ambient-acid techno landmark recorded by richard james aka aphex twin in the early nineties.
intuitive, dissonant, the minimal-psychedelic visions of a rare talent who possesses real creative foresight and a mozartian inclination for melodies seemingly written on nature's own treble clef. techno is alive, it breathes, it hypnotizes and terrorizes.
the experiment does not care about you. experimental media is not interested in entertainment. it does not concern itself with repeating back to you the world as you believe you understand it. electronic music attracts those with an experimental temperment, because technology invites tinkering. a world of technology is governed by exploration, by blind discovery. It's a world of complete control, but also a complete lack of control. Increased technology means increased mastery over the manipulation of sensible information, like sounds and images, but it also means the possibility of withdrawing control, of finding new ways to allow the processes of manipulation to act upon and transfigure the world.
it's often said that techno music is future music. the simple way to appreciate this is to hear techno sounds as being direct indices of future existence, soundtracks to digital life, with cyborgs and jet packs. the more nuanced way to appreciate this is to understand the future not as a pre-planned fate, the stuff of fifties flying-car advertisements, but a world that can never take place.
The future as such can never happen. But concentrated slivers of it can explode into the grey calm of the present. Techno is not the future, but through its most experimental moments, it can point to the future. Its experimental instances, like 'surfing on sine waves,' point to the future by incarnating a new musical possibility. When a new possibility is incarnated, it repeats forms and elements that are already familiar, yet at the same time it projects an utterly strange and foreign sensibility. 'surfing on sine waves' sounds like early nineties acid techno on Warp records, but at the same time it sounds like nothing else. James is the quintessential mad-scientist of techno, a onetime engineering student whose machine obsession has long since mutated into an exploratory drive for the inner cosmos of electronic sounds, a haunting, unsettling realm, an inverted mirror world, a phantom space of black-box circuitry and artificial intelligence.
"Someone once asked Hildebrand [inventor of the Auto-tune] if [it] was evil. He responded, “Well, my wife wears makeup. Is that evil?” Evil may be overstating the case, but makeup is an apt analogy: there is nothing natural about recorded music."
If you carry this point to its conclusion, you begin to understand that all recorded music is like the Trans cover. It's a work that by way of apparent exception, points out the hidden universality of its condition: all records are man-machine throwdowns. So SFJ's latest piece is on the auto-tune, the electronic vocal-altering software popularized by T-Pain, which he points out will sonically represent the late aughts the way that the "dry, flat drum sounds" of Fleetwood Mac's Rumours represent the seventies. And also that most people think the autotune is a vocoder. Very different process: autotune corrects your voice until you have hyperexact pitch, while the vocoder adds a tone, effectively "encoding" your voice.
This is why it was invented. The vocoder, like Muzak, has a military origin:
"Between 1942 and 1945, while working for Bell Laboratories and the British Secret Service, respectively, Shannon and Turing developed the vocoder, a wonder weapon that would make the transatlantic phone conversations between Churchill and Roosevelt safe from interception by Canaris and the German Abwehr...It lives up to its name: it encodes any given data stream A with the envelope curves of another sound sequence B..to test his vocoder, by the way, Turing played a record of Churchill's belligerent voice, whose discreet or cut-up sampled values he then mixed with a noise generator using modular addition...Appropriately, Turing's vocoder was named after Delilah, who in the Book of Judges tricked another warrior, Samson, out of the secret of his strength." - Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone Film Typewriter, p. 48.
I posted the track "Computer Cowboy" from Trans before, but f*ck a re-up, here's the album. My friend Trey gave me Trans. I was at his house over Thanksgiving and he had the album image magneted to his fridge, perhaps the only bit of visual decoration in the entire apartment, which shows how significant it is. Trey taught me everything I know or think I know about DJ craft. If I ever wanted to make a version of "Searching for Bobby Fischer" but about DJing, then Trey would be the Bobby Fischer part. Born of a great inner aesthetic sensitivity, his skills are unparalleled, but like John Fahey or Sly Stone he largely withdrawn from the game in recent years. All of Trans is really dope. It's his Devo album, so it's no surprise that some of the tracks show up on the goof-off movie "Human Highway" that he filmed with Devo the same year. "Computer Crusher" is a serious jam. In general you could just DJ by mixing two copies of this LP into a face-melting electro-rock megamix.
