Tidying up

Claude François

Many people have commented to me that I should have mentioned that most people believe Claude François died using a sex toy in the bath and not changing a light bulb as the official version states. This is hard to demonstrate, as interesting as it sounds, but I leave readers to refer to an additional site for more unsubstantiated information (though I do also like the secret agent theory).

What is true, however, is that it was actually David Bowie who received the first official offer to write an English language translation of “Comme d´habitude” in 1968. Bowie’s song called “Even a fool learns to love”. The version of the song is from an old acetate with Bowie singing over the original supplied backing tape. By strange coincidence, his lyric also includes the words “my way”.

“There was a time, the laughing time,

I took my heart to every party,

They´d point my way.

How are you today?

Will you make us laugh? Chase your blues away?”

Although technically accepted for release by Essex Music, no further action was taken as Bowie was not yet considered big enough as a star to get the track off the ground leading to the involvement of Paul Anka and subsequently Sinatra.

Thou shalt not worship false idols.

Australia is hardly famed for sculpture or statues of famous people, but we do have several fine works celebrating local musicians. Some include the rather small statue of former AC/DC singer Bon Scott at the Fremantle wharfs in Perth, as well as statues of our man John Farnham, our lady Kylie Minogue and the unsinkable Dame Nellie Melba, all in the Docklands of Melbourne.

While most are well known figures, Dame Nellie Melba is probably less recognised these days, especially outside Australia. Famous for her fiery temperment and wonderful technique, she recorded with opera greats such as Caruso and was a genuine star (and one of the first Australian stars) of the late Victorian era and was one of the first perfomers to receive a damehood. Culturally she is remembered not just by her statue, but by the dish "Peach Melba" and the not often used expression "more farewells than Dame Nellie Melba" due to the 8 years of farewell tours she conducted between 1920 and 1928.

But back to Michael Jackson´s statue in Fulham, this is not the only unsually placed statue of a musician according to a brief photo tour released on the Guardian recently.

Cover versions - Claude François versus the world

Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry famously described cover versions as the “found objects” of recording art, ready-mades as it were, for the musician(s) to attach their name like Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal sculpture. Sadly, many cover versions end up also as filler or as lazy statements of hero worship.

There is also another curious aspect to cover versions which is when they cross borders and enter into another culture or language. This can often be amusing as well as insightful, especially when the song “belongs” so closely to a particular artist or country.

One man who should know more than any other about cover versions is Frenchman Claude François. Born in Egypt to Italian and French parents he has the sad notoriety of having died in his bathtub at the age of 39 trying to straighten a loose light bulb. In 1967 François and Jacques Revaux penned a hit called "Comme d’habitude" (“As usual”). However, it took a re-write from Paul Anker, in English, to transform the song into “My way” immortalised by Frank Sinatra, but apparently the most covered song of all time (my bet would have gone for the Beatles “Yesterday”). Famous interpreters include Elvis, Shirley Bassey, U2 and Robbie Williams and more. The most infamous version is perhaps Sid Vicious from the Sex Pistols, although the loudest (available) version is by French death metal group Mütiilation.

Claude François:

Frank Sinatra:

Elvis Presley:

Shirley Bassey

Robbie Williams:

Sid Vicious:

Mutiilation:

But Claude François is no stranger to covering songs himself, having filled his albums and sets with a vast array of “ready made” tracks throughout his short carrer. Perhaps one of the most unusual of all of these is his 1977 hit “Je vais a Rio” (“I go to Rio”) which was a cover of the hit originally penned by Peter Allen and Adrienne Anderson, which became the former’s signature song. The two videos are also fascinating, with the lonely Allen nonetheless enjoying himself while performing a striptease, whereas the plucky François lives the Fench stereotype by wooing a bevy of beautiful and busty women. Importantly here, François also sports a lovely mullet haircut not far away from that worn by Johnny Farnham (see below).

Claude François:

Peter Allen:

And speaking of covering famous Australian hits, I am reminded of a bus journey I had many years ago in the centre of Greece. Something on the radio caught my ear. At first I didn’t recognise it for the language, but once the chorus broke it became clear what it was: a Greek cover version of John Farnham’s “You’re the voice”, originally penned by Andy Qunta, Keith Reid (of Procol Harum fame), Maggie Ryder and Chris Thompson (ex Manfred Mann) in 1986 and released on John Farnham’s massive “Whispering Jack” album. The original video does nothing to dispel the myth that all Australian men had mullets during the 80s and that there is a reason why bag pipe solos aren´t often used in popular music.

