"My purpose was simple: to catch the feel, the pulse of rock, as I had lived through it. What I was after was guts, and flash, and energy, and speed" - NIK COHN -
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "When the music was new and had no rules" -LUNA C
After N’Joi, Saffron fronted - front being the operative word - this Republica tune that I file with a lineage of excitable go-for-it ladette pop (Icona Pop, "I Love It", Pink "Coming Up", Spice Girls's "Wannabe", Ke$ha "Tik Tok" / "We R Who We R", Martin Solveig + Dragonette "Hello", Ting Tings "The Drums", right through to Charli xcx)
Even more delightful in this mode I think
Too exuberant and boisterous to be glamorous, too insolent to be elegant
Lily Allen hovers on the edge of this lineage, as a spiritual sister, a cheeky monkey, but her tunes are a bit too chill and leisurely in tempo yet also laden with meaning, lyrics-wise. Too fraught with grown-up anxieties and recriminations, too, whereas these girls are out to party and have not a care in the world.
Of course that's pretty much where Charlie XCX started her career, so it's make a nice loop of party-hard girl-pop
“Ready to Go” is a very calculated record - let's merge dance and Britpop - but for all that a perfect slice of mid-Nineties energy - a time when things were a lot better than we tended to think at the time (all that pre-millennium tension bollix, darkness shtick) compared with the next three decades of steady descent into hell
N-Joi, I've never found anything else by them quite as exciting as "Anthem"
But the Untouchables had another amazing moment
Shattering ecstasies
Part of its own mini-lineage of 'distraught divas' tunes - Johnny Jungle "Flammable", Omni Trio "Mainline" , Acen's "Trip"
Talking of being "taken away" and shattering ecstasies
N'Joi played an important role in my life insofar as they were one of four rave acts playing live at a major conversion moment in my journey towards becoming a raver. The headliner, in fact, so I would have been peaking when they came on....
Well, a dream comes true - I appear on a pirate radio station. Except it's legal now, but still - Rinse FM!
I am talking - alongside Martin Clark aka Blackdown - about Burial's debut album, which came out 20 years ago - on Eclecticist's show on Rinse.
Now I think about it, I have been on a pirate before - twice in fact.
The first time was inadvertent: BBC radio (I think Radio 4) had done a report on jungle, then emerging, in the summer of 1994, and the reporter came around to our flat to get some quotes from me. And immediately after it aired, one of the pirates - Kool FM if I recall right - pirated it. Played the whole program a few times on the radio. So there I was, coming over the airwaves of the station I most frequently tuned into at that time. (In 1994, after 8 years living in South London, I had finally made it North of the River and was living in Belsize Park, slipping out of range of my beloved Don FM but in compensation able to pick up Kool and other pirates that had mostly been out of reach when living in Brixton).
Another time I actually deejayed on a pirate - but this was not a nuum pirate, it was a sort of hipster pirate in Williamsburg. Sometime in the early 2000s. I played gloomcore and stuff like that, but the guy before me played Anthony Braxton and such. So the station was a bit like The Wire on the air. I have no idea if anyone listened. Still, a buzz to do.
A few times I have been inside an actual functioning London pirate station - Flex FM at the height of 2step in 2000, that was in South West London, a big if delapidated house, when reporting on UK garage for Spin. Deekline was spinning.
And then in 2005, again reporting for Spin, this time on grime, I got to go inside Rinse FM's HQ, a basement of a building near Whitechapel. It had once been a travel agents and it was surprisingly smart looking still (compared with Flex FM). They even had a sort of ante-room with a sofa in it, and then the actual room where the deejaying took place - the Ruff Sqwad followed by Roll Deep - was quite tidy. And actually now I recall it was Martin Clark who made the connection for me and came long to the session (thrilling to watch close up - the young Skepta was there). So big up Blackdown.
Here's what I wrote about Burial in 2006 when I reviewed it for The Observer Music Monthly
Burial
Burial
(Hyperdub)
The mystery-shrouded artist known only as Burial is
affiliated to the dubstep scene, a
sister-genre to grime that this year looks set to eclipse its waning
sibling. Running in parallel for the past half-decade, both these London underground sounds
rely on the same pirate radio infrastructure and share a common history in UK
garage and jungle. But dubstep is a largely instrumental style bigger on mood
than personality (no shouty MCs here). It’s also a site-specific music, its
bass-heavy menace achieving full impact only through a massive sound system in
a dark, crammed club. Burial’s self-titled debut is the first record from the
scene to transcend that context. It evocative atmospherics and enfolding ambience make it a perfect lose-yourself
soundtrack for headphones or lights-low living room listening
“Distant Lights” blueprints the basic Burial sound: an
ominously amorphous bass-rumble and a frantic-yet-subdued 2step beat are
countered by the slow-motion mournfulness of the track’s other elements, a
yearning vocal sample and a reverb-blurry trumpet, like Kenny Wheeler wilting
in a Temazepam swoon. Titles like “Night Bus” pinpoint Burial’s subject as the
melancholy and anomie of city life, while “Southern Comfort” localizes the vibe
further to South London. But the feeling this
music creates--imagine The Blue Nile of “Downtown Lights” but with the euphoria
turned to sorrow--is something any metropolis-dweller anywhere on the planet will
understand: sensations of grandeur and
possibility battling with desolation and entrapment. There’s a simmering, suppressed violence
bubbling inside Burial’s music, hinted at in titles like “Wounder,” which
conjures images of a city full of damaged people ready to inflict damage on
others. But there’s also a hovering grace and tenderness that makes me think of
Wings of Desire, a quality that
emerges most clearly on “Forgive,” a beatless ache of sound threaded with the
sounds of cleansing rainfall.
