Bring Me Coffee Or Tea

Families, Paper, Beats And The Man Who Swore Better Than Anyone

2012-02-10T04:10:00.000-08:00

My Mum is coming up to visit this weekend. So in tribute to her and Mum's everywhere, here are some great photos of rockstars with their folks published in Life Magazine once.

Peter Cook would have been 75 this year and in March the BFI are hosting Peter Cook: Genius At Work . His output was brief considering his stature, but this is a man that said the unsayable, putting satire in front of the dinner plates of 60s Britain and then planting deliciously foul language in the minds of children everywhere. You can catch nights dedicated to Bedazzled, Beyond the Fringe and luckily not Supergirl from the 1st - 21st March.

Evian Christ I was tipped off about from my friend Claire who works in my favorite coffee shop. I thought she said Evian Price and when I googled it all I found was the current retail prices of bottled springwater.

This mixtape, from Witch House specialists TriAngle Records is free to download as well as stream: dark electronics, cavernous and claustrophobic, hiphop with its central conceits blown and scattered around an airtight bubblepark that for a second could be LA before clouding ominously into Peckham.

Brooklyn producer Pursuit Grooves' new Soundcloud is so good its hard to believe its live. Banishing perceptions of the contractual obligation live album murkarama with a swift bombing of crunchy, almost awkwardly stiff but all the better for it beats, this is 35 minutes of future bass music, reminiscent of early jungle in some of its echoed sampled voices, recast into a post-dubstep environment, spacious yet stripped back red raw.

I approached seeing The Paper Cinema's latest show, Odyssey, with a touch a trepidation. Sure, its three week run at BAC has sold out and been getting rave reviews but these are people I've grown up with, shared houses with, projects with, these are my bros and I can't lie to them if I don't like the show.

Like a revitalized Rocky after training montage, Paper Cinema pulls it all out. Odysey somehow brilliantly compacts the Homer epic into something that ups their game utterly. A newly found sharp Simpsons-like eye for cultural reference, a confident irreverence and a truly cinematic scale - this is a movie made in front of your eyes. And the music. The music escapes the post rock cliches sometimes involved with live scorring to conure up something both beautiful and cheeky and to anyone familiar with The Paper Cinema an ending you'd never ever expect. Wonderful

Good Hair, Bad Cults and Sudden Endings

2012-02-07T03:30:00.000-08:00

How good is this? Shabazz Palaces affiliated Stasia Irons and Catherine Harris-White's new single as THEESatisfaction is a short burst of joy. For some reason Sly's Everyday People comes to mind as a groove futuristic as it is timeless warms into place. And its on SubPop of all things. Is Tad rolling in his oversized grave? Is Tad dead? I suppose I could google it

What stays in the mind two days after watching Martha Marcy May Marlene? Its hard to believe this is Elizabeth Olsen's debut, so mesmerizing is she as a former cult member. Primarily though, this is just one element of a film absolutely in synch with itself - where every performance, camera shot, line of dialogue and use of music tells you everything and only what you need to know, which by the way, is very far from everything. Jumbling time with the poise of prime Nicholas Roeg, building a sense of unease through cinema's greatest weapon of fear: calm; this is moviemaking with the comfort barrier of exposition and establishing shots removed.

Thanks to Tom Hyena this morning for pointing out what I had missed a few months back. The Shining's Hey You is a balearic kraut stomper, with something of the Michael Mooney era Can in the vocal refrain, early Cure guitars and a warmth that crackles like a charming ghost. Oh and you like handclaps? Well, this has got very good handclaps and an ending more sudden than

Now let's take a red eyed drive to a 24 hour garage along deserted rubbish infested streets. Lay Your Cards Out by Polica, featuring a vocal by former Gayngs' Channy Leanagh (above) has just enough autotune to give the effect of what on MDMA I used to call the flicky flickies. What the drums do, at first very slyly, every now and again, building from the snares and upwards till it crescends is the tracks hidden weapon.

Robots, Punks, Corporate Villains And Long Tracking Shots

2012-02-03T03:38:00.000-08:00

Kraftwerk have this week launched their own Twitter channel. What this means yet I've no idea but it gives me an excuse to include them on the blog. Plus its 30 years since The Model made it to number one and Radio 6 on sunday is having an epic day of Man Machine related shows

London based Lianne La Havas is a real eclecticist. Her voice: honey with the sediment left in, has worked with Willy Mason, incorporated diverse elements and here we get R'n'B living in a harmonious loving relationship with Electronica. Clinky, micro to macro pool ball being hit noises and casio'ish keyboards dominate over any real booty swinging, a marraige is after all a little of this and a little of that.

Lianne La Havas - Forget (Shlohmo remix) by The Line Of Best Fit

Featuring members of Sian Alice Group, Eaux trade in glacial eroto-folk. If this demo is anything to go by its like being transported into the opening credits of a Bond film made by a pagan synth cult. You can see them play The Shacklewell Arms on Feb 16th supporting Blondes

the light demo by eaux music

Theo Angelopoulos who died last week in a road accident whilst shooting his latest feature, had been a bold cinematic painter of ideas and long composed shots (one of his breakthrough films, The Travelling Players, consists of only 131 shots in 4 hours). From 1970 till his death last week at the age of 76, the Greek auteuer never compromised on political ideas. Also have you noticed how tired that wobbly in/out of focus "Ooh look at what I can do with a tiny digital HD camera" thing is becoming? I see film makers such as McQueen and Considine marking a return towards the long, composed tracking single shots Angelopoulos mastered.

On monday I heard plans the council were considering going ahead with allowing international narcissists Tescos to open on Broadway Market. Tescos' aggressive expansion policy is like that scene from Hitchcock's The Birds where more and more winged specters land on those swings, except instead of causing direct terror each shop perches up as a felt tipped pen penis scrawled arrogantly over a home made birthday card made by your first love. This is capitalism as vandalism. For Hackney Council to consider green-lighting this on a street that has re-built itself up in the last decade as a haven of independent traders, and after the riots, where a huge debt is owed to the Turkish traders who will be perhaps most affected by the plans, is pretty bleak.

The other week I featured Leeds band Maggie 8's sublime Charming Lady - a sort of sonic sequel to The Smith's This Charming Man. Listening to their EP on bandcamp so much more is revealed: hints of Bollywoood, Asian influences, Spagetti Western, all chaos tempered by a beautiful sense of melody. Check track Damaroo for an instant spin round a global supermarket, not a Tescos one though.

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Get Her To The Greek

2012-01-30T02:51:00.000-08:00

Now I quiet like Lana Del Amitri. Yes, I hear the argument for her being a big fake, that her lips are silly, and I'm sure it's unlikely that she'll be pursuing the "Gangsta Nancy Sinatra" look in a year or two's time when her album sales have propelled her into a need to maintain a proper pop career with corporate sponsors pumping money into franchise products and tour sales but ultimately and right now, fake or no, her Lynch-twanging melancholia and decent face make her the best pre-packaged pop thing since The Sex Pistols. Better than the similarly contrived authenticity of Michael Kiwanuka. But, I just have one question for you...

Below is a video of the Greek singer Eleni Vitali, from 1991. Now I am in no way trying to suggest this song bares any kind of resemblence to Videogames and, even if it does, baring a similiarity to an older, obscure song is no grounds a bad thing, music is after all an aural tradition, but check it out and see what you think...

Blackgoldbuffalo make dreamy music, contemporary yet strangely oceanic. One of them has recently moved to LA whilst the other cuts my hair on the occasion I get round to it. A Recent trip to Nottingham put them to work with producer Faley Fnord from Late of the Pier, but until these fruits drop, here is Magnets.

Not much I known about producer Buillion, except the brilliant single Say Arr Ee is released on the rejuvinated R&S Label. Twisting a perfect blend or eerie familiarity into something unhinged, with what sounds like a wooden sax solo; vocals that hit a blend of Dinosaur L and early 90s Factory Records; pads that point towards a long lost utopia and all maner of echoed blurches jostling just a little too far out of neatness.

Terry Gilliam is the anti-Spielberg. Both authors of often fantastical flights of fantasy portrayed through a child's perspective but where Spielberg is a reassuring uncle who puts the house back as he found it, with maybe a little extra sugar in the cupboards, with Gilliam, from Time Bandits to Tideland, you get nothing as simplistic as a guarantee of a happy end. Below you can check out his new short - an online released mini feature, The Wholly Family, which from the outset is unmistakably the work of the man who cast Robert DeNiro as a heroic plumber in a dystopian future based on the 1940s. Bought to you by Distrify, it isn't free to watch, but I think you know if this is your bag and worth the admission...

Toy, Astronautica, Third Man and Wednesday

2012-01-25T05:34:00.000-08:00

As hard a band name to google as Girls, it would be understandable if Toy are possibly annoyed at getting constant comparisons to The Horrors, even if most of those are pretty damn complementary. Left Myself Behind is a psych pop epic, it has guitars that are played properly (as in, with very few notes and put through lots of pedals) and the final few minutes are a crescendo of Stereolab'esque modulations.

Together it gets a re-release by Heavenly on Jan 23d. Also known as the other day.

HVN233 - TOY 'Left Myself Behind' & 'Clock Chime' by heavenlyrecordings

It is important as a modern human being to not think in terms of genre when it comes to preference. Our lives and options have changed irrevocably through technology in the last ten years and are now far too expansive to justify hiding behind the woolliness of one thing. Championing one cause is for football fans, not music lovers.

Astronautica has done something very lovely with some minimal electronics, some grain, some pulses and they're even very kindly letting you listen to a whole album of it on Bandcamp. Fuck, do you remember MySpace? Do you remember when actual people, not bands, had MySpace pages? Do you remember how each and every one of those pages looked like a teenager's bedroom?

&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://astronautica.bandcamp.com/album/astronautica"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Astronautica by Astronautica&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;

The above is a still from Secret Cinema. It finished on sunday so now I can talk about it. The Third Man came to life in a disused office/factory in Clerkenwell (where part of Batman Begins was filmed). I curated a bunch of live musicians to play in various nooks and crannies of the fictitional post war landscape and the whole thing went swimmingly. Below is a moody little youtube of the event made by my good friend Tom Haines - who also DJs as Hyena

Today We're Starting with Bowie Eating Peas on a Train

2012-01-20T02:24:00.000-08:00

This is Femme and you can listen to her awesome tune Bring It Back Round below. In some ways its the best R'n'B pop tune by someone who isn't strictly R'n'B pop since Dirty Projectors' Stillness Is The Move. It also has a touch of the day glo pop of the golden yesteryear of Bow Wow Wow about it. If you want to see more, she's playing as part of the producer Herve's Cheap Thrills label party at The Nest, Dalston on February 3rd

Bring It Back Round by FEMME

Next wednesday I shall be DJing a set of glam stompers at the Glam Rock Murder Mystery. Exactly what it says it is: a murder mystery with plenty of stomping glam rock. A combination of live music and interactive theatre, possibly a cross between Cluedo and Velvet Goldmine where the audience have to work out who killed the fading singer of a legendary hair-piece. Get down to the Amersham Arms, New Cross for furry fun. And here's the facebook page

Like Wahol's 15 minutes theory, even the most dubiously heralded performers have a nugget in their cupboard. That one moment where they shine amongst a career you wouldn't usually poke a stick at. Rock On is David Essex's Copland, his Devil Woman, his Blackadder.

Then below and right at the top of this post its great to see, on occasion, David Bowie does normal things. You can see more of these normal things here

New York based psych pop producer Expensive Looks has just released his debut album Dark Matters. Check out this short but very satyisfying mix below - where the delicate atmosphere of Aphex Twin seamlessly evolves into the crunchy The Juan Maclean and beyond. Its only 19 minutes which is about the same amount of time it takes to caramelize red onions

Decisions (Live Negatives Mix) by Expensive Looks

A little more Ken Russell below. This early photograph proves he not only invented Resevoir Dogs but also A Bande Apart

Old Devils, Weeknds, Barons and New Roxy Music Remix

2012-01-17T02:05:00.000-08:00

When Ken Russell died at the tail end of last year there was a noticeable immediate sense of loss of something most people had forgeten they had even needed. After all, you need to go back decades to get to the essence of why it suddenly seems we have lost such a visionary. You need to travel back prior his last decade of home shot movies, prior his 80s shlock back to a heyday that ended with Altered States but began several decades before that with his creative highs of Women in Love and The Devils. But even before then, before his BBC work we glimpse a young devil capturing stills of austere post war Britain and its bombed out buildings, where there was actually a law forbidding dancing in Hyde Park and where Ken's lens captured the rarely glimpsed Teddy Girls (above).

Yes. Yes. Yes, this is a very good thing. I never get bored of playing the original out and now I have this superb edit to look forward to hammering - there will be heavyweight vinyl editions of this released as well...

LOVE IS THE DRUG (TODD TERJE DISCO DUB) by BryanFerry

Last time I featured Baron I could describe their sound as being vaguely Canterburyesque, full of chamber pastorialisms, a touch of the less fiddly Crimson. I booked them to play Tago Mago last Halloween and new Bandcamp released track Comea (below) is a sign of their newer stuff: heavier, Eastern influenced yet at the same time still beautifully divorced from the ATMs and mock-celebrity Britain of 2012.

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A song came on the radio the other day - it had a soulful epic sweep and beautiful strings, it sounded like Rotary Connection or Roy Ayres and as the winter sun hit dustbeams I felt momentarily warmed in that way post-psychedelic acoustic soul can do. Then I noticed my DAB was telling me it was an album track by BBC Sound of 2012 winner Michael Kiwanuka and I suddenly clenched like I had been tricked.

What in a name should alter how I feel so instantly? Why, just because a piece of music I presumed was made in 1972 suddenly turns out to be brand spanking new should I revise my opinion on what I felt?

Should music makers have a duty to reflect the times they live in, sonically as well as lyrically?

Or are we happy to have our music supplied to us by, rather than artists - craftsmakers. Craft like a table lovingly made out of old oak where every bump and pattern has been slowly chiseled and naturally carved, a tradition passed down with genuine care, an artisan preservation society chaired by Paul Weller, where Corine Bailey Rae takes minutes and Jack Johnson serves tea out of a flask during the break. Interesting to note his album has been produced by The Bees - whose best known song Chicken Payback authentically recreates an era before when your TV was colour.