Greece (X factor) version (starts around 1 minute)

John Farnham original:

Tommy Four Seven

2011 is shaping up to be a landmark year for experimental techno. January opened with Sandwell District’s “Feed forward” which was a masterful blend of crystalline minimalism and hopeless, shadowy moods. February saw Italian Luca Mortellaro aka Lucy release “Wordplay for working bees” on his own Stroboscopic Artefcats imprint, probably the most “in” techno label now and subject to a showcase at this year’s Sónar. Perhaps less techno and more IDM than Sandwell District, Lucy’s album nonetheless reinforced the dancefloor side of the label while demonstrating Mortellaro’s extensive skills at blending political messages with ambient industrial sounds. More recently in March, Tommy Four Seven released his debut album “Primate” on Chris Liebing’s CLR imprint. Rugged, dirty and fascinatingly mixed almost without high hats.Tommy Four Seven has also been busy making a number of promotional videos for the album release, including the most recent "G" as well as the two earlier singles "Armed 3" and "Track 5". The crossover between CLR and Stroboscopic Artefacts has also been productive with several remixes recently released or upcoming.

Cover art - Will Bankhead

All the fuss last week was about Lady Gaga. Not her falling over (again) during a performance, but the rather insipid cover art that she has so eagerly received for her forthcoming album. The said artwork features her face like a blow up doll blended into the front of a motorbike with Photoshop, complete with cheesey light sheens and hyper-real textures that has “service station CD bin” written all over it. One wonders if the hidden message here is “ride me” or “treat me like an object” whereas one caption I read had “Born to be riled”.

As appalling as it is, my personal retort would be “who gives a fuck?” in first place hardly anyone will see the album cover anyway, since most of their listening will be done on the radio and via MTV one presumes. Secondly, most people who do see this travesty will never see it any bigger than a box of matches on their iPod or the latest mobile device (who will need to or dare to show it full screen on an iPad or tablet?). This brings up the point of cover art in the digital age. Where does the future for music graphic design lie?

I recently raised this idea with the editors of Resident Advisor we will see if there is any response as it seems time now more than ever to start acknowledging a bit more the graphic artists making cover art and also those involved in video making.

One of my favourite designers/artists at the moment is Will Bankhead who has been responsible for the large majority of the recent covers coming out of Honest Jon’s Records.

Not possible to see at the digital level is his excellent use of mixed media. The two Shackleton covers, for instance feature the grainy textures of enlarged photographs and either added oil paints (on "Deadman") or embossed glossy textures on the surface (on "Fireworks"). His use of colour mismatching and games of repetition on the circular vinyl stickers is also commendable to complete the package, in particular on Actress’ now seminal album“Splazsh”.

Bankhead is an English artist based in London, and although in the limelight now for his work with Honest Jon’s (as well as the James Blake and Darkstar covers), he has in fact been designing for the better part of two decades and was one of the artists responsible for some of the most important covers on Mo’ Wax from the mid 90s.

Black Swan 3

Meanwhile it seems that everything is the Black Swan. Firstly, the group Black Swan about to release their follow up album on Experimedia, called "The Quiet Divide". Following in a similar vein to the first album, it nonethless incorporates greater use of voices and classical musical fragments.




Somewhat serendipitously, a Berlin techno label called Freund der Familie just sent me a 12" to review where the A side is a track called "Cygnus astratus" by Phidias. Cygnus astratus is of course, the scientific name for the black swan. Curiously, the gothic and tones and dark atmospheres make it seem almost a remix of the Experimedia project.

Bathetic Records

Here is an interesting label I came across recently called Bathetic Records, who release all their stuff on 7”s and casettes. The style of the label is difficult to pin down, but varies from folk to the more low fi semi-electronic elements of some modern strains of indie, noticeably the Not Not Fun crew who’s roster has crossed over with Bathetic on the odd occasion.

The first video is from Angel Olsen singing a folk piece that is surprisingly haunting and recorded in an interesting homage to 60s psych-folk. The vocal is fragile and delivered with a hint of pain or longing and has received many positive reviews on the web.

