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

How little we need to be happy

June 2009 marks 25 years of the solo career of David Sylvian, whose music has made a major contribution to settling the serotonin and other neuro-transmitters in my brain over half my lifetime. It had seemed like a brave and cruel decision to ditch Japan at the height of their hard-won fame in 1982. Hard on the band, hard on the fans. But, for Sylvian, fame was the problem. With a lifetime of interior travelling still to do, fame was an exterior journey he was not prepared to take. Being voted the world’s most beautiful man had seemed like the last straw. When Brilliant Trees emerged, however, Sylvian still had much of his loyal retinue. Red Guitar was a Top 20 hit. It was to be his only one. For, with his first solo album, Sylvian had jumped in the deep end and most Japan fans either couldn’t swim or found that the water would not support the weight of their bodies. The music was too philosophical, profound, inward-looking. The jump from the thoughtful pop of The Art Of Parties to the avant-jazz of Weathered Wall was cavernous. From this point on, by his own contrivance, Sylvian was ‘hiding in backwaters’. To find him, you had to be on a similar inward journey. I remember how, late one morning in June 1984, I asked permission from my employer, an antiques dealer in London’s Mayfair, to take a couple of hours out to go and queue outside HMV Records at the junction of Oxford Street and South Molton Street. The first so many hundred copies of Brilliant Trees had been autographed by the man himself. On my way around the corner from Bond Street, I remember encountering Griff Rhys Jones pushing a small child in a pram. The first series of Alas Smith and Jones had just run on the BBC. Our eyes met as I joined the end of the queue. I was very excited. That sense of anticipation and heightened consciousness has remained with me whenever it’s been time for a David Sylvian music release over the last quarter of a century. His very personal journey from the edge of pop to the jazz avant garde has been one I’ve been very willing to accompany him on. We’ve had a lot to share. And he’s been a good listener. I’ll have much more to say about this long-standing relationship. But, in the meantime, occupying various rooms in my head, here are 25 for the 25. My favourite is Camp Fire: Coyote Country from the Gone To Earth album of 1986. It doesn’t even feature Sylvian’s voice, an instrument in its own right – just the most sublime piece of Robert Fripp guitar work I’m ever likely to hear. There’s a special crystal-lined corridor in my mind that’s purely dedicated to it. The only piece of music that’s ever approached it was the version of Threnody For Souls In Torment I heard Fripp play in Coventry Cathedral a month back. But that’s typical of David Sylvian’s collaborative work. He contains the genius of so many others, just as they contain him. His next LP, Manofon, due out in September, I eagerly await. And I look forward to our next 25 years together.

A New Career In A New Town (from Gentlemen Take Polaroids LP, 1980)
Nightporter (from Gentlemen Take Polaroids LP, 1980)
Ghosts (single from Tin Drum LP, 1982)
Forbidden Colours (with Riuchi Sakamoto – single, from soundtrack of film Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, 1983)
The Ink In The Well (single from Brilliant Trees LP, 1984)
Words With The Shaman, Part 2: Incantation (from cassette LP, Alchemy: An Index Of Possibilities, 1985)
Taking The Veil (from Gone To Earth LP, 1986)
Before The Bullfight (from Gone To Earth LP, 1986)
Camp Fire: Coyote Country (from Gone To Earth LP, 1986)
Upon This Earth (from Gone To Earth LP, 1986)
Maria (from Secrets Of The Beehive LP, 1987)
Mother and Child (from Secrets Of The Beehive LP, 1987)
Premonition (Giant Empty Iron Vessel) (with Holger Czukay - from Plight & Premonition LP, 1988)
Pop Song (single from Pop Song EP, 1989)
Heartbeat (Tainai Kaiki) (with Riuchi Sakamoto – single, from Sakamoto LP, Heartbeat, 1991)
Pocket Full Of Change (with Rain Tree Crow/ex-Japan members, from Rain Tree Crow LP, 1991)
Cries & Whispers (with Rain Tree Crow/ex-Japan members, from Rain Tree Crow LP, 1991)
Thalheim (from Dead Bees On A Cake LP, 1999)
Café Europa (from Dead Bees On A Cake LP, 1999)
All Of My Mother’s Names (from Dead Bees On A Cake LP, 1999)
Linoleum (with Tweaker – from Tweaker LP, The Attraction To All Things Uncertain, 2001)
Late Night Shopping (from Blemish LP, 2003)
How Little We Need To Be Happy (from Blemish LP, 2003)
The Librarian (with Burnt Friedman & Jaki Liebezeit – on their Out In The Sticks EP, 2005)
A History Of Holes (with Nine Horses – from the Nine Horses LP, Snow Borne Sorrow, 2005)

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk