shoe2

Jon Dale points me to the press release for The Primitive Painters reissue: 

"Deciding to make their tribute to this style of music the duo turned out 10 tracks of gauzy, melodious electronica in a white hot fever, one after another over the ensuing months. Settling on a name for the new project they picked ‘The Primitive Painters’ taking inspiration from the band Felt. 

“We are both children of the C86 movement,” explains Jörn. “this attitude of noisy art school influenced rock like Primal Scream, MBV, The Jesus & Mary Chain really inspired us to take a DIY approach to our music.”

So it is confirmed! 

Something in the air? At Pitchfork, Philip Sherburne reviews an album by Auscultation wherein producer Joel Shanahan "expands his palette, mingling shades of ’90s ambient techno with distant echoes of the Cocteau Twins’ dream pop."

Meanwhile, Ian Hodgson writes in with some of his favorite shoegazetronica tunes of t' 9ties - mostly shoegaze groops remixed by Electronic Listening Music notables. 

This is his All-Time Fave



Never heard that, although I liked Slowdive and Bandulu. 

Another Slowdive remix suggested by Ian  - this one by Global Communications alter-ego Reload

Clean forgot this lot....  seem to remember reviewing a single of theirs that toted a hefty load of ELM / IDM remixes. Perhaps it was this very one? 

Curve were such music press faves, weren't they? Well, Melody Maker faves, let's be honest - but I like to think of MM as being the music press by 1990 (always amazed to come across people who were still reading NME by that point). A group that's completely itself evacuated from popular memory. I must say I was never really convinced by them - a bit too much the canny ZeitGeist surfers, I felt,  like the Eurhythmics in their day.   My colleagues went gaga for them, though. 

Another band I completely forgot existed



I do appreciate the name, though - something of a reference point for your post-Lacan theorists of jouissance as "ineffable pleasure-spasm", Theresa. Perhaps it was the Hildegarde of Bingen tune by  The Beloved ("The Sun Rising"?) that turned these dreampoppers in a techno-ish direction. Or maybe they heard the dark-bliss pleasure-spasm of One Dove's "White Love"... 

Of this next track, Ian says "10/10 this one I reckon"

I had a major Cocteaus jag the other week -  tried to do that daft thing of listening to the entire urrrrv in one go, from start to finish (well, I didn't bother with the twilight-phase albums when Elizabeth starts singing in very plain English). The stretch from Head Over Heels and Sunburst and Snowblind to Aikea-Guinea via  The Spanglemaker and Treasure is sublime and almost immaculate .... as is the stretch from Love's Easy Tears via the Harold Budd collaboration to Blue Bell Knoll.  Before the first flush of genius, they're warming up, finding their unique voice; after the second flush, they're losing it, losing their way, heading into the diminishing returns zone. But there's that mysteriously middling and unmemorable patch of Victorialand, Tiny Dynamine, Echoes in a Shallow Bay, where the magic touch just goes away for a bit. And then it comes back, full strength - perhaps more even more consummate. Very odd - who else has that happened to?



Ah I remember, there was a whole album of Chapterhouse remixology wasn't there?   

Seefeel are exactly in the zone



And this is the ultimate shoegaze into ambient techno nexus - one of my own abfavs and a pinnacle of t' 9ties

Ian points to Mark Van Hoen as a key figure in this blurry indietronic zone. And also Ulrich Schnauss as the one who inherited and furthered the idea.  



He also mentions M83 as a later iteration 

M83 and Ulrich S fall into "the same box: sort of quality hi-lush electronica that crosses over (good songwriting)", Ian notes, adding mischievously, "And ends up as soundbeds on motorsport montage clip shows."

For me, the problem with a lot of it is that it gets a bit too wispy and clean-sounding.... and pious. A sort of saintly pallor. 

(A religiose vibe that actually came back a bit in the 2010s). *

It picks up the aforementioned "The Sun Rising" / Orbital "Halycon" etc vibe in the chill beatific side of house ... and melds it with the "mist gathers at the base of the ruined abbey, ghost choristers waft sighingly through the cloisters" vibe of lots of shoegaze.... 

Which I did love with this Slowdive-covering-Syd beauty



Well blimey, that is actually a release on the Sonic Cathedral Singles Club.

