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A YEAR IN THE RUST: 2011

2012-01-25T17:15:00.001Z

A YEAR IN THE RUST: 2011

What a year, what a year. For many, 2011 will live in infamy, between heart-breaking scenes of earthquakes in Japan and mass slaughter in Norway. In the UK, a barely-elected coalition of venal Tories and supine Liberal Democrats are taking the knife to the public sector, using the country's deficit to justify ideologically-driven attack on housing benefits, disability allowance, welfare and the National Health Service; whilst all the while ignoring the massive bonuses the execs of state-owned banks are paying themselves, or the way billionaires and corporations continue to worm their way out of tax. Oh, and our prime minister and the likes of Teresa May have also thrown in long-discredited pernicious myths about immigrants, diversity and human rights for good measure. Nice.

2012 at least brings with it the promise of a London-based mega-party, in the form of the Summer Olympics, but we'll still be cursed with the unedifying spectacle of the US presedential elections and Boris Johnson's campaign to remain mayor of London. But, as I said in 2010, at least we have the arts, even if Cameron has once again demonstrated his cluelessness by declaring that film funding should go towards "commercially-viable" projects. So stupid, it doesn't deserve an answer, although here's a pretty good one: http://thequietus.com/articles/07717-david-cameron-film-policy-cuts

There were a number of great musical events for me in 2011, most of all the launch of my music journalism "career", which has featured, notably, interviews with Skullflower's Matt Bower (http://thequietus.com/articles/07403-skullflower-interview), Ramleh (TBA), Philip Jeck (http://www.theliminal.co.uk/2011/10/an-aggregation-of-small-gains-an-interview-with-philip-jeck/), Arabrot (http://thequietus.com/articles/07242-arabrot-interview-solar-anus), Eyvind Kang (TBA), legendary director John Carpenter (http://thequietus.com/articles/07784-john-carpenter-interview) and Richard Buckner (http://www.theliminal.co.uk/2011/11/just-moments-an-interview-with-richard-buckner/). I also got to review tons of albums, from modern composition to techno, harsh noise to pop, drone to country; and meet the likes of Richard Youngs, Romain Perrot (Vomir), Richard Ramirez (Werewolf Jerusalem), William Bennett, Tony Conrad and Luke Younger. Drinking beers with Bennett whilst discussing the limitations of watching porn on dial-up internet was one of the weirdest experiences of my life!

You can read all my reviews and interviews here: http://www.dustedmagazine.com/writers/burnett; http://thequietus.com/users/5884; http://www.theliminal.co.uk/author/jburnett/

Meanwhile, my radio show Noise in the Ether gathers strength, and has both a Mixcloud page and a space on Facebook. Get in touch!

I've also enjoyed a number of films over the last twelve months, from the sweeping ambition of Tree of Life (Terence Malick) to the intimate gay romance Weekend by Andrew Haigh. Re-discovering Bunuel's surrealist masterpiece L'Age D'Or, as well as the experimental short films of Jeff Keen and Stan Brakhage was a further delight, and further proof that film can be a forward-thinking and ambitious form of artistic expression. As for Jaromil Jireš' Valerie and Her Weekend of Wonders, it may just be the best cinematographic discovery I made all year (along with The Werckmeister Harmonies, The Killer of Sheep, Ivul and Tropical Malady of course! I never change).

Before I go, I must give a massive shout out to The Saatchi Gallery for continuing to exhibit Richard Wilson's majestic minimalist piece 20:50 (if you haven't seen it, what the fuck are you waiting for?), to Hofesh Shechter and Antony Gormley for their magnificent concert-cum-performance piece-cum-ballet Survivor at The Barbican (read my review here) and to those great men and women of jazz who gave us masterpieces like Andrew Hill's Point of Departure, Archie Shepp's Blase, Cecil Taylor's Unit Structures, Last Exit's Koln, Bill Evans' Sunday at the Village Vanguard and The Spontaneous Music Ensemble's Karyobin. Not to mention the entire works of John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Albert Ayler! As you can gather, I've been gleefully over-dosing on jazz recently! It really is a genre that blows away the gate of perception in ways The Doors could never have dreamed of.

Below is my list of the top 20 albums of 2011. Special mention must also go out to Visible Breath by Eyvind Kang and the re-released Aestuarium he recorded with his wife Jessika Kenney; to Re: ECM by Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer; Richard Buckner's Our Blood; the excellent post-techno albums by Dalglish (Benacah Drann Deachd) and Martyn (Ghost People); and oddball releases by Deadbeat (Drawn and Quartered), Annapurna Illusion (Life Is An Illusion), Helm (Cryptography) and Hive Mind (Elemental Disgrace). 2011 was a great year for music, and long may it continue!

Peace!

20.
The Fall
Ersatz G.B.
(Cherry Red)

The hardest-hitting Fall album since the early 1980s may also be their best in a decade. Mark E. Smith is in fine snarling form, whilst his vicious backing band channel The Stooges, Black Sabbath, krautrock and a bit of rockabilly to perfection. Long live The Fall.

19.
Red Horse
Red Horse
(Type)

Rambunctious, in-your-face jazz percussion descended from the school of Han Bennink is married to squalling noise on this brazen duo’s second self-titled album. A triumph of raucousness mixed with unexpected subtlety.

18.
Pinch & Shackleton
Pinch & Shackleton
(Honest Jon’s)

Two stalwarts of the U.K. dubstep scene combine to remind us just how great the genre can be, especially when it delves into darkly urban atmospheres and restrained, hypnotic melodies. Far from the brash technicolor vistas of the current scene, Pinch & Shackleton is stripped-down, ghostly and edgy, and is all the better for it.

17.
Phurpa
Trowo Phurnag Ceremony
(Ideologic Organ)

Huge kudos to Stephen O’Malley for resurrecting this forgotten masterpiece of subterranean pre-Buddhist vocal drone. So dark and murky it could have been recorded at the bottom of a well, Trowo Phurnag Ceremony sounds like nothing else released this year.

16.
Bill Orcutt
How The Thing Sings(Editions Mego)

Bill Orcutt’s solo work may be anchored in the blues, but its ferocious, unfettered intensity owes just as much to his background in hardcore noise rock. The inchoate vocals and machine gun acoustic guitar playing are exhilarating and exhausting.

15.
Alva Noto
univrs
(Raster-Noton)

Thoughtful electronic music at its best. Carsten Nicolai explores the juxtaposition and integration of techno beats with the universality of language, and how that impacts musicality and communication. It’s a cold, calculating project but (and this is key) univrs also packs some serious melodic punch.

14.
Indignant Senility
Consecration of the Whipstain
(Type)

Type Records continue to explore the darkest reaches of the human soul with this second album from Pat Maherr’s Indignant Senility project. Unfathomable sounds drift in and out of the soundscape, from intense drones, frightening samples, drifting melodic snippets and the omnipresent crackle of morose, broken-down vinyl. If you thought hypnagogic pop was getting twee, check out Consecration of the Whipstain.

13.
Eleh
Floating Frequencies / Intuitive Synthesis
(Important)

The mysterious Eleh reworked his/her/their earliest vinyl pieces for the digital age, resulting in a titanic triple album of deep electronic drone, the kind that insinuates itself into every nook and cranny of the listener’s perception. Eleh’s music takes patience, but rewards it with music that will swallow you whole.

12.
Vomir
Application à aphistemi
(Maison Bruit)

Vomir is quickly becoming a giant in the noise world through his intransigent approach to harsh noise walls. Application à aphistemi sees him break new ground, using a 12-string acoustic guitar on one track to create a fascinating widescreen wall of fierce drone. Meanwhile, the other track is trademark Vomir harshness, a brutal waterfall of overwhelming mulch.

11.
Richard Youngs
Amplifying Host
(Jagjaguwar)

The prolific Scotsman maintains his remarkable form of late on yet another album of glorious, haunting folk. His looped, echoing vocal is drenched in emotion, whilst his delicate guitar playing juxtaposes inventive style with gorgeous melodies. His best album since Sapphie.

10.
Skullflower
Fucked on a Pile of Corpses
(Cold Spring)

Never anything less than brilliant, Matt Bower’s Skullflower project continues to push back the boundaries of noise and metal. Fucked on a Pile of Corpses is the band’s most extreme album in years, overflowing with crunching power electronics, transcendent wall noise and black metal-derived monster riffs.

9.
Kuedo
Severant
(Planet Mu)

Kuedo’s Jamie Teasdale transcends his dubstep roots to deliver a rapturous, hypnotic album of escapist futurism in electronic form, one that runs the gamut from Chicago house to trance-like synth music, via delirious coke rap-inspired beats and throbbing bass lines.

8.
Cindytalk
Hold Everything Dear
(Editions Mego)

Since the ‘80s, Gordon Sharpe’s Cindytalk has been operating in the shadows of British popular music, from moody goth to adventurous electronica, but the trio of muted, thoughtful electronic albums released over the last few years on Editions Mego represent the summit of Sharpe’s unique vision, with Hold Everything Dear standing as its triumphant conclusion.

7.
Surface of the Earth
Surface of the Earth
(Utech)

The best reissue of 2011. Surface of the Earth were a short-lived New Zealand act, and this, their second album, is an unrelenting masterpiece of clanking, thundering industrial drone, all performed on overdriven, mangled guitars. Dead C fans take notice.

6.
Werewolf Jerusalem
Confessions of a Sex Maniac
(Second Layer)

Veteran noise legend Richard Ramirez delivers the ultimate statement in the harsh noise walls genre over four discs of brutal, overwhelming and unexpectedly haunting layers of unrelenting noise.

5.
Demdike Stare
Triptych
(Modern Love)

Essential triple album compiling the British duo’s three outstanding and ground-breaking 2010 LPs. Few bands are as adept as Demdike Stare in the creation of tense, mesmerising and atmospheric sample-based electronica.

4.
Pete Swanson
Man With Potential
(Type)

For those of us who have been lamenting the demise of Yellow Swans, the emergence of Pete Swanson as a vital solo act has been a godsend. On Man With Potential, he takes the noisy drone central to YS’ aesthetic and marries it to warped techno beats, creating a furious strand of pulsating, noisy electronica.

3.
Leyland Kirby
Eager to Tear Apart the Stars
(History Always Favours The Winner)

There may be something simple in the heartfelt emotions explored in Leyland Kirby’s music, but that doesn’t stop it from being overwhelmingly powerful and resonant. Extended piano melodies drift in and out of clouds of drone, capturing the heart and stirring the soul.

Cut Hands
Afro Noise Vol.1
(Susan Lawley)

Erstwhile power electronics legend, and supreme provocateur William Bennett breaks new ground with his Cut Hands project, creating a form of harsh mutant techno using a mixture of industrial noise and African percussion. One of the most ferociously challenging and weirdly sexy albums of the year.

1.
Ellen Fullman
Through Glass Panes
(Important)

Through Glass Panes approaches minimalism via the dusty sound of American Primitive music. Intense, drawn-out drones tug at the mind’s eye, eliciting dreams of endless prairies and forgotten landscapes. Fullman’s emotive use of long string instruments brings new depths to the minimalism of LaMonte Young, Pauline Oliveros and Tony Conrad.

12 months of Rust: Summer 2011!

2011-09-07T22:56:00.000+01:00

That's right, my monthly reviews section has had a name change! Not much will change, I guess (it's not like anyone will really notice), but I've always felt that I needed a name change. There's always been a whole lot more to the music, art, films and general musings I put up here every month than can be contained on an iPod. Summer having been mighty busy, between holidaying in gorgeous Dubrovnik (go there!) and making my first steps as a proper music journalist (get me: http://www.dustedmagazine.com/writers/burnett), this post coversJune, July and August. This seasonal formula may be the way I take things moving forwards, for time reasons. So brace yourselves!

Meanwhile, the world of British journalism has had its best news since Lucifer knows when, as the sordid red-top News Of The World has been forced out of business by allegations its journalists have been hacking the phones of abduction victims and people caught up in the 7/7 bombings. It's a shame it has taken something so heinous for people to wake up to the iniquities of our national press (I'd like to think The Sun and Daily Mail may follow soon, though I'm not holding my breath), but at least it looks like the woefully inadequate Press Complaints Commission is set to be scrapped, meaning we might have at last have a decent shot at proper press regulation soon. Fingers crossed. Of course, the ridiculous riots across England gave a lot of very intellectually-challenged journalists (step up Mad Melanie Phillips, Max Hastings and Richard Littlejohn) to write absolute drivel with some authority, so bad journalism is still, regrettably, alive and well on these shores.

Stupid: the London riots have given arsehole right-wing journos quite a few opportunities to spout nonsense this Summer. Still, the toff-looking chap in this picture is rather funny. "If I stand still, maybe they won't see me..."

We also had to bid a sad farewell to the troubled Amy Winehouse. I was never a huge fan of hers, especially given the media frenzy she always seemed to generate, but I still think she had a lovely voice, and an undeniable talent for songwriting. It's a shame to have seen that talent dissipate so publicly. The music world has also lost the great Conrad Schnitzler and Akira "Joe" Yamanaka of hard rock giants Flower Travellin' Band this Summer, so it's been a sobering couple of months.

And RIP to the victims of that mad cunt in Norway. Some of the rhetoric emanating from the Right recently, from the hysterical nonsense of idiots like Melanie Phillips and Richard Littlejohn to Sarah Palin and her despicable cross-hair map, has been disgraceful, and, allied to economic meltdown and issues of immigration, not to mention an irresponsible press across the US, Britain and other supposedly developed nations, it has obviously helped to galvanise this stupid, insane and heartless man. Here's hoping lessons will be learned, although, if the initial way the incident was reported is anything to go by, I'm not holding my breath. A true tragedy, and a terrifying one at that.

Onto music. Periodically, I find myself getting so into a specific genre of music that it beggars belief. It doesn't have to be something new, and this month, it's been a genre I've loved for over a decade, but left to one side for most of the last 5 years: THE BLUES. Not many genres get the distinction of having "the" placed before them. Then again, few genres have transcended the decades with such primordial simplicity as the Blues. To be honest, I've been guzzling down too many different records to realistically be able to profile them all here, but the following albums must all be considered real classics of the Blues.

Muddy Waters - At Newport 1960 (1960, Chess).

In terms of electric Blues, this is something of a holy grail (should that be "an" holy grail? I'm never sure, and one likes to be as pompous as possible...). The Newport Jazz Festival was, by 1960, something of an institution among the American intelligentsia: smart, sophisticated and cool. Blues was, after a golden period in the '30s, not so cool, but who better to catapult the Blues back into the collective consciousness than the great McKinley Morganfield?
Though, if I'm honest, this late-50s strain of electric blues has not, in my mind, aged as well as later variants. I know that many a Blues aficionado will be looking down their noses at me, decrying me as a philistine white boy too enamoured of the heavy rock guitar to really appreciate the Blues. Fair point, maybe. I'm a sucker for a high-powered guitar mania. But I still think that the blues presented here is still too linked to skiffle and r'n'b to really have the feel that Waters would crystallise on 1977's Hard Again.
Having said all that nonsense, this album remains an essential document of the moment Blues moved away from its own unfortunate ghetto into the wider consciousness of modern music. Waters' solos are sharp, smart and gorgeous, whilst the harmonica work of James Cotton is genre-defining. A few tracks are rather similar, a leitmotiv style across Waters' oeuvre (seriously, the differences between "Hoochie Coochie Man" and later classic "Mannish Boy" are not that easily detectable, folks!), but opener "I Got My Brand On You" is a Blues masterpiece, soulful and moody at once, with some outstanding guitar work from Waters. As the audience falls in love with this titanic man, the future of Blues is being laid out on record for our lucky ears. Sometimes it takes one track...

Paul Butterfield Blues Band - East-West (1966, Elektra)

If Muddy Waters set the trend, it was taken up big time by a bunch of white upstarts, chief among them harmonica genius and singer Paul Butterfield. Marshaling a world-class band around him, including genius guitarists Elvin Bishop and Mike Bloomfield (the latter an unparalleled genius in America at the time), Butterfield electrified the Blues beyond what even visionaries like Muddy Waters and John 'Lee' Hooker had dreamed.
Before even John Mayall and Eric Clapton, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band returned the Blues to the forefront of popular music, bringing rock music into the fold (some of their tracks were fucking hard), whilst preserving the emotional depths and pathos of pure Blues. Tapping into the "revolutionary" zeitgeist, they even challenged rock stereotypes by being one of the few mixed-race rock bands in America at the time. So it's fair to say that the Blues was a crucial factor in the fight for civil rights. From Johnny Winter producing Muddy Waters to The Band working with New Orleans Blues legend Allan Toussaint, the Blues, and its relationship to rock, was crucial to popular music's embrace of social change.
And The PBBB were at the forefront of this revolution, never more so than on East-West, one of the most forward-looking albums of its era. To listen to it is to marvel that it came out in fucking 1966! Whether they're blazing through short, taut blues-rockers like "Walkin' Blues" and "Get Out Of My Life, Woman", or stretching out, in wild premonitions of the post-Sgt Pepper's musical landscape, all wondrous guitar solos, funky piano breaks (courtesy of the great Mike Naftalin) and Butterfield's sexy amplified harp, these guys are always on top of their game, as tight as a vice yet able to stretch out in ways that prefigure the heyday of West Coast rock by over a year.
This comes to a magnificent head on the title track, a gasp-inducing, 13-minute romp displaying all the virtuosity of the band, especially Bishop and the superlative Bloomfield, who had already by this point made rock history as part of the backing band on Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited and at his controversial 1965 appearance at Newport. Hearing him on "East-West", you can look past the blah, and appreciate his genius. If Butterfield was the brains and voice of the PBBB, Mike Bloomfield was the soul, and his guitar, taking in Eastern influences (we're talking a whole year before George Harrison and his sitar), and the pure, unadulterated bliss of the Blues. East-West is an unfettered masterpiece, a band at the peak of its powers and, almost literally changing the world.

Canned Heat - Boogie With Canned Heat (1968, Liberty)

If The Paul Butterfield Blues Band laid the groundwork, the American band that most capitalised on the resurgence of Blues in a rock context, even as they were overshadowed by their less authentic British rivals (sorry, that's another dig at Clapton, but fuck him), was Canned Heat. The Heat was formed by two musicologists, guitarist and harmonica player Alan 'Blind Owl' Wilson and vocalist Bob 'The Bear' Hite, experts in the Blues both. As such, the music of Canned Heat, whilst produced by a bunch of white guys, is about the most authentic of all the sixties Blues acts.
This was most prevalent on Boogie With Canned Heat. In many ways, most Canned Heat albums suffered, as did many Blues records, by being more a collection of songs than a cohesive statement. But my God, these guys were good! In fact, I'd claim that, apart from the aforementioned Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Canned Heat were the best rock-blues band of all time. So, collections of songs or not, Boogie With Canned Heat shakes its mean ass!
Boogie With Canned Heat works like many a Blues album, especially of the post-PBBB type, mixing Blues standards with self-penned originals. Probably the stand-out of the latter is "On The Road Again", a sitar-driven folk-blues hit that catapulted The Heat into the charts, and making Wilson, vocalist on that track, the unwitting voice of a generation (more so after "Going Up The Country", the Woodstock theme, from their follow-up Living The Blues). "On the Road Again" is a pop/folk/blues classic, Wilson's fragile voice adding gravitas to a tune that, as a hymn to hitchhiking and busking, embodied the spirit of a generation.
Boogie With Canned Heat revels in the eclectic talents of the band, from the fierce Blues-rock classic "Evil Woman", with its driving tempo shifts, to the melancholic slow Blues number "Marie Laveau", which is dominated by some wonderful guitar work from Wilson and second guitarist Henry Vestine (formerly a Mother of Invention). But the cherry on the Mississippi Mud Cake is 11-minute jam "Fried Hockey Boogie", in which the band-members, introduced in turn by Hite, flex their improvisatory muscles and tap into the psychedelic zeitgeist of the time. The Blues, as with "East-West", was no longer a dwindling genre for nostalgic old-timers, but an art-form as modern, complex and adventurous as anything done by Grateful Dead or Quicksilver Messenger Service. Canned Heat would go completely overboard on follow-up Living The Blues, with some drug-fueled, over-long jamming, but Boogie With Canned Heat remains an unparalleled classic.

Albert King - Live Wire / Blues Power (1968, Stax)

One of the 3 "Kings" of the Blues, alongside namesakes B.B. and Freddie, Albert King was also, in this amateur hack's opinion, the best. Never as successful as B.B. King, Albert nonetheless deliver a bona fide classic in 1967's Born Under a Bad Sign, and it's wonderful, horn-powered title track, and then promptly added to his burgeoning reputation with this wonderful live masterpiece. Live Wire / Blues Power shows a master guitarist picking up on the "rock" approach white Blues fans were bringing to the genre and unleashing his fabulous vision on a truly delighted audience.
Rock's ubiquitous love for the Blues come 1968 is obvious from the location of the concert: Bill Graham's renowned Fillmore West auditorium in San Francisco, a much-loved venue for rock and psych acts such as The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company. But there's no way a guitarist as fucking talented as King was going to be in any way intimidated by performing in one of rock's cathedrals. Instead, from the moment he is introduced via a blistering rendition of upbeat instrumental "Watermelon Man", something of a signature track of his, he doesn't let up, letting his Gibson Flying V sing and squeal and howl through tracks that are about as close to electric Blues nirvana as can be achieved. The slow burning "Blues Power" is a particular triumph, with King's hilarious spoken-word passages bouncing off some truly incredible and moving solos. If Albert King had a weakness, it was his lack of vocal talent, but as a guitarist, he knew few -if any- peers. This is a truly essential addition to the rock/blues canon, one that proved that Black Blues musicians could rip it up with as much power as their white students.

Ten Years After - Undead (1968, Deram)

Generally speaking, I'm rather unimpessed when it comes to the "British Blues Boom" with so-called classic recordings such as Disraeli Gears, Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton and most of the early Stones' and Animals' material seeming rather derivative and puny in comparison to what Paul Butterfield, Canned Heat and Albert King were doing at the time. Until the advent of Free in the late sixties, it seemed only the Peter Green-helmed version of Fleetwood Mac could compete with the American Blues bands, and even then only live and on a handful of cool singles.
The one exception circa '67-68 would have been Ten Years After, who had a sense of virtuosity and exploration that seemed to exceed that of most of their Anglo peers (although, admittedly, they would never really capture in the studio). The best example of this is Undead, especially the extended 2002 reissue (the original vinyl edition was woefully truncated). The biggest selling point Ten Years After had was leader Alvin Lee, one of Britain's premier electric guitarists (at one time, he was hailed as the "fastest guitarist in the world", a dubious honour if ever there was one, and one that totally overshadowed his inescapable talent), who was also blessed with a nicely sulky post-Jagger voice to boot.
Undead remains the band's crowning statement, an album mostly made up of covers, all expertly re-imagined in the TYA style in front of a very lucky live audience. Most notable is the band's interesting rhythmic approach, incorporating a definite jazz shuffle on extended workouts like "I May Be Wrong, But I Won't Be Wrong Always" and "(At the) Woodchopper's Ball", in which the insistent, skipping beats move at breakneck speed whilst Lee wrenches a series of hypnotic solos out of his axe. TYA were obviously refusing to fall into rock or Blues cliches, and their incorporation of unusual skiffle beats is testament to this.
In typical sixties psychedelic style, there's a lot of improvising here, including the odd testing drum solo, but for the most part the jazz anchoring allows each band member to showcase his talent without becoming tiresome (this includes some awesome bass solos), and there is a clear joy in the performances that reminds you just why improvisation in a rock/Blues format can be so wonderful. I consider Undead to be one of the great live Blues-rock albums, and the very best of British Blues by some margin.

Johnny Winter - The Progressive Blues Experiment (1968, Sonobeat)

Before I move onto something other than the Blues, I really should mention albino star Johnny Winter, whom I find to be rather underrated despite his status as one of the most popular guitarists of the late sixties and early seventies. In fact, he is undoubtedly a key figure in the late-sixties Blues-rock explosion, and would endure as such until being side-lined by heroin addiction and a subsequent decline in inspiration.
This album was recorded in 1967, briefly appearing the following year, only to disappear until after Winter's triumphant appearance at Woodstock and the release of his hit official debut album, Johnny Winter, in 1969. Yet, as a distillation of all that makes Winter such an endearing and exciting figure, The Progressive Blues Experiment, a blend of originals and rocked-up covers, may just be his most definitive and enduring statement.
The most attractive quality of Winter's is that, whilst so many of his peers were trying to "modernise" Blues music for a rock audience, he hadn't, at this stage, lost sight of the genre's roots, making sublime use of slide guitar in particular, and echoing everyone from Muddy Waters (on the aptly-titled "Tribute to Muddy", easily as good as anything the master ever did) to Elmore James, somehow without ever seeming derivative. Partly I think this was down to his distinctive, countryfied croon (his ability to leap from snarling growl to high-pitched yelp is incredible); part of it is also the dusky, sand-swept tone of his guitar, which is, for all his influences, 100% Texas.
Like all of the artists mentioned here, Winter is a master of switching atmospheres and styles, from pacy rock numbers to aching soul-influences heart-breakers. And of course, he's a fucking mental guitarist, running his fingers up and down the fretboard like a man possessed, notably on his signature tune "Mean Woman Blues" and the anguished "It's My Own Fault". Just as on At Newport 1960, East-West, Boogie With Canned Heat, Live Wire/Blues Power and Undead, The Progressive Blues Experiment (what an apt title!) epitomises the variety, power and above all emotion, that lie at the heart of this most heart-felt of genres. Long live the Blues!

Somewhat on the other side of the popular music spectrum, I've also been bludgeoning my ears with a suitably abrasive avalanche of brutal, crunching metal, mostly courtesy of a number of Stephen O'Malley-related records. O'Malley is of course best known as one of the mind's behind legendary cowled doom-drone icons SUNN O))), but to my mind he is also one of the most progressive and forward-thinking geniuses in modern rock. His massive musical knowledge and sense of exploration are apparent both in his work as part of SUNN O))) (and indeed, we should also salute his supposedly more troglodyte-esque SUNN O))) cohort Greg Anderson in this regard, for both have a wide range of influences and inspirations), and via his numerous side-projects, which seem to take in just about every genre conceivable in modern music. I was already very familiar with his work as part of extreme metal act Khanate (one of the few truly peerless bands of the last 10 years) and with Peter "Pita" Rehberg in KTL. As with SUNN O))), both projects are pretty fucking amazing, so I was curious -nay, excited- to discover some of the other works and projects he'd participated in or been influenced by. What resulted was an increasingly tangential (in O'Malley terms) exploration of some of the more intriguing and extreme forms of modern music...

Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine - Rampton (2003, Southern Lord)

This is a truly excellent little collaboration between the twin heads of SUNN O))), Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley, and a pair of English doom-metal mongers in the form of Electric Wizard's drummer Justin Greaves and Cathedral's vocalist Lee Dorrian. As such, Teeth of Lions... are something of a transatlantic drone/doom supergroup, and have had to weather expectations accordingly.
It would be easy to see Greaves and Dorrian as mere add-ons to a SUNN O)))-dominated project, but in fact, the greatest strength of Rampton is that it expertly blends the monolithic dirges of American drone metal, with the edgier, industrial strains of British doom. Anderson and O'Malley certainly make themselves present, belching out those subterranean guitar and bass riffs that they do so well, setting the very walls of your consciousness rumbling and your guts broiling. Played at full volume, opening track "He Who Accepts All That Is Offered (Feel Bad Hit of the Winter)" is equal to anything the duo have done on their own, the bludgeoning, never-ending guitar mess seeming to roar out of the very fabric of the earth, a truly seismic occurrence.
So far, so very SUNN O))). Except that very quickly Greaves asserts himself on the track, his supple, jazz-inflected drumming adding a funky undercurrent that rips the music out of its rootsy meandering and into a more urban context. They may be named after a track from Earth's second album, but Teeth of Lions... feel much more industrial than anything by Dylan Carlson's band. This feeling is compounded by Dorrian's misanthropic vocals, the ex-Napalm Death man coming on like Justin K Broadrick in his Godflesh pomp. There may be an earthier vibe to Rampton than on, say, Streetcleaner, but it's still a long way from the wide-open spaces that characterise much American doom and black metal.
Although admittedly over-dominated by the aforementioned monolith of an opener ("The Smiler" is pretty fucking great, too, with Dorrian giving it his all), Rampton stands up as well as most of Khanate and KTL's output amongst the many SUNN O))-related side-projects. If you like your metal to be dark, angry, violent and heavy, this is required listening.

Thorr's Hammer - Dommedagsnatt (1996, Moribund)

Long before they formed SUNN O))), Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley played guitar in a much more short-lived (we're talking about 6 weeks) black metal act, Thorr's Hammer. They only released one EP, Dommedagsnatt, recorded in Washington state in 1996, before disbanding, with O'Malley and Anderson going on to form Burning Witch from the ashes of the Hammer. Since this demise, the band has gained something of a cult following, namely on the back of its members' subsequent success.
And for once, the O'Malley/Anderson duo wasn't the focal point of the band's mystique. That honour has to go to then-teenage vocalist Runhild Gammelsæter, whose Scandinavian good looks, arresting make-up and singular vocals ensured that Thorr's Hammer would achieve legendary status, even among people who'd never heard the band. After all, a hot chick fronting a Norwegian-style black metal band? How cool is that?
Turns out not very, I'm afraid. The music on Dommedagsnatt is rather conventional by metal standards, and whilst there are times when Gammelsaeter's troll-like roar is striking, for the most part she sounds like just about every male black metal vocalist out there. The best track is "Mellom Galgene", a live bonus one on the recent Southern Lord reissue, but for the most part, this is a case of a once-forgettable band getting little-deserved recognition on the back of its members' posthumous achievements.
As an aside, if you want to really check out the talents of Runhild Gammelsæter, I heartily recommend her joint project with the great James Plotkin, Khlyst, and their debut album Chaos Is My Name. Much more challenging, interesting and vocally innovative!

Alongside his musical activities, with Anderson and others, Stephen O'Malley is also involved with a range of projects in different media, and has recently been given a curatorial role of Editions Mego sub-label Ideologic Organ, which is dedicated to exploring "acoustic" music in all its various facets.Typically, for O'Malley, the second release on the label sounds so subterranean it could have been recorded in Hades itself:

Phurpa - Trowo Phurnag Ceremony (2011, Ideologic Organ

Seriously, where the fuck did O'Malley find this phenomenon of oddness? Phurpa are a group of Russian former metal-playing "heads" who have dedicated their music to exploring the proto-Buddhist "Bon" religion. Like in Buddhism, the sounds produced are based almost entirely on vocal chanting, but if Tibetan Buddhist chanting is deep, then the rumbling mantras of the Bon religion are positively abyssal.
The formula for Phurpa's tracks is relatively consistent, apart from a couple of instrumental pieces where the clanging of metallic percussion and rumbling horns seem to bridge the gap between this most ancient of music and modern-era industrial rock. Each track starts with the clatter of a metal plate or the tingle of a bell, before the voices rumble into the ensuing resonance, either a single one or a terrifying avalanche of raw, gravelly tones that stretch over and supersede one another with pig-headed single-mindedness. These mantras seem to take the throat singing style made popular (read: palatable) by Tuvan acts such as Huun-Huur-Tu and drags into a netherworld of old gods and forgotten tombs. You can almost picture the incense smoke snaking across a dark, cavernous chamber in a temple buried under a mountain as near-mummified monks try to resurrect the dead. It's heady, chilling stuff.
As such, Trowo Phurnag Ceremony is not music that is "enjoyed". I doubt it even has the power of transcendence for most Western listeners. It's long, murky and intimidating, going beyond even what LaMonte Young and Marian Zazeela have achieved in similar experiments. But if you are willing to quake in its heavy, spiritual wake, you will experience something quite unlike anything else currently available in modern music.

So, as well as being an artist and music-maker supreme, Stephen O'Malley can now count being a record label curator of exquisite taste among his many talents (the other Ideologic Organ album, Aestuarium by Jessika Kenney & Eyvind Kang is equally impressive, in a very different way, asTrowo Phurnag Ceremony, though I can't review it here). Here's hoping he (and Anderson) will be given a curatorial role by ATP sometime soon. I'd definitely head to Butlins to see Phurpa!

Ezekiel Honig - Folding In On Itself (2011, Type)

William Basinski's opus The Disintegration Loops has left a deep impression on the musical landscape that has followed it. For sure, the likes of Fennesz and Philip Jeck were already playing with the intensification of the more discrete elements of ambience and turning them into ambitious, elegiac pieces; and of course Basinski owes a debt of gratitude to the great minimalist composers of the mid-sixties-onwards. But few pieces managed to be so spectacularly emotive using such spartan means. And since then, a veritable avalanche of artists have taken up exploring elements like the crackle of vinyl, minimal strings and synths or submerged electronic percussion and hoping to create something deep, intense and meaningful with relatively stripped-down means.

Which brings us to Ezekiel Honig. In many ways, he brings nothing new to this already sturdily-garnished table, yet Folding In On Itself is a worthwhile addition to the menu. Essentially, it's a moody and abstract soundtrack to Honig's home city, New York (something he also shares with Basinski), as the composer/producer grabs found sounds such as cars, conversational chatter, the subway and clanking machinery and then overlays them with subtle flourishes of piano, guitar, organ and synth to create a vivid mind's eye view of the Big Apple, albeit a deliberately foggy one.

