Floatinghead's ramblings about music and music-related themes interspersed with various interludes and home of Cabeza de Vaca radio show on Scanner FM, Barcelona.
Head over to Scanner FM
for the
latest show which is an all ambient special! A few beats in some tracks, but
nothing worth locking up your daughters for, even if one of the artists is Xhin
who you might expect to lay it on heavy.
There will be
another ambient show in a couple of weeks, but I confess to lying accidentally
at the end of the show, when I say that next week will be back to beats. Looks
like a coup instead for the Spanish speaking contingent as I have an interview
with Christian Pascual, director of the Beefeater In-Edit International Festival of Music Documentaries, that was the
foundation of the previous show and will be now at the centre of the next one
with the interview at heart, but the beats will return.
Also, anyone
curious about listening on mobile devices, there will be a major overhaul of
Scanner FM in the near future and you will be most impressed with the new
direction, new programming and new flexibility, so stay tuned and be patient
for now.
For supplements,
here is a little film on Actress’s "R.I.P" album by Pierre Debusschere. The concept
of the album may be loosely John Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, but little mention is
given to the title with its two and not three points at the end of the letters.
My personal take on it would be that the “I” in the centre is meant to be read
as “I” or self and you are meant to place yourself into the story. Another
possibility is that the “I” is almost a mirror or a portal where one has “R”
and “P” on opposing sides, almost reflections of each other. I haven’t read
Milton as most of us haven’t, but maybe there are more clues there.
Mohn (the
project of Jörg Burger and Wolfgang Voigt) has also had several video treatments,
but none for the self-titled track I use in the show that closes the album.
This track falls just before it and its “negative view” of the world is somehow
metaphorical of ambient music and its absence of daily rhythms.
Finally, I
mention in the show the websites of ASC and Australian artist Kane Ikin, in
particular, and here are some nice mixes from the two. Check out their websites
though for much more and of course plenty of useful information to boot.
I promised when
I named the show Cabeza de Vaca that we would cross uneven and unexpected
terrain and so it is that we end up playing almost all punk and no electronica
in the most recent show!
Well a couple of tracks anyway.
All the tracks
on the program today were chosen to coincide with the 10th edition
of the Beefeater In-Edit International Festival of Music Documentaries held this time every year in
Barcelona (last year’s review can be found by clicking here).
Because of the local nature of the festival I chose to do the program in
Spanish this time, a first, and more difficult than I thought, but then it was
late and I was tired and I am always rushing with preparation. Not a perfect example
of the language, but not too shabby either. But apologies for saying repeatedly
that Paul Weller was from The Clash and not from The Jam… I had one ear/eye already on Joe Strummer
and The Clash. But That’s Entertainment!
The origins of
the show actually came from an idea to do one about LCD Soundsystem’s track “Losing
my edge” which I will still probably do in the future when the promos and new
releases dry up a bit. Their track doesn’t need too much more introduction
other than the film itself which will be eagerly awaited by many:
As part of the
LCD show I had wanted to play the Talking Heads track “Cross-eyed and painless”
from “Remain in light” as it always reminded me of LCD Soundsystem, even though
it doesn’t feature on the official list part of “Losing my edge” that was to be
the basis of the show. That said, neither does Can appear, perhaps the other
critical group for triangulating the LCD sound, although Can does get a more official
mention in the main lyrics. Looking forward to seeing the full feature of “Stop
Making Sense” which seems to be one of the more pioneering live concert films
ever made for different reasons, including staging, lights and so on.
The punk stuff in
the show we have more or less dealt with serendipitously in different posts including
the one on punk and the
second show which dealt with Tresor, Berlin and Detroit.
The only things
additional to report here, especially for the English speakers who won’t catch
me saying it in Spanish are the fight between Paul Weller and Sid Vicious over
the Sex Pistols use of the bass guitar riff from “In the city” in “Holidays in
the Sun”. The damage done by Weller on Vicious was apparently permanent (at
least until his death not long after) with the irony being that Vicious had
been incensed that Weller had dare claim that the riff was stolen, when all and
sundry knew it had been, but he’d felt it worth fighting for anyway.
I chose to put
in the live version of “New York” recorded at Chelmsford Prison, one of the only
prison gigs I know of, except for Elvis Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock”, Johnny Cash
in St Quentin’s prison in 1958 and The Cramps playing, of all places, California
State Mental Hospital on June 13, 1978.
“Somebody told
me you people were crazy, but you seem alright to me”
- Lux Interior
There is a great
joke and insult by Johnny Rotten at the end of the track where he says
“Best captive
audience I ever played for. Boring, you’re boring me. I bet you all have piles
from sitting down too much”
Joe Strummer has
two films about him, the more well-known Julien Temple film “The future is
unwritten” as well as a Spanish film “Quiero tener una ferreteria en Andalucía”
(y no “Quiero hacer una ferreteria en Andalucía” like I say in the show – lo siento
mucho).
