A Twitterer said Senior ‘feels like a blend of early Air, Boards of Canada and Ratatat’. I replied ‘Depends how 'senior' you are. To me, this LP recalls Can, Mantovani and Hawkwind.’ That’s Röyksopp for you (aka Cantovani).
Last year, with Junior, I jumped too soon. My first review was negative. It was only when I took it on holiday to Japan for three weeks and began to appreciate the textures and influences that I realised it was Röyksopp’s best ever. That said, I didn’t hold out great expectations of Senior, especially when the band described it as Junior’s flip-side low-key moment.
So, I’ve been listening to Senior for three weeks now. It was a great move to pre-release The Drug, then The Fear, probably the album’s best two tracks. But, then, it was a poor idea to include Tricky 2, an inferior instrumental version of the track on Junior.
Three weeks in, my view is therefore that, while I like some of this album, it really is a bunch of out-takes from the Junior sessions that didn’t fit. They’ve packaged it otherwise, but what should have been a 5-track EP is actually a poorly put together 8-track+bonus CD. And that lets Röyksopp down. For there simply hasn’t been any filler on the first three albums.
Don’t get me wrong. Röyksopp are a generous band. They give away a track a month on their website. And, I have to tell you, some of these are better than some of the tracks on Senior. For this reason, I’m kicking out the poor opening track, And The Forest Began To Sing, replacing it with De Ushuaia A La Quiaca, a Röyksopp track of the month from their website. Then, it’s out with the not-very-senior-sounding second track, Tricky 2; and in with This Space. Then I’m leaving alone the next five tracks, as they form the core of this LP. The anaemic final track, Coming Home, also has to go. I’m replacing it with the sublime Malangen Fra Bruhodet. If you bought the CD, there’s a final bonus track, the abominable A Long Long Way. Isn’t this just the worst thing they’ve ever released? Finish it with Electric Counterpoint III (the Milde Salve version).
On the website, the band says: “Senior is the introverted, dwelling and sometimes graceful counterpart to last year’s Junior: brim-full with dark secrets and distorted memories, insisting I’m old, I’ve got experience… Senior is furthermore an album about age, horses and being subdued, with devils breathing down your neck. Each track is equally as important as its predecessor and successor. We feel that none of the tracks should be regarded outside of this context. Quite a ‘brave’/stupid thing to do in this day & age of iPods and cherrypicking, one might suggest. We couldn’t agree more – hell that’s even probably why we did it.”
So, although it was a brave/stupid thing to do, Senior can best be enjoyed in the way Röyksopp describe it as the following set of tracks…
De Ushuaia A La Quiaca
This Space
The Alcoholic
Senior Living
The Drug
Forsaken Cowboy
The Fear
Malangen Fra Bruhodet
Electric Counterpoint III (Milde Salve)
Don’t let me down again, boys! We old ‘uns don’t like having to create our own LPs.
markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk
Showing posts with label Royksopp. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Royksopp. Show all posts
Thursday, 30 September 2010
Wednesday, 18 August 2010
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
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
Friday, 13 August 2010
Saying goodbye to dubstep
Much dubstep has disappeared up its nihilistic fundament. Most of what now passes for dubstep sounds like deathmetal cybergrunge. It’s unlistenable. Even major practitioners like Benga have fallen for the race to create the next theme tune for Top Gear, the acme of irritating TV irrelevance. After coming up to a brilliant climax with Diary Of An Afro Warrior, we get Phaze One and crappy, stereotypical stuff like No Bra, No Panties (classy, eh?!). And I really wouldn’t wish that on even Jeremiah Clarkson. The dire collection released by The Ministry Of Sound this year entitled The Sound Of Dubstep is another miserable case in point. 46 tracks of absolute vuvuzela earpain. The freedom of the internet means we all now have to be quality filters of the multi-dimensional wall of music out there, even within any one genre. To cut it short, that really means we just choose what we like listening to. OK, if we’ve time, it doesn’t stop us creating a list of what’s what. And very few people are memorable in this dubstep dramascape. Benga merely sounds like the best of the rest, when the rest is nothing but a bowel blockage. For sheer consistency and the creation of a particular sound, it’s Burial and label-mates King Midas Sound, as far as I’m concerned. These days, I’m no longer into car crash histrionics. I want the sound of modern Mantovani. Which reminds me. Röyksopp’s Senior is out a month today and I’ve just downloaded The Drug as a taster. But I’ll wave goodbye with a soundtrack of 13 on the 13th...
MOUNT KIMBIE Serged from Sketch On Glass EP
BURIAL Raver from Untrue
KING MIDAS SOUND One Ting (Dabrye remix) from Cool Out EP
SCUBA So You Think You're Special from Triangulation
BENGA Loose Synths from Diary Of An Afro Warrior
BREAKAGE Open Up from Foundation
DJ ZINC My DJ from Wile Out EP
FLYING LOTUS Zodiac Shit from Cosmogramma
NOSAJ THING Voices from Drift
PARIAH Orpheus from Detroit Falls EP
PINCH Gangstaz from Underwater Dancehall
SKREAM Kut-Off from Skream!
STARKEY Time Traveler from Ephemeral Exhibits
markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk
MOUNT KIMBIE Serged from Sketch On Glass EP
BURIAL Raver from Untrue
KING MIDAS SOUND One Ting (Dabrye remix) from Cool Out EP
SCUBA So You Think You're Special from Triangulation
BENGA Loose Synths from Diary Of An Afro Warrior
BREAKAGE Open Up from Foundation
DJ ZINC My DJ from Wile Out EP
FLYING LOTUS Zodiac Shit from Cosmogramma
NOSAJ THING Voices from Drift
PARIAH Orpheus from Detroit Falls EP
PINCH Gangstaz from Underwater Dancehall
SKREAM Kut-Off from Skream!
STARKEY Time Traveler from Ephemeral Exhibits
markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk
Saturday, 11 July 2009
Electronica 3 (the Mark De Boffin mix)
Move over Edward de Bono and Alain de Botton. This is the Mark de Boffin mix. Based on the kind of thinking I call Avantgardening – digging for the roots, nurturing what’s growing at the edge of the world of memory. I’m looking for Numu. That’s new music to you. This is how it’s going to happen. The best voices and lyricists from the world of rock – certainly including Jack Penate and Brandon Flowers – will move away from the guitar/bass/drums four-square rock band format and into electronica. Oh, I know, similar movements have been tried before. But have they succeeded? No, I say. When Billy Mackenzie’s arrogance gave up Alan Rankine, the game was up for The Associates. He kept the name but henceforth, William, it was really nothing. You were a perfect soundless voice in the eighties wilderness. Only when Boris Blank, the sound of Yello, picked you up could we hear your mouth move. Then, you were the rhythm divine on single occasions, inside Yello albums, alongside Shirley Bassey and banks of perfectly orchestrated technology. If only you’d acceded to the request and actually joined Yello, we’d have had the first, perfect crossover. But you wouldn’t and didn’t. The only Associate, your power dwindled. There was no techno-soundtrack to your voice, as there couldashouldabeen. You took to raising racing whippets, won a few prizes, but put yourself down once and for all. For you, maybe the crossover was too early (or too late for your glamour chase). So, I’m calling for musicians to cease holding onto anachronistic modes of making music and cross over into electronica now. Indie, rock, soul, funk, jazz. Move over. The world has become electronica. We are living inside it. Touch wood. Torchwood. If only I were musical, I’d do it myself. I’d make it happen. I’d form the perfect band called Florence Mightinhale, whose first album would be entitled I Sink Therefore I Spam. Not about sampling and stealing and borrowing and begging and all that laziness afforded by technology ever since the early 80s. But a newly minted sound, bouncing inside a triangle of Blondie, Associates and Kraftwerk on a great day (and Abba, Blood Sweat & Tears and Human League on a good day). A new genre incorporating dubjazz called Afrodizzi or Blisstempo; but, of course, electronica, like all good music today. Oh, no, I can smell mushrooms. Hvordan frustrerende! Somebody’s already got there before me. Röyksopp. Junior is the best album in the first decade of this, our last century. I don’t have to listen to all the rest to make that judgement. I just know. Those perfect pop lyrics. The sound of today. Anneli Drecker and Karin Dreijer Andersson, your voices are liquid loveliness. You abbadabadoo it for me. You put the English language through a crushed velvet Manga machine before sending it first class on the Nozomi bullet train from Tokyo to Hiroshima. It’s a sound I can eat for breakfast Melody AM, or when I’m having a Junior Senior moment as the cocks are crowing.
markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk
markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk
Thursday, 9 July 2009
Electronica (The Quinquagenarian Mix)
Yes, I know I should be listening to the Marcin Wasilewski Trio or Tom Farrell, but I’ve given in to a need to explore electronica. I’ve had to do something about a knowledge which began with Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk, got drunk on DAF in the Palais Schaumburg, then stumbled up the Holger Hiller before falling foul of Aphex Twin and The Orb. So I dove into the deepend of a music download site somewhere on the west bank of the Rhine and emerged with Kompact Total 4 between my teeth and a piranha called Superpitcher on my tail. The latter’s version of Eno’s Baby’s On Fire sounds like Boney M doing Hendrix. That good? That bad? It’s all pretty relative, isn’t it? ‘Are you in the market for repetitive beats?’ the download site asked me. Actually, on first hearing, much of this stuff sounds like the klang you curse the 18 year-old knobcheese who drives past your window at 80mph four in the morning blasting out a death pulse from a neutron star. You feel like you need a day’s gardening after enduring Frei’s Freiland, or quality time at a health spa after subjecting your spirit to the doorbell disco of Maria by Closer Musik. A lot of it sounds like the soundtrack to a vicious burglary, produced by people who have forgotten what it means to put their arms around another person. This is the noise of a cold criminal nailing a cat to a wall in Yates’s wine bar in the centre of a city like yours. To get anything out of this you surely have to be more plastered than a plasterer from Plaistow. Or totally wired, can’t you see?! But you have to get through this cloud of confusion. There’s a long way to go and you need to enjoy the journey, so pay attention! After all, what with people so obsessed with genres these days, it’s difficult to take two steps forward into electronica without zig-zagging left and right and getting quite, quite lost. 2-Step/Garage. Abstract. Breaks. Dance. DJ Mix. Downtempo. Drum ‘n, Bass. Electroclash. Electronic Ambient. Electronic Dub. Electronic Experimental. Electronic Industrial. Global. Groove. House. IDM. Jungle. Krautrock. Leftfield. Nu-Jazz/Broken Beat. Remix. Techno. Trance. Trip-hop. Turntablism. Not to mention Aphrodisiac, Cannibalism and Roadrage. Actually, I made up the last three, but you get my point. Everybody wants their own genre in electronica. And, in this world of digital recording, precording and frecording, is anything not electronica? Or, looking at it the other way round, does electronica exist at all, or is it just a way of playing another style of music? I’m surprised about how incestuous it all is – everybody recording and remixing everyone else’s versions. You wipe my bottom, I’ll wipe yours. I don’t knock this approach – The Good Son vs The Only Daughter is a brilliant, Sylvian-supported remix of his album, Blemish, probably better than the original. But wipe your own arse is all I’d say, you 21st century gigolos. But is electronica worth it? That’s my question. Do I like it beatless, banging, grinding, sensual or glossy? You ain’t going to keep me out with no semantic smokescreen, Jörg! Even though, today, electronica is as wide as jazz and as deep as a painting by Marc Brown. Just because it starts with synthetic pop of the Rice Krispies variety like Röyksopp and ends way over the horizon with the avant-garde emetic of Triola. I will find something I like and turn it into memory mix. But just a word, D J Koze, about your mix of Reinhardt Voigt’s Zu Dicht Dran...remember you’re a human being - not even a dentist would do that. Finally – it doesn’t take long if you’re persistent - I think I’ve found something under Nu-Jazz: an album by Craig Taborn called Junk Magic. Sounds like The Pop Group or James White’s Contortions put through a synth. But I might start with The Field’s From Here We Go Sublime, a bottle of Adnam’s Innovation and a couple of Neurofen.
Maybe we make too much of electronica. It used to be nothing more than sequenced keyboards. Brian Eno showed its true worth, as ambient sound. Post-Punk bands like Human League and Simple Minds were keyboards-based bands. Remember, Punk had banned keyboards from the stage. They were Rick Wakeman’s toys. Yet, the summer of 77 may be recalled for the flowering of Punk, but I also recall it for two big tracks, I Feel Love by Donna Summer and Oxygene by Jean-Michel Jarre. These changed music forever. The Giorgio Moroder-led I Feel Love became the platform for the dance music we’ve known ever since. Oxygene was MOR Tangerine Dream, spawning the soft ambient and trance music to come. Interspersed with Dub and Punk, I played them over and over again. With Punk out of the way, keyboards were back. The early, experimental Human League singles and albums went nowhere. The hypnotic, multimedia live shows were witnessed by two students and a robot dog. Electonica had arrived on these shores. And it didn’t have to be Germanic or intellectual. It took a while for Human League and Simple Minds to work this one out. Cabaret Voltaire and bands like 23 Skidoo never did or didn’t care. They were happy with art-house. Then the New Romantics came along, bringing brightness and fun and a recall for Pop. With synth drums the technology of the day, electronica progressed into the mainstream. Simple Minds were very much part of this progression from German experimentation into British pop. They grew out of the ashes of a fake Punk band with a great name – Johnny And The Self-Abusers. They got their new Post-Punk name from Jean Genie by David Bowie, or Play It Safe by Iggy Pop. One way or the other. They were influenced by Lou Reed but interested in the experimentation that new synth technology now offered. So, early albums tended to reference Kraftwerk and Neu! and the more unapproachable Teutonic groups. It was not until they signed to Virgin that they began to make headway (this label had faith and patience and gave the breakthrough for so many bands, including The Sex Pistols, Public Image Ltd, Magazine, Human League and Japan). They were even produced by the hippiest of hippies, Steve Hillage. They got to support Peter Gabriel. When I first saw them in March 1981, they were stretching out to headline places like The Venue in London. Jim Kerr would stride onto the stage in knee-length leather boots and jodhpurs. For all the world, the 21-year old electric equestrian. Something was changing. There was a new dream of gold. Jim Kerr is 50 today and much more has changed. Simple Minds occupied my thoughts greatly in 1981 and 1982. They promised me a miracle but they delivered something considerably less than that to the multitudes thereafter, during the course of the 80s. After a brief flirtation with pop somewhere in a new romantic summertime, they became a bloated stadium rock band, produced by the same man who went on to produce U2, Steve Lilywhite. In this, they had their greatest success. So that, at one point in the mid-to-late 80s, there was little difference between Simple Minds and U2. A long, long way from the roots in electronica. And that’s what I mean – electronica used to be a means not an end. The drum machine was never the star, only the satellite of love. Now it’s owned by the German death-heads once again. Personally, I like the bands who are trying to take it away from them and breathe some humanity back into it - like my favourite Norwegians, Royksopp.
markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk
Maybe we make too much of electronica. It used to be nothing more than sequenced keyboards. Brian Eno showed its true worth, as ambient sound. Post-Punk bands like Human League and Simple Minds were keyboards-based bands. Remember, Punk had banned keyboards from the stage. They were Rick Wakeman’s toys. Yet, the summer of 77 may be recalled for the flowering of Punk, but I also recall it for two big tracks, I Feel Love by Donna Summer and Oxygene by Jean-Michel Jarre. These changed music forever. The Giorgio Moroder-led I Feel Love became the platform for the dance music we’ve known ever since. Oxygene was MOR Tangerine Dream, spawning the soft ambient and trance music to come. Interspersed with Dub and Punk, I played them over and over again. With Punk out of the way, keyboards were back. The early, experimental Human League singles and albums went nowhere. The hypnotic, multimedia live shows were witnessed by two students and a robot dog. Electonica had arrived on these shores. And it didn’t have to be Germanic or intellectual. It took a while for Human League and Simple Minds to work this one out. Cabaret Voltaire and bands like 23 Skidoo never did or didn’t care. They were happy with art-house. Then the New Romantics came along, bringing brightness and fun and a recall for Pop. With synth drums the technology of the day, electronica progressed into the mainstream. Simple Minds were very much part of this progression from German experimentation into British pop. They grew out of the ashes of a fake Punk band with a great name – Johnny And The Self-Abusers. They got their new Post-Punk name from Jean Genie by David Bowie, or Play It Safe by Iggy Pop. One way or the other. They were influenced by Lou Reed but interested in the experimentation that new synth technology now offered. So, early albums tended to reference Kraftwerk and Neu! and the more unapproachable Teutonic groups. It was not until they signed to Virgin that they began to make headway (this label had faith and patience and gave the breakthrough for so many bands, including The Sex Pistols, Public Image Ltd, Magazine, Human League and Japan). They were even produced by the hippiest of hippies, Steve Hillage. They got to support Peter Gabriel. When I first saw them in March 1981, they were stretching out to headline places like The Venue in London. Jim Kerr would stride onto the stage in knee-length leather boots and jodhpurs. For all the world, the 21-year old electric equestrian. Something was changing. There was a new dream of gold. Jim Kerr is 50 today and much more has changed. Simple Minds occupied my thoughts greatly in 1981 and 1982. They promised me a miracle but they delivered something considerably less than that to the multitudes thereafter, during the course of the 80s. After a brief flirtation with pop somewhere in a new romantic summertime, they became a bloated stadium rock band, produced by the same man who went on to produce U2, Steve Lilywhite. In this, they had their greatest success. So that, at one point in the mid-to-late 80s, there was little difference between Simple Minds and U2. A long, long way from the roots in electronica. And that’s what I mean – electronica used to be a means not an end. The drum machine was never the star, only the satellite of love. Now it’s owned by the German death-heads once again. Personally, I like the bands who are trying to take it away from them and breathe some humanity back into it - like my favourite Norwegians, Royksopp.
markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk
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