Alex Kassian is in a rich vein of musical form- the Berlin based producer and DJ struck gold in 2021 with a 12" titled Leave Your Life which contained the title track in two versions and on the flipside the magnificent Spirit Of Eden (which came with a beautiful Bill Laswell Dub). Following that Test Pressing released the Voices 12" and last year Alex's cover of Manuel Gottsching's E2- E4 which came with a pair of Mad Professor remixes.
Last month Alex released Orange Coloured Liquid, a reworking of Spooky's 1993 track. Alex has outdone himself again- Orange Coloured Liquid (Part I) and Part II are 2025's most Balearic moment, a sumptuous, mellow, lost in a trance version. Part I is powered by a breakbeat that keeps it grounded while the synths, keys, piano and pads do their utmost to soar. Part II is weightless and ambient, with strings and a harp.
The 12" and digital package come with a Placid Angles remix by John Beltran which shifts it again, the breakbeat back with a twinkling melody and the faintest echo of voices- it ends with a floaty synth string breakdown and fadeout that could happily play out for much, much longer. The EP finishes with the Spooky original from the duo's 1993 album Gargantuan. You can get the digital at Bandcamp.
Notts Balearic duo Coyote and Wisconsin psychedelicists couple Peaking Lights have teamed up for a three track 12" that has rapidly become one of my favourite releases of the summer. All three tracks are loaded with dub influences and blissed out psychedelia. Love Letters is a seven minutes long, Indra Dunis' vocals floating along on top of a shimmering haze...
On So Far Away the four go slower, deeper and even dreamier, the bass prodding gently, a wash of dub FX and some very sleepy vocals. Really lovely. The Coyote Dub Mix does exactly what it says, all delay, bass and warmth, a long weekend in LA with King Tubby looking out over the Pacific Ocean and wondering how far the sea goes...
In 2012 Peaking Lights released Lucifer In Dub, dubbed out version of their album Lucifer. It's long been a Bagging Area favourite, ambience and psychedelia down out with acres of space and endless repetition, the pop- psyche element underpinned by some serious dub styles. The highpoint is probably Beautiful Dub but I've posted that before so try this one today, the hypnotic and soothing door bell dubbings of Lo Dub High Dub.
In among the obituaries and remembrances for Sly Stone and Brian Wilson last week the news of the death of Douglas McCarthy slipped out. Douglas was vocalist in Nitzer Ebb and died at the very young age of 58. He was less well known than either Brian or Sly but Nitzer Ebb had a big impact in the 80s within a fairly niche world. Nitzer Ebb formed in Essex in 1982 and singed to Mute in 1986, making uncompromising and physical industrial/ EBM/ proto- house that demanded your attention. Their track Join In The Chant found its way to Ibiza and onto the legendary Balearic Beats Vol. 1 album alongside Thrashing Doves, Electro's Jibaro, The Woodentops, The Residents, Code 61 and Mandy Smith (among others).
Andrew Weatherall once said that the closest he came to finding God was dancing to Join In The Chant.
Let Your Body Learn, like Join In The Chant, came out in 1987, a single recorded at PWL with Phil Harding and then remixed at Hansa. There can't be many records that link the two worlds of PWL and Hansa.
LCD Soundsystem began an eight night residency at Brixton Academy last week, the New York art- dance, post- punkers continuing their habit of rolling into a city and taking it over for a week. If I hadn't been down to London for Sabres Of Paradise I might have thought about going, although I'd prefer it if James Murphy decided the next UK destination for a residency is a bit closer to home- Manchester would do fine.
In 2010 LCD Soundsystem released their third album This Is Happening, an album that at the time I remember feeling a little ambivalent about. It seemed quite stuck to the LCD template that Murphy and co. had established on Sound Of Silver three years earlier but it's grown on my over the years and songs like Drunk Girls, I Can Change and Pow Pow all worked their magic eventually. This Is Happening starts with this song...
Many of LCD's songs are builders. Dance Yrself Clean is very much a builder and at nearly nine minutes long there's a lot of time to build. The first three minutes are very slow and low, a sparse drum machine pattern, James' voice compressed and alone, some backing vocals joining in and the thud of a piano. The lyrics dissecting friendship gone wrong or maybe some soul searching. The song explodes in the third minute, synths and FX, and continues ever onward, James now on the floor and dancing himself clean.
Support at the second half of the residency comes from Working Men's Club, the Calder Valley's own electronic dance/ rock/ acid house/ post punkers, a group led by Syd Minsky- Sargeant. On Friday night Working Men's Club warmed up for those gigs with one at The Golden Lion, a much more intimate venue than Brixton Academy.
The pub is packed, the downstairs stage is low and where I'm standing over by the DJ booth it's difficult to see much, Syd's head and microphone, the occasional glimpse of the other members of the band. A stuttering synth loop kicks in and builds over several minutes, other loops kicking in, eventually all coming into sync and then we're off, a full on WMC sound- synths, bass, 303s and 808s and on top Syd's vocals, repeated loops of lines. There aren't any gaps between songs, one song seguing into the next, an hour long megamix. Working Men's Club sound like New Oder if they'd kept pushing and got tougher after Technique or maybe Joy Division in an alternative 1983, one where Ian didn't die but they'd gone fully synth and electronics anyway. WMC's second album, Fear Fear, came out in 2022 and was informed by lockdown and existential dread, Syd's fear writ large. 'When we talk of the times/ We talk in the past tense', rattles round the pub over some very heavy post- punk/ New Beat. There's a healthy dose of late 80s rave and its defiance, its anti- authoritarian stance- the refrain from the song John Cooper Clarke, 'We dance and we smile/ We laugh and we cry/ We play and we fight/ We live and we die', sounding anthemic.
Both Working Men's Club albums were mixed into single, twenty minute megamixes by Syd, versions of the albums and the live set. Megamix and Megamix II give you an idea of what the live set sounds like.
Live the songs are even more physical than they sound on disc, Syd a bobbing and frenetic presence at the front of the stage, conducting and waving his hand around as his stream of consciousness is thrown around the pub, the soundman applying layers of FX to the vocals. We get an hour and then they're off. On the basis of tonight, anyone with tickets for LCD Soundsystem should get there in good time.
Be My Guest was on WMC's self titled debut album, released in 2021, crunching drums and laser focused noisy guitars, Syd bursting out of a small town in West Yorkshire.
Syd is also a member of Demise Of Love, a trio made of him, Daniel Avery and Ghost Culture's James Greenwood. A four track 10" EP came out recently led by Strange Little Consequence which I posted in February. This song is also on the EP, Like I Loved You, a slow burning summer epic, some New Order gone interstellar synths, distorted vocals and a loud/ quiet dynamic that keeps the song shape- shifting.
Eliza is twenty two today. The picture above was a school photo taken in about 2008 at a guess, so quite some time ago. Eliza came home from university a year ago and got herself a job straight away, working at the day care centre that Isaac used to go to, working with adults with a variety of special needs and disabilities. It's not a job everyone can do. In March she handed her notice and booked herself flights to and from Bali, travelling solo, spending nearly four weeks backpacking. Since she came home she's been looking for work, applying for various jobs with all the hassle and frustrations that job hunting involves. She's stuck at it, been penniless for the last few weeks, and has recently found a job at an SEND school. Her resourcefulness is a good quality and she gets stuff done. Happy birthday Eliza. Enjoy it.
Twenty two is a funny age. Eliza joked (half- joked maybe) that she was having a quarter life crisis. I remember being twenty two and being a little adrift, university behind me and now being, as far as the world was concerned, an adult- but not really sure what I wanted to do or what the future might hold, feeling too young to start a professional career job, not having much money, living in a series of short term rented flats/ house shares. It's a tricky age I think.
In 1969 Iggy acknowledged twenty two's difficult status on the opening song of The Stooges's debut album, a song that sets out perfectly the band's modus operandi. Noise, distorted wah wah, sludgy riffs, primitive thumping drums and this- 'Last year I was twenty one/ Didn't have a lot of fun/ Now I'm gonna be twenty two/ Oh my and boo hoo'.
It's 1969. America is burning. Iggy's bored and sarcastic.
Ten years later Neil Young and Crazy Horse recorded one of their epics, Neil slipping back into the past to deliver a song about war, family, death and youth. I always assumed it was set in the time of the American Revolution, the 'red means run son' a reference to the British army and their red coats. The narrator's family have all fallen by the way, Daddy's gone, Neil's brother's out hunting in the mountains, Big John's been drinking since the river took Emmy Lou. There's just Neil, his Daddy's rifle in his arms and just turned twenty two, wondering what to do...
There are several other twenty two songs- Taylor Swift's 22, Lily Allen's 22 (same title, different tone), The Flaming Lips' When Yer Twenty Two and Bright Eyes' Land Locked Blues that contains the line, 'The world's got me dizzy again/ You'd think after twenty two years I'd be used to the spin'. Not really mate- twenty two is still ridiculously young. We'll finish with Billy Bragg and his 1985 calling card- 'I was twenty one years when I wrote this song/ I'm twenty two now but I won't be for long'.
