psychmetalfreak

Mike Kelley (Destroy All Monsters), R.I.P. 1954-2012

2012-02-02T19:21:00.000-08:00

The passing a great artist, non-musician and all-round conceptualist and aesthete. Founding member of proto-punk/noise/freak unit, Destroy All Monsters in the early 1970s in Detroit and non-music art group, The Poetics, and later went on to be a successful artist who has close association with Sonic Youth, culminating in the use of his art work on the Youth's album "Dirty" which was released in 1993. A key mentor and icon in the American underground and alternative scene and culture, and with his death, it seems like another nail into the coffin which seals the end of an era which was signposted by post hippie-burned out, punk nihilism and the democratisation and grassroot-ification of avantgarde culture from the mid 1970s to the 2000s. Go get a copy of the 3CD Destroy All Monsters collection and be shocked by its prophetic noises and sounds which pointed to so much of what we are listening today in the underground scenes and beyond.

I Saw The Future of Music & It Is... CUT HANDS in Tokyo

2012-01-30T18:50:00.000-08:00

Everyone in the venue, UNIT, was filled with anticipation; around two hundred people were there, in one of the hip areas of Tokyo, Ebisu. It was a triple bill night with veteran Noise legends, Incapacitants celebrating their 30th anniversary, Ramleh of seminal Power Electronics record label, Broken Flag and the headliner, Cut Hands completing the triptych. The opening act started at around 7.15pm, but it was not one of the three acts mentioned earlier. Masked and hyperactive at his gadgets on the table placed in the middle of the stage, the man went on for 20 minutes to squeeze out some of the most piercing electronic squiggles possible this side of The New Blockaders. It might just be one of the Rupenus brothers underneath that ski-mask of the guy...

Incapacitants were the next act; rock n' roll was what they were all about. The two by-day salarymen in offices of their banks transformed into rock monsters tonight and they have been at it for 3 decades. The electricity from their circuit-linked noise set-up seemed to course through their bodies and in turn, sent tremours throughout the audience and the venue. They kick serious ass. Especially when one of them stage-dived into the crowd. Sheer Dionsyian abundance.

Ramleh came on next and their signature mix of psychedelic guitar-pyrotechnics with the wall-of-noise of power electronics is all about melting the ether and freeing the synapses of the audience. Volcanic and immersive, the duo was still at the top of their game.

When Cut Hands, a.k.a. William Bennett of Whitehouse and Come notoriety came on at around 9.20, the mood was right for what was in store for the congregation of refuse-niks, Noise heads, long-hair freaks & other assorted weirdos. The thundering Afro beats with the accompanying bass rumble shook the place, the images on the wall presented still photographs of Africans in their various daily affairs but pulsing in synch with the almost distorting and overloading rhythms from Bennett's laptop. What the hell was he emitting? Basic Channel filtered through cassette-quality Sublime Frequencies tapes and re-fed back into the existentialist speculation of modern life? This is not merely Noise transmogrified through beats but this is a sign of what is to come, in other words, I saw the future of music and it is Cut Hands.

Kye Records - Another Record Label Spotlight

2012-01-24T23:01:00.000-08:00

It was criminal of me to omit one of the BEST record labels from my year-end review of 2011 last December: Kye Records. One of the most understated labels of all-time with one of the most enigmatic line-up of artistes who are not just sub-subterranean (not due to any fault of theirs, of course but more a result of wilful ignorance and self imposed media occlusion) but limited in its editions of each release so far. The provenance of the label is a continuation of the beautiful, surreal and oblique other-song-liness of the Shadow Ring (which I actually had as one of my previous blog entries a while ago) which released a double CD retrospective a few years ago and it is also run by one of the three Rings, Graham Lambkin. Within the orbit of Lambkin is Tim Goss (one of the three Rings) and his new project, Call Of The Giants, which have released two modern day post-noise sketches of almost lament-like musical scribbles with his step daughter, Chloe Mutter; both the self titled album and the follow-up "the Rising" are affecting and deep-night contemplative soundtracks.

Also on the label is the re-issue of one of the side-projects of the Rings, Elklink, "The Rise of The Elklink", which frankly speaking befuddled me tremendously but it is one of those albums which slowly draws one in gradually which its "what-the-hell"ness of it. Veteran Noise/drone/freak outfit, Idea Fire Company also released one of their most sublime albums on Kye with "Music From The Impossible Saloon"; a suite of 1920s piano-led tone-poems going slightly wonky at the edges but buoying the listeners with its rudimentary a-melodies at its core.

The discography of this excellent label is still slim but with other great releases by Belgium composer Moniek Darge, Australian avant-rock group Vincent Over The Sink, one half of Bird Of Delay, Helm, and weirdo post-music outfit Fossils, Kye is one of the labels to watch out for. I for one, is hooked.

One Man Nation - A Singaporean Artist in Exile, An Interview

2011-12-19T00:22:00.000-08:00

In early November 2011, I met up with Marc, the man behind the project One Man Nation for a chat. So far One Man Nation has released an LP on Austrian record label, Moozak last year, entitled SUSPENDED IN A VORTEX IN THE MIDDLE OF A BOWL FROM TIBET / WHEN I WAS YOUNG I WAS EASILY AMUSED, BUT NOW IT IS ALL, THE SAME. AND THE SAME.... His album refuses to be pigeonholed conveniently, call it experimental, avant-garde, electronic or sound art, it is one and all of those adjectives listed.

The session started with a question on his personal musical path; to Marc, the discovery of the computer as a tool was a pivotal moment but it did not happen immediately thereafter. He traced the genealogy of his musical development as followed:

2003 – punk music with straight-ahead guitar

2004 – beginning of the use of a computer, but with guitar added

2005 onwards – more full-on use of computer, and he has used the similar setup since then, with a conscious emphasis to make sure that things do not get too techie, as to him, the music and the performance are much more important.

Marc never stopped stressing the power and significance of the collective creative experience with other musicians and artists in his creative journey thus far, as to him each collaboration goes beyond mere interaction and communication but it is about the sharing of the moment between the parties involved. He could not highlight enough that to him, he does not want to just play music but to him, the entire experience of musical creation and immersion is more than the current neo-liberal belief that all arts are just essentially entertainment and nothing more. On the other hand, he does not want to fall into the trappings of the other end of the spectrum, which is elevating what he does into something on the pedestal, i.e. high-brow academic platitudes/museum and art gallery fodder. He is always drawing what he does as a form of a continuation of the punk spirit which brought him into music and the arts in the first place. It is about breaking socially dictated norms and more vitally, breaking the artificial bourgeois spotlight placed on the spectacle of musical presentation/performance.

[One Man Nation] Tour in Bali + Lombok (Apr 2010) from transitoracle on Vimeo.

We moved on to talk at length about experimental art; we both agreed that it should be about breaking away from the many stifling cultural norms –all artistic and musical experiences should not just be spectators standing there to watch but instead both the artist and the audience ought to be involved in the shared immersive trip, and Marc mentioned a possible shamanic one but yet there should not be an invisible hierarchically-defined line between the person expressing & the people responding.

Naturally we also talked about the earlier proponents of experimental art like dada & Fluxus, which foregrounded innovation and breaking away from cultural/dogmatic confines, as opposed to the institutionalisation of the “experimental art” today. It must be about pushing forth the process as well as the creative intentions of the artists and not something driven by careerist and opportunistic drivel so common found today.

We then returned to review about Marc’s personal intentions behind his art thus far. When probed, he stated flatly that he sees no difference between what he does in his solo work as one man nation and his many varied collaboration with other artists. I then asked for an epiphanic account from Marc of a very exceptional collaborative work that he could share. He brought up Truna, a Spanish musician, whom he has an Improv duo with. The form might be nominally punk but it has been a fulfilling collaboration for the parties so far as it was like an artistic and creative conversation during their performances, a venture which is very different from One Man Nation solo project.

Spared from the type of state persecution underwent by many older Singaporean artist, Marc has been globe-trotting to Rotterdam, India, Indonesia and Spain (currently he maintains a residence in Spain, Granada but he is usually not there most of the time), and he is also focusing more on The Unifiedfield, an artists-run organisation which the Wire magazine featured in its Global Ear series last year. I thus tried to source out the provenance of his current nomadic lifestyle. Without batting an eyelid, he confirmed my suspicions that he had always wanted to leave Singapore as a child, and he has not found a way to remain here and thus he simply cannot see himself staying in Singapore and he grabbed the first chance he could to follow his wanderlust.

Thus, after the mandatory military conscription duty here, he left to tour, not the typical packaged style of course, but punkish, DIY way around Asia in 2003 and thereafter to Europe since then. He does not see much here in Singapore. It is not so much that he is totally rootless but he up-fronted his strong disdain for the general conformist and materialist mentality. We concurred that the whole society in Singapore is in general not made for individual discourse as the overall structure is stringently top-down and media dictated (which is closely monitored by the state as well), the dreary day-job situation to support the materialistic wants and he was bemused by the local grant-doling institutions for having a very narrow mind-set in their relentless search for sponsoring and supporting artists and art forms/projects here which have to have a prominent Singaporean agenda/front to them. He feels that the local arts administrators are still not very well-versed in the fields of art and Singapore despite its claim for the being the top in many areas, the arts is one glaring gap which must be seriously looked into.

However we also agreed that in Singapore even the arts is largely about the economics which sad to say we really cannot judge based on monetary basis; either that many Singaporeans just follow a well-trodden path that everyone is going down on. Perhaps it is due to the state of Singapore that it is in: the solid security of it all and the hyper planned-out nature of our day-to-day (though the recent SMRT debacles proved otherwise). With all these in place, it can easily lead to general complacency amongst the populace and in turn, their thought processes are seriously affected. And if one would to apply the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we are not getting better here as Singapore, despite the prosperity (economic but not in other areas), we are in actual fact more enslaved to the entire system due to the high cost of living & the way and wants of most Singaporeans.

From politics we next turned back to the personal. Marc shared that his globe-trotting experience has shaped not just his musical but artistic self as even though creatively he is having some sort of a lull, but to him, art is life, life is art. One Man Nation is what he is, who he is and whatever he does daily.

I surfaced the recent acceptance and in fact active encouragement of the corporate world to promote the idea of creation and he feels that it is all about absorbing what they think is useful for them to help barf up their coffer at the end of the day. Business as usual, mate.

He then went on to talk about the importance of introspection in his daily life which is a very crucial process in his art. Seen by Marc as a process key to his personal existence, his intention to create is not the only thing out of this, but instead he is consuming life itself as the same time as it is about how he lives. He constantly reminds himself that he does not want his art-making to be tainted by commercial intentions and vanity. If there is money then it is collateral but definitely not the main thing. But he admitted that it has been a tightrope to balance to live & create, for whatever reasons he feels so far. It is not easy to live the way he is as it has no room for complacency, but the trade-off is that this instability which he faces daily makes him appreciate everything in life, which gives him the insight to treasure the moments in life.

Towards the end of the interview I asked him for an epiphany. And this is what he related to me:

He was playing with some dancers in Bilbao, at the Festival of Improvisation 2007, which annually invited both acoustic and electronic musicians, dancers and other artists to just come together to jam. At this festival, he was the nominal electronic musician with his computer and he was largely still in his “electronic musician” mind-set, as he wanted to match the “right” music/sounds to the setting. Then it suddenly hit him that he should just think beyond creating music but to instead feel the temperature in the room, sense the lighting, feel the size of space, connect with the people in the space, and more, as everything he was doing and was attempting to do in there was actually part and parcel of a synthetic fuse with the set and setting to create. He concluded that musicians who are usually too caught up in the conventional music-making procedure, very often fall into the trappings of the male patriarchal schema.

Finally when asked about the meaning behind his project, One Man Nation, he expressively stated that it is all about going beyond nation-state and nationality, to be in a world without any borders, in other words, to even go beyond international, but to be an outer-nationalist at the end of the day.

Yan Jun in Singapore: An Interview

2011-12-18T19:24:00.000-08:00

Interview with Yan Jun, 28 Oct 2011

I met Yan Jun, the renown sound artist, Noise practitioner, event organiser and all-round ideologue of the current Chinese experimental/avant-garde scene who came to Singapore and performed during the same Sonorous Festival (which Uchihashi Kazuhisa also performed at) organised by LaSalle School of the Arts in Singapore. The interview with Yan Jun was conducted in Chinese and so the following summary of our interview would definitely not be the truest representation of the interesting conversation which transpired between the two of us. There were still many issues which we wanted to discuss but due to time constraint we had to cut short the session and thus I am looking forward to chatting with Yan Jun again in the future if the opportunity arises.

We started the interview with a short chat on Yan Jun’s musical biography when he told me that he sees himself primarily as an event organiser; for the past six years, more than 300 performances were staged by him. On the average he has one gig going on per week, and for a particular six-month period, he actually had two gigs running on a weekly basis. The artists and performers, according to Yan Jun can be largely classified into about 50% Chinese and the other half from abroad. He still defines himself more as an event organiser and record label boss, releasing albums, and not as strictly an artist. He runs the Sub Jam/Kwanyin Records. He is mostly based in Beijing, China but he was awarded Asian Cultural Residency in New York in 2011so he was in NYC for some time as well.

When our conversation moved on to his ideas and concepts on sound art and noise, he became more animated and passionate as he began explaining to me his personal definition of such terms, terminologies and conceptual schema. He feels very strongly about the fact that, today, modern art is very dictated by the canon, conventions and history of western ideas and aesthetics; to him modern sound art or noise is not so much a genre but sound should be treated as a medium, a tool. Sound, noise & sound art should be divorced from their western roots and meanings in the new century when the world has become more globalised.

To him, sound art in recent years is very formalised, formulaic and predictable. If I did not get him too wrongly, sound art today is too academic and elevated to the status of high art which seems contradictory to the original intent of the pioneer practitioners. Noise and sound, in a very hygienic western world in contemporary times seems to need noise to create some form of contrast and source of opposition. This is very different from where he came from, China. He shared with me an anecdote about his own house back home: his house has no ground/earth wiring and thus so a lot of noises/sounds are emitted all around the residence and they sipped into his recordings whenever he does any home recording. Noise is intentionally forged but it is part of the landscape feeding into the artistic eco-system of him and perhaps, for some other artists from China too.

He went on to qualified that in China it is very noisy consistently, and just like on a daily basis when he eats he is also consuming a lot of toxin, the noise/sound pieces which he creates can be seen as a product of his input in all sense of the word.

When I asked him if his ideas and understanding on noise/sound art is a shared one amongst the practitioners in China, he replied that it is more personal than anything else but he revealed that two other artists based in China today do have some mutual similarities in their personal aesthetical conceptions on their art and sound. One such artist is Yao Dajuin, who is actually from Taiwan but is based in China today. Yao is a key player in the Chinese avant-garde/sound scene today and his curated double CD album released on the record label, Post-Concrete, entitled, China – The Sonic Avantgarde, is a clear illustration of Yao’s personal vision of what he views sound art/noise as: field recordings, sound collages and sonic bites which totally rejects the high art, sound art in the museum/art gallery paradigm so fashionable and profitable for the more careerist ones in recent decades. Yao is more interested in the history of listening, auditory experiences and their psycho-social, psycho-geographical relationships than a nicely packaged tour in the white spaces of the halls of western cultural shrines.

The other kindred spriit of Yan Jun is Lin Qi Rui (I hope I got his name correctly, so if I did not do so please drop me a comment and let me know more about him, thanks!) –a Taiwanese noise/sound artist based in China who is very staunchly against the western cultural hegemony in the arts and music. Lin has just finished writing a book in Mandarin, to be published soon. With 800, 000 words in tow, it examines the history and lineage of sound/sound art/noise in the Chinese world.

We went on to discuss about the terminology of modern sound art in China and he hinted that they are perhaps just fads and names merely as before 2005, these activities were sweepingly branded as Noise but post-2005, Sound Art became the acceptable name instead. He did say that China today is maybe Taiwan in the past and thus given time, China would be able to mature and grow more as a site of sound/noise creativity in the near future. Yan Jun also shared that those interested in sound/noise seem to come from the lower classes and many of them are youths living in the urban centres who are, in most part, not connected with the traditional art forms. Yan speculates that Noise to them can be seen as a form of personal projection of their personal environs and place in China today.

We went on to discuss about the perennial search for modernism today. He stresses that even before the 1911 Revolution in China, the obsession with modernity was already there. Today, the Chinese artists are continuing the path towards the push towards modernism; whereas ten years ago, the buzzword was to be the avant-garde and earlier on, to rock was the predominant artistic goal, the mental and psychological desire to stretching the envelope remains, the same today. Many want to be more extreme, more modern and even more avant-garde than the west, where such ideas first germinated. Yan Jun gave the analogy of imitation and even later on iconoclasm as the modus operandi of many artists in China. He even mentioned that it is like a form of artistic devouring of the predecessors, to make these earlier aesthetic travellers part of their own. It should be seen as form of flattery and praise for those who have come before. Right now many in China are not very self-conscious about the entire process and thus it takes time for the Chinese artists to be more sensitive, more cruel and relentless to be, neither Western nor traditionally Chinese, a third path.

Before we were interrupted by the next performance during the night, we compared the western avant-gardist tradition to that of the current Chinese strain; where Dada, Surrealism and Fluxus were a very conscious break from the bourgeois western art world (just like when Yan Jun was in Zurich, the street where the Dadaists staged the Cabaret Voltaire, the main motivation force was to disrupt and upset the quietude and sterility of the place and Europe), in China, they do not need to do so due to the differences in the historical-cultural forces at play in China for the past century.

We ended our interview at this point but from what Yan Jun had discussed, we can perhaps glean better into the developing milieu of the increasingly Chinese-prominent century in the future.

2011: The Year In Review

2011-12-15T22:52:00.000-08:00

1. Label of the Year : Vinyl On Demand: Psychic TV with White Stains, German Punk & Wave Vol 1, Laibach, Ghedalia Tazartes, Club Moral, Grim

2. PAN: R/S, James Hoff, Heatsick, Tricoli/Ankersmit

3. Editions Mego: YasunaoTone, Bill Orcutt, Mika Vainio, Hecker, Russell Haswell, Mark McGuire

4. Blut Aus Nord - 777 sect(s)

5. Simon Reynolds - Retromania

6. Metalion

7. Ben Watson - Adorno For Revolutionaries

8. Sudden Infant: Noise In My Head

9. Spectrum Spools: Hive Mind, Driphouse

10. Skullflower

11. Psychic TV - Themes (Box)

12. Merzbow - Merzbient (Box)

13. Lou Reed & Metallica -Lulu

14. Andrew Chalk - Violin By Night

15. Christoph Heemann - Rings Of Saturn

16. Stare Case - Lose Today

17. To Live And Shave In L.A. - The Cortege

18. Ambarchi/Haino/O' Rourke - In A Flash Everything Comes Together

19. Prurient - Bermuda Drain

20. Album of the Year: Cut Hands - Afro Noise

Uchihashi Kazuhisa from Altered States in Singapore - An Interview

2011-12-15T21:17:00.000-08:00

Interview with Uchihashi Kazuhisa, 2011:

In the recent Sonorous Festival organised by Tim O’ Dwyer and Darren Moore at the DaSalle College of the Arts in Singapore, I had the rare opportunity to interview one of the key Japanese improvising stalwarts, Uchihashi Kazuhisa just before his performance. We talked briefly about the Improvised music scene in Japan as well as some of his personal thoughts on related subjects.

He first shared with me a short history of one of his most renown groups, Altered States. The group was established in 1990 and thus it has been an on-going enterprise of his for the past 21 years and from the sound of it, it is still going on strongly as Uchihashi Kazuhisa will be releasing the new album soon. He was also involved with Otomo Yoshihide in Yoshihide’s key group in the 1990s, Ground Zero for much of the group’s existence then. He also shared with me his ideas for Altered States; they started with a structure and gradually they moved into more improvised realms. The ultimate stage for the group would be playing in a totally improvised setting.

We then talked about the Improvised music scene in Japan in general. He commented that the scene saw its greatest share of fan base and support in the 1990s (we somehow have a common view that it was due partially to the interests shown by the western press during the same period of time). But he qualified that the fan base is always there regardless of musical trends and currents awashed in the music press.

He expressed his enthusiasm for new and younger musicians to emerge to meet and play with but he did admit that the newer musicians seem to appear from other genres like Noise and electronic music but not so much in the improvised music scene. When I mentioned about the Improvised Music From Japan scene he showed his dissatisfaction with the curatorship of the label as he felt that it is mainly the idea of one person and thus the name which he used does not justify the use of such a comprehensive term.

We ended off our conversation with a short discussion on his favourite Improvised music hero – Fred Frith (Henry Cow, Naked City and solo, just to name a few of Frith’s musical involvement). He felt that Fred Frith’s ability to move between the various musical forms and his improvisational skills are points which earned him his admiration.