In true ambient fashion, a lot of Honig's music is deceptively slight, with soft synth lines playing over scattered found sounds and wisps of digital fuzz. It may sound slight, but almost unexpectedly, Honig injects sub-aquatic techno beats into the mix, adding an uncertain edge to tracks like "Subverting the Memory of Your Surroundings" and "Between Bridges". The former opens with a bizarre clattering sound and a muted sample of the New York subway, which dissolves and reappears throughout the track, snaking around wobbly rhythmic pulsations. The track's forward momentum handily sets the public transport scene, but the hazy production and droning organ mean that it's a post-party hangover journey your on, fitful light from grimy carriage windows hitting bleary eyes. "Between Bridges" is techno for smackheads, insistent but slovenly, the rhythm almost as insubstantial as a heartbeat whilst disconnected mutter unintelligible snippets of non-song. They're the two catchiest tracks on the album, but they still set the tone for an album that is sad, detached and drowsy.

The general vibe of Folding In On Itself is of distant memories of living, even surviving, in a dense, grimy and crowded city. The faded photographs Honig uses for the cover give the game away: this is an album dedicated to the lost heirlooms of people's lives, the sounds we hear but never properly register, the memories buried in daily life.

From the aching piano on "Drafting Foresight" to the moaned guitar lines of "High & Low", Folding In On Itself is laden with this sense of loss and regret. Time passes and damages, and beauty hurts. If at times the album is almost suffocatingly maudlin, Honig's light touch and elusive approach mean it never becomes overbearing for long. It's a touching and resonant addition to the legacy of The Disintegration Loops.

(A full version of this review can be found here: http://thequietus.com/articles/06630-ezekiel-honig-folding-in-on-itself-review).

Surface of the Earth - Surface of the Earth (2011 reissue, Utech Records)

By 1999, Phill Niblock, Nurse With Wound, William Basinski, Windy and Carl, The Dead C and others had brought drone into the latter half of industrialised (indeed, post-industrialised) 20th century culture. But, to my mind, few albums captured this better than Surface of the Earth's self-titled second album. It's just a shame that, apparently, no-one was listening at the time.

Because Surface of the Earth, for me, represents the apex of the urbanisation of drone. At its core, this is a guitar album: two or three electric guitars, fucked-up and fucked around with until they are barely more than noise generators, spitting feedback into the ether to dance listlessly with an even less coherent synth rumble. But out of this barely-palpable mess come weird and arresting sounds: the smash of metal upon metal, unholy crackles and seething sub-frequencies. It's as if a hundred machines and power plants are collapsing into your ears. This is, to somewhat join the dots with Brad Sanders' article, the point where drone (re-)connects with metal, as the whole of Surface of the Earth creeps out of the speakers like the kind of unsettling and beautiful murk you get on a Khanate album.

But it is intrinsically, unrelentingly, urban. No flighty dreams of lost gods and opened consciousnesses here. The music of Surface of the Earth is tight, nocturnal and oppressive, as if, as a listener, you've suddenly woken up on top of a ruined skyscraper, in a crumbling city at the end of time, and all around you buildings, railroads and monuments are crashing into a seething pit of nothingness. On the two longest pieces, "Causer Gird" and "Voyager", this almost paradoxically hits such levels of terrifying beauty that, in the manner of Radigue's best works, you might allow yourself to feel elated, transported even, as if on some tantric trip. Then a saturated blast of distorted guitar hits you, and you're plunged back into that ailing city at the end of anything meaningful. It's not often that music can make you feel like the world is ending. Surface of the Earth is one of those delicious moments.

Perhaps this is because it never allows itself to become detached from human existence in the way that, to be honest, a lot of "urban drone" (and, whilst I'm at it, Black Metal) does these days. Maybe that's because it was recorded in a wooden community hall in Wellington, NZ, on two lowly microphones and a cassette deck. Whatever the case, Surface of the Earth is a painfully humane album. Yes, it's deeply oppressive and relentlessly dark, but pay attention and sudden, aching blasts of emotion will emerge, like fleeting bolts of sunlight piercing a cloud-covered sky. On "Voyager" a warm synth line bubbles into the mix, fighting fitfully against the crumbling wall of melancholic distortion and noise. On the luminous closing track, "Sea of Japan", one of the guitarists embarks on a mournful solo, one that wouldn't be out of place on a Slowdive or Jefre Cantu-Ledesma album, full of pathos and despair, but also resolutely urban, as if a lone figure is miserably saluting the end of the world with a guitar from atop the roof of one of those crumbling buildings.

(A full version of this review can be read here: http://thequietus.com/articles/06766-surface-of-the-earth-album-review)

Annapurna Illusion - Life Is An Illusion (2011, Rocket Recordings)

The two Wire-bolstered horsemen of the recent New Age revival are Oneohtrix Point Never (aka Daniel Lopatin) and the trio Emeralds. Whilst both have definitely produced tracks that expertly bridge the gap between twee old-school synth music and post-noise “noughties” culture, I have always found much of their respective outputs (with the exception of OPN’s latest, and excellent, album Returnal, I should mention) to be rather insubstantial and unchallenging, which was the main problem with New Age in the first place.

Above all, when it comes to synth-based drone and ambience, I can never shake the feeling that the Germans did it all a whole lot better decades ago. In the late sixties and early seventies, whilst popular British and American artists were cranking up the volume of their amps, or escaping to rural pastures to expand their minds and turning to folk or prog, several German krautrock and kosmische musicians and bands were using the drone templates of avant-garde composers such as LaMonte Young, Eliane Radigue and Pauline Oliveros to stretch beyond typical rock and pop structures and into the musical cosmos. But where modern-day synth revivalists strain for similar objectives using retro-psychedelic synth melodies and faux-futuristic imagery, they simply cannot compete with the planet-sized, overwhelming sonic explorations of Cluster, Klaus Schulze, Popol Vuh or Ash Ra Tempel.

Which is where Annapurna Illusion, the “doom and dark” project of Not Not Fun alumnus High Wolf, aka “Max”, comes in. Because, even if you forgo the links to Hindu mythology and the Himalayas inherent to the name, Annapurna Illusion creates the sort of deeply enveloping and mystical synth music that was, up until now, the near-exclusive domain of the best of the kosmische acts. To put it in less wanky terms, Life Is An Illusion is simply one of the best albums released thus far in 2011. From the very first shimmering notes of ‘Entering Illusion’, you are given a sense that this music is meant to be huge, uncontrollable and all-consuming.

Throughout Life Is An Illusion, the synths are MASSIVE. On the album’s centrepiece, ‘Dizzy Vultures’, a pulsating, metronomic rhythmic line propels the piece forwards, whilst the synths dart and roar around it like some mad electronic tempest. The proof is here, should one need it, that wholly synthetic music can as heavy, to quote the Les Rallizes Denudes’ album title, as a death in the family. Forget the easy-going patter of Oneohtrix Point Never, the music on Life Is An Illusion feels as dense, unforgiving and mystical as the two great electronic drone albums of early-seventies Germany: Schulze’s Irrlicht and Cluster’s Cluster ’71.

Which is not to say that this is a vulgar case of a young disciple aping his predecessors, far from it. If Daniel Lopatin has one major quality, it’s that he increasingly uses his Oneohtrix Point Never project to inject shades of noise, rock and the avant-garde into mellow synth music, and “Max” does much the same on Life Is An lllusion, only better. ‘Entering Illusion’ may serve to ease the listener into the Annapurna Illusion soundscape, but it still bristles with uneasy electricity, ending in a crackle of volcanic hiss and noise. Throughout ‘Dizzy Vultures’, unsettling vocalisations and rumbles add extra tension to the mix, the track coming on like Cyborg-era Schulze blended with the deconstructed techno of Squarepusher or Aphex Twin. Meanwhile, flexing his kraut muscles to the full, “Max” then adds hard electronic percussion to ‘Crane and Bear’ and ‘Ambrosio’, managing to evoke not just the motorik grooves of Neu! and Harmonia but also the post-industrial clang of Skullflower or Ramleh. The whole album is a heady, subtle blend of approaches and styles, which creates a startlingly powerful and cohesive whole, a sum much greater than its collective influences.

What Annapurna Illusion has essentially lifted from the kosmische giants of 69-73 is not so much their sound as their overall approach. The music on Life Is An Illusion is gigantic and all-encompassing, conjuring up images of towering mountains, lost gods and swirling cosmos. At the same time, he elegantly suffuses his insistent and open-ended drones with touches of industrial noise and saturation that in less capable hands would seem out of place or clumsy. As such, Life Is An Illusion is one of the most accomplished synth drone albums released this last decade, and a welcome addition to the great kosmische canon.

(a full version of this article can be read here: http://www.theliminal.co.uk/2011/08/annapurna-illusion-%E2%80%93-life-is-an-illusion/)

Ricardo Villalobos & Max Loderbauer - Re: ECM (2011, ECM)

ECM is one of the foremost European labels of any kind, releasing gorgeously assembled modern jazz and modern composition, and the genesis of this project can be traced to when the ever-curious Villalobos began integrating titles from the label’s catalogue into his live sets, notably the sparse works of Arvo Pärt and Alexander Knaifel (a great discovery for me - I'm embarrassed to admit I'd never heard of him). Inspired by the results, he recruited Loderbauer and together they set about working on what almost amounts to an homage to the various facets of ECM’s prodigious output.

I say “almost” because these two operators are far too canny to descend into vacant plagiarism or pastiche. That said, fans of Villalobos’ unrote rhythms will probably be baffled upon first hearing “Reblop,” when it edges cautiously out of their speakers. Lifted from a piece by modern composer Christian Wallumrod, it is a stately, minimalist track, with atmospheric piano and harp drifting out of phases of pronounced silence. Techno, this is not. But Villalobos and Loderbauer aren’t content to sit behind others’ achievements, and, armed with their modular synths and mixing desk, they sneak in throbbing synthetic bass lines and fragmented ambience, rearranging the piece into something wholly new. “Resvete,” meanwhile, shifts and shudders between stuttering percussion and meditative ambience. Whether playing with the sparse compositions of Pärt, or the experimental jazz of Bennie Maupin (as on “Rensenada”), Villalobos and Loderbauer create tracks that take the essence of the pieces they’re working on, and re-imagine them in often unpredictable ways.

Villalobos’ night job still occasionally shines through. On “Reblazhentsva,” the pristine vocals and mournful violin lines of Alexander Knaifel’s “Blazhentsva” are married to restrained beats and swirling synth undertones, before segueing into crackling digital noise, creating one of the most exquisitely beautiful and surprising tracks on the album. Meanwhile, “Reannounce” toys with the Arabic music of Louis Sclavos’ “L’Imparfait des Langues,” looping its pulsating polyrhythms and submerging its warbling vocals in layers of waterlogged effects.

The deconstruction and subsequent reassembling of existing musical styles in a post-noise musical culture is an increasingly recurrent meme in popular and underground music these days. Re: ECM essentially takes the idea to its conceptual apex. Bold and exciting, the project demonstrates the infinite possibilities available to modern producers, if only they look in the unlikeliest of places.

(A complete version of this review can be found here: http://www.dustedmagazine.com/reviews/6664)

Phew! I think that has to be a record. And yes, I'm aware the last four are cut-and-paste jobs from websites I contribute to, so sue me. They're there as a bonus anyway, and the points I make still stand.

But, for the record, other albums I've been enjoying this month include Barn Owl's excellent 2010 drone epic Ancestral Star (Thrill Jockey), which sees the Brooklyn duo go all Earth on us, with Morricone-inspired guitar rumbles interspersed among spacier, more kosmische pieces; and the edgy, minimal techno of Ricardo Villalobos' Vasco (2008, Perlon), not to mention his superlative recent collaboration with Max Loderbauer, Re: ECM (2011, ECM), in which they deconstructed and recombined pieces from that venerable modern composition/jazz/world label into startling and unexpected new post-techno experiments.

Switching to more sparse fare, I grabbed a copy of Loren Mazzacane Connors' The Curse of Midnight Mary (2009, Family Vineyard), a recently exhumed collection of old blues moans recorded by the guitarist back in 1981 in a cemetery in New England. Spooky stuff, and proof lyrics aren't always needed to convey a narrative of dread and mystery. His recent collaboration (again on Family Vineyard) with fellow avant-garde guitarist Alan Licht, Into the Night Sky, is also fantastic, and proof that time and Parkinson's disease have not dimmed Connors' power, talent and inventiveness. Speaking of collaborarions, I also highly recommend An Aural Symbiotic Mystery (2006, Sub Rosa), a live set from two personal heroes of mine, Tony Conrad and Charlemagne Palestine. Expertly melding the former's tantric violin drone with the latter's oddball chanting and minimalist piano, the duo creates a single piece that seems to evolve almost organically, hence the album title.

Finally, to satisfy my need for intense volume, I was blessed to submerge myself in Swans' latest album, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky (2010, Young God), an intense, angry record that sees the band's stalwart, Michael Gira, deliver some of his strongest songs in years without showing any signs of letting up on his trademark belligerence. It's not uniformly brilliant, with some weaker tracks that descend into near-Nick Cave levels of high camp, but opener "No Words/No Thoughts" is one of the best songs I've heard in months. Equally abrasive is the wonderful music of The Shadow Ring, the now-defunct band of experimentalist Graham Lambkin. Their second album, Put The Music In Its Coffin (1994, SIltbreeze) is one of the most startling releases of the first half of the nineties, a typically British underground experimental rock masterpiece caught somewhere between The Dead C and The Kinks, with oddball lyrics set to churning electric guitar and bonkers effects. Their 1999 magnum opus Lighthouse (Swill Radio) is even more outlandish, brimming with Lambkin's electronic noise and harsh spoken-word vocals in the fine tradition of Throbbing Gristle and Whitehouse, only more peculiar. Connecting the dots between those acts and the current post-noise underground, The Shadow Ring deserve to stand alongside Skullflower, Ramleh and Richard Youngs as giants of the late-eighties/early-nineties UK underground.

Onto movies. I was able to get back to the cinema in July, and have also been splurging cheerfully on DVDs, from Artificial Eye's Andrei Tarkovsky box set, to the avant-garde shorts of Jeff Keen via My Brother Tom, Gus Van Sant's Gerry and a couple of John Carpenters. I was also rather nonplussed by Spielberg's Munich, but I shan't dwell on that. Here are some of the films that most pumped my nads over the Summer.

Have to start with the big one of the year, really - Terrence Malick's momentous Tree of Life, which won the prestigious Palme d'Or at Cannes. It's a complex, yet also simple (I'll get there, I swear), film that initially had me rather cautious in my appreciation. Essentially, and being rather facetious, there is a phenomenal film at the heart of Tree of Life, but it starts about 45 minutes into it, and ends 15 minutes before the credits roll. Oscar-winning actor Sean Penn plays Jack, a man in the present day who recalls his childhood in Texas, in particular his relationship with his angelic younger brother (who, we learn, has since died), his doting and considerate mother and, above all, his domineering and bullying father (Brad Pitt). Malick's genius is the way he makes this superficially banal foundation into an enduring, emotionally resonant and universal story, and one that transcends its humble origins to reflect the lives, loves and lessons of just about anyone who watches it. If I have a grumble, to return to my earlier facetiousness, it's that he felt the need to underline this universality by book-ending the central premise with some CGI-generated references to the Big Bang, dinosaurs and the origins of humanity themselves. It all seems rather pompous, especially when compared to the heartfelt simplicity and beauty of the middle portion. But make no mistake, Tree of Life is a beautifully shot film, and one powered by the same ambition and vision that drove the great Hollywood films of the sixties and seventies, such as Apocalypse Now and Lawrence of Arabia.

Equally lauded, but much more discreet in its approach was Winter's Bone, a low-budget 2010 chiller by Debra Granik, which was a surprise multiple nominee at this year's Oscars. That it didn't win any is a travesty, because Winter's Bone is the sort of dark, powerful independent film that I'd started to think was dying out across the pond. Set in a remote "redneck" community in the Ozark mountain of Missouri, it depicts a world of methamphetamine labs, lawlessness and emotional isolation, aided by stark photography and a pervading atmosphere of dread and menace. Ree, played by the astounding Jennifer Lawrence, is a self-sufficient teenage girl forced to take care of her younger siblings due to having a disabled mother and absent father. When the authorities come looking for the latter, threatening to evict the family from their ramshackle home if he doesn't show, Ree takes it upon herself to track him down, even if it means confronting the shadiest and most sinister denizens of her community. Again, the premise is simple, yet so effective, and as you follow Ree's increasingly fraught journey through backwoods and trailer parks, the tension becomes nigh-on unbearable, culminating in a heart-pounding finale. Winter's Bone, like Boys Don't Cry, Happiness and My Own Private Idaho before it, demonstrates that it is possible to make truly resonant and powerful films on a tight budget, and in Granik and Lawrence, two new female stars have been unearthed. I can't wait to see their next works.

