There’s a fairly well-known story about Charlie Parker bringing his band to Paris, and spotting Igor Stravinsky in the audience. Like many of his jazz peers (and despite his headlong, self-destructive reputation), Parker was a keen and well-informed follower of classical music. As he played the bebop standard Salt Peanuts he added an impromptu tribute into his solo, blowing in a quote from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in the same conversational way that he’d have sung back another jazzman’s phrase through his horn. Stravinsky – no less a jazz fan himself – was so delighted that he spilled his drink.
If only all meetings of the classical conservatoire and the jazz stand were as happy as that one: but for every genuine Parker/Stravinsky-style love-in, there’s a daffy piece of fusion or a classical piece which colonizes without comprehending. I’ve learned to be suspicious when reading program notes in which a classical composer claims to love jazz and engage with its ideas. Too often, that jazz component becomes another post-modern ingredient to be used and ploughed under, just another dead rattling tongue in the composer’s vocabulary. It’s ugly to see a living form become a dried-up skin, its rhythms pinned under the steamroller of European art music as the latter rumbles on, convinced of its own innate superiority and its right to merely mimic and exploit where it should be sharing.
Richard Causton’s ‘Non mi comporto male’ is a welcome exception to these disappointments. Nominally, it’s a close-clustered set of solo piano variations on that cheerful Fats Waller evergreen, Ain’t Misbehavin’. Even the title is a tongue-in-cheek classical translation. In fact, being all of a piece (and having been built particularly freely out of the melodies and chord progressions), it’s closer to being a contrafact: an adaptive and inventive form which in modern times has found a happier home in jazz than it did in classical. Additionally, ‘Non mi comporto male’ builds backwards in a kind of reverse deconstruction. Coalescing over seven minutes from multiple, deliberately scattered fragments of tone and rhythm, it returns to the re-integrated original piece like an explosion filmed and played back in reverse. piwhT. moobaK.
So far, so tricky; and on spec alone this could have been a bloodless game. As a composer Causton’s cerebral skill is evident, and he echoes some of Harrison Birtwistle’s ideas of presenting multiple views of a musical theme from differing angles (and through different gaps in the musical bulk) and John Cage’s chance rearrangements of Erik Satie in ‘Cheap Imitation’. Yet rather than attempting to overwhelm Waller with architecture and indeterminacy, Causton chooses to honour him instead – first installing him invisibly at the heart of the piece and then gradually revealing him in small touches. Starting with what seems to be a tranquillized muddle of straying notes, and moving into fitful chromatic squiggles akin to bursting bebop saxophone lines, Causton slowly lets his key parts fall into place. A flurrying treble line may zig-zag away, only to lose its momentum and be gently pulled back in like a puppy on a leash. The entrance of a familiar bass chord brings gravity to a whirl of chromatic flechettes; emerging as if from nowhere, a true melody note is carefully positioned on a hinted moment of swing.
Pianist Stephen Wolff plays a major role in making this work. His impressive technical skill is well suited to interpreting Causton’s long-game of structure and projection; but he also displays a humble and affectionate understanding of jazz, making the eventual recovery of the original tune entirely convincing. By the sixth minute, Ain’t Misbehavin’ has emerged in full, softly and freely played, taking its final steps back into shape while surrounded by jags of high notes. Until just before the very end, a few stray extrapolated plinks still glint around the melody, like the dust left by hand-tooling: the last traces of Causton’s unexpected loving touch. You can imagine Fats himself – tipsy and happy, with whisky-glass in hand – chuckling away at it.
Richard Causton: ‘Non mi comporto male (for solo piano)’ (performed by Stephen Wolff)
unreleased recording (private collection)
composed and performed 1993
Band named after large thing actually sounds small. Single named after tiny things suggests that small-sounding band (named after large thing) could go massive. Sometimes I love pop’s ridiculous anti-logic.
Elephant are two. Christian Pinchbeck coaxes noises out of computers and wrangles chittering textures from guitars. Amelia Rivas plays old sounds on modern keyboards while swimming and sighing distractedly through the middle, avoiding eye contact. It’s synth-pop, allegedly, but it’s also nothing quite so obvious. Amelia and Christian may or may not be a couple, but that’s not clear either. With Elephant, not much is.