It's been often noted that Young started using the vocoder in part because he noticed that it got a stronger emotional reaction out of his young son afflicted with cerebral palsy. So an instrument that alienates a great deal of his fans helps him connect with his child stricken by an alienating disease.
Young explains the record in an 1989 interview for the Village Voice Rock N Roll Quarterly:
"Trans was about all these robot-humanoid people working in this hospital and the one thing they were trying to do was teach this little baby to push a button. That's what the record's about. Read the lyrics, listen to all the mechanical voices, disregard everything but that computerized thing, and it's clear Trans is the beginning of my search for communication with a severely handicapped nonoral person. 'Transformer man' is a song for my kid. If you read the words to that song - and look at my child with his little button and his train set and his transformer - the whole thing is for Ben.
"People completely misunderstood Trans. They put me down for fuckin' around with things I shouldn't have been involved with. Well, fuck them. But it hurt, because this was for my kid."
Oh, interestingly enough, want to know how Frere-Jones' autotune article ends? with a quote from T-Pain, current autotone master. Read it together with Young's sentiments:
"When I asked T-Pain if he could ever forgo Auto-Tune, he said, 'I got a song on my album about my kids. I ain’t use it on that one.'"
Here's Neil doing a track from the record mit vocoder on the BBC. BTW there is an 1983 concert film of him doing a lot of Trans material, filmed in, you guessed it, Berlin, aka the town where musicians go to turn into robots.
Neil Young - Computer Age (Live BBC)
Attached are three other wtf electronic jams, one by Paul from his 1980 solo record, one from Cat Stevens, which is totally goofy and great, and a Chic-produced Carly Simon slow-disco jam that was for a 1982 film that flopped and later became an Ibiza acknowledged classic. All illustrating another reason why electronic music is great, because not only can anyone do it, but it's ok if they do it for just one song. Anyone can do punk also but it's fake if you just have one punk song, but you can have all the one-off drum machine jams you want. Which makes crate-digging (or as Wade says, leak-digging, or even craig-digging) even more entertaining, because pretty much everybody has one cash-in disco jam, or one beatboxed-out free for all.
Because techno is for everybody.
"The Pod - Community Techno Unit"
PS I almost put up the video for "Coming Around Again" by Carly Simon because I must have heard that song one billion times when I was a kid, and it is kind of awesome. but the video, replete with home-movie clips and a severely 80s-out Carly, is also kind of horrifying.
PPS do you know that if you click on 'share' on the player, it takes you somewhere special? try it.
The inaugural March edition of AC radio is curated by me.
1. Thief at your Window - Endless Grift Recorded last April at Explosion Robinson, a basement studio on Grand Street in Brooklyn whose name was adopted by the urban clothing store which had previously occupied the space. Engineering and guitars: Darian Zahedi. 2. You May Be Blue (Neighbors Remix) - Vetiver Topanga folkie Vetiver refits his own track from the album 'To Find Me Gone', turning the dark folk-rock number into a very Superpitcher/Kompakt-like brooding minimal-techno stomper. 3. Space Disco - Universal Robot Band Eleven minute epic track that is a very strong blueprint for the now-resurgent 'space disco' style: short on chic/village people/bee gees disco decorations, long on hairy tribal weirdness. Sounds a bit like that 'Cloud One' record if it achieved lysergic velocity. 4. Train (Ewan Pearson Remix) - Goldfrapp 5. Once Upon a Time - The Heliocentrics Belongs in consideration with the DJ-Shadow playing high school band and the Hypnotic Music Ensemble. It seems that live bands have figured out how to play like Entroducing and are ready to start killing shit. 6. Idle Hands - Harlem River Drive Jonathan sent us this, a burning latin funk album lead by Eddie Palmieri. This is the deepest, most muscular track. The kind of intense music that will temporarily erase your memory and make you forget you have other songs you could be listening to. 7. Track 5 - Ulaan Khol Stephen R. Smith's new solo record, very recommended if you are pleasantly susceptible to soaring guitar squalls and other types of mesmerizing sonic excess. 8. National Anthem to the Moon - Bruce Haack From 'Electric Lucifer'. Deeply eccentric outsider-art moogness from the same camp as White Noise, American Metaphysical Circus, etc. 9. Snakedriver - Jesus and Mary Chain From the Crow soundtrack! You know what, as a matter of fact, I want you to go listen to that whole record right now. 10. Anambra - Ozo Renowned for being one of the close-out tracks at NY disco impresario David Mancuso's legendary loft parties. Not even really a disco track at all, just deep spiritual beats from no country. 11. Effective Placebo Effect - In Flagranti 12. Hung from the Moon - Earth 13. Super Inuit - Holy Fuck
Intro: The Wire, episode 59 Pylon – Danger Ebony Bones – We Know All About You Liquid Liquid – Optimo (JD Twitch Edit) The Gossip - Standing in the Way of Control (Playgroup Mix) Ghosttown DJ’s – My Boo Kano – I’m Ready Paradise – In Love With You The Chemical Brothers – The Golden Path (Ewan Pearson Extended Vocal) David Bowie - TVC15 Dondolo – Dragon (Shit Robot Remix) Montell Jordan – Get It On Tonite Gui Boratto – Like You (Supermayer Mix) Supermax – Love Machine Love & Rockets – So Alive Playgroup – Number One Lindstrom – Another Station (Todd Terje Mix) Grinderman – Honey Bee
The Borgata hotel, Atlantic City, NJ
Why f*ck a re-up? Don't we like re-ups, because that's where the goods come from? Aren't re-ups necessary for life? If we diss the re-up, do we still get to listen to Clipse? In episode 59, The Wire's police officials break out from simply catching drug dealers conducting re-ups. Had they remained in the re-up, it would have been like a grey, existential french drama. Re-up after re-up, with no end in sight.
On Friday night at the Borgata hotel in Atlantic City (AC), after having driven down with several close friends of mine for a long night of bro-ing down, I personally had to say f/ck a re-up, and I was all the better for it. Let me say here that if you are to visit the lovely Borgata hotel, and you want to know who there is not on your side, his name is Joe Vanderslice, the manager of crowd control. Mr. Vanderslice, a stocky, stoic man, refused, even after an extended well-argued and even-tempered plea from me, to admit my passport (issued to me abroad, at the US Embassy in Prague) as a valid form of ID, thus allowing me to drink alcohol and to gamble on the premises. While I respect the relatively unpleasant and joyless labor of maintaining order at a busy New Jersey casino, and the attendant lack of human sympathy that I imagine is an invaluable tool in such a career, I remain convinced that I suffered an injustice as a result of Vanderslice's painfully limited knowledge concerning legitimate forms of government-issued identification.
In a casino, while gambling, one's drinks are re-upped periodically gratis by the house. Denied the re-up, I went for re-supply: sympathetic to my situation, my friends agreed to retreat to our hotel room, where room service was entreated to produce a bottle of Absolut, the contents of which were then enjoyed with gusto, the remainder going into a clear plastic water bottle I had procured earlier from an in-hotel Starbucks. I treasured the fact that I would be the only one that night who could get in trouble for drinking, high-school style.
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On scanning the tracklist, the attentive reader will notice that several of the pieces do not make their debut appearances here, but have in fact been utilized in at least one, perhaps more than one, previous mix. It's possible that the reader will greet this observation with a twinge of disappointment. Why this persistent attention to these particular songs? Should today we not look forward, are we not, as it is said, in an era that craves and deserves change?
There is a kind of change associated with upheaval, radical disjunction, and the jolts of sudden difference. And then there is the change of modular repetition, of unfolding, of infinite permutation. The former is what is hungered for by an appetite trained by the rhythms and intensities of industrialized entertainment. In this context, technology is used to deliver the promise of the first change, while a deeper potential lies in its capacity for exploring the second.
The most intense exploration of this capacity in sound is in electronic dance music, and in language, the French postwar nouveau roman, exemplified by the repetitive narrative techniques of Alain Robbe-Grillet (who passed away less than a week ago) and others.
What R-G shares with techno is the engagement with modular repetition as a phenomenological lens on the world. A mental object, be it a condensed literary scene or a four-bar loop, is held, bound, suspended, rotated, its possibilities and potentials unfolded and ignited, again and again, without progress, without tragic arc, without end.
This world is marked everywhere by the permanent tension between possibility and determination. Each object or event carries in itself more possibilities than can ever be realized, all of which make equal claim to the right to be manifested. Modular repetition stages the interruption of the process of determination, holding the object up the light of potentiality and engaging in infinite inspection.
One of the benefits of a blog is that its disposable character, its off-handedness and comparative instantaneity give it a workbench-like atmosphere. The reader is not a tourist in a museum of finished masterpieces, but a casual visitor to a craftsman's studio during work hours. Hence the reworking, the investigations of alternate drafts, discarded revisions, and the compulsive return to old favorites.
final episode 60 of The Wire now available from HBO On Demand. As if you're not so deep in it right now.
EDITORIAL ADDENDUM: If it is the case that the comment posted anonymously below is the result of some kind of mildly beleaguered indignation, as is often so with expressions like 'come on, guys', we would like to point out that the preceding video is not only wholly within the general editorial spirit of this blog, it also directly forms an aesthetic triangle with two videos previously featured here, Wiz Khalifa's 'Say Yeah' and Hot-tub Johnny's 'Let Me Tell You'. With the first it shares an opening up of hip-hop to the rhythmic forms and structures of electronic dance music, which is arguably really going back to re-ignite potentials that were present between electronic music and hip-hop at the latter's historical inception (see our post on the Beat classic compilation), and with the second it shares the reduction of vocals to absurdist, minimal chanting. If hot-tub johnny were a rapper, he would be Ninjasonik. If Wiz Khalifa plays a show in NYC, Ninjasonik should open.
Plus he wears tight white pants, which is very Weekend Prince/Casual Pansy. This is like a summertime Bushwick rooftop Caspan jam.
-William
ADDENDUM POST-SCRIPT
yeah and like, what about 'Watch my Feet' by Dude n' Nem?' that's a good point.
Zombie-Zombie are a French electronic-rock duo. Who have a new album coming out on March 3 called A Land for Renegades. "Driving This Road" is the lead track.
They play portentous synth-discoey or electro-rock jams with militaristic beats. The soundtracks Carpenter composed to his own low-budget 70s & 80s exploitation films seem like a big influence.
I heard 'Driving This Road' a while ago and loved for its ring-modded minimal synth riff and general minimal sinisterism. I kept waiting for the album to stray from the formula that makes 'Driving This Road' so effective and it never did, it remains very much in the pocket, very tight and concise. There's a broad parallel to be drawn with Deerhunter, actually, as they both take certain brooding, stiff joy-divisiony elements and stretch them out into spacier jam formation.
I downloaded the album from itunes with fingers crossed. The same 'please don't suck' fingers that were crossed when, after several days, I finally listened to the remainder of OK Computer after being blown away by 'Paranoid Android'.
