‘Fear of resembling Liverpool’ if Dave Haslam is to be believed? The criticism is that if we continue to revere work from the past, to frequently revisit it, we will stifle progression. It claims that Manchester could/does resemble Liverpool in the fallout of the Beatles. Presumably, the arguments’ reach is to those who deem Liverpool a rival. It merely assumes that revisiting culture is counter-progressive. Amazingly Dave Haslam, the former Hacienda and XFM DJ, is a lecturer at a local university. It is questionable whether he is qualified for such a position seeming that here he openly cashes-in on prejudice towards Liverpudlians. This argument fails to highlight the real problems and should be dismissed as being xenophobic amongst other things.

The tenet of this argument is in its assumption that revisiting culture is damaging towards progression. However, it could, and should be argued that people keep returning to Factory Records because it was a purple patch for the city’s culture and our understanding of this era is crucial to our advancement. Put simply, if we do not learn from the mistakes of the past how are we going to avoid committing them in the future?

Secondly, how is the fallout of Factory Records and progressive pop culture linked? Surely those who wish to make progressive music will do so, whilst those who want to make nostalgic music will do so. The bottom line is that those who wish to pursue the arts may do so in anyway they so feel. If you don’t like their choice then deal with it. Protest. Boycott. Critique. Argue. Rant. Whatever. Just don’t make arguments so loaded with erroneous assumption, xenophobia and self-contradiction that you resemble Dave Haslam.

It seems the core of the anti-FAC revolt surrounds that many residents are baffled or finding it hard to accept that the Factory Records and subsequent ‘Madchester’ era continues to influence and inspire. That it continues to attract large crowds and the attention of many pop fans, young and old. The blog FUC51 (NB: FAC51 was the Hacienda) expressly argues for an end to revisiting the past. However, with so many people investing in nostalgia, we must let democracy and the free market reign and allow these people to carry on as they wish. They are not deluded, they know the value of their product, they know they are digging up the past.

That’s enough sitting on the fence for one day me thinks, after all it’s going to rain sometime, it’s Manchester. Where’s the problem? Highlighted a few years ago by local cultural journalist Gary Ryan in The Big Issue, “you don’t need to be Madchester to work here – but it helps.” This is why our town is fucked. Plain simple. From a journalistic perspective, you can’t get anything done without some ‘Madchester’ prick lurking in the corner. The local radio, the press, they’re all riddled with these nostalgic tossers who on one hand LOVE MANCHESTER for what it has produced and on the other are the voices for new music. The issue is that people who still listen to Joy Division (for example) for reasons other than nostalgia are stupid. As I understand it, these bands were so popular because they captured the post-industrial disillusionment of their era. Today, Manchester is not that city. It is big, and shiny, it has new financial quarters, concrete and glass buildings, upmarket shopping centers, posh eateries and coffee shops, fancy bars and 3-D cinemas. Levenshume Baths are out, the Aquatics Center is in. Plus, all the estate agents are pretentious. The Northern Quarter is so big now it practically consumes Ancoats (wherever that was). The fact is, that we want new, not old. We don’t want Manchester to be dying and shit to then have music as its saving beacon. It has moved on. Joy Division is no longer the sound of Manchester because the city they sing about no longer exists. That and the Cold War is over. So it begs the question, why do these people continue to listen to these bands? It is my mind that they do so because they adhere to all stereotypes. They are the marginalised schoolkids. Too bookish to formulate their own opinion. They adhere to the waves of received opinion. They listen to canonised bands because they need to be told when music is good. They lack any intuitive prowess. They use these big names to hide behind rather than to convey new ideas. So when they come to talking about new bands they stammer and stifle. They wait for major labels to back local bands then they jump on them like idiots. They herald bands that sound like other bands that are big, rather than talking up bands that sound like nothing you’ve heard before. One local band rising through the ranks at the moment are Spokes. In essence they are atrocious. They fail to develop ideas, their motifs are void of feeling or character, they convey no greater ideas other than, “this is pleasant”. Fortunately for them, they sound like Arcade Fire so people will champion them.

Either way, if these people are not intuitive enough to realise that Factory Records and ‘Madchester’ are no longer culturally relevant, that playing their records and slapping their faces on magazine covers isn’t engaging with nostalgia then how can we trust them when they champion new bands. How can we trust them when they try to engage with a progressive city. The reality is that we can’t trust them and they’re fucking it up for the rest of us.

The reason why Manchester is in trouble is because the main houses of industry employ those who champion Manchester’s past. The city is struggling to move on because many in a position of power, from Clint Boon and Haslam to City Life to BBC Manchester are all stuck in the past but instead of acknowledging this they all think they’re the voice of modernity. When in essence they are over the hill, coffin dodgers who are, as Haslam so observantly put, “old men telling young people what to do is the complete opposite of what pop music should be about.” That’s right Dave…now fuck off you old git. If Manchester is going to move forward, we shouldn’t forget the past but we should at least get rid of its ghosts and these impotent losers.

To sound out, seeming that there are growing numbers against the nostalgia brigade I’d hope a clear message can be achieved in order represent these concerns. However, at the moment it’s the anti-FAC lot who lack a clear direction.

“It would be a cruel irony if the NME were to disappear at precisely the time when it finally got its act together.” – Maggoty Lamb

The NME peaked in sales by 1972 at around 300,000 copies per week. McNicholas took to the helm in 2004 and by 2007 the paper’s circulation had reached a new nadir falling 12.6% on its previous year to an average of 64,033 – almost half of the 120,000 copies circulating weekly in 1990. By June 2009, the month before Murison was confirmed as McNicholas’ predecessor, weekly circulation had dropped a worrying 27% on the year previous to just 40,948 copies.

It’s been almost 6 months since Krissi Murison began her editorship at The NME. The news was treated with a combination of both relief and scepticism. With the departure of – the heavily criticised – former Editor Connor McNicholas here was an opportunity for The NME to change. The question is, has it acted on criticism or has it continued digging it’s own grave? Here’s the Bricolage Music review of issue dated 13 February 2010:

Cover: The Courteeners

BM: Keeping up McNicholas’ tradition of ‘Boy-love sells‘

Masthead: Jamie-T on tour

BM: popular and revered artist gets ‘free’ publicity for rescheduled tour

News (in order of column inches): NME Awards tour; Gangs of festival ticket touts; Strokes to record new album; Melissa Auf der Maur concept album; Glastonbury flag-ban latest; Futureheads go prog; Carl Barat is good kisser; Gorillaz on NME Radio…

BM: shameless self-promotion; human interest scaremongering; nostalgia; weird nostalgia; over publicised festival gets more endorsements; meh!; shocker; more self-publicity…

Vox pop interviews: Serj Tankian (System of a Down); Romy Madley Croft (The XX)

BM: still on the Kerrang aggressive; façonnable.

Letters: Person in Sheffield gets ‘mardy’ after Arctic Monkey’s are blacklisted for NME ‘Worst Album’ award.

BM: If NME is in transition, the readership is yet to catch up.

Radar: Yuck; Wild Palms; Nottee; Grave Babies; ‘Coventry folk scene’ under the microscope.

BM: 90’s US indie band sound-a-likes, nostalgic; post-punk revivalists, ditto; NME still reveres Kitsune Maison; heavy art-house band; didn’t the try this a few years ago when they thought the Enemy were the future of new music? This time round there’s a distinct lack of hyperbole.

Interviews: The Courteeners, Lonelady, Pin Me Down (Bloc Party side-project), Band of Skulls, Local Natives,

BM: ‘Liam Fray is about to silence the doubters’ etc. A friend saw the man in a Manchester club, rolling around the floor reeling on drugs – It’s going to take a lot more than a Barry Nicolson article; Lonelady is a fantastic choice, more of this please; less of this please; keep up Beaumont; good choice.

Comment: Gavin Haynes on JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye

BM:…just in case you haven’t read the book / we were all 14 once.

Another vox pop: Dinosaur Jr.

BM: Barlow and Mascis must be tripping out, ‘Guys, I’ve got NME on the line, they want to lick you sphincters?’

Album Reviews: Marina & The Diamonds 9/10, Field Music 8/10, Lightspeen Champion 7/10, Xiu Xiu 7/10

BM: It’s a quiet week on the album front for articles, the lead review reads like a PR email then progresses to a full on  ’smoke up their arses’ music industry styled special; steady; scraping the barrel for support; hyperbole alert!

Album Archives: Urusei Yatsura rating N/A

BM: quite pleasant.

Live Reviews: Ellie Goulding/Daisy Dares You, Mike Snow/Theophilus London, Japanese Voyeurs, Wale/Chiddy Bang, Midlake.

BM: move on, nothing to see here; yawn; Hello; hipster; boys club.

Gig of the Week: Yeasayer

BM: Be sure to wear your Topshop necklace

One final vox pop: Akiko Matsura (Comanechi/The Big Pink)

BM: Akiko once gave me a Black Metal compilation so i like this, however getting Peter Robinson to do this interview rather than the other voxpops gives the impression that The NME is trying not to take itself too seriously. More nostalgia, in a way.

FIN

Afterthought: I will probably buy it next week. Even though Vampire Weekend will be the cover stars they are an improvement on The Courteeners and may such a trend continue. The Lonelady interview was an easy highlight, NME, welcome back to the table!

In my search for a new wave of grrrl bands, which I’m calling protogrrrl there has been one band that I have been reluctant to write about, Mika Miko. It’s just not in my nature to echo the voices of many, it just doesn’t provide any purpose. But if I were not to include this band it would be a greater injustice.

The first time I missed Mika Miko it was at the Islington Mill on tour with No Age. I was pretty pissed off because I’d just missed Santogold elsewhere in town after the venue oversold and cut the artist’s guestlist. Stuck in the pissing rain waiting for No Age’s tour manager to finish filming them and give the promoter the guestlist. Months later I’d become disinterested with the band, got my kicks from elsewhere. Then a friend was putting them on at a rollerdisco and for reasons beyond my control I spent protesting in a bar rather than rocking out on 8 wheels. So there you have it. A band that typify a genre that I have invented out of sheer enjoyment, pleasure and assumed relevance have never been seen live by yours truly due to pitiful reasons. Am I embarrassed? No, I’m too proud, but I should be because without Mika Miko’s jams our lives would be poorer.

(This article was completed drafted on June 23 2009. It has been shown the light of day because it’s not a vampire. Thanks – BM)

Apparently blogging isn’t conducive with listening to music. The act of going out and exploring music is a world away from being sat in your study with the light of a Macbook corroding your retinas. Speaking of the death of local journalism and its impact, writer David Simon – a former ‘newspaper man’ himself, obsessed with the end of empire – put it,

…you do not, in my city, run into bloggers or so-called citizen journalists at City Hall or in the courthouse hallways or at the bars where police officers gather. You don’t see them consistently nurturing and then pressing others—pressing sources.