Ants is Elephant’s debut single, and it spends its three minutes cunningly, surprisingly persuading various things that shouldn’t work together to cosy up and make something which does work. A gentle reggae bounce, a dribble of whiter-than-anything psychedelic guitar direct from Cocteau Twins; a roughed-up reedy synth figure like a bass accordion with hiccups. As for what the song might be about, it’s somewhere between love-gone-wrong and epilepsy; like David Lynch reimagined as lovers rock. “I’m tired and I’m bruised for you,” Amelia murmurs, moping elegantly across the backbeat. “The war that I fought made my body contort… I’m down in the black, and I’m blue.”
When we talk of indie-pop being sickly, we usually mean that it lacks power. Here, sickliness is power. Unease and disease blend together, reality is erased by symptoms, and experience is somehow amplified by the giddiness and blank alarm. Throughout, there are references to buckling knees; to floating and amnesia and jump-offs; to falling to the ground or into song. Even the chorus avoids clarity in favour of hallucinatory warp (“Ants now scurry on the floor, / I just can’t remember before,”) with all perspective thrown right out-of-whack. Yet Elephant snatch a victory from these flashes of confusion and disaster, sheathing them into a subtle, catchy, play-it-again heartbeat of song; a cool, black-and-white flicker of distress call.
While Ants cloaks strangeness under bits of spooky washed-out reggae ballad, its flipside Wolf Cry goes for out-and-out surrealism in a stream of Bunuel electro-punk. Amelia sings of seasons, seafarers and parted lovers. Deeper into the song, she jinks these acid-folk fairytales into blurred dreams of power struggles, throwing out images of hunky aristocrats or “militants on the roof.” Everything hangs together – precariously – over Christian’s alienated instrumental bonework: a flat backdrop of flat echoing skitters, deep red bassquakes, ghostly chords and spray-can snare hits. As the song riffles balefully through its repertoire of cinematic flashes, impressions build and cut (“the ticking of a clock, jumps to interior,”) or flirt, archly, around games of obscurity (“we all wear a mask to a fellow passer-by.”)
Ultimately, Wolf Cry comes apart in the fingers if you squeeze too hard (the strange syntax, the dodging of plot, their mingling of seduction and avoidance) in much the same way that the story of Ants comes to us half-melted. Elephant have a knack for this kind of anti-logical play, squeezing into the gaps in the story. Besides, they’ve already demonstrated that they’re masters at magicking something coherent out of disorientated fragments – not least via a fine mournful tune or two. Evasive or not, they’re very much in the room. I suspect that I’m going to go on talking about them.
Elephant: ‘Ants’ Memphis Industries, MI0172S vinyl 7″/download single released: 17th January 2011
I’m new here. This is my first attempt at blogging, after several years when I felt that the blogosphere was saturated and didn’t believe that I myself had anything worthwhile to add. Words and feelings, however, have a habit of bleeding up after a while.
In my case, although I’m new here, I’ve also… been here before. I’m guessing that many of you who have dropped by to read this are doing so because of music reviews I’ve written in the past. This started out with bits and pieces for various British fanzines and small magazines (back while the age of paper was still rolling along nicely). By 1997, however, I was publishing online via my own ‘Misfit City’ music webzine, and if you’ve heard of me it will most likely have been via that.
Or perhaps I’m being arrogant. Maybe most of you have surfed in by accident, never having heard of ‘Misfit City’. In all honesty it was never more than a minor cult site: marginal, even for music webzines. It was London-based, eclectically musical, lushly-written and soft of underbelly. It wandered and waddled around the music scene between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s looking to have its synapses fondled (I myself did much the same thing while haunting various little venues in London). Initially this was all happening before the days when everything was online. Post-‘Pitchfork’ and ‘Organ’, certainly; but before the likes of ‘Stereogum‘, ‘Gorilla vs. Bear’ and ‘Drowned in Sound’ came to prominence. (AS it happens, halfway through the original ‘Misfit City’ run, ‘DiS’ came calling and invited me to play. Sometimes I wonder what might have happened if I’d said yes.)
