Illusion Of Time

This was put up online yesterday, a new release from Daniel Avery and Alessandro Cortini. This is so far up my street, so hitting the sweet spot of where my listening habits are at the moment that when I clicked play I couldn’t imagine how it could be any better, any more exactly right. A keyboard part, looped and with just enough reverb on it, altering slightly, a piano playing some bass notes, and some variation in the keyboard riff before it settles back where it began, over waves of static growing and fading in intensity. Four minutes seventeen of meditative, transporting ebb and flow.

 

 

Is This The Road That We Take To The End?

Brexit is happening suddenly but quietly. It’s largely disappeared as a news story, forced off the front pages/ top of the hour reports by Johnson’s victory in December which has taken all the debate and opposition out of it and a flurry of other stories- the royal family and paedophilia, the royal family and racism, the royal family and the entirely sensible decision by two of its members to get out of it, the Coronavirus, Trump’s impeachment and Iran to name but a few. Johnson promised to get it done. What he’s done is get everyone to stop talking about it. In two days time Britain will leave the E.U. Admittedly we won’t see any real changes until the end of the year. Freedom of movement will remain while the UK is in the transition period, we will still be bound by E.U. laws, and the European Court of Justice, worker’s rights and trade will remain the same but without any representation in the European Parliament. As the press looks elsewhere the government will supposedly get on with the job of negotiating the terms of the real departure and the UK’s future relationship with Europe, trade deals and all the rest. They’ve already passed legislation banning themselves from extending the transition period beyond the end of 2020 which means that we could conceivably slip out of the EU on December 31st without any deal. Something that a good number of these bastards have wanted all along.

Symbolically the moment when we leave is midnight on January 31st (Brussels time, nicely). That’s the moment that this country takes the step to make itself poorer, worse off in all sorts of ways, to cut itself off from the largest single market in the world, the moment this country chooses to be an inward looking, mean spirited, small minded Little Englander nation. There will be some arseholes draped in Union flags having parties where they’ve ‘banned’ French wine, Dutch cheese and German  sausage, Little Englanders to a man. They will be misty eyed dickheads standing staring at Big Ben, willing it to bong, and sharing pictures of the White Cliffs of Dover. These people will be gone one day, forgotten, swallowed up by the mess they created, the country they chose to reduce, the country they willingly have turned into a laughing stock around the world. I hope each one of them at some point has a moment where they see what they’ve done and silently admit to themselves that they made a massive fucking error.

Two late period Big Audio Dynamite songs, both showing in different ways that there was life in Mick Jones’ band after they were seen to have passed their sell- by date. In 1991 Mick put together a new version following the departure of the original line up after Megatop Phoenix. Recruiting three younger players (Nick Hawkins, Gary Stonadge and Chris Kavanagh) and renaming the band Big Audio Dynamite II they released Kool Aid in 1990 and then The Globe in 1991. The Globe was in part a re-working of Kool Aid, kicking off with Rush and the cracking title track plus fan favourite Innocent Child and one or two others that still cut the mustard. The Globe was remixed by ambient house heroes The Orb, nine minutes of bliss starting out with the song, then going all dubby bubbly and ambient before bringing in Mick’s most famous guitar riff to see us throgh the last few minutes.

The Globe (By The Orb)

By the mid 90s B.A.D. II had become Big Audio and then back to B.A.D. They were dropped by their major label and signed to Radioactive. In 1995 they released F- Punk, eleven songs created with the same line up Mick put together in 1990 but now with Andre Shapps on board on keyboards and co- production. Andre is the cousin of Grant Shapps, former chairman of the Conservative party and currently transport minister in Johnson’s cabinet. We can’t really hold this against Andre but it’s a bizarre link. F- Punk contained one end period B.A.D. classic…

I Turned Out A Punk (U.S. Mix)

Counted in by Mick shouting ‘1- 2- 3- 4’, a tinny two chord riff crashes in, backed by wheezy organ and then Mick’s familiar reedy voice…

‘Mummy was a hostess, daddy was a drunk
Cos the didn’t love me then, I turned out a punk…

… Slowly started slipping round, til my ship was sunk
Going nowhere in my life, I turned out a punk…

… took my disabilities, packed them in a trunk
rock ‘n’ roll’s alright with me, I turned out a punk’

Tremendous stuff, Mick still kicking against the pricks and writing from the heart. Fuck Brexit.

