Live 4 , courtesy of the incredibly kind and unbelievably patient blogger behind the excellent Triangular Sun . It really is a fantastically addictive, creative and ridiculously easy music package , although, as with any loop-based program, it does become difficult not to let into your basic instincts and let fly with mad-fast psy-trance (I always knew those Tim Leary, Hunter S Thompson and Space Odyssey wav files would come in handy). If ever I make anything that's [...]
As a minor continuation from the last post The Residents are one of those bands that I like the idea of more than I like the sound. They've made some decent records but they tend to be intellectually crisp and dry; you wouldn't want to snuggle down with The Residents on a cold day. The Residents - Love Me Tender I guess what first attracted me was a picture in the now long dimmed light [...]
A motif that seems endlessly repeated in music (and film) reviews is the 'emotional laziness' critique where a piece of music is criticised for appealing to our emotional sensibilities (as opposed - I'm guessing; this is never made explicit - to our higher cortical processing). The limbic brain is apparently not the stuff that music ought to be made for; perhaps it's seen as too close to our reptile brained cousins (I'm thinking of people from Chard) or perhaps it's assumed that music itself derives from the 'human-ness' of our brains, the frontal lobes perhaps, and therefore anything [...]
The Northlondonhippy ...it's kinda hard to tell, isn't it? I mean, if it's A) then we should probably leave well alone but if it's B) then maybe just maybe... I guess it could be C) but then we wouldn't wish that on anyone and there's even a slight possibility that it could be D) in which case there's just not enough Somerset Hours in the day... What do you reckon?
Ugress are from Norway. They're pretty hard to pin down stylistically, mining a vaguely nostalgic seam of trip-hop / electronica, which sounds not unlike the kind of stuff I remember hearing in the early hours sessions of Brighton Festival Radio circa the early 90s - a station which seemed to see no reason not to play 'intelligent' techno alongside mentalistic gabba, trip hop, ad hoc NWW remixes, Jello Biafra spoken word albums and John Cage concertos for prepared hatstand and Native American. A station peopled by people with no ostensible sense of purpose and the [...]
50g X 2 Yangoon. Taken as Tea. "...understanding that some people are numerical and others are verbal, that this can change, that one will always be higher than the other, or appear to be because higher functioning is associated with different functioning and flexibility is associated with intelligence. Neither of these associations are necessarily true." "...words can be nasty, can get behind your eyes" "...silence is not golden, is full of deep thought which [...]
Just back from a wonderful trip to Italy - edited highlights: the Head of Archaeology and the Head of Geography's head/face injuries whilst in the midst of an ill-advised experiment into walking through glass; snow on Vesuvius over an iced Pompeii; not becoming the new Pope; the sun setting on Herculaneum as Coil's Are You Shivering? plays out on the i-pod; driving towards Sorrento to Orbital's One Perfect Sunrise ... more importantly the students we took re-affirmed my faith in education: no self-motivated moaning, no failing limbs; just unbridled enthusiasm and joy and interest and discovery. [...]
"TKO - Hot Chip TK Max Mix" by Le Tigre : Cut free from the Perky Eighties Post-Hoodoo Gurus FM-Rock Chassis of the A-side (reviewed here ) this flip-side remix initially felt disappointing?but somewhere around the 9th play (What, you think I?m bluffin?, hombre? Well, I don' fuck around, senor : this is Method Record-Reviewing ?) I eventually stumbled over the realisation that the opening bars had craftily referenced every single Pop Record made in the Mid-Eighties that has a drum-machine intro? [...]
Missed the point of Underworld - the lager lager's never seemed as ironic as they intended - always preferred I'm Too Sexy (for my shirt) for watching Beer Yeti dancing in Cardiff nightclubs - later, Hot Stuff from The Full Monty - did like King of Snakes I think, but only in the midst of a compilation tape of Radio 4's Mixing It - easily the best radio programme ever, especially the bits where they describe some Merzbow/Hantarash improv like it's Bach::: "Mmm, Robert, I especially [...]
Music can be incapacitating; it can drag you down. You have to be constantly vigilant. You just have to open the window to hear the sound of human blood boiling: nasty pop-Trance (incidentally, when did that term come to mean Ian Van Dahl and not Hallucinogen or the Goa/Psytrance acid mentasms? I mean specifically? No, really, I'd like to know...),spazzy Rasmus (worst band ever?), dead-eyed Usher twirls... There are tiny U2 viral strains just waiting to rip through our bodies, nanobotic claws that pull on our hearts and can make us [...]
After some initial research funded by a generous, though time-spatial, loan from TTSB inc. (Those That Stain Blue) we have come to the following conclusions: 1) There is no way to find or define the 'You' in the sentence: 'That cardigan suits you.' It now has to be assumed missing and dead. 2) That the long-sought, seldom investigated so-called Secret of Immortality is indeed a malfunction of the Sleep-Wake cycle, as first suggested by Krunk et al (1988)*. Specifically, the secret appears to lie in the behaviour of what has [...]
Hippopotamomus was released in 1991 and received this review in the NME: It now seems beyond all reasonable doubt that Nick Currie is a perv; if not in deed, then certainly in mind. Taunted from the deeper recesses of his imagination by the voice of his (recently deceased) idol Serge Gainsbourg, he provokes, in his soft-spoken, bedsit-poet way, musing on forbidden lusts in a wholly gratuitous catalogue of titillation. Currie with his Momus head on is obsessed with talking about sex, for it seems (as he describes in [...]
I know I shouldn't but I can't help getting ridiculously over-excited when free stuff appears in the mail. The latest is an album by AK Momo on the Hidden Agenda label coustesy of those nice people at Parasol Records . It's a sex-wooze kind of record, reminiscent of Felt Mountain era Goldfrapp: lilting vocals, mellotron flushes and oodles of scratchy Optigan (seems a lot of this instrument around at the moment...where do they all get them?) I feel somehow soiled mentioning this, for reasons I [...]
Years ago, in a moment of pure, white-light clarity, I realised that the chief distinction between me as a child and me as an adult was my shift in allegiance from Sebastian Coe to Steve Ovett. As a child, I wanted Coe to win, thinking Steve Ovett looked like the kiddie fiddler baddy in a Public Information Film and then... I realised that somehow I'd got it all wrong. Coe seemed to morph before my eyes into a V lizard, a seething Cthulhu tentacular with an hypnotic programme that kept small children in [...]
overheard: 'thing is, everyone keeps getting hit by buses...tearing holes.' '...when they should be realising there is no bus.' 'mmm...or at least stop trying to wave it down... or catch it up...' 'that's anxiety... who's on the bus... who's off the bus... where's the bus going ...' 'and especially stop worrying about sitting next to a stranger if you do get on...' '...i think if my children... got hit by one.... even [...]
The Jack the Tab album, Genesis P Orridge, Dave Ball, Richard Norris et al's fake acid house compilation came out in 1988 and, while hailed as innovative (though not at the time and, actually, not in retrospect either by the majority of critics...bugger), it set a trajectory for acid house and electronica which never quite took off. The album has a DIY amauterish feel to it that seemed to reflect the initial idea that Acid House would become the new punk; meaning that previous structural/ musical limitations would be taken apart [...]
An Idiot's Guide to Dreaming
Avicii – Two Million
Beck – I Just Started Hating Some People Today
iamamiwhoami: kin - Teaser