The opening line is a borrow/ steal from Simon and Garfunkel's Leaves That Are Green, a 1966 song about lost love. Billy places A New England in the early 80s, Thatcher's Britain with youth unemployment, the bomb, the miner's strike and the Falklands War as his backdrop. Among all of that he doesn't even want to find a new England, he's just looking for another girl.
'I saw two shooting stars last night/ I wished on them/ But they were only satellites/ it's wrong to wish on space hardware/ I wish I wish I wish you cared'.
I'm not sure there are many better lines in popular music than that.
Brian Wilson’s death at the age of 82 came just days after Sly Stone’s at exactly the same age, another of the giants of the 60s departing from the stage. And there’s no doubt Brian Wilson was among the giants of that decade, the pop culture decade that played such a huge part in creating the world that we live in. Brian Wilson’s genius on those recordings the Beach Boys made in the 1960s is pretty much beyond compare. By the age of 21 he was producing mini- symphonies, elevating pop music (itself only a decade old) into an artform. His musical genius is evident in his songwriting, his skills at arrangement (his brothers' and bandmates' harmonies, the cream of LA's session musicians and entire orchestras), and his production (Good Vibrations, splicing together different recordings, the weirdly smooth but out of kilter psychedelic pop of songs like Surf’s Up and ‘Til I Die, the phased, magical sound of Feel Flows written by his brother Carl, the spooked eeriness of In My Room). Good Vibrations is a hymn to teenage emotions, love and lust as religion and mystery, something unknowable, the ultimate 60s pop song with theremin and harmonies, the most expensive single ever recorded at the time- and worth every cent.
He had another side to his genius too. Brian Wilson grew up in Inglewood and Hawthorne, those south Los Angeles suburbs that grew as the city sprawled in the 20th century, post- war America's economic boom fueling mass expansion of the cities, rows and rows of identical houses with driveways and gardens and picture windows. His father was a brute, physically and emotionally abusing Brian and his brothers Carl and Dennis. Despite those domestic difficulties Brian grew up in post war California, the place at the centre of the most advanced consumer society in history, a utopia where every (white) family owned their own perfect home, where everyone had a well-paid job for life, where everyone owned a TV and a car, where the shops were always full and the ocean was always blue, where the 20th century dream was a reality. Brian knew, and you can hear it in some of his earliest songs, that there was something wrong with this, that there was a hole in the American Dream, that utopia had an emptiness. The beach, the tan, the perfect smile, the ice cold Coke bottle with a straw, the surf, the girls, the little Deuce Coupe, the endless sunset and forever summer- it wasn’t the answer.
In 1963, following a run of singles most of which celebrated surfing, The Beach Boys released Be True To Your School. What could be more wholesome than that?
Flip the disc over and there’s Brian’s first real moment of fragility, the melancholy that emanates from much of his work, and maybe a sign of the mental health problems that affected him all his adult life. In My Room is an aching plea for solitude, a song about wanting to be away from the world and although the lyrics suggest his room is a place of safety, the minor key eerie beauty of the song suggests something else.
You’re So Good To Me, California Girls, Don’t Worry Baby, Wouldn’t It Be Nice, God Only Knows, Caroline No, I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times, I Know there’s An Answer/ Hang Onto Your Ego… all these songs have that at their core, a sadness, a searching quality, an answer to a question that you don't want to ask and can't be found.
This melancholy and emptiness inside Brian Wilson- no amount of 20th century consumerism can fill it and as Brian discovered LSD couldn’t fill it either. Nor could religion. Pet Sounds is a sumptuous, perfect pop album and also the sound of a man welling up, his eyes filled with tears but he’s not sure why.
In 1968 Brian invented pop culture’s first real moment of nostalgia, nostalgia for the early 60s, the desire to get back to a pre- Kennedy assassination, pre- Vietnam world where everything was simpler. ‘It’s automatic when I talk to old friends/ The conversation turns to girls/ We knew and their hair was long and soft/ And the beach was the place to be… let’s get back together and do it again’.
And then in 1971 called time on the whole thing...
In the 70s he struggled with mental and physical health problems. The other Beach Boys filled his absence with their own songwriting but he could still create absolute magic, his own version of psychedelia that mixed doo wop and barber shop quartets with 60s pop and tape effects. The albums Sunflower, Surf’s Up and Holland are peppered with Brian’s genius, with otherworldly songs that have a huge emotional power not least Surf’s Up, Sail On, Sailor and ‘Til I Die. There were various comebacks, upheavals, arguments, battles and re- unions, ill health and moments of resurrection. I never saw him play live but know people who did and who talk about it in terms of religious experience. A diagnosis of dementia in early 2024 meant that Brian's death was not unexpected but even so, what a loss.