My wonderful boss Noreen very kindly lent me her DVD copy of Howl (Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, 2010), which was released in 2010 to celebrate the 55th anniversary of the publication of legendary Beat poet Allen Ginsberg's seminal poem of the same name. Rather than simply doing a biopic of Ginsberg (well played by the mercurial James Franco) at the moment of writing the poem, it intersperses a re-enactment of the famous 1957 obscenity trial his publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was subjected to, with Ginsberg's own first reading at the Six Gallery, interviews with the poet at a later stage, and animated sequences designed to illustrate Howl itself. The success of the film is that it brings into focus the genius and beauty of Ginsberg's poem, with the gorgeous animations doing just enough to conjure up its evocative images without distracting from Ginsberg's words. If Howl is perhaps lacking in real drama, it nonetheless succeeds in re-creating the climate and mentalities of the time the poem was released, as well as giving an insight into the mind of its singular creator. Above all, one hopes it will encourage more people to pick up the works of Ginsberg, for they are truly remarkable.

But, for all that the above movies captured my heart and min, the cinematographic figure who most powerfully dominated my summer was maverick British director Andrew Kötting, a true outsider of modern cinema. His 2001 fictional debut, This Filthy Earth can be bought from the BFI (they do pretty awesome DVD packages, I must say) and is well worth the investment, such is the way it stands out from the rest of British cinema, especially in these lackluster days of dull mainstream blockbusters and vapid romantic comedies (can someone please kill Richard Curtis?). This Filthy Earth, set in a remote rural community somewhere in the north of England at an unspecified point in time, is a truly nightmarish vision of country life, soaked in blood, cum, piss, mud and shit, in which nearly all characters are cruel, stupid, manipulative and bigoted, and where all decency is rapidly quashed. Eschewing the forced "realism" of his contemporaries, Kötting takes inspiration from contemporary art and sound manipulation, injecting bizarre archival footage and unexpected musics to create an imbalance between the grittiness of the action and these strange flights of experimental fancy.

He perfected his approach tenfold by the time he released his next film, 2009's masterpiece Ivul. If anything shows the flawed and unadventurous approach we have in this bloody country to our own cinema, it's that talented and innovative directors like Peter Strickland (Katalin Varga), Thomas Clay (Soi Cowboy) and Kötting have been forced to look abroad in order to be able to finance their films. In Kötting's case, he had to take Ivul to France, where he set his allegorical but also deeply personal coming of age tale, in which a teenage boy decides, after being chased away by his father, to live in the trees above their home. Again, Kötting uses his background in avant-garde art to transcend his simple storyline, creating a series of startling and troubling montages to intersperse within the narrative. Ivul is an oddly moving, intense and often amusing film, the closest this country has come to delivering a British answer to Werner Herzog's Herz Aus Glas. That Kötting had to go to France to make it speaks volumes, though sadly, I doubt any of our national tosspot institutions are listening. They're probably too busy wondering where the next Harry Potter-esque cash cow is going to come from. Dicks.

Before I finally bid farewell until the Autumn ends, I should just shout out to that wonderful British institution that is the Tate, once again. Their exhibition of the Vorticists at Tate Britain was excellent, shining a light on a rarely discussed, but phenomenal, avant-garde movement. Tate Modern, meanwhile, garnered deserved praise and success for their comprehensive retrospective of Spanish artist Joan Miro, and, whilst I'm not a huge fan, I certainly developed a new-found admiration for his iconoclastic, amusing and unusual works, which I wouldn't have acquired otherwise.
I'd also like to heartily recommend Rob Young's excellent book Electric Eden - Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music, published by Faber, which gives an in-depth and well-researched history of British folk music (and beyond), from Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst all the way to Julian Cope and David Sylvian, via Peter Warlock, Ewan MacColl, Shirley Collins, Fairport Convention, Davy Graham, Pentangle, Comus, Black Sabbath and a myriad other phenomenal artists.
I also recommend Steve Roden's peculiar book of "music in vernacular photographs, 1880-1955", ...I listen to the wind that obliterates my traces, in which ancient pictures of long-dead musicians are given a new life, but also a new sense of mystery through Roden's intriguing study. Well worth tracking down.

I think I'd better end there, or it'll be December before I get this done. Until next time, whenever that will be, and with the hope the gormless Nadine Dorries' health bill dies the death it deserves, I bid you a happy, erm, life.

- J

Live from a rusted-out garage - the (un)holy triptych of the 68-70 underground

2011-06-26T00:41:00.004+01:00

I'm aware that I've been a little lax of late, with "May on my iPod" falling by the wayside. In my defense, it was the debut gig of my duo Shadow/Play this month, and my life became absorbed by rehearsals and general stress-related inertia. Coupled with a busy work schedule (oh to be a starving but subsidised artist!), and my first forays into published music criticism, and it was inevitable that Rusted Shadows would get somewhat neglected. I did still get round to giving an overdue glowing review of Gene Clark's No Other, so it ain't all bad!

But I return, and to make up for my largesse, I've decided it's "feature" time again. And this month, I intend to focus on three fundamental albums that have come to define what it means (or should mean) to be "underground" or "independent" in rock music. Three albums that defined these very terms. On top of that, I will dedicate some space to other records that also played a huge part in bringing the underground into rock folklore.

These days, with "indy" apparently meaning more that a band sports skinny jeans, Converse and floppy hair, as opposed to any statement on said band's financial status or musical style, it's easy to forget that there once was a time when bands would scrape out an existence well out of the spotlight. These days, in truth, "indy" should mean the multitude of acts that don't make into the pages of the NME and either remain internet phenomena or aren't signed to anything more than a Type-like micro-label. The Libertines, Blur, The Kooks, Kings of Leon, The Killers? Not independent, no matter what the aforementioned toilet paper rag may claim. But between 1967 and 1970, it appears certain visionary bands were able to make real waves whilst flying very much under the mainstream radar. The internet has allowed a similar train to gain some momentum of late, but compared to those halcyon days, it's very much hit-and-miss, with most promising oddballs eventually getting swallowed up by the corporate monsters.

Much of this was due to the psychedelic explosion that took America (Britain not so much - blame it on the domination of the likes of Decca, Polydor, the BBC and so on...) by storm. Suddenly, even more so than in the post-Beatles period, American youth had a true musical movement that reflected its values and tastes. Bands that could barely play, or had spent months noodling away on electric guitar in their parents' garages suddenly became hit acts, and, in comparison to the age of "Love Me Do" and "She Loves You", this music was louder, harder, wilder and more experimental. The term "acid-rock" became a staple way of describing the likes of Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, The Doors and Jimi Hendrix. It didn't have to be perfect. But it generally had to be loud. In an attempt to cash in on this new phenomenon, record labels big and small began scrabbling around and signing every West Coast band in sight, meaning the '66-'71 period would see prodigious amounts of records hitting stores and radio stations all at once. Of course, some of it was dross. Some of it would be era-defining, multi-million-dollar-earning statements. And some records, whether on big labels or tiny indies, would go completely unnoticed, and yet end up having a more lasting effect on most of what came later in rock than the Beatles and even The Rolling Stones. Combined!

The Lenny Kaye-assembled compilation Nuggets is a great way to get a glimpse of this effervescent and overlooked explosion, from a more singles-orientated perspective, and it is an essential purchase for all lovers of garage-rock (as this nebulous sub-genre is perhaps best described - just), but there were also a handful of albums released in the immediate post-Surrealistic Pillow period (i.e. 1966 to early '67) that also merit mention, none more so than the debut album by The Velvet Underground, The Velvet Underground & Nico, which came out in March 1967 and was promptly ignored. Much had been made of the band's association with Pop-Art guru Andy Warhol and the mad, multimedia shows they put on. And let me just say this now, whilst I haven't included The Velvet Underground & Nico in my titular triptych, it is nonetheless the most important album I will mention in this feature. The birth of art-rock, and a wondrous, terrifying and mind-blowing musical snapshot of the seedy underbelly of New York City, The Velvet Underground & Nico is quite possibly the most influential rock album of all time. That it sold so poorly only underlines its status as the underground album par excellence.

And yet... Maybe it stands too far apart and ahead of all competition, being almost impossible to categorise in its scope and vision. It also feels intrinsically linked to Warhol's vision, and his desire to respond to what was coming out of California at the time. Not so much a garage-rock (loft-rock, maybe?) album but a dirty, sophisticated, New York version of Monterey Pop psychedelia (its closest cousin maybe the deceptively sunny psych masterpiece by Los Angeles quintet Love, Forever Changes, released the same year). The Velvets would take their vision into even more noncommercial and extreme directions, meaning The Velvet Underground & Nico is more an amuse-bouche of the underground rock genre (after all, it was intended to be a big deal, and only shit promotion from MGM, coupled with Warhol's increasing disinterest, that caused it to sink), even though it set the scene.

Sitting awkwardly alongside such a magnum opus were the much less ambitious trio of The Seeds, The Deviants and The 13th Floor Elevators.

The Seeds were one of L.A.'s typically ramshackle acts (somehow, the San Francisco bands always seemed more starry-eyed, musically competent and politically-charged, whilst their L.A. cousins seemed more angst-ridden, mean and rough), propelled by lopsided organ and fuzzy guitar riffs. Above all, they had the sneery-voiced Sky Saxon as their leader, someone who could out-weird the likes of Jim Morrison and Arthur Lee. Saxon's paranoid lyrics and high-pitched snarl reached their apex on A Web of Sound, released nearly six months before The Velvet Underground & Nico in October 1966. It's a nasty, druggy album that was always doomed to fail, but which in many ways points to where rock would go ten years later with The Sex Pistols and The Clash: short, snappy rock tracks with nasty vocals and warped lyrics (meanwhile the artwork announces The Cramps). Even more immediately prescient was the side-long opus "Up In Her Room", a gorgeously incompetent garage version of the endless jam epics that would characterise much of where psych-rock would go in the next two years. See? Even in 1966, garage-rock was ahead of the curve.

Even better were Texan band The 13th-Floor Elevators, a barmy, drug-fueled outfit who supposedly coined the term "psychedelic" (at least in rock terms) via the title of their debut album, The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th-Floor Elevators. Where The Seeds were so unkempt, and Sky Saxon so unnerving, that they were never going to trouble the charts, the inability of The 13th-Floor Elevators to crack the top 10 is a bit more of a mystery, were it not for the drugs at least. In Rocky Erikson, they had a singer who could match Mick Jagger for vocal ability and personality, and their songs were just the right blend of belligerent rock and hook-laden psych, with "Fire Engine", "Roller Coaster" and the absolute masterpiece "You're Gonna Miss Me" being nearly peerless. Of course, I've answered my own question, as Erickson's legal troubles and the general vibe of menace and excess that surrounded the band would ultimately be their undoing. However, more than The Seeds, and almost as much as The Velvet Underground, The 13th Floor Elevators have become a bona fide cult band, their murky sound and sinister, warped riffs inspiring a generation of rock bands, including those that immediately followed their first flash in the pan.

The Deviants, meanwhile, hailed from England, which had remained remarkably un-edgy in its psychedelic explorations, especially once Hendrix returned to his homeland. English psych bands often had a pastoral vibe that has rarely aged well (except those that went all the way, such as Fairport Convention and Comus), but The Deviants, part of a Ladbroke Grove/Notting Hill scene that would produce future members of Hawkwind, The Edgar Broughton Band and The Pink Fairies, were an altogether more abrasive proposition, with darker lyrics and harsh blues licks that made Cream look positively twee. Addled by excessive drug-consumption and general incompetence, The Deviants would never make many waves, but their debut album, Ptoof! was released in 1967, long before the freak-rock of Hawkwind would become a proper money-spinner, putting these guys right up there with the aforementioned bands as proper pioneers of the underground sound. "I'm Coming Home", in particular, is a demented, blues-inflected slab of nasty stalker rock, whilst "Nothing Man" predicts the darker, sci-fi-influenced direction psychedelia would end up embarking upon, at least in some circles.

These three uneven, often musically basic records would have a lasting influence on punk and grunge, but ultimately seem like glorious (and gloriously weird) failures, hamstrung by drug excess and a lack of proper musical talent. But then again, that is part and parcel of what defines garage-rock, and by extension the sixties/seventies underground in its entirety: the low budgets make getting something truly transcendent that much harder to attain, with attitude being far more important than chops and virtuosity.

Back in America, one San Francisco act was stepping out of the trippy, flower power vibe of its peers and making up for its lack of musical nous ladle-fulls of attitude and volume: Blue Cheer. Forget Cream, Blue Cheer are the perfect power trio, and they practically invented hard rock on their January 1968 debut Vincebus Eruptum. Vincebus Eruptum is definitive proof, should you need it, that being able to flick out a Jimmy Page-esque solo for twenty minutes whilst simultaneously referencing Robert Johnson, Son House, Chuck Berry and Bach means fucking jack shit compared to being able to scream like a possessed devil and punish your six-string at full, ear-shattering volume. This Blue Cheer, especially their demented axe-man Leigh Stephens, twigged with bells on, and Vincebus Eruptum contains some of the most extreme and heavy metal you will ever come across, with old classics like "Summertime Blues" and "Parchman Farm" (retitled "Parchment Farm", for some reason) given overload treatment, whilst "Doctor Please" must be one of the most overtly drug-influenced monstrosities released in the sixties. It's a decidedly over-the-top and belligerent album, and all the better for it. You can be sure Iggy Pop and Mark Farmer were listening. And in my opinion, Vincebus Eruptum kicks the first 3, even 4, Led Zeppelin albums into the dirt. In fact, only Black Sabbath were doing stuff this heavy in the late sixties. And Blue Cheer got there before them all!

In the UK, the aforementioned Edgar Broughton Band delivered something similarly fucked-up and nasty and loud in the form of their 1969 debut Wasa Wasa, that took the Sabbathian doom-folk-blues vibe and added a dollop of acid-drenched fuzz and Broughton's Howlin' Wolf vocals for good measure. Wasa Wasa possibly has too many delusions of grandeur and hippy notions to really equal the underground vibe of Vincebus Eruptum, but it is just wicked and fucked-up enough to warrant mention here, and like the concurrent records by Hawkwind and Man, show the better side of the UK scene in the post-Beatles, pre-Bowie void years. It's certainly more interesting than what Led Zeppelin (I'm not picking on them, I swear!) and Pink Floyd were doing at the time!

Volume and darkness seemed to be the going trend in the rock underground by this point. The idealism of the Airplane and the Dead, and the commercial triteness of Pink Floyd and the Beatles had become stifling, especially in the wake of Manson and Altamont, and those bands on the periphery of the "scene" were duly responding with bile and fury. Even some of the mainstream was going that way, with the Sabbath acting as a grim shadow to Led Zep and Deep Purple's more fey strands of metal, whilst sinister and sophisticated King Crimson emerged as the most exciting band of the nascent progressive rock scene. And let's not forget the dark turn the Rolling Stones' music took in the wake of Brian Jones' untimely passing. Hippiedom was in its death throes, commercialism was rearing its ugly head, but the underground was somehow making itself heard, and its vibe was permeating everything.

The MC5, a Detroit-based quintet of ex-hippies, pretty much distilled these divergent strands of rock music in 1968 on their live debut Kick Out The Jams. In many ways, it represents the apex of the hippy movement, in that, unlike the mostly passive Woodstock-ites, The MC5 were properly militant, directed with a fierce hand by John Sinclair, founder of the White Panther movement, and with songs expounding communist and revolutionary views and promoting a generally all-or-nothing ideal of social change. In these cynical times, it all seems a bit silly, but luckily the 5 backed such political ramblings with some fucking amazing hardcore rock'n'roll, with the twin guitar attack of Fred 'Sonic' Smith and Wayne Kramer ripping into your ear drums, equally influenced by the punishing crunch of Blue Cheer and, more subtly, the blazing free jazz of Archie Shepp and Albert Ayler. Meanwhile, Rob Tyner was a vocalist extraordinaire, exhorting the crowd at Detroit's Grande Ballroom with the energy and charisma of a religious preacher. There are times when listening to Kick Out The Jams that you actually feel rock'n'roll could change the world. Of course, the MC5 would burn out spectacularly, and the dream of a hippy revolution out of Detroit died, but again, the scream of those guitars did not go unheard.

