SUPPOSE YOU FOUND THE PERFECT FLOWER – WOULD YOU PICK IT?

“Becoming has no number. We can count, measure, dissect only the lifeless and so much of the living as can be dissociated from livingness. Pure becoming, pure life, is in this sense incapable of being bounded. It lies beyond the domain of cause and effect, law and measure. No deep and pure historical research seeks for conformities with causal laws – or, if it does so, it does not understand its own essence…”
(Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol 1, Chapter III: Alfred A Knopf Inc, 1926)

What if absolute certainty failed to disguise the nothingness which sometimes constitutes the essence of something only considered to be “pure life” by the person living it, provided that person is impelled so forcefully to impose themselves upon the world, unasked and only grudgingly loved? “Loved” defiantly but definitely tethered to its inverted commas – loved because the aim of your media is to burnish your image on the inner retina of everyone, so that they can never hope not to see you, be aware of you. Such is the case with Madonna; so brazen and bold is her hatred and contempt of the world, and more than anyone else, her fans and perhaps her lovers. And we, her spectators, are made to feel the guilty parties. Don’t we have anything better to do with “our” lives?

Hard to imagine that, although Madonna played no active part in the No Wave movement of the late ‘70s, her career couldn’t have happened without it – and more importantly, Ze Records - as a guideline. Early hits like “Holiday” and “Borderline” wouldn’t have been at all out of place on Mutant Disco, and the genuine pop and fizz of her music at this stage is comparable with the jouissance of the early Jackson 5 records; from a period when she was still on the make but didn’t let us, or even herself, into her secret agenda. And what about “Like A Virgin” – the record which finally gave Nile Rodgers a new trick card to deal with, a supremely ironic statement of unironic chasteness, deliciously derailed by her performance of the song on TOTP in a proto-Kelly Osbourne pink wig, committing fellatio on the studio floor. How could she lose? “Into The Groove” – the punctum behind her only cinematic appearance of worth, playing an airbrushed self within the airbrushed post-No New York of Desperately Seeking Susan, but which is the closest and most sublime celebration of the subjugation of her already very big Self into the non-verbal communiques of the music. “Only when I’m dancing can I feel this free/At night I lock the door so no one else can see.” But barely has she liberated/imprisoned herself before she expresses the deep desire to “dance with someone else.” Isolation does not equate with a monastery, at least not one which Madonna cannot run with an iron heel.

One might have expected the ego to go supernova in tandem with the career, but apart from the tacky “Material Girl” which sounded and still sounds like a Hazel O’Connor B-side, with its entirely unnecessary Monroe pastiche of a video, the standards were maintained; “Live To Tell” is as moving and affecting as any of her ballads, and “Papa Don’t Preach” is a seamless Barthesian analysis of the value and meaning of the word “baby” in popular music, a direct counterpart to Scritti Politti’s “The Word Girl” – how literal do we take the word “baby” when sung? Are we turned on by it or turned off by realism? Is it her boyfriend or her pregnancy whom she is intent on “keeping”? (And note the sublime third way in the first verse – “I’m not a baby”) Think of how moved you are by Joni on Blue until you realise that the profundity of your affection and empathy with her is directly affected by how carnal her otherwise despondent (or despondent because it’s carnally frustrated?) voice sounds (as with Rickie Lee Jones – the two most sublime and sexual singers of the word “baby” I can think of). And “Open Your Heart” with its cascading drums a crucial half-beat behind the introductory vocal of “watch out, watch out” is as persuasive an argument for unregulated capitalism as one could ever dream up, amplified sinisterly by the video which pictures 13-year-old Felix Howard trapped within a peepshow. Would anyone get away with that now?

Sadly, the myth then took precedence over any notion of “quality” and the persona became more of an issue than whatever art she could turn her hand to. The film and soundtrack Who’s That Girl? were fatally (because uninterestingly) self-referential. Shanghai Surprise typified the sort of empty vessel which any ego will ultimately be compelled to sail. And all this fed back into 1989’s grotesque and overrated Like A Prayer - Madonna’s final demand to Take Her Seriously (but we already were! Ciccone Youth’s “Into The Groove(y)” was an unalloyed tribute - No Wave’s Fifth Cavalry claiming back someone who should always have been one of their number), her attempt, more or less, to be Prince. Indeed Prince contributed to the distinctly unsexy duet “Lovesong” (never to be confused with Lovesexy) and anonymously to the title track and its closing mirror “Act of Contrition.” It is self-pitying, Sean Penning, otiose and overblown.

Madonna then drew back a little. Taking Malcolm McLaren at his word, she caught up with his ambulance to produce “Vogue”; and then corralled Lenny Kravitz into producing his only good record “Justify My Love” wherein a Public Enemy beat is ripped out of its testosterone surroundings and, to an extent, feminised. But both of these were a warm-up for 1992’s astonishing album Erotica which is still viewed by most with wariness and suspicion but which, a decade later, is more clearly than ever her one great album; the only one, dare one say, which admits the existence of doubt. Of un-happiness.

“Erotica” the song, as with Erotica the album – and its distant and misleading cousin, the Sex photobook – is of course unsexy. The “sex” is a red herring. Everything here – submission, dominance, masochism, sadism, pleasure, coming – is subdued to the unasked question “is that all there is?” (and why Madonna has not covered that song in blancmange yet I do not know). Shep Pettibone did most of the production, and alone of all Madonna’s producers, from Reggie Lucas to William Orbit, appears to have understood her and understood what to get out of here. Erotica was, along with its alter ego Automatic For The People, my most played album of 1992 (especially on Oxford Tube journeys – alas I did not overplay, or even underplay, the more ostensibly hip records of that year such as Lazer Guided Melodies or It’s A Shame About Ray). It came out in the autumn, and autumnal it certainly sounds; no more so than on the title track, which deploys the saddest and most poignant use of a Kool and the Gang sample (“Jungle Boogie”) to provide a slight atonal but wistful counterpart to Madonna’s oddly distant and asexual pleas. Every song on this album is in a minor or semi-minor key.

And speaking of “Is There All That Is,” how right it should be that Madonna should get around to covering that tormented torch song’s prequel, “Fever.” But if your yawning can barely be suppressed at the thought of yet another cover version of “Fever,” this is understated, underplayed, and crucially reharmonised – the carnality is turned into abstract philosophy revealing the true poverty of human historicism. The groove is subdued; the vibraphone warns that a heartbeat can dwell a universe away. But is the veil lifted? Not a chance. “Bye Bye Baby” manages to paraphrase both PiL (“This is not a love song”) and Dylan (“So I’ll just stop blowin’ in the wind”) to tell the boy who has dared to make her cry to fuck off. I’ll sneer so that I can’t be seen crying.

Then comes “Deeper And Deeper” which may well be Madonna’s finest and most yearning single. It sounds like, of all people, Stock, Aitken and Waterman with a dash of the Pet Shop Boys (the opening and chorus vocals are very Kylie) and some flamenco guitar towards the end. Within the song Madonna succeeds in uniting her dysfunctional parental disapprovals with the need for greater and realer sexual fulfilment. She becomes her own mother and paraphrases her own “Vogue” to climax the song. Brilliant and still underrated.

“Where Life Begins” is a far more comely invitation to/exaltation of cunnilingus than the, shall we say, somewhat over-literal Yeastie Girls on Consolidated’s “You Suck” from the same year; within it are some embers of compassion. Then comes the letdown, however; “Bad Girl” (“drunk by six” with its unambiguous use of “baby” in the chorus) is another good ballad which stops just short of sentimentality; “Waiting” is about non-tantric tension.

Side two of Erotica is a fairly bleak affair; death is evident within its grounds, and sex is only, literally, the flipside of death. “Thief Of Hearts” bounces along uncertainly, punctuated by the percussion of smashed glass and a snarled “Bitch!” “Words” reconfigures and ultimately negates Martin Fry’s idealisation of discourse above/parallel with penetration (cf. the subtle reference to “The Look Of Love” in the intro to “Papa Don’t Preach”). Then things slip into winter: “Rain” veers too far into the land of gloop; “Why’s It So Hard” (“to love one another”) is a deliberate pun and a routine pop-reggae plod whose sentiments would shame Sting; “In This Life” is the album’s intended epic ballad, and though its threnody for AIDS victims might just be discerned as heartfelt, and its piano refrain which sounds like Monk’s “Misterioso” played sideways, isn’t unmoving, it’s too literal; you’re telling us too much, running the risk of being banal. Perhaps that’s why you hide. And that is why she, at the end of the record, retreats to her “Secret Garden” – a remarkably early attempt at refined drum ‘n’ bass, and one of the most disturbing pieces of music she has ever recorded. As with none of her other records, she sounds as though she is talking, no, whispering, to herself, trying to reconstitute her existence. She is on the verge of unmasking herself as what she has always been – a blissful blank space. “You plant the seed and I’ll watch it grow” – we’ve been here very recently, haven’t we? “Where my place is – where my FACE is – I know it’s in here somewhere…a heart that will not harden/A place where I can be born.” But, as with any Second Coming, can we truly believe her? At the end – following a truly chilling moment where she switches directly from narration to singing – extremely threateningly in its assumed composure - she confides in us: “Somewhere in Fontainebleau lies my secret garden,” and almost imperceptibly, James Preston’s piano paraphrases a motif from Tadd Dameron’s 1956 tone poem “Fontainebleau.” That she says nothing about this, either on the track or on the sleeve, may well be a pleasing exemplar of how hip Madonna expects her audience to be; but then again, and more likely, it may just have passed her by.

