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

Are we not Devo?

It’s 30 years today since Bauhaus released their seminal single, Bela Lugosi’s Dead. I ought to talk about Bauhaus. But I’ll save it for another day. For today, I’d rather talk about Devo, who, 31 years ago, released their first album, Are We Not Men? We Are Devo. Now, I liked Devo. They divided opinions like no other American band of the time. They were too intellectual. They were insensitive. They were ahead of their time. They were young. They were old. They were wierdos. Their message was nonsensical or dangerous. Was it really possible then, never mind now, to open the eyes of the world with song titles like Mongoloid and Jocko Homo? They were championed by David Bowie and Brian Eno, who produced their first album. Did Devo invent that snare drum sound that Bowie nicked for his Low LP? Stiff Records took them on board in the UK. There must have been something there, so why didn’t Devo ever crack it? At Knebworth in 1978, in the very month they released their debut LP, they experienced the same fate as U Roy and The Mighty Diamonds had at Reading in 1976. Canned off for being too different, in the wrong place, with the wrong audience. But was there ever a right audience for Devo? Poor Virgin Records. First U Roy and The Mighty Diamonds. Then The Sex Pistols imploded. Then there was Devo. Virgin had only ever had success with Mike Oldfield’s tubular balls. But now they wanted to be a rebel brand who only took on the challenging, so what did they expect? And Virgin wasn’t to get any mainstream success again until David Sylvian’s Japan – and then only briefly, before he, too, walked away from the limelight. (True, Virgin did bring Human League from the margins into the mainstream.) But that’s another story. Back to Devo. Trouble is, nobody ever really knew how to take Devo. In a time of simplistic, cut-through Punk, Devo wanted you to think about this idea they had whose name nobody could quite remember, never mind grasp. I was one of the only one among my peer group who engaged with the de-evolution idea, which went something like this…Forget evolution, think of the opposite. De-evolution. Instead of evolving, humankind is actually going backwards. Just look at all the social dysfunction and mass mentalism of the so-called most developed countries. Especially America. Although bizarre, it was quite refreshing for an American band to avoid flying the flag and all that sentimental chest-beating. It didn’t last. Devo had their 15 minutes in 1978. Are We not Men? We Are Devo flopped and America began to embrace Born To Run whereas Britain eventually turned to U2. But, since Devo, those of us who remember what it was all about have always been able to point at elements of society – from Big Brother to Facebook - and say, We are Devo.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Electronica 2 (the Avant-gardener mix)

I like various aspects of electronica and always have. Now, I'd like to explore it more, to see if there's something new I can take in. To see if there’s somewhere new it can take me. For me, it will always be a means to an end, a technological support system to convey another feeling. That first feeling was pop - what we grew up with. Or should I say Popcorn? Hot Butter re-recorded this, the first synthpop instrumental hit in 1972 (and covered again by so many since, from Jean Michel Jarre to Herb Alpert and Aphex Twin - and, another techno-dance favourite of mine, Daft Punk, who included elements of it in Around The World). Popcorn emerged around the same time that Brian Eno was wowing us with his synth. I remember that it was the Roxy Music single Pyjamarama (not on any of the LPs) that did it for me. Stuck in a long traffic jam near Llangollen on the A5, on our annual summer pilgrimage to the homeland in Bangor, I recall shouting at my father to switch the station back on half way through the song. I was 13 and very aware that I had just walked my mind into another world and there was no going back. When Kraftwerk emerged with Autobahn in 1974, I knew Bowie and was growing into a world of rock music. This German band represented the acceptable tip of a world of dark and brooding LP covers I'd discovered in W H Smith's record department from bands called Amon Duül, Can, Cluster and Neu! Autobahn was my first experience of ‘found sound’ and the appliance of technology to replicate real-life noise. When Lou Reed produced Metal Machine Music in 1975 (the aural equivalent of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake), it was nothing to do with electronica and more about his state of mind and bad relationship with his record company. Just as Brian Eno was inventing ambient, with slightly disappointing albums like Another Green World, Kraftwerk were changing their sound, introducing the Minimoog among a whole bank of new technology in a purpose-built studio called Kling Klang. I read about it and wanted to be there. Radio-activity was a superb LP, yet somehow also disappointing, because, title track aside, Kraftwerk had turned away from the approachability of Autobahn. It wasn’t until mid-77 when they re-emerged. I’d gone into Stafford’s only Punk record shop to buy God Save The Queen, but what I heard was Showroom Dummies. I was as knocked out by this as I had been five months earlier by Bowie’s Low – still the best album and electronica of 77, ahead of Marley's Exodus for me. This track, and the accompanying LP, Trans-Europe Express, took electronica into another dimension. It was entirely behind my desire to go around Europe by Interrail, which I finally did in 1981. But Kraftwerk still didn’t truly make it to the mainstream until the Man Machine LP in May 78. By then, we’d had the Donna Summer/Giorgio Moroder breakthrough I mentioned. Yet, as beautiful as Man Machine was, it seemed like a swan-song to me. That Kraftwerk had reached their height and, from now on, would just be an influence for others. And so it proved. While we were all distracted by Power Pop, Mod and Ska revivalists, Kraftwerk paved the way for many of the Post-Punk and New Romantic bands, from the drum machine of Echo and the Bunnymen and Martin Hannett’s production of Joy Division, to the techno-funk of A Certain Ratio on the one hand, to The Associates, Soft Cell and Depeche Mode on the other (the latter, amusingly, claiming to have invented the incorporation of ‘found sound’ into recorded music!!). Rediscovering the catalyst of electronica was a great lifesaver to me when I emerged from two years in the heart of darkness at the end of 1980. As ever, electronica was the way to somewhere else. But the purest sound of electronica will always be Kraftwerk’s to me. OK, they’d topped out and were in Computerworld by 1981. But everything else we hear today is ‘son of’. They’ve toured as recently as 2007/08. The resultant double LP, Minimum-Maximum, has its good points, but it sounds like what it is – a retrospective without the energy and excitement and sense of time and place of the originals. Nevertheless, I was listening to the version of Radio-activity on this album as we entered Hiroshima, by bullet train, in April this year. But I guess the big point I’m making in all this is to say that, for our generation, the baby-boomers, electronica was never an end in itself, but only a means to carry something else that already existed into a new place. I read an interesting article today about Generation Y – the kids born 1978-1994. How, for these people, rather than us or Generation X (1965-77), new media are not a tool, a means to an end. Technology is where they live. The medium is the message. That’s why so much electronica is mediocre, even crap, soulless and unedifying – rather than the exciting, cutting-edge support system, the escape route, it was for us. In our day, so much rock music was also dull, average and lacking. That’s where we lived. So, what electronica needs is its own Punk revolution to weed out the dross, clarify all that has gone before and set a new direction.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk