the Classical

Recently I was in a well-known - indeed "iconic" - record store, where I flicked through an assortment of brand-new and recent releases, checked them out on the decks, and found most of them to be pastiches of earlier styles of music (styles abrasively new and unforehead at the time of their emergence) or solid / stolid,  worthy additions to long established and revered traditions. 

Business as usual, then. 

For much of my visit to this store,  Manuel Gottsching's E2-E4 burbled blissily in the background. 

That got me thinking.... Isn't it strange how the Once-Was-New can still sound new, somehow -  no matter how long ago its moment was... despite the huge number of times you've been exposed it? The force of its former insurgence rings out, even though its innovations will have been assimilated and endlessly recycled by subsequent artists. *

That applies to Madame Bovary as much as to Jimi Hendrix, to the Pastoral Symphony as much as to "Hymnen", to Performance as much as "Terminator" (the track not the film, silly!), to "The Harlequin's Carnival" as much as to McCabe and Mrs Miller... 

Everything now classic was once radical: in its own time, a breakthrough or a break-with-tradition. 

Equally, anything in the present that styles itself as "classic", that defers to a hallowed earlier moment, that adheres to and abides by a Legacy - it will not and cannot be a classic in the future, or for the future. The sieve of time will sift these out. 

And in the meantime, we really shouldn't bother with them. Not when there's a superfluity of now-classics / then-breakthroughs existing in the world that can renew our inspiration... and strengthen our resolve to never settle for less. 






* How does this effect of once-new, always new actually work?

A snippet from an old blog essay about the modernistic drive of the hardcore nuum, in which I redeploy some nifty thinkage of Frederic Jameson:

According to Fredric Jameson, what defines the modernist artwork is a relationship to time. It enacts the break with the past forms of art within itself. "The interiorization of the narrative [of modernity/modernism]…" becomes an integral element of the artwork's fundamental structure. "The act of restructuration is seized and arrested as in some filmic freeze-frame" such that the modernist work "encapsulates and eternalizes the process as a whole."


What could that mean in music? Precisely a genre [jungle / drum + bass] that involved a kind of suspended clash of sampling/digital processing with the analogue/hand-played, such that the uncanny time-warping of digital technique coexists with and permeates the hands-on, real-time musicianship. Thus breakbeat science captures the moment of superhumanisation, the funk of flesh-and-blood drumming (just eight seconds of G. Coleman's life-force from "Amen, My Brother") mutating into something beyond itself. Likewise with vocal science. Jameson, again: "the older technique or content must somehow subsist within the work as what is cancelled or overwritten, modified, inverted or negated, in order for us to feel the force, in the present, of what is alleged to have once been an innovation." 

The shock of the new, eternalized. 

early-Noughties nostalgia?

A man argues that the year 2000 is now officially retro.  It being 17, 18 years ago - which is almost two decades, and 20 Years being the traditional cyclical point at which things get revived or start to seem quaint.

What he (Matt Novak) specifically means, though, is that the year's 2000's ideas of "futuristic" now seem retro-futuristic. (The site he's writing for is Paleofuture, which is all about retrofuture).

I don't remember that much actual futurism or futuristic-ness in 2000. Although it's a year that seems indistinct in my memory... I'd have to strain to actual recall what was big or happening in music, or pop culture that year.

(Strains for a bit)

2step in the UK was still dominating the Top 40 in 2000...  the Timbaland R&B wave, although peaked, was still rolling...  dancehall...  Southern rap in the bounce and crunk style...  All of them pretty shiny and modern, yes, but futuristic? I'm not sure. If it was futuristic it was pretty much a continuation of the Nineties vibe of future-now, shiny digital sleekness).

But there was also - in the early 2000s - a lot of actual retro happening in real-time. There was the garage punk revival, the electro / Eighties revival was taking off, there was the early stirrings of the postpunk revival, Even filter-house and Daft Punk had its nostalgic, past-recycling aspect.

So it's not really the case that 2000 that has become retro; it's more that it was the beginning of the retromania era that was the Noughties.

Hauntology Parish Newsletter - Christmas: Moon Wiring Club

Often when a recording artist reaches that point where it feels fitting to release a 

best-of / greatest-hits -  or a career-spanning commemorative archival anthology -  it seems to signal  (or even, in some obscure fashion, precipitate) the end of their musical journey. A silence ensues. Perhaps followed, after a long interval, by a wan comeback. Perhaps followed by nothing at all. 

In Mr. Hodgson's case, he has not only returned punctually, at his usual time of year, but he has come back stronger than ever, with a triple-dollop of some of Moon Wiring Club's best work yet: the double-CD Tantalising Mews and the vinyl long-player Cateared Chocolatiers.
                                 
                                        


                                                                            

Noteworthy is the attractive new-look packaging for Tantalising Mews: a cardboard gatefold, with no information on the front, back or inside (indeed the release only identifies itself on the spine).

                                       


In a pouch lurks a fold-out insert that supplies the titles of the thirty-three  - thirty-three! - tracks on the pair of discs, and hints at the narrative framework that links them: "wireless telegraphy - from the immaculate ghost of an identical ancestor".  Perhaps informed here by the analogy that 19th Century spiritualists saw between remote communication with the dead and the recently invented telegraph?


                                      

Cateared Chocolatiers contains - in the form of a brightly coloured fold-out poster -  the board to a game that involves "a journey through a rococo town of rolled-up carpets and crumbling toffee buildings in order to catch a train from a weird rural station you know you’re going to miss." The boardgame can be played by following the rules printed on one side of the disc's intricately illustrated dust jacket and by consulting the cast of characters arrayed and described on the other side.