A new Adrian Sherwood release is always something worth giving one's attention to. A 10" Discoplate release under his own name would seem to be worth one's absolute full attention. The four track EP, titled The Grand Designer, comes out this Friday and has been trailed by a track of the same name. It's a superb piece of dub music, spiritual almost, with a wonderful groove and array of FX laid over the top- sirens going off, hisses of cymbal and percussion, a snatch of guitar, deep bass, explosions and growls, bongos, pianos, whatever... it's beautifully realised and perfectly produced.
The other tracks include Let's Come Together complete with vocals from the departed Lee Scratch Perry and two that promise a lot just by their titles- Russian Oscillator and Cold War Skank. The vinyl is unfortunately sold out but the digital is available here.
The death of Sly Stone rippled and then flowed through the world of music and social media on Monday evening and into Tuesday. He was 82 and had lived quite a life. I think I first caught sight of him in 1989 with the 20th anniversary release and TV screenings of the Woodstock movie. His name became a fashionable one to drop and Sly And The Family Stone's multi racial, mixed gender, good time dance music from the late 60s fitted in with the times. When people mentioned acid house, S- Express, The Stone Roses, Bass-o- Matic, De La Soul and a host of others, Sly Stone and The Family were never far away. Like many people I bought the Greatest Hits album, an album stuffed wall to wall 60s dance floor hits, a fusion of pop, soul, funk and psychedelia played by people with long hair and Afros wearing dungarees and floral shirts. They were tailor made for 1989- I Want To Take You Higher, Dance To The Music, Everyday People, Hot Fun In The Summertime Everybody Is A Star...
It's fair to say as well that when the Woodstock film is taken as a whole, Sly is very much the star... boom lackalackalacka...
Later on in the early 90s Arrested Development sampled Sly for their hit People Everyday and then people began to refer to There's A Riot Goin' On. In 1991 Los Angeles went up in flames with the acquittal of four policemen who had been filmed brutally beating Rodney King. It seems frighteningly apt that when Sly died, there was indeed a riot goin' on again in L.A., this time caused by the President and (again) racially motivated.
The album There's A Riot Goin' On is a very different record from the feel good anthems the Family Stone made in 1967/68. Recorded largely by Sly on his own and featuring one of the first sues of drum machines, it's a dense, pessimistic and disillusioned album, murky funk. The arc of the civil rights movement is reflected in it, from I Have A Dream in 1963 to the assassination of King in '68, from the Freedom Rides and the Greensboro Sit Ins in the early 60s to the Watts riots and Black Power by the end of decade. It's a pissed off, militant and on edge. Sly had mixed with the Black Panthers and was being urged to make music that reflected the times, with an all Black band. Drugs and paranoia play their part. It's one of those albums that everyone should own a copy of.
Jerry Harrison and Adrian Belew have been touring Remain In Light in Europe- they played Oslo, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Hamburg and Cologne, three dates in the Netherlands and then Brussels, Warsaw and Luxembourg and last week arrived in the UK with gigs in Manchester and Wolverhampton and then London. Harrison was a Talking Head, guitar and keys/ synths, and Belew played guitar on Remain In Light in 1980 and then as part of the touring band (documented on the second disc of The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads and an incredible film of the band playing live in Rome in 1980).
The band that took to the stage at The Ritz last Thursday night is a dozen people strong, Harrison and Belew centre stage accompanied by two female singers, a man right in front of us who sings a lot of the David Byrne parts (and not afraid to bring his own take to some very well known songs) and plays a huge saxophone, several keys/ synth players, another guitarist, a drummer, a percussionist and a bassist. Most of them are also the support band, Cool Cool Cool, and they do a superb job of re- animating those Talking Heads songs. They have the necessary funkiness and can do the New York edge too. I've seen David Byrne perform many of these songs before- Harrison and Belew do them just as well but without the performance art that Byrne always brings to his shows (and I loved his American Utopia tour).
The set isn't just Remain In Light. They dip into other parts of the Talking Heads back catalogue and beyond, kicking off with Psycho Killer (a crowd pleasing place to start) and hit us with four Remain In Light highpoints- the jerky, uptight but loose art- funk of Crosseyed And Painless, Harrison and Belew trading guitar licks, followed by House In Motion and a brilliantly slightly manic but very much on the button I Zimbra. From this they roll into Born Under Punches, the sax/ singer in front of us screaming the vocal lines, 'Take a look at these hands/ The hand speaks/ The hand of a government man'. The band are dancing around, the 76 year old Jerry Harrison is doing that thing where he closes his eyes and rocks back on his heals, his long curly locks framing a very contended smile.
