I’ve just had the bizarre experience of having to choose between seeing either Leo Kottke or The Raconteurs live next Friday nite. Jesus. I almost had a heart attack. I’ve gone with The Raconteurs – louder.
Oh, yes, and tonite Steve Earle is playing…

Imagine what SXSW is like.

In early 1997 I had an epiphany. I had started listening to techno – real techno – Detroit techno, German techno. At the time I was just surfacing from a suffocating 4-year obsession with R.E.M. and techno, apart from being the first purely instrumental music that I had seriously listened to, introduced me to an entirely new concept – completeness of sound.
I am willing to separate all music into two fundamental forms; music in the form of songs and music in the form of sound. Until I was introduced to techno[1] I really only understood music in pursuit of songs and R.E.M. is a prime example of this approach. To be fair, Berry/Buck/Mills/Stipe did write some good songs and their first five albums do have a tangible coherence of sound, but R.E.M. were/are never credibly interested in sound in its pure form. Their jangly rockabop just does not allow for controlled sound in the way that something like My Bloody Valentine does. But Detroit techno, and its archetypal 90′s genius Jeff Mills, took the perfection of sound to new levels and my ears have never been the same.

The epiphany was this; music does not need songs, producing a complete sound is enough. Now, of course, complete sound does not preclude great songwriting and there are true masterpieces that combine the two[2] but perfect sound on its own is enough. And techno is all about sound, whether soft and ambient or hard-as-fuck, techno is always sparse and producers like Jeff Mills could be heard to have worked on tracks only until their sound was complete. Here I’d like to cite Mills’s mega-hit Alarms above all else. I still want to puke my brains out with glee when I hear it. There’s a little click in the background that sounds like a vinyl pop but clearly constructed digitally and purposefully inserted by Mills. If it wasn’t there I would have shot myself – something would have been missing. But that pop is there and it makes the sound of Alarms complete.

Jeff Mills

This music review is about two pieces of music that I got in the early part of this year that both have a complete sound. The first is Burial’s Untrue – the second album from London’s incognito suburban Dubstep killer – the second is Cocteau Twins’ BBC Sessions (live!) rendition of Violaine. Here they are for you to listen to while you read this[3]. As an aside, the first track is actually a cheap mix of three tracks from Burial’s album – Archangel, Ghost Hardware and the title track. Violaine is left intact.

My brother’s approach finding interesting new music is to download anything that gets a score of 7.5 or higher on Pitchfork – Burial qualified. Burial’s thing is that no-one knows who he is[4]. He produces dense, popping Dubstep on his crappy computer at home. But despite his low-fi approach to producing electronic music he manages to produce a sound that is distinctly futurist. I’ve not felt this type of headlong propulsion into the future since Amon Tobin’s Out from Out Where.

I want to learn one day how to make tunes properly, but I wanted to do a tribute to my rubbish, dying computer. It starts smoking sometimes and the screen flickers like a strobe light, it mashes your eyes. The tunes are made where they’re made, somewhere in my building, the roof or wherever, but not in some airtight studio. Loads of the album was made with the TV on.
Burial

There are two things about Burial’s sound that makes it revolutionary. The first is his approach to lyrics, he takes samples sung in a quiet, soulful form and cuts and squishes them until they are just about intelligible. I’ve never heard singing like this before – a human voice trapped inside the fog of a cold, wet London lamppost at 4:30am.

Sometimes I run out of a vocal and I have to re-cut up each word and make them sing a whole new verse, and you cant tell what they’re saying. But I feel I can make them say certain lyrics.
Burial

The second complete sound in Untrue is the subsonic bass that rolls below the surface of the ticking syncopated beat. Burial understands bass – it doesn’t have to be loud or overdriven to dominate a track. His ghostly rumbling lines always remain in the background, but they drive the tracks by pushing and pulling at the beats and vocals, holding them back or shoving them along.
In this I feel that Burial has hit on the same idea perfected by Richie Hawtin as Plastikman on his pinnacle of nothingness – Consumed. Plastikman set out to record the sound that is left when you remove the music (leaving only echoes) and Burial builds his tracks on the echoes of the Dubstep bass that comes home with him in his head when he leaves the club.

It’s always been difficult for me to make tunes. I’d just sit or walk waiting for night to fall hoping I’d make something I liked. Or come back in and try to make the club echo in my head from going out.
Burial

Burial produces a complete sound by waking the dead ‘ghosts of rave’ and getting them to sing despair[5] at the echoes of earlier bass.

*

The second piece under review is an entirely different thing – Cocteau Twins‘ live rendition of Violaine[6]. Let me say up front that I am stunned at the prospect of this really having been recorded live. From what I’ve read it seems that it was recorded for a BBC radio program somewhere in the late 90′s which suggests that, indeed, a bunch of people with guitars (no synthesizers) got together and made this sound in 3 minutes and 46 seconds. Violaine was my great discovery of January. I had gotten a bunch of Cocteau Twins mp3s somewhere in 2007 and due to their haphazard, alphabetic ordering never listened past about F for Frou-Frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires. While cleaning up unlistened songs[7] I saw the title and clicked it and was confronted with its blistering glow.

Cocteau Twins – BBC Sessions

Cocteau Twins were never known as a rock band, they operated way over in the etheral end of the 80s indie scene. If not originators of shoegaze they were, for a while, its floppy-haired poster children. This makes the BBC Sessions version of Violaine all the more amazing since it is a proper fucking rock song. And not scruffy, jangly rock-n-roll; but a clean, precise blade. The precision of the sound cuts.

