Southwold Sound

In his own words, Marc Brown says, “The sea has been a connecting thread that runs through generations of my family, which has its roots in East Anglia and Holland…Working in mixed media, my work aims to capture elements of sea and coastline found along my native North Sea coast. I often explore the juxtaposition of large open skies with strands of finely detailed horizons which often focuses on isolated buildings or objects. I am particularly drawn to the vast open stretches of our coastline that feature remote or derelict buildings or structures.” While this captures it ‘like it says on the tin’, it somehow isn’t enough for me. I’ve been wondering about what sort of soundscape would accompany a viewing of the online gallery of this Southwold-based painter. The vast open shorelines seem to call for an absence of noise, but silence is not what I hear. I needn’t have worried. Marc recently emailed me, along with his other supporters, to announce a new website, featuring this gallery of his work (http://www.marc-brown.com/). His home page details several influences. You’d expect visual artists to appear on the list. They do. There’s De Chirico, Edward Wadsworth and Jean-Pierre Roy. But it’s music I hear when I stare at Marc’s mixed media work. So, it doesn’t surprise me at all to see that most of his influences are musical and that most of these musical influences are electronica. Although I find Murcof, one of Marc’s influences, too minimalist and glitchy, the music has helped. I’m not yet able to say in any great detail, however, why I connect with Marc’s paintings. But I’ve been following his progress since my first visit to Southwold in 2005, when I discovered by accident the art gallery in which he was exhibiting his work. It’s very rare that a painting can arrest my attention so that I not only do a double-take, but do a backflip like a slinky spring. But one did. So much so that I felt I had to engage the guy at the desk in conversation. I had to offset the overwhelming feeling of breathless surprise I was experiencing. The last time I felt that was at the age of around nine, when, attending the local brine baths with school sports legend David Field, I jumped in what I thought was the shallow end of the pool, only to find it was the deep end. At the time, I could barely swim and had no explanation for what was happening. Survival was instinctual. The same was happening here, before this painting. In this mixed-media shoreline depiction of a boat, lying lopsided at low tide, I’d no idea that the earth could be so deep. I was drowning in the texture of sand. The guy minding the gallery turned out to be Marc Brown himself, a young, unassuming fellow who, then, of course, rendered me speechless through the revelation of his identity. I didn’t buy the painting, mistakenly valuing the presence of higher numbers on my bank statement more than the transcendental capacity of Marc’s work. Since then, I’ve contented myself with occasional visits to the gallery’s online site. But I had to go back. And 50 provided my excuse. Ever since I bought a small piece of Marc’s art, entitled Distant Mooring, on a trip to Southwold for that very purpose at the end of June, I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night, hearing and thinking about electronica. Until I’d plumbed Marc’s influences, it hadn’t occurred to me that the painting now facing me on the wall opposite our bed – the last thing I see before sleeping and the first thing upon waking – could be having such an effect. Now, as some of you will know, I’ve been writing about electronica these past few weeks. For me, there’s a sonic temporal loop that connects today with the summer of 1977 that had such a great effect on my life and direction. There is a definite link between hearing Showroom Dummies by Kraftwerk, I Feel Love by Donna Summer and Oxygene by Jean Michel Jarre back then and the music I’m hearing in my sleep after viewing Marc Brown’s Distant Mooring today. Yes, Marc, it’s very tempting to see your work backdropped by the articulate silences of Stars Of The Lid. But to me, you see, you hear, your art has a looped rhythm to it. So, when I look at Memory Horizon or Strange Moon, Orford Ness I get Axel Willner, otherwise known as The Field, working with Sound Of Light – Nordic Light Hotel or From Here We Go Sublime. Whatever, I think I’m saying that Marc Brown’s painting is a time machine, or at the very least, a catalyst for personal transcendence. I’m well aware that I’m making the kind of transformational connection that Andy Blade talks about at the end of his book, The Secret Life Of A Teenage Punk Rocker. Andy talks about his life as if it was like emerging from the other end of a tunnel in his 40s, having entered it as a 15 year-old in 1976. For Andy, the revelation takes him straight back to the moments just before he entered that tunnel. Back then, he didn’t recognise the revelations for what they were – the first stirrings of connection with the real, inner self. Then, he spent much of his life moving away from that inner self, just when he thought he was winning and his chance came to be king. And now, after many, many years and a long journey, here they are again, those self-same feelings of excitement and dawning awareness. Yet, what they really are is a return to self and the meaning of who you are as a person in this world. Except that this time, you now have the chance to live with and explore that self, instead of running away from it. The ebbing tide in the shorescape I’m now moving towards is on an internal horizon. Unlike before, there’s no rush to reach it, because I know it’s always there. I walk towards it every day. Through the Marc Brown window.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

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