Honestly.....

I think Novara media generally and, especially over the course of the recent election, Aaron Bastani's tireless commitment to getting out into the mainstream media in support of Corbyn(ism) (not to mention what excellent, cogent media performers both he and Ash Sarkar have become) have been an enormous force for good.

I encourage you to join me as a suscriber or if you are one already to join me in increasing your subscription rate where you can*

*we are not mates, have never met and if we did probably wouldn't like each other.

in praise of exorbitant serendipity

Significant overlap between my exorbitant sufficiency stuff and woebot's latest here, esp in its focus on acid/future folk, its relation to tradition/the pastoral/the ecstatic and its Rowan William's quote about an hour in.

this track from Rocket Cottage is also really interesting in its dubby use of the studio...

 

Exorbitant Sufficiency; or, some questions I would like to have asked Mark Fisher

( I was asked to give a talk about some aspects of  Mark Fisher's work, so this is what I said)

About a year or so ago I was briefly in contact with Mark about his book Acid Communism, which I'd heard rumours about, didn’t quite believe really existed and finally succumbed to the temptation to ask him about it. Anyway he sent me the introduction, which may have altered subsequently, and among the many striking observations there was one section and one phrase that particularly struck me, partly because I was thinking along similar lines and also because of what I was reading and listening to at the time.

I wanted to ask Mark lots of questions about this project and this particular phrase he’s used but it wasn’t the right moment to start burdening him with my insights so they went unasked, and so I am taking the opportunity to reconsider them now.

Mark uses a passage from Danny Baker’s autobiography to illustrate a moment that he then characterises as expressing a sense of “exorbitant sufficiency”.

I’ll think about that phrase in two dimensions, political and aesthetic, because as we are repeatedly told there is only aesthetics and political economy

First, here’s the passage from Baker’s autobiography.

"It was July 1966 and I was newly nine years old. We had holidayed on the Broads and the family had recently taken possession of the gorgeous wooden cruiser that was to be our floating home for the next fortnight. It was called The Constellation and, as my brother and I breathlessly explored the twin beds and curtained portholes in our cabin built into the boat’s bow, the prospect of what lay ahead saw the life force beaming from us like the rays of a cartoon sun. … I … made my way up to through the boat to take up position in the small area of the stern. On the way, I pick up sister Sharon’s teeny pink and white Sanyo transistor radio and switched it on. I looked up at the clear blue afternoon sky. Ike and Tina Turner’s ‘River Deep, Mountain High’ was playing and a sort of rapturous trance descended on me. From the limitless blue sky I looked down into the churning, crystal-peaked wake our boat was creating as we motored along, and at that moment, ‘River Deep’ gave way to my absolute favourite song of the period: ‘Bus Stop’ by the Hollies. As the mock flamenco guitar flourish that marks its beginning rose above the deep burble of the Constellation’s engine, I stared into the tumbling waters and said aloud, but to myself, ‘This is happening now. THIS is happening now.’ (49-50) 

The preconditions for this experience of exorbitant sufficiency get spelled out in the text essentially the high point of a post war social democracy and which Mark is keen to emphasise are the general preconditions of this particularly personal moment of rapture in order to deflect the criticism that it only represents a nostalgic reflection on Baker’s part or a typical, halcyon moment from childhood. This is of a piece with many of Mark’s observation that the foundations for a particular continuum of working class art and music production, punk/post-punk/rave/drum and bass were based on the possibilities of a dropping out and/or going to Art school, having a reasonably comfortable life on the dole, something which probably stops being possible around the mid to late 90s in the UK.

there is something very specific about this moment, something that means it could have only happened then. We can enumerate some of the factors that made it unique: a sense of existential and social security that allowed working-class families to take holidays at all; the role that new technology such as transistor radios played in both connecting groups to an outside and enabling them to luxuriate in the moment, a moment that was somehow exorbitantly sufficient. (italics mine)

One of the things that’s interesting in the book or at least in its opening section is that Mark has returned to the Sixties. In some ways the Sixties for an earlier iteration of K-Punk in its blogging heyday would have been anathema, the hippies and their tree hugging, free-love organicist enthusiasms were everything that Punk and Cyberpunk stood against and one of the main currents that has developed out of a particular strain of Mark’s thinking, Accelerationism, is still quite openly anti-Hippy in its orientation.

One of the ways in which hippie culture is/was anathema is in its focus on the child as symbol of  nature and innocence and Mark was a famous early advocate of anti-natalist positions, championing No Future by Lee Edelman and so on.

So I suppose my first question here would be; while we have to be careful to make sure we are looking at the techno-economic paradigm that make these highly personal moments possible, can childhood and the experience in childhood of continuous levels of engagement and enlargement, the constant learning, the, if you like, repeated epiphanies, be a good model for acid communist or exorbitantly sufficient subjectivities? I am also thinking here little bit of a recent proposal for a National Education Service in the UK, a non-neoliberal equivalent to the market demand for life-long learning, because there is something psychedelic in the world-renewing properties of theorizing and reconceptualising and that’s consonant in some ways with Mark’s interest in the notion of an outside; this space beyond current conceptions and boundaries that we constantly push into.

Can we locate a radical version of the inner child? Can we repurpose it, move it away from kind of wide-eyed avatar of some essential goodness and wonder, into a questing and adventurous, intellectually omnivorous, polymorphous subject, one that retains openness to an outside and that doesn’t ossify into a “realist” “adult” or highly individualized subjectivity?

There are several categories that Mark identifies as being essential to this sense of exorbitant sufficiency, light and space are two of them, but the most essential is perhaps time, free or unpressured time, and the sense of unpressured time comes of course from being a child, but also from a lack of anxiety about the future.

Exorbitant sufficiency has an ambiguous relationship toward the future as the space into which we project both anxiety and hope, but both those projections occur only if the present is intolerable, fallen, and will be redeemed in some way by the yet-to-come.

You might want to say that in exorbitantly sufficient moments the experience is one of time being in-joint as opposed to being out-of-joint. I’ll tentatively suggest that perhaps the time is always out-of-joint but that there are positive and negative modalities of that disjointedness. And I’d also suggest that there’s something slightly bittersweet in Baker’s passage which is perhaps why Mark says that it could “only have happened then” as it takes place just as a shift of a certain kind is occurring and that shift is symbolized here by the transistor radio that Baker takes up onto the bow of the boat.

One of Mark’s most influential formulations or projects was Hauntology, Hauntology expressed a time out-of-jointedness in its negative mode, a certain future should have appeared, a better present should exist but has failed to come into being and the remnants of this better present are scattered around us, provoking us, reminding us of the lost possibilities.

This idea is given a certain kind of empirical base by economists like Carlota Perez, who's essentially a long wave theorist of Capitalism and who argues that a shift toward a different type of post Fordism, a production regime not based on oil, mass production and disposability should have occurred around the 1970’s but the “spatial fix”, essentially the opening up of China and the economic power of big oil to suppress alternate technologies, among other factors, have kept us trapped in an unnaturally elongated  slowly and unevenly differentiating Fordist moment.

Interestingly the subject that Perez imagines as the new consumer of this deferred future/present is very similar to the figure of the Hipster, she believes that elites lead the way culturally, so these would be moneyed connoisseurs,  interested in the specialized, high quality, durable goods. interested in recycling and reclaiming and oriented toward vintage and low energy-intensive forms of commodity accumulation, creativity, “up-cycling” if you like. So to a degree the 2000’s in which Mark formulated Hauntology was haunted both by the remnants of the Utopian promise of an early order, Modernsim, intersecting with these kinds of harbingers of a Perezian future, temporally stranded and wandering around Dalston waiting for solar panels and vertical farming to arrive.

.

Time can also be out of joint in a “good way” however and I’d think here about Mark’s complaint that with regard to modern technology’s role in music, you can’t hear it anymore, using the example of Brian Eno's synths and tapes and the way they irrupted into Roxy’s often quite standard, pastichey pop and rock tunes, inducing in the listener an exhilarating frisson of Future Shock. Here the time is out of joint because the future is forcing its way back into the present, opening a passage in space-time and allowing the ghost of the yet-to-come, more an angel than a ghost perhaps, to come floating in.

In the passage with the young Danny Baker on the boat we have a couple of key interrelations, firstly the surrounding countryside offering an image of the eternal, the pastoral and sublime, the boat and its engine, an older classical form, an established type of technology and the emergent, the future, as symbolized by the radio.

 As it notes though, the radio is tiny and portable and the moment therefore captures something of an inflexion point in terms of the possibilities of Future Shock as an affect or an experience, and it’s a notion which disappears from the culture probably from the late 70s onward and is, to some extent an addiction that people of a certain generation have never been able to wean themselves off. Indeed you might want to argue that a lot of the accelerationist project both aesthetically and politically is redolent of Future Shock envy on the part of a younger generation.

For this Future Shock to occur I think the technology has to be visible in the same way as it has to be hearable in music, hence in a kind of vulgarized or at least popularized Hauntology and in Steampunk we have a fetishization of clunky, monolithic early versions of technology with huge, glowing cathode tubes, gramophones, vast banks of synths and so on. So as technology miniaturizes, blends in with its surroundings, becomes invisible, becomes more of a discrete frame, as architecture does too around this point, then this kind of juxtaposition, the eternal, the residual, the emergent begins to disappear. Even though cyberpunk, extropian and to some extent accelerationist fantasies focus on seamless integration, technical augmentation, the man-machine and so on, in a way a certain affect a certain dramatic temporal tension is lost with miniaturization, the future side of the relationship falls away, becomes invisible and the present feels lopsided, dislocated, out of joint.


 

So I suppose another question I would have there is, what’s the relationship of exorbitant sufficiency to time? Is it only possible at a given historical moment, a good out of jointedness? Is this why it can’t seem to come again?

The term exorbitant sufficiency expresses that one has enough yet that enough feels luxurious, far in excess of what’s required. So this is a paradox or an oxymoron, and this sense of completeness in the moment, this lack of orientation to the future puts me in mind of Todd McGowan’s recent work. McGowan’s a Lacanian, which makes reading him a rather forbidding prospect, at least it does for me , but essentially McGowan tries to build a politics, an anti-capitalist politics of the death drive.