‘Misfit City’ also pre-dated that rash of personal music blogs which stretch across the web now, and which don’t just offer comment and pictures but full multi-media. At the time, I thought I was doing well with my painstaking homepage links and contact addresses. With everything now interlinked via Facebook and beyond, possibilities have clearly moved on…
In addition, ‘Misfit City’ was written in an attempt to be all-embracing: never a good move in an age of sharply-defined identities. At the time, the London music scene (always active but sometimes sclerotic) was a ferment of ideas from Britpop to hardcore, post-rock to jazz, acoustica to electronica, contemporary classical to strange forms of folk, and all kinds of various cross-disciplinary pursuits. I caught onto the edges of some of these and missed others entirely. I passed my weeks in a whirl of night buses, speaker stacks and long hours spent alone hacking away at the type-face. As I once wrote (sometime in the early 2000s), the zine occasionally found credibility, but usually because it had bumped into it en route to somewhere else.
Now, eight years after ‘Misfit City’ finally collapsed, went offline and vanished, I’m resurrecting it as a blog. I’m heading back out onto the pulpit with a handful of notes and impressions plus those insights I’ve gained from exploring music, and simply winging the rest. There are new pieces to be written, and perhaps a greater opportunity to bat ideas around. Even back in the old days, there was so much more to cover and consider than that which eventually made it into the zine. Beyond some vague urges of salvage and exploration, I’m still not entirely sure what I’m doing beyond re-evaluating, re-working and re-posting. So for a number of months I’ve been listening and writing, preparing for once again travelling (and posting) in hope, allowing the blog to grow from there.
Reading certain blogs, one gets the impression that the writers have dropped fully-formed into the blogosphere – they’re wellsprings of information, opinions and discursive skill with all of their functions, fittings and rhetorical excellence in place. I doubt that this blog will be like that. My own mind has always been less regulated: it’s been more like a snow-globe or a kaleidoscope, full of whirling objects and tiny lenses through which I’ve viewed the world in squints and starts. This may mean that this blog starts out vague and smeary. Sorry, but so be it. Final form takes time to evolve. (The process of getting back into the saddle isn’t immediate either.)
While this is a new blog, and new items will be covered, don’t expect all of the posts to be covering brand new items or events. Far too much interesting material has sluiced over and past me over the years for me to ignore it just because it was released in a different year. Also, there’s plenty of music and reviews from the old days which deserve resurrection and fresh attention. So expect reviews of material released at any time, according to my whim. The agenda and base rule will be that if it still interests me, and I think that it’ll interest you, it’s going in. The original ‘zine was a sprawling jam of miscellaneous coverage (much as my listening habits were) and that’s not going to change now.
I’m aware that this also means that if there’s a defining character to this blog, it’ll be “wandering through my music collection.” Oh well… see the top of the page…
As ‘Misfit City’ takes on a new shape (as cities do when new demands and new ways of doing things impinge on them) I’m sure I’ll begin to find my way again. For the moment, I’m also considering the question of “why write about music”? – to which the answer is (in spite of all of the background noise, demands on my attention, arguments and frustrated stand-offs) because it still speaks to me and I want to speak in response. It still opens me up, and I want to find out what’s there again.
Testing to destruction. For some, this isn’t a harsh and necessary process, but a judicious way of life. For the floating, ever-mutating alliance of centrozoon (magisterial touch-guitarist Markus Reuter and synth-bumping/pad-thumping lateral thinker Bernard Wöstheinrich) it seems to be a shrug of nature. Either that, or a compulsion. As centrozoon add to their body of work over the years, they’ve studiously avoided clinging to previous methods. Instead, they function as a kind of art-rock Laputa – hovering briefly over various musical terrains, dropping down tendrils to slurp up flavours and approaches. Despite their bone-dry sense of humour, they’ve always remained a little detached and aloof.
At the same time, centrozoon are driven hard by cryptic fascinations of their own, including their vigorous collision of schooled technical approaches and wild, derailing instinct. Their music has always been bipolar and simultaneous. Crude synth presets are embedded into beautifully-fashioned electric textures; ravening, artful touch-guitar solos play off the blunt wallop of electric whack-pads. En route, centrozoon have explored majestic dark-ambient drift music, ridden the clattering back of gabba techno (while flaying it to within a microtonal inch of its life) and spent time as rhapsodic prog-inspired melody men. In the early 2000s, they borrowed the lissom voice and hooded lyrics of Tim Bowness (on furlough from No-Man) to slide smoothly into a song-driven world of art-pop. Equally smoothly, Markus and Bernhard subsequently hit the eject button in order to reform as an introverted chamber electronics duo. Every time centrozoon go public, they’re different. Every time they seem to settle on a final format, they discreetly blow it up and start again.
Ultimately, centrozoon navigate their increasingly risky game of de-build and re-build by trimming back everything that they’d otherwise need to defend. They explode their identities as musicians to become a diffuse spray of wandering cells. They reduce themselves, once again, to enigmatic minds on the prowl; and now they’ve delivered the most abstract and challenging record of their career.
Emerging after a period of diversion, scatter and relative silence, ‘Boner’ suggests that it’s becoming increasingly pointless to define centrozoon‘s work as a clear interplay of individuals. Instead, their work has become a kind of willing entanglement into which each man – somehow – disappears at full volume. Suitably, the contributions of the band’s current third man Tobias Reber are mostly sonic collage (drastic laptop sound-mangling, heavily processed field recordings, occasional blurts of absurdist lo-fi vocal). With both Markus and Bernhard now enthusiastically jumbling up their own sounds, the band creates an intense and murky improvised electrophonic soup – extreme, exaggerately processed and roaming balefully across unstable tonal centres. It’s both utterly fragmentary and utterly involved. If anything, those interim years spent on other projects have only added to the creative centrozoon seethe, bringing the musicians and sounds closer together.
Where ‘Boner’ stands in the wider scheme of music isn’t clear. Not jazz – there’s no swing here, few melodic rushes or pursuits of harmony, no acknowledgement of pop moves. Not ambient as such – despite the atmospheric swishes of sustained texture, there’s little solid order and continuance, and precious little commitment to minimalism. Something in the drive and stance of the music links it to the far fringes of experimental rock. If so, it’s clinging on by a fingernail.
These new, uncomfortable compositions hang in the air like spasming irises or like nested Venetian blinds: multi-layered, periodically flexing open and shut to reveal new textures and patterns. Ever restless, centrozoon shuffle each and every one of these layers, flying in further sound-fields in the blink of an eye. A dribble of coffee-maker noise jump-cuts to a rumble of bass strings. A radiophonic pot-swoop is overwhelmed by a ringing metallic chord or an imperative percussion thump. In the arrhythmic wander of La Waltz of Kirk, hints of Zawinul tropicalia well through the gaps. On Cervus, ominous and dissonant passages in a classical-minor form recur first as vaporous synth pads, then as overdriven bassy touch-guitar lines.
You could try to cite assorted chaotic improvisers, plunderphonic artists and mixing-desk contrarians as close cousins to this music. However, what remains clearest (most evidently on the rumbles, quick body-blows and Mellotron hangings of Knock Outs) is centrozoon‘s familial relationship with King Crimson. More particularly, with that band’s most left-field improvisations – the atonal busyness of the ProjeKCts; the poly-everything lurch and creak of the ’90s Double Trio (spattering pulped MIDI all over the stage on ‘THRaKaTTak’) and the spidery skitter of ‘Starless and Bible Black’. The post-modern stomp of Markus’ work with another Crimson spin-off – Tuner – is also present. Both Tuner and ‘Boner’ share a hypnotic mixture of harshness and disorientation; an over-arching, out-of-focus beauty; and a grate-and-chop, channel-surfing mixture of signals to pour into your ears. Like Crimson, centrozoon also possess a rigid skeleton of stateliness which glides serenely through even their most chaotic improvised scrambles.
While attempting to make sense of this scattered map, it’s equally important to point out that centrozoon are also exploding the idea of what a commercial music album ought to be. Generally, such things are self-contained musical statements – linked to a point in time, a specific intent and a clearly-defined sales package. In making ‘Boner’, the band embraced as many constructive (and deconstructive) possibilities of chance, reinterpretation and creative dissension as they could. Hundreds of initial hours of free trio improvisation were cut and pasted into new compositions; then a third layer of process was added via two outside remixers, each of whom independently cloned and mixed down the finished sessions.