Finally, in the
Joy Division track (another track from Jon Savage’s compilation) you can
apparently hear the group eating crisps (patatas) at the start of the track, well
drenched in reverb by Martin Hannett.
The Ice T track
was chosen as it relates to the three films that he stars in, or appears in in
the festival this year that relate to Hip Hop.
“Planet Rock: The
Story Of Hip Hop And The Crack Generation”,
“Something from
Nothing The Art of Rap”
And finally “Uprising:
Hip Hop and The LA Riots”
The track “New
Jack Hustler” from the “O.G. Original Gangster” album of 1991 is also one of
the first examples of gangster rap, but was also used in soundtrack to the
Mario van Peebles-directed film “New Jack City” starring Wesley Snipes as well
as Ice T and Chris Rock amongst others.
Those with a
keen sense of humour might also see the irony in the use of the term “O.G.” for
“Over gold”, a syndrome by which African Americans die in ghettos from wearing
too many gold chains a-la Mr T in the blackploitation comedy “I´m gonna get you
sucka” which also stars Chris Rock as well as Isaac Hayes and was directed by
the Keenan Ivory Wayans of “Scary Movie“ and more fame.
The classic
scene with (young) Chris Rock and Isaac Hayes:
Rest of the
tracks don’t need too much explanation, though arguably you shouldn’t mix Sigur
Rós with The Doors too often, but, as Paul Weller says, “That’s Entertainment”.
Enjoy the festival and the show!
“What kind of place are we in where nobody
cares?”
-Disco
Inferno (D.I. Go Pop)
Despite the many beautiful voices and tracks on this weeks Cabeza de Vaca show at Scanner FM, the stars are undoubtedly Essex group
Disco Inferno who are enjoying a belated and most deserved moment in the
spotlight.
The catalyst for this attention is the release
of “The 5 EPs” compilation on One Little Indian that as its name implies, colletcs together five singles of almost all non-album tracks from the period 1992-1994.
The CD version came out last year and its
success prompted the release of a double vinyl edition that has kept the group
clearly in the consciousness. One suspects a certain amount of guilt in this,
since the group were clearly overlooked in their time, something that is both
surprising and sad since back in quiet little Perth in Australia at the beginning
of the 90s it seemed that everyone owned and loved “In Debt” released on Ché Trading back in 1992.
In addition to
learning that Daniel Gish of Bark Psychosis fame was once a member of the group,
Howell’s liner notes demystify how the group made their sounds, describing in
detail the gear that Disco Inferno started using and the problems it caused:
“Principally
inspired by My Bloody Valentine’s dense swirl, by The Young Gods Wagnerian,
sampler-enhanced post-industrial rock, and by Hank Shocklee / The Bomb Squad’s
sample-heavy, pressure-cooker productions for Public Enemy, they dismantled
their conventional indie set-up in one subversive, resolutely non-rock gesture.
Pulling back from the idea of being entirely sample-generated, [vocalist and
guitarist Ian] Crause replaced his standard guitar pickup with a hexaphonic
Roland GK2 MIDI version (outputting separate signals for each string), which
fed into a Roland GI10 (a guitar-to-midi interface that could track pitch). [Drummer
Rob] Whatley bought a set of MIDI drum pads [and later a full electronic dDrum
kit), and the combined output of this and the guitar data fed into a Philip
Rees MIDI merge, and then a Roland S750 sampler. Unable to afford the switch to
MIDI, [Paul] Wilmott’s bass remained unmediated and – like that of Joy Division’s
Peter Hook or PIL’s Jah Wobble – came to the fore as lead instrument,
functioning as a stable anchor and often the sole point of obvious melody.
Recording as a live band with guitars and drums triggering a MIDI-based sampling
system, the results came to resemble some chaotic studio explosion. Notes, chords
and beats were abstracted into shifting blocks of sampled sound. Each piece of
Whatley’s kit, each string of Crause’s guitar could be wired to a separate sample
(with each fret affecting its pitch or pan position), unleashing in real-time a
limitless flood of sound: the burst of fireworks, dripping water, breaking glass,
peeling church bells, crashing cars, screeching gulls, clicking camera shutters,
revving engines.”