One thing about Kick Out the Jams (and indeed the heavy blues of Blue Cheer and The Edgar Broughton Band or the basic formula of The Seeds), is that the structures and styles of the music are at heart nothing more than a modernisation, at maximum volume, of those of the r'n'r pioneers such as Jerry Lee Lewis and Eddie Cochran. Once again, this predicted the trend of a few years later, when the UK's proto-punks and pub rockers like Dr Feelgood updated old-school r'n'b to the general acclaim of the press and public. But, of course, this trend for such overt nostalgia (as that of Dr Feelgood) was predicted in an even more overt way by yet another celebrated garage-rock outfit, San Francisco's Flamin' Groovies. Their masterpiece was 1971's Teenage Head, a veritable proto-punk classic, but they set down a marker even earlier with 1970's Flamingo. A former jug band, the Groovies were rocked by seeing the MC5, as well as their psyched-out West Coast brethren, and responded by upping their amp volume exponentially. But at their core, they were ecstatic fans of Lewis, Cochran, Muddy Waters and Little Richard, and their main appeal is that they could rock out in true turn-of-the-decade fashion, with menacing Manson vocals and lyrics, but also had the jerky energy and camp of early rock'n'roll. Sadly, it never caught on, and whilst the Groovies would manage to go one step further with their follow-up, they would remain an influential footnote in the history of garage rock, and little more. Although, for the record, they left behind one of the greatest rock songs ever recorded: "Whiskey Woman", which manages to out-Stones the Stones.

So what of my triptych? For whilst all of the above are excellent, ground-breaking albums, three masterpieces for me sum up what it means to be a proper, unfettered underground (or independent, or garage - you choose) band.

Of course, I could not let The Velvet Underground slip by with such a complimentary but only cursory mention of their first, superlative, album. For, as I have said in the past, The VU are the greatest, most important rock band that ever walked this timid earth, the only band to truly capture, in all its depraved glory, what it means to fucking rock, not just with a guitar but as a way of life. If their debut established that a rock band could also be smart and artistic, then once they had dispensed with the beautiful but intrusive presence of Nico (who would go on to create wonderful albums on her own, I must say, before Nico fans get on my back; I just think the best Velvets moments mostly happened after the German chanteuse had left), they truly flew, albeit in the face of what it meant to be a popular pop-rock band.

The result was White Light/White Heat, which erupted into the world in January 1968, the same month as Vincebus Eruptum. Talk about a double conflagration! Both The Velvets and Blue Cheer played at deafening volume, but where Leigh Stephens and co went for the bludgeoning effect, Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Mo Tucker took the distortion, fuzz and clatter of their hard rock, and married it to probing, intellectual, humorous and sardonic lyrics, mostly written by Reed at his best. Meanwhile, the Tucker/Morrison rhythm section pound out relentlessly steady beats whilst sudden, piercing guitar lines, or shimmers of electrified viola arc out of the murk like rockets, joining the dots between Reed's doo-wop/pop-rock roots and the avant-garde minimalism of Cale. Every track on the album is a wonder, from the awkward grooves of the title track and "Here She Comes Now", to the manic, off the wall noise mess of "I Heard Her Call My Name". Meanwhile, "The Gift" is an hilarious spoken word horror story delivered in hysterically deadpan fashion by Cale. But if any track defines and encapsulates the spirit of fucked-up, heroin-drenched New York punk-rock, it's "Sister Ray", possibly the best rock song ever recorded. As Reed mangles his guitar in a way that could make your hair go grey, for 17 blissful minutes, Cale punches out a daft series of moronic riffs on organ whilst Tucker pounds away on a single drum like she's trying to tear apart the San Andreas fault and bury Californian rock for good. No band was doing rock like The Velvet Underground in 1968, and it's fair to say quite a few people were listening, even if MGM, and the public at large, were not.

Luckily, Mo Tucker's drums, as powerful as they were (and there have been few better drummers in the history of rock music), didn't sink California into the sea, for if they had, we would have been deprived of the majestic garage-country of Neil Young & Crazy Horse. Such has been the Canadian's celebrity (Artist of the Decade in the seventies, according to Village Voice), and the unparalleled success of his mellow 1972 country-folk album Harvest, that it's easy to forget that, after the demise of his sixties band Buffalo Springfield, Young was a bit of an unknown quantity, much in the shadow of his Springfield acolyte Stephen Stills and with only a failed debut solo album to his name.
His meeting with L.A. garage rock quintet The Rockets was a moment of rock serendipity that has rarely been equaled. The rhythm section of The Rockets was made up of Danny Whitten on rhythm guitar, Billy Talbot on bass, and Ralph Molina on drums, and they combined unbelievable funkiness with unbelievable levels of incompetence, in a way that only Neil Young could love, and led to one of the greatest albums of the Canadian's career: Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969). The magic of Crazy Horse was that they allowed Young, a disturbed, fragile and angry folk-rocker, a platform in which to make his sound loud, without putting the kind of pressure on him that the Springfield did. Talbot and Molina were minimalist, but built rock-solid bases for two of Young's most elegiac pieces: "Down By the River" and "Cowgirl in the Sand". On these lengthy masterpieces, the drums and bass become a blank canvas for his guitar and voice. And what a guitar! What a voice! At one time, Young's voice was considered so dismal that he wasn't allowed to sing on his own tracks for the Springfield. Yet his sensitive, fragile warble elevates "Down By The River" or "Running Dry" to elegiac heights, the vulnerability adding to the doom-like vibe of the tracks, as if they were sung by a kid stuck in a closet whilst untold demons roam the corridors outside. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere brought soul into garage rock, adding an emotional depth that transcends the raw power and sturm und drang that characterises most of the above-mentioned music. Neil Young, especially with Crazy Horse, will break your heart. As for the guitar, well I have heard enough guitar solos to elevate a million souls to heaven, but no-one can beat Neil Young in his pomp, and he has rarely bettered "Cowgirl in the Sand", as delivered to an unsuspecting world in 1969 on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. Fuck Clapton, Page and Gilmour - no-one beats Neil Young when Crazy Horse let him fly.
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere brought the hippy Topanga Canyon vibe into somewhere darker, more abstract, jazzier and grungier. Indeed, the look Young sports on the album cover would become the style of Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder and other grunge icons nearly 30 years later. Less than a year after this album, Young would embark on a lucrative, but frustrating, path, as he joined the ego-fest of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, exposing his wondrously underground sounds to a wide -and appreciative- audience, and perhaps already showing how the "indy" rock world could be easily and tackily absorbed into the mainstream. Luckily, Young would be too slippery to obey market concerns, as his controversial mid-seventies output would emphatically prove.

Neil Young, when associated with Crazy Horse, took hippiedom out of flower power into the rusted garage, and made the Woodstock vibe loud. The Stooges took loud music out of hippiedom. They were less intellectual than The Velvet Underground, but songs like "Now I Wanna Be Your Dog", from their debut, self-titled, album, demonstrated a similar interest in depraved and violent sex. But any subtlety, as encapsulated by Lou Reed's lyrics or John Cale's avant-garde leanings, was lost with The Stooges as a miasma of guitar noise and punishing rhythm engulfed any of singer Iggy Pop's potential pretensions in a deluge of exquisite noise. The Asheton brothers, Ron and Scott, on guitar and drums respectively, were long-hired rednecks, with a vicious undercurrent that helped make The Stooges so violent and punishing that, no matter how their second album, Fun House (1970) strayed from the mainstream, it couldn't help but get noticed. It's that good.
Much of The Stooges appeal will always be down to front-man James Osterberg, aka Iggy Pop, who, for all his bonkers stage antics (self-harming, nudity, swearing at the audience...) was very much the thinking man of the band, the lyricist, jazz-lover and friend of Bowie and Reed. But never underestimate Scott Asheton's ability to hold a beat like a heavy metal metronome, whilst Ron's scything, ever-soloing guitar (he had that remarkable talent of being both lead guitarist and rhythm) is like a coiled snake, scooting around Pop's voice as he moans, roars, sneers and yelps. The Stooges defined a rock dynamic that moved away from the twin-guitar-with-vocals approach of the sixties bands, and back to pioneers like James Brown and Little Richard, where the voice and guitar don't so much duet as duel. On "Dirt", the pinnacle of Fun House, The Stooges lay aside their high-octane, full-throttle attack in favour of a dirty blues groove, whilst Ron Asheton's guitar, with its peppering, never-ending solo, comes across like John Coltrane's sax. Yes, it's that gorgeous. Iggy's lyrics of self-harming and self-loathing are just the icing on the cake. "Dirt" proves that The Stooges could be subtle and smart, whilst the rest of Fun House saw them flexing muscles and battering the senses in all their garage-punk-metal glory. The Stooges were well ahead of their time, a true punk outfit, but with the personality of a post-punk band. They managed to predict both The Sex Pistols and PiL. Need I say more?

If anything, my (un)holy triptych perfectly demonstrate just how intangible "garage", "indy" or "underground" rock can be. Lou Reed, Neil Young and Iggy Pop are all now mega stars, who have eased, perhaps reluctantly, into elder statesman territory. Such is life. The Stooges, Crazy Horse and The Velvets are now often the first bands on the lips of the latest band to be signed to Universal or Sony. The underground is now so vast as to be incomprehensible, whilst our old idols only make sense in reverse. Again, such is life. Or at least music. And with the endless horizons come new artifacts from decades long past: true underground and lost gems, such as Alexander Spence's Oar or Tangerine Dream's incredible debut, Electronic Meditation. Both came out in the period I've been describing in this feature, and in so many ways they go beyond even the heady heights of my triptych. But the trio I have ultimately chosen bridge the gap between noncommercial music and the mainstream, tearing angrily at the fabric of popular trends to take things, whether they knew it or not, to new levels. It would happen again with PiL, Joy Division, The Cure and Television, amongst others. The underground won't leave the mainstream alone, and for that we should be eternally grateful, even if it makes no sense.

My '66-'70 Garage Playlist:

1. The Seeds: "No Escape" (from The Seeds)
2. The Seeds: "Up In Her Room" (from A Web of Sound)
3. 13th Floor Elevators: "You're Gonna Miss Me" (from The Psychedelic Sounds Of...)
4. 13th Floor Elevators: "Roller Coaster" (from The Psychedelic Sounds Of...)
5. The Electric Prunes: "I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night) (from Nuggets)
6. The Velvet Underground: "Venus In Furs" (from The Velvet Underground & Nico)
7. The Velvet Underground: "Heroin" (from The Velvet Underground & Nico)
8. The Deviants: "I'm Coming Home" (from Ptoof!)
9. Blue Cheer: "Doctor Please" (from Vincebus Eruptum)
10. Blue Cheer: "Parchment Farm" (from Vincebus Eruptum)
11. The Edgar Broughton Band: "Death of an Electric Citizen" (from Wasa Wasa)
12. MC5: "Kick Out The Jams" (from Kick Out The Jams)
13. MC5: "I Want You Right Now" (from Kick Out The Jams)
14. Flamin' Groovies: "Heading For The Texas Border" (from Flamingo)
15. The Velvet Underground: "The Gift" (from White Light/White Heat)
16. The Velvet Underground: "I Heard Her Call My Name" (from White Light/White Heat)
17. The Velvet Underground: "Sister Ray" (from White Light/White Heat)
18. Neil Young and Crazy Horse: "Cinnamon Girl" (from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere)
19. Neil Young and Crazy Horse: "Down By The River" (from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere)
20. Neil Young and Crazy Horse: "Cowgirl In the Sand" (from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere)
21. The Stooges: "Dirt" (from Fun House)
22. The Stooges: "1970" (from Fun House)
23. The Stooges: "Fun House" (from Fun House)
24. Tangerine Dream: "Journey Through A Burning Brain" (from Electronic Meditation)
25. Alexander Spence: "Grey/Afro" (from Oar)

- J.Phimister, June 2011

Great Unsung or Underappreciated Albums 12: NO OTHER by GENE CLARK (1974)

2011-05-29T18:37:00.001+01:00

Here's a thought: what if the best album of 2003 was in fact a reissue? I mean, quite a few bands, including M83 with their superb Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts could probably have a claim to that title, whilst the usual music rags waxed lyrical over The White Stripes and their ilk, but the remastered edition of Gene Clark's 1974 classic probably beats them all. Hands down. The fact that it was unavailable for so long only added to the delight that I felt upon rediscovering No Other.

A little history is in order. Even as the annals of rock history are exposed and pondered by all, Gene Clark comes across as something of an enigma. He was a founding member of The Byrds, the "American Beatles". In fact, ha was their first singer, finest songwriter and most driving early creative force. It's his distinctive warble that graces such classics as 'I'll feel a whole lot better' and, audible despite the three-part harmony, 'Mr Tambourine Man'. Early Byrds fans still look back with fondness as they remember the tall, shy-looking Clark standing centre-stage, banging his tambourine. He looked like an early Neil Young. He could have been a star. But, as his fear of flying took its own centre-stage, he quit the band in 1966, and became a pioneer of country rock and then one of the best examples of the late-sixties/early-seventies singer-songwriter movement. His 1971 self-titled 3rd album, aka White Light, should have been huge. Dylan loved it. The critics gave it good reviews. But the public ignored it, as they always would when it came to Gene Clark. His reluctance to tour played no small part.

But his fortunes appeared to be turning in 1973, when he emerged from a doomed Byrds reunion project as the only one with a bit of credibility and was handed a fat contract by Asylum records to make a new album. Much like Neil Young with Tonight’s the Night, what Gene Clark delivered to Asylum boss David Geffen was undoubtedly a million miles from what the money-obsessed record exec expected. He had probably been hoping of 12 tracks of sunny, Byrds-like vocal harmonies or trendy country-rock backed by delicate picking, the odd electric guitar break and Harvest-style slide. Instead, he got a weird, expensive, 8-track UFO of a record, with baroque arrangements, a landslide of backing vocals, and bizarre, arcane lyrics that were about as far from “moon-June-spoon”as you can get. He pretty much threw it in the trash and No Other disappeared quickly without a trace, despite several positive reviews.

Which is a travesty, because I can boldly state that No Other is unique. Gram Parsons dreamed of making “cosmic American music”, a sort of magic blend of all the great music ever made in the New World: rock, blues, country, gospel… Well, Parsons came pretty close on Grievous Angel, but Gene Clark hit the nail slap-bang on the head with No Other. ‘Life’s Greatest Fool’ kicks off in deceptively familiar fashion, a cheery country jaunt superbly delivered by Clark’s mesmerising tenor (think of a psychedelic Roy Orbison with less style but more haunted). Suddenly, a choir of backing voices kick in and the song becomes a ghostly gospel, with topical (dare I say spiritual?) lyrics to boot. The second track, ‘Silver Raven’ is even better, a track so filled with mysticism, it could have been written by Native Americans or Celtic druids. Clark’s imagery is stunning, deeply evocative yet strangely elliptical. It leaves you guessing throughout the album, despite the wealth of images and reference points that spring up: seventies drug culture, cocktail parties in 1930s Hollywood, the rolling pastures of the Deep South... It seems that all of America is encapsulated in this album, a feeling only boosted by the music: avant-garde effects and warped funky congas on the title track, soothing country folk with mystical overtones on ‘From A Silver Phial’, sweeping orchestration and elegant piano on ‘Strength of Strings’. Clark’s prose hits spectacular heights on the latter track (as he evokes the feeling, not so much of music itself, but of the air that’s filled with music, if that makes any sense!) and on the majestic ‘Some Misunderstanding’. This is seventies psychedelia at its best, the listener is swept up in a tornado of unpredictable sounds, from the sweeping choir to Clark’s unique vocal style.

Analysing No Other is perilous: it has no bounds, so how can you start to pick apart the details? Like blind people checking out an elephant for the first time, you only get part of the picture by clutching at the straws: an instrument here, a line there. This is the kind of record you need to plunge into, to absorb like a vast canvas. It’s not always easy going, but the aura of tortured elegance is fascinating. It’s been years since I first heard No Other on a bootleg CD, but I keep coming back to it. Its twisted, lonely beauty keeps drawing people back to it, another element that puts it on a par with Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night. No Other is just as seminal record as the Canadian’s magnum opus, and it’s influence on everyone from Fleetwood Mac (just listen to Rumours) to REM is obvious. No Other’s reputation, like that of a good indie film or a great restaurant, is creeping from person-to-person by word-of-mouth. I hope this helps a few more people get on board. There literally is no other album like No Other!

Lonely tears - thoughts on depression

2011-05-21T15:44:00.001+01:00

"Though my problems are meaningless/That don't make them go away" - Neil Young, "On the Beach"

No-one prepares you for the agony of living...

The curse of the middle classes, someone once called it (I'd like to think that was me, but I doubt it). For context's sake, I should mention that someone I know has tried to take his or her life. Thankfully, this person was unsuccessful, and whilst he or she has escaped the worst, he or she will now have to deal with the fallout of that attempt: the guilt, recrimination and incomprehension. Above all, this person will have to continue to fight against one of the most prevalent but misunderstood illnesses in the world: depression.

Let me give the lie to one of the most stupid and harmful of misconceptions about suicide: that it's selfish and cowardly. Can anyone imagine anything braver? I do not believe that such a decision is made flippantly, at least not in 99% of cases. I know first hand of the anguish and despair that can lead to the notion, one that quickly becomes all-encompassing, that one's life is no longer worth living. And these people have stared into the abyss of non-existence and decided that total annihilation is still preferable to being alive. This is the level of despair and pain we are talking about.

