We went for a walk on Sunday, up the canal and round the water-park, across Chorlton Ees, stopping for a pint on Chorlton Green and then back through the floodplain towards Ashton village. These places might not mean anything to you but they are green land around the Bridgewater Canal and River Mersey in south Manchester, rural feeling but with motorway, Metrolink and roads audible, and fairly full of strollers, dog walkers, cyclists and so on. On the walk, back towards Stretford cemetery there had been an enormous amount of fly tipping going on. And while I can't condone this kind of large scale littering it provides some interesting subject matter for photographs. Other people on the walk took pictures of their kids in Christmas jumpers. When we compared the photos on our phones at the end of the walk my view of the afternoon was a little bit gloomier. This shot in the tunnel under Washway Road that looks like it's from A Clockwork Orange.
Back in 2012 Four Tet and Jamie Xx remixed each other. This is an unsettling, disjointed and uneasy piece of work although the synths bring a certain kind of warmth..
Monday morning techno- the last Monday before Christmas techno too. Very festive.
Carl Craig's 1995 album Landcruising is a Detroit masterpiece, a sleek glide around the city at night with machine beats and glacial synths. In 2005 Carl revisited it and tinkered, updating it and then re-releasing it as The Album Formerly Known As... As you can imagine some of the techno purists were aghast. Carl said that 'some parts were dated so I wanted to make it again removing the dated parts and enlarging the good parts.' Technology and software goes through changes and when out djing he found some tracks jarred when played next to more modern sounds. Largely it comes down to taste but ten years on from the remake both versions sound great to these ears.
This one is absurdly good, the bass thumping from the start. Even if you think you don't like techno, you should let this one work its magic and hypnotise you.
I followed a link on Twitter the other night to Fact Magazine's 20 Best House And Techno Records of 2016 and started digging. I haven't got through them all yet but am having fun delving. The fact that I knew hadn't heard of pretty much any of them and knew almost nothing about any of them was-
a) a bit over-facing
b) a bit daunting and
c) proof that I'm well out of touch. But
d) shows that end of year lists have a useful purpose.
This one is really good. Released back in May on Where To Now? Records it starts with a echo-laden woman's voice and then a crisp beat. Icy waves of synth come in and some buzzes and beeps, layers of recorded noise with the rhythm becoming more complex. The narration continues intermittently but I'm never being quite able to make out what she's talking about. The moans five minutes in start to clear things up. BBC Radiophonic Workshop gone laptop techno. Lovely stuff.
Machine Woman (Anastasia Vtorova) was born in Leningrad, raised in Nottingham and now lives in Berlin (this song is very Berlin).
I saw a thing on social media recently which said 'nobody cares about your end of year review'. Possibly true. But it's a blogging tradition and so here it is.
2016 has been a wretched year in so many ways but there's been a real glut of good music from start to finish, from Bowie's astonishing and difficult to listen to Blackstar (and death) in January through to the very recent album from A Tribe Called Quest (also marked by the death of one of its makers, Phife Dawg).
Albums Of The Year
All of these have spent time on the Bagging Area turntable and/or car stereo...
David Bowie 'Blackstar'// Andrew Weatherall 'Convenanza'// Dinosaur Jr 'Give A Glimpse Of What Yer Not'// Unloved 'Guilt Of Love'//Aphex Twin 'Cheetah'// A Tribe Called Quest 'We Got It From Here...'//Beyonce 'Lemonade'//Tim Burgess and Peter Gordon 'Same Language, Different Worlds'//Toy 'Clear Shot'//Underworld 'Barbara Barbara We Face A Shining Future'//Echolocation 'Empire Blood And Bones'//Sordid Sound System 'Lux Exterior'//Cavern Of Anti- Matter 'Void Beats'// Steve Mason 'Meet The Humans'//Frank Ocean 'Blonde'// Baltic Fleet 'The Dear One'//Pete Astor 'Spilt Milk'//Cobby and Porky 'Cities Below Future Seas// and the much played round here swansong from Iggy Pop 'Post Pop Depression'
As well as all of these the three that have given me the most repeated joy are...
Woodleigh Research Facility 'The Phoenix Suburbs (And Other Stories) Beyond the Wizards Sleeve 'The Soft Bounce' Factory Floor '25 25'
But the most jawdropping album has been a compilation which included new recordings along with old, mixed together perfectly, making something new that was a meditation on life, love, loss and death, and that is David Holmes' Late Night Tales. So that's my album of the year.