Facility 4

Maybe we should have just gone and had a Weatherall theme week. This is the new digital only monthly service from the Woodleigh Research Facility, out to buy on Friday- the first fruits are an e.p. called Into the Cosmic Hole. Three tracks for your pleasure, Birthday Three, Phonox Special No. 1 (Outer Space) and the title track Into The Cosmic Hole. Birthday Three is a wheezy drum machine and keyboard homage to Stockholm Monsters, Burnage’s finest. Phonox Special a haunted dancefloor number, with distorted voice, bleeps and a snare, sirens from Fad Gadget, a glide through the dark night. Into The Cosmic Hole is an expanse of pagan chanting, Nina Walsh’s voice and echo and delay on everything else.

Baby

Four Tet drip fed another new one onto his Bandcamp page last week, another taster for his upcoming album Sixteen Oceans. Baby is melodic, padding about softly until the thin kick drum comes in. The vocal comes from Ellie Goulding, cut up and looped, fading in and out. Birds tweet and water runs during the breakdown, over long synth chords and then the voice and the drums come back in. The effect is pretty magical, like everything Kieran Hebden touches at the moment.

Keiran keeps different identities for different aspects of his music. He began dropping his own edit of a Nelly Furtado track into his DJ sets which he released just under a year ago as KH, a full on house banger called Only Human, with a couple of lines of Nelly’s vocal (from a 2006 song) sped up and repeated so that it sounds like a playground chant.

‘You’re so afraid of what people might say/ but that’s OK ‘cos you’re only human’.

Meanwhile the rhythm tracks bangs away, four on the floor, in time with that strobe.

Only Human

Monday’s Long Song

I’m waiting for the comment from keepingitpeel in the box below, if I build it he will come… here for Monday, like dub powered busses turning up in threes, is yet another new release from our friend Andrew Weatherall. This is on top of the Unknown Plunderer 12″ I posted last week, news of a monthly digital only release from Facility 4 (Weatherall and Nina Walsh), the first e.p. out on Friday (more on that later this week perhaps), the announcement of two remixes of a song by The Venetians and now this… The Moton 5.

Nearly eight minutes long, pumping bass, a nagging synth arpeggio, moody keyboards and forward motion. Soundtrack music.

2632 West Pico Boulevard

Like yesterday’s Gary Clail song, this song was inescapable in 1991 but is cut from superior cloth, a genuine contender for Best Song Of The Decade etc.

Unfinished Sympathy

Describing the constituent parts of the song doesn’t really do it justice or come anywhere near identifying what gives Unfinished Sympathy its power. The scratching at the outset, as soon as the needle hits the groove, some studio voices and the tsk tsk tsk of a hi- hat, locate the song in Massive Attack’s roots as a 1980s hip hop collective, the programmed drums roll in, and then we’re off, the strings rolling ominously, the ‘hey hey hey’ sample (John McLaughlin and Mahavishnu Orchestra apparently), leading into Shara’s ‘I know that I’ve imagined love before…’. For the next few minutes the strings and Shara swell and soar, drama and emotion building, and little touches like the piano rundowns and more scratching keep the song firmly rooted. It sounded ‘classic’ the first time you heard it. It’s never really sounded dated. It can still silence a room.

The stings were added afterwards by Will Malone. Massive Attack tried synth strings but they didn’t cut it and so opted for a full orchestra, having to sell a car to pay for it ( a Mitsubishi Shogun fact fans).

Nellee Hooper’s 12″ mix is pretty smart, re-arranging it for the dance floor, opening with piano and pushing the piano and drums to the fore. Less dramatic and less deep than the album mix but when those extra vocals come in around three minutes it’s all arms in the air and spines a- tingling. Plenty of scratching, some chanted backing vox, thumpier drums- its all good.