Tiniest Lights from Angel Olsen on Vimeo.

Second up is High Wolf, a Frenchman, who apparently lives in exotic locations such as Brazil and Jakarta, who makes low fi analogue tracks with a kind of faux New Age bent that recalls the tongue in cheek “dubious eroticism” of Father Moo and the Black Sheep.

Somewhere in between all these styles and ideas, and with a similar video to Angel Olsen, is the curious group The Wreathes with their debut release.

Wreathes - The Reigns from Death Coast Entertainment on Vimeo.

Though shalt not worship false idols

Here is a tale of two cities and two statues and how easy it is to worship false gods. Firstly, several weeks ago the chairman of Fulham Football Club, the Egyptian Mohammed Al Fayed erected a statue of Michael Jackson in front of the ground much to the chagrin of many (most) of the fans.

The question is: what has Michael Jackson got to do with football? Michael had visited the ground on one occasion back in 1999 to see an apparently uninspiring match against Wigan Athletic and yet was apparently in love with football.

However, the sadder truth is that the statue was apparently intended for the Harrod’s Department Store which was previously owned by Al Fayed and was deemed surplus to requirements by the new owners. It now takes pride of place next to the statue of the late midfielder Johnny Haynes a genuine idol for the club.

On the other side of the world in Detroit, there has been the bizarre proposal to erect a statue of Robocop, a fictitious cyborg from Paul Verhoeven’s sci-fi action movie who fights crime and saves the city from drug smuggling gangsters.

Perhaps the ironies are in this case that (i) Robocop is essentially an anti-capitalist film with apparently clear messages against privatisation and competition based business practices (who doesn´t remember the line from the sleazy tv show “I´d buy that for a dollar…” amongst others)

(ii) Detroit is of course a city famous for a myriad of musicians from jazz, to Motown to techno. Rather than honouring these people, the citizens prefer a Rocky-style statue to a violent figment of the imagination. In the following “comic” video, the actor Peter Weller who played Robocop perhaps inadvertently m akes the same point, listing some of the artists who have put Detroit on the map.

I also came across this scultpure recently in an exhibition. It is a giant Corned Beef can eerected in Sarajevo by the artist Nebojsa Seric Shoba as a "Monument to the International Community" for supplying the said brand of unpopular food as part of their humanitarian aid during the Balkans conflict. In this case, however, the wrong statue gives the right idea.

But while still on (or close) to Detroit, Carl Craig’s seminal Planet E label has just published a 20^th anniversary cretrospective and embarked on an extensive promotional tour. One of the highlights of this set was a Craig penned track under his Tres Demented moniker called “Shez Satan”.

Craig’s delivery here is truly comic while the electro styled techno only adds to the light heartedness. Lyrically, it is stupid and almost a joke, but the manner in which Craig projects himself into the delivery is special.

“You think the girl is dead

The cops charge you with her death

But she’s alive

And getting high on loads of coke and meth!

She’s Satan!

Your heart is broken

Torn up inside

Your lawyer tells you that bitch is still alive

She tried to rob a bank with her lover

Now you’re on the street

And that bitch better run for cover!

She’s Satan!”

One of the other standout tracks on the album is Martin Buttrich's track "Full clip" from 2006.

Recent gigs - Störung Festival

This weekend in Barcelona was the annual Störung Festival of experimental music and digital art held in La Farinera del Clot. A very low key affair compared to bigger cousins like Sónar, it is nonetheless always a good opportunity to hear some ambient and minimal music often in the context of specially created visual compositions and multimedia presentations.  This year all the concerts were held in a totally blackened and unlit theatre in the Farinera building, in one case even without the token gesture of a performer on the stage. The exception to the darkness was during the video interlude in the middle which worked especially well with eyes opening and adjusting to the light and trying to take in all the minute detail of the videos as they switched between rod and cone vision. In particular, two of the pieces shown here in the second half of the promotional video were spectacular.

Music wise, the Friday performance consisted of three musicians. The last to perform and generally the most venerable and well regarded was Asmus Tietchens a German musician with a pedigree that has seen collaborations with Thoma Köner, Merzbow, Tangerine Dream and Richard Chartier. Sadly, his performance was the least engaging of the three, albeit the most tranquil. Incongruous sounds often broke the resonating drones and the undulating sound fields and the overall evolution was often hurried.