And she never got near it again. All Madonna’s subsequent output seems to me like a desperate attempt to keep up. 1994’s Bedtime Stories wanders around in Nellee Hooper’s immense corridors to little effect, with the exception of her last great ballad, the one time when she does let the mask slip, “Take A Bow” – an extremely moving piece of self-assassination and realisation of one’s own imminent iconic redundancy; perhaps she ought to have said “goodbye” for real after the song ended. But no, there followed Ray Of Light which only shows how much better Orbit understood All Saints than he did Madonna, and the incoherent, unfathomable mess that is Music. What certainty does she have left now? Her ill-advised tenure as faux lady of the manor in Britain is coming to a very precise end; she gets back to LA just in time, before she’s snared as the star turn in the Conservative Party’s 2005 election rally. For Madonna, borderlines were never as important as deadlines.

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .

FILLED SPECTRE

What is it about the 3rd of February that makes it a date for pop music nemeses to call themselves in? It was on the 3rd of February 1959 that Buddy Holly took the ‘plane because he wanted his shirts laundered for his next gig. On the 3rd of February 1967 – surely not a coincidence, for Holly was his avatar, endlessly evoked in repeated seances – Joe Meek, approaching 40, out of fashion, penniless, soon-to-be homeless bankrupt, turned a shotgun on his landlady and thereafter on himself. And on the 3rd of February 2003, Phil Spector was arrested and charged with first-degree murder following the fatal shooting of a moderately well-known 40-year-old actress, Lana Clarkson, in the grounds of his immense mansion. No one else appears to have been in his home at the time of the shooting, which occurred in California, a state in which first-degree murder still carries the death penalty. Musicians with whom Spector has worked in the past, such as Leonard Cohen and the Ramones, have spoken of him as a paranoid control freak not averse to pulling a gun on the artists if they do not adhere obediently to his aesthetic template. All in all, it does not look promising for Spector, yet may be the sadly logical conclusion to a wasted and wasteful career.

I had planned to write this piece before news of the murder broke, but listening to his productions – it almost seems unreasonable to apply the term “music” to them – feel that I would have come to the same conclusion, namely that I find Spector’s records to be oppressive, meretricious, bombastic, pedantic, unfascinatingly hollow, devoid of any interest in or relation to humanity (even the most “inhuman” of music has to acknowledge, by definition, the existence of humanity) and, much worse, destructive to the artists and the music involved, and smugly sinister in its attempts to disguise the reactionary sentiments expressed within it under a coat of post-Camelot faux-liberalism. Spector’s work is about the mechanics of control, and does not necessarily presuppose the existence of something concrete to be controlled. As the controller, his work often descends into grotesque, sub-Mr Arkadin self-pity.

It may well all have been the fault of Lonnie Donegan. Legend has it that the teenage Spector was originally inspired to pick up a guitar after listening to Donegan’s “Rock Island Line.” More probably, the suicide of his father when Spector was 13, and the family’s subsequent move from the Bronx to Hollywood, drove everything driveable. His first attempt at songwriting and production fortuitously turned out to be the international hit “To Know Him Is To Love Him” performed under the name of the Teddy Bears, the song’s title famously derived from the epitaph on his father’s gravestone. As a record it is a self-enclosed hymn, with already enough echo on the lower registers of the piano to suggest at least partial submersion in an underwater grave; quiet, but why is it so explicitly quiet? Compare it with its 1961 sequel, the Paris Sisters’ “I Love How You Love Me,” an almost exact parallel – melodically and lyrically – to the Teddy Bears song. The production approach has hardly changed, the tempo remains funereal rather than carnal, Priscilla Paris’ whisper is anything but sensual. The song is either an expression of necrophilia or self-love, and reminds us of the wafer-thin line which separates the two (and as regards “liberal” self-love, compare either with John & Yoko’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” from 1972, again produced by Spector, and a song whose structure, by Lennon’s own admission, derived squarely from “I Love How You Love Me.” Despite the presence of the Harlem Community Children’s Choir, the record can hardly be described as open).

“To Know Him Is To Love Him” was a substantial hit around the world, but Spector was ripped off on the money, and a couple of years later flew to NYC to commence work as, firstly, A&R man for Atlantic (one entertains fantastical notions of what Ornette or Mingus records might have sounded like with Spector at the control desk), and then freelance writer/producer, eventually setting up his own indie label, Philles Records. Early Spector hits were generally unpretentious teen fodder (Ray Peterson’s “Corrine, Corrine”) or straightforward, if melodramatically arranged, rock ‘n’ roll (Curtis Lee’s “Pretty Little Angel Eyes” and “Under The Moon Of Love” – both records owing their vitality to Lee’s driven, slightly over-enthusiastic vocals). Perhaps the earliest signs of what was to come lay in Ben E King’s “Spanish Harlem” which, although more or less a Leiber and Stoller production, did feature contributions from Spector, including a gradually enlarging aural canvas, and the beginnings (Spector wrote the lyric) of what was ultimately to prove a dangerous infatuation with the Other (“With eyes as black as coal that looks (sic) down in my soul…I’m goin’ to pick that rose and watch her as she grows/In my garden”). Despite King’s naturally beneficent vocal delivery, this gives us an early indication that Spector was to become pop’s most pretentious plantation owner.

Gene Pitney’s “Every Breath I Take” shows stirrings of portentous and unsubtle rhythmic emphases over a routine Goffin-King ballad, but the Spector “wall of sound” as we know it blossoms in the course of “Uptown” by the Crystals – in fact you can hear it happen at the beginning of the second verse, as a second rhythm section audibly makes itself known to bolster the sonics. Sung by Barbara Alston, the song concerns a downtrodden “little man” who only becomes “a King” when he visits the Other “in my tenement.” The chord changes are tempting, but the record comes across as a glorification of Spector’s own cultural tourism.

Far more disturbing was the Crystals’ unreleased follow-up “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss).” The poignancy of King’s melody hardly serves as any kind of counterpart to Goffin’s lyric, which seems to me like a prototype Taliban manifesto, exalting the virtues of violence against unfaithful/disobedient women. Alston’s vocal is clearly uneasy about the whole thing, and it might be relevant that she never again took the lead vocal on a Crystals record. “He’s A Rebel” again tells us how great and individual Darlene Love’s baby (or, if you like, Spector) is, apart from when he’s with her. The excruciating and overwrought plod through “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” by Bob E Soxx and the Blue Jeans introduces another Spector trademark – of magnifying something essentially banal by means of pomp and bluster to make it appear avant-garde and/or profound. Note that here we have a black singer interpreting a song from that KKK-excusing Disney flick Song of the South. Note generally the complete subjection of black singers to Spector’s whiter than white wall of sound over the next 2-3 years.

There is not much to say about the well-known run of hits involving the Crystals and Ronettes. Some commentators (perhaps you needed to be born in the 1940s to appreciate Spector) exalt records like “Be My Baby” and “Da Doo Ron Ron” as being Roy Liechtenstein’s pop art transported and reinterpreted within the context of the pop song, and constituting the most articulate expression of teenage dreams and wishes. But a cursory view of the lyrics reveal just how conventional, conservative and dreary these “dreams” are – almost without exception they return again and again to themes like marriage and children, about giving themselves up to their babies, in both senses. The Republican Party would have been proud to use these lyrics as a basis for their election manifesto. Nor do they work particularly well as pop records; the vast armies of musicians employed by Spector (generally pissed-off West Coast jazzers making a living reading flyshit, or else trainee stars like Harry Nilsson, Sonny Bono, Glen Campbell, Herb Alpert and Leon Russell) slow the dynamics of the music, making the rhythms ploddy and undanceable; and what they produce is not very interesting sonically. Spector may have used five guitarists, two bassists and three drummers, but they are all playing the same, banal riffs. The only interesting commentary comes from the out-of-phase castanets which rattle their spermatozoa conduits through tracks like “Be My Baby” (the triple snare drum fills, as on many other Spector records, sounding like rape) and “Then He Kissed Me.” Ronnie Spector’s voice is caressing and brilliant, but too often on Ronettes records does she sound as though she’s struggling to make herself heard, even on what is supposedly the personification of the adolescent male fantasy of female domination, “Be My Baby.” Appropriately, in the booklet which accompanies the Back To Mono boxset compilation, the photograph used to illustrate the lyrics to “Be My Baby” illustrates an elated Spector being literally cradled in the arms of the Ronettes as though they are about to go down on him en masse. He can barely hide his hard-on…and of course he ends up marrying one of them.

It’s a marvel, really, at how these records were taken at all seriously as pop. Compare the sludge-filled, overbalanced plod of things like “Walking In The Rain” with the ebullient and unforced jouissance of what was being produced by Motown at the same time. Spector could never have been capable of anything with the lightness and genuine good humour (humour seems to be a complete absentee from Spector’s work) of something like “Please Mr Postman” or “Mickey’s Monkey” – not to mention the genuine ingenuity of Smokey Robinson, Norman Whitfield and Holland/Dozier/Holland, working with more or less the same large-scale number of musicians, but without any of the grandstanding (with Spector you are never far away from the semi-despondent cry of “Look how big mine is!”).