So, instead, listen to The Weeknd. Abel Tesfaye makes music that sounds like its made for now, or even a time that doesn't exist yet. Futuristic R'n'B, open and exposed, like the gold champagne skin of the genre has been surgically removed and inside all that's left is insecurity, doubt and darkness. It is also damn sexy. The 21 year old canadian released three mixtapes last year, culminating in Echoes of Silence. All of them free to download here

Transgressions, Space and Snoop

2012-01-12T02:39:00.000-08:00

New York based photographer and film maker Columbine Goldsmith's new short Hatsuyume (First Dream) has that feel of transgressive underground cinema. Having a pounding acid drenched rock score helps, always...

Below is the first photographic proof of something that could be really good. Hoping Snoop avoids jail after having carried some of his favourite gardening produce across the set of Easy Rider, we see him and headphone salesman Dr Dre back at work doing what we love them for, to which they'll be playing live together at this years Coachella.

If your American and stupid and have kids, the hilarious US spoof newspaper Christwire published these figures of what your little angels can expect to come away with if they go to this "Festival of Disease and Sin" Adding: "Your children will most probably die." Sadly, I think its more likely they'll come away with a few new friends and a touch of disappointment over the At The Drive In reunion.

Below I was going to post the video of Over There by Johnny Headband. The beginning reminds me of that Will Oldham film Old Joy, except more happens. Then I heard a sneaky peak of their new album - which takes the music into more interesting, deeper psychedelic and organically electronic directions so instead check out Lost Claus below and some photos from the video above

Back to the transgressive. Brooklyn psych rockers Prince Rama (image above) were raised in a Hare Krishna commune and have released music on Animal Collective's Paw Tracks. What do they sound like? A 3 piece Brooklyn psych rock band raised in a Hare Krishna commune that have released music on Animal Collective's Paw Tracks. This is a good thing. Light some candles

And as if that wasn't enough, Prince Rama's 15 Minute Exercise runs for a good extra four minutes than its title proclaims and adding to the fever dream mix are some of the most crunchy analogue arpegios since Delia Gonzales and Gavin Rusholm's Days of Mars - by far the greatest thing ever released on DFA

&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://princerama.com/album/15-minute-exorcise"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;15 Minute Exorcise by Prince Rama&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;

My friends Dan Beck and Sandra Kazlauskaite have set up Unmute: an audio and visual participatory network, where fortnightly themed musical podcasts are accompanied by a visual counterpart. A way of bringing two disciplines together. The mix below, made by Dan, is a genuine journey - the theme of Space playing with the way music can create its own geographical surroundings that takes in Bardo Pond, Mount Eerie, Popul Vuh and John Hopkins to create a sometimes cavernous, sometimes unsettling, sometimes luxuriant mixscape.

Unmute Theme 3 - Spaces by Unmute on Mixcloud

Check out their website here: http://unmute.eu/Pages/spaces.html
You'll get the visual accompaniment made by Nye Williams if you do so, so there

Deep Red

2012-01-10T04:14:00.000-08:00

Happy second week of the new year. Have some proper decent new hiphop on me... Its very hard to type and listen to A$AP at the same time without doing stupid hand gestures and spilling my coffee. Like most people either swing a bit to the politically left or to the right, or have a little bit of either autism or dyslexia, I tend to hear sound rather than take in lyrics - my love of a vocal lies more in its shape and texture than in context, as Sir Iggward Pop once said, lyrics ain't poetry, so on a purely personal level my love of hiphop is based on an advancement of sound alone, to which this sounds like what would happen if the rabbit hole in Alice In Wonderland was a giant 808 and the cheshire cat was a cocksure young man in a baseball cap

I don't really know anything about Maggie 8, except her Facebook page says she comes from Leeds. Staying in last night, tucked in bed with a copy of the new Madame Bovary translation, Radio 6 played this haunting yet sprightly re-imagining of The Smiths' cider down the trousers on the indie dancefloor classic. In that middle of the night there was something very sublime about the way elements of the original shuffle in to play

Charming Lady - Maggie8 by maggie8

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Maggie8/111644945528972

Knotty..Knot..not from Lucy Butler on Vimeo.

I designed a program of music for visual artist Lucy Butler's display at Jasper Conran. Lucy made the above film in connection with the installation displayed in the London and Paris stores. The idea was to play around with the ethereal, electricity and nature. I just happened to be reading Tom McCarthy's C at the time, itself sort of an exploration of the metaphysics of electricity. It was fun to link this up to Eno, Arvo Part and Oval amongst others.

Sancho / I'm on your side from Stéphane C. is a photographer on Vimeo.

I love the work of French photographer Stephane C. I met him a couple of times around a decade ago, I was producing music for Sebastien Schuller in a barn-like studio in the Parisian suburb of Yerres. We dined like kings for a month on wine, pate and cheese and the studio had Bowie's old mellotron from Berlin which i'd inhale each morning for inspiration.The Vimeo above is a photo of his put to a song I made under the name Sancho from the album Mystery Year (released by Seed Records, 2007)

You can check out a load of Stephane C's work at:

http://www.stephane-c.net

Winter Mix Tape

2011-11-23T03:34:00.000-08:00

Chopping wooshy psychedelia and chunky laptop hiphop with a few unexpected guests. As genre distinctions blur, all we are left with is feel. NY's Clams Casino's reverberating off kilter productions have him lined up to produce hiphop big guns like A$AP Rocky yet feel as much locked in some kind of shoegaze dreamspace. Django Django's krauty, west coast explorations owe bitesize crunch to Diplo's beatwork. I couldn't resist putting in a few vintage gems along the way for a mix rough around the edges and most definitely not for purists...

TAGO MAGO WINTER MIXTAPE by bringmecoffeeortea

Clams Casino – Motivation (Lil B)

Starslinger feat. Reggie B – Dumbin’ (Diplo Remix)

Shabazz Palaces – Swerve…The Reaping Of All That IsWorthwhile

Colour Music – Tog

Friends – I’m His Girl

Leila – (Disappointed Cloud) Anyway

Django Django – Waveforms

Squeeze – Take Me I’m Yours

Odd Future – Forrest Green

Nicholas Jarr – Why Didn’t You Save Me

Baths – Heart Emoticon
Alicia Keys - Try Sleeping With A Broken Heart (Chad Valley Edit)

Shabazz Palces – Swerve (Reprise)

The Antlers – VCR

Laws – Run Away

Deerhoof – Super Duper Rescue Heads

Can – Turtles Have Small Legs

Clams Casino – The World Needs Change (Soulja Boy)

Keep up to date with Tago Mago events at:
http://tago-mago.tumblr.com/

Smooth Criminals (With some fey Shoegazing, of course)

2011-11-08T06:00:00.000-08:00

The History Of Apple Pie - Tug by The History Of Apple Pie

Twee name and initially slightly twee sound aside, this is great. Like those sisters from Throwing Muses, with distorted guitars sweet without sickly. Yum

When courts delivered their verdict yesterday on Dr Conrad Murray, guilt that had been assumed in the minds of the Jackson family and his fans since the moment it was announced there was a possibility someone could be found guilty of the Earth Song star’s death was confirmed.

Shuffling the paper in the café, the only difference between reading about the case in The Guardian and The Sun is the choice of grammar. It is still a fierce, garish piece of anti news: a ghoulish carnival of speculation and fanaticism whose baring on anybody outside the courtroom with an adult mental age is very little. Meanwhile, further down the news, it is announced that the police in the UK have been given the go ahead to use rubber bullets in the student demonstrations tomorrow.

This piece of carpet has more relevance to you than the Jackson trial

Am I manipulated by news? If I find myself thinking of news items in terms of heroes and villains than yes, I probably am. Can the distaste growing in collective consciousness of the more cannibalistic aspects of capitalism expand beyond its current rainbow - like position of a brief illusory moment of beauty that comes about after the downpour? This is not to say I don’t believe protest to be most righteous, and the church’s support of the St Paul's protesters is a strong conformation that the distaste is collectively spread across all walks of life rather than the sole practition of your gribbly tree whitereggae types. But are we just flies being humoured briefly before the controlling forces swat their newspaper down? Crushing our dreams with regulations and taxes and water cannons and rubber bullets and whatever else they are currently aloud to get away with or working towards getting away with.

I have seasonal man flu and its making me sound cynical. In reality I live in a romantic dreamlike notion of the sexy leftwing extremism of BaaderMeinhoff, the postcard encrusted sepia revolutions of the late 60s and the gorgeousartwork of the USSR. I am a pussy living in a post modern world that allows meto view these moments and images in a romanticised way. As a lifestyle choice.

Choice here is the real crux. Exactly how Huxley portrayed the Soma in Brave New World, choice gets sold to us as a neverending series of options, lifestyle choices, ways to sooth and comfort ourpain. Each one more easier and soothing than the last. X Factor, Lotto,irrelevant news like the Jackson trial: comforting little pills of numbness to help us melt into the sofa, forget our woes.

But, there is still choice, there is still the choice to turn off X Factor and put on a Goddard or Fellini; to put down that article on a celebrity trial and pick up a Penguin Classic; to not waste hopes on buying a Lottery ticket but to go and see a local event or exhibition; to not go to the new Westfield Shopping centre but pay a visit to St Pauls instead.

It might seem like an idea too strong to pallet on a Saturday night to switch from reality TV to some foreign film made by a dead bloke but that’s only the Soma talking. That’s the sugar we’ve been taking in our tea that makes ideas hurt. That makes engaging with ideas seem an option we don't have to confront once out of education and out of work hours. We don't all have to show physical force by protesting, but we can sharpen our blunted brains into the thinking conscious articulate machines they all have the capability of by bathing in the rich and varied world of art left for us.

Night of the Living Dead

2011-10-28T03:30:00.000-07:00

Tago Mago has always been interested in the metaphysical, the eerie, the damn right uncanny so it feels right to be hosting Tago Mago 3 this saturday. Halloween Day. Well, monday is technically Halloween but ignoring that.

Hyena (alias film maker Tom Haines) presents a mix of full on Halloween horror. If you've witnessed any of his rhythm heavy crate digging sets you might have an inkling of what to expect. Big on echo, finding a mythical place where Prog hits the dancefloor and trashy New Wave goes cosmic. I'm sure thats a sample from John Carpenter's The Fog in there at one point.

Put this on around an hour before going out this weekend...

HYENA GOES TO HELL by Hyena

Mafia Lights

2011-10-18T09:43:00.000-07:00

Mafia Lights have been on this blog before. They make music that sounds as intimate as it does epic. Comparisons to US contemporaries like Washed Out can be picked up on but with a wit and texture that could only come from the U of K.

I caught up with Mafia Light singer Jowl Amie the afternoon Stone Roses announce a third bash at being adored...

Hey Jowl, howare you? Got your winter jackets sorted out yet?

We have onebig communal jacket that we share between three of us. James pulls it offbest, we all think.

Your logo is apacket of fags, Consumerist satire or cunning product placement?

I wish it was as deep as either of those two things, but it was just that itlooked totally rad. I think more people have brought the T- shirts than themusic, the first batch sold out in the first day...

There’s a bit about three quarters through the tune that sounds like you’veput Pink Floyd and Squarepusher on at the same time. If you really were to dothat on your stereo who would win?

Fugazi.

Can you explain a little bit about the concept of the video?

Well, we had two different sets of films, both coming from James's idea of acontinuous motion of film. James made the top one by walking a couple of milesaround Surrey where we live, and I filmed the bottom half out the sun roof of acar on the A3. I like to think the top half represents the glitch-y-ness of thedrum pattern while the bottom represents the purple fog of the guitars. But I'mnot sure if anyone else sees that other than us...

It reminds me a bit of the split screen experiments of Mike Figgis or MichelGondry…

Ah! Thats totally awesome. We aren't really trying to branch too heavily intofilm making or anything, it's just quite satisfying to create something whereyou had some input in every aspect. We're all into films and the theory behinddifferent shots and cinematography etc, but we'd still all rather be The Clashthan Stephen Spielberg. (Disclaimer: We are well aware we are nowhere as goodas either of these two, don't worry.)

It says directed by Mafia Lights. Do you enjoy covering all bases as a band?

Yeah totally, like I mentioned its just another creative aspect that’s fun tobe involved in. Obviously all the videos we have made are very basic andbasically just us mucking around on iMovie but I think if you have a certainidea in your head, or a particular aesthetic you want to achieve, like we dowith every track, then it's best to just do it yourself. Or at least try!

I met you a few months ago when you played in, ahem, California. How wasthat? Can you explain a little bit about this?

o
Surreal. The show was awesome, we all really enjoyed ourselves and the wholeSecret Cinema Festival was just mental. It was Top Gun themed, so we played ashow to a baying crowd of pilots, girls in aviation jackets and wannabe TomCruises. That's probably one of our favourite shows, just for the sheeruniqueness that was created by Secret Cinema. Kinda beats playing FetchamVillage Hall.

When’s the album coming out?

Well, we've got enough material for about 3 albums, so we could put it outtomorrow if we wanted. I could rant on in a really cliched way how albums aredead yadda yadda yadda, but it still remains that now is the time for bands tothink of more interesting ways to get their music into the hands of fans. Ithink Odd Future nailed it by just releasing so many mixtapes for free online,but now its been done something else has to come up. Saying that, the day Ihold a vinyl in my hand with Mafia Lights music on it will be a very specialday indeed.

Do you see yourselves as chillwave?

Nah, we're better than that.

If not, which of each of the below do you most sound like

a. a food product (ie, apple or digestive?)
b. a Will Ferrell film
c. a bizarre sexual fetish

a. Lucky Charms.
b. Can I pick Eastbound and Down instead? He still stars. C'mon.
c. Chillwave.

Thank you Jowl, anything else you think we should know at this point?

The Stone Roses reformed today, and we wanna support. Please?

DRC Music

2011-10-11T06:48:00.000-07:00

DRC Music is that rare thing: a really, really good charity record.

A bunch of producers including Damon Albarn, Actress and Dan The Automator spent 5 days working with Congolese Musicians and came up with this. Released through Warp on 7th/8th November, all profits go to DRC and DRC Musicians.

Check the official stream below. What surprised me the most is that despite all the different contributors it actually sounds like one very unified, consistent record...

DRC Music - Kinshasa One Two by DRC Music

20 Years of Teen Spirit, 20 Years of Geek Rule

2011-09-22T08:03:00.000-07:00

One of the children from the popular sitcom Outnumbered

My first time hearing Smells Like Teen Spirit. A teenagerdoing A Levels, my Grandma’s house, English Lit Essay half written on desk,John Peel in the background. Around then I was one of those that wore a greenarmy jacket, the logos of indie bands scrawled in felt tip on an army issuegrey mesh bag. There were others like me; we were called Gothics, or Gribbleysor just freaks.

Coming to Peel was like learning how to breath underwaterand suddenly being aware of a whole new universe of creatures and delights,some fearful, some beautiful but all alien, a different world from the clean,slick gloss of the mainstream. Paradoxically I also loved the Sunday eveningchart show on Radio 1, the suspense, the build up to finding out the new LushEP entering straight in at 38 or Teenage Fanclub making the lower top 30 for asingle week gave me a sense of pride, the nearest my soul has ever got toexperiencing what its like to support a football team. It was that feeling ofone of ours going out and taking on, albeit in the most minor way, them.In 1991 there was a lot more them than us, a lot more Simply Red,a lot more Guns N Roses, Christ, curtain haircuts were fashionable. The chartswere Heroic.

Legendary TOTP performance. The Top 10 at the beginning shows you the kind of shit they were up against, actually pretty similiar to a night at Visions Video Bar, Dalston

Something caused me to put down my pen. Was it those openingchords? Slightly dampened, pre surgeviolence that would go on to act like an air raid alarm for every mosh pit tofollow. Was it the way those drums kick in? If David Grohl has become the faceof radio friendly unit shifting stadia he will always be spared the bowels ofhell for this and this alone, a few seconds that justify a lifetime’sexistence. All this and the song hasn’t even got to the vocals. Music writingis worn down by the whole “and then the whole punk thing happened” school ofepiphany but for an awkward 17 year old virgin struggling with an essay aboutHamlet’s procrastination this was a moment way and above just the music.

Recent Meadham Kirchhoff collection riffs on era values

Peel was littered with angry shouty men playing louddistorted instruments. Sub Pop, the home of Nirvana’s first album, Bleach, thebenchmark setter of this sort of thing, all recorded in a shed production nonvalues and distant hints of melody. What was unique was that this was angry,shouty music that shone until you could see your face in its production, thathit a deep, dark seductive melody in a music where melody was something youdidn’t really master, a bit like post war man and cooking, it was the femininity atwork in the soul of Kurt Cobain that was so way ahead.

Sonic Youth were so wrong, 1991 was not The Year Punk Broke,it was the year that Nirvana signed to Geffen, teamed up with Butch Vig andmade a timeless pop record.

I scrawled Nirvana on my bag. A few weeks later in MelodyMaker I read that the album it came from had made the Billboard Top 10. Thiswas like a tramp suddenly being invited to have tea with the Queen. Then thesong went Top 10 in the UK. Over a few weeks I started to have conversations with otherkids that usually didn’t like alternative music, that very definitely didn’tdress like me. Not only had thesekids heard of, they had heard and they liked it. I started to get invites toparties, to clubs. I kissed a girl, I had nevereven kissed a girl before and this one was a beautician, the great unwashed andthe hyper clean joining tongues. Unheard of.

The biggest difference between 1991 and 2001, internet andchoice of terrorist figure aside, was the separateness between tribes that haddeveloped over the eighties between the cultural tastes of the mainstream andthose of the underground. The lyrics of Pulp’s Misshapes, released four yearslater, explain this. The fear of Saturday nights in city centres may stillexist in regional England but the consequences of Nirvana/Vig/Geffen’s rewiringof hardcore values to mainstream music jolted alternativeness out of a selfalienating parochialism.

Some losers in the era of Nirvana at a festival. Not me, honestly

History has been kind to the 80s. Triggered by a rejectionof Thatcherite values, it felt more genuine for a band with a conscience, analternate outlook to deny melody and production values: representing signifiersof success, of making money, of the greed bug of the 80s. This disgust had anecessity but we had entered a new decade, the Iron Lady had been replaced bythe greyer, extra serving of peas rule of John Major, green issues and an early90s sense of conscience were replacing shallow ideals (at least on the surface), it had to find a way to out of the ghettoand Teen Spirit unwittingly was the ticket.

The Misshapes Jarvis sung of are now (several generationsin) the taste makers in media, in fashion, in technology, that lead our societyculturally, that inform where we go, what we watch, how we see and hear anddress. Society has been rebooted, stylistically at least, to the aesthetics ofthe Gothics, the Gribleys and the Freaks and their decedents and we have Cobainand Vig to thank for inadvertently kicking this off.

Less than three years later, Cobain was dead, I had swappedmy felt tip altered army jacket for a skinny fit T-shirt and a 60s mod cut,angry distorted guitars for ironic observations about British life. The initialcoupling, the embrace that grabbed me so of Teen Spirit and Nevermind, theunion of punk anger and pop sensibility was a mantle never taken up by thesubsequent wave of grunge and alternative music. It’s preoccupations with theworthy (Pearl Jam’s right on cause awareness work) and the grotty (heroinechic, dreadlocks on white people). Cobain loved Leadbelly, loved DanielJohnston but he also loved The Beatles and ABBA. The anger in Nirvana was always contrasted with a joyousness, a love of pop. Nirvana: a Trojan horse that wouldeventually lead directly to Puddle of Mud.

Cobain's kid. Now

Nirvana didn’t invent grunge. Or at least the Celebration ofpale but chiselled features clad in combinations of check and ripped denimpoked down the catwalks with all the cringing panache of a Geography teachertelling his kids about dubstep that the fashion world insists is called grunge.London Fashion Week threw up a recent example; Meadham Kirchhoff’s collectionwouldn’t exist if Kurt Cobain hadn’t announced on The Word in 1991 thatCourtney Love was “the best fuck in the world”.

The real legacy of this brief, ephemeral moment in thelate 20^th century was not in the subsequent music, not in thefashion but in the confidence it gave a million freaks to go on and be bold, bebrave and fantastic, but on their own terms…

Recent Work...

2011-09-13T04:56:00.000-07:00

The weather held out just long enough to help put this on at the beginning of summer, California Classics, the largest film event of the year...

It was very kind of those nice people at BBC News (as well as Channel 4) to come down and file a report...

Tom Vek came in for a coffee and a chat at the Cafe in mid August. Just before his acclaimed performances at Bestival and Reading/Leeds...

Imaginary Soundtracks, Vol. 8 by London Fields Radio on Mixcloud

Just before jetting off to California wharf on the 277, I launched a new night at Hackney's London Fields Pub. Dirty Mind mixes dirty rock n roll party music from the 20s to now... The next one will be in November. Watch out on facebook/twitter/here for more details...

You can now also follow me on Twitter at @PaulHanford1
I'm a little Brian Butterfield with it at the moment, but am hoping to get slicker...

Danger Zone

2011-07-27T09:14:00.000-07:00

Electric Pianos haven't sounded this good since Moon Safari. In fact without resorting to bunging on In A Silent Way, they haven't sounded good at all for a long time. Nicholas Jarr, from New York, changes this with the beautiful, haunting Colomb.

Its been out for a little while so apologies if you know it already...

The ancient rusty tanoys strapped to the carpark ceiling of Dalston Kingsland shopping centre blast a distorted “Dangerzone” by Kenny Loggins. You here it as you go up the steps, past the torn natty chairs tied along a railing left presumably for the tired shopper. They fade out as you reach the busker guy on the slope up, always the same busker guy. Weathered but positive. About the same age as me, and in a parallel multiverse of split decisions I can see how both of our lives might have been totally different.

The White Heart pub in Whitechapel, 2002, cutting back under the arches and half cut to boot, to a flat on Bethnal Green Road. Sounds happening as they are: a Train mumbles overhead, two hoodies chatting, a bark from a lone dog carried along by the wind, glasses smashing, distant siren.

A symphony of elements, all seemingly random in composition yet not without origin. Every sound ushers in my sound field by an unknown and unlimited series of conductors, all offstage. The dog I hear, stray or being walked, what lead the dog to barking where it did at that moment? You could write it as a score, the notation would be a combination of local map (entry point here – exit point here) with psychological breakdowns and biographies of the living players in my organic, moving composition. An aural moment representing a series of interconnectedness.

Up in Sainsburys now, I hear lazer gun fire from the future of Buck Rogers. A father scans the aisles as his young son aims at everyone in site with a futuristic machine gun, destroying them in his imagination. Less than a fortnight after the massacre in Norway, an entire supermarket slain purely in young child's mind, blood and guts in the humous section, as the father tries to read the writing on the scrawny envelope of a shopping list.

The Green Door Kids is a Glasgow based project featuring a range of New Wave Classics recorded by youngsters at a community studio project. Here two 10 year old kids from Possil via Ghana cover the Scroggins sister's New Wave classic Moody:

The Green Door Kids - Moody (ESG Cover) by Optimo Music

Mystery Mail

2011-07-25T09:50:00.001-07:00

You know how at school there was always someone who'd just punch you for no reason? Or the bloke in the pub that you don't know who tells you your jumper is rubbish? Or the comment leaver that has seen a picture of your pet cat online and wants it to die?

This card was left on top of the decks when I was playing a set at the rather wonderful Platform Terrace Bar last weekend. Anyway, Frederic who works at Paradise Row Gallery, I'm not sure if you meant to leave your email address and mobile number on an anonymous hate note or weather this is characteristic behavior of a big spined chap such as yourself but you did provide plenty of laughs for us afterwards.

The next day, slurping coffee I noticed a very relevant article in The Observer

Teej, maker of architectural post rock, on the ace new Blood and Biscuits label (home of Three Trapped Tigers) directed me to his alter ego Wolf Tone. Like Daft Punk slowly getting a G-Thing on, if I did aerobics I might warm up a bit to this...

Wolf Tone - Returned by Teej

The guy in this video has opted to have his hair in a bun. Since when did this look become acceptable? It makes the wearer look like Liam Neeson in The Phantom Menace. I may have to anonymously drop a hate filled business card at his desk... The music Tropics make here is gorgeous, more muscular rhythmically, more live dynamic than most of your recent blissed out bunch but still a glorious way to drown....

Another Radio Show, this one I speak to Who By Fire, two inspired actors who have set up a great new immersive experience company...

Imaginary Soundtracks, Vol. 6 by London Fields Radio on Mixcloud

Long Lost Sancho Album

2011-06-28T05:54:00.000-07:00

<a href="http://sancho1.bandcamp.com/album/wait-dont-wait">Wait Don't Wait by Sancho</a>

I made this. With the help of a bunch of wonderful music makers.

A little while after it was completed I disbanded the group. Things had changed, I was in a different place, the concept of touring with the group was an impossibility given everyone's different careers and lifestyles. I packed Sancho into a box, branded it with an iron and got two guys to deposit it inside a massive warehouse like right at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Curiosity lead me to listening to the album again the other day and I knew it had to be heard. Since 2007 when I finished the album, Bandcamp and Soundcloud have opened up and it feels fitting to deposit this "lost" recording on line as something people can take or leave, listen to as an album like it was intended, with ebbs and lows and highs and darkness and comedy.

I hope you enjoy.

Cannes Diary Part Deux

2011-06-07T06:41:00.000-07:00

I wondered the deserted suburbs for an hour or so before finding a cab, I head back to the venue. The journey home from is best shown visually. My eternal thanks to Brian the Chef, Adam and Luke for going that extra 6 miles…And Adam again for recording it…

The most exclusive screenings here you need a tux or a ball gown. You also need to obtain accreditation. This comes in the form of a laminated ID card, the same sort of thing you’d get if visiting a Nuclear reactor in Wales. The other way to see competition films is to find yourself the target of a producer’s promotional desires. After 6 days here I catch my first film, 127 Hours on a friend’s laptop. It’s been out for ages but makes a decent hotel based bit of downtime.

In a town where you can pay Thirty Euros for a beer, the bus ride from Mandalou into La Croissette is a refreshing One Euro and proves a beautiful slice through the hills of this region. Local old men with round passive faces sit outside African cafes on hills, teenagers with ipods and severe haircuts, young mothers with tans. The bus weaves its way along streets terraced and shuttered. Shuttered windows show a nation’s value of its people over consumption. Shutters say to a people: We have the moment when we bring day back into our life at our own hands. A nation with shutters on windows understands that relaxation is a basic human need and not something you have to earn.

Nothing to do with Cannes: I'm a little late of the tracks to hear this. Like the best bits of Screamadelica and Fox Base Alpha found at the bottom of an abandoned swimming pool

Many people here are involved in the making of low budget independent feature films. Each day trade magazines get dropped off at the venue full of breaking deals, exclusive partnerings and powerful people walking along red carpets. But cuing in the toilets in a bar located a few streets back I witness one of many conversations involving two strangers plugging projects to each other. You will hear many people say the words Low Budget Horror Film and Set in a Cottage. If these people are British they might also describe their film as having Gangsters in, set in the east end. It’s a comedy. It’s gritty. It’s a gritty comedy set in the east end. In a cottage. With zombies. With gangsters. Its low budget. Its partly financed now. It’s a spoof but a gritty one. Zombies. Gangsters. East End. Cottage. At film school the kids are making their grad films infused with the freeform jumpcuts of Goddard, the wild extravagant flights of Almodovar, the hallucinatory Om-ness of Jodorowski, the mundane truths of Mike Leigh and they laugh at that guy in their class, and there always is one, making a zombie film. Probably in the local woods. Oh that’s original. They probably joke that this guy has learning difficulties and note his complete DVD box sets of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and they joke that in five years time, as they are themselves approaching their second feature, the first having screened in Cannes, at Venice, even Sundance, that this guy will have realised that film making is not for him, that working in Blockbusters probably is. Wrong, this guy is in Cannes, he’s all over the place, and he has pretty much single handedly raised the budget and is due to start filming in August for his gritty, slightly comedic horror film, with gangsters, set in the East End. In a cottage. Oh, and it might well star Danny Dyer. And if you are in the toilet cue in a bar just off La Croissette you may well have seen him give a card to a doppleganger of himself.

I knew I shouldn't have played Windowlicker...

