In the past, particularly in the sixties, underground music was a label given either to cult artists who were difficult to seek out or whose music could in some way be defined as oppositional to the establishment.

As critic Simon Reynolds points out in his excellent article for The Guardian, these former definitions are no longer convincing as a new generation of fans consume and conceive of music in a wholly different ways.

When I was a lad, if I read about some obscure new band in the New Musical Express, the only way to hear what they sounded like was to track down the vinyl or hope that John Peel would play them on his radio show. Nowadays such enlightenment is just a mouse click away. This is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it reveals to us some amazing ‘hidden’ sounds while on the other hand the sense of mystery is lost. As Reynolds points out,  you can’t keep secrets for very long on the Net – the worldwide web is a free for all community.

Personally,  the accessibility of all this marginal music has opened by ears to a wealth of possibilities and re-ignited my enthusiasm for sounds which can’t be neatly packaged within narrow boundaries. It has confirmed my loathing for the nostalgia peddled by glossy adult orientated mags like Mojo and Word. This pseudo rock academia merely panders to the post 30 something listeners who get a hard on for whatever they got their collective rocks off to when they were 18.

The fact that legal and illegal downloads makes limited edition or deleted titles available to the masses doesn’t make this music for the masses. Whenever there’s a choice between easy and ‘difficult’ listening, the vast majority of consumers opt for the former. The mainstream media may have expanded enormously in the past decade but it is still largely unable to grasp the true value of anything that cannot be readily compartmentalized or easily packaged for a target audience.

This is exemplified by the rise of the so-called ‘weird’ music of  drone, noise, new psychedelia and free folk which has thrived in spite of being largely ignored by the mass media. The smart press have belatedly acknowledged ‘overground’ artists like Animal Collective, Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom but have largely ignored the fact that these represent only the tip of massive iceberg.

I agree with Reynolds that the old definitions of ‘underground’ music no longer carry much weight in the same way that to describe artists as ‘alternative’ or ‘indie’ is ultimately meaningless. I take comfort from the knowledge that the best music is still out there in the margins rather than festering in the mainstream.  This may be easier to locate than it was half a century ago but this doesn’t mean that it’s any more palatable to the lumpen masses . To my ears the counter cultural edge has not been entirely blunted. There is still a healthy minority who oppose the disgusting normalness of modern culture and look to music to communicate a truth and vitality that squeaky clean X-Factor wannabes will never satisfy.

The underground is dead – long live the underground!

I’ve been posting my 100 albums from the noughties recently (more tomorrow) with a year-by-year selection. Others (and there are many, many others!) have been doing top 20s, 50s, 100s etc as a decade long overview. Simon Reynolds noticed a very marked tendency for albums from the first half of the decade to garner 80-90% of the top ten placings in the various listings and offered some compelling reasons why in this Guardian article.

I pretty much agree with nearly all of his points. The internet and download culture has made it cheap and easy for musicians of all stripes to self-release their music. Some in a hope of attracting the attention of a record company, some just because they want the fruits of their labours heard. As a result the number of releases have reached unprecedented levels. I have no scientific basis for saying this, but I bet there was more music issued in 2009 than in all the years up to the end of the seventies combined if you include both physical releases (and the endless repackaging of old material) and the rapidly expanding download cottage industries.

The results of this hyperbolic increase in music released has led to the mainstream and the majors becoming more and more safe and conservative. They realise that their most reliable income streams are from a) ‘fifty quid bloke’ – the Mojo reading male with ready cash whose tastes are firmly planted in ‘classic’ rock, and will happily fork out for remastered reissues, box sets and all manner of fancy but pricey special and limited editions: things like the Neil Young Archives, the Pixies’ Minotaur and the rest. Then there’s b), the great majority for whom music isn’t central to their lives, but they like a nice tune. These are the people who buy Susan Boyle, X Factor and Katherine Jenkins records as well as the more conservative and tasteful indie rock such as Keane and Coldplay. Outside of that, the music industry knows that its consumers are picky and risky to market to and are no longer willing to invest in music for its own intrinsic value.

So we have a self-perpetuating circle. The more adventurous music enthusiasts are finding less and less new stuff that interests them in their local HMV, and are finding that more and more of it comes from small labels, both physical and web based.

Is this a problem? Well, for consumers, no. For bands who dream of being the next Radiohead, very likely. I can’t see there ever being a next Radiohead – a band who appeal to the masses and yet remain sonically adventurous. It’s a divide that will soon become impossible to bridge. This is something that has already happened with classical music and jazz, where people who pushed the music forward ended up losing the mass audience. Most enthusiasts of both those genres probably listen to very little that’s contemporary.

Returning to Reynolds’s article, I think it’s inevitable and unavoidable that the idea of any kind of consensus is doomed. People are zooming off in their own directions, picking tips up in their own virtual communities, and finding music that feels personal to them and that’s their own discovery. They’ll have favourites, but it’s unlikely that their list will tally with anyone else’s, simply because it’s unlikely that any two people will have heard the same things. You can see this in the end of year lists (tallied with admirable patience by DJ Martian). There’s very little sense of any pattern.

Rock (in its broadest sense) isn’t dead – far from it. But its days of being a mainstream cultural force are. Whether that matters or not is beside the point. I can see there being no let up of interesting, creative and terrific music during 2010 and beyond. Just don’t expect any of it to really penetrate the mainstream.

Description:
I am a girl who needs a man. I am a romantic and passionate. I need serious relations. I need a man to love and take care of. I am a positive person. I always try to smile. Smile helps to live. This world is wonderful and colorful. I am a calm person. I am really very calm. I never shout and I do not like argues. What else can I add& my friends say I am a good friend and good adviser. I am a very communicative, and I always have a plenty of topics to discuss. May be that is why I have a lot of friends. I like sports and I like travelling. I adore being close to the nature, so I spend a lot of time outside. I lead active lifestyle. I am always on move. I like going to the cinema, to the theatre, I like just walking in the park. I like playing with my friends by the seaside. I like summer very much. I really adore summer. I like swimming and I like being active. I also like reading. Books are my good friends.

Ideal match description:
I am looking for a real man, strong and positive. I am looking for a soul mate, I am looking for a partner, I am looking for a best friend, I am looking for a man who prefers Ja Rule to 99% of other rappers and who published an old interview with Chuck D in his book “Bring the Noise” where the erstwhile Public Enemy frontman is on some “bitches need to shut the fuck up and get back in the kitchen” tip, and doesn’t bother to press him on this matter, but then goes and writes a book about how indie rock is misogynistic because, y’know, yeah.

More to the point, judging by its output in recent years, it’s become a deadening force: as a listening experience, but also as something that maintains a deadlock on the musical imagination (and personal ambitions) of Black American youth. I doubt very much that this demographic has no more surprises up its sleeves in terms of sound and style, judging by past form(s) (jazz, rhythm and blues, funk, house, et al ). But that New Thing won’t come until they tire of hip-hop themselves and turn against it.

Of course, Reynolds is actually a very educated man when it comes to hip-hop. Here’s a few lines chosen completely at random from his end of the 90s round-up:

The Notorious B.I.G.
The odd nifty catchphrase and deft rhyme, but c’mon, this man was a pig—Notorious P.I.G. more like; Piggy Smalls, heheheheh-and with a little help from his buddy Sean he almost singlehandedly set rap down its current path of spiritual bankruptcy. And he had the most unappetising vocal timbre in all of rap- asthmatic and adenoidal and mucus-bunged-up and fat-fuck wheezy all at once.

I came across this lengthy but genuinely interesting talk of March this year by tireless menschevik Simon Reynolds, concerning the identification of a history of dance music which he calls the ‘hardcore continuum’, or ‘nuum.

• RIP Maryanne Amacher
• Excellent piece in the Boston Phoenix on Boston Noir, and the city’s troubled history with film production.
• At Rhizome, Geeta Dayal explores the connections between the work of Brian Eno and cybernetics.
• Simon Reynolds profiles Numero Group, the number one label for obscure funk and soul reissues.
• Arnaud Desplechin talks to Wes Anderson in Interview Magazine.
• Dennis Lim on the new Samuel Fuller DVD boxset, featuring the awesome Underworld U.S.A, in the LA Times.
• Dave Kehr on this year’s festival of recently preserved films at MoMA, in the NY Times.
• On that topic, here is a video tour of the MoMA’s film preservation center.
• Also in the Times, Manohla Dargis has an excellent piece of the recent crop of famous dead women in the movies
• Great piece on Ingmar Bergman’s home, on the Sweedish island of Fårö in W Magazine.
• Christopher R. Weingarten is interviewed by  the AV Club.
• How I turned Woody Allen into a comic strip: Stuart Hample at the Guardian.
• Commissioned by W Magazine, Robert Crumb illustrates the history of women.
• Small feature on Tracy Emin in New York Times Style Magazine.
• Massive piece on James Cameron in the New Yorker that let’s everyone know he’s an asshole.
• Inside look at the creation of the wild things, at Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, courtesy of Vanity Fair.
• The American Scholar takes a look at Fitzgerald’s tax returns.

[Photo: Ghosts VI, Sam Taylor-Wood, 2008]

Bull is a darkly comic neo-noir about deception, identity, money, murder, and really tall buildings. Deep within heatwave-baked skyscraper canyons, a hapless stockbroker gets caught up in a twisty web where no one – no one at all – is telling the truth.

The Big British Castle continues its excellent …Britannia series tomorrow with an instalment chronicling the oft-maligned but undoubtedly influential electronic and synth-pop movement of the late ’70s and 80s. Influenced by dystopian fiction as much as the music of Kraftwerk, British post-punk pioneers created music that soundtracked the bleak urban landscape, yet was filled with emotion and an alien warmth.

It’s a genre of music we’ve been paying more attention to and discussing a lot lately, so I’m really looking forward to what will no doubt be an exhaustive and in-depth exploration of this unique period of musical history. As post-punk expert Simon Reynolds mentioned in his write-up for The Guardian, the innovations of synth-pop have become intrinsic to modern music, continuing to shape pop: “electronic tonalities are omnipresent to the point of banality, thanks to ’90s techno rave and noughties R&B, videogames and ringtones”.

Synth Britannia begins on Friday, BBC4, 9PM. You can view several clips on the BBC site.

Video: Kraftwerk – Das Model

Gary Numan – Cars

• A candid interview with Jane Birkin in the Telegraph.
• Howard Hampton, at the Los Angeles Times, on the new collection of Manny Farber’s film writings.
• A few choice cuts over at the New York Times: Manohla Dargis visits Ken Jacobs at his loft, David Itzkoff talks with Garry Shandling about the forthcoming DVD release of It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, and Dave Kehr talks about the Dusan Makavejev box set released by the Criterion Collection.
• The NYFF  selection committee responds to criticism over this year’s films over at IndieWIRE.
• Tom Breihan, at his Dip Dip Dive blog, posts a new quarterly report of newly released albums.
• Jessica Hopper, at the Portland Mercury, on why we need The Raincoats.
• Simon Reynolds, at The Guardian, on the legacy of British synth-pop.
• A discussion of Antichrist, the new film by Lars Von Trier, at Film Quarterly’s website between Rob White and Nina Power.
• The video portraits of Robert Wilson.
• David Thomson, at The New Republic, reviews the new oral biography of Robert Altman.
• At Cargo, an interview with UbuWeb founder Kenneth Goldsmith.

Minerva

Sorry to make it two in two on Simon Reynolds but something else struck me when writing my previous post. A recent grenade in certain parts of the blogosphere has been his concept of a “hardcore continuum”, the theory of a strand of music stretching from breakbeat hardcore in the early nineties, through jungle and garage to dubstep and grime in the noughties. Reynolds writes in his introduction to his seminal series of articles in The Wire that “it was only in 1999…that I really became conscious that for several years I’d been documenting a continuum of musical culture that emerged out of the British rave scene”. In doing so he makes explicit something that lately seems to have slipped his mind: that it is only after something has happened that we can begin to understand it. This is what Hegel meant when he said that “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk” – we can only understand a particular historical (or social or cultural) moment once it has passed.

Recently Reynolds has responded to nascent genres such as “wonky” and “funky” by denying that they may form part of the hardcore continuum. But these socio-cultural moments are still happening now, and Reynolds would do well to remember Hegel’s advice. By attempting to understand a socio-cultural moment he risks prescribing rather than describing.

All seven of Reynolds’ seminal articles on the hardcore continuum are archived at The Wire, the first of which is here

This post on his blog illustrates what a hot topic this has been in the last year or so

Reynolds’ defence of his theory at Liverpool’s FACT is archived in video form here

Related articles:

The Rise of the Non-Metaphysical Hegel
By Simon Lumsden , University of New South Wales
(Vol. 2, November 2007)
Philosophy Compass

Hegel’s Metaphysics: Changing the Debate
By James Kreines, Yale University
(Vol. 1, September 2006)
Philosophy Compass

theory as drug

A recent article for frieze by Simon Reynolds defends the importance of theory in discussions of music. Several issues raised by this:

1. The fact that writers such as Reynolds feel the need to jump to its defence is a symptom of the profound mistrust that large parts of society have of Theory, specifically critical/cultural theory, sometimes known as continental philosophy. Is this something that is growing or has it always been the case?

2. “Theory”, an abstract concept, also implies “theorising”, a practice, perhaps the most dangerous of all the activities that academia is engaged in. And surely this “theorising” is virtually synonymous with “philosophising”, philosophy being the discipline that takes as its building blocks the slippery conceptual material of thought itself. This mistrust of theory would therefore indicate a profound mistrust in the practice of philosophy.

3. It is implicit in all philosophical activity that we are engaged in a task that is both useful and relevant to our lives. Reynolds likens the synthesis of Theory and (for want of a better phrase) empirical reality with combining two drugs to get a more intense high than might be achieved by taking each of them separately, a “potentiation” in which the outcome is greater than the sum of its parts. This in mind, what can be done to stop philosophising being sidelined from the cultural field of play?

4. We might also ask – what of analytic philosophy? If Reynolds and others are distressed by the apparent evaporation of continental philosophy (critical/cultural theory) from critical discourse, what about the Anglo-American tradition? Note that the giants of twentieth-century analytic philosophy – Wittgenstein, Russell, Moore – are not even mentioned in Reynolds’ article (nor will you find their names in related literature/blogging). What does this say about analytic philosophy/philosophers?

5. A final thought – philosophy has always taken upon itself to carry out the rather hubristic task of providing a critical assessment of the other academic disciplines. As philosophy has progressed through history, it seems that it has refined itself to the point of restriction, with certain areas accorded status as the “proper” domain of philosophy (logic and grammar for analytic philosophy, to a lesser extent hermeneutics and history for continental). Thus we might pose a quasi-inversion of the question I asked at the end of the second paragraph above, something along the lines of “Is philosophy sidelining itself”? Surely the pre-twentieth century hubris was better, a true polymathic endeavour, the philosopher as the lover of knowledge, the chance to “set your brain on fire”, in contrast with the ever narrowing dark alleyway of modern academic “Philosophy”?

Another frieze article on a similar subject by Mark Fisher, aka K-Punk, can be found here

Related articles:

Musical Expressiveness
By Derek Matravers , The Open University
(Vol. 2, April 2007)
Philosophy Compass

Musical Works: Ontology and Meta-Ontology
By Julian Dodd , Manchester University
(Vol. 3, October 2008)
Philosophy Compass

Lorsqu’il s’agit d’évoquer le post-rock, on en vient rapidement à citer Tortoise, supergroupe de Chicago nommé par le critique Simon Reynolds qui inventa cette expression dans un article pour le magazine “The Wire” en 1994, un genre devenu depuis passe-partout lorsqu’il s’agit de s’attarder sur une musique instrumentale et sophistiquée. Pourtant les membres de Tortoise ne sont pas très fans de ce terme, qui a pourtant permis de les découvrir ; on sait aussi que “Standards” et “It’s All Around You” avaient moins marqué les esprits, que “The Brave And the bold” était un album de reprises, réalisé en collaboration avec Will Oldham. Bref, on avait l’impression que Tortoise était passé en mode mineur depuis quelques années, et on n’attendait plus grand chose de leur dernier album.

Un peu dubitatif, on se plonge alors dans “Beacons Of Ancerstorship”, parce qu’on a quand même gardé de la sympathie pour le groupe, et la surprise est de taille. Avec High Class Slim’ Came Floatin’ In, Tortoise retrouve de l’inspiration issue de Djed et pousse plus loin encore sa passion pour le collage d’ambiances. Basse et batterie posent les bases de cette musique, tandis que l’on note l’apparition de beaucoup de claviers Krautrock, pour citer un autre sous-genre musical. Mais ce qui frappe dans l’ouverture de ce nouvel album, c’est son côté à la fois abrasif et tribal. On le sait, le rythme est au cœur de la musique de Tortoise, mais le groupe trouve ici une dimension nouvelle en utilisant une bonne dose de fuzz accentuant un peu plus les synthés de Northern Nothing ou encore les riffs mélodieux des guitares de Prepare Your Coffin. Le quintette nous rappelle même que certains de ces membres viennent du punk avec la première partie noisy de Yinxianghechenqi.

Ce dernier titre assure même une subtile transition vers une deuxième moitié d’album beaucoup plus calme et ambiante, retrouvant certaines atmosphères enfumées que l’on pouvait entendre sur “TNT”. Les arpèges Morriconniens de The Fall Of Seven Diamonds Plus One font basculer “Beacons Of Ancestorship” vers de l’electro qui s’adresse au cerveau, des cadences pour soi même, un tempo pour introverti. Le conclusif Charteorak Foundation est finalement le titre le plus post-rock d’un groupe qui s’amuse encore à expérimenter dans sa musique ; on y entend difficilement des voix, venu se poser là pour assombrir un peu plus cette ambiance de fin de décénie.

“Beacons Of Ancestorship” fait donc parti de ces superbes albums qui nous tombent dessus un peu par hasard et qui s’impose doucement comme un petit chef d’œuvre. Un disque où Tortoise s’affirme encore comme un groupe soudé, qui a beaucoup de plaisir à jouer, et nous le fait partager.

Par Mathieu

Le Myspace de Tortoise propose deux titres de “Beacons Of Ancestorship”.

So one of the albums catching my attention as of late has been Music For Men the latest release by one of the last remaining beacons of punk rock hope, The Gossip.  There has been a lot of talk surrounding this album, partly due to the success of their third release Standing In The Way Of Control.  Many fans are embracing the dance-inspired tunes with open arms – other are reluctant to join in the fun, throwing around terms like “sell-out” as explanation.  While I would be hard pressed to call the current incarnation of their sound punk, may they yet still prove to be bastions of strength, change and rebelliousness in music?

I like to think that my tastes in music are far reaching, but I do have a significant and fairly well known soft spot for the loud, sometimes cacophonous, often poorly produced, pulled together sounds of punk rock. Though I count many shades and varieties of this potent genre, often far more than your average music critic – it has always seemed to be a genre of ideas rather than one confined to a short era in history or by a characteristically scratchy guitar sound.

On the other hand, it has usually included some form of high tempo mischief.

Gossip preform “Standing In The Way Of Control” the song that got them famous in england in 2005. (I was at this show and it was bloody awesome.)

Disco, long perceived as Punk’s arch-nemesis, seems to be making a comeback. Historically disco and punk have their origins in the same era and mindset with two obviously differing results.  Shortly after disco’s explosion of popularity however, there hardly was any hint of that rebelliousness left.  That is except of course, in the gay community where, through ever-present glamour and polish, it remained a F-you to the system.  A way to claim an area, if even only a dance floor, as a place for safety, freedom, and love.  Disco, if looked at through the same lens I take to punk, has remained with the gay community in some form or another throughout the years.  Yet despite it’s staying power, whether it be termed house, dance, or electronica, it has long since lost the bite of its youth.

And punk, for all its brazen potential, has in the past few years seemed to be on a waning decline.  While not universally true there have been a large sum of bands dissolving, and many more in their wake who, while still making wonderful music, are retireing the lo-fi sounds of punk in favor of reinventing genres gone out of fashion, whether it be country-rock, bluegrass, or disco itself.

Which brings me back to The Gossip.  Those familiar with the first few albums know well the surprisingly potent roots-meets-grunge music they produced.  It’s true Music For Men sounds like a far cry from where they started.  In reality however, it only represents a progression from a band that was already playing around with disco-tinged music.  And they’re not the one ones.  It’s Blitz the latest album from fellow art-punks Yeah Yeah Yeah’s also turned heads with its disco sound, and was inspired by the same track that led to most ‘post-punk’ music in the 80’s: Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love.”

It’s not to say that there isn’t the potential for the voices of brazen artists to reach people through disco.  In fact, it would seem quite the opposite.  Take Public Image Ltd, John Lydon’s project after The Sex Pistols, and the last track on their debut album. “Fodderstompf” arguably the most pivitol song on the record is one-long disco inspired mess.  Mind you, it was clearly made with the intention of taking the piss out of the record execs’ contractual minimum time limit on the album, and was not without a sense of parody for the genre.  Yet when it came time to record album number two, guess which song provided the ground work?  The result is that one of the most influential bands and icons of the genre turned the direction of punk onto a disco curve.  According to music historian Simon Reynolds:

“Around this time Lydon Started telling the press that the only contemporary music he really cared for was disco, a striking rhetorical move given the fact that the standard punk stance was that disco sucked.  PiL, he stressed were a dance band.  Disco was functional, useful music.  It dispensed with all the bollocks, the false  hopes, and unwise investments in rock as counterculture that punk had ended up perpetuating.”

Say what you will about disco, it’s hard not to see Lydon’s point.  For all the seriousness of punk with its delusions of grandeur for changing the world through music; sometimes the most honest thing you can do is dance.

The argument can also be made that for someone on the outskirts of culture to influence it just by yelling at it, is not unlike yelling at a herd of cattle to change directions.  You can put your all into it, but the odds of success are decidedly against you.  Might it not be a better solution then, to change things from the inside?  If, at the end of the day, all people really want to do is dance, then why not say something interesting at the same time?  That is after all Le Tigre’s basic modus operandi, and there was never any shortage of punk rock loving kids getting down at their shows.  And bands like Hercules And Love Affair and Glass Candy have been producing music that is unabashedly disco, and doing so in such a way that has the potential to shake up the status-quo more than a guitar currently would.

So why then does it seem different for The Gossip?

A major factor, not to be ignored, is the decidedly punk rock cliché of selling out.  They did after all leave hometown queer friendly label, Kill Rock Stars, for giant über-label Sony.  Though again, if the goal is to makegood music that reaches a vast audience, wouldn’t the best way to do that be signing to a label large enough to reach them?  And changing labels does not implicitly mean a loss of quality.

