"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
That macabre sing-song sample - "did you ever think / when the hearse goes by / that some day you are going to die?"
Also on the theme
Younger than me, by a half-decade... sobering, eh?
I reviewed Depth Charge - or is it Depthcharge? - a couple of times in a Melody Maker Singles column, and each time the release brightened that week's rather barren haul
from October 1989
DEPTHCHARGE
"Depthcharge"
(Vinyl Solution)
Inconsequential but captivatingly labyrinthine "dance" record that reminds me vaguely of Arthur Russell's bathyscopic odyssey "Let's Go Swimming". Over a bubbling cauldron of deep-sea dub bass, drifts a sargasso sea of sonic flotsam, sonar blips, smeared Kung fu samples, anemones and polyps. If Sun Ra thought he was from Atlantis rather than Saturn, was into Adrian Sherwood, and had an obsession with martial arts, he might make records like this. (That's a lot of "ifs", I s'pose, but there you go...)
Kind of Renegade Soundwave-y, without the grating Guy-Ritchie-movie voices....
Sort of anticipating trip hop, but not really...
And in some ways also anticipating Big Beat.
The other Depthcharge single I reviewed, from early 1990
Bit Wu-y in his predilections...
Vinyl Solution label mate with the also-departed Eon a/k/a Ian Loveday. He went quite a while back....
Anticipating darkcore
This even earlier tune has quite a darkside title, if not the sound or vibe really
I guess it's just the Pulp Continuum - video-nasty bizniz
Also as The Octagon Man, this has neat beats
Here's an obituary for Jonathan Saul Kane by Carl Loben at DJ magazine
He seems to have rubbed shoulders with a lot of people from that "DJ Records" moment in the late '80s - Mark Moore, Tim Simenon - and also the aforementioned Renegade Soundwave.
Here's a reminiscence / tribute I've borrowed wholesale from Danny Briotet of RSW.
"One upon a time in West London, in a place called Ladbroke Grove, there was a band of (very) young brothers that went under the name of Krew.
"Krew, multi-racial, comprised of MCs, DJs, breakers and graffiti artists and were one of the 1st hip hop crews anywhere outside of the US (we’re talking early ‘80s).
"At tangents from Krew there were myself and a kid called Jonathon. Jonathon began DJing mostly at local hip hop jams on the manor, which often descended into mayhem and violence. Jon (sometimes wearing a black cape) was unphased by this – as well as having DJ skills decades before the term ‘turntablist’ was even thought of, he was also well-versed in martial arts (a theme than ran throughout his career) and could look after himself.
"When I first knew Jon he lived at his mum’s in Powis Sq and had a massive scaffolding construction in his room to house his decks and records...
"By the mid-80s we were both playing at illegal warehouse parties in places like Shoreditch (then a barren wasteland with just a few Bengali families living there) or under the Harrow Road roundabout at Paddington.
"Jon started releasing records around the time of the 1st RSW releases, on the Vinyl Solution label (the original shop was opposite my flat), first as Grimm Death, with MC Tony Tone from Krew.
"Then Jon brought out the 1st Depth Charge record at the same time as we released The Phantom, and the 2 records would find themselves together in so many DJs' boxes, although they sped DC up to fit with 120 bpms of the Rave scene, (although Jon was always tea-total and never went anywhere near a pill).
"We used to talk, at the time, about how we’d both done these tunes, completely independently of each other, but kind of coming from the same place. The Depth Charge records were massive, and it goes without saying how big an influence they were on the Chemicals, Wall of Sound and so many others in that amazing post-acid house period when alternative became mainstream.
"As things progressed, Jon and I would find ourselves on the same bill in all sorts of weird and far-flung places and he was often late – I remember sitting on planes ages after they were meant to take off, only for Jon to stroll on, record box in hand.
"Jonathan’s approach to DJing was same as his approach to life – uncompromising. He didn’t suffer fools lightly and it wasn’t hard to lock horns with him over anything from samples to football, which he loved – when I first knew him, he played in a team of local Arab kids.
"I woke up this morning to see Zaf’s post about his passing, and I was deeply shocked and upset – it’s a strange sign of the times when you learn on social media of the death of someone you’ve been friends with for over 4 decades, and whose life ran parallel with yours in so many extraordinary ways. I knew he was ill, and only bumped into him very rarely – he became reclusive. I got a message from a mutual friend just now, that said they saw his house getting cleared out a while ago but didn’t put 2 and 2 together. I also heard he’s been gone for months, and no-one knew – well, tragic though that may be, I can’t help the feeling that Jon might get a chuckle out of that, as the enigma continues to grow. Respect, brother, really."
I love this whole other meaning the word "raver" had in the 1960s - basically a sexually wild 'n 'free young woman
The solicitous, condescending tones of the interviewer in this Man Alive report are something else
Simon Dupree and the Big Sound was the pop-psch band of Ray Shulman (A.R. Kane producer / mentor ) and his brothers - which then turned into the ultra-prog outfit Gentle Giant
This was SD & the BS's big hit
The Associates, under an alias - 39 Lyon Street - covered it
Following on from the "my kind of rap" post with its coda about Auto-Tune and ad libs.
Here's something that's been puzzling me for a while...
Q: Why have female rappers not embraced Auto-Tune to anything like the same degree as their male counterparts? They tend to have naturalistic sounding voices.
(possible) A #1 - Because the pop associations of pitch-correction - melodizing the rapping, turning it into something between rapping and singing - are something to avoid for "real MC" cred reasons?
(possible) A #2 - Or is that the androgynizing effect A-Tune has on gruff male voices is not equivalently transgressive when applied to a woman’s voice?
Below some further thoughts on this - originally an unfinished blogpost from 2018
Migos, "MotorSport"
The ethereal effete wafting of the backing track has an almost systems music quality to it: that chiming tuned-percussion pulse, the flutters of strings.
There's the contrast between the floaty, angelic, half not-there-ness of especially Quavo and Offset, and the super-potent, marauding, phallic-woman cameos by Cardi and Nicki. Which are so overpowering, so in your face, they topple the mood of the song. Such that listening, sometimes I will actually skip the two female tour de forces, cut straight from Offset to Takeoff, to preserve the dreamy ambience.
Playboi Carti - No Time
Vocal-texturally (as well as backing track texturally) this reminds me of Orphan Fairytale's hypnagogic instrumentals or the fluttering, twittering vocal counter-melodies that Liz Fraser does in back of her main vocal on Bluebell Knoll / Heaven Or Las Vegas era Cocteaus.
I hallucinate the line as "I draw my penis out"
And then the baby voice and foetus voice stuff - completely regressive, emasculated, dreampop-chillwave melting-of-self.
Jump to 1.18
The virtuous dominated the end o' year lists (but then they always have played well with that constituency - remember Arrested Development)
The decadent, though, had - if not the best tunes - the best swoons. A monopoly on jouissance.
For me all other metrics fell away - importance, innovation, resonance, significance etc - and I fell back on, fell into, bliss - as the inarguable - a category I started out with in many ways as a writer
Although it is innovative and original, and possibly not devoid of significance or resonance, the Migos sound above all distinguishes itself through the flooding insistence of jouissance.
And it is about jouissance - this is its subject, its subjectivity in fact - how many times do things flood or drip in these lyrics? These are selves that are melting and brimming and bubbling and overflowing.
Culture the first has higher heights - "T-Shirt" and "Slippery" but Culture II is the one I've listened to many times more. It goes further into jouissance, deeper into a deliquescing subjectivity.
I started out liking the bangers most - "Narcos" and "Auto Pilot".
Great beat and the production takes the terraced voicescape thing even further - main rap, ad libs, wordless backing ripple of Gregorian gurgles and droning moans and then that mysterious incantation intoning deep in the cavernous background - a sample? I could almost believe it's from Popol Vuh.
But then the initially overly subdued-sounding second side bloomed for me and I realised that the second half of the second side - traditionally where a double album starts to run thin and run out of steam - was the most creative, unusual and different stretch of the album.
From "MotorSport" through "Top Down On Da Nawf", via "Moving Too Fast", "Work Hard", "Notice Me", "Made Men" (skipping the misconceived "Too Much Playa", and the inessential album coda / finale / reprise)
"MotorSport" is an example of how far Migos have come from their own earlier mixtape incarnations. Before, the hyped-up jabber - sinewy and shouty - emphasized how hard they work for their success. Now, from "Slippery" onwards, their feel is imperturbable nonchalance, gliding serenity, basking in glory.
That spring-heeled buoyancy was captured perfectly by writer Jordan Rothlein when he described hearing his own Auto-Tuned voice through headphones: “I immediately felt superhuman. The best comparison is walking through an airport and stepping onto one of those conveyor-belt walkways, where suddenly you’re walking twice as fast as everyone else with the same amount of effort.” Which is why on “MotorSport”, Quavo raps “I feel like I can fly”, while Offset goes further, declaring, “No human being, I’m immortal”.
Migos, "Moving Too Fast"
Serenity creased with melancholy - "My heart is so numb /I cannot cry /I don't got feelings"
Migos "Work Hard"
Except they don't sound like they're working at all - and that to me is so much more interesting, unusual - this almost effete rapture - what Stubbs and I would once have called "the ghostly unbody"(in reference to the likes of A.R. Kane)
Migos, "Notice Me"
Migos, "Made Men"
Very musical track, that
Migos, "Top Down on Da NAWF"
"I'm home... I can never get lost"
Again, cruising-in-the-car serenity creased here and there with pain and sorrow
In the intro, that sample -is it the little girl from Poltergeist trapped in the TV saying "please help me"?
And then the cracks in the armored fortress-self - "for some reason I can't cry-cry"
But the words are saying the opposite of the music - or rather the music (and the vocalisation style - fey melancholia) is undercutting and contradicting the lyrics
The lyrics are like a residual element, a hollowed-out signifier of rap-as-was
But the truth of the music is the woozy gaseous vocal texture - the listless wistfulness
These vocals have more to do with PM Dawn or A.R. Kane
The discontinuity between the two elements - lyrics and vocal grain / affect / mode - can get pretty jarring
This serene elegaic mood of instant nostalgia is set up and then it ends with the mood-dissonant line "she got my kids on her face"
Yet as hard-hearted and cold-souled as the lyrics seem, the fluidity of the vocal interplay and its ecstatic texturizing speaks to something else: a vulnerability to bliss. Quavo and Offset and Takeoff seemed entranced by themselves, lost in an auto-erotic swirl, draped in a jouissance that seems to seep out of their bodies as mist of Auto-Tuned droplets, a self-swaddling canopy of shivers and moans, fluttery-shivery wafts....
Quavo, so phonetically proximate to “quiver”, is the perfect name for the Migos MC who is the most ecstatically merged with Auto-Tune technology, to the point where he’s a virtually a cyborg, inseparable from his vocal prosthesis.
The lyrics are the usual alpha male, warrior male, gangsta, hardest working me in the rap biz stuff - but the vocals are saying "I surrender"
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Not a blissy one but hark at that fractured, halting structure, the way the ad libs are almost as prominent as the main rap. The effect is almost like a trap equivalent to roundelay or canon singing.
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Twelve months of Migos over-saturation were bookended by this (the purring glow-moan back-lighting "this is how it's sposed to be" is like a fluorescent marker pen)
And then that was it... nothing else really of note from the Migos camp, solo or the main group (Culture III, idiotically deemed a return to form by some after the supposed squib of Culture II, is utterly barren, from the pointless sampling of "Papa Was A Rollin' Stone" on the opener onwards)
Still, in hindsight, their sound remains one of the most original, unexpected sounds of the past decade.
