THE BRAIN DEAD ENSEMBLE The Green Door Store, Brighton, Thurs 6th Sept
Comprised of two cellos and a double bass, the basis of the Brain Dead Ensemble is drone-like strumming. Never a bad thing in the book of Lucid Frenzy. But, while never really breaking from that basis, they could throw the strangest things into the mix. At the time I had assumed the chap on laptop was live-processing the sounds, but it seems the three players were doing this themselves. As they explain...
“Two feedback cellos a feedback bass and a Threnoscope are plugged together to form a multi-instrument, multi-channel system. The feedback cellos and bass are DIY electro-acoustic-digital resonator instruments. Each instrument has pickups under each of its strings and transducers built into the acoustic instrument body, inducing electromagnetically-controlled feedback which can be digitally processed.” (I hope someone else followed that. Me, they could have just said “because of magic”.) It leads to a visual as well as a sonic beguiling, you naturally expect standard-looking instruments to come up with standard sounds, and when they don’t that adds to the overall eerie effect. It sounded simultaneously a force of nature which would never end, and an ever-evolving and absolutely unpredictable series of shifts and changes. You soon didn’t feel like you were in the room listening to the music but were inside the music, with the room not reappearing till the end. At one point the strings seemed accompanied by organ swells which were almost churchy. The Threnoscope, from what I gather, was providing a visual infographic of the music in real time. As coloured segments shifted and floated around inside concentric circles, I wasn’t really sure how it mapped the music, but that might not matter. Not being any kind of timeline, but more capturing moment-to-moment transitions, it caught the immediate spirit of the music. As well as the Ensemble’s… well, ensemble nature. As they put it, “No one is in control, although everyone is playing.” And that Brian Dead part of the name? Though they don’t dress up as George Romero extras, it’s perfectly fitting. People seem strangely convinced dance music is the last possible word in anti-cerebralism, in abandon. Yet it’s based on keeping in time, which in practice means maths. Whereas this is the sort of music which most allows you to, in the time-honoured phrase, turn off your mind, relax and flat downstream. This from an earlier gig of theirs…
GZA THE GENIUS Concorde 2, Brighton, Wed 5th Sept
With his brother RZA, GZA was for all intents and purposes the backbone of the legendary Wu-Tang Clan. And ‘Liquid Swords’, effectively a collaboration but released as his solo album, is often thought of the finest Wu-Tang releases, and even one of the finest albums of hip-hop.
It’s appeal may be in the combination of obsessiveness with crazy, an almost blistering intensity runs with a willingness to throw together different sonic elements which is recklessly cavalier.(Just as it lyrically shifts from street life scenes from Staten Island to metaphysical ruminations about God, literally without missing a beat.)
The counter to Ghostface Killah’s circus of guest stars, this was a stripped-down affair which focused on him. Yet he seemed an uninvolved figure, with even the talking to the audience business delegated to an MC. It as almost as if he’d become his own karaoke tribute. It was very much a classic tracks set. (I’ve heard little from recent years, and still knew most of it.) Whether GZA no longer feels attached to those old numbers, or whether he’s simply not a live act is more than I can tell you. Yet he seemed to go down a storm with everyone else. I can’t help but wonder sometimes if popular music has become heraldic. Seeing the main man from the Wu-Tang Clan has become like those holidaymakers who trek to Angkor Wat, take a quick selfie of themselves in front of it then head to the nearest bar. It’s bucket list living, not about enjoying the experience but being able to say you were there. Alternately, it may just be me who’s a grumpy old git. Either seems possible... An engaged-seeming audience from Bristol…
So I finally catch up with Ozomatli live, even if it took their twentieth anniversary tour for Mr. Tardy here to do it. Describing the band’s actually easy for once, as they’ve done it themselves and it’s even placed upfront on their Wikipedia page. Locating their sound in their native Los Angeles, they say:
’You drive down Sunset Boulevard and turn off your stereo and roll down your windows and all the music that comes out of each and every different car, whether it's salsa, cumbia, merengue, or Hip Hop, funk or whatever, it's that crazy blend that's going on between that cacophony of sound is Ozomatli, y’know?”
As band members ceaselessly swap instruments the shifts and turns in musical style make for a gig that always feels like it’s being propelled forward, while always coming across as organic and arising from the players rather than being self-consciously eclectic.
They have a reputation as a political outfit, initially intending to form (I kid not) a workers’ union. This doesn’t much come over live, bar the occasional quick intro to a song. It does seem a little strange to find that a band best known for their live shows should omit what seems an integral element. But then there is something appealing about music that’s political and good-timey. Given the state of things, there’s plenty to be angry about and of course we have a right to that anger. But we’ve got the right to celebrate resistance as well.
Though it’s quite a different style of music, the gig echoes something I came across when seeing Goat, unrelenting energy levels; “The gig's pretty much at… fever pitch the whole way through. They're quite unrelentingly up.” In fact so irrepressible is the band’s spirit, that when a phantom hum invades the PA they decide what key it’s in, and instantly start jamming around it. Complete with a vocal which plaintively wonders “where could that hum be coming from?” It actually proves a highlight of their set, so maybe they should request hums more often.
For the closer, as I believe is a tradition of their shows, they pick up their gear and relocate to various points in the auditorium. As they moved they’d trail audience members behind then, snaking in a great conga. A slightly random clip, but a good one of the band on home turf… QUJAKU Sticky Mike’s Frog Bar, Brighton, Mon 27th Aug
Qujaku are self-described as “Japanese rock band [playing] psychedelic gothic dark shoe gaze [with] post rock vibes”, and are fronted (slightly inexplicably) by a lookalike for late Seventies Bowie.
They seem to wait before starting up, as if channelling something. They then go into a slow, soundscapey intro with a bowed… uh, bowed something and rung bells. Though the thumping riffs then drop, this intro kind of permeates the rest of the gig and gives proceedings a ritual feel.
Riffs are somewhat like houseguests. They’re going to stick around for a while, so you want to be sure not to pick the wrong one. Qujaku display a talent for finding mantra riffs, the sort of riff you want to hear over and over again. Their riff repository is also satisfyingly varied, from the slow and pounding to the agitated.
But they’re also adept at curveballing riffs, first getting them white-hot and then bending them into different shapes. At such points the second guitarist then turns back to the bowing or starts to pound a drum. It’s the upside of heavy riffing married to the upside of post-rock, giving a shot to your reptile and a stimulus to your Cro-Magnon brain.
The Bowie lookalike concludes the noise-fest by blowing a kiss to the assembled throng. Slightly inexplicably. In a good way.
The only real drawback of the set - and I know I always say this - is that there wasn’t enough of it. These aren’t short, snappy songs, the numbers are like potions you need to leave stewing in the cauldron awhile. But, with two support acts, they played for less than an hour. Bands have a natural set length determined by their music, which can’t be reduced to a meaningless mean. Sunn O))) played for two hours,which didn’t seem too long. Qujaku don’t necessarily need that sort of length, but they operate on timescales which take more than an hour.
This vid starts just as the intro section ends… PHILL NIBLOCK + TIM SHAW Cafe Oto, London, Fri 31st Aug
So next I was off to see a gig dominated by electronic hums and pulses. If Ozomatli had intruded with their Latino-tuned trumpets, the circle would have been completed. But they must have been busy elsewhere…
To try and explain Tim Shaw by a distinction, he’s quiet different to Cosmo Sheldrake,who assigned samples the respective roles of instruments. In fact Sahw's set did not, I don’t think, include any musical samples. But it did, I think, include organic sounds, albeit heavily treated. The effect become more like coloured shapes on various pieces of transparency paper, being shifted, shuffled and overlaid in different combinations. It produces new shapes and colours, until you’ve forgotten what you started off with.
Shaw’ set wasn’t divided into movements, as in classical music, but passed through distinct sections. While Phill Niblock performed five quite separate pieces, even if he ran them all together. Though there are those who claim this music to be samey, each piece was quite distinct in character. (Some more than others, as we’ll get onto.) Despite each piece inevitably being shorter, they were much slower to evolve - at times feeling like their evolution was happening in Darwinian time. Duration became part of the experience. His music’s comprised of murky drones and rumbles he refers to collectively as “tones”. Each one seems straightforward in itself, though blurry at the edges. It’s in the interchange between then at the magic happens, as subtle shifts come to have magnified effects. It all seems poised at the borderline between the liminal and subliminal, where you can’t quite perceive what he’s doing. Where people go wrong, I think, is assume this is some sonic backdrop, an aural mulch out of which flowers will appear if you wait. But it’s in that ‘backdrop’ where it all happens. The metaphor of stepping into a darkened room, and the initial monotone revealing more and more shades and distinctions the longer you stay, I’ve used that many times by this point. But it’s the best metaphor I can think of, so it’s getting recycled again! As often with drone-based music, what sounds rough and atonal can tip over into the serene. In fact in his second piece this was given centre stage, and the effect was quite tranquil. The music seemed to shimmer rather than move. Some of those tones may even have started life as notes - yes, actual notes! But it was the fourth piece which was the densest, and perhaps the most rewarding. Broad rumbles provided perhaps not a backdrop but a surround for sharper sounds. It became like a sandpaper raga. These four pieces already lasting over an hour, I figured we’d had our lot. Yet Niiblock started a fifth. It commenced with rumbles so low, so faint they could have been coming from the next room. Fifteen minutes later, with the room now mostly empty, I started to wonder whether this was going anywhere after all, and cut my losses. Are those that persevered still there now? We may never know. Nibloch, who started as a film-maker, normally plays to a film show. Apart from the somewhat eccentric closer, this was the night’s only weak point. Reportage film of what looked like South Sea Islanders was too distinct, too of something to work with the more mysterious, suggestive music. (And yes, with Johanna Bramli I liked the visual but not the music - truly, there’s no fully pleasing me!) Before the show, a series of stills which looked to be from the same source were flashed up. With their merest hints of narrative connection, they may have worked better than a continuous film. Precisely what makes this music appealing is precisely what makes it challenging to review. If you heard these pieces at different times, you’d not just react differently you’d quite likely actually hear them in a different way. The effect becomes individual and introspective. Again, a fairly random clip. But again, worth watching…
GW Sok, ex of the Ex, was last spotted as vocalist for hire with King Champion Sounds. While Action Beat are the self-styled “noise band from Bletchley”. The first town I ever signed on in, and my general impression of Bletchley was “as uneventful as Milton Keynes, but shoddier”. Milton Keynes was like a new coat of paint over nothing, while Bletchley lacked even that. Someone making something happen in Bletchley is deserving of respect.
Tom Waits once stated “have two people say the same thing and one of them is unnecessary”. Whereas Action Beat’s maxim would seem to be “why stop at two?” They sport three guitarists and three drummers. (Drummers actually reduced to two on the second night by the confines of the Cowley Club.) After seeing King Crimson with three drummers, I’m now wondering if they’re becoming a thing. Will they keep multiplying, like piercings did in the Nineties? Only time will tell. Anyway, in celebration of all this additionalising I went to see them on two successive nights.
And how do they use those numbers? To make a mighty racket! King Champion Sounds, with their brass frills, are quite melodic by comparison. No track had a verse/chorus structure, mostly going for intense/intenser, or punch/pull back/punch again. What it lacks in finesse it more than makes up for in ferocity, getting so white-hot listening to any individual instrument would be a virtual impossibility.
The drummers mostly gang up together, pounding out thumping beats in triplicate. And while the guitarists can do their own thing, like squalls in a storm, at times they’re appy to gang up too. For the encore in London, they grouped into a circle. There’s points where everyone effectively gangs up together, the bassist turned to lead the drummers like a conductor with amplification as all pile aboard. Even Sok’s guest star vocals become submerged in the overall maelstrom.
Though tracks take just enough twists and turns to stop the whole thing becoming fully monolithic. There’s the feeling that they’ll never stop, combined with the sense you’re never sure what they’ll be doing next. In fact it’s the longer numbers, containing the most changes, which seem the most effective. Shorter tracks can leave you with the feeling they stopped before really starting.
Thurston Moore one famously said that the spirit of punk now lived on in the noise scene. Combine Action Beat and GW Sok and you get a pretty good illustration of that.
Note even from the right tour, but gives your ears a good grounding…
MAKOTO-PIKA DUO Green Door Store, Brighton, Fri 11th Aug
This marks the second time I’ve got to see the team up of Kawabata Makoto, guitarist from psychedelic warlords Acid Mothers Temple, and Pikachu, drummer from noise rockers Afrirampo after their Sticky Mike’s appearance last year. And it was perhaps not quite as good as before. But it was on the other hand more mad.
Never has a drummer been less confined to sitting behind their kit than Pikachu. At one point she employed the stage monitors as impromptu percussion devices, before traversing the auditorium, drumsticks clattering along the floor as she went. Through all of this she’d stream-of-consciousness into a head mike At such times it feels like she’s embodying childlike exuberance, umediated and unconstrained, with Makoto as the enabling parent. At times things would stray towards the twee, but Pikachu’s engaging personality normally stopped them slipping over. (Weakest parts for me were when Makoto would abandon the guitar for a chest-slung rinky-dink keyboard.)
Yet that’s not the whole of it. At other times they’d lock together form a sheer sonic onslaught, both heads lowered and no-one the star of the show. Points where you’d have to stop chin-stroking and start holding on to your hat.
And if both were good places to visit, their combination was key. The intersection between free impro and pyschedelic space jam turns out to be one of those double virtue places, combining the ceaseless inventiveness of one with the other’s fondness for riding a groove as far as it could take them. With my ignorant English tendency to put together all things Japanese I couldn’t help but think of the classic opening line from ’Monkey’ - “the nature of Monkey was irrepressible!”
You probably do need to watch the full eleven of minutes of this to get the full flavour…
DJ SHADOW Concorde 2, Brighton, Tues 15th Sept
The visuals to the opening track were of a spaceman flying through the cosmos. While for later numbers they featured news footage of demonstrations with the lyrics thrown up on the screen. Which bodes well...
It always seemed to me a virtuous combination when late Sixties underground bands would alternate between punchy, riff-driven numbers and spacey freak outs. Hawkwind for example could combine ‘Urban Guerilla’ with ‘You Shouldn’t Do That’. Like we were going to rise up against the system and blow our minds.
And at such times this gig suggests some modern dance music equivalent of that combination, but one which pushes the parameters still further – the most insistent uptempo hip-hop morphing into the most spacy house, like focusing in on a newspaper headline then pulling back to reveal the passing of geological time.
And it was certainly a whole lot better than most college kid hip-hop. (You know, the stuff which goes “rappin’ with a thesaurus, bet you wanna hear more-us”.) But for me it didn’t quite have that vital sense of abandon. And with electronic music in particular you do need the lunatic factor, or you’re reduced to watching a bloke on stage twiddling knobs and pressing keys on a laptop. The feeling was accentuated when the gig ended with a credit sequence, making it seem less visceral and more of a movie.
I may be guilty of not quite comparing like with like, but earlier electronic dance gigs by Fuck Buttons and Squarepusher had more of the sense of sheer sonic derangement, as if we were inside the minds of madmen and could only cling on for the ride.
It should be said I seemed to be alone in my slight underwhelm-ment, in a gig which sold out so quickly a following night had to be added. And, in a genre known for it’s larger than life personalities and the associated bragadaccio, Josh Davis (to give him his de-shadowed name) is remarkably regular and unassuming. At one point he asked us to “put one hand in the air if you love rap music”, like two would be overdoing it. Teach him the accent and to drink tea, he could probably pass for a Brit.
It can sometimes feel like modern music
is hopelessly split in twain – between that which ceaselessly coins
new compound genres (death metal disco, anyone?) and music which
regurgitates the past with the diligence of a re-enactment society.
It can feel like the post-modernists have bewitched us into a
self-fulfilling prophecy, sticking us between the rock of novelty and
the hard place of nostalgia. When great music has always come partly
through an engagement with it's times and partly through an
inter-relationship with the music of the past.
In which case acclaimed San Francisco
ensemble the Kronos Quartet are not just a longstanding exception but
a kind of antidote. As I said of the last time they played the Barbican (with Laurie Anderson) “for all their commissioning of scores and
ceaseless boundary-pushing, [they] are at root a string quartet whose
business is to perform recitals from scores.” For the most part
they play 'classical' stringed instruments, unfiltered and
unprocessed. They're even named after a figure deemed archaic by the
Ancient Greeks. (Okay, its more likely to be about connoting time.
Just go with it, okay?) They’re like spotting a classic car still
on the road, so elegant when queued up with mass-produced indentikit
boxes and yet able to keep going.
With one single exception, every
composer in the programme is still alive. (Two join the quartet
onstage.) And only two compositions are pre-millennium. Four are part
of their new 'Fifty for the Future' series, where fifty new compositions
will have their scores stuck up on-line as part of a learning
repertoire to enable further performances.
One notable feature of their approach
is the lack of a video screen. When it works multimedia can work very
well, but when it's bad its horrid. An automatic expectation of i
screens means stuff gets dragged aboard by rote, and often just ends
up distracting. The band onstage can't be just a band onstage but
becomes like one of those overloaded commercial websites, surrounded
by clickbait and dancing GIFs.
Belying the widespread notion that this
music is austere and difficult, several pieces are melodic and
lyrical. Fode Lassana Daibate's 'Sunjata's Time'
is like one of those works based around a folk tune. In fact the
problem was almost the reverse. Some pieces were too short to get a
hold of and consequently felt rather ephemeral. (Including Laurie
Anderson's 'Flow'.)
Kronos continued their longstanding
relationship with Terry Riley with 'One Earth, One People,
One Love', dating from 2002. The title springs from a
'mantra' made up by Alice Walker as an anti-bellicose response to
September 11th, so the sentiment may well be welcome. But,
perhaps even more than with his own Barbican appearance, it's further evidence that the
once pioneering minimalist is now little more than a New Ager. It's
platitudinous quality was mirrored by some soporific music.
Alexsandra Vrebalov's 'My
Desert, My Rose' (part of the Fifty for the Future series)
was by contrast an indeterminate composition more akin to the Riley
of old. Each player is given control of their own musical line, free
to meet up with the others but also to separate off again. Think of
four mountain walkers following four separate spiralling paths,
criss-crossing then uniting on the speak.
Martin Green (of Lau) accompanied the
band on his own home-made instruments for his 'Seiche'.
Two 'Kronoscillators' were mixed-up slinkys, the other (at the back
of the stage) had some strange mechanics I couldn't discern. His
interest was in creating something “impure... slightly
uncontrollable and unpredictable”, where even the player couldn't
determine what the instrument would be doing next. Perhaps
consequently, it was hard to tell how composed and how improvised it
was. Perhaps the 'proper' instruments were scored, but with the
capacity for the players to respond to the unpredictable. It ended up
with both the ups and downs of improvisation, at points stumbling
along while at others everything would come together and sound like
nothing else.
Mary Kouyomdjan's 'Beiruit'
provided the finale of the main set. The piece begins with recordings
of her own family from Lebanon. As they start to discuss the Civil
War and their emigration, the recordings start to overlap and the
accompanying music becomes more agitated. (A woman's voice tells of
giving birth while bombs drop.) The stage then falls into darkness as
we hear actual recordings of bombing. It is somewhat chilling to read
in the programme that these are not from sound library but were
recorded by her family from their balcony. And yet once framed by
music they take on their own musicality, like a Futurist noise
symphony. The players stridently join in with the sounds before
taking over from them, to subside back into quietude. The piece is so
striking it's a surprise to read Kouyomdjan was only thirty when she
wrote it.
The Quartet's sole concession to
rock'n'roll behaviour was to be pulled back onstage for two encores.
This
collaboration between film-maker Lizzie Thynne and composer Ed Hughes
was a modern, home-based update of the 'city symphony' film genre “drawing on such precedents as
Walter Ruttman's silent classic 'Berlin, Symphony of a Great
City'.”
Hughes'
music, though a series of pieces more than an actual symphony, was
quite involving. It was effective the way strings and brass would
effectively work as two musical channels, creatively playing off
against one another.
Thynne's
film contained a neat device in framing the history footage within...
well, within the frame. A woman lines up a seafront photo on her
phone, and we see she's somehow time-machined a picture of
yesteryear. This is of course the way we do see the past, we cannot
help but mentally compare it to the present. It's something which
could perhaps have been played up more. The seafront facade for
example could have been shown as dissolving back through time
periods, until we pass before the film stock era. Brighton was a
centre of the early film industry, so the footage should be
available.
Overall,
the emphasis seemed to be on the ordinariness of Brighton, on people
doing everyday things. Which is perhaps the best approach to take.
Art that manages to reframe the everyday can be more effective that
art that aims at grand metaphysical statements.