Opening proceedings was American Kim Cascone who has a formidable reputation on avant garde electronic music circles. His piece “Dark atmospheres” was powerful and aggressive, described by himself as  

“A thirty minute immersion into a Lynchian hissing, sparking soundtrack for an irradiated wastelend…”

Sandwiched inbetween both these older artists was the younger Greek musician Thanasis Kaproulias working under the moniker Novi_sad. His work was arguably the most simple in idea, taking slowly pulsing and recognisable sounds and slowly building them over 15 minutes into (in)tense and over bearing  noise pieces before fading out. He performed four pieces in this manner, all somewhat similar with the most intriguing being the last which slowly modified sweeping cello lines into burning arcs of noise. However, the similar mechanisms to induce their patient unfolding coupled with their varied starting material meant each piece was reflected in the others of the set for comparison and contrast, creating a relative context that the other artists did not have, they being more intentionally amorphous and disorientating.

Always part of the festival is the ubiquitous Spanish producer Francisco Lopez. Here is an intriguing video from a previous edition of the festival in which his working method is shown, again with the emphasis on hearing by detaching any visual engagement with his “performance”. The video is in Spanish, but it nonetheless gives a clear picture without understanding the words.

In terms of the digital art, one of the highlights was a local Catalan design group called The Onionlab who had made some extremely subtle and psychedelic videos to accompany some music. This video is in Catalan and features a short interview describing the technology they use with excerpts of some of their work. More of their works are shown in excerpts in the second promotional video.

Some works of other visual artists and related musicians who performed or premiered pieces at the festival are:

D-fuse

Hugo Olim

Simon Whetham

Elufo

It was 20 years ago today - Part 2

While we have already seen that some of the periphery indie bands from the early 90s have been relegated to the budget price second hand bins, others are arriving at their 20^th anniversary celebrations in style. Two of these bands are Primal Scream and Ride, who have seen deluxe reissues of their classic albums, “Screamadelica” and “Nowehere”, respectively. The Primals in particular have gone all out with a special tin box, whereas Ride have gone for a remastering and a bonus live CD thrown in.

It is a shame that the footage has been removed for copyright reasons, but there exists some amazing footage of Primal Scream performin “Loaded” on Top of the Pops in 1991. The footage is interesting for two reasons. One, it features a wired band falling all over the stage without even the vaguest intention of miming, while secondly, the nonplussed keyboard player is none other than Ride’s Mark Gardner, roped into the appearance by Creation Record bosses. He too makes no attempt to look authentic and merely stabs at his instrument with a frown.

Two of the standout tracks from the albums are the Primal’s immortal “Higher than sun” consistently praised as the greatest ecstasy song ever written and who could argue, even if Bobby Gillespie does look like Liv Tyler in the video.

… and Ride’s Jonathan Livingstone Seagull-inspired opening track “Seagull” for which sadly there is no proper video.

Those keen for more nostalgia should look out for the recently released documentary about Creation Records called “Upsidedown” which is great on the big screen with a massive sound system, even if it is a bit linear. Sadly the story is a simple one, musicians and managers experimenting with music and dabbling in drugs, become drug addicts experimenting with drugs and dabbling in music, especially by the time Oasis come along. Nonethless, the story is interesting as it parallels the clash of guitar culture with the nascent acid house scene (cue Primal Scream again) and there are also many parallels with the Madchester scene and the Factory Records story told so well in “Control” and “24 Hour Party People”

Recent gigs - Eleh

Last week I had a last minute and rushed chance to catch the mysterious Eleh in action at a little gallery below a bank in Plaça Catalunya for a rather cheap €3.50. Not much is known about Eleh and he clearly wants it that way since he played the entire gig with back to the hundred-strong audience and lit from behind so he was only a silhouette. Perhaps more surprisingly, he finished the gig in a total and sudden rush, turning off the light then all his gear with a ruthless flicking of switches, before scurrying off into the wings.



