Sound up. lights down. Pay close attention to every inch of the screen, every word of the text. More like a puzzle this time, and as gorgeous as ever...Andy's back
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
For anyone who has been missing the fun over at Antigram the Miller versus the Smughackunt Kontingent is reaching new heights. Cracking post here.
Monday, March 19, 2007
“Don’t talk to me about simple things, there’s no such thing. All a man can build is his vision, and I love my man for trying”
The Constantines: Shine a light.
The general line on the Young Gods is that they’re “Futuristic”, X number of years ahead of everybody else in the world of Rock (if indeed they belong in this or any other world), and this has been the take on them since 1987 when their self-titled debut LP was made Album of the Year by Melody Maker. In fact it’s probably only with the most recent release “Second nature” and the upcoming “Super Ready Fragmante” (about which more later) that they have finally pushed out ahead of us and begun to exist in a dimension that might rightly be called the future.
Getting out there, beyond us, in order to report back has been a twenty year odyssey, a massive, visionary undertaking. As a first step The Young God’s went as far back as it’s possible to go, back to prehistory, in order to strip rock down, purge it of its impurities and forge it again, burning off the rust, liquefying it, reducing it to its essence, tampering with its DNA. With their first two singles “Envoye” and “Pas Mal/L'amourir” ( Treichler’s binding of love and death into a single term) the rock trappings, even though deeply distorted, were still undeniably there, lighting fast, scimitar sharp samples, more like sudden arcs of electricity ripping through the tracks than anything resembling a conventional riff, Stooges and Hendrix sample pulled inside out, collapsing in on themselves and irradiating the ferocious forward momentum of the martial drumming.
The album itself, by taking a further step back, was a move forward and, with perhaps the exception of the track “Jimmy” ( whose chorus is tellingly, “Jimmy’s still hammering!”), the last traces of Metal had been scoured away. The whole album was enacted on a distant, twilight shore, waves crashing against the cliffs, the moon heavy in the sky, the elements in turmoil, the earth itself still cooling and forming. It was glacial, volcanic, a kind of rugged, shale and basalt psychedelia, Treichler’s mind blown on the emptiness and immensity of the New World, hymning the sun and moon, communing with his fellow creatures ( “A Ciel Ouvert” “Nous de la lune” “Fais le Mouette”). The overlap between the Young God’s vision of a new, unexplored world and the sets of possibilities, the great unpopulated vistas opened up by the sampler itself (their only instrument aside from the drums) is evident. The technology was the precondition for the full expression of the imagination, a previously undreamt of synthesis of man and nature through the medium of the machine could be glimpsed. If the Young Gods were exultant it was because their/our moment of apotheosis was drawing near.
Perversely the Young Gods were lumped in with the industrialists of the time, yet that first album, in all it glowering, granite glory couldn’t be further from the abjectionist, hyper-charged R and B of Harley Davidson riding, cartoon Alienation Peddlers such as post- “Land of Rape and Honey” Ministry, NIN et al who largely used the technology to beef up Tradrock. The Young Gods were arty Europeans who played sampler led music with rockish dynamics. They didn’t really fit into the industrial/new beat dance bracket (post DAF flirting-with-Fascism stuff: Front 242, Front Line Assembly, Nitzer Ebb) but weren’t part of the Wax Trax white trash axis either. And therein lay the root of the problem that exists to this day. Just where do the Young Gods stand in relation to any other music/ genres?
The answer is resolutely outside or beyond them. Certainly not with the industrial rock that was around at the time and only tangentially with an earlier wave of metal bangers ( Neubauten, SPK). Where, for example, SWANS set out to replay the master-slave relationship (as a form of critique, no doubt) in the most hypertrophied manner imaginable, the Young Gods were never punishing or gruelling, never about endurance or machismo. Mystical, hippy tree-huggers to a man, wont to daub themselves in loam, Slit’s style (earth fathers?) they expressed a pre-industrial, even pre-social joyfulness, a fullness, a plenitude of being. Their genius of course was not to think that this would best be expressed by rootsy guitar strumming and a bongo, quite the reverse, that it was only through the sampler that a radical reordering of things was made possible. The “God” trope may have done it too, of course, it has, after all, figured large in industrial/rock, but crucially the difference between “the Young Gods” as opposed to say, Gira’s “Young God” records, is not just in the pantheistic pluralizing, but in where the stress falls. Young God is swaggering, super potent, worshipped and feared, every unsure adolescent male’s default rock fantasy, “The Young Gods” carries a different emphasis, is a different assertion of selfhood, the emphasis is on the “young”, the tenderness of it, the power still in its emergent phase, still flushed with the thrill of discovery, all expectation, what more might we become? If these were gods, they were gods who frolicked in the first dawn, not Sadean emperors presiding over debauches in a ruined kingdom. Where Industrial sought liberation through fatal strategies of consumption, derangement and submission the Young Gods were a distinctly Utopian proposition and if Triechler’s voice was deep, guttural, rasping, “commanding” (attributes which have slowly been eschewed) this was less drill sergeant’s bark than a consequence of the power of whatever almost uncontrollable force came surging through him. That line of Rilke’s “I am a string stretched tightly over wide, raging resonances” seems to capture Triechler’s relationship to the music best. What the Young Gods said simply, better still what they showed, was that it hadn’t all been done. There were still possibilities in becoming, a future man was waiting to be realised and they were plotting their trajectory toward him.