The equipment
was not without its problems. The old Atari computer used for the recordings
would endlessly crash and playing live was frought with difficulty for the same
reasons. Crause later described it as “vaguely amusing nightmares of malfunctioning
and crashing equipment.” It is arguably this reason above all others that might
have led to the group’s downfall. Media praise had, after all been genuinely
positive, if not as prolific as the group might have like, but their inability
to gain momentum on the road and also to enter into any scene perhaps cost them
the most. Disco Inferno were forever outsiders, embracing sampling and
technology at a time when indie, surprisingly, turned its back on the burgeoning “baggy”
scene, while Crause’s obvert political lyrics may have been too much for many.
"Foreigners
get hushed-up trials
And you're
waiting for a knock at the door
Which would tell
if you spent the next few years
Free from life
attacked by petrol bombs
The price of
bread went up five pence today
And an immigrant
was kicked to death again."
Wilmott
explained the bands position clearly to Howell in an interview:
“We appeared to
exist within a bit of a bubble. The guitar kids didn’t like us because they
thought we were weird. The electronica people didn’t connect with it. The art
crowd weren’t really sure about us either… we existed in this strange
never-space where we sat outside looking at the Venn diagram and wondering why
nobody liked us…”
There are some
post-Disco Inferno curiosities floating around, more than I have briefly collected here, including several unreleased tracks
that might see the light of day again soon, and surely there is now a call to
re-release the early material on vinyl or even CD as well, as even the CDs are fetching high enough prices on Discogs?
To start, an unreleased
Disco Inferno track from the “Technicolour” sessions:
A BBC 3 live radio
session was post-humously released as “The Mixing it session” by Tugboat in
1999.
After leaving
Disco Inferno, Ian Crause recorded two solo singles, one for Tugboat and another for Spanish label
Aquarella. Crause’s politics apparently also led him to Bolivia.
Psychogeography
is a term that seems to come up a lot in terms of music these days (see also
the previous post on Punk and Jon Savage)
In particular, Patrick Keiller’s films are hailed a big influence on the
politics and sound of Disco Inferno and blend in with Crause’s left-wing
politics.
New radio show is
now available at Scanner FM.
All deep house this week with a focus on Manuel Tur. No need to say too much
more, but I previously posted
on a lot of these tracks recently if you need more information.
Next show will be a mixture of post-punk
influenced electronica, some trip-hoppy sounds and more, but details once it is posted next week.
“A modern
democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined.”
– Norman Mailer
There is a line
in the Introduction to Jon Savage’s exceptional history of the Sex Pistols and
punk rock, “England’s Dreaming”, which neatly summarises the underpinning
philosophy of the movement and marks its protagonists with the certainty of
tragedy:
“The central
problems thus remain for those who want to question the basis of society: how
do you avoid becoming a part of what you are protesting against? If everything
exists in the media and you reject it, how do you exist?”
The questions
are essentially the same as Albert Camus’s “The Rebel”, where he preaches the caution
necessary for any revolutionary action. Overthrowing and system and usurping
the power is to make yourself the dictator against whom you rallied; is to
contradict the pure motives of the uprising once assuming the burdens and
freedom of the newly gained power. One is thus forever locked into a cycle of
revolt.
Savage also
makes reference to a haunting quote by Joseph Campbell, from the essential book
“The Hero with A Thousand faces”
“If the hero,
like Prometheus, simply darted to his goal (by violence, quick device or luck)
and plucked the boon for the world he intended, then the powers that he has
unbalanced may react so sharply that he will be blasted from within and without
– crucified, like Prometheus, on the rock of his own violated consciousness”
The Sex Pistol
revolt is clearly complicated. Their album contains the track “E.M.I.” written
about the record company who famously dropped them after releasing the “Anarchy
in the U.K.” single, with the lyrics:
“and you thought
that we were faking
that we were all just money making
you do not believe we're for real
or you would lose your cheap appeal?”
Yet the knife
cuts both ways (sic: see below). John Lyndon, for example has recently given a mixed message about the recent “Never mind…” deluxe
edition perhaps still all too aware that
the mere presence of Sex Pistols product, and worse in luxurious “wealthy”
version, somehow undermines the authenticity of the groups struggle. Anti-capitalist
lyrics were rife in early punk and became the foundation of post-punks
philosophy. Lyndon himself played the game to great effect with Public Image
Ltd and their carefully designed releases. Incidentally, for those who may have
missed it, PiL have a new album out as well:
As he unravels
this conundrum, Savage also joins the gap between punk and Nirvana, who
followed the same path in many ways, only in a different media landscape. He
also draws in the imagery of Nicolas Roegg’s “The man who fell to earth”, where
David Bowie, playing the alien Thomas Newton is confronted by walls of TV
screens emitting white noise and imagery that is both “simultaneously exciting
and terrifying”, the two polar extremes of punk. Savage also invokes the “blank
generation” of replicants in Blade Runner, quipping “They don’t have feelings,
but recognize their necessity.”
