Put a donk on it

Forget niche. Put a motherfucking donk on it.

Q&A: Black Meteoric Star

"Black Meteoric Star is a channel for my interest in dance music and dance culture. It’s also a way to experiment with pitch and rhythm relationships using a limited set of tools. The tracks are done in single live takes."

I don't know about you, but I'm pretty excited (wee in my pants excited, that is) about Black Meteoric Star, the new acid house-oriented project from Gavin Russom (of Delia & Gavin fame). He may look like, and project the air of, a cult-member/serial-killer (sorry Gavin), but the Berlin-based Russom is a very droll chap indeed; read my recent interview with him by clicking here...

You can hear a bit of Black Meteoric Star in the mix DFA's Justin Miller and Jacques Renault recorded for FACT, and, of course, in some episode or other of Beats in Space.

Q&A: Felix Kubin

One of my greatest, most important discoveries of 2008, along with Cadgwith and (yes, me too) The Wire, is Felix Kubin. Though I knew his name (thanks, I think, to 20 Jazz Funk Greats), it was only when I saw him support Silver Apples (well, Simeon) at Corsica Studios earlier this year that I realized what a remarkable character he really is. An e-mail exchange ensued, leading to this rare UK interview with Felix, conducted on behalf of FACT.

Q&A: Appleblim

...and then there's my interview with Bristol-based (post-)dubstep hero Laurie 'Appleblim' Osborne. If you've yet to download Laurie's April 2008 podcast for Rinse FM - only the best, most important mix of the year, far more so than his higher profile Dubstep Allstars and RA sessions - you can still do so here. Look out for Ramadanman's 'Humber', Vista's 'Elixir' and Greena's 'Houze' - bass music's future incarnate.

Oh, and the man himself is playing our next (and probably last) Washing Line party at The Constitution in Camden, NW1 0QT. Appleblim kicking out the jams in a 60-capacity lockside boozer? You betcha.

Q&A: Carsten Nicolai (Raster-Noton)

It's been a while, eh? But I've been busy. For starters, there's my interview with Raster-Noton's Carsten Nicolai, conducted ahead of the label's 12th anniversary showcase at the ICA earlier this year.

Interview: Kelley Polar

Reading Todd L. Burns' enjoyable profile of Kelley Polar over at Resident Advisor has prompted me to re-print below my own e-mail Q&A with Kelley, conducted way back in September of last year, but pertaining largely to his just-released sophomore album, I Need You To Hold On While The Sky Is Falling...


Hi. How are you?

Lately, suffused with melancholy.


What’s on your stereo at the moment?

I'm getting a new live show put together, and I like to do one cover at the end, as an encore....so I've been listening to the final candidates before making some new arrangements...They include 'Disco Spaceship' by Lauri Marshall, 'Life on Mars' by David Bowie and 'I'm a Man' by Macho.
They all have excellent, excellent string parts that I know my crew will enjoy playing.


What was the inspiration behind the new album? Love Songs Of The Hanging Gardens seemed preoccupied with the stars and, well, love…How does the new album differ? Is there a conscious change in mood/direction/sound palette, or do you see it as a natural sibling to / progression from Love Songs…?

This album is kind of an evil twin to Love Songs, and it's called I Need You to Hold On While The Sky is Falling, which will be hard to fit on a little iTunes graphic. I wanted it to be even denser, with even shorter songs, but still changing more quickly, and it is actually a little longer in total than the last one. I wanted it to be like the audio equivalent of one of those mythical sci-fi movies where there are hundreds of special effects shots per minute, juicy and transporting. There is a song about a satellite in orbit forever, waiting to receive a signal, in love with the idea of it. There are multiple songs about the world ending, but sometimes you and I escape into Paradise. There are songs inspired by obscure Romanian violinists, with inside jokes that only diehard classical chamber musicians will get, ha ha, and some inspired by trilobites and the Burgess Shale. There are even more elaborate choral parts, which is why it took so damn long, and there are still strings, but they are becoming more and more demure.... Much of the time I am singing like I am in some psychotic space musical, which people will probably Take Issue With. There are some songs that are meant to be danced to, there are songs with no beats, and there are still no guitars, luckily. And it is all, for better or worse, still about Love.


What’s your instrumental input into your records, if anything, beyond strings and voice?