Cities from Fear Of Music follows and then Harrison plays Rev It Up from his 1987 solo album Casual Gods (I have Rev It Up on 12" and I'd be surprised if its been out of the sleeve since 1988). Slippery People sounds huge, Jerry's synth and keys solo a particular joy. Adrian Belew takes the spotlight for a King Crimson cover (Thela Hun Ginjeet according to SetlistFM- I'll have to take their word for it, a man's got to got o the toilet and the bar at some point) and then they launch into Once In A Lifetime, a refreshingly off kilter take on the song- the part three quarters of the way through where Harrison hits some huge synth chords is grin inducing. By this point we're right at the front. Everyone's dancing. There are a lot of younger people in the crowd as well as the usual middle aged audience and the feeling (I hesitate to use the word vibe but probably should) in The Ritz is amazing, evryone really enjoying hearing these songs so close up played by people having the time of their lies. A one point the two singers, the keys players and the sax/ singing man do a choreographed turning on the spot dance, a nod maybe to Stop Making Sense- it's a wonderful moment.
More? They play Life During Wartime, easily one of Talking Heads' best songs, Byrne's endlessly quoteable lyrics reeling by as the band cook up a storm- 'We dress like students/ We dress like housewives/ Or in a suit and a tie/ I changed my hairstyle so many times now/ I don't know what I look like....'- and then they close with Take Me To The River.
The encore is just two songs, the first Drugs (from Fear Of Music), a woozy, fractured, distorted song, and then they dive into The Great Curve, maybe the most dancey, most poly- rythmic, most Remain In Light of the Remain In Light songs, Belew providing the squeals of guitar and bursts of electricity, as the band bring the futuristic sound of 1980 into now. When it ends the players line up across the front of the stage for the ovation and it's clear that Jerry Harrison (plus Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz) as well as additional players like Belew, brought a huge amount to these songs, both in the studio and live- Jerry Harrison is unflashy and un- rock starry, New York cool and an innovative guitar and keys player- and as the house lights come on its all smiles on the floor of The Ritz.
Hugo Nicolson's return to musical action has seen him land at Brighton's Higher Love Recordings, a thoroughly reliable source of Balearic and electronic music. His new EP, Black Stick, came out last week, three tracks, all over seven minutes long and all first rate. The lead track is Little Kind, nine minutes of acid madness with burbling 808s and crunchy drums, a seabed- depth bassline and some of those wiggy melodies that send dancefloors off into orbit. You can get all three at Higher Love's Bandcamp.
The two that follow- Spanner and Zombie- are equally good. Spanner is percussive, thumpy and has a voice talking about destiny. Zombie is swampy and tribal, lots of FX and a squeak at the top end. The descending synthline sounds a little like a distant relative of Don't Fight It, Feel It, a record Hugo produced with Andrew Weatherall many, many moons ago.
Back in 1991 Hugo remixed Julian Cope's Beautiful Love, a track that came out on bright pink vinyl. The drums are a slowed down sample from a jazz record- someone told me which record once but was ages ago and I've forgotten. Hugo drops in a wobbly bassline, some FX and gets Copey into a very '91 groove.
Stereolab's new album Instant Holograms On Metal Film is an unexpected joy, their first for fifteen years and containing song titles that could have been created by a Stereolab song title generator bot- Mystical Plosives, Transmuted Matter, Vermona F Transistor, Melodie Is A Wound... The music though and the energy the songs contain make the band sound like they've been fired up after touring to support a series of re- issues and have a lot to do and say.
The album kicks from the outset, the familiar Stereolab elements all present and correct- motorik drums, analogue synths, Moogs being very Moog, guitars and Laetitia Sadier's flat but engaged vocals, an amalgam of krautrock, ye- ye, easy listening, bossa nova and jazz, library and sound effects albums, with a healthy dose of Marxist politics. They sound like they did in the 90s but also sound like now, updated and refined. The songs fly by, some short, some six or seven minutes long, a rush of retro- futuristic avant- pop. Aerial Troubles catches the mood of the album perfectly, both sonically and visually.
Sadier said in an interview that the album is inherently political even if the lyrics aren't directly political- by creating and by being positive they're countering the relentless negativity in the world, the poison of Trump and Farage, the mass murder taking place in Gaza, a Labour government taking benefits from the disabled and attacking the vulnerable (the list is mine not her's but I'm sure she was thinking of those things and others).
Space Age Bachelor Pad Music (Foamy) is from the 1993 mini- album of the same name, released on Too Pure and a calling card for the groop- Tim Gane, Laetitia Sadier, Mary Hanson, and Sean O'Hagan.
