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 --