Playlist 10

Last month's Playlist was almost late and, for numerically contrived reasons, this one's a bit early.  'Playlist 10' is also Post 100 on this blog and, as each list contains ten tracks, the temptation to mark a century this way was irresistible.

'Dubstep Allstars: Volume 03', Mixed By Kode 9 (Feat. The Spaceape)

Hyper Hat Dudes, Kode 9, AKA Steve Goodman, (L) & The Spaceape (R)

Dubstep's real moment is well past now and it long since succumbed to the formulaic mainstream or, more encouragingly, fractured into numerous fascinating 'Post-Step' mutations.  Luckily, I'm a 50 year old bloke who doesn't need to stay abreast of fashion and can just enjoy the intrinsic qualities of stuff, (that was never aimed at me in the first place), whenever I want to.

Kode 9's 2006 mix captured the movement in rude health, showcasing several of its original heavyweights, including Digital Mystiks, Benga and Skream.  Regular collaborator, The Spaceape, lays his laconic, blacker-than-black voice all over the mix tying the whole thing together effectively.  Generally, I prefer this kind of thing in instrumental form but his approach is far more engaging than the usual Grime bombast and definitely adds another dimension to the sound.  Even The 'Ape gives way to Warrior Queen though, as she teams up with Pressure to give the 07:07 suicide bombers a right good telling off.

'Five Years Of Hyperdub', Various Artists

Whilst record labels may be an increasingly endangered species, certain Independents have managed, over the years, to epitomise and distil a particular zeitgeist through strict quality control, stylish visuals, belief and vision.  Factory and 4AD are obvious examples, as is the Norwegian Rune Grammafon.  Kode 9 has pulled off much the same trick with his Hyperdub label, as a go-to source of crucial Dubstep and many of the good things that have followed in its wake.  We're closer to ten years of Hyperdub now but this 2009 survey demonstrates the strong foundations on which the label was built.

Of course, having Burial, (whose 'Fostercare' remains heartbreaking), and King Midas Sound on the roster helps no end.  Kode 9's own '9 Samurai' and reworking of 'Ghost Town', (featuring The Spaceape's near-comatose vocal), are hardly shabby either.  There are loads of other good things on the compilation, from the steppy Techno of Martyn to Darkstar's 21st Century Electro.  Amongst tracks I might never have heard otherwise are Mala's 'Level Nine' and 'Shake It'  by LD.

'Midnight Mushrumps', Gryphon

Gryphon Dress Up And Hang About The Woods Late At Night

Gryphon's second album forms a perfect bridge between the folky-medievalism of their first and the Prog. complexity of their third.  I have immense affection for their blend of good humour, authentic instrumentation and impressive musicianship and even find their fancy-dress excesses a cheerful reminder of a more flamboyant era.  In true early 70s style, the title piece is a suite composed for an Old Vic theatre production and tailored to fit one side of an LP.

'Wish You Were Here', Pink Floyd

Sid Barratt: The Unrecognizable, Rotund Stranger Who Appeared
 Mysteriously At The Recording of 'Wish You Were Here'

This is an obvious but an undeniable '70s classic' and effectively Pink Floyd's high water mark.  I revisited it after watching a late night 'making of…' documentary on TV.  It was predictably formulaic, featuring standard tropes of master recordings dissected by elderly sound engineers and band members strumming guitars nostalgically, but included some great vintage material and interesting insights into the album's creation.

It's impressive how a group of initially unfocussed, emotionally inhibited individuals could shape an artwork as resonant and well-resolved as 'Dark Side Of The Moon' then, despite various distractions, attain similar heights again with this.  For that we must forgive Roger Waters his driven megalomania, even if it resulted in embarrassing later work and, famously, fractured the band altogether.

Either way, 'WYWH' shows how, occasionally, a concept album could become a thing of sophisticated beauty by interweaving, (but not spoon-feeding), themes of absence and record-biz Mamon, and personifying them in the tragic figure of lost Floydian, Sid Barrett.  Most importantly, when all the discussion's over, the music is very good and not emotionally inhibited at all.

'Dub Side Of The Moon', Easy Star All Stars

'I an I' & 'Us and Them'

A Reggae version of Pink Floyd's best known album sounds like a crass novelty stunt but this is really very enjoyable.  New York label Easy Star set their in-house band and several big-name guests to work and three years later (!), they returned this clever rethink of the original, suggesting they took as much trouble over it as did the Floyd themselves.  Perhaps it's no real surprise that the original pristine atmospheres translate well into a dubby context and it's apparent that Roger Waters' basslines  weren't so far from the big reggae bottom end employed here.  The All Stars also get a little sly humour into the project, (bubbling bongs and coughing instead of cash registers on the 'Money' intro., etc.), but this tribute is anything but cheesy and actually adds a whole new dimension to 'DSOTM'.