I play all the instruments (meaning synths and drum machines!), except for some cello. I can't play cello, so my friend Rupert is playing it. That's how the last album was too, I played all the stuff except for a few percussion parts. I think some people think I'm like Li'l Kim, and Morgan is like the Notorious B.I.G.; like he's writing or playing all the stuff, and I'm just singing. But I actually did 95% of the music for the last one, and 100% of the music for this one. There are some additional differences between Morgan and I, and Ms. Kim and Biggie Smalls.


What’s the most embarrassing musical project you’ve embarked on / participated in?

I was playing with one of the border orchestras, Portland or Brockton or something, and some wannabe hotshot conductor tried to conduct Bartok Concerto for Orchestra with no score, from memory, and he cued someone wrong and little by little, different pieces of the orchestra got lost and dropped out, so the music disappeared also little by little, until finally there was just one person playing, and then they stopped too, and there was silence. Awesome. Anyways - any classical music freelancer, which is what I am for a lot of the time, has a zillion stories like that.... I was supposed to play with P. Diddy in Giants Stadium for some Relief Aid thing, back when he sampled that Led Zepplin song, how unfortunate for everybody...But he decided just to use the CD or whatever, finally. Paid us Juilliard kids a LOT OF MONEY to just sit there and move our bows. It's a strange world, when pop music meets classical. Bond, Yanni, those heavy metal cellists. Lots of embarrassment for everybody...


Do you still play with the other three members of the Kelley Polar Quartet?

Well, Siggi got deported back to Iceland, I can't say why because of the pending legal stuff, and Max got a job with the Northern Sinfonia over there in England as principal bassist, and now he has a serious alcohol problem. Elise suffered a crisis of conscience which was well-deserved, and joined the seminary permanently. So, no. But classical string players are so desperate for work, you can pick em up off the street and give them a cheese sandwich, and say "DANCE YOU MOFOS" and they will happily oblige. So there is no shortage of KPQ automatons.



How did you first encounter Morgan and hook up with the Environ label?

In the late 90s, I was in a tiny art-house theatre in Queens, NY, playing an experimental solo viola score to Yakov Prolatazanov's 1924 silent film Aelita: Queen Of Mars. Morgan was the only person in the audience - he enjoys early Russian cinema, and had wandered in. Anyway, it was my third showing of the day, and I was getting bored, so I threw in some licks from the string parts of 'You're So Right for Me' by the Eastside Connection. At the time, he and Darshan were just getting started with Metro Area, and he liked my disco feel, so he asked me to play strings on, what was that first one? 'Rainy Street Feeling', the first Metro Area record. Then I did 'Miura' and 'Caught Up', and a few more, and started doing my own tracks on the side, which he was kind enough to put out. So Morgan was my entrance into the dance music world, and he has been a very patient and long-suffering musical mentor. He knows an incredible amount about high-quality, old-school dance music. Awesome.


When you’re composing/writing, what’s your usual first step? Do you begin with putting things together in the studio, or do you write with an instrument, or sing, or….?

The best is when you are just exploring a new song, making the beat, or discovering where that beat is going to take you, like a really good sculptor (or how I imagine a really good sculptor works), looking at a piece of stone and seeing the sculpture inside it, the piece of art latent in the stone. Unfortunately all my exploring was done months ago, and I am now just trying to do things like sing all of the parts right, which is like laying down the sewer system in the country you had so much fun exploring months before. I could sing something a thousand times and still there'd be something I wish I'd done differently, which is a good thing to realize.....Lately I've been trying to document the little pieces of songs that come in to my head (they come out and then I forget them and they are lost forever!), by calling my answering machine and singing the part into it. I had this beautiful woman staying with me for a while and she came home and checked the messages and heard me singing all this weird shit to myself on the machine, and that was pretty much enough for her. So I got a cellphone with a voice recorder.


Did Morgan mix/produce the new EP and album?

He's mixing both, but not producing, I'm doing that myself. I learned a ton watching the final phase of production last time, and I've been paying extra attention to the mixing stage this time, trying to learn a ton more. He had to help me edit the choral stuff on the last album: for example, in the first track of Love Songs, there's a three part chorus made up of me singing 12 parts each, so that's editing 36 tracks per verse, and there's like 4 verses or something, so that's editing 144 vocal tracks, balancing, making all the "t"'s and "k"'s line up, because I can't just SING IT RIGHT, on and on. That made Morgan LOSE HIS MIND, so he is making me do that this time, which is his well-earned prerogative. He is AWESOME at mixing, and these tracks are not easy to mix, so if it sounds good, it is entirely thanks to him, again.