But
it may be harder to pull off. Perhaps the film was unlucky in that I
re-watched Chris Marker's classic poetic essay film 'Sans
Soliel' only a short while later. A film which states its
intent near the beginning with the comment “I've been round the
world several times and now only the everyday still interests me”.
And Marker's film is suffused with such small everyday moments;
catching the January shadows of Tokyo, or people awkwardly trying to
sleep in their seats on a slow ferry. It's those intimate moments,
the poetry of everyday life, which seemed absent here.
Perhaps
it fell between stools, the images not striking enough to be
memorable while feeling too framed and composed to truly evoke the
ordinary. Perhaps it should have done something like the 2009
'All Tomorrow's Parties' documentary, which took
attendees' home footage and assembled it into “a post-punk DIY bricolage”.
But
perhaps the biggest failing was that the heralded collaboration
between film-maker and composer didn't actually happen. They may have
done their things at the same time, but there was little creative
spark between the two. The musical pieces would vary in tone and
tempo, but those variations were never really matched by the visuals.
And
the genre took it's name for a reason. Alex Barrett defines it as “films that are influenced by the
form and structure of a musical symphony.” Chris Marker, again from
'Sans Soliel', said:
“This
city ought to be deciphered like a musical score; one could get lost
in the great orchestral masses and the accumulation of details. And
that created the cheapest image... overcrowded, megalomaniac,
inhuman. He thought he saw more subtle cycles there: rhythms,
clusters of faces caught sight of in passing—as different and
precise as groups of instruments.”
Perhaps
they worked at different scales, Ruttman's film capturing the grand
sweep of a classical symphony and Marker's more modern work homing in
on clusters - the difference between Beethoven and Philip Glass. Yet
Thynne's effort lacked any kind of rhythm or musicality at all, just
serving up shot after shot of people ambling around.
There
were points when it felt like an art-house version of a tourist info
film, detailing the city's attractions for the visitor. (The Sea Life
Centre not only featured prominently but got their logo in the end
credits, so were presumably a sponsor.) At others it seemed keen to
portray a city of hipsters at play. (“Look! A young woman boarding
a train carrying an acoustic guitar! That's the kind of crazy,
happening place Brighton is!”) The sort of stuff which gets me
muttering “one day a real rain will fall”. Though there were
admittedly some counter-scenes of student demos and homelessness.
Given
which, it would be neat to dismiss the film as 'neoliberal',
exposing how unlike the amassed city symphonies of the past people
today don't play their part or even bang their own drum – they just
tap it listlessly.
But
even that seems to grant the film too much. A film for example like'Wolf of Wall Street' may in many ways be risible, but is in a
sense doing it's job (at the most surface level) of capturing the era
it's in. I'm not sure this achieved even that. I didn't even take
against it, so much as shrugged and went home.
When
Brighton was granted city status back in 2001 many of us took against
the idea, feeling we were swapping our uniqueness for a non-identity
as London-by-the-sea – becoming like everywhere else to make it
easier for other people to come here. To this day many people I know
still defiantly call their home town a town. And here we had proof of
how much media froth that 'city status' really was - a non-symphony
for a non-city.
GHOSTFACE KILLAH
Royal Festival Hall, London, Sat
14th May
I don't really need to tell you that
Ghostface Killah was a founder member of Wu-Tang Clan, do I? Their
importance not just to hip-hop but to general music history was
perhaps best summed up by the posse themselves, with the track
'The Wu-Tang Clan Are Not a Bunch of Fellows to be Trifled
With'. (They may have phrased that slightly differently.
They are from New York.) Their ability to be streetwise and cerebral
at the same time was again handily summed up by a track title -
'Da Mystery of Chessboxin'. Their edgier, more
aggressive sound both galvanised hip-hop and fed into some of the
excesses of gangster rap. But important artists always leave both
good and bad music in their wake.
With hip—hop the rapid-fire rapping
can sound stream-of-consciousness. But the music's often intricately
layered, dragging sounds and samples in from different directions
like Tom Cruise on those video screens in 'Minority
Report'. Which reprises a question asked over
the Cannibal Ox gig, is it something which can work well
live?
Ghostface Killah's approach seems to be
not to try to reproduce the studio but embrace the chaos. He takes to
the stage with a large entourage in tow, announces mid-way he'll only
perform under red lights because “red is my favourite colour”,
drags audience members onstage to take the parts of absent Clan
members (which works surprisingly well), brings on guests (which
doesn't, one gets booed off), starts and stops tracks at seeming
random.
He holds much of it together through
sheer strength of personality, something he seems to have little
shortage of. And you could argue that you can only get the
good chaos, the unexpected event, with the bad
stuff. But it seems remarkably like he'd forgotten he was in London
to do a gig until five minutes beforehand, and works only fitfully.
At points it starts to sound like karaoke for rabble-rousers.
Notably, when stuck for something else to do, his co-vocalist breaks
into a bar from 'Purple Rain'. And as a result we
do get to hear a fair bit of 'Purple Rain'. It
ends almost mid-song, with him transmitting the news his time is up,
and the house lights switching straight on.
For once there is footage of the
Brighton gig, and it's a time when I caught the London show.
Figures...
What
happened to hip-hop... sometimes I feel it could break my heart.
Pioneering bands like Public Enemy and the Wu-Tang Clan audaciously
tore music apart and reassembled it in a different order, to the
point where it felt there was no real putting it back together again.