The source of
the blankness is as fascinating as the violent upheaval that broke its control.
“Britain’s postwar decline began in wartime British dreams” Savage quotes. The
end of the post war boom in England saw rising unemployment (particularly in
youth), a collapse of the financial system that nearly triggered an IMF bailout
and the aforementioned rise of media saturation which only enhanced the
extremities between consumer desire and consumer reality. The psycho-geography
of the time also is paramount as he reveals in this short interview to
accompany an exhibition of some of his photos from the period. His poignant
last words here are “J.G: Ballard: High Rise and Crash.”
At the heart of
the book then is this terrible anxiety and nervousness, the terror of watching
John Lyndon, Steve Jones, Paul Cook and variously Glen Matlock and Sid Vicious,
and those who entered their slipstream, unravel society by confronting it with
taboos, by breaking the 20th Century’s symbolic language and
undermining the power of authority by holding up a mirror to its hypocrisy and
denouncing its commercial materialism. Indeed, the commercialization and thus
the disempowerment of the hippy ideal and its setting in the voided landscape
both within and without meant that only direct confrontation would do. The real
horror comes when society turns back, its bluff called and the thin veneer of
“civilized society” broken. The group are frequently attacked in the streets,
particularly Lydon; the debunking of fascist imagery somehow spirals into a
rise in fascism and the National Front; anti-authoritarianism becomes the iron
rule of law and eventually Thatcherism. All the while, the media makes its
money turning their lives into a soap opera while banning performances of the
group, appearances in the charts and essentially trying to erase the official
mark of the group on the unfolding history.
Malcolm McClaren
in particular comes across rather poorly, doing his best to encourage the
conflict (which in the end was the product). In particular, his intentionally poor
planning of the US tour was what broke the band already falling to pieces after
18 months of aggression, drugs, failing relationships within the group and
media pressure. Rather than choosing marquee venues to milk the fame and
reputation of the band, he instead chose to send the group to the south where
conservative attitudes were more likely to provoke violence, which is what
happened.
Watch Sid swing
his axe at the end of the set.
The death of
Nancy Spungen and Sid Vicious are also worth bringing up again as one of the
great rock n roll stories. Depending on your territory, you should be able to
watch this documentary “Who killed Nancy?”
The differences
between the findings of the film and the book are startling.
“[Rockets] Redglare’s
[a policy informer and methadone addict who apparently dealed to Nancy] policy
testimony conflicts with the account given to journalists immediately after
Nancy’s death by Neon Leon, a black guitarist who lived down the hall. In this
version the pair came over at midnight: Sid showed him a five inch knife Nancy
had bought him on Time’s Square, to protect himself from frequent beatings. Then
Viscous gave Leon his leather jacket and his newspaper clippings, repeatedly saying
that he was nobody, that he had no self-confidence. A few days after the story
Leon disappeared.”
Leon has in any
case has not disappeared in the documentary and is almost the main testifier.
Parts of his story ring true and consistent down the years, although his excuse
of having a tooth ache and having to return to the Chelsea Hotel on the fateful
night seems somehow improbable. In the documentary, it is an unknown dealer
form the hotel who did it and who did disappear never to e seen again. The
books conclusion seems to fall more with the hypothesis that it was Sid who
killed Nancy, using a knife that he was known to possess. In one version of the
story, the knife is identical to one given to Stiv Bators of the Dead Boys by
Dee Dee Ramone. The procurement of an arm was not, apparently, strange at the
time, especially amongst junkies who had seen a tough and often violent intrusion
into their world of deals and hits. Ironically, it was a fight over drugs and
Nancy’s failure to score that is the lasting impression given by Savage,
although he treads a careful non-judgemental path around the evidence. It is
not Sid’s death that is the subject of the book, but the death of punk and, in
a way, the death of society itself.
Sid and Nancy
were clearly in a very poor state by the end as this sometimes funny and
sometimes heartbreaking “heroin” interview shows.
Heroin had apparently
entered the popular mythology of the scene via Johnny Thunders and the
Heartbreakers and the New York Dolls (Nancy would come to London where she
would meet Sid as the girlfriend of the Dolls Jerry Nolan).. While Keith Richards
will attest to heroin’s availability before this time, it was the more brazen
projection of the myth in lyric and lifestyle that softened the inhibitions.
“Somebody called
me on the phone
They said hey,
is Dee Dee home
Do you wanna
take a walk
Do ya wanna go
and cop
Do ya wanna go
get some chinese rocks”
If there was any
more need of evidence of Johnny Thunders potent ability to act as a gateway for
the drug, then look no further than a banned Swedish broadcast from 1982.