This album actually comes complete with a concept (it’s a
sound-portrait of a near-future South London submerged under water, New Orleans-style)
while the most persuasive readings of the album hear it as a requiem for the
lost dreams of rave culture. But the
non-specific sadness that shimmers inside this music ultimately transcends attempts
to pin it to a place, period, or population. You can imagine Burial’s tremulous
poignancy reaching out to hurt and heal all kinds of listeners--fans of David
Sylvian and Harold Budd, Massive Attack and Boards of Canada, Radiohead and Joy
Division. This music can go far.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I am reading Moby Dick at the moment - it's incredible, but it's taking me a long time - and one thing that surprised me is that seafaring men of that era did actually address each other en masse as "me hearties" e.g. "pull hard, my hearties" when rowing a small boat in pursuit of a whale
Well, I may not have provoked a musician to pen a retaliation tune (unlike my own flesh and blood, who recently joined a select pantheon of irritant critics).
But I can now bask in having inspired a song, and one made by a well-known and highly regarded group too: electronic act Overmono.
Their single "Lockup" - which heralds a new album Pure Devotion - apparently came from reading not Energy Flash, like you would probably have expected in the circumstances, but the other book of mine that people like.
According to the Overmono duo, brothers Tom and Ed Russell:
"We’d been reading rip it up and start again by Simon Reynolds and just generally on a massive post punk binge trying to find out as much as possible about how some of those records were made and the philosophy behind them".
"We got so obsessed with the all tactile soundscapes, the chaotic mix decisions, the use of physical processes and spaces and probably most importantly the approach to trying to break as many things as possible in the process of creating something new. "
For "Lockup", Overmono sampled "What A Waste" - not the Ian Dury song, but a tune by Birmingham postpunk outfit Fast Relief, who I've never heard of (call yourself a postpunk historian!)
It's on this comp of Midlands postpunk on the Easy Action label
Which you can hear on the streamers - like here at Tidal
Update: Stylo finds it on YouTube too
And here's a photo of the group, who appear to only made the one recording, as excavated for Un-Scene!
They could hardly look more postpunk. Flute in the line-up too.
Listening to "Lockup" I'm not really hearing the connection to postpunk beyond the sample. But it's a cool track - I like the way they loop the yammering vocal from "What A Waste", making it sound almost like bhangra.
I seem to remember enjoying Overmono's earlier stuff while feeling they were, if not outright retro-rave, then consolidators of the tradition.
But then people making music today in most fields are unavoidably history-conscious, given the accumulation of all that music behind them.
Whether it's rave or rock or rap, the tradition exists as a fact, a pre-existing thing, an arrayed archive of massed material - something to work with, to rework...
It's in the way, and the only way forward is to go through it...
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I await the album with interest, curious to see if there are other manifestations of postpunk
It's nearly always the case that the things that are touted for their supposedly superior musicality, are actually - on inspection - rather meagre, musically speaking.
Timbrally and tonally impoverished.
Especially when compared to the alleged hoi polloi of the day.
Far more startling melody-dissonance clashes and harmonic strangeness to be found in the jungle tekno of the time.
(And we won't even mention the rhythmic shortfall).
But I am preaching to the choir here, no doubt!
"Mondrin" - I assume there's an "a" missing here?
I liked the title of their second full-length effort, which was three years a-comin', Time Tourist but not sure I ever listened to it.
Yet like so many IDM-ers they had a perfectly solid pre-career doing hardcore
Like this moderately entertaining bit of novelty bleep-acid
This one even has a breakbeat-y groove and a mentasmic synth-smear
This has a piano vamp and a nice curl of diva vocal
A blippy chugger with a fairground Waltzer-like riff
Moderately bangin'!
But then within a year or so, they opted for restraint and politesse
Another good title
from a less-good titled EP Retreat from Unpleasant Realities
