The Crackling Ether: Electronic Music record reviews
Original position in magazine: pp 5-11
Contents: Techno Animal, Tricky, Isolationism, Scanner, Z’EV, Bruce Gilbert, The Sidewinder, Paul Schutze, Jessamine and Spectrum, The New Atlantis, Martin Archer
Introduction
Some general notes… ‘well music is changing isn’t it?’ reads a touching fibre-tip note at my local CD store at the Elephant, sellotaped over the shelf of a little Ambient - Techno - Trance section. Why the devil do I listen to this stuff? Perhaps Bob Parker was right - many years ago he was dubbing this sort of swill a modern equivalent to 1970s prog-rock. And in terms of pretentiousness and over-blown self-indulgence, he may not be far wrong! Now that I’ve locked into this seam of material it’s become terribly addictive - like taking Soma, Aldous Huxley’s soporific sleep-inducing drug. I should have heeded that stern warning ‘Drown in your Soma Bath’ issued by The Legendary Pink Dots. Give me a sprawling overlong Ambient CD and I’ll chomp on it for hours like a baby with a huge biscuit crammed in its gob. I’m not particularly proud of this. Of course I’m missing out on the social dimension, never been near a chill-out room in my life, but these ethereal sounds are a welcome palliative and often fill up large spaces in my empty life. Yet the stuff’s maddening. Florian Fricke’s observation that this music lacks a centre is quite accurate; but this lack of focus is what makes it so dangerously approachable. The ideal for me is finding myself in a thick fog of music, with no awareness of how I arrived there - like being lost in the middle of Dante’s dark wood. Perhaps I should employ some mischievous minion to play me CDs at random, at weird hours of the day and night. And returning to that sleepiness aspect, some of these CDs have provided me with sweet soundtracks for very enjoyable 20 minute naps. But then I’ve always used music that way - Pink Floyd sent me to the Land of Nod more than once in my adolescence! This is not to imply the music’s boring; the truth is I welcome any means of getting in touch with a rich subconscious vision, and try and model myself after the Surrealists in that way. The comforting swaddle of Isolationism is also touched on below; but for a little more grit in your electronica diet, taste the stern brew of Bruce Gilbert, or the aggressive punch of The Sidewinder. Incidentally, all of the above allusions to Soma, sleep, fog - and biscuits - are endorsed by the titles of Ambient CDs and tracks. If you are inclined to doubt this, flick through the swelling second-hand Ambient section at SelectaDisc sometime.
Techno Animal
Re-Entry
UK VIRGIN AMBT 8 / 7243 8 40404 20 CD (1995)
Tricky
Maxinquaye
UK ISLAND BRCD 610/524 089-2 (1995)
Two items, not really connected, and I probably wouldn’t have bought them but for the fact that The Wire made them sound kind of interesting in 1995, so by now it’s all old hat to you hipsters I have no doubt. Techno Animal’s offering is totally nightmarish, and sheer delight for the stereo, it works on one level as just purely enjoyable explorations of textures. Right from the start I was overwhelmed by some sense of gargantuan scale, and this not just the fact that it’s a double CD (each disc over an hour long). I mean this wonderful illusion of experiencing more than you’re hearing. They prove the drug of music really does work. Tremendous use of subliminals - grunts, shifts, blips, all manner of things right on the edges of perception somewhere, hinting at much darker forces and huge physical shapes beneath. Of course to arrive at this point you have to listen your way down through layers of barbed wire mixed with tendrils and bracken. But when you arrive, here is this fascinating bedrock, an undulating concrete ocean, simultaneously liquid and rock solid. Beneath it there lurk all manner of strange beasts. So this record succeeds in fashioning an entire separate planet, with its own strata and volcanic rock formations, whose history is all there to be read by those equipped with aural geiger counters and geological hammers. The sleeve art of course hints at another dimension, the populating of this strange world with hideous cyborg entities, among them a robot baboon and a computer-generated dragonfly. No fluffy theme-park comfort to be found here, rather a terrifying rollercoaster ride through the possibilities of digital futures.
Techno Animal is two guys, Kevin Martin and J Broadrick, joined here by other musicians, among them the great Jon Hassell on trumpet fed through pedals, filters and overall studio technique, methods Hassell has been employing for many years. I was intrigued enough by this to pick up a vinyl copy of his Possible Musics, which is a nifty item (I had been put off by many elements before, the Eno connection, the pseudo-ethnography feel, the bland sleeve). Re-Entry consists of two suites, ‘Dream Machinery’ is the aggressive primary disc, exploring the scaffolded superstructure of this alien world - check out titles like ‘City Heathen Dub’ and ‘Demodex Invasion’; where auxiliary disc ‘Heavy Lids’ drags us through the murky swamp of the city’s insecure foundations. The latter disc nods in the Ambient direction but it’s no less disturbing for being quieter and not as sharply focused. This record was a revelation to me. It apparently demonstrates all kinds of imaginative and resourceful approaches to dub mixing, sampling and use of electronics. Executed in a seamless manner that makes all the edits disappear. But I can’t emphasise enough that the terror of the whole enterprise is what sweeps you along, a vision of darkness inexorably proceeding like a monster virus throughout our decomposing urban empires, at all levels.