As can be heard (but not seen!) from this piece, his music is immersive and microscopic, unfolding slowly and often using frequencies that have a physical presence: bowel churning bass and brain frying high frequency. I must confess, however, to being mildly disappointed with the show. The changes were a little clumsy at times and the trajectory of the music was often uneven as if he was in a state of anxiety or perhaps nervousness for the show. It was a shame as the gallery was bathed in slowly changing violet and magenta lights like La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela's Dream House in New York and seemed an ideal place to relax, especially with the busy city reaching a Saturday afternoon climax above. One of the moving things about the gig was also seeing a few parents with their children ther which seems a nice way to educate them into different musical enviorments and sonic possibilities, though tsome of the more extreme frequencies might not be great for the developing auditory senses!

Towards a cosmic music

Here is a quote by German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen about the nature and response of listening to music, taken from his book "Towards a cosmic music". I think the quote illuminates very well the many different emotional wellsprings with which music connects and asks very clear questions about why we might listen to music and different types of music.

"Music can take you downwards, upwards, sideways, lengthways - in any direction- Saying 'I love this music' doesnt mean anything at all. What do I love in myself when music pleases me? That is the decisive question. What part of me or what centre within myself, do I particularly love when I am listening to a piece of music? A single one, several, or all?"

It was 20 years ago today - Part 1

Some crate digging at a record fair on the weekend turned up many treasures amidst plenty of shit (as always). Three albums I bought for €2 each were quite intriguing as a snapshot of the indie scene from 20 years ago. All three of the bands have largely been forgotten which perhaps explains the price of the records, but going through them you can hear principally three different directions the indie scene was going and, more functionally, that many of the songs in between the singles aren’t so good which is perhaps why they haven’t quite stood the test of time.

First up and perhaps most primitive of all is Ned’s Atomic Dustbin. Arising from the Midlands in the late 80’s the group was distinctive for having two bass players and being composed of very young members who likewise attracted a younger crowd, often skateboarders and other post-hardcore teenagers drifting into indie rock. Their sound was perhaps the most continuous with the then nascent grunge scene. Dating from 1990-1991, "Grey cell green" is the better track from the “Bite” album, but since there is no official video for it we will go for “Kill your television” which is always a sentiment I can support.

Next up is The Farm, a group from Liverpool who were typical of many other groups at the time being a straight up rock band heavily influenced by acid house and the summer of love. Retrospectively, their sound is like a poor man’s Happy Mondays, but without their excessive drug influence and chaos. I always loved the artwork for their 1991 "Spartacus" album although I still cannot stand the faux loved-up everyman vibe of their ubiquitous hit “All together now” which closes it off. “Groovy train” is perhaps better for bridging guitars with beats.

Last but not least we have Curve with a track from 1992. Mixing shoegazer sounds with more robust dancefloor intentions and gothic style was always going to be a success, especially if you can add the sex appeal of night queen Toni Halliday, but it’s a shame that only the singles were really good, “Coast is clear” especially, but here we have “Fait acompli” from the “Dopplegänger” album. Halliday does her best to break Anglo-Gaulic relationships by (deliberately) mispronouncing the French “Fait” as “Fate”.

Christian Marclay

One of my favourite artists, Christian Marclay, has an exhibition on at the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank of London that finishes this weekend and has been receiving rave reviews.

The piece is essentially a 24 hour movie where each minute is composed of scenes of other movies depicting exactly that time of the clock and o real day in the scene. Already hailed as a masterpiece, it works as an installation, an extended collage and a critique of film.

A short piece by the BBC gives an overview

While some excerts from the installation are available here:

“The Clock” is not dissimilar to an earlier work of his called “Video quartet” which consists of four screens, or panels, each featuring scenes of movies in which the action centres on music making, singing or even patterns of sounds like explosions and screams. There is an abstract narrative to it, in that themes are clustered and designed to segue through a cycle of all the key emotions. However, the catch is that with four screens you tend to listen to the screen you are watching, thereby changing the sound every time you watch.

Another piece entitled ”Telephones” features a cut and post phone call through the history of cinema.

More musical based work by Marclay has also included sculptures of reassembled vinyl records and a piece called “Guitar drag”, which was a metaphore for the racial atrocities of the south of the US, in paticular where blacks had been dragged behind pick-up trucks in racial attacks. The piece also confronts the fetishism and sacredness of the instrument, especially a Fender guitar, by destroying it in an (a)musical climax.

Finally, here he is on television DJing with four turntables simultaneously. The difference here is he is playing modified records, where one piece of vinyl has literally been grafted onto another to make a chimeric disc.