The Young Gods had lost none of their exploratory elementalism when they next touched down with an album even more extraordinary than the first. From the pre-modern world of ice and rock their next album, and largely ignored absolute masterpiece “L’eu Rouge” ( The Red Water), not only created but then took the listener on a careering journey through some Baudelarian Fin de Siecle European city of the imagination, built up from samples of classical music, metal guitars, barrel organs and a cathedral’s worth of musique concrete. Again though, despite the opportunity for Grand Guignol, or showy Decadence the album never feels anything other than celebratory, immensely life affirming, overflowing with energy, ending with “Les Enfants” a triumphant military parade through the streets, seemingly heralding another new dawn. After the prodigious leap from prehistory to the late Nineteenth century Treichler and co began to take smaller steps. Their next album was a brilliant reworking of songs by Kurt Weil, including an extraordinary version of “Mackie Messer” and, for me at least, the definitive version of “Alabahma Song” a great charabanc clanking its way across the dustbowl as the clouds gather overhead, Treichler howling his insatiable appetites out into the teeth of the storm.
“TV Sky”, the next release, was the God's first and so far only direct engagement with Metal, Treichler shifting over to singing in English and following the progress of whatever Geist they had in their sites, to the new world of post war America, the age of affluence. In some ways it’s their least rewarding album. Though it does contain moments of extraordinary power it’s marred by the inclusion of the over-literal Steppenwolfisms of “Gasoline Man” and anthemic Goth singalong number “Skinflowers”, their two biggest “hits” to date. “TV Sky” was their most conventional gesture toward American Industrial and its peculiarly simple minded take on Cyber-punk (even the title is reminiscent of Nueromancer’s famous opening line “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel….") and certainly the singles were nowhere near as bold and condensed as the phenomenal “ Night Dance”, the beautiful proto-ambient “ She rains” or the epic, Doors-alike title track
1996’s “Only Heaven” by contrast emerged into the world of flows, weightless economies, demateraliazation, the sound taking a much closer step toward Ambient, but still loosing none of its cathartic force. Intriugingly it was only here that the Young Gods began to reference the future at all. “Someday we’ll be on our way, say goodbye to yesterday,” Franz sang on the magnificently titled “ Kissing the Sun” (not so much anti-Oedipus as anti-Icarus, these boys (“someday we’ll be in the light/swimming in the open skies”)). By now the sounds had become as unsourceable as they were on the first LP, when it rocked there were blasts of multicoloured light, sheets and washes of fizzing and humming power, a white-water ride through great eddies and cataracts of uninflected sound, but increasingly the music was becoming more mantric and meditative too, a kind of cosmic drift shot through with gaseous billows and the twinkling of distant constellations. Treichler actually sang here, purred at times, whispered, there was a lulling, inacantatory quality. Where the covers of previous work had seen the Young Gods primitivist logo scoured onto a variety of surfaces, ice, rock, metal, with “Only Heaven” the three stick figures simply floated in a great, white void.
By the time “Second Nature” arrived they had disappeared altogether. “Second Nature” was preceded by an album of radical minimal techno remixes “Heaven deconstruction” and found the band at last where they had always aimed to be , though it had, perforce, taken a mighty detour for them to get there, to the future they had always craved, the momentum they had created by swinging so far back finally allowing them to break through. The cover of “Second Nature” was a roiling, vegetative miasma, nature seen up closer than human eyes can manage, the sound itself a virtually indescribable hybrid of textures, at once brittle and permeable, more like a series of swarming, multi-coloured fragments solidifying into planes and then scattering, kaleidoscopic, multi cellular, oddly organic. “Astronomic” throbbed and scintillated as it pulled glowing shards of anti-matter and slivers of space rock into its super dense, black heart, Treichler promising over and over “ I’ve got a present for you….the future, the future…” The ferocious single “Lucidogen” (an imaginary drug that would render the user hyper-alert, super-connected, post-human) cried out “ Calling all the animals, help me wash my eyes, the future is in sight.” But they were already there. If their work bore a resemblance to anything within music it was Trance and Techno, the presiding sentiments were joy, peace and exhilaration. There was no posturing, no bad boy-ism (there never has been) no anger, no sneering, no transgression, no sex or violence, yet it was undeniably rock. Perhaps the Young Gods were simply the ultimate Prog band, the most successful attempt to elevate rock from its roots in low Dionysian revelry, to civilize it, to Westernise it. In fact, if there is such a thing as an apollonian frenzy or Dionysian serenity then the Young Gods have it. They don’t tread a cautious middle ground, they seek instead to synthesise the unsynthesisable. Seeing no conflict between a love of nature and a love of technology, that man can be reconciled to and shaped by both in an endless, joyful dialogue “Second nature” seemed beamed back from some post-human future dreamed of by Stelarc or Houellbeque .
