Icon

Some re-worked Detroit techno for you on this Wednesday in May in lockdown. Around 2015 Vince Watson was invited to re- work Derrick May's Icon, a Rhythim Is Rhythim  track from 1996. It came out in 2017 backed with another re-working on the B-side, an updated version of Derrick's co- write with Carl Craig, Kao- Tic Harmony. Vince treats both tracks respectfully, rebuilding them without taking away the original feeling or energy. Some added drums, some strings maybe. Retro Techno/Detroit Definitive- Emotions Electric was the title of a 1991 compilation of the early Detroit techno and it fits this just as well. Dance music for the heart and the head as well as the feet.

Icon (Remixed and Reconstructed)

Planet Caravan

Brand new from Moon Duo is this ten minute odyssey, a very chilled psychedelic cover of Black Sabbath's Planet Caravan. It appears on a tribute album called What Is This That Stands Before Me?, a compilation of covers of Sabbath songs by bands on Sacred Bones Records. If you like Moon Duo (I know some of you do, and if you don't, you should) you'll love this. Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. Duo Blissed Out Duo. This is so good and so beautiful it practically works as medicine.

Monday's Long Song

I posted this photo on Twitter last week, the contents of a box I found in the loft. These cassettes have survived numerous house moves and various culls. I was happy to find them, the Proustian rush was enjoyable. Many of them date from the late 80s when it was in lots of ways a different world and I was a different person. Someone called Jon Fugler saw the photo and commented 'good haul, the ladybird is my favourite...' to which I replied 'Fluke', a useful piece of information I thought as the band's name isn't on the front of the cassette. It was then pointed out to me by @AcidGrandads that Jon Fugler was the singer in Fluke. Sometimes you just have to give a virtual shrug, smile and face palm.

Fluke were ace, an acid house/ electronic band who crossed all the genres from techno to house to ambient, guitars, synths, samples, drum machines and vocals. Their song Pan Am Into Philly is one of the great lost ones of the era and the version on Creation's Keeping The Faith, Philly (Jamourphous Mix), is superb and a real personal favourite from that time. The album with the ladybird on it is from 1991,a live album from a time when people doubted whether this type of band could really perform live- the band doubted it as well as the computers weren't always reliable enough to survive a gig. Nevertheless the album, Out (In Essence) is a great snapshot of the group.

Garden Of Blighty (Out/In Essence)

What makes my inability to recognise Jon Fugler even worse is that in my final year at university I knew Hugh Bryder (who was Fluke's tour DJ and friend of a friend, and Hugh was supposed to be DJing at my wedding in 1995 but was stuck on a train).

Canción Mixteca

Playing around with the Harry Dean Stanton monologue from Paris, Texas when I was putting yesterday's Isolation Mix together last week caused me to play the entire soundtrack through a few times. It's not a very long album, only ten tracks and if it wasn't for 'I Knew These People...' which clocks in at over eight minutes it would be much shorter. Ry Cooder's guitar playing, all slide guitar, delicate finger picking, reverb and atmosphere, perfectly matches the moods and look of the film- the dust of the desert, the longing of the characters, the melancholy and loss of Travis and Jane. Ry Cooder said in 2018 that director Wim Wenders caught the ambience of the south west of the USA with the use of ambient microphones which picked up the sound of the desert and the wind, which he discovered is in E♭. So for the soundtrack they tuned all the instruments to E♭. That's the kind of detail I like, tuning your guitar to the key of the wind.

This song, Canción Mixteca, is ne of the highlights of the soundtrack and is little more than Ry Cooder's echo laden guitar, some piano and Harry Dean Stanton singing. The song is a Mexican folk song, written between 1912 and 1915 by Jose Lopez Alvarez. He wrote it in Mexico City suffering from homesickness for Oaxaca, his home. Since then it has been adopted by many Mexican exiles who long for their hometown.

'So far am I from the land where I was born!
Immense nostalgia invades my thoughts,
and, to see myself, as lone and dismal as leaf on the wind,
I would that I'd weep ‒ I would that I'd die ‒ out of sorrow!

O land of sunshine! I sigh for‐to see you.
Now that, far from you, I live without light ‒ without love.
And, to see myself, as lone and dismal as leaf on the wind,
I would that I'd weep ‒ I would that I'd die ‒ out of sorrow!'

Canción Mixteca

Isolation Mix Five

Five weeks into these isolation mixes already- doesn't time fly when you're socially restricted? There is a higher BPM count on this mix but also some folky darkness and post punk dread from Nick Drake and A Certain Ratio respectively, some dance grooves from Ellis Island Sound and Scott Fraser, the ultra Balearic vibes of Richard Norris' Time And Space Machine remix of A Mountain Of One, some 1990 class from World Unite when Creation Records went all E'd up and dancey, Andrew Weatherall remixing Moby and Wayne Coyne in epic style, half of The Clash with Frank Ocean and Diplo plus the West Los Angeles Childrens' Choir (brought to you in association with Converse) from 2014 and a very long Seahawks remix of Tim Burgess, some headspinning ambient noise set against Harry Dean Stanton's monologue from Paris, Texas. 'Yep, I know that feeling'.

Tracklist:

Nick Drake: ‘Cello Song

A Certain Ratio: Winter Hill

Ellis Island Sound: Intro, Airborne, Travelling (Scott Fraser Remix)

A Mountain Of One: Ride (The Time And Space Machine Remix)

World Unite: World Unite

Moby Ft. Wayne Coyne: Another Perfect Life (Andrew Weatherall Remix)

Frank Ocean, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Diplo: Hero

Tim Burgess: A Gain// Stoned Alone Again Or (Seahawks Remix) v Harry Dean Stanton, Nastassja Kinski and Ry Cooder: I Knew These Two People, Paris Texas soundtrack

Montego Bay

In November 1982 The Clash arrived in Jamaica to play at the World Music Festival, held in the Bob Marley Performing Centre, Montego Bay. The grandly named arena was apparently not much more than a gravel car park with a stage at one end. The line up looks incredibly impressive all these decades later. As well as Ladbroke Grove's finest, The Beat, The Grateful Dead, Squeeze, Joe Jackson, the B- 52s, Jimmy Cliff, Peter Tosh, Toots And The Maytals, Black Uhuru, a touring version of The Beach Boys, Rick James, Aretha Franklin and Gladys Knight were all booked to play. The Clash had sacked Topper Headon by this point, his heroin use pushing him out of the band (a move that Joe admitted years later was the start of the end). Terry Chimes had been drafted back in, on the basis that he at least knew all the early songs. Clash history has treated Terry a little unfairly, his re- naming on the sleeve of the first album as Tory Crimes, his unwillingness to get on board with the band's political stance and self confessed desire for a Ferrari. Admittedly, he wasn't as good a drummer as Topper, but who was? The sets he played with the group in 1982 and 1983 show he was more than capable of filling the drum stool as they slogged their way round stadia (supporting The Who), arenas and festivals.

At Montego Bay problems with the running order and set timings meant The Clash didn't take the stage until very late on the second night of the festival, about 4.00am. Feelings were running high and people were pissed off. There's a story about the band demanding $200, 000 in cash to play and being the only band that refused to be filmed. Joe was unhappy about ticket prices excluding the locals from attending. The audience, not unsurprisingly at that time of the night/morning were a bit subdued, Joe trying to whip up some atmosphere on a couple of occasions including threatening to send The Grateful Dead on in their place. The set has been widely bootlegged, recorded from the sound desk. The Clash, according to people who were there and the evidence of this recording, were pulling out all the stops and gave it their all from opening with London Calling and then onward. The middle section of their set, from Junco Partner through to Bankrobber sounds particularly good. It's Friday. Red Stripe. Jerk chicken. The Clash.



