My guest on Imaginary Soundtracks this week was James from Synth prog stars Portasound. The London Fields Radio show was recorded on a balmy tuesday at Wilton Way Cafe - purveyors of the best flat white this side of anywhere. We played music (Com Truise, Twin Shadow, the Emmanuelle soundtrack and John Barry to name a few) and talked about VHS Apocalypse.
Something official new from Azealia Banks. 212 has never left the front of my DJ bag since I first heard it, it instantly became the best dance-and-shout-off record in years, up there with genre classics like Pon De Floor, Out of Space and Killing in the Name. Van Vogue below is like a subtler, deeper 212, her voice reigning over echoed yet uncluttered beats
Anyway, what are you up to this Jubilee weekend? Regardless of your feelings on pageantry, London (and other places I gather) looks set to transform into a super fun long weekend of ridiculousnous. I'll be DJing a lunch time set at the Wilton Way Diamond Jubilee Party between 1pm and 2pm.
On paper you could say the new Bobby Womack album, released on XL, and co-produced by Damon Albarn and label owner Richard Russell might be a cynical post Gil Scott Heron move. XL has always been a canny survivor, successfully transitioning from early rave 12"s to credible big name dance albums from the mid nineties onwards before broadening out to include quality leftfield rock. Where to go next for a rapidly middle aging brand than to get a piece of the Rick Rubin pie.
You know the thing: find a vaguely neglected old timer worthy of a fresh revaluation, bring them in the studio, record them in a new light, ala Johnny Cash/Neil Diamond (oh and hello Jack White are you doing this as well?). Throw in an Albarn - who you can just imagine spilling his fairtrade coffee all over the West Way on hearing the Jamie XX/Gil remixes going "I can bloody do that! Who the shitting else isn't dead yet I can do this for? Bobby Womack, is he alive?"
First single, Please Forgive My Heart was fantastic and kept the haters from the gate. Here, Bobby Womack's voice is effortlessly sublime - rough and cracked around the edges but with enough soul to drown in however it weirdly vanishes half way through and you realize what you are listening to is a Lana Del Ray tune. What this feels like is a lot of point scoring on behalf of different vested interests but with regard the song? My jury is still out.
Something for the weekend? House by Kindness is warmer than a hug from the Dalai Lama, best listened to as you rag out that last bit of a hot bank holiday, the fading chemicals in your system causing you to sway like a white dreadlocked Ibiza cougar in a pub beer garden as dining couples look on at you as if you've become that moment in Old School where Will Ferrel runs home naked.
Yesterday lunchtime I spent with James from Portasound as my guest on Imaginary Soundtracks. We chatted about The Running Man and where music is going and the podcast will be up on London Fields Radio very shortly. Until then, check out their amazing conceptual EP, Second Resistance, on Blood And Biscuits:
The first ten minutes of this are simply stunning, shiver juddering, any words of explanation will be counteractive, except to say if you have a fond love of Twin Peaks this will make your day
It goes without saying I've featured Nicholas Jaar before, his melancholic electronica hung like ornamental baskets over 2011. Here, he bends the format of that chubby institution BBC's Essential Mix into two hours of aural snake charming.
I've always adamantly opposed checking tracklistings on good mixes before you've completed an entire listen. Where a Compilation is a curated list, a Mix should be taken as a whole, a whole feeling, a whole experience, one where the individual selections lend themselves to a greater, larger mood. This Mix, broadcast on saturday is possibly the first time I've heard Pete Tong's voice this decade and do you know what? I actually kind of missed it!
It's good to know Agent Cooper's been busy lately as the reggae loving mayor of Portland...
I don't think there was an actual first time I heard I Feel Love. I was pre-school in 1977, I have early memories of being stung by a wasp and eating cheesy quavers and my hero was John Craven. During this era and through into the early 80s I remember a fascination that seemed to be everywhere with the space race: rocket launches were a regular fixture on TV and elsewhere Pans People on TOTP always seemed to mime in silver space swimming caps with BBC lazer graphics shooting out of their eyeballs.
I was too young to get the futurism of the track, in an era when tin foil could convince a nation of other worldliness I had the future all around me. Children of the 70s were surrounded by it: an optimistic pre-Blade Runner - world that mixed the reality of an actual active space race (which now looks about as quaint as footage of one of those 1960s World Trade Fairs) with a never ending supply of Buck Rodgers, Blake's 7 and Dr Who. Throw in the sequins and sparkles remaining from Glam Rock, now appearing alongside the analogue synths and synthetic robotic rhythms of disco and you have a generation nurtured through a golden optimism.
Simon Reynold's epoch defining Retromania book draws on ideas of how positivity towards the future and science fiction has been replaced by Dystopia to which The Hunger Games is the latest in a long line, and asks if there is a disapointment felt by the reality of what reaching the year 2000 actually offered (rather than what it may have promised).