And with “Super ready: Fragmante” they’ve gone even further forward. It’s a tremendous work, expanding even on “Second Nature” and where there were fears that their momentum couldn’t be sustained it’s probably their best work yet, a kind of hyper-amalgam of all that’s preceded it. There’s so much going on at any given time that its impossible to unpick the sheer immensity and multi-textured complexity of the sound. Noises burst, rotate, race past each other in opposite directions, throb, fade, shatter . Stand out tracks at this stage are “Cest quoi cest ca” in which great slabs of rusting iron are repeatedly dropped into the middle of track and ground up by the drums, “El magnifico” with its super-attenuated, backwards, forked-lighting guitar solo, the title track, a magnificently controlled nine minute building and release of tension. (There is no melancholy in the Young Gods, no sense of exhaustion, possibly because the momemt of climax is so often deferred, energy is hoarded in order to prolong the bliss, to be kept just always at the point of rapture without hitting the downward slope). By “The Colour Code” Treichler’s so blissed-out himself he can only manage to gasp a dubbed out, transported “every, every, every” as the track lifts him and carries him along in its silvered slipstream.
And bear in mind I’m listening to this on a computer.
The cover of “Envoye” the first single, back in 1986, was a photo of Treichler’s torso (no men without chests here!) with the band's name carved rather messily into it. Long before Ritchie tried to convince postmodernism he was 4 Real and simply couldn’t, no matter how much he hacked up his wrists, Franz Treichler was passionately inscribing his absolute commitment to his own vision in his flesh. It’s a commitment that has never waned. To say that they’re simply the most important band in the world trivializes them. The Young Gods are an event.
The general line on the Young Gods is that they’re “Futuristic”, X number of years ahead of everybody else in the world of Rock (if indeed they belong in this or any other world), and this has been the take on them since 1987 when their self-titled debut LP was made Album of the Year by Melody Maker. In fact it’s probably only with the most recent release “Second nature” and the upcoming “Super Ready Fragmante” (about which more later) that they have finally pushed out ahead of us and begun to exist in a dimension that might rightly be called the future.
Getting out there, beyond us, in order to report back has been a twenty year odyssey, a massive, visionary undertaking. As a first step The Young God’s went as far back as it’s possible to go, back to prehistory, in order to strip rock down, purge it of its impurities and forge it again, burning off the rust, liquefying it, reducing it to its essence, tampering with its DNA. With their first two singles “Envoye” and “Pas Mal/L'amourir” ( Treichler’s binding of love and death into a single term) the rock trappings, even though deeply distorted, were still undeniably there, lighting fast, scimitar sharp samples, more like sudden arcs of electricity ripping through the tracks than anything resembling a conventional riff, Stooges and Hendrix sample pulled inside out, collapsing in on themselves and irradiating the ferocious forward momentum of the martial drumming.
The album itself, by taking a further step back, was a move forward and, with perhaps the exception of the track “Jimmy” ( whose chorus is tellingly, “Jimmy’s still hammering!”), the last traces of Metal had been scoured away. The whole album was enacted on a distant, twilight shore, waves crashing against the cliffs, the moon heavy in the sky, the elements in turmoil, the earth itself still cooling and forming. It was glacial, volcanic, a kind of rugged, shale and basalt psychedelia, Treichler’s mind blown on the emptiness and immensity of the New World, hymning the sun and moon, communing with his fellow creatures ( “A Ciel Ouvert” “Nous de la lune” “Fais le Mouette”). The overlap between the Young God’s vision of a new, unexplored world and the sets of possibilities, the great unpopulated vistas opened up by the sampler itself (their only instrument aside from the drums) is evident. The technology was the precondition for the full expression of the imagination, a previously undreamt of synthesis of man and nature through the medium of the machine could be glimpsed. If the Young Gods were exultant it was because their/our moment of apotheosis was drawing near.
Perversely the Young Gods were lumped in with the industrialists of the time, yet that first album, in all it glowering, granite glory couldn’t be further from the abjectionist, hyper-charged R and B of Harley Davidson riding, cartoon Alienation Peddlers such as post- “Land of Rape and Honey” Ministry, NIN et al who largely used the technology to beef up Tradrock. The Young Gods were arty Europeans who played sampler led music with rockish dynamics. They didn’t really fit into the industrial/new beat dance bracket (post DAF flirting-with-Fascism stuff: Front 242, Front Line Assembly, Nitzer Ebb) but weren’t part of the Wax Trax white trash axis either. And therein lay the root of the problem that exists to this day. Just where do the Young Gods stand in relation to any other music/ genres?
The answer is resolutely outside or beyond them. Certainly not with the industrial rock that was around at the time and only tangentially with an earlier wave of metal bangers ( Neubauten, SPK). Where, for example, SWANS set out to replay the master-slave relationship (as a form of critique, no doubt) in the most hypertrophied manner imaginable, the Young Gods were never punishing or gruelling, never about endurance or machismo. Mystical, hippy tree-huggers to a man, wont to daub themselves in loam, Slit’s style (earth fathers?) they expressed a pre-industrial, even pre-social joyfulness, a fullness, a plenitude of being. Their genius of course was not to think that this would best be expressed by rootsy guitar strumming and a bongo, quite the reverse, that it was only through the sampler that a radical reordering of things was made possible. The “God” trope may have done it too, of course, it has, after all, figured large in industrial/rock, but crucially the difference between “the Young Gods” as opposed to say, Gira’s “Young God” records, is not just in the pantheistic pluralizing, but in where the stress falls. Young God is swaggering, super potent, worshipped and feared, every unsure adolescent male’s default rock fantasy, “The Young Gods” carries a different emphasis, is a different assertion of selfhood, the emphasis is on the “young”, the tenderness of it, the power still in its emergent phase, still flushed with the thrill of discovery, all expectation, what more might we become? If these were gods, they were gods who frolicked in the first dawn, not Sadean emperors presiding over debauches in a ruined kingdom. Where Industrial sought liberation through fatal strategies of consumption, derangement and submission the Young Gods were a distinctly Utopian proposition and if Triechler’s voice was deep, guttural, rasping, “commanding” (attributes which have slowly been eschewed) this was less drill sergeant’s bark than a consequence of the power of whatever almost uncontrollable force came surging through him. That line of Rilke’s “I am a string stretched tightly over wide, raging resonances” seems to capture Triechler’s relationship to the music best. What the Young Gods said simply, better still what they showed, was that it hadn’t all been done. There were still possibilities in becoming, a future man was waiting to be realised and they were plotting their trajectory toward him.