Postscript I: Altered States are a great band to listen to on CD (sadly I still have not heard them live yet); but the music of the group is the best distillation of the less convoluted moments of Magma, Henry Cow’s looser instances but all blended together with the unique vision of Uchihashi Kazuhisa and co. to integrated avant rock form, improvised thought-process and basic raw power of modern music of the 20^th century. They are music which sounds intellectual on paper but groovy, fun and genre-defining when heard through your speakers (yes real speakers so please no listening to it via phones and puny little earphones attached to your mp3 players).

Postscript II: I have very busy in recent months but currently I am in the process of transcribing another interview which I have conducted with another artist at the said festival as Uchihashi Kazuhisa - Yan Jun from China, as well as another interview which I have done with Marc of Singapore's very own One Man Nation. More coming up on the Review of 2011 and my recent trip to Japan where I caught Cut Hands, Incapacitants and Ramleh live in Tokyo. So watch this space!

Reading Another Bulletin from Wall Street While Listening to... Killing Joke

2011-10-13T21:14:00.000-07:00

Now Naomi Klein of "No Logo" speaks at and about the Occupy Wall Street... The smell of jasmine might just be close enough... Go to here for full article.

The world is watching, and can someone write songs/tunes/tracks on these now?! Is the wind blowing or not? Listening to Killing Joke's latest from last year, "Absolute Dissent" now seems quite a matching soundtrack to the situation.

More News From The Frontline of Wall Street & elsewhere

2011-10-11T22:38:00.000-07:00

More News from the frontline over some American cities... American Spring or something like that? Dont think so but good efforts...

Article

Photo 1, Photo 2

As hip-hop group Public Enemy says it in 1990, "Fight The Power, fight the powers that be!"

Burn Wall Street Burn

2011-10-06T19:17:00.000-07:00

Following what have happened in the UK, now at the centre of the International Capitalism, Wall Street, people are angry and helpless. That is why they are doing this, just like the rioters in Britain a short while ago. Fukuyama's End of History theory is a totally irrelevant piece of hogwash, its bright eyed optimism on the triumph and the forward Crusade-like quest of capitalist fuelled "liberal" democracy. It now time to resurrect the ideas behind outer-nationalism perhaps?

Relevant soundtracks to this moment:
CRASS - NAPALM DEATH - GANG OF FOUR - THE POP GROUP for those who want to have anthemic/shout-along musical moments

Situationist International (Slight Return.. as an Online Comic)

2011-09-13T23:08:00.000-07:00

Heard about it, read about it but try watching an online comic on it - Situationist International, more relevant than ever before. Reclaim your lives, reclaim your leisure, reclaim your spaces....

GO TO The Beach Beneath the Street (what else?!)

Brainless British Rioters Burn Down Warehouse for Independent Record Labels in UK

2011-08-10T22:00:00.000-07:00

This is a bulletin to urge all to support the labels affected by the recent riot in the UK which is affecting the many independent record labels whose stock is currently melting in the flames. Support them either by buying digital or for someone like me (a Luddite, essentially) buying available physical stock. Times are already bad so if possible let us help one another out in the global independent/alternative music community. Please see this link for more details.

Ulver, Improvisation and Modernity in Extreme Music

2011-07-18T17:35:00.000-07:00

As a continuation of my current listening habit of extreme metal, Ulver is of course a must in the stereo system recently. The band has been variously described as post-metal and genre-hopping but most writers seem to skirt around the actual musical content of their post Nattens Madrigal output by focusing more on their radical move away from the Norwegian Black Metal sound to embracing electronica, Coil-like compositions, soundtrack-y, etc and etc which at times feel convenient and perhaps even slightly clueless to what Ulver seem to be doing.

I am no expert in extreme Metal but listening to many of their post-Nattens albums gave me an interesting epiphany: the creative forward-path of the band reminds of that of David Sylvian, the ex-frontman of New Wave/New Romantics forerunners, Japan, and since the late 1980s, has been a marvellously innovative artist in his own right. The parallel might seem improbable but the creative trajectories of both artistes do have much similarities between them.

Both David Sylvian and Ulver emerged from their previous reputation as key players in their respective fields but both did an about-turn and move towards a route of departure from prior musical association and experimentation subsequently. While Sylvian collaborated with established names in the field of avant rock, electronica and Improv like Holger Czukay, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Robert Fripp, Derek Bailey, etc, Ulver got their hands dirty by working with Christian Fennesz, Steve Noble, Stephen Thrower, Alex Ward, etc. The results of the two are elegaic, thoughtful investigation of song form, mannered fitting together of disparate elements into tracks of sublimity and subtlety.

One common thing which I heard in both is the vocal evocation of Sylvian and Ulver: at times tender whispers, falsettoed emphasis of words, crescendoes of vocal swipes across the aural space and glissandi of nuanced articulation. Of course, Ulver still allow unease and at times, moments of silent dread seep through their compositions while Sylvian's spirituality trades for more transcendentalism, both deal with human fragility and frailty.

Both Ulver and Sylvian work in the very under-populated musical enclave of contemplative and innovative music made for the jaded, the thirty-something and above; not AOR, not MOR, not bland radio/iTune fare but music to grow wise and gracefully to with the right doses of experimentation for the restless-at-heart of the 21st century.

Simon Reynolds's Retromania & ... Extreme Metal!?

2011-07-12T21:24:00.000-07:00

Well thanks to the recent Napalm Death gig I have been picking out many of my Metal CDs to spin: besides the Napalm Death albums which span across their long career from late 1980s till today, I am re-digging many early Grindcore and Death Metal albums from mainly the Earache Records, namely Carcass, Morbid Angel, Brutal Truth, Terrorizer and sludge garage metal act, Fudge Tunnel (their 1991 opus, Hate Songs In E Minor, is still an underrated classic in both the Metal and avant rock pantheon).

Then one thing leading to the others, I started digging out the more experimental titles from my collection like Cobalt and their 2 outstanding albums, Eater of Birds and Gin, Akercocke, Celtic Frost recent masterpiece, Monotheist and more importantly, the albums from French Black Metal bands like Blut Aus Nord, Deathspell Omega and Antaeus. In more than one instance I have read about Metal undergoing its "modernist" phase" in recent years, which witnesses an explosion of not just new sub-genres within the already established ones but also the quest for experimentalism or simply doing things differently in the previously fixed templates of the various sub-genres of Metal. This is of course countered by many others of the growing horde of "hipster" metal bands and fans who jump into the bandwagon not for the "trueness" of Metal but more as a result of Metal's recent hipness in the alternative and avantgarde circles on the Internet and the music press. All these happened within the span of a decade, i.e. the first decade of the 21st century, which make me draw this to a book which I have just finished reading - Simon Reynolds' s Retromania.

Reynolds's book deals with many interesting and relevant issues which have been plaguing the musical press for the past few years - the non-progress of musical innovation and the dearth of exciting musical genres while throwing back to embrace all things retro and past to the point of fetishistic and then some. Frankly speaking my personal stand is a half way house of his and those who disagree with him (many considered him penning a mid-life crisis book or jaded or... you get the drift). In the realm of most pop and rock music, with the onslaught of reunions, retrospectives, archival releases and reissues, etc, things do look pretty tired and misty-eyed. However it depends on one's point of view about innovation and being "new": the argument inevitably goes back to the issue of "is there anything new under the sun". Yes and no, at least to me. Being human is a unique set of paradigm, regardless of the advancement of science and technology. The innovation that we often speak of has a lot to do with our sensual input, cognitive reception and processing as well as our expanse/limit to make sense of our creations, our environment and our existence. We cannot break away from certain basic things like listening to sound waves which are beyond our audial capability and thus the point I am trying to make is, yes, to us humans, there are certain limitations to how much we can soar forward and break-on through to the other side, bio-physiologically.

However given these constraints, we can still quite a bit of things: we always crave for novelty and some of us genuinely hope that some of these novelties will turn into trends, ideas and products which have deeper meanings and longer lasting impact which will contribute to the (modernist) notion of the surge forward. So to say that the psychedelic late 60s and the rave late 1980s/1990s produced sounds which were unheard of in the first place is a bit stretching it. The 60s psych sounds have their roots/borrowing from Indian modal music, free jazz, country, folk, rock n' roll, musique concrete and etc while the electronic music revolution of the late 1980s would not have come about if not for precedents in Krautrock, hip-hop, synth-pop, disco and etc.

Basically I am arguing for the case that whether there is still a future for music is that yes; but we cannot expect total newness as, to me, it does not really exist in the first place, and secondly, there are still new exciting sounds out there now. This might sound a bit biased but the modernist phase of extreme metal this past decade has been a very fruitful one with Sunn0))) pushing the envelope of doom and drone metal; with French Black Metal throwing their hands up to embrace transcendentalism and cosmic mysticism and many others. Int he field of Noise, I have always want to trace a possible historical narrative through its myriad influences and input and today we still see interesting variants via Noise Wall and Aktionist noise replacing Japanese Noise and Power Electronics-infused sounds of the early to mid 2000s. The fact that one may draw Tony Conrad's Four Violins with Vomir is a case of picking up from a point in history which noone or few had picked up from and today, doing something exciting about.

At the end of the day, to paraphrase from Simon Reynolds at the end of his book, I too see a future.

Review on Singapore's Rebel X'Ho Latest Album

2011-06-23T22:08:00.000-07:00

My recent review on X'Ho, Singapore rebel artist, social commentator, critic and DJ. and his lastest album has just been published online at X'Ho Album. He has been an oasis in the desert of cultural amnesia and void on the island republic for years and he can be considered to be the John Peel to Singapore's underground/alternative music scenes.

Napalm Death in Singapore soon!

2011-06-20T21:04:00.000-07:00

Come 29 June the mighty Napalm Death will be in Singapore for a one-night gig, can't wait. The band brought back memories of shared news trading of this legendary band with their ultra-short songs of a couple of seconds (You Suffer) and arguably the inception of Grindcore as an extreme metal genre for the subsequent 2 plus decades to come. But more importantly unlike most other bands under the banner of Grindcore, they are well-known more for their political stance, both personal and macro; sliming multi-national corporations before most others back in the mid-1980s and warning us of issues as broad as personal responsibility to our own lives to poverty, greed and war throughout their discography. Go catch them if you can. The link to their gig is:
Napalm Death in Singapore

Politics and Music: CRASS

2011-06-20T20:56:00.000-07:00

Have been listening to my Crass CDs again and at the same time just finished reading an excellent book on protest songs by Dorian Lynskey entitled 33 Revolutions Per Minutes: A History of Protest Songs. The recent re-issues of the classic CRASS albums allow me to pick up 2 of the 5 band albums which this great but controversial anarcho-punk band released from the late 1970s to the mid 1980s. Often dissonant and sprawlingly messy but definitely committed and ferocious as hell, CRASS had been and still are a whirlwind of musical phenomenon to behold. Their biting lyrics, vitriolic and at times didactic, pointed many then to the unjust politics of the United Kingdom under Margaret Thatcher (who was partially responsible for sweeping aside much of the humane side of the post World War II social and political institutions, now never to return). Their songs, album covers and band polemics are, to me, still relevant, despite the fact that, many are today disillusioned with any talk of political and ideological hook-on with the popular culture and the arts (understandably due to the current insidious and not-so-covet methodological assimilation of anything and everything under the sun to the simple neo-capitalist mills of packaging, branding and selling to the post-post everything generation of the 21st century. A timely reminder.

The book by Lynskey thus fits aptly with CRASS; the author attempts an ambitious tome of 33 representative tracks for the past 100 years and traces, links and demonstrates to us his personal take and hopes (and perhaps pessimism towards the end of the book, not totally though) of songs as vehicles of protest and politics. (CRASS has 1 song included in his book but though I would prefer the other more straight forward but general CRASS classics, "Do They Owe Us A Living") Of course some of the these singers/bands/song-writers are usually not full-fledged flag wavers of certain causes they commented and wrote about and many became entrapped in the ugly and sinister political undertow of their artistic choices and ventures as a result. A good book nonetheless, perhaps on a more individual note, protest songs might be less effectual but they are still needed today.

AMM, Meta-Music & Personal Politics

2011-05-15T18:02:00.000-07:00

I had a very "heated" debate with a commenter at the s/pores website a couple of months ago about music, politics and the world. For those of you who read this space often would realise by now that I see a close relationship between music, politics and agency of action in today's world (still) and thus the debate was basically me claiming my stand and my sparring partner trying to prove otherwise. It helps to sharpen my mind quite a bit as the exchange do make me re-look, evaluate and fine-tune my thoughts about things and re-assess my personal commitments about my beliefs as well. But as they often said, a good workout.

Anyway, I have been reading Edwin Prevost's (of AMM fame) book "No Sound Is Innocent" and the treatises the drummer/publisher/ideologue puts across talks about the fundamental intent of human action and agency in music making (using his group AMM as a start off point). Music is never naive or devoid of meaning; when someone sees music as entertainment and the entire industry catering to that need, it is already a transactional relationship par excellence which a capitalist society (oh sorry, neo-liberal capitalist) is so good at. Producing, creating a demand, pushing for the producing, and the process goes on. Meta-music which strips such loaded hegemonic or economic meanings as well as breaking away from repetition and reproduction of mere "cultural artefacts" is the way towards a truly meaningful way at creating a form (I am refraining from using the term "art" as it might smack of capitalist borugeois notions) which can be liberating, to say the least.

Of I have certain reservation about Prevost's take on popular music and rock/punk music but well we are entitled to our own opinions. But consuming defines what an individual is is as simplistic an idea as saying what you eat is what you are (true to a certain extent BUT...). The key thing here is for us to learn and to transfer what we have learnt and go out there to do some stuff, activism perhaps, DIY maybe. No matter what music is political, at least to me.

A Philosophical Exit from the Current Pow-Wow in Singapore? Try Speculative Realism & Transcendentalist Nihilism

2011-05-02T21:13:00.000-07:00

White Noise Records & Some Updates...

2011-04-26T18:06:00.000-07:00

Have not been able to contribute much to this blog this year much due to my writing commitments: a chapter in the upcoming National Library Board commissioned book on the history of music in Singapore, as usual I have contributed something on the history of English popular music locally which I have traced the first stirrings since the 1950s till today; just sent in my chapter on the history of Noise As Music to an upcoming publication on Noise/Musics (most likely published by Duke University Press). I have also written an album review of X'Ho's new album which will be published in the near future at the website of local semi-academic e-journal, s/pores. So the first 4 months of the year have been writing, researching, listening etc. Tedious at times but overall, enjoyable and enriching.

But to continue from my previous blog on Bimbo Tower, the premier record store based in Paris, I just returned from Hong Kong and yes, as per custom, I visited the main experimental/alternative record store, White Noise (wanted to go to the other one, Monitor Records but due to lack of time and losing our way, we gave up but next time most probably!). A small hole-in-the-wall outlet which stocks many excellent releases from both the local (HK/Taiwan/China) as well as others from the usual (USA/UK/Germany/etc), it was quite a trip for me; picked up a couple of Whitehouse re-issue LPs and a Dead C re-issue vinyl plus a few other CDs, it dawned on me that we are seeing the disappearing of more and more indie record stores the world over. Even White Noise has to move locations many times since its inception due, partly to financial and changing music consumption patterns. But hey guys there will always be people out there who would put in that extra effort to seek out the more challenging and mind/ear provoking music and culture.

Sutcliffe Jugend in Singapore

2011-03-23T16:22:00.000-07:00

Beginning with the signature WASP synthesizer wail, the two greying gentlemen (depending on your viewpoint on their political/cultural alignment via their lyrical content) began slowly swaying their bodies and regularly checking on their intstruments (from what I could see, a sampler, guitar, assorted electronic implements) and additively, layering of more and more sounds and tones. I was thinking in my head that finally, power electronics live on this island republic which is usually NOT associated with more extreme forms of musical expressions. The rest of the set was simply assault on the ears and the body as well as the audience could feel the low ends and high pitch tones wrapping around everyone there. It was so all-embracing that you had to give them their full attention and nothing less.

I spoke to the organisers behind the gig and they gleefully informed me that they might be bringing more Industrial/Noise/experimental acts like Sutcliffe Jugend to Singapore, like perhaps, Colin Potter or even Nurse With Wound? Well let's keep our fingers crossed and that it all comes through. It is high time that this island republic is witnessing some righteous noise!

Vomir New Release!

2011-03-15T02:07:00.000-07:00

One of the key acts of the Wall Noise/HNW sub-genre, Vomir, has just released a CD, entitled, Apllication à Aphistemi. Unlike his last release on Crucial Blast's subsidiary label, Crucial Blaze, it is a proper CD release. Apparently the second track of the album sees a stylistic departure of Vomir's usual "wall-of-noise"/HNW sonic assault on the listeners. Good news, as it will be interesting to hear how it sounds like. HNW reminds me of extreme end of minimalism of Tony Conrad and Arnold Dreyblatt and Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. Immersive and engulfing the listeners, HNW, though most likely a creative dead end soon, but it is an interesting sub-genre which has its unique appeal to drone fans too. I hear traces of my favourite drone artiste, Andrew Chalk, in Vomir most sublime moments (I could be wrong as I could be so deep into it that I was drawing invisible music similarity which might not be there, but nonetheless). Check it out...

Revolution, Free Jazz & FMP

2011-03-02T16:38:00.000-08:00

I have been listening to some releases by Peter Brotzmann and the record label that he has been most associated with - FMP, or Free Music Production. Be it free jazz, fire music or ecstatic music, the descriptors are not able to convey the history, the energy and the context behind the entire canon of albums, artistes and record labels which first started in the late 1950s with the release of iconoclastic albums by Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor and later on Albert Ayler, John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders. The close link between these artistes and albums with the Black civil rights movement has been documented many times across dozens of publications throughout the years. BUT the parallel movement which sprang in the 1960s in Europe, inspired by these great Black artists across the Atlantic, has been a lesser known proponent, even though the Europeans were pushing the envelope of the genre as well as putting into practice the radical politics in the way they operate and run their activities, gigs and record labels. They were DIY, staunchly ideologically-driven and passionate about their music and the socio-political context/rationale behind the sounds they were creating.

The pockets of such Hakim Bey coined TAZ or even PAZ (hopefully, permanent autonomous zones) , I hope, are role models and should be beacons for us to follow today: the CDs in the retrospective set of FMP (FMP In Retrospect) are powerhouses of musical free playing and collective music making, demonstrating to us that even before the rise of punk which supposedly flushed out the bloated corporate major label run music industry, alternative ways of doing stuff by the musicians and artistes themselves were already well in place (besides FMP, Incus and the various labels formed by the Dutch jazz scene are just some of the many examples which appeared in the 1960s and 1970s; today we have Eremite, Ayler, Okkadisk and many more).

In the increasingly bland and hegemonic cultural and social giant corporate-run world of today, such independent and collective endeavours should serve as signposts for the current and future generations of thinking youths to emulate and to carry the torch forward in their own ways.

The Death of Music Industry Has Been Overrated

2011-02-08T16:37:00.000-08:00

Read an interesting article published on now-defunct-but-turned-virtual Singaporean music/culture magazine on the health of the music industry in 2010 entitled, MORE MUSIC SOLD THAN EVER BEFORE, DESPITE INTERNET SHARING. The main drift of the article is that in 2010, the sale of music was actually at an all-time high of 281.7 million units sold, as compared to 2006's 221.6 million units. If this is the case, why are the major record companies moaning and groaning and blaming the downloaders worldwide? The article went on to talk about the fact that instead of albums sold, it is the single track that propel the upsurge of sale. The digital format/MP3/etc allows consumers to buy the best single tracks/singles instead of buying crappily put-together albums which most of them contain only 3-4 good to excellent tracks at best. In the past, the album buyers had to endure the motley quality of the mix-bag but now they can go direct for the "good" stuff and as they always put it, cut the crap. Makes sense, in fact it makes a lot of sense when we are talking about the general quality of pop major label released albums which have been declining since the late 1980s. Why would a consumer pay the price of a full price CD/album for a few good tracks now that he/she can choose and buy them individually?

A few questions popped into my head with regards to this though: does this mean that we will not see any more legendary recording sessions of albums as albums are increasingly obsolete (at least in the mainstream pop/rock world) like back in the 1960s-1980s? For the alternative/underground acts, which are switching to releasing their stuff on vinyl and even cassette, are they equally vulnerable to such industry development? For Keiji Haino who usually has one single track on an allbum as it is usually 50 plus to even 70 plus mins, it seems to make no difference. With many surviving record labels, they are going for limited/art edition releases, luxuriously packaged and targetting at collectors, die-hard fans and old farts like me and thus there are a parallel but opposing trends of development in the entire music industry. I am all for the demise of the major record industry and I am always ready to hurrah the cottage industry in the music world. Let the EMIs, WEAs and Polygrams die of a slow death but let the PSFs, Vinyl-On-Demands and Raster-Notons live on.

R.I.P.Trish Keenan (Broadcast)

2011-01-17T17:50:00.000-08:00

It is sad to hear about another casualty in recent months: this time Trish Keenan from English group, Broadcast on 14 January 2011. Closely associated with Ghost Box and the whole shebang behind the "Hauntological" meta-genre in recent years, Broadcast have created beautiful yet surreal, sublime and eerily moving songs of the first order. They would have plenty of chart hits if the world we live in had been a better place. Rest in peace and let's hope James Cargill will continue to produce music as chillingly infectious in the future.

Favourite Record Shop Now: Bombo Tower

2010-12-27T22:24:00.000-08:00

It is official: my current favourite record shop (yes, that now increasingly archaic institution from the last century since download killed this social phenomena called record shop, especially the independent ones) is Bimbo Tower in Paris. The thing about this amazing shop is that even though it has a webpage but besides the address and some basic information and a Japanese influenced graphics at the centre of the page, that's it! No online catalogue, no shopping cart, no release updates, no frills. When you finally manage to locate the shop after walking for about 5 mins after leaving the Ludru-Rollin Metro station, and when you about to pay as you are pulling out your wallet and pass the man behind the counter your credit card, he will tell you, sorry no card, we only take cash and he will direct you to the nearest ATM machine.

Well, what does all this mean? It means it might be anachronistic in today's hyperreal, globalised, digitalised and paypallified world to have a shop like Bimbo Tower existing in one of the biggest cosmopolitan cities of this world but looking at it from another more considered and less neo-capitalist world or simply the mainstream culture, Bimbo Tower is an excellent example of counter-cultural, anti-mainstream/neo-capitalist TAZ around the world today. Stuffed to the brim with 12", 7", cassettes, CDs, fanzines, magazines, books, DVDs, posters, T-shirts and other paraphernalia of music genres spanning the most exciting and transgressive today: Noise, Psych, Out Rock, Improv, etc. I was overwhelmed initially when I was at the shop as I have not been to a REAL record shop for a long time (well, I was in London prior and though I have been to a few there, they are ones which I have been to in my previous trips there so no such exhilarating emotions) as I was flipping through the racks and shelves.

It is sad that authentic record or even independent shops of any sort like this increasingly disappearing by the day as most societies have succumbed to the Americanised/transnational corporate sponsored malls sprouting up everywhere. With the internet, the downside also see us increasingly more wired but less human devoid of real-world, face-to-face human and physical-tactile experiences. Personally, the internet is great for some of us who are not living near the main scenes of the cultural agitation in the other end of the world as we get to stream, purchase online (physical or virtual products), get instant news and updates, communicate and have meaningful exchanges but it should not replace basic human interaction like discussing and sharing within a common real space and feeding off each other's excitement and enthusiasm and pulling out a record or fanzine from like, 1 metre away to prove or illustrate a point.

Well perhaps I am just someone from the "old" world, partially mourning for the gradual loss of it to the new.

Captain Beefheart R.I.P.

2010-12-27T21:32:00.000-08:00

It is quite disheartening to hear that another icon of the alternative/innovative music scene passed on in recent weeks (17 Dec 2010): now it is the turn of Captain Beefheart. Don Van Vliet, his name by birth, was one of the most iconoclastic "rock" artiste since the 1960s whose unique vision in the blues, jazz and folk managed to re-invent rock music into a mutant form which, up to today, is still unsurpassed. Together with the various incarnations of the Magic Band from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, Captain Beefheart and his Magic men had been concocting powerful amalgams of avant-blues weird rock-jazz jams which perplex and fascinate in equal parts. My personal favourite is Trout Mask Replica, with its neo-dada cover design to the many spoken word-blues holler mini-epics (and many weird instrumentals to boot as well), I have gone back to it time after time since I bought it 12 years back. It is time you try catching up with him, even though you know, he would always be miles ahead of you.

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R.I.P. Sleazy

2010-11-26T16:09:00.000-08:00

It came as quite a shock when I went to Simon Reynolds' blog: his latest entry is a video of Coil and at the bottom, he wrote r.i.p. sleazy...

Sleazy, both as one of the founding members of Throbbing Gristle and Coil (with Balance who passed away a few years ago), had been one of the most influential figures in the alternative/underground/industrial/rave scenes for the past few decades. Coil and TG are two of the first few acts which re-wired my psychological, mental and musical paradigms, as well as urging me to constantly keep vigilant about my personal take and stand on culture, aesthetics and politics in general. May him and Balance rejoin in the after-world (if there is one). Their creation will, hopefully, continue to create, subvert and amuse us for a long time to come.

P.S. His death was confirmed to be 24 November 2010 in Bangkok, Thailand

2010 in Review

2010-11-15T17:30:00.000-08:00

Yes another year has almost gone by and it's my list of the year to sum up the year in (counter)culture:

1. Aural Fit's new slab of psych-out-overdriven-noise-rock simply emerges as one of the tops of the year, at point sounding very much like Derek Bailey's noise rock project with Bill Laswell and others in Arcana's The Last Wave. Essential.

2. Seijaku, Keiji Haino's new project post-Fushitsusha, has been a blast long awaited for... a double whammy assault of distorto-outsider blues, on doubtmusic.

3. Another Haino must-have: Fushitisusha electro-shock pulsing through the double vinyl set which sends shivers down one's spine.

4. A slew of re-issues and first-time-available CD/vinyl from the fertile pre-punk/post Velvet scene of Columbus, Ohio: a lethal stew of Lou Reed, Avant guitar action, goofy no wave mindset and mid-West rock lineage inform these batch of excellent rockers/punkers. Blistering.

5. Two Hypnagogic Pop labels of Not Not Fun and Olde English Singing Bee: An unending stream of hypnotic retro-inform futuristic pop for the NOW - Forest Swords, Julian Lynch, Rangers, Pocahaunted, LA Vampires/Zola Jesus, Outer Limits Recordings and Sun Araw. Mind-melting.

6. Emeralds' rise and rise this year will guarantee them seminal and influential status in the years to come: a potent amalgamation of cosmic Kraut, retro-machine age vibes and noise to lull you and then wrap your brains all over.

7. Oneohtrix Point Never's new one for 2010: starting with a blast of electrical sandstorm and then proceeding to churn one's consciousness to bits.

8. A memorial for Shizuka who passed on beginning of the year. Powerful, cathartic and mystifying. Japanese psych at its most lunar.

9. Arthur Doyle released two head-clearing blasts of sax blurts on plastic. One of the few Fire Music proponents left today, and he is punk to the max too.

10. Long time coming but worth the wait: Steve Underwood of Harbinger Sound bringing us the first ever Noise Culture Magazine with chock-ful of interviews, reviews and articles on Noise of all sorts and beyond. I am already anticipating eagerly for issue number 2.

11. Los Angeles Free Society getting its recognition in London recently in October plus this year also see releases of both archival and new to update us on the latest adventures and past legacy of these bunch of underrated but essential collective of weirdness, freakdom and esoterica (in the best sense).

12. A masterpiece of the history of visionary artistes and musicians tapping into the Great Albion Spirit (both imagined, historical, re-shaped and futuristic as well as Utopian and Dystopian) by ex-Wire editor, Rob Young. More such texts please (David Keenan, when will your sequel to England's Hidden Reverse be out???)

Les Rallizes first (?) legit/semi-legit (??) re-issues on Phoenix Records of previously CD-R format. Widely available and generally good sound-wise but what a great way to introduce the pagans out there about this great band.

13. Acid Archives: what can I say? This is THE bible for anyone remotely keen on the deep psych underground, private press, ignored major label acts, outsiders and Incredibly Strange.

14. A year of great re-issues for these bunch of misanthropes and heavy punk-metal outsiders. An evil smile will emerge across your face whenever you listen to them.

15. Swans's latest album (as Michael Gira says Swans has been re-activated but not reformed) is a 21st century upgrade of post No-Wave post rock: anthemic, soaring and spiritual.

16. Sun City Girls last studio project which makes us wonder if they had not disbanded... Eclectic, other-worldly and rocking all at the same time.

17. Blixa Bargeld meets Carsten Nicolai: a blend of electronically-fuelled tone poem, adventurous vocal acrobatics (courtesy of Bargeld) and muscular and angular execution. One of the best works of the year.

18. Xasthur's last: featuring Marissa Nadler's ghostly vocalisations which fitted the hallowing songs well and rejecting all generic postures of buzzsaw guitars etc.

Some Thoughts on Reading the Acid Archives (2nd Ed.)...

2010-11-14T18:09:00.000-08:00

Have been trawling through the massive tome of the record collectors' bible, The Acid Archives (2nd Ed.) and came to a few conclusions:

1. The guys back in the 1960s through to the early 1980s really love their music to go through the trouble of self financing the release of such gorgeous private press releases like Vulcan's Meet Your Ghost as compared to today's ease with PC/laptop recording software and simply uploading into the ether space

2. The never-say-die vinyl condition of the record as a format for not just the music but, the ideas behind the music (in the inserts, design of the sleeve and on the vinyl itself) and tactile relationship between the beholder and the object of art
3. And go get the book as you will not regret it; reading the book is like stepping into the multitude of Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zones, which in the 21st century is even more necessary than ever. A labour of love from the writers and the editor, Patrick Lundborg.

Don't wait too long as the stock is running low all over the world and you wont want to pay loads of cash for it later.

New Minimalist Masterpieces Unearthed

2010-11-13T04:28:00.000-08:00

Have gotten hold of two never-released-before lost classics of underground Minimalist pieces: a lavishly produced set of a CD and a book by Die Schachtel - Catherine Christer Hennix's The Electric Harpischord and a vinyl release from Yik Yak by Yoshi Wada's(whom I have mentioned in one of my earlier blog entries) son, Tashi Wada, entitled, Alignment.

Unlike the now populist Minimalist works of Steve Reich, John Adams and Philip Glass, the two works here still ooze vibes aplenty of the Other: for Hennix, the heady days of the 1960s and 1970s, and the staunched influences of Sri Pandit Pran Nath, one of the key gurus of such Minimalist masters like Terry Riley and La Monte Young. For details of the story of Hennix, you may want to check out The Wire, issue 320 (October 2010). To me it is another slab of deep listening hymn which gently pulsates through the listener and affecting him/her profoundly if given the right context.

Tashi Wada, on the other hand, is right on with his understanding on Just Intonation (check out Tony Conrad, one of the vital proponents). The violin makes him even closer to Conrad it seems but the resemblance somehow stops there. The two side-long works sound punky at times, like some private press vinyl press of a home-made composer who digested fully the principles behind Just Intonation and in a sitting blast out these two pieces of drone-swirls.

Do yourself a favour, check them out. By the way, Minimalist works work best on vinyl, not CD or digital.

Alan Moore's Underground Missives

2010-11-01T19:39:00.000-07:00

Just read the first 2 issues of Alan Moore's Dodgem Logic magazine: a blast basically. This is his attempt with his comrades-in-arm to re-claim the Underground in the 21st century after the demise of such key 'undie' rags like International Times, Zap Comix and Oz. This is a continuation of his key ideas from "V From Vendetta" about hoisting and rallying under the black flag.

I love Moore's articles on the history of Anarchism and the Underground Press (which served as his raison d'etre for Dodgem Logic. I am waiting to start on issue 3 which has an article on the Decadent writers which should be good. Savage Pencil has two delicious cartoon strips in the 2 issues too. Go buy them now (issue 6 is out now) and hold something solid in your hands than just clicking and dragging, staring into the blinking screen 24/7...

Strange Attractor Blitz: An Avalanche of Three Unpopular-Culture Books To Be Published Soon

2010-10-14T17:59:00.000-07:00

One of my favourite publishing house and journals Strange Attractor will be unleashing three volumes of modern otherworldly scriptures: Volume 4 of the esteemed journal, an anthology of alternative film magazine and a biography of one of England's magickians from the last century, Austin Osman Spare.

Strange Attractor Volume 4 is as usual expected to be filled with papers and articles on esoterica of all sorts from science to literature to anything under the Sun while The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology focused on what the Electric Sheep magazine does best: offering in-depth critical but sometimes unorthodox insight essays on key alternative films and directors alike. The last title, Austin Osman Spare: The Life And Legend Of London's Lost Artiste, is a much needed biography on one of England's most enigmatic artistes of the spiritual and mystic kind. Often mentioned in the same breathe as Aleister Crowley, this volume should shed light on who he really is and presenting him as a unique, visionary and singular being. Can't wait.

Go to Strange Attractor Press News to find out more details and the Strange Attractor website for other information on the publishing house and the journal.

Scene Feature: Garuda Hypnagogia, Tropical Indonesian Style

2010-10-14T17:15:00.000-07:00

I was catching up with my friend recently and being music fans we brought up the current underground movement of Hypnagogic Pop. He suddenly recalled from his perpetual incessant search for exciting nusical vibes and scenes (especially those of the Singaporean and Southeast Asian types) that in our neighbouring behemoth, Indonesia, there is a group of guys who are creating Hypnagogic Pop-like kind of tracks and uploading them onto MySpace. He subsequently sent me the links and I was blown away: the oppressive heat, deep-seated humidity and overall sickly ooze of the tropical atmosphere of Indonesia and Southeast Asia can be felt through listening to the tracks of these guys. Just imagine 1 part DJ Screw, 1 part Sublime Frequencies, 2 parts Olde English Singing Bee, 2 parts tropical Southeast Asia, you will get a fairly close approximation of their sounds. Duckdive, Sawi Lieu and Sangkakala are the three key guys but closely associated to them is the online record label Stone Well Sound Records and affiliated musicians. From event organising to gigging to collaborating musically and releasing tracks on the internet, they are thriving on vibing off one another and creating a temporary autonomous zone of musical independence, creativity and community-building. In fact, Ruralfaune, a record label specialising in experimental music from France is planning a vinyl release of Duckdive soon this year. One of them also maintains a Hypnagogic Pop image/visual site in the vein of their American counterparts on Vimeo, it is called Cincang (The visual at the top of this blog entry is taken from this site). Below is an interview with one of the key guys from this Indonesian Hypnagogic Pop scene.

An Interview with Sawi Lieu

1. How did you start making the music which you have currently uploaded on MySpace? Is there any particular musical influences? Or the geography of your location plays a part? If not then what is it which shape your music creation?

Hello! To begin with i started making my own music in 2008, music used to be my obsession. To be honest I can’t play any music instrument very well, I play and learned them by myself. I met a lot of people in the music scene, we shared thoughts about many things: from what they listen, and how they see music in them, and it was also them who gave me thoughts to make my own music. My form of music is from a belief in occult things.

2. Your music reminds me of psychedelia, elements of World music, minimalism and dare I say Hypnagogic Pop which is all the rave in the US Underground now. So how do you see yourself in all this and do you see any connection in anyway?

Yes, pretty much my music were inspired and influenced by the genre you said up there, my friend Gonzo (real name Muhammad Fahri) who introduced me to this kind of music. From Terry Riley to the Skaters, and I also got interest in free improvisation and free jazz at that time. Gonzo made a project called Duck Dive, I think he started the all drone scene in here, his first gear was space echo (I think), he told me he just bought it from Yogyakarta with good deal price. And then he gave me his track called Kava-Kava, the track is some kind of tropical folk, well he is all about Freak Folk and New Weird America, and then I start to remix his song Kava-Kava, The remix didn’t publish in everywhere its just for fun. In that time I was studied in Malaysia, i learned many things and I try acid, my first journey through the mind of the world was there, in mid 2008 I have to go back to Jakarta, I got problems with my mindset, and all things. After I spent my days in hospital, I made a group with Wing Narada Putra and Al Imran Karim, our first jam was totally out of control. this group was inspired by free improvisation/noise local act like Sungsang Lebam Telak, Aneka Digital Safari, Kalimayat/Khuruksetra, Mereka.., Duck Dive and many more. Sangkakala starts their debut on internet net label called Stone Well Sound Records, a project made by gonzo and his art student friend Anry Dhanniary. It turns out another musical project called Schadefreude made his debut there! Schadenfreude is Obon, he is an art student from bandung to USA, he made a lot of installation you can check his arts here http://unlogical.multiply.com/.

3. Southeast Asia has always been seen as places where people from Europe, the USA and Japan come for World music and traditional art forms. What do you think of your music in this whole scheme of things?

I do love world music, I think all this love of Indonesian folk music came in my blood, my improvisation sometimes reminding me of folk songs from Sundanese music, my mother used to listen to a lot of Sundanese music, my father came from Padang, he also a lot of Padang folk music, my influence of music came from what my family listen to in the past, also my favourite figure in my big family is harry Roesli, he’s my aunty husband, we didn’t talk anything, but I do like some of his music from the past.

4. Who are your current favourite musicians, artistes and groups? Why them?

Its hard to put the artist, albums and songs, cuz daily I always download many stuff from internet, so I just make you a mix-tape to listen, enjoy!

The mix-tape can be found at:
http://soundcloud.com/sawilieu/udel

Play-list -
1.Bob Freedman - Polyphemus
2.Kit Ream - Dont Be So Holy Poly To My Souly
3.The 5th Dimension - Its A Great Life
4.The Alan Lorber Orchestra - Up Up Away
5.Piero Umiliani - Allucinazioni
6.Sovetsyaka Gone - Untitled
7.Social Climbers - Palm Springs
8.Jagaraga - Collie Science
9.Far East Family Band - Timeless
10.This Heat - Horizontal Hold
11.Aku - Pengutil Dan Kasir
12.Acid Mothers Temple - In
13.The Flying Luttenbachers - Entropic Field Total
14.Tony Conrad With Faust - From The Side Of The Machine
15.Seek Six Sick - Antara
16.Laraaji - Universe
17.Bob Freedman - Erebos
18.Harry Roesli - Keringat

The music and contact of the key members of these exciting group of musicians can be found at:

http://www.myspace.com/sawimusic

http://www.myspace.com/duckdivemusic

http://www.myspace.com/sangkakalamusic

New Noise Magazine Update: As Loud As Possible

2010-10-07T16:16:00.000-07:00

Yes I know I have put up an entry like almost a year ago about the impending publishing of Harbinger Sound's new print project, As Loud As Possible #1 but this time round it is confirmed: it will be out on the 22nd October 2010 to coincide with the, (gasp!), weekend of Los Angeles Free Music Society and friends' presence in London entitled The Lowest Form Of Music (22-24 Oct, if you are in London on those dates, i say GO FOR IT!). Yes I am a fan of these guys, see my earlier entry on them. Friends appearing with them include premier Japanese Noise acts, Incapacitants and Hijokaidan, two acts seriously influenced by the LAFMS guys. Edwin Pouncey a.k.a. Savage Pencil with others will ruminate and discuss about the importance of them too. This event is brought to you by Second Layer Records, As Loud As Possible magazine, The Wire magazine amongst a few others. So two events of utmost importance to look forward to this month...

One Man Nation Unleashes His Noise On Vinyl

2010-10-05T23:27:00.000-07:00

One Man Nation, a.k.a. Marc Chia, a rising Sound/Noise artist from Singapore has released a limited edition LP on Austrian record label, Moozak just. A double A side LP entitled, 'Suspended In A Vortex In The Middle Of A Bowl From Tibet/When I Was Young I Was Easily Amused, But Now It Is All, The Same And The Same...' which reminds me of Hermann Nitschean Action Theatre and Raymond Dijkstra's surrealistic sides from the samples on the label website. Marc's sound has definitely developed and matured into something of character and originality.

I still remember about 4 years ago, he played me a CDR of tracks which he had composed. The tunes might have sounded slightly derivative at parts but his raw passion and conviction shone through. Shortly after that he left for Europe for his pan-European gigging, squatter-punk style. Four years later and he has produced an LP of crackling beauty. He was also recently featured in music magazine, The Wire's Global Ear section (August 2010). Check him out.

When You Are Hit By Da Brainbombs!

2010-10-05T22:33:00.000-07:00

Brainbombs were and are still one of the most original 'rock' bands 'out there': the voice of the band is just one hell of a charmer in the sickest sense possible. An obscene mix of Bruce-Banner-turning-into-Hulk snarl with that perpetual lusty but yet loser-vibe grunt, which coupled with those psychopathic lyric sheet of theirs just made them more establishment shaking than most extreme metal and hardcore punk bands today.