"Sonic cathedral" being the parody meme taking gentle piss out of the kind of praise prose poesy that wrapped itself around Cocteaus, 4AD in general, dreampop etc etc, back in the day - yours truly being a perpetrator

Ah and this has reminded me of another nexus in the shoegaze / electronic-listening / ambient / early post-rock / Stereolab-Saint-Etienne typestuff / etc confluence - Darla Records

Who started a series of releases called The  Bliss Out - named after a certain book








Here's a best of The Bliss Out



*    from that 2012 post on the New Exquisite / New Religiose i.e. Juliana Barwick, Julia Holter, Grouper

the hallmark: those pure airy vocals, more often than not wordless, or blurred to the point of indecipherable... multitracked into a choir-of-one... warp 'n' wefted... tapestried... heavy on the reverb ... where plainchant meets enchantment

the sound of the Ineffable... being effed

i don't think the intent is particularly retro or to hark back to anything (other than to the pre-modern or primordial)... but clearly it's influenced by the late Eighties... and it can't help reminding of that moment, if you're of a certain vintage yourself

where late 80s post-Goth/4AD-type stuff connects to current conditions of music-production is that Goth-Lite was primarily studio music, it was all about layers, sound treatments, effects... it broke to large extent... with the performance model of rock recording (Cocteaus DCD et al did play live, of course, but their live shows were attempts to duplicate the textural richness of what was concocted in the studio, rather than the other way round: the studio recording as attempt to simulate/approximate the energy of a live performance). So obviously that translates to the solo artist + digital audio workstations in a bedroom scenario of today, where live performance is an optional afterthought to careers created through blog-buzz

artificial reverb, that other hallmark of the New Religoise, figures as an irresistible temptation to producers looking to add "space" to recordings that are otherwise by their mode-of-construction a bit airless and dry


along with the outerspace/innerspace associations of the "sonic cathedral" effect...

shoegazetronica

Says Chal Ravens, "really enjoying The Primitive Painter reissue coming on Apollo – glittering cybertech waters, distant polygonal islands, '90s digiutopics, that sort of thing"

Now I was wondering if the artist name (an alter ego for Alter Ego, apparently - i'm stealing a Youtuber's quip here) was a reference to Felt

... and thought "nah, more likely it's directly referring  to Lascaux"

But lookee here, a nod to The Waterboys

and "Cathedral" - as in the proverbial "sonic cathedral" for 4AD-ish religiose reverb aesthetic?

Felt had this proximately titled song

and this even more proximately titled song




ah - and, stop press - as Cesar in comments points out, there is also this Felt song 

so clearly formatively rooted in mid-80s Anglo-indie this The Primitive Painter chap - or chaps, rather, since Alter Ego = duo 

now I'm wondering if that song is named after the House of Love offshoot captained by Terry Bickers of vitreous-guitar showering you with crystalline splinters renown?

The shoegaze into post-rock evolution is well documented and logical

But the shoegaze into the electronic listening music / chill out / IDM side of techno is less delineated

Chapterhouse got that album remixed by somebody or other IDM-ish (Global Communications? Future Sound of London? )

Morr Music

a German friend of mine Heiko Hoffmann - long time editor of electronic music magazine Groove, until recently - did a shoegaze compilation back in 2003

the texturitis and blissy feeling of dreampop / shoegaze was a gateway drug for E-lectronic dance and non-dance, for some, maybe

for me as a writer, maybe that applies too - texture-attentiveness (texture > text) vis-a-vis MBV et al, sets me up well for texturrythm-attentiveness about rave .... ditto "the politics of ecstasy" becomes "the politics of Ecstasy" (although in both cases I would say now that it's more like an "anti-politics" - for better or worse, and increasingly, i think worse) 

but as a listener I was into club music and synth-abetted funk right from the start of the 80s

and in fact would write about things like Mantronix  in that engineer-as-poet / new sonic architecture mode well before I became a raver - at the exact same time as I was hymning A.R. Kane in similar sort of terms (not man-machinic but certainly the human figure disappearing into the miasma of sound)

same kind of becoming-abstract, depersonalized, sensation-not-significance approach

"against interpretation" (before I'd even read Sontag's essay)

Deleuzian, before I'd ever cracked open A Thousand Plateaux 

one instinctively know what is right

and this was the right response to what the music was doing 




the missus reviewed this gig (where they were supported by The House of Love) 

later we saw Felt's final gig together