As a sampler for those that haven't heard it it opened with Barry Woolnough's tribute to his wife who died of cancer, a 7" single on Moine Dubh...
This is Song Sung's spooked out cover of 10cc's I'm Not In Love (not a song I previously particularly liked but this is just wonderful)
And this was a one take vocal performance by BP Fallon to his friend Henry McCullough (a pair of Weatherall remixes are due next year).
E.P. Of The Year
Hardway Bros (Sean Johnston) released a four track e.p. in the early summer and I can't think of three songs that have sounded any better on one piece of vinyl than Pleasure Cry, My PNO and especially Argonaut. The sound of my summer. Still doing it in December too.
Songs Of The Year
Drew's songs of the year from last Saturday crosses over with mine in many ways- our 2016 Venn diagram has a big overlapping section. Here are 24 songs from 2016. No rankings, think of this list as a suggestion of the order in which these songs could be played...
Steve Cobby and Rich Arthurs 'Bushfarmer' Cobby and Mallinder 'Tumblefish' Primal Scream '100% Or Nothing Dub (Bobby Selassie And Primal Jah) David Bowie 'I Can't Give Everything Away' Wussy 'Ceremony' Pete Astor 'Really Something' Paprika Kinski 'Kids Of Your Crime' Iggy Pop 'Gardenia' The Hurt 'Berlin' Unloved 'When A Woman Is Around' The Liminanas ft Peter Hook 'Garden Of Love' (Lundi Mouille Mix) Warpaint 'New Song' Woodleigh Research Facility 'Taqiya' Massive Attack 'Ritual Spirit' Andrew Weatherall 'The Confidence Man' The Xx 'On Hold' Beyonce 'Hold Up' Beyond the Wizards Sleeve 'Diagram Girl' (BTWS Re-Animation) Craig Bratley ft Danielle Moore 'Play The Game' (Andrew Weatherall Remix) Circle Sky 'Reveal' Daniel Avery 'A Mechanical Sky' Death In Vegas 'You Disco I Freak' Andrew Weatherall 'Ghosts Again' (Scott Fraser Ghosts In The Piano Mix) Hardway Bros 'Argonaut'
A new Jesus And Mary Chain single came out last week, the first in eighteen years it is claimed. This ignores All Things Must Pass which came out in 2010 and was on a Best Of... (which in the internet age almost counts as a single). It also ignored the fact that the new single, Amputation, is a re-recording with a new name of a Jim Reid solo single from 2006. Here it is...
I liked Dead End Kids, bought it on cd single and thought it was a decent song. A typical Jim Reid three chord riff and a typically Jim Reid lyric- 'It's wine today, it's piss tomorrow', 'fucked up girls like fucked up boys', 'I'm a rock 'n' roll amputation'. The new version has some squally feedback at the start and reverb covered vox, a dirty guitar part on the chorus. But this release should have been a genuinely new song instead of a shrug and a sense of disappointment (which is what I felt). It's not an All For One level disappointment. A milder disappointment. Ah well, hey ho. Still, tickets for the tour in March are on sale and they were very good when they toured Psychocandy two years ago.
The Vinyl Villain has been hosting a long running series where different contributors suggest a ten track Imaginary Compilation Album for an artist or band, running the gamut from The Smiths to Massive Attack, from Durutti Column to Captain Beefheart. Now totalling over one hundred posts I finally pulled my finger out and wrote an Andrew Weatherall ICA. I cheated- it's a double disc compilation. You can read it here.
This One Dove song didn't make the cut but probably should have.
A third song to go alongside West Bam and West India Company- I'll stop after this, it's getting a bit tenuous. The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band were from Los Angeles and made psychedelic rock. Shifting Sands came out in 1967, a B-side. There are some lovely distorted guitars on this and a folky vocal. And it was just as forward thinking at the time as Tuesday and Wednesday's 'West' records were I guess.
This is the tune I was looking for before getting distracted by West India Company, a 1990 offering from German DJ West Bam (Maximillian Lenz). Offering doesn't really do this speaker shaking 12" justice. It's a slap in the face and a shiver down the spine with a juddering riff (sampled from Gang Of Four apparently and then borrowed from this by Weatherall for his legendary My Bloody Valentine remix) and a Tutonic breakbeat. Wakey wakey!
