Today's long song, all nine minutes and seventeen seconds of it, comes from 2017, a remix of Mama's Unmask Me by Ashley Beedle. Unmask Me comes from an intersection between Deep House and modern soul, floating by very nicely with wispy synth chords, the vocal beamed in from another dimension as the drums shuffle away. Ideal for summer and outdoor parties so maybe I've posted it a few weeks too late.
Mama is Simone Ogunbunmi, from London but now resident in Berlin. And here's a reminder that Ashley Beedle is very unwell. There is a Go Fund Me page to raise money to provide him the support and equipment he will need in the future. You can find it here.
I saw Ride at New Century Hall on Friday night- they are a superb live band right now, powerful and punchy, light and shade both represented, noise and melody. In an interview Andy Bell once said that his vision for the band came to him when at home listening to The Beatles while his mum was vacuuming, that blend of 60s melodies (with twin vocals) and a wall of noise and fuzz. Tonight they have plenty of all of that. They open with Monaco from this year's Interplay album, straight ahead modern rock with a glossy sheen, Mark Gardener centre stage and in good voice. They finish the main set an hour later with Seagull, the huge shoegaze tour de force that opened Nowhere in 1990, the song where they transcended their MBV and JAMC influences.
In between there are songs from almost every point in their back catalogue- new ones like the sweeping, Byrdsy Last Frontier and anthemic Peace Sign with its spirit of 1969/ 1989 chorus, 'Give me a peace sign/ Throw your hands in the air/ Give me a peace sign/ Let me know you're there' stand out. Future Love from 2019's This Is Not A Safe Place album. The crushing, wall of noise teen angst of Dreams Burn Down. 1992's Cool Your Boots, the Withnail And I sample kicking it off and the band powering into it, Loz and Steve proving they were indie rock's secret best rhythm section, Andy's squally guitar at the centre of the storm. The last two are Seagull and before that Vapour Trail, Andy's epic, romantic song from 1990 that closed their debut Nowhere, the crowd singing the cello part, a sea of middle aged shoegazers and indie kids la la la la- ing as the band wind down and stop, grinning at us and each other.
The encore spans the years again, in reverse. Light In A Quiet Room followed by Leave Them All Behind, twin guitars and vocals, distortion and thunderous drums, the one where they left all their peers behind. Then Chelsea Girl, from their first EP, the red roses one on Creation when they (and we) were barely out of our teens, young and full of dreams.
After the gig we have a chat with Andy Bell in the bar downstairs. I thanked him for giving us his cover version of Smokebelch for our Sounds Of The Flightpath Estate Volume 1 album and said he was honoured to be part of it.
In October 2022 I put together a mix of Ride songs from the re- union years. You can find it here. To complement it I've done an early years for today's Sunday mix, from the first EP to Going Blank Again, singles, album songs and EP tracks/ B-sides. Two sides of a c90 tape.
Cool Your Boots is from 1992's Going Blank Again. The album was very much a step on from the debut Nowhere, confident and wide screen, shoegaze but buffed up. Leave Them All Behind is a single from the same album- it reached number nine in the charts and got them onto Top Of The Pops. On release it had a statement feel, Ride are back and have left the others behind. Hammond organ intro, Mark and Andy on twin vocals, tumbling rhythms and endless guitars (especially in the full nine minute version).
Seagull opens Nowhere, the fastest song on the album and a ferocious piece of indie guitar rock. Nowhere is in some ways a classic debut from that period, 1988- 1993- eight songs in forty minutes with ebb and flow, a sound that permeates every song, a sleeve image that hints at what lies inside, a self contained piece of art. Dreams Burn Down comes from the same album (and was the A-side on the Fall EP, out in October 1990 with three new B-sides, the third of four four song 12" EPs, a run of records and songs that stand alongside Nowhere) . Vapour Trail is the last song- 12 string guitar intro with a repeating chord pattern that keeps resurfacing throughout the song, Loz's brilliant on- the- note drums, Andy's voice and love song lyrics and then the two minute coda with cello. A proper last song on the album feel.
Taste was on the Fall EP, a new song along with Here And Now and Nowhere (the title track from the album that wasn't on the album). Three minutes of noisy indie rock with a vaguely euphoric vocal.
Sennen was on Ride's EP Today Forever, four new songs released in March 1991. A video album was made for the EP, each song getting its own video. The video for Sennen is exactly what some of us looked like in 1990/ 1991- fringes, long sleeved t- shirts, baggy jeans, hooped tops, desert boots. The song is all strummed guitars and a stop start rhythm, stoned harmonised vocals, the Byrds the morning after a night at Phuture. 'The memory fades away', Mark and Andy murmur, the vocals themselves sounding like a memory fading. Sennen is I assume named after Sennen Cove in Cornwall.
Chelsea Girl is from the Ride EP, released in January 1990. A new decade. The first song on the first release on Creation to make the proper charts. The first Ride song most of us heard. A two and a half minute thrashy marriage of noise and pop, the Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine in there for sure, but its own thing too.
In 1989 house music burst its way into the popular consciousnesses and the mainstream. Dance acts began to top the charts. No one exemplified this better than Black Box, an Italian team, who took their single Ride On Time to the top of the UK charts at a time when doing that meant selling serious amounts of vinyl. Ride On Time was genius, a huge uptempo dance track, powered like a rock song, and a gateway to rave. The trio behind it- Daniele Davoli, Mirko Limoni and Verlio Semplici- sampled three separate vocal lines, one an unauthorised line by Loleatta Holloway's 1980 single Love Hangover. They sampled Love Unlimited Orchestra too and went out to road test their new song in a club in Italy. Davoli played it in his set, 1000 people on the floor. It cleared the floor. Daniele was heartbroken. His mates told him that it wasn't the record, it was the wrong club. Excellent advice.
After legal action from Loleatta they re- recorded the vocals, an uncredited Heather Small, later of M- People, taking over at the mic. Just to show we were not in indie/ rock land any more where credibility is everything and miming is deception, they hired a model to be the frontperson/ 'singer' for all the TV appearances- of which there were many. Katrin Quinol was as unforgettable miming and dancing as the song itself.
Ian Brown said in an interview at the time that there were only three good records in 1989- his own band's Fool's Gold, Doug Lazy's Let It Roll and Ride On Time. He missed a few I think but he's right to include it.
From Ride On Time it was a short step for many people to the various artists compilation Italia (Dance Music From Italy), a budget price album clad in a distinctive blue sleeve, packed with further gems from the Italian club scene, from the beaches of Rimini and the bars of the Amalfi Coast. Dr. Zharkov, Gino Latino, The Jam Machine, D.F.C. Team, and Psycho Team all contributed more uptempo, piano-led dance music for all your partying needs. And this one, Starlight's Numero Uno, another massive crossover hit.
Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds released Wild God at the end of August, the eighteenth Bad Seeds album with the main man four decades into a career as the Bad Seed singer. Over the years fifteen different men and women have been Bad Seeds. The original line up- Cave, Blixa Bargeld and Mick Harvey- in some ways bears little relation to the current incarnation, a band with Warren Ellis as Nick's creative foil and Thomas Wydler, Martyn Casey, Jim Sclavunos and George Vjestica (and sometimes Radiohead's Colin Greenwood on bass) doing the rest of the work. But in some ways, the Bad Seeds remain the same- Wild God sounds to me like a Bad Seeds record.