They unleashed rule-breaking sonic assemblages which should by any
rights have sounded insanely cacophonous but for some inexplicable
reason always pulled together.
But
all that innovation just led to the likes of Puff Daddy (or whatever
he's called this week), rhyming badly about how many consumer
durables he either owns or has for sale over some randomly chosen
cheesy disco track. It went from the sonic equivalent of graffiti
art, colourful unexpected and transformative, to the plain tagging
of a wall.
I
suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Nothing is more conservative than a
failed revolution. And perhaps it's no different to the Beatles and
the Stones “influencing” Oasis. But the result is that I tend to
treat hip-hop the same way I do black metal. I love the idea of it,
but so rarely do I take to any actual examples I figure I'm better
off sticking with the idea.
Cannibal
Ox, for example, get labelled 'underground hip-hop' when they are surely the truer
inheritors of the great Wu-Tang tradition. Yet as Christopher Dare said in Pitchfork they're in many ways
“like a musical negative, an inverse reflection of hip-hop history,
full of everything DJ's cast aside, from Sega sound effects to
electro-industrialism, gear-work grooves malfunctioning, synthesizers
belching, a menagerie of digitalia.”
Like
both Public Enemy and the Wu-Tang Clan, they hail from New York and
make urban music. Not in the marketing sense of 'made by black people
and therefore most likely edgy', but reflecting the urban
environment. Their classic, and until very recently only, album
'The Cold Vein' is dedicated to “New York City,
the Mecca of Hip-hop” and seems inspired less by music history than
by a walk around the city block.
Marshalling
the insistent force of repetitive beats may inherently evoke the
urban environment, as in the otherwise quite different Godflesh. Pere Ubu named an album
'Dub Housing' after seeing a street on repeat,
repetitive beats evoke repetitive landscapes. But as William
Burroughs said the city is itself like a real-world collage, things
thrown together randomly and ever-shiftingly, and the lyrical
logorrhea and sonic assemblage of Cannibal Ox's music takes in both.
'Cold
Vein' slips from one line to the next between the social
realism of streetwise ghetto tales, grandiosely science fiction
images and Marvel comics references, never giving you the chance to
catch up. (It's bizarre but not all that unusual for New York natives
use both the real and the media image of city equally for
inspiration, like one accentuates rather than dispels the other.) Its
New York is a “rotten apple... evil at its core” and an Iron
Galaxy, described by the somewhat excellently named Sumo Kaplunk as "like a wildlife
documentary on the concrete jungle seen from an alien perspective”.
The lyrics seem at once stream-of-consciousness surrealism (Vast Aire
getting mid-way through one track, commenting he “used a word
twice”, and going back to the start with a substitute term) and
some fully fledged Burroughsian mythology, released in cut-up and
piecemeal fashion.
“Now
the environment's a product of me” they rap audaciously on 'Ox
Out the Cage' (not alas, a track they perform live), which
may be the key to the whole thing. It's like they've got a rhyme to
counter every brick and body in the city, and figure they might as
well set the lot off at once. A
while ago we looked at the way George Bellows’ turn-of-the-century paintings of New York celebrated “the strenuous life”,
and however different in style Can Ox’s turn-of-the-millennium
music has same spirit to it – the individual in constant conflict
between being crushed down by the mighty city and rising up to meet
it. They become critics and embodiments of the city simultaneously,
and like the city they're describing they're abrasive, overpoweringly
forceful and strangely compelling all at once. Picking it as one of his favourite albums, the Guardian's Dan Hancox called it “the true soundtrack for the end times”. And its one of
those releases that somehow doesn't stop, you can't imagine listening
to and not hearing something new in it.
The
alert reader may notice at this point in the gig review that I have
not said much about the actual live performance. And its perhaps an
irony of hip-hop that it started as a live affair, as a DJ and a
rapper performing in a park, but soon became a studio sound. It
passed quickly from its 'Hard Days Night' era to
its 'Sergeant Pepper'. Part of its collage quality
is to present sounds arranged at different levels, your ears
assaulted from every angle. While a live PA can have a flattening and
blurring effect, like watching a 3D movie without the special
glasses. Indeed when their one-time collaborator, and 'Cold
Vein' producer, El-P was in town I hummed and hawed over
this, and ended up not going.
On
the other hand, rapping is about personality and the interplay of
characters, possibly even more than punk. And its surprising how much
being able to put a face to a voice has transformed the way I listen
to 'Cold Vein'. Vast Aire is like the Chuck D of
the band, an unstoppable force, gesticulatingly working the crowd as
he spins lyrics. Yet Vordul Mega is less Flavour Flav than hip-hop's
Brian Jones, a semi-spectral presence drifting across the stage with
half-closed eyes.
I
have already squirrelled away my ticket to GZA this Autumn, so expect
further reports of live Hip-hop shortly...
Not
from Brighton, but the classic album opener 'Iron Galaxy' from a
Dutch festival on the same tour...
...and
for the sake of comparison the studio version...
TERRY
RILEY
Barbican
Centre, London, Sat 18th July
With
a better claim than most to be the father of Minimalism, any
appearance of the legendary Terry Riley is not something to be passed
up. You would of course be disappointed if he was promising a
programme of his best-loved tracks in note perfect order. But then of
course his freeform methods of creating pretty much make that an
impossibility from the get-go. Instead he's showing up for Station to
Station, a self-styled post-Sixties Happening, where he'll compose a
new piece while in situ (titled 'Bell Station III')
while on view to visitors. And he'll perform it... well, this very
evening. With Riley the unexpected is unsurprising.