In 2013 West Bam released a new album which had this song on it, She Wants, with vocals by Bernhard Sumner (sic) and a slightly disturbing, NSFW video. If last year's new New Order album had been more like this, I'd have liked it more.
Here's another 'I was looking for that but then I found this' post. I was looking for an mp3 of West Bam's Alarm Clock and couldn't find it so did a search for 'West' and this came up- West India Company's O Je Suis Seul (remixed in 1989 by Andrew Weatherall and on the flipside by Weatherall with Alex Paterson). I wasn't intending to do another Weatherall related post so soon after the previous one but it's a go-with-the-flow time of year right now.
West India Company were an interesting mix of people, including Vince Clarke (from Depeche Mode, Yazoo and Erasure, above left), Neil Arthur and Stephen Luscombe (from Blancmange, above centre and right respectively) and the legendary Indian singer Asha Bhosle, and they set about making synth pop with Indian rhythms and instruments in the mid 80s. By '89 they were heading housewards. Weatherall and Paterson lived in neighbouring flats in Battersea and presumably they crossed paths somewhere. The Bhagwan Boogie Mix is a chuggy ambient house tune, peppered with Indian percussion and has an appearance of that 'Yep, I know that feeling' sample which Weatherall would re-use on Screamadelica. The Orient Express Mix is a bit more abstract and disembodied, more Orb-like in fact.
I was flicking through my records on Saturday looking for something else when I found what I wasn't looking for but pulled it out and played it anyway- Hootenanny, the second album by The Replacements. Hootenanny is a halfway house, a stepping stone from the breakneck punk of their early years to the slightly more considered sound of Let It Be and Tim. Hootenanny is still ragged, a bit of a mess in places with some songs that sound tossed off for a laugh but it also has the first of what would become Paul Westerberg's signature aching, yearning guitar songs. Within Your Reach is just Westerberg too with a drum machine, flanged guitar and a trademark romantic lyric.
Watching Martin Scorcese's Bob Dylan documentary on Friday night was a bolt from the blue. I'd seen it before but not for a long time and it's ages since I've properly listened to any Dylan. There doesn't seem much doubt to me that he completely changed the form of popular music in the early 60s and carried on doing so through to late 60s, more so (single-handedly) than anyone else- the words mainly (but not only) and what a song could be about, the fusing of street poetry and beat poetry to firstly folk music and then to rock music (for want of a better term). He set the standards and in 1965 and 1966 he looked sharp as fuck too (which is not the only thing but is important). This song was recorded live in April 1963 at New York Town Hall but not released until the strangely compiled Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Volume II in 1971. I've loved it since I first heard it sometime in the late 80s.
Today involves all manner of Christmas stuff. But first, to ease the pain, some dub. The Legendary Skatalites In Dub is exactly that- the horns of ska with the dub basslines and rhythms of King Tubby. This one is a perfect example and why you should get a copy of this album if you don't have one already.
Back at the start of the year Andrew Weatherall- him again- released two albums, one under his own name (Convenanza) and one with Nina Walsh as the Woodleigh Research Facility. The WRF album, The Phoenix Suburb And Other Stories, is eight tracks of dubby instrumentals and is continuing to reveal is pleasures nearly a year on. About a year ago the good people at Rotters Golf Club sent out an mp3 to everyone who'd subscribed to the Moine Dubh singles club by way of apology for a delay in pressing the first 7". This was it.
There's a lot of Teenage Fanclub on the internet right now and in real life (they're touring). They've become very... comfy. Heartwarming. Fair play to 'em. The songs off Bandwagonesque still do it for me, there's a bit more crunch and distortion about them. The album sounds like a group on the rise, in a fruitful period where the songs just poured out of them.
I'm a Taurean by the way. Reliable, practical, sensual and independent it says on the web, with an eye for beauty and good with money (ha! My wife would disagree about that last one). Also lazy, stubborn and materialistic. Like, whatever.
Sally Rodgers and Steve Jones, the duo that were/are Balearic heroes A Man Called Adam, have been recording more recently as Discrete Machines using iPads and mini-controllers and an improvisational approach. A mini-album came out in 2015 and opened with this wonderful seven minute tribute to the ladies of electronica (Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram and Pauline Oliveros) set to an Afrobeat. There's something about this which is totally entrancing. The rest of the album is equally good, inventive and fresh, minimal and loungey, a bit of krautrock, some poetry- definitely from over there, outside the mainstream. It includes a song called Stockhausen's Cardigan which is reason enough to give it a go. You can buy it here.
Unique 3 were from Bradford. This 1989 single was a massive club record, north and south. It also shows just how strange and abstract late 80s dance music could be and how far it could confuse people. Aspects of it, the buzzing bass and the drums, are made to be blasted through speakers to get people dancing. But there's nothing conventional about it, the structure and those bleeps that run all the way through are from some other place entirely.
In the early 80s Factory signed lots of bands who sounded very Factory. Many of them struggled to escape from the long shadow cast by Joy Division and New Order. Occasionally someone would produce something that stepped forward from those shadows. Section 25's Looking From A Hilltop, from 1984, is one of those records. The single release had this version on the B-side, produced by Bernard Sumner and Donald Johnson from ACR (as Be Music), it is years ahead of itself. A pulsing bassline, percussion and drum machine way up front, with layers of synths, guitars and noises and hard to hear vocals. It is one of Factory's most startling moments and despite being eight minutes long it never feels like it. Various underground djs and left of the dial radio stations in the States picked up on it pushing it further onwards. From Blackpool too. Kiss me quick.
One of the things music blogs are for is going deeper and further, plucking out the out of print, the lost and forgotten, the obscure b-sides and alternate takes. Today I've got two Big Audio Dynamite B-sides for no reason other than I was scrolling through a folder and the first one caught my eye. Mainly because looking at the track name I couldn't place it at all.
The spirit of forward momentum and trying new ideas, new sounds and new technologies that led Mick Jones through The Clash and then into Big Audio Dynamite is in full effect on In Full Effect. It was on the Contact 12", the single that promoted 1989's Megatop Phoenix, an album that married B.A.D.'s guitars, choruses and samples with acid house. In Full Effect is a seven minute instrumental credited to Mick and Greg and shows they could do a pretty convincing version of what was then the new thing.
San Diego's Crocodiles are always worth a listen. They put out their sixth album back in October which somehow I missed and have just been discovering recently. The fuzzed up, sleazy psych sound of their previous records has been replaced by something sunnier on Dreamless, especially so on the single Telepathic Lover which sounds a lot like late 80s New Order to the Bagging Area ears. Across the album as a whole here's some spreading of wings (winged crocodiles would be fearsome) and they sound like a band energised and loosened up by experimenting, synths and piano are all over this as well as the usual guitars, even though the lyrics remain pretty weighed down by life and experience.
Some records grow in reputation over the years, even the ones that are raved about on release. DJ Shadow's Entroducing... is one of them. I listened to it loads in the months and years after its release but haven't played it end to end for years. It is a monument to one man's obsession (record collecting, obscure samples, building an album by using pretty much nothing but an Akai MPC60, a Technics SL-1200 turntbale and a tape recorder) and has probably become a bit of a millstone around its creators neck. I listened to it again recently, after Ctel posted a remix of Midnight In A Perfect World, and said he wasn't such a big fan of it. On this occasion I have to disagree (and Ctel is often right in these things). I can't find any reason to suggest that it is anything other than a stunningly inventive piece of work. Midnight... is based around a sampled drum beat and a David Axelrod piano sample and doesn't sound twenty years old at all. When the album finishes it almost forces you to turn it over and start again.
Le's start December with something new. New to me anyway. A friend passed this to me earlier this week, a Canadian duo called Bob Moses. Tom and Jimmy met at school and started making music, trying Californian punk and grunge before heading into a deeper electronic groove. This song has an Xx feel, the pitter-patter of drums, minimal waves of synth, a pulsing bassline and some easy-does-it vocals. The breakdown and re-entry at just after six minutes goes into club territory and I like it very much. From an e.p. called Far From The Tree.
This came out back in 2013 to little fanfare which is a shame as it's a rather good remix job done by Weatherall and Fairplay on Justin Robertson's Deadstock 33s, a sort of hypnotic, space age, techno remix. Some lovely melodies reveal themselves set off against the breakbeat. Best description I can manage right now.
Tim Burgess and Peter Gordon's Same Language, Different Worlds album is full of low key pleasures, little analogue synth parts burbling away, sax drifting in, Tim's hazy vocals. This remix of Around by Sonic Boom adds further tension, loops and some chopped up, repetitive parts.
