Playlist 14

My last ten-piece playlist was essentially a generic primer - signifying how the various facets of Dub Techno almost wholly dominated my listening, some weeks back.  As ever, events move on - and this one demonstrates just how eclectic things have once more become.

The Fall:  ‘The Unutterable’

I suspect one might never get to the end of The Fall’s expansive back catalogue, even if foolhardy enough to attempt it.  However, you can have a lot of fun trying.  The late 80’s incarnation (of a band everyone will have been in, for at least half an hour, sooner or later) was one of the most engaging live acts I’ve witnessed.  Their albums are rarely less than intriguing – even at their most ragged or least coherent.  The great ones (of which there are several) can be plain jaw dropping.  I’d contend this offering, from 2000, is close to one of those.

Despite leader Mark E. Smith’s famous, revolving door recruitment policy, each successful Fall line-up eventually sounds like a rackety, all-consuming piece of home-assembled machinery - operated by a contrary, but surprisingly well-read, bar room philosopher.  ‘The Unutterable’ follows that blueprint, combining their trademark, punkabilly guitar thrash with the kind of keyboards that suggest Eleni Poulou (Mrs. M.E.S.) had only a couple of lunchtimes to learn her instrument, (she plays it very well).  Hubby mithers all over it, in fine belligerent style - with no subject seeming too oblique or disconnected.  

There’s always a moment when those rudimentary elements fit together into something immense and hypnotic, and everything makes sense.  Here, that happens during the intimidating ‘Serum’.  Elsewhere, there are well judged changes of pace, a generally acclaimed masterpiece (‘Dr. Buck’s Letter’), and even a left turn into spastic ‘Jazz’ (‘Pumpkin Soup And Mashed Potatoes’).  Mostly though, it’s just a great, steaming pile of everything The Fall does best.

DNA: ‘Blonde Redhead’

Of course, everything’s relative - meaning that early 80s ‘No Wave’ band, DNA, can make The Fall sound vaguely conventional.  Famous is also a relative term, but they were, ‘famously’, one of the mainstays of a movement that sought to deconstruct Pop/Rock yet further back than Punk did, and even - to dispense with formal structure by marrying it to free improvisation.  What you actually have in DNA, is a trio (two trios, actually), comprising untutored musicians, (or others who chose to play that way), whose mania lasted around four years - never extending beyond their NYC hot house, at the time.

Miraculously, this almost professional video exists on YouTube.  It shows them in their second-gen. pomp, (with a bassist who could play a bit), running through one of their ‘hits’.  As is often the case with such Free noise-making, repeated immersion eventually reveals an alternative, internal logic - however perverse.  If nothing else, you’ve got to love Arto Linsey’s detuned guitar work, surely?

Pantha Du Prince: ‘The Triad’

I’ve enthused about Hendrik Weber’s music as PDP before, and this new album largely carries on from his previous two – ‘Black Noise’ and ‘Elements Of Light’ (with The Bell Laboratory).  This time, he works in close collaboration with Scott Mou and The Bell Laboratory’s Bendik Kjelsberg (plus guests), to fill that (often) sweet spot between ambient soundscape and dance floor.  They do so with now-familiar chimes, melodic tones, and unobtrusive beats, alongside increasing amounts of vocals, with an essentially pastoral overall aesthetic.  It’s a sound not alien to followers of, for instance, Four Tet - although painted on a somewhat larger canvas.

Of course, there’s a danger of such stuff becoming overly tasteful, but it does provide some lovingly assembled sonic healing, once DNA and The Fall have packed in their racket.  My only real criticism would be with some of those vocals.  The aim is seemingly to inject techno tropes with greater emotion; but that can feel more like ‘emotion’ as a non-specific stylistic dressing, than anything particularly felt.  Certain moments here sound worryingly like Depeche Mode, or a certain brand of anodyne Indie Dream Pop - but are outweighed by the album’s more intense passages.

Paul Simon: ‘Stranger To Stranger’

The question is probably - does the world really need yet another solo album by one of the aged luminaries of Classic/Soft Rock?  Certainly, there will be many who wish the quasi-MOR stylings of Paul Simon’s Mid-70s output had been consigned to history during the ‘Punk Wars’ - or at least by DNA and their ilk.  But I’ve never bought into that Stalinist outlook and kind of want it all.  If the old folks can still marshal talent and inspiration, and even more importantly - experiment with new ways to express themselves, why shouldn’t we sill give them consideration?  It’s got to beat endless luke-warm rehashes of the back catalogue - surely.

As it turns out, a degree of relative innovation is exactly what Simon pulls off here.  His songwriting still sounds pretty fresh; and he switches between the emotive, the socially engaged, and the just plain quirky, with a fleetness of mind many composers a third of his age might only dream of, (sometimes all within the same song).  However, it’s the arrangements that really distinguish this album.  No Paul Simon record is going to lack pristine vocals or melodic beauty, but here they often float over a bare bones rhythm bed, or within fields of unusual instrumentation, (liberally augmented with samples).  ‘The Werewolf’ cosies up to Tom Waits’ junkyard aesthetic, whilst Simon’s use of Harry Partch’s outsider instruments suggests he’s as conversant with Avant-Garde traditions, as with contemporary studio practice.