The release of OK Computer has something structurally in common with zombies, and I'm not referring to the ones that have been created in the decade of its wake, those who stalk around in the stingy ghettos of the internet world with bleeding mouths, who eat one another's brains and have aching, starving stomachs that crave the next little Radiohead morsel (Thom singing 'Cabaret' on the toilet? Some helicopter sounds played backwards and overlaid with thin, brooding guitar?). No, both the album and zombies, specifically their movies, by which I mean movies concerning zombies. They're both events, in the philosophical sense. That's to say that in both cases, something intense happens to you that catches you off guard and compels your complete and urgent attention, and you then turn to look out the window or ring up a friend of yours, only to find that this phenomenon is going on outside as well, or over at your friend's house, and then it's going on in the whole neighborhood, then all over town, then spreading to the hills...
Full Disclosure: we here at the AC have a mild case of catastrophilia.
A Land for Renegades might be a concept album. It certainly feels like it. On the track 'What's Happening in the City', disorienting pitch-shifted voices make ominous statements about the state of things...they could very easily have been lifted from "Dawn of the Dead's" claustrophobic, panicked media transmissions: "I see all the people leaving in the city. Can you tell me what's happening in town? You will feel pain in your body...Your nose will bleed every time you think about it."
AC says:
We are psyched about these guys. We bet they totally like 80s horror movies and synth jams.
It kind of sounds like if Superstudio did set-design for a horror movie.
That would be awesome. You should look up Superstudio, you would like it.
It would be cool if ZZ came to play the United States.
But you see, while I would hesitate to call ZZ disco, I think a certain affinity for spacey-experimental disco can be found in their kraut-goth jams. (Kraut-goth, does that make it like, Nosferatu? It's not really vampire club music, though, that would be way more erotic and alluring. ZZ's music really does have that perpetual lurch of the brain-hungry undead).
I think this is a rather European phenomenon. If disco is to euro what rock is to the US, that's because they're also both the respective nomadic musical forces that can mutate and permeate all kinds of other styles and micro-styles. That's why in Europe and France in particular you have disco-metal (justice), space disco (Dirty Sound System), etc. While on the other hand if you want to communicate to american ears, particularly New York ears, you have to speak rock. Whatever you want to say, say it in a rock accent. That's why LCD Soundsystem is so effective because it's navigating between these two powerful nomad forces, disco and rock.
AC remains perplexed as to why techno (aka minimal beats) remains a distinctly european force. Why does America resist? is it some metric-system shit or what?
Seriously though, Tear Da Club Up (Dragged and Chopped). DJ Black is the Saint Paul of Houston rap, spreading the word after the death of the savior. He doesn't call it 'chopped and screwed' out of respect for the father, and as well 'dragged' is fitting because it's slower than screw. It literally sounds like you're dragging something, like a body. The beginning of the track could be a ghetto zombie soundtrack. TEAR DA CLUUBBBB UP TEAR DA CLUBBB UPPP. Northface jackets, bling and brains, smashing tables, knocking drinks over, blood on the dancefloor. PS check out Black's myspace page, it is ill.
Were one to feel a slight pang of doubt, understandable to be sure, as no life on this world, no matter how serene and secure, is free from such pangs, that cosmic disco was not of particular relevance in today early 2008, one would have to look no further than this recent B-side by LCD Soundsystem in order to encounter evidence to the contrary. The beat is discoey, slow, spaced, and at the end following a goof-off drum solo there's a weird synth-ed up detour which appears without warning.
The recent recipient of glowing praise among the purveyors of contemporary indie music, El Guincho has often been described as a heavily tropacalia-inflected mutation of last year's Panda Bear solo album. There is not much reason to contend, dispute or enhance this description. There is reason, however, to dispute the claim made by the recent Pitchfork review that 'there's nobody else making music like this right now': Manu Chao, anyone?
Little is known to this writer about Mogollar other than it can be described by means of the phrase, 'Turkish progressive folk-pop of the 60s-70s.' An ill and mellow jam, all things considered.