You may have heard the sad news that Inspiral Carpets drummer Craig Gill died last week aged just 44. Friends and fans have launched a campaign to get their 1994 single Saturn 5 to the number one slot for Christmas as a tribute, so you know what to do. Back in 1990 this was the song that broke them through from a local concern to a national following.
Back before Manchester City got a load of cash United fans used to be able to sing along to this with different words- 'this is how it feels to be City, this is how it feels to be small, this is how it feels when your team wins nothing at all'. Alas, we can sing it no more.
If you ever need to explain to someone what dub is and why there are times when you should fall to your knees and hail King Tubby as a supreme musical producer and explorer, play them this. And then the rest of the Blood And Fire compilation Dub Gone Crazy- The Evolution Of Dub At King Tubby's 1975-1979. And then they'll know.
I post these up on a monthly basis and it seems worthwhile because there's more top quality new and old music to be found in them than in almost any other two hour show the internet can provide. This is Weatherall's November offering for Music's Not For Everyone at NTS Radio. As well as the usual concoction there are, count 'em, four new Weatherall remixes- The Early Years; Piano Magic; Nancy Noise, Craig Christon and Tim Hutton; and one from David Holmes' recent Late Night Tales compilation I raved about last week, Holmes and BP Fallon.
This might soundtrack the afterparty back at our's spilling over from Isaac's 18th. Cheers!
A friend tipped me off to this last night, an utterly retro but totally fresh breakbeat rave smash that was made in 2016 but sounds like 1991. That's an Emotions vocal sample in there. Guaranteed to put a smile on your face.
Chime by Orbital is one of British dance music's breakthrough moments, proof the UK could do what the US had been donig in Chicago and Detroit. Chime was written by the Hartnoll brothers in Kent in 1989. It was recorded in early 1989 onto cassette in their makeshift home studio, a cupboard under the stairs, using a recently acquired Roland TB 303 which had been bought from a working men's club keyboard player. Legend has it that it cost a fiver (a documentary I watched a while back), £3.65 (an interview where he describes having to shell out for a metal TDK cassette) or a single pound (wikipedia). Paul Hartnoll mixed it live onto a four track tape recorder and then went to the pub. Paul described the evening thus- Chime' started as a big riff from me playing this joyous Detroit-y chord progression that mirrored my mood — it was a sunny day and I was off to meet girls down the pub — and then I built a two-bar groove on the 909 that turned out to be rubbish until I decided to play it as one-bar loops.
Taking it down to the local record shop where mentor Jazzy M worked, they played it through the shop's system and people started asking for it there and then. The full twelve minute one is the one you really want. This one here is a five minute edit. Shorter but still wondrous.
If you're going to do a cover, do it like this- rip it to shreds with volume and feedback and stick an American TV preacher over the end with the sound of breaking glass.
At 7.37 am on the morning of November 23rd 1998 our eldest Isaac forced his way into the world, two weeks early. Today he turns eighteen. Some of you know his background. He was born with an incredibly rare genetic disease, Hurler's Disease (MPS1), which saw him taken off to intensive care immediately and he didn't come out for a week. Hurler's disease is caused by a missing enzyme which leads to all kind of difficulties- deafness, learning difficulties, physical disabilities and gradual loss of functions to an early death. There is no cure. Aged eighteen months he went through two bone marrow transplants that have put some of the missing enzyme into his body, a treatment that has given him the life he has now. He's had numerous operations for skeletal problems. One unforeseen consequence of the bone marrow transplant was that the chemotherapy used to enable his body to accept the donor material also destroyed his immune system which then failed to grow back. Aged ten with a weak immune system he got pneumonia which turned into meningitis, which floored him. Back into intensive care and not expected to survive the night. Coma and eventual recovery but with his hearing completely wiped out. It's been a long road.
But that's only some of the story. He is in good health currently, goes to special needs 6th form college, has trips out with friends, knows more people than I do and is having a party on Saturday where we are expecting roughly 150 guests to show up. We are transitioning into adult services from children's, both hospitals and social care, which for us is daunting. He just gets on with it. The remarkable thing isn't his continued determination to carry on against the odds or his resilience in the face of disability (though they are pretty remarkable). The remarkable thing is the connections he makes with people, the impact he has on them and the joy he gets from them.