There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since Maxinquaye first appeared, and bits of mythology are accruing - some of it self-made by the artist, some of it pasted on by clueless media folk. Tricky has been in The Guardian Weekend where the journalist tried to portray him as a mysterious demon figure. Also, Nearly God and Pre Millennium Tension have been released - neither CD is yet on my shelf, but apparently these alone have been cause for a Tricky backlash in some circles. Such is the over-riding imperative - the relentless thirst for novelty, and some wayward concomitant perception of ‘hipness’ - that can sometimes prevent listeners from simply using their ears, making their own judgements. Maxinquaye is a fine record in anyone’s book and I understand it is deservedly popular, bringing the best of a particular style of music to a wider audience. The astonishing surface is what draws you in first - quite honestly few things in life sound as interesting as this - dense, confusing, and filled with unexpected dynamics. The voices are fantastic: Martine’s sad whimper to the fore, plaintive and smitten with some secret pain, barely controlled emotion, yet resigned. Tricky himself adopts the voice of a murmuring dark magus, startlingly effective when he mutters the same lyric out of step with Martine.
After this wears off, you’re still left with an uncanny eccentricity which still seems to baffle some listeners, hence perhaps these attempts to ‘psychoanalyse’ Tricky the artist via some superficial readings of Tricky the person. He remains however a shrewd figure, as protean as the Fool in the Tarot pack, moving freely within contexts and definitions, guided by his artistic demons and perhaps with one eye on the rear mirror to see if anyone’s caught up with him yet. But, like his enormous vehicle here on the back cover, Tricky can traverse all kinds of difficult terrain with apparent ease. An intriguing image is this truck. Its camouflage marking suggests a covert military operation (although he simultaneously blows his cover, announcing his name in large stenciled lettering), the long whip aerial indicates secret message broadcasts and connects to his sonic mission. It is parked in a sandy area difficult to reach, and tire tracks leading both ways show he can move whichever way he likes.
Each track is a different fantastic voyage into harsh landscapes, dream environments, obsessive nightmares and visions. These are realised through a prescient, magical mastery of the sonic studio space. Anything can be used in Tricky’s palette of sounds and textures, thus the familiar mix of sampling and real-time musicians playing. Tricky seems to perceive the whole sound environment in a perfect hyper-real 3-D, and is able to insert his inspired, fleeting details with extraordinary precision - it’s like glimpsing brightly coloured tropical fish darting past your retinas for a millisecond. This is surely the Eisenstein ‘montage’ aesthetic given a new twist and a new lease of life: through his edits and juxtapositions, Tricky unleashes dark emotions, leaves odd traces and impressions and, through the adding of yet another element in the mix, accretes new layers of double-bluff, contradictory meanings. Is he not the Jean-Michel Basquiat of music? Familiar popsong concepts of ‘development’ through the traditional verse-chorus structure of a song are refused, in favour of simply repeating the same hooks, verses, riffs - into an infinity of hysterical self-reflecting and self-parodying echoes, a mirror ball picking up new colours and shapes on each successive spin. I find this particularly on the tracks ‘Ponderosa’ and ‘Black Steel’, which simply grow increasingly insane and demented as they progress. In fact this same pattern is echoed by the linear sequence of tracks here - the record becomes almost totally incoherent by the end, with ‘Strugglin’ menacing you every second with its shotgun sound effect used as a percussion track, and ‘Feed Me’ with its glissandos of fucked-up, disintegrating robot voice.
He plays clever games with your memory - a song can linger on in your mind long afterwards, even in the middle of the night an echo or phrase will return to haunt you, so it’s best to play it one track at a time to minimise brain damage. Yet, another listening of the exact same track will yield totally different results. Presumably the snippet of Blade Runner dialogue here confirms this science fiction Philip K Dick-ish element. Surely both these excellent records are examples of 100% studio-based approach to making records - in neither case could tracks like these be pre-composed at a piano, nor indeed notated in that way afterwards. They give us hope for the medium of music’s potential as a tool for the effective communication of ideas in ways that circumvent logic and linear thinking.
