From Irene McC Sent Mon, May 17th 1999, 16:18
From Irene McC Sent Mon, May 17th 1999, 16:18
On 17 May 99, simonc wrote re: (idm) holistic recordings?: > They're all interconnected in a weird way and all make sorta.. umm.. > well, Red Snapper meets Ozric Tentacles, I guess, wandering off > into more experimental stuff at times.. Found this a while ago: // quotation follows: Shed Music Inadvertently adding fuel to the Ferret's Enwightenment fire is a piece in February's Mixmag. 'The Wight Stuff' is full of that sneering NME post modernist journalism. Aside from getting its picture of the Isle of Wight totally arse up it does highlight some Island musicians working in an area of music I define as shed. Shed music is the kind of stuff concieved, well in sheds. Heady brews of relentless syncopated drumbeats and collages of inspiration. Sometimes noodling, maybe occasionally brilliant but for me beached in its own little world and often guilty of disappearing up its own backside. Vic King, owner of albums by Max Brennan and Universal Being concluded: "I struggle with it at times but I don't want to take it off like I do a Capo Regime record. Max Brennans music seems all bleeps and effects and mostly keyboards. There's a bit on his album which sounds like that sound Jesse Colin Young got on his solo albums, lovely electric jazz piano" No matter that the tastes of Isle of Wight Rock may differ because Mixmag concludes that these Isle of Wight guys are the business. Max Brennan (remember T26 on that Island sampler?) records as Fretless AZM and as Universal Being with Rupert Brown. Brown is also recording as Hubble which he described to me last year as "It's like a cross between Joe Zawinul (Weather Report) and Tangerine Dream." Pat Watson, Paul Butler, Colin Brocquillion and Kate Smith are Delta T with Pat Watson, we think, being the only member from the original dub reggae band of the early 90s who were highly respected. Paul Butler also records as P Nu Riff. The piece in Mixmag begins: "Stoned in the middle of fucking nowhere, surrounded by water and encircled by posh yacht-going wankers and a community of soon- to-be-dead pensioners. Welcome to the Isle of Wight, a little known bit of empty coast and misty forest off the edge of England where the upper classes sail their boats, the reitred pop off one-by-one and people like us . . . well, what do they do? Not much really. Get high, sign on, take shit jobs, leave the island for the mainland or maybe get their shit together and make some fucking music. The Isle of Wight is so boring it's hard to believe anyone could do anything creative here. Yet a bunch of local heads have found each other and started joy-riding across the borders that divide trip hop, jazz, ambient, disco and breakbeat." - From the Wight Stuff, Mixmag, February 1998 As Frank Zappa once said "It's only art when you put a box around it" and I guess I'll just sit this one out. For one man's meat is just another man's sheep in a box. Put me in Sun Ra's Magic City or in a bar of Mexicans when Ysabel does her table dance but don't force me to listen to endless tape loops. The Mixmag article makes more sense of it than I can. But Vic's on the case. Mike Plumbley http://www.iowrock.demon.co.uk/nothing/shed.html