Pure Inspiration

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

Let's Not Push Things Forward

 

A celebrated remix of The Streets's "Turn the Page"

What its existence would seem to demonstrate, though, is inability to turn the page of this particular book of history. 

(What you'd want, really, is not even a new chapter, but a whole new volume).

But this is Overmono whose debut album Good Lies was hailed by the Guardian as “UK rave history... distilled to perfection” 

I'm trying to think who would've been the equivalent in rock  - when this stage of "history" getting  "distilled to perfection" would have got underway..

Oasis seems too obvious, and also belated... I feel like the process was well underway by the mid-Eighties.

You'd probably have to wind it back to earlier in the (re)Creation arc - to Primal Scream

All that said, listening to Good Lies for the first time, I'm enjoying it. There's cleverness, there's craft, it's made up out of or in reference to things I already reverence... but the echoes, allusions and twists are subtly done. In a certain sense, what's not to like?  

I was always a bit more vulnerable to the appeal of "record collection rock" than I would have liked. I couldn't quite ever be as stern about it as Mark Fisher. 

Still, it's an odd thing  - given that the foundational principle of the culture is F-FWD - to listen to this 

Apart from the overall sound quality -  clean and crisp in a 2023 upgraded sort of way - there is nothing about this track that would sound out of place in 2000. It sounds like Groove Chronicles.  

I mean, maybe the wibbly synth wouldn't have been there but it could have been, if GC had wanted it to be. 

Surging styles become settled styles.

Bit like how groups operating today can be described as - can describe themselves as - "postpunk". 

It's a stable, if not utterly static, form - akin to the blues, or folk. 

yet already flashbacking in 2009 to 2004?

This "Dubstep Heritage" series only got to two episodes!