Unfinished Sympathy Nellee Hooper 12″ Mix

The video is famous, filmed in a suburb of Los Angeles with Shara shot in one take as she struts through the streets, ignoring everyone around her. The group, 3D, Mushroom and Daddy G are all there briefly. Some of the other people in the video are extras and some real residents of the area who wouldn’t get off the streets. The main reason they went to L.A. to film the video, 3D said, was for the light, a golden light you don’t get anywhere else. It’s a brilliant video, the perfect accompaniment to the song, and much copied. This map pinpoints Shara’s walk should you find yourself chasing the golden light and in L.A. with the desire to recreate it.

Blue Lines was a stunning album, a record I don’t think they’ve come close to matching in the years that followed. That’s not really a criticism- nobody else has come close to it either. It was a genuine crossover record, growing through word of mouth, passed on from hand to hand by cassette through the spring and summer of 1991. From the opening paranoia, heavy funk of Safe From Harm to the slow- slow- quick- quick- slow rapping of 3D, Tricky and Daddy G, to the slow groove of Be Thankful For What You’ve Got, the zonked out calm of Daydreaming to the closing beauty of Hymn To The Big Wheel, whale song and liquid beats and Horace Andy’s vocals.

There’s Something Wrong With Human Nature

A record purchase made on a whim and a coincidental sequence of posts on social media have sent me down a rabbit warren of On U Sound recently. The record purchase was On U Sound’s Pay It All back Volume 7, a budget price double album of recent releases from Adrian Sherwood’s dub stable. Not long after someone posted Human Nature, the 1991 single by Gary Clail, produced by Sherwood, a massive club and chart hit in 91 and inescapable for a while.  Weirdly I do not own Human Nature in any format- vinyl, cassette, CD or mp3. I have plenty of On U Sound, several mp3s of Gary Clail tracks and Beef on 7″ but no Human Nature. Here’s the video.

 

Clail’s impassioned vocal over the dub/ indie- dance rhythm track and that keyboard riff, the piano part and Lana Pellay’s ‘let the carnival begin…’ chorus are all obvious highlights, much of the music being David Harrow’s musical handiwork (the keyboard riff, as I’m sure you all know, was used on the titles Snub TV, the much loved BBC 2 music programme). This being 1991 there were remixes and the Steve Osbourne Perfecto mix is a banger.

Originally the song included a Reverend Billy Graham vocal sample which couldn’t be cleared for release and Clail recorded the part it himself. Some promo copies of the single made it into record shops though. You can hear it here courtesy of blogging legend stx.

In 1989 Gary Clail released an album called End Of The Century Party produced by Sherwood and  featuring an all star cast- members of Tackhead, David Harrow, Bim Sherman, Jah Wobble and Keith Levene. This one is a dubby affair with Bim on vox alongside Clail and is infectious like flu.

Two Thieves And A Liar

 

Miss Lonely Hearts

I was sent a link to this earlier this week, a technicolour riot of samples, surf guitar, synths, repetitive beats and sounds from 1950 science fiction films (something of a theme this week). The source material is Miss Lonely Hearts by The Pink Diamond Revue, an electro- punk duo from Reading, guitars and drums with vocals piped in from samples and a mannequin centre stage when performing live. This remix is five minutes forty five seconds of fun from the hands of South London’s Rude Audio who have graced these pages before. Out soon on 10″ vinyl, the forgotten child of the vinyl revival.

Unknown Plunderer

At the risk of repeating myself, here’s a new from Andrew Weatherall, a fired up, slo- mo dubbed out excursion. This is one from an e.p. out on Byrd Out next month along with another track called End Times Sound and a pair of remixes. Unknown Plunderer, the latest fruit from his writing and recording partnership with Nina Walsh, has Andy Bell laying down guitar lines over the top, clipped riffs ricocheting about over cavernous bass. Tasty stuff.

The Effect

Something altogether darker and less earthbound today, a remix from a forthcoming Dan Wainwright e.p.  by John Paynter (who runs a night/site called A Space Age Freak Out). Percussive, chugging science fiction with a springy bass, theremin action and noises zooming in and out, sounds beamed in from space and bouncing around from the red planet to the Sea of Tranquillity, from Convair Aeronautics to mission control.