Computer music with Brian Eno

I am sure my computer nerd friends knew this already, but it came to my attention recently that it was actually none other than Brian Eno who designed the sounds for Windows 95, making it one of the most heard (and despied) “pieces of music” until of course later releases of the software.

Brian Eno claimed that Microsoft wanted "… a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,  and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long." No mean feat.

The promotion for Windows 95 was extreme even by many standards, with rumours that US$3 per copy was spent on promotion, including the use of the Rolling Stones “Start me up” in the advertising campaign. Obviously then, the “universal emotion” of Eno’s start up music was nothing compared to Jagger and company’s ability to get us up and buying.

It is not immediately clear who made the sounds for Windows XP or Windows 7, but for Windows Vista Microsoft turned to another well known musician in King Crimson’s Robert Fripp.

Finally, although no video is available, Trans Am released a track off their Red Line album called “Let’s take the fresh step” which featured Eno’s Windows Startup sound stretched to 50 seconds.

Exploiting psycho-acoustic simulation

Many may have seen that the Beatles back catalogue finally made it to the iTunes store this week. Also in the news was a story of a legal suit against a US based company called BlueBeat who had briefly been selling MP3s of Beatles and other tracks for as little as $US0.25 until their forced closure in 2009.

What is interesting about this story is the apparent use of a technique called  “psycho-acoustic simulation“ by company owner Hank Risan to create “unique versions of copyright material”. The judges were obviously not convinced and concluded that Risan used an "obscure and undefined pseudo-scientific language [that] appears to be a long-winded way of describing 'sampling'."

But the Beatles “move” to the iTunes store is also intriguing. One wonders if it is a subtle link between the Beatle’s Apple Record Label (who's records came with vinyl labels designed with the inside and outside of an apple on either side) and the computer brand, a peace of sorts after years of apparent legal conflict over the image rights.

EMI however, look at the deal as a form of salvation amidst the music industry’s current collapse (see Figure 1 for albums and Figure 2 for singles).

  Figure 1: Album sales 1973-2010

Figure 2: Singles sales 1973-2010



Given the Beatle’s 50 year life-span so far it is interesting to imagine their contribution alone to the curve, having gone through a variety of formats despite only arriving now at digital.

What is perhaps more disturbing for the companies is that "The Beatles were about 10% of their [EMIs] sales in the US last year [2010], excluding digital, so having The Beatles available online can clearly be a good thing. They're very good at exploiting them." According to Ben Rumley from Enders Analysis. That an old group accounts for so much is worrying for such a company, but also one has to laugh at his “innocent” use of the word exploiting. It’s always nice to be treated with respect.

Black Swan 2

And while the Black Swan is still fresh: Cristian Vogel, another Barcelona resident (albeit Chilean born) has also recently released an album called Black Swan on Sub Rosa. Somewhat curiously this work was actually intended as a dance piece, but sadly without Natalie Portman. Vogel has worked frequently over the last years with Swiss choreographer Gilles Jobin and together they have premiered works in several countries.

By more coincidence, Vogel has also remixed a track by Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, also entitled Black Swan… This track combines Vogels electronic background with his more guitar and song based work.

This is an unofficial video but a nice accompaniment. Musically it shows another side of Vogel’s work, based less on electronics and more on his guitar and song based output.

Recent Gigs – Pulshar

It was a great pleasure to finally see Pulshar, a group from Barcelona that I like a lot at a club last week. It was also a greater honour to be able to do some photos of them as well for Resident Advisor even if my camera is not quite up to it.

The duo is made of Pablo Bolivar and Sergio “Aphro” Sainz. Bolivar is a long term survivor of the local scene, releasing an impressive array of techno, ambient and dub flavoured music for almost a decade including many tracks on Barcelona-based Galaktika Recods. His vocal partner Sainz is a designer and was a vocalist in several previous reggae groups. This was their first show of a mini tour to support their album from last year.

“Nospheratu” is probably their signature track while “Dub by the river” gives a sense of Bolivar’s techno side, albeit slowed down and spaced out. My favourite track is “No meditation” which is something of a soundtrack sometimes.

“You’re thinking too much

You think that you’re thinking too much

No meditation..."