Of course I Feel Love was about sex as much as it was about the future, just as much as disco was about sex as much as it was about dancing (and the relationship between the two). As it is the song joins the gaps between the kinky machine sex of Barbarella, the Gay power of New York loft parties, the afro-futurism in the cosmicology of Sun Ra and P-Funk, the cold/warm precision of Kraftwerk with the raunchy eroticity of Prince and even the way booty- tastic performers like Rihanna and Missy Elliot have merged elements of sexual sci-fantasy into their visual style.
It was good to get back to London Fields Radio, where I was honoured to have Swedish uber-electronic goddess Karin Park as my guest. The Radio station is housed in East London's friendliest, nicest coffee shop Wilton Way Cafe.
Karin's blog, Highwire Poetry is a treasure trove of diary, thoughts and work in progress journal lovingly curated. The below image is of her home/studio, an old church. Below that a lifelike model by German artist Frank Kunert.
Automatic Writing are another band with a much better than avarage blog: a collage of retro-futurism, grain from optimistic footage of shuttle launches and their music, songs like Crystal Visions hint at the epic decadence of classic bedsit dandies like The Associates and Japan. Theirs is a world of wine stain hampered good tailoring and flickering candles waxing onto ancient Penguin paperbacks and ducking seedy landlords in shared tenement blocks.
In 1899 Jean-Marc Cotes made a series of illustrations of how he imagined life would be in the year 2000. As you can see from three examples below he luckily neglected to mention Nu Metal and Prog House DJs
Twin Shadow's debut album was a big favourite in Hanford Towers.
You know that bit in The Breakfast Club where Rebel archetype Judd Nelson gets everyone stoned and they all start doing backflips and smashing glass with their voices in the library? Well this is how The shad's new tune Five Seconds makes me dance: it has roll-your-jacket-sleeves-up-drums, dangerzone guitars and Roxette synths. I genuinely thought we long ago had our fill of this 80s carpet bombing but there is such a joyous anthemic camaraderie about Five Seconds that none of this matters.
What is great about The Breakfast Club now is it stands as a voice of dissent made in the midst of the Reaganite era of Greed Is Good (or at least arguably the first post war wave of a time where consumerist values over eclipsed welfare ideals).
As much as we view John Hughes in the fuzzy VHS of cute teen dynamics and nostalgic soundtracks, what we have, from Breakfast Club to Uncle Buck to even Home Alone, is a series of essays in the importance of the human spirit against the tyranny of ...
The Man.
John Hughes was after all a babyboomer, a child of the sixties and those idyllic values of change permeate his work. What The Breakfast Club says is that it doesn't matter if you're the jock, the prom queen, the freak, the nerd or the delinquent - given the chance The Man will iron all of those creases out of you, all of those quirks good or bad, and turn you into part of The Man yourself.
An ever expanding automated system that stands to claim us all. The Man is waiting in your overdraft, your work schedule, your mortgage, your exam results, he hovers on indifference, waiting for your youthful dreams to become downtrodden into fantasy. The Man is lurking out of site from where I write out of the windows of Hackney Pearl and onto some missile equipped rooftop overlooking Olympic Park.
The only way to fight The Man is by sharing compassion, never ever letting passions erode into mundane responsibility and of course always, always share cigarrettes...
Sometimes, just on occasion, I like imagine I'm tugging on a spliff in some decaying Canterbury victorian semi, surrounded by longhaired musicians bent over brass instruments, patchouli oil blending in with the thai weed shooting dragon shaped clouds through the cornfield yellow sunlight.
It's 1971. The sixties are over and the straights out there who missed it all are facing the three day week, strikes and being tempted with new credit cards to fly to Spain and drink continental aperitifs. In 1971 life is bus drivers with comb overs, racist gags on TV and white dog poo.
This doesn't effect us, for we are jazz rock fusionists, we have potholes in our cardigans and matted hair that gets wrapped in our specs. As children our hearts snapped in two the day the plane with Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens crashed. Later on our mod hair grew out and we let everything go at all night multi colour sensory freak happenings and oh how we felt an interconnectedness with our past, our ancestors, victorian furniture and of course the chicks were wild. It was like all of history you could see breathing, pulsating.
So we would play, we would play amidst the views of the cathedral, the keys of the Hammond growing yellow with nicotine and ale and that Birth of Cool would never leave the record player and we would extend, improvise, and play in 7/14 time. We would recreate the history of this land and we would explore it using language borrowed from Black America. We are pioneers. We play cornets. For us the mythic is the new and the ancient pulsates through the crackles of 78s and modal accomplishment. We are the jazz rock fusionists, and we sit on our throne, the Henry VIII of pop. Oblivious to the danger ahead.
Evolution from he new Bandamp by Super Best Friends Club brims with a Canterburyesque magic, a touch of Hot Rats and a knowing mysticism. It sounds like the last great party that happened before the opening credits of Withnail and I, except with blood sacrifice at the alter