London Calling
Police On My Back
Guns Of Brixton
The Magnificent Seven/ Armagideon Time
Junco Partner
Spanish Bombs
One More Time
Train In Vain
Bankrobber
This Is Radio Clash
Clampdown
Should I Stay Or Should I Go
Rock The Casbah

Straight To Hell
I Fought The Law

Stranger On The Shore

Michael Smith, writer and poet, worked with Andrew Weatherall in 2016. Weatherall had been offered the post of artist- in- residence at Faber & Faber. One of his projects was to provide an ambient soundtrack over which Smith read extracts from his novel Unreal City, his Hartlepool accent very striking over the soundscapes made by Andrew, Nina Walsh and guitarist Franck Alba. There was a limited edition book with Andrew's handwritten notes in the margins, a CD of the soundtrack (six long ambient pieces with Michael Smith speaking over the top) and a 10" record remixing one of the tracks, all released in one lovely package.

ONDON

Lost

Michael Smith moved to St. Leonards, a down- at- heel seaside town near Hastings and with Maxy Bianco made three films about three seaside towns, liminal places where the land meets the sea, where the rules are slightly different, and the people that live there. Andrew and Nina again produced a soundtrack. This is the Hastings and St. Leonards one....



The other two films explored Whitby, North Yorkshire and Grays in Essex. You can watch them at the BFI's website.

Dreaming

Things are weird at the moment- it goes without saying really- but despite now having got into a routine during the lockdown period and the weekly events becoming ways to mark the passing of time (weekends free of virtual and online/video work, Tuesday putting the bins out, Thursday night clapping) there are moments when the sheer otherness and scale of what is happening hit home. The community that is being fostered, especially on streets like ours where people live close to each other and while the sun has been shining people have been socially distancing in their front gardens, talking to each other across walls and hedges, is a definite feature of 2020. But there are times when it's all a bit much. The silence outside. The absence of the people you'd expect to see every day. The strange atmosphere in supermarkets. The crossing the road to avoid people when out for a walk. The new normal seems normal and then something happens that makes you remember how un-normal this all is, how far from normal we are.

As I type this a hearse with a coffin in it and just two cars following has driven past my window.

 I've seen several links to newspaper articles about people experiencing more vivid or more lucid dreams during the lockdown and I have found myself waking up suddenly, in a jolt, from some very vivid dreams. I don't think the dreams themselves are especially strange- often they seem to be work dreams- but they do seem to be very real.

In May 1991  Creation's dance act Hypnotone remixed The Lilac Time. Hypnotone remixed other Creation artists, memorably Primal Scream and Sheer Taft and had several great records at the time themselves. The remix of Dreaming is a lovely piece of dance pop, warm and open, ambient and bleepy, and the voice repeating 'all the people on this earth... I am talking to you'. A record totally in tune with the shift that had taken place at that time.

Dreaming (Hypnowah Mix)

Night

Kelly Lee Owens was about to release her second album Inner Song, the follow up to her 2017 debut, but has pushed it back in light of the current situation. She put this up last week though saying...

'From me to you, here is a song from my album. It's called 'Night'. This wasn't really supposed to be a single but with everything that is happening right now I wanted to reach out x'

Night is a wonderfully emotive piece of electronic pop, a song with a softer edge than the techno of previous single Melt! and with a pulse that anchors it. It builds too, becoming quite explosive. Very nice indeed.

Monday's Long Song

The new album by The Orb, Abolition of The Royal Familia, has been a bit of an opinion splitter. For some it's a return to the halcyon days of Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld and U.F.Orb, a sprawling four sides of vinyl, dub house odyssey. There are, for some people, some issues with the running order and the first few songs which seem very out of step with the rest of the album but on the whole it's been very well received. One thing is certain for me- the penultimate song, the twelve minute bliss of The Weekend It Rained Forever- Oseberg Buddha Mix (The Ravens Have Left The Tower)- is something that I cannot get enough of. It has some recurring echoes of and themes from the Blade Runner soundtrack and Roger Eno's piano playing is perfect. My only concern is that it will forever in my mind be associated with the lockdown and everything that goes with it.

Immersion

I posted the first two instalments in Richard Norris' Music For Healing series back when lockdown began and make no apology for returning to the latest ones. Richard has now put out five episodes of Music For Healing, twenty minute long ambient pieces, minimal deep listening, designed to calm the mind and slow the circulation. All work incredibly well as therapy but are equally good as pieces of music in their own right, a perfectly judged combination of repetition, ambience and minimalism, lit up by small, chiming melodies and soft drones, recorded live and in real time. This one, Music For Healing 5 is only £3 and Richard is donating the monies raised from the sales to the mental health charity MIND



Here's Music For Healing 4 where you can float away on some beautifully blissed out drones.

Isolation Mix Four

A bit of a change again for this week's hour long isolation mix, this time a trip into more psychedelic and psyche areas, some guitars, a couple of cover versions, some remixes and a re-edit of an 80s alt- classic with an eye, a third eye maybe, on the cosmic and the blissed out. One of the segues is a little bit clumsy but I can live with it. I've had to move the host over to Mixcloud as I'd used up all my available space at Soundcloud without going to the paid for service.



Tracklist-
The Durutti Column: Otis

Wixel: Expressway To Yr Skull (Long Champs Bonus Beats)

Moon Duo: Stars Are The Light

Curses: This Is The Day

Le Volume Courbe: Rusty

Sonic Boom/ Spectrum: True Love Will Find You In The End

Mogwai: Party In The Dark

The Liminanas: The Gift (Anton Mix)

Goldfrapp v Spiritualized: Monster Love

Julian Cope: Heed Of Penetration and the City Dweller Head Remix by Hugo Nicholson

Edit Service 8 by It’s A Fine Line: The Story Of The Blues (Talkin’ Blues)

The Early Years: Complicity

Tactical Support

Two remixes by artists of each other's work from the tail end of the 20th century for today. Two Lone Swordsmen remixed Kenny Hawkes, the Brighton based DJ and producer who kickstarted Girls FM, an important London pirate radio station, and who played at several London club nights including Space at Bar Rhumba. Sadly, Kenny died in 2011 following an illness.

Ashley's War opens with some amusing vocal samples at the start the TLS remix of Ashley's War settles into a laid back, languid groove with no particular end in sight, just some downtempo head nodding from late 1999.

Ashley's War (Two Lone Swordsmen Mix)

In return Kenny remixed a track from Two Lone Swordsmen's Stay Down album, their 1998 experimental, dub techno excursion into underwater minimalism. Kenny's remix appeared on a 12" single Two Lone Swordsmen Receive Tactical Support which coupled Kenny's remix with the C-Pij remix of Big Clapper (C-Pij being a Nina Walsh pseudonym) and Silicon Scally's remix of Black Commandments. Just another obscure and high quality release hidden away in the Andrew Weatherall back catalogue. Kenny's remix of Hope We Never Surface is propelled by a clattering drum beat and some dark synths along with the crackle and hiss of late 90s Two Lone Swordsmen.

Hope We Never Surface (Kenny Hawkes Remix)

Already!

Bushpilot were an early/mid 90s Leeds- based band whose sound shows the influences that fire their tremendous racket- Krautrockers like Can, US punk and post rock groups such as Slint, the tough grooves of James Brown and Funkadelic. Trebly guitars, sharp riffs, punk funk bass and loud motorik drums, energy and spirit in abundance, and songs with titles like Big Quaalude Thunder Nothing and Jesus Loves That Rock N Roll. I'm not saying they should have been massive but there is plenty going on here and there are multitudes of bands circa.1994/5 who sold many more records with far less going on. Their recordings have recently been re-issued on vinyl and digitally by God Unknown Records.

Bedrock City

Here's Joe Strummer, sometime in NYC, in a Bedrock City t- shirt. Joe had a thing about cities. His solo career has songs named after at least three (imaginary) cities. To Joe, cities seem to have existed as a state of mind or a condition. With The Clash he spent time in Clash City and Innoculated City.

Trash City came out in 1988, Joe backed by The Latino Rockabilly War. The song was one of five done for the soundtrack to Permanent Record and came out as a single too. Trash City is fantastic, one of those chugging railway guitar riffs and there's some terrific Joe imagery in the lyrics, American junk culture over a clattering rhythm. It sounds like it could have been written and recorded in five minutes and none the worse for it.

Trash City

Forbidden City was on the first album Joe did with The Mescaleros, 1999's Rock Art And The X Ray Style, acoustic guitars and bongos, a song for the people of China and a 'dream of freedom'.

Forbidden City

Bummed Out City is from his second album with The Mescaleros, 2001's Global A Go Go. Bummed Out City is where Joe resides following a bust up with his wife. 'It was me/drove off the off- ramp/ of the sweetheart highway' he sings at the star and then in chorus follows up with 'we're in bummed out city/ that signs says/ I plead your mercy and your pity'. A gentle apology over acoustic guitars and a fiddle.

Bummed Out City

Bedrock City was the home town of the Flintstones, 'the modern Stone Age family'. My 'research' shows that there were two Bedrock City theme parks, one in Arizona (which opened in 1972) and one in South Dakota (which opened in 1966). It looks like both are now closed. Whether Joe's t- shirt came from a trip to one of the two theme parks I don't know but it paints a nice image in my mind, Joe with leather jacket, quiff and family trawling round some Yabba Dabba Doo rides.

In 1986 Joe's ex- Clash mate Mick Jones put out Badrock City, an electro/ dub version of their rocking C'mon Every Beatbox single, seven minutes of cut and paste samples, sirens, drum machines and bassline. The single led BAD's second album, No. 10, Upping Street, a record which Joe produced and on which he co- wrote some of the songs with Mick.

Badrock City

BAD also provided a song for the soundtrack to the 1994 Flintstones movie, a song called Rock With The Caveman. It pens with roaring dinosaur sounds and Fred shouting 'Wilma, I'm home!!!' before heading into rock 'n' roll pastiche territory, covering a 1956 Tommy Steele song (actually the first British rock 'n' roll record to enter the UK top 20, a fact which apparently has pissed Cliff Richard off over the years). You'll probably only need to listen to this once.

Rock With The Caveman

Pounding System

Not far to the north of where we live lies the River Mersey. The riverbanks on both sides are walkable and when you cross by the footbridge up near Ashton- on- Mersey golf club there are a maze of paths that wind their way through floodplains and fields, either east to the water park and then Chorlton or west through to Urmston. Much of this land is known as an Ees- Stretford Ees, Chorlton Ees and Sale Ees. Ees is an archaic word meaning a piece of land liable to flood or water meadow. The footpaths cut their way through the Ees, surrounded by trees, hedges and meadows. The M60 and its link roads are all interwoven but are very quiet at the moment. Usually from our back garden you can hear the M60. At the moment you can hear the birds and the occasional rattle of the tramline, a mile in the other direction. Our daily bout of exercise sometimes takes us along the riverbank, especially in the evening when it's much quieter and social distancing is easier and less fraught, and through these lanes and pathways. As the sun dips out west beyond Irlam and Warrington you can sometimes get to witness a spectacular sunset. This is one of the positive things lockdown is giving us- finding local moments of beauty, even in our fairly unromantic and ordinary parts of south west Manchester, and this is now life in 2020- taking the time under these restrictions to appreciate what's on your doorstep.