What’s it like to work with Morgan? Do you work on a one-to-one basis, or is it a case of sending things back and forth between your respective studios?

I don't have any internet connection in my shack, so I drive from the deep woods down to New York, and we mix there. We both also take our eating extremely seriously, so there will be a period of mixing, and then a long discussion about what to eat, pizza at DiFara's or vegetarian Bon Mi, tofu-skin duck in chinatown or green mango salad with salty catfish in Queens. New York, still no place like it on Earth. Then there will be the period of actual eating, followed by a recovery period, depending on the amount eaten. Then the cycle will repeat until the song is mixed, and then I drive back to the woods. Working with him is great, he has a lot of patience with me, and he believes in me and my music, and is a good and loyal friend, and a generous label boss. He cares more about music than just about anyone I know.



Tell me a secret.

"The rate of chirping in the cricket Oecanthus Niveus depends on the temperature. During warm weather, the chirp is rapid and high pitched but during cold periods it slows down and becomes a rattle. The formula is as follows, where N=number of chirps and T=temperature in Fahrenheit: T=50+(N-92/4.7)"
-Insect Natural History, c. 1942


Which contemporary composers, artists, bands or producers excite you?

I have a bad habit, which is that I like music by people I like, and I don't like music by people I don't like. I like Jeremy Greenspan, so I like the Junior Boys, and I like Metro Area, and Danny Wang, and Gavin Russom [of DFA's Delia & Gavin], and Javiera Mena because she wrote to me, and Blevin Blectum, because she is my sister. Also Marco Cibola at novestudio.com, he did a video for me that's awesome, and he's a great guy. I'm afraid that's the extent of my knowledge about today's art and music scene. My sister sends me some of the electronic music going on in San Francisco, and my cousin makes some great electronic music in Berlin, and I hear the tracks that Morgan and Darshan are working on or remixing. But that's pretty much it. If that comes across as snobby to you, please know that it's more sad than snobby. I would love to be listening and swinging with the artists of the cutting edge and the rich, famous and beautiful, but I have not yet had the opportunity. I am by myself most of the time and I am often lazy.

And, since I perform with a classical quartet, I am constantly basking in the radiance of the masterful giants: Schubert, Bach, Shostakovich, Brahms, etc. And since I hang out with Morgan Geist, I am constantly warmed by the heat of strange electronic dance music and disco: Bruce Haack, Charles Stepney, Patrick Cowley, etc.


What was it like to perform your songs live? Was it difficult to achieve the vocal, instrumental and electronic textures of your records in the flesh? Do you have plans for more live shows this year?

Well, I would much rather just stay in my shack and make records, but the sad reality is that I didn't make much money from the album; the US indie distributor went bankrupt with most of my stock sold and none of the profits actually delivered to the label...So I put together a few live shows, actually at some nice big European festivals [including Bestival in the UK], and a few clubs, to make some money. I had my recorded backing tracks, my beautiful Amazonian Clare de Lune, a mysterious synth drummer and a string section. People seemed to like it, and we actually got better and better, but I hated having to use pre-recorded electronics, and my silly little costumes that I sewed myself, and no sound engineer of my own, etc, etc... I wanted it to be like the fucking Chartres Cathedral, laser beams shooting out of my eyes and crazy flying space horses onstage and shit. But it was just the six of us, country bumpkins on the circuit with the big boys and their cabaret dancers and studded belts. People seemed to like it a lot though, we were better than the usual kid-in-a-t-shirt-hunched-over-his-laptop I suppose, but still....it stressed me out, somehow. So for the new band, debuting this fall, I want to take it up a notch again, live-er, as elaborate and transporting as I can get with the resources I have. Which ought to be plenty.


How do you know Clare de Lune?

Claire has had a very strange life, poor creature....She was originally from Alsace, I believe, but the rest of her family disappeared during a rather ill-advised camping expedition in late 70s Algeria. She was mostly raised by Bedouins in the Tassili n'Ajjer, until one night, around a desert campfire, she was discovered by a visiting Raï singer and brought back to Paris...But the big city was too much of a culture shock (one of the many things we have in common), and so she had a nervous breakdown, convinced she was a refugee from the Moon, born of a long-forgotten lunar aristocracy. I was in Paris during a viola competition I did there, and had some mental problems of my own; there's actually a lovely sanatorium there near the Tuileries, and we met there. Now, when she's able, she sings with me on the live show, and if I can get her released for long enough, she's going to do a duet with me on the new album, a Human League-style track.


What do you like to do when you’re not listening to / playing / making music?

I often have crises of a mental nature (see above), which is one reason that I finally left New York and moved to the wilds of New Hampshire, 10,000 acres, very few other people around. I have found that I can regulate my body chemistry by 2-4 hours of obsessive daily running, so I'm doing that. The resulting physical state of dry heaving, pissing blood and a general inability to breathe are insignificant, discardable side effects.


What really startled me about Love Songs of The Hanging Gardens was how complete it sounded - both in the sense of it being a full-realized record, and in the sense of your voice/vocal identity being very much your own, and itself fully-realized and utterly individual. Was the EP a difficult birth, so to speak? Was the new album?

There was a big article over here in the Times recently about how, in the digital-download age, the album is going the way of the Caspian Tiger. On one hand, it's fun to think about a return to the Motown-style singles age, but I have to say that, compositionally, making albums is too fun, even if no one listens to them that way...I have a friend who made a lot of money manufacturing music stands with liquid-crystal displays (so you never have to turn pages), and he has a $500,000 sound system, turntables with four styli, suspended in a baths of liquid nitrogen or whatever, you know, and he has just two giant speakers from the year 3000 and a big overstuffed chair in the middle, for listening. I record everything with one mic in my little shack in the woods, but I still try to make music with that dude in mind. Not people streaming a crappy low-bitrate mp3 from a myspace page. Production, mixing, taking people on a journey, that's all part of the fun, right? So the new album is also that, an album. For the THIRD album, I have an entirely different idea...

As for my voice, the vocal sound on the last album is purely a product of just desperately doing anything to make my voice sound even remotely acceptable. Layering, singing softly, 'verbing it out, etc. So maybe you are half-right - individual, yes; fully realized, no! But that's kind of you...However, something strange happened while doing a live show over the past year - I was on stage in a giant club, and all of a sudden something inside went "fuck it" and I started belting it on out, and leaping around the stage, freaking out. Morgan said it was like the final scene in those after-school special TV movies, where all of a sudden the nerdy kid like, hits the home run, or they save the manatee, or whatever, and people are like, "He's doing It, HE'S DOING IT". So on the new album, I really tried to SING....We'll see if that was a mistake or not. It's definitely been interesting. Just like it was for Milli Vanilli, I imagine.


How are the longhair cattle treating you these days?

I treated them - first with some rope, and then with an axe, and then finally a little soy sauce and garlic, and that is the truth and no lie. About six months ago. Sorry, all you vegans in Brooklyn...

The Contemporary Fix (04/08)

The latest instalment of my Contemporary Fix column for FACT is concerned, broadly speaking, with the possibilities and pitfalls of live electronic performance, but to be more precise (and honest) it's really all about Felix Kubin's brilliance as live performer - a brilliance rooted in his willingness to give the audience a sense of gesture, and then to pervert or confuse that sense to his, and ultimately our, advantage (the more I think about it, the more I realize that my piece barely even skirts the larger subject of live electronic performance; if that larger subject is something which interests you, I recommend you check out Robert Henke's essay fragment 'Live Performance in The Age of Super-computing', over at the Monolake site). In this month's Fix I also attend rather limply to Brinkmann's When Horses Die, Matmos's forthcoming Supreme Balloon, the Popol Vuh remixes on EMego, Pluxus's congenial debut for Kompakt and 2562's newbie for Tectonic.
Read it all here.


As I write this I'm listening to Sabres of Paradise's Haunted Dancehall. Haven't fished it out for years and, as expected, a large number of the tracks reek far too pungently of 90s breaksy downbeat to be palatable in the here and now. The better tracks, however, especially the uber-kosmische 'Chapel Street Market 9am', really are rather, er, haunting and help make this album the flawed classic it quite obviously is. Don't you think?

The Washing Line...this Saturday

Rustie interview

I actually did this e-mail Q&A a while back, in the wake of Rustie's Jagz The Smack EP, easily one of 2007's most important and fresh-sounding releases. Since then Russell and his art-minded hip-hop crew Lucky Me have become rather hot property, with Hudson Mohawke recently signed to Warp. Hud's squashed beats are essential listening, but for me it's Rustie's more expressive, expansive and genre-bending tech- stylings that deserve the highest praise; look out for his forthcoming Cafe De Phresh EP.