To very crudely summarize his argument, we have suffered an originary loss and we try to replace this loss all through our lives by pursuing an object that will stand in for the loss, here, commodities, which promise us a sense of completeness but only lead us to experience disappointment, because what we actually want is the disappointment itself, the loss that allows us to desire again. The chase is better than the catch as Motorhead succinctly put it

McGowan believes ALL orientation toward the future is inherently bound up in capitalist desire, that the constant search for and repetition of failure maps onto the structure of capital accumulation, orientation toward the future as a salvationary space is caught up in the logic of the profit motive, commodity production etc. All of this is expressed through the kind of counterintuitive and paradoxical formulations of which Mark was fond, the title of his big book being “enjoying what we don’t have”. What we should stop doing for McGowan is precisely thinking about the future, seeking out boundaries and limits to overcome in the  belief that beyond them there is a true satisfaction possible as we already have everything we need or possibly everything we don’t need. Or perhaps better still we already don’t have everything we don’t need.

There are problems with McGowan’s work in that it fails to address the body and material needs, poverty and so on. It’s hard not to be oriented toward the future and accumulation if you don’t know where your next meal is coming from or you face crop failure this summer, and so there is an extent to which McGowan is really perhaps addressing, in a more rarified register, the Affluenza that bedevils his students and his peers. Either way, this refusal of the future overlaps in some ways with Marks exorbitant sufficiency; the moment burgeons into a sense of plenitude because in some ways it’s been bracketed off. The relationship with acid here might be fairly clear. Acid shuts down the memory and the sense of anticipation, the music critic Simon Reynolds likening its results to one being dazzled by the moment.

So the next question I would have asked is whether a post capitalist desire is at odds with a demand for the future and whether an exorbitantly sufficient renunciation of the future isn’t also an option to be considered? Does the idea of exorbitant sufficiency map in some ways onto the idea of Communal Luxury more than Luxury Communism.

Thinking about exorbitant sufficiency as an aesthetic, one of the songs Mark mentions as exemplifying this is the Kinks’ Lazing on a sunny afternoon, free time, a certain luxuriousness of surroundings, life devoted to the ludic, but also crucially a loss or a sense of being unencumbered.

I am going to suggest a series of qualities that I think are required for a work to add it to a canon of the exorbitantly sufficient and do that on the basis of some of my interpretation of the phrase I have already outlined.

I think it should it contain a sense of the good childlike, in the sense that it must have a certain numinous quality, a sense not of breaking into new territory/overcoming boundaries but of transformation or enlargement.

It should concentrate on a concentrated moment and that moment should be, paradoxically, illuminated by the eclipse of the future

Should have a sense of ease and lassitude.

Should formally express a relation and tensions between deep time and the traditional and the defamiliarizing possibilities of the technological but without aiming at the sense of the ruptural that characterized Future Shock

It should have something of the reverie and the epiphany.

I am going to nominate a song for this and that's Estuary Bed by The Triffids from an album with the interesting title, Born Sandy Devotional.






The  song title is also relevant. Estuaries are as much a combination of forces pulling in different directions as they are a confluence, an arresting of  motion and a deepening of it, rich, teaming environments alive with growth, ancient and yet also densely populated, worked over by humans, in some ways undermined by them.

Here are the lyrics.

The children are walking back from the beach/ Sun on the sidewalk is burning their feet/Washing the salt off under the shower/And just wasting away, wasting away

The hours and hours and hours

Come on, climb over your father's back fence/For the very last time we'll take the shortcut/Across his lawn/Then lie together on the estuary bed/Perfectly still, perfectly warm

Sleep no more/Sleep is dead/Sleep no more on the estuary bed/Ache no more/Old skin is shed/Sleep no more on the estuary bed

I see you still/I know not rest/Silt returns along the passage of flesh/ I hear your voice/I taste the salt/I bear the stain, it won't wash off/I hold you not

But I see you still/What use eyesight if it should melt? What use memory covered in estuary silt?

I know your shape/Our limbs entwined/I know your name, remember mine

Sleep no more/Sleep is dead/Sleep no more on the estuary bed/Ache no more/Old skin is shed/Sleep no more on the estuary bed

There is an emphasis on childhood, un-hurried time, sunlight, nature, the sense of rebirth, sloughing an old skin, awakening, mutual embrace, a mutual transformation. The track itself is essentially a pretty straight, folk-rock track given a particular brightness and ambient edge through the production, and as it progresses the lead vocal becomes increasingly detached from the background, swimming off into a kind of overlapping, multi tracked, oneiric drift, urging whoever the song’s addressee is, perhaps the singer themselves, to awake, to face life replenished. There is nothing but two people lying together in the sun, in a particular favourite place and yet the song implies this is everything, more than anything one could want, exorbitantly sufficient.

So, I suppose all of this would just have been a long preamble to the question, What do you think of this song, Mark? Do you like it?

To which his answer would almost certainly have been “no”.

Utopian interregnum/The acid commune must be built.

PUSSY GALORE - Revolution Summer

I wrote something brief about Corbyn for the Repeater blog.

MILKAVELLI - MONSTER UNDER THE BED

Lee Scott & Black Josh - Skedaddle (prod by Baileys Brown) OFFICIAL VIDEO

One of  Lee Scott's finest moments, from last year. Lad's a genius really.

It must be the vitamins that keep him going

indefatigable Renaissance  man Matt Woebot's  sublime yet instructive latest video project here.

First really warm day of the year.

You should donate to this.

HEAT - BROCKHAMPTON

Quite something.

Get your war paint on.

A Guy Called Gerald Escape HD HQ

Never heard this before: samples Negativeland's Escape from noise and Christianity is stupid, eh?

Donate

Novara  media have done tirelessly inspiring work for the left over the past five years and if  you can manage it I would encourage you to donate/subscribe.