ED PINSENT
Various Artists
Isolationism
UK VIRGIN AMBT 4 CD (1994)
My understanding is that this compilation coined the phrase ‘Isolationism’ which for a time has gained some currency (amongst critics and record stores) to describe a certain strain of Ambient music; a useful tool for those chroniclers who enjoy splintering this work into sub-categories. One could take Isolationism to mean music which is by nature withdrawn and introverted, creating an artificial environment of great comfort to the listener; from this follows accusations that this music is not outgoing, is no fun whatsoever, and appeals chiefly to the shy and socially inadequate in need of a ‘virtual womb’ to cushion themselves from the harsh realities of life.
That may be. I’m encouraged to see such an interesting mixture of artists, this compilation has a very catholic definition of its terms, so it includes contributions across a wide spectrum: from the avant-gardish zones we have AMM, the Japanese noisemeisters Keiji Haino and KK Null, Jim O’Rourke, Paul Schutze; from slightly more familiar Ambient territories, Techno Animal, Aphex Twin, Scorn, Lull, Main. Each track overlaps into the next, so that each disc almost describes a gigantic panoramic vista; in a way to separate everything out reduces the project back to its constituent ingredients - the segueing and track ordering are what help to produce this excellent mixture of contrasts, light and shade.
K. Martin’s sleeve note is filled with grandiose claims and I support him for doing this - whether you agree with him depends on what benefits you manage to extract from these discs. The view of many is that the term ‘Ambient’ starts with Brian Eno, who had a defined vision of what it ought to be - ‘as ignorable as it is interesting’, but remember it came about by accident. Martin here does namecheck the effete Brian, but also situates the Isolationism ’scene’ alongside a host of other, more interesting antecedents and parallel developments, and spreads this shopping list before us in a dazzling storefront of delights.
Sleeve art by The Pathological Puppy, the same imagists responsible for Techno Animal; the inside pix are dazzlers, while the front cover is a black murky blob resembling the mouth of a cave with a row of stalactites; perhaps my guess at a ‘virtual womb’ (or a vagina dentata?) is not far off the mark.
ED PINSENT
Scanner
Scanner
UK ASH INTERNATIONAL ASH 1.2 CD
Robin Rimbaud is becoming somewhat ubiquitous these days both in terms of live performances and appearances on his own and others’ CDs; he even turned up on Radio 4 in July 1996, where he turned one of his sampling tricks on the dialogue fresh out of the mouths of the presenters. His method is to monitor telephone calls using radar-ish equipment, and play back recorded edits and samples intermingled with ethereal synth backings. On this CD, I believe his first one, there is much emotion and weirdness in the ghostly voices of the unsuspecting publics, which qualities bear repeated listenings - particularly if you favour spoken word materials anyway. Inflections of accents and timbres of voices can take on something of a musical tint. Scanner’s ambient backing component however can become a bit of a nuisance, and you ask yourself if it’s always necessary. That said, there is an unsettling tension in the whole package, and it’s always a compelling play-through listen. In a way he reminds me of Mark Boyle, who as much as I like him was something of a one-trick pony (as Scanner is in danger of becoming). Boyle used to make life sized fibre-glass casts of street sections chosen at random - there’s the same 100% urban grittiness and paranoia, and the determined focus on a particular aspect of city life which everyone simply takes for granted. Scanner plucks our very speech from the air and clinically analyses it simply as digital information, regardless of content. Subversive? Not really. He does it from the safety of his bedroom using expensive spying equipment. A real confrontationalist would be out on the street with his concealed mics, or better yet shoving ‘em right in the faces of unsuspecting people, getting into fights, and accepting the consequences.
Scanner is also to be heard doing it live, on a brace of recent Sub Rosa items which include Main and David Shea. Quantum 102 was live at Paris in June 1996 and features a very good ‘Live Firmament’ by Main; Quantum 051 was recorded May 1996. Neither of these is essential, but enjoyable enough. Having seen David Shea live now, I find he does it with a large computer based keyboard called an Ensoniq, feeding little discs into its black metal mouth. This technique allows him tremendous control over his sources - perhaps too much control. The Spitz show (1st February 1997) was professionally done, but somehow bloodless - nor did the material really engage one’s attention for long.