Simon & Garfunkel: ‘The Only Living Boy In New York’

In reality, listening to any quantity of Paul Simon’s work with Art Garfunkel, from the other end of his career, will either break your heart or rot your teeth.  It’s easy enough to dismiss them as the more saccharine wing of the 60s Folk movement, but that would be to ignore the consistently strong core of Simon’s songwriting, and the care and attention that went into the creation of much of their material.  It also occurs to me that each S&G album comprises a group of pieces, each with it’s own individual identity and specific emotional cargo – in contrast with something like ‘The Triad’, for instance.

Anyway, this is, for me, the best thing of theirs I’ve heard, and brings together all the elements of their music I enjoy.  Simon ruminates on the inner tensions that would soon tear the duo apart, (and seemingly trigger decades of acrimony).  But he does so with a degree of implied love and respect for his colleague - making the lyric more philosophical than antagonistic.  The melody is just about perfect, and captures a world of melancholy whilst soaring elegiacally in the choruses.  As recorded, the song wears some of the lush orchestration and studio atmospherics as ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, but avoids that track’s grandiose, manipulative overkill.  The organ runs occasionally rising in the mix are a triumph of understatement that kill me every time.

Gryphon: ‘Red Queen To Gryphon Three’

Gryphon (Those Were The Days)

Ah - that inevitable, potentially awkward, early Prog moment.  Actually, I feel no shame in enjoying this kind of thing - relishing its good-natured ambition and potential to become a portal to a partially re-invented youth.  Gryphon and their unembarrassed faux Medevalism have also featured here before, but this is their Proggiest masterpiece.  Four extended pieces, comprising Folk melodies, vintage synths, early instruments and numerous tempo/mood changes, build to a wholly instrumental, overall concept piece, on the theme of a chess game.  Really - what’s not to like there?  Only in the 70s…

John Dowland: ‘Complete Lute Music’ (Performed By Nigel North)

If Gryphon were playing at Early Music, This is very much the genuine article, (in so far as any recording of a contemporary performer can be).  I picked up this multi-disc box set a while back, at an embarrassingly low price considering the sheer quantity of treasure it contains.  It’s an absolute sanity saver when I require a little tranquility, clarity, or calm dignity in my head, and always takes me to a place far from the sensory overload of the modern world.  I also love the way that, although just another wooden box with stretched strings - a lute always sounds intrinsically more ancient than a guitar.

Of course, the Renaissance world from which it all derives was one of routine death, war, pestilence and religious persecution – in which only a tiny, privileged elite could access such stuff at all.  So, I suppose we should be grateful to our modern age for providing the economic and technological frameworks that allow us to experience it, after all.

Half Man Half Biscuit: ‘I Went To A Wedding’

I took my eye off the HMHB ball many years ago, assuming them to be a once-amusing, novelty-Indie act whose moment must have surely passed in the late 1980s.  This little gem, from 2003, proves I was wrong.  Yet I only stumbled on it because of its oblique Dowland reference (bless Wikipedia).  I marvel that it also mentions another giant of Renaissance music, Thomas Tallis, amidst some wry social observation - before ending with a cheery football chant.  It’s all done with a Merseysider’s erudite wit, and actually ends up as a rather poignant little bit of contemporary Folk.  I have next to no pride in being English (especially, now), but things like this (along with Dowland, Tallis and The Fall), do represent some of this benighted nation’s saving graces.

William Basinski: ‘The Disintegration Loops II’

Still From: William Basinski, 'The Disintegration Loops', Video, 2001

Basinski’s complete ‘Disintegration Loops’ is a bit beyond my monthly financial reach, but I’m enjoying slowly acquiring them in manageable chunks.  In the process of revisiting earlier short loops, Basinski discovered that the tapes were physically deteriorating before his ears, and thus serendipitously created a masterpiece of long-form ambiences, cycling into decay.  It should, I suppose, feel tediously repetitive, and mostly about the concept.  In reality it’s a sensual and highly involving experience, and bridges the gap between intellect and emotion beautifully.  That he finished work on the morning of 11 September 2001 just seems too ‘good’ to be true.  It allowed him to pair the music with a video account of the unfolding events and reverse-engineer it all into a profound monument to the disintegration of entire civilisations or value systems.

Deadbeat: ‘Drawn And Quartered’

Had I heard it at the time, this would have definitely been in my Dub Techno-themed playlist.  Indeed, it now feels rather like Scott Monteith's masterpiece to date.  With delightful perversity, it contains five wholly instrumental 'Quarters', each of which sit at slightly different points on the Dub/Techno spectrum, and gradually unfold to build a whole much greater than their sum.  Monteith's genius is to retain sufficient, recognisably Jamaican tropes, within a largely abstract context, as in 'First Quarter', where isolated guitar clangs rise up like thrilling signifiers.  'Fifth Quarter' does something similar with fragments of brass, whilst 'Second Quarter' uses recognisable bongo hits to punctuate its metronomic rhythms.  Ultimately though, isolating individual tracks makes less sense than just treating it as a really satisfying start-to-finish deal.