The previous three Nick Cave albums were all informed by the tragedy of the death of his son Arthur. Skeleton Tree was started before Arthur died but completed after. Ghosteen was written about Arthur (and as Nick says with Arthur alongside him). Carnage was a Cave- Ellis album and although not entirely informed by Arthur he's very much there in many of the songs, not least the stunning Lavender Fields. The sound of those three albums is less 90s Bad Seeds (and the predecessor, Push The Sky Away was moving in that direction) with Warren Ellis' synths and strings and choral backing vocals becoming the core sound, a shift that seemed to be a reaction to events the sombre, confessional, harrowing nature of some of the songs reflected in the spare, synth sound Warren Ellis conjured up. On Wild God there's a move to a different sonic field again- this isn't a return to the chaotic, guitar wrangling, pots and pans noise/ blues of the early Bad Seeds and it's not the full on Grinderman assault either. It's a new Bad Seeds- strings, piano, choirs, foreground basslines. The brittle, sparse Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen music has been replaced by or evolved into a warmer, full, cosmic, optimistic Bad Seeds. It's still a record that is 'about' Arthur - and about Nick's son Jethro who died last year aged 30 and also ex- band mate and former partner Anita Lane who died in 2021 and appears via a phone message in a song about her, O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is). But it's an album about recovery, about choosing joy over sorrow and about living again.
The album bursts into life with the opening song, Song Of The Lake, a massive ascending orchestral sound and Nick speaking about an old man on the shore of the lake, looking at a moment worth saving. Nick starts various lines and then pulls away with the phrase, 'never mind, never mind', choosing, I don't know, the moment, life, love... The bassline thumps away and the drums rattle and then the choir swells in again.
It's followed by two singles- the title track and Frogs. I've posted about both before. Both have grown and grown since their release. I don't think Nick's written a better song than Frogs- it's a career high and the album's centre, a psychedelic Scott Walker pop song, with Cain and Abel, walking home in the rain on Sunday, the frogs jumping for joy from the gutter, and Kris Kristofferson 'Walking by kicking a can/ In a shirt he hasn't washed for years'. It's extraordinary. I can't fully explain it and don't really need to. It's how it makes me feel that's important.
Frogs is followed by Joy, a song that took my breath away the first time I heard it. In Joy as piano plays and an ambient noise floats around and a lone horn pipes up, Nick sings in a quavering voice, 'I woke up this morning with a blues all around my head/ It felt like someone in my family is dead', and then he picks up and moves on, describing a nighttime visitation by a teenage boy, 'a ghost in giant sneakers, laughing, stars around his head'. Nick doesn't name the ghost as Arthur- that's for us to do. Then 'the flaming boy' sits on Nick's bed, and says, 'We've all had too much sorrow/ Now is the time for joy'. The song flows on, horns and a swelling bed of music, Nick on top singing of people all over the world shouting angry words, and then of mercy, love and joy. Around him a choir ahh ahh ahhs.
Wild God doesn't let up, the ten songs an emotional hit one after the other, the music sounding wide screen and epic in parts, intimate in others and Nick making some kind of sense of the world as it is now for him- Final Rescue Attempt has someone (his wife Suzie presumably) coming for him. 'After that nothing really hurt again', he sings.
Side Two (and this feels like a two sides of vinyl, forty minutes and ten song long album of the kind from before CDs and streaming) launches with Conversion is dark, cinematic gospel. Cinnamon Horses is another standout, a string- laden meditation on love, Nick concluding, 'I told my friends that life was sweet/ That love would endure if it could'. He has spoken and written about about moving on with grief and consciously choosing to be happy. This is a recurring theme on Wild God- life is for living, we carry the dead with us but have to make the most of what's around us and that the real essentials, the things that keep us alive are love, family, friends, moments.
Long Dark Night is a Cave piano ballad that was the final pre- album single and works much better as a part of the album than it did on its own. O Wow O Wow is beautiful and bouyant, a tribute to Anita Lane that ends with her voice chattering away in a phone message, talking about when they lived in a place near Brixton prison, laughing and remembering about 'mucking around and making up songs'. The album ends with a short song, As The Waters Cover The Sea, a song which is over and done with in two minutes, a musical box melody and strings, soft and either about his wife Suzie or maybe his Christianity, and suddenly joined by the choir again- and as it finishes my main response is to flip the disc over and go back to the start, to go on Nick's journey out of pain and into a beatific state again.
It won't surprise you that much of this resonates with me strongly. Since Isaac's death in November 2021 Nick's songs, his words at The Red Hand Files and in his book Carnage, have been a help to me. The songs on Wild God are something else- they don't necessarily mirror me or where I am but they strike me, I recognise them, I feel them. In the end, with music, maybe that's the main thing- what it does to you, what makes you feel.
