Ahoy there, me hearties (pirate encounters)

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

interviews x 2 - Grime Blog Oral History + Réflexions sur le Nuum

I'm among those interviewed for this Complex UK oral history of the Grime Blogs Era, shepherded into existence by Joseph JP Patterson, and also including the voices of Chantelle Fiddy, Martin "Blackdown" Clark, and Elijah, among others. It's an interesting read, although from my perspective the original dons of grime blogging have to include figures like Heronbone, Silverdollarcircle, and Woebot. But it seems that there was a whole other circuit of grime bloggeration going on - and going on longer. 

Time for me to  pull out my creased, dog-eared with over-use jest about it's time for you to pull out your Harraps French to English Dictionary - for here I am, en Francais, chatting about le Hardcore Continuum, with Adrien Durand of Manifesto-21 magazine.  The occasion being the recent publication by Audimat of Hardcore, a collection of my writings about touts les choses nuumologiques.  

I say "en Francais" but of course I did not conduct the interview in French - never was fluent enough to do much more than order a meal in a restaurant. However I was able to more or less read and understand this colloquy with Adrien (at one point I could read En Attendant Godot and L'Ancien Regime in the original). Mind you, I have a head start in so far as c'est moi qui parle. Here is a bit from it in French followed by the Google-garbled rendering of it.  

En vous trouvant confronté à ce nouveau mouvement, en particulier dans des contextes live, étiez-vous déjà dans une démarche analytique ?

J’étais sous ecstasy la plupart du temps (rires). J’avais eu l’idée un soir de faire une review collective et j’avais donc confié à mes amis des carnets de notes. Bien sûr quand je suis rentré chez moi le matin suivant, tout ce qui avait été écrit était illisible. Mais j’observais beaucoup la foule, le moment où elle ne fait plus qu’un, formant un gigantesque organisme. La façon dont les danseur·euses s’imitent les uns les autres également. C’est de cette façon que j’ai appris à danser. J’analysais les choses même en étant en train de danser dans un état second. Je sortais le week-end et la semaine j’écoutais cette musique sur les radios pirates. A cette époque, j’écrivais Sex Revolts avec ma femme, j’écoutais Can, j’allais en rave, tout cela se connectait dans mon esprit. Alors oui, j’analysais déjà des choses, mais je n’étais pas dans une posture analytique froide !

As you confront this new movement, especially in live contexts, has it ever told you in an analytical way?

I was on ecstasy most of the time (laughs). I had the idea one evening of doing a collective review and so I sent my friends notebooks. Of course when I got home the next morning, everything that had been written was illegible. But I watched the crowd a lot, the moment when it became one, forming a gigantic organism. The way the dancers imitate each other too. This is how I learned to dance. I analyze things even while dancing in a trance. I went out on weekends and during the week I listened to this music on pirate radio stations. At that time, I was writing Sex Revolts with my wife, listening to Can, going to raves, it all connected in my mind. So yes, I was already analyzing things, but I was not in a cold analytical posture!

(This anecdote got a bit garbled in transcription - it's about being at a particular rave (more like a multi-act gig in fact) and being there to review it for Melody Maker and - as we're all coming up - the bright idea hits me that the review should be a collective review -  my crew as a single reviewing organism (had been reading Deleuze for the first time) - so it's a single notebook, the one I brought to the event to do my job with, that there and then gets passed around. But in fact hardly anything got scribbled down and what was scribbled proved later to be largely illegible, because scribbled while dancing. So the review ended up being just me plus a couple of images and observations from my friends. And of course  - so much for collectivism! - push comes to shove it's me that gets the byline and receives the paltry pittance IPC pays for a 400 word review (barely enough to cover my X-penses that night!). 

 

"End of the Road"--probing and super-in-depth piece by Martin Clark for FACT on road rap and its implications for the (uncertain-looking) future of the hardcore continuum

"Pirate radio is being replaced with a primary medium that is indistinguishable from media used by all other musical continuums, road rap is absorbing grime’s road energy into hip-hop’s traditions, house continues to satisfy ravers’ need to dance without a strong sense of local identity, breakbeat/bass science rudeness or flava. Grime and UK funky continue to iterate in interesting ways, ways that show real promise but can’t claim the seismic bursts of intense energy they once saw. Dubstep fans who reject brostep have dispersed into either purist halfstep traditionalist stasis (“the dungeon sound”), floating islands of the post-dubstep archipelago, trad European house  and techno, homogenizing crate-digging revivalism and eclecticism, US trap rap and juke. So what’s next?"