 

Audio Resolution

The audio book of Resolution Way gets released in a week or so. It's here. 

Of course I suppose the downside of the impending Labour landslide will be to make this novel seem less relevant. Still you can always think of it as the future we have now happily avoided!

Knots in May

They create chaos because they are weak


We create chaos because we are strong


therefore only we can protect you from the chaos we create

HAPPYPPL [LEE SCOTT X TRELLION] TIMON SQUARED

This album's great.

Strange U - Terminator Funk (OFFICIAL VIDEO)

or maybe I will mention that Strange U album

worthwhile  initiative.

T-U-R-T-L-E POWER!

though lee scott claims this was the track that made him want to become a rapper

Robbie Williams - Rudebox

This could be the UR-text here, though. Then again I have always liked it.

MONGRELS - DUPPY CONQUEROR

We seem to be going through something of a golden age for hyper pop culture literate absurdist lo-fi provincial British hip-hop. With great videos.



and let's not even get into that Strange U album

HAPPYPPL [LEE SCOTT X TRELLION] MANZEL FT MILKAVELLI

Remarkable. So when are these guys getting on the cover of the Wire?

Happyppl [Lee Scott X Trellion] - Hashtag Sad

HAPPYPPL [LEE SCOTT X TRELLION] SWAYZE POINT

Lee Scott devotee that I am I'll have to give Trelly this one.

PATRICK DONSDALE - MON£Y iN BA9$

The Drones - Feelin Kinda Free / Full Album

MILKAVELLI - ROTTEN MILK

Milkavelli - Duck Tape Goose

HAPPYPPL [LEE SCOTT X TRELLION] HEART SHAPED U

No point in this not being publicly available is there? Especially as setting it up in Blog format was a bit of a labour of love. Apologies for dead links and inserts. time takes its toll.

No more miserable Monday mornings

RIP Mark Fisher. 

He meant a lot to me and did a lot for me and I'm far from being the only one who owes him a huge debt of gratitude. My thoughts to his family and close friends.

What a horrible loss. What a tremendous influence.

"when I am dead and gone/ my vibrations will live on"

Platform Capitalism is a very brisk, highly readable (yet detailed!) summary of the last thirty years plus a very cogent and persuasive overview of types and development of platforms, their role in contemporary capitalism, future direction and, briefly, possible responses to their power.

So that's a recommendation, then.

Interview with yours truly by working class hero David Lichfield over at his blog The Work Trials. Just in time for Christmas too! Trust me, if you knew how much I rambled you would understand the herculean levels of synthesisng and sculpting the lad has undertaken.

This is a short and very interesting analysis of the grounding of bitcoin (and related cyberlibertarian tropes) in the discourse of the extreme right.

Golumbia also blogs here

I'll be representing the mighty Repeater Books at this mini-Indy-Lit-fest  next week, reading from Resolution Way I guess.

Also a nice review of the book here.

Anybody else wants to review that book anywhere, just let me or Repeater know and we'll get a copy to you.

The in/estimable Owen Hatherley using Resolution Way to talk about the transformation of South London (among other things).

A Begging Letter.

Anybody out there feels well enough disposed toward me or my works, I'd be grateful if you gave me a vote on this.

Still banging on about the same old thing.

In the ongoing attempt to get someone, anyone to pay attention to Resolution Way (it's a crowded scene!) we are having a crack at this....

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/jul/18/not-the-booker-prize-2016-vote-for-your-favourite-book-of-the-year

Anybody who has read it and feels they could nominate it, that would be great, and incur a lifetime's supply of pints owed etc.

Officially inspirational,

There's a short interview with me here. Dunno what I am doing with my hands in that photo.....

Strange seas of thought, alone.

For heaven's sake man, buy!

In piss-poor attempt at promotion I remind you all that this exists. That's just what the reading public needs right now, a political dystopia to escape into.

If anyone has any better ideas re promotion I'd welcome them!

Also if I promised you a copy fear not, they will be dispatched this very weekend. Even if its raining! 

Which it will be

in a nutshell.

The defence of Corbyn is not the defence of an individual, even an admirable and, as the present situation shows, extremely brave one, but the defence of a possibility (and at the moment it is only a possibility) that Labour can offer and generate alternative purposes to those given by existing economic, political and social power. To defend Corbyn is also, though, to will and then engage in the thought and practical effort required to resolve the serious problems articulating, defending and finding ways to institutionalise and implement a modern socialist programme

Good blog post from Tom Gann

Resolution Way extract at the Repeater blog.

Simon being nice about Resolution Way

Bank holidAYA.

I chose the name and that image I'll have you know.

Indeterminate Resolutions

Right. well there you go. Though  actually it appears, rather in keeping with the books central theme that Resolution Way both exists and does not yet exist. Perhaps depending on whether or not, or who is looking.

Again I can only beseech anyone  who has read it to leave  a positive  comment on Amazon, should they feel positive  about it of course. Apparently these things matter.

Lovely stuff, as Alan Partridge would doubtless affirm.


WordPress code

The songs that hate women and the women that love them.

A great initiative

An important day for everyone of a left-leaning political disposition in the UK today. 

That's right, it's exactly two weeks until sleeper feel-good dystopian hit of the long, hot 2016 summer rockets to the top of the bestseller list, driven by the wave of radical leftism sweeping through the country.

