THE NEW YORK PRESS OFFCUTS
Sun. January 25, 2004Categories: Abstract Dynamics
On the principle of waste not, want not, I’ve pasted some material below that was originally intended for New York Press. Apologies to Marcus from Rephlex, who sent me the review copies – I did try my best to get the Rephlex reviews placed. I’ve also included a piece I wrote for NYP on the Junior Boys – it’ll be old news to most of youse lot, but it’s probably worth an airing.
Cybotnia: Cybotnia
Rewind Records Soundmurderer and SK1
Pangeia Instrumentos: Victor Gama
Three releases showcasing the diversity of Londons maverick label, Rephlex.
The 8-track ep Cybotnia is a collaboration between Cylob (aka longtime Rephlex artist Chris Jeffs) and Astrobotnia (aka Finnish laptop dreamer Alekis Perala). Initial impressions of a somewhat forbidding glitched abstract techno give way, on subsequent listens, to a growing appreciation of the duos command of texture and mood control. Jeffs and Peralas digital pallet of electronic moans, groans, squiggles, bleeps and ominous synths is offset by gently reverbed gongs and bells in what makes me think, on occasions, of a laptop update of Cans Peking O or Japans Tin Drum. Like all the best electronic music, Cybotnia sounds less like something painstakingly programmed than a riotously luminescent audio unlifeform, undulating, pulsating and mutating according to its own alien logic.
Soundmurderer is the alias of Todd Osborn, the owner of Detroits first Drum and Bass record store; SK1 is one of the aliases of Ann Arbors Tadd Mullinx, a man who has produced instrumental hip hop under a variety of pseudonyms (including Dabyre, on Prefuse 73s Eastern Developments label). Their joint LP (released in association with Osborns fittingly-named Rewind label) is very much an enthusiasts record. It lovingly revisits the British jump-up jungle sound of a decade ago: a genre which consisted almost solely of Jamaican MC ragga chat riding atop digital mash-ups of the Amen breakbeat (so named because it is sampled from funksters the Winstons track, Amen, Brother). If that sounds limited, it actually wasnt: jump-up jungle made astonishingly imaginative use of its few resources, and while history has been somewhat unkind to the then more critically-feted artcore genre, jump-up jungles libidinal brutalism still sounds fresh. Which is presumably why producers have been drawn back to it recently. Fellow Rephlex artist Luke Vibert is another currently mining a similar seam , on his five ep series, Amen Andrews. But where Vibert imagines an alternative past in which jump-up jungle is combined with techno, Soundmurderer and SKs approach is strangely curatorial. In a sonic equivalent of Gus Van Sants scene-by-scene remake of Hitchcocks Psycho, the tracks seem to have been conceived of as near-exact simulations of the original jump-up sound, so much so that they could comfortably have been fitted into a DJ set in 1994. Even when they sample a rap source (Public Enemys Mi Uzi Weighs a Ton) it is from a pre 94-track. The whole effect is strangely disconcerting: as if a part of Britains mid-90s (multi) culture has been wholesale preserved and re-animated in the USA in 2003.
In every way different is Victor Gamas Pangelos Instrumentos. If Soundmurderer and SK1 recreate the near-past, Gama aims to establish a continuity between the ancient past and the present. Gama, an Angolan of Portuguese origin, produces his sounds on acoustic devices he has designed as evolved versions of traditional African instruments. These strange machines so oddly beautiful that they have been exhibited as sculptures produce a hauntingly desolate sound, simultaneously harmonic and percussive. Gamas deceptively simple, intricate involutions can sound like Steve Reich played on a ribcage; or junkyard symphonies played on glass; or chimes gently agitated by a playful wind; or automata learning to make music by beating their own mechanoid spines. (Im reminded of the apartment of the android tinkerer, Sebastian, in Blade Runner.) Yet what breathes through all these compositions is the silence and space of desert(ed) terrains, landscapes populated by no-one but traversed by nomads; geographies beyond ordinary human time
Richard X Presents the X-Factor Volume 1
Were looking for the X-factor.
– Line endlessly repeated by judges on the UKs Pop Idol/ Popstars
Is Richard X a symptom of Pops current malady, or a potential cure?
With its hired-hand reality TV star guest vocalists, fruit machine bleeps, simulated adverts and omnipresent, ominous sense of ubiquitous commodification (everything is for sale even this!), Richard X presents his X-Factor is a distorting funhouse mirror of UK Pop 2003. But step through the mirror and you enter an alternate Pop universe of which X is the mad scientist x-perimenter-God.
XYZ not r n r.
The Year Zero of Xs Popverse is something like our 1979. Xs No rock and roll in Xs Pop anti-history, which begins with the synthesizer, and ends or loops back on itself before our Pop universe rehabilitated guitar-n-r and the future ended. Xs is a postmodern Modernism, a revival of Synthpops disdain for rock nostalgia.