Jenny Ondioline was the lead song on a 10" EP from 1993, Transient Random Noise- Bursts With Announcements, a rush of guitars and noise. The version here is from the three CD box set Oscillons From The Anti- Sun. In 1993 they appeared on The Word playing French Disko, a song from the same EP. Stereolab made the absolute most of a bit of a cultural mismatch, a song that ends with the rallying cry of 'la resistance!'
The Noise Of Carpet is from the band's 1996 album Emperor Tomato Ketchup, possibly their best album- complex, multi- layered, vibrant, obtuse. It's a 90s banger.
Lo Boob Oscillator was originally one side of a 7" single from 1993 that came out on Sub Pop. It was then compiled onto Refried Ectoplasm. Gotta dig those album names.
Orgisatic is from Peng!, a 1992 album, a rattle of guitars that indicate Tim Gane's indie background - noise and distortion and sing song vox. My Bloody Stereolab.
Ping Pong was the lead single to their third proper album, Mars Audiac Quintet. The lyrics are critique of the west's addiction to boom- bust economics with vintage synths and brass leading the way, all very melodic and 60s pop.
Les Yper Yper Sound is also from the box set Oscillons From The Anti- Sun, a stunning, hypnotic five minutes of thumping drums and distorted synths sounds.
The Free Design came out in 1999, a bossa nova/ tropicalia song from an EP of the same name and then on the album Cobra And Phases Group Play Voltage In The Milky Night.
Iron Man was a 1997 7" on their own Duophonic label and sold at the merch stand on the Dots And Loops tour.
Melodie Is A Wound is from the new album Instant Holograms On Metal Film. Which is highly recommended.
Brian Eno's soundtrack work is many decades old. A selection of tracks were compiled as a double vinyl/ CD in 2020, cunningly titled Brian Eno- Film Music 1976- 2020. One of the remarkable things about the album and its seventeen tracks is that it works as a whole and feels like a cohesive piece of work despite the music bookending it being separated by forty six years and spanning a wide variety of films and TV programmer, from the Apollo moonshot documentary For All Mankind to Top Boy, from an Arena documentary on Francis Bacon to the 1984 version of Dune, and Married To The Mob to a film about sharks, Natural World- Hammerhead.
I've posted some of Eno's soundtrack music before- An Ending (Ascent) from For All Mankind, Deep Blue Day from Trainspotting, The Sombre from Top Boy and Prophecy from Dune have all featured here previously so thought I'd post some other tracks from Eno's film music, all of which is wonderful.
Dover Beach is a four minute ambient excursion, a hum, a ringing drone, the sense of time passing and things changing. It's from the soundtrack to Jubilee, Derek Jarman's 1978 drama/ trip, a film that transplants 16th century occultist John Dee and Elizabeth I into 1970s Britain, a country decaying and shot through with anger, despair and nihilism. It's wildly impressionistic, largely plotless and infused with London punk. Everywhere looks like a World War II bombsite. Various punk figures star in the film- Siouxsie Sioux and Steve Severin, Adam Ant, Jordan, Gene October and Toyah all appear and some of them are on the soundtrack too which concludes in ambient style with Slow Water and Dover Beach.
In 1995 Michael Mann directed a crime/ heist drama bringing together two giants of American cinema, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino for the first time. Eno contributed to the soundtrack, the very cinematic track Late Evening In Jersey, all long synth chords, a single guitar note, explosions echoing and rattling snare drums.
Eno recorded with U2 for the soundtrack too, appearing as Passengers, and Einsturzende Neubauten turned up as did New Order covering a Joy Division song, New Dawn Fades, with Moby. I'm not sure that was a collaboration anyone needed.
Reasonable Question is from the 2021 soundtrack to the film We Are As Gods, a documentary about pioneering free thinker and environmentalist Stewart Brand. Brand was one of the Merry Pranksters on Ken Kesey's Magic Bus and an advocate of cyber- utopianism. Apparently he coined the phrase personal computer. He's now in his 80s and big on rewilding ecosystems. Reasonable Question sounds like a computer programme turned into music- that's not a criticism.
Justin Robertson's recent dub excursions, both his remixes and his own productions, have been first rate. He's kept that winning streak going with a pair of dubbed out versions of Fluke's I Wanna Be under his Five Green Moons name (the Five Green Moons album Moon 1 was one of my favorites of 2024).
I Wanna Be (Five Green Moons Dub) is a world of deep bass, crashing drums, rattling rimshots and FX, unfolding over eight glorious dubbed out minutes- groove, space and echo. You can get the remix and the dub- there isn't much between them- at Bandcamp.