The Young Gods had lost none of their exploratory elementalism when they next touched down with an album even more extraordinary than the first. From the pre-modern world of ice and rock their next album, and largely ignored absolute masterpiece “L’eu Rouge” ( The Red Water), not only created but then took the listener on a careering journey through some Baudelarian Fin de Siecle European city of the imagination, built up from samples of classical music, metal guitars, barrel organs and a cathedral’s worth of musique concrete. Again though, despite the opportunity for Grand Guignol, or showy Decadence the album never feels anything other than celebratory, immensely life affirming, overflowing with energy, ending with “Les Enfants” a triumphant military parade through the streets, seemingly heralding another new dawn. After the prodigious leap from prehistory to the late Nineteenth century Treichler and co began to take smaller steps. Their next album was a brilliant reworking of songs by Kurt Weil, including an extraordinary version of “Mackie Messer” and, for me at least, the definitive version of “Alabahma Song” a great charabanc clanking its way across the dustbowl as the clouds gather overhead, Treichler howling his insatiable appetites out into the teeth of the storm.
“TV Sky”, the next release, was the God's first and so far only direct engagement with Metal, Treichler shifting over to singing in English and following the progress of whatever Geist they had in their sites, to the new world of post war America, the age of affluence. In some ways it’s their least rewarding album. Though it does contain moments of extraordinary power it’s marred by the inclusion of the over-literal Steppenwolfisms of “Gasoline Man” and anthemic Goth singalong number “Skinflowers”, their two biggest “hits” to date. “TV Sky” was their most conventional gesture toward American Industrial and its peculiarly simple minded take on Cyber-punk (even the title is reminiscent of Nueromancer’s famous opening line “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel….") and certainly the singles were nowhere near as bold and condensed as the phenomenal “ Night Dance”, the beautiful proto-ambient “ She rains” or the epic, Doors-alike title track
1996’s “Only Heaven” by contrast emerged into the world of flows, weightless economies, demateraliazation, the sound taking a much closer step toward Ambient, but still loosing none of its cathartic force. Intriugingly it was only here that the Young Gods began to reference the future at all. “Someday we’ll be on our way, say goodbye to yesterday,” Franz sang on the magnificently titled “ Kissing the Sun” (not so much anti-Oedipus as anti-Icarus, these boys (“someday we’ll be in the light/swimming in the open skies”)). By now the sounds had become as unsourceable as they were on the first LP, when it rocked there were blasts of multicoloured light, sheets and washes of fizzing and humming power, a white-water ride through great eddies and cataracts of uninflected sound, but increasingly the music was becoming more mantric and meditative too, a kind of cosmic drift shot through with gaseous billows and the twinkling of distant constellations. Treichler actually sang here, purred at times, whispered, there was a lulling, inacantatory quality. Where the covers of previous work had seen the Young Gods primitivist logo scoured onto a variety of surfaces, ice, rock, metal, with “Only Heaven” the three stick figures simply floated in a great, white void.
By the time “Second Nature” arrived they had disappeared altogether. “Second Nature” was preceded by an album of radical minimal techno remixes “Heaven deconstruction” and found the band at last where they had always aimed to be , though it had, perforce, taken a mighty detour for them to get there, to the future they had always craved, the momentum they had created by swinging so far back finally allowing them to break through. The cover of “Second Nature” was a roiling, vegetative miasma, nature seen up closer than human eyes can manage, the sound itself a virtually indescribable hybrid of textures, at once brittle and permeable, more like a series of swarming, multi-coloured fragments solidifying into planes and then scattering, kaleidoscopic, multi cellular, oddly organic. “Astronomic” throbbed and scintillated as it pulled glowing shards of anti-matter and slivers of space rock into its super dense, black heart, Treichler promising over and over “ I’ve got a present for you….the future, the future…” The ferocious single “Lucidogen” (an imaginary drug that would render the user hyper-alert, super-connected, post-human) cried out “ Calling all the animals, help me wash my eyes, the future is in sight.” But they were already there. If their work bore a resemblance to anything within music it was Trance and Techno, the presiding sentiments were joy, peace and exhilaration. There was no posturing, no bad boy-ism (there never has been) no anger, no sneering, no transgression, no sex or violence, yet it was undeniably rock. Perhaps the Young Gods were simply the ultimate Prog band, the most successful attempt to elevate rock from its roots in low Dionysian revelry, to civilize it, to Westernise it. In fact, if there is such a thing as an apollonian frenzy or Dionysian serenity then the Young Gods have it. They don’t tread a cautious middle ground, they seek instead to synthesise the unsynthesisable. Seeing no conflict between a love of nature and a love of technology, that man can be reconciled to and shaped by both in an endless, joyful dialogue “Second nature” seemed beamed back from some post-human future dreamed of by Stelarc or Houellbeque .
