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.

It’s time again for my annual xmas music compilation; xmas07 – Moving Houses. I’ve also recently finished a dodgy electronic music compilation named Cheese n Technique, and rightly so; some cheese, some technique.

I really don’t have anything else to say except death to 2007 but no to 2008.

Happy fucking holidays

Fucking A! The Black Crowes were awesome[1]!

I must admit to not knowing much about them, other than radio name recognition, when I saw the ad in Atlanta Creative Loafing, but through the flyer I felt their music floating toward me through the hazy late-summer heat. There’s something just right about Southern Rock and late afternoon heat[2].

Flier

Atlanta had had some serious late afternoon thundershowers the preceeding few days which sent me scurrying off to Wal-Mart for a $3 umbrella as I prepared myself for a huddled down show. But in the end Sunday afternoon turned into a steamy hot Sunday evening as the hometown crowd gathered at Chastain Park.

Chris Robinson got it right when he welcomed everyone to the show after ‘a little monsoon’ – his gospel inflected vocal style present even in his sing-song way of speaking.

Gathering Storm

The Black Crowes are vaguely classified as a hard rock Jam Band. Jam is right. The songs are constructed around thick, scratchy blues riffs that are set up for extended jam opportunities. The guitarists invariably trade solos as the songs organically growing into the evening air. Even the drummer gets an extended solo as the rest of the band members light up a cigarette[3].

The show itself is stoner central with the stage covered in oriental rugs and a US love flag draped over the organ on stage left.

US Love

Of course there were some absurdities(this being America). Even though it is an outdoor venue there is absolutely no smoking allowed. What? We’re here to see one of the top three stoner bands[4] in the world, it’s a fucking rock show and there shall be no smoking? Are you fucking nuts?? About 5 minutes into the show the first plumes of smoke appeared in the pit down front and by the time the sun was down the evening air was filled with the smell of marijuana[5] and, surprisingly, incense.
But regardless of your preference for beer, water or weed a nite with the Crowes is all about the blues riffs and the jams. And from first song to last the riffs and the jams were as thick as the batter on Chicken Fried Chicken. I’ll stop with the down-home lingo now, but the whole thing was absolutely fantastic, y’all.

Great musicians, wild hair, gloopy riffs and the distant snoring of cicadas.

[1] I’d rate it up with Dieselboy in Cape Town and Takkyu Ishino in Kuala Lumpur
[2] Cape Town summer weather is just terrible, dry and windy. I’ll take heat and humidity any day.
[3] Or worse
[4] And they’re willing to back it up, and not only through their image. Chris Robinson was high as a kite throughout
[5] Let’s not be coy by calling it a ‘herb’ – these people were looking to smoke some major pot.

I went through a dub/reggae phase a year or so ago, mainly due to an interest in Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and his Black Ark studio. I was particularly interested in the mystical aspect[1] of reggae and its evil twin, dub. Here was a popular music form, arguably the folk music of Jamaica, which was first and foremost a religious, gospel music.
What blew me away more than anything else was the tight cut bop of a reggae rhythm section – equal to anything achieved by Fela Kuti or James Brown’s backing bands or the best mid tempo electronic music anywhere[2].

the Black Ark

Another surprising discovery was that Bob Marley was, as a legitimate musician, by far the leading exponent of reggae’s darker edge. I had always thought of Bob in terms of Buffalo Soldiers and No Woman No Cry. The type of thing that 20 year-old’s drunkenly sing along to at after parties. But his work with Lee Perry was of a different class entirely. His skill as a gospel songwriter, the timbre of his voice and the quality of his performances leads reggae to this day. I still rate Reaction as a transcendental moment.

Imagine my glee when I picked up the May 2007 issue of Mojo[4] at one of those magazine clearance stores featuring a cover article on the recording of Exodus. I never knew that Exodus was recorded mostly in London while B was in tourist exile from the political upheaval of Gun Court-era Jamaica. The magazine also features a cover mount disk with a range of reggae and dub tracks. The centerpiece of this collection is an 11-minute live rendition of the title track(Exodus!) performed by Bob Marley and the Wailers at the peak of their abilities.

Sun is Shining

I don’t do this often[5] but here it is. As a performance it demonstrates supreme skill and feeling and is dominated by the rhythm section’s uninterrupted 2-bar loop. The Wailers do something that very few musicians can claim, they play a single figure consisting of no more than a handful of notes for 11 minutes on end and you cannot tear yourself away from it for even a second.

There is a little piece of magic that happens about 25 seconds into the song[7]. The band start the song out at a tranquil tempo(playing that two bars from the very start of the song) and some 20 something seconds in you can hear Bob taking the microphone from its stand. Then there is a slight upturn in the tempo as Bob picks up the feel. I can imagine him laying down his smoke, getting the feel for where the Wailers are at, wanting more and picking them up with a drop or two of his head. And then he is ready to start, ‘My mhababah shaba shabba shey-now oh-oh-oh Exodus!’

[1] No, not the stoner aspect – the dread.
[2] Musician acquaintances have confirmed that reggae is probably the most challenging form of music to play live[3].
[3] — Except, of course, for 80′s Scandinavian speed metal
[4] I really don’t want to paint myself with the old-time-music-is-still-the-best brush, but the quality of Mojo’s feature journalism is outstanding.
[5] Just in case you might think that this is a free music dumping ground.
[7] Yes, there are other bars and other parts to the song, but the core of the performance is a single loop.
[7] Something that would have been guaranteed to get you fired from Fela Kuti or James Brown’s band, but which I believe was all just part of the moment in the Wailers.