Of course, for the family of a suicidal person who has taken this plunge, it's horrible as well. They are left behind to pick up the pieces. It's awful, but that should not be a reason to undermine the agony that depressive people feel, even those who end up leaving their loved ones behind.

For over 10 years now, I have suffered from severe depression and borderline personality disorder. At first, I internalised it, unable to comprehend what I was feeling - surely it was little more than typical pubescent angst? As my teenage years turned into my twenties, I continued this isolation, not confiding in anyone about the fact that I was so miserable so often, for reasons I couldn't understand. After all, what did I have to be miserable about? I had a loving family, parents who had given me more love and financial support than I was entitled to expect. I was wealthy, well-educated, and well set on a path to be successful. As such, the guilt over the dark feelings and implacable sadness was almost as crushing and those emotions themselves. I knew people who had lost their mothers or fathers or siblings at a young age, or who were having to deal with poverty, severe illness or abuse. How dare I feel like shit on a nearly basis? These people had a reason to. I sure as fuck did not, or so I believed (and still do, despite my decade-long struggle). So I kept it inside, and, imperceptibly, became a drinker.

It only came to a head once during my uni days. My drinking spiraled as I fought to keep my inner turmoil to myself. Sure, there were times where I would tentatively confide in friends that I felt mournful at times (a touch of "the blues"). Sometimes there would be tears, dismissed later as drunken foolishness. But one night, as I lay -admittedly drunk after a solo binge on vodka- in tears on my bed in my studio flat, I decided I'd had enough. A voice in my head was telling me that the reason I was alone, and had never had a girlfriend (my depression was so bad during my teenage years that I was totally unable to process the fact that I was gay; something that would remain a source of unidentified identity strife until I was about 21), was because I didn't deserve anything more than this solitude. I had reach depths of self-hatred that I couldn't even put a name to, I couldn't comprehend what was happening to me. All I knew was that I felt awful, that I was in floods of tears for no apparent reason, and that there was only one way I could end it for good.

Thankfully, I failed. Possibly my innate fear of death stopped me going through with it properly. I don't think it was just a cry for help, as I was very much alone, and didn't tell anyone for years. Had it worked, I wouldn't have been found for days. But the pills I took just made me vomit profusely, and I escaped. I threw myself into my university work and, above all, a wonderful relationship, and evaded such depths for a while.

It didn't last, sadly, and, after a few idyllic years during which my mood fluctuated without frequently reach rock bottom, the dark clouds returned, with a vengeance. This time, inspired by a Stephen Fry documentary, I decided to get medical help. My best friend, and then girlfriend, had already explained to me that I had something wrong with me. (Incidentally, she helped me accept my sexuality.) But Fry's brave exposure of a different form of depression - bipolar disorder - crystalised the notion that this was something you could treat. For a while, the combination of anti-depressants, my girlfriend (later friend)'s support, and a diagnosis of depression and body dysmorphic disorder, helped me to gain some perspective on my mind and feel better about myself, and my sexual identity.

But, and this is key, as far as I, and many depressed people I know, are concerned, it never goes away. Ever since that initial diagnosis and slow start to treatment, I have experienced constant periods of catastrophically low mood, where it feels like my mind is turning on itself, rending itself apart in a tornado of evil thoughts: that I'm worthless, ugly, stupid and should be dead. Sometimes things set it off: my personality disorder means rejection is something I can't handle at all, for example; sometimes it comes seemingly out of nowhere. There are times where I wake up in the morning and wish I hadn't. Times where my thoughts are consumed with ideas of death and dying. This has impacted on my work, my drinking, my relationships with others and my ability to experience romance or love. I am currently having to deal with being alone for the foreseeable future as I try to deal with these pits of debilitating depression. It's a sad, troubling reality, and one that is almost impossible to understand if you don't suffer from something similar.

To a lot of people, I seem perfectly happy: good job, good sense of humour, lots of fun times... I've learned to project a mask, as so many others with my condition(s) do. If anything, this is the hardest part: keeping up an appearance of normalcy when everything inside you feels like it is crumbling into chaos and horror.

But I am working on it. It has taken over a decade, but I have finally a proper and, I believe, lucid idea of what is wrong with me. I have a good therapist, and strong medication. Sadly, the sense of guilt about this "invisible" illness, that somehow I should, in the words of the Daily Mail, just "snap out of it", that I have, as someone close to me once said, "so much going for" me and therefore have little right to feel so down so frequently, doesn't go away. There is so much stigma attached to mental illness, even when it's this dramatic. But the bravery of people like Fry, Alastair Campbell and Ruby Wax, who have "come out" as mentally ill and/or depressed, is an inspiration. I now try to not put such a rigid mask up. If people ask, I will talk about this illness. Not necessarily so that they will understand, though that would be nice, but so that I can keep facing up to it, and, to use an Americanism, "own" it.

I don't know if I will beat it. I hope so, as this is not a sustainable way to live. It hurts too much. It's exhausting. My personality is still fundamentally flawed, in ways that I can't control and that make me at times unable to move, eat or sleep. The suicide ideation is never far away, although I've found that channeling it into songwriting helps. Knowing what is wrong with me, and expressing it, has certainly helped, and I'm stronger, albeit more exhausted (10+ years is a long time to carry this stuff) than when I was alone in my studio flat 8 years ago. But I'm still alive. And I like that. If we can continue to break the walls of silence and incomprehension that surround mental illness, maybe fewer people will have to go through the isolation and desperation that my friend and I have suffered. Baby steps are still steps...

This world is a wonderful place, full of beauty and kindness. But some of us can't often see it, especially in ourselves. It's a true disease, a dysfunction of the brain. My heart was broken by my mind. I'm trying to put it back together. As I do, it goes out to my friend and all the others out there who have to live under a heavy, painful cloud. Please spare us a thought. Love really is the answer, as corny as that sounds.

- J Phimister

April on my iPod!

2011-05-10T20:19:00.003+01:00

Greetings one and all!

So, predictably, the Alternative Vote, the one chance that us Brits will have to change our outdated and unfair electoral system in a generation, has failed, undermined by a lackluster "Vote Yes" campaign, some cynical, misleading and nasty campaigning from the "No" camp, and the fact that the whole country now hates Nick Clegg. In fact, had the aforementioned Deputy PM really wanted it to pass, he should have gone around the country campaigning for First Past the Post. The result would no doubt have been a Yes landslide. Instead, we keep a stupid system that favours the Tories and Labour, the former even more so now that their plans to redraw the electoral map can go ahead. Oh well...

Then, of course, there was the Royal Wedding, between Prince William and the "lower class" Kate Middleton. Such an event, yet I slept through it, something I apparently should be grateful for, as it involved such levels of sycophancy and talk of hats that I probably would have topped myself. Sometimes alcoholism has its plus points.

Luckily, I have more edifying things to interest and amuse me, such as Gerard Malanga and Victor Bokris' Up-Tight; The Velvet Underground Story. Malanga was one of the dancers in the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, the multimedia show that Andy Warhol put together to accompany the Velvets in the early days when they had Nico as "chanteuse". Poorly edited, the book nonetheless gives some interesting insight into the circus that surrounded this most important of rock bands (the best ever?), from the Warhol-mania of the first two years, through the lackluster promotion by MGM, the departures of Nico, Warhol and guitarist/bassist/viola player, and musical genius, John Cale, to the band's ultimate demise in a cloud of paranoia and drug abuse, usually involving the egocentric other genius of the whole enterprise, Lou Reed. The main protagonists' complex personalities and interactions are laid out in much detail and, whilst there will always be something frustrating about how things panned out, for the musicians themselves as well as fans like me, Up-Tight essentially serves as reminder -were it needed- of how innovative, exciting and creative The Velvet Underground really was.

Hip-hop is not usually a genre I have much time for. Obviously, the prevalent (and generally unchallenged) homophobia, sexism and crass glorification of materialism are massive turnoffs for me, and people can say whatever they like about Eminem's supposed "talent", the fact that he's written songs about physically attacking gay people and calling us "faggots" means he can jump up his own arse and die as far as I'm concerned. But beyond such ethical matters, there's also a sense that rap and hip-hop have lost their mojo, the music becoming shiny and over-produced, the lyrics less interesting the more they focus on cars and ass over political issues. The days of Nas' superb Illmatic album seem far away now.
Which is why legendary, lamented Houston-based producer DJ Screw remains such a truly essential figure, eleven years after his untimely passing. Screw invented a new way of approaching hip-hop, taking existing tracks and slowing them down, cutting them up and reassembling them as off-kilter reflections of the originals, often highlighting the emotive power or humourous undercurrents of the source materials.
Pat Maherr, discovered by me last year under his Indignant Senility moniker, is obviously a keen follower of the DJ Screw style, and gives a wonderful demonstration of the possibilities of this approach -dubbed Chopped and Screwed- on the debut album of his Expressway Yo-Yo Dieting project, Bubblethug (Weird Forest, 2010). The album surges out of the speakers from the get-go, the first of 13 untitled ("Unknown") tracks leaping forwards with a lopsided gait and awkward brazenness. Ugly, untidy beats accompany a voice so slowed-down as to be rendered unintelligible, an untethered moan that is almost hilarious as the other core elements of the track -a shimmer of electronic synths, some ghostly backing vocals- attempt to bring coherence to the unsightly (but hypnotic) mess. In 6 minutes and 3 seconds, Maherr pretty much rewrites the rules of hip-hop, destroying the genre's macho swagger and turning it into something rawer, more unhinged from material concerns and therefore both primordial and futuristic.
Bubblethug is therefore a confusing slab of modern pop, uneasily ghosting between genres, always hip-hop at its core, but unremittingly dark, as the tortured vocals and minimalist music pervert the joviality of the album's parent genre. On the third track, the abrasive, disjointed percussion recalls the metallic crunch of early Einsturzende Neubauten or Test Dept., with track 4 also following a similar industrial path, with an opening burst of tremelo-ed noise that wouldn't sound out of place on a Skullflower album circa Orange Canyon Mind or Taste the Blood of the Deceiver, which leads intot he kind of noisy pounding groove familiar to most SPK fans. By track 8, Maherr whittles down the grooves completely, leaving a shapeless post-industrial ambience, before launching a messed-up, motorik form of driving-krautrock-meets-hardcore-rap on the 9th track, joining the dots between house, ambient techno and pure, krunky hip-hop.
At hip-hop's core are synths, beats and vocals. By untethering them from each other, Maherr allows these parts to dissolve into a post-noise miasma, honing in on the gloomy core of the tracks he's fucking up whilst freeing up the genre to incorporate fresh ideas. Whilst, like Indignant Senility's Plays Wagner, Bubblethug is overlong, it hits more often than it misses and Maherr has managed once again to create something fresh, exciting and rather peculiar.

A word I've seen used to describe such experimental manipulations of hip-hop is "underwater", and it would be equally apt if applied to the meandering drone of Geoff Mullen's wonderful Bongo Closet (Type, 2010). It's an odd title for an album of haunting, whispy, electronic drone, but, as one reviewer noted, you don't have to have bongos in your bongo closet. It also suggests hidden, forgotten instrumentation, and Mullen's elusive use of percussive elements illustrates this rather mysterious approach to sound sculpture. Most of the album, straight from the opening track, doesn't so much advance as drift, weightlessly, with quiet ebbs and flows evoking the best of Thomas Koener, always hanging at the edge of perception as deep bass notes rumble towards your guts and occasional wafts of synth patterns edge into focus before sliding away into the digital haze.
The possible exception is the second track, on which the album's title is given an ironic twist through sub-aquatic percussion that seems to seep into the mix from very far away whilst echoey guitar snippets and occasional flutters of electronics dart and surge like butterflies fluttering around your head. It's a sort of languid take on the motorik krautrock of Neu, but performed with the ethos of ambient kosmische pioneers Cluster, pulsating and oblique. In the end, the album's closest cousin is probably D'Agostino/Foxx/Jansen's classic A Secret Life, sharing that album's delicate sense of urban alienation and detached melancholia. There will always be something vaguely insubstantial to such deliberately vague and transluscent music, but the hidden sensitivities are wonderfully comforting, particularly in the deep of a city night.

As underground music has exploded in a myriad of directions, one rather reliable constant has been the enthusiasm for bass music, from the hugely successful uber-throbbing dancefloor music that is dubstep, to the pop-reggae crossovers that have emerged, mostly from the USA, in the wake of David Keenan's heralding of the hypnagogic pop epoch. In this regards, husband-and-wife duo Peaking Lights are not really plowing a novel furrow on 936 (Not Not Fun, 2011), coming on the back of labelmates Sun Araw and Pocahaunted's success, but it is one of the better example of how underground electronic pop-rock can be threaded into dub and still be accessible, tuneful and hi-energy (ok, not that energetic, this is languid stuff, but it's not as drawn-out as most dub).
The considerable strength of 936 is the duo's songwriting craft, which probably exceeds that of Pocahaunted, even at that band's Island Diamonds pomp. Tracks like "Amazing and Wonderful" and "Birds of Paradise" have a verve, vim and drive that is incredibly infectious, hooking you from the get-go and swimming through your system like cold tonic on a warm day. The balance between the fat bass lines and the synth/guitar melodies is pitch-perfect, whilst Indra Dunis' dreamy voice is used to perfection. There are also some wonderful drum machine beats, notably on "Amazing and Wonderful", which glides along like a wave on a sandy beach. Compared to the deliberately woozy dub-pop of many of their contemporaries, Peaking Lights keep things energetic and anchored in the Slits/PiL tradition that birthed the marriage of dub and western music. An accomplished album.

Fucking hell - I really, truly, deeply, unconditionally, fucking LOVE The Rita!! Ok, so that's a bit mad, but it's hardly my fault given the overwhelming quality of just about everything Sam McKinley does.
The Voyage of The Decima MAS (Troniks, 2009) may be his most extraordinary statement yet, the culmination and sublimation of everything that has thus far been accomplished in the field of Harsh Noise Walls. If giallo film scores and underwater recordings of sharks provided excellent sources to be manipulated by The Rita's devillish hand and turned into walls of unending saturation, on The Voyage of The Decima MAS, he has found his best material yet, as he uses recordings of -wait for it- snorkelling (!) to deliver something so outlandish it could just about represent the apex of this noise sub-genre. I mean, just consider it - this surely represents a stroke of genius on McKinley's apart, something that is apparent from the first second. The album launches with a traditional burst of unmoving, hugely saturated and crackling white noise, but almost immediately evolves into the furious rumble and burble of bubbles whistling through a snorkel. Amplified to the extreme, these sounds become part of the wall of sound, bass-heavy and abrasive, but much more dynamic than anything on A Thousand Dead Gods or Bodies Bear Traces of Carnal Violence. The listener is not so much assaulted as -and surely this is the ultimate aim of most HNW?- submerged, plunged into the sound as if into a vast, turbulent ocean.
Rest assured, The Voyage of The Decima MAS is as monolithic, harsh and implacable as anything done in the world of harsh noise, with the familiar grittiness so frequently encountered in American noise, but the sudden eruptions of swirling, volcanic water sounds gives it a sense of drama (at times you can feel like you're drowning, such is the psychological impact of the sounds) and impetus that elevates it above most of its contemporaries. McKinley's approach is cerebral, an exploration of how a genre as alienating as noise can evoke emotions beyond the traditional anger, viciousness or brutality associated with it, and plunges it (almost literally) into a consideration of nature versus technology, the effect pedal against the roaring ocean. It may just be the best-ever harsh noise album, certainly close, and definitely one that elevates The Rita to similar status -in my eyes- as Merzbow, Hijokaidan and Werewolf Jerusalem.

Hmm, with the possible exception of Peaking Lights, I seem to have gone for a sub-aquatic theme this month. Curious...

Decidely NOT watery was the wonderful Fred Frith concert I attended on April 28th at the now-ubiquitous in my life Cafe Oto. Frith, formerly of Henry Cow and Art Bears, and who released one of the world's greatest albums of guitar improv, Guitar Solos (1974), delivered one of the best concerts I've ever seen and, coming so soon after Keiji Haino's equally wondrous two-day residency a few weeks earlier, I'm beginning to think that Oto, for all the falafel-and-ginger-beer propensities of its crowd, can do no wrong.
Like Haino, Frith's first set was a solo exploration of the extreme possibilities of electric guitar, as he used a variety of tools, from spinning copper plates to chain necklaces, plus his faithful effects pedals and speedy fingers, to extract a wonderful array of sounds, from punkish sturm und drang to elegant, deeply emotive melodic motifs. It was fascinating to watch, and deeply moving.
For the second set, he was joined by drummer Roger Turner, and there was a sense of gleeful exploration as the two men set about improvising with a delight and humour too often missing from such explorations. Both carried on the exercise of using weird utensils on their instruments, but never for weirdness' sake alone, and never forgot to rock out and deliver tangible riffs and melodies for the audience's delectation.
For the third piece, more abstract, Frith joined forces with genius saxophonist John Butcherb and cellist Hannah Marshall, before Turner returned for a grandiose, powerful finale. These two performances were certainly more challenging than the first two, and perhaps a tad too cerebral in comparison to the raw energy and humour of the first half, but you could not but admire the sheer talent and virtuosity they all displayed. Another fantastic demonstration of the power of experimental music in the live setting, once again sold-out, as if to prove there is hope for avant-garde art in these dark, lowbrow times.