The American Museum of the Moving Indian, the cherished Battery Park institution dedicated to preservation and celebration of heretofore under-heralded contributions by Native Americans to dance music, recently commissioned Brooklyn techno producer Masta Bingus to compose a new track in honor of the museum's centennial festivities. Bingus' dancefloor ode to traditional Native American hospitality underscores the traditional Native American shelter of teepee or 'wigwam' as being the original pre-white people version of the techno club.
AC presents MB's original mix, together with a Weekend Prince remix, not so much a remix as a altogether new track which is built from the original's tech-tribal stomp and twists it into a mopey synth-disco jam. Enjoy please.
Bingus is a natural choice for the AMMI's commission, as his forte is the combination with a perverse and cartoonish sense of characterization, unsurprising given his animation background. The words on 'Welcome to My Teepee' are those of a collaborator known for his remarkable Navajo vocal mimicry. The original text was quite long and appears here in highly truncated form, the remainder being set aside by Bingus for the production of an Indian-themed cartoon, which will greet visitors to the AMMI's Kidz In Da Teepee children's exhibit.
Ancient Teepee
The musicological premise of the AMMI is to emphasize the process of secularization by which the organized drum ritual of the Native American slid into to the modern electronic music spectacle. 'Welcome to My Teepee' helps reassert this genealogy, also while extolling the virtues of the teepee. Indians used to have ecstatic drum parties which were encased in temporary architecture as opposed to boring who gives a shit clubs. The clubs would go with them. They could make beats wherever they wanted.
Modern Norwegian Teepee with Bose speakers
From a broader critical perspective, the largest change once drum rituals went from being religious to secularized is that the psychological energy which is released or produced in the listener is no longer so rigidly directed. Without being so bound up with maintaining in ritual a connection between terrestrial and divine realms, the releasing of this energy makes manifest a fundamental ambiguity not only about rhythmic music but art in general, namely regarding the nature of catharsis. Music is a drug, and it all depends on the dose. You can never predict when it's going to get energy out of your system in a relieving, purifying, cathartic way, or whether it's going to jack you up, get you distressed and overstimulated, get you addicted and wanting more. This is arguably one of the biggest changes once art became de-coupled from its original cultic value.
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As well a designer and video director, Masta Bingus operates out of a converted firehouse in Far Eastern Bushwick, where his closest neighbors are Pumps, a blue-collar exotic-dancer bar, which has elsewhere earned blog comment accolades such as this from "Slappy McGee III esq": The only skin bar I've been too wear the strippers have on aviator shades, sports coats and hoodies ... fucking awesome!, a lonely BP gas station alit in ghostly neon, a number of gnarly junkyards with the appropriate fauna, and an impressively desolate and fetid stretch of canal which seems to have as much of a chance of spewing into the river Styx as it does hooking up with the East River.
Of the number of Bingus videos on the web, the music clip for Hot Tub Johnny most embodies Bingus' process of getting one of his friends to act like an ass and then making a techno track out of it. The result is kind of disconcerting because it is kind of difficult to stamp the video with an origin or a context. Is it a joke? Is it for real? Like 'Teepee' it gives off the effect of having, in the middle of the night, turned on the television in a low-starred hotel somewhere in Eastern Europe, only to be harassed by an inexplicable transmission. Who are these goony ravers? Why do lights shine out of their punches? What should I do, now that I know that all kinds of things are up in this place?
Hot Tub Johnny - Let Me Tell You
Also recommended is Bingus' video for Laibach "B Mishina", viewable on the Bingus blog here
Addendum: Two additional tracks in the tribal-chant vein have been added as supplements to the Masta Bingus - Weekend Prince throwdown: minimalist Ricardo Villalobos' highly-buzzed new track 'Enfants', and a very out-there song by Roberto Di Simone, experimental Italian conductor, together with his group, New Company of Popular Music. The blog Marathonpacks indicates that this track was recently the subject of an uncredited cover by the Japanese group OOIOO on their Thrill Jockey album TAIGA.
*for more on the Di Simone track see the entry on Marathonpacks blog here