However, major labels do tend to mean production budgets far bigger than small bands are used to.  The result for The Gossip is an album far slicker than anything they’ve done before.  Due in no small part to producer, and co-head of columbia records, Rick Rubin.  So much polish in fact that there are times when it sounds closer to Lady GaGa than Le Tigre.  Drum machines and synths place less importance on guitarist Brace Paine and drummer Hannah Blilie while highlighting Beth Ditto’s formidable voice.  This shift in sonic focus does not appear right away.  The first few tracks of Music For Men seem to be a logical progression from Standing In The Way Of Control. As the album continues however, the disco shine starts to come into full view, leading to moments where there seems little to do for Brace and Hannah.  And I can’t help but be a little concerned for the future of the band over their level of boredom with this new sound.

The Lyrics are quick to enforce their punk rock roots, with references to The Slits (“I’ve heard it through the bass line/ how much longer will you be my baby”) and others.  Yet closing track “Spare Me From The Mold”, arguably the weakest track on the album sounds forced and reaching.  As though it were only included to convince you they can still thrash.

Despite what it may seem, I am not saying I don’t like the album.  In fact, I toe-tap through it quite happily while on my way to work.  No matter how much I listen to it though, I can’t quite help but feel there was a better version waiting to be recorded.  Beth has in no way lost any of her piss and vinegar, and it is quite simply thrilling to watch her own the role of punk-rock diva: wearing designer clothes and dedicating songs to the “faggots and slit-lickers” in the audience.  Given that fiery energy it’s hard not to feel like Music For Men is the dressed up, tamed down result of what we were all hoping would be their best album yet.  So I am left pondering whether or not it is possible for a disco album to ever truly be punk.  Or will it always inevitably succumb to the glitter and glamour of fame instead?

The video for the lead single from Music For Men, “Heavy Cross” from 2009.

Illustration by Tory Sica.

I’ve stumbled across this interview, conducted last February, with Simon Reynolds over at The Quietus. I was particularly taken by something he mentions at the end of the exchange:

“It’s a bit like My Bloody Valentine; there’s a sort of an uber-hipster approach to MBV which says ‘Oh well, you know really they just sound like The Byrds.’ But that’s what’s good about them! That’s what draws you in, the gorgeous melodies that combine with this massive wall of sound and more traditional structural elements. That’s their achievement really, it’s not this colossal weird wall of sound thing. It’s always been my suspicion that that [on its own] is probably fairly easy to do! But to do that and make it as songs as well . . .that would be the hard thing.”

This summer, I went to a cottage in the French countryside (Masif Central). No internet connection, no mobile phone connection – only chickens, goats and a big dog.

In short, A perfect occasion to read a couple a books. One of them was “Rip It Up and Start Again. Postpunk 1978-84″ by Simon Reynolds.

The book is a comprehensive, albeit somewhat frantic, guide to a period in music which generally receives a lot less attention than, say, the late 60s or early 70s. Being born in 1977, many of the bands mentioned in the book are completely new to me. Hence, inspired by the book, I tapped into the net to listen to some of the songs mentioned in the book.

The quality varies greatly, but there are some true gems in the music mentioned in the book, which I have collected in two playlists:

Part 1 – The guitar mix

1. The Pop Group - Thief of fire (youtube)
2. The Slits – Love Und Romance (youtube)
3. Gang of Four - At home he’s a tourist (youtube) RECOMMENDED!
4. The Mekons – Where were you? (youtube)
5. Pere Ubu – Final Solution (Google)
6. Devo - Whip it (youtube) RECOMMENDED!
7. The Human League – Being Boiled (youtube)
8. The Fall – Totally Wired (youtube)
9. Joy Division – Transmission (youtube)
10. Passage – Taking my time (Google)
11. Suicide – Ghostrider (youtube) RECOMMENDED!
12. Talking Heads – I Zimbra (youtube)
13. Talking Heads - Once in a Lifetime (youtube)
14. Wire – Strange (youtube) RECOMMENDED!
15. Wire – Map Ref. 41N 93W (youtube)
16. Scritti Politti – Skank Bloc Bologna (youtube)
17. Young Marble Giants – Cakewalking (Google) RECOMMENDED!
18. Chrome – Chromosome Damage (youtube)
19. Public Image Ltd. – Death Disco (youtube)
20. Public Image Ltd. – Socialist (Google)
21. Gang of Four – I love a man in uniform (youtube)
22. The Specials – Too much too young (youtube)

Part 2 – The wacky and electric mix

1. The Beat – Hands off, she’s mine (youtube)
2. Madness – Baggy Trousers (youtube)
3. The Specials – Ghost Town (youtube) RECOMMENDED!
4. Dexy’s Midnight Runners – Come on Eileen (youtube)
5. Adam and the Ants – Ant music (youtube) RECOMMENDED!
6. Adam and the Ants – Prince Charming (youtube)
7. Bow Wow Wow – I want candy (youtube)
8. The B-52’s – Rock Lobster (youtube)
9. ESG - Moody (Google)
10. Grace Jones - Pull up to the bumper (youtube)
11. New Order - Confusion (youtube)
12. Orange Juice – Blue Boy (Google)
13. Gary Numan – Are friends electric? (youtube)
14. Visage – Fade to Grey (youtube)
15. Spandau Ballet – To cut a long story short (youtube) RECOMMENDED!
16. The Human League – The Sound of the Crowd (youtube)
17. Ultravox – Vienna (youtube)
18. Depeche Mode - Everything Counts (youtube) RECOMMENDED!
19. Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft – Der Mussolini (youtube)

You can read more about Simon Reynolds’ book here:

• Review in the NY Times
• Blog posts here and here
• Simon Reynolds’ blog
• Wikipedia – Simon Reynolds
• Buy the book here or elsewhere

It has been a great experience to tap into a world of music, which was almost entirely new to me (born in 1977, I do not remember it for obvious reasons). It was also an easy and enjoyable read, and beside some of the music, which I thoroughly enjoy, the videos are from the maiden years of MTV and therefore a lot more fun than the über-polished stuff, we get nowadays.

OK. Thought I’d shove up some random archive stuff, especially as my hard drive backup seems to be eating my old files, never to return. First, an interview from 2005 conducted for… where? I have no recollection, but I feel that perhaps I used some of this later in a Plan B feature. There’s already plenty of stuff about some of these bands elsewhere on my blogs (particularly here) and there’s a great article from Alistair Fitchett about it here, but I really can’t be arsed to link to it all. Sorry.

Alright, first the basic questions that I ask everyone:
Which were the most important earlier bands leading up to the C-86 wave?
Orange Juice, Josef K, Aztec Camera (the sound of Young Scotland): the ideology behind Creation Records but not the bands themselves (with the exception of the Mary Chain and The Pastels): anything on Rough Trade records post-1978 (except The Smiths who always were corporate sell-outs): The Fall (because they influences EVERY independent band from the UK post-1977): Buzzcocks, Subway Sect, Captain Beefheart (half the bands on that NME tape ripped the good Captain off), The Velvet Underground (and the other half ripped the Velvets off): Trixie’s Big Red Motorbike, Sophisticated Boom Boom and any of the girl-led pop groups that Peel used to play in the early Eighties: Captain Beefheart again: The Byrds and The Creation and The Kinks and all that white boy jangling guitar Sixties stuff: Television Personalities: plenty more, but that’ll do for now.

If I were to pick 10 bands from the C-86 era to write more about – which should I choose?
The Pastels
Talulah Gosh
Shop Assistants
The Wolfhounds
Jasmine Minks
The Membranes
Big Flame
The Wedding Present
June Brides
The Legend!

(This is a random list, drawn from the top of my head – and I’d be amazed if I haven’t forgotten a load of great bands.)

Are there are any bands that surfaced after the tape but are still considered to be C-86?
Not for me to say – but some people may consider what Matt and Claire put out on Sarah Records to fall firmly within the “C86 category”. Talulah Cosh were actually post-C86 if my memory serves me correctly. Comet Gain are totally C86 – as were many of the Riot Grrrl bands (especially the later ones that lost the politics but retained the cutie edge). Oh, and I guess BMX Bandits would’ve loved to have been.