You can pre-order it on Amazon, but you should probably get it from your local independent bookshop.

And if you do, thanks. I owe you a pint.

The Self Possessed

Winter sleeps and dreams of Summer

As does Autumn, as does Spring
but Summer, in its fleeting fullness
dreams it is beyond such things.

I, on the other hand had my first anxiety dream about Resolution Way coming out last night and am strongly tempted to enter into a period of protracted hibernation myself.

AYA, you'll be delighted to discover, is emerging from its winter hibernation.

Brion Gysin - All Those Years

This just appeared out of nowhere as I was listening to youtube, and it's really rather lovely, simple, charming, unexpectedly so. So I thought I'd share it.

Lee Scott - NVR MND (prod by Chemo) OFFICIAL VIDEO

Lee Scott/Blah Records on a bit of a roll at the moment.....

Great video too.

Slow Tech

No coincidence perhaps that this article

and this appear on the same day!





It's the (gratifyingly slow) partial return of Illbient really, innit? No objections there and much as I think a lot of this stuff is great it still hadn't surpassed Illbient's high point which, for me, must be this,






or maybe this 20 bpm banger....





hmmm....is a return to slow in the offing?

The Holy Mountain

The Arena of the Unwell

Out soon...

19th of May to be exact. I'll get some author copies no doubt. If you'd like one, email me. All I ask in return is that if you like it you leave a positive review on Amazon. And if you don't, you just quietly bin it.

Bass bits 3. The day everything became nothing

Another bass-driven hardcore band that reached their creative peak around the late 80s and early 90s and around whom, mysteriously, no critical consensus as to their excellence has coalesced is of course, No Means No.

The album Wrong remains as good as anything from the time, while the Blast First retinue were lionized partly because the smart, Vorticist-inspired branding and post-industrial/ experimental/no-wave pedigree of many of its bands fit the bill for smart, arty, leftfield attempts to revivify rock(ism) other less readily theorizable but no less exhilarating or experimental bands were relegated to second or third  division as lumpen hardcore, naive or simplistic  aggro music for the dog-on-a-string brigade, moshing music for the unwashed.

No means No were on the unfashionable Alternative Tentacles, Jello Biafra's label and as such, suspect, retrograde, tarred no doubt by association with The Biafran sensibility, (a sensibility that to be fair inflects most anarchism) painful self-righteousness combined with laboured Situationist wackiness (see; Chumbawamba). No means No might on first glance appear to be proponents of The Wacky, technically brilliant musicians “subversively” squandering their gifts as a repudiation to the sad, co-opted straight world of “success”/ the Industry and expecting to be celebrated for such (see; Ween), but any serious engagement with their work, saturated in dread, caustic surrealism and straight romantic yearning along with a dynamically inventive approach to the form that pushed hardcore right up against the limits of funk, prog, jazz and metal without ever spilling over into math-rock or other dry attempts at “complexity” and hybridization should rapidly rebut any such association. They remained fun, funny, powerful, ingenious, surprising, moving, perplexing; ranged widely without ever losing the essential elements of their own unique take on life and their chosen genre. You might call that the very definition of the fully achieved artist.

All bass dance-floor filler from the Phono's hardcore night circa 1988. Killer bass, killer guitar, killer lyrics. ditto non-Wrong bangerz (this list is potentially huge so I content myself with three more.) Worldhood also a strong contender for best NMN album.

Bass Bits 2 "HERE LIES THE FUTURE OUR PARENTS ENVISIONED"

Simon observes that there's not that many bands with two bassists. True, but luckily there is also.... Cop Shoot Cop.

Now given that Cop Shoot Cop remain one of my favourite bands of all time I am hard pressed not to just post all their albums up here. Instead I’ll do a rough chronology of best (bass) bits from Piece Man through to Release, from sharp-edged, metallic, primarily percussive Neubautenism to the more slickly produced, propulsive rubberized bounce once they got onto a major. The two-bass, percussion and sampler set up was a deliberate attempt to Smash Retro, to force rock into a different direction, expand the logic of post punk, staying true to their anti-Reaganite political vision and their experience of poverty and exclusion in the New York of the Eighties. Why they aren't celebrated as one of the great bands of the period (or indeed all-time) remains a mystery when also-rans Drive like Jehu are somehow headlining ATP. Off we go.

 

 HERE LIES THE FUTURE OUR PARENTS ENVISIONED

 A great high-toned hulking beast of a bassline on this bad boy.

 

 What's a lousy cut of meat/without a stinking crust of bread?

 But can't resist posting this one for the way the bass is used to lunge in, scatter shards and shrapnel around, generate tension.

 

 50 grand would make me a man!

But could also be used  to produce lovely, elegiac,chrome-plated melodic lines when they needed to get more ballady on us. Even if they were ballads about existential and political deadlock.

 

 Injustice is never an accident.

And also managed to combine the icily mournful with surges of bracingly cold funk. Plus some of the best lyrics, possibly the only explicitly political lyrics of the era.

 

Everything was easier when you had your time/ you have taken my innocence and now you want my prime/now what have you given me to remember you by/but hazy excuses and a handful of lies.?

Of course as they launched Project Mersh fully things started to get more conventionally rocky. Ask Questions Later tries to get into RATM and Springsteen territory, (Room 429) (among many other things) at the same time. Fantastically well in both cases, with extra doses of snark and Romanticism.

