Sunday, February 11, 2018

The Sprawl


“No one goes home. Nobody else comes through”



This mix started off as a request by my friend Jorge for a sequel to the Alien/Sci-fi mix that I did a year or so ago. The conversation might have been triggered by listening to Klaus Schulze’s album Cyborg at home one evening as the first idea was to have a cyborg flavoured mix and the first place-holder name of the mix was actually “Cyborg”. Initially I began to make a list of some movie source material for samples and sound effects that would drive the ambience and “narrative” including Terminator and some of the more dubious cyborg/robot-themed Sci Fi films of that type including Cyborg and Universal Soldier, none of which I had or have ever seen. There was therefore a rough early idea that the sounds would suggest flesh and machines.





However, by coincidence, at the same time I had started to listen to a lot of Sonic Youth. This included both the old albums I used to love when I was at university and the newer post-Experimental Jet Set Trash and No Star albums which I had never heard as the band had by then drifted off the radar. Sonic Youth had also been discussed a lot in summer when another friend Patrick was over visiting with his family (when I mentioned the mix to Patrick during the creation he referred me to Alva Noto which was a glorious find). One of the things he mentioned to me was an anecdote about the Sister album and that it was inspired by Philip K Dick’s twin sister who died shortly after birth. Daydream Nation also had a track on it called The Sprawl inspired by William Gibson whereas one of the more recent albums, Sonic Nurse, also features another track Pattern Recognition also inspired by Gibson and his 2003 novel of the same name. As I started revising all the Terminator films for samples and atmosphere, including the appalling Terminator’s 3 and 4 which I had never seen, and listening to Sonic Youth, it seemed that they should somehow be combined. It also seemed logical that to make the mix as different as possible from all the others I have done that it should feature as many guitars as possible. There is therefore a question in the mix, that old fashioned question that was asked a lot at the time that electronic music and rave emerge “what is authentic music?” Authenticity is also a very important theme to Dick and to Blade Runner. In the mix the guitars and the electronic music should confront each other, sometimes dividing, sometimes uniting, challenging each other to be victorious and more real than the other (flesh and machine). In a certain way the idea is then to explore cyberpunk as both a whole, but also to divide it into cyber and punk halves. In the latter case, post-punk rather than pure punk is a more accurate interpretation.

Cyborg then pretty quickly became The Sprawl in terms of idea and mood, but also in terms of what the music itself was suggesting through its own genealogy. In a search for new tracks I kept coming across artists and tracks that made direct reference to the Sprawl, such as Sonic Youth, Blush Response and the electronic collaborative group The Sprawl (Logos, Mumdance and Shapednoise), who sadly do not feature despite some effort to find some place for them at various occasions. Arcade Fire are way too pop to even thing about.

 



Bringing it all together, the idea was to create a vibe that was reminiscent of a place like the Sprawl, neon and chrome, dystopian, lonely people filled with television anxiety, an endless city filled with wonder and despair, body hacking, technology fetish, violence, grime, virtual reality and drugs. A “high-tech shanty town”. However, whereas Gibson’s Sprawl in the books refers to the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis (BAMA) on the East coast of the USA the mix is definitely intended to be a West Coast thing, especially LA which is the scene of the Terminator movies as well as Blade Runner which is of course heavily indebted to Dick and emerged at the time that Neuromancer was published. In terms of Blade Runner, the new film came out while the mix was already underway (the mix was started around August in terms of ideas and track hunting and finished in January 2018), but I wanted to steer clear of Blade Runner as much as possible, or at least to suggest it in many of the tracks and the mood, but not depend on it. I caved at the end, but it seemed almost appropriate in a way, a return to that theme of eternity where “my invented world” in the mix suggests the “real world” of Blade Runner, but it is only when the latter emerges at the climax that the real vs the authentic becomes a doubt and a question.