'Early Venetian Lute Music', Joan Ambrosio Dalza, Francesco Spinacino, Franciscus Bossinensis & Vincenzo Capirola, (Performed by Christopher Wilson & Shirley Rumsey).

Robing and A-Luting

Recent winter floods remind me that Venice is a doomed city, destined to sink beneath the rising waters of its lagoon.  That makes these elegant, plangent lute pieces from the city's 15th and16th Century heyday rather poignant but I'm an enthusiastic observer of entropic processes and somewhat dubious about modern attempts to preserve the past in aspic (or cement).  This music was originally performed by professional musicians for wealthy patrons, providing escapism from the plague, war and financial corruption that surrounded them.  It provides similar distraction today, allowing me to inhabit an imaginative, ideal past where shifting sunlight reflects from water, onto the ceilings of a Renaissance Palazzo.

'Venice', Fennesz

This was also inspired by, and partially recorded in, Venice, being released in 2004.  If  Renaissance lutenists released beauty from strings through manual dexterity, Christian Fennesz does it by recording, treating and smearing them in gorgeous, degraded layers across his computer's hard drive.  The results are fluid,  atmospheric and mostly very abstract.  Should all this nuance and non-specificity become wearing, David Sylvian appears on 'Transit' with a deeply melancholy vocal evoking a form of particularly European demise.  Later, on 'The Stone Of Impermanence' the guitar work becomes loud and abrasive before subsiding back into ambience.

'The 50th Anniversary Collection', Bob Dylan

Young Bobby Single-Handedly Takes On Folk Music
At The 'Carnegie Hall Hootenanny', 1962

This is a massive, very limited and astonishing 4-disc release of outtakes and live performances from 1962.  It's also a cynical piece of ring-fencing, designed to secure European copyright under the 'use it within 50 years or lose it' rule. Inevitably, the tracks can be easily heard 'unofficially' anyhoo, so it's baffling to hear reports of the 100 or so physical discs already commanding stupid prices.  Scanning my music shelves, I wonder who really needs 7 alternate takes of 'Mixed Up Confusion' or indeed, any more versions at all of 'Blowin' In The Wind'.  It's astounding how one artist can have such an extensive back catalogue and how the recycling of Dylan's early recordings now resembles an unstoppable juggernaut.

Then I listen to the actual music and remember what all the fuss was about in the first place.  Whatever Dylan became over the intervening years, the young Bobby that Suze Rotollo and Joan Baez fell for was palpably hungry and committed to the material he appropriated or originated.  These performances certainly demonstrate his famed dynamism and unrivalled attack.  He steeped himself in Folk and Blues tradition but was always going to transform it into something uniquely his own and there's evidence here that Dylan actually toyed with electrification as early as '62.  More amazingly, there are even songs I'd never heard before.  It's a perfectly acceptable, (if repetitious), way to hear Dylan in his first incarnation, but I'm not sure why you'd pay for it, even if you could find one.

'Kurt's Rejoinder', Brian Eno

'Kurt's Rejoinder' re-joined

As I write I'm planning a day in London, including a visit to Tate Britain's Kurt Schwitters Exhibition.  It reminds me of this track from Brian Eno's 1977 album 'Before And After Science' which includes fragments of Schwitters reciting his own Dadaist phonetic poem 'Ursonate'.  Actually, the whole album is excellent  and, whilst Eno is best known for his membership of Roxy Music and for 'inventing' ambient music, I consider this is amongst his best recordings.

'Fear Of Music', Talking Heads

'Fear Of Music', - Be Very Afraid

Eno's production finger prints are also all over my favourite Talking Heads Album from 1979.  He and head Head David Byrne were very tight during this period so it's probably no coincidence that title track 'I Zimbra' features a lyric written by another Dadaist, (Hugo ball, this time).  The album is twitchy and rather paranoid in overall tone, showcasing Byrne's Art Geek schtick whilst capitalising on the band's inherent funk.

Postscript:

I've decided to scale down these monthly playlists for a while.  I enjoy writing them and music certainly remains intrinsic to my regular routines.  However, I fear they're tending to skate superficially over the surface of things, resorting to journalistic labelling and genre-fixation, rather than evoking the particular qualities of the actual music.  The comic captions may be getting out of hand too.  In the future I'll aim to write more subjectivity in fewer, but more in-depth, music-related posts; to get inside the music more and, (perhaps), just provide simple monthly lists as additional clues.

At The Edges

Shaun Morris' Exhibition 'Stolen Car' is about to open in Rugby and I was interested to read his fellow Birmingham artist Andrew Smith's essay on the work in a recent post on Shaun's own blog [1.]. Those motorway paintings are completely rooted in the kind of intermediate zones, delineated by major road systems, where a large city frays into the countryside.  Having grown up on the fringes of Birmingham, Shaun is still clearly drawn to the particular qualities of such places and the associations they provoke.