 Surprise, Surprise! The Government lies!

The below is probably a Natz track. Natz, to be fair, was the less interesting of the two vocalist/bassist both musically and lyrically tending to emphasize the post-Birthday Party/Scratch Acid to Jesus Lizard, skronk and howl. There's a bit too much Johnny Cash and Rockabilly in Natz's track as as opposed to the starker, wry Europeanism in Todd A's stuff, still this is a beauty.

 

If your lover used to beat you with his anger/if your mother used to tie you to a rock/ observe your former life preserved in amber/ like someone pulled the power on the clock.

The last album, Release goes full on for memorable, bouncy bass lines and is their most Stranglerish (clearly an unacknowledged influence) but still manages to produce some post Neubauten/ Young Gods derived clangoursly driving industrial belters a la.....

 

 Another Natz track, I suspect.

But the best of this is definitely Todd A ( who went on to found the brilliant Rain Dogs era Waits inspired

Firewater.)

 

 Can't really pick a best track, it's generally superb.

One last track then? Indulge me! A rather beautifully deployed scatter-shot, swelling melodic line from Days Will Pass another of the haunting, cusp-of-defeat semi-lullabies they also plied.

 

 We write the book/ we take the praise but not the blame.

Ah, so true! Drive like  bloody Jehu, I ask you.......

Bass 1.

So we are doing bass are we? Basstard that I am I am going to get in first with Punk Bass Favourites.


There's a particular kind of charging/frantic bass intro that sort of hurries/propels you into the track and these three are I think particularwinners in setting up the bit-when-the-guitar comes in.

THIS for instance is a bit long/flashy but it's still a great bass intro, innit?



Some people may well claim that The Stranglers have  been written out of Punk history for being to true to its apparent principles. I say this is also true of the Misfits and I also say that this is another rip-snorting intro, It's the tone as much as anything, along with those cheap tumbling drums. Gets me every time, in its numerous versions

 .




And who could  forget of  course The Dwarves' magnificent Fukking Life from the epochal Tooling For a Warm Teabag?*





Hmm. Maybe  I'll stick with Punk/Hardcore for a bit. Just so I can revisit all the songs I listened to from 15-20.

*for those who care Fukking Life starts at 1:56.

Eminent Domain

Eminent Domain. 

Eminent Domain.

Repeater books' first two books out today, That's been a pretty heroic effort from leaving Zero to getting the stuff out there ( a year and a few months I guess). Massive respect to all involved.

Facebook page here.

Shintaro Sakamoto -- "You Can Be A Robot, Too (feat Kamome Children's Ch...

I have discovered THE Accelerationist anthem. Of course it's Japanese. Goes the full gamut from the Extropian desire to engineer ourselves away from the horrors of the body to full automation and posits a burgeoning collective of pre-teen Transhumanists hungering for a release from work and the burden of emotions who will oversee the process. No, honestly, it does. Plus it's catchy.

Happy New Aya

This should be the perfect start to the year/tonic for your hangover.

I have never paid any attention at all to Nick Cohen to be honest. Not out of any strong (prior!) dislike I’d just presumed my time was better spent reading other things. I am also generally highly resistant to anti-Corbyn clickbait. Nonetheless this morning I did open this article and was, to say the least, surprised by the level of flimsy, delusional bullshit on offer. It’s almost as if we are living in two completely different Universes, Nick and I.

Nick bemoans the fact that the Tories are running over us unchecked by any serious opposition and the implication of course is that this is Corbyn and his supporters fault, after all Tories are going to be Tories, we shouldn't hold them to account for their actions, it’s “in their nature” and the real responsibility for the Government’s actions lies with the Opposition’s failures to counter them. Ultimate responsibility for food banks then lies with the Corbynistas. This is a perverse and self serving, you might even say morally vacuous, position to take ( and I suspect that Nick is nothing if not a moral vacuum).

Now, correct me if I am wrong, but wasn't much of the Corbyn surge brought about precisely by the failure of Labour to oppose the Welfare bill and by Burnham and Cooper’s essentially cowardly, opportunistic abstention? Didn't John McDonnell stand up and say he would swim through vomit to oppose it while the majority sat on their hands? Aren't the 48 MPs who did oppose it all the ones likely to do well in the imminent re-shuffle, and rightly so, “ after such knowledge, what forgiveness” and all that? Hasn't there been any effective opposition so far, no problems for the government whatsoever? Nothing around Tax credits? Hasn't McDonnell wisely shifted his position away from aping the Tories terms on the deficit? Hasn't political punditry been proven repeatedly and risibly wrong, around Oldham for example? Wasn't that increased vote a success, or are we just pretending it didn't happen, or doesn't mean what we insisted it would mean now we have been shown to be wrong? Still, of course the lack of integrity and realism is all on the other side, right? Not yours!