When Spector relented on the grandiloquence a little and allowed spatial awareness to intrude upon his work, there were admittedly glimpses of interesting ideas – the genuinely unsettling and unsettled arrangement, for instance, on Darlene Love’s “Strange Love” or the unresolved cadences of Love’s “Stumble and Fall” (with Hal Blaine’s drums appropriately stumbling in distended rolls), or, best of all, when Spector let Ronnie be herself, gave her a beautiful Valentine of a record – her cover of the old doowop standard “So Young,” the strand from which Lynch, Badalamenti and Cruise subsequently drew their own musical visions. For just about the only time in Spector’s music, compassion makes itself known here.

When Spector signed the Righteous Brothers, they were the first male voices with which he had worked for at least a couple of years; yet his work with them is no less histronic or purposeless, least so on the overblown “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” which remains nothing more than a grotesque minstrel show parody of black soul vocalese, and in particular a slowed-down parody of the Four Tops’ contemporaneous “Baby I Need Your Loving” which is scarcely less gratuitous or patronising than Vanilla Fudge’s dreary demolition of “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” two years later. Subsequent assaults by Bobby Hatfield’s beyond-hammy falsetto on “Unchained Melody” and “Ebb Tide” are unlistenable – the murder perpetrated on the latter, in particular, is bloodier when set in contrast with Sinatra’s definitive, grieving and understated performance of the same song on Only The Lonely, not to mention the genuine emotion which Roy Hamilton brought to his recordings of both songs in the ‘50s.

I haven’t mentioned Brian Wilson yet, and purposely so, because in Wilson we not only have a musician who, apart from contributing keyboards to some Spector sessions, idolised Spector and listened (and still listens) to “Be My Baby” every day as some kind of talisman/prayer point, but also understood that he, Wilson, could do more with what Spector started, and bring some emotion and architecture to the Wall. Thus Hal Blaine striking a half-filled watering can in “Caroline No” conveys more emotion than a boxset full of martial rolls and crashes, because with Wilson his interest in humanity is paramount. Bassist Carol Kaye, a Spector and later Wilson regular, cried when Wilson played her “God Only Knows” on the piano for the first time. You cannot cry at anything Spector produced, because even the melancholy continually comes across as self-propagating egotism (feel my imagined pain! never mind the pain I cause to others!). Joe Meek was as chilly a human being as Spector, but even at his most seemingly dictatorial you never lose sight of Meek’s eagerness, and even lust, for adventure – not just to try something different, but to convey something of himself onto his productions. Rarely do Spector records caress the listener. The Wall of Sound could easily have fitted into Michelangelo’s mausoleum of a lobby for the Lawrentian Library in Florence. It is cold and fundamentally anti-human (not the same thing as “inhuman”). That having been said, two tracks of this period – “This Could Be The Night” by the Modern Folk Quartet and “Paradise” by the Ronettes – provide clear pointers to Pet Sounds. As both songs were co-authored by a youthful Harry Nilsson, it’s understandable that they offer an escape route which Wilson took and Spector isn’t.

Perhaps most anti-human and sickest of all is the way in which Spector makes his wife perform the clearly heartfelt lament of “I Wish I Never Saw The Sunshine,” forcing her to express her emotional and physical pain, all of which was caused by him. It is perhaps the cruellest performance ever imposed by a producer on an artist in pop history, only approached by what Bjorn made Agnetha sing on “The Winner Takes It All” (and I remain ambivalent about the mechanics behind Abba’s later work). Go on Ronnie, tell the world you’re in pain – no one’s listening, they just want to get off on it (cf. the screams on Eminem’s “Kim”). Those massed drums thumping (they literally sound like wifebeating). It is a horrendous ordeal to hear; little wonder that the track was never given a UK release. One wonders how narrow an escape she did make.

It’s perhaps entirely in character that Spector’s one indisputable masterpiece of a record was sung by another battered wife whose husband got a label credit but who was kept out of the studio. “River Deep Mountain High” by Ike and Tina Turner was of course the record towards which Spector had been building over the previous five years, the orgasm towards which he had been fucking pop music. A hollow masterpiece it may be, but in its own David Bomberg way, the art within it exploded into precisely ordered rhombi of sonority.

How hollow? Indeed the song has a wooden heart. It compares love for the Other with love for a rag doll and a puppy – mute, obedient objects who won’t complain about being mistreated. But the terrible, ecstatic awe of both Tina Turner’s vocal and Jack Nitzsche’s for once genuinely multilayered orchestration combine to produce a pop record which actually sounds as though it’s going somewhere, rather than standing still and demanding that you admire it. The dynamics are felt – the quiet middle section remains potent, with its congas and finger snaps, before strings and brass gradually work their way back in, up the register until finally Turner and Spector come, scream, as one. That moment is the cynosure of all Spector’s art, and after it the art could only disintegrate into its fundamental components. The final resonant chord of the record sounds as though the Wall of Sound has been knocked down, demolished.

It was Spector’s finest creation, and because he refused to subscribe to payola shenanigans, radio stations decided to freeze him out and the record stiffed everywhere except in Britain, where it sold a million. Spector retreated to his opiate of a Xanadu, briefly to re-emerge in 1969 to produce some sides for Sonny Charles and the Checkmates. A garrulous and overwrought assassination of “Proud Mary” was the nadir of this period; while “Black Pearl” acts as a kind of bookend to “Spanish Harlem,” and “Love Is All I Have To Give” is more or less an excuse for Charles’ David Ruffinesque vocal to articulate Spector’s plea to Ronnie to “let me live again” (how devalued that expression sounds here, compared to the genuine distress with which the suicidal Jimmy Stewart sobs the words at the climax of It’s A Wonderful Life). The song here is virtually buried under all the ornamentation, the sliding scales of which perhaps constitute a pointer to what My Bloody Valentine would do two decades hence, and a forlorn violin comes in at the fadeout to play some klezmer licks.

After that, Spector retreated, only to come out as a “class” producer, a signifier devoid of signified, to be displayed like a trophy by rockers needing a revival – by Lennon, by Harrison, by Clapton, usually using nothing more than his trademark echoes, now sounding more tangible and less extreme with advances in recording technology (it is a myth that Spector’s sound was unreproducable, as evidenced by the success with which people like Ivor Raymonde and John Franz, with the aid of a Fairchild compressor, were able to reproduce it pretty accurately on the Walker Brothers and Dusty Springfield’s series of mid-‘60s hits; or indeed Roy Wood with Wizzard in the early ’70s, at much less cost and with much more humour). Records such as Lennon’s Rock And Roll or Leonard Cohen’s Death Of A Ladies’ Man sound like long, slurred, drunken barroom conversations set to some autopilot Spector music.

Individual efforts during this period such as Cher’s “A Woman’s Story” attempt the faux-grandeur of old, but sadder is Dion’s interminable reading of “Born To Be With You.” This latter clearly aspires to kaddish status – when Dion sings “sleep eternally” one almost expects the band to break into “Just A Closer Walk With Thee” – but it’s no more profound than “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah”; it, and its follow-up “Make The Woman Love Me” are lumbering, ponderous beasts of records which can’t quite summon angst, making a bonfire out of a couple of discarded lighters. It is significant that Bruce Springsteen and his band visited the studios during the sessions for the latter, and even more so that with “Born To Run” – recorded and released in the same year, 1975 – he managed to do Spector better than Spector. Even to a non-Boss believer such as myself, it’s obvious that in “Born To Run” the epic grandeur – achieved with just the usual E Street Band line-up – is heartfelt and the emotions expressed in the song are urgent and genuine. In its intuitive understanding of the dynamics of pop, it grasps what Spector never could; because Springsteen didn’t, and doesn’t, shut himself away from the world with only his own unmarked standards to live up to. A recording console is so much more straightforward to fuck than another human being.

And with recording studios in the ‘70s not being what they were in the ‘60s, Spector’s records suddenly started sounding smaller – as though anyone could do it. Anyone could have recorded the Ramones’ version of “Baby I Love You” – indeed Dave Edmunds had done so seven years previously. Since 1980 it has been mostly reclusion and silence, except for some aborted sessions with power pop band Outrageous Cherry, and recent sessions (which remain likely to be released) with Starsailor. I cannot say that I am wringing my hands in anticipation. Hear the strident yet subtle brilliance of Trevor Horn’s production of tAtU’s “All The Things She Said” and then imagine what a lumpen, sunken, self-pitying pudding of a record Spector would have made out of it.

But then again, the events of the 3rd of February – in a year in which we may be compelled to question all our beliefs in this thing called pop music as never before – may well serve as a reminder of what happens to those of us who value music, art, wires and plastic over the flesh and blood of humanity.

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .

253

The book which for me symbolised that strangest of years, 1998, was 253 by the British-based Canadian expat Geoff Ryman. This was a "print remix" of a moderately interactive novel which Ryman had posted on the internet in 1996, and consists fundamentally of a detailed 253-word analysis of each of the 253 passengers (you see the pattern already) taking a Bakerloo Line tube train between Embankment and Elephant and Castle. There are links between some of the passengers, which are easily locatable on the internet version, but in the standard book format, unless you cheat by going to the index at the rear, you have to work out these links by yourself.

Ryman admits that nothing much happens in the seven-and-a-half minutes which the action of this book covers. This is ingenuous, as one very major and final act occurs, without which the book would be nothing but a Trivial Pursuit-type dalliance in planned serendipity. There are plenty of footnotes, mainly ironic commentary on the non-existent architectural beauty of inner SE London, garnished with some autobiographical reminiscences about Canada and Ryman's youth; some mock advertisements; and one footnote in particular which occupies several pages and concerns the return of a 200+-year-old William Blake to the Lambeth of 1995.