And with “Super ready: Fragmante” they’ve gone even further forward. It’s a tremendous work, expanding even on “Second Nature” and where there were fears that their momentum couldn’t be sustained it’s probably their best work yet, a kind of hyper-amalgam of all that’s preceded it. There’s so much going on at any given time that its impossible to unpick the sheer immensity and multi-textured complexity of the sound. Noises burst, rotate, race past each other in opposite directions, throb, fade, shatter . Stand out tracks at this stage are “Cest quoi cest ca” in which great slabs of rusting iron are repeatedly dropped into the middle of track and ground up by the drums, “El magnifico” with its super-attenuated, backwards, forked-lighting guitar solo, the title track, a magnificently controlled nine minute building and release of tension. (There is no melancholy in the Young Gods, no sense of exhaustion, possibly because the momemt of climax is so often deferred, energy is hoarded in order to prolong the bliss, to be kept just always at the point of rapture without hitting the downward slope). By “The Colour Code” Treichler’s so blissed-out himself he can only manage to gasp a dubbed out, transported “every, every, every” as the track lifts him and carries him along in its silvered slipstream.
And bear in mind I’m listening to this on a computer.
The cover of “Envoye” the first single, back in 1986, was a photo of Treichler’s torso (no men without chests here!) with the band's name carved rather messily into it. Long before Ritchie tried to convince postmodernism he was 4 Real and simply couldn’t, no matter how much he hacked up his wrists, Franz Treichler was passionately inscribing his absolute commitment to his own vision in his flesh. It’s a commitment that has never waned. To say that they’re simply the most important band in the world trivializes them. The Young Gods are an event.
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
Ambulance Song lyrics by COP SHOOT COP
When it's 4:30 in the morning
And the vacuum sucks you in
The tell tale trace of guilt upon your face
The sidewalk feels just like your skin
When your heart is full of winter
And your days become like living in a lie
And the clouds outside your bedroom windowpane
Resemble crippled children limping slowly 'cross the sky
When you grasp at straws like forgotten songs
And your memory's short but the days are too long
Every dream that you bought seems to slip right through your hands
Well, love has got disorders
And work has got demands
Don't say a word
Don't make a sound
Just might be going down
And when the sun is pounding on the pavement
And the streets are dripping sex
And murder gets to sounding like a kind of inner peace
And everybody wants to know what's going to happen next
Well, I won't give away the end my little troubadour
Though I've been here before and I can't bear to watch the rest
But don't you blink
Don't close your eyes or it will pass you by
The weight of history is hanging on your chest
Don't say a word
Don't make a sound
Just might be going down
Well, your problem's sticking with you
Just like flies up on a strip you crawl inside your head
But it ain't worth the trip
You rearrange the furniture
But it always looks the same
Christ on a crutch [too late, too much] call it a day
Don't say a word
Don't make a sound
Just might be going down
Could be you're going down...
When it's 4:30 in the morning
And the vacuum sucks you in
The tell tale trace of guilt upon your face
The sidewalk feels just like your skin
When your heart is full of winter
And your days become like living in a lie
And the clouds outside your bedroom windowpane
Resemble crippled children limping slowly 'cross the sky
When you grasp at straws like forgotten songs
And your memory's short but the days are too long
Every dream that you bought seems to slip right through your hands
Well, love has got disorders
And work has got demands
Don't say a word
Don't make a sound
Just might be going down
And when the sun is pounding on the pavement
And the streets are dripping sex
And murder gets to sounding like a kind of inner peace
And everybody wants to know what's going to happen next
Well, I won't give away the end my little troubadour
Though I've been here before and I can't bear to watch the rest
But don't you blink
Don't close your eyes or it will pass you by
The weight of history is hanging on your chest
Don't say a word
Don't make a sound
Just might be going down
Well, your problem's sticking with you
Just like flies up on a strip you crawl inside your head
But it ain't worth the trip
You rearrange the furniture
But it always looks the same
Christ on a crutch [too late, too much] call it a day
Don't say a word
Don't make a sound
Just might be going down
Could be you're going down...
Kevin at PLM comes up with the goods again, posting...well....the soundtrack to Suspiria as re-imagined by err.. some bloke.. plus the guy who used to produce New Kingdom (and put out his own stuff on Wordsound/plus Macro Dub Infection bizness) Scotty Harding. It was used as part of an installation by Stan Douglas, and I quote...
