Here we go Sublime

I’m looking for a new sub-genre of electronic music, exemplified by Röyksopp’s The Drum and Brian Eno’s Spider and I.

Brian Eno supplies a lot of music for this sub-genre. It’s Bright Blue Day from Apollo – Atmospheres & Soundtracks. And Spinning Away from Wrong Way Up, his album with John Cale. Also This from Another Day On Earth.

It’s mostly calm and contemplative, but not purely ambient. It can also have rhythm and beat, but the overall feeling is a sense of ecstasy, dreamy beauty and transcendence.

Some of it is undoubtedly in the music of Isan, though I’ve yet to identify a specific track.

It could be in Zodiac Shit, by Flying Lotus, from the album Cosmogramma, although most of the latter is just a confused jumble of noise.

It’s definitely in Kraftwerk. Probably Neon Lights off Man Machine.

It is A New Career In A New Town by David Bowie, from Low.

It’s likely to be very evident in David Sylvian. There was certainly something of the sublime on every album in the beginning. From Backwaters on Brilliant Trees to Campfire, Coyote Country on Gone To Earth and Mother And Child on Secrets Of The Beehive.

It could be in New Order’s Thieves Like Us (Instrumental). Maybe in the first album by Electronic.

I’d say that one big qualifier for the sublime is that it has to be uplifting. So this would discount music of a hauntingly beautiful but depressing tendency. And the instrumentalisation has to be essentially electronic.

Much of it would sit somewhere on a line between ambient and rock. It isn’t about the style of a band, but purely about the style of a song.

I’m still trying to identify which song from Gui Boratto on Take My Breath Away it would be. Probably Opus 17. Then, of course, there’s The Field’s Over The Ice from Here We Go Sublime. This is probably where the idea came from.

And there must be several Luke Vibert tracks that touch it, without ever being wholly it. Wow! It’s Now! or Sparky Is A Retard from Rhythm, for example. Or Prick Tat from Lover’s Acid. Not forgetting Yello. Something humorous like Otto Di Catania from Flag.

I seem to have come round full circle now to where I was over a year ago when considering the link between the art of Marc Brown and electronic music. This was the discussion of the sublime, as I recall it, that instant transport into raptures of delight as soon as you see/hear something. In art it’s easy. I only have to look at the early Pre-Raphaelites, Van Gogh or Rothko. But in electronic music?

To be honest, the sublime is not just in electronic music, but that’s mostly where I find it these days. Many songs from the 60s carry this sense of the sublime for me. Everything from Let’s Go To San Francisco by The Flowerpot Men to Eloise by Barry Ryan and Albatross by Fleetwood Mac to Mr Armageddon by The Locomotive. It’s in The Beach Boys and The Beatles.

It’s in snippets from songs, but not the whole songs. It’s the keyboard introduction to Light My Fire by The Doors and many of Ray Manzarek’s knob-twiddling in other songs, such as the forward-backwards keyboard loop in the middle of Hello, I Love You. It’s in You Disappear From View by Teardrop Explodes. And Tainted Love by Soft Cell. It was in early Human League. It’s that bit in Vienna by Ultravox, when the speed picks up.

The mood of the whole song may not be sublime, but there’ll be an element of it that just does it. The introductory whoosh and piping refrain of Radioactivity by Kraftwerk. Much of the background production of Joy Division’s Closer LP. The soaring and diving keyboard in the middle of The Man Who Dies Every Day by Ultravox. So, we have to be careful to remember that the taste of sublime is sweet.

There is nothing that says it has to be twiddly keyboards that make the sublime. That’s just where I mostly seem to find it. In Mr Armageddon by The Locomotive, it’s the trumpet break, as it is in Miles by Miles Davis. And yes, it is Neil Young’s guitar solo in Like A Hurricane or Phil Manzanera’s in Roxy Music’s All I Want Is You. But it can be voice. As with Jimmy Somerville in Comment Te Dire Adieu. Or Astrud Gilberto singing How Insensitive or So Nice. Andy Williams singing Wives And Lovers or Moon River. I Left My Heart In San Francisco by Tony Bennett. Elvis in his quieter numbers: Are You Lonesome Tonight?, Crying In The Chapel, Wooden Heart. I was listening to Michael Franks on Jazz FM this morning. There’s an element of the sublime in his voice. Naturally, it recalled Scritti Politti (and it’s clear that Green Gartside took his vocal style and intonation from Michael Franks) and the work with Miles Davis on Provision. That has the sublime element.

With the sublime, there are connections between songs. Röyksopp’s You Don’t Have A Clue from Junior is the sublime sister of The Associates’ Party Fears Two, 27 years apart. A perfectly sublime tribute from one band to another.

With Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, Roadrunner is the sublime song of coming of age. Full of joy, transformation and the moment. But electronic, it ain’t.

Looking back, the sublime is definitely in Oxygène Part IV by Jean Michel Jarre. In the summer of 1977, the combination of this and Donna Summer’s I Feel Love and Kraftwerk’s Showroom Dummies completely knocked me sideways from my obsession with Punk. These of course are now classics. The challenge is to identify the sublime from new music I encounter now. I may get that instant ecstatic movement, but will it last through time?

Röyksopp are the standard for the sublime. There is something of it in all their music. If you still don’t get the sublime, start here. It’s no secret that I think there’s something of the sublime in Mantovani. But for me, that’s what Röyksopp are: a perfect melange of Mantovani, Kraftwerk, The Associates and themselves. All of which makes them the modern Abba. The sublime is never complex.

All this wondering about the sublime begs a big question. What is it about all this music that makes it sublime, for me? It’s highly likely that much of it is connected to memory. Or is it just that, the particular song, or part of a song, leaps out head and shoulders of the rest and then imprints itself in my mind alongside whatever else happens to be around at the time?

So, for example, when listening to Röyksopp’s Vision, I’m sitting on the Tokyo metro, listening to all the different electronic jingles and tunes as the doors open at a new station. Yet the track You Don’t Have A Clue from the same album, Junior, has me on a bullet train to Kyoto. I got to know and love that album while on holiday in Japan. For me, it will always have that connection. Whereas Let’s Go To San Francisco by The Flowerpot Men always has me sitting on an Anglesey beach as an 8 year-old. And Oxygène Part IV sees me in the Lake District, on holiday with school-friends, Rog and Simon, aged 18, shortly before heading off to Bradford University. So, do I have to be receptive enough in the first place to acknowledge the sublime in music? What comes first? The music or the environment and circumstances?

For me, the sublime is a journey of great expectation. It’s about always being open to discovery, radar on, receptors tuned, just in case. One of my favourite authors used to be Colin Wilson. He had a name for what I’m talking about: peak experiences. For some people it would be spiritual. The only chemical stimulant worth experiencing, the sublime simply expands the moment, so that everything is here and all seems possible. It can personalise a moment in time for perpetuity. Sublime songs stop me in my tracks. I just have to listen.


markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk