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