Fluke's re- emergence last year was a welcome return. The original version of I Wanna Be came out a week before the Five Green Moon ones and is very much in familiar Fluke territory- throbbing, pulsing, widescreen progressive techno with Jon Fugler's vocals up front, 'I wanna be/ The very best me I can be'.
New out from Tici Taci is the second full length album by Mr BC, ten tracks bound together as Smart Dust. There is plenty here for those fond of the chuggy/ ALFOS/ electronic indie- dance community to enjoy, with sparkling. cosmische synth sounds, low slung bass and slow mo machine drums pumping and hissing away. Ultrasuede is a starlit opening track, a sleek shimmy under the mirror ball with robotic vocals and melodica.
Title track Smart Dust throbs and shimmers, with a topline that could be either a clipped guitar or a vocodered voice, and gorgeous sequencers, keys and piano runs.
The album glides by, each track a man/ machine joy, Hospital Blues and Frequency Illusion, bringing deep, funky bass and thudding kick drum, and nu disco sparkles and synths. Previous single Make It Burn is present in its Disco Mix form, Chic style guitars, while Are You Acperienced is stellar with a pulsing acid bassline. After nine slices of uptempo cosmic chug Smart Dust ends with Endless Loop, a four minute piano and FX piece. Halfway through the drums pad in and it lifts off, Kling Klang synths firing off in technicolor before it all drops out leaving just the piano. A rather lovely way to finish. Smart Dust is at Bandcamp, available on CD and as download.
I read Elijah Wald's Dylan Goes Electric! recently, the book that the film A Complete Unknown is largely based on. Wald is a veteran of the folk scene himself, an author and teacher. The book builds up to Bob Dylan's pivotal appearance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 with an electric band and the moment they crashed into Maggie's farm and then Like A Rolling Stone. Wald acknowledges their are multiple accounts and perspectives of what happened next- the boos, the shock, the applause, the disappointment, the reactions of Pete Seeger and his axe, whether the booing was in reaction to Dylan's electric guitar and band or to the poor sound quality and overloaded live mix... all this and more.
Wald goes back to the start though and looks at the American folk movement and the split in it that became crystallized by Dylan's arrival, the split between the purists who thought that folk music should only be the songs of the traditional American communities and working people of the previous decades/ century and the modernists who were happy with topical songs. The notion of seeking commercial success also split the folk scene, the view that anything gimmicky was abhorrent and a sell out versus chart success bringing new people to folk music who might then appreciate the 'real folk music'.
Reading all of this you realise of course that this story and schism has split every music scene ever since. As the reader follows Wald through the stories of Seeger and Dylan between 1961 and 1965 you also realise this- that in Wald's view, Dylan didn't go electric, Dylan was always electric.
Wald's storytelling is first rate and his description of the various Newport Folk Festivals and their line ups is superb. I'd never really known much about the Mimi and Richard Farina and was sent to YouTube several times looking for their music. Richard Farina was a folk singer, songwriter, poet and novelist. His only published book, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me, is a 60s counterculture cult classic. He met Mimi Baez, the seventeen year old sister of Joan in 1962. She was already an accomplished singer and guitarist. They married and became a performing couple, Mimi and Richard Farina, appearing at Newport and recording two mid- 60s folk albums, 1965's Celebrations For A Grey day and 1966's Reflections In A Crystal Wind, both on Vanguard Records. Richard was killed in a motorbike accident in April 1966, on the day of Mimi's twenty- first birthday. I've become a little obsessed with some of their songs since reading the book although neither album seems easy to get hold of on vinyl this side of the Atlantic. Here's a song, one from each album. The first was written about three white college students murdered by the Ku Klux Klan on their way to a peace march in 1964. The second is the title track from their second and final album.
Iggy Pop's arrival on stage at 9pm on Saturday night in front of a crowd of 3000 fans was electrifying. The crowd was all ages, from teenagers up to fans in their 70s. Almost every single leftfield and punk band t- shirt you can think of was being worn somewhere in the building. His band filed onstage, two guitarists, a drummer bassist, keyboard player and two piece horn section, and then Iggy appeared to a roar from the crowd. By the time he'd reached the microphone stand he'd ripped his waistcoat off and was topless. The band then careered into TV Eye from the 1970 Stooges album Funhouse. TV Eye is reduced, mechanised rock 'n' roll, the 60s rock dream brutalised and moved to Detroit, Iggy boiling his lyrics down to just two phrases, 'see that cat', and 'she got a TV eye on me'.