Shaun Morris, 'Stolen Car', Charcoal On Paper, 2012

Shaun Morris, 'Stolen Car' Painting, Oil On Canvas, 2012

Coincidentally, it was also Andy Smith who recommended Robert Smithson's writings to me and I'm taking the liberty here of quoting verbatim an extract from his 'Spectral Suburbs', - itself just part of a longer, wider-ranging essay entitled 'A Museum Of Language In The Vicinity Of Art, from 1968 [2.].  It's a great piece of writing that connects with the whole subject of suburbia and 'non sites' that have fascinated numerous creative artists in recent decades.  It also gives specific mention to Ed Ruscha, - an artist whose work interests me greatly.

Ed Ruscha, 'Every Building On The Sunset Strip', Artist's Photo Book, 1966

"Suburbia encompasses the large cities and dislocates the 'country'.  Suburbia literally means 'the city below'; it is a circular gulf between city and country - a place where buildings seem to sink away from one's vision - buildings fall back into sprawling babels or limbos.  Every site glides away towards absence.  An immense negative entity of formlessness displaces the centre which is the city and swamps the country.  From the worn down mountains of North New Jersey to postcard skylines of Manhattan, the prodigious variety of 'housing projects' radiate into a vaporised world of cubes.  The landscape is effaced into sidereal expanses and contractions.  Los Angeles is all suburb, a pointless phenomenon which seems uninhabitable, and a place swarming with dematerialised distances.  A pale copy of a bad movie.  Edward Ruscha records this pointlessness in his 'Every Building on the Sunset Strip'.  All the buildings expire along a horizon broken at intervals by vacant lots, luminous avenues, and modernist perspectives.  The outdoor immateriality of such photographs contrasts with the pale but lurid indoors of Andy Warhol's movies.  Dan Graham gains this 'non-presence' and serial sense of distance in his suburban photos of forbidding sites.  Exterior space gives way to the total vacuity of time.  Time as a concrete aspect of mind mixed with things is attenuated into ever greater distances, that leave one fixed in a certain spot.  Reality dissolves into leaden and incessant lattices of solid diminution.  An effacement of the country and city abolishes space, but establishes enormous mental distances.  What the artist seeks is coherence and order - not 'truth', correct statements or proofs.  He seeks the fiction that reality will sooner or later imitate." [3.]

Ed Ruscha, 'Sunset Strip', Scratched Photograph, 1966/1995

Los Angeles, California, (Photographer Unknown)

Los Angeles, California, (Photographer Unknown)

Ruscha's L.A. is, of course, the archetype of the de-centred, freeway-dominated modern city and in 1968, America was the best place to experience the phenomenon in its most highly developed form.  I witnessed it myself, in 2000 whilst driving across the interminable outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona, - a city that resembles nothing so much as the desert it emerges from.

Phoenix, Arizona, (Photographer Unknown)

Dan Graham, 'Homes For America', Offset Litho Print, 1966

Dan Graham, 'Homes For America', Photographic Print, 1966

Notable home grown poets of similar terrain would include writers J.G. Ballard, Iain Sinclair, Michael Simmons Roberts and Paul Farley; film maker Patrick Keiller and painter George Shaw, but the entire list of those who have engaged with it would be much longer,  (Ballard and Sinclair have both made a feature of motorways in their writing, it should also be remembered). Indeed, are not most people born since the war actually denizens and potential chroniclers of the suburbs?

We're all familiar with the extensive suburbs surrounding big cities but these days, most towns and even villages have their own spreading skirts of estate housing and light industry, or are simply conjoined or absorbed into larger conurbations. British suburbia may be less diffuse, and often more parochial in nature than the world that Smithson and fellow artist Dan Graham revealed but increasingly, a similar kind of romantic alienation can be felt here too, - in contemporary industrial estates, business parks, and green-field developments of all sorts.  

George Shaw, 'The New Houses', Enamel On Panel, 2011

Film Still From 'London', Dir. Patrick Keiller, 1994

J.G. Ballard Outside His Shepperton Home

Smithson's philosophical coda has had me meditating on the core function and motives of artists for several days.  The notable subjectivity of his response to suburbia as a phenomenon, underlines his comment that what an artist really seeks is...

''...the fiction that life will sooner or later imitate' [4.].

  

Shaun Morris' exhibition of paintings, 'Stolen Car' can be seen at Floor One Gallery, Rugby Art Gallery & Museum between Friday 9 February and Saturday 22 February, 2013.

