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January 27, 2004
Dizzee Rascal : Cold Beat Platter
Bosch delighted in reminding his contemporaries of the intimate proximity of everything evil. Among his supernatural fauna, as a repeated motif, the Flemish master depicts organic forms hollowed out by decay or by the predations of crawling things, and now harbouring in their putrid concavities wicked demons cavorting in hideous transports of joy or industriously pursuing their frightful profession.
Despite the manifold symbolic interpretations that have been pressed upon them over the years, it's likely that the infamous imps are populist illustrations, imaginatively drawing on common folk- and bible-lore; the substantial message perhaps being that 'evil' is omnipresent in and integral to nature. The obscene succulence of organic forms' disintegration, the lingering between life and death, form and deliquescence becomes a parable and warning of the issue of moral bankruptcy, the decay and eventual apocalyptic desolation of the human spirit.
The artist's obsession culminates, in The Garden of Earthly Delights with the grotesque figure of a man who, propped on two wooden arms of hollow trunk as on crutches, looks serenely backward, along with the viewer, to his torso; both observers finding it a mere hull within which a feast is eagerly anticipated. The infernal diners, more frightful, like insects, because of their tininess, seated happily upon a reptile bewitched into rigidity, await the serving of beer. Meanwhile atop the tree-man's head long beaked devils drag unfortunate human beings - tired, scrawny, pale creatures forlorn and inadequate amidst the demons' tumultous carnival colours - in a merry dance about a vast bloated bagpipe whose music, thankfully, one can only imagine...
***
I just didn't take much notice of Dizzee until recently. Hearing 'Fix up, Look sharp' on the radio, must have been the best part of a year ago, I still detected something of the tawdry, shabby sound of UK hiphop as it had been - outfits like London Posse who had somehow just not hit the mark, no matter how much one might have wanted to support their effort to create a true british hiphop. For me, The Streets' album had done just that, its delirious geezer-poetry redolent more of The Fall's Mark E Smith and Happy Monday's Shaun Ryder than WuTang or Nas.
One important element was the use of homegrown rhythms - it was always clear that a british lyrical style was going to come out of the pirate's Mcs chatting over UK garage, and that the legions of Wu-tang copyists practising their Staten Island impressions were doomed.
Together with The Streets Dizzee ushers in the second important element: an unfeigned lyrical style that risks ridicule or commercial humiliation in its unashamed sense of place and specificity. After all the vast majority of british hiphop acts - and rock and pop groups, for that matter - have always hidden behind americanism. In The Streets we have a hybrid brummie-essex boy, and now Dizzee, with that brutal East London twang.
Stil,l Dizzee's single just didn't do it for me at the time. Unaware that it was the atypical soft centre of the album-to-be, and distanced anyhow from the capital, pirate radio, and cutting-edge musical trends, I slept on.
In September I see him on TV collecting the Mercury prize; no concessions to the event , he insouciantly drawls his big ups and slinks off the platform. But it still takes another event to make me sit up and listen.
***
Oct 19 '03 : I'm getting neckache watching a perspex box suspended over Southwark. There's someone in there, and good god, he's having an experience;! Thousands look on, transfixed. After forty days of being ogled, abused, worshipped and pelted by Londoners, it's nearly comedown time for postmodern magus David Blaine.
The day is memorable for a strange convergence of borderline artertainment events with religious overtones. Each features perspex boxes, prerequisites for contemporary happenings in which, whilst panoptical transparence to the point of obscenity is de rigeur, inner spaces remain glazed-over, occulted by uncertain factorings of fame, money and desire.
At midday then, I was gazing through someone else's pane, this time blood-spattered, attempting to fathom the opaque ruminations of Damien Hirst. His latest inelegant conceit, to employ the sombre gravity of greying cow's heads in the service of an unlikely new interest in biblical studies. One plexi-cubed hundredweight anvil of pickled beef for each apostle, and an accompanying pamphlet of poems, breathless art-student epiphanies thickened with nihilist oaf grit.
Religion is always suspect in modern art: A lazy burrow to profundity, it smacks of laziness and desperation. And the work itself is all-too-familiar. Given the long hiatus since his last work, it seems Hirst is becoming a self-parody, becoming what the bitterest elements of the media always longed for. Not that it makes a difference; he's long-since been admitted into the world of self-fulfilling profits: a name, an investment. Besieged by the invisible denizens of Tessier-Ashpool-world, Matthew Mark Luke John and all the rest have been sold before the exhibition opens.
Up on the top floor of the White Cube, through whose executive floor-to-ceiling windows a sun-raked Hoxton Square seems a no less revolutionary site than Tiannenmen, a foul odour taints the clinical precision of the glass partitions, the costly interior marriage of chrome and restraint. Strictly ten people allowed up at a time, to 'meet' the artist. He's grinning (well he would be wouldn't he). A thoroughly down-to-earth sort, his optimism is not even shaken by countless embarrassing moments with people from another planet. Mine, though to me cringingly awful, is probably not exceptional, as I inevitably struggle with the impossibility of saying anything intelligent during a brief encounter across the great divide. A signed book as salvage from the wreck of my self-respect.
What is; that stink pervading the the art-world's premier penthouse crib? A hired industrial fan at the window can't evacuate the odour which at first, cognitively wrongfooted by an irresistible pull of metaphor, I automatically assume to be the stench of filthy lucre. Entering the inner sanctum and examining the unassuming black canvases reveals a ghastly chitinous texture suggestive of immense opened-out garibaldi biscuits; each black square is encrusted an inch thick with dead insects.
With his sticky black-syrup traps for stateside collectors (all due attention to archival considerations? How does one preserve squashed flies?) Hirst is hammering on at his grand theme -- the recession of death in the face of attempts to (re)present it. But Blaine's forty days in the wilderness are far more authentically religious - for Blaine, anyhow. The real show, a one-man-show with a one-man-audience, was Blaine's subjective experience. The cameras were there merely to fund his personal trip. Harmony Korine's mess of a film, in-between Blaine's feeble mantras ('it's so byoodiful up here'), captures one poignant speech where Blaine reflects on the ineffable nature of experience, his high-rise epiphanies already being beaten into recession by quotidian reality. He bemoans how even now, one day on, hospitalised and drip-fed, he's losing focus. When he was up, he was very very up, but now he's down, he's down. As the crane lowered, the cosmic insights turned to dust, leaving only fatuous scribblings in a yellowing notebook. Communication was impossible. Did he know now how Jesus felt? Would he die? The forlorn hope he embraces is that by doing even more stupid stunts eventually he'll bring that expanded consciousness back with him into everyday life (of exactly what use it would be, no word). It all evaporates into silence and pious platitudes.
Maybe those on the ground got a better deal after all. On the last night a sizable crowd of revellers are gathered on the bank of the Thames and across Tower Bridge. Some have been there every day. Some did Michael Jackson dances for David. Some held up signs, some shouted for a moment of recognition. Unsportingly, but gratifyingly to me, Blaine says that the ones he liked the most were those who just looked, for a long time. Wondering.
Considered as an entertainment, from the audience's point of view, it was the stillness, the slowness that was the revolutionary aspect of the whole show. At the endgame the proprietors are betraying it, with a final blast of showbiz to make it pay.
But even this loud and gaudy finale is trumped. Just before the clock strikes 00:00:00:00 an immense barrage of militaristic beats wafts over from the north. Sparring with the media-whipped but still tepid murmur of the crowd as the perspex box threatens to lower, softly cut-up by a gentle breeze off the thames, it comes on like a brutal remix of the Omen theme, a dark bombastic choir heralding the entrance of some demonic hip-hop hero. Unsure as to whether the soundtrack is part of the performance or not, we try to concentrate on the matter in hand.
Once back on earth, The Famished One's emoting, relayed onto giant plasma screens, can no longer disguise the obvious anticlimax. Blaine's absent thunder is less stolen than relieved of its embarassment, by a further repetition of the stentorian chorus. Churlishly I suspect a cheap PR trick, a shoreditch misappropriation of Blaine's demographic. But once Blaine's been tipped out of the tank and hospitalised, we naturally head over to the bank where a bunch of Hackney homegirls are going nuts.
Buzzing back and forth beneath the homeward-jostling masses on Tower Bridge we spy, apparently, a jubilant Dizzee Rascal and entourage caning 'Jus' a Rascal' repeatedly at impressive volume from a motor yacht that obviously has the edge over two policeboats fruitlessly looping the stanchions of Tower Bridge in pursuit of the megaphone-wielding MC. Respec'!
***
A couple of months later I finally get given a copy of the album, and have to try and make sense of it all.
One reference that quickly springs to mind is Eric B & Rakim's 'Chinese Arithmetic' track on 'paid in full'. That early hiphop has an external similarity to the Dizzee sound, in its manifest awkwardness. But on the Eric B track you can just imagine the sample button being stabbed manually in a primitive studio. It's the sound of someone doing their best (and frankly it's a bit crap) With Dizzee, in a world where you could remake Bohemian Rhapsody with a computer retrieved out of yesterday's garbage, it's the fruit of a concerted effort to create an awkward, flat monotony. It's the sound of someone doing their worst.
It's can't really be described as harshness; rather the sounds seem to be an abrogation of all sonic qualities. On further inspection, however, I decide that they're neither harsh nor mellow, they're alternately flat and hollow.
Is it just because of my familiarity with the form that everywhere I hear elements descended from drum and bass? I'm taken back to a time in drum and bass history when these peculiar bass sounds first started to emerge; One of my all-time favorites is Ray Keith's Society; 12" on Penny Black; there's an astonishing bass sound which has - if this is possible - a leaden bouncy feel, and ends with a dolorous aftertaste as the note droops downward before expiring with a soft blunt cut-out. There's something peculiarly cold and unforgiving about the sound: the frequencies have actually been split in half and hollowed out.
You can feel the difference. In the days of 'Jungle' (the quaintness of the term now!) the bass was most often a pure sine wave: given the super-low frequencies this made the experience of the bass at high volume wobbly and overwhelming; round, dark cotton clouds drifting through the body.
An inevitable growth and exploration of sonic science then proceeded not by scientific method, but via crowd-controlled genetic drift. Blending relatively high frequencies into the bass sound made it possible for the bass to become a more accented punctual, percussive element. Now you felt the impact of each bass hit. The coldest, the rudest bass sound is the hollowed-out evil sound; mid-frequency sawtooth or square waves buzz through the upper ribcage like a haywire powertool, whilst the soft sub-bass, sneaking in under cover of the punctual high-frequency hit, infiltrates the pit of the stomach and the groin. In place of the all-over permeation of dub-descended junglist bass you get a terrorising kick in the gut. There's no doubt that the emergence of The DeathBass is down to selective pressure, plus the self-reinforcing loops as crowds' obvious enjoyment of the thanatropic buzz spurs producers on to perfect the sound; and as a result the general atmosphere of the scene becoming darker and demanding MORE. In a related d&b-descended trope, on 'Stop Dat', the bass suddenly jumps ridiculously high, two octaves up, yet in this ludicrous register still remains menacingly aloof. With sinister barrel-organ indifference it grinds on. Such bass-escapes were in commonplace use to break up drum and bass tracks, winding up the fever to another level.
Meanwhile in Eskiland, rhythm ruefully swears off every comfort that loops and breakbeats ever offered, becoming both more; metronomic and less; regular. No doubt, things get easier with each listen, but still you get thrown by the total disregard for bass-snare patterning (on this score 'Fix up Look Sharp' seems totally out of place).