An edited version can be found in FACT:24; read the full, unedited interview here.

Santogold interview

Santogold's self-titled debut album, out (I think) next month through Atlantic, isn't quite the 21st century pop masterpiece that the style press will say it is, but it is excellent - indeed, if all commercially-minded music was as good, TOTP would probably still be running and we'd maybe even still listen to Radio 1.

I spoke to Santogold, aka Santi White, on behalf of FACT last week, and to my surprise found her to be the most self-aware and easy-going interviewee imaginable. Read the piece here.

New Woofah and FACT blogs...

The new issue of the excellent Woofah fanzine should find its way into a record store near you this week, and is available to buy direct now.

Includes features on Durrty Goodz (by Simon Hampson), Scuba (whose new album sounds intriguing), Shut Up And Dance, "grime and the police" (by Dan Hancox), dubstep reviews by Kek-W and Gutterbreakz, and Tom Lea on young grime MCs, namely Chipmunk, Griminal and Little Dee.

While I'm here, I should mention two recent additions to FACT's array of monthly columns. As well as my own Contemporary Fix, which focuses on house, techno, dubstep and electronica, Sinden's global gutter dispatch Bassbins & Bangers and K-punk's monthly blast of pop theorizing, Rebellious Jukebox, we now bring you Kek-W's transparently monikered Kek's Wyrd World and Tom Lea and Raven Baker's Clicks, Whistles & Radio Rips. Both columns are two months old.



Kek's inaugural Wryd World investigates the murky sounds of Burzum, Shit & Shine and Lesbian, and features an interview with helium-voiced avant-folker Theo Angell (see video above); what's more, there's an accompanying podcast worth hearing for its host's avuncular tones alone. The March instalment is a fascinating peek at Finland's vibrant electro-pop underground, replete with Kompleksi interview.




Meanwhile, Tom and Raven trawl the net in search of free mixtapes, vids and kernels of truth for your delectation and enlightenment. Their February blog is still worth visiting for an exclusive Toddla T mixtape and interview with Slix, but the March offering is even more generous: behold, an exclusive mix from Dirty Canvas resident DJ Magic, Ruff Sqwad and Skepta vids, interviews with Sheffield low-end oddball Grievous Angel and Jason Urick of Baltimore-based noise outfit WZT Hearts. Essential reading/listening/watching.

Further confessions of a grime novice

I'm something of an ingenue when it comes to grime(as if it's not already obvious). I live in London now, but spent the first eighteen years of my life in Hull, and the following four in Bristol and Oxford - as such, grime (like garage before it) didn't really show up on my radar, and even if it did I was too busy worshipping, or rather gurning, at the altar of house and techno to give it anything more cursory attention. I didn't really have access to (or knowledge of) the tape-packs, pirates and dubplates where things were really happening, so I hadn't the foggiest idea of the energy and innovation that people like Wiley, Slimzee and Skepta were bringing to the game. Thanks to the guidance from FACT stalwarts Simon Hampson and Tom Lea and erudite and established grime bloggers like Prancehall, Bok Bok, Hyperfrank, Martin Clark (Blackdown) and Dan Hancox, I've recently been making an earnest attempt to catch up on some of grime's more unmissable moments...

Perhaps I just wasn't listening properly, but back in the early noughties, what little grime I ever used to hear invariably comprised uninterestingly abrasive, cracked-up beats and correspondingly uninteresting, abrasive, cracked-up vocals which were, at best, verbose and a little bit titillating. I suspected there was tons of grime out there that I would love, particularly on the instrumental side of things, but I kind of resigned myself to the fact that I'd probably never get to hear it. Imagine my pleasure, then, when Bok Bok delivered his 69 Allstars mix for Bloggariddims. If you haven't heard this outrageously good rinse-out of seminal grime instrumentals, get downloading now. Bok Bok's blurb sums up the spirit of the mix:

"The classic iconic image of grime is probably Crazy Titch and Dizzee Rascal as callow young road MCs, squaring up to each other in a pirate radio box-room on top of a high-rise block of flats. But the story of grime runs deeper than that, and it's hidden from view. Before the ego of MCs took over, and they were still answerable to the beat, radio was all about rollage - a steady, nervous momentum; a silhouetted impression of garage; a momentum we've tried to respect by matching grime's frenetic energy - that's why you've got 69 tracks in 60 minutes. This mix is largely instrumental – not because we want to devoice a voice-heavy genre, but because grime works so well as club music."

Click here to read on, view the tracklisting and download the mix.

A more recent discovery for me (again courtesy of Bok Bok - cheers old boy) is one of grime's apparently sacred texts, an old Pay As U Go mix given away as a free CD on a Sidewinder tape-pack. I know absolutely fuck all about it, save for the fact that Slimzee's on DJ detail, Wiley and Dizzee deliver some of the best lyrics of their life, and it sounds absolutely fresh and visceral even now, a glorious example of what happens when MC and riddim are in perfect accord. Thanks to the wonders of YouTube, you can hear exactly what talking about; part 1 is above, part 2 is right here...




...and by now you'll have guessed where to find parts three and four.

Blokecast

I'm beginning to think I should've named this blog Preaching To The Converted, such is the frequency that I feel I might be stating the obvious. But hey, my world is a small and blinkered one, and perhaps there really are people who should've heard of Rob Booth's Electronic Explorations podcast but haven't...

"A deviously crafted patchwork of carefully sewn rhythms, sonic contortions and delicate melodies. Dubstep, minimal electronica, techno and advanced soundscapes. Producers who rarely see the light of day, too busy in their own homes, making some of the most arresting, forward thinking and intelligent music.

If you like your music experimental, uncompromising, hand crafted and eerie, mathematical and heavy on the bass, if you’re an admirer of records labels such as Planet Mu, DMZ, Tectonic, Hyperdub, Skull Disco, Tempa, M_Nus, Rephlex, Counterbalance, Dynamic Tension & Warp Records to name but a few, then you’re in for a real treat."

As you can tell from the tell-tale "intelligent" and "mathematical", this is very much on the blokey side of things, but hey, we all use moisturizer and we're all crap at DIY, so maybe we need a bit of masculine electronica in our lives. Anyway, the calibre of guests contributing exclusive mixes speaks for itself: Neil Landstrumm, Surgeon, Vex'd and Ramadanman are the one's who'll be of interest even to those for whom North Face anorak and beard isn't standard attire.



While we're on the subject of blokey podcasts, you'd be fool a not to acquaint yourself with Bleep43's weekly sessions. These guys really know their shit, and their shows range from straight-up residents' selections to guest mixes from the likes of Jan St Werner (pictured above) and Legowelt, via special tributes to the likes of Tangerine Dream, Nurse With Wound, Drexciya and Uwe Schmidt. Click the pic to visit the Bleep43 site and give your ears a treat, and also check their next party out in the real world - taking place on Friday 18th April at London's Corsica Studios, with guests I-F and DJ Stingray. Will probably be a bit on the blokey side, but...


Oh, and last of all in my blokecast primer: monthly mixes by Skam man Rob Hall (pictured left looking weirdly male model). I recently caught Rob DJing in support of Autechre, and it'd be fair to say I was blown away. He's been giving away an mp3 mix each month for the past eleven months, with only one more to go before the series ends - so go visit his site and get downloading. Cheers to Ben for this and Bleep43 tips.

Apple core, you know the...

...score. Read my rushed and frankly rather dodgy review of Silver Apples' gig at Corsica Studios last week. More than anything I'm ashamed of my failure to mention Felix Kubin's "warm-up" set, which was surely one of the most entertaining live shows I've ever seen. I intend to pay full tribute to Felix, an artist who I would know nothing about but for the wisdom of 20JazzFunkGreats, some time very soon.

Durrty business

Pictures by Georgina Cook

Driving through bright, expansive East Yorkshire countryside on a windy, volatile Saturday afternoon, the windscreen flecked by sun and snow alike, I find myself thumbing through the ol' iPod, looking for music appropriate to my mood and my surroundings. I try last year's trusty Comicopera from Robert Wyatt, Bedhead's 'Bedside Table' as covered by Adem on his forthcoming, generally rather insipid Takes collection, and then, sensing that all this organic acoustica just ain't doing the trick, I find temporary satisfaction with Monolake's brilliant Polygon Cities (a recent discovery for me). Still, it's not quite right, it's not exactly what I want to hear right now. Without really thinking I pick out Durrty Goodz's Axiom, the London MC's 2007 EP-cum-mixtape-cum-mini-album, a session I know grime aficianados (for I am but a novice) consider one of the genre's definitive statements, and certainly one of last year's most impressive and compelling.