The result is two twinned but different takes on the final album, with different mixes and track sequences (the Marziano Fontana version emphasising those dramatic cuts and layering, the Adrian Benavides mix more spacious, smooth and chilly). Additionally, centrozoon sell ‘Boner’ in a bewildering variety of packages (via its “Bonestarter” campaign), with diverse extras plugging into the deal like bonus phone apps. Options now include one or both album versions; further choices of formats and downloads; signatures; custom clothing; original artwork; even personal access via one-to-one conversations or touch-guitar lessons.
It’s not that these moves, in themselves, are new. Alternate mixes and reinventions are commonplace, and compositions via mixing desk and improv have been around at least since Zappa. Jane Siberry has offered special-purchase deals with souvenirs and judicious personal access for years. What is new is centrozoon‘s audacity in coupling all of this to such a demanding, avant-garde musical package.
Even without the bonuses, ‘Boner’ may prove to be an incomprehensible palimpsest for many listeners – a palette of capriciously shifting noises and sonic pounces. For others, these same qualities will be a selling point. With colossal chutzpah and confidence – and a disregard of risk – centrozoon are selling the album with all of the confidence of arena rockers touting a singalong blockbuster. Bold, yes – and also pretty funny.
But ultimately, buying one of these bonus-laden ‘Boner’ arrays is rather more significant than buying a box-set edition of a rock album. Those who go for the full-deal set of clothing, decoration and tuition won’t just be grabbing nick-nacks, but buying into a whole centrozoon artistic method: effectively, into a way of life. As a consumer, how can you be sure that you truly own and understand the bewilderments of ‘Boner’ unless you have the Grand Deal with all of the trappings and the chance to press flesh with its creators? Alternatively: if you just own your preferred single recording of ‘Boner’, have you identified its core source, and swept aside all of those commercial refractions; all of those fetish fruits to sweeten the pill?
All of this casts up more questions than answers… as does the album itself. Those who don’t want to embrace the whole Bonestarter frenzy (and ultimately, even those who do) will ultimately find that their involvement will boil down to whether or not they find ‘Boner’s relentlessly abstract, unaccommodating music worth the investment.
Cautiously, I’d say that it is… although I’d add the warning that this music will never be quite what you expect it to be, or what you try to force it to be. Material of this nature is tough to understand, as such – you need to intuit instead, working your way into it. As you’ve seen, ‘Boner’ has already spun over a thousand analytical words out of me as I try to get to grips with its multiple paths and detonated form. Yet my primary reaction to the album is visceral and instinctive.
Beyond the chopped-up structures and the modular marketing, I’m listening to a trio persistently and inexorably falling into the realms of utter abstraction, only to pull themselves back out by their fierce musicality as players and editors. What I’m hearing through the hundreds of shifts and swaps is their determination to plot a course through this humming chaos. The cautious and catlike way in which they place their feet, while otherwise convulsing their music so utterly. The manner in which they orbit and flirt with musical collapse, like a capsule orbiting a threatening black hole.
It’s these things that I remember, past the sing-song AutoTuned rants in Bright Meowing and Smoked Info Monster; past the pocket-calculator seizures of Weak Spelling; even past the jigsaw-puzzle Bonestarter sale of mixed music, time and trophies. It’s this determination that links those fleeting glimpses – around jump-cut corners – of fingers hammering down on strings, keys and mouse buttons before vanishing into the edit.
centrozoon: ‘Boner’ Unsung Records,
CD/download album (plus assorted packages)
Released: 9th May 2012
Your past is a different country. Wander into the wrong part of it and you might get socked on the back of the head: yes, you may have been there before, but you can’t do things in the same way now. At the same time, you’ll find that you’re already changed by having been there in the first place, so you can’t do those things in the same way anyway. Meilyr Jones knows about all this – now – and he’s keen to tell you about it.
Compared to some of the music Meilyr and his band have put out previously – exciting indie pop with an experimental edge rumpling up the sound – Mates is fairly straightforward. In common with many other Welsh pop bands, Race Horses have that Cymric reputation for lateral thinking squatting on their shoulders; but they wear it lightly. Instead of opening up a window through which you can peer into their world, they come lolloping over to meet yours, trailing the odd strange decoration or kooky wristband to colour things up a little.