Dizzee's voice meshes with this sonic landscape absolutely. The dark punctuated mellifluence of his choked-back whine is as rude as the bass. The Queen's english is all articulated at the front of the mouth, teeth and lips. Vowels are closed off politely. The Dizzee drawl is an occult emanation from the back of the throat, its very escape from the oral cavity perplexing. Vowels are fattened, chewed, spread wide; plosives live up to their name, crackling with percussive static. Like Eski, the voice is uptight; brutal restraint is its essence, so much so that even in the absence of any threat, its evasive inflection still gives the impression that it's cagily fostering something dangerous.
LONDON TING:It's well-attested that those who arrive from outside seem to be able to express the inner magic of the capital more eloquently than those who grew up inside the grind. The Streets' Mike Skinner, a brummie incomer, can imagineer London as a hybrid of kung-fu epic, playstation RPG and local boozer pissup. But to hardcore londoners like Dizzee there's no romance in a travelcard.
Skinner's vibe is generous, wistful, playful. You get none of that shit here.
As with The Streets, accent and frequent anglicisms offer a welcome contrast to the polished finish of even the most supposedly edgy US hiphop (masculotronic, gang-solidarity, nothing out of place, letting nothing slip, a rock wall of hardness and impermeability). With Dizzee it's not exactly a vulnerability though; the overriding sense is is one of exposure only to the extent that exposure can't create any more damage than what's already there. A don't-give-a-fuck confidence in his own groundlessness allows Dizzee not to pretend to anyone else's model of 'the street'. There's definitely a charm in his disregard for attitude-armour when he declares he's 'flushin MCs down the loo'; and all self-deprecating brits can only nod in recognition at the fact that an MC can't even get hold of the most basic ghetto accoutrements, and cheerily admits it: 'I ain't got a .44, I'll have to make do with an iron bar'. In US Hiphop, ghetto poverty is always gilded by the American Dream, even (especially) if it's the supposedly flipped playa dream of Bling. In DizzeeWorld, escape is slow, painful, disheartening, and ultimately perhaps impossible.
The level of nihilism casually on display here make the motorcycle-jacket sneer of rock'n'roll, the spite of punk, and even the cold robotic takeover of techstep, look obsolete and naïve with their reserves of positive energy. By comparison, everything that's gone before appears compromised by its qualities, its enthusiasms, its direction. Cos in Eski coldness reigns supreme. And yet...there is an impulse to bring the coldness into the world.
Simon Reynolds argues that the humanity is to be sought precisely in the inhumanity of the sound. That the brutal anger of Wiley's sound portrays the thrashing impossibility of making sense of a world in which you are 'the product of society'. The hopeless headbanging sonic spasms perhaps hammer against the frustrating irreconcilability of the determinism of poverty with the 'freedom' that the 21 st century western individual supposedly basks in.
And maybe this material can truly be called tragic, a precise portrayal of the brute fact of the continuation of life under existentially unfeasible, absurdly amoral conditions. What more chilling illustration of the indifference of the gods than the emptied-out mockery of the sampled female voice: I....luv....U....I..I..I.....luv....U. Or the cycle of anemotional gameplaying in Round we Go. Refusing both melancholy and redemption, Just sittin there, Dizzee resounds with tragic overtones : 'I must go on, I can't go on....I'll go on.'
Hiphop is a moribund form, there's no escaping it. The omnipotence of glossed-up hiphop is a testament to the tungsten-carbide stomach of Kapital, able to digest anything and turn it into a procedural machine stamping out hollow gloss-encapsulated placebos. Hiphop is dead inside, but its shiny surface can be preserved indefinitely. Whilst over in the US proliferating crews shine up the surfaces, Dizzee faces the death of hiphop head-on. The mashed-up clunkatronic spasm of Dizzee is the sound of the meat inside the hollow shell rotting out. Paradoxically, after all the clinical gloss, it's like a breath of fresh air.