Without every going into the zone of tediously testing the listener, striving to be frenziedly challenging or difficult - staying within the ear-erogenous zone.
The sheer pleasure-principled orientation of the music hides how out-there it can be - there are moments in "Auto Pilot", "Top Down on Da NAWF", "Bosses Don't Speak" - shivers and shudders and dilated moans - that seem to be cut from the same cloth as Tim Buckley's "Starsailor". A song I once described as being like the 'space' of orgasm expanded into an environment, a maze you can walk through.
That's what the Migos backing gurgles - or Playboi Carti at his heights - or the entirety of Young Thug's vocal in almost anything - or Lil Yachty on "The Ride" - or Future at his most groggy and reptilian - that's what it sounds like: coming, endlessly stretched out.
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Going back to how this started - virtue versus decadence - the electric lure of the dissolute, of dissipation and the reprobate...
Migos could be contrasted with another Atlanta-based artist whose latest mistresspiece is far more feted
The latter is - like all her previous ones - an essay about Afro-Futurism (with a tick list of progressive stances). It's woven almost entirely from what was once genuinely futurist in its day but is now a stifling tradition. Rendered in insipid melodies and a rather small voice.
Migos, Carti, Thug, Future - these simply are Afro-Futurist without having to declare themselves as such (although Future kinda nods at this with his "Future Hendrix" talk). This is a new thing that is out there in the world, on the radio, on YouTube, streamers.
The sentiments are the opposite of progressive - in fact, they are psychologically and socially regressive - but they are also hallucinatory, psychotic, hyperreal - the leaking id of the Simulacrum - and symptomatically revealing of the contemporary moment.
The lyrics are like some terminal hyper-decadent state of gangsta-thug-playa-izm - beyond even rap in its hair metal phase of the 2000s - just fleeting fragments of triumph, flaunting, disdain, glory, etc - barely any continuity from line to line.
Compelling on that level - but what's really fascinating is the disjuncture between the lyrics and the "message" of the music itself.
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“Writing aloud is not expressive; it leaves expression to the pheno-text, to the regular code of communication; it belongs to the geno-text, to significance; it is carried not by dramatic inflections, subtle stresses, sympathetic accents, but by the grain of the voice, which is an erotic mixture of timbre and language, and can therefore also be, along with diction, the substance of an art: the art of guiding one’s body….
"Due allowance being made for the sounds of the language, writing aloud is not phonological but phonetic; its aim is not the clarity of messages, the theater of emotions; what it searches for (in a perspective of bliss) are the pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language.
"A certain art of singing can give an idea of this vocal writing; but since melody is dead, we may find it more easily today at the cinema. In fact, it suffices that the cinema capture the sound of speech close up… and make us hear in their materiality, their sensuality, the breath, the gutturals, the fleshiness of the lips, a whole presence of the human muzzle (that the voice, that writing, be as fresh, supple, lubricated, delicately granular and vibrant as an animal’s muzzle), to succeed in shifting the signified a great distance and in throwing, so to speak, the anonymous body of the actor into my ear: it granulates, it crackles, it caresses, it grates, it cuts, it comes: that is bliss”
Roland Barthes, The Pleasures of the Text
Auto-Tune, Melodyne, Harmony Engine etc complicate the idea of "the grain of the voice", Barthes's "carnal stereophony" and "language lined with flesh"- but I feel this passage still captures what's going on with this music and its reversal of priorities.
Noise, energy, blare, blast - and voice and words as just a joyous shout of self-assertion
What I've less interest in: lyrical rumination, inwardness, reflection
What I've no interest in: didacticism, messages, uplift
I like tracks that are like engines with the foot on the gas... unflagging... jets of steam shooting out from underneath
The kind of rap I like is in fact rap where the rapping is not that important as semantic content, instead it's all about the the sheer pumping flow-motion of it. Another form of rhythmic thrust dovetailed with the track .... the voice completely merged with the dynamo of the beat.... an adjunct to or constituent element of the groove.
I suppose human beatboxing would be the ultimate extension of this idea, but - fun as it is - it's a step too far beyond the semantic into purely rhythmatized vocalism.
What thrills (more on this below) is a dance between sense and nonsense, a battle between lyrical meaning and the demands of rhythm.
Okay, now this next example does have great writing but what matters is the swing and unflagging pump-action of Rakim.
But in case you think it's all old skool, stuff from three decades ago
That tune contains within it the "engine" / foot-on-the-accelerator idea.
Now this one - it's a "Loose" for 21st Century
I have no idea what Kanye is on about here - what gets me is the sheer aural thuggery, it hits me like Gary Glitter's "Rock and Roll, Pt 2"
Languid is fine so long as it's pure feline sass - again, the words play their part but above all it's the grain and tone of his voice that makes this seductive
This now forgotten fellow was my early Platonic ideal of rap - "annihilating" sense in the cyclotron of rhythm madness
I wonder why Mantronik didn't just invite T. La Rock to be the MC in Mantronix?
(MC Tee is a sweet presence in the sound, but he's overmatched)
"Push It" belongs in this company but my fave Salt N' Pepa is this:
Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, Skinny Boys... some Public Enemy moments...
Latterday exponents: Onyx, DMX, Lil Jon
For sure, the writing-as-writing is often great - DMX especially, LL and Beasties too, Chuck D obviously
But primarily it's about energy and vocal force and command
I feel that whenever you have to concentrate - when there's wordplay, allusion, meta-reference - or even where there's picture-lyrics that appeal to your visual and imaginative faculties.... this is detracting from the pure musicality, the insistence of rhythm.
I'm with Nietzsche here: his distaste for the Italian style of opera in which musicality is distorted by and suborned to the requirements of the libretto - the result being “semimusical declamation” from a “singer who speaks more than he sings” and appeals to “the listener who
desires to hear the words above the music”
(My rap version of this would be going to see El-P (supporting Cannibal Ox) and finding the too-many-words thing really aggravating - and even more so the way that fans in the audience would rap along to the too-many-words that they'd learned by heart, all of them).