You will be familiar with Xs trademark technique from last years smash, Freak Like Me, in which the Sugababes sang Adina Howard over Tubeway Armys Are Friends Electric? Dr X repeats the same trick splicing black r n b with white electro – on Liberty Xs Being Nobody (a Human League-Chaka Khan hybrid) and on Keliss Finest Dreams (Human League again, plus SOS Band). Yet on the album this seems to be less a gimmick than a formula for a Pop Utopia, or Utempia, in which Pop is racially and temporally desegregated. X engineers a Pop present in which Soul and Synths are (un)natural bedfellows. The template, oddly enough, might have been the early Spandau Ballet. Back in 1981, Spandau were soul boys turned leaders of the New Romantic scene, and its no surprise to hear their Chant Number 1 getting the X treatment on Rock Jacket. Like the whole New Romantic clique, Spandau were Art Pop, and it is Art Pop that X-Factor dreams of digitally restarting. Art Pop was meta-Pop, and so is X Factor: a self-conscious reflection on 00s Pop and its status as commodity. Has Richard X sold out? asks a meaningless market research survey on the CD booklet, in an echo of The Who Sell Out, a previous landmark in Art Pop.
Nothing new? Nothing now? The nullity of a ringtone Pop well past its sell-by date?
Yes or no?
Or X for unknown?
THE JUNIOR BOYS: HAIL THE NEUROMANTICS
Its strange, isnt it, how synthpop is so associated with a certain era?
Rock sounds and riffs are invariably allowed to ascend to some timeless place, beyond the vagaries of fashion, but dare to invoke synthpops textures, and youll be labeled retro quicker than you can say Moog . Sometimes the accusation is justified: the Electroclash scene, or an even more extreme example – Detroits Adult, display a forgers obsessiveness, a fans desire to reanimate, wholesale, a particular moment, sometime in 1980
All of which confirms that nothing dates quite so quickly as Yesterdays Future.
And just a few years ago, nothing was more embarrassing than synthpop. Were indebted to Kodwo Eshuns study of sonic fiction, More Brilliant Than the Sun, for effecting a complete re-evaluation of the genre. Eshuns tracking of the ur-sources of hip-hop, techno, house and jungle took him far beyond the usual suspect, Kraftwerk who already enjoyed more or less universal respect and down into the bargain bin depths of the apparently unredeemable and the laughable: Gary Numan, Visage and A Flock of Seagulls. Their rep as no-hopers, Eshun showed, was limited to White Rock(ism): in Techno Detroit and hip hop New York, the synthpoppers were revered as pioneers of electronic music. (Anyone who doubts this should check out Kurtis Mantroniks 2002 compilation on Londons Soul Jazz records, Thats My Beat. The LP a collection of the tunes that inspired Mantronik when they were played in the New York clubs of the early eighties – includes Visage, Yello, YMO, and Sakamoto.)
What happened along the way, as synthpop begat Mayday and Underground Resistance, was that the synth got severed from the Pop. The Song got lost as the Track got built.
All of that changes with the Junior Boys, whose debut EP, Birthday/ Last Exit is released in September on Londons kin records. The Junior Boys who are actually just one boy, Jeremy Greenspan – hail from Hamilton, Ontario, and theres a pleasing symmetry in the fact that the Junior Boys material is to come out on a London label. Detroits infatuation with synthpop brought with it an attendant anglophilia (check all those simulated English accents on the early Model 500 records!), so theres something of a closing of a cycle here. North America returns synthpop to its home, changed and renewed.
Renewal is the key. While the Junior Boys retain synthpops modernism, its intolerance for the old (something that Techno built a genre upon) what they also recover is something that is often forgotten about synthpop: its melancholia. Synthpop is usually remembered as death-of-affect emotionless, Terminator cold. Yet that very coldness often had a keening, plangent quality, an impersonal sadness, as if the machines themselves were weeping. The Junior Boys have obviously absorbed Numan and Foxx, but it is OMD who come to mind most when listening to Birthday and Last Exit. These delicate, vulnerable songs recall the yearning swoon of something like OMDs Souvenir.
Yet there is no trace of revivalism here. In fact, it is just as easy to fit the Junior Boys into another trajectory altogether. Five years ago, the manic X-tasy rush of Speed Garage slowed down as it became acquainted with Timbalands R and B. The result was 2-step, an itchy and scratchy, edgy, dance music in which voice and song once again became central, albeit subjected to sampler-micro-splicing reconstruction and recombination. Londons Garage scene has taken another turn, into the brutalist rap of the so-called Grime scene. The Junior Boys rhythms tripping and stuttering in that addictive tic-time Timbaland discovered are a continuation of the prematurely curtailed 2-step experiment.
In combining 2-step with synthpop a crude and mechanical description of their beguiling sonic sorcery, which could just as easily be compared to Steely Dan or Scritti Politti – the Junior Boys have mapped out a future for white pop. They have resisted the temptation either to ignore black music never on the cards in their case or to redundantly ape it. Instead, they have produced a new white pop template that acknowledges and absorbs black influence, but has the confidence to literally speak in its own voice. The Junior Boys vocals vulnerable, quiet, quavering, wavering with longing are their special treasure. Both Birthday and Last Exit are intimated in Jeremys emaciated, late-late night swooncroon, the sound of a dream voice, a dreamed voice
And make no mistake: this is pop music; there is a subtly compulsive hook in almost every line.
The term neuromantic is being applied to Junior Boys and, in its suggestion of Gibsonesque edgy-tech plus synthpop plus emotional ravishment, its perfect. The sound of a renewed future
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Re: merging soul and synthpop, this was early Soft Cell’s MO also (much more successfully than Spandau Ballet IMHO.) This is a big reason electroclash sounded so much worse than what its hype suggested; they forgot the soul behind the sleaze.