Eighteen years ago I was totally unprepared for this- having a child is change enough. Having a disabled child is another world. Looking back now I'm not sure how we coped with some of the things he and we went through. But here we are. One of the things he wants the most on becoming an adult is to have a pint poured for him (which he won't drink but it'll be poured and sat with). So if you're raising a glass of anything tonight, have one with us.
When I drove Mrs Swiss to hospital eighteen years ago the last song that played on the car stereo cassette player was this, Cinnamon Girl- still I think my favourite Neil Young song (which I don't have on the hard drive right now).
'A dreamer of pictures
I run in the night
You see us together
Chasing the moonlight
My cinnamon girl'
Sometimes a fringe and a denim jacket is all you need. Johnny Marr's been all over the media recently including here two days ago. His guitar playing was all over other people's work too, occasionally during his time in the The Smiths and then especially in the years afterwards. In full flow in the years after the split he recorded impossibly funky Nile Rodgers style guitar onto Still Feel the Rain by Stex. I've got a real softspot for this single and even with that very 1990 drumbeat this song still sounds good today. The Grid were involved in a remixed version on the 12". Difficult to believe this wasn't a massive hit.
In the video the fringe and denim jacket have gone, replaced by a crop and baggy white sweatshirt and jeans. Time moves on, never stand still, keep looking forward and all that.
Plus Instruments were an early 80s industrial/electronic pop outfit, the work of Truus de Groot and whoever else was around (this included Jim Sclavunus from Grinderman with Nick Cave). After thirty years out of the game Truus returned recently and now Love Is Enough has been remixed for a 12" by Khidja, Luke Solomon and Richard Sen. In a piece of happy synchronicity Richard Sen did the cover art for Sabres Of Paradise's Smokebelch 12" which I posted a few days ago. I chanced upon the Sen remix yesterday, a dark house reworking with a thumping kick drum, trippy strings and icy vocals. The video is pretty hypnotic too.
As you probably know Johnny Marr's autobiography, Set The Boy Free, came out recently. I was in a shop and had just picked it up when my phone rang. Mrs Swiss said her Mother had just phoned saying she'd found a Christmas present for me and she was really excited because I'm 'difficult to buy for'.
'So whatever you do, don't buy the Johnny Marr book'.
I put it back, sighing slightly as I'd have to wait until the end of December to read it.
Electronic was a bolt hole for both Marr and Bernard Sumner and the original intention was to put out club inspired music with a variety of guests. First single Getting Away With It was a big hit in December 1989 so the idea of releasing things quietly and anonymously was shot to pieces there and then. Follow up Get the Message in 1991 was a brilliant piece of pop. It was followed by a remix 12" where the song structure was stretched into a dancier groove.
Back in 2013 I wrote about Towers, the second album from one man band Baltic Fleet. The one man is Paul Fleming, former touring keyboardist for Echo And The Bunnymen, who has returned with another album- The Dear One. This is the title track and single, an instrumental with more than a nod to your cosmische West German groups and a synth riff that'll stick in your cranium for days. The album takes in similar sounds, passing through Eno and Bowie's Berlin days. It's affecting and exhilarating stuff- and fully fits in with this week's mission to defy fascists with music. Avanti!
Just trying to catch up with some stuff people have recommended in various places and I come across the new one from A Tribe Called Quest. Back, back, back, backer than backer. This is how you do it...
Friday- and thank fuck for that. It's been a long and trying week. I've got my computer back and it seems to have survived the experience despite the best efforts of the staff at the shop who were borderline incompetent, had no customer service skills whatsoever and didn't even seem to think an apology was due when I listed the multiple let downs in service they've provided me with over the last four weeks.
Today's tune to lift the spirits is a follow on of sorts from Drew posting LB Bad's New Age Of Faith last week, the starting point for Sabres Of Paradise's 1993 classic Smokebelch. David Holmes took Weatherall and co's track and added a tumbling house piano guaranteed to set the hairs on the back of the neck up straight and a majorette style drumming section. Breakdowns and build ups, and end the of the night has come too soon.
If you haven't yet heard Holmes' Late Night Tales compilation you really should do so as a matter of urgency, whatever your current tastes. It is much more than a mix cd or compilation. It is an expertly put together and seemless mix of songs to guide you through the small hours, taking in psyche, folk, the weirder end of rock and roll, a children's choir, ambient and found sounds, the spoken word and some songs recorded by Holmes specifically for this album. It takes in the words of Seamus Heaney, the music of strange bedfellows like BP Fallon, Jon Hopkins, David Crosby, Buddy Holly, The Children Of Sunshine and Moine Dubh's Barry Woolnough. It tracks a journey through life, complete with loss and love and redemption. It is quite magical and proves that light always finds its way through the dark.