Against this unmusicality, Nietzsche exalted the folk song, where the primordial incantational force of
melody and rhythm overrides the text:
“The continuously generating melody scatters
image sparks all around, which in their variegation, their abrupt change, their
mad precipitation, manifest a power quite unknown to the epic and its steady
flow.”
This might seem a paradoxical expectation of rap, which is nothing if not speak-sing.... but I guess I'm saying the "sing" - rhythmelody - and other non-semantic vocal aspects (grain, intonation, etc), these are more important than the "speak" (meaning communication).
My favorite rappers makes me glaze out, dip in and out of lyrical-focus, catch words here and there
Just like the Rolling Stones, like the Fall - like most great rock music in fact
The golden rule with pop and rock overall is that lyrical sense is fairly low down on the list of virtues... it's not absent, it doesn't contribute nothing to the pleasure and power, but it's far from the be all and end all.
You can have great pop and rock with lousy words
But no lyrical cleverness or poeticism can salvage music that is sparkless.
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The ad libs era of recent trap was a massive re-irruption of exactly-what-I-like - vocal noise, non-semantic energy-bursts, voice-as-logo, onomatopeia, voice FX, gimmicks - purely rhythmatized speech and non-speech - made all the more delirious through being filtered through Auto-Tune and other processing technologies.
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Talking about folkmelody, image sparks and mad precipitation, Nietzsche would have loved these surely
It's that melancholy time of life when every so often you wonder, "who's going to be next out of my contemporaries, all the people I've known, to go?".
Today's answer is Achim Szepanski, founder of Mille Plateaux and its sister-labels Force Inc and Riot Beats (to name just a few).
Through these imprints Achim put out so many cool records between the early '90s and early 2000s - artists like Oval, Gas, Porter Ricks / Thomas Koner, Curd Duca, Biochip C, Alec Empire, Panacea, Cristian Vogel, Microstoria, Vladislav Delay, Alva Noto, the Clicks and Cutscompilations, In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze.... on and onand on. Encompassing a stunningly diverse sonic spectrum, these records often came with release-rationales and theory-framing attached that were genuinely provocative and thought-provoking - conceptronica when it was a new thing, a refreshingly unusual approach, before rigor became de rigeur.
Fond memories of hanging out with Achim when spending a couple of days in Frankfurt to do that feature (see below - along with a review of the Deleuze tribute Achim curated). He liked to talk theory and he liked a drink. A bunch of us took the 30-minute train ride to Mainz to visit a club tucked away inside the foundations of a bridge that spanned the Rhine. Gene Farris from Relief / Cajual played a fabulous set, I heard tracks like "Flash" by Green Velvet for the first time. Things got very merry. I picture Achim in the throng waving a bottle in one fist and shouting, "Gene Farris is the best house deejay in the world!!!!".
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MILLE PLATEAUX
The Wire
April 1996
by Simon Reynolds
Frankfurt is simultaneously Germany's financial capital and a longstanding centre of anti-capitalist theory. Most famously, it gave the world the 'Frankfurt School' of Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer et al: neo-Marxist thinkers who fled Nazism and landed up in Southern California, where their eyes and ears were affronted by the kitsch outpourings of Hollywood's dream-factory.
Today, the Frankfurt School is mostly remembered for its snooty attitude towards popular culture, which it regarded as a soul-degrading inferior to High Modernism, and as the 20th Century's opiate-of-the-people. Adorno, in particular, has achieved a dubious immortality in the cultural studies world, as an Aunt Sally figure ritually bashed by academics as a prequel to their semiotic readings of "anti-hegemonic resistance" encoded in Madonna videos and 'Star Trek'.
There's no denying Adorno deserves derision for his infamously suspect comments about the "eunuch-like sound" of jazz, whose secret message was "give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated...and you will be accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you". But in other respects Adorno's critique of pop culture's role as safety valve and social control is not so easily shrugged off.
Witness these remarks from his essay "On The Fetish Character in and the Music and Regression of Listening": "Their ecstasy is without content... It has convulsive aspects reminiscent of St. Vitus' dance or the reflexes of mutilated animals". Adorno's verdict on the swing inspired frenzies of the 'jitterbug'--"merely to be carried away by anything at all, to have something of their own, compensates for their impoverished and barren existence"--could easily be transposed to '90s rave culture, which--from happy hardcore to gabba to Goa trance--is now as rigidly ritualised and conservative as heavy metal.
Mille Plateaux shares something of Adorno's oppositional attitude to mass culture. For label boss Achim Szepanski, Germany's rave industry--which dominates the pop mainstream--is so institutionalised and regulated it verges on totalitarian. Adorno-style, he psychoanalyses Ecstasy culture as "a metonymic search for mother-substitutes (Ecstasy can be your new mommy)". Alec Empire, a Mille solo artist and prime mover in his own Berlin-based anti-rave scene Digital Hardcore, is more blunt: "rave is dead, it's boring! House is disco and techno is progressive rock". As for Oval, Mille Plateaux's 'star act'... When asked about their relationship to techno, they simply reply: "Relationship?!"
Influenced by post-structuralist theory and named after a gargantuan tract by Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Mille Plateaux release deconstruction techno. Situating their activity both within and against the genre conventions of post-rave styles like electronica, house, jungle and trip hop, Mille Plateaux point out these musics' premature closures and seize their missed opportunities. The results may not offer the easy satisfactions of less ambitious techno labels/auteurs, but they do constitute the most consistently stimulating catalogue in the post-rave universe.
I meet Szepanski at his apartment, which doubles as HQ for his four labels (Force Inc, Mille, Riot Beats and Force Inc USA), and is located in Frankfurt's sleazy equivalent to King's Cross (handy for trains, lots of junkies and hookers). Having read his Deleuze-style press releases (lots of "sound-streams" and "disjunctivesingularities") and conducted a theory-dense E-mail conversation, I'm expecting a rather severe individual. But over the course of the weekend, Achim reveals some unexpected sides to his character: a dry sense of humour, a soft spot for plastic pop (he confesses to buying CDs by TLC and Kylie) and an awesome talent for piss-artistry.