What other musical events (gigs, record releases etc) except for the tape made the year 1986 stand out?
I remember standing at a Soup Dragons Hammersmith Clarendon (upstairs) concert with a basket full of new Legend! fanzines (Wolfhounds/Razorcuts flexi) and not moving all evening – people coming up to me in a constant stream, as I sold about 130 copies. Also, I’d travel up to Bedford Esquires (and other venues) a great deal for their fine triple bills starring folk like Talulah Gosh and Big Flame and Membranes – shows put on by Nigel Turner, who now runs Pickled Egg Records. I can’t recall events – was ’86 Live Aid? USA Against Warmongering By Capitalist Countries? C86 was actually a massive disappointment to me: for a compilation that so clearly had its roots in all the bands I would write about for NME at the time, it was incredible I hated so much of it (it’s cos the compilers were too arrogant to consult a “kid” like me). I still don’t like much of the tape – it’s unrepresentative of its times certainly (as opposed to the brilliant C81 comp, five years earlier) and even unrepresentative of the small narrow strata of music it thought it was representing. I recall a Troublefunk show that I danced my ass off at.

Were there any venues or clubs that were central to C-86?
Was McGee still putting on shows then? If so, then whatever he was behind would have been central. If not, then certainly Dan Treacy’s Room At The Top, upstairs at the Enterprise Chalk Farm, next to the excellent Marine Ices shop where everyone would hang out before bands, was vital. As were Leigh’s shows at Woolwich Polytechnic and Nigel’s shows in Bedford. They were the main three I’d go to.

Was C-86 in general political – lyrically or musically? Or was it just shaped by the politics of the time? And was it working-class or middle-class?
Depends which strata of C86 you’re talking about: the crap pop bands like The Bodines and Mighty Mighty or god-awful Close Lobsters certainly weren’t political. The more obviously Beefheart-influenced bands like Stump and The Shrubs and Big Flame and The MacKenzies seemed to be on the surface – although it’s arguable that was only because of the style of music (angular, awkward, challenging) they were aping. The Age of Chance seemed revolutionary, the way they matched guitar pop to dance rhythms, and were unfortunately (for them) 10 year ahead of their time. Half-Man Half-Morons (who should NEVER have been near the compilation) were an out-and-out joke band.

The temptation nowadays when faced with a crop of ‘indie’ bands is to automatically think of them as middle-class but looking down the list on C86 I’d have to say most of them are working-class (probably in some last echo of punk’s diverse roots that spread out to the working-class communities from its middle-class origins with Strummer and McClaren and that whole London thing). Most of those C86 would’ve played benefits for the miner’s strike and the like… again, I think this was probably part genuine outrage at the Thatcher years, and probably part follow-on from punk and post-punk’s obvious political leanings. Yes, of course the bands were shaped by their times, and among that section of society in the mid-Eighties, dissent was very much to the front.

Interesting that, out of 22 bands on the compilation, only three of them are female.

I’ve heard that there wasn’t a homogenous indiepop sub-culture before C-86. Is that true? And what were the identifying markers of anoraks, both on the surface and ideologically?
No, there wasn’t – not readily identifiable, at least. The most it amounted to was boys like Bobby Gillespie and Edwyn Collins who wore their hair like members of The Byrds: there was definitely a Mod and Sixties crossover with some of the more jangling elements of the independent sector (thanks a lot to the Creation Records aesthetic) but no… To be honest, I don’t think C86 was the main factor behind ‘indiepop’… that was more down to the law of diminishing returns and Sarah Records’ (in particular) sometimes inspirational but more often damn right annoying tunnel vision and insistence on sticking with ONE PARTICULAR SOUND, no messing (and certainly with no room for females, barring the ever-present Amelia Fletcher). Anoraks were NOT the norm in ’86 (Stephen Pastel wore one, but with leather trousers) not at all… it was the younger brothers of the C86 generation who decided that they were cool, not the people of the time.

Where did C-86 go? Did it merge with other genres or did it all turn into twee?
Let’s get this straight. C86 didn’t actually exist as a sound, or style. It was supposed to be a “state of the independents” compilation, similar to C81. The reason it wasn’t was down to the myopic vision of its compilers. The reason it wasn’t stronger was because major contributor behind the scenes, Neil Taylor – who only ever chose to write about bands I’d reviewed two weeks before – had no actual idea about music beyond reading other journalists. I loved soul and dance music at the time of C86. But the compilation didn’t reflect any of that. One half of C86 obviously turned twee – was already on the verge even as the tape was being put together. The other half continued existing merrily on its own terms thanks very much.

What’s your definition of C-86 today?
I don’t have one. See above. And I find it weird bordering on surreal that people are starting to use it again, specifically to sell seven-inch singles on eBay. No one used the term back then. They really didn’t.

And now the more important questions, especially tailored for you:
I assume you wrote the fanzine The Legend! – how would you describe it?
Impassioned, arrogant, self-obsessed, determined to strike its own path separate to the great morass of fanzines who all just seemed to be content with being third-rate copies of NME (I always knew I couldn’t do interviews, so I never ran a single one in any of the five issues of The Legend!)…naïve, futile, excitable, plenty of exclamation marks, instant, brutally honest, refused to take any ads whatsoever (and yes, I was offered some), very proud of what it did… almost entirely written by me, designed and published by me…

What other fanzines do you remember liking and what distinguished them?
Idiot Strength, Are You Scared To Get Happy?, Juniper Beri-Beri, Attack On Bzag, The Rox, that damn magazine Miki and Emma did years before they formed Lush (Alphabet Soup), Incendiary, Hungry Beat… for pretty much the same reasons as I’ve detailed in the description of The Legend! (None were as passionate or extreme as mine, of course.)

You were writing both for your own fanzine as well as for the NME – was that uncommon? And what did you think about the NME ca 1986?
There were several of us who wrote for both our own magazines and the music press – me, John Robb, James Brown, probably several more. It wasn’t that uncommon, there was a great tradition of writers coming to the music press from fanzines that started during the early punk days – and to the best of my knowledge has continued through even till today. I hated NME but of course I secretly loved it too. I didn’t exactly socialise with any of the other journalists there… I was routinely ridiculed and looked down upon by my fellow writers, especially the more august ones (and with some reason: I still couldn’t string a sentence together at that point). Danny Kelly supported me, and Steven Wells and David Quantick. Cheers mates.

Were you involved with compiling the C-86 tape? Why was it put out and what determined which bands were on it? (If possible, compare with C-81.)
I think I’ve already answered this question above: it was basically intended as a “state of the independents” round up – NME had a tradition of putting out tape compilations, like C81, but covering all forms of music (Rebellious Jukebox was my all-time favourite, introducing me as it did to the wonders of Southern Soul Music: there were several others also, covering jazz and hip hop). This was at least a decade before the idea of giving music away with a music magazine had become so thoroughly devalued that nowadays you don’t even bother buying Mojo or Uncut unless they have a free CD attached, and even the broadsheets get in on the act…

I wasn’t involved. I should have been, but I was a jumped-up fanzine kid (who just happened to be introducing most of these previously ignored bands to the music press and their readers). The standing joke at the time was that the tape comprised all the bands who’d slept on my floor when they played London – Shop Assistants, Wedding Present, Pastels, Bogshed, A Witness, Age of Chance, Soup Dragons….If I’d been involved there’s no way bands like Mighty Mighty or Half-Man Half-Biscuit (neither of whom had ANYTHING to do with anything) would have been allowed near the tape.