People are starting to arrive for the two shows my employer is directly organising. These are in a few days and as we get nearer familiar and warm faces arrive from London. Performance directors, actors, costume people, production people. All of talent, enthusiasm and decency. As they hit La Croissette for the first time I see a wonder in their faces that only just a week ago may have been on mine.

I have heard about this place the crew simply call The Castle. It is a real castle, on a hill overlooking the whole city and every night there is a wild party where the drink flows freely. Many crew members have already been and mere mention of the place brings about the kind of grin a child saves for Star Wars.

One night after DJing, me and my roommate take the costume girls there but we can’t find it. We walk up and down a series of hills before giving up, settling for a beer and a slice of deep fried stale pizza down a side street café. The girls leave, tired and on early call the next day. We decide to take one last blind search, up a steep side street, and find the castle. Aching feet and relief. We give the secret password and enter.

Inside the Castle is a slice of Paris, urbane and relaxed clientele dancing to funky and knowing music and drinking from the free bar. If you ask for Bollinger then that is what they get, free. Up a turret, at the top people mill about, their backdrop: the cinematic view of Cannes lit up like fairy lights below. The party has something to do with French music bible Les Inrockutibles and the clientele has a looser, more relaxed music based feel than the uptight tuxed vibe around much of the town. One thing you get to understand about millionaires is what a square bunch they can be. Here, there are women beautiful because they are simply beautiful, rather than they have bought this beauty. Price tags always leave a mark and here the vibe is more thrown on than gold card. I meet a nice girl who works in a Parisian bookshop and we talk about Britpop. She cannot believe I love Daft Punk who she considers to be irredeemably naff and I cannot believe she loves Oasis which I consider to be irredeemably naff.

It is round about here that the Gangster enters the story.

I have developed a daily routine. The lumbering rhino waiting to happen that is my later years is set in pace by a predilection for attaching routines without me noticing. I march out to the pool in the early afternoon sun and sweat my hangover out before having a swim. I eat some chorizo. A pro biotic yoghurt. Take some of Brian the Chef’s Cod Liver Oil and drink an Earl Gray.

It is the night of the first show at the venue curated by my employer. And it kicks off. The crowd are dancing and the venue is shaking, props are falling off shelves and sweat drips. I feel there is a very loving relationship right now between the crowd, the music and myself. Fabien introduces me as Paul Hanford from Dalston, I think he is being comedic but the next day I get told by a crew member that they overheard someone in town talking about a DJ in town who comes from Dalston. Dalston: fish guts washed down Ridley Road Market, cheap prostitutes climbing into shady lifts along Cecilia Road and Italian Vogue’s most Fashionable Place on the Planet 2010.

We get to the castle, piling into cabs. More Bollinger. Up the turret a girl with dreadlocks thrusts her exposed breasts into my face. I jump into a cab with the Crew. Our cab has two cabbies, which is rare, and when we arrive they charge us 90 Euros, three times the regular cost. Most people are so blind drunk they are already on autopilot, they stumble to their beds. Me and my room mate are left to argue with the guys and refuse to pay what is three times the journey, a simple con designed to snare drunken rich film makers. The cabbies are persistent, showing a receipt they have made up for 90 Euros. A scrap of paper printed with a cab name on the top and a random figure written below. This is bullshit and we tell them this. They call the police. Fine, we say, bring them here…

The police arrive, four officers and immediately hit off a familiar, warm even, rapport with the cabbies. They joke and sigh and look at us transparently as vermin in somebody else’s vegetable patch. Shit for brains Brits abroad, baked bean tins and Irish bars, fry ups and cries of “Garson” from the mouths of Saint George painted scalps. Millions of tiny Britons have grown up cunts knowing nothing of the outside world. We are the accused. The legacy handed down to us from embittered ex-Empiricals with only the religious zeal of supporting a soulless corporate football team to get through the decline.

“Are you going to pay?” “No” They ask for our passports, write our names down and mutter about this being settled in court. “Fine” we say. “Fine” says the younger of the two cabbies with an unsettling look of relief impossible to read as it is unnerving.

We are sat on the porch and day is wiping away night. The Golden hour. Pure, unpolluted light and freshness that briefly wipes away the miasma of the last 24 hours, a brief clean slate before the world dips into pattern. The very reason Heaven’s Gate was such a notorious flop but also its strength was the escalating budget clocked up by Michael Cinimo insisting on only shooting at this time of the day and at dusk. We drink beer and relax, perplexed at the con but glad to be breathing early morning air.

Suddenly, our names are being called and a shaved headed Algerian looking man in a smart suit squares up to us out of nowhere.

“I kill you. I kill you now. You fuck my men and you have no idea what you mess with. You have no idea who I am” he lifts his shirt to reveal a vast scar covering the entire continent of his torso. He stairs into my roommate’s eyes and he knows our names. “The police, they say I just kill you. You fuck my men. I say you pay me now or you die.”

He then passes me his iPhone and charger and says “My batteries are low. Can you charge my phone please?” I run to a plug socket and run back

Then he switches back, “You give me money now or I kill you. I am not film, you guys are film, I am something else. I see you in La Croissette I kill you just like that. You not pay I ring my men and they kill all your men in their sleep”

I remember once having a shotgun pulled on me in the City Café bar in Edinburgh, you know there are times not to fight back. My upbringing is that deep down everyone is decent, everyone is an older version of the child they were. You want to smile and say what a nice person you are, find that humanity in every soul and connect and feel that tension release as you both realise that the gift of life is the greatest thing and all human life is interconnected and if we try, we can work it out.

“Pay me or I kill you” We have to jump into the gangsters car, blacked out windscreens, the bland smell of polished leather, he drives up to an ATM. We get out. Pay him. “Now we are even. You no longer hear from me”. He drives off. In some bar in town that guy who made the zombie grad film for is bigging up the gangster element of his gritty east end set cottage gangster horror due to start shooting in August. With Danny Dyer.

Cannes Diary Part 1

2011-06-03T04:40:00.000-07:00

A stuffy journey to Stansted. Everywhere in humid and at the last minute my employer lumps me with a series of hefty and impractical to carry promotional items which the boarding gate woman informs will cost £50 to take through. She advises me to cram or tie onto the side as much of this into my one allowed piece of hand luggage. I like her, in an age of Iron Faced Air Fear she is warm and human.

I glance out the departure lounge window, a sea of runways, the Easy Jet orange logo emblazoned on most planes like a swarm of supermarket plastic bags being blown around an empty car park.

I people watch, guessing who else looks like they are headed the same place as me, the 64th Cannes Film Festival: a guy that could be a chubby Lenny Kravitz with one pink hairclip in the back of his greying afro; a Michael Moore type with obligatory film maker baseball cap. I’ve never been to a film festival before but I bet every film festival on the planet has a Michael Moore type, just like every music festival has a Karen O type or a Marilyn Manson from Tunbridge Wells drinking cider at midday. I bet the Michael Moore type has made a short film, a personal one at that, a sort of regional version of a real Michael Moore film. An investigative but vaguely goofy report into the closure of his old school tuck-shop.

Planes excite me. I have to sit by the window and watch terra firma shrink below into a model town before evaporating into a meringue of clouds. Turbulence excites me; give me a plane crash over sinking on an ocean liner any day.

It’s definitely not Lenny Kravitz sat across the aisle. My internal jukebox loads up with an old song of his, “Always on the Run” and I get an image of a chubby Lenny Kravitz on the run, stuck in a never ending series of Easy Jet flights. Never really landing. Airport to airport. No need for bags anymore. Like the way Bob Dylan has not stopped touring for years, here Lenny Kravitz has not managed to find his way out of an airport, unless its to board another endless flight. Chubby from eating at Frankie and Johnny’s in departure lounges, the only food he has time or the option to eat before boarding another Easy Jet flight. Always on the Run. If you’ve spent any time in a departure lounge in the last few years you too may well have seen him, a chubby Lenny Kravitz, Always on the Run, attempting to escape but finding himself on another flight in some Kafka-esque fever dream.

Jacques Dutronc, and the Bardot song below, were very much part of the playlist atmosphere for Chez Jacques

I jump off the bus, loaded with ligers, journalists and whoever like me gets the call to go to Cannes but arrives in the most budget way possible. La Croissette is like a trade fair, massive billboards drape from historic hotels not of films in competition but of massive gargantuan summer blockbusters to be. Some of them like the Transformers one have screens within them showing clips. Critics may be arguing passionately over the new Von Trier but there’s big money paying for the Smurfs in 3D to be in town.

I sip Café au Lait in a seafront café, it is Tuesday and the festival starts tomorrow. People everywhere are draped in money, and a woman walks past of an indeterminate age, she is old but the surgery makes it impossible to guess anywhere near how old suffice to say she looks a little like that bit in Moonraker where James Bond gets his face whipped on a G Force machine. I get an image of a transvestite Roger Moore loaded up with Hermes bags and gold, trying to seduce a hapless bellhop.

I am sorting out playlists for the evening’s first DJ stint. It is opening day and the bustle on La Croissette has multiplied tenfold. The view where I will be playing over the next two weeks is meters away from the sea and I glance out to see a huge private yacht with its own helicopter on the back. Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek stand on a giant effigy of some cartoon cat’s boots on a short pier to my left while a swarm of paparazzi make violent hawk noises at them with a breathtaking lack of dignity. “Salma, this way, this way” “Antonio, the shirt, the shirt” they squawk like dirty birds in a run down zoo begging for scraps of bread as the two stars ape light-heartedly but aimlessly and I’m reminded why I’ve never seen them do improvised work.

The venue is basically a tent on the beach, directly parallel to the Carlton, set designers for the company I am here to work for have transformed it into a retro 60s nouvelle vague pad of a fictional playboy, complete with circular bed, retro futurist TV, stuffed animals, old film magazines and tables and chairs. Everything here is retro, except the bar which pours Stella Artois. Properly, not like we do in England, with care and a series of steps. It looks different, you hold it different and it actually tastes different.

Tonight the DJing is providing ambience to a series of clients who filter through. There are two beautiful Belgian girls in 60s black dresses, with their hair done in elegant early 60s styles, one blonde and one brunette and when I up the tempo to stuff like Rock With You they dance. I find out after they are employed to be here, to create a good mood. Everyone here has cards and most conversations will involve at some point the exchanging of cards. I pace the free alcohol, aware that this is work and not just some house party where I can get wrecked and stand on the decks. By the end of the night I do get a modest room full of people dancing, that old chestnut Once In A Lifetime always works and allows me to even play a little Wu Tang Clan. Someone who looks a lot like Pharrell Williams shakes my hand. The people who turn up are friendly and nice.

So I get a call. The client needs me on site to ask me something. It is not explained on the phone what they wish to ask me.

The hotel where we are staying is 6 km away in Mandalou. It has a swimming pool and no working laundry and we have to share rooms. Once, when one of the guys in our team approached the hotel porter with a question the porter runs off and hides in his room. We have a chef who has to manage on 5 euros a day per head and despite there being various hire cars we do not have a full time driver to ferry people to the venue and back.

La Croissette is bubbling over with flesh. Gendarmes use whistles to redirect pedestrians as parts of road are closed to allow the motorcades containing important people to arrive at red carpets. Along the boulevard by the sea a street performer dressed as a viscount holds from one hand a black cat and the other a white cat, the black cat is waving its paw in slow motion like its on ketamine. The act culminates with the Viscount rubbing the two cats together, maybe he’s attempting to get them to mate or he’s rolling them like a child does with plastacine into one big black and white pharmaceutical ball of felinity.

What the client wished to tell me is that in about two hours time I will be DJing for Robert DeNiro. He has hired the venue for a private party of 20. I have a lot of “cocktail hour” material suitable for early evenings by the Cote D’Azur and this seems to suit. I stare at the sea and smoke Lucky Strikes that if you squeeze the filter magically turn menthol, they are the nicotine version of those Salt n’Shake crisps.

There is a small flurry of people. He walks in. Grey haired, light jacket. He stands near the DJ booth and has a drink. The people he is meeting with look very powerful in a Weinstein sort of way. DeNiro himself seems very modest; of course, I can’t hear what they are saying because the music I’m playing is getting in the way. I play some Stones, I almost play Across 110th Street but then remember its in Jackie Brown and so was DeNiro and playing it to me feels a tacky thing to do. The guy is just trying to have a drink and doesn’t need some smart arse reminding him of things he’s done.
Then, glass empty, he leaves. Swiftly. For a two hour cocktail party he stayed a maximum of half an hour and it makes me realise that if you is DeNiro and you wants to go out for a drink with no fuss you is going to have to book off somewhere each time. You can’t just arrive at the White Heart and hope some idiot doesn’t go “You talking to me?” Yet, all said, the man arrived and left with no security, no entourage and no fuss. He dressed modest, acted modest. In a festival where taste can often take a backseat to vulgar displays of wealth DeNiro is class because of his very modesty.

Already having drunk more than eaten I make my way down the Boulevard to a party in a hotel for a New Zealand feature, Devil’s Rock. I gave the director some music for a short a few years ago and we have some mutual friends present. One of these, Mal, and I look over the balcony, wine in hand, silently taking in the acres of beautiful flesh churning up and down the sunsetting boulevard. Cosmetically enhanced, want to be somebody people, tuxedoed and ball gowned slide in between Gendarmes and tourists. Two local youths in baggy vests swig vodka as they dart along the road on a scooter, the police notice and laugh a little. Over looking this circus is the HD blue beauty of the Cote D’Azur’s flat calm marina, glistening, the surrounding hills like natural jewels. In my over romanticised mind I had developed an image, impossible to live up to and naturally corroded by time and myth. The Girl from Ipanema. Sophia Loren. Kirk Douglas full of vim reigning over his hotel window. Brigitte Bardot hanging up her washing outdoors in the nude. A suave playboy rolling into town unbeknownst to all is the one and same dreaded Jewel thief that always leaves a single playing card at the scene of the crime. In 2011 we get a billboard announcing the imminent production of Expendables 2.

I haven’t eaten yet but I’ve carried on drinking. Back at the venue London based film magazine Little White Lies are holding a party. It’s a good London crowd, it feels like being in London except we’re stood on a beach. I am too drunk so I hail a cab, I slur the address of the hotel and then some time later exit the cab somewhere else. This is not the hotel, this is some other hotel. The cab has shot off. Where the hell am I? Lost, drunk, out of cigarettes. Three days in and I haven’t formed a sense of local geography, I start walking but I don’t know where to. All my beer weighted body wants to do is sleep and momentarily I cry.