Plagued by a mystery ailment, he spends most of Saturday sipping homeopathic remedies and complaining that he's too poorly to undertake a planned excursion to see Chicago house DJ/Force Inc artiste Gene Farris spin at a club in nearby Mainz. At midnight, he decides he's just about up to it. For the first five hours, Achim's spirits remain low, despite an alcohol intake rate of three beers to my one:
But by 6AM and the magic number Beer #12, Achim can be found flailing on the dancefloor, enraptured by Farris's trippy set. Every three minutes, he accosts someone to blearily proclaim: 'Gene Farris is the best house deejay in THE WORLD, I don't care, I will tell anyone--Josh Wink, Laurent Garnier--to their face, Farris is the BEST".
* * * * * *
Now aged 35, Szepanski got involved in student politics in the radical, post-1968 climate of the mid-'70s. He read Marx, flirted with Maoism, protested conditions in the German prison system. Later in the decade, he immersed himself in the post-punk experimentalist scene alongside the likes of D.A.F., playing in the industrial band P16D4. In the '80s he went back to college, watched the Left die and got very depressed, consoling himself with alcohol and the misanthropic philosophy of Cioran.
Two late '80s breakthroughs pulled him out the mire: his encounter with the post-structuralist thought of Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, et al, and his excitement about hip hop and house. While still working on a doctorate about Foucault, he started the first DJ-oriented record store in Frankfurt and founded the Blackout label. By the early '90s, Szepanski was tripping out to Deleuze & Guattari's 'A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia", a colossal tome that Foucault hailed as "an introduction to the non-fascist life".
For Achim, the experience was revelatory and galvanising, because Deleuze & Guattari's theories showed him "that you don't have to be negative or sad if you want to be militant, even if what you fight against is very bad. The Frankfurt School and Marxism has a very linear interpretation of history and a totalising view of society, whereas Deleuze & Guattari say that society is more than just the economy and the state, it's a multitude of sub-systems, and local struggles."
From this, Achim conceived the strategy of context-based subversion which informs his labels: hard-techno and house with Force Inc, electronica with Mille Plateaux, jungle with Riot Beats, trip hop with the "Electric Ladyland" compilation. These interventions are somewhere between parody and riposte, demonstrating by deed not discourse what these genres could really be like if they lived up to or exceeded their accompanying 'progressive' rhetoric.
Founded in 1991, Force Inc was initially influenced by Detroit renegades Underground Resistance: not just sonically, but by "their whole anti-corporate, anti-commodification of dance stance". In its first year, Force Inc's neo-Detroit/nouveau aciiied sound had a lot of impact. At the same time, the Force crew were involved in the underground party scene, organising "guerrilla events at strange locations, without all the tricks and special effects that you get at normal discos". But as the aciiied revival took off and trance tedium took over in 1992, Force Inc "made a radical break," towards a breakbeat-oriented hardcore that weirdly parallelled the proto-jungle emerging in Britain.
Szepanski & Co deserve massive respect for recognising so precociously the radicalism of the then universally deplored 'ardkore. They even loved the much derided sped-up 'squeaky voice' tracks that ruled in 1992.
"Maybe it was just our peculiar warped interpretation, but the sped-up vocals sounded like a serious attempt to deconstruct some of the ideologies of pop music. One dimension to this was using voices like instruments or noise, destroying the pop ideology that says that the voice is the expression of the human subject."
And so Force Inc embarked upon its own "abstract industrial take on UK breakbeat", mashing together harsh sonorities and angelic samples over ultra-fast breakbeats, as on Biochip C's marvellous "Hells Bells", available on the recent Force anthology "Rauschen 10". Achim also licensed UK tracks like NRG's super-sentimental "I Need Your Lovin'" and stuff by Force Mass Motion. "We did some great parties, our DJ friend Sasha playing much faster than the English DJ's, at 200 bpm, using an altered Technics cranked up to + 40. At this velocity, it was very abstract, coming at you like a sound wall. It worked good for us but nobody else! We were very isolated in Germany".
In 1993-94, Szepanski watched aghast as rave went overground in Germany, with "the return of melody, New Age elements, insistently kitsch harmonies and timbres". With this degeneration of the underground sound came the consolidation of a German rave establishment, centred around the party organisation Mayday and its record label Low Spirit, acts like Westbam and Marusha, and the music channel Viva TV. The charts were swamped with Low Spirit pop-tekno smashes like 'Somewhere Over The Rainbow' and 'Tears Don't Lie', based on tunes from musicals or German folk music. And the alleged 'alternative' to this dreck was middlebrow trance, as represented by Frankfurt's own Sven Vath and his Harthouse label.
For Achim, what happened to German rave illlustrated Deleuze & Guattari's concepts of 'deterritorialisation' and 'reterritorialisation'. Deterritorialisation is when a culture gets all fluxed up--punk, early rave, jungle--resulting in a breakthrough into new aesthetic, social and cognitive spaces. Re-territorialisation is the inevitable stabilisation of chaos into a new order: the internal emergence of style codes and orthodoxies, the external co-optation of subcultural energy by the leisure industry. Szepanski has a groovy German word for what rave, once so liberating, turned into: 'freizeitknast', a 'pleasure-prison'. Regulated experiences, punctual rapture, predictable music. "Boring!".
Would he go so far as to see kind of aesthetic fascism at work in rave culture? "The techniques of mass-mobilisation and crowd- consciousness have similarities to fascism. Fascism was mobilising people for the war-machines, rave is mobilising people for pleasure-machines...".