[1.]:  Andrew Smith, 'Darkness On The Edge Of Town: The Paintings Of Shaun Morris', 2013

[2.], [3.], [4.]:  Robert Smithson, 'Spectral Suburbs', (Part of 'A Museum Of Language In The Vicinity Of Art', 1968), In Jack Flam (Ed.), 'Robert Smithson: Collected Writings', Berkeley, University Of California Press, 1996

Richard III & The Greyfriars Project 5: Confirmation

The skeleton found at Greyfriars, just up the road from where I sit in Leicester, has been officially confirmed as that of Richard III today.  The news is already full of reports about Leicester University's news conference so I won't labour over the specific details here.  However, I did write quite a lot about the Greyfriars archaeological project and how it captured my imagination last year, so it's only appropriate to mark the occasion at least.

Photo:  University Of Leicester

I am genuinely engaged by the historical aspects of all this, in an admittedly dilettante kind of way.  However, of equal interest is how Richard's story, in both life and death, has become such an exemplar of political propaganda, artistic interpretation, news management and public relations.  Never can the 'story' element of the word 'History' have been so significant.

Photo:  University Of Leicester

A quick skim through just a couple of today's newspapers reveals how various disputes still swirl around Richard.  In addition to the old goodie/baddie issue are now added questions, including...

• The scientific validity of the DNA results announced; How this will all impact on the historical account of the late medieval period;

• The high profile, populist promotion of the project by Leicester University and Leicester City Council, (and what it reveals about their own funding and regeneration agendas); 

• The most appropriate site for the skeleton's eventual re-interment;The role of the highly partisan Richard III Society and any resulting compromise of historical objectivity;

• The involvement of the media generally and how events may have been tailored to suit television and maximise news impact;

• The conflict between Academic rigour and populist amateurism;

• The advisability, (and affordability) of Leicester City Council's, (or possibly, Mayor Soulsby's), plans for a Richard III visitor centre.

Photo:  University Of Leicester

Anyway, it's all be very interesting on a numerous levels.  One point that particularly intrigues me is the confirmation that the human remains were actually discovered very early in the dig.  Having visited the site on a subsequent public open day and heard from site supervisor Matthew Morris that chances of finding Richard were pretty slim.  I must conclude that events certainly have been VERY carefully stage-managed and that Mr. Morris is a convincing actor as well as an accomplished archaeologist.

Shaun Morris, 'Stolen Car'

January is a memory, the snow's all melted but the snowdrops are in full effect.  As I write, the sun's lighting up the street outside my window and it feels like 2013 might soon start waking up properly.  We've still got February to navigate, and these days the weather can astonish us at any time, but this month always feels like a shorter haul and, last time I looked, the planet still goes in only one direction.

It feels like time to get out and about a bit more and visiting a few exhibitions in the near future is a priority.  One of these will be 'Stolen Car', - an exhibition of paintings by my friend Shaun Morris which opens soon in Rugby.  Regular readers will know I exhibited some paintings alongside Shaun and the other members of the Indigo Octagon collective in Birmingham last November.  That show included several of his nocturnal paintings of the world beneath the elevated M5 motorway to the west of Birmingham.  I know the show's title reflects Shaun's love of Bruce Springsteen so perhaps the M5 is his very own 'Thunder Road'.  In Rugby, he'll be exhibiting the whole series and I'm looking forward to seeing them all together.  

Paintings By Shaun Morris  (L & C) At 'If A Picture Paints A Thousand
Words Then Why Can't I Paint' Exhibition, Birmingham, 2013

Shaun Morris, 'Stolen Car' Painting, Oil On Canvas, 2012

Shaun Morris, 'Stolen Car' Painting,
Oil On Canvas, 2012

The following is from Shaun's press release for the show...

"The work on display represents the artist's first serious collection of landscape painting, and reflect his interest in depicting the so called 'edgelands': the forgotten, overlooked, nowhere zones that exist between the city or town and the countryside.  Feeling and experience are held in these vivid images that represent an individual and personal vision from this emerging artist, and his close relationship to this rarely represented landscape." [1.]

Whilst Shaun's paintings focus on the M5, Birmingham is completely girded by Motorways.  He has, on occasion, also found himself below the renowned Spaghetti Junction, north of the city.  I found myself in that same bizarre underworld of concrete and canals beneath the M6 a few weeks ago and can understand exactly why he became fascinated by the unique atmosphere and experiences to be had in such places.  Without wanting to steal Shaun's thunder, I hope to post some of my own photographs of the subject here fairly soon.  Here are two to be going on with...

The 'Stolen Car' Exhibition can be seen at Floor One Gallery, Rugby Art Gallery & Museum, between Saturday 9th February and Friday 22nd February.  You can read more on the Indigo Octagon Facebook page and see many of the paintings in various posts on Shaun's blog.  Rugby also lies adjacent to a motorway (M1), and is on a main rail line, so it's easy to get there.  I'd urge you to go to see the work for real.

[1.]: Press Release for 'Stolen Car, New Paintings By Shaun Morris', Floor One Gallery, Rugby Art Gallery & Museum, 2013