How come the two in retrospect perhaps most classic C-86 bands, Razorcuts and Talulah Gosh, were not on the tape?
I’m fairly sure Talulah Gosh were only just emerging right about the time the tape came out, so you can hardly blame the NME for not including them. (Why no June Brides, though? That was a bigger scandal.) And same held true of Razorcuts (although I absolutely LOVED that band by the time C86 appeared)… as I say, I had nothing to do with that tape despite being part of the inspiration for it. If I had then of course the ‘cuts would’ve been on it.

What were the connections between C-86 and other related terms such as anorak, shambling, jangle or twee? What did they mean and in what order did they emerge?
Anorak was something Simon Reynolds invented a couple of years later, in Melody Maker (he wrote a big article in ’88 on the whole fanzine ‘scene’, which by that time had moved along to the Canterbury Arms in Brixton, I think, that included massive pictures of John Robb and me – much to NME’s disgust). I think he may have invented ‘twee’ at the same time. Both are horrible condescending words. Ugh! Jangle was probably around since ’81 or so, with Orange Juice and the bands that loved Sixties groups like The Byrds. Shambling (and the thankfully underused grebo) has been credited to John Peel circa ’85 – but I never listened to him so I wouldn’t know. I think it was taken to mean bands like The Fall, and the Beefheart-influenced lot, who didn’t care so much whether everything was perfectly produced or polished, but had a more ‘shambolic’ approach to recording and playing live. I used to think it meant any band that took more than three attempts to start a song… in which case Teenage Fanclub early on were the ultimate shambling band. But to me, Bogshed always were.

Why did the NME turn on a scene of their own creation and start using the term ‘C-86’ in a scornful manner?
That was because most of the writers never liked it in the first place – and also cos the description quickly codified into a certain sound. And that always sucks when that happens.

Some people seem to think the invention of ‘C-86’ killed off indiepop. What were the negative as well as the positive effects?
I can’t comment here; neither term actually means much to me as descriptions of a genre of music (the two are synonymous as far as I’m concerned) so the question is meaningless. Cheers, Everett

In the first issue of Loops, Faber’s new music magazine, Simon Reynolds, the renowned blogger and author of Energy Flash, Rip it Up and Start Again, Bring the Noise and Totally Wired, looks at the attempts to imagine the music of the future in science fiction films, and finds they often can’t escape the past:

As theorised in his masterwork Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson’s ‘nostalgia mode’ is not to be confused with either the nostalgia felt by an individual for his own past or veneration and longing inspired by a remote-in-time antiquity that seems superior to the present. Rather it’s a symptom of artistic and cultural malaise, an inability to innovate forms of narrative and modes of expression capable of representing the present let alone projecting the future.

Talking of nostalgia, remember when the broadsheets reviewed serious cultural theory? See Simon Reynolds’ review of Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism from the Observer in 1991.

Simon Reynolds is contributing an article on Grime to the forthcoming The Wire Primers: A Guide to Modern Music.

This appeared in the summer 2009 issue of Garageland (issue 8, pp. 30-33).

Unheard Melodies

Andrew Gallix goes in search of the most elusive of the phantom bands — L.U.V.

“As a rock critic, when you reach a certain age, you begin to wonder if all the mental and emotional energy you’ve invested in this music was such a shrewd move,” wrote Simon Reynolds in the introduction to Rip It Up and Start Again. More recently, he wondered if “searching for utopia through music” had not been “a mistake” (Totally Wired). To ascribe such doubts to impending middle age alone would be to forget that there was a time when music truly was a matter of life and death, when days were whiled away listening to records and poring over album covers in some ill-defined but all-important quest. Instead of producing plays or paintings, the best and brightest were busy perfecting one-note solos on replica Starways from Woolies. Rock’n'roll was central to contemporary culture: it was where it was at.

Needless to say, no band could ever totally live up to such high expectations. Malcolm McLaren shrewdly ensured that the Sex Pistols made precious few live appearances in order to enhance their mystique. Spandau Ballet would use a similar trick at the beginning of their career by playing invite-only gigs. Keats (Morrissey notwithstanding) was right: heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter. After all, bands are necessarily approximations of the dreams that conjured them up. Some — like the Libertines whose Arcadian rhetoric was often far more exciting than their songs — are condemned to remain pale reflections of their Platonic ideals. By the same token, a record is always a compromise: The La’s famously spent two years recording and re-recording their first album without ever achieving the desired effect. Even at its best, music cannot vie with the silence it comes from and returns to — the silence inhabited by phantom bands.

We are not talking dead silence here, but rather something akin to the background noise during a performance of 4′ 33″ or the tinnitus burned on to the mind’s ear by imaginary songs overheard through the static in between radio stations. A living silence, perhaps. According to the great academic and critic George Steiner, “A book unwritten is more than a void”. The same could be said about songs unrecorded or unplayed: they actually exist, virtually, in some Borgesian iPod of Babel. Phantom bands themselves are not complete figments of the imagination either: to qualify, they must have some kind of shadowy existence, leave some kind of (lipstick) trace. The Chris Gray Band never existed beyond a few graffiti around Victoria Coach Station in the early seventies, but the idea of forming “a totally unpleasant pop group” designed to subvert showbiz from within would obviously be a major influence on the Pistols project (1). The London SS — whose short lifespan was one long audition bringing together most of the major players on the future London punk scene — is probably the most influential group to have neither released a record nor played a single gig. Synthpunk pioneers The Screamers were described by Jello Biafra as “the best unrecorded band in the history of rock’n'roll”. Typically, their first photoshoot appeared in a magazine when they were yet to play live (2). At a later stage, they were approached to release an album cover containing no record — an art stunt which never materialised but would have been a fitting metaphor for this textbook phantom outfit from Los Angeles. The Screamers managed to become local legends although — or perhaps because — they only did a handful of gigs and never got round to cutting a record (3). The Nova Mob from Liverpool did not even try to go that far. Fronted by Julian Cope, they were a purely conceptual group dedicated to never playing a single note of music. Instead, they would hang around caffs discussing imaginary songs — a practice they referred to as “rehearsing”. Definitely one for the Borgesian iPod.

“It’s like being in love with a woman you’ve never had,” says Dominique Fury, trying to account for the enduring fascination exerted by the group in which she briefly played guitar more than three decades ago: “The relationship hasn’t been consummated”. She smiles. A ray of sunshine has crept into her artist’s studio near Belleville. Through the open window, I can glimpse the pink apple blossom in the middle of the dappled courtyard. All is quiet. All is still. When I say I’m in love, you best believe I’m in love L-U-V. For me, the most phantomatic of phantom bands has always been L.U.V., an elusive and largely illusive all-girl punk combo from Paris. I remember reading tantalising news snippets about them in the music or mainstream press at regular intervals. A quote here, a namecheck there. Just enough to whet my appetite. And then — nothing. A tale told by an idiot, full of silence and fury, signifying nothing. Nostalgia for a band yet to come.

Only one picture of the complete line-up was ever published (in the long-defunct Matin de Paris). Granted, it is worth a thousand words, but the fact that there seem to be no others speaks volumes about the fragility of L.U.V.’s collective identity. It is also rather paradoxical given that style was all the substance they had. From left to right you can see Aphrodisia Flamingo (the rebel), Dominique Fury (the femme fatale), Liliane Vittori (the cerebral rock chick) and Edwige Belmore (the It girl). Wearing matching sunglasses, Aphrodisia and Dominique — the terrible twins who formed the nucleus of the group — stand very close to each other as if they are an item. Aphrodisia stares the world down, her full mouth a smouldering moue of utter contempt — Bardot gone badass. Dominique, in terrorist chic mode, adopts a far more glamorous, almost provocative pose. Liliane, for her part, seems to be fading into the background, a faraway look on her anguished features. Edwige towers above her like some Teutonic titan, sporting a Billy Idol hairdo and the blank expression of a Galeries Lafayette mannequin.