They are from Sweden (coincidentally the home of one of the foundational nations of extreme metal which gave the world some of the top Death Metal, Grindcore, Melodic Death Metal and Black Metal acts for the past two decades plus)and, in my eyes, they rival Whitehouse in terms of their constant vitriol spit out at the straight-jacketed political-correctness of most so-called experimental/alternative/extreme/underground scenes. Closer to Sadean social psychosis, Decadent bodily horror and scene-setting of narrative as well as musical outre moves.

Listening to a Brainbombs CD/LP is like strapping yourself voluntarily for a tongue-in-cheek S & M ride down their typical three-line chants of scatology and sexual-fantasy-turn-Benny-Hill with a spot of masochistic posturing thrown in for additional laugh. And I have mentioned earlier in the title for this entry, they are da Bomb!

More about them can be found here.

Keiji Haino Says Bye To Fushitsusha And Welcome Seijaku?

2010-10-05T20:51:00.000-07:00

This is really really exciting for me... Doubtmusic from Japan will be releasing two CDs simultaneously of Keiji Haino's new group project, Seijaku. It is supposed to be an unimaginable blues band fusing Delta Blues and Noh (from label website). Since the last album release of Fushitsusha half a decade ago, Keiji Haino has not been having any permanent group act till now. Can't wait to hear them. Check them out at Doubtmusic.

Finnish Power Electronics

2010-09-26T22:32:00.000-07:00

It is sad to listen to the last albums of Pan Sonic in recent months as we mourn for the end of the excellent electronic duo after almost two decades of intensive electro-cuting of music listeners all over the world with their uniquely personalised brutalist but at times pointilistically minimal techno from 'Vakio' to 'Gravitoni'. Their two albums with Keiji Haino, released also on Blast FIrst Petite are brain-melting void to sink one's head in. As I listen to the two chaps frequently overpowered by Haino's guitar and vocal histrionics (there are few who dont...) in these tracks, I remember a scene, almost 10 years ago when my friends and I brought them down to this island republic of mine to perform at a dingy little club. We were just trying to break the ice when we chanced upon the topic of Keiji Haino and his infamous post-rock group (as in after-rock and not rock-rock if you know what I mean), Fushitsusha. They expressed much interest in him and they wanted to check him out more and thus a couple of years ago, they not only checked him out but played with him at a gig and in a studio too. They are fans of music and they themselves left a legacy behind for others to be fans of theirs, for a long time to come, I hope. As I have mentioned this elsewhere in this blogspace about their music's links to Noise, I just want to salute them for their groundbreaking nerve-raking music: music to scratch your brain cells to.

On the topic of Pan Sonic, who are from Finland, I just finished a book on the early history of Finnish electronic music by Petri Kuljuntausta called First Wave: A Microhistory of Early Finnish Electronic Music. Well researched and written, it traced the international development in post-World War II modern composition scene of new music, musique concrete and electro-acoustic music of the American (Cage, Varese), French (Schaeffer, Henry) and German (Stockhausen and the Darmstadt school) and their impact on Finnish composers, engineers and radio. It got me to pull out some of my early CD collections of early Finnish music on Love Records like Erkki Kurenniemi's 'Aanityksia/Recordings 1963-73' and compilations like 'More Arctic Hysteria/Son Of Arctic Hysteria: The Later Years Of Early Finnish Avant Garde' and 'Psychedelic Phinland: Finnish Hippie And Underground Music 1967-1974'. 5 CDs of primitive rock vibes, prog tunes, satirical rock poetry, electronic etudes and hoe-downs.

Then I also pulled out the recent vinyl reissue of infamous but legendary underground experimental out rock group, Sperm called 'Shh! Heinasirkat'. Check it out, as it contains some of the most consciousness tweaking atonal pre-rock atvaistic jam sessions ever; if you are into Amon Duul's Psychedelic Underground or Futura Records' stable of weird psych/concrete rock/out jazz. Finland did not start with Pan Sonic in its underground/experimental musical tradition: it continued with the formation of the duo and it is still, I hope moving and pushing music forward in the next decades to come.

Shizuka Meets Les Rallizes!

2010-09-19T19:48:00.000-07:00

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Stop Press!

Shizuka played with Mizutani of Les Rallizes back in the 1990s! Check out the following website:
Shizuka Meets Les Rallizes

The Hypnagogic Haze of Southern Hiphop

2010-09-08T21:06:00.000-07:00

Listening to the "Chopped & Screwed" albums of Chamillionaire's The Sound Of Revenge and David Banner's Mississippi can be a joy in the tropical heat of where I come from: blasting the slowed-down, stretched and hypnotizing beats and acrobatics of the words by these rap acts while driving through the hot tarmac roads, windows wound down allowing the scorching breeze to cruise through the inside of the moving car while the music interacts with the surrounding sounds and traffic is simply hazy and groggy.

The origin of the "Chopped & Screwed" sounds came from a home-based DJ based in Houston before he passed in November 2000. Calling himself DJ Screw, his home-brew sonic alchemy and the subsequently released mixtapes (mix CDs too) became the next point of progression in the evolution of the creativity of Southern Hiphop in the 1990s. Allegedly influenced by syrup and the weed, the music of DJ Screw and the "Chopped & Screwed" albums can be considered as the manifestations of post-Cold War psycho-lysergia and bodily lethargy. Oozing with dreaded beat deconstructions, their musics are both a copped-out as well as an up-yours to the increasingly paranoid world of neo-liberalism championed by the Bush administration, the supposedly indestructible financial powerhouses (well at least that was the perception of the world and the companies before September 2008) and the hegemonic transnational corporations.

So is music today a form of copping out and myopic up-yours too? Hypnagogic Pop and its attendant musical allies in Hauntology are seemingly a-political; whereas the need for political activism is more pertinent than ever, is H-Pop merely just lull us into a state of resignation? Or perhaps providing us with a platform to really, tapping into the past and re-imagining a future which today seems so foreclosed and doomed?

By the way, a perfect soundtrack to mull over the above:
Dagger Swords - Dagger Paths (An excellent hip-hop inspired English underground sonic hypnosis) on an excellent record label, Olde English Singing Bee.

Stop Press!: Online exhibition: No Wave

2010-09-02T17:23:00.000-07:00

Online exhibition: No Wave

An excellent film treat to the nascent late 1970s/early 1980s New York No Wave scene featuring the Queen of Siam, Lydia Lunch, film maker Vivienne Dick, powerhouse post-hardcore growler, Henry Rollins, the legendary Beth & Scot B, key stalwart of the Cinema of Transgression, Nick Zedd and many more variously as the directors or actors in these three films. I hope you enjoy them, so just click on the link above.

Sun Ra: Truly Hypnagogic

2010-09-01T19:50:00.001-07:00

Have been digging out my Sun Ra albums and blasting them for days as I am absorbing the cosmic knowledge documented in John Sinclair's edited collections of interviews,reminiscences, musings and tributes of and on the man from Saturn. Years ago, I read the definitive biography on Ra by John F. Szwed, "Space Is The Place: The Lives And Times Of Sun Ra" and he has been a source of deep amazement and wonder. His music is neither past, present nor future but it can be all three at once, strangely. His big band pieces, fire music-like blasts, 1960s/1970s outer space keyboards adventures, disco tunes and groovy 1970s fuzak are all part of his repertoire. His albums inspired Merzbow to release literary hundreds of albums as Masami Akita, the man behind Merzbow, thought Sun Ra used to release thousands of albums(!).

But I want to focus on his indirect influence or rather similarities with today's underground scenes obsession with retro-futurism: Sun Ra is consistently re-visiting the past never lived and living through a present that is seldom static, while looking ahead into a future which is oddly deep with Black Astro-musicology. The theses put forward by Kodwo Eshun in his seminal text, "More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures In Sonic Fiction", published in the late 1990s, was one of the first to draw these hidden a-chronologies in the Black Sonic Arts of Sun Ra, Lee Scratch Perry, Miles Davis, Detroit Techno and beyond. Strictly non-linear but multi-versal in nature, the music, teachings and poetry of Ra is all of the above.

Hypnagogic before anyone else. Sun Ra's music is about looking back and re-imagining a better future for the Afro-Americans since the 1950s till the year he passed in 1993. His space-age visuals, costumes, album covers, chants, headgear, and lyrical themes are stuff beyond the shallow 1960s mainstream commercial white-boy psychedelia: he truly understood the history of the Blacks in the USA, the lost home of ancient Africa as well as the re-empowerment of Egyptology for his fellow black brethrens. And his music is both avant garde and pop: Hypnagogic pop.

Is There A Noise Continuum Part 15: Performing Noise, Noise Performs

2010-09-01T19:28:00.000-07:00

This is another part from my Noise paper... focusing on the links between some of the performance art's aesthetics with the art of noise.

The connection between Noise and the world of performance art and sound art is an erratic one as some are clearly music precedents while others are more conceptual forebears: within the Fluxus and Fluxus related group of artists, Yoko Ono with John Lennon released albums which combined her experimental take on voice while pushing the form of rock to its limits and thus foretelling the coming of No Wave and Noise Rock; Yasunao Tone’s wounded CDs in the 1980s and 1990s are also creative re-thinks of abusing the format of the then new digital miracle music carrier, the CD, to make non-repetitive and unpredictable results in their noise/music production. Christian Marclay, who two generations later, made a name for himself with his use/abuse of the vinyl, and one can find Noise artists working in similar vein in the works of Industrial Records associate, Boy Rice/NON, and Japanese free jazz/improviser Otomo Yoshihide. All three of them explored, questioned and interpreted the medium in their own ways in their noise making.

Hermann Nitsch, the most established and recognized of all the Viennese Actionists today, was into Noise: his symphonies and his infamous Des Orgien Mysterien Theaters performances placed the cacophonous ‘musical’ accompaniments (Noise) in the foreground as one of the key elements of the re-enactment of the Dionysian rite. He and the other Actionists like Gunter Brus, Otto Muehl and Rudolf Schwarzkogler were pushing performance art using the body and rituals while highlighting certain atavistic and primordial symbols and signs in their various actions, which during the 1960s in Vienna and Europe attracted police interference, legal actions, smear campaigns from the press as well as applause and support from like-minded audiences and fellow travellers. Subsequent Noise artists are known to name-drop them or explain their Noise aesthetics and performative foundations based on the actions and words of this group of taboo breakers. Early Merzbow releases used words like ‘action’ as a form of acknowledgment to Masami Akita’s debt to them.

Other performance artists who were not so linked to Noise making and music became important influences on the later practitioners in their conceptual ideas and the execution of performances: Vito Acconci’s theory of the power field and his various performance pieces which aimed at interrogating the domains of public and private in the late 1960s and early 1970s were conceptual avant garde bullets which shattered the straitjacketed mindset of the public; Chris Burden’s Shoot Piece totally destroyed the middle class construct of life and art when he was injured when, during the performance, he was supposed to be grazed by a bullet fired by his collaborator from a distance but instead more than what was expected was blasted off his body.

Younger generations of performance artists traverse the invisible demarcation between art, music and life with ease after the 1960s and 1970s when the first generations of performance artists from both groups had successfully broken down the initial societal barriers: John Duncan’s Blind Date (he had sexual intercourse with a corpse, recorded and released the procedure and then he topped it off with a vasectomy) updated Acconci’s Seedbed (the artist situated himself below the exhibition space, out of sight of the visitors and masturbated according to his associational fantasy of the sounds and voices he heard through the floor board) and pushed it even further by wrapping it with ethical thorns to prick and question the audience about issues of moral standards and societal norms. Of course, he did not deny the fact that it was also a form of public psychoanalysis to interrogate his personal psyche and purge his demons in some of the works he enacted. Christof Migone, a Canadian artist though not as outwardly transgressive, also uses his body as ‘canvas’ for noise and sound making: from holding out his tongue as far as he could to the cracking and popping of the joints on the body. His art is more personal but never frivolous as he often throws open the assumptions of the body politics and its relation to modern-day existential struggle. Even the notorious Haters are performance artists par excellence, who revelled in the joyful and iconoclastic physical destruction of fetish objects to attempt to break down the modern human materialist consumerist thought processes as well as injecting a solid dose of vitriolic fun in their acts of smashing and drilling. The recordings these artists made, which interface the usually inviolable boundaries between previous non-contaminated fields, are precisely what Noise is all about - a transgression of conceptual, creative and even ethical spheres, and questioning issues which most take for granted.

Is There A Noise Continuum Part 14: Hypnagogic Pop Strikes Again...

2010-08-23T22:33:00.000-07:00

Advanced Beauty from Konx-om-Pax on Vimeo.

Here is another installment from my recent Noise paper on H-Pop and the future of Noise...

Noise has come a long way since its Modernist beginnings in the early decades of the last century with plenty of conceptual and ideological forefathers staking claims and mining the different possibilities according to the freedoms and restrictions given by the technological progress of the given time. In recent years Noise has matured as a genre which allows a higher profile for the practitioners to reach out but it is also being narrowly framed as one of the many kinds of art form, a generic name which can be seen as the stratification and gradual stagnation of a creative impetus as well as the formulation of generic musical norms and conventions which often hinders the continual growth of any art form. Some past champions of Noise, have, in recent months, declaimed the death of Noise as Noise becomes more codified and canonized.

Where should Noise go from here? Some critics, record labels and record shops, especially those with links to the British alternative music magazine, the Wire, seem to point the way forward via this group of very disparate musicians and groups and even coining them, Hypnagogic Pop (or H-Pop). It is a broad umbrella of artists tapping different music sources and producing a variety of interesting sub-genres like avant garage rock to twenty-first century Goth pop. The more relevant stream amongst this wide plethora of musicians to Noise is made up of many who used to work at the periphery of the Noise axis in the mid 2000s like the Skaters, whose two members are now working separately to create otherworldly slabs of retro-gazing sonic song murk with New Age overtones. In fact, some of the early Noise influences can be found, once again, in the musical DNAs of these outfits: the more cosmic sector of Krautrock, certain elements of musique concrete and certain seminal albums of the post-Industrial Underground.

Current favourites of the ex-Noise proselytizers and critics like Emeralds, Ducktails and Oneohtrix Point Never, have created long form musical/sound interrogation of a less abrasive form but they share certain attributes with their distant relatives in Noise: the importance of a sonic jouissance not rooted in melody and song form but instead sharing a penchant for long form and improvisation as well as junkyard art sensibility. More Popol Vuh, Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel than Faust and Kluster, H-Pop might foretell the next progression of Noise to come. The release of albums by these musicians on traditional Noise record labels like Editions Mego, No Fun Productions and Hanson, look telling of the affinity of H-Pop with Noise. Noise as a genre seems to fit into the Deleuze-Guattari paradigm of a constantly de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation of the past hundred years, flitting back and forth repeatedly across the entire historical continuum of music and the arts. Thus, contrary to what some might choose to think and hear, Noise might still have plenty of life in it in the subsequent decades of this century.

The Godz Must Be Crazy... in 1966

2010-08-04T19:24:00.000-07:00

Taking a break from all the Noise... just watched the following video of the Godz freaking away. It was filmed by Jud Yulkut in 1966, a MTV of sort. I have the Godz's first album but never remembered them as so Amon Duul's Psychedelic Underground meets Cro-magnon and jamming it with Jandek in his recent live incarnations, all weed-out. Killer! Gonna go back and dig out that CD to blast this weekend.

Is There A Noise Continuum?: Part 13 - Musique Concrete

2010-08-02T19:36:00.000-07:00

Here is another part from my paper on the Noise Continuum paper which I presented recently in Salford, Manchester...

The tape recorder as a compositional tool became the departure point of the foregrounding of non-musical elements around us: noise as music. With the post-war availability of the tape machine proliferating through Europe and the USA, it was just a matter of time before someone would harness it extensively to create musical pieces of pure electronic provenance and texture from surrounding noises. Pierre Schaeffer and his assistant, Pierre Henry, composed the world’s first tape/electronic work, Symphonie pour un homme seul (Symphony for a Man Alone), which signalled the final realization of the pre-Second World War sensibility and its imagination of bridging the idea of modernity with a new music to the actualisation of a truly modern art in the form of tape composition by the end of the 1940s in France. With this symphony, everyone who mattered in the modern classical world had to try their hands at it: Stockhausen, Cage, Berio, Boulez and the list goes on. Music has finally broken away from the presumptuous imitation of the natural world of sound into an abstract realm: the limit is simply constrained by the imagination and the tediousness of composing using the tape. Other key musique concrete and electronic composers like Luc Ferrari and Bernard Parmegiani who helped cultivate the sustained experimental legacy of the INA GRM produced works of pristinely beautiful but frequently aurally jarring pieces which incorporate sharp shards of electric spikes, dramatic soar and trawl of amplitude and an uncanny knack for inserting processed found sounds into the composition which helped to re-invent music and invent a noise language along the way. Noise as a self conscious musical form was thus born.

The subsequent setting up of centres devoted to the composition of tape-based works and electronic pieces was a sign of the euphoric acceptance of the musical avant-garde of this new mode of creativity. Some applied the principles of serialism (Pierre Boulez), some made use of the inherent asynchronous nature of two simultaneously playing tape machines (Steve Reich) and some, especially the axis around the INA GRM, re-imagined the found sounds surrounding us and molded futuristic and, noisy sound etudes. But it would take the world quite a while to catch on and understand fully what this all meant. Right now only with the coffers of the state and corporate sponsorship could one dream of doing likewise. Noise making like traditional composition was still in the hands of the upper strata of the society. However, the fact that the founding father of musique concrete was more of an engineer than a traditional composer with the relevant conservatory training and its attendant musical baggage was a sign to come by the time Noise became a fully insurrected genre in its own right. Most Noise artists are unable to sight-read and scribble musical staves but rely plainly on their need to create anew and concoct musical forms which defy notes, tones and musical conventions. They hijack the evolving technological forward thrust for their own sonic bliss and jouissance based on their intuition and the art of improvisation.

Is There A Noise Continuum? Part 12 - Noise From the Antipodean

2010-07-18T22:53:00.001-07:00

This vanity series of mine is back again... basically I am uploading some of the parts from my recent Noise Conference which I presented in Manchester. This entry focuses on the New Zealander Noise scene.

The rise of Noise in the 1990s can be attributed to a few key theorists and chief operatives and one of them is New Zealand’s Bruce Russell. The self-styled sound/Noise/underground magus operated two of the most legendary labels of the late 1980s and 1990s out of a small city from the southern most country in the world and has influenced and affected thousands of music fans around the world: Xpressway and more relevant to Noise, Corpus Hermeticum. Not restricting themselves to releasing Noise records, the labels epitomize the spirit of adventurism of the acts and the label owners in anything sonically exciting across genres but more often than not, one can discern a particular allegiance to the Noise aesthetics of improvisation, dissonance and ignorance of musical conventions. The now-seminal classic compilation of New Zealander noise/assorted scene, ‘Le Jazz Non’ is now hailed as the ‘No New York’ of the country’s vibrant underground. It even sprouted the release of another relative fringe scene thousands of miles over the other side of the world in Norway with a compilation of the same name also featuring the key Noise/noise-related acts in the country previously known for its infernal rock institution of Black Metal and the middlebrow jazz/modern classical label of ECM.

Bruce Russell also plays in one of the most inventive/influential out-rock/Noise rock trio, the Dead C. The almost formless song structure and their penchant for free form, untutored improvisation allow the music of the group to push and pull the form in and out of the traditional boundaries of rock and often making one wade through a thick fog of miasma of dissolved guitar tones, percussive swirls and bass ululations. The band is definitely one of the main prime movers of the Noise/Noise Rock/Out-Rock milieu of the past two decades. The other side projects of the members of the Dead C like A Handful Of Dust and Gate mine slightly different sonic fields but are all crucial to the international development of Noise. Russell’s Corpus Hermeticum also released key underground Noise artefacts (in the identifiable cardboard fold-in envelopes for most of the items in its catalogue) like outsider one-man operative Omit, whose Quad triple CD box set filled with terminally out-there sonic drifts and cocktails of weird electronic etudes, is another holy grail on the wanted list of noise freaks and underground music heads.

Another key Noise act of note would be Campbell Kneale, who goes under various monikers of which Birchville Cat Motel would be the most well-known. One of his key albums, ‘We Count These Prayers…’, was released on Corpus Hermeticum as well. Frequently starting off with one or two sounds and gradually building the track up to a multiple-layered noise bliss towards the end, Kneale’s style of Noise can be seen as a continuation of the more rock-moment AMM, the psychedelic build-up of the first few Ash Ra Tempel albums and the black tarred sonic density of extreme Metal (Metal, and of course Black Metal, is a vital musical influence on him). He also runs his own label, Celebrate.Psi.Phenomenon, which releases his various projects as well as other like-minded acts focusing on Noise and Avant Metal.