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” 

The idea was also to capture an 80s vibe when the cyberpunk genre started to emerge. Many of the tracks were identified doing searches for random music that might be from that time that or that might contain guitars, be dark ambient, dark wave etc. This is how I found Factrix which was a gold mine and I knew that no matter what Phantom Pain had to be in there. Chrome also comes up when looking for these kinds of search terms although I was already a convinced fan. Sadly I couldn’t match in their guitar sound as much as desired since they were perhaps too song based at times. But being a West Coast band, there was a lot of desire to get them in there and their warped and dystopian sci fi tendencies clearly fit the overall mood. Chris and Cosey also came about looking for these kinds of tracks as well as Gamardah Fungus from Ukraine, Phase Fatale and Boris with Merzbow (albeit all of these are more contemporary).

The mix should therefore try to assemble different levels of entrance (jacking in) and exit from consciousness and reality, an intentional audio virtual reality which should hopefully conjure up images of passing Tron-like through cyber security networks to reach different environments, all within the Sprawl, psychedelic experiences in the modern city and the pressuere and tension of information driving capitalism and seeding doubt and questions of identity. Or it could be even a virtual reality passage to the Sprawl from the present time. Some of the voices (especially Kim Deal’s and Factrix) are meant to resemble characters in a vague movie plot coming back occasionally and influencing the narrative.

The original idea of the end was to finish with the end of Sonic Youth’s Trilogy: Eliminator JR, but this was jettisoned in favour of the end of Trilogy: Hyperstation which has a much more tolerant pace for mixing in. In the climax I also wanted to use Ital’s White II from the 2014 album Endgame (Planet Mu), but the sounds were strangely too cyber (much like the group The Sprawl) and I couldn’t get the mix right with my primitive setup (everything was done with Adobe Audition CS5). Evan Caminiti’s album Toxic City Music was tried out in several places, but never quite worked whereas I would have loved to fit in Soft Cell's Slave to This track from Last Night in Sodom that was from the same mid-80s era that the mix tries to evoke and seems to resemble the kind of madness and mind meld of reality and virtual reality running together. I also looked at trying to build on the guitar aspect with a more metal influence with labels such as Cold Meat Industry from Sweden providing some interesting options that were not easy to weave in or too dominant in a demonic way and thus fell by the wayside. There are some snippets of Sephiroth and Leviathan, although I would have liked a bit more perhaps of these and the metal sounds (these were also specially considered for Jorge and Carles). Like the Ital track, it was not possible to get in some New Zealand noise like Gate, Birchville Cat Motel or the Dead C, as well as the non-NZ Double Leopards, as again, with these tracks it was hard to get the texture right since they are generally really low fi and stand out too much when they come in (raising the question of musical authenticity again, perhaps; compare their fidelity with Ital for example). Saåad’s album Verdaillon was another that I couldn’t find a place for. In terms of numbers, it is worth pointing out that there were 275 tracks in the final shortlist (equivalent to 1.1 days of continuous music listening!) of which 58 made the final cut. However, as many of the tracks were also cut up and rearranged and with additional samples there is probably close to 100 individual sound files collaged together in the final mix.















As well as plenty of tunes that didn’t make the final cut there are plenty of cyberpunk films that I never referred to and/or haven’t seen yet including the Matrix trilogy which I loathe, Johnny Mnemonic (too much Keanu Reeves), Ex Machina, New Rose Hotel, Strange Days (another LA film with James Cameron links), Ghost in the Shell (not the new version) or any other animé film.




Dedicated to: Jorge Boscan, Carles Roca, Patrick van Kann. In memory of the late Steve Barwick and his game of Shadowrun.






