From Greg Clow Sent Mon, May 4th 1998, 15:14
From Greg Clow Sent Mon, May 4th 1998, 15:14
Found the following posted to rec.music.ambient and thought it would be
suitable to forward to the list...
-- forwarded message --
taken from http://www.villagevoice.com/
U.S. Too
Americans Who Like
Autechre. A Lot.
by Jeff Salamon
Also see the Village
Voice's concert and club
listings.
Talk back!
xxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxxxx.xxx
Leaning his bony ass against a couch arm in a penthouse suite
atop Miami Beach's Fountainebleu Hotel, Mixmaster Morris
voices a complaint: "I can't play this music in England!" "This
music" is the pasty-faced output of the Warp and Rephlex labels;
beat concoctions by turns goofy and dead serious, from groups
like Autechre, Squarepusher, and Aphex Twin that Brit dance
music power brokers won't give their stamp of approval to.
"You're more likely to hear that stuff in America," he proclaims.
This is the reverse of the usual story we get told, about Detroit
techno pioneers who, like generations of jazz musicians before
them, have to go to Europe to get paid. But there's evidence that
Morris is right: in places like Oakland, Miami, and Madison,
Wisconsin, indie labels launched from someone's bedroom are
putting out vinyl 12-inches in the Warp-Rephlex mode. But
unlike Squarepusher or Plug, most seem less interested in taking
the piss than in updating the serious-minded American
tricksterism of Harry Partch and Conlon Nancarrow. In one of
those annoying ironies that muddies the issue, the first CD
evidence of this has arrived from across the Atlantic, in the form
of Altered States of America (Lo Recordings), a compilation
featuring 12 examples of U.S. (and, cheating a bit, Canadian)
marginalectronica.
One of the most striking cuts on Altered States is Chessie's "The
Last Lie I Ever Told," which starts with a heartbeat rhythm and
then dredges up shuffled breakbeats that sound like someone
re-arranging tech snares on the Titanic. In a previous life the man
behind Chessie, Stephen Gardner, fronted the "anti-rock" group
Lorelei, whose '94 album, Everyone Must Touch the Stove, was
as assured an extension of My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive
as any American has come up with. Chessie's just-out debut,
Signal Series (Drop Beat), is the dreamy, oceanic music I've
been hearing in my head since it was rumored that MBV's next
record would be junglistic. There are dance rhythms here, just
like there's "rock" in MBV, but set against his synthesizer swirls
and eddies they evoke bad dreams and turbulent oceans. Gardner
is primarily a bass player, and he doesn't settle for the usual
trickbag of atmospheric burbles or head-ringing dive bombs,
preferring more conventionally musical bass patterns that guide
you to the surface of his music and then pull you, gasping,
20,000 leagues under.
American post-rockers, following the same instincts that led
them toward the aesthetics of drift, have proven a fertile ground
for electronica that avoids house and techno's own 4/4. Brad
Laner of Medicine has recently put out Studio City
(Supreme/Island), his second album under the guise Electric
Company. Filled with easily grasped melodic motifs and rhythm
tracks that sound like two pieces of styrofoam rubbing against
one another, Studio City creates a convincing world of
cybernetic sound. The piano figure that runs through "Star
Klang" sounds to me like a fragment of the Charlie Brown
theme, but the press release says it's actually Stockhausen. Then
again, sowing such confusion is Laner's stock-in-trade. Studio
City may be the most uncommercial major label release since
Metal Machine Music, but you can also imagine the Percy Faith
Orchestra making something appealingly peppy out of it.
Another post-rocker, Ken Gibson, of Austin-L.A.'s Furry
Things, has taken on the nom de gloom 8 Frozen Modules and
released The Confused Designer (Trance Syndicate). As "Sand
Bubbles," the track included on Altered States, shows, he has a
knack for Alec Empire's "Fuck Dance, Let's Fart" school of
aural eruptions. But because there are no vocals, he avoids
Digital Hardcore's dunderheaded agitprop. Also on the
post-post-rock front, Casey Rice, engineer for Tortoise, has
recently teamed up with Black Nuclear Power to record as Super
ESP. "Born With ESP," the lead-off track on their self-titled EP
for Hefty, works a segment of Dizzy Gillespie's "Things to
Come" into the mix, a far more salutory jazz reference than the
'70s fusion cops that litter most "jazzy" jungle. Perhaps this is
how the U.S. can distinguish itself from the U.K. scene--doing
right by America's native classical music.
Not that white-boy classical types haven't gotten the jungle bug,
too. Jake Mandell is a Madison, Wisconsin--based composer
with a background in improvisational piano and the world of
avant-garde computer music. His new label, PRIMEdeep
Records, has released a 12-inch matching subterranean synths
and radar pings to complex breaks that skitter and double back
on themselves, the results as oddly resonant as the
Autechre-style claptrap titles: "dlue veacon," "silder shiver."
Sounding not dissimilar, but coming from the other end of the
spectrum, is Metal Beast, actually one Shad Scott, who's done
engineering for Aerosmith and Alanis Morissette and runs
L.A.'s Isophlux, which is putting out the compilation Dirty
America in May. Lustmord vs. Metal Beast (Side Effects), a
collaboration with a Brit who helped invent industrial back in the
early '80s, adds the new beats to the old tectonic shifts.
The most fertile scene for all this highbrow maneuvering, oddly
enough, seems to be Miami, better known for the deliriously
body-conscious sounds of Bass. The Miami label Schematic
hasn't come up with anything as infectious as "MyBabyDaddy,"
but last year's Skone EP by Jeswa (a/k/a Josh Kay) and the
Randa Roomet EP (Warp import) by Kay's other project, the
duo Phoenicia, follow the example of his pals Autechre's Tri
Repetae--stripping sampled static, computer bloops, typewriter
clacking, etc., of everything but the attack and turning them into
21st-century percussion mazes. Schematic is an offshoot of
Isophlux, originally located in Miami; now another Schematic
partner, Seven, has started his own label, Chocolate Industries.
His first release, Push Button Objects's Unauthorized EP, is the
rare instance of marginalectronica with an explicit hip-hop flavor;
beside the hiccup scratches, this is the first record I've heard
featuring a mike check and an Autechre remix.
It's not clear there's anything distinctly American about these
adaptations. As if in compensation, the music's packaging goes
out of its way to wrap itself in the flag. San Francisco's Lesser
has recorded an album called Welcome to the American
Experience (Vinyl Communication) featuring "Markus Popp Can
Kiss My Redneck Ass," a slap at the leader of Germany's Oval.
PRIMEdeep's mission statement insists that "distanced from the
UK scene, American drum and bass has the potential to be either
a pale imitation of British jungle or an extremely innovative
force. We are not a mimeograph." And pHlux's Preacher EP
(Isophlux) features something that'd steam up Harry Smith's
horn-rims: a hysterical 10-minute radio sermon by a Southern
preacher that starts off rude and gets progressively more drunken
and profane. Try as I might, I've been unable to cast these
shadowy artists as heirs to Greil Marcus's "invisible
republic"--the networks that stretch across the Atlantic have
simply become too dense for the republic to stand as a useful
aesthetic unit. But if Mixmaster Morris's contention is correct,
perhaps we'll wind up doing what what we've often
done--taking Europe's unwanted masses and making them our
own.
This document last modified Wednesday, April 1, 1998, 12:28 PM EST.
-- end of forwarded message --