This is a deceptively spiritual book, and reading it from beginning to end in print is not only a different exercise from toing and froing between links on the net, but is how I suspect Ryman actually intended the book to be read. Its structure becomes more conventionally apparent, as we move, passenger by passenger, from car to car, as the histories and fears accumulate, and the climax towards which the story is working. It is generally bleak and unremitting (it is set in early January) in its pitiless descriptions of the forlorn souls who by coincidence or circumstance come to occupy this train on this particular morning - all struggling to stay alive in their different ways, nobody fulfilled, most of them coming to "the end of the line." Salvation can only be achieved in abstract ways (there are many and increasingly more pronounced references to "salvation through art").

We of course can guess what's going to happen from the first character described; the train driver, a refugee Turkish political prisoner who is knackered after a late night arguing the toss over Islamic fundamentalism with his two best friends (and check the heaviness of the symbolism there - it leads to death!) and consequently falls asleep at the wheel, having first hung his jacket on the Dead Man's Handle. References are made throughout to what's going to happen - in particular when Ryman (cameoing as himself) is escorted off Car 2 of the train at Lambeth North by a policeman, having engaged in unlicensed "Tube theatre," i.e. a dud-sounding comedic routine involving sitting on several passengers. An announcement comes over the Tannoy, and everyone suddenly falls silent in shock.

Another group of people have disembarked from Car 4 after a hungover passenger has vomited copiously. Yet another group literally dance off the last car - Car 7 - already in another, older and perhaps better societal world. They manage to escape to ground level before hearing of what's happened on the train.

Spiritualism, as I've said, becomes more and more pronounced the further down the train we travel - from Car 2's one-armed psychotic Milton Richards, believing that he is under instruction from Jesus to kill his pregnant stepdaughter, who happens to be in Car 1, to more explicit pronouncements relating to the afterlife in Car 6, and finally in the climactic Car 7, where an old lady who does not know she is the escaped Anne Frank spontaneously leads everyone else in the carriage in a dance to "Is That All There Is?" - that kaddish of a popular song, written by Leiber and Stoller for Peggy Lee. No one here is ready for the final disappointment.

Ryman is very canny to play down the impact of the section he labels "The End Of The Line." He says that the crash was only put in the book to make it more interesting for readers impatient for some action. But in fact the crash, death, haunts the entire book; is in fact very deliberate. It is the book's attempt to make itself art. The book would have been impossible without the crash - it would not have transcended the boundary between parlour games and literature. Those unlucky enough still to be on the train at Elephant and Castle cease to exist, bloodily and horribly (the literary understatement renders it all the more sinister). The only survivors are the hungover exec, a pigeon which accidentally flew onto the train, and "Anne Frank" - and the latter is clearly symbolic.

At the rear of the book Ryman proposes that readers submit entries for a sequel - Another One Along In A Minute - wherein the train behind the one which has crashed comes to a halt for five minutes - 300 passengers, 300 words. Not much appears to have happened with this, nor do I suspect anything needed to happen. The whole thing is hyperreal - for a start, Bakerloo line trains are not composed solely of elongated rows of single seats - it's as much a fiction as the proposal in Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday wherein the world would be destabilised were the Circle Line train from Sloane Square next to stop at Baker Street.

Is this a major work of fiction? I cannot answer that - only that it has carried especial relevance to me, on my daily journeys through London back to - and from - Oxford, many times involving changing tubes at the Elephant and Castle, in the year of 1998, in an odd but not inexplicable association with Ultrasound's "Best Wishes" - one of the great singles of the '90s, and one of the great prayers for the dead rendered in popular music, its cover showing an identikit suburban high street, slowly being flooded. It haunted me, but did it prophesy? Not in terms of what happened at Chancery Lane the other week, but in terms of my own narrow escape from death in October that same year. It was as if that entire year had been leading up to it. And what did I listen to when I came out the other end of the tunnel? Bill Fay, for one (see above). And what did I read? Commentary in the Guardian and London Review of Books about the simultaneous passing of Ted Hughes. Ron Brown caught short on Clapham Common, a location as unreal to me in my hospital bed, just a couple of miles away, as the projected vision of Kansas in Ryman's previous novel Was. Quite a lot of Borges.

And what did I learn?

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .

THE WILD WOOD OF BILL FAY

The theme of this month's Mojo magazine is Great British Musical Eccentrics. While it is obviously preferable that artists such as Vashti Bunyan and Robin Gibb (as a soloist) are written about in any capacity than not at all, there's something faintly odious about the way in which Mojo seeks to pigeonhole people like Jarvis Cocker, Richard D James, Ray Davies and Andy Partridge, none of whom could fairly be described as "eccentrics." Worse still is a perfectly fine list of British albums which are labelled as having been produced by "eccentrics." In the case of records such as Rock Bottom, this is a vacuous and virulent insult; in the case of others such as Maxinquaye it is quite inexplicable. The received subtext would appear to be Records Made By People Who Fail To Adhere To The Tenets Of The Camden Town Good Music Society. People who are not normal. Musicians whose music is somehow far less real than REAL MEN like the increasingly hapless Solomon Burke.

Among this list is included the eponymous 1970 debut album by the singer, pianist and songwriter Bill Fay, the sleeve of which portrays him walking across the Serpentine. Well, OK. And your point is?

One point is that this album was released on CD in the autumn of 1998, combined with his far less (ostensibly) cosy 1971 sequel, Time Of The Last Persecution. Having just painfully left hospital, I seemed to require quietly disturbing, yet fundamentally pastoral, music to ease my various manifestations of pain; and this CD left a mark on me, much more so than, say, Dylan Live At The "Royal Albert Hall" which came out at the same time, which I listened to once, was knocked out by (at least the electric second half) and which I duly filed away, never to be listened to again.

English music, as much as or more than any other, demands of its appreciation its relationship (real or imagined) to the environment in which you listen to it. And I cannot listen to Bill Fay's exquisitely tortured music without thinking of Oxford in that transitional, queerly sunny winter of 1998-9. How can it make sense in South London?

On the CD there is also included both sides of his solitary single from 1967. The B-side "Scream in the Ears" is a surprisingly volatile take on electric Dylan, but the A-side "Some Good Advice," painfully perfect in its two minutes and 18 seconds, is, I am convinced, one of the most punctuating singles I have ever heard. And it is so fragile; a repeated descending minor key piano chordal range with melodramatic drumrolls every eighth beat and a mellotron floating above the music like Banquo's ghost. Lyrically it is what the title suggests; advice to a young child, more probably advice to himself. "If you want to build a shed/Then go ahead/And bulid your shed...And if you want/To paint a gate/It's not too late/To paint your gate." Sounds like a Junior Choice reject? No...it's so frail and hopeless a scenario, so shattering in its humility. Hear how the guitar suddenly shreds halfway through the track before disappearing again. The final lines, sung with evident relish, are: "Don't listen to/Anything anyone tries to tell you." Except he doesn't. It's one of the greatest singles of its year, or indeed any year. You may cry at it if your mind is framed in a certain way.

Then nothing for three years, until he emerged, clean-shaven atop the Serpentine, for his 1970 debut. The sonic palette was magnified immeasurably (though not everyone agrees) by the involvement of Michael Gibbs as arranger. On the sleeve there is a telling commentary by Fay wherein he states that as a boy he spent five years constructing a small wooden box. When completed, he took it to his woodwork teacher, who proclaimed it the worst piece of woodwork he'd ever seen and smashed it with a mallet. This album, he stated, was the first creative thing he'd done since then. He would do what he needed to do, and then go away again to dodge any further mallets.

So this is what he needed to say, and he needed to say it all at once. Critics complain that Gibbs' orchestrations compete with and drown out Fay's songs, but here the large sonorities are to me as apposite as those Gibbs was later to devise for Joni Mitchell's Don Juan's Reckless Daughter. One only has to hear how the strings and brass rise and fall with terrible suddenness behind Fay's vocal on "The Sun Is Bored." The record is much more explicitly bleak than anything Nick Drake did, but not terminally so. The brief but biting "The Room" is the nearest the record comes to the atmosphere of "Some Good Advice," but here Fay presents us with a black and unsentimental portrait of drug addiction which again and again finds no respite in the unresolved graveyard of its minor chords battling against his fatalistic, semi-croaked "forever." "We Want You To Stay" is pretty unambiguous in its message, too, though Gibbs lifts us out of the despair with his radiant sunlit chords, as well as an uncredited but instantly recognisable John Surman on soprano sax. The desperate faux-Cockney of "Sing Us One Of Your Songs May" is reminiscent of the John Cale of Helen of Troy tackling "Yesterday Once More" - who the hell am I? But there is hope and light until the end, with the mildly rebuking but essentially positive message of "Be Not So Fearful."

The record didn't sell - was hardly promoted - but Fay still had some more things to say, and say them he did, albeit ten million times more brutally, on his second album, Time Of The Last Persecution. This record was scarcely even reviewed, let alone promoted, and its cover depicted a now long-haired, bearded and very weary-looking "Billy Fay." Out went Gibbs' lushness; in came what was essentially the working band of improv guitarist Ray Russell, who had appeared, albeit relatively restrained, on the first album, but who was now given licence to do whatever was needed. And certainly in that strange period between 1970-76, bookended by comparatively conventional careers, Russell was as near as this country ever got to producing a guitarist as proficiently fiery as Sonny Sharrock.