L.U.V. (4) was the brainchild of Aphrodisia Flamingo (Laurence “Lula” Grumbach) who, having mixed with the likes of Nico, Lou Reed and Patti Smith in New York City, returned to Paris determined to launch a girl group of the punk persuasion. One night, down at the Gibus (France’s answer to CBGB), she caught sight of Dominique Fury (née Jeantet) (5). It was L.U.V. at first sight: “I just made a beeline for her because I instantly knew I wanted her in the band”. The fiery, long-haired brunette and the glacial, short-haired blonde were attracted to each other like polar opposites. Dominique speaks repeatedly of a “magnetic relationship”: “There was chemistry between us — something magical that was more than the mere sum of its parts”. Both came from very wealthy but troubled backgrounds (6). Aphrodisia lost her father when she was only eleven; Fury never really found hers (which may explain her penchant for collective experiences) (7). The latter was a revolutionary heiress who made donations to the Black Panthers and bankrolled a couple of utopian communities that she describes as “a quest for something beautifully wild”. Once the opium fumes of the communal dream had dissipated, she embarked on an equally eventful American road trip (almost meeting her fate near the Mexican border) and was soon drawn towards punk’s “dark and romantic aesthetics” — which brings us back to the Gibus circa early 1977.

Although L.U.V. revolved mainly around these two soul mates, the most famous member at the time was in fact Edwige — a striking bisexual amazon who was already a face on the local clubbing scene and would soon be crowned la reine des punks. For fifteen minutes, Paris was at her feet: she ran the door at the hippest joint this side of Studio 54 (Le Palace), was photographed with Warhol for the cover of Façade magazine, formed an electronic duo called Mathématiques Modernes, posed for Helmut Newton and allegedly had a string of affairs with the likes of Grace Jones, Madonna and Sade (“The Sweetest Taboo” is rumoured to be about her). Given her stature, Edwige seemed destined to bang the drums for L.U.V. As Fury puts it, “The group was primarily an image — a work of art — so it was great to have this iconic figure”.

This conception of the band as tableau vivant or performance art was (and indeed remains) at odds with some of the other members’ more conventional aspirations. “Aphrodisia gave me the opportunity to create something,” says Fury, but that something was not rock’n'roll. When L.U.V. petered out, she joined Bazooka, an art collective (where she famously found herself embroiled in a convoluted ménage à trois with two artists of either gender) rather than another band (8). But Liliane, the bassist (9), simply could not understand why Dominique showed no interest in musical proficiency and insisted on teaching her how to master her instrument. Fury reckons “she just wasn’t mad enough”. “She simply didn’t get it,” concurs Aphrodisia. Whenever journalists or A&R people attended rehearsals, they drafted in Hermann Schwartz — Métal Urbain’s axeman — who would play concealed behind a curtain while Fury struck guitar-heroine poses (10).

Aphrodisia, who is currently writing her autobiography, sees L.U.V. as a missed opportunity: “We never wrote a single song. We wanted to, but were probably too stoned” (11). She explains that rehearsals were constantly interrupted because someone always needed to score. She talks about major label interest. She remembers how Rock & Folk, the top French music magazine, would beg them to play a gig that they could cover in their next issue…

Some of us are still waiting for that next issue. Come, let us dance to the spirit ditties of no tone.

Endnotes:

(1) The eponymous Chris Gray was a member of the English section of the Situationist International (expelled in 1967) and the author of the seminal Leaving the 20th Century anthology (1974) which popularised Situationist ideas in Britain. Like Malcolm McLaren and Jamie Reid, he was involved with political pranksters King Mob.

(2) This is reminiscent of the Flowers of Romance (which included Sid Vicious, Viv Albertine and Keith Levene) who gave an interview to a fanzine although they had never played live (and would never do so). The Pistols would later cover the Flowers’ “Belsen Was a Gas”.

(3) The Screamers’ uncompromising music — all synthesizer, keyboard, drums, screamed vocals and not a guitar in sight — was unlikely to get heavy rotation, but delusions of grandeur were probably the main reason why the big time eluded them. A prime example of this was their decision to turn down a tour with Devo. There were also rumours that Brian Eno wanted to produce them, but the band felt that their histrionic live performance could not possibly be captured on vinyl. Instead, they envisaged a video-only release which would have been commercial suicide pre-MTV. It never saw the light of day anyway.

(4) The band’s name is obviously a reference to The New York Dolls’ “Looking For a Kiss,” but according to Laurence Grumbach it also stands for Ladies United Violently or Lipstick Used Viciously. Laurence’s nom de punk was chosen because she was born on 9 August which is St Amour’s day in the French calendar (hence Aphrodisia) and because she was fond of the Flamin’ Groovies (Flamingo). Apparently, it has nothing to do with John Waters’ 1972 film, Pink Flamingos.

(5) Dominique Jeantet reinvented herself as Fury in reference to Faulkner and the Plymouth Fury automobiles. She once owned a guitar with “Fury” inscribed on it.

(6) Fury recently discovered that her godfather was none other than the then future (and now late) President François Mitterrand.

(7) Fury’s father was a protean character. Among many other things, he was a spy with multiple identities who was involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler. Before the war, he had been a member of a far-right terrorist group.

(8) The two artists were Olivia Clavel, who introduced her into the collective, and Loulou Picasso. Bazooka are most famous in Britain for producing the cover of Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces. Dominique Fury, who was once described as the Parisian Edie Sedgwick, also dated Lenny Kaye and Mick Jones of The Clash.

(9) Liliane was also a talented photographer who worked for the music press.

(10) Hermann Schwartz also acted as L.U.V.’s Pygmalion. It was he, for instance, who introduced the girls to The Shangri-Las.

(11) L.U.V. covered two songs: Nico & The Velvet Underground’s “Femme Fatale” and The Troggs’ “Wild Thing”. Dominique Fury showed me some lyrics, both in French and English, that she had written for the band, but I’m not sure she ever shared them with the other members. Some are reminiscent of X-Ray Spex in that they describe a dystopian consumer society. Others stood out because of their violent imagery: “We’ll take the handle and you’ll take the blade”.

Bull is a darkly comic neo-noir about deception, identity, money, murder, and really tall buildings. Deep within heatwave-baked skyscraper canyons, a hapless stockbroker gets caught up in a twisty web where no one – no one at all – is telling the truth.

ILB finds itself in the mouths of certain in-the-know journo figures more often than free champagne: whether it’s certain Guardian journalists engaging in email volleys with ex-girlfriends in a desperate search for “dirt”, or just that prissy dude that edited The Quietus before it went tits up pissing and moaning on Facebook about me, we’re a hot topic. My favourite ever casual reference to mefrom a hack though was when patron saint of the glasses-wearing music writers, Simon Reynolds, asked a former Stylus writer at some sort of New York New Media shindig “Dom Passantino… is he actually like that in real life?” The writer in question said “Yeah…. yeah he is”, and went on to report that later in the evening Reynolds was to be found tapping out the beat to “Undone (The Sweater Song)” on his legs.

Which is why we’d feel obliged to defend the guy from any external attacks. He penned a whatever, whatever piece on the third Audio Bully where he referred to Caspa as “the Guy Ritchie of dubstep“. The world awaited Caspa’s response. He really hasn’t disappointed. From Real Groove:

“Oh, that fucking donut!” he starts. “When I first read it I actually laughed. I don’t ever recall in my life meeting this guy, so I don’t know where he got these words that he writ you know?
“He writ 1700 words on how much he hated me, when actually all I am is a 26-year-old guy enjoying myself, making music, touring the world, doing something that I love. And there’s someone trying to bring me down and saying all these things like he knows me as a person.
“He doesn’t know me at all, so I just found it quite funny that he had all these assumptions and all these ideas when he never met me. The thing is he’s a journalist, and journalists are there to antagonise and get people to raise their eyebrows and go ‘ooohhhh!’
“And that’s what he’s done, but to be honest, if he’s got nothing better to do than write 1700 words on why he hates me then he’s a prick. I don’t mind people saying bad stuff, if they don’t like me as an artist that’s fine. But he kind of got personal, and he didn’t need to do that. I’m sure one day we’ll meet face to face, and uh… he won’t be hiding behind his computer.”