Oops! Due to a technical fuck up this post didn't publish at 8 am this morning as it should have and has only gone live now, nine hours later.
Fluffy Inside released an album on Mighty Force last year, Nylon Corners- inventive ambient techno and electro from Exeter, analogue synths, 303s. They put out a new EP in August, four tracks of wonderful melodic braindance/ acid called Mushroom Harmonics. This is the title track...
A dark acidic bassline, fluttering synths and FX, the propulsive thud of the kick drum and tsk- tsk- tsk-tsk of the hi hats and some hypnotic acid squiggles that come to the fore out of the dry ice. Lovely stuff. The other three tracks - Added Vinegar, Raven and Craving Nature- hit the same sweet spot. You can buy it here.
I've been having particularly vivid dreams for about a year now. Last summer I got a high cholesterol reading and started taking statins (as well as cutting down on crisps, cheese and cake). Statins can have all kind of side effects and apparently vivid dreams and disturbed sleep is one. The dreams aren't all necessarily nightmares but they aren't always pleasant either and they are often vivid enough to wake me up suddenly, unsure for a few seconds what is real and what is dream, and then I spend a few minutes calming down as the reality sinks in and I try to drift back to sleep. These vivid dreams, coupled with the fact that occasionally I dream about Isaac, means my sleep is pretty erratic- and dreaming about him always wakes me up, leaving me unsettled. In my dreams he's still alive. I also have some lucid dreams, where I think I'm aware that I'm dreaming. I have got used to it over the last year to some extent but it's all quite odd.
R.E.M. are named after the stage of sleep where dreaming occurs, where brain activity is high and there is rapid eye movement. In 198 on Green Michael Stipe wrote a song, Get Up, where he deals with sleep and dreams. I say deals with- it's as close to dealing with as Stipe got in the 80s. Get Up is wonderfully simple sounding song with layers of complexity. Peter Buck's guitars clang and riff, the drums and bass thump and surge, there's a kaleidoscopic, psychedelic breakdown/ middle eight and some of the best vocal interplay between Stipe and Michael Mills on any R.E.M. song, especially in the 'Dreams, they complicate my life/ Dreams, they complement my life' call and response vocals. In the late 90s, on stage, Stipe announced that song was written about Mike Mills and his tendency to lie in and then be late to the sessions for Green. Get up Mike.
It's right up there as one of my favourite R.E.M. songs. In 1989 they toured the world playing Green and songs from their previous albums. I saw them at the Royal Court in Liverpool, 26th May 1989, what felt like a big venue at the time but pretty small in comparison to the arenas and domes they played in the mid 90s. They were superb- electrifying, urgent, arty, rocking- and it was impossible to take your eyes off them all night. R.E.M. filmed some of the U.S. shows and released a concert length video Tourfilm, based mainly around the gig at Greensboro in November but also containing some sections from four other American shows. In the middle of Tourfilm R.E.M. play Get Up and if anything it's even better live than on Green. They power into it, all the guitar psyche- pop turned up to the max, Stipe bouncing around in his ragged white clothes, his late 80s pony tail hanging down his back, the strobe effect projections producing a dream- like effect. Get Up at breakneck pace, two and a half minutes of intense dream/ indie/ psyche. 'Where does time go?', Stipe sings, the smudged mascara blurring around his eyes. 'I don't know'.
Herbie Flowers, session musician and bassist, died at the weekend aged 86. In 1972 he played the bass on the sessions that would become Lou Reed's Transformer, an album produced by David Bowie and Mick Ronson. On Lou's most famous Herbie came up with an instantly recognisable bass part, the song's main hook in many ways, for which he was paid a session fee of £17.
In the song Lou celebrated all kinds of New York outsiders and misfits, the late 60s and early 70s demi- world around Reed, Warhol and all the rest brought to life in a few beautifully crafted lines- transgender actresses Holly from Miami FLA and Candy Darling, Little Joe, the Sugar Plum Fairy (Joe Campbell, a dealer) and Jackie (Curtis). Throw in some references to drugs and oral sex and you have the perfect slice of transgressive pop music. It's the sort of song that you can remember the first time you heard it, the door to another world opening slightly.