How worst to describe Persecution? The name of Syd Barrett immediately springs to mind, but more pertinently, imagine a Syd Barrett who, in a rare moment of utter clarity and lucidity, saw his situation, saw the world and for 30 or so minutes was able to make complete and articulate sense of it. Not so far from Roger Waters? Perhaps not - and there's certainly an element of Waters' later misanthropy in songs like "Let All The Other Teddies Know." But there is a severely scarifying assuredness to the brutality into which this record more often travels, especially on its second side. The songs on side one, including bruised ballads with divine Beatles chord progressions like "I Hear Your Calling" or "Don't Let My Marigolds Die," give us an idea of the suppressed immense rage at which Russell's guitar intermittently and immaculately scratches. The focus on the very Barrett-esque "Laughing Man" is as sharp as last Thursday afternoon's snow. A horn section appears on "'Til The Christ Come Back" but its repeated fanfares become increasingly higher-pitched and more discordant. The track fades out just as it's about to explode.

And detonate the music does on side two, most pronounced on the devastating title track over which Fay's Cale-like croon (and even Bryan Ferry in a sour mood-anticipating croon) over stately Sunday school piano chords is increasingly subverted and finally drowned in a freeform whirlpool, Russell taking off for atonal space; trombonist Nick Evans and tenorman Tony Roberts not far behind him. "Come A Day" is the equivalent of the previous album's "Be Not So Fearful," but no easy salvation is to be found here as again the track disintegrates into shards of improv noise causality, the piano continuing sternly underneath the apocalypse. The album, and Fay's career, ends with the still terrifying lullaby "Let All The Other Teddies Know" (with its sinister aside "be ready when the cupboard explodes"). This song is relatively peaceful, but Russell cannot resist adding some more Sharrockian runs towards the end, just to let you know that the demon, and death, still exist.

And that was it. Fay released nothing more and until the 1998 CD reissue (and in its sleevenotes) had been assumed to have vanished without trace, into some sort of Drake/Barrett type of self-imposed hell; another casualty of causality. But stories are not always so facile. With the renewed interest, Fay bemusedly re-emerged to say that actually he had been holding down a perfectly good day job for the last quarter-century, and yes he did still write songs but didn't feel any great need to put them out on record; because (he didn't say it, but we knew it anyway) everything he had, was driven, to say had been said, definitively and finitely. The malletphobia out of his system, he could then resume his life. Art, music, as catharsis. He didn't die, didn't go mad, didn't do drugs. He lived, and lives, as you or I do. Still...listening to it again in Oxford in January 2002, I still smell death in the notes of this music. But that's wholly my fault, and not at all his, that his music can make me cry and terrify me like that of Dylan never has done or could ever do. And that's not Dylan's fault, either. But it's nothing to do with "eccentricity" - it's simply people trying to make aesthetic sense of their existence. How else do we create?

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .

MARVIN GAYE – I CAN’T GO ON. I GO ON

The Beckett analogy is not out of place with Marvin Gaye. Let us be clear on a key point – What’s Going On, the album, is not Noam Chomsky set to music, is not an exhaustive yet pertinent blueprint for a perfect society, is not Socialist Worker editorials set to music, sets no agenda, does not pretend to speak for anyone except the man who was responsible for it, and – crucially – those who cannot speak for themselves. It is routinely voted into all-time top ten album lists for the wrong reasons. It was not recorded to justify the existence of Neil Kinnock or Paul Weller, or come to think of it Jamiroquai. It is an intricate (more often than not painfully intricate) examination of the assumed disintegration and disordering of a man’s mind.

In many ways What’s Going On was, implicitly and explicitly, an anti-Motown record; explicitly because Gaye wanted to do things his way, wanted the title track released as a single and refused to record or release anything else until Berry Gordy wearily agreed. Why introduce reality into the fluffy kitten of a world that was Motown in 1970? We’ve got along fine doing it our way…don’t spoil our fun (or, more importantly, our profits). Arguably, though, Norman Whitfield, who had done such a subversive job arranging and producing “Grapevine,” had already ventured (albeit comparatively shallowly) into political waters with the Temptations of “Cloud Nine” and beyond, and the Undisputed Truth’s “Smiling Faces Sometimes” wasn’t far away. But What’s Going On the record? Gaye knew exactly what he wanted, and Gordy eventually conceded and requested that he record an album around the concept of the song. This Gaye did in March 1971 with most of the Motown regulars on hand, including strings arranged by David Van DePitte (credited the “Fastest Pen Alive” on the sleeve) and major musical and lyrical input from Renaldo “Obie” Benson of the Four Tops.

And there are personal reasons why What’s Going On? might be considered anti-Motown; Tammi Terrell, Gaye’s preferred female singing partner, had died in 1970 of a brain tumour, having collapsed in Gaye’s arms onstage some months previously. It was said that the onset of her tumour was a direct result of an injury sustained to her head by her then partner, ex-Temptation David Ruffin, at the time still the epitome of full-on “maleness” in Motown music. So it was made in the light of bereavement, both personal (Terrell) and symbolic – his younger brother Frankie was away fighting in Vietnam.

The first thing we have to consider about What’s Going On? is the duality expressed by the presence of the two saxophone soloists, Eli Fountain on alto, and Wild Bill Moore on tenor. Both were given the master tapes and asked more or less to solo throughout all the tracks; their contributions were then edited and faded into the foreground when aesthetically required. Fountain represents the female or “mother” side of Gaye’s personality, his graceful, kind and warm tone very reminiscent of the then recently deceased Johnny Hodges (and his playing is significantly predominantly featured); while Moore’s tenor is the male and (sinisterly?) the “father/he-man” side of Gaye, hard-toned and thrusting forwards, explicitly under direction to do a Pharaoh Sanders or Archie Shepp – indeed, both Sanders and Shepp were approached to solo on the album, but were contractually bound to ABC/Impulse Records at the time (this in itself lends an interesting perspective to Shepp’s curious near-miss of an album, 1972’s Attica Blues, which quite openly is his attempt to do a What’s Going On?). Moore’s playing suddenly comes into the spotlight when a particularly emphatic point (or anger) has to be made (or expressed).

The utopia to which ‘70s soul music repeatedly returns was primarily constructed out of the title track of What’s Going On? In the album mix, Gaye parties with members of the local football team (stoned or not stoned?) in the background, while the (apparently accidental) duality of his various vocals is made more prominent – the voice singing, the mind thinking something else. The duality comes back again and again throughout the album. And there is never any “soul” singing as Brown or Pickett would have recognised it – the approach of Gaye’s light tenor we now can appreciate more fully in light of his expressed admiration for Jimmy Scott; and indeed it is virtually asexual, as though he is looking down with great reproach at the world to which he remains umbilically attached.

The album is essentially a half-hour extrapolation on the title song. The same main musical motif introduces the second track (and the rest of side one segues continuously) “What’s Happening Brother.” Constructed as an imagined dialogue between Gaye and his Vietnam-based brother, the viewpoint alternates freely between either; Gaye’s own personal day-to-day agonies (“Can’t find no work, can’t find no job my friend”) set against Frankie’s heartbreaking attempts to hang onto some sort of recognisable reality (“Are they still gettin’ down where we used to go and dance/Will our ball club win the pennant, do you think they have a chance?”). The climactic final lines “What’s been shakin’ up and down the line/I want to know ‘cause I’m slightly behind the time” could be said by either. At that point the music decelerates, goes into momentary dissonance under Gaye’s anguished falsetto croon before mutating into “Flyin’ High (In The Friendly Sky).” Here the “utopia” becomes a woozy anaesthetic, James Jamerson’s inverted bassline (compare with John Cale at the close of the Velvets’ “I’m Waiting For The Man”) commenting ironically on Gaye’s mental destabilisation as he attempts to seek refuge in drugs, always aware (“so stupid minded”) that there is “self-destruction in my hand” and that he has become “hooked…to the boy who makes slaves out of men.” In the background one of his alter egos muses “Nobody really understands.”

But he can’t destroy himself when others are set to be destroyed through no fault of their own. So the music re-focuses into the orchestra and chorus waltz of “Save The Children” where Gaye’s song is echoed deliberately by his far less certain spoken voice. Can he believe what he is singing about the end of the world? The music stealthily builds in tension and both Gaye’s singing and speaking voices rise – perhaps tearfully, perhaps orgasmically. As both of their voices decide to “save the babies,” the pent-up tension of the music suddenly breaks free into an ecstatic rhythmic 3/4 groove over which Fountain’s alto floats in a heartbreakingly brief expression of freedom. But Gaye the realist quickly stops it all with an extended “But…” before the “What’s Going On?” music starts again and he modifies it into “But who really cares?” He still has to care, so it’s a return to ecstasy for the glorious “God Is Love” where for the first time on the record the music is in an unambiguously major key, trumpets (of the Angel Gabriel?) joyfully blaring as Gaye reasserts his own faith. The attendant irony of “love your father” is of course only detectable retrospectively (and hear the whisper behind “Don’t go and talk about my Father (i.e. God)” which warns “Don’t talk ‘bout spiritual lust (i.e. his own father)”) but the grievous punctum comes when he reaches the line “Love your brother” and his alter ego suddenly screams “MY BROTHER!” and briefly overwhelms the entire track.