And
as he walks on he certainly looks the part, an almost perfect double
for Robert Crumb's Mister Natural, even pressing his hands together
when taking applause. Yet surprise arrives along with the other
players. Minimalism normally operated through small ensembles, agile
guerilla units against the regimented rows of symphony orchestras.
Yet not only do countless players march on stage, they even bring
with them a children's choir.
As
the baton is passed back and forth between a solo Riley and these
amassed ranks, the point of the exercise would seem to be a creative
juxtaposition between the two. Yet the two were so
different it was hard to even contrast them, it felt like two
separate programmes spliced together. Worse, the ensemble's
interruptions served to cut against the all-important mesmerising
quality induced by Riley's performances.
The
ensemble's pieces were palatable enough, the clear children's voices
made them feel almost Christmasy (bizarrely enough for a hot July
day), but in the twinkly rather than the schmaltzy sense. The best
piece matched those freshwater voices against woozy jazz brass,
finding a creative juxtaposition within a piece rather than between
them. Yet overall they weren't especially memorable. If asked blind
to guess their composer I would have suggested Sid Vicious or the guy
who wrote the music for the R Whites lemonade ad before ever coming
up with Riley.
Riley's
solo performances took advantage of their un-ensembled nature to
become more free-form, and were most likely semi-improvised. They
also meshed well with Austin Meredith's film backdrop which, with its
held semi-abstract images, was involving without being
attention-grabbing. He swapped instruments for each piece, and for
his best number took to what I assumed was an electric organ but
discovered later was a synth... well he was playing it like
an electric organ. The notes naturally swirled and clustered around
the instrument, as if making patterns in the air. It bore a
similarity to the classic 'Persian Surgery Dervishes'.
But
his raga singing and prepared piano were listenable yet not
exceptional. Anyone blind-dating the gig, hoping to catch up with
what made Riley so important... well, in all honesty I don't think
they would.
It
might be overtly romantic to expect the man to still be making music
as innovative and captivating as in the days of yore. It might be
verging on contradictory to demand something brand new that also
holds up against past triumphs. At the age of eighty, the remarkable
thing might be he's still producing work at all. And ultimately it
doesn't really matter. Riley's longevity was assured a long time ago,
and proven more fittingly two years ago in this very venue when two separate ensembles
performed two wildly different versions of his classic 'In
C'. Musicians often face a dilemma between enabling new
work to happen or keeping alive the great compositions of the past.
With Riley's indeterminate, unprescriptive scores there's no need for
such concerns. Every time someone plays one of his works it will
sound new.
Events
conspired against my seeing any other Station to Station events. I would have been curious to see Suicide's Punk Mass, keen for Beck and would have loved to see the Boredoms with eighty-eight cymbal players – but
alas events intervened. Whether the whole event truly was a Happening
or merely a festival trading under a more attention-grabbing name,
I'm not really the one to ask. I retain, however, my natural
skepticism. Getting to see rehearsals live seems a bit of a thing
currently (PJ Harvey was also at it earlier in the year), but feels more
like the logical next step from the way everything
– including rehearsal tapes – now gets released. But witnessed
rehearsals doesn't seem very much to do with the 'no audience' spirit
of happenings. I took in two art instillations while at the complex
which were notably not just bad but bad in identical ways –
gimmickry stuffed with New Age platitudes.
A
different performance inside a video instillation in France three
years ago. Only excerpts but sounding distinctly better than the
night I went to...
...plus
some classic back-in-the-day footage, just because it would be
foolish not to...
While
previous examples have almost exulted in the eclectic this one seems
to stick on post-punk for most of its running time. Even if it
doesn't start that way. And ends in a squall of feedback, like being
caught out without a mac. But then post-punk was pretty eclectic in
and of itself. I'd tell you why any of this was if I knew myself...
Beth
Gibbons & Rustin Man: Resolve
Tunng:
Sweet William Morgan Fisher (aka RW Atom, aka Hybrid Kids): You've
Lost That Lovin' Feeling The Flying Lizards: Summertime Blues The
Pop Group: Thief Of Fire The Slits: So Tough (John Peel
BBC Radio 1 Session) Blurt: The Fish Needs a Bike The
Drones: The Minotaur The Fall: Craigness The Tiger Lillies: The
Story of the Man Who Went Out Shooting Alternative TV: Nasty
Little Lonely Can: Deadly Doris The Jesus And Mary Chain: Head
(Single Version) Kyuss: Writhe Mission Of
Burma: Einstein's Day Fugazi: 23 Beats Off Gang Of Four: Love
Like Anthrax Cannibal Ox: Ox Out the Cage
Fairport
Convention: Stranger To Himself Emmylou
Harris: Strong Hand Robert
Plant: House Of Cards Abdel
Hadi Halo & the El Gusto Orchestra of Algiers: Win Saadi Life
Without Buildings: The Leanover The
Flaming Lips: Do You Realize?? Kevin
Ayers: The Lady Rachel (2003 Remaster) My
Bloody Valentine: Lose My Breath Drum
Eyes: Gyanza Coil:
A Cold Cell In Bangkok
* The
Drones: I Am The Supercargo Swans:
The Seer Returns Death
Grips: Beware World
Domination Enterprises: Asbestos Lead Asbestos Hole:
Mrs. Jones L7:
Pretend We're Dead
(* I really wanted to use this track by Coil but it didn't seem to be on Spotify.)