Iggy Pop is 78 years old. Occasionally he sat on a stool for a few seconds between songs but for most of the ninety minute set he prowled and worked the stage, his voice sounding great, strong and growly, leading the band through a 20 song set that was exactly what you'd want him to play. Iggy knows what his back catalogue should sound like and this band played them as they should be played- plenty of late 60s and early 70s punk rock menace, with that groove that The Stooges had, and the horns adding the free jazz element. When not singing he works the crowd, standing at the front of the stage, slightly lopsided due to the decades of physical abuse he's put his body through, waving his arms, pointing at people in the crowd. There isn't much chat between songs- 'fucking Mancunians' he says approvingly at one point, and he introduces Some Weird Sin by saying it's 'time for some poetry'.
The Victoria Warehouse is a large brick hall. People have been critical of it as a venue in the past- the security for being over the top, the sound being muffled, it being oversold- but there are no issues tonight, its a seething mass of Iggy Pop fans. In front of me a 20- something couple dance and bounce around, clearly having the night of their lives. Beer is flung across the crowd, there are some crowd surfers- gigs can sometimes be very sanitised affairs these days- the mayhem around us is a joy to behold and as the gig goes on it gets hotter and hotter. I didn't go to the bar once during the gig. There was no way I was going to miss any of what was going on and carrying three drinks back through the crowd without spilling them would have been risky (especially at £8 a pint).
The first half of the set is sensational, one classic after another, a steam train of proto- punk and 70s rock, Iggy blasting through them with the energy of a man half or a third of his age. TV Eye is followed by Raw Power, then I Got A Right and Gimme Danger slowing things down a little. Five songs in he plays The Passenger and follows it with Lust For Life- that's two of his best and best known songs played in the first 20 minutes. Lust For Life is spectacular, the drums swinging and guitars punching, Iggy at full throttle. Then Death Trip and Loose (those horns really adding to the Funhouse songs) and I Wanna Be Your Dog, the audience chanting the chorus back at him. During the guitar solo he hurls his microphone stand across the stage and at the end of the song asks, 'where's my fucking microphone stand'.
By this point I'm a mess. It's hot, my shirt and jacket are stuck to me, I'm dancing around, Iggy is twenty feet in front of us, the sound is loud and punchy, the band sound superb, he's playing all the songs we want to hear. After the crowd pleasing, ecstatic thump of Lust For Life he plays Search And Destroy, the ghost of James Williamson's squealing guitar re- animated, Iggy's Vietnam stream of consciousness unfurling, those lines about being a streetwalking cheetah with a heart full of napalm and of love in the middle of a firefight spat out in that gravelly tone. Iggy plays the crowd- at one point a girl in front of us is up on her boyfriend's shoulders, phone in hand. Iggy spots her, head and shoulders above the crowd, a girl young enough to be his grand daughter, points straight at her and sticks his tongue out.
He goes into a few deeper cuts- Down On The Street, 1970 with a wailing free jazz trumpet, Iggy telling us that the song is what it was like to be alive 55 years ago, I'm Sick Of You and Some Weird Sin. It's high octane and exhilerating stuff, genuinely life affirming despite all the nihilism of the songs, Iggy as Godfather of Punk, the originator, last man standing, still there, giving it his all, 2 years short of 80. It slows down a little for the last 20 minutes. He plays Frenzy (from 2022, a song that starts with the line 'I got a dick and 2 balls, that's more than you all'), the song ending with a full band freak out, drummer thumping round the kit, guitars howling, horns blaring and out of this cacophony the drum machine lurch of Nightclubbing emerges, Iggy back to the front of the stage, singing his 1977 song about Bowie and the cool crowd, numbed out in West Berlin. Nightclubbing doesn't stick around for long and Iggy introduces a recent song, Modern Day Rip Off, muttering that he feels like he's been cheated his whole life.
We're nearing the end. Iggy wanders over to a speaker stack mid- song and gives it a few tugs but decides against pulling it over or climbing it. Then they play I'm Bored, from 1979's New Values, Iggy as apathist in chief, 'I'm bored/ I'm the chairman of the bored'. After nearly ninety minutes he's having a bit of a rest, slowing it down, the sound slightly muffled, but it doesn't last long as Iggy and his band slam into Real Wild Child, the song sounding huge now shorn of its 80s production. The pair of 20- somethings in front of me are still dancing, occasionally stopping to shout lines of songs into each other's faces. Iggy finishes us off with Funtime, his 1977 gothic/ kraut lurch with its blank eyed chant of 'all aboard for funtime', a fine way to leave, and after singing his last line he wanders off stage, the band left to see the song to its conclusion. No encore, house lights on, an exhilarated and sweaty crowd wandering out into the Old Trafford streets, wrung out and spent.