The vision is there, its articulation as yet incomplete. We now move into the climax of side one, “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” where a bewildered Gaye asks “Where did all the blue skies go?” before musing on the “poison in the wind that blows from the north and south and east.” Moore’s outraged tenor rips through the musing for a moment or two, before the opening “What’s Going On?” motif yet again returns and remains unresolved, culminating in what is still one of the most frightening endings in all popular music – the sudden and completely unexpected appearance of the Moog synthesiser, not quite for the first time on a Motown record but certainly the most pronounced, as the song/sequence grinds to a halt, giving way to the terrible horror of the closing inhuman “voice,” Gaye’s piano issuing a repeated, crashing, dissonant toll as though he is smashing his own right hand. Another Dies Irae for the world’s end.

Side two is where Gaye tries to find some answers. “Right On” begins as a typical early ‘70s soul-funk workout, very much in the Isaac Hayes/Curtis Mayfield mode, Danya Hartwick’s flute well to the fore. Eventually Gaye’s voice enters. He begins what you eventually realise is a prayer of salvation, a list of those who will survive:

“For those of us who simply like to socialise.
For those of us who tend the sick…
For those of us who got drowned in the sea of happiness.
For the soul that takes pride in his God and himself and everything else.”

Fountain’s mothering alto watches over him from above. Because it is love that will save us. Yes it’s that simple, yes it’s that unattainable. The tempo briefly quickens up as though it is to COME

and the music metamorphosises into Sinatra (with one further blast from Moore’s tenor). Apostolic strings, Gaye’s voice pleading just as it’s coming on: “PURE love can conquer hate every time” – he finds as many variations on expressing the word “love” as Van Morrison did in “Madame George” – and, inevitably, the need for personal love becomes evident and finally predominant. Listen to him inviting you: “And my darling, one more thing/If you let me, I will take you/To where Love is King/Ah, ah, baby” – the final line is wept. PLEASE KEEP ME ALIVE.

and then the groove restarts, briefly, then the percussion and alto clip-clop in unison, and then it is time for the epiphany – “Wholy Holy” where Gaye now pleads for the entire world, all humanity, to become his Other. “We can (and how close to “can’t” his voice seems to sound) conquer hate forever…we can rock the world’s foundations” – if only you’ll let me. So peaceful, yet so confident a prayer (the graceful if ever so slightly regretful descending chords – proto-Badalamenti), he asks us to believe in Jesus and almost uniquely in popular music you want to believe it too. He very nearly persuades you.

Except of course that it’s a dream, a utopia, which cannot yet – if ever – be converted into reality. And even Marvin Gaye has to wake up to what is the most tangible and most perceptible “reality” – the world, America, as it stood in 1971. “Inner City Blues” is where, having reminded us of how high we could reach if we wished, we have to have our faces rubbed in how things actually are. We have to confront the shit in which, if we look at the sky for too long, we may end up buried. Another list, this time of things which will kill; the inability to pay one’s taxes, the banality of one’s own “hang-ups, let downs” set against moonshots (don’t be flying high, give your love and money to the have-nots), capitalism (for years I thought he was singing “Inflation, no chance/Too many creeps finance” though actually it’s “to increase finance”), and finally (could it ever be firstly?) apocalypse (“Crime is increasing/Trigger happy policing/Panic is spreading/God knows where we’re heading”). Is my alternative really so woolly, he is asking. The music is low cast, Bob Babbitt’s bass flowing like cynical blood through the aorta of the strings and the death march piano chords. The piano finally takes us back to a reprise of the key lines from the song “What’s Going On?” to complete the cycle:

“Mother, mother (my God, how he emphasises the “mother,” how right it’s Eli Fountain’s alto which should take us out of the album)/Everybody thinks we’re wrong/Who are they to judge us/Simply ‘cause we wear our hair long?”

Sung by someone who would never be seen dead in long hair, who appears on the sleeve wandering around a children’s playground in the rain, dressed in a smart black raincoat, black suit and a wide gold tie, smiling benignly.

And we do not quite return to a loop – just Gaye’s wordless vocals, Fountain’s alto and percussion. God knows where they’re headed…except that eventually Gaye would move from his dissertation of big deaths into a microscopic examination of the little death. More about that shortly.

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .

THE FUTURE IS AS GOOD AS THE PAST: JUST A DIFFERENT SORT OF "GOOD"

Is 2003 by definition better than 1981, musically? There is music being produced now which reminds us irresistibly of 1981, yet the remembrance is irresistible precisely because we know full well that the music of now could never have been made in 1981. It is the awareness of the prior existence of 1981 which differentiates it - no more so than with Do You Party?, the debut album by The Soft Pink Truth.

The Soft Pink Truth is, in truth, Drew Daniel, one-half of Matmos, who about this time last year produced an engrossing and not too distant album constructed from the sounds of actual surgical operations - A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure. As with that oddly engaging record, Do You Party? is almost entirely constructed from cut-ups, some of sound effects of uncertain industrial origin, others from naggingly just-beyond-familiar records, films and broadcasts. In terms of sonic spaciousness, SPT can be imagined as a logical extension from the benevolent revisitations of early '80s disco by Metro Area, and from the other extreme a logical reduction of the refractions between different sound sources harnessed to rhythm so expertly sculpted by Horsepower Productions. Of course SPT can occupy one point of an entirely different "cut-up" triangle, the other two points being Kid 606 and Cassetteboy. But on Do You Party?, the aim is neither polemic nor parodic, but purely pleasure. Much of this record adds up to the most sheerly danceable and enjoyable album since "side one" of Daft Punk's Discovery.

The introductory track "Everybody's Soft" starts with a strobe-lite/glitch voice cut-up which immediately puts one in mind of Arthur Russell - not a bad start - and the rhythm track skilfully builds up pace while the synths create space. Sonically the record is almost 3D in its approach; sounds hurl out at you like - yes - puncta, and there's a transcendent moment two-thirds of the way through the track where a massive orchestral-synth glow suddenly becomes visible, as though you are riding the first rise of the Westway, suddenly seeing the city in all its garish glory spread before you (Amon Tobin did something similar, though for entirely different ends, in last year's "El Wraith"). It's not long before you forget how the music's been constructed.

"Gender Studies" is a dancefloor smash in any sane person's book; again conscious of the architectural need for build-up, there's an enticingly squelchy bass throb which builds up through the snippets of half-forgotten disco classics and indeed creates something that perhaps could have been imagined in 1981 (a sharper DAF? a de-ironicised Heaven 17?) but could never have been produced. "Promofunk" continues the unbelievable roll with a glorious, tremulous thump of a tune; and hear how it suddenly descends into a canyon of aleatoric ambience at the end. This record dares you to guess what it's going to do next.

And I'm sure it would have been difficult to guess that SPT would then segue into the album's true killer track; a cover version of "Make Up" by Vanity6, one of the many satellite operatives of Paisley Park (as with Sheila E, Jill Jones, the Family et al; take my word for it, if you're looking for sublime '80s dance-pop, pick up anything by any of these people that you might see in your local second-hand emporium - it's all terrific) and in its original form something of a prototype for Destiny's "Bootylicious." Here, though, it's sung with winning semi-amateurish charm by Blevin Blechdom and successfully converted into an ode of joy at discovering the wonders of womanhood; cynicism replaced by awe.

It's hard to think of any routine techno operatives who would have a thousandth of the ingenuity of SPT in constructing a track like "Soft On Crime." Here is a path down which Basement Jaxx would do well to tread for their next album; the track starts with an exultant chant (MC Hammer meets Cossack dancers) before eventually decelerating into a Spaghetti Junction of crazily interviewing (a)tonalities and gradually distending beats.

After that, the ambience becomes slightly more downbeat, ever so slightly more solemn. "For Satie" is based on one chord of one of Erik's Gymnopedies which has a considered debate with a sinister bass rumble. This decelerates further into "Soft Pink Missy" (which appeared as a 12" last year), a thoughftul, unhurried romp with mid-range voices floating round your head like missiles which have failed to convert into satellites. Then the pace picks up again with "Big Booty Bitches" which cannily deconstructs macho rap howls with the aid of what I agree with The Wire's Peter Shapiro is indeed a rearrangement of the synth riff to J-Lo's "Play" - doing anything but keeping it real (thank God). "Over You (No Love)" is where Wigan Casino awakens in Skylab; several different "pasts" of music blissfully combine to throw you around your bedroom in essemplastic elation.

The closing salutation "I Want To Thank You" must surely be a sideways salute at the flexidisc included in the Human League's Dignity of Labour EP; as with the latter, it takes the opportunity to include the credits as part of the album. The acknowledgements are done in cut-up style, incorporating everything from the Encarta talking dictionary to "Stephen Hawking" via Desert Island Discs. It is amiable and approachable, as with all of the rest of this wonderful record. It's a generation down the line from Mutant Disco but just as entertaining and as avant-garde - crucially, at the same time. One could call it electroclash, and if one is going to call it electroclash, then this constitutes the best 53 minutes which have yet come out of it. It works because it reminds you of how great 1981 was, as opposed to how far downhill everything went from 1981 (which it didn't), and tells you that things can be, in fact are, as great again. That's the secret of utilising your influences creatively; don't use them as an anchor, but as a compass. That way, a future is created out of the past; thus do you continue to live.

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .

GAIL BRAND IS GOD

We're so used to the seemingly inbuilt inadequacy of Improv records. The recital is familiar: "you needed to be there...the space between musicians, between musicians and audience...the impermanence of Improv...every Improv record is 70 random minutes and another 70 could have done the job just as well...Statements...Documents." Sometimes you wonder whether you're expected to be the improviser in order to understand the music s/he's playing. You have to breathe their oxygen, drink their coffee, exist within their lives.

But every so often a record comes along and reminds us exactly why we cannot dispense with recording Improv. There is always, albeit infrequently, a performance which, miraculously or otherwise, will work as a record, will be aware of its own emotional and aesthetic peaks, will understand the solidity of structure which comes from intimate knowledge of your music and the improvisers with whom you choose to work. Such a record is Strong Language, the second album by the London-based quartet Lunge - led to all intents and purposes by the trombonist Gail Brand (she will doubtless deny it until her mute's blue in its face, but hers is, even if by default, the predominant voice here) and also including Pat Thomas (keyboards/electronics), Phil Durrant (violin/electronics) and Mark Sanders (drums/percussion). On the cover is a picture of peeling wallpaper. Punched out or struggled against? Lunge was one of many Improv units formed out of the debris of Butch Morris' "Skyscraper" tour in 1997. I think they might be the best.

The main body of the CD was recorded live in Amsterdam in June of last year and comprises four distinct "tracks." It's been a while since I've heard any piece of recorded Improv with the immense and immediate impact of the brilliantly-titled opener "Planarchy." Here Brand sets out her aesthetic stall - she is a musician of great purpose and power, but also of great discipline. Aware of Rudd (the low-register smears) and Rutherford (bell and mouthpiece manipulation, but with only very sparing use of multiphonics) but equally aware not to fall into laddism as so many notable European free trombonists have done. Brand's playing is one elongated punctum; it/she jumps out of the matrix/fabric and focuses your attention immediately.

But that is to belittle the contributions of Thomas, Durrant and Sanders, all of whom do more than keep up with Brand. Indeed, the duologues between Durrant's excited, pointillistic violin and electronic manipulations and Brand's purely acoustic trombone sometimes leave it difficult to decide who's playing what. And of course, it doesn't matter, because the collective structure is more important. There's a fantastic moment about nine minutes into "Planarchy" where Sanders almost imperceptibly, but entirely naturally, sets a drum 'n' bass tempo for a minute or so - this is fabulously exciting to listen to repeatedly - and then, with sublime architectural grace, the piece then naturally subsides into an atrium of quiet concentration and close-up, meditative interaction. The sustenatos achieved here give the piece a hymnal aspect, and it concludes entirely logically.

"Rough With The Smooth" emphasises what a wonderful "ballad" tone Brand achieves on her trombone - her high notes and tonality are very affecting indeed and remind me, strangely enough, of Jimmy Knepper's ballad playing (cf. Gil Evans' "Where Flamingos Fly"). There's a moving slow section about six minutes into the piece, mournful and contemplative, before the temperature gradually gets turned up again; and at the end, the musicians do seem to "lunge" at each other, or at least breathe with each other - dare I say that the music at this point takes on a distinctly carnal quality? Durrant signs off with a long, satisfied exhalation of electronic breath, presumably just about to light up a cigarette.

"White Writeable Areas" absorbs elements from both of these pieces for another fascinating journey. Brand here manages to be both affecting and decisive. Thomas' piano is patient, satisfied with its cautious chordality before later breaking free into joyful runs. At times, if not quite the "full industrial onslaught" cited in the sleevenotes, this music can be exuberant and propulsive (drum 'n' bass meets Ambient), at other times hover beautifully on the edge of extinction.

The final four-minute rave-up "No Filters" is the wildest thing here, but crucially the musicians (unlike certain participants in the good ole days of FMP) never lose control or poise; you realise instinctively that they know exactly what they're doing. Thomas' samples and electronics are ceaselessly inventive behind Brand's full-throated attack; indeed, towards the end you sense the ghost of Radiohead's "Kid A" seeping through the background.

There are two further tracks from a studio session in December 2000 which are fine in themselves - in particular I repeatedly return to the poignant "Rothko" - but were clearly made before the quantum leap which enabled Strong Language to be alchemised. But this album needs to be heard and listened to repeatedly. It has blood and humanity flowing through it in so strong a manner as I have rarely seen in a British free/Improv issue since Isipingo's Family Affair a quarter of a century ago. It's that good, that powerful, that beautiful. Gail Brand is a visionary.

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .

"you don't even know I'm here, do you?"

There are few places on this planet more frightening to me than that blank space between Oxford and Headington, when walked, on foot, in the dark. The parks and their postcard views annulled by the night, all that's left is a Sisyphus of an ascending pathway, finally yielding to a highway, houses set well back on either side, patrolled by unblinking lights. It looks so much larger and more immense in the dark. To my right will eventually materialise the library where she worked. To my left, the school which she attended. About a quarter of a mile further away on my right is where she now lies. The highway back to her becomes dreamed; but the dream is not idyllic. I am reminded of an enormous intensive care unit; the low-cast lighting, the low-ceilinged claustrophobia. A depot, a clearing house, a mortuary. And later on I will spend the evening in a pub just 200 yards from Laura's grave, subsequently walking back through Old Headington to the Oxford Tube stop as though it were an abandoned film set; the walls of the houses merely props.

It was a cold but very pleasant day in Oxford. The bum with a bruised face squatting outside the meadows, his radio loudly blaring Dale Winton's 1963 Pick of the Pops. The girls passing by who voice their repulsion, not so much of the man, but of the music he is playing. The bizarre peace of the Westgate Library. Being reminded of the unmatchable brilliance of the Carfax Chippy. The saddest birthday anyone could have spent; knowing that, had things been different, I would have spent my birthday here, but not alone or alienated.

I last listened to Nick Drake's works on an extended Friday evening journey from Victoria to Gloucester Green on the Oxford Tube, back in the winter of 1999. A slow and pressurising trip, as Friday evening ones tend to be, including the inevitable pile-up at the Lewknor turnoff and the consequent crawl down the barely perceptible forest that is/was the "old" A40. Peace and repose in the midst of chaos. The famous shot on the sleeve of Bryter Layter wherein Drake stands in the street and bemusedly views a commuter frantically rushing past him.

Yet Drake was no talisman or avatar. After 30 years of trying to work him out, the task remains as hard as ever. No one tried as hard not to talk or sing to anyone except himself. His music is some of the most inward-looking outside of the more featureless plains of free improvisation. How did it happen? The teenage Drake was apparently perfectly sociable and up for it - from the days of his school band, whose line-up briefly included a young Chris De Burgh, he was good-looking, keen on the ladies, a fine athlete and not a bad musician. From there to Cambridge, where he barely lasted through his first year - out of the womb into another; why would he feel so alienated? Thence to London, in various states of dis/repair, and finally back to the family home. Just a few live performances in 1968; then nothing - only one music press interview, no promotion; a reluctance to live?

If Scott Walker was the Dirk Bogarde of Brit (or honorary Brit) introspective troubadours - grandiloquent, immense, avant-garde - then Drake would be the James Fox; always apologising for breathing, so reticent that you feel that he perhaps would have been happier within a gated religious cult (as Fox later briefly was). But it's not quite accurate to assume that Drake's world is a blissful, asexual, even pre-sexual garden; in fact, if we take Barthes' identification of the "grain" of a voice corresponding with its "diction" - how the singer has assimilated the "pheno-song" and "geno-song" components, and how the singer renders them to the not necessarily passive listener - then Drake's voice is sometimes as carnal as hell. This is obviously more apparent on early things like his reading of Robin Frederick's "Been Smoking Too Long" where his voice is surprisingly earthy, almost Hoagy Carmichael-ish; but take a real listen to his 1968 debut album, Five Leaves Left - hear particularly his Sinatra-derived habit of extending the final consonants/syllable of key words in his lyrics, sometimes with a barely suppressed growl; the "love" in "Time Has Told Me"; the "time" in "River Man"; even the "slave" in "Three Hours." His natural baritone voice confirms that everything here is suggested/suggestive - Drake's voice is, more often than you might think, very sexy.

Most of the songs on Five Leaves Left concern Drake's wish to enter the world and maybe enter the Other. It's an album of negotiations and occasional bewilderment - the plea for the rich girl to come and share his metaphorical "rotted" shed in "Man With A Shed" ("Please stop my world from raining through my head...you'll find that sheds are nicer than you thought") - touched with the realisation that some Others will forever remain unreachable ("Thoughts Of Mary Jane," "Cello Song" - the latter using the same rhythm as "Sympathy For The Devil" and yet its polar opposite, its negative). And of course - and this is where legends of prematurely stilled talents come into blossom - he muses on death; generally in "Fruit Tree," specifically in "River Man" wherein the protagonist, Betty, is dying (this is confirmed by the excised verse subsequently discovered in one of Drake's notebooks). Robert Kirby's near-static but ominously progressing string lines indicate clouds about to blot out the sun; the pain which lies under no idyll. It's the natural counterpart to PiL's "Death Disco" but with ten years' less wisdom. The album concludes with the go-down-easy vibes (literally) of "Saturday Sun" - and even this sunny vision is punctumised by the recognition of "Sunday's rain." It's a remote cousin to Lennon's "In My Life" - a rueful nostalgia realising its own selectiveness and redundancy; the same sort of feeling for which Jon McGregor tries in his novel If No One Speaks Of Remarkable Things, with the same foreknowledge of impermanence and tragedy.

