Where Have They Been?

Thick Pigeon were one of the many interesting bands to be left out of the movie 24 Hour Party People. Granted, they were from New York, not Manchester. I don’t know if their story is more interesting than the antics of Happy Mondays, but their music certainly is.

Active for a passing moment in the early/mid-80’s, they created sparse, avant pop songs with the austerity of the Durutti Column and the hesitant playfulness of Young Marble Giants.

“Jess + Bart” is both charming and creepy. It sounds remarkably like their label mates Joy Division’s “Decades”, but without the introspection. (Noted: Joy Division/New Order’s Steve Gilbert and even New Order’s Gillian Gilbert are marked as group members on the credits. But so is Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore. Go figure.) In keeping with the sound of their label, both songs use an economy of elements. Rhythms are gentle versions of Krautrock’s motorik linearity accompanied by pulsing organs. Neither bother with guitars. Thick Pigeon doesn’t even bother with much bottom, let alone a bass line. Curiously, Ian Curtis’ lyrical moans are akin to Stanton Miranda’s squeaky whispers – both are delivered in near monotone. The key difference is subject. Instead of Ian Curtis’ humorless dirge of “young men” in a “portrayal of the trauma and degeneration”, Miranda’s nearly ginger children’s song is about cowboys riding bronco bucks. Joy Division create a very complete, bleak picture of loss; Thick Pigeon create a humorous juxtaposition of eerie electronic music about ye olde American prairie life. Which would be outright funny if it weren’t so uncanny.

Thick Pigeon - Jess + Bart

Chillum Riddim

I first (knowingly) heard R.D. Burman’s music in a restaurant in Arambol, Goa, India. But I had likely heard him before, since his Bollywood compositions are legion.

I know nothing factual about this track, and google gives me little.

The structure of the music churns with a directionless drift, comprising only a rhythmic, muted pulse and spindly, phazing strings. The earnest male vocals are forward but delayed to pull them into the otherworldliness of his accompanists. Despite that connection, his vocals seem to freestyle over a potentially endless, spiraling track. It’s as if he found an already used instrumental to support his vocals.
I wonder if any other singers have used this 'Chillum Riddim’. If so, I want the dub plate.
I also wonder if, at the time of its recording, the heavy use of flanger was merely an interesting effect to the producers or if, as in the West, it signified ‘trippy’ and referred to states of intoxication.

Regardless, it’s a beautiful example of Bollywood’s genre hybrid tactics.

George Harrison has “Love to Love You” and R.D. Burman has "Dhanno Ki Aankhon Mein".

R.D. Burman - Dhanno Ki Aankhon Mein

Camp Invisible

Nash the Slash is an iconoclast from Canada.

In ’81, I saw him perform at The Police Picnic -- a music festival outside of Toronto with the Police, Killing Joke, Iggy Pop, the Go-Go’s, the Payola$, Oingo Boingo and the Specials. Of course it changed my life. It was the first time I’d seen dyed hair and hash oil.

Nash the Slash’s schtick is that he dresses like the Invisible Man with a bandaged face, round sunglasses, top hat and suit. On one hand, it’s just a goofy but memorable hook. On the other hand, the esthetic is a perfect match for his sound: processed electric violin, mandolin and synthesizers that hovers between cinematic compositions and campy pop covers. Future retro. Campy menace. Even his threatening name has a split intention – it was taken from a 1927 Laurel & Hardy film. His rather tongue-in-cheek cover of Jan and Dean’s Dead Man’s Curve makes a certain Monster Mash sense in his Hallowe’en costume, but when he plays a mournful instrumental composition like Wolf (a droning motif from Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, linked below), his bandages maintain an alienating distance. A top hat on a pop singer goes from an amusing absurdity to the sign of a misfit. His costume fits into the history of Canadian pop music as appropriately as his electric mandolin.

He’s such a misfit, in fact, that despite how totally bleak his recordings are, he is almost completely out of the goth cannon. (Have you even heard his Daniel Lanois-produced hit Dance After Curfew in a goth club? I haven't.) Even though he created pop music produced by electronic music pioneer/guru Steve Hillage, he’s largely outside discussion of electric prog. Listening to his records, his tones are often so mean, you might think of Throbbing Gristle. However, there’s little room in the Industrial cannon for humor, and certainly none for camp.

So I perched on my uncle George’s shoulders in ’81 to see Iggy Pop do a flip on stage and be seduced by the Go-Go’s charms, but what really left an impression on me was how haunting Nash the Slash was. Even in the middle of a summer day.

He’s sort of the bowed-string version of Gary Numan. And though his sound is decidedly otherly, it’s somehow familiar, in an early-Sonic Youth sense. You’d swear you’re hearing the familiar might of rock guitars, but they’re wrong. Perfectly wrong. And dense.

So, much like the Invisible Man, he simultaneously commands the power of singularity, but his alienating presence is dolorous. His look and sound are of one alone. Without peer or community. Who really sounds like Nash the Slash? He toured with Gary Numan, but what do the two really have in common?