In movies, two films I saw last month were worthy of note, being stand-out examples of the portrayal of homosexuality in film, from opposite ends of the struggle for equal rights.

Released last year, Strapped is an excellent little indie film written and directed by Joseph Graham, which takes place solely within a single apartment building. Hunky young actor Ben Bonenfant plays a veteran hustler who services a john, helping him come to terms with his sexuality in the process, but then finds himself unable to find a way out of the building, leading to more and more encounters with the sad, the fucked-up, the lonely, the old and the repressed of the gay world. It's a familiar theme in gay cinema, is hustling, but in Strapped it is approached from a novel angle, as Bonenfant's character, whilst providing temporary or lasting solace to others, starts to analyse his own life and his own purgatory. The dialogue is smart and intense, and the various characters, whilst all archetypes, have a depth and emotion to them that is testament to Graham's skill as a writer.

As novel as it it may be, Strapped is nonetheless a product of a world where homosexuality, whilst not always completely accepted, is a legally recognised sexual orientation and lifestyle; and was released in the relatively open-minded 2010s. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Basil Dearden's Victim, released in 1962, came out at a time when sexual intercourse between two men or two women was illegal in the United Kingdom, and punishable with a prison sentence. Its very creation was an act of bravery and, as expected, it was wholly controversial, though now cited as one of the factors that led to decriminalisation in 1967. The late, great, nay, magnificent, Dirk Bogarde plays a successful, married, QC names Farr, whose young gay friend, with whom he had a platonic but affectionate relationship, commits suicide after being blackmailed over his relationship with Farr. When Farr attempts to take on the blackmailers, his own homosexual past, and the hostility of conservative society, not to mention the blackmailers themselves, threaten to jeopardise his career and the facade of "normal" life he's built up. In terms of narrative and photography, Victim is pretty standard of its time, and hardly ground-breaking, but the fact that it tackles such a then-taboo subject head-on, not to mention a marvelous central turn by Bogarde, make it one of the most important films ever to deal with gay issues. It doesn't flinch from portraying homosexuality as natural, and gay men as the unfortunate victims of repressive law and evil blackmailers. A brave and stirring film, one that all gay men and women should see, especially as it highlights the struggles and anguish our forbears had to face.

Much as with Cafe Oto, I finally put paid to a glaring omission from my East End cultural landscape by finally going to the wonderful Whitechapel Gallery (website here: http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/home). I cannot recommend this -usually 100% free- gallery enough, as it combines all kinds of forms of artistic expression and above all gives voice (and canvas and space) to little-known and emerging artists. However, on the day I went I was lucky to visit their extensive retrospective of the 30-year career of photographer Paul Graham.

His earliest works from the eighties, i.e. Thatcher's Britian (the show is chronological), were notable for their political nature. In "The Great North Road", he explores the UK's north-south divide, and social inequality through photos taken along the A1, from "comfortable" north London to Edinburgh via sleepy former industrial cities and rundown backwaters. His pictures have the forlorn weariness of an American road movie a la Broken Flowers or Paris Texas, and shine an unusual light on England's battered roadsides. In "Beyond Caring", he takes his wide, cinematic approach to dole offices, filming those miserable antechambers of poverty and the unfortunate souls who had to trek into them every day in a desperate often vain attempt to find work. The grubby offices and haggard-looking people in them serve as an uncomfortable indictment of the Tory party's ghastly social policies. Given the way they're once again taking the knife to public services and jobs in 2011, "Beyond Caring" is unfortunately still very relevant, although the beauty of each picture's composition goes some way towards alleviating that sense of frustration.
In the 90s, Graham's pictures would become more abstract and poetic, as opposed to overtly political, as demonstrated in his series on Japan, "Empty Heaven", which juxtaposed images of traditional Japanese things like geishas and ceremonies with urban decay and modernity. Less demonstrative, this opposition of images, in bright, lurid coulour, leaves an impression of ambiguity, and even suspense. In "End of an Age", young people in an anonymous city at the turn of this century are photographed in close up, their expressions once again ambiguous as they approach the uncertain future of the new millenium, with a deeply melancholy vbe permeating throughout. Best of all, in "Ceasefire", Graham uses gorgoeus pictures of grey skies, taken in Northern Ireland, to illustrate the frustration and uneasiness of yet another lull in the Troubles, this time in 1994. As history has shown, it would be tragically only a temporary reprieve.
By the last decade, Graham's ambition had grown even greater, and the last series, "a shimmer of possibility" combined the best of his earlier "social commentary" period with the sense of intimacy found in "End of an Age". He travelled the USA, photographing the multi-faceted aspects of American society, from crippling poverty to towering, modern cities, stopping to take small series focusing on particular individuals, as if trying to get more intimate with and close to his subjects' lives. The separation created by the camera of course creates an unavoidable barrier, meaning such closeness is only a vague possibility, and this dynamic creates real drama, and poetry.
Paul Graham was a wonderful discovery for me, and I heartily recommend art lovers visit the Whitechapel before the exhibition ends.

So ends another monthly musing. Peace!

- J Phimiser

The Ecstatic Crunch and Crackle - Werewolf Jerusalem and Skullflower in concert

2011-05-02T14:25:00.000+01:00

On April 15th, I returned to the scene of one of my favourite concerts, the Voltigeurs/Filthy Turd/Vomir/The Rita noisefest of last November, Stockwell, South London's wonderfully gritty The Grosvenor pub, with its inimitable back-room performance space.

Once again, I was there for noise, and two of the living legends of the loudest of musics had convened to share another bill organised by the wonderful chaps from Second Layer records: Werewolf Jerusalem and Skullflower. I was predictably as excited as a child given access to Disneyland all on his own.

People who read this blog will know the regard with which I hold the might Skullflower, one of the greatest bands of all time (if you don't, here's my modest history and album-by-album appraisal of the band's output: http://rustedshadows.blogspot.com/2010/11/gateway-to-blasphemous-light.html). Skullflower's evolution from post-industrial doom metal pioneers to psychedelic post-noise annihilators is one of the fascinating tales of the UK underground and, whilst I'd seen bandleader Matt Bower in action with his side-project Voltigeurs (twice, both times excellent), I'd honestly imagined my chances of a live Skullflower show, especially in such an intimate venue, were minimal.

Werewolf Jerusalem, meanwhile, is the moniker used by Houston, Texas noise legend Richard Ramirez, whose prodigious output under his own names and various collaborations and pseudonyms has elevated to the rank of royalty among noise aficionados. As an aside, he is also one of the only known gay artists operating in the field of noise, so a personal hero of mine; proof we're not all Lady Gaga-worshiping numpties with the mentality of 14-year-old anorexic girls.
Werewolf Jerusalem is, in my opinion, the greatest of Ramirez's many projects, and one of the four horsemen of the Harsh Noise Walls apocalypse (the other 3 being, probably, The Rita, Macronympha and Vomir). So my excitement was, as I mentioned, unbridled as I flitted through the CDs on sale at the door (promptly spending £30-worth) and leaned against a wall to start savouring some motherfucking NOISE.

First, though, we had to get through two opening acts that I'm afraid I won't dwell on too much. Hal Hutchinson was intriguing, but rather by-the-ropes harsh noise, most interesting when he ran what appeared to be a piece of polystyrene over a pick-up to generate some percussive bursts of static. However, it was mainly a case of all pedals and no personality. At first, I was intrigued by the next guy, Helm, who broke from the mould to work with throbbing low-frequency digital noise, before reaching to a screaming crescendo. Sadly, his lengthy set (annoyingly the longest of the lot, for some reason, meaning WJ and Skullflower's ones seemed shortened) went on for two long and quickly got dull, barely rescued by the aforementioned squealing climax.

And then, onto the good stuff, as a rather unassuming man with long black hair dragged a small table to the front of the stage and began setting up. I quickly realised this was Ramirez himself, and became a babbling idiot, whispering "It's him! It's Richard Ramirez!" to my rather baffled friend Chris who gave me a look as if to say "Well, yeah, he is performing after all".
The first thing that struck me was the modesty of the set-up. Where most noise performers laden their tabletop set-ups with an improbably large gaggle of pedals and noise generators, Ramirez was practically minimalist" a battered-looking small FM radio and what appeared to be two or three distortion pedals. And yet, his set was the loudest and most intimidating of the night, although it started quietly before gradually building into an unstoppable onslaught of crackle, roar and hiss. I read one blogger who reviewed the show musing on why fans such as me would crowd to the front to see a man standing stock still, head bent over a table fiddling with switches and knobs. It's a valid question - noise artists are not known for the interactive performance skills (although I consider Vomir's brand of absolute stasis with a bag on his head particularly potent). However, for me, this was a chance to watch a master of the art of harsh noise in action.
His movements were subtle, the shifts gentle, but potent, as a gentle twist of a knob on one pedal would take the wall of sound up a notch, increasing the bass thunder or the squeal of the high-end. And, as with Vomir and The Rita, I was struck by the sheer artistry involved; that this was not just chucking noise randomly out there, but rather a considered, intelligent sculpture of absolute sound. It's beauty was as towering and overwhelming as a Robert Morris sculpture, or the minimalist cinema of Warhol or Conrad. There is something absolute in the the musical constructions of Werewolf Jerusalem, and to be caught in the eye of the storm was fantastic.

Just stepping away from the concert for a minute, I would like to take the opportunity to review the monstrous Werewolf Jerusalem box set I purchased on the night, that brings together a number of recent and old tracks as, if not a career retrospective, then at least a daring portrayal of the subtle facets of Ramirez's work under this name.
Called Confessions of a Sex Maniac (2011, Second Layer Records), it distills (over 4 discs, so not exactly triple-filtered) the essence of what motivates, stimulates and results from the strange mind behind the Werewolf Jerusalem moniker; namely perverse sex, murder, extreme noise and, oddly, humanity.
When I briefly spoke to Ramirez after his set, I was struck by how soft-spoken and gentle he was, something which again offsets the reputation for brutality and sadism that dogs a lot of noise. No matter how nasty some of the elements and thoughts Ramirez explores are, from sadism to violence, there is a beating heart and intelligence that takes it above the crass exploitation of a lot of the noise genre's other adepts, especially the power electronics crowd. Track titles like "Your Sweet Body For Killing" and "Date for a Murder" may be a tad nasty, even tasteless, but there's a sense that this is not a man reveling in such thoughts, but rather revolting against them, the towering walls of noise being a perfect abstract embodiment of despair, anger and regret. I could be wrong, but that's the feeling I get, and the film dialogue snippet from the start of the excellent "Because of the Cats", featuring a conversation between what appears to be a policeman and a female suspect, reverse the misogynistic approach of a lot of noise artists, with the woman seeming to be both strong-headed and sexually aware, rather than a passive victim of rape or murder.
However, the moral attitudes of HNW music are hard to discern, even with WJ, and so Confessions of a Sex Maniac actually is best-appreciated as a showcase for the genre's evolution and position in the noise world, as evidenced by its prodigal son. Disc one features a series of short (for Harsh Noise Walls) tracks that showcase the genre at its grittiest and most obscenely violent. The second disc, possibly the best, is comprised of one near-hour-long exploration, "The Face at the Window", which is so loud, unmoving and extreme as to come close to swallowing the listener whole. It's the summation of the genre's bloody-minded excess and aesthetic purity, much in the manner of Vomir's Renonce or The Rita's Thousands of Dead Gods.
The third disc demonstrates, to those who would advance that all HNW sounds the same, that the genre can, and does, evolve, being more focused on digital noise, and slightly more subtle textures. The three tracks on the CD evolve cautiously, background hiss evolving gently or brutally into in-your-face mess at the flick of a switch or gradual twist of the knob on a distortion pedal. It's the disc where Ramirez most expertly experiments with the sound source of Werewolf Jerusalem's music: the static between stations on portable radios, and the three tracks are exceptional. The final CD is, in my opinion, the least interesting, being a series of collaborations with like-minded HNW artists. Whilst the idea is intriguing, I think these tracks would be best appreciated if seen live, as it's near-impossible to discern one noisician from another.
Confessions of a Sex Maniac is surely Werewolf Jerusalem's most definitive release, as mysterious and extreme as any album ever released, and the perfect embodiment of this strange artist's unrelenting quest for sonic purity.

It was a full band set-up that then took to the Grosvenor stage for Skullflower's performance, with a youthful drummer and bassist joining Matt Bower and his current partner Samantha Davies, also of Voltigeurs, who had set aside her guitar in favour of some barely-audible howls into the microphone. Bower meanwhile squatted over his monolithic guitar, unleashing the kind of full-on six-string wall-of-sound that he masters so well. The resemblances with the set Voltigeurs performed opening for Keiji Haino at Cafe Oto earlier in the month were obvious, with both Davies and Bower steadfastly keeping their backs to the audience and their heads bowed as they wrestled with the torrent they were producing. But where Voltigeurs' sound is unabashedly inert, a sort of bloody-minded form of amplifier worship that feels purposely like they are trying to summon arcane gods of noise, Skullflower is a more intricate incarnation of the dark spirits that motivate and propel Bower's muse. The presence of drums and bass reasserted the band's beginnings in less abstract forms, hinting at its doom-metal past and albums like IIIrd Gatekeeper. But such has been the evolution of Skullflower in the years following the band's "return" in 2003, that attachment to notions of "song" are vague, and so the rhythm section became a sort of platform for psychedelic flight of the most ear-assaulting kind. It was familiar stuff, but also thrillingly loud, obtuse and elegiac. But sadly too short. After two -admittedly long- tracks of blissful pagan metal, it was up, and Bower scooted off to hide behind the amps, whilst those of us still gasping for more called for an encore. For a brief second, it felt like we might get one, but the moment passed. Skullflower make the kind of music I feel I can listen to, entranced, for hours, so it would have been nice to get a longer set. But maybe sometimes it's just best to savour brief, wonderful pleasures.

On the plus side, I did then get to meet the great Gary Mundy, of Ramleh fame, and founder of Broken Flag records, who was in attendance, and who is a frankly charming fellow. I'm hoping that Ramleh will be back on tour as well soon, especially given the high quality of their recent Valediction album.

So, in all, a great evening, and there is so much to be said about seeing gigs in such intimate venues, where the beer is cheap, the space cramped but convivial, and you actually can talk to the artists after the sets. I've now been privileged to meet Richard Ramirez, Gary Mundy, Sam McKinley (aka The Rita), Romain Perrot (Vomir) and Matt Bower at The Grosvenor, as well as revel in their amazing music. As far as I'm concerned, Britney fans can keep the fucking O2 Arena.

Peace!

March on my iPod!

2011-04-11T17:07:00.000+01:00

Cuts, cuts, cuts and more cuts. It seems the two words that have dominated just about every discourse in the press and media over the last month have been "cuts" and "Libya", with a brief hiatus to say "Japan" and the odd "deficit" thrown into the bargain.

The dynamic is now assured and exhaustingly familiar: the Tories' and their Liberal puppets' formula is this: "we inherited this awful deficit from those Labour bastards so now we have to cut (and -whisper it!- privatise)." Labour in response howl "actually I think you'll find the deficit was caused by the global economic collapse but we need to cut but we don't like the way you're doing it and you're a bunch of bastards right back atcha!". In both cases, it doesn't make for a very edifying debate, even when the odd trade unionist, journalist or member of UK Uncut argues that cuts aren't needed at all and is promptly patronised into submission.

But there always seems to be one question that never gets asked when the three major parties waffle and argue about how we need to cut the deficit, but that I can't get out of my mind: why do we need to do this? I'm not being facetious; I truly don't see what the argument is.

If you're running a household and you rack up a load of debt, I get it, you need to pay it back. If you don't, your house or TV or whatever will be repossessed by whoever lent you the money, usually a bank. But I'm pretty sure HSBC or the IMF can't repossess Britain in its entirety. Besides, Britain's debt has been as high as or higher than it is now for 200 of the last 250 years. I get that the deficit is not the same as debt. It's that our rate of interest is going up. Again, the first word that pops into my head is a rather juvenile "so?". "We don't want our children to be lumbered with this debt" Danny Alexander said on Question Time two weeks ago. I know it sounds callous, but why not? Our parents lumbered us with one. And theirs did it to them. Britain has been in debt for centuries and we've done alright. The crux of the matter to me is that the penalty for having high levels of debt seems opaque at best. Debt is bad, fine, but how bad? People will point to Greece and Portugal, but our economies are not comparable. Britain produces more, exports more and sells more. Businesses will always want to be based here.

