Piney Gear

Happy new year!  Unless you read this within 8 hours of my posting it...or unless you read it months after I posted it...or unless you read it twelve months after I poster it, in which case, it works again.  So, whilst I'm here, happy Easter and happy Passover and happy flying ant day.

MU-ZIQ - ...IN PINE EFFECT (Hi-Rise) 

I went to school with Squarepusher. He was a year above me. I once told him that bass solos were pointless. That is my IDM anecdote. 

My IDM discussion point, the one that leaves me shunned in parties, is how nobody can decide where to file μ-Ziq. Some record shops treat that Greek character as an M, because that’s pretty much what it is; some read it as representing the syllable “mu”, as I have above; some don’t look carefully and file under U; some just ignore the weird squiggle altogether and stick it under Z (nip into Oxford’s HMV for evidence of this, clearly the worst of all approaches). I maintain that this is because the name is unique, and I for one cannot think of another act where a character from another alphabet has to be named, rather than sounded, to pronounce the act credit.  Oh sure, loads of acts have done it with numerals – 2 Live Crew, 4Play – but not letters. And before you ask, grabbing a Cyrillic or something and sticking it in your band logo might look cute, but it’s not the same thing (System 7 once released a record where the name was made up from the digits 1-7 at different angles, which was clever...and a damned sight more interesting than the drab hippy trance on the disc).  

Whether this typographical oddity is why Mike Paradinas’s output is not quite as celebrated as those of his chums Richard James, Luke Vibert and Tom Jenkinson, I couldn’t say. Maybe it’s because he tends to stick to a narrow and tested palette of sounds (and, yes, ‘Within A Sound’ on this album has those trademark crunchy drums that sound like someone putting the boot into a box of Frosties in an aircraft hangar). And even within his oeuvre, this album gets less love than I think it deserves: the opening duo of Tango N’ Vectif and Bluff Limbo get props – perhaps because they were on Rephlex – and 1997’s Lunatic Harness was the one to get the lavish rerelease treatment, but for my money, ...In Pine Effect is the pinnacle. Maybe I just like that ellipsis at the start – how do you file that, eh? 

The album as a whole is neat smash-up between clanky, intense techno and easy listening, with ‘Phiesope’ sounding like some laid-back KPM library music that might have popped up on behind a montage on Holiday 83, with strummed guitar and xylophone...or cheap synthesised equivalents, anyway, because this album does seem to revel in the otherwordly qualities objectively naff sounds can have, in common with a lot of Paradinas’s work – check out the “hip-hop producer does hotel lounge music” vibe of the Jake Slazenger records. Perhaps the wonkiest example is ‘Roy Castle’, which adds ersatz horns to a perky beat, though they’re less in the style of the eponymous jazzer-turned-presenter than Herb Alpert’s cheese-grin efforts. In related news my brain has suddenly started singing the words “Tijuana Brass” to the tune of ‘Do You Wanna Dance’ as made famous by Cliff – send help. 

On top of that we have tracks like ‘Dauphine’, which starts out with brooding menace but turns into the sort of squelchy synth boogaloo that might have accompanied Morph’s antics, and the title track which is just a big dumb fragment of some fake boogie-woogie repeated for a while (and ‘Green Crumble’, even more so). But it’s not all rollicking fun. ‘Mr Angry’ delivers on its nominal promise by being a greasy chunk of Aphexual tweaked percussion over which someone howls with rage. A lot. Whereas ‘The Wailing Song’ sounds like someone tried to condense Górecki’s 3rd symphony to a few minutes using a budget keyboard. ‘Problematic’ doesn’t seem too unusual, until an ear-scratching lead synth line gets all atonal round the edges. 

I have also just this minute found out that the CD version actually had fewer tracks that the vinyl version. That just didn’t happen in 1995. Now I’m annoyed that I have been missing out on 8% of the album. Might put ‘Mr Angry’ on again... 

Sole Music

The Lunchtime For The Wild Youth reviews tend to come in batches, as the editor sends me occasional packages of recent issues. In this one, covering 1994 releases, I look at two discs of abstract ambience, which as you might imagine none of the other writers do. Someone does review Disco Inferno, though, god to know someone else in the world likes them.