His approach does not quite create a genre hybrid, but a genre all his own. And perhaps that’s why his commercial success was limited. Even in his most realized moments, you have to ask yourself, “what the hell is this?”
Which leads to the question, “who was that masked man?”

Nash the Slash - Wolf

Tainted Songs

Tainted Songs is a 12” that I had to do some amount of begging to acquire. It’s an a cappella of Total’s Missy Elliott-produced Trippin’ over some sort of minimal house beats. The base track may be a Hansen & DJ Daniel original, but I like to think it’s a Maurizio/Basic Channel track I can’t locate. Like maybe M4.75.

A minimal house mashup is something I can genuinely get behind.

If I may invoke Bruce Sterling’s SXSW lecture again, he proclaimed, flippantly:

Nobody’s going to listen to mashups in another ten years. Mashups are novelty music. They’re like the Monster Mash. They have no musical staying power. You’re pursuing a phantom there. It’s bad music. I mean, it’s not bad…it’s a pastiche. It’s like magazine collage. Which can be good for what it is. But to pretend that’s like tremendous, creative work? No. It’s a tremendous, creative power. And it can have a tremendous audience. But it’s not tremendously good. And we need a bit of esthetic honesty in confronting things like this. Because it’s new and people with laptops can do it and get away with it and find an audience for it does not make it a real cultural advance. It’s an epiphenomenon.

Comparing mashups to magazine collage is, of course, totally accurate. But to use that comparison as proof of its quality builds a weak argument. No, I’ve never heard a mashup that’s made me cry (to conflate his critique of mashups with his critique of blogs). And I’ve rarely heard a mashup that gave me a deep esthetic experience that made me want to investigate how its form affected me on an emotional level. But last night, listening to Adrian and Mysterious D spin for a few hours, I had a really great time equally generated by friends, champagne and a backdrop of pop cultural forms colliding in my head. Mashups demonstrate the way in which pop culture and collective nostalgia continue to evolve and create new esthetic forms. To dismiss mashups outright (which I’ve been guilty of) is to ignore the way culture shifts under our feet -- and how we can derive pleasure from those shifts. The Monster Mash was a success for a reason.

Tainted Songs may not get play at Bootie but it demonstrates a collision of whimsy and cynicism that is very familiar to me. Its justified absurdity reminds me of the the Evolution Control Committee’s Herb Alpert/Public Enemy collision Rebel Without a Pause (Whipped Cream Mix) from ’96. It also makes me see the value in colliding Air Liquide with Amerie. If I ever do such an absurd thing, I promise, I'll post it.

Hansen & DJ Daniel - Tainted Songs Track 1

Of Clusters & Crackers

I found this pair of 45's in '96, when Post-Rock was really starting to get exciting. Bands like Rome, Tortoise and Ui were exploring very rhythmic instrumentals inspired by funk and jazz.

Around this time, the Indie set was trying its collective, Caucasian hands at remixing -- usually in the name of disintegration rather than looking for the perfect beat. (Just listen to the Tortoise’s ‘96 remix album Rhythms, Resolutions & Clusters.) On the three-tracks-on-two-7"'s Match My Foot, the technique is somewhat Illbient. Ui were from New York, so perhaps atmospheric destruction was in the air.

Ui were still new and somewhat mysterious in ‘96. More funk-driven than Tortoise, yet somehow more cerebral.

Ui's Sasha Frere-Jones was later to become much less cerebral when last year he referred to Stephin Merritt as a cracker. Far too many blogs have dissected that one to death, so I'll just drop it at the reference.

Ui - Match My Foot
Ui - Match My Foot (D Mix)
Ui - Match My Foot (D Mix 2)

Am I Late to the Party?

If my first post is about posting, am I being predictable or is that the new handshake?
“Pleased to meet you!”
Sometimes arriving late is a sure way to garner attention. You can only turn heads if there are heads to turn.
“I’m so glad you made it, girl!”
Not so here, it appears.
This is just fashion -- where late for the party is bandwagoning.
So, here I’m reaching up for a pull onto the wagon.

At SXSW this year, Bruce Sterling said:

“‘55 million blogs and some of them have to be good.’
Well, no actually.
55 million blogs and some of them have to be good blogs.
We don’t know what that is and it’s not that old a thing.
And I don’t think there’ll be that many around in ten years.
I’ll be quite surprised if in 2017 anybody uses the term ‘blog’. I think they’re a passing thing.
….
It’s good for some things and not really that potent a medium.
It’s hard to find a blog that will make you cry. Or a blog that really has the effect of fine art.
And now you’re seeing really weird developments like the kind of discourse where you have three paragraphs, embedded video, two paragraphs, five hot links, flickr set, ‘Dig this!’ at the bottom.
This is our means of expression and it’s a thing that I spend a lot of time reading but we don’t have a vocabulary for describing what that is or telling if we’ve done it well or badly.
…
It’s such an unstable medium. It may never aspire to greatness because the ground is being eaten out from under it almost as quickly as it’s being built.
Which is typical of folk culture, actually. It doesn’t really build much because it’s a word of mouth kind of culture that lacks a critical assessment.”

I don’t believe for a second that it lacks critical assessment any more than any other media past or present.
I find the immediatism and instability so seductive.