Herbie played loads of other sessions, over 20, 000 apparently, and created loads of other basslines including Space Oddity and Diamond Dogs for Bowie. But Walk On The Wild Side remains the one.
In 1990 New York hip hop group A Tribe Called Quest sampled the bassline for what became their best known song, the call and response sample- fest/ piece of genius that is Can I Kick It? As well as Lou/ Herbie it samples Lonnie Smith, Ian Dury and The Blockheads and Prokofiev. Lou Reed took pretty much all the profits from the sales apparently. Such is the music business.
In 2018- 2019 Rick Smith and Karl Hyde decided 'out of boredom' to write and release new/ previously unreleased Underworld material on a weekly basis, every Thursday. They wanted to disrupt the write/ album/ tour schedule and do something more instinctive and responsive. It could have gone horribly wrong. Instead, Drift (as it became known) saw them produce the best material of their post- 1990s career. At the end of it they cherry picked ten tracks and compiled them as Drift Series 1 Sampler, an album that is the best they've done since, as I said opined before, the 90s. It closed with the ten minute track Custard Speedtalk, a track that sounds like classic Underworld, all straight lines and railway rhythms, Cowgirl synth squiggles and Karl's overheard fragments of conversation- 'I can't be soft at work/ They'd eat me alive'- and stream of consciousness emotions- 'You're really good at making people feel good/ You don't realise what a mess you're in/ Listen to yourself...'
By happy coincidence, last week Underworld announced a new album, Strawberry Hotel, a record they've been drip feeding tracks from for the last year- denver luna and And The Colour Red have already signposted where Karl and Rick are at. On Friday they put Black Poppies onto the streaming services and now we've got another what looks like essential album for 2024 ahead of us.
Ashley Beedle is one of those people whose music is written through our record collections like the word Blackpool through a stick of rock, for those of us of a certain age. He recorded with David Holmes and Lindsay Edwards as The Disco Evangelists, as Black Science Orchestra and with Rocky and Diesel as X- Press 2 and The Ballistic Brothers, as a DJ in his own right and has been responsible for more great remixes than you could fit into one post.
In 1995 The Ballistic Brothers released this tribute to a London record shop, a magnificent slice of uptempo dance dub.
Sadly Ashley has been very unwell. After recovering from prostate cancer Ashley suffered an enormous brain bleed and seizure in November 2023. During a sixteen hour operation to remove a brain mass he had a major stroke. He's been in hospital ever since, losing the movement in his arm and leg on his right hand side and his speech too. Ashley is recovering some speech but is still very unwell and requires a wheelchair and other assistance due to the loss of mobility on his right side. There is a fundraising page here with more details and if you wish to and are able, you can help.
Back in 2009 Ashley recorded an hour long mix for New York's Beats In Space, an inspired mix that finds dub in all sorts of places.
Generations Walking - Midnight Bustling (Francois Kevorkian Dub) Basement 5 - Immigrant Dub The Pop Group - 3:38 Dub Pistols feat . Rodney P - You'll Never Find (Dub) Stiff Little Fingers - Bloody Dub Generation X - Wild Dub Flesh For Lulu - I'm Not Like Everybody Else (Dub Version) The Pogues - Young Ned Of The Hill (Dub Version) The Clash - One More Dub Bauhaus - Here's The Dub (She's In Parties) Leftfield - Dub Gussett Air - How Does It Make You Feel? (Adrian Sherwood Mix) Massive Attack vs Mad Professor - Radiation Ruling The Nation (Protection) Reverend And The Makers - Sundown On The Empire (Adrian Sherwood On U Sound Disneydubland) The Clash - Robber Dub The Specials/Rico Rodriguez - Ghost Town (Extended Mix)
Bandcamp Friday yesterday dropped a ton of new music into my Inbox and while today is a day late in terms of the benefits the artists get from the monthly Bandcamp Friday (Bandcamp waive their fees for one day a month) it's still worth posting some of the highlights- and yesterday was packed full of highlights.