In Part Two: More parties, more sun, more of this and that and even some gangsters...

It's Only Words

2011-05-04T03:47:00.000-07:00

Tago Mago 2 is on this saturday, in the wonderful venue of The Servant Jazz Quaters, hidden 2 secs behind Dalston Kingsland Station. Join me and various wonderful cohorts for a night of Majik and Shadows...

<a href="http://happyhome.bandcamp.com/album/live-not-live-at-the-dilapidated-house">Live, Not Live at the Dilapidated House... by Happy Home</a>
...Happy Home play Psychedelic Chamber music, and will be doing so on stage

Notes from an as yet unwritten piece about a subject I have yet to fully articulate:

Words are Power

Around 1439: the invention of the printing press

Music can be duplicated en masse in the form of sheet music

With the distribution of sheet music a commodity is formed

With this commodity, the birth of the music industry

Governing factor in sheet music – Ability to read music

A wealthy, European male is more than likely to be the exclusive recipitent of the education to be able to read or write music.

The establishment has secured the means of control and creates an exclusion over both the definitions of music that can be performed and those able to perform and understand it.

A gulf emerges. Performing music based around written translation as opposed to performing music based around what is felt to be right to play at any given moment.

Instruction verses intuition.

The filter of life experience documented in music is told according to the perspective and desires and censorship of this elite. The spectrum of life experience is restrained in musical content.

Once a woman reaches orgasm, she is able to orgasm and orgasm again and again. She has no reserves she can run out of.

When a man reaches orgasm he will require time to revitalize his supply.

Male dominated music of this era is very often focused around a climax.

A more feminine music, that of cyclical nature, has traces present in some works by composers like Bach but is, particularly in the prevailant German Romantic movement, cast aside in favour of grand, bold, masculine expression and climax

Cyclical Music. Present in the folk music of its day. Globally. Rather than climax fixated is based around extension, waves, multiplying. Passing on an oral history, it is open. It has not been bound by the formality of print.

Print regulates and forms an order beneficial to maintaining hierarchy.

Western Academic music will be experienced in a Concert Hall or a Parlour. With people experiencing it sat, watching. Watching sound.

Music of a Western Academic Nature. By that I mean the music we known as Classical music, with its biases around class, race and gender will go onto taint our perception of music till this day. Based primarily around what we see as being serious and what we see as being frivolous

Non Academic music: Feeling, Volume, Rhythm – reaction to rhythm through dancing.

The possibility of electricity is dated back to 2750 BC. Ancient Egyptian texts describe electric fish or the “Thunderer of the Nile”

However, in 1877, Thomas Edison invented the Gramophone

Method of production changes. Method of distribution undergoes a liberalisation: music can now be appreciated by anyone, purely based on listening.

20^th Century progresses. Composers like John Cage can be seen to liberalize Western Academic Music by accessing interpretation.

Composers like the Minimalists Feminize the form through creating cyclical, climax free music

Words are still taken very seriously.

1966. Keith Butler shouts “Judas” at Bob Dylan at Manchester Free Trade Hall.

Dylan has just gone electric. The view is that the man is angry that Dylan’s seriousness, encapsulated in his music through the upfront focussing of his words in relation to the sound around it (voice – lots of words, acoustic instrument in the background) – virtually defining serious for a post war generation, has, by going electric, made a vast concession to pop music and all this protestor believes it stands for (Volume, Cheap gimmicks, Girls, Dancing)

Keith Butler inadvertently makes a link between conservative reactionism in Western Academic Music and Folk Music

Bob Dylan smirks and tells The Band to “play fucking louder”

1973 to 1975: Brian Eno releases a trio of albums.

He sings nonsensical lyrics over emotive phrasing. This is deliberate. He is trying to test weather we react empathetically to the sound of words rather than the meaning.

New York. Mid Seventies

HipHop develops. It takes a break. Loops it. Add infinitum if so desired.

Global Commodity by the 90s. Market Leader by the Millenium. Loop based, by nature cyclical. Worth remembering, no matter how misogynistic rap may occasionally dip, HipHop, defined by Cyclical repeteition, is a feminine music.

2011: We still view Songwriting as being a word based craft. We still have a certain view of the written word somehow making music more serious

Music Concerned with the body is still somehow viewed as being less serious, less important.

Travelling Not Moving

2011-04-21T02:20:00.000-07:00

Heart goes out to the family and friends of Gerard Smith today. A loss for music

Huysmans’ Against Nature chronicles the adventures on vacation a man takes without ever leaving his house. Scandalous in its day and much admired by Oscar Wilde, the book shows the liberation and decadence of doing the exact opposite of perceived wisdom.

Nearly 120 years later, the possibilities of travelling in your imagination are enhanced no end by our relationship with the moving image. Last summer, at its summeriest, an afternoon walk through London Fields, golden sun in my eye, catching an entrepreneurial tray of Pimms making its way around the hordes of those also lucky enough not to be trapped in an office that day, I imagined, no, it did seem momentarily that I was on Venice Beach in the mid 60s. I’ve never been to Venice Beach. Or California. Or the 60s. But as a youth I listened to a lot of the Doors and chewed at least one VHS of the film.

As a child I wanted to be Harrison Ford so much that I thought it was merely a case of wishing hard enough to become him. He was both Han Solo and Indiana Jones. As a teen, it was the Lizard King. OK, looking back, he was an alcoholic with a penchant for writing things like “Ride the snake, the snake is 10 miles long” whilst Agent Cooper hammed merrily away on the Hammond. But, it’s a rite of passage to be an arrogant little shit and wanting to be Jim Morrison helped me through a difficult stage. It got me laid. It got me stoned. It gave me confidence to play guitar, if not the immediate ability.

Well over a decade later, that film and that band long forgotten. The right gold light, the smell of the chopped mint, the haze silhouetting beautiful forms reawakens a combination of long dormant brain cells. Once again Jim rides through the park. I am the lizard King, I can do anything. Look, there’s a hippy Meg Ryan, look there’s a Native American hallucination, lets jump up and down on a police car. That last line didn’t happen.

Article originally appeared in travel blog, Black Tomato

English Afflictions

2011-04-19T05:53:00.000-07:00

Is it really April? As the foreplay of Spring seems to be reduced to a short peck on the cheeks, this week’s weather was pretty forward. “London Fields Weather” my technical sound colleague Christian calls it, and if the reason a two day long hangover can be accounted for then perhaps it’s easy to mistake the climate for being at a festival.

Festivals are a format of bingeing, where all you’re cultural and hedonistic needs are concentrated into a one-stop shop, a bit like Tescos. In France the traditional eight course banquette is broken up by sorbet but have we in the UK learnt the importance of this? Or are we still at the evolutionary step of imbuing energy drinks and chemicals to squeeze in that extra mileage?

Seasonal Listening #1

<a href="http://baron.bandcamp.com/album/illegitimate-nephew">Illegitimate Nephew by Baron</a>

Baron sound like the weather right now in the most languid form. A hint of what used to be called The Canterbury Sound filters their parochial expansive psychedelia. Listen to it now for immediate panoramic effect...

Of course this is all very middle class talk. That peculiar English affliction of being continually uncomfortable with your own lot yet also critical of anyone else’s, your major coping mechanism to construct an unlimited range of boxes, endlessly categorizing and sub dividing. This is also called OCD.

Return to notebook a week later. It has a coarse grain of dust sealed on, the accumulation of smoke machines residue combined with floor grime of a venue that I doubt has never been entirely scrubbed. A week has passed spent in this secret location. Putting in place secret elements for a secret show. A week free from a regular diet.

In my downtime I find a narrow Vietnamese run greasy spoon. Its yellowing laminate menu offering a galaxy of combinations, on one side of Eggs n beans, on the other, Cashews and noodles. “The best chips in London,” she smiles, a good proprietor can be like a raconteur, it helps cover of multitude of gastronomic flaws.

Imaginary Soundtracks, Vol.5 by London Fields Radio on Mixcloud

A week with no new music. A week isolated in a secret era, with purely the music of that secret era to mould into a shape. A week without the purely modern luxury of scanning infinity on broadband and the entire better for it. Religion doesn’t form through variety. Choice is great but eventually becomes like picking individual faces out of a bustling, ever changing crowd.

Seasonal Listening #2

<a href="http://teethrecords.bandcamp.com/album/ep">EP by Teeth Records</a>
Mafia Lights could be described as Hypnogogic, but behind every hazed out keyboard lies something shadowy, rumaging in the shadows like a bin rustler at a park cricket match

New Wave As Weird Psychedelic Chili Con Carne

2011-03-31T08:27:00.000-07:00

X-MIX by Hyena

Hyena is the record spinning name of London film maker, Tom Haines. You may have seen his Spagetti Western tinged videos for White Denim and Tunng amongst others. Here he turns his attention to a psychedelic, sprawling miasma of New Wave obscurities. Mostly late 70s, early 80s cuts, with lashings of delayed out vocal samples.

The Original Dude

2011-03-31T08:16:00.000-07:00

The biggest sign of Jeff Bridges’ elevation to Living Legend is that now he only has to play a variation on his Dude persona. True Grit, Tron, Men Who Stair at Goats, Tidelands, the country one he won the Oscar for, always scratching long hair as he pulls himself out of some horizontal position at some god forsakenly late hour in the afternoon.

What started out as the Coen’s perceptive evaluation of the Bridges stock: Yeah, lets do a noir but have a Dude in the Philip Marlowe role. Excuse my ignorance, there has always been a Dude in the Philip Marlowe role…

Watch or re-watch Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep. Witness the Original Dude in action. This is a guy who keeps a bottle of gin in his car, that gets out of bed at 2pm, and only then because the phone rings, this is a guy that always sort of does the right thing but manages to get in an unbelievably pornographic amount of Hayes code era innuendo with Lauren Bacall along the way. You pull a gun on him and he’ll tear you apart with a one liner shot straight from some cosmic bowl of existentialism.

Elliot Gould’s early 70s take on Marlowe in Altman’s super 70s, super bleak The Long Goodbye is obviously Dude - like because he’s survived, drink in hand from the 60s and has the hair to show it. Bogart died before the pill, he’s pre-Beat, in fact his career started post-War: post World War 1. But he is the Dude. More so now than ever… An American in the sense of Hemingway or Miller or Coltrane, the best thing about his type of Dude’ ness is that, pre 60s, he’s not a stoner – no half assed mumbling philosophy, no infatuation with slightly gone on rock.

There is a sense of feeling betrayed by the 60s. The baby boomers, possibly the most lucky generation to walk the earth, invented modern sex and the modern psychedelic experience and then quietly reinvented themselves through the eighties as the yuppies, spent it all, left nothing in the way of National Services or pension schemes for their off spring and off spring’s offspring. That stoner shlick is wearing thin. Which is why Bogie now is the real dude for these times as well…

That scene in Casablanca where he assists the cheating of a Roulette game all in the name of helping a girl to avoid an unwanted molesting whilst simultaneously remaining a hundred percent undercover, appearing for all the world like a cynical pro whilst underneath bubbles an integrity and heart. In all fairness Lebowski would probably see the Roulette wheel and get no further than spin out, hallucinating long legged dancers with Saddam ‘taches.

Goddard’s handbook of things that are really good about American culture: Lucky Strikes, Jazz, Bogart, remains accurate. Two years after his death, a young Parisian punk, Galloises in mouth, sees his own reflection in a poster cast against Bogey’s, and seems to try and will a mentor’s spirit into his. Can you imagine Jean Paul Belmondo giving the same response to John Wayne and what kind of film would that have made Breathless? Fat racist subspecies dressed like Village People pulls Jean Seberg and acts cool around Paris? Really not going to happen.

Things I've Been Busy On Recently...

2011-03-14T08:31:00.000-07:00

February was spent in an alternate reality London of the 1940s. This show was a joy to construct the music for...

For someone remarkably untravelled I'm not sure how I started writing for a travel blog. The nice folks at Black Tomato let me do this...

About once a month on a Sunday, I meet my good friend Lance for a coffee and we make a radio

show...

Imaginary Soundtracks, Vol. 4 by London Fields Radio on Mixcloud

Speed 3

2011-01-13T04:03:00.000-08:00

If any music has ever managed to project the exact feeling of travelling, relatively fast down a straight line its Neu! Autobahn incarnate. Kraftwerk may own the copywrite on the song but their motorik crusade was more robot projection of an idyllic journey, a demonstration video for a proposed way of travel yet to be built, that only down to its impeccable design and detail manages to avoid kitsch and still remain blueprint.

No, Neu! is being awake at some godforsaken hour, piling into a damp smelling motor, deprived of sleep and surviving on cheap amphetamines and you just drive, endlessly drive. Neu! is the two monosyllabic travellers from Two Lane Blacktop, locked into silent harmony with machine and road. Human, machine and road: accomplices along the endless journey.

Imaginary Soundtracks, Vol. 2 by London Fields Radio on Mixcloud

Neu! is escape and flight. This is modern but it is not urban. You cannot build up that amount of speed and then stick to it for continent shifting stretches of time if you are surrounded by blocks, traffic lights and custom. Neu!’s LA cousin is Dr Dre. Dre is equally routed to motor but his car has no need for such stratospheric aerodynamics in an urban geography where speed isn’t really the issue. Dre’s early 90s refit was to move his speakers out of the club and the block party and into the back of his car. When you can’t build up speed you can surely bounce. This is motor vehicle as huge, gyrating ass. The bulk and bass of the car bouncing in the LA heat would permanently alter the tempo and redo the lower frequency EQ of hiphop.

Back in Deutchland, Neu! Are ignoring all signposts, all turnings and all diversions. Their eyes are red and twitching. If they were flashing past Dre’s ground in a nearby freeway, they would have been pursued by Warren Oates, or helped along by a renegade DJ named Super Soul. But here they are on their own. Over the next ten years their path will be followed on both continents by Wim Wenders but for now there is no lyricism as yet on these roads, no need for an understanding. Just drive.

