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 

fashion and style

was listening to a 2step era pirate tape - Ice FM I think - the other day and heard the MC use the expression "fashion and style"

one of those buzzphrases that comes out of dancehall

"Dancehall cyaa dead yeah

Gyal haffi go spin pon dem head yeah

Fashion and style haffi set yeah

Star haffi born wa yo check seh"

It made me think of this drum and bass track by Mr Size 

But also of the UKreggae label Fashion

which had popped back into my consciousness this week anyway because music press archivist Nothing Else On has got to early 1985 and these NME articles came up in his scan-tweet project

a piece on Fashion and Earthworks

and then the following week

Any excuse to repost the videos of Smiley's two top tunes

Here's a TV mini-profile of Fashion Records

Murder Most Foul

by far the best tune with this title

(and it's not even in the Top 15 Foul Play tunes)

Mystery Tune #29 - Yodeling Pixie Ragamuffin Mi Rude Boy

and that i think is the last of them

at least of this hefty batch

may well generate a few more as i trawl through old tapes

shout going out to the tune-identifier massive, bigupyachess and ta v much