In 1994, Achim started Mille Plateaux. Just as Force Inc worked with and against the demands of the dancefloor, Mille is a kind of answer to 'electronic listening music' and the ambient boom. Achim sees Mille Plateaux output as the musical praxis to Deleuzian theory, fleshing out concepts such as the rhizome (a network of stems that are laterally connected), which is opposed to hierarchical root-systems like trees. In music, 'rhizomatic' equates with the Eno/dub idea of a democracy of sounds, a dismantling of the normal ranking of instruments in the mix (usually privileging the voice or lead guitar). Instead, says Achim, there's a "synthesisation of heterogenous sounds and material through a kind of composition that holds the sound elements together without them losing their heterogeneity".
Anticipated by the fractal funk and chaos theorems of Can and early '70s Miles (the 'nobody solos and everybody solos' principle), rhizomatic music today takes the form of DJ cut'n'mix (at its rare, daring best), avant-garde hip hop and post-rock. Oh, and the output of Mille Plateaux, of course!
Another key Deleuze & Guattari trait shared by Mille Plateaux is an interest in schizophrenic consciousness. Achim talks of admiring darkside hardcore for its "paranoia", and mourning the way jungle traded its vital madness for "serious" musicality. "Since the Fifties, in musique concrete, in industrial music, in techno, one heard diverse noises, screaming, creaking, hissing--all noises one related more to madness. Echo-effects allow sound hallucinations to occur, they delocalise the perception apparatus, allowing forms of perception to emerge that one had previously attributed to lunatics or schizophrenics". For Achim as for Deleuze & Guattari, such sensory disorientation is valuable, acting as a deconstruction of "subjectivity".
Last year, Szepanski contacted Deleuze himself, sending material by Oval and other Mille artists, and asking if he'd write an essay for Achim's planned anthology of techno theory, 'Maschinelle Strategeme'. The great man wrote back saying he couldn't do it, but gave his blessing to the label, and said that he particularly dug Oval. "He even wrote about specific tracks! Later, the German publisher of 'A Thousand Plateaux' told us this was really quite unusual, to get such a letter."
Not long after, the terminally ill, 70 year old Deleuze committed suicide. Szepanski immediately organised the double-CD tribute "In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze". Featuring contributions from American post-rockers Rome and Trans Am, DJ-philosopher Spooky, a gaggle of Achim's old allies in the European experimental music scene, and all the usual Mille Plateaux affiliated suspects (Oval, Mouse On Mars, Cristian Vogel, Ian Pooley, Scanner, Gas, etc), "In Memoriam" is probably the best thing the label's put out yet. Stand-outs include the electro-acoustic jiggery-pokery of Alec Empire's "Bon Voyage", the musique concrete jungle of Christophe Charles' "Undirections/Continuum", and Rome's Cluster-like drone- mosaic "Intermodal".
The ubiquitous Jim O'Rourke also appears, and is working on a sort of O'Rourke Vs Mille Plateaux remix project, using the entire Mille catalogue as source material. Techno-Animal may also be doing a remix project based around the 'versus' concept, "Techno-Animal Vs Reality", which will involve five guest collaborators; material will be shuttled back and forth between each artist and the band, eventually resulting in ten versions of five tracks. And then there's Oval, who are currently scheming their way towards a sort of Listener Vs. Oval scenario: a digital authoring-system that will enable the punter to make their own Oval records.
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Interviewing Oval is, shall we say, challenging. Their methods are obscure, their theory fabulously rarified, their utterances marinated in irony. All that can be safely said is that Oval's "music"--however irrelevant aesthetics may be to the trio--offers an uncanny, seductive beauty of treacherous surfaces and labyrinthine recesses.
Ironically, given Oval's polemical engagement with digital culture, our encounter takes place in one of Frankfurt's new cyber-cafes. Immediately, there are communication problems. Humble enquires about backgrounds and influences are met with rolling of the eyes, sniggers, and 'next question!'. Tentative characterisations of their activity are treated as a reduction or misrepresentaiton of the Oval project. So what ARE they trying to do?
Put as simply as possible, Oval is "not so much about music as the technical implementation of notions of music", says Markus Popp. "It's an effort in sound-design rather than music with a capital M. The main content of our effort is to have an audible user-interface."
In nuts and bolts terms, this means fucking with the hardware and software that organises and enables today's post-rave electronica. Most critical of these technologies is is MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), which allows different pieces of equipment to be co-ordinated like the players in a band, or instrumental 'voices' in an orchestra. For Oval, this is precisely the problem. "MIDI is basically a music-metaphor in itself, one that's so deplorably dated. It's so constraining in every way, you have to go beyond these protocols".
Despite, or rather because of, this technology's reliance on "traditional music syntax and semantics", Oval deliberately use the set-up, because their real interest is in standardisation. Their first Mille Plateaux release 'Systemisch', says Sebastian Oschatz, "was done with a very cheap MIDI set-up and a borrowed copy of Aphex Twin's 'Selected Ambient Works Vol II". This later turns out to be an Oval in-joke; apparently, Richard James is one of many artists who've claimed that 'Systemisch' was based on his material. "That album is composed of material that is really old, and it got edited, layered and recombined so many times, it's stupid to ask 'whose music is this?'," says Popp. "That is the only truly negligible aspect in our music. Most of the CDs we used were rented, and often they didn't have their covers!"
Going back to MIDI and sampler/sequencer software like Cubase, Popp compains: "There is so much determinism within these programmes, working with them involves so much compliance to principles that are highly critical. In a social context, these technologies are mostly used in a controlling way: monitoring the workplace, workplace efficiency, optimising the user-interface. On-line newsgroups are full of people who E-mail back to the manufacturers saying 'we'll need this, change that', and all of this keeps them in front of their computers even longer. Our way of dealing with this is to overcome the manufacturer's distinction between 'features' and 'bugs'".