Mates does start off as exotic process. The title, chanted, is an offbeat factory loop over which the song is assembled: a marimba plinks throughout, stolen from the school music room in order to scatter musical cherries on top. The muscle of the song itself is something of a hiccupping cha-cha-cha, led by the bass. The melody and words, though, make up a cheerful self-deprecating Britpop boysprawl, all big feet and perky singalong tune. It’s a song about being dumped – knocked sideways and woebegone – but it refuses to just lie down and die. The same clever boyishness has kept classic Madness songs fresh since the ’80s (though Race Horses sound as much like a decade-stretching handshake between the Bowies of ‘Scary Monsters’ and ‘Hunky Dory’, even down to the music-hall quirks).
As for where Race Horses find themselves at the moment, it’s in that freefalling zone between “us” and “you and me”, where laws of belief are tumbled over and even geography gets overwritten with new, painful memories. “All the times I used to doubt it / but now I find I’m lost without it” complains Meilyr, groping after a love that’s evaporated and left him staggering. This could be chapter one of a Casanova’s progress, as he seems to have found the first sniff of something he’s suddenly found himself hooked on. For now, he’s still fumbling in disbelief around the ache. “Your words, cold and heavy, / echo down the walls of the place we used to go, / when we were mates.” I know what he means – for me, a particular park in Crouch End is haunted even in bright sunshine, and I still can’t see a shooting star without feeling a twinge.
Still, despite the complaints, Meilyr seems to have already wrapped up the experience into a little eight-syllable summary which he can hold up like a snowglobe – “It cuts, it soothes. / It comes, it’s you,” – and the bouncing plink of the tune sounds more happy than despondent. Perhaps it’s the indomitable bungee-rope of young testosterone. Perhaps Meilyr’s just singing in the sure knowledge that Mates could be one of those songs which make a lot of capering indie pop kids happy during the summer of 2012. Hey ho, the twisted power of love gone splat. Ouch.
Race Horses: ‘Mates’ Stolen Recordings (no catalogue number or barcode)
Download-only single
Released: 9th May 2012
Buy it from: Download free from Race Horses Facebook page.
Out at the helm of Glowing House, Steve Varney is raw, ruffled, hollering and sounds born to run. This is just as well. Trouble is hot on his tail. “I don’t think there is a gauge that will save me – / somehow they overpower gunpowder, like it’s easy…”
The head-up single for the second Glowing House album, Taming Lions is all about the incipient, savage disaster that’s just about to crash down on Steve’s head. The band’s fall-apart folky acoustic noise catches the feeling perfectly. They sound like the kind of band which survives credit crunches, small nuclear wars and the collapse of most of the functional parts of civilization. You can see yawing flashes of light straight through the gaps in the barefoot, wind-tossed rhythms.
Besides the cluck and clunk of Steve’s banjo, the song’s a superb stomping wobble of school piano, Salvation Army brass, foggy rasps of accordion and dirty cello, and someone beating time on a tumbledown shack with a handful of big sticks. (I checked back on this – it’s actually a third of the band playing on church pews. Talk about muscular Christianity…) At the top of his carrying, celebratory bruise of a voice, Steve’s making it quite clear that he’s stuck in a rigged and increasingly dangerous game. “They gave me a ten-minute head start, and they started counting. / I need a top-notch hiding spot I can hide out in. / Don’t be fooled they’ll give you space in the chase for a reason – / they wait for the perfect minute to stop the healing.”
Off he hurtles; firing a cartoon blunderbuss for cover, and to no great effect. They keep coming. As the song bounces on, there are more than a few suggestions that what Steve’s actually fleeing are his own demons, bouncing after him like a tin can tied to his ankle. Not much hope in escaping that way. But the sheer vigor of the band – of the song itself – suggests that they’re people who thrive on this kind of peril and the energy it kicks up. This is enormous fun. Keeping one step ahead of disaster rarely sounded so lively.
Glowing House: ‘Taming Lions’
Bandcamp
download-only single
released: 8th May 2012
Swoon. /swo͞on/ A verb. To be emotionally affected by someone or something that one admires; become ecstatic. Here are some people and things that make me swoon. #swoon #swoonage
Misfit City 