Demonic minstrels inside the evacuated body politic. The sheer desolation of Eski sonics, incorporating the voice as pure sonic blunt instrument, screwing your neck back to face your own emptiness.
Evil stuff. Ringtone existentialism. Something's rotten in the state of hiphop. The grime's real. Worrying at the wound, picking at the scab. Must listen, Can't listen, Will listen.
Posted by robin at 02:09 AM | Comments (10)
January 21, 2004
Deep South / Bad Sausage / Punctuation Puzzle / Horror of Crowds
Last Sunday, took an impromptu trip to The Lizard, the most southerly point in Britain. Basking against the southern flank of our island you could imagine you had stepped into a Ballardian parallel universe. The sun beats down on the thick layer of strange succulent plants that cover the cliffs. Breaking one of the fat leaves apart, you can taste how these errant junglists thrive by internalising their saline environment, becoming endlessly ramified chlorophyll and salt-water-powered blankets of vegetation.
The café perched on the cliff is incredibly good considering its tourist-friendly location - you can imagine the temptation arising to sell up to some upwardly-mobile idiots who will ruin the place by painting it yellow and latté-ing it up.
Chips that would have Martin Parr reaching for his camera, just enough potato in 'em to hold the oil together. Proper table furniture (I love a good sugar pourer). Decent tea.
Table furniture and tea are one good indicator for café quality. Another is the provision of outmoded, unhealthy, faintly horrific (to effete-health-culture-besieged 21st-C man) ingredients as a default option. Our studio/darkroom is across the road from a fantastic place where the perfect standard breakfast (a sensible £3) includes fried bread, with black pudding an option. A proper british caff treads a fine line between disgust and the comforting savour of the unreformed lumpen-diet of yesteryear. It's definitely not; 'eating out', with all the social horror, discomfort, being patronised by imbeciles with aprons, pretentious wine-talk, and wasted money which that entails.
On the other hand, in caffworld there are negative signs to be alert to. If, outside the kitchen, you see stacks of cardboard boxes saying things like "50,000 economy sausages, Bret Skinner's Meat Byproducts of Coventry", you can tell it's not a classy joint. If they could be bothered to hide; the boxes, it might be forgiven, but otherwise this bespeaks a lack of pride in caff culture. After all, the illusion of conjuring a greasy plate of nosh from nothing is the theatrical essence and the pleasure of the cafe (note to 'the new brasserati': if I wanted to dunk a teabag on a string in a cup, I'd have stayed at home. GET AN URN, wanker. And oh for a world when you could just say 'a cup of tea' without having to specify six-variable co-ordinates to locate the desired tea-type on the abstract phase-diagram of baroque herbal infusions. (It's too late to stop this trend with coffee now of course, but good cafés, whether or not they serve cappucino, at least understand the concept of a default, unspoken option of normal coffee. Why do the new brasserati purposefully refuse to recognise this? Because by doing so they hope to fluster you into buying a £3.20 banana and cinnamon grand mocha supremo of course.). In an unhappy incident last week, I only saw the giveaway boxes after I'd eaten the sausage - the inside of which was grey as a wet weekend in the midlands, and so little attention given to the taste that it wasn't even salty, there was just the faint tang of bits of animal you shouldn't eat, mixed up with substances whose only role is to fill space (Could have been woodchip). No matter what a cheap and cursory effort it takes to make something, a british food manufacturer will always find a way of making it cheaper and more revolting. It reminds me of a fantastic piece by George Orwell where he eats a wartime ersatz frankfurter that fills him with a cosmic revulsion at the indignity of modern existence.