"One could say that Douglas's overall project involves modernism's promise and the nostalgia that results from its failure. With Suspiria the artist turns explicitly to a few historical moments of utopian aspiration. Referring to both Das Kapital (in which Marx repeatedly nods to a fairy-tale idiom of drama and transformation) and The Communist Manifesto (which famously opens with the "specter of communism" hanging over Europe), Douglas mines the Grimms' stories for economic and social allegory. The characters here--the innkeeper, the giant, the poor traveler, the long-suffering servant--act out cryptic vignettes centering on payment and debt while being confronted by alternately nightmarish or ecstatic visions. Each scene inexorably replaces the previous one in a roundelay that itself brings up ideas of exchange and entrapment. Douglas's ghosts are shadows of a future that never came to pass: the economic and social redemption promised by modernism; the end to alienation foretold by communism. The "ghosts" also point to the obsolescence of a medium, in this case Technicolor (Argento's Suspiria was one of the last films made in the West using this process)."
So, it's a 2002 (!) Hauntology reworking of one of the hippest Italo-prog film soundtracks by one of Hip-Hop's most underground artistes.... so this Douglas chap is clearly doing some interesting stuff, plus his wikkipedia page says he's spent the last few years exploring Beckett!
So for example I'd quite like to see Panda Bear, Thursday night. But, it's at 93 Feet East. Which means the Hoxton Gabarati will be in full gum-flapping effect throughout the entire set. These people go to see bands in order to have ticked them off their checklist of hip-prerequisites for the day. I'm still semi-traumatized by the sheer disrespect and basic rudeness shown to David Thomas and Two Pale Boys a few years ago in Spitz when the crowd seemingly consisted of one fan (me) and a hundred and fifty other shrieking semi-hysterics who obviously had to talk louder once the band came on, otherwise how would they hear each other over the music, yeah? People yelling into their mobiles a few feet from the stage, the general attitude that the gig was an unwelcome intrusion in the dull, endless narcissistic self-assertion availed by telling other people what you are into and who you know and what your current projects are and dispensing acute cultural observations that are designed to show just how far ahead of the game you are as your friends go through the same grotesque rigmarole, around over and under you, nobody actually listening to anyone despite the volume and the sweaty, desperate animation. The gig's just another space for you to roll out your threadbare "personality", even when they’re up on stage, it's still all about YOU. It never stops being all about YOU, does it? The witty asides you rehearsed, the books you want to name drop, the casual references to cultural goodies that show just how deeply mired you are in all things left-field and laudable. Social space is just another arena, after all, get the weapons out, attack. Almost as though gig-going were a professional obligation to be undertaken with fellow professionals in a spirit of aggressive competition rather than any kind of shared experience. Is there any substantive difference between this mentality and the Philistines over in Canary Wharf who still have Phil Collin’s CD's in their collection and stand around bellowing about their Salaries/bonuses/houses/holidays and spend all night in bullish but brittle ego battles? I find this professionalization of culture, the character of my fellow gig-goers, so downright fucking irritating that it makes me think twice about going to see stuff I really like. Clearly this is more exaggerated at certain gigs than others and in certain parts of town but Jesus, I ask you. Creatives!
"Come friendly bombs and rain on Hoxton..."
"Come friendly bombs and rain on Hoxton..."
Update! This would be a good example of both the Panda's genius and the abominable, interminable chatter of the evil, Hydra-headed, Gabasourous Wrecks.
Monday, March 05, 2007
Not that I'd encourage anyone to break the law but I can't help noticing that one of those two God Machine albums has turned just turned up here.*I haven't heard this album myself for years, so let's just say they seem at least pertinent to current concerns.
And should I appear to be rudely not replying to comments I can only say that I'm suffering the same plight as PMPEP at the mo. Can't post comments, can't blog from You tube....
*even as I type, dude has posted a Scorn lp and I notice super-groovy "Paradise don't come cheap" by New Kingdom's there too.... clearly a man after my own heart!
Saturday, March 03, 2007
Warning! If you want theoretical rigour, or even coherence, I direct you to the links bar!
“Is that a call to arms I hear rising? Is that a call to arms I hear rising, out of that concrete hole?”
"Got no Soul" Cop Shoot Cop
Some disorganized thoughts on the impending, multi-faith War On Indy.
I wonder where Scott Walker’s “The Drift” stands in relation to the current intelligent-Metal milieu. There must be a million Dork err sorry DARKwave kids out there who do/would dig it. Did “Terrorizer” even review it, I wonder?
Still, we do seem to be at a point of intersection of several kinds. How far off can the Dubstep/Metal/World crossover be (it’s probably already happening of course, but how would I know? I never leave South London.) I mean, if there are the underlying set of affiliations the Blissblogger claims (difficulty as a component in pleasure etc) and that K-Punk’s going for (the anti-Po-Mo, ritualistic, religiose aspects of metal) surely both of these impulses/desires are well served by lots of stuff that lies in the currently shudder-inducing category of “World”. The Goth/World/Folk crossover has long been going on under some kind of cross-genre Paganism (Dead Can Dance, NWW, Nocturnal Emissions, Current 93 et al) the affinities to metal and metal’s own affinities to Classical music are evident. I think what we're largely talking about is an anti-Popist upsurge and a coalescing/marshelling of an anti-Po-Mo/Indy underground under the rubric of the New Solemnity. A while ago I played Neuraxis to a collegue who used to DJ Jungle back in the day (when I was thirty and he was about twelve) and the first thing he said was “that’s Gabber!" Same with Breaks....the line between the Cock Rock Disco (telling name, eh?) crew and Slayer/Sepultura/industrial stuff like “Mind” era Ministry (very Dubstep sleeve art on that) and onwards seems pretty slight to me, but then so does the distance between the blasted quasi mystical ceremonial aspects of Sunn(i))))))) and (as has been pointed out) lots of trad “world” stuff/ devotional music etc (and those peskily obscure blighters, Deleyaman, et al whose overlap with both Clinic/Movietone's serotonin-depleted pastoralism and Gregorian Goth is pretty strong.)