The two covers are kind of the inverse of each other aren't they?
Let's keep dancing but today with a tinge of sadness. It was announced on Monday that David Mancuso has died aged 72. Mancuso is something of a legend. As a dj in New York in the 1970s he created invite only parties that mutated into The Loft, the spiritual home of NY disco. His 'anything goes as long as you can dance to it' attitude to his selections, his nights as a haven for the 'disaffected and disenfranchised' of New York, his state of the art sound system, his belief that mixing spoilt the purity of the records (he would play the whole song, leave a brief gap and then play another), his view of djing as creating a mood, a scene, taking the dancers on a journey- all hugely influential. And yet he still took the view that the dj should not be put on a pedestal, that the record selector was just one part of the party.
Musically he stretched far beyond disco, playing whatever records he found that made people dance. These two songs became alternative anthems due him championing them...
Looks like Jerry missed the message about wearing red for the photo shoot.
Songs to raise the spirits and raise the roof after a week/year of shite and disappointment- Crosseyed And Painless (The Heat Goes On). In 1980 Talking Heads were the funkiest post-punk group on the planet, expanding to include new people in the studio and soon a killer line up of live musicians, with with Brian Eno continuing on production. David Byrne's control freakery had almost driven Tina and Chris out but they stuck together to make their last truly great album, Remain In Light. This is the opener and sets the tone for what is to come.
Byrne has said that the album was 'spiritual' and 'joyous and ecstatic and yet it's serious'. The groove on this song is something else, rhythms for dancing and losing yourself. The vocal parts call and respond like uptight gospel. And the lyrics defy explanation. 'Lost my shape, trying to act casual' he starts out. The phrase 'I'm still waiting' comes and goes and then towards the end he starts to list what facts can and can't do. And as we all know, we are now in a post-fact world.
'Facts are simple and facts are straight Facts are lazy and facts are late Facts all come with points of view Facts don't do what I want them to Facts just twist the truth around Facts are living turned inside out Facts are getting the best of them Facts are nothing on the face of things Facts don't stain the furniture Facts go out and slam the door Facts are written all over your face Facts continue to change their shape I'm still waiting... '
I'm entering week four without my computer. No downloads I'm afraid but the words and the non-downloadable music continues.
The right wing are on the march again. Social media is a giant echo chamber of like minded souls throwing out brief statements towards their friends and followers, glimmers of hope, analyses of what's gone wrong, occasionally funny comments on pictures of the new right wing overlords posing in front of gold plated lifts, racists gloating about how everything will soon be sorted when the immigrants are sent back/stopped from coming. It's dark- in every sense. Dark when I get up to go to work, dark when I come home from work, dark when I open a newspaper or turn on the news.
We can fight this darkness in lots of ways. One small way is by sharing 'up' tunes, songs and tracks to raise the spirits, to put a smile on the face, a melody to whistle or hum as you go to work, songs that matter to one person and to many people. Fuck fascism (and that's what we're facing I fear, the beginnings of a new kind of fascism and a newly confident fascism)- let's dance.
On And On is widely credited as the first house music track, created in Chicago by Jesse Saunders in 1984. Chicago's warehouse scene was largely for and by young black and gay men, with music of transcendence, liberation and rebellion. Saunders, a Chicago dj, had the only copy in the city of On And On Megamix by Mach, his signature tune. One night it was stolen from his record box. Jesse and Vince Lawrence decided to make their own version with a Roland TR 808 drum machine, a Korg synth, a 303 bass synthesizer and some new lyrics from Vince. From this one record came a whole new movement that would cross the Atlantic, create the last true youth music revolution in the UK and the only kind of music that a British government has passed legislation to prevent (music 'characterised by repetitive beats' being listened to by more than 20 people, the Criminal Justice And Public Order Act of 1994). Let's dance.
I got an email on Friday, unsolicited music submission, from a man called Mark. The tone of the email kept me reading as did the sentence 'Andrew Weatherall and Don Letts have been playing them'. Four links provided and I replied saying I'd listen. And I'm glad did.