                                      

Noteworthy also: the sounds.  "Ghostly drifting molten landscape musicke" is how Blank Workshop characterise the contents of Chocolatiers.  And indeed that album especially, but all three of the discs,  push the ambient-leaning tendencies in previous Moon Wiring Club music to a new extreme of ectoplasmic exquisiteness and sickly malaise.  Beats, barely mustering the will to manifest, are decrepit and ineffectual entitities, rarely cohering into a pulse, let alone a groove. Voices droop and decompose, releasing vapours that fog the brain and obnubilate concentration. The mind wanders into mist-shrouded, boggy terrain, mistakes marshy phosphors for beacons, gets lost, founders.

It's a true return to formlessness.

You can place advance orders for this Christmas hamper bulging with sticky delight here and here.

                                                        

Hauntology Parish Newsletter - November - Further #2, The Belbury Circle

Further returns on November 18th, with an evening of ghostadelic entertainment at the Portico Gallery in  West Norwood, London.

Press release: 

DJ Food & Pete Williams present the second of their immersive  audio visual evenings at the Portico Gallery, London. Live music from Simon James and a not to be missed A/V set from Sculpture. Get lost in Further's multi projector light and sound show. Food, drink, a record stall from The Book and Record Bar plus plenty of seating.

Programme: 

7.30 - 8.30: Doors open, there will be a record stall with stock picked to compliment the evening by Micheal Johnson from the nearby Book & Record Bar and delicious local food served alongside the fully licensed Portico bar stocked with local beers and ales.

8.30 - 9.15: Simon James - former Simonsound and Black Channels member and one of the foremost exponents in today's modular electronics scene - plays a rare live set with his Buchla 200e Electric Music Box.

10.00 - 10.45: Sculpture bring their incredible live show to West Norwood via Dan Hayhurst's tape loops and electronics and Rueben Sutherland's zoetrope turntable visuals

10.45 - 12.00: DJ Food & Pete Williams (Further) will open and close the evening with their multi-projection Light & Sound Designs.

Tickets available here

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Ghost Box have a new release - Outward Journeys, a first and fine full-length from The Belbury Circle - that is to say, Jim Jupp of Belbury Poly + Jon Brooks of The Advisory Circle- featuring once again contributions from John Foxx on two songs, in the form of  vocals and synths. Dig also the new style design from Julian House which has the air of Omni about it maybe...

                                              

"I will always be there for you" - the ghost of rave / the ghost of socialism

Here's an essay I did for Pitchfork about Burial's Untrue ten years on. 

It's also effectively a tribute to Mark Fisher, who is a recurring presence in the piece. 

It's intentional that Burial's real name is never once mentioned in the piece - honoring his original allegiance to rave's radical facelessness and anonymous collectivity. 

Below is my favorite out of the post-Untrue Burial output - in some ways the missing chapter from that album.

There were two parallels and precursors for Burial's  ghost-of-rave (as ghost-of-socialism) aesthetic that I couldn't get into as it would have been too much of a digression.

The first: Mark Leckey's Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, which I wrote about here. 




And the second:  "Weak Become Heroes" by The Streets.


 

What Burial related through samples and moody orchestrations, Mike Skinner conveyed with words,  describing the flashback of a former raver abruptly set adrift on blissed memories of love and unity on the dancefloor. “All the commotion becomes floating emotions...  They could settle wars with this...  Imagine the world's leaders on pills... All of Life's problems I just shake off.” Then he's snapped back to the dreary streets of a hostile and hopeless 21^st Century England: “gray concrete and deadbeats... no surprises no treats... My life's been up and down since I walked from that crowd.” “Weak,” in Skinner’s song, means not just personally frail, but politically powerless. The weak became heroes when they became a mass, uniting around the unwritten manifesto in the music: someday there’ll be a better way, but in the meantime let’s shelter for a while in this dreamspace.  What the critic Richard Smith (like dear Mark also “late” now – so many ghosts these days) called “the communism of the emotions” triggered by Ecstasy seemed to prefigure a social movement. But the collective energy never got beyond the level of a pre-political potential; the moment dissipated. 

“I love those hardcore and rave tunes because they sound deep, hopeful, for the times, and the people... It’s unbelievable, that glow in the tunes, it almost breaks your heart.” - Burial, someplace, sometime

"The tunes I loved the most…old jungle, rave and hardcore, sounded hopeful....  All those lost producers…I love them, but it’s not a retro thing… When I listen to an old tune it doesn’t make me think ‘I’m looking back, listening to another era.’ Some of those tunes are sad because they sounded like the future back then and no one noticed. They still sound future to me." - Burial, someplace, sometime  


In a way, it's a shame Burial stopped doing the interviews -  he was almost born to do them, even more than make music! He's better at describing his own music and motives than any of his critics, except Mark Fisher himself. I remember Mark telling me after he'd done the interview that he couldn't believe his own ears - the stuff that Burial was coming out with was so poetic and evocative, too good to be true almost. A dream of an interview. Anwen Crawford told me of a similar experience: as I recall it, it was like she was hypnotized, sent into a trance by his voice over the phone. But at same time he was completely real and genuine - somehow down to earth and an ethereal being floating out there at the same time.

"I wanted the tunes to be anti-bullying tunes that could maybe help someone to believe in themselves, to not be afraid, and to not give up, and to know that someone out there cares and is looking out for them. So it's like an angel's spell to protect them against the unkind people, the dark times, and the self-doubts" - Burial on Rival Dealer EP / "Come Down With Us"

Actually there's a third parallel/precursor - The Death of Rave by V/Vm, a/k/a The Caretaker - another of Mark's favorites of course... 



This post is dedicated to Carl Neville.