What a guy.

Simon Price reviews Casanova by the Divine Comedy and David Stubbs reviews Expert Knob Twiddlers by Mike & Rich, 13th July 1996.

Also David Stubbs reviews Das Est Ein Groovy Beat Ya? by Jake Slazenger, Simon Reynolds reviews Tech Steppin’ Various Artists, John Robb reviews BlueTip by BlueTip. Ian Watson reviews Miracle by Bim Sherman, Martin James reviews Mexican Church by Blue and Julian Craven reviews Warm Nights by Robert Forster.

Be sure to read those in-depth Q&A’s in full. Vital stuff!

[loads gun, pulls trigger]

Ah, 1982: El año en el que Christian Marclay, que pronto sería reconocido por llevar los giradiscos al mundo de la improvisación libre, usando rápidos cortes, capas múltiples y loops para una traducción en vivo de Tape Music cintas, interpretadas por primera vez con sus caseteras en The Kitchen; el año en el que Brian Eno lanzó “On Land”, su segundo disco ambient, ampliamente ignorado en ese entonces, su sonido de bajo profundo y movimientos glaciales, serían una gran influencia en la siguiente década para el Ambient de las discotecas; y finalmente como Syeve Barrow dice en el libro Simon Reynolds Generation Ecstasy, “Para 1982 el dub había agotado su curso en Jamaica, se había transformado en una formula” Reynolds nota entonces, “Pero este fue solo el momento en el que las técnicas del dub, empezaron a usarse en el electro-funk de New York y en los remixes de música disco realizados por los productores, un lado B con versiones instrumentales.”

Todos estos hechos no relacionados ayudaron a poner en marcha la idea de una cultura DJ, que alcanzó su cenit en la segunda mitad de los ’90. El DJ, no el guitarrista, fue el héroe instrumental de la época. Durante la era disco, DJ’s como Larry Levan y Nicky Siano atraían un grupo de seguidores para sus sesiones semanales de culto, elaborando un groove interminable con diferentes simples de 12”, pero nunca fueron el centro de la escena. Solo Arthur Russell parece haber hecho la conexión en esa época entre estas maratónicas sesiones y el trance rítmico del minimalismo del eje Riley/Reich/Glass. Russell era un chelista, no un DJ, pero considerando su producción de sencillos de música disco, composiciones clásicas, canciones pop e instrumentales, hacer una comparación con la estética de “conecta los puntos” de cualquier buen DJ, no es una idea descabellada, y sus actividades son, en cierto modo, precursoras de la relación entre la vanguardia y la electrónica, que llegaría no mucho después de su muerte en 1992. 

No sería hasta que el ambient encontrara una audiencia con la publicación del disco de Aphex Twin/Richard James, “Selected Ambient Works 85-92”, que los fanáticos y autores de la música experimental tomaron conciencia de lo que sucedía en los clubes. Con la llegada de James, las correspondencias entre el Techno y la música experimental se hicieron más evidentes. Autechre inyectó altas dosis de ruido metálico dentro y sobre sus beats; The Orb muestreó a Steve Reid; y el underground respondió, con fiestas como la Electronic Lounge de Londres o la Soundlab de New York, que estaban a mitad de camino entre una noche en The Kitchen y una en La Hacienda, raves artísticas sin las drogas. DJ Olive acuñó el termino Illbient para distinguir el sonido más crudo de la escena, con las asociaciones con el Ambient más Chill-Out y New-Age. Los DJ’s eran las estrellas, inclusive en espacios igualitarios donde no había escenarios o cabina. The Wire puso a DJ Spooky en la portada de su número 138 (1995), antes de que tuviera un álbum editado; en el artículo mencionaba que sus sets eran “jazz dado vuelta, o Ambient Blues, usando los instrumentales de John Lee Hooker”, lo que parece confirmar que la Floating Dance Party era otro lugar donde la música experimental podía ser encontrada. Ultimo en la estirpe DJ/Rupture, es también, más que sólo un DJ: es un entrepreneur musical, un alquimista del beat raro perfecto, un izquierdista de la contracultura musical misma y también coleccionista de los sonidos más extraños del mundo; Rupture es un verdadero activista, de esos que ejecuta su inconformidad a través de beats y mezclas atípicas en vez de discursos y filosofías estúpidas. Un verdadero punk del nuevo milenio.

Lo realmente novedoso era la identificación generalizada del DJ como un virtuoso performativo (a pesar de los reclamos que hicieron algunos sobre que el atractivo del DJ, era una variante de la tradición/mito del Punk/No Wave, de hacer música sin la necesidad de aprender a tocar un instrumento). Gente como Ben Neill llegaron a la orbita de Sounlab desde el mundo del Avant-Clásico; Arto Lindsay, Bill Laswell y David Linton desde la escena experimental del Downtown de New York. La cultura DJ también afecto al rock independiente, con Tortoise haciendo un álbum de remixes de su disco debut y   To Roccoco Rot uniendo fuerzas con DJ I-Sound. Entonces Derek Bailey hizo un disco con DJ Ninj, y DJ Olive empezó a presentarse junto a Uri Cane y Dave Douglas. El mundo del arte también tomó nota, viendo las comparaciones entre las fiestas underground y los happenings multidisciplinarios de los ’60, con el resultado de la entrada de los DJ’s en las galerías de arte, museos y participando en exhibiciones de arte sonoro en Europa y los Estados Unidos.

No es difícil establecer la conexión entre el arte sonoro y los DJ’s; cuando  Beth Coleman, miembro del colectivo Soundlab, comento sobre un amigo que escuchó de forma diferente una usina, luego de haber oído un soundscape de uno de los ruidistas de la fiesta, fue reminiscente al trabajo de Max Neuhaus con sus viajes para escuchar las usinas de Con Edison durante los ‘60s. Tampoco es difícil ver porque el indie rock la recibió con los brazos abiertos o porque el mundo de la música experimental tomo nota.

La idea de un DJ desplumando sonidos y estilos dispares y mezclando o suturándolos juntos, resonaba bien con la reevaluación del catalogo de viejos sellos vía la invención del formato CD, y poco después, archivos compartidos. Lo arcaico se volvió contemporáneo, y ahora que todo lo grabado alguna vez, estaba disponible nuevamente, las posibilidades de recombinar eran infinitas. Al mismo tiempo, volviendo la vinilo en una era donde los CD’s habían tomado el mercado y la gente hacia música con sus laptops, la cultura DJ fue el salvoconducto en la guerra entre lo analógico y lo digital, quizás desplazada por el movimiento Freak Folk de principio de década.

William Burroughs, cuya técnica del cut-up es frecuentemente citada en estudios sobre la cultura DJ, era aficionado en citar a Hassan I Sabbah: “Nada es verdad, todo esta permitido” En 2009, no como en 1982, casi todo esta permitido, es decir creíble, cuando hablamos de hacer y escuchar música fuera del mainstream. New Wave, disco, hardcore punk, Prog rock, psych-folk, que eran discretas categorías y fuerzas opuestas en 1982, se han reunido en artistas como Animal Collective (que reverencian a Arthur Russell), y revistas como The Wire. La cultura DJ de los ‘90, remplazando eclecticismo con el arte de la mezcla, ayudó a crear el corriente clima musical pluralista.