The Cocteau Twins were always known for their rich soundscapes flush with clouded vocals and ultra-reverb guitars. But their album sound is consistently bittersweet pop. This makes the BBC Sessions version of Violaine a stand out. As an aside, you’ll notice that Burial and Cocteau Twins share a common approach to inscrutable lyrics. Burial cuts and warps his samples until they are only vaguely understandable, Elisabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins sings in a phonetic language of her own invention[8].
But back to Violaine; what makes it such a powerful sound is the clarity of all of the instruments (including Fraser’s voice). It opens with a whistling line of controlled guitar feedback that is sustained throughout the song. That feedback in itself is an amazing achievement, but it is accompanied by at least two other guitar lines that present a wide range of sounds from delicate picking through to a powerful, round sustained reverb in the closing minutes of the song. Additionally, the volume control is brilliant, from soft verses to a massive ringing guitar bridge before the last set of choruses. And all of it is done live and in analog. Fuckin heavy.

So then, two pieces of music – both with the explicit purpose of producing complete sounds in which songwriting is a side effect of the pursuit of that sound.

I watched CNN’s[1] live coverage of the Olympic Torch relay in San Francisco yesterday. It turned out to be an enormous victory for the anti-Chinese protesters even though they never even caught sight of the actual flame – a brilliant, absurd turn of events facilitated entirely by the wonders of US live action news.

After the London and Paris protests[2] the US news media geared up for a live extravaganza not seen since the OJ White Bronco chase. With protests on both sides (pro- and anti-Chinese) by thousands starting the day before the actual relay those newsrooms must have been cooking through the night. In the end the world’s hungry eyes weren’t disappointed.

pro-Chinese Activism

The protesters showed up(again on both sides), the Chinese musical revue showed up for the relay end ceremony, the news helicopters showed up in force[3] – but no flame. Actually, what they did do was to light the torch and then to jog it into a warehouse where it stayed for some 10 minutes or longer. The warehouse (under the watchful eye of the news helicopters) then spat out a convoy of buses and a decoy of a boat and jetski’s in the harbour to confuse the protesters as to where the torch was. Meanwhile the protesters waited patiently and peacefully along the originally planned route. An hour later the torch magically appeared on an empty street more than two miles from the original route. The relay’s closing ceremony was also canceled and the poor Chinese musicians had to pack up their stuff with their hopes of 15 minutes of network news coverage dashed. And it was all captured in glorious colour by CNN.

anti-Chinese Activism

Here’s some of what people said on the subject:

We assessed the situation and felt that we could not secure the torch and protect the protesters and supporters to the degree that we wished. As a consequence we engaged in subsequent contingency planning that we felt would keep people safe.
SF Mayor

I think we were cheated, because I think the meaning of the relay was to show the whole world that our country is hosting the Olympics
the pro-Chinese

I think it’s cowardly. If they can’t run the torch through the city, it means that no one is supporting the games.
the anti-Chinese

So then, no arrests and everyone went home. Well done to the protesters(on both sides) – you showed up and stood your ground. But why was this such a victory for the anti-Chinese protesters? They got very little face time while this was going on. It’s brilliantly simple really; because Americans (and by extension the US media) looove breaking news – unforeseen developments. Had the relay gone on as planned and there had been some scuffles and arrests the TV-watching public would have nodded in agreement with whichever preconceived notion they had; either ‘Damn right! China out of Tibet!’ or ‘Damn right! Politics out of sport!’. But it didn’t happen that way. Instead the uniform message that the news monster broadcast was that China and their San Franciscan hand-holders were so shit scared of running the peaceful gauntlet that they jumped in a van and hid the flame beneath their tracksuit shirts. An outrageous victory for the anti-Chinese protesters.

Phew! At least the flame survived

In closing I’d like to comment on the sentiment of some politics-out-of-sport groups about whether these types of protests should be linked to the Olympic Games. The argument that they are pushing is that, given the world’s economic intertwinedness with China[4], people should be protesting at the doorstep of the global corporations doing business in China before they dump on the poor athletes who only want to achieve their potential.
There is some merit in this thinking, but the fact is that this is not just an Olympic Games. It is, what has been elegantly called, Beijing’s coming out party. This is a very powerful moment for Beijing and the Chinese. This is their debutant show on the world stage; their first run as a global city; a centre of culture and glorious achievement. How can anyone be part of this level of hypocrisy without saying something?
By all means, do not boycott the actual games. All the athletes should attend and achieve their best. But why should they do so silently? Why not wear a Kasaya armband? Again I am preaching without actually doing anything[5] – but the athletes have a wonderful opportunity to show up, rock the house with their excellence and still tell China that they do not fall for the glorious delusion of the Bird’s Nest stadium.

As part of my quest to combat bandwidth thieves with Satan I came across DearComputer.nl’s Google Image Ripper[1]. It’s a service that will query Google Images and display the full-size images of the search results in no apparent order. Essentially it rips the images from the warm womb of their hosting site and spits them out in an explosive bricolage.

Dear Computer – surprise me

What’s interesting about it is that it seems to have a magical ability to present, in one jumbled up mess, the intimate aesthetic of its subject. Somehow, through its collected images, each subject comes to its right. And, of course, that aesthetic changes daily as the internext changes its mind about its subject – what the internet thinks about abortion today is not what it’ll think of it tomorrow. It’s fucking profound, man.

My next post will be a music review for Burial’s Untrue and Cocteau Twins and for both of these Dear Computer gets it right. Of Burial we know nothing more than his single sketch. The Cocteau Twins shoegaze from the 80s 4AD.

So go ahead, have some fun with George Bush(easter bunnies and Jesus), global warming(Al Gore, children and graphs), suicide(Tibet, Singulair and Pete Wentz), Zimbabwe(hands and queues), best life(astronauts, Oprah, Joel Osteen and Patrick Dempsey).
Your dear computer will project the glowing light of its subject onto your wall.