Another great thing about this cafe is the repeated use of the "café owner's quote" (see pic), a piece of punctuation I like even more than the greengrocer's apostrophe (cabbage's 50p). What's great about the café owner's quotes are their ambiguity; you don't quite know how to interpret them, it's impossible to say quite what the person who uses them means by them. One imagines there must be some; positive impulse behind their use, otherwise why use them? Is the café owner trying to signify that the foodstuffs are mere imposters, that the so-called "gammon steak" is in fact not a gammon steak at all but some sinister placebo? You can't help but be suspicious about the provenance of the '"Homemade" Blackberry and Apple Pie'. Or maybe the quotes are intended to elevate the humble descriptions to proper names, indicating that "Local Crab", more than a mere descriptive term, has become an atomic linguistic token, a brand. But wouldn't this still tend to suggest an unwholesome deception, a hiding behind quoted slogans wholly unbecoming of the honest caf&ecute; proprietor? Maybe the quotes are simply used as a sort of emphasis, and in this light they look rather delightful, like little sparks leaping from the ends of the words, adding a bit of pizazz and attracting the attention of the potential punter. I honestly don't know the answer. It seems rather rude to start interrogating the staff about their choice of punctuation. Let me know if you have any leads on this important matter.
The last time I was at the Lizard was at the beginning of the year on a photographic assignment with a bunch of anti-war protestors. In a gesture which in retrospect seems like the sort of hilariously bad-taste symbolism that only sincerely well-meaning dim upper-middle-classes could cook up, the cornish contingent were transporting a coffin draped in the UN flag from the most southerly point, across the southwest, to arrive in london for the demo.
Historically, crowds appear to be a necessary part of radical social change, but I must say (a)I just don't know if that dispersion of the individual into crowd-phenomena is possible now and (b)personally I can't stand 'em. The famous London demo didn't even feel like a crowd, it was more like a fuck-off huge queue at Tescos. I'm not joking, in a gridlocked westminster stuffed solid with bodies, twittering idiots were actually trying to push past us as if we were purposefully dawdling in the entrance to the Harrods sale. Oh god, and those drums and whistles: the tribal signals of the trustafarian clansmen. The idea of 'identifying' with this 'movement' just made me nauseous. There was something inescapably ugly and fascistic about the whole thing; everyone shouting hopelessly naïve twittisms and using the occasion as an excuse to let out their little bitternesses about life in general. Totally joyless. By the time we reached Hyde Park my anger against blair and bush had melted into a general hatred of humanity, and I was firmly for; war.
Posted by robin at 08:12 PM | Comments (2)
Phile under Anglo
>> Caution: long rambling post ahead <<
In his inspirational book On the Way to Work (read it, even if you think you hate him), Damien Hirst talks about two early experiences : as a student he lives next door to an OAP hoarder who eventually gets carted away by social services, upon which Hirst breaks into the house and spends every waking hour for weeks just searching through the endless deposits of junk that filled the house, fascinated by the sheer materiality of it, the brutality facticity of its disorganisation, and the richness of the resulting semantic mulch.
One day, he climbs in through the window to find nothing there, everything cleared by the council, everything gone.
A later visit to Chris's Crackers;, a junkyard, brings back to him the same sense that he will never create a greater work of art than this lifetime's slow accretion - discarded sofas, exhaust pipes, tangled-up bits of wire, coconut shells, holey saucepans, all decaying gently together (The incredible thing, says Hirst, is how Chris knows about every single object, where it came from, and how much he wants for it)
Hirst picks up on something powerful here: a collection of material possessions, assembled as a bird assembles its nest, become in their relationship to each other and to the whole, a part of what constitutes a person or character. A distribution according to no conscious plan but precisely expressing the rhythms and patterns of a life: I remember after my Dad's death having to go through his flat and possessions and feeling that they would have preferred to have stayed in place indefinitely, bedded in, entwined and holding fast to each other, and preserving a part of his being, even down to the half-empty margarine cartons in the fridge - this must be why bereaved parents leave their child's room exactly as it was on the day they 'lost' them. The strands have to be disassembled though, painstakingly and painfully picked apart. Like merciless bailiffs we continued as each piece was taken from its proper place, pieces of a person jarred loose. He existed less and less.