Perhaps none of this has happened and I have just imagined it all, no doubt I am so blinded by my atavistic political allegiances that I have some kind of confirmation bias that prevents me from seeing the wider political landscape like Nick. Heaven forbid that he has but this one shabby drum that he’s been beating for decades now every time the Guardian drops a coin in his slot. What pieces like this do is turn in some cod-serious analysis of Labour’s current dire state as true “opposition”, big on po-faced rhetoric and loftily fulminating with blocked compassion, without having the guts, or brains, to run with a convincing counter-factual. Where would we be now if Cooper or Burnham or Kendall had won, or if Benn came roaring in as replacement? Would they be holding the Tories feet to the flames over their cosying up to Murdoch? Would they be too abashed to do it at all if they had to face that dogged champion of the people Tristram Hunt across the floor, or any one of the others who wasn't previously prepared to oppose them on what should be a fundamental issue? Would Food banks have been instantly eliminated under Kendall, the leader we were repeatedly told the Tories most feared because she was somehow dead set on overturning the entire Thatcherite project and running completely counter to the Tories’ class interests by positioning herself to the right of them? Does this position of Nick’s, this implied loss and lack we suffer under, bear any relationship to the actual array of potential options as presented? Can a convincing case be made that any of the other candidates would be doing what is “needed”, can what’s “needed”, beyond a few empty signifiers; “effective opposition”, “electability” “ leadership” even be adequately defined here? The simple answer as far as I can see is: no.

Perhaps I won’t be reading him again, not because I want to bury my muddled head in the sandpit of infantile Leftism, I’ll happily read intelligent and honest Conservatives all day, even smart Neo-liberals, but this is just nothing, isn’t it? A windy, embittered, blustery and blathering nothing.

That’s what Nick’s bringing to the New Year Party.

I had always,somewhere at the back of mind, wanted to write something about Stump, mostly about what a superb lyricist Mick Lynch was, a man who now will mostly be remembered for repeatedly singing “big bottom” on The Tube.

When A Fierce Pancake first came out I was a bit disappointed; the Holger Hiller production was a little too monochrome and unmoored for me, lacked the drive and colour of Quirk Out or the fiercer elements of Mud On a Colon (Ice the Levant is essentially a retread of Release the Bats) Later I appreciated that as an album about depression personal and political in all its shades of grey, about trying to keep body and soul together in the money grubbing  80s, the pressure of poverty and bad habits on relationships, and the flights of  fancy, willful absurdity and gallows  humour  needed to get through, it was something of small, sui generis masterpiece. The  album it reminds me of most, oddly, is the Blue Orchid’s vastly more euphoric and acid-fuelled The Money Mountain. If the Orchids  were still riding the diminishing blast  waves of the Sixties on through to the early Eighties a Fierce Pancake’s ashen, punch-drunk psychedelia was more attuned to the drained, queasy, scattershot state of the counterculture by the end of the decade.

A Fierce Pancake, Wikipedia informs me, was Flann O'Brien's term  for “a  deep conundrum”, the conundrum of how to go about being an artist and an avant-gardist as the 90s arrive, and here’s perhaps the reason why it’s  easy not to look too closely at Stump or Lynch’s lyrics, there’s  a superficial or surface wackiness that has prevented a proper critical appraisal.

As a small personal tribute I have tried to transcribe the lyrics to Heartache, a brilliant, punning conflation of personal and political states .Though I can't quite get the bit where the vocal effects kick in.

Nothing grows in the shadow of heartache

House plants wither, time grows old

Entropy is a lousy friend

When you are in from the cold and at your wit’s end

It’s a leech, it’s a landlord calling for the rent

demanding the loot when you're already spent.

when hunting a headline means walking a breadline

when you're strangled on a shoestring,

blisters on a new thing (?),hooked

by fine line

wriggling

Nothing grows in the shadow of heartache

House plants wilt, time grows old

Entropy is a lousy friend

When you are in from the cold and at your wit’s end

It’s a leech it’s a landlord calling for the rent

demanding the loot when you're already spent.

meet me and (?) the wound won’t heal

well that’s the rub of the deal

so much for chemistry

you’re just a suppository

for a pile of old memories

It’s a leech, it’s a landlord calling for the rent

demanding the loot when you're already spent.

Repeater celebrates its first anniversary by announcing its releases for the first half of next year. And you  can treat yourself to an early Christmas present (well, Christmas 2016) by pre-ordering the magnificent Resolution Way here, apparently.

Naha partakes of the infernal

I have a guest post over at the Repeater blog, a playlist of 80's/90s Japanese female pop artists.

Anthony Galluzzo's fascinating ongoing spat with the Prometheans/Accelerationists ongoing here.

Naha partakes of the infernal.

Smart Cunts.

There seems to be a particular pack of broadly New Labour Leftists whose anger toward Corbyn I have difficulty characterizing as anything other than pathetic. To say that there is no substantive critique of their policy proposals, or a broad alternative analysis of what a post-Crash social and  economic strategy looks like, how Labour might get back into power and what the media-scape is now, would be a generous understatement; it rarely seems to get past the level of “URGGHH, look at his Beard.”+”my principled moral objection”/ “ LOL Trots and Tankies are so Eighties!” I can only conclude that Corbyn has ruined their brand, their image, tarnished the shiny New-Labour self they invested in; they liked that Blairite, business-suit-and-a-neat-haircut kind of Left, a Left comfortable with good food and nice houses, a Left that would go to war for a noble cause and help Britain punch above its weight in the world, a Left that would be taken seriously by Washington and Wall Street, that out of "realism" would do deals with Saudi and China, that was "adult" and had accepted the end of History, yet knew how to party and got why the creative industries (in which they work) were vital to the Nation etc. That's the kind of Left they want to be associated with, the kind of Left that relieved them of the burden of being uncool. Now you have to be associated with a hair-shirt, bearded pacifist Vegan in a tank top who doesn't think the economic argument is won and has all these "outmoded" attitudes. "URGGGH! look at his shirt" You don't want to rub shoulders with the uncool kids, the ones you felt superior to for years. You know a decent shirt when you see one,  you’re clued-up.