Track
Artist
Title
Label
Year
1
Sonic Youth
(I got a) Catholic block
SST
1987
2
Sonic Youth
Mote
DGC
1990
3
Sonic Youth with Christian Wolf
Edges (1969)
Sonic Youth Records (SYR)
1999
4
Sonic Youth
Ghost bitch
Blast First
1985
5
Chrome
TV as eyes
Siren Records
1976
6
Factrix
Splice of life
Adolescent Records
1980
7
CTI (Chris & Cosey, Joe Potts & John Duncan)
Trapezoid
Play It Again Sam Records
1988
8
Silent Servant
Untitled
Ecstatic
2017
9
Autechre
Second bad vibel
Warp
1995
10
SNTS
Origin of light
Samurai Horo
2017
11
Blush Response
Rebirthed in the Sprawl I
Total Black
2016
12
Lustmord
Babel
Blackest Ever Black
2013
13
Lustmord
Grigori
Blackest Ever Black
2013
14
Gamardah Fungus
Opium
Hidden Vibes
2013
15
Sonic Youth
Contre le sexisme
DGC
1998
16
Samuel Kerridge
Straight to hell
Downwards
2013
17
My Disco
1991 (Lustmord 20/20 remix)
Downwards
2016
18
Regis
Blinding horses (Turin version)
Blackest Ever Black
2013
19
Leviathan
A silhouette in splinters
Profound Lore Records
2005
20
Svreca
Jade (Skirt remix)
Semantica
2012
21
Sonic Youth
I love her all the time
Blast First
1985
22
Sonic Youth
Expressway to your soul
SST
1986
23
Ancestral Voices
Divination
Samurai Horo
2017
24
Sonic Youth
The Sprawl
Blast First
1988
25
Sonic Youth
Providence
Blast First
1988
26
Roly Porter
Gravity
Subtext
2013
27
Sephiroth
The call of the serpent
Cold meat Industry
2005
28
Factrix
Phantom pain
Adolescent Records
1981
29
Silent Servant
End / Optimism
Infrastructure New York
2016
30
Abdulla Rashim
Under this wasted sky
Northern Electronics
2014
31
Dadub
Life
Stroboscopic Artefacts
2013
32
Sonic Youth
Brave men run (in my family)
Blast First
1985
33
Oscar Mulero
Black propaganda
Warm Up Recordings
2012
34
Scarpa
Pi-hahiroth
Frozen Border
2015
35
SNTS
A1
Horizontal Ground
2014
36
Danil Araya
Acid ambient 1
Kontra Musik
2016
37
Lustmord
Grigori
Blackest Ever Black
2013
38
Phase Fatale
Beast
Hospital productions
2017
39
Roly Porter
High places
Tri Angle
2016
40
Autechre
Second bad vibel
Warp
1995
41
Fjäder
Hjärtans Fröjd
Shaded Explorations
2016
42
Hans Zimmer & Benjamin Wallfisch
2049
Epic
2017
43
Vangelis
Tales of the future
EastWest
1993
44
Alva Noto
Xerrox monophaser 2
Raster-Noton
2007
45
Blush Response
Rebirthed in the Sprawl I
Total Black
2016
46
Hvide Sejl, Varg, F. Valentin
A Vase on a Table & a Painting in a Room
Posh Isolation
2016
47
Alva Noto
Xerrox Teion
Raster-Noton
2007
48
Boris and Merzbow
Akuma no uta
Relapse Records
2016
49
Sonic Youth with James Tenney
Having Never Written a Note for Percussion
Sonic Youth Records (SYR)
1999
50
Sonic Youth
The Trilogy: The Wonder
Blast First
1988
51
Burial Hex
Book of Delusions (St. Hilarys Day Remix)
Brave Mysteries
2011
52
My Disco
Our decade
Temporary Residence Limited
2015
53
Carter Tutti Void
V1
Mute
2012
54
Burial Hex
Book of Delusions (St. Hilarys Day Remix)
Brave Mysteries
2011
55
Fjäder
Venus
Shaded Explorations
2016
56
Ancestral Voices
Divination
Samurai Horo
2017
57
Varg
Ursviken
Northern Electronics
2015
58
Sonic Youth
The Trilogy: Hyperstation
Blast First
1988


Features extra samples from: Bade Runner (1982), Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Terminator (1984), Terminator: Salvation (2009), Escape From New York (1981)

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