It’s interesting that “World” is so neglected by the Hiperati, too many Womad hippy associations and oleaginous Jools Holland smugfests to be taken on board I suppose, plus the fact that “Songlines” , despite its routinely excellent free CD’s is the worst written and least coherent music mag out there. Still, despite the horrible trappings, in the war against the Indy ideal ( i.e of music as soundtrack to a life of giddy consumption rather than life as the background to an immersion in music) “World” is on our side. One of the reasons Mark K-Punk is so revered in the blogosphere is , I suspect, precisely because of how seriously he takes music and the degree to which this catches LOTS of other peoples' feeling that it is intensely important, central to a meaningful life on numerous levels, and not just something to be picked up on as marketing dictates, flirted with, name-dropped with “cool” friends and dumped next day in exchange for the next new-old thing. Fundamentally both scenes lack “coolness.” This is a very good thing. The metal scene and the world scene (along with Jazz, I guess ) overlap in a number of significant ways, first of all in reverence for musicianship and a canonical tradition (though as with any theology there are doctrinal disputes, competing schools of thought etc), that worldly success is largely scorned ( this is another quasi-religious ascetic trope, right? It’s about the work, not the earthly rewards. Witness the guy Simon reports on who is admired precisely because he DOESN’T have a myspace page!) That neither of them recycle culture per se they expand on it, feel their way forward with that kind of one-step-back, two-steps-forward approach that for example I’m using now, writing this.
The question is not, where is the new “Unknown Pleasures”, who is best charting the corroding of the soul under late capitalism, urban dread reconfigured for the post-rave contingent etc, but who is reaching out and connecting, exploring the overlaps, engaging, testing their own assumptions and traditions against others. So much more importantly, where is the contemporary, “ Bush of Ghosts”**?
There’s something very Anti-the-prevailing-spirit-of-the-times in the submission to form and tradition in both metal and “World” ( horribly nebulous term, but you know what I mean). Where the poptimists get it wrong is the assumption that we want to basically live lives of divine frivolity, that effectively we are consumers first and foremost who want an endless array of semi-novel, heavily mediated, “experiences”, a dizzy, multicoloured kaleidoscope as opposed to some kind of a life project/investment of all our faculties/emotions in something “meaningful”, by which I mean something that subordinates bright, eclectic, clued up knowingness to just actually knowing something, which subordinates range to depth.I know a little of everything (and will therefore never be completely caught off guard/have my lack of clued-upness exposed) for, I know a few, or one thing, deeply. Now this might smack of the ludicrous to some but for me it seems admirably less ludicrous than the remorseless, shrill and panicked bluffing/blagging I encounter every time I leave the house ( NOT a reference to the Kino Fisters I hasten to add!) Just admit you know nothing about Deleuze, just admit you’ve never heard A-Z by Colin Newman! (I'm talking to myself there by the way folks!) So to me, whenever I see depth of engagement, be it Sunn(i))))) or La Chicana ( who couldn’t really be more different as bands) somehow the nausea and mild migraine that even a superficial flick through the NME or a walk along Oxford Street induces, cuts out. They’re not trying to second guess the trends, they’re not getting suited and booted to impress the A and R guys, for them being an artist isn’t just being another kind of canny middle class professional with the right names on the CV.
“Is that a call to arms I hear rising? Is that a call to arms I hear rising, out of that concrete hole?”
"Got no Soul" Cop Shoot Cop
Some disorganized thoughts on the impending, multi-faith War On Indy.
I wonder where Scott Walker’s “The Drift” stands in relation to the current intelligent-Metal milieu. There must be a million Dork err sorry DARKwave kids out there who do/would dig it. Did “Terrorizer” even review it, I wonder?
Still, we do seem to be at a point of intersection of several kinds. How far off can the Dubstep/Metal/World crossover be (it’s probably already happening of course, but how would I know? I never leave South London.) I mean, if there are the underlying set of affiliations the Blissblogger claims (difficulty as a component in pleasure etc) and that K-Punk’s going for (the anti-Po-Mo, ritualistic, religiose aspects of metal) surely both of these impulses/desires are well served by lots of stuff that lies in the currently shudder-inducing category of “World”. The Goth/World/Folk crossover has long been going on under some kind of cross-genre Paganism (Dead Can Dance, NWW, Nocturnal Emissions, Current 93 et al) the affinities to metal and metal’s own affinities to Classical music are evident. I think what we're largely talking about is an anti-Popist upsurge and a coalescing/marshelling of an anti-Po-Mo/Indy underground under the rubric of the New Solemnity. A while ago I played Neuraxis to a collegue who used to DJ Jungle back in the day (when I was thirty and he was about twelve) and the first thing he said was “that’s Gabber!" Same with Breaks....the line between the Cock Rock Disco (telling name, eh?) crew and Slayer/Sepultura/industrial stuff like “Mind” era Ministry (very Dubstep sleeve art on that) and onwards seems pretty slight to me, but then so does the distance between the blasted quasi mystical ceremonial aspects of Sunn(i))))))) and (as has been pointed out) lots of trad “world” stuff/ devotional music etc (and those peskily obscure blighters, Deleyaman, et al whose overlap with both Clinic/Movietone's serotonin-depleted pastoralism and Gregorian Goth is pretty strong.)