Nowadays I sense that only the exceptionally eccentric accrete these significant towers of stuff around them over long periods. The rule is to clear; knock down the walls, get rid of the old furniture, nice bright open space. Shiny new commodities.
Music is becoming the same. Rather than bringing depth and resonance, samples are too cleaned up and glossy. It's all too clean and new, a sonic Manhattan loft.
I'm dreaming of a revitalized sampladelia. Every so often a crowd of unrelated free-ranging tropes coalesce into an idea. At the moment I'm relishing the idea of a new musical genre which can never exist.
I love mechanical fairground organs, especially the sinister wooden figures which remain totally still for the first two minutes of a tune, and then like an victorian chocolate-box premonition of The Exorcist, suddenly make an unnatural rotation of the entire upper portion of their bodies to clang a bell. The relentless militaristic cheer of the fairground-organ commands the attention to such an extent that some find its cheery outpourings an intolerable sonic persecution, an equal evil to car alarms and bagpipes. With their endless trumpeting and clanging they seem continually to herald the arrival of some great dignitary who never ceases to fail to appear. In many cases their original purpose was in fact to draw attention to the gaudily-tented attractions of the fair: freakshows, bioscopes, variety shows, bearded ladies.
Watching their seemingly perpetual motion (although there is nothing more deathly than when the last cymbal crash dies and the garish rococo contraption falls quiet), one can't help imagining the feverish melodies continuing long after all human life is extinct. There's something innate about them that invites a post-apocalyptic scenario. With every note they announce their independence. Every cymbal crash is a brash display of their comtempt for the small amount of human intervention required to bring them to life. (I found the aeonic scope of Spielberg's AI moving on this point - the machines dormant on the seabed for centuries. ).
Mechanical music cannot help but express the fundamental uncanniness of the mechanical itself, of the strange unlife that working machines have - especially machines which reproduce cherished human activities (cf AI again. The beautifully portrayed teddy-bear-android with its programmed love and positivity).
(footnote. There's a historically twisted but genealogically indubitable connection between the fairground organ and contemporary electronica, most evident in the happy hardcore/early rave repertoire. When I got the opportunity to step inside a fairground organ I realised just how direct the technical connection is: the tunes for a mechanical organ are supplied as concertina'd lengths of cardboard, divided lengthwise into thin strips relating to each instrument (around 100 on the larger organs). The cardboard is impelled through mangle-like rollers (most properly by steam power. On my favorite steam-organ record each tune is prefaced by the chuffing and whirring of the power source, as much part of the performance as the music itself). In the inner workings multiple pins push against the cardboard, small holes signifying when a given instrument should play, allowing the pin to strike home and set in motion valves, gears, levers.
Anyone familiar with sequencing software such as Cubase would immediately recognise its hardware ancestor. At the dawn of rave not much had changed: the cardboard strip and its holes now appeared on a screen, and instead of triggering valves and levers, triggered a sampler. In the last decade we have seen the rise of HD recording technologies, breaking this lineage by making sound much more flexible and manipulable: although still fundamentally based on the same time-based triggering mechanisms, at the user interface level rather than a selection of pre-chosen sounds being triggered one now manipulates and alters any subsection of sound directly, effectively dealing with an almost indefinitely fine-grained sonic matter rather than a distribution of atomic lumps of sound. Even despite the possibilities this technology brings, we see a constant return to and revival of the clunkiness of the earlier methods; which limitations, after all, in their struggle with human creativity, defined multiple genres of sequenced electronica.)
Demonstrating the ambivalent qualities of mechanical music, in The Elephant Man - a film about a man who is himself a fairground exhibit - David Lynch employs fairground-style music in two key scenes (I think I'm right in saying this, but I couldn't be bothered to go and check); upon Merrick's triumphant and emotional night at the theatre, where after being hailed as a noble celebrity he is utterly transported by the magical world. A beautiful scene which brings tears to my eyes on every viewing. Here Lynch celebrates not only the pathos of Merrick's open-eyed joy at the beautiful illusion of a simple pantomime, but the very magic of performance, of art and illusion itself. The artificial rush of the fairground music fits the endless delight and novelty of the weird creatures, stylised animals leaping and receding into darkness, undecidably human actors on a stage or automata, two- or three-dimensional, real or created.