In the context of such opacity, the argument for investment rather than cuts sounds convincing. Investing further in young people, the arts and employment would generate wealth, it seems obvious. If everyone is austere, then no-one's spending and no-one's making any money. I'm not saying don't cut waste (the NHS needs to be looked at, though not in the hideous, privatisation-ary way the Coalition is going about things), but what is happening now seems wholly unjustified. And proper, fair taxation is fundamental, and seriously lacking. Boris Johnson can demonise UK Uncut all he likes, the fact is that the banks, even those we bailed out, are awarding their hierarchies massive bonuses even as their actions are causing people to lose their jobs and benefits; and people like Philip Green continue to evade millions of tax whilst being wined and dined by Cameron and Osbourne. In the context of these ill-justified cuts, that is nothing short of sickening.

Politics, especially when it is affecting the livelihood of millions of people, is about explaining why what you, as a politician, are doing will benefit the country. In that respect, the coalition is failing overwhelmingly.

Phew! Meanwhile, in a much nicer world, an early contender for album of the year popped into my consciousness in March, in the form of Canadian dronester Tim Hecker's new album Ravedeath, 1972 (2011, Kranky). Hecker has long been on my radar (notably through Fantomas Parastasie, his wonderful collaboration with Aidan Baker, of Nadja fame), but this has been my first full solo Hecker album. And what an album! Essentially, there is nothing new here, it's familiar post-Cluster electronic drone, but few albums has the atmosphere of Ravedeath, 1972. The cover image of a piano being tipped off a roof is hugely evocative, and expresses a sense of tumult that would appear to be raging between Hecker and his art (and music itself), something reinforced by track titles like "Hatred of Music" and "No Drums". It appears that Hecker is grappling with the notions and precepts of ambient drone, notably its arrhythmic nature and lack of overt lyrical references. As such, Ravedeath, 1972 is dark and haunted, a secular meditation mass akin to the early, pagan works of Klaus Schulze (think 1973's Cyborg, with synths). Recorded mostly live in an abandoned church in Rekjavik, ably assisted by the Australian master of austere ambience, Ben Frost, Ravedeath, 1972 is a stirring work of modern electronic drone.

Also released in March, but remarkably different, was Super Great Love by electronic "supergroup" Evil Madness (2011, Editions Mego). Evil Madness is made up of 5 Scandinavian drone/electro/glitch/noise veterans (Jóhann Jóhannsson, BJ Nilsen, Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, Pétur Eyvindsson, Helgi Thórsson) who are clearly having a blast by throwing off their austere shackles and revelling in some good, floor-pounding disco! Mind you, this is not the disco of Donna Summer or Barry White, but rather the faster-paced italo disco of the eighties. And, these guys being who they are, the sound here has a glitchier, more angular edge than the smooth grooves of properly vintage disco. But with track titles like "Divine Sensual Love Fantasy" and "Sexy Feeling All Year Long", and soaring synth lines over motorik, driving beats, there is no escaping the fact that this is music to dance to with a smile on your face. If the album has one flaw, it's that, by also having a very metallic, artificial feel, it does at times drift close to pastiche rather than a proper genre exercise. But such moments are rare, and with its mixture of stark electronic and relentlessly hook-laden beats, this is a great album to put on as we gear up for party season

Much darker was a proper obscurity I discovered almost purely by chance, guided by my love of all things Wolf Eyes and Hair Police (whose Mike Connelly is a smashing chap, if an e-mail is anything to go by). Trawling through the countless side-projects of the core members of both those bands, I stumbled upon one that caught my eye simply because of its outlandish cover art (which you can judge for yourself on the left). Who is this weird black dude with eyes on the palms of his hands, standing in the dark? Why does he look awed and scared at once? Is he a preacher? A prophet? A dope-head? The album title, Father Son Holy Ghost (2010, AA Records) reinforces the oddball spirituality of the image, and the band's name, Toxoplasmosis only served to add to the sense of weirdness. Toxoplamosis is a duo, made up of 2/3rds of Wolf Eyes side-project Demons, namely Nate Young and Alivia Zivich, and they plough a similar dark, post-noise furrow to Demons, with references to the occult, horror movies and warped spirituality. This is enhanced thanks to pretty murky sound in which Zivich's distorted organ and Young's guitar combine to create a swampy tapestry of deadened drone, which wouldn't sound out of place on a Wes Craven soundtrack. But there is also an ethereal, even cosmic, undercurrent to the dark nightmares, bringing the music of Father Son Holy Ghost closer to the realms of such giallo soundtrackers as Goblin, or the creepy ambient prog of Popol Vuh's Nosferatu soundtrack. It's a compelling debut, strong on atmosphere and imagery, and one that promises to elevate Toxoplasmosis beyond the status of mere side-project.

Remarkably, whilst a lot of different albums were given a whirl on my battered old iPod, it was a single that most defined the month for me: 2003's "Pass This On" by The Knife. Whilst much of what the Swedish synth-pop duo does is forgettable, this tune, from their Deep Cuts album, has latched itself to my brain, aided by this wonderful video:

It features Swedish drag artist Rickard Engfors miming to the song in front of a bemused and even hostile audience of junior football players and managers. At one point, a boy, played by The Knife's keyboardist Olof Dreijer himself, gets up and dances with Engfors, freeing the rest of the crowd up to come and join in. It's simple yet touching, and the presence of the usually-elusive Dreijer in such a key role seems deliberate, especially when you consider the lyrics, in which singer Karin Dreijer (Olod's sister) seems to be relating statements made to her about Olof, possibly from gay men. There's a sexual ambiguity and tension throughout the song and video, in which gender roles are masked and blurred (Engfors is a man, miming a woman's voice and being flirted with by Olof). In many ways, "Pass This On" is just a pop tune, but it's a good example of the emotions and sentiments that can be created in pop, even as people are grooving on the dancefloor.

It was the 25th anniversary edition of London's excellent Lesbian and Gay Film Festival this year, and I got the chance (thanks to my friend Scudder) to go down to the BFI to see Les Amours Imaginaires (Heartbeats), the sophomore film by Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan, who received rapturous acclaim in 2009 for his debut, J'ai tué ma mère, made when he was still in his teens. Les Amours Imaginaires demonstrates the immense talent of this remarkable young director, as it is confidently directed, features some witty, amusing dialogue, and wonderful camera work. I found myself struggling to believe that Dolan is only 21, such is the bravura of his oeuvre. Such style and literary accomplishment makes up for the lack of a meaty plot (it's a musing on the perils of love told via the classic "a guy and a girl fall for the same man" routine), and this is a typical art-house film, in which much of the emotion and tension are generated through dialogue and lingering shots of faces, as opposed to overt action. It's not a perfect film, by any means, with an overdose of "pointed" music (Bach during four sex scenes that all mirror each other, really?) and far too many slow motion shots. But Dolan is so young, and so dizzyingly talented, you want to forgive him his naivity and pretension. After all, he can only get better, and the bar has already been set pretty high.

Completely shallow, but perhaps more fun, in comparison is Terence Fisher's seminal 1958 film Dracula, which I finally got to see, after many years searching, thanks to Lovefilm's freeview scheme. So thanks go to them. This Hammer classic is considered one of the definitive recreations for film of Bram Stoker's legendary gothic horror story, and is often erroneously credited with being closest to the book's plot, which I can categorically state it isn't. But in terms of how it redefined the character of the vampire count, focusing on his powers of seduction rather than his cruelty (as, say, Murnau did in Nosferatu), the influence of Fisher's film is undeniable. Christopher Lee is tremendous as the cool, elegant and handsome Dracula, who first thwarts Jonathan Harker's attempt to dispose of him before taking flight to Harker's hometown and spreading fear and death amongst his nearest and dearest, whilst always turning on the charm for the ladies. There are several unforgettable moments, and the film's combination of mild gore and heaving bosoms would revolutionise the horror genre, catapulting it into the mainstream and making Hammer a worldwide brand in the process. And stealing the show entirely was the magnificent Peter Cushing as the vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing, in one of the Star Wars star's greatest ever performances. Admittedly, Dracula hasn't aged very well, but as a piece of camp history, it's an important artefact of a strange time in British cinema.

British cinema, of course, was not all about cheap high camp and gothic horror, of course, and one of this country's most iconic, essential directors was the late, lamented Derek Jarman, who gave us such magnificent films as Sebastiane, Jubilee and Edward II. Jarman's films were often noted for their considered use of historical subjects as a way of commenting on his own society, and the trials, injustices and conflicts that people have to face, notably the LGBT community. But far from being simply a "gay" director, Jarman was a cinematic innovator, whose visual flair was matched only by his audacity. Most arresting, difficult and, ultimately, overwhelming of his films was his final one, Blue, released in 1993, mere months before his untimely death from AIDS. The virus had rendered him mostly blind, his normal vision replaced by a blue haze, and it is this that he recreated for the film, which consists of a single, 75-minute frame of azure blue, over which Jarman narrates his reflections on his life, his disease, and how society views him and others like him. Ever the poet, Jarman's musings are alternately thoughtful, defiant, scathing and cynical. Featuring participation from Tilda Swinton, Nigel Terry and John Quentin, and an amazing score performed by members of Coil, as well as tracks by Satie and Momus, it’s a bleak, naked and hallucinatory journey into a deeply thoughtful, poetic mind, and one of the most emotionally powerful and harrowing films you are ever likely to see.

The closing lines say it all:

In time,
No one will remember our work
Our life will pass like the traces of a cloud
And be scattered like
Mist that is chased by the
Rays of the sun
For our time is the passing of a shadow
And our lives will run like
Sparks through the stubble. I place a delphinium, Blue, upon your grave.

Lars Von Trier is another director who likes to push boundaries, although usually those of good taste and the ability to shock. 2009 saw the controversial release of Antichrist, starring Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe as a bereaved couple who travel to a remote cabin in the woods after the death of their son, who, in the opening scene, fell out of a window whilst the couple was fornicating. The woman (simply referred to as “She”) is –understandably, you’d think- grief-stricken, and “He”, being a psychotherapist, believes that taking her to these woods that she so fears will help her get over her trauma. Instead, the exercise devolves into violence and brutality, as inner demons surface and the pair’s grasp of reality because skewed… There are moments of brilliance peppered throughout Antichrist, such as the frightening encounter between “He” and a talking, disembowelled fox; or a tense, brutal chase scene that is pure psychological horror. The photography is stunning, the dark, humid forest closing around the characters like a ghastly shadow, and the use of sound is perfect. But after it was over, all I could think was “why?”. There seems to be little point to Antichrist beyond the shocking violence, and charges of misogyny on Von Trier’s part are not too undeserved (although you could argue that point until the cows come home. I find it hard to believe that even a bereaved couple could descend to such pits of horror just by isolating themselves, and it seems Von Trier couldn’t really decide whether he wanted the film to be a psychological study with dark undertones, or something more in the vein of an over-the-top horror shock-fest. Antichrist therefore ends up being neither. It’s definitely worth seeing, for it is impossible to feel indifferent when watching it, but it comes across as more an exercise in excess than a really potent, relevant work of art.

But, if I had to herald the film that –along with Blue, and in some ways rather similar- really touched me this month, I would have to point to the wonderfully bizarre memoir in film that is My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, 2007). I say it’s like Blue, but only in that it is one man’s confessional, delivered in his own voice and in a deeply personal style. But where Blue is a stark confrontation of death and disease, Maddin’s opus is a strange tribute to a city, Winnipeg, Manitoba in Canada, where the director was born and still lives, in the shadow of his domineering mother and the city’s unique history. Like the equally wonderful Of Time and the City by Liverpudlian Terence Davies, My Winnipeg takes the reality and history of its subject-city and uses this as a basis to explore personal issues as well as comment on the singular psycho-geography of this snowy, dark town. Maddin does not gloss over Winnipeg’s darker side, with some hilariously bleak stories and touching historical critiques punctuating the narrative of his weird mother-son relationship and the recurring theme of trying to leave Winnipeg, but never actually getting around to doing it. All this is filmed in glorious black-and-white, with the excellent Ann Savage surrogating as Maddin’s mother. My Winnipeg is one of the most surreal, indefinable films I’ve ever seen, and for that it deserves ample recognition.

So, another month, another moan at the government, another set of great musical discoveries and another slew of wonderful cinematic treasures. Not all perfect, but then, nothing ever is perfect, but that’s what gives life its flavour.

Speaking of glorious imperfection, the third edition of my radio show, Noise In The Ether, is up on Samurai FM. Enjoy!

http://samurai.fm/meakusma/meakusma-pres-noise-in-the-ether-3

Downloadable version: meakusma pres. Noise in the ether #3 at samurai.fm by meakusma

Peace,

-J Phimister

You See Art, I See Clay & Whitby Goth Wonderland

2011-03-29T14:21:00.000+01:00

On Thursday, 24th of March, a small group of trendy (natch) young things witnessed the first edition of a brand new alternative London club night: You See Art, I See Clay. Here's the Facebook page, for reference:

http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=158494667542181

People with encyclopaedic knowledge of 80s pop will have recognised that the evening, organised by my friend Charles Savoie and held in the atmospheric basement of The Victory on Kingsland Road, takes its rather original name from an obscure slice of synth-pop by Craig Sibley, and, courtesy of two DJ sets and two bands, a veritable smorgasbord of heady electro beats and hypnotic synth lines was served up, in the grand tradition of European cold wave, British industrial and, courtesy of yours truly, a quick flourish of motorik krautrock. Certainly there are few nights in the capital where such sounds can be heard without suffering the intrusion of gruesome, MOR pop in the Madonna/Jackson/Duran Duran mould, or some bland Primal Scream/Brit-pop rock, so I'm hoping (not just for my sake and that of a friend), that this is the first of many.

Certainly, the bands were worth seeing. All-female duo Replicas play a form of elegant, stripped-down and icy pop in the vein of The xx, early Gary Numan (think Dance more than the Tubeway Army album that gave them their name) and even a hint of Junior Boys, with dreamy twinned vocals, metronomic electronic percussion and deep, throbbing basslines. What the duo lacks in stage persona is made up for with their glacial beauty and detached vocalisings, and I wouldn't be surprised if they went on to be one of the next big things on the indie circuit. They certainly have the hooks. Check'em out here: www.myspace.com/replicasreplicas

American industrial/synth performer Nurvuss will be an altogether harder prospect for the mainstream to take to its bosom, hence perhaps why I was particularly taken by Reaver M. Fulbrigh's set. Over chatteringly violent computer-generated beats, the American snarled, roared and sneered his menacing lyrics, propelled along by gritty, heavily-compressed synth lines. Nurvuss is much closer to the spirit of Suicide and Cabaret Voltaire than early Human League or OMD, and his edginess drove some punters back up to the ground-floor bar, but I for one was smitten, gleefully snapping my head from side-to-side under the onslaught. Another one to watch. http://www.myspace.com/nurvuss

All in all, there is a lot of promise in You See Art, I See Clay, and the poor attendance was disappointing. Hopefully the next one will be better attended.

Whitby Abbey

The next day, I was on a train hurtling up the length of England, on my way to Whitby, Yorkshire, for the bi-annual Whitby Goth Weekend. A chance for a break from the bustle of London life, and to discover an underrated gem of a town, with its ancient, ruined abbey and narrow streets. This is the England of ruddy cheeks, no-nonsense conversation, ham-sized fish and chip portions and charming eccentricity, the latter epitomised by the scores of people dressed in their best Victorian garb, umbrellas, corsets, top-hats and face paint. Locals and out-of-towners all joined in on the fun, as gigs by The Damned, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry and others were accopmanied by much drinking in pubs decorated with fake cobwebs and plastic spiders.

For me, despite the revelry, and the fact that I met some wonderful people (is there a nicer social group out there than the goths? I'm not sure), the highlight was the abbey. Bleak and foreboding, perched on a cliff-yop overlooking the town, it is no wonder they struck such a chord in Bram Stoker that he decided to set part of Dracula in Whitby. As I wandered around the crumbling colonnades and stared at the twisted features of ancient grotesques, I played the soundtrack to Werner Herzog's Nosferatu - Phantom Der Nacht on my iPod, for a truly awe-inspiring experience. The adjacent, more recent, church, with its cliff-top graveyard was also a great place to ponder one's thoughts, Heathcliff-like, in a windswept daze of melancholia, and, for all the fun I had drinking in pubs and meeting cool people, visiting Whitby will remain a truly spiritual (for want of a better word) and introspective memory for me.

Wow, this may be my shortest post in ages! I suppose it's one of the bloggy-er ones I've done, but I just felt these were sentiments worth sharing. Not sure why...

- J Phimister