The immediate cry of "he's unelectable" also reveals something intellectually and imaginatively stunted in this over-identification with New Labour, an inability to dwell in "negative capability" a panicked desire to foreclose the moment, a movement you no longer understand .Something's  happening, there is a groundswell, the future is open, it may go in numerous directions, one needs to be  alive to  possibilities, more importantly , to seize them, more importantly still, maybe you can learn something from those people you previously dismissed, maybe a bit of humility would be in order, what, after all, did you do for the greater good during the Great Moderation you seem to somehow think New Labour conjured up for you with a slick suit and a bit of spin and which Yvette Cooper would somehow magically restore? Were you paying attention to what was on the horizon, what the foundations of your mini-golden age were built on, the direction of travel. No? None of this has caught you off guard? The Crash, the protests, the SNP, the Corbyn victory, Greece, the housing crisis, austerity. You were paying attention, close attention weren’t you, understood the axiom that the boom was merely the precondition for the nature, depth and severity of the bust? Or were you too busy congratulating yourself on being the  smart guys; all that stuff is over! And now you are wandering lost and  angry in a world you don't understand. And raging at it for being wrong. Or sulking and sniping. But hoping if you front it out long enough somehow your authority or credibility as One-Who-Gets-It will be restored.

So if anyone’s having an ongoing “emotional spasm” it’s this big bunch of petulant New Labour crybabies throwing their toys out of the pram because they don’t get to be THEY_WHO_KNOW anymore. I had a bit of this myself when a whole host of people half my age and much better informed, more highly educated than I am and roaringly articulate turned up on social media with a set of commitments and insights more radical than my own. I felt a bit threatened, I felt a  bit compromised, I adopted a defensive ego-protective approach of  tutting at their naive enthusiasms and wanting to “correct” them before having to admit, Carl, you still have lot to learn even if you are 42, swallow your unearned pride and accept that at best here you can contribute but you are in no position to command. Of course, I don’t have to have an opinion for a living, it doesn't matter much to me if I am wrong or I have to, once again, have my own limitations and shortcomings, my own relative ignorance revealed to me, to all. After all I am just an English teacher with a now very occasional blog. Imagine the discomfort of waking up one morning if you did it for a living and discovering that lots of young people think you're an irrelevance and that Seumas Milne is “a Don” (facebook, 2015). Why would they think that? Historical naivety? Unlikely, because if this generation have done one thing it’s stay in education due to limited work opportunities, and those history, political science and philosophy graduates are the ones most obliged to stay in there. Any analysis of the average level of formal education attained by the new surge of Labour supporters? I am prepared to bet there's plenty of MAs and PHDs in there. Not that that matters because they haven't had your “life experience.” and anyway we all know that degrees today aren’t as difficult as when you got your B.A. at the taxpayer’s expense.

One of the reasons Corbyn, Milne and McDonnell are popular with the young people might be  because when the student protests and Occupy happened a few years back rather than wisley chortling about its stupidity in the pub they went along to the occupation and offered support, turned up at the demos and spoke encouragingly to the confused youngsters who still can’t quite see why the treatment that Xi is getting at the moment, or our support for Saudi or Israel, our  colonial past and present, or the illegal wars we have entered into is all basically fine, “how the world works", but to suggest that Putin may be anything other than the reincarnation of Stalin or that the historical record on Communism has been distorted or that Marx may be worth reading makes you an apologist for fascism or a guileless ideologue, a danger to civilized values, eaten  away at by "liberal guilt". What’s most extraordinary and perplexing about this demographic is the bafflingly unashamed way they can talk about Communism. Remember back in the roaring, brand-new 90s when if you said things like Class or Marx or even the word Capitalism, summoning up thereby some atavistic binary in which there were oppositional ideas and movements that had now been relegated to the  dustbin  of history, you revealed your own sad attachment to a vanished world, your inability to see how times had moved on? Get with the new-speak. “Market democracy”; that was the term to use wasn’t it? “Global Forces”. “Inclusion”. And yet those terms themselves can’t be uttered straight-faced anymore. “Capitalism” is back, with all the antonyms the word invokes. That’s the link up between twenty-somethings and Corbyn’s generation. They speak the same language, use the same terms unashamedly.

Maybe that oh-so-modern, Left-Liberal position, that market-democratic triumphalism, the notion that because for a few years inflation was stable, credit loose, the banks yet to crash and a housing bubble burgeoning, we were in radically new, classless times was just wrong, even though you said it a thousand times! Even though all your clever, successful friends agreed! Who would read Capital at that point, or engage with old fossils like David Harvey, so sad! Well, thousands of young people, it turned out. Still wedded to that particular moment in your art, opinions, practice, daily Pub-patter? Still confident it’s not the 70s anymore (lol) or the 80s, that all that has been superseded. I certainly hope we won’t find you shifting your eternally sceptical realism leftward, always tracking from a wise remove the re-calibrating commonsense of the moment. Yet realists never seem to actually get to grips with the real conditions of the current moment, do they?

Oh well, you had your time at centre-stage, maybe  you made hay, maybe you lost the chances you had, maybe it will all come back again for you, but if not do try and show a bit of dignity as you are wheeled off into the wings, won't you?