I'd listened to Axiom in the office a couple of times back in November, after a number of FACT contributors included it in their end-of-year lists, and while I was impressed by what I heard ('Boi Dem', which rides Bass Clef's killer 'Welcome To Echo Chamber' riddim, was an immediate favourite), I couldn't digest it whole at the time (I don't know if you've ever tried working to a soundtrack of vocal grime, it really doesn't work). And then I promptly forgot about it.

For whatever weird reason, Axiom today presented itself as the perfect musical accompaniment to my rural jaunt, and for the first time I was in the right frame of mind to enjoy, not just appreciate, Goodz's mercurial talent for writing and spitting. 'Switching Songs', an unbelievably snappy, self-aware account of grime's chequered history and uncertain future, has to be heard to be believed, as the 25-year-old MC adjusts his content, register, tone and flow to fit each of a succession of ten different riddims from grime and garage's past, all the while commentating lucidly but stylishly on all that's been lost and gained in the last decade of UK urban music evolution. It's an exhilarating track which will, unlike a fair few of those it describes, undoubtedly stand the test of time.

That Axiom is essential listening might not be news to you, but if it is, go get your copy now. I'm sure there are innumerable channels where you can download it for free, but why not chuck some well-deserved £££ DG's way and buy the CD from myspace.com/officialdurrtygoodz ?

Durrty is an interesting character besides. From Dan Hancox's recent profile for FACT:

It’s been an extraordinary two years for 25-year-old Durrty Goodz, aka London-born Dwayne Mahorn. Signed by Polydor in 2005 and recognised as one of the biggest talents to emerge from grime’s first flush of youth, he then spent almost a year in jail awaiting trial for the murder of 21-year-old Richard Holmes. Mahorn was acquitted in November 2006, while his half-brother Carl ‘Crazy Titch’ Dobson, also one of the most hotly-tipped names in grime, was convicted of murder (along with one other) and sentenced to 30 years without parole.

Read the rest of Dan's fine piece, in which DG discusses his time inside and its impact on the making of Axiom.

Irdial and the Free Music Philosophy...

Idly browsing the Hardwax site earlier today, I changed upon an interesting selection of 12"s from a label I'd never heard of before, Irdial. Discogs offered the following bio:

Irdial Discs is a fiercely independent label that has been running since the 1980s. Owned and run by one person, Akin Fernandez, it has released a large volume of varied and experimental electronic music, including the debuts of several now legendary producers such as Lee Purkis (In Sync), Anthony Manning, Neuropolitique, Aqua Regia and Morganistic [Luke Slater].

As well as being a landmark label in UK electronic music history, Irdial wowed the world in a wider context with some of it's "found sound" projects, most notably the "Conet Project" CD which revealed the decades-long held secret of Numbers Stations, and the "Electric Enigma" CD featuring recordings made of the Aurora Borealis.

As part of it's embracing the Free Music Philosophy, Irdial has made the majority of it's catalogue available for free download from the Internet.


Obviously this last paragraph fair leaped off the page. I headed promptly enough to the Irdial site and, true enough, pretty much everything the label ever put out, including those tracks found on the retail 12"s at Hardwax, is available to download for free. A document entitled 'Irdial-Discs embraces the Free Music Philosophy' is published on the site, a few quotes from which I've copied below:

"[The Free Music Philosophy (FMP)] is an anarchistic grass-roots, but high-tech, system of spreading music: the idea that creating, copying, and distributing music must be as unrestricted as breathing air, swimming in the sea, or basking in the rays of the sun."

"Free Music means that any individual has the freedom of copying, distributing, and modifying music for personal, noncommercial purposes. Free Music does not mean that record labels and musicians cannot charge for records, tapes, CDs, or files."

"You have the freedom to make a copy of a CD we've released, the freedom to download soundfiles of songs we've released from our servers on the Internet, the freedom to cover or improve upon a song we've released, as long as you do not profit from that copy or improvement."

"Freeing music will certainly not be detrimental to the sales of merchandise and concert tickets, nor will it affect compulsory or performance royalties. If anything, it will improve sales since people will continue supporting artists they like by going to their concerts and buying their merchandise. Profits from record sales will also not be affected because people will be encouraged to buy directly from the artist or small label for the added bonuses of Vinyl liner notes, lyrics sheets, and packaging. Thus Free Music can be used as a marketing tool to ensure that musicians do not starve."