This isn't really Monday morning music, it's Saturday night stuff. It's my Dad's birthday today and he wouldn't get these either. But there''s some rather excellent acid house going on here. Rude Audio are a south London and Geordie concoction, based in Peckham and Herne Hill. The first one I listened to was this, Crystal Pylons, a dancefloor stomper.
Knockemdub has been spun by Don Letts on BBC6, spaced out and dubby...
This one, User, was Weatherall's pick, played on Music's Not For Everyone back in April- a stuttering reggae style beat and echoey vocals, not too far from The Orb's Ultrabass remixes.
Half Moon Lane Glitter takes us back to the dark back room of a club, some slo-mo action...
Rude Audio's website asks the question 'where are all those chunky, dubby, riffy, mind-melting, epic, progressive, Balearic tunes when you need them?' Right here.
I've got more and more out of The Xx as time has gone on. At first I thought they were impressive but easier to admire than to love. That's changed over the years since their debut and its follow up, even more so after Jamie Xx's solo album from last year. News came out on Friday that their third album will be released in January and in advance of it comes a single called On Hold.
The opening section with Romy and Oliver trading lines starts out sounding like an 80s power ballad but stick with it. The synth stabs coming in forty seconds and then the repetitive vocal sample (Hall and Oates) at fifty seconds take it elsewhere, into higher places.
While I'm in the Xx zone this Jamie Xx edit of Sunset off second album Coexist is a wonderful bass and kick drum led thing of beauty. The repeated guitar line building up to Romy's vocal drop is magnificent use of tension and release and the end section is pretty amazing too.
I don't know about you but I could do with a lie down in a darkened room for a little while.
The KLF's Chill Out, forty four minutes and twenty seconds long, recorded in one go by Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, and released in February 1990, is a mythical drive through the night up the Gulf Coast from Texas into Louisiana. Bill Drummond said at the time he'd never been to those places, it was all in his head. If you want more about the background, samples, recording, track titles and whatnot there's more here. But maybe it's best just to press play and let go.
It seems wrong to let today go by without a tip of the trilby to Leonard Cohen.
'Now I bid you farewell
I don't know when I'll be back
They're moving us tomorrow
To the tower down the track
But you'll be hearing from me baby
Long after I'm gone
I'll be speaking to you softly
From a window in the tower of song'
Some photos I took at the Somme and around Ypres this summer, one hundred years on from the Battle of the Somme. Ninety eight years ago from now the First World War came to an end. We still remember them.
Another lost piece from the Joe Strummer jigsaw, Generations was recorded in a day in 1996 while Joe was in Los Angeles. Having spent some time driving around the surrounding areas in his Cadillac with Shaun Ryder, Bez and Richard Norris, getting hopelessly lost on occasion, Joe was beginning to get back towards a band style scenario. The Mescaleros started to come together not too long afterwards, Joe writing with Richard Norris. England's Irie, England's unofficial Euro 96 song led to Joe's only Top Of The Pops appearance with Black Grape. Joe was on the move. Contacted about a project to put out an album called Generations- A Punk Rock At Human Rights Joe went away inspired to contribute a song and wrote the lyric quickly. It was then recorded in a day in LA with Rat Scabies and Seggs from The Ruts on bass and drums. The producer Jason Rothberg came up with the name Electric Dog House. Joe's response was along the lines of 'well we're not going to come up with anything better today' so Electric Dog House it was. It's a funny song with plenty of charm- loose drumming and some organ open it up and then Joe comes in. The mix and echo on the vox make it sound quite chaotic and the instruments pile up towards the end but there's a good tune inside it, a nice chord change in the chorus and an affecting lyric- 'let's go running down the road' Joe repeats. It's a shame the three of them didn't go on to record anything else together.
Difficult to know exactly what to say after yesterday's news that other people haven't already expressed elsewhere. Right wing demagogues stoking up waves of populist revolt, people excluded economically and who see political elites as the cause of their problems, racism and xenophobia used to fan the flames, multimillionaires posing as voices of the people who represent the man in the street and tell it how it is. This has happened before, in Europe in the 1930s to give one example, and it doesn't go well.
I still haven't got my computer back either. I did manage to get into my emails last night for the first time in three weeks but haven't got the will to go through them all.
This record by Finitribe from 1986 is a blast. Just check the beat... and those bells! Dancefloor rocking stuff, electronic 80s, on the fringes of industrial, picked up by the thudding, slow mo New Beat djs in Belgium and then the Balearic scene in Ibiza and South London a couple of years later.