Neu! have a large family, they have relatives who at one time or another were not engaged in speed but used the machinery around them to fight or build empires. In Detroit, in what used to be home of American motorcar production, The Stooges amplified the sound of the factories, the machines to an incendiary level. Distortion saw through the faux hippie dream, blasting flowers out of headphones through sheer amplitude and a singer who’d writhe on broken glass. Motor Town was Motown. Deliberately mimicking the assembly line procedure that had kept the city’s Black population in impoverished and unequal employment, a team of writers in one room passing through a song to next room where a blinding session band work it into some shape and so forth. Assembly line. Adopting Henry Ford’s American dream and changing white America’s perception. The cultural importance, even historical importance here is for another story.

Yet far from the nihilistic destruction painted in the American road movie, Neu!’s journey was always towards the horizon. The Driver, The Passenger in America may have felt the wind of freedom in the speedometer but would always eventually run out of road, usually met by a blockade of police cars or a violent gut reaction from an unforgiving and unprogressive American past. Neu! were trailing away from nothing, they had everything to drive towards. It has been said that the music, film and art that came out of Germany in the second half of the twentieth century was a year zero, historical events had caused people to cut off from the past, to literally aim into the future.

The big secret in pop music is that, whilst it has always implored it should “be your baby”, it has actually been engaged full time in a morphing partnership between man and machine. You can here it in Neu!, Dre, Motown, The Stooges, it advances through cracked software, in autotune and more often than not, with four wheels.

Ruminations of a Britpop Survivor

2011-01-04T11:34:00.000-08:00

above: Damon Albarn and his Dad

In the 90s, things were very clearly labelled in the most orthodox fashion. Like the well-stocked larder of an anally retentive, where Heinz Beans must face outwards and are always, always kept apart from millet flour, everything had its place. The band that first defined, then survived Brit Pop the most, Blur, were the first to discredit it and move on. Suddenly in love with Pavement and America, you could feel the band squirming at the thought of Union Jacks and the parochialism, xenophobia and general conservatism that had grown out of the cracks in what had originally been a brave and satirical gesture. The difference between the freshness and verve on Modern Life Is Rubbish and Pulp’s His n Hers and what was coming up in 96/97 is a gulf as wide as Jaws is to Jaws: The Revenge. A witty joke that had become a dull playground taunt before morphing into a blunt weapon: the hideously played Claptonesque classicism of Ocean Colour Scene and gap year nonces Kula Shaker’s Peter Sellers Indian routines. Like the government that was to take its seat that year, what was supposed to be and initially was a breath of fresh air had in fact masked the arrival of some deeply repressed English conservativism.

Modern Life Is Rubbish was a slow burning gem, its landscape of Little Chefs, chintz furniture, suburban lives and Sunday roasts a revelation, capturing a pre Ikea Britain on the cusp of being a post Ikea Britain. So different from the grunge imports and the grubby T-shirt indie occupying week lasting stints at number 38 in the charts, it portrayed an Englishness akin to The Buddha of Suburbia or even Martin Amis, referencing Bowie, Madness, mod and whatever else distinctly English all wrapped into super lush, crisp meta pop. Shorter hair, tea drinking and wit became very cool, killing off the tour date T shirt, the crusty big shorts and having bass players with names like Rat or Smedge.

What actually happened over the following three years contrastingly was how Britpop dug up a wave of retroism of a scale never heard and scene before or since. Satirising an attitude can very easily just become embracing an attitude and this, in British popular culture in the mid nineties, is exactly what happened. In just over two years, reaction had descended into reactionary.

A year after Modern Life was released, a mythical Manchester band returned with an album that seemed to suggest if you do enough cocaine then you too can be Jimmy Page. What stopped The Second Coming from being written off entirely was Ian Brown’s delivery, his page boy on weed flatness and sense of location allowed such blatant retroism to Trojan horse through the gates of time. If the Blur and Pulp records had referenced the past to make a point, then Second Coming ditched all of this clever bollocks to make stoned rock, like Free or Bad Company, slavishly worshipping the past and in awe of instrumental technique over ideas.

Englishness is about knowing your place, and in Britpop if you were happy to play a guitar that sounds like a guitar, or play bass that does what a bass is supposed to do like what its always done or play drums as if you were the son of Ringo Starr following a strummed acoustic guitar then Britpop could warmly accept you.

Going to an indie club in the mid 90s was like auditioning for a low budget musical based on Swinging Carnaby Street. Young men morphed into a weird hybrid of Nicholas Lyndhurst and Kate Beckinsdale’s Dad, the one from Porridge. Girls often set about to look like Twiggy in a child’s dress and when dancing they’d raise their eyes and tilt their head, the very way Louise Wener would do when performing her songs on Top of the Pops. After the commercial peak of Britpop in summer 95, any new music seemed to be infused (or diluted) with a reverence to the most well known, conventional beat groups like The Who or Small Faces. Only bands who had had greatest hits compilations with names like The Platinum Collection or The Very Best of… were seen to be worthy as template bearers in how to play an instrument (play it proper like they did in the 60s), what sort of people you should have in your band (4 or 5 men ideally, a token woman singer occasionally, there was a black guy in Ocean Colour Scene to be fair but this was more than rare, best keep if four white guys, like they did in the sixties eh?)

Many Britpoppers pretended they were from up north when they weren’t. Tony Blair, the man who single handedly killed off the concept of hope, wasn’t a folk demon yet and would invite professional northerner Noel Gallagher around for tea and press photos. There was even a greasy spoon dedicated to the simian brothers in Manchester’s Aphlex Palace.

Although much is said about the return of the nineties, I am glad that music and taste is doing its best to stick clear of Britpop. The last 10 years have very softly seen a liberalisation of how to make music (however you like), how your music should sound and who should be making it (whoever and however). We’ve ditched the idea that you always need guitar/bass/drums together. Britpop became shorthand for calling a spade a spade. Its important here to emphasise that one of the key dance crossover tunes of the last 10 years, Seven Nation Army, was made by a blues worshiping bassless boy/girl duo who recorded on vintage equipment yet made a song that was picked up by Erol Alkan and the like and still, over seven years on sets dancefloors alite. Prior, in the 90s, a dance crossover meant an indie tune with a slightly funky drummer beat. Like Black Grape.

I honestly believe there is a richer, fresher diversity of music right now than at any other time. What we lack is any real strong scene, any unifying movement. Or do we? Britpop gave us a kind of scene even if all it stood for was a passion for recreating Get Carter. Maybe scenes these days should not be judged in context of a bunch of people with similar hair congregating to a similar sound in certain designated locations. For better of worse, we live in a separate/participatory culture where scenes are forged through wireless and infected with sheer diversity.

Now we are not mods or punks or ravers or skinheads or hippies but technological negotiators, jumping between genre and platform, aware of this interconnectedness without any sense of euphoria because the most essential act of any scene: those commune moments, those ritualistic happenings where a tribe congregates and breaths a collective sigh of what it feels to be in a moment of time with other like minded souls, are all done individually.

Censored

2010-11-30T03:22:00.000-08:00

I avoid the walk of shame by doing the bus of the same. Sunday, 8pm. Fumes and frost shoot up off the icy ground as the 277 jaggedly cradles me home. There are moments when I love Hackney, moments like when I see an austere looking Christian woman off to prayer, sat across from a young Muslim, returning from prayer. I have no idea what they are thinking but they co-exist and they are making me feel calm. Any hangover I develop as the day forms is irrelevant.

I used to make my music in isolation. I had a glass conservatory where I’d lovingly run sound between two Akai DPS12’s. Laboriously, I’d chip at textures, in love with the process as in love with the calm. In love with the romantic ideal of the artist. People move to Berlin because they are in love with the romantic ideal of the artist but I pursued this in a glass conservatory in Dorset. The frost on the bare trees outside one of the large windows became a line input to the grain on the Edith Piaf sample I may have sculpted. The silence at night, I wanted my music to be heavy of volume like this silence.

Imaginary Soundtracks, Vol. 1 by Londonfieldsradio on Mixcloud

I loved the idea of London but it wasn’t for me. I thought London was all about agenda. Or rather, I wanted to protect my music from agenda.

I have friends who believe music is corrupted by commerce. This may in some cases extend to the belief that mixing money and music is circumspect on any kind of level beyond getting paid for playing gigs. Full stop. I know music makers who view London as a nest of vipers and I know those that view the rest of England as hopelessly parochial. I used to imagine that networking was a terrifying and cold-blooded ritual because years ago, at a festival, I watched a fellow music maker from Dorset running around handing out CDs to every famous person he met. Now I work in the industry I can’t imagine meeting anybody like this, certainly nobody worth listening to.

Two outcomes can ruin any debate. One is the well documented way of ending any internet comments board by making a comparison to Hitler, I’m sure you’ve heard David Mitchell’s level headed analysis of this. Another is by following a line of contention by remarking something along the lines of “We all have different tastes, live and let live”. This contradiction (how can someone utter a line like this, under the assumption of freedom, without realising they themselves have demanded a form of censorship?) is a way of de-intellectualising any form of debate by looking at the provoking statement in an emotional context. Don’t talk about maiming puppies, because my puppy was once maimed. OK, so if I mention anything about puppies being maimed I will provoke someone into asking me to stop talking about puppies being maimed. What if, in the context of talking about puppies being maimed, there is something else being said here? Something the sayer or writer of the puppy maiming comment feels is valid, maybe probes a point that only using the puppy maiming can achieve? This no longer gets said or discussed, rejected or accepted because it can offend somebody who is reacting emotionally. When this happens in art it is considered censorship. Without meaning to stop the flow, we all know who else used to love censorship.

I admit it, this song actually turns me on...

I used to censor myself when I tried to make music in London, years ago. I lived in a flat in Bethnal Green and constantly tried to close mics off from the sound of traffic outside, I didn’t have my silence, my isolation to draw on. I would start an idea and toy with it like a cat too fat to appreciate the maimed mouse in its grip, before erasing it from my hard drive. I’d smoke a cigarette and blame the world. How did I get here? Rewind months and me and two colleagues were under the wing of the people who’s wings Gorillaz and Kylie were and possibly are still under, making music unaware of our privilege. Forward to a time still a while back and I am in Dorset, enjoying my silence, observing the cracks in the garden paving where fennel grows, only occasionally snipped to sit with sardines: these green strands form imaginary European cities that leave my headphones as glitched beats and degraded samples. I am unaware at this stage that this same process will lead me to be sat on a bus, at 8am on a Sunday morning, appreciating the silence of two patrons of two contrasting but similar religions. Their symmetry is like sound not undiscimilar of that of the fennel bush and the gaping Dorset silence. Their grace and contentment briefly reminds me of something.

2010-09-01T09:01:00.000-07:00

"Some art exists to ask questions, and to play with expectations. Some people want art to take them to a place they would never have imagined going to in the company of people they would never have imagined meeting. Bob Dylan, Samuel Beckett and Reeves and Mortimer all do this. Other people want art to reconfirm the things they already know, and send them away feeling better about themselves. This is the job of Coldplay, Music Theatre and those kind of Comedy Store/Jongleurs stand-up comedians who invite the audience to think, 'Yes, that's exactly what happens whenever I try and open a sachet of tomato sauce too, brilliant!'. These polar opposite intentions can be equally difficult to achieve, and I'd wager that there's an element of genius involved in simply thinking of the idea of SingalongaSoundOfMusic equal to the moment of epiphany enjoyed by Beckett when he realised it would be a good idea to strap Billie Whitelaw into a harness and light only her mouth while she rambled all but incoherently for twenty minutes in Not I. But one of these end points is clearly vastly more valid than the other."

Stewart Lee,

http://www.stewartlee.co.uk/

Seeing the name Max Tundra on anything is gives me an instant warm feeling, like glancing at a sweet rack by chance and realizing you can still by Curly Wurlies. This Abe Vigoda remix has the two best Max Tundra elements you can possibly have on it, and it has them in abundance: "Holiday" era Madonna keyboard stabs and the least pretentious and most fun sounding glitches you can imagine!

Abe Vigoda - Throwing Shade (Max Tundra Remix): "Abe Vigoda - Throwing Shade (Max Tundra Remix)"

PS: Can you still buy Curly Wurlies?

Deerhunter's new tune sounds more similar to thingy face's Atlas Sound project than the band's amazing Microcastle/Weird Ero Cont from two years back. It's great but I would enjoy it a great deal more if the cheapo builders out the back of my house would stop drilling for a second. I'd like to kill them. They would not be missed. If anybody has any tips on how to kill cheapo builders please let me know...

Summer Camp and Memory Archives

2010-08-26T08:17:00.000-07:00

I usually cringe at pop promos with opening credits, usually indicating overblown egos and a prevalence of plasticity where names like Lady Gaga materialize on the screen like the dollar signs in the thought bubbles of what we vaguely left hyperbolic types call with generalized disdain execs. Oh look its another alter ego by Beyonce. Christ, she’s on form. Oh super, look who she’s dragged in to appear with her. Now let’s gloss em up, get some cars and some arses wiggling and an overlaboured story based around Thelma and Louise/their incredible rags to riches story or possibly something else.

SUMMER CAMP - Round the Moon from Paddy Power on Vimeo.

The video for Round The Moon by Summer Camp gets away with opening credits by being half spot on pastiche of any dimly remembered VHS film: even the band’s name sounds like a half forgotten film as much as it could be a remembered experience. The credits set the scene for a mini showdown. Archetypes are all in place. The other half of what makes this work is how it becomes a weird nostalgic stimulant, it’s a little quaint and creepy, the visuals of 80s haired kids smoking fags in a melancholic Northern youth club setting not too dissimilar from the Hauntology of Ghost Box. It uses nostalgia to play with our memory. Christ, we are so lucky now, during the Britpop wars nostalgia was engulfing and stifling: a rigid format of conservative emulation. We bopped to Kula Shaker and Ocean Colour Scene and talked of the authenticity of the sound of an Orange Amp. Now, nostalgia is becoming a creative tool, channelling our cultural identities through pop culture into a nearly psychoactive dialogue between shared memory and technology.

Even Wire magazine, has woken up to how pop music is probably THE most creative musical force in the margins right now. The most evocative and forceful writing in their current Retro-Active issue looks at the Hypnagogic HipHop, the Viral futurism that YouTube affords to recast previously existing content (oops, I used an exec term again), and the day glo wooziness of the hazy, sun kissed whatever wave I’ve previously talked about here.

Summer Camp differ from their US counterparts in woozy. The pitch bending pop on offer may be trendy but check the melody. How Sheffield is that? They’re not even from Sheffield but really, it sounds very Sheffield. A chorus that smells of the fag and peanut stenched Formica of social club tables, of falling off your BMX. But wait…I never even owned a BMX. How can I know what falling off a BMX feels like? Weirdly, I do. Summercamp starred Marty McFly’s Mum, but DARYL was about a boy with a computer brain maybe? And then Flight of the Intruder was about a…. hang on, whats the one with a young Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix and they make a spaceship? I am getting confused now. Ah shit, I’m thinking of Spacecamp.

Enter The Void

2010-08-12T07:27:00.000-07:00

Tuesday saw me at a preview...

Years after Irreversible cemented its place as one of those films that nobody actually liked watching but everyone has seen, Gaspar Noe returns with a neon drenched psychedelic opus, Enter the Void, and it’s that rare, rare thing: a headtrip film! Woozing alongside 2001, Altered States, Apocalypse Now and the visual fearlessness of Jodowowski, Enter The Void takes its place as a future fuck heads classic.

The clearest link with Irreversible is Noe’s camera. Always spinning, always moving, always distorting, flying over walls, zooming into unborn foetuses and emerging out in pixelated ultra bright flashes. His camera acts as the eyes and spirit of a young Canadian druggie in Tokyo played by non-professional Nathaniel Brown. We only glimpse his face briefly, when he checks the mirror or leaves his body; we walk through the seedy, sci fi streets of Tokyo as him, we hang with his Oliver Zahm alike buddy and his perma nude sister Paz De La Hueta. But, what happens over the next 2 and a quarter hours is best left unexplained: a collage of sound, spinning cameras, dizzying POV that hooks up psychedelic drug use, the Tibetan Book of The Dead, out of body experience and blackly comic melodrama.

This will have, already has its detractors. It is far from subtle: a real taboo killer, but it will also come to be known as a benchmark for visual storytelling and sound design. Yes the sound design, that’s Thomas Bangalter that is, those tones, textures and pulses. It seems fitting that the Daft Punk man should be the aural driving force for probably the closest you can get to a triple gatefold sleeve prog album of a film. His design taps into the natural ebbs and flows of the visuals to the extent you often feel part of a real, drug induced experience rather than a film.

Yes, dismiss the trite aspects of the melodrama as the shock tactics of an enfant terrible but then also miss the point, why don’t you, this is a sensorary exploration, a big, luminous voyage into the unknown. Texturally as masterpiece, it will be shown in years to come by fucked students and admirers of innovative form.

Leaving the screening in Soho, I take a turn into Chinatown and still feel like the film hasn’t ended, the POV of Enter The Void is now in what I see, the luminous, gliding images jumping from Noe’s imagination into my mindset.

Summer Sports

2010-08-09T07:02:00.000-07:00

Matthew Dear - Little People (Black City)

I love dance music with really dorky vocals. This has that in spades, dorky as in trying to be all Bryan Ferry suave but you can tell as he sang this in his bedroom he was mostly paying attention to the LEDs on his compressor.: "Matthew Dear - Little People (Black City)"

Best Coast - Boyfriend: "Best Coast - Boyfriend"

This tune has been all over everywhere for weeks but its still well worth putting up here. As we collapse into the late summer, this is the perfect accompaniment, short and lovely, reverbed out like listening to The Breeders at the bottom of a swimming pool.

We are in a field in Suffolk in July, long after the main draw has left the main stage, possibly left the country to play another main stage in another field, and the scorched yellow grass surrounding is now deserted apart from a sea of butts and empty cardboard food containers. A short walk away around 1,000 sweat dripped heads are contorting, jumping and jostling in a tent to the five guys on the stage who seem weirdly transported from another time.

Someone Has Gone And Digitalized Our Festivals!

A band steeped in 50s rock n’roll, amped up with the 60s power of the Detroit sound, where the vocals have been trimmed to nothing but the familiar shrieks and buzzwords of a bygone era could only emerge the product of a post modern post 90s. Together with a focus on power that could only exist as a form of dance music since the moment when the guitar and drum got its groove back and killed off the prog house dinosaur millionaire DJs who stumbled bloated round the long forgotten Mediterranean island of Ibiza and who, Oasis excepted, did more than anything ever to strip music of its panache and ingenuity. The Jim Jones Revue could soundtrack a thousand burlesque routines, draped in red curtains and a lascivious tongue lick. For a band who’s spirit exists in a twilight diner somewhere along the highway of mid twentieth century Americana, The Jim Jones Revue are weirdly now. They could only exist as they are, spat out in 2010. They rock, and in this contained tent they convince beyond reason. But are we all now in the film Westworld? Happy holidaymakers at the end of all that has gone before, taking a peek at how we got here?

The festival era as it is: the modern equivalent of the English camping break; has really developed simultaneously with Broadband. Back in the 90s your Reading and your jump the fence era Glasto was just getting acquainted with newbies like V and T and of course the hippies, the travellers and the ravers had their own thing. The plethora of choice in what you can go to over a weekend has sprung up with the plethora of click away history online. Does this abundance of choice replace die-hard connection?

Skimming a festival programme, walking round a festival site, dipping in and out of the sounds at your disposal: every weekend of the summer you can pitch a tent inside a giant iPod. Individual experience becomes something you pick, a buffet of sounds. We are all now deciding between the scotch eggs of anthemic rock and the humus of the Bugged Out tent.

Earlier on that same night, back on that main field, you hear the sound that begins around 9.30pm. This sound is everywhere on any festival at this time. It starts with a bass drum holding down some vaguely militariasque 4/4, a guitar or Midi Piano or both swelling, and some low, muted vocals. It starts to get louder, vocals are starting to repeat lines in a higher voice, sometime around 9.55. The guitars and pianos, swelling still, accompanied most probably by violins and a little brass and then at 10.00pm an eruption in probably a wordless chanted chorus, lighters are raised, the 4/4 is accompanied by a triumphant snare.

This is the sound of the Anthem Band. They are called The National, they are called The Arcade Fire, they are called The Arcade National, they are called the Flaming Fire, they are called the Grizzly National, they are called the Sigur Lips and where ever they go they will stimulate a response of mass emotion, of being part of something. They are billed on every festival poster, in invisible ink it says: “tonight your Anthem band will be…” In 2010 we don’t have time to get won over slowly, en mass, by the uniqueness of, say, a Dirty Projectors, what with all these festivals every weekend, we need to be guaranteed headliners that can generate a mass response without taking the risk of weather a headliner hungry audience will be initiated in a band’s collected mannerisms and ticks, and so we need bands, lots of bands, that can instantly turn on the feeling of mass togetherness by the simple, deceptive trick of arranging certain chords and rhythms in a way that when played loud enough and in front of enough people can turn the uninitiated into believers.

Stimulating an emotional response by aping the sound of mass emotion. Much like being part of a football crowd does, much like the Nuremberg Raleigh did. A trick developed very possibly by Roman Catholicism: make huge amplification units of churches, make the public feel like they are touched by the power of god, and what have you got? New believers. Shock and Awe, baby. Shock and Awe.

In our quick turn over rapid digital world there is often no time to build up this unique trust between listener and sound maker, and much like instant noodles, the anthem band comes in to replicate something a bit like this. As opposed to personal experience you get mass feeling.

The Anthem band, let us be clear, is not the same thing as the stadium band. There are similarities, but the festival going anthem band has its roots in credibility. Its desire to make vast quantities of people emote in unison is always mixed with an element of edginess rather than The Edge. The National could almost be The Tindersticks at points; Grizzly Bear are bravely flamboyant. These are bands designed to make a diverse but not duff at all crowd of thousands come together after a day of sampling a variety. We are not talking U2, Muse or any of those pantomime old dames with rocket launchers in their leather trousers and global proclamations: Anthem bands play to a background of sunburnt skin, swigged drink mixtures and noodles; they do not play to a background of turnstiles, hotdogs and Budweiser.

Like being one of the hapless tourists in Westworld, we dip in and out of a million replica experiences, ornate music makers peddling a particular borough. Post itunes there are a thousand million niches, sincerely offered to us to channel hop around. It is easy to understand why, when an act has often under an hour to ply its wares to us or risk being forgotten, a wordless sound of mass euphoria can cut through and act as a substitute for a hard found uniquely resonating voice. This can explain why anthem bands are often a little older – the grey hairs on Wayne Coyne’s once outlandishly psychedelic head became ubiquitous once his band connected their music to big choruses. These guys have been through it, and learnt to connect to a Darwinian way of evolving through survival.

Collecting Excuses

2010-06-30T10:03:00.000-07:00

Its been a while since I updated, but I have a doctors note…

This was an amazing show to work on. From my role as music consultant we got in some amazing talent: Chrome Hoof played 9 glorious gigs over 6 nights. Great DJing from Hannah Holland, Mystic Rock and Fnord (Faley from Late of the Pier and Fred). I got so used to living around replicants, dwarfs, fire breathing strippers and real snakes that real life after is still feeling a little wibbly...

A few weeks back I supplied a mixtape for an exhibition about collecting curated by Details On Request. The brief I got was simple: Fill one C90 Cassette with my absolute favourite music, and absolutely nothing less.

What a super, super task for someone that spent a great portion of their formative years pressing Rec and Play, hammering down tunes on a C90 for every girlfriend, every prospective girlfriend, every car journey, every long train or coach ride, every Deck-less party way over the age of the burnable CD.

I was making mixtapes way before I was making actual music. In fact the mixtape was how I started, and I’d like to think informs more of a musical knowledge than learning conventional instrumentation. And I think this holds. Although classical training isn’t necessarily a handicap, I do believe the ability to select the right music is far more crucial than the ability to play the right music in any given situation. Musicianship can be learnt and is essentially just a tool that needs to be constantly supervised by taste and feeling.

OK, so, back to the mixtape I had to make. It wasn’t the immediate process that I thought it would be, I do this sort of thing for a living, but its different for a bespoke atmosphere where you can select from a vast amount of stuff to fit the nooks and crannies and attentions and flows of an event. There are many barriers. Ultimately, the selection had to be honestly, purely, my favourite music. So, no current infatuations, nothing I’ve picked up this week that is rocking my world, I have flings with new stuff all the time, most of which tend to be one night stands, passionately genuine in love with for a night but still only one night stands. So, for me, it’s way too early to assume that Toro Y Moi or Major Lazer are worthy to be placed as all time favourite. What is good now can be forgotten about double quick, then found, behind the bin covered in gone off humus.

Also, bang out of the window goes another kind of selection: The stuff that I love but its also cool to say I love and if I honestly think about it, there’s far more truth in saying its cooler to say I love than I actually do. Hello Captain Beefheart and your album Trout Mask Replica. I admire you so but you are all kudos and no fun, and anyone that strongly begs to differ, that can honestly say they get unlimited pleasure from constantly putting this album on and listening to the whole damn thing is also the kind of person who can watch Salo without squirming and should be scrutinized heavily before sharing any time with.

A friend recently expanded a theory that collecting has gone on some siezmic shift in recent, recent history. We have gone from a person generally having a certain amount of stuff that comprises their collection of something, to the desire to own everything. Merely having a nice selection is no longer enough. For this, I blame Figurini Panini. who made collecting finite, rather than infinite. Now, you can own everything. Those Figurini Panini sticker albums, where you could collect an entire set of World Cup players or Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom characters, basically a whole set of everything emerged in the Thatcherite years and its lasting legacy was to instil that ideology in those at the time too young to make political decisions but now make up todays under 40s. These albums encouraged obsession to own and control everything, where completion is prized over contentment.

Space Shipman from Small Wolf on Vimeo.

My pal Ed did the music and captions for this rather captivating video. Something a little Tim Burton esque about the visuals me feels, back when he made films rather than theme park trailers.

Another thought as I am halfway through side 1: Maybe there is something very English about making a mix? We live in a veritable compilation of a climate. This spring particularly felt like two Gods with different tastes niggling over what to put on next: rainy? Nah, fuck it, bring the sun out, oh no, actually hail? Yeah, havn’t had any hail for a while, yeah nice one, that really works, ah cheers mate, I was going to slam a bit of really hard wind on next, check it out! Awesome, nice nice build.

Now, although the Cassette is defunct, its DNA survives as a momento of something or other and the digital climate has turned all of music into a compilation. With music truly democratised in the sense that most of us have in our pockets or on our backs a means of instantly hearing most music ever made, the revolutions of the mods or the hippies or the rockers or the ravers is isolated and singular and requires far too much seperation when your hand can slip on a miniscule slip of technology and you can end up hearing something totally unplanned.

Ownership goes out of the window. The value of a physical object less, music is returned to its source of being in the ether. Music just as sound, free to hear. The idea of collecting can transform into the idea of a collective, where songs are shared rather than owned. Yum Yum.

For more info on what Details on Request do, click on the old link:

http://detailsonrequest.blogspot.com/

Win Something on an Obsolete Format!

2010-05-17T06:21:00.000-07:00

Click on the pic above for the tracklisting to last week's mix. I'm going to give out two home made cassette tape copies of the mix. Email me at paul.hanford@googlemail.com and i'll pick two names out of a metaphorical hat in a couple of days.

Air Con

2010-05-11T11:20:00.000-07:00

Electric Bedroom Music. Throw away that big analogue, all you need is an SK5 if your singing is hazier than a ketamine puppy. A few reminders of a history in the haze but overwhelmingly this is a mix for May 2010. I'll put the tracklisting up soon and let you know how how you can WIN a cassette version, i'll even use the Royal Mail to send it to your door in a jiffy bag!

Air Conditioning Mix by bringmecoffeeortea">
Air Con

A pub round the back streets of Dalston, almost empty. A Trinidadian middle aged man is DJing country and western as we drunkenly play pool. A mile in one direction there is a house party I don’t know about, one of dozens, where someone I’ll meet in July but don’t know yet is dancing, trying not to be sick. Tomorrow there will be a good Sunday roast, Prince Arthur is expensive but convincing with its addition of red cabbage and, of course, has a much better designed interior than the monolith of a bar that dwarves the The Spurstowe.

Recently on a bus, some kid was playing his MP3 player really loud. Way beyond headphones, the 90s sounding R&B reached every passenger. But, for the first time in history, this didn’t bother me.

Brian Eno described his ambient music as “Perfume”. Yet if you take the every day ambient sound around us – road drills, cars, phone conversations, it can seem like over applied Brut 69. The Englishman is his very own make believe king of the castle. An islander through and through, distrusting information, forever swatting flies, keeping the lawn clear. Irrational and crabby at what he has no control over: like sound.

I was born around the time Eno started ambienting about. Very recently, Hyperdub founder and Kode 9 man, Steve Goodman, updated the “Perfume” concept as Air Conditioning. As in how sound travels through the air and conditions our environment. How seventies, how almost Abigail’s Party for Eno to use the Perfume metaphor for his fine aural delicacies, care for another After Eight Mint, sir? Oh with these Ferrero Rocher you are simply spoiling us! Phrased as Air Conditioning, there is none of Eno’s quality choice, there is no control over what we hear.

My friend Beardy Nic was talking recently about an old Chemical Brothers tune, one of the ones with Beth Orton singing, and how it starts so beautifully, so hazy. Like sun flooding in through strips of curtain on a Sunday morning. And then some distorted beats turn up and chew the entire tune to shit. I’ve had roadworks outside my window for ages and every morning is like bill paying day. A minute of half aware beauty out of dreaminess then drill. Drill. Drill.

This is why I can’t hate the kid on the bus, the kid with the beats, drowning out the silence of the 242 of all the little Islanders. Nothing validates like sound. You may be minted, you may live in a rather amazing house with a beautiful spouse and a coriander patch but you most certainly do not own a button that temporarily shuts down your ears. We all live, for better or not, in an aural free for all, an invisible kingdom that exists concurrently with what we see like a layer on Photoshop. And in this kingdom there are Kings and Queens and Warriors. The foot soldier digging up the road; the flamboyant King displaying his MP3 on the bus like a proud Peacock, his glorious feathers invisible to the outside world.

My friend Freddie had this painting seized by the Police in Lambeth, and his housemate was arrested when transporting the canvas down the road. Painting is back now with owner. Housemate had a nice afternoon in the local lockup.

Party Like Its 1991

2010-04-29T09:09:00.000-07:00

You can here it in the distant reverb vocals floating all over the pastoralism of Atlas Sound or the Balearic of Delorean. The hazy cloud at the centre of Neon Indian and Let’s Buy Happiness or in micro genres like “Summertime Gothic”. Shoegaze is resurfacing like a musical ghost more than 20 years since the original wave hit our consciousness like a rather polite swirl of sound before evaporating in a wall of distortion.

I always got the feeling that nobody ever made the best Shoegaze single, to the extent that there was never a defining moment put to sound. The original Thames Valley Scene seemed preoccupied with cultivating a form of shyness so delicate and so fleeting that it consequentially held its nose high against obtaining lasting physical perfection. No, what the original shoegazers committed to those now warping, dust gathering EPs was a world of half remembered dreams, fractured reminisces stained with bong water and Ribena.

Shoegaze captured a beautiful moment between childhood and adulthood. Not the pain of adolescence, or the trials of being a teenager so much as the often overlooked minor victories. It’s like this: everyone knows that the popular kids in school end up kicking early graves, buried in cul-de-sacs with receding hairlines, expanding waistlines and hemmed in by circumstance. Now look around you at the people you know that are interesting, beautiful, creative, successful, enigmatic: these were the geeks at school, the meek, the bullied, the crap at PE and the Dyslexics (who went simply unrecocoginsed in the late 80s/early 90s). Before, there were no beautiful losers, only losers.

Shoegaze soundtracked the exact moment when these kids swanned into pre-raphealite beauty. Where skinniness started to look more desirable than muscles. Where reading books stopped being a reason for collecting bruises, being painfully vague becomes being shockingly cool and naming obscure bands a method of meeting other like minded souls scurrying out of the debris, growing like weeds out of the cracks of ten years of sick notes and hiding under desks. Yes, the jocks were still about, spending their nights in carparks and the shit local niteclub, the one where you’d get a free bottle of cheap bubbly on your 18th birthday, but they were no longer omnipresecent. Wavelengths had sprouted up that they couldn’t even here, let alone identify. For thousands like me, we had found our first subculture.

Of any scene ever, the people in the bands were exactly the same as the people listening, Shoegazers were pale creatures, take for example Lush singer Miki who managed to look both ill and exotic at the same time and was an Emma Peel like figure for literally about two thousand teenage boys. The look of the Shoegazer could be achieved within months: Hair grown out for the first time, floppy curtains for the fellas and often-bright red dye for the ladies. The boys dressed in Breton shirts and the girls coined the Doc Martin/doll dress nightie look often wrongly credited to Courtney Love. Stripey tights. Band T-shirts with vague pictures of oceans or flowers. German army jackets bought from the Army Surplus Store.

MBV were considered shoegazing at the time and every shoegaze band is measured against how MBV they are. With the last few years re-emergence of shoegazing, this is still the rule. How indecipherable the vocals are, how distortedly reverby the guitars are. Journalists reviewing the latest Chapterhouse or Moose EP would say things like “glassy cathedrals of sound” or use words like miasma or vortex.

To most Shoegazers, there was a touch of the school band about them. Scene leaders Ride basically made up for their shortcomings in wanting to be The Byrds by maxing out at every given on FX boxes. EPs by Slowdive and early Catherine Wheel sound like they were the creation of lunch breaks hidden away smoking behind the sports field. This was post-Goth, still dabbling in Byronic romance and decay but feyer: inarticulation as a blurry photo of some roses or a blank ocean. These were people for whom shoegazing was as much a necessary function in negotiating which Boss FX pedal to stomp on as it was a way of hiding insecurities behind thick greasy curtains.

It is only natural that shoegaze, in its original form, lead by its original perpetrators, would not survive. It captures a time in one’s life brief and ephemeral, killed off as voices broke and bumfluff became stubble. Andy Bell from Ride would end up joining Oasis, which is a bit like the pale poet kid at school years later driving round in a white van with a UKIP sticker on the back.

Cult legacies live on with the likes of MBV, Galaxy 500, Stereolab, The Pastels: bands who can legitimately claim to not be shoegaze at all but kind of got lumped in due to some woozy aspect to their sound. But as far as the direct players? Most came mainly from Oxfordshire and so became known as The Thames Valley Scene, and went to each others gigs a great deal where they drunk a bit so also became known in the music press as The Scene That Celebrates Itself.

In 1992 Ride went top ten with their epic Leave Them All Behind and disappeared soon after and two years later the first Oasis album was out. If you ignore the vocals it pretty much sounds like a shoegaze record: the same basic guitar chords distorted, the same school band rhythms. Oasis didn’t kill shoegaze. Grunge had already assimilated the ripped jeans and channelled the teen alienation into aggression primarily by reintroducing acne’s bestest ever friend: heavy metal.

What Oasis did however that was contrary to the prevalent indie spirit, a spirit that ran from the early DIY/Rough Trade scene of the late seventies, through the C86 period, fraggle and which shoegaze was the last to emerge from. Oasis and Britpop generally removed the tide away from music being a special friend that could only be understood by a certain kind of person and accessibilize it to all by actually having hits, and hummable tunes. And in this 90s climate this let through everything the Shoegaze spirit had briefly, successfully managed to escape from: the bullies. By 1995 all the Orcs had firmly flooded the Shire, laughing at the poncey books and replacing them with copies of Loaded and football scarves. The 6 pack of lager replacing the snakebite and black. Swagger replacing enigma. Bacon butties. Sausage Sarnies. Front. Proud to be British. Rickenbackers defaced with Union Jacks. The finger. The Bird. C’mon. Yeah. They were even posing with the fucking PM!

And now, despite renewed shoegazing music, or chillwave or whatever, a reappraisal of these original pioneers hasn’t fully materialized. Until recently most of the music exists in the memories of thirtysomethings and in vinyl EPs gathering dust in basements, lofts and the odd Sue Ryder but now Youtube offers fuzzy chart show VHS memories and you can check out most of the key works on Spotify.

From doing this it is interesting to see what has survived and what hasn’t. Much is lost in bad production and underdeveloped songwriting. But the key component, the central wooze, survives. It is indirectly in everything from Animal Collective and Deerhunter to the harsh bedwetting scapes of Snow Patrol. Although it remains to be seen if the oversized T Shirt with a million and one tour dates on the back will ever return!

A massive Thankyou to Lynn Hayward and Tom Ralfe for going through some old shoeboxes for me to find these images.

The Awesome World Of Can (Part One)

2010-04-14T07:31:00.000-07:00

Above: The Paper Cinema do Can, http://papercinema.wordpress.com/

Can really are the most important and best band ever. OK, just maybe second only to the Beatles. You may disagree, this is fair enough, I’m sure you have your reasons but you are wrong.

Often when people get together and talk about best type music things people use the phrase Best Rock n Roll band ever. And Can are not this, often they hardly sounded like rock n roll at all. According to perceived wisdom, The Stones, The Who, Led Zep, The Clash or The Ramones are the best rock n roll band ever. They usually are in lists. We have this image of men, always men, playing loud blues with swagger and it dominates like a bully over anything else. The best rock n roll band ever consists of a sound that is in its 50s or 60s, a puffing and wheezing macho old dame obsessed with photocopying and photocopying its own face, again and again, the wrinkles fade further with each copy but so does the impact. Can do not do this.

Recently the Tories have been utilising the fear of a “nanny” state in their campaigning, creating an image of a UK gone PC crazy where our rights are becoming eroded. The subtext being: vote Tory and we can get back to a Britain you recognise. Just as Noel Gallagher’s Union Jack guitar fitted snugly with Tony Blair’s 1997 rock n roll Britain, a retro glory of a Britain entering a new era; now the Arctic Monkeys are on Cameron’s I-Pod, providing a friendly face for our imminent take-over. All of this means that rock n roll is the ultimate comfort food, where rebellion has been inverted to stand as a reactionary roll call for familiarity. Feeling threatened by the Polish down the street? Worried about your mortgage? Worried about a landscape you no longer understand? That’s OK, The Stones and Led Zep are there for you. Providing the comforting Horlicks of a loud riff and a rebellious pose. We all know Rock n Roll no longer represents rebellion, now it forms some kind of counter insurgence. The Home Counties are wielding axes and Angus Young shorts and are thoroughly rattled about this and that.

The Stones were a bunch of posh boys pretending to be black; Led Zep sold millions pretending to be wizards; The Who an art-pop band who failed to do anything really arty or poppy. The Clash hung around a bit looking all rebellious yet we have them to thank for classic rock and probably U2 and The Ramones are a novelty band that should have stopped. Can are none of these.

The Krautrock Party by Ed Dowie from Paul Hanford on Vimeo.

My friend Ed made this video. You can check out his stuff here http://januarysteamcleaner.blogspot.com/

By now you could well think I’m a complete wanker, especially as anyone that knows me has full knowledge I may even like the bands above. But that doesn’t matter because Can are the best Rock n Roll band ever.

Just as the only real punk of the punk era was Johnny Rotten because he knew his only real purpose was to destroy and that as soon as what was needed to be destroyed was destroyed, then it was time to move on, and become John Lydon, then Can, one of Lydon’s biggest influences, were a bluprint. There is only one proper Sex Pistols album because a second would not be the Sex Pistols, it certainly wouldn’t be punk. A bomb doesn’t go off twice, let alone again and again for 34 years. Fast forward generations and Green Day or Gallows or whoever owes as much to punk as some guy at a medieval enactment society does to Henry VIII. Miles Davis was a punk; Emily Pankhurst was certainly a punk.

Wings Of Desire by bringmecoffeeortea

A mix I made for Secret Cinema and their recent show based around Wim Wenders' 1987 film Wings Of Desire.

Can are also the best Experimental Pop Group ever. It is perhaps very, very easy to make experimental music. It is quiet possibly the easiest type of music you can make. All you need is:

A guitar, linked up to some FX boxes. The more the better, in fact you can attach these boxes together in your own custom made box, in your own special order.

A laptop with MaxMSP, where you make real time algorithms that only you understand.

A quintet, a quartet, or a trio where you can channel experimental urges with a jazz flourish. You can get gigs at Café Oto and be on a Wire Tapper CD.

To make the above music you can either have a very advanced degree in music or have absolutely never picked up an instrument in your life. It matters little, because the outcome is exactly the same.

When 4’ 33” was performed in the early fifties nobody had the slightest idea how this period of silence, performed in a concert hall, would go down, nobody knew how to perceive this. When our friend with the improv/algorithms takes some idea originating from the same time period at The Fleapit we know exactly what the outcome will be: our friend with the impeccable influences makes Experimental styled music, and recorded it can be filed nicely and neatly under the tag “experimental”. Can did not do this, they experimented most definitely, they improvised for sure and often they made noise, but they gave it a function, they gave it rhythm. And in a really, really strange way, they were Pop. Can are best Experimental Pop Band ever.

By now you may think I’m a complete prick, after all, I have tried many of the experiments listed above. Yet life is so much more fun after accepting that we are all by nature hypocrites, so lets not get hung up on contradiction, and certainly lets not all get huffy about being pretentious. Go with the flow. And that’s what Can specialised in. No other band in history has been so in synch with little other than their own flow motion. If a regular rock band is the shape of a triangle, an army in attack motion, getting ready to charge at you then Can form a circle, turning inward and spinning round like a disc. An entity where no sound dominates over another. Can set the blueprint for the following decades forays into DJ and producer led music and connected it together with its experimental past (Czukay studied under Stockhausen).

Can’s music does not say look at me, Can remove the emphasis from the hero/warrior of the pantomime poet Jagger/Morrison tradition, itself a honky riff of Byron/Shelley goes sing the blues. As a consequence Can float like a jellyfish through oceans of sound: they are punks ignoring conventional form, unable to lock into the American soul grooves they so loved, Jaki Liebezeit’s drumming made a kind of jerky funk that could and often did go on and on and on into infinity.

Can are the only band in history that fit neatly and precisely in to some sort of place between the art that punks built out of debris as well as the mess their arch enemies Prog made, yet they simultaniously tied up Stockhausen’s ideas into a neat little bundle of Top 30 Disco’ness like I Want More. Like all good artists working in any field, they made virtue of their shortcomings.

12 Self (opened) Self by bringmecoffeeortea

A Krauty flavoured track I recorded as Sancho a couple of years back. You can check more out here: http://www.seedrecords.co.uk/