ED PINSENT
Z’EV
Heads and Tails
USA AVANT AVAN 034 CD (1996)
Shudder - of all records in this issue this one probably scares me the most! Boasting ‘100% Recycled Sound’, it’s an ingeniously crafted onslaught of relentless rhythms, overlaid with disjunctive voice samples and noises of the most delectable vileness, all performed with merciless efficiency. This is a full scale attack using heat-seeking Exocet missiles, bazooka and mortar shells fired with pinpoint accuracy, leaving your inner sanctum totally devastated, in flames. I only know of Z’EV from his appearance in a Glenn Branca (who has co-production credit here) concert, where he apparently assaults a drum or gong of hideous proportions so as to make your very bones scatter to the four winds. This record uses contemporary Dance and Jungle sounds to the full, but not like U2 or David Bowie who simply tack it on to what they do anyway in some pathetic attempt at hipness (or just to try and sell records). Indeed no, Heads and Tails has something to say - and it punches every syllable of its message home using the rivet gun of drum n bass, stapling a steel plate to your skull. This vital message is not a palatable one - all kinds of unpleasant images seep out from between the cracks of these samples - but it is something which we could all learn from. Cathartic, subversive, laced with black humour - a work of genius. Get a hold of this monster and use the arc-welder to seal it inside your CD player.
ED PINSENT
Bruce Gilbert
Ab Ovo
UK MUTE CD STUMM 117 CD (1996)
This CD reminds me of a Play-Dough Fun Factory toy - imagine an electronic version that squeezes out the raw material of noise into novelty extruded shapes. Probably something to do with the somewhat ‘bendy’ nature of the sounds - we don’t get segmented scales or individual notes so much as a huge twisty column of blurty noise. But also Gilbert has a tremendous overall mastery of the components at his disposal, as though he’s shaping up the clay in his hands before he throws it on the wheel. At the same time there’s a clear building-block aspect to this method; each sound is practically stand-alone, refusing the interactive complexities of harmonics for example, and yet refusing to stick to the sounds thrown next to it.
As many of you know Gilbert continues his long standing residency as ‘The Beekeeper’ DJ to the Disobey Club of London. His slightly stern and formal appearance makes me think of a strict mathematics teacher, which is hard sometimes to square with his bouts of sonic anarchy. One of the most striking Disobey events was where he performed on stage concealed inside a garden shed. This concealment is apt, as I feel there’s little that’s transparent about his work; to see him hunched over a control desk reveals nothing, and even if you’re told he works with spray-painted CDs, it doesn’t aid your understanding of the process too much. Ab Ovo is a delightful celebration of the possibilities afforded by today’s technologies, delivered with artistic confidence, added quirks and eccentricities - no traditional linear exploration of ideas, no backing beats - just a panoply of growling electronic burrs, deployed with an uncompromising fierceness of attack.
ED PINSENT
The Sidewinder
Colonized
UK VIRGIN AMBT 17 (7243 8 42176 2 4) CD (1996)
This truculent little beast has been released by Kevin Martin and J K Flesh of Techno Animal, and this project reaches even further than their previous foray into the darker recesses of the cerebellum. Here, the pulsebeat is practically everything. Each track immediately clogs up the air with layers of these Mephistophelean beats, muffled and doctored to produce nightmarish, claustrophobic effects, squeezing the listener along narrow channels and inviting you to explore soundworlds of menace, one after another. What a fine soundtrack it would make for Fantastic Voyage as those miniaturised scientists pass by the inner chambers of the heart and crash through cellular walls! Notice how many other classic 50s-60s Sci-Fi movies are hinted at by the track titles! (Send me a complete list and win a prize). If K Mart is transforming the listener into a snake, this scaly reptile we become is imbued with a frightening sense of urgency, driven to achieve its goals at any price, relentlessly pushing its body to the utmost limits. But judging by the crystal sharp computer graphic on the cover, The Sidewinder has two heads - so we could slither in either direction. The music urges us to take control and focus our energies. Once the initial repulsion and claustrophobia wears off, you travel through a bottleneck and enter a new plateau of purposefulness. Either that or you’re just relieved the CD’s over! A million miles away from the relatively comforting Isolationism above.
ED PINSENT
Paul Schütze
Apart
UK VIRGIN AMBT 6, 7243 8 32233 29 CD (1995)
One of his earlier releases - there’s now a lot of his works available via the Californian label Tone Casualties, and Big Cat in this country, and for whatever reason the companies appear to be selling him to us as some sort of modern composer, rather than just another Ambient geek with an expensive workstation. One can’t deny the seriousness of his intent, although the results here aren’t exactly earth-shatteringly novel. If there’s a contemporary mystical-ceremonial school of electronics (forefronted by David Toop), Schütze is an acolyte thereof, and his recent Site Anubis CD would seem to confirm this, simultaneously placing him in a line of those who love to use Egyptian imagery - Sun Ra, Don Cherry, The Dark, Ash Ra Tempel, Popol Vuh, Organum. John Wall is thanked there on the credits. I wish Schütze had more of Wall’s steeliness, or inner core of asceticism; instead the overall impression is sometimes one of shapelessness and inconclusiveness. The initial piece starts promisingly enough, immediately creating a sense of occasion and anticipation, which the remainder never really delivers. I reached the ending with its sad tinkling of the high-hats, probably sampled / looped / played by a sequencer and not really connected to the rest of the piece at all; realising Schütze has to (or chooses to) play and do everything himself, like a child with a big box of toys and nobody to share them with. It seems a rather lonely way to make music, but hey - that’s Isolationism I guess. On the plus side, the second disc contains ‘Sleep I’, at 14.24 minutes it’s a fine lengthy microtonal exploration that’s superficially very close to the great György Ligeti - and I suspect that’s probably the point.
