(idm) (fwd) Village Voice article about IDM music in America...

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 --