Then in the chilling scene where the porter brings his paying customers into Merrick's quarters, returning Merrick to his status of freak, ogled and manhandled object. The whirling of the fairground music is here bitterly detached - The merciless turning of the wheel of fate, the gnashing of teeth, the rattle of bones, a feverish st vitus dance. Inhuman in its jolly insistence, it gives voice to the mechanical, inhuman nature of commercial exploitation and the amoral biological reflexes of pleasure and cruelty.
The mechanical uncanny, and this ambivalence of the fairground, site of engines of pleasure, mystery and desire, is one of the elements I imagine bringing together in imagined music. Because every time I listen to 'For the Benefit of Mr Kite' I want to stay in the world it miraculously conjures up, for just a moment longer, to hear more. This is greatness in music, as in other art forms: to create the impression that the work itself is just a small part of a whole occulted alternate cosmos. Of course it may be pure hubris to attempt to re-create that parallel universe, or even one in the same neighborhood. But I can't help it.
Scratchy LPs of 'badly'-recorded folk music from a period where gentleman-enthusiast collectors, recognising the imminent demise of indigenous folk culture in the age of radio and motorcar, travelled out into rural areas with their manuscript paper and tape recorders to preserve music that, even at that time, persisted only through the efforts of a few survivors, old men scratching away at fiddles, pummelling wheezy squeezeboxes and recalling scores of vintage songs at village pub get-togethers. Some of these recordings have a marvelous far-away quality. One can savour the richness of this terminal state, the paradoxical nature of the recordings being that the very instruments (human and mechanical) of preservation are also the herald of extinction. It's not so much a nostalgia as in a longing to return, as an enjoyment of the texture of loss, decay, and imperfect preservation - the crackle of the needle, the distortion of the magnetic tape, the unselfconsciousness of reedy, distant voices.
I started thinking of an audioscape made up of these elements whilst listening to St Etienne, imagining it as an antique counterpart to Fox Base Alpha. St Etienne's greatest, a proper long-player in the old piper-at-the-gates-of-dawn sense (short, crafted, and perfectly paced, unlike todays overstuffed miscellanies). Anglophile dub, endlessly expanding cotton mists of reverb suddenly blossoming into starchy medleys of peculiar pop. Recited inventories of tube stops, BBC-accented voices echoing through sooty underground tunnels. There's something special in this album that I never found with any of their later material, not only in its appealing enthusiastic-amateur sonic constructions but also the sense of the group's groping, in a bleary haze of PG Tips, woodbines and wednesday afternoon TV black and whites, to articulate the half-imagined lost world, merrie england manqué.
The final element in what, if realised, would probably be a hideous mess or a work of sonic genius, is a preference for beatlessness. Not beatless in the sense of floaty new age muzak, but pulsed rather than punctual, sharply articulated rhythm; often achieved by Gavin Bryars in works where he manages to create a rhythm without locking in to any pop/rock tradition. I'm not swearing off beats, but I sense an imminent Zone of Fruitless Intensification ( ©Blissblog ) apropos of beatz-culture in general, and a soft pulsing is more fittingly somnambulous. Every so often you're woken up by spoken samples emerging from the fog: Snippets of Ealing Comedy; Cryptic, Lugubrious Alec Guiness in TV Le Carre adaptations.
There are three of them, and Alleline;
Overriding atmosphere: a pea souper. simultaneous accretion and decay, richness, layering.
I've no doubt the idea of this music is more fascinating to me than any actualisation will be, in fact the result would be something else entirely. Now if only I could think of a name for it...
Posted by robin at 07:48 PM | Comments (1)