Here is some dub splendour to match the sunset above from Dub Syndicate, a key part of the On U Sound stable. I was going to post the majestic, far out sounds of Ravi Shankar (Pt 1) but it turns out I've posted that before, back in 2017. Pounding System was the opening track on their 1982 album The Pounding System. The bass and drums/percussion are so precise but so loose in Sherwood's hands. The horns seem to rise up from the mixing desk, levitating. Skanking guitar parts pop in and out. Every element in it's own space and with room to breathe.

Pounding System

Monday's Long Song

This song isn't particularly long, not by the standards of some songs in this series, but it feels long- and not in a bad way. In 2008 Goldfrapp released a second single, Happiness, from their Seventh Tree album. J Spaceman's remix/version came out on the CD #2 (back when record companies got you to buy two CD singles by spreading the remixes and B-sides out). There is a very good Beyond The Wizards Sleeve Re-Animation too, a very 60s European sounding re-working, boulevards and the Champs Elysee, but the Goldfrapp v Spiritualized song, Monster Love, is something else. Strings, drone, bells, a lazy tambourine, a wheezy organ and Jason's numbed out vocal just drifting, sighing 'everything comes around', repetition and seemingly endless. It's only five and a half minutes long but feels like an eternity.

Monster Love

Barry Island

This is new from Rich Lane, Newcastle under Lyne's Balearic chug overlord, and it's a beauty. Laid back and easy going, slinky and filmic in scope, it hits the spot from the moment those synths fade in at the start and the windwood brings the melody.

A friend on Facebook said it sounds like driving down the Amalfi coast in a convertible, wind in the hair, sunglasses on, sun dipping in the sky, the tide coming in, the evening ahead of you. It's all those things. And even though all those things are imaginary at the moment the music makes them almost close enough to touch. There are two top class remixes, the Long Champs dub is lovely, an unwinding and stripped down take on the original while Duncan Gray Ambient Mix is gorgeous, opening with the sound of the tide coming in and some synth bleeps before the strings take over. Buy all three for £1.50.

Isolation Mix Three

It's over halfway through April already. The weeks seem to be flying by even though some of the days seem very long. This is Isolation Mix Three. I thought I'd do something different from the ambient, blissed out, opiated sounds of the first two mixes and this mix is something that I first wrote about doing in a post here about three years ago. This is an hour and three minutes of spoken word and poetry and music. Andrew Weatherall features in various guises and with various poets, the Beat Generation and The Clash are represented, there's some reggae and the unmistakable voice of John Cooper Clarke.

Jack Kerouac/Joe Strummer: MacDougal Street Blues

John Cooper Clarke: Twat

Misty In Roots: Introduction to Live At The Counter Eurovision

Linton Kwesi Johnson: Inglan Is A Bitch

The Clash (and Allen Ginsberg): Ghetto Defendant (Extended Version)

Allen Ginsberg/ Tom Waits: Closing Time/America

Andrew Weatherall and Michael Smith: The Deep Hum (At The Heart Of It All)

Joe Gideon and The Shark: Civilisation

Woodleigh Research Facility and Joe Duggan: Downhill

Fireflies and Joe Duggan: Leonard Cohen Knows

BP Fallon and David Holmes: Henry McCullough (Andrew Weatherall Remix)

Mike Garry and Joe Duddell: St Anthony: An Ode To Anthony H Wilson (Andrew Weatherall Remix)

Allen Ginsberg: I Am A Victim Of Telephone

Titan Shuff

Rich Thair and Ali Friend have spent the best part of three decades as the co- founders and rhythm section of Red Snapper. In their downtime recently they've formed Number, a group built around themselves as the core with a floating cast of vocalists and pushing a tough funky post- punk energy, the wired dance floor sound of ACR, Talking Heads, New York's No Wave. The album, Binary, is a nightclub riot of percussion, disco bass, scratchy guitars, some electro, a generous helping of dub and some lovely, wonky horns. It is out at the end of the month. In the meantime here's Titan Shuff, a science fiction intro, silky, dubbed out vox and a tremendous mutant groove.