A lovely discovery on Static Caravan is Serafina Steer. With tracks produced by Mike Lindsay from Tunng and a style that plots a course between Joanna Newsom, a British version of Linda Perhacs, and New Buffalo, Steer’s debut album Cheap Demo Bad Science is a wondeful, albeit short, listen. Oh yeah . . . she plays the harp.
Here’s the stop motion clip for Tiger which also appears on the CD.
Oh . . . and here’s a live song too.
I’ve been asked to write a chapter for a book on Australian electronic music. I’ve got the chapter on the early-rave explosion of creativity in terms of local production. And it has had me thinking and reminiscing.
I was just reading some threads in a Sydney ‘old skool’ group on Facebook and had a sudden memory of seeing The Beloved play at the Phoenecian Club in 1990. That was the first proper ‘dance party’ I went to . . . Greta, my girlfriend at the time, and I were totally unprepared. Her sister, Renae, was a couple of years older and went to the Hordern parties of the time but didn’t really give us many hints as to what to expect.
We hung around in the carpark out the back for ages, then got up the courage to get in the door – they were using the rear entrance rather than the main front doors – in hindsight, probably because of licensing reasons. They came on around 3am and I think we stuck around for about 5 songs because we were knackered. I think one of the other DJs Jacqui O, played a couple of Happy Mondays remixes earlier on and a stack of Balearic and acid house which pretty much went over our heads.
It took another year till I ‘got’ it in terms of dance parties via a couple of indie crossover Madchester nights. There was a particularly crazy one I remember at the Black Market. Baggy pants and tie-dyed hoodies galore in 1991, then it was off into warehouses and abandoned buildings beginning with one of the Psychosis parties.
Ahhhh . . . The Sun Rising . . .
It has been nearly 10 years since I listened to Omni Trio’s early EPs on Moving Shadow. I rarely ever played them out when they came out – they were too full of piano breakdowns, diva vocals and syrupy synth breakdowns to fit into the kind of sets I was spinning at the time (German techno, then later screwface techstep, acid breaks and moody blunted trip hop if I remember correctly). But for some reason I hung on to them.
Listening to them again now you can hear the kind of proto-memories that Burial’s choices in vocal samples call upon – post-hardcore melancholy – that would be first reflected through UK garage at the tail end of the 90s. The rhythm science is what makes Rob Haigh’s tracks really interesting. These EPs (collected on The Deepest Cut Volume One) were a bridge between anthemic ‘ardkore and more drum & bass – skittering drums, hyperchopped breaks, micro-time stretches – and those bass drops. These were also the EPs that triggered the ultimately short-lived ‘intelligent drum & bass’ movement before it petered out with ‘jazzy’ rubbish and was then overrun by the brutalist darkside of techstep ushered in by Ed Rush, Trace and others.
I don’t listen to drum & bass anymore and haven’t for quite a while but listening back to these and those early Metalheadz releases reminds me that there was something quite special going on in the 90s before it all got codified and suffered genre-cide.
An interesting piece in the New York Times on Prince. When I was in the UK a few weeks back there was a lot of controversy (heh heh) about his move to give his latest album away with a newspaper – which has apparently led to Sony refusing to sell to retail in the UK.
Prince’s priorities are obvious. The main one is getting his music to an audience, whether it’s purchased or not. “Prince’s only aim is to get music direct to those that want to hear it,†his spokesman said when announcing that The Mail would include the CD. (After the newspaper giveaway was announced, Columbia Records’ corporate parent, Sony Music, chose not to release “Planet Earth†for retail sale in Britain.) Other musicians may think that their best chance at a livelihood is locking away their music  impossible as that is in the digital era  and demanding that fans buy everything they want to hear. But Prince is confident that his listeners will support him, if not through CD sales then at shows or through other deals.
This is how most pop stars operate now: as brand-name corporations taking in revenue streams from publishing, touring, merchandising, advertising, ringtones, fashion, satellite radio gigs or whatever else their advisers can come up with. Rare indeed are holdouts like Bruce Springsteen who simply perform and record. The usual rationale is that hearing a U2 song in an iPod commercial or seeing Shakira’s face on a cellphone billboard will get listeners interested in the albums that these artists release every few years after much painstaking effort.
But Prince is different. His way of working has nothing to do with scarcity.
Prince is in a rather unique position – he is already bankable, he is already a celebrity. But what of those who are not yet in a position to sell out stadiums and command giveaways in the national press? And, what about those for whom ‘performing’ is not an option?
Gutterbreakz guesting on Loki’s fabulous blog An Idiot’s Guide To Dreaming recalls his early obsession with Jean-Michel Jarre. Gutter writes,
Appropriately enough, I discovered Jarre whilst on holiday in France around the turn of the eighties. One of my Dad’s friends allowed me to have a listen to his new gadget – a clunky item about the same size and weight as a house brick called a ‘Sony Walkman’. The cassette was Jarre’s “Equinox”, and I can honestly say that my young mind was utterly blown and my senses completely ravished by the electronic sounds emanating from those daft little orange spongy earphones. What I heard during the twenty minutes I was allowed to use the Walkman probably coloured my future tastes more than anything else. The swooping filtery analogue melodies, the pitter-pattering electronic percussion, the sense of floating through entire new galaxies of sound…an audio rush that I’ve been trying to reach again and again ever since.