"Free Music is a chance to reach audiences who do not adhere to the old patterns that generate fan bases, perhaps more seasoned and musically mature and ready for real innovation in music. It is these people who will more readily understand and adopt an approach where people send the label or artist a "donation", if they found value in the music they copied, understanding the great difficulty of producing high quality music. This practice could become an ingrained practice in society, like tipping, where even though there is no enforced requirement to tip for various services, people do anyway."

And finally, a nice bit of old-fashioned indie bile:

"[The old music industry] will die a death. It will cease to exist. Can you say 'Pan Am'? The pimps will have their throats cut. At last we will be able to disseminate our bold sounds unfettered. At last we will have revenge."

I don't want to get chatting about the future of music distribution and consumption (I'll save that for my dayjob), so instead I urge you to go yourself to Irdial's site and have a poke around. Of the 70 odd releases on offer, as far as I can tell the absolute essentials are the aforementioned Conet Project and Electic Enigma albums, and the late Anthony Manning's Islets in Pink Polypropylene.

More on this label, these artists and their releases as and when I listen to and find out more.

Ghost stories

About two years after everyone else, I've found myself utterly captivated by Julian House and Jim Jupp's Ghost Box label, and the cross-media mythology which they've built to support, enrich and advance it. I'd always been dimly aware of Ghost Box as a design entity, but had always imagined that the music could only fail to be as stirring and evocative as House's 60s and 70s-referencing typesetting and illustration. For the 34,560th time in my life, I was wrong.


My curiosity was piqued by the label's licensing and subsequent re-issue of Mount Vernon Arts Lab's Seance at Hobs Lane, the work of one Drew Mulholland, recorded in 2001 for the Via Satellite imprint with helping hands from Adrian Utley (Portishead), Isobel Campbell (Belle & Sebastian), Coil and Barry 7 (Add N To X). "[A] psychogeographic investigation into a world of abandoned Underground stations, Quatermass, seventeenth century secret societies and the footsore reveries of the modern flaneur", "a world of time haunted vaults beneath Neolithic barrows, and haunted Scottish pub cellars", Mulholland's sonic fiction shares thematic and stylistic concerns with Ghost Box, not least that preoccupation with (put simply) our sense of past and place, but is different in that it relocates this mode of thinking and myth-making to an urban space (Ghost Box's offerings are usually "set" in the fictional rural town of Belbury - read a spot of local history here).


Seance At Hobs Lane is also a more ragged, organic and loose-limbed affair than Ghost Box standard issue, though Ghost Box standard issue is no less engrossing or affecting: the label's first two releases are currently out of print, but I can heartily recommend a couple of later offerings, Belbury Poly's The Willows and The Focus Group's Hey Let Loose Your Love, both superlative exercises in unheimlich pastoral futurism. The latest Ghost Box release, The Advisory Circle's Other Channels suffers for its over-eagerness to sound, well, weird; but is nonetheless a worthy addition to the canon.

If you have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about, I recommend you read the introduction to Ghost Box that Simon Reynolds' wrote for Frieze and K-punk's feature for FACT Magazine, 'Music is dead! Long live hauntology!', and take things from there.

Anyway, what prompted me to write this post was the discovery of a printable PDF of an Arthur Machen short story, The White People, hidden on Ghost Box's website. Machen's tales of the occult are a profound and acknowledged influence on Jupp and House, and perusal of this unsettling if rather clumsy piece of prose will only make you enjoy and appreciate Ghost Box's products more. Seriously, once you pop with all this stuff, stopping rapidly ceases to be a credible option.

Humans have to shit

"Really, mistakes are a part of me. For example, I don't have all of my teeth anymore. There are already mistakes this way. I smoke too much. I know it's not healthy and stuff, but humans are like this. They're not perfect. Everybody tries to make a big show of making everything polished. I think humans are a little bit too sheltered. They have to shit, for example. Every day."

Decent interview with Thomas Brinkmann over at Resident Advisor, focussing on When Horses Die, his new, vocal-driven and none-more-gothic album, and, as above, more general points of interest.

Slugged out!

Pretty much unmissable new night from Alex Bok-Bok (Faggatronix) and L-Vis 1990, pushing the best in 4x4 garage, niche and grime styles. "Thugged out ecstasy music"? Yes please...

More information and apposite mixtapes here.