V/A - ISOLATIONISM (Virgin) 

The potted pop histories tend to leap from grunge to Britpop, but there was another significantly influential genre nestled between the two in the guise of ambient (jungle was also big business, but wasn’t an album genre at this time, and only became one when it morphed into drum ‘n’ bass). In the wake of The Orb’s success, lush and primarily beatless music sold a fair few copies and filled a fair few columns. This allowed Virgin to scour their back catalogue and throw together a bunch of double CDs, offering a new generation some mostly excellent music from names like Sylvian, Eno, Fripp, and Froese. The compilations were decent, even if the covers were hideous. 

Volume 4, however, was unusual because not only was it mostly comprised of new material, but it was a collation of colder, bleaker sounds under the title Isolationism (what would more likely be called dark ambient nowadays, and post-industrial beforehand). The set was pulled together by Kevin Martin, who is best known as The Bug today, but then was thought of (if at all) as half of Techno Animal with Justin Broadrick. He sets out a mini-manifesto in the sleevenotes – peak mid-90s arty digital design making them bloody hard to actually read – to drag ambient away from the joss-sticks-and-joints crowd and back to the experimental mindset of New York minimalism and Krautrock, painting Future Sound Of London as the anodyne ambient enemy (which seems harsh, as a record like that year’s Lifeforms is pretty inventive and not afraid to be unnerving and creepy at times, and there are tons of better candidates for scapegoat...perhaps there was some bad blood from Broadrick’s sampling of pre-FSOL acid classic ‘Stakker Humanoid’ in his Godflesh guise). To be honest, there’s not really a meaningful ethos or ideology behind the record, but it is a fantastic two-and-a-half-hour journey, and I bet it shocked a few 90s neo-hippies who bought it expecting more friendly tones from the likes of Laraaji and The Grid. Interestingly, although this was last comp to go under the Ambient name, future releases kept the AMBT catalogue number, though these stray ever further from the ambient concept (not that they’re not generally good, and I recommend seeking out the early post-rock selection Monsters, Robots & Bugmen, both the Macro Dub Infection sets which are also Martin’s curatorial work, and David Toop’s selections of favourite singers, guitarists, and electro producers).  

Here are a few Isolationism highlights: 

ICE – The Dredger Techno Animal also show up on the album with some chain-rattling eeriness, but this alternate project from the same duo is better, boasting a thick hawser dub bassline overlaid with metallic sax scrapes.   

:zoviet*france: - Daisy Gun I’ve included this partly for the nice papery delay on offer, but mostly just because I like the way the punctuation marks look. 

Labradford - Air Lubricated Free Axis Trainer Again, this warm tunnel of organ with buzzing spring sounds is good, but mostly I just like the name. 

Paul Schütze - Hallucinations (In Memory Of Renaldo Arenas) Considering the ostensible froideur of the compilation, this is quite a funky groove, with a submerged ostinato and relentlessly rolling percussion. 

Scorn – Silver Rain Fell (Deep Water Mix) Sounds like a hip hop behemoth clumping along in the next valley. 

Disco Inferno – Lost In Fog An odd addition as their music is very poppy underneath all the MIDI monkeying (their second album, DI Go Pop from this year is worth tracking down). 

Total – Six In that strange zone where noise is so abrasive it becomes soothing. 

Nijiumu – Once Again I Cast Myself Into The Flames Of Atonement Keiji Haino, by any other name. As ritualistic as the name suggests, but quite restful. I’ve only just realised that the name implies the guy keeps fucking up and having to make up for it. 

Aphex Twin – Aphex Airlines Probably the main selling point for the compilation. This is from the absolute pinnacle of Richard D James’s output, where great albums like Selected Ambient Works II, Surfing On Sine Waves and I Care Because You Do just seemed to spill out. He even tossed great tracks onto compilations without fanfare, such as ‘My Teapot’ on Warp’s second Artificial Intelligence album, and its sister track ‘Phlid’ on a Select magazine covermount (I had no idea what the track name meant at the time, and I now wish I didn’t). This track is like a tired ogre with indigestion, and perhaps not up with the best work, but all Aphex is worth hearing. 