It’s interesting that “World” is so neglected by the Hiperati, too many Womad hippy associations and oleaginous Jools Holland smugfests to be taken on board I suppose, plus the fact that “Songlines” , despite its routinely excellent free CD’s is the worst written and least coherent music mag out there. Still, despite the horrible trappings, in the war against the Indy ideal ( i.e of music as soundtrack to a life of giddy consumption rather than life as the background to an immersion in music) “World” is on our side. One of the reasons Mark K-Punk is so revered in the blogosphere is , I suspect, precisely because of how seriously he takes music and the degree to which this catches LOTS of other peoples' feeling that it is intensely important, central to a meaningful life on numerous levels, and not just something to be picked up on as marketing dictates, flirted with, name-dropped with “cool” friends and dumped next day in exchange for the next new-old thing. Fundamentally both scenes lack “coolness.” This is a very good thing. The metal scene and the world scene (along with Jazz, I guess ) overlap in a number of significant ways, first of all in reverence for musicianship and a canonical tradition (though as with any theology there are doctrinal disputes, competing schools of thought etc), that worldly success is largely scorned ( this is another quasi-religious ascetic trope, right? It’s about the work, not the earthly rewards. Witness the guy Simon reports on who is admired precisely because he DOESN’T have a myspace page!) That neither of them recycle culture per se they expand on it, feel their way forward with that kind of one-step-back, two-steps-forward approach that for example I’m using now, writing this.
The question is not, where is the new “Unknown Pleasures”, who is best charting the corroding of the soul under late capitalism, urban dread reconfigured for the post-rave contingent etc, but who is reaching out and connecting, exploring the overlaps, engaging, testing their own assumptions and traditions against others. So much more importantly, where is the contemporary, “ Bush of Ghosts”**?
There’s something very Anti-the-prevailing-spirit-of-the-times in the submission to form and tradition in both metal and “World” ( horribly nebulous term, but you know what I mean). Where the poptimists get it wrong is the assumption that we want to basically live lives of divine frivolity, that effectively we are consumers first and foremost who want an endless array of semi-novel, heavily mediated, “experiences”, a dizzy, multicoloured kaleidoscope as opposed to some kind of a life project/investment of all our faculties/emotions in something “meaningful”, by which I mean something that subordinates bright, eclectic, clued up knowingness to just actually knowing something, which subordinates range to depth.I know a little of everything (and will therefore never be completely caught off guard/have my lack of clued-upness exposed) for, I know a few, or one thing, deeply. Now this might smack of the ludicrous to some but for me it seems admirably less ludicrous than the remorseless, shrill and panicked bluffing/blagging I encounter every time I leave the house ( NOT a reference to the Kino Fisters I hasten to add!) Just admit you know nothing about Deleuze, just admit you’ve never heard A-Z by Colin Newman! (I'm talking to myself there by the way folks!) So to me, whenever I see depth of engagement, be it Sunn(i))))) or La Chicana ( who couldn’t really be more different as bands) somehow the nausea and mild migraine that even a superficial flick through the NME or a walk along Oxford Street induces, cuts out. They’re not trying to second guess the trends, they’re not getting suited and booted to impress the A and R guys, for them being an artist isn’t just being another kind of canny middle class professional with the right names on the CV.
This isn’t some rock-lovers rhetoric of “authenticity”, what we're finally talking about is reorienting of the relations between seemingly disparate styles on the basis of an underlying ethic***, simply, that you do what you love (if you're capable of love, many aren’t!), you work at it forever, maybe, without any prospect of reward, the world never knows you, you receive no applause. Nonetheless you’ve had a good life. You’ve been one of the lucky ones. Because if your involvement in the art itself has been deep enough, it will have sustained you. Because the conversation you’ve maintained with the tradition has been serious and intense. Better a bearable weight (feel how the body and all the senses engage under the load) than all this unbearable lightness!
In my craft or sullen art
In my craft or sullen art
In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labor by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.
Dylan Thomas
*I think Mark just stops shy of calling Indy/Po-Mo profane
*I think Mark just stops shy of calling Indy/Po-Mo profane
.
**Am I the only one hearing a lot of Devotional Fourth World Polynesian Lushness in that Truly Fucking Amazing Panda Bear lp?
***This would apply in the blogosphere too, there's plenty of people out there whose tastes are rather different to mine, none the less I feel as though we're on the same side.
Thursday, March 01, 2007
Surely these boys have reasonable claim on the forefathers-of Shoedoom or Druidgaze or Technical Quwali Metal or whatever it is crown.... plus they were earsplittingly loud live as I recall..AND they did versions of both "What time is love?" and err....a track by Echo and the Bunnymen.....AND "One last laugh in a place of dying".....truly Glumerous!
Luciano, if you don't know these guys I suspect you're going to like them!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)