We'll start with a 10: 40 remix of Puerto Montt City orchestra, a song called Hey You, out on Brighton's Higher Love label. By his own admission Jesse's work as 10: 40 has been an ongoing mission to make music/ remixes that channel Spiritualized and this one takes that to the nth degree- cue up Jason Spaceman's Lay Back In The Sun either before or after this and enjoy the sun drenched, blissed out ride....
The song is a cover of 14 Iced Bears' Hay Fever, an 80s indie classic. You can get buy the 10: 40 remix of Puerto Montt City Orchestra at Bandcamp.
Next, another murky, underground, radiophonic, analogue synth missive from Pye Corner Audio, the first one for a few months, this one titled Texture Reels. Four minutes and forty five seconds of subterranean, kosmische reel to reel intensity. Get it at Bandcamp, pay what you want.
Thirdly, Emma. Matty Ducasse records as Skylab. His Skylab International offshoot released a new single onto Bandcamp yesterday, a cover of Hot Chocolate's Emma. Mat plays and produces, Zoe Filthy- Rich songs. The drum machine pitter patters, chunky machine rhythms. The synths ping and blip. Hot Chocolate's mid- 70s pop- soul hit is darker than you might think. Producer Mickie Most asked singer Errol Brown for 'darkness and depth'. Errol gave him lyrics about lost childhood and suicide, a film star 'who can't keep living on dreams no more'. Mat and Zoe dredge up all of the pain and darkness that Errol piled into his lyrics. The EP is at Bandcamp, remix, edit and instrumental.
Lastly, Richard Norris whose Oracle Sound dub project has become essential listening. Richard has recorded three albums of dubs, available digitally and on vinyl via his subscription service. Recently he hosted his friend Jon Carter, who DJed at the Heavenly Social in the 90s and recorded as Monkey Mafia as well as under his own name. Richard wanted to show Jon some new kit. They ended up making a dub track called Ceefax- rocking drums and bass, space echo, melodica and an Ampp Freq live dub machine. The results come in three parts- Ceefax, a Norris dub and a Carter dub. All three are at Bandcamp. As I keep typing.
You can buy all the music above for less than the price of a pint of lager in central London (and some central Manchester pubs). And while the lager may look briefly colder and more enticing, the music will last longer.
Richard Sen's album India Man came out on Bandcamp at the end of August following a limited vinyl release earlier in the summer. Richard's life in the counter culture goes back to the mid- 80s and his career in music spans three decades. In the 80s he was a graffiti writer, using the tag Coma- he became aged eighteen the first person in the UK to be jailed for graffiti writing. He immersed himself in the late 80s acid house scene and has made music as Bronx Dogs, Padded Cell and Hackney Vandal Patrol as well as under his own name. He DJs and has a Masters degree in Criminology. He painted the sleeve art for Sabres Of Paradise's Smokebelch and contributed the massive sounding Tough On Chug, Tough On The Causes Of Chug to Sounds Of The Flightpath Estate Volume 1 earlier this year.
India Man is in part an album about his roots, about his family background, ethnicity, his father and grandfather who both came to the UK from India, and his own life as the fourth generation of India men. It's also an album that merges the house/ cosmic disco/ electro of his own music with the music styles of India and the Middle East. India Man kicks off with Eleven Eleven, a tribute to Charlie Bones, the founder of Do You!! Radio where Richard has a residency- chunky, slowed down chug with cosmic twinkles and blasts of bass. Moksha speeds things up, a thumping four four rhythm and squalls of sax and acres of bottom end. Indus Symphony brings the funk, joined by Bollywood strings and a vocal sample. Leaving no electronic stone unturned, Parsi Princess goes to the basement, moody electro- machine funk with menacing synth strings.
The second half slows things down again, a funky drumbeat driving Proto- Dravidian, another Indian vocal on top, sultry and seductive, the music and voice gaining intensity. Magadhan Empire glides in on synth and piano, eight minutes of dark cosmic disco with chanting, ideal for early doors at ALFOS. It's followed by the throbbing electro of Mysteries Of Meluhha, rattling snare and sequenced bass. India Man concludes with Hills Of Kashmir, an epic, sweeping electronic drive, bassline pumping out and synth melodies wigging out.
India Man is out at Bandcamp digitally and there are a handful of limited edition vinyl copies with art print left. Get either/ both here.
The Jesus And Mary Chain returned with a new album earlier this year, the swaggering, scabrous Glasgow Eyes. They launched a book this week too, Never Understood, an in- their- own- words account of the Reid brother's, their lives and their music. Out of the blue they released a single yesterday too, a new song called Pop Seeds.
The earliest version of Jim and William's band was called Poppy Seeds and this song lyrically is a recreation of those days forty years ago when they first began to strum guitars, shake their plastic tambourines and channel the influences they were soaking up from their tapes, magazines and records. 'Don't let those grey skies bring you down', Jim sings, the older Jim telling his younger self to push on through, ignore the East Kilbride weather, and get things going. Glasgow Eyes is an abrasive record in places with an edge, all scuzzy synths, filthy beats and jagged guitars. Pop Seeds is a much lighter, breezier Mary Chain, recalling the warm fuzz and acoustic guitars of Honey's Dead or the best songs from Stoned And Dethroned. You can buy it here.
We spent a night camping at the end of last week. We haven't camped since before Covid and part of me felt like I didn't want to think my camping days were over. We borrowed a smaller tent than the giant three pod, family tent we have (which is in a poor state of repair too) and headed out for Sherwood Forest. This was partly because we wanted to see Isaac's tree, the oak sapling we planted in MPS Remembrance Wood at Sherwood Pines two years ago- it's a four to five hour round trip in a day so staying overnight made sense, the weather was lovely and the campsite looked good. Isaac's oak tree has for the first time started to peak above the protective cone.
As soon as the tent was up I realised how much I've missed camping and while this summer may be over I'm now sure that weather permitting we'll be camping more often and for longer next summer. Last Thursday night we sat outside our tent with a bottle of red wine watching the sky turn from blue to black, the stars appear in the heavens above us and it felt good. Earlier on we had a look round the campsite- among all the motor homes there were a number of glamping pods and a single camping pod that looked like this...
'A geodesic dome for camping in', I muttered to myself, and as soon as the words 'geodesic dome' left my mouth I was singing this 1980 Fad Gadget single, stunning turn of the 80s apocalyptic synth pop, one of those records that creates its own world and inhabits it.
We walked into the pines in the early evening, the sunlight breaking through in shafts, the umbrella pines creating a canopy way above us, a strange warm silence settling over the woods broken only by birds and the odd mountain biker.
On Twitter Khayem suggested Back To Nature should be followed by Faze Action's Into The Trees (and I agreed) but I don't have it as an mp3 at the moment and this has a virtually identical title- from Moon Duo's 2010 debut Escape...
There was some very sad and sudden news yesterday- the unexpected and tragic death of Danielle Moore at the age of just 52. Danielle was the singer and ball of energy at the front of Crazy P, the electronic band formed at Nottingham University in the mid- 90s by Jim Barron and Chris Todd, Danielle joining them in 2002. She grew up near Manchester, found herself on the dancefloor of the Hacienda and in recent years lived in Todmorden where she was a huge part of The Golden Lion community and where she will be hugely missed.
This is Cruel Mistress from 2015, Crazy P at their slinky best, shimmering electronic disco/ house.
Danielle sang on Craig Bratley's Play The Game, a 12" out on Magic Feet in 2016, a record that came with a sizzling Andrew Weatherall remix- people who worked with Andrew often say that when doing a remix the first thing he'd get rid of was the vocal. Not so in this case, Danielle's voice remaining at the centre of this ten minute remix, laid over the top of the slo mo drums, juddering guitar chords, and synth arpeggios.
You can buy Play The Game digitally here. The vinyl is long since sold out.
Back in work today after the summer holiday and, oh, is it painful. There's got to be a better way of making a living than working.