AMM – Vandoeuvre  A very different approach from the free improv stalwarts, which is not harsh or unsettling, and in fact comes across quite cosy and cuddly. 

O’Rang - Little Sister Tex Mex in dub?  Something like that. 

Final – Hide The volume leaps up about 30 seconds in: is this art, or a mastering cock-up? 

Lull – Thoughts It’s a touch obvious, but effectively cold and windswept. It’s the work of Mick Harris, erstwhile Napalm Death drummer, I bet you weren’t expecting that. 

 

Mad Capulet Markets

 Christmas, innit? So, yeah, happy Christmas, or whatever.

ELVIS COSTELLO & THE BRODSKY QUARET – THE JULIET LETTERS (Warner Bros) 

I used to buy cassettes from Boots. That seems like an absurd false memory now, as if I’d bought spanners from Holland & Barrett or Anusol from Timpson’s, but Chelmsford Boots had a decent little music section, and when my parents were buying grown-up stuff like shampoo and aspirin (I'm pretty sure not Anusol, and I'm not going to check), I’d browse through the records. They often seemed to have some very good tapes on special offer at the counter, and I recall every one of these that I bought was a cracker: Lou Reed’s Transformer, Coldcut’s What’s What Noise? (my introduction to Mark E Smith, believe it or not), Baby Ford’s Fordtrax, and this one. I was 17 for most of 1993, so I suspect I might have been in Boots on my own by this time, but I don’t recall; I’m certain it’s the last thing I bought from there, though weirdly I remember buying marked-down copy of the triple-tape Secret Broadcasts set by Glenn Miller from Oxford’s Boots when I came up to study a couple of years later, and I find it pretty amazing they were still doing music in 1995, it can’t have lasted much longer. 

The album is a series of epistolary songs for solo voice and string quartet, apparently inspired by people who wrote to Juliet Capulet – presumably C/O That Big Crypt, Verona - with their troubles. Only one of the 20 tracks addresses this theme specifically though, the others zipping over all sorts of ground, which has allowed Costello to give reign to some highly inventive lyric-writing. Some of the words are very funny, and this small chamber set-up means every one is easily audible, which I think Elvis relished – listen to the swift judgment of Damnation’s Cellar (which looks like an Entombed song title, but is about bringing people back with a time machine), and the Gershwin-level tricksiness of ‘This Offer Is Unrepeatable’, a satire on hard-sell Christianity in the form of junk mail: “Girls will be swooning because you’re exciting them/ Not only fall at your feet but be biting them...The wine that they offer will go to your head/ You’ll start seeing double in fishes and bread”. There are also some heart-wrenchingly emotional songs on display, which teeter on mawkishness but manage to survive, and ‘The Birds Will Still Be Singing’ can still bring a lump to the throat. 

The whole endeavour, of course, is pure South Bank show shit, the sort of Arts Council bait perfect for a middle-aged artist with an eye on a Sunday supplement spread, but what’s noteworthy about this album is how often it rises above middle-brow novelty. The music is strong with a broad sonic palette, from drawing-room elegance to arthouse intricacy, with plenty of aggressive percussive playing and excellent use of sudden dissonance to balance some incredibly catchy tunes. Costello is in fine voice too, his scuffed intense vibrato sounding oddly like Horace Andy at times, and his pitching and sense of drama are immaculate - but if you were worried that he’d gone opera and lost his punky rots, check the mad-eyed screech of ‘Swine’’s final word, “penknife” (this “letter” appears to have been carved into flesh). Amongst all this there’s space for a very straightforward soulful pop song, ‘Jacksons, Monk And Rowe’, a slightly inscrutable tale of a large close-knit family which doesn’t seem to be a letter at all, and this Pop Private Eye has concluded that it was written before the Brodksy project began and swiftly adapted. 

Many people at the time were disappointed at how far this was from Elvis’s new-wave roots, though that’s odd because we’d already had the country-beard vibes of King Of America and the lush, McCartney-bothering Spike and Mighty Like A Rose. Still, those who missed the full-throttle brain-pop of the late 70s only had to wait one more year for a return, with what might be the best Costello album, Brutal Youth...but that’s a tale for another day (or next issue, who knows).