Piiptsjilling

Another group that recently released on Experimedia that deserve a bit more attention is Piiptsjilling (pronounced ‘peep-chilling’). Their album “Wurdskrieme” from last year keeps appearing in commentaries and round ups of 2010 without ever making the “best of” lists. Combining isolation ambient, laptop and acoustic improvisation and most strikingly the poems of duo Jan and Romke Kleefstra, the effect is almost overwhelming and sometimes frightening with its quiet intensity. The language of the poems is from Friesland, a province in the far North of the Netherlands which adds another air of mystery-

“Ik soe in wurd net allinićh wêze wolle

Ik soe ûnmjïtlik ljoćht wêze wolle”

“I’d like to be a word not alone

I’d like to be immeasurably light”

-          Wurch Ljocht (Tired Light)

The musicians are the much celebrated Rutger Zuydervelt of Machinefabriek and Soccer Committee's Mariska Baars also from the Netherlands. The video was presented at the Frisian Film Festival 2008.

Black Swan

Perhaps a bit of serendipity that the week that I finish a review of an album by Black Swan that Darren Aronofsky’s brilliant film Black Swan opens in Barcelona. They have nothing to do with each other except perhaps a spiralling sense of darkness. But whereas the films claustrophobia is highly energised and sexualised, the album is detached and objective, but hardly emotionless.

Essentially an album length ritual, “In 8 movements” conjures up feelings of descent and drowning. In particular, listening to the album gave me the recurrent image of a scene from Yukio Mishima’s novel “Thirst for love” where the embittered and emotionally tormented widow Etsuko is finishing her bath and, in a wonderful stream of consciousness, Mishima describes her life whirling down and out with the bath water. Strange, that one can be parched and thirsty and yet drown at the same time…

"Until the moment of her death, it seemed, no one would know she was drowning."

But as a tangent, the music of the film Black Swan, as well as several other Aronofsky films, was done by Clint Mansell, once of 80s/90s group Pop Will Eat Itself (PWEI or the Poppies). Despite a somewhat aborted attempt at a reunion in the last few years, they seem largely forgotten and written out of the history of the great indie-electronica cross over of the time. Arguably an album like Screamadelica is better than their watershed “This Is The Day...This Is The Hour...This Is This!” or even “Cure for Sanity”, but still, one shouldn’t forget their worthwhile contributions.

To go even further on a tangent, one of the Poppies highlights was their tongue in cheek song for the Italia ’90 World Cup. Overall a mixed success, but then English groups singing pro-Italian songs about porn star prostitutes is never going to take you far.

The title is a pun on the New Order track “Touched by the Hand of God” from around the same time which also pays its own homage to the previous World Cup in Mexico and the actions of Diego Maradona. New Order also released a track for Italia ’90 that was England’s official song and featured an embarrassed looking Liverpool striker John Barnes in the video. Although not featuring prostitutes, the cheeky line “E for England” somehow went unnoticed at the time, despite being an obvious pro-drug reference. Would you get away with it nowadays? Not sure, but since the father of Chelsea captain and ex-England captain John Terry was arrested for selling cocaine, it could possibly slip through.

Druggy techno 1: Oni Ayhun

The latest clubbing trend across Europe at least, seems to be the After Hours scene. This means going to a club around 6am, with headlining DJs often coming on 11 am or later and shows lasting until late on Sunday evening. This doesn’t bode well for work on Monday, especially since there is a fair bet that to last from Saturday night until Sunday afternoon you have probably imbibed something illegal. The consequence of all this has been perhaps a greater emphasis on performance. Not of the DJ, but of the music. The music has to work in a more productive way to keep it all going so long. A side effect of this is some particular strains of electronic music with a heavy chemical element to the sound. It is almost as if the music itself needs to talk directly to the neurotransmitters to feed them forward into some perpetual frenzy of confusion, eleation and unknown pleasure. Perhaps one of the best examples of this is a track by Oni Ayhun from last year.




Oni Ayhun is the nom de plume of Olof Dreijer, one half of Sweden’s now defunkt electro super group The Knife. This track is almost uninteligible from a certain point of view, but its uncompromising weirdness is particularly unique and psychedelic. However, it does suggest a note of caution: there is always an end to excess and while now this kind of music is still “peaking”, there will come the inevitable come down one day.