One of the albums I listened to during a long- ish drive recently was DFA Compilation #2, a triple CD from November 2004 crammed full of early 21st century dance- punk from James Murphy's stable. The opening track on CD 1 is by Black Leotard Front...
'Do you wanna wear the overcoat?', is the opening line. After that follows fifteen minutes of DFA dance- punk brilliance, relentless four four drums, synth squiggles, Shaft guitar, a chant of 'Bonjour/ Bonjour/ Bonjour/ Bonjour/ Comment allez vous', punk funk bass, and eventually the voices getting to the lyrical heart of the matter, 'I put on my overcoat/ It's written across my chest/ You love me you must confess/ You passed the test'.
Black Leotard Front were Delia Gonzales, Christian Holstad and Gavin R. Russom. I guess once they got the groove started on Casual Friday there didn't seem much point in stopping it, the electro- indie/ disco just kept going on and on, the lyrics kept flowing, the drop out in the seventh minute invited an extended hand drum re- entry, more wigged out synths and a further seven minutes of fun. 'I was leaving the office/ I took off my dress/ I put my overcoat/ To surprise you in the flesh/ It's written all over my chest/ You love me you must confess/ You passed the test'.
I like the idea of the DFA offices having casual Friday. After a long working week making electro- indie and dance- punk, all buttoned up in suit and tie, dress down Friday must have been a relief and an ideal way to meet the weekend.
James Holden has been making records since the late 90s. In the early 2000s he was heralded for a while as the new wunderkind when his remix of Nathan Fake sent lots of people into a spin. He backed away a little and made several albums and numerous other singles and EPs that were solely his vision. His three solo albums- 2006's The Idiots Are Winning, 2013's The Inheritors and 2023's Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities- are all hugely impressive and engaging, inventive pieces of work, records that move the head, the feet and the soul.
Back in 2004 (twenty years ago!) electronic music was over a decade on from the acid house revolution that shook up so many people and two decades on from Detroit techno's pioneers. The early 21st century saw a lot of the forward progression of the previous two decades arc falter. Guitar bands were back. Indie sleeze, electro- clash, mash ups and whatever else had pushed their way to the fore. Nathan Fake's The Sky Was Pink came out in August 2004 and proved that there were still places where electronic music was twitching and looking to the future. James Holden's remix is a magnificent piece of electronic sound, percussion and drums, synths and FX, minimal and progressive, echoes of Aphex Twin and Warp in the 90s but different too. Nine and a half minutes of brilliance.
The Caterpillar's Intervention is from james Holden's second album, 2013's The Inheritors and has saxophone from Etienne Jaumet of Zombie Zombie. The album was inspired by a 1953 William Golding novel, set at the time when homo sapiens began to replace and outdo their neanderthal predecessors. Neolithic rock art adorns the sleeve. Some of the music on the album sounds like neolithic folk music could have sounded 10, 000 years ago. There are modular synthesisers, acoustic/ electro dynamics, drones and ramshackle drums, rhythms and melodies switching around, nothing ever staying quite where you might expect to, with the sax riding its discordant path on top. Blackpool Late Eighties is from the same album, an utterly superb piece of music, definitely nodding to Richard D. James, but Holden's own thing too, building slowly with a keyboard line on the top that gradually becomes the focus, unfolding and soaring like a murmuration. It sounds nothing like Blackpool in the late eighties either.
Idiot is from James' full length debut album, The Idiots Are Winning, the track a seven minute centrepiece- repetition, distorted synths, buzzing synths that make the synapses twitch, electronic impulses flickering around.
On 2023's Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities Holden constructed an organic, sublime, dream of an album, one that looked back to the free party and New Age traveller rave of the 90s (a scene that was possibly the true underground of that decade), the pastoral techno of FSOL and The KLF's Chill Out, 90s ambient music, and used all of this - modular synths, rave sounds, bird song, sax, piano and field sounds, tabla and the influence of 70s cosmische groups like Popul Voh, to make one of the best albums of last year. It's massively emotive music too- a 21st century dream of a rave utopia.