My own interest in Jarre covers a similar period – Rendezvous, Zoolook – all on cassette. Perhaps not surprisingly Jarre was often ‘covered’ by programmers making music as soundtracks for their video games. It was the classic platform-style game Bomb Jack in its Commodore 64 port that made me track down Jarre – his tune Oxygene forms the relentlessly catchy background music to the action. Of course, like all video games of the time, it was uncredited . . . I’m pretty sure the few Jarre tapes I bought for my Walkman are long gone.
The Amazing Rolo demonstrates a very nifty bit of Max/MSP programming connected to a Nintendo Wii controller to screw with and ‘perform’ his sample-driven beats.
(via Make)
Over at Fabchannel there is a recent-ish live show from Junior Boys. I rated their debut album Last Exit much more than their follow up So This Is Goodbye and here on this live show the skitter-y Timberland-inspired rhythms of the older tracks don’t really translate so well with the live drums. If you liked Violator-era Depeche Mode then you’ll love this stuff – I was more into New Order.
Probably what excites me more about this is the whole Fabchannel thing which gives you an entire live show with sound quality suitable for computer speakers and decent video. The Flash interface is nice with easy skipping tracks and fast forwarding. These are all recorded in Amsterdam’s Melkweg and Paradiso and stay online for however long they have been able to negotiate rights for. There is a list of ‘expired’ shows as well which is a really nice touch giving a transparency to the whole rights issue which for me almost highlights a ‘blacklist’ of artists.
If you check their archive of cleared stuff you’ll find some fun stuff including all sorts of indie pop and post rock like Wire, Stars, Do Make Say Think, The Wedding Present, and Najah Attabou (which first got me onto this site via Jace’s Mudd Up) buried amongst plenty of other things not so aligned to my taste.
From one of my favourite blogs, History is made at night –
A black box emitting a high pitched pulsing sound designed to deter loitering teenagers is being used in thousands of sites around Britain just a year after its launch, prompting warnings from civil liberties campaigners that it is a “sonic weapon” that could be illegal. The Mosquito device, whose high-frequency shriek is audible only to those under around 25, has been bought by police, local councils, shops, and even private home owners, to tackle concerns over groups of young people congregating and causing disruption.
Apparently from the Guardian initially.
Crazy stuff. I wonder how long it will be before they are widely deployed in shopping malls.
Even more crazy is that this is from the SAME company that developed the ‘secret teen-only mobile phone ringtone’ – the mosquito ringtone?
I’m sitting at the dinner table writing up some reviews with headphones on. My wife is sitting on the couch watching Grey’s Anatomy.
Up wafts TV On The Radio’s ‘Playhouses’ which is obviously providing the backing to a particular scene. Except it goes for more than the usual 5 seconds. I get up to see what is going on – “why is this song keeping on going?” I think to myself. It has been 30 seconds now. And still it goes on. And the scenes change.
Then I realise my mistake.
No, music isn’t being used to underscore a ‘point’ in the narrative in the way has been used for decades. No, music isn’t being used to tweak emotions. It is simply being included to ‘shift more units’ and to ‘break bands to core audiences’ in the era of downloads.
Silly me. How naive of me.
I’m pretty sure the viewer is not supposed to realise that they are being ‘marketed’ to.
Last week I was digging through a pile of CDs in search of music to play at the Art Gallery. One of the CDs I dug up was Kuchen Meets Mapstation (Karaoke Kalk). It had been a long time since I had listened to it – and obviously I hadn’t paid much attention at the time. It was released in 2003 and two review copies had landed at Cyclic HQ and one went to Serena Armstrong who posted a review. and then that was that.
Maybe I had played it a few times at Frigid but likely not. Anyway, since digging it out I’ve given it a thorough re-listening – and its wonderful. What kindled my interest in the album was that Kuchen is infact Meriel Barham who used to sing for the Pale Saints, one of my favourite bands of the very very early 90s and perhaps the best ‘shoegazer’ indie group of the period. (I actually interviewed her for 3D World at the tail end of their career in 1994 – Ian Masters had left the band and Barham had taken over the vocals and songwriting).
Kuchen Meets Mapstation is full of the old synth pulses and blips which reminded me of something else. I was racking my brains until last night when I pulled out Hypnotone’s album AI (Creation). Hypnotone was one of the late ‘balearic’ bands and their only album appeared on Creation which was experimenting with ‘dance music’ at the time. Hypnotone did the production on Primal Scream’s Slip Inside This House and had some classic remixes – Sheer Taft’s Cascades and Primal Scream’s Come Together. After that they pretty much disappeared.
Most of AI sounds terribly dated, but there are a few tracks which are similar in style to Kuchen Meets Mapstation, albeit over a decade earlier. On God CPU you can hear that bubbling synth . . . . ahhhh.