Which brings us to the famous Oval deployment of deliberately damaged CD's to generate the raw material of their music: the glitches, skips, and distressed cyber-muzik that makes 'Systemisch' and its sequel '94 Diskont' so ear-boggling. The CD-thang is another 'reduction' that irks Oval: "we did use CD's, but that is neglectable, there are so many other things we could have used... The important point was that the CD-player has no distinction if it's an error or a proper part of the recording, it's just doing calculations, algorhythms."
This recalls, say, Hendrix's aestheticisation of feedback, a 'bug' or improper effect immanent in the electric guitar but hitherto un-exploited. Oval reject terms like 'sabotage' to describe the CD-treaments and the more esoteric forms of algorhythmic mischief they wreak within hardware. But they do use the word 'disobedience', which also has a frisson of subversion.
Perhaps the closest term to describe Oval's methods is deconstruction, at least in its precise original meaning: Derrida & Co's close, rigorous reading of philosophical texts in order to unsettle the terms of post-Enlightenment thought from within. Deconstruction involved unravelling the rhetorical tropes and purely literary sleights that compose any text's supposedly rational argument; it meant exposing the text's blindspots, paradoxes and hidden complicities. Oval similarly talk of engaging in a kind of non-antagonistic dialogue with corporate digital culture, with Sony, IBM, Microsoft, et al.
Contradictions abound in Oval's own rhetoric. They speak in almost punk anyone-can-do-it terms of deliberately keeping their activity at the "lowest entry-level", of not wanting "to convey an image of arcane technology and years of expert study in digital signal processing and programming". Yet their discourse is often absurdly forbidding and user-unfriendly. Then there's the way they deny any musical intentions, only to later come close to characterising their project as an enrichment of music. They talk of not wanting to produce a merely "predictable outcome" of the hardware and software, of wishing to "offensively suggest" the existence of soundworlds "from 'outside' the digital domain", of having invented a "completely new music-paradigm."
Says Popp, "Another aspect of what we wanted to achieve musically is to generate a new kind of perception. In the beginning, some labels sent back the demo tapes because they said 'there's no music on it'!". In that respect, Oval's audio-mazes induce a 'perceptual dissonance' akin to the Op- Art of Bridget Reilly, or the perspectival chaos of Escher. Sebastian adds: "it works the other way: obvious mis-pressings on the albums, or DAT drop-outs on certain compilation tracks, don't get spotted during the production process!"
Future Oval projects include some kind of EP for Mille Plateaux; the US release of 'Systemisch' and 'Diskont', accompanied by "exclusive material, possibly predating 'Systemisch'," via ultra-kool label Table of the Elements; an 'interactive' product designed in collaboration with British computer boffin Richard Ross.
"It's not exactly CD-ROM or hypertext", explains Popp. "But it will involve guiding the user through some kind of design-environment, and basically enabling people to do Oval records themselves. The working title is 'The Public Domain Project', and it will involve a lot of work. We also want to investigate the forthcoming video-disc, maybe there are ways to work with the combination of optical and audio, new potentials. And we are thinking about using the sounds of data processing itself--the sounds the computer or sampler generate when they calculate or process the sound. For there is always sound somewhere in the mixing desk, when stuff is stored or window-boxes get closed or opened. We are thinking of recording this because it is basically the sound of the user-interface itself."
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At the other extreme from Oval's oblique strategies lies Alec Empire's insurrectionary anarcho-tekno. Empire and the Oval boys appear to have had some sort of ideological rift, in fact. Popp refuses to comment, but Empire makes a veiled jibe about Oval doing "their music from this very intense theory, whereas I do it not only from books but from what I feel."
An engaging fellow who's constantly laughing, usually at his own utterances, Alec Empire divides his energy between recording solo albums for Mille Plateaux (the sombre electronica of "Low On Ice", the zany Sun Ra meets Perrez Prado avant-EZ-listening of "Hypermodern Jazz 2000.5"), and fostering the Berlin-based Digital Hardcore scene. This two-pronged campaign reflects Empire's interestingly jumbled background. On one hand, he studied music theory for a while and, unusually for a techno artist, uses notation when composing his own music. On the other hand, he was a breakdancer at the age of 10 and playing in a punk band by the time he was 12.
At the end of the '80s, Empire got swept up in Berlin's underground party scene. Despite being anti-drugs himself, Empire embraced aciiied's cult of oblivion. "For a lot of people at the acid parties, it was about escaping from reality. At the time it made sense, politics seemed futile, with the Left dead, and even the autonomists seeming like silly kids rioting for fun". The German scene quickly turned dark and nihilistic: "People got into heroin and speed, there were parties in East Berlin with this very hard industrial acid sound, Underground Resistance and Plus 8, 150 b.p.m.".
Empire dug the way this aggressive sound reflected the kids' frustration, and, influenced by the abstract militancy of Underground Resistance, he formed the agit-tekno band Atari Teenage Riot. Atari signed to a major label, but were dropped before they released an album. Wrecking a recording studio's amplifier and running up huge cab bills by stopping off at record stores, they were just too much trouble.
By this point--the end of '93--Alec had already released around 15 EP's of solo material on Force Inc and other labels, including "Hunt Down The Nazis" and "SuEcide". Meanwhile, he was experimenting with a Germanic jungle sound for Riot Beats, drawing on the influence of UK 'darkside' tracks by Bizzy B and the Reinforced crews.Darkcore remains an influence on Digital Hardcore, which is both a scene and a label. "Our beat are fast and distorted, but the programming is not as complex as the UK producers."
Breakbeat appealed as both an antidote to Germanic techno's Aryan funklessness, and as a multicultural statement. "I did 'Hunt Down The Nazis' at a time when skinheads were attacking immigrants. Then you'd discover, talking about the attacks to people on the rave scene, that a lot of people were quite racist. At the Omen Club, Turkish kids were turned away for no reason. There was quite a nationalistic aura to German techno, 'now we are back on the map'. Mark Spoon from Jam and Spoon made a comment on MTV, about how white people had techno and black people had hip hop, and that's the way it should stay. One neo-Nazi magazine even hailed trance techno as proper German music."