Although Simon is speaking of the local press rather than the music industry, some editors and journalists have been inclined to make such a leap and claim that music bloggers mostly stay at home bottomfeeding the industry. Now, If you are looking for a constructive narrative that honestly portrays and cleverly lampoon’s Simon’s claim, go here. However for a slanted, biased and uncredible account, looking at how this criticism is obsolete when referring to music bloggers, please read on. As the popularity of this quote and its various guises, including an article in the Washington Post, increases, it is becoming a benchmark position from which to attack the web community. They are unjustified and this is why:

It’d be a real shame fucked were the media not to engage with reality, if we find ourselves in some dystopian future where we are eternally confined to a single building and never leave. To be planted before a machine and to be force fed culture, news and bran flakes 24/7. To be completely subservient of the machines set out to provide. But this isn’t some disillusioned fantasy, nor is it some negative projection, it’s not even our future, it is our reality; but more than that it’s our history. No matter how it functions, inevitably pop culture is just one feeding machine, never satisfying needs, merely drip feeding us through a tube right into our frontal lobes. As frequently as the capitalist model professes about how we have limitless choice and unlimited selections the reality is very different. There is only limited air time, page space, chart positions, music blogs – even if they do appear to be infinite. There’s a limit to how many artists we can consume and a limit to how many gigs can be frequented. It is not only the mainstream media that is drip fed shite by the record makers and passed through in the same instant but the bloggers, the subversive magazines, the underground kids, everyone is at it, even this blog. So whereas the oligarchs, the number fiddlers and the press officers epitomise corruption in David Simon’s courthouse example, from the perspective of the music media, such characters (the industry heads, the promoters, the press officers) are deemed a necessary evil. What I’m saying is that it’s not the case that it would be fucked if Simon’s end of the empire apocalyptic preaching were to exist…it is fucked, because it does exist, it always has and always will.

However what’s wrong with this theory when applied to music bloggers (as it has been done) is that they do get out, in fact they get out to the gigs more than most. It’s because they are the journalists, the PR companies, the promoters, the bands. the management, the roadies, and most commonly, the DJ’s, the fans. It’s not that they need to go down to the courthouse to find out what’s happening…they are the courthouse. Unlike the critic, they do not exist on some meta-level where their involvement is purely observational. Don’t misconstrue my claim here with a Judge, Jury and Prosecution argument, rather that amongst the independent industry – as I perceive it – there’s an ‘all hands on deck’ mentality.

Furthermore, the machine is so bloated that the music critic scarcely resembles the hard nosed hack down City Hall as Simon so describes. Besides, what’s there to report on? What needs investigating other than the records and the performances? The hermited blogger is still getting half of the material to ‘investigate’ even if they don’t leave their wireless prisons.

So this got me thinking about who’s actually performing the role of music journalist. Q: Who is going down to the courthouse and returning with content? A: Everyone

Me thinks that the music journalist reconstructs the sonic narrative in a different medium, albeit text, speech, photography, illustration or a combination of the above. It’s worth pointing out that I do value hacks reporting back that Little Boots is from Blackpool, and that she went to school here, and performed her first song when. It’s important that such demi-goddesses are humanised so that our reaction to their music is, ‘She’s like me, maybe I can make music like her’, as opposed to, ‘This music reminds me how I’m a talentless fuckwit’. But this role of investigative journalism can be performed by anyone with a notepad, pencil and broadband connection. Hell, these hacks don’t even have to leave their increasingly barren office spaces.

Listening to sounds from The Earl of Edgecombe’s new mixtape entitled The Slow Death of Mr. Go Go Go the archival collages of the mixmaster is seen in the archivist blogger who posted it. Blake Leyh, musical supervisor to David Simon’s TV hits, from The Wire to the latest, Treme about New Orleans musicians and Katrina. It seems that the journalists, digging up the music and throwing it out there are operating on his time, with his money. Now I’m not accusing Simon of hypocrisy, but his own musical director is running an occasional blog posting cutting edge music, and you wouldn’t like to accuse Leyh of not being down the courthouse either. The mixtape works Soulja Slim, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Jelly Roll Morton, Wynton Marsalis, Juvenile and some unidentifiables into an all to brief hot slice of wild sounds. Now I’m not waxing lyrical on this just to parade some moral high-ground because in many ways I want to agree with Simon – he did write The Wire after all. Also, I’ve dragged his words so far kicking and screaming out of context that any claim for a moral victory would be completely delusional on my part.

I still believe music journalism is important and long may it live but when you consider the courthouse argument, if Simon is aiming his comments at the entire blogosphere, he shoots himself in the foot.

(This article was completed drafted on July 28 2009. It has been shown the light of day in an effort to do some ‘Spring cleaning’ through a process similar to carpet beating. Thanks – BM)

DIY music is dangerous. It’s many other things but danger is what it does best. Of course, when I say danger I don’t actually mean anything particularly dangerous. It’s not about dicing with death or anything untoward and life threatening. Danger in musical terms is less exploring uncharted territory and more revisiting overworked formats and blueprints. It’s about displaying the portentous capacity to self-destruct. Unfortunately there is rarely anything dangerous to the music, it’s the same chords to the same distorted sprechgesang that one would expect from any laconic hipster. It’s the kind of danger that were an everyman to witness such a term being used in this way they would scoff into their double-bagged glucose riddled Yorkshire brew, as would the connoisseur, albeit into a herbal infusion as a change. On both accounts, the Danger in DIY µzak is disingenuous on grounds of pretension.

On High In The Cinema, Pens have the audacity to adopt such pretension, “Yeah we’ve got no money and we’re going to break in”. It’s a stupid, self deprecating, naive lyric but it transforms these pretentious arty kids into pathetic public school teenagers trying to be dangerous. They capture the faux-danger that continues to undermine rocknroll. Which is about as dangerous as it gets.

So lets book a compere, don our glad rags, put on a spread, and officially inaugurate PENS into the protogrrrl (©Bricolagemusic) club. Joining the ranks of Finally Punk, Eagle and Talon, maybe Jemina Pearl and probably Mika Miko. They alsobecome the first non-Americans to join the club (so long as you don’t include Afrirampo).

I can tell you my love for you will still be strong after the boys of summer have gone

Don Henley – Boys of Summer (1984)

Watching the Karate Kit I could only marvel at the slacker-coolness of Ralph Macchio. In an early scene he has a playful wrestle with a friend who’s sporting a t-shirt of two bloated cartoon pigs fucking, the caption reads, ‘Makin’ Bacon’. He’s wearing that t-shirt ‘cos he don’t give a fuck, and that is cool. It’s the kind of cool that younger kids would admire it’s the kind of cool that adults would recognise, it’s the kind of cool that I’ll never be. It’s Julian Casablancas cool.

The great quality of slacker-rock is that it’s the easiest genre to pull off so long as one of you plays guitar real neat. You can get you wardrobe from an older sibling/cousin. You can get your electricals from skips and you can get your music on cassette from charity shops. It’s one of those trends that is always cool no matter what. It’s cool this year, it was cool last year and the year before that, it was cool in 2001, it was cool in 1992, it was cool in 1984, it was cool in 1978, it will be cool next year.

Listening to The Smith Westerns I imagine them seated cross-legged before some clapped out telly playing Karate Kid on a NES and listening to Don Henley. They drink sprite and wear sweat bands. I want them to play some Williamsburg pool party or some log cabin in the Midwest or a skate pool in LA. I want them to exist in a world where smoking grass doesn’t cause headaches, where everything can be resolved either by skating, karate or ghostbustin’.

The trick to the music is to write a guitar heavy track in the vein of the Ramones and then slow it down around to 100bpm. The lyrics have to be about girls or boys or both. The basist has to lay of any theatricals, there’s no need to give the impression that they can actually play! And the drummer should just focus on the cymbals. It’s not meant to be difficult, it’s meant to be so easy that you could play it in any state and it would sound just as good.

All Americans are good at is destroying things. Yeah, take that you, you Yankee doodle dandies. Stick that up your fatty arses and, er…

So I’m not very good at ‘trash talk’ but that’s not the point. I’ve got this theory that art is inherently destructive, that artists have the tendency to behave like driver in a demolition derby. Since America’s founding fathers constructed such a grand political theory the only way was down. The only way was to raze everything to the ground. Some tried to do it piece by piece, some tried it in one detonated gesture.

To look at this another, less xenophobic way, it could be noted that there are two prevailing schools off thought at work, constructive and destructive. What occurs to happen is that it is the destructive one that seemingly has a stranglehold over popular music.

As one generation follows another, styles are passed down hear say. Sounds are re-invented but more frequently than not, destroyed. The movement of cultures can quite frequently be reactionary in relation to a previous movement. Punk can be seen as a protest to what came before it; Postpunk equally so; Synthpop to Grunge etc. The inspiration is often destroyed in order to move on. Despite the great belief that society is improving day by day many don’t feel like they are better off – this mentality is reflected in the sound, that music we listen to is dictated, at least in part, by this concept of destruction and decline. That the only way we can move it forward is to remove all traces of that which has already failed.

To elaborate, destruction is the most important part of creation. Pop music is slowly being destroyed piece by piece, cut by bloody cut. The necessity to pull the plug on popmusic seemed an immediate necessity. It’s an important point in many music fanatic’s life when they wake up and realise that pop music is dead. They can come to this conclusion any number of ways. But it’s not lack of ingenuity that’s killed music. It’s not a failing industry model either. It’s quite simply our cynical minds that’s done it. We kill it every time the pristine entry level consumer concoctions allude us and in our frustration we proclaim its death for the umpteenth time. We are sick of shiny new products of capitalism and we decided that fucking up old cars until they were steel wrecks was the best possible pastime, thank-you America. We decided that we wanted to kill it. It took some doing but we did it.

It’s this penchant for destruction (and murder) that’s driven my love of noise (personal favourites would include Burning Star Core, Shit&Shine and Wolf Eyes). The brutality of noise which can bring all sorts of emotions to the surface, love, anger, frustration, release and more often than not, humour. However its unique feature is that it bares little aesthetic resemblance to traditional, arcane pop music. It has taken all the failings of artists trying to pursue the ‘perfect pop song’ and ensured that they are not used. It is in my mind, the ultimate (or at least most extreme) deconstruction of the classical forms. In its place it constructs the most crude sounds attainable. However, my appetite appears to have been sated, en bref I don’t listen to that shit no mo’. What I’m trying to understand is where do we go now? Or how can we move on from what was designed to be the send off for music?

If we’ve killed it, if the King of Pop is not housed in some cryogenic container, if he is actually decomposing (albeit slowly) in his glass crypt, what is left? One common idea is that we can’t give up the ghost, literally. That once something dies we are haunted by it for eternity. That we find these tormenting spectres calming and nostalgic. That we’ve become so conditioned to these sounds that we couldn’t truly hear anything else, that we’re possibly in denial that our old friend popmusic has passed away. Take La Roux, who I love, for example. Listening to her debut is comparable to being dragged around some synth-laden nostalgia fest by Yvette Fielding. As much as it is synthetic and contrived I just can’t suspend my disbelief enough to agree that it is anything other than sheer brilliance.

My other concocted daydream that I have the audacity to call a theory, is that us the murderous bastards that we are, with blood on our hands are trying to get rid of the rotting corpse that is pop music. I picture ourselves traipsing around wondering what to do. “Holy fuck we’ve killed it” and in all our guilt it becomes personal, ‘I’ve killed it, I did this, I stopped believing. Why oh why?’

It is with this image in mind that I listen to Loren Connors. The experience is an empty one – it is not a full bodied affecting sound like Wolf Eyes say. There are distant memories of old friends, old blues riffs enter and leave amongst the ebb and flow of Connors’ improvising. The songs bring tears rather than joy, trying to lay memories to rest. The pain and the hurt are at the forefront of his imagination.

The PR blurb for The Curse of Midnight Mary goes as such:

In 1981 guitarist Loren Connors took his tape recorder to the graveyard where the legendary Midnight Mary’s grave lies in New Haven, Connecticut. The curse is: Anyone who gets caught in her graveyard past midnight will die the next day. But Connors, like a young fool, taped in that place, making this album.

It would be hard to argue either way as to whether Connors is playing for the ghost of Midnight Mary or or lamenting his own imminent death. With only myself and this stinking corpse traipsing about, the wonder is where’s the music coming from? Who is this singing the old songs, am I not alone in this post-musical apocalypse? Connors it seems, is channeling if not the afterlife then at least the atmosphere.

Connors’ voice can be heard occasionally, hard and heavy, lungs full of fluid and blood unable to breath, merely letting out this groan. His plucking at the strings is crude yet passionate. As if his muscles had started to cease up since the blood had stopped flowing. Recognising the old tunes acts out the process of writing anecdotes for a eulogy. They are obscured by the slack tempo and blurred by the intended alterations. Furthermore his rendition of Amazing Grace may not be the tune we eventually lower our coffins to but one does wonder how many have gone in the ground to the Judy Collins version? It’s not that Connors is dead, he’s not neither in reality nor my imagination. The interesting feature is that we want the music to play on. That the notion of creating a sound to which nothing can follow – as I deem noise to be a strive for – has been advanced, albeit non-chronologically by Connors’ music. As dead as I believe music to be, it seems that I cannot lay it to rest.

Whether this is the eulogy, whether this is the funeral, whether this is heaven or hell, whether this is limbo, Connors has made music for life after its death. Or at least, music for life after noise.

Oh you are really such a pretty one
I see you’ve gone and changed your name again
And just when I climbed this whole mountainside
To wash my eyelids in the rain.

So Long, Marianne, taken from Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967)

People play and interpret psychedelic rock in different ways usually adhering to their vice. In the past collage kids in America have adopted the “you’re either on the bus, or you’re off the bus,” way of thinking but psychedelia doesn’t have to be hardcore. Like some never ending experimental road trip the sound of psychedelia continued to evolve as new extremes were invented. For instance, when Ken Kesey was graduating from Stanford, LSD (legal at the time) psilocybin, mescaline, and amphetamine IT-290 were the drugs of choice, but sounds would evolve as different substances became popular. With speed, the ephemeral bliss of Thrash Metal and faster, more phallic riffs; with Ecstasy the jams got longer with arching crescendos and a love of synths and electronics. There’s been one drug however that has survived all these ages that captures the psychedelia fan more than any, booze. With more exotic drugs leading the listener down treacherous paths of indecipherable hedonism or recently more classic club sounds the psychedelia fan is no longer the Merry Prankster, at best a retired stoner.

‘Maybe this typifies how psychedelia is no longer dangerous or exciting, that it’s not willing to take risks any more.’ This seemingly would be right had the genre died a deserved death back when the drugs stopped working, but the sounds are more exciting now than they have ever been. Now that we live in a society of 5% pure cocaine and where fizzy drinks keep you dancing longer than a pill, psychedelia has become a hot pot, a furnace, a cauldron even, of smoking head-y sounds. It’s had to compensate for crap drugs. Sure there are droves of pale imitators smokin’ doobies, wasting time talking about Hendrix in an ugly binary of ‘Yeah’ and ‘Dude’ but that’s because cannabis has become strong, too strong, resulting in many of them being unproductive and hyper reverential to times past.

When leaving Café de la Danse after a particularly underwhelming Dead Meadow show I passed the bassist who within a brief conversation managed to convey that he’d left the merch stall unmanned and was far too drunk to identify – let alone count – Euro notes. It appeared that the whisky and wine he consumed on stage with theatrical thirst had taken hold, further highlighted by his huge bail en route to sell the new album – I later concluded that it was inebriation as well as draconian volume control that compromised the gig.

I don’t know whether Witch have a poison of choice, my guess would be a couple of 40’s, although I could be wrong. The point is though, that the only way Witch could sound like they do – as it is with all psychedelic acts – is if they have a penchant for escapism, whether that be drink, drugs, fantasy novels or heaven forbid, the music itself. It’s probably a combination of the lot. Witch are psychedelia as fantasy – hence the name. It’s about absorbing the listener in a whole new world where the banalities of reality don’t take place. With J. Mascis on drums (where he should be?) there’s an irregular driving force behind the band and although the essence of the guitars is on familiar ground the sound as a whole takes you somewhere altogether new.

Whether it’s the booze and the drugs or more sedate substances that help you escape reality it doesn’t matter, but if at any point you’re looking for a change or a new fix, I’d give Witch a go.

Post-Scriptum

The fantastic Arthur Magazine has recently posted a recording of Dr. Christian Rätsch who specialises in ethnopharmacology and psychoactive plants and animals. In the lecture, Rätsch is quick to point out how Himalayan Shaman (professional psychoactive substance users) are known to be big fans of Everton FC’s favourite tipple, Chang Lager.  This alcohol malarkey must be pretty heavy stuff.

Friend: “Is that the name of the band or…”

BricolageMusic: “…nope, it is what it says on the cover.”

There’s some wacky stuff out there, I’ll admit it, but nothing could have prepared me for this one. For £1 the lovely men at Rare&Racy parted with this treasure. Now because my relationship with CD-R’s is comparable to that of a Whippet and rabbit shit, I had to bury my nose deeper and find out more. The guy who’s releasing it goes under the pseudonym of Toaster In The Bath, he had to say this:

I came across the recordings because my friend, who was living with me at the time was one of the children on the recording and her Dad wanted to get the tapes burnt to CD.

So here’s some musings on and around it:

Lithuanian Children Talking 1983-1994 (toaster in the bath)

Over the last decade or so there has been an ongoing debate amongst music writers into Heidegger’s notion of Geist (‘ghosts’) and more specifically, Hauntology – the study of ghosts.  The questions arose following the enquiry of Jacques Derrida’s article under the English title, Of Spirit. The argument, about music and Hauntology, which has become synonymous with blogger K-Punk, has given rise to the question, ‘Does, and if so where does, Hauntology appear in music?’

Followers of both music and philosophy have been keen to point out instances where it does arise. Without examining all formal proposals for entrants into this exclusive, paranormal, club I want to lay claim that Lithuanian Children Talking 1983-1994 is an apposite example of Hauntlogy and hopefully from that, make a clear distinction as to which other sonic artifices are credible reference points of this supposed Genre.

The key element for me is that, as Derrida makes clear through the structure of his argument, our conception of Hauntology is inextricably linked to our notion of Geist. As is such, the depictions of Geist must realise or share properties with our conception of Geist.

Now herein lies the problem, what writers appear to have done is to search through other texts by Derrida in search of how we can derive a suitable definition of Geist, not as concept but as art practice – Writing and Difference being the main culprit. They have used these texts to seek a link between a conceptual idea and an artistic representation, which I believe to be an ambitious endeavor due to the requirement to bridge a metaphysical gap.

Instead of this linear method, I propose an inside out approach: to find artifacts of ‘Geist as representation’ and then find concurrence or difference with notions of Hauntology. 

In a questionably successful article by Brian O’Connell in reference to a more credible one by Jan Verwoert it is argued:

As Verwoert points out through his own invocation of Derrida, a double possession takes place: the artist takes possession of the appropriated object by performatively consuming it within a given practice, while at the same time that practice is possessed (in the ghostly sense) by the discourse that accompanies its act of appropriation.

Now without making this article too laborious it is worth pointing out that between this Toaster In The Bath character, his flatmate and the father they appear to have offered a CD-R that seems to fit perfectly with several readings of Hauntology, all in reference to Derrida.

I don’t think that this is the sole sonic artifact of hauntology by any means, I just believe it to be a true one. As I await the arrival of ‘People Take Warning! – Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs’ and replay Burial etc. I’m going to see what else can fit the mould in my own non-academic, uninformed way. I just want to point out that if you hear a scenester rant on about how some Goblin record is like soooo Derrida, tell them to fuck off.

CD is available by mail order for £1 +SAE if you email: toasterinthebathrocks@gmail.com

So I had to confess my endless love for country music this week – it’s my Achilles heal, it’s my vice. It’s as good as a slice of cake or a cup of tea, or them both, together. If I can hear steel wires brush a snare drum or the buzz of a handmade pickup on a classical guitar, I love it all like the love of a mother to her children.

A A Bondy, as I have it, is from the ‘I’m gonna seduce you to sleep’ school of country. There’s this slack drawl in the vocals that rocks back and forth like an intellect after a bottle of wine, eyes shut, trying to realise their thoughts and emotions. The style when repeated and imitated could qualify as feigned. That the emotions are just acted out for the purpose of disguising a false authenticity. Obviously this is not the case, that there are so many young male balladeers struggling to comprehend their inhibited emotions the only way for them to do so it seems is to act all dark and broody, to exist in some kind of halfway house between complex poet and sex object. As apprentices of De Sade disguising themselves as Ovid, so that they can cop-off without debasing themselves in anyway – because they take themselves too seriously.

The trouble is that these young troubadours are never willing to admit that they play guitar for the women. Maybe in all their emotional ways, if they were to have a partner it would zapp all their pent up sexual frustration creativity and their art would die, heaven forbid.

When he sings, “It’s love that’s tearing them down” a cute inversion of, “Why can’t everyone just get along, man. Why do we have wars and shit.” Hippie crap basically, but its attractive all the same. Between the lines I read, “so come on baby, lets make love not war.” Utter bullshit, but seductive in its own morbid way.

If I were to say this to Bondy’s face I believe that he’d be moments away from punching my lights out. Decking me before lecturing me on how we’re all doomed, how the end of the world is coming, that if we don’t bomb ourselves to death we will certainly gas guzzle our way into oblivion. It’s not that I see the world in a radically different way it’s just that, I don’t believe you! I don’t believe that preaching about Armageddon is going to achieve anything other than get you laid.

As I sardonically try to reduce these young Ovids to but a horny chap, in the case of many it’s in vein. For A A Brody, specifically he has struck a chord that few manage: The Boss Chord as I call it. It’s the note that few can strike, save for Bruce Springsteen. It’s about Levi’s 501’s, it’s about baggy shirts, it’s about being so fucking macho that everyone in the room wants to suck the testosterone from your sweaty brow. Yeah I think he’s phony, hell I think most of them are phony, there’s nothing even original or novel to A A Bondy, but if you have an obsession with country music, I defy you to not like it.

The art worlds are never in sync with each other. They go through their own self absorbed loops. What’s popular in one medium is very rarely popular in another at that moment in time. However there was a moment not so long ago that a fusion occurred. Watching White Denim the other week were two trendy girls both sporting Matthew Williamson dresses from H&M (feel free to click, for every reader referral I get a reach around from their PR officer). Seeing their psychedelic colours with a hint of contrived trailer trash their look perfectly defining the band. Eleven months ago I wrote of the band, “the audience [...] wishes to break out dancing, arms flailing wildly whilst maintain the icy coolness of the bourgeoisie embracing Outsider Art,” but in Leeds the other week, there was no ‘icy coolness’ in the audience, just two girls losing their shit to what is now, a great band. In my mind what’s happened is that the two circles, art and fashion, have both moved toward the same point at the same time. Both White Denim and Williamson have turned their back from the high-end avant guard and embraced the popular to great success.

As this overcooked observation settles I thought that I’d use the opportunity to force feed you a slice of psychedelia in the belief that you have a revitalised penchant for it (and how about an H&M dress?).

I first got onto this band, Kill For TOTAL PEACE after Etienne Jaumet recommended them to me. Although he plays sax with them occasionally I have no reason to believe that the recommendation was anything other than sincere. What separates them from their peers is the oscillations that enter and exit the tracks allowing the fuzz and distortion to pause and settle – if only just for a moment. Without it, these essentially stoner riffs would be dull and cliche’d but with these on target references to Goblin, the listener is dragged into a zombie horror hallucination, which with the right headphones, can be suffocating. Kill For TOTAL PEACE are still very much fixed in the avant guard realm however unlike White Denim, they carry it well. I don’t expect that in a year’s time the fashion industry will be draping their sound over mannequins, but something inside me says that it should happen.

I’m thinking of picking a leader for protogrrrl, my imagined genre (see here and here for past examples) and I’m considering Jemina Pearl as a possible candidate:

Every great movement has a figurehead, a spokesperson, an idol, it’s one of its defining features. ‘Who can lead us?’ hollers the bands; ‘Who can embody our aspirations and beliefs?’ shouts the fans: ‘What are we going to wear?’ cries the fashionistas. Crudely, there needs to be someone to take the flack, to crash and burn but mostly to shine hard and fast. We need them to embody the thoughts of their people. We need them because popmusic in its disposable ways is incomplete; we’re constantly chasing our next fix because our appetite is never sated. We need music to reflect life and the figurehead achieves this because their distinguishing art is their lives, projected upon the fans who absorb it piecemeal. We need them to be a bit like Morrissey…

…but that’s the problem, as effeminate as Morrissey maybe he’s still male. As I dig through the crates of contemporary female punk bands in search of a figurehead for protogrrrl I’m beginning to think that in the case of a feminist movement having a figurehead seems slightly inappropriate. Questions like, ‘Why should we replicate a capitalist, hierarchical system for a movement that seeks equality, not an inversion of a dominant-subordinate system?’ or rather, ‘With so many male figureheads, Cobain, Lydon, Barratt (Syd), Cocker etc. is the concept patriarchal?’ To create enough feminine figureheads to rival the males is like asking Nottingham Forrest to match Real Madrid in European Cup victories – a long term (fruitless?) task, as inappropriate as this football simile. I’m not saying here that women cannot be leaders, I’m saying that the very notion of a figurehead embodies the old crimes of the patriarchal hierarchy of the pop industry, the chauvinism, the sexism, the shit.

But as is the case with idols, they cannot elect themselves nor can they shy away from election, the election cannot be planned and the purpose of the candidacy can only be understood in hindsight. They are chosen by the people and they represent the people, it’s a pure as democracy can be. Jemina Pearl has fought her way to the top and can stand shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Thurston Moore. She’s got a cool standup and be counted vibe to her lyrics further contributing to the broad church of protogrrrl. More importantly, I reckon she wouldn’t mind the illustrious position of genre figurehead – she does run a personal blog where she seemingly practices ‘living as art’. However watching her former group Be Your Own Pet perform their penultimate UK concert last year I saw her voters out in full, even if I didn’t think much of them; some fall into two categories, the objectifiers and the patronisers, and some manage to straddle both illustrious groups,

Man 1: She’s a pretty good guitarist for a bitch.

Man 2: …and fit.

Man 1: I’d fuck her if she wasn’t so young.

Man 2: She’s like twelve isn’t she?

Man 1: No, I think she’s older now, 17 maybe?

Man 2: Legal?

Man 1: She’s half my age, less than half.

Man 2: I’d do her.

Man 1: You’re a prick.

Man 2: So are you.

It’s inevitable that a proportion of the electorate will sexualise the postergirl which seems counter productive to a protofeminist movement. It’s tempting to suggest Beth Ditto but it would be for all the wrong reasons, and in my mind Ditto is more an advocate of Punk feminism than a figurehead for progression. To coronate Ms. Pearl when she’s only released three of her new tracks seems a little pre-emptive even if she seems born to lead. Also, her sound is quite straight up rocknroll and isn’t that in line with her prospective peers. Unfortunately, Ms. Pearl plays the sexual subordinate all too often and there are moments when listening to the new tracks that remind me of wannabe pop starlets, Pink or Avril Lavigne which doesn’t easily suit a feminist model. If Jemina is going to lead anyone it is will be the fashionable new wave of Punk bands like Wavves. I can see her being linked to Nathan Williams and causing great scandal.

For many idols, when they realise their lives have become their art they wish to be the authors of their final scene. Tragic really, but from a cold-hearted consumerists perspective, an inevitable necessity. I would never wish suicide upon Jemina Pearl, I want her to live a long and prosperous life…maybe one day, as a protogrrrl.

It all happened so fast. One minute I’m listening to The Idiot in a Le Fanfaron, a debauched rocknroll bar, the next I’m sneering at an album cover in an empty record store, and it’s all because of this man, Michel Houellebecq (pictured). 

This antagonist, hermit, drunk and womaniser has – through the brilliance of translated texts – become the rockstars’ rockstar (Iggy Pop has written the soundtrack to a documentary on Houellebecq’s attempts to make a movie based on his book La Possibilité d’une île) and I’m beginning to see why. The book in question is written from two perspectives, that of blogger Daniel and Daniel24 (if my memory serves me right) and is consistently scathing towards the internet and its functions. In his earlier novel Extension du domaine de la lutte, Houellebecq, himself a former civil servant and IT manager writes,

I don’t like this world. I definitely do not like it. The society in which I live disgusts me; advertising sickens me; computers make me puke. My entire work as a computer expert consists of adding to the data, the cross-referencing, the criteria of rational decision-making. It has no meaning.

In an interview for the release of his new album, Préliminaires, an expansion of his soundtrack to the documentary, Iggy Pop explains that when he was recording the songs he had an internet savvy assistant who sent the songs for the Louie Armstrong-esque backing to be recorded. He comes across rather nonchalant when saying this, but you can guess that Mr. Houellebecq and Mr. Pop probable see eye-to-eye on technological matters – and they’re not the only ones. On Neil Young’s latest record, title track Fork in the Road the aging Canadian sings,

I’m a big rock star
My sales have tanked
But I still got you
Thanks
Download this
Sounds like shit

Keep on bloggin’
‘Til the power goes out
Your battery’s dead
Twist and shout

Ouch! I want to agree with the two old rockers, maybe they’re right, maybe this internet malarkey is so impersonal that through endorsing it we are only distancing ourselves from those around us, maybe as Houellebecq argues, ‘It has no meaning’, but I can’t. I find myself deserting these canonised artists because the transcendental qualities of youth – one of the key selling points in their respective oeuvres – is destroyed in the instant they come over all nostalgic on us and start singing about how good it wasin the pre-web era. Young has used the same venom that he had for the establishment in songs like Ohio and directed it at web users. The whole experience is just debasing on their behalf. 

It’s not a political qualm I wish to add; it’s not because they they’re all a bunch of Right-wing warmongers, because they’re not even if they do all swing that way. It’s not because they’re all out to make a quick buck and live their paid-up professional lifestyles that grates on me; although that advert is pretty horrendous, and Young is just as bothered about his revenue streams as he is the bloggers in his lyrics. It’s because when I listened to The Idiot back in Paris I believed that it could have been written about me and those around me. It spoke to my neurosis and the end of existence, of war and bombs. However when I hear that Iggy Pop is releasing a concept album around a book that openly attacks the web and only weeks after hearing Neil Young spit vitriol about the digital age, I just think, ‘Fuck ‘em. They’re past it. They don’t know me anymore.’

When they attacked Nixon and gave a voice to those who had been silenced, when they shared the pain and strife of the underdog, that’s when they mattered; nowadays they sing not-so-tongue-in-cheek anecdotes about being King of the Dogs in a world they cannot fathom. They’ve given up, they sit there in their cabins taking pot shots at the world as it is, if anyone has lost touch with reality it’s not the bloggers and web users, it is them. 

There’s a lovely moment in Extension du domaine de la lutte (tr. Whatever) where an office worker gets drunk at the Christmas bash, strips and gyrates about. Down to her knickers she realises what she’d done and has to collect her clothes while her colleagues look on. I’d like both Iggy Pop and Neil Young to come to their senses like the female office worker does. To feel a sense of shame and embarrassment that the party’s over and they’re exposing themselves.

I’ve been fixed in a trance for an hour or so listening to Make Me Love on their myspace and I’ve decided that I’m now in a suitable state to blog. The light pulsations on the track are now but the quickened heartbeat of a digital Venus. Ear to her chest you can hear the polyrythmic beats of her heart. Paralysed in ecstasy the listener is wrapped in a soft synthetic embrace.

It recalls a performance of Steve Reich’s Six Marimbas annotated for one musician which I saw a decade ago performed by a Hallé percussionist, On Make Me Love, it’s as if you can hear a percussionist’s hands working independently of each other, the right dancing about the blocks with hard mallets, the left rattling occasionally with softer strokes. The two tracks share a hypnotic effect and an attention to subtle sonic progression. Towards the end of this 12 minute masterpiece distorted cello notes reach the lower frequencies, if anything could mar the simplicity of their conception it is this, but by the time it arrives I am so spellbound that I just imagine Arthur Russell perched in the corner bowing gleefully.

All thanks go to Philip Sherburne on this one.