After "Noise Affect Politics" Conference 2010

2010-07-06T20:45:00.001-07:00

Just came back from, I believe the first Noise conference, Manchester UK. It was a very engaging and humbling experience. Will update more about it in this space soon after I have re-orientated myself back from the cool summer days of the last few days in Northern England. I was basically burying myself in preparing my paper for the conference for the whole of June and before that reading, web-surfing and of course, listening. Will be back blogging soon.

Shuji Terayama: My Kinda Man

2010-05-12T17:26:00.000-07:00

Yes, I have been obsessing over one of the greatest polymaths in counterculture recently and will still at least for the next few months. Shuji Terayama, poet, dramatist, film maker and all-round scene setter par excellence from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, he had been the soul of the Japanese underground and alternative scenes and inspiring many along the way and leaving behind a rich legacy till today. However, there has been a short supply of materials on him both in print and in various digital formats. Besides a book which was published a few years ago (which I managed to get hold of a copy), a DVD box set of his films released also a few years ago (which thanks to a friend, Hideho from Tokyo has helped a great deal to connect me with the publisher in Shinjuku, Tokyo) and some albums which feature music from his theatre productions written and produced by J.A. Caesar (another under-documented Japanese music underground head), that is basically it.

He was scene maker, icon and guru for the rising Japanese psychedelic, beat, freak and anti-establishment circles in Japan for the bulk of the 1970s and he was as irreverent as one can wish for. His works often bridge surrealism, traditional Japanese and religious motifs, social criticism, Leftist discourse, anti-capitalist stance and the primacy of rock and jazz energy, be it his plays, films or poetry.

Have been doing research for the up-coming Noise conference in Manchester but am already restless enough to plan for my next writing project on this illustrious man, Terayama. If anyone out there who has any information on him which I may use to do a more comprehensive research on please don't hesitate to drop me a mail.

Rowland S. Howard: R.I.P.

2010-05-04T20:27:00.001-07:00

(24 October 1959 – 30 December 2009)

This is a bit late but Rowland S Howard had been one of the key guitarists since I set foot on the path of out rock exploration more than 15 years ago and his second band, the Birthday Party, has been one of those key nodes of my listening as well as my understanding of what real primal rock is all about. Together with Nick Cave, he was one of those trans-global musical icons who bridged New York sleazy downtown with London hidden subterranean all the back to their homeland, Australia. His post Birthday Party sojourn was closely related to the Queen of No Wave, Lydia Lunch on the two classic albums, Shotgun Wedding and Honeymoon In Red, which are scathingly confrontational and outlandish but pushing blues-based out-rock at the same time. He is to be greatly missed.

Sheer Hellish Miasma - Rock As Pure Energy, Live

2010-04-25T17:43:00.001-07:00

I have been listening to three key archival releases recently of three seminal rock acts of the past 3 decades. There are 3 things which hit me whenever I press play on my player and the first noise emits from the speakers which cause the membranes covering the cones to tremor and shake involuntarily for the next hour or so. First, the 3 CDs are about the pure manifestation of rock as catharsis, to purge oneself of the decadent and materialist grime which we have been accumulating since birth; secondly, rock as disruption, to upset the status quo of the current staid music scene of the moment, to shake everyone up; and lastly, rock as molten energy released by a group of individuals cohering together for that brief moment on stage. We are talking about rock as transcendence basically.

Even if we discuss the three groups in more or less conventional rock instrumentation of guitar(s), bass, drums and human vox, we are actually witnessing rock as avantgarde's drive towards excess and ecstasy. The Stooges, Harry Pussy and the various Grindcore/Earache bands at the BBC epitomise rock's ability to move millions in the first place since the 1950s. But the 3 groups took it one step further by pushing rock upwards to volcanic release of human psychic and physical tension.

I regret to say that, today, I can't seem to find such energy in rock. I am of course not being retrospective for the sake of it as we all understand that even back in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, it was difficult to find rock bands similar in calibre of the three above-mentioned. But I am looking forward to see the rise of another rock act who can show me the way in the new decade of the 2010s.

3 Essential Live Recordings:
1. The Stooges - You Don’t Want My Name You Want My Action: 1971 The Missing Link

2. Various - Grind Madness At The BBC: The Earache Peel Sessions

3. Harry Pussy - You Will Never Play This Town Again

Icon of The New Left: Slavoj Zizek

2010-04-13T19:23:00.000-07:00

Have been reading Zizek recently and will be delving into a few more of his books in the coming months. A controversial modern-day leftist philosopher who basically holds no bar in all aspects in modern society, Zizek writes like a true left-wing polemicist. He was born in the ex-Yugoslavian state of Slovenia, today an independent nation (Laibach is from there though they would prefer to be known as from NSK of course), a former member of the Yugoslavian Communist Party and he is a full-fledged Left-wing ideologue, just like Alain Badiou from France. I dont totally agree with all he proposes but I do agree that in today's world we urgently need to warn others about and be critical about the behemoth self- serving and all-consuming monstrosity called neo-liberal capitalism. He uses, quotes and critiques films, poetry and books as well as bridging the gap between high and low culture by his selection of materials he dissects in his prose. Inspiring but dangerous. However there is one major irony here: if not for the fact that we are living under the hegemonic neo-liberal world order with all other alternatives discredited since the fall of the Berlin Wall (except maybe for religious fundamentalism), people in authoritarian capitalist states might not get to read his books. New Left's confrontational stance might have been curtailed and censored by the authorities if we were still living in a Cold War-like millieu. But anyway, it is good that there is someone like him out there making some NOISE...

Singapore Indie Underground Review

2010-03-21T18:45:00.001-07:00

My recent article/review on the 3 CD set focusing on Singapore's indie/underground music scene from the 1980s to the noughties has just been published. Please go to the following link:
Singapore Indie Underground CD review

Boxes of Noise

2010-02-22T18:14:00.000-08:00

Is it just me or has Noise been more and more recognised as a valid genre of music in its own right with its attendant canon of artists who are now receiving their belated accolades via deluxe box sets, radio programmes and even a conference (coming up in July this year, more on it later)? Just last year alone, we have the Hijokaidan 30 CD retrospective behemoth set which, I think, came second due to the existence of the unbeatable 50 CD Merbox released back in 2000. Incapacitants, another Noise veterans also have a 1990s overview set unleashed last year, and it is now out of print. Government Alpha, a second generation Jap Noise act has its due saluted with a 4 CD box too.

Then this year, a 6 LP/DVD set has just been released of seminal noise 'out'fit from the Los Angeles Free Music Society axis, Smegma, from the 1970s/1980s. Sudden Infant, the mainstay of the Schimpfluch Gruppe, has also been canonised with a 2 volume 4 LP set out this month. Whew! And I am just talking about the sets which I am aware of. Hefty.

This somehow goes to support my feeling that Noise is now a proper, valid genre on its own: unlike a decade ago when Noise had been discussed as any form of musical/cultural fission of the status quo/musical practices/mindset which can range from Elvis to punk, it now has its own set of past progenitors and current practitioners. With record shops like Tochnit Aleph being one of the key flagship shops promoting and selling all things Noise as well as others, which champion the cause of Noise as a genre (Volcanic Tongue, Second Layer, for example)loudly on their websites.

Actually late last year, after I have found out that Salford University is organising a conference on Noise, I decided to crystalise some of my ideas about Noise in a proposal for the conference on, yes, Noise as a musical genre with a distinct past, present and future, as well as peripheral auxillary support network of record labels, magazines and festivals. I will be sharing some of my ideas for the proposed paper in this space in the near future.

Bondage, Up Yours!

2010-02-19T02:09:00.000-08:00

I was reading Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces and was very inspired by the way he outlines a secret history of spiritual/intellectual search out of this material world of rude survival, crass competition in the name of 'effectiveness' and 'efficiency'. From the Brethren of Free Spirits to the Lettrists to the Situationists and to the Punks, it seems like there has always been a small group of people around who are always searching for the 'way out': out of mortal suffering, out of the capitalist downward spiral and out of a cultural cul de sac.

But how about the rest of humanity? Dont they care? Perhaps they do but the circumstantial factors some how dont allow them that luxury. Perhaps they are not even aware of alternative options. Or perhaps they have resigned to life and opt for the easier way out. But maybe people in the SI or the Punks simply think too much or they are just, bored.

It makes me ponder about the human condition; to reconsider the meaning of life more often each day. I have no answer and neither do I have a solution. But it just seems a lot, at least to me, to be able to say to myself, huck it, no matter how tired or jaded I am at my 'day-job' i must find time to read what I want to read, what i want to listen to and what I feel its worth watching. Putting in that extra effort to find out about the 'truths' and to squeeze out that marginal time/effort I have to digest them and think about them and sharing them sometimes, seems to me, to be my way of saying 'oh bondage, up yours!'

Shizuka: R.I.P.

2010-02-07T21:37:00.000-08:00

I am very sad to announce in this space that one of the greatest voices/group in not just Japanese psych rock, but the entire genre, has just left the building last Tuesday, 2nd Feb 2010. Miura Shizuka, the leader and vocalist of psych rock band, Shizuka, ,took her own life and thus ending one of the greatest modern psych rock unit in the past decade or so. The band can sound beautifully fragile one moment and can easily rev up and crank up the distortion meter and volume level the next, she and her band featured past members from Fushitsusha and Les Rallizes Denudes and had released one studio and three live albums of gorgeous psychedelic bliss. She will be greatly missed.

Top Albums of the Noughties?

2010-01-13T20:50:00.000-08:00

This seems like an act of me jumping on the bandwagon but hey I have been a music geek for years, so I guess, geeks just simply love lists. My list is, AS EXPECTED, heavy on Japanese psych, Noise and psych rock in general as to me, besides a few surprises that you will see below, are the most crucial genres of music in this era and time of cultural blandness, indifference and helplessness. I hope you will pick up a few of the albums in the list and give them a listen, and hopefully blow your mind along the way.

So here we go but not in any order except for the Top 10:

1.Various - Broken Flag: A Retrospective 1982-1985
2.Incapacitants - Box Is Stupid
3.Fushitsusha - Origin's Hesitation
4.Harry Pussy - You'll Never Play This Town Again
5.Electric Eels - Eyeballs Of Hell
6.Skullflower - Orange Canyon Mind
7.Albert Ayler - Holy Ghost
8.Hijokaidan - The Noise
9.Tunnel Canary - Jihad 1978-1984
10.Sonic Youth - Murray Street

The rest:
• Various – By The Fruit… You Shall Know The Roots
• Various – California
• John Coltrane – The Olatunji Concert: The Last Live Recording
• Cecil Taylor Feel Trio – 2 Ts For A Lovely T
• Cobalt - Eater Of Birds
• Various – Improvised Music From Japan
• Converge – Jane Doe
• Coil – Live Volumes 1-4
• EL-P – Fantastic Damage
• Borbetomagus and Hijokaidan – Both Noises End Burning
• Wolf Eyes/Anthony Braxton – Black Vomit
• Kevin Drumm – Sheer Hellish Miasma
• Boredoms – Vision Creation Newsun
• Pan Sonic – Aaltopiiri
• MV & EE With The Bummer Road - Mother Of Thousands
• No Neck Blues Band – Sticks And Stones May Break My Bones But Names Will Never Hurt Me
• Rocket From The Tombs – The Day The Earth Met The Rocket From The Tombs
• Merzbow – 24 Hours: A Day Of Seals
• Whitehouse – Aestheticists 2006
• Burial – Burial
• Om – Conference Of The Birds
• Vodka Soap – Un Chand Pyramidelier
• Richard Youngs – Summer Wanderer
• Onna – Onna
• Gary War – Horribles Parade
• Oneohtrix Point Never – The Rifts
• Iro – Tamafuri
• Up-Tight – The Beginning Of The End
• Shizuka – Live: Traditional Aesthetics
• The Hospitals – The Hairdryer Peace
• Consumer Electronics – Nobody’s Ugly
• Henri Chopin/Various – Revue OU
• Nurse With Wound – Salt Marie Celeste
• Jackie-O Motherfucker – Liberation
• Cyclo – Cyclo
• Scott Walker – The Drift
• Kousokuya – Ray Night
• Jandek – Glasgow Sunday
• William S Burroughs – Real English Tea Made Here
• Sunburned Hand Of The Man - Wedlock

R.I.P.: Free Folk Maestro - Jack Rose (1971 - 2009)

2010-01-05T22:30:00.001-08:00

The passing of one of the most important six string master in contemporary times in not just New, Weird America but the world, Jack Rose, was one of the key pillars of the Free Folk movement which peaked in the mid 2000s. He founded the raga inflected electric folk trio, Pelt in the 1990s and produced many vital documents which continued the music tradition from Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music through to John Fahey to the free folk ensembles of the 21st century. I remember chills down my spine whenever I put on any CD with him in a group setting or in his solo guise. Inventive but firmly rooted in the great American underground cum folk wellspring. He will be greatly missed.

2009:The Year In Review

2009-12-21T02:34:00.000-08:00

After a long hiatus of quite a few weeks, finally back for a retrospective for the year. This has been a great year for music for me, with key Noise acts issuing hefty box sets charting their evolving aesthetics throughout their history, of which many, have spanned decades. Hygnagogic Pop is still in the stage of critical review, of its status as a valid generic name for a wide spectrum of acts which do not seem to have much in common except for some semblance to a retro-reinvention of past sounds from the 1960s/1970s/1980s. Japanese psychedelic rock has been great still but the fact that we are seeing more retro-issues is beginning to get a bit worrying. Many good to great books on music and its attendant culture were published this year as well. In terms of visuals, two amazing DVD box sets entered my life this year which sad to say I have not been able to fully digest yet. The following is basically a pictorial summary of my ups for the year, I hope yours have been as great, on the cultural frontier as well.

- Schimpfluch Gruppe: Sudden Infant/G* Park/Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock/etc.: Mind boggling, my late discovery of the rest of the guys (I was quite into Sudden Infant & Ohne already) from this amazing collective of actionist-influenced noise-niks.

- Hijokaidan: The box set is a gem...

- Incapacitants: This is another box set gem...

- Alejandro Jodorowsky: Psychedelia in full frontal assault; even though it has been more than 30 to 40 years, the films are still vital and prophetic in the 21st century.

- Ramleh + Consumer Electronics: The return of 2 of the most important Power Electronics outfits, updated 2009 style.

- Gary War: Finally, a "pop" act that really push the envelope of the interface between noise, psych pop, electronica and garage rock after all these years of barren musical desert.

- Jeff Keen: My official favourite film maker/director/conceptualist par excellence. If we could make noise image, Keen's films embody it.

- Bobby Beausoleil + Kenneth Anger: Another film master who bridges psychedelia, magick and alter consciousness which is stil, relevant in today's world.

- Bill Orcutt + Harry Pussy: The re-issue of the Pussy's live stuff plus Orcutt's comeback LP is so very essential to the current state of the music scene as who are the real deal in underground music scene

- The Stooges: A necessary box set release which tells us so much more about one of the few most crucial groups in rock for the past 40 years.

- PSF Records: As great as ever, with retrospective DVDs and re-issues of lost classics and possible future canon fodder, to me, still the greatest record label of the past two decades.

Maryanne Amacher: R.I.P. 1943-2009

2009-10-26T20:10:00.000-07:00

It is sad but true: yet the death of another grossly under-appreciated musician/artist/conceptualist of the past few decades. Having only released a couple of CDs (see my earlier blog entry on her) on John Zorn's Tzadik Records, her works take tremendously effort and commitment to ingest and digest, but they will never disappoint. Download does not do justice to listen to her music as to appreciate them, the actual architectural space she recorded them in would be the best but CDs will have to do, for now, until someone brave enough, decides to re-stage some of her works again. Now it's time to check her out, if you have not done so.

Hypnogogic Pop Versus Hauntological Pop

2009-10-22T17:21:00.000-07:00

The "H" words are in vogue in recent years. First, music writers and theorists (particularly in the UK and Europe) deposit Derrida's idea of Hauntology in some of the more other-worldly and retro-futurist sounds coming out of Britain on labels like Ghost Box, Mordant Music and Trunk Records, as well as acts like Broadcast and Boards Of Canada, which use similar studio and musical raison d'être and wizardry/techniques to create music which goes back to the recent past without one being involved in the actual time era in question and thus it is basically a re-creation and re-imagining of the more esoteric and underground culture of the late 1960s and 1970s. So materials ranging from obscure psychedelic and folk records, library sound bites, proto-muzak/New Agey sounding tunes, pastoral musing of all sorts on vinyl and of course BBC soundtracks and background sonic-artefacts are all for the tapping and re-appropriating.

Then this year David Keenan wrote an article on Hypnogogic Pop in the Wire which, though not once mentioning the word "Hauntology" basically argues for a return of the post-Noise underground generations, who in their 20s, are hacking back to the proverbial retro well-spring of not so much that of the 1960s and 1970s but, alas, the 1980s! (Yes, yes, in Singapore, it is associated with mainly the current fashion trends, bad chart pop music, theme-based night spots and club nights as well as budget-priced compilation CDs from the major labels to try and regain some lost grounds from the ubiquitous downloads). The key flag wavers of the Hypnogogic cohort who revel in the 1980s are best represented by the Skaters and the individual projects embarked by Spencer Clark and James Ferraro. A potent mix of Californian beach balm, 1980s pop cultural detritus, the Reaganian dread of the decade and a shiny and bright psychedelic surface to boot.

The others tap into various sources and decades for inspiration and sonic raw materials: the late 1960s regional psych rock of Texas are re-channelled without much retro-gazing pose by Gary War and the Super Vacations (plus other acts on the Shdwply Records); the post-Goth/Industrial song re-structuring of Zola Jesus and Cold Cave; the Tangerine Dream/German Kosmische drone of Emeralds are all, according to Keenan, prime proponents of the movement.

So what is the big deal? I personally have some issues with the categorisation and classification of certain acts under the two umbrella generic names but I do agree that musicians in both camps are trying to get out of the cul de sac of the fields of practice which they originally came from: for the Hauntologic Pop acts, English pastoral-inspired music from the 1960s/1970s and electronica of the 1990s; while for the Hypnagogic Pop groups, Noise and Psychedelic Rock of the 1990s and 2000s. Instead of the simulacra of the various mere retro-flexing music products of the current rock/pop acts in the charts and radio/TV, these artistes are genuinely looking for a way out in creativity and musical expressions despite the deep-seated notions which many feel that in music all that can be done have been done before.

Thus, it is still pretty exciting though to listen to some of these stuff as music, despite being jaded and all, can still bring a smile on my face whenever I pop a cassette in, slip a CD in or position the stylus in place.

Stop Press!!!

2009-10-21T22:16:00.000-07:00

Have not been very motivated to write another new entry for the Noise Continuum series but two pieces of news caught my eyes so I thought I would like to share with you here.

First, David Keenan, the owner of the record shop based in Glasgow, Volcanic Tongue and the author of the book on Nurse With Wound, Coil and Current 93, "England's Hiddern Reverse", has decided to call it quits with his blog site, The Hidden Reverse, due to, according to him, other more important commitments as well as the heart for it. You can still go read some of his entries though, go to VT.

Secondly, a website specialising in distribution of magazines, Stack, has recently interviewed Tony Herrington, the don of the sainted alternative music rag, The Wire. He basically presented some insights about why the magazine is able to continue to thrive despite the current decline of music rags in today's world. Some of the factors he highlighted, perhaps will serve as inpetus for the rest of us out there to persist on as music fans, and more importantly, refusing to take whatever bullshit the mainstream culture industry is trying to shove down our throats in both blatant and insidious manners.

Read on!

Theory In Music Writing: The Will To Write Rock Versus The Will To Rock-Write

2009-10-08T17:48:00.001-07:00

Taking a break from my vanity blog project of tracing the history of Noise in my "Is There A Noise Continuum" blog series, but still wish to point to anyone who is interested about the history of Noise that shortly after I have started writing about the Noise Continuum, the esteemed Art/Music radio/internet station Resonance FM, which is based in London, also kickstarted a regular programme on, guess what, the history of Noise, featuring some of more active Noise activists around the world today.

By the way, was ruminating for quite awhile about an article Simon Reynolds wrote and published online some time ago about Music & Theory. Basically he was tracing the history of rock/music journalism in the UK music press since the 1970s with some reference to the precedent and concurrent rock-write taking place in the USA as well. He is saying that there are two schools of music journalism, i.e. plain straight forward reportage/interview/review of rock stars, artists, albums and career of the trend setters and hip shakers of the moment or the canon OR the attempt to theorise and contextualise the scene, genre development, ideas and politics of the music and its protagonists. The former is about no-bullshit, non-academic and high-faluting linguistic posturing while the latter is all about reading between the lines, psychoanalysing, reading into the history and genealogy and coming up with an essayist conclusion or prediction of things past or to come.

<= Smarty Rock-write

VERSUS

Simply Write Rock =>

Well, it set me thinking about my relationship with rock/music writing for the past few decades: Too young to experience some of the polemical writings of some of the iconic journalist and writers mentioned by Reynolds in his article but a bit older than those who might not even be aware about the joy and importance of serious rock-write of the post Gen Y populace (who grew up with the Internet, which in many ways is responsible for the slow-death of music magazines and serious essay-length rock-write), but belatedly trying to latch on to the tailend of a declining breed of rock-write inspired millieu of the recent past, I am often caught in a inner dilemma about music, the writings and the people who write about it.

Personally I admire the eloquence and enthusiasm of the current writers like Reynolds, David Keenan, Tony Herrington and Rob Young. As for the older writers mentioned in Reynolds' article who started out in the late 1970s, Chris Bohn, Edwin Pouncey and Mark Sinker are key ones I can think of. As for the godfathers of rock-write in the 1960s and 1970s, of usually American stock, Lester Bangs and to a much lesser extent RIchard Meltzer, are the ones for me. It is a mixture of theory-driven type and the rock-as-pure emotional/expression style. I love theory but I have little patience to dive deeply into it as to come up all drenched from head to toe with jargons and relevant terminology to boot. However, I definitely am for the big-picture/zeitgeist/scene and genre essays. In other words, I like my rock-write intellectually powered but still coming across strongly in its vernacular articulation and musical joussiance. Kickass but smart.

But today, many people are just not interested to read beyond much, their career/academic fields, self-help manuals (just go and check out the top 10 lists of most chain book stores)and popular fiction (which might just be appearing in cellular form sooner than you think at the nearest big screen to your place). Even self avowed music fans are suffering from similar traits of habits and mindset. We simply have too much choices of entertainment (yes, pure and simple, down-to-the-lowest denominator kinda entertainment and not culture or food for thought) and not forgetting that almost every music genre can be downloadable (most of time illegally) in a matter of minutes via the Internet, why bother to read, understand and make an informed choice about what you are listening to? It's just muzak for most, anyway.

It is time to re-think: technology should help us to up the ante in terms of our ability, capacity and tenacity to understand the world around us, be it music, films, politics, social issues, global awareness, etc. This is of course a sidetrack from what I first started out to expound here though.

Anyway, yes intellectual rock-write vs simply writing about rock. The ability to read, understand and think about what we absorb is a unique human characteristic which, I think, should not be lost. Let us try to read a bit more into things, and in this case, music, which has the power to infect the soul, affect our emotions, deflect most dredgery in life and of course try to reflect what life is, to us.

Oh yes, Reynolds ended off his article with this line: "The quoting from philosophers over-indulged in by myself and my peers, and earlier by our role models, was perhaps closer to being a drug-pusher than anything else, the motivation less to do with impressing the readers than turning them on: 'C'mon, try it, try it... This will really take you places." and the fact that he entitled one of the parts in the paper with "The appeal of theory is precisely its power to intoxicate", though not presenting the whole picture does speak volume of the people who are always passionately yakking away or sending literary missives out to entice, to draw people in and to evangelicise the music they hold dearly to. Rock on, guys.

Singing The Digital Noise: Is There A Noise Continuum? Part 11

2009-10-01T17:21:00.000-07:00

When Kraftwerk first unleashed the ultra modern, streamlined and no-frills electronic mantric tune of 'Autobahn' into the world in 1974, it not only went up to the top of the charts all over the world but it also ushered in the age of electronic music. Serving as both inspiration and raw material, Kraftwerk basically became the godfathers to aspiring home electronic tinkerers, amateur non-musicians and inspired DIY electro-punks, spawning an entire multiverse of hiphop/electro/freestyle, Chicago House, electro-pop, Detroit techno and New York Garage.

The subsequent explosion of dance music and the genesis of a wide variety of sub-genres and sub-sub-genres within the dance continuum (which is still going on today)encourage some to describe the second summer of love to be equivalent to the original psychedelic late 1960s and the highly nihilistic late 1970s of punk, which paved the way for a whole wellspring of creativity and vibrancy in the music scene. By the mid 1990s, with the collapse of Soviet-led Communism becoming history, the reach of this electronic revolution proliferated into previous un-imagined locales in Eastern Europe and Russia too. The founders of the electronic/noise art Raster Noton record imprint, Carsten Nicolai and Frank Bretschneider, were prime examples of such globalising outreach of electronic media before internet became a household buzzword a few years later.

The Raster Noton imprint presents electronic/dance music with a big difference from most other artistes broadly classified under this umbrella category: with Ryoji Ikeda, Alva-Noto(Carsten Nicolai's own project), and even other more overtly dance-able acts like Byetone, Frank Bretschneider and Signal, they sounds are filled with what Rob Young of the Wire called the glitchtronic textures and musical syntax but they albums and tracks are infused with a perpetual tight-rope balance between atonal melody pulses and straitjacketed noise signals.

At times, the tracks just sound like a long-desserted spacecraft emitting sine-tone based electromagnetic waves into the stratosphere of the vacuum of the universe. When the rhythm kicks in, its overdriven electric-spasmotic twitches careening down one's nervous system, verging on the hiccups and tensile pull of the time-stretch linear construct of the track. Organised noise with a pulse of almost Nitzschean will-to-power forward thrust.

Few within the electronic dance canon could rightfully be placed within the Noise scheme of things, Raster Noton is one of them. Compelling stuff. The only other act I can think of would be Pan Sonic, from Finland. The duo of maximalist electro-noise driven pulse beats which first built up their sound on their first album 'Vakio' and mutated throughout the years via albums like A and reaching its creative climax with 'Kesto', a multiple box set of almost Merzbow-like intensity for electronic dance-based music. The constituents of the duo, Mika Vainio and Ilpo Vaisanen have not only released albums and tracks on Raster Noton but collaborated with other stalwarts of Noise like Suicide's Alan Vega and Keiji Haino. They managed to bring back the 'power' to the notion of 'power duo' back to electronic dance music.

To find out more about Raster Noton, go to Raster Noton for information and RN for the label site. For Pan Sonic go to, Sonic.

Fire Music: Flaming Tongues And Volcanic Brass - Is There A Noise Continuum? - Part 10

2009-09-30T17:59:00.000-07:00

Noise as agent of freedom? As agent of change and hope? As agent of Civil Rights even? The angry but sometimes sometimes joyous and often spiritual noise of the free jazz brigades from the late 1950s onwards basically politicised Noise forever in popular music. Whereas the talk of Noise in academic classical and modern compositional circles had started long before that but the common person was often kept out of the loop of such intense debates and out of hearing of these works by the various avantgarde composers from Varese to Cage to Xenakis. Jazz on the other hand, before the onslaught of Rock N Roll from the 1950s and 1960s onwards, was the voice of Pop or symbols of popular culture then.

The debate of whether the Noise in free jazz or fire music or the New Thing as it has been variously and divisively called by both fans and detractors pushed jazz as a music form out of the popular music circuit by the beginning of the 1970s is inconclusive. But the Noise it entails definitely resonates till today. The power of progenitors like Albert Ayler's march like tunes turned wild improvisation of the highest level has not only make many jazz musicians to re-think their approach to the art form (whether they were supporters of it or not it caused many to either become more staunch in what they do or to try to go "out" in their playing).

As a result of going "out" many free jazz musicians employed non-tonal based moves and thus inviting many critics to called the new sound emerging 'noise' which in some cases they do sound like shards of pointed non-chords and non-notes coming at you. The Europeans heard landmark free jazz albums like Albert Ayler's 'Spiritual Unity' and were inspired to make an equivalent album in the form of 'Machine Gun' and many other European free jazz greats on the musician-run FMP Records in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Long before Hiphop, free jazz was the original 'Black Noise' which put forward the notion of Black empowerment and limitless artistic expression. A noise of righteous anger in the face of the struggle for Civil Rights and Black Rights and a resolute staking of ground for Black consciousness and non-White contaminated music. A music which rejects the idea of Black music as entertainment, minstrelsy and joke to the Whites, thus continuing and further developing what the Black Be-boppers first started out to achieve.

To find out more about Albert Ayler, go to Ayler.

Smashing The Cul-de-Sac Of Poetry: Is There A Noise Continuum? - Part 9

2009-09-30T17:32:00.000-07:00

While William S Burroughs was plotting and cutting up texts in Paris, France, another iconic but yet lesser known figure was trying to revolutionise poetry from its two-dimensional staid cul-de-sac in France as well - Henri Chopin. Just like Burroughs, he was enthralled with the possibility of making poetry alive and more tactile once again since the heydays of dada by harnessing the seemingly boundless electrified potential of tape recorders. Poetry as sound, poetry as audio painting.

What Burroughs was doing in novel and prose, Chopin was pushing the boundaries with poetry albeit without the paranoid infected and conspiracy-loaded mindset of the Burroughsian worldview. Chopin was interested in the exploration of the grain of voice, the manipulation of the timbre of vocal utterance, the vibration of the larynx, the texture of throat emission, and of course the accompanying hiss and gasps of the medium of the art form, the recorder by liberating using the record, pause, stop and play buttons of the tool to often startling effect.

Chopin basically pioneered the breaking down the artificial markers between music and language by proposing in his various experiments of the corporealisation of poetry as an art form and as a medium of expression. He viewed poetry as quinessentially a form of energy which we should actively tap and re-channel to greater efficiency and efficacy.

To many he was also a figurehead of the various strains of mid-twentieth century avantgarde movements which spanned across post dada, lettrists, fluxus, etc in his editiorship of the sound/poetry magazine OU from the 1960s to the 1970s which featured works from Burroughs and Brion Gysin to Bob Cobbing, from Raoul Hausmann to Ake Hodell and many more which have been excellently compiled and released as a deluxe boxset by Alga Marghen a few years back.

A true visionary who believed in the transformative power of language as human sound as noise as art. Today his influence can be felt in many noisicians who are exploring the interface between electronic tools, the human voice and noise.

Go to Chopin to find out more.

A Break From The Noise Continuum: A CD by CD Review Of Hijokaidan's Box Set

2009-09-30T16:19:00.000-07:00

Someone out there actually did a review on every single CD on the "The Noise" box set which I raved about recently. Go to The Noise to read about it.

Merzbau: The Art Of Noise - Is There A Noise Continuum? Part 8

2009-09-24T22:27:00.000-07:00

The all-emcompassing, all-engulfing, back-to-the-womb, all-senses-open and at the end of the day, glorious and transcendent blasts of noise from the man who is responsible for "popularising" noise in the 1990s and the noughties: is he a man or a myth? To understand Merzbow, a.k.a. Masami Akita,one need to comprehend the art of total art of the senses. From Bataille to the Surrealists, from free jazz to abstract expressionism, Merzbow is an elemental force of sheer relentless singular vision and focus to craft the ultimate kunstwerk of sonic overload, total tonal suspension in space-time and of course plenty of tinnitus thrown in as well.

Taking his name from dada-ist/Surrealist Kurt Schwitters' on-going art piece of junkyard heap art and material fetishism, Merzbow understands the source of sensual sublime to be posited just above our normal human senses. Obliteration of the senses meant the obliteration of the materialist realm. His noise goes for volume, power but as well as plenty of sensuality. Crafted and nuanced, most of his releases do not pander to the simple turn the volume knob beyond 11 and sustaining it till the attention of the creator fizzle out. His is sonic immersion tinted with intention and eroticism, an element in Noise which many do not see. Similar to the eros, noise is the annihilation of both human emotional and rational reception of one's surroundings and his Noise aims to achieve that. After all, he is an established writer on the art of Japanese bondage in Japan.

His first musical foray into music started in the late 1970s when he was disappointed by most rock musicians stopping at the noisy guitar solos and push the boundary of music and sound in his early output. His first works sounded like European Improv gone wrong, Prog Rock slithering sideway into uncharted territory. Then in the 1980s his sound consolidated to something closer to what most of his later fans are more familiar with: analog-based kling klang. The 1990s was a decade of expansion and refinement of his 1980s sound till the late 1990s when he embraced the digital interface of the laptop computer and to celebrate and say good-bye to his analog years the behemoth 50 CD box set, Merzbox was released on Australian label, Extreme to acclaim and attention.

Today, his output remains prolific, of more than 250 releases to date. Talk about the art of excess, few can equal let alone beat him at the game. Noise of the most glorious kind. Merzbow defines what Noise is all about in its relation to what being a human is than most so-called music out there. Truly art.

To find out more, go to Merz.

Suicidal Performance Ri(t/d)es: Is There A Noise Continuum? Part 7

2009-09-24T18:17:00.000-07:00

One of the main reasons why popular music from the mid 20th century onwards was deemed as "noise" was partly due to its propensity to induce ear-aches: the rapid development of musical instruments powered by electricity, the emphasis on volume and its accompanying live dionysian context, and of course the socio-political implications of it all when you have swarms of teenagers and young adults going crazy over it. The starting point of noise is thus not so much the visionary actions of a singular artiste or group but more of a combination of teen-fuelled wilfulness, artistic adventurism and even plainly for the heck of it.

Enough has been told of the accidental discovery of feedback and distortion caused by placement of the guitars to the amplifiers and the wonder boxes of effects invented. All these took place basically from the 1940s to the early 1960s when popular music was seen as simply 'pop' noise and adolescent jouissance: from the bright surf guitar tones to fuzzy overload of the garage bands as well as studio experimentation with creating a wall of sound and pushing the quality of audio fidelity as well as novelty despite limited technological hardware available then. The self conscious "noise-making" came about when musicians started getting their minds fried by psychedelics but more crucially the sounds emanating from the records produced by the ecstatic free jazz/New Thing of the Afro-Americans, the studio wizardry of the musique concrete and electro-acoustic sororities and of course the visionary performances of rock icons like Jimi Hendrix.

However no matter how much the musicians wished to push noise to the foreground, the technological constraints of the late 1960s and 1970s coupled with the conservative mindset of the engineers, producers and studio techs to censor the sonic excesses of the recording process hindered most of the sonic dissonance of these bands from being documented on vinyl. The only venue left for them would be the live setting of a gig.

The amp overload of the Velvet Underground, the Stooges and the MC5 in the late 1960s are by now legendary to the point of canonical; the relatively softer but equally valid exploration of sonic outrage of the San Franciscan psychedelic bands like the Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service, the abrasive primitivo- proto punk of the Deviants, Tomorrow and the Pink Fairies with the psych-noise of Syd-era Pink Floyd in the UK, and the kraut and kosmische ramblings from Germany of Can, Faust, Tangerine Dream and Guru Guru, were all signposts of such explorations and ventures back then. But all of them still remained rock in various degree at the end of the day. It would take the later self conscious art-influenced and inflected artistes to push their live forms into the noise-spheres in the 1970s.

The notorious confrontational live noise rituals of Suicide in the early 1970s presented to many that noise could be a way out of the rock and roll dead end, and even after they had turned more "rock" in the 1970s, their live gigs were vital documents of noise-as-ultimate-art-statement. The try-me-if-you-dare attitude of Alan Vega and Martin Rev took the rock-as-performance informed Iggy-estics together with the avant posturing of various confrontational schools of thought in modernist thought and present shows of no-compromise and emotional baiting display of such-fire life situations. Delirious to say the least. To make things worse, their resolutely non-rock presentation of a non-guitars-and-drums set up is just "noise" to the eyes and ears of most dudes who chanced upon them.

Of course, with a name like Suicide they were simply asking for it at the end of the day but, hey, who's blaming them? By the way their potent blend of Elvis style rock-a-billy shrieks and emotive tunes when charged with the in-yer-face shock-noise moves can sound cheesy at times but it is sure as hell noise to those ears man.

To find out more about these guys, go to Suicide.

Industrial Evolution: Is There A Noise Continuum? Part 6

2009-09-22T22:03:00.000-07:00

Industrial music for Industrial people? The corporate motto of the at-once revered and revolting collective, Industrial Records a.k.a. Throbbing Gristle, from the UK basically encapsulated the grimy, apocalyptical mindscape and psychogeography of the rusting West in the 1970s in the midst of the Oil Crisis, rampant inflation and high unemployment and tense social fission between the self righteous leftists and the right wing conservatives. The fallout of the optimism of first the 1950s and the hippy dippy 1960s burst the bubbles for the youth in the tumultuous decade. People were dodging the reality of the harsh conditions, evading the psychological and econo-social trauma of those ashen black years and basically seeking the seemingly non-existent light at the end of the tunnel in Britain, and to a certain extent, cosmopolitan America as well as New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy, and San Francisco was still huddling in a corner from the psychedelic backlash with Los Angeles simply churning out bland soundtracks, faux-heroics on the big screens and mega-rock stars to divert the attention of the people. Bleak times indeed.

Genesis P-Orridge entered the picture, armed with his rhetoric from the world of avant garde art movements and manifestoes, actions and pranks, the COUM Transimissions and later on Throbbing Gristle presented to the world a mirror: that we are all ugly assholes and come on, let us be honest about it, and of course our belief in the progress of the Western science-obsessed and technological enhanced society was nothing but a sham, a reversion, a de-evolution of the human kind. Setting the tone to this message was the sound of the industrial signifiers and signified in sound, image and word. A gesamtkunst-sham of the highest order to present Noise as a reminder, a Lacan-like ego-reflection of the self-deluding public.

By first riding on the humps of performance action-based art, mail art and other dada-inspired moves, COUM Transmissions reached its creative climax with the infamous exhibition, entitled 'Prostitution' and on the same night of its inaugural opening, P-Orridge introduced to the world, the Throbbing Gristle. The folding of one act signalled the commencement of another. Where art could not reach, music, as P-Orridge argued, would hopefully achieve. The rest as they always say, is history.

To find out more about Industrial Records, go to IR.

Chasing That Monday Blues Away: Nihilist Spasm Band's Proto-Noise Musings - Is There A Noise Continuum? Part 5

2009-09-17T16:52:00.000-07:00

Feeling that Monday blues and not sure what to do to rid yourself of that dreaded feeling? Try picking up an instrument, find a few friends, locate a friendly venue and jam. This was what kick-started the non-career of the group of un-self-conscious folks in Canada way back in 1966 (The band was, however, formed earlier in 1965). The most distinctive sound of the band is the kazoo and of course the joyous noise-making which has been documented since 1967 and a year later, the band released their debut album, entitled "No Record" to almost universal neglect but over the years a few heads did chance upon it and picked it up...

The noise of NSB (their preferred acronym) is about a celebratory human communal activity of interaction, buddy-hood and all-round good-time vibe. Nothing about subverting the powers-to-be, no ambition beyond the need to express themselves in a small town in North America and most important of all, no thoughts about "making it" at the end of the day. The fact that they are now revered by many underground freaks and noise connoisseurs all over the world validated the non-vision of this collective: that more so than Punk, they are doing it themselves and doing it right.The fusion of jazz, primitive rock moves and folk-inflected improvisations of the NSB just sound so ahead of their times that put many current "hip" acts to shame with their measured and calculated manoeuvers.

Noise as freedom, as expression and as a resolutely non-careerist move (actually many amongst the group are professionals in their work life, e.g. one of them is a doctor)should give us the inspiration to do something about our life of merely consuming and consuming. In its own way, NSB's noise can be more subversive than the more self-ruminative musicians/music critics/fans as it taps into the basic human instinct to simply go out there to create.

Go to NSB to find out more about them.

Cut-ups As Revolutionary Tool: Is There A Noise Continuum? Part 4

2009-09-14T18:43:00.000-07:00

William S Burroughs

In the beginning it was the word. Language. Grammar. Alphabet. Letters. Syntax. All these give us meaning, provide a system, an operating one. Whoever controls the word controls the system, the society. So, what if we disrupt it by cutting it all up and throwing it back to the system?

William S Burroughs proposes a disruption of the word and thus a disruption of the powers-to-be's hegemony over us as the word has been the dominant tool of control over us since the word first appeared millenniums ago. The religious institutions and their holy texts, the political structures and their laws, the capitalists and their books and figures. Language is a virus, which we have been infected us for generations, used as a tool by Them on Us.

The society or the hegemonic superstructure basically values order over everything else: no disruption to the social order, and thus the powers-to-be could enjoy their dominance over us in peace. Noise, or a disruption of the word would mean to upset this peace, to question the legitimacy of the ruler over the ruled. Noise as revolutionary tool, as a spanner in the works, as a vehicle for possible change if not as the amoral conscience of the human society.

Noise is thus all about questioning, about going against the stipulated grain of the presribed dos and don'ts of one's behaviour. So what if all these are one big mistake? Burroughs shows us not so much the way but a glimpse of possibility out of the capitalist cul-de-sac and even though the capitalist behemoth has rapidly modified its form from a materialist greed and consumerist avalanche to a post-capitalist one of information control and overload of today, there is still a hope for going under or above. Resistance through the cut-ups, the disruption of the word.

Noise As Transgression: Is There A Noise Continuum? Part 3

2009-09-01T22:15:00.000-07:00

Noise can mean trangression of any sort as it defies conventions and norms. It breaks people up due to its ability to shock, to horrify and to provoke thus it is unwanted by the institutions, unknown to the people and unbecoming to the powers-to-be in most cases. However, once you experience it, and yes, it is not just an audio thing but it can be extended to include tactile, visual and even olfactory fields of senses, you wil not have a neutral reaction to it. You either shun it by walking away, turning it off, closing your eyes or simply pushing it far far away. It disrupts, it disturbs but most importantly it serves a few purposes: at its best, it forces one to think, to question and to react to it and hopefully from there, one can move on to look around us and start thinking more critically; at its worst, it satisfies, it fulfils and it satiates one desire for something other or different from their daily dredgery. In other words, Noise engages and even empowers.

Noise is never just about the aural reception and translation of it; it should be about an experience, a trip or a "show" even. Thus, in many instances, noise artists emphasise the importance of a total art presentation, approximating the gesamtkunstwerk but without the bourgeois or class connotation. Some of these artistes even stage events, festivals and commune based performances which may or may not involve fans, believers and friends in its presentation. And more often than not, it invites controversy and the law.

Hermann Nitsch

One of the godfathers of the modern noise-thetics, as well as one of four key proponents of the notorious Vienna Aktionists, Nitsch had during his heyday 30 years back for not just shocking the world with their artistic breakthroughs back in the 1960s and 1970s but having as much legal and societal transgressive asides thrown in for good measure too. He is in fact still very active, releasing records and performing. At first listen, his ritualistic music does not so much sound like the in-your-face noise blasts of today. His music however work on another level of disruption and dissonance: which is the inquisition and breakdown of religion, human ritual practice, bloodletting and animal sacrifice together with the experience of an other-worldly trance/ecstatic process of a more primordial and archetypal form. His music mixes marching band, animal sounds, human chants, religious litany, rock instrumentation and atmospheric noise from the performance into something truly transgressive and mind boggling. Noise as transcendance, but not so much to blast our ears and minds into oblivion but more of a partake of a communal rite, a one-mind and "self" shredding passage.

What he does was to give noise a meaning, a human one which when it works, touch base with who and what we are. Noise as elemental force, as a tool to awaken us out of this dreaded capitalist (now post-capitalist) stupor of pure helpless spectacle on our part.

To find out more about Nitsch, go to Nitsch.

Is There A Noise Continuum? Part 2

2009-09-01T17:46:00.000-07:00

Noise has always been the most illusive of all genres in terms of its meaning to the creators, its distributors and at the end of the line, its listeners. Devoid of melody and harmony and full of jarring notes, spiky tones and messy instrumentation of at times non-traditional types, noise emcompasses all and eschews none. As John Cage has mentioned, music that we know of is just organised noise around us. Thus, before the recent solidification of Noise as a recognisable genre or a "sellable" category, noise is what music is not basically. This implies that, anything as rock as punk rock, as arty as Fluxus sound pieces, as transgressive as early industrial, as serious as sound poetry are/were at one time or the other considered as, noise, in more often than not, derogatory light.

The problematic part about tracing the genealogy of noise, is that unlike most genres, noise does not start from a convenient popular culture starting point, like Elvis or Beatles or Duke Ellington or the serialists or Sex Pistols. As the definition of noise is already so full of contradictory accounts, differing perspectives and even geographical provenance which often obscure the awareness of one progenitor of noise from the other till recent years, Noise can at most be seen as a simultaneous slow simmering of tiny bursts of creativity, rebellion and up-yours-ness across the world. Many of them did not even consider themselves noise-niks in the first place. Freaks, junkshop heads, unclassifiable jazzbos, and anyone who has the penchant for discordance and dissonance in their audio soundtracks were the ones who made up the ranks of such breed of din makers.

Los Angeles Free Music Society

The LAFMS is such a collective which arguably forged the current aesthetics of noise based on the millieu which I have traced above. Irreverent, goofy, experimental for the sake of experimental and then some, junkheap derived exercises, audio insanity and fauvist basement rock stylings, are just some of the descriptors for these loosely collected weirdos and geeks. They started operation since the early 1970s, when the USA was having its most barren times musically speaking. Go to: LAFMS

A collective which more than anything else emphasizes the individuality of the constituents of this motley crew, it is more an association or union of noise-makers than a band of aesthletes working within a similar parameter. But what binds them together is their urge to re-draw the meaning of music, sound and noise using non-conventional instrumentation and musical principles.

Doo-dooettes, Smegma, Airway are some of the more "famous" outfits under the aegis of the LAFMS. Besides working alongside fellow travellers within the collective, many of them venture out to collaborate with contemporary art terrorists/artists like Wolf Eyes, Keiji Haino and David Toop for the past few decades. A continuum to speak of? Most probably as they are still on-going today.

Is There A Noise Continuum?

2009-08-30T17:24:00.000-07:00

Simon Reynolds has been talking about a hardcore continuum in recent months. I have been more or less a lapsed electronica/dance music fan since the early noughties, except perhaps for stuff released by the Basic Channel axis, Raster-Noton label and the minimal noise-tronica terrorist, Pan Sonic. But reflecting on the development of Noise and related releases that one can vaguely classified under the broad umbrella of Noise (as posited by David Keenan's Noise primer in the Wire, Tochnit Aleph's mailorder catalogue,etc.), Noise as a genre seems to slowly unravel its provenance, roots and cross-disciplinary germination from as far afield as concrete poetry and electronic compositions in the modern classical mode, when more and more Noise-niks reveal their likes, influences and recommendations in the various rags, blogs, interviews and what-have-you in today's ultra-linked up world.

The Futurists, dada-ists and Surrealists might have provided the initial license to make some glorious noise in their various manifestos, actions and even some recordings, but they mainly gave the Noise-niks the philosophy, rationale and basis. Musically, of course it's a minefield to tread: from Lou Reed's iconoclastic "Metal Machine Music" to Throbbing Gristle to Whitehouse, from John Cage to Musique Concrete to Free Jazz, it all depends on whose entry point we are looking at and talking about. Of course, most of these currents, subcurrents and streams might or might not have actually mingled, mixed and produced the wide plethora of sub-genres of Noise today. But the main question is, what does Noise mean in today's world? With the floodgates of re-issues opened since the advent of CDs in the late 1980s, the digging of "seminal", "classic", "genre-defining" albums and lost works from the past just seem to overwhelm us month after month.

What I am attempting here is to propose, like what Reynolds has done for electronica, a continuum for Noise. I do not of course have the know-all to claim my view as the be-all end-all but perhaps as another source of point of reference, I hope will serve to discern the murk of electronic detritus, junk-shop clanks and high frequency jabs to our ears.

I do not intend to say that there is ever a first album which started it all but at anytime there would be a few visionaries crazy enough to release on plastic something audacious to shock and enthrall those who were listening out there.

Destroy All Monsters

A truly seminal band of misfits and art-damaged freaks from the mid-West of the US of A, DAM, has been making some noise literally for a few gloriously years under the radar. Like Masami Akita of Merzbow, whose initial impetus to make noise was that most of his favourite rock acts did not go beyond the ecstatic-inducing distortion of the electric guitars in their solos or jams, Mike Kelley (a renown artist in his own right, whose most famous art move to rock fans can be seen on Sonic Youth's album cover for the Dirty album/CD), Jim Shaw, Niagara and Cary Loren formed DAM in 1973 to rebel against the bland "rock" aristocracy of the day but also to infuse some of the more head-scratching ideas from the 20th century art world into the realm of "rock" or what they deemed as rock.

More Noise-rock than noise, DAM is the missing link between the world of found sounds, readymade scraps and sound shreds and traditional band set-up. It is almost like John Cage meeting MC5 in a lavatory and deciding to do a spirited rendition of Sun Ra's "Space Is The Place" using whatever they can pick up in the vicinity. But what a joyous, inspiring din! Listening back to the 3 CD box set (recently re-issued again), I cant help marvel at how ahead the band was in the midst of the disco-country rock-prog rock-fusion jazz stuffed 1970s. And of course its no surprise that the current heirs to Noise in the USA, Wolf Eyes, came from the same site of incubation, Ann Arbor!

To find out more about them, go to DAM.

Blind Beast: No Pain Baby No Gain?

2009-08-26T15:58:00.001-07:00

Went to National Museum for the film, "Blind Beast". It is one of the films featured in this year's Japanese Film Festival and main theme this year is horror. Based on a story by Edogawa Rampo, a renown Japanese writer of the mystery genre, the film is an excellent adaptation onto the big screen of profound inquisition of the nature of humanity, love and relationships. Yasuzo Masumura, the film director, though not known for any award-winning production held the helms behind this weird combination of erotica, psycho-thriller and crime which must have shocked, perplexed and intrigued many who had seen it back in the late 1960s when it was first shown in Japan.

The film depicts the obsession of a blind amateur sculptor who kidnapped a model who was supposed to embody the perfect female body form and in his attempts to persuade her to be his captive-model to pose for his ultimate artwork we witness the fall of the blind man into the pitfalls of manslaughter, lust and eventually S & M.

The most intriguing thing about this film is its ability to still provoke thoughts in the viewers despite the apparently gory amputations and ideas of S & M love/sex amidst today's overload of CGI-enhanced slash & cut horror/thriller flicks. Obvious not as in-your-face in terms of visual approximation of the blood and guts scenes but the film succeeded in its ability to update Marquis de Sade, "Venus In Fur" and some of the decadent literature. The primary question that popped into my head when I was watching the film was: who are we and what are we actually? Are we mere animals? Or worse, are we the aggressors-victims of our own sensual pleasures, transgressive thoughts and acts as well as psycho-erotic impulses?

The film does not answer these questions (who could actually, at the end of the day?) But it pushes us to wonder. A good film since awhile for me though.

Find out more about the film; the director here and the author of the story here.

HIJOKAIDAN Making Some Righteous Noise Across 30 CDs!!!

2009-08-16T17:55:00.000-07:00

Well, I almost wanted to name and dedicate this entry as "World's Second Greatest Record Label... After PSF - Alchemy"! but the sane side of me kept me in check. But I would say Alchemy Records, if it does not fulfil the above mentioned accolade, it is pretty close to it. Label boss, Jojo Hiroshige, an imposing looking man with no hair and a pair of mafia-like specs on his face reminds me of a yakuza hitman or someone along the line. Yes, he is a hitman of sound and noise. Pretty much the godfather of noise in Japan and arguably the world, he, his band, Hijokaidan (meaning Emergency Staircase) and the label basically define what Noise as a genre is since the early 1980s. Based in Osaka, instead of Tokyo, the long accepted face of Japanese Underground, Alchemy has been releasing tons of CDs of bands/acts from the Kansai region (as opposed to the Tokyo Bay region), providing an alternative to the domination of the capital city. Healthy rivalry I would say.

Back to the recently released anniversary box set of 30 CDs, titled simply "The Noise", it tracks the start, growth and development of the band since the late 1970s till today. From the early days of prog rock inspired Improv jam to all-out dada/actionist assaults on their audience to their mid-period explosion of band-based noise rock to today's in-your-face wall-of-noise blasts, this set tells us who's the boss in the world of Noise, be it Japan or elsewhere in the world.

Thrilling, kickass and what a blast to all pretenders of cool-noise dude faked fans out there!

Go to the PSF/Modern Music shop site if you are thinking of procuring a copy.

Rashied Ali: R.I.P. - 1935 - 2009

2009-08-16T16:06:00.000-07:00

Another month, another passing of another great musician/artist this year: Rashied Ali. One of the all-time greatest jazz drummers in the free jazz/post-free jazz era (1960s to now), he, together with Sunny Murray basically re-defined jazz drumming and push the power, passion, inter-play and energy of fire music/free jazz/ecstatic jazz to the outer limit without so much as looking backwards to wait for the rest of the world to catch up for the past four decades.

If you want to pay respect to this great man, check out these two albums: his all-time classic duo album with John Coltrane on "Interstellar Space" and his other duo album with Frank Lowe on "Duo Exchange". Both releases hold the world in hostage (if you are listening, that is) since the late 1960s/early 1970s. Buy the CDs and make sure great music continues instead of existing pathetically on some po-mo meaningless cyber-nothingness.

Find out more about him here. Others do a better job than me to eulogise and tell you much more about the man.

Another Slice of American Underground 1980s - Minutemen

2009-08-12T17:45:00.001-07:00

Another nostalgic trip while reading Azerrad's book concurrently with my current obsession with the Buttholes is the Minutemen. A totally different ballgame in terms of sound, aesthetics and image when placed next to the Surfers; Minutemen embodied the quintessential qualities of hard work, down-to-earthness, from-the-heart kind of honesty and directness - in other words, they were the salt of the earth.

Their funk/punk/jazz concoction across the various singles, EPs and LPs in the early/mid 1980s were breaths of fresh air in the increasingly stultified American hardcore scene where only skinheads, rapid-fire four-to-the-floor tom thumps and blitzkrieg guitars and army commander barks were acceptable norms. D Boon, M. Watts and G. Hurley refused to play the hardcore prescribed formula but instead went for a didactic approach with brain-provoking lyrics and unconventional but still powerful and angry song structures, which still manage to swing!

Watching the Minutemen DVD (if you can grab it, an invaluable document of the band and about the 1980s underground which was released a few years ago) brought back more memories of the good old days of pre-Alternative Rock era as the director of the documentary interviewed Henry Rollins/Chuck Dukowski from Black Flag, Joe Baiza from Saccharine Trust, Thurston Moore/Lee Ranaldo from Sonic Youth, Byron Coley and various other underground luminaries from the 1980s. Interjected with loads of Minutemen gig footages from their earlier days to their demise after the car wreck which ended D Boon's short but powerful life just made me pine for a rock hero of the 21st century. M Watts's heartfelt thoughts, reflections and eulogy to the band and D Boon somehow, made me realised that most likely, the spirit of the 1980s underground will not repeat itself again now and in the near future. The polarised dichotomy between underground and mainstream seems to be lost in the consciousness of the people today as with MP3 downloads, what difference does it make?

Surfing The Butthole... Once Again!

2009-08-11T21:15:00.000-07:00

Have been re-reading Michael Azerrad's tome on 1980s American underground rock over the past few days and as a result, the simple but lucid writing of Azerrad reminded me of how much I loved the craziness of the Butthole Surfers more than a decade ago. Almost immediately, I went to dig out all my Butthole Surfers' CDs and they have been spinning in my stereo ever since.

From "Butthole Surfers/Live PCPPEP" to "ElectricLarryLand", the Buttholes have managed to bring artistic and musical derangement to mainstream consciousness and scoring a few MTV hits and a gold album along the way. Many people, especially in the American underground have very different things to say about the band: from opportunistic money grabbers to absurdist dada damaged blues monsters and anything in between, they were often a bit of whatever that people have spew out about them. Who could beat a group with two drummers who play standing up, a naked lady dancing and doing far-out stuff on stage, with gruesome images/films being projected in the back with a bunch of acid-fried longhairs bouncing around with guitars?

No matter what people say about them, they were important: they were there, fearlessly pushing the form of rock forward, sideways and backwards even during their prime in the mid-1980s. Even their more recent major label albums were head-scratchingly fun to listen to and at least a few yards ahead of what was been released then. The avant rock/underground noise/New Weird America scenes of today would have been less interesting without the Buttholes.

And of course with a name like Butthole Surfers to top it off, what else do we need to say?

Check them out here.

New Noise Culture Magazine Launching Soon!

2009-07-28T17:46:00.000-07:00

Just found out Harbinger Sound label is launching its inaugural issue of a new Noise Culture magazine called As Loud As Possible... Think its long overdue for such a rag. Check out news of the mag here.

The label will also be re-issuing the long deleted 6 cassette box set in CD from one of the most underrated English Power Electronics bands of the 1980s/1990s, Ramleh, entitled Awake!. Also check out The Wire magazine's recent article on the band (from July 2009) by David Keenan of Volcanic Tongue.

Other releases of note of the Noise/Post Industrial scenes in recent months:
Nurse With Wound - Surveillance Lounge
Current 93 - Aleph At Hallucinatory Mountain
Skullflower - Malediction
Various - Michigan
Wolf Eyes - Always Wrong

The Baader Meinhof Gang - What Can We Infer From The 1960s/1970s?

2009-07-16T17:40:00.000-07:00

Recently watched the film made last year on the infamous "Commie/Anarchist terrorist" group, the Baader Meinhof Gang, simply entitled "The Baader Meinhof Complex". It was a two hour whirlwind of explosive scenes of riots, confrontation between the Left in Germany in the late 1960s/1970s, the acts of terrorism against the government, the USA, the capitalist tycoons and anyone who represented the Right. Done in the Hollywood/commercial narrative of action-pack sequences, it was not exactly a very good film: it fails to characterise the main figures of the Gang sufficiently to allow the audience to understand where they were coming from ideologically and contextually, the characters in the film were simply just characters without much attempt to establish some empathetic links between the viewers and the main protagonists.

However, the story of the Gang is a moving one: back then (it was only 30 to 40 years ago!), the people were idealistic, single-minded and determined to jump into action becuase of what their believe in, no apathy allowed basically. Both the Left and Right would go to streets, fight their opponents and even kill if need to. I am not advocating anarchy here but I am definitely touched by their conviction and devotion. In today's world, humans are simply caught up in the pure apathetic worldview of consumerism, 24-hour entertain-me people and careerist impetus in what they do.

Perhaps the collapse of the bipolar world of the Communist and the Western democratic worlds also marked the end of ideological fervor. But one interesting thing depicted in the film is that the so-called Islamic terrorists then were allies with the Baader Meinhof Gang and many other Left wing cell action groups around the world (see the demand-to-be-released list of the terrorists who bloodied the Munich Oympics or the training the Arabs provided for the Gang in the early 1970s). A far cry of the simplistic, religious/cultural based confrontational stance we see today between the Muslim fundamentalist groups and the West.

The Decadent Literature: Are They Really So Decadent After All These Years

2009-07-15T18:48:00.000-07:00

The Decadent/Symbolist literary movement has fascinated me for ages and I actually have a few books from these bunch of supposedly debauched chaps sitting on my shelf for years and recently thanks to my resurgent interest for fiction, I finally plucked them off the pile and finished a couple of them: Oscar Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Gray and Octave Mirbeau's The Torture Garden. The former title brought Wilde infamy and the latter actually earned the title for the sickest piece art of the 19th century. So what's all the fuss about?

Dorian Gray, one of the most popular titles in paperback fiction actually narrate the downfall of a young man who was endowed with such beauty that after his encounter with, a painter who did a portrait of him with such devilish likeness and a amoral man with plenty of suave and class from the aristocracy, that he began his fall from grace. The pivotal event to his slide was his utter disappointment with a girl whom he had fallen in love. Thereafter he became the god of temptation and decadence embodied, feared and loved by all with his misdemeanor. He remains gorgeous for decades while the painting of his deteriorated with much rapidity and severity. At the end he tried to destroy the painting and he kills himself instead. Dorian Gray is a tale of morality despite the claim for its decadent influence on the public then (in the book he openly references another decadent/symbolist classic, Against Nature by Huysmans which also contributed to the fall of Gray). Gray's misadventures in life was eventually terminated due to his own vanity, in other words, he reaps what he sows in the end. The emphasis of physical attributes and the disregard of a person's actions was the zeitgeist during the turn of the century but isn't it more so today than before? Hedonism for the pure sake of hedonism is the rule of the day. At least for Wilde and others based their belief in the transcendant nature of art, the art for art's sake maxim.

The Torture Garden on the other hand was basically an account of the narrator of the story who relates a lurid venture to the Orient and his encounter with the mysterious lady of his love. The second part of the story which gives us an account of the Torture Garden in China is the crunch of the entire book: description after description of horrid, revolting and inhuman ways of torturing and killing humans off with the utmost sense of pleasure and aesthetic attached to them by the lady. Even the self proclaimed decadent narrator cannot fathom and stomach much of what he witnesses. The lady however, goes through a cycle of regeneration after her every visit to the Garden. The book is thus basically a tale of warning of the sternest level: humans are cruel and some of us given the context will push the envelope of such propensity to its extreme as can be seen in the book. So what is morality and what is its role in the world today?

Both books might not shock any in today's world but the message and characters in them still have plenty of value to us: who are we, as humans actually? Are we by nature evil and amoral and that morality is just a cuff to hold us back from a potentially human hell of wilful cruelty and non-repenting course of self-serving hedonism?

Retrospective Introspection: Birthday Party, Loop and Flipper - The Glorious 1980s & Some Reasons Why This Is So

2009-07-13T16:04:00.000-07:00

It's sad but true: 99% of what the mainstream press called Rock today is just a joke: a dead facsmile of what went before or simply necrophiliac, and I am not even being retro. Where is the pure unrelenting power and energy? How about the sneering attitude with loads of real kick-ass out-of-control guitar riffs, plodding bass digs and no-frills drum thuds? What about the in-your-face confrontational live antics to end it all (even though I was not there but enough rock lore just keep me drooling)? None of the above and then some. Today's bands pose aplenty but there is where their creatvity, vitriol and awareness end. Period.

I have been listening to many 1980s stuff for the past few months: the Wipers, Half Japanese, etc. and I am impressed with these underrated/unsung musician heroes. I am impressed with the pure idealistic drive to play what they believe in with no or little commercial considerations. Yet, they push on hard, no harder than ever. Many of them (the Americans in particular) trawled through the inhuman circuit of the mid-1980s with almost no-pay, wet dorm floors and crammed vans which could break down any moment in the middle of the Mid West. Some went to see them, a few of them had their lives changed forever, and they went on to form bands of their own. Any lovely tales of such today, hardly, really.

I am just randomly picking out 3 bands: the Birthday Party, Flipper and Loop. Three acts of differing ideological. musical or motivational backgrounds to pick up a guitar or mic to rock out in the first place and they are so good that they just blow the hell out of 99% of the current bands (below 5 years of age but making some bucks cos they are so cool and hip with "in" hair-do or hip make-up) out there.

Nick Cave's second band (after Boy Next Door when they were in Australia then changing their name to Birthday Party soon after), Birthday Party is a pure machine of rage and musical debauchery personified. Sloppy at times but when they were together they could take on even their own heroes like the Stooges and the Pop Group. Listening to their live album again recently just reminds me that this is what great rock and roll should be.

Flipper is another great post-punk band from West coast USA. Moving through the circuit during the heydays of Hardcore Punk they were just so different: sludgy, heavy, intelligent but decadent all at the same time. They were able to fuse Black Sabbath, Chrome and Wire into a primal ball of rock energy with no effort at all. The two classic albums, Generic and Gone Fishin' were so ahead of their times that few appreciated what they meant and were trying to do. The Melvins, a seminal band which started their career in the mid 1980s basically tells us what we needed to know: without Flipper, the Melvins and whatever genres they spawned subsequently would have not happen. In other words, they were trailblazers of the highest order.

Loop, on the other hand, was seen as copyist band of another great act of the 1980s, Spacemen 3. But how could they have done so? Even though nominally both acts were influenced by the Stooges and MC5, the Nuggets compilation garage punk bands and etc but Loop added in krautrock and more drone than meandering vibe into their music. They represented the pushing of guitar based molten rock (in the aftermath of the pig-fuck bands on Blast First Records like Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers and Big Black which first stirred the imagination and furor of the British underground)to near catatonic forward-motion motorik psych rock ooze of the first degree. Their sound has been closer to the post-power electronics rock flail of Ramleh and Skullflower than the more shoegazing contingent which they were sometimes placed together then.

The three acts are just the tip of the iceberg of what real great rock means. They belong to the lost continuum of the alternative Rock genealogy starting from the Stooges, the Velvet Underground, MC5 and 13th Floor Elevators. An alternate history which needs to be told, soon.

Sky Saxon: R.I.P. 1937 - 2009

2009-07-08T17:10:00.000-07:00

The passing of a rock legend who though only had one hit on the charts back in the 1960s, went on to influence hundreds of artists and musicians in the past four decades - Sky Saxon. The single "Pushin' Too Hard" was a primitivo-motorik driving piece of rock blast which defines punk before punk actually happened. Grinding, urgent, intense and manic (just listen to Saxon's vocals), Saxon and his band, the Seeds basically handed down the basic mould for hard, garagey psych punk rock. Together with the 13th Floor Elevators and the Sonics, they created a sub-genre of post British Invasion derived bands in the States in the late 1960s.

Saxon subsequently disbanded, reformed, disbanded again, etc the band and released some solo effort, involved in musical and communitarian projects of another West coast legend Yahowha 13 in the 1970s (check out the Captain's Trip Records 13 CD box set for some of his contribution to this infamous cultic psych rock band; a killer set by the way).

Too bad his death has been overshadowed by another lesser legend of popular music, and I simply refuse to mention his name anywhere here...

If you want to pay tribute to this great musician, go to:
Sky Saxon

GIMME SHELTER! - Big Burly Guys on Harley Davidsons, Hippies, Peace & the End of An Era - the 1960s?

2009-07-02T16:09:00.000-07:00

I was at the National Museum of Singapore last Saturday to catch the music documentary, "Gimme Shelter", produced by the Maysles brothers, who were actually commissioned by the Rolling Stones to film the much talked about free concert at Altamont Speedway in California in the winter of 1969. Mick Jagger wanted it to be a posterity stance in the vibe of the recent Woodstock filming and as well as to introduce the new guitarist, Mick Taylor, who replaced the deceased elfin Brian Jones, to the Americans. Free concert? Yes, all in the spirit of the 1960s.

What actually took place and filmed on celluloid was more than just documenting a musical event, it became, in the eyes of many keen observers, one of the few key events which marked the end of the innocent, naive and peace-loving decade. What happened? Even before the violence which shocked the world took place at the site, there was purportedly a sense of foul and tense mood hanging in the air, according to many. Some musicians even felt that the concert "smelled wrong" and wanted to pull out even before reaching the site (Spencer Dryden of the Jefferson Airplane). We sure did not see this too clearly in the film though as it was focusing mainly on the Stones. By the way, Mick Jagger looked at times out of sorts or at a loss during his re-viewing of the footage taken during the event and he was looking at himself, not able to do much but just mouthing, in this case, ineffectual words like "brothers", "sisters", "peace", "cool it" and "love" to the audience most of the time before the eventual demise of the concert. Lester Bangs, in one of his articles on the Stones actually commented that Mick Jagger looked more like a lost child as compared to Keith Richards who at least dared to confront the Hell's Angels and the audience in the midst of the whole situation.

So what happened? Apparently, one of the Hell's Angels was interviewed to be saying that the audience became rowdy and "touched" his "wife"/Harley Davidson and of course no one could allow others to touch or abuse their wives and thus retaliation had to be in order. But of course, it was more than that. The film did not really show the fatigued audience much and the ill-conceived preparation the organisers, record company and management biggies which actually contributed to the violence which erupted despite so near comic telephone conversations between them shown interspersed throughout the first half.

The Hell's Angels (the San Francisco chapter), the infamous Harley riding outlaw-like band of wild-hearted chopper lovers who led a care-free but drug/alcohol/crime addled life were engaged as security for the concert (partly due to the short time notice, partly they were involved in Grateful Dead's security previously plus the Stones had used bikers for similar purposes back in UK). However, many underestimated their propensity for violence (see Lester Bangs' account of a gun-point gang bang in one of his posthumous anthologies).

On top of that due to the short notice as it was originally planned at the Golden Gate Park earlier but which did not pan out eventually provided logistical and psychological time bomb for the event on that day. Thousands of fans had to divert from heading toward San Francisco to this barren plot of arid land within a few days with literally no shelter available there. The fans looked tired and beat, as gleaned from the film, and no wonder some of them had short nerves or temper but the time the concert started.

The Airplane played "We Can Be Together" as the opening piece, hoping to ease the mounting tension felt in the air at Altamont but in vain. With hundreds of fans refusing to clear the stage and insisting on "breathing down the neck of the musicians", according to Sam Cutler, the Stones tour manager's plea to the audience to move away from the stage failed just meant that the clash between the fans and the Angels to be more inevitable. Then when the Airplane started their second song a bustle occurred at stage front. Marty Balin, the other vocalist of the band suddenly disappeared into the crowd and before anyone realised it he was knocked out by Angels. The rest of the Airplane tried to reason with the Angels to show "love" but this was definitely not the 'Love-In" crowd of Woodstock or the early days of San Franciscan psychedelia. They valiantly finished the set but the atmosphere had already been doomed.

The Dead did not even perform at Altamont as they had heard about what happened to Balin and the general bad vibes at the scene even though they were not there at the stage but due to a solid network of friends and fans, they were well-informed of the situation. They decided to beat a retreat and headed back for the helicopter which they had taken to the site.

At the end of the disaster, an Afro-American who carried a gun with him to the concert dead in the chaos which ensued when the Stones were playing.

What happened? Was it the organisers' fault? The Stones? The audience? The Hell's Angels? The venue? Or the dawn of the Summer of Love? Noone could and can give a definite conclusion or analysis.

The film was well done, capturing the tension between the audience and the organisers, between the Angels and the audience, between the Angels and the musicians without resorting to much fanciful camera work, as the saying goes, the truth speaks for itself.

At the end of the day, it perhaps marked the beginning of the end of the innocence.

John Zorn: Post-modernist Dilettante OR Modernist Avantgardist?

2009-07-01T19:14:00.000-07:00

Was reading the John Zorn book by John Brackett and was impressed with the insights and overall writing of the author and, illuminated, for me a deeper understanding of this great composer. My relationship with Zorn (on discs, of course) went back all the way to the mid 1990s when I bought his first Naked City album. Zorn together with his excellent band of who's who in the New York Downtown scene plus Fred Frith (ex-Henry Cow and guitar extraordinaire par excellence) basically altered part of my perception of what music was supposed to mean. A blitzrieg of diverse styles and genres within minutes, seconds even for some tracks, the album is full of surprises and shock by turn. But I felt distant towards it, as even though Zorn and co. played some of the grindcore/thrash like passages brilliantly and heavy as hell but somehow the overall vibe felt measured, and even calculated. Of course, I did not know much about him and his background then (that was before the age of the Internet).

Over the years, I bought more and more albums by him/his projects: Painkillers, Masada, Spy Vs. Spy, his more academic compositions, etc. and I grew to appreciate him more. Zorn seems to me (confirmed by Brackett's book) to be a proselytiser of avantgarde and transgressive music and as well as a traditionalist in the avantgarde tradition (thus the title of Brackett's book, Tradition and Trangression). Zorn regularly pays tribute to musicians and composers, film makers and actors, writers and artists and anyone who has been pushing the envelope of their arts in his music: Naked City and Painkillers as tribute bands to his love for thrash/grindcore/death metal, Masada for his Jewish roots but his love for Ornette Coleman (Spy Vs Spy too) as well and list goes on.

He dabbles, yes, but he goes deep and he knows his roots and history and he, in his sometimes oblique ways, follows a fine line of tradition which is at times obscure but forward-looking, shocking to the mainstream but necessary for the progress of the arts. Hence, he is not a postmodernist dilettante like what most critics think he is: he is one of the key nodes of the great modernist/avantgarde genealogy who is able to survive in this postmodernist age with his keen sense of the current socio-political contexts and his awareness of the need to show us the links between the various art forms and genres without flexing the postmodernist pose.

Go here to find out more about John Zorn:
John Zorn Bio

Check this out for his releases and others on his record label:
Tzadik

PSF Records: The Greatest Record Label of All Time?

2009-06-26T21:13:00.000-07:00

I was pleasantly shocked to find 4 great CDs on 70% discount when I was overseas recently:

Vajra - Sichisiki
Vajra - Sravaka
Kan Mikami - 13/4,900,089,658
Cinorama - Three Lies And A Ding-A-Ling Five

These might not be the top selection from PSF Records but anything, to me, released by this reverent label is better than most releases out there then and now. A one-man operation since the beginning (with the help of a couple at the retail shop front Modern Music), PSF Records has defined what it means to be no-bull shit music selection, no consideration for commercial logic and no compromise in quality. It first started out as a record label to release High Rise's first album, a power-amped up trio who combined the raw energy of the Stooges, Motorhead and Peter Brotzmann into one mind-swirling unit which kickstarted this label to international notice by underground geeks, obsessive collector types, chin-stroking intellectual music buffs and sheer nihilistic sonic freaks. What followed after this album in the mid 1980s were hundred over LPs, CDs, DVDs, videos, magazines and a book for the past 20 over years. Keiji Haino (something on him will, hopefully appear in this space in the near future) and his numerous outfits like Fushitsusha, Nijiumu and Vajra (an outfit with another legendary folk hero of the Japanese politico-folk scene from the 1970s, Kan Mikami), Acid Mothers Temple (the unit which turned many a psych fan from the west to the over-the-top sounds from the Japanese underground), Ghost (now anestablished psych-prog act which play major rock festivals all over the world), and numerous other bands under the radar but above the bar in their music.

Then I also ordered some recent releases from PSF as well:

High Rise - Psychedelis Speed Freak Live 1986 DVD
Maher Shalal Hash Baz with Masami Shinoda - Koshi Kudake No Inu DVD
Satoshi Sonoda - Everything Lies Beyond The Burning Summer Grasses: Early Works Of Satoshi Sonoda 1977-1978 CD

Two DVDs which further consolidate the overall aesthetics of the label in question:
High Rise's short archival DVD from mid 1980s is worth all the money with approximately 25 minutes of playtime but it packed some of the most cortex-melting free form/psych rock ever to put on scene. The power trio of Asahito Nanjo, guitarist Munehiro Narita and drummer Ujiie Yuro first start with some crunchy heavy garagey rock moves and within seconds tear through the chords and form and blitz through the set with so much vitriol and invention that the boundaries of rock has been stretch to its very limits and barely pushed back to shape thereafter. Blistering.

Maher Shalal Has Baz on the other hand showcase the other side of rock with a small group orchestra under the leadership of Tori Kudo, one of the prime movers of the late 1970s/early 1980s Club Minor scene in Tokyo (with other underground luminaries like Keiji Haino, Asahito Nanjo, Michio Kadotani, etc.)recorded live during the 1980s in the first years of this established band of shambolic, naive, outsider primitivo rock combo. False starts and informal rehearsal like gestures and communication fill the DVD: it feels as if we are peeping into the usually hidden mechanisms of a slick rock gig common today, with little regards for showmanship but everything to deal with sincerity, innocence and sheer exuberance towards music making. Fey melodious tunes, small group renditions of jazz, showtune and cabaret like pieces litter the whole enterprise but with surprising ripping guitar solos, Sun Ra-like keyboard stabs and inspired Eric Dolphy like sax from Masami Shinoda, who sadly, passed away in the early 1990s when he was still in his 30s.

The last item, the archival CD release by Satoshi Sonoda is commemorative album for the recently deceased Fushitsusha (Keiji Haino's greatest contribution to rock music) bassist cum all-rounder underground mainstay in the Jap Rock Underground since the 1980s, Yasushi Ozawa. Recorded during the embryonic days, Sonoda, together with Ozawa and others attempted several sideway glances and experiments at re-inventing garagey free-form punk-inspired rock, European Free Improv imformed sound scraping and even at moment Velvet like chord moves. A timely memorial for one of the foundational musicians of the scene.

If you want to check out some of these stuff go to:
PSF Records
Coming up I will be writing some stuff on John Zorn as well as some comparative retrospective on one of the most talked about concert in rock history, Altamont Freeway Free Concert, headlined by Rolling Stones which I had the fortune to view at National Museum of Singapore last weekend, 27 Jun 2009. Watch this space.

Review of 100 Greatest: Singapore 60s – The Definite Collection

2009-06-22T00:49:00.000-07:00

Recently have been out of town but managed to squeeze out a review of the recently released CD box set of Singapore's rock & pop scene by Universal Music here. Here is the link to the review:

Another Archival Article: Les Rallizes Denudes... Who are these mysterious.. eh... nude ones??

2009-05-24T17:24:00.000-07:00

This was written for the Flux Us website back in 2007:

Les Rallizes Denudes, a mysterious Japanese quartet (sometimes quintet) which is shrouded in as much cloak you can find on the main stage where Phantom of the Opera roams... No one knows what the mainman, Takashi Mizutani is up to nowadays, some whisper that he is currently in prison, due to his association with the Red Army (Shekigun) and their terrorist activities back in the 1970s and early 1980s. While others murmur through the thickened mist of rumours/hearsay that he is traversing across the globe, leading a carefree and vagabond-like existence.

But who are they, really? The name of the band roughly translates to “The Nude Rallizes” but what is “Rallizes” is anyone’s guess. If you have been affected & infected by the power and rage of some of the most transcending psychedelic rock vibes of Keiji Haino & Fushitsusha, High Rise, Acid Mothers Temple, Musica Transonic, Mainliner, etc., you would have heard traces of influence this band has on the names dropped. They are, nevertheless, a beast all on their own: Swirling fuzzy, distorted rock riffs spilled out at all directions and hit you like a hurricane once you have placed the CD in your player & pressed play on the control panel. But the similarity between Les Rallizes Denudes & the other so-called Jap Psych Rock bands stops there: What the other bands lack, the Denudes have it aplenty, which is the groove. Not just any rock groove a la The Stooges or Gang Of Four (which so many have copied & failed terribly) but something more, eh, funky? Something you can shake your toes to even (well at least for 1 of the tracks).

Another mind-boggling thing about them is the near impossibility to find legitimately released CDs/records by these guys (unless of course you are willing to mortgage your house or pawn your wife) as the 2 CDs & 1 video which they have released in early 1990s were totally sold out within weeks of their release. What you can find now are just bootleg CDs/LPs, nothing more, and many of them being CD-Rs.

The best label in the thriving cottage business of re-issuing various versions/combinations of the 2 legit CDs, soundboard recordings & live bootleg tapes by the Denudes is Overground from France. So far it has re-issued 2 proper CDs from these guys & they are proper factory pressed CDs & not poorly issued CDRs (which will deteriorate in a few years' time if you have not noticed):
1. le 12 mars 1977 a Tachikawa (a double CD set of 1 of the 2 CDs issued in the early 1990s, called '77 Live)
2. Live 1972

le 12 mars 1977 a Tachikawa - This is the one, the holy grail of Japanese psych rock before it was issued by Overground to save thousands out there in the world from total bankruptcy just to procure a copy of the original. Full of black magikal energy and endless psych riffs, solos and feedback, you will be totally transformed after you have played it once through, play it again, you will be forever change(d)..

live 1972 - The 2nd release features a more mellow set of deranged head-damaged blues, Mizutani and co. went for a more brooding mood in the songs, which evoke a certain sense of loss, the sensation of a bruised soul. Less in-your-face than the 1977 set but equally essential and mind-churning.

Post-script: After I wrote this article for the Flux Us website, Univive, a record label was established in Japan to release Les Rallizes Denudes box sets of live and soundboard recordings. Some of these are CD-Rs while the rest are properly pressed CDs. Apparently, this label has been given the nod from the man, Mizutani, himself to unleash more monster pandora’s boxes into this vacuous world of us. God bless Mizutani for saving us…

Notes From The Underground: RE/Search

2009-05-20T23:38:00.000-07:00

I just received a parcel yesterday and it contained a book which was published by RE/Search, entitled: RE/Search #4/5: W.S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Throbbing Gristle. Looking at the cover and its familiar-looking design and layout brought back memories of the good old days when we could take a bus or MRT ride down to Scotts Road, walked into Pacific Plaza and taking the elevators up to Tower Books (R.I.P.). I would definitely take a peep at the shelf where the store displayed copies of the publications from this exotic sounding printing house, RE/Search. What captured my attention and to made it a point to look out for books from RE/Search was the subject matters of these strange books: J.G. Ballard, Burroughs, Industrial Culture, Incredibly Strange Music, Incredibly Strange Films, etc. Esoteric. It makes one want to pick one copy off the shelf and read it to find out more.

The books are almost all A-4 sized so they look and feel more like magazines which I think they are: periodic spurts of rarefied gems from the counter-cultural underground. Over the years I picked up quite a few books from this amazing publisher and I became a fan till today. Run by V Vale and his partner for the past twenty over years, they are true icons and models of independent minded individuals who believe in reaching out, doing it on their own regardless of trends and fashion, and keeping the news coming from some of the most brilliant minds for the twentieth century.

My favourite one from RE/Search is Industrial Culture Handbook: a must-have manual into the post-punk spokesmen of this post-modern dystopian age. (The fact that so many noise, psych rock, electronica, weird folk musicians today are actually fans of Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Non, etc just tell us how influential the riveting noise emitted from the Industrial-ists were back in the late 1970s/early 1980s.

In today's increasing "all-branding-no-brain-needed" world, independent publishers like RE/Search are beacons of resistance and they serve as reminders to us that we need to be alert and not slide into the void which all the sit-coms, reality dramas, manufactured pop stars and simulacrum are perpetuating. Of course, not forgetting that they are true models of the modern small but staunchly-devoted cells committed to the ethos of "cottage industry": they teach us one important lesson which is think, think for yourself and make informed choices for whatever you do and consume lest you slide into the cul-de-sac of the bland and empty consumeristic trap of today.

Check these books out here:
RE/Search