Ironically, Empire now reckons that UK jungle has gotten too funky. "The energy is missing. I don't care about them taking Detroit strings, 'cos I like Detroit, but jungle is just not forceful enough, and a whole night of it is just too flat.
The idea of mixing, of fading tracks into each other smoothly, is over-rated. Pirate radio was better before the DJ's learned to mix properly. DJ technique is just like a guitarist who knows how to make a really complicated guitar solo. A Stooges riff can mean much more, with just three notes. If the energy's not there, what's the point?"
With its speedfreak tempos and brutalist noise aesthetic, Digital Hardcore has less in common with jungle than it does with that other descendant of the original 1991 pan-European hardcore: the terror-gabba and speedcore sounds of labels like PCP, Kotzaak, Fischkopf, Cross Fade Entertainment, Praxis and Gangstar Toons Industry (many of whom can be found on the Empire-compiled "Capital Noise Chapter 1" CD). DHR's own acts, like EC80R, Moonraker, Killout Trash and Sonic Subjunkies, mash up 200 bpm breaks, ultra-gabba riffs, thrash-metal guitar, Riot Grrl shouting, and loads of midfrequency NOISE. "In techno, in jungle, the middle frequencies are taken out, it's all bass and treble. But the middle frequencies are the rock guitar frequencies, it's where the aggression comes from."
As well as 'boost the midrange, cut the bass', Digital Hardcore's other key precepts are 'tempo changes keep it exciting' and 'faceless techno PA's are boring'. At their parties, DJ's favour a crush-collision mess-thetic of mixed up styles and b.p,m's, and there are always bands playing. Instead of hypnotising the listener into a headnodding stupor, Digital Hardcore is meant to be a wake-up call.
So if rave is heavy metal (rowdy, stupefying) and electronica is progressive rock (pseudo-spiritual, contemplative), does that mean Digital Hardcore (angry, speedy, 'noise-annoys'-y) is punk rock? "The only similarity with punk is the frustration. And that's also where our stuff differs from Mille Plateaux: it's less theoretical, and perhaps more negative. All the kids are into chaos and anarchy, because nothing else seems to work.
"You know, there's this foundation of musicians who used to play at parties and have now been put out of business by DJ's, " laughs Empire, "German Rock Musicians Against Techno, and we want to join it." He adds, "Just to take the piss", but, y'know--I think he means it, man.
I really liked this guy Christophe Charles's track on In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze
A-maze-ment
PORTER RICKS,
live at the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage
Village Voice, Tuesday, Jul 3 2001
by Simon Reynolds
No doubt about it, the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage is an amazing space. As a music venue, though, this gloomy maze of looming, steep-sided chambers leaves a lot to be desired: Performers tend to drown in a quagmire of reflected sound. On June 28, the final installment of Creative Time's annual series of avant-electronica events (a 10th birthday bash for Frankfurt's Force Inc and its sister label, Mille Plateaux) saw some groups faring better with the acoustics than others. Panacea's 180-b.p.m. Gothkore bombast suited the medieval ambience, but Kid606's set was too busy and event-crammed (Boredoms do IDM) to thrive in this catacomb. SND suffered from the opposite syndrome: Too sparse even for the Anchorage, they sounded like an ailing metronome trapped in an echo chamber.
Luckily, Porter Ricks fit the space like a glove. Thomas KΓΆner and Andy Mellweg first came to acclaim with their late-'90s releases on Chain Reaction, Berlin's "heroin house" label. Combining KΓΆner's texturology (he's an avant-garde composer renowned for bleak arctic dronescapes) with Mellweg's grasp of house's pump-and-pound rhythm, Porter Ricks make formlessness funky.
But that's no preparation for how hard they rocked tonight: Imagine Eno's On Land meets the Stooges. Porter Ricks use a guitar processor on all their synth sounds, which helps explains the added grit in their grind. Early in the set, the songs felt like spelunking through spongy-walled caverns flushed with foamy water: total body-massage. But as the beat got steadily more bangin' and the texture-riffs flared fierce like magnesium, Porter Ricks hit a sublime pitch midway between warm pulse and cold rush: a sound as visceral as hardcore, as sensuous as deep house, as abstract as glitch. The combination of this glorious roar and the Anchorage's architecture was like being teleported through time-space to Berlin's legendary early-'90s club E-Werk, a disused power plant. Finally, the Anchorage became the rave temple it has always promised to be.
Someone posted this on Twitter, I can't remember who
Burial songs be like
*thunderstorm sfx*
*6 separate vinyl crackle loops*
(ASMR whisper) πππππππ...
*moody ambient synth*
*UKG beat mixed -8db below the crackle sounds*
(nightcored R&B vocal) ALL YOUR LOVIN’s GONE
*entire song stops*
(in the distance) α΄ α΄α΄ΚΚα΄ α΄ΙͺΚΚ...
I chuckled, we all chuckled...
But then self-parody is the price - the inevitable next stage - of originality
Only true originals get parodied by others... only originals tip over into self-parody, at some point.
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How I put in Pitchfork when blurbing "Strange Neighbourhood":
The mark of achieved style for an artist is when you can be
parodied – by yourself as much as by others. So yes, you could say that
“Strange Neighbourhood” and the almost-album it comes from, Anti-Dawn,
are formulaic. But it’s a formula Burial patented. He owns this
sound: the shivery shards of imploring
vocals that flare up like embers carried aloft by the wind, the funeral-parlor
organ swells, the moist reverberance and
muffled found-sounds, the disconcerting pauses and glitchy lapses where it
feels like the track is giving up the ghost.
Rather than seeming deja, this 11-minute audio-movie evocation of the
hauntedness of urban space impacts with feels-like-the-first-time
freshness. You start to think Burial
could carry on like this forever. It doesn’t hurt that his music’s signature
mood of orphaned desolation suits the emotional rawness and fragility of our
times more than ever.