ED PINSENT
Jessamine and Spectrum
A Pox on You
UK SPACE AGE RECORDINGS 003 CD (1996)
These excellent new projects of Sonic Boom, splendidly packaged on his own Space Ace Recordings label, are to my mind far more diverse and interesting than the work of Spacemen 3. I liked a lot of Spacemen 3 records but sometimes found the insistence on druggy culture not to my taste, and some of the lyrics a bit trite. Sonic is now going for 98% music and sound exploration, which can only be a good thing in my book. A Pox on You is credited to Spectrum and Jessamine, a splendid 30 mins 5 track item and as the first one I heard it seemed to lay out the ground rules for this project: by word and image (and music, of course!) Sonic proudly displays such influences as the BBC Radiophonic workshop, The Silver Apples, Musique Concrete, the Theremin and perhaps Joe Meek. The back sleeve shows off Sonic’s new toy - a fantastic VCS-3 synth, which is undoubtedly to the fore in my favourite track here, ‘Satellites’, which is abstract enough to have come from the Radiophonics Workshop’s Out of this World special effects record (BBC REC 225, 1976), and also stands as a tribute to the exemplary work of Froese and Baumann on Zeit. And you can’t miss his tribute to ‘A Pox on You’, wherein he somehow manages to emulate the sound of Simeon Coxe’s unique instrument via the use of Theremin and synthesizers, and mixes in a convincing Danny Taylor drum sound to boot. His take on the song is to echo the vocal heavily thus stripping it of the original bite and bile, and transforming the singer into a vengeful ghost living in the Phantom Zone, coming back to haunt an unfaithful lover.
ED PINSENT
Various Artists
The New Atlantis
UK ORBIT 004 CD (1996)
Sonic Boom and friends again. The sleeve prints a Roger Bacon quote from the year 1624, which layers a notion of 17th century cosmogony over these electronic interrogations (’Wee also have sound-houses…’), and connects thus to Sun Ra’s Atlantis and another take on Joe Meek’s New World. This CD is a sampler for the label and includes some early tapes of Spacemen 3 rehearsals; a take of ‘Transparent Radiation’ stands out, mainly because it’s such a great song. It also seems to indicate Spacemen 3 had their project all worked out right at the start.
ED PINSENT
Martin Archer
Ghost Lily Cascade
UK DISCUS 4 CD (1996)
The William Morris wallpaper CD wrappers and inserts suggest some pastoral succour here, but as the title says it’s only the ghost of a lily - nature rendered as a stylised image, mere decoration. Having visited Sheffield (where this was recorded) myself, I can testify there is little pastoral calm in that urban area, and I found ghosts of steel factories and the hideous Meadowhall shopping centre populated by further ghosts. So Archer perhaps hoists this music as a screen, a bright pennant declaring the powers of art, to mask off the blight and vicissitudes of the world, and within the safe haven of his studio he surrounds himself with friends and kindred spirits. This music is the result and does indeed evoke that sense of a small outpost of civilisation gathered around a fire while the philistines are rioting without. Perhaps in a sense Archer is aligning himself with William Morris, proposing an idealistic artistic community? The starting point appears to have been dense synthesizer backdrops devised by Archer and his worthy constituent Chris Bywater, with energetic acoustic instrument layers dropped over the top. These are played with skill by Simon H Fell, Brian Parsons and many others. My only problem is there isn’t quite enough tension in the actual performances to make it as compelling as it could be. However Archer remains a craftsman of studio technique, this CD works as a collection of very well delineated textures and lines, a superb testament to commitment to excellence in digital recording. Such an attitude is altruistic and user-friendly compared to say the Incus approach, which to a certain extent still denies ‘good’ recording technique and minimises listening pleasure - the performance is everything! At least one of Archer’s recurring textural components is so washed out as to be barely present, a fascinatingly insistent sandpapery electronic buzz that made me think my speakers were conking out.
ED PINSENT