Shortly
before the band came on, I observed the typical Death Grips fan to be
a youthful hipster, busily texting and tweeting while sporting ironic
facial hair. “These young people of today,” I thought to myself,
my mind imagining their idea of watching the gig would consist of
updating their live feeds while waxing lyrical of hardcore gigs of
old.
Scant
seconds after the band came on, a huge wave of arm-flinging energy
erupted across the crowd - which didn't seem to abate until well
after the whole thing was over.
Good
for you, young people of today.
If I
were so foolish as to reduce the live Death Grips experience to a
sound-bite explanation, it would be something like 'hip-hop and
drum-and-bass beats, cross-bred with full-on noise then set to attack
mode.' Though it's not at all the same type of music, they chiefly
reminded me of another band I saw in this very venue – Sunn
O))). There's the same single-minded dedication to taking
one frontier of music and pushing at it, never pausing even for such
a lunch-is-for-wimps moment as a gap between tracks. There's the same
deranged decibel level, music so loud your bones almost shake along
to it.
Except
Death Grips' accessory of choice isn't dry ice but strobes – fired
at us pretty much incessantly, and perfectly matching the abrasive,
rapid-fire beats. The performing duo are backlit to the point I'm not
even sure they actually existed in three dimensions, the singer a
perpetual motion machine of aloft arms and jutting elbows.
Live
they're considerably less sample-centric than on record. Tracks are
stripped right back to their elements, much the way robbers do with
shotguns. But there's also a deranged kind of invention to it; things
will become almost psychotically metronomic, only for some curve ball
to be thrown in. Much
like Fucked Up they throw such a dizzying punch live you
can't imagine it working on record. Yet when you try them on record
you find they're richly rewarding.
Things
climax with a good few minutes of squalling white noise. Then the
first thing my punch-bagged ears pick up on stepping outside is a
security guard talking to another. “They had more rabbit than
Sainsbury's.” Which they did.
Like
so many styles of music before it, hip-hop went mainstream many moons
ago. Rappers present a puffed-up parody of black street life for a
mostly white audience, while name-dropping
brand names for product placement cash. But at it's
inception it was about taking music forward by
taking it apart, reassembling it then giving it a
kick out of the lab door. (In methods not so different from Krautrock
outfits such as Faust.) And it's alternative acts like Death Grips,
far from being some wayward offshoot, that are keeping that spirit
alive.
In
what seems an increasingly common step for hip-hop acts, the 'CD
stall' held no actual CDs – just T-shirts and hoodies. (Like
Fugazi in reverse.) Their first release,
'Ex-Military', put up on torrent sites, opened
with a Charlie Manson quote calling the music biz “a bigger jail
than I just got out of.” (On a track appropriately titled
'Beware'.) I didn't believe the promoters' claim
that this had become the most legally downloaded piece of music, and
yet it seems it's so. After signing to Epic and being told
their next release wouldn't appear for over a year, they promptly
torrented that as well. (They are, to no great surprise, no longer
signed to Epic.)
The
first one being free and all that, you could do worse than check it out. This is
the opening track with that Manson intro...
COLOUR
OUT OF SPACE WARM-UP
West
Hill Hall, Brighton, Sat 4th May
These
warm-ups/ fund raisers for the (hopefully still forthcoming) Colour Out of Space
festival seem to be becoming stalwarts of the local scene.
(Though the bohos were too cool and laid back to plug the night even
on their own website!)
As
usual, things were pretty unusual. Tuluum Shimmering played a
succession of folk and ethnic instruments, laying each upon the
others like some totem pole of sound. It probably rests upon a formal
feature of folk instruments, that their open tunings are closer to
drones than modern instruments. Which means each new layer could grab
at your attention, as if bursting into the room like a surprise
witness, only to quickly flatten down into the shimmering sea of
sound as soon as it was usurped. It was like you perptually felt
yourself at the pinnacle of something, only for the totem pole to
grow another step higher.
Getting
carried away as usual by this virtuous combination, I started to
conceive the piece's internal harmony as evoking the ongoing folk
tradition – growing like coral, building upon itself. Of course us
commie types should eschew such notions of smooth historical
continuity, and I should probably have introduced an element of
rupture and struggle by invading the stage. Luckily there wasn't one,
so I could just sit back and enjoy it. I also loved the way that,
after such a mesmerising set, they immediately stuck Slayer on the
PA. That's the way to do it...
Another
of the edited highlights was Avarus
(pictured, but from another occasion), a Finnish free psychedelic outfit with a floating line-up
involving ex-members of Pylon. Despite those geographic origins to me they most resembled a latter-day
Krautrock act, improvising inventively around a metronomic groove
like the spirit of Ash Ra Tempel still lies over us. True they took a
little while to really hit their stride, and alas they were
restricted to a fairly short set. (The venue is in what's known as a
“residential area” so curfews are firm.) They showed every sign
they could have kept going all night, something I'd very much like to
see. Check some out (albeit from another time, another place)...