It would be facile but no less true to say that, if Five Leaves Left was Drake's rural album, 1970's Bryter Layter is a noticeably more urban one, with a full band on most tracks, but is it any more outgoing? There's a strange ecstasy in Drake's cascading, descending lines which he tries hard not to let spill out of the conflicting rhythms of "Hazey Jane II" ("Andwhatwillhappeninthemorningwhentheworlditgetssocrowdedthatyoucan'tlookoutyourwindowinthe morning?" - all sung in that one breath, and with a strange ecstasy) but there are also suburban-meets-pastoral instrumental interludes; idealised visions of a forever sunny Muswell Hill on a Sunday morning. Don't be fooled, however, by the title of "At The Chime Of A City Clock" which foresees Weller's urban alienation nine years later in the Jam's "Strange Town." Again and again we return to the motif of an ideal lost, or unable to be regained or even reached.

"Fly" has Drake importuning for "second grace" but the sentiment is knowingly defeated by the conflicting lyrical themes of "now I just sit on the ground, in your way" (cf. "Standing" from Buffy: The Musical) and "for it's really too hard for to fly" (cf. Walker's "Rosemary"). Unlike Walker or even Al Stewart (the Terence Stamp of bedsit Brit bards?) - and very pointedly, unlike his more confident, objective and aware mirror images, Richard Thompson and especially John Martyn - he's unlikely ever to "get it on" (no "Duchess" or "Love Chronicles" from him). Instead we get a not entirely satirical stab at self-deprecation in "Poor Boy" which is the one instance in Drake's recorded works where he does show the barest hint of self-consciousness. Harder men would have made a career out of that one element. Not that it suited him; "Poor Boy" is only lent punctum by the involvement of the great Chris McGregor, leader of the Brotherhood of Breath (the link is Joe Boyd, who produced both), whose deadpan Protestant-kwela piano block chords and always intelligent chordal and melodic runs work healthily against the lyric, as does the acidic alto sax of Ray Warleigh, sounding very like McGregor's right-hand man Dudu Pukwana (who was first choice for the session but at the time was across town recording with the Incredible String Band).

Then we get "Northern Sky"; a song which doubtless will be extracted for a commercial or a Hugh Grant film and get to number one before long. Nathalie says this song is like "one big tear" but it's a tear of happiness; the one song in Drake's career where he is actually and unequivocally happy. John Cale's celeste chimes in the background as though Drake's Christmas had indeed come. He has found his Other. Too much emphasis has been placed on the line "would you love me 'til I'm dead?" because of what happened to him; but this is an expression of unalloyed bliss. The instrumental "Sunday" which closes the album expresses the same foreseen regrets as "Saturday Sun," Lyn Dobson's flute sounding as though it is crying (cf the unbearable poignancy of Leila's "Young Ones"). As though it were an exit from the world - which is what it turned out to be.

Pink Moon, Drake's third album, appeared in 1972, and only because the receptionist at Island Records noticed a package which Drake got the courier to take in. In the package was the master tape of the 28 minutes of Pink Moon; no band, no producer, Drake, now completely disillusioned, now completely on his own - just him and his guitar with the occasional piano overdub. One of the most self-referential records ever made, Pink Moon ceaselessly refers back to previous Drake songs, it is also one of the most pitying/pitiless records ever made. His lyrics here are sometimes reduced to bleak haikus (the title track, the genuinely frightening deadness of "Know"), dealing with the reductions of his ambitions ("You can take the road that takes you to the stars now/I can take a road that'll see me through" - "Road") and the fatal fallacy of all other humanity (the musically achingly beautiful "Things Behind The Sun"). "Free Ride" shares a lyrical theme with "Man In A Shed" but here there's not even the pretence of humility and uncertainty; he just wants saving. This is made yet starker in the numbing "Parasite" ("for I am the parasite who hangs from your skirt") which cleverly inverts the themes of "City Clock."

And then there was no more in Drake's lifetime; not that there was much within it. These albums sold minimally while Drake was alive, were hardly ever reviewed. It's always easier to build a cult out of a stopped genius than it is to pay him while he's alive and capable of creation. An example to no one? Hard to see how he could be. Patrick Humphries has written a full and minutely detailed biography; Drake's Cambridge contemporary Ian MacDonald has written movingly about the man and authoritatively about his radical approach to guitar tuning and chording; his lyrics have been analysed to atoms.

The voice? By the time of Pink Moon it had gradually become more slurred and more "horn-like" in its delivery, noticeably very much like John Martyn. Except, as suggested above, Martyn is a tougher and perhaps more adventurous character who was able to connect with the world - even if only obliquely - and Martyn of course acknowledged this failure in Drake's chemistry as the theme to his song "Soild Air" in which Martyn does indeed stretch out vowels and consonants almost beyond the point of comprehension. Could Drake ever have made an album like Solid Air (the line-up of musicians being nearly identical to that of Five Leaves Left)? I don't think he could have - the musical adventure in Drake lay entirely in his delivery, indeed his "diction." I doubt that any avant-garde or New Wave would have interested him even slightly. And - and here is the barrier which still prevents me from surrendering completely to his music - his music is ultimately so insular, so of him, so insistent that you have to be Nick Drake to understand him, that you wonder whether he had much thought for anyone or anything else in the world. He would never have been capable of something like Blue. Much has been made of 1974's admittedly bruising "Black Eyed Dog" but if there's any dread or helplessness here, it is audibly unreachable. He sings it as if he's waving you away with your fist even though you're trying to help him.

He died, as you probably know, in November 1974 aged 26, of what appears to have been an accidental overdose. Thus was the cult initiated; no middle-age to let everyone down, no Phil Collins-produced AoR records, no duets with David Gray on Later With Jools Holland, no Daniel Lanois/Mitchell Froom "avantings" to deal with. It's a world I can examine with morbid curiosity, and even frequently be moved by, but I would never wish to live in it - perhaps because it echoes my own so closely and so sinisterly.

* * * *

But still it stays with me, just as Oxford does, because I can't get rid of it, indeed cannot think of living without constantly being drawn back to it. That great cut which divides Oxfordshire from the rest of the world (note how the London radio stations immediately cut off once you enter the cavernous "tunnel") suggests a bountiful utopia when you reach the immense view on the other side. And I cannot live without Oxford, I cannot deny it. This particular umbilical cord will take a lifetime to cut. Not that I wish to cut it. Not until, at the very least, I have grieved properly.

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .

LAST NIGHT'S AUDIO SERMON - TRANSCRIPT AND PLAYLIST

By special request, here is the full original script of my broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM last night. Many thanks for all the kind comments I've already received. It was one of the most nerve-racking experiences of my life but I loved doing it thoroughly.

Sadly because of lack of time I had to omit a couple of the tracks listed below from the actual programme, namely Don King and Bikini Kill, and some of the script was edited or minor amendments made.


CLEAR SPOT: THE FEMINISATION OF NOISE
Resonance 104.4 FM - Tuesday 21 January 2003

Good evening. You are tuned to Resonance 104.4 FM. This is Marcello Carlin, proprietor of the Church of Me website and writer for the Wire and Uncut magazines, presenting this evening’s edition of Clear Spot.

We know you want to go back. So let’s return. Let yourself swim in the aqueous lactations you so clearly desire. Return to the place of origin. Realise its selfless, compassionate comfort. You are aware of the noises, seemingly random but already organising themselves. The purposeful organisation of noise is not the exclusive by-product of testosterone; indeed, when feminised, its theoretical cul-de-sac transmutates into a dreamed highway.

But to go back to the beginning, you have to be aware of the circuitousness of life. You have to be aware of how it will end; because the first noise you will hear in your comfort is also the last noise you will hear…but played backwards.

Track 1: Carla Bley/Paul Haines: This Is Here… (5:56)

That was the opening proper of the greatest, because the most infinitely meaningless, record ever made, Escalator Over The Hill by that supreme feminist of noise Carla Bley. Among the musicians and voices which flashed inside your ears were Jack Bruce, Don Cherry, Don Preston and Jeanne Lee. Everybody exists within her world; her totality is dependent upon your readiness to accept the world as she has remade it.

There are many ways in which to assemble the elements of noise in order to feminise them. Let us not be naïve: by noise I signify all the unregulated, random sonics produced, or already extant, in the world. For now we concentrate on the voice, the most elemental instrument, yet also the one most capable of timbral and emotional variety. The prologue to Escalator Over The Hill can imply either a new dawn, or the dawning awareness of an apocalypse. At this time I prefer to interpret and absorb concepts of a new dawn. For an example, we turn now to the voice of a woman who can be whatever you prefer her to be. Liberated Inca princess or Welsh coal miner’s daughter? Amy Camus – note the ineffable infinity of that surname – or Yma Sumac? It’s up to you to decide what she makes of it.

Track 2: Yma Sumac – Xtabay (3:19)

The title of that song “Xtabay” is irresistibly associated with ecstasy. There is certainly awe in Amy or Yma’s ecstasy; but imagine a longer road, a highway dotted every ten seconds by 44 different emotions, all of which the woman must go through, experience and express – shorn of decoration, of ornamentation. The voice must speak for and to itself and be its own therapist. In this recording of Luciano Berio’s Sequenza III for Female Voice, the voice of Cathy Berberian is obliged to undertake the journey of a life. There is nothing random about this seemingly spontaneous articulation of these 44 emotions; each is a stage, a post of a slalom, around and through which Berberian must deftly travel in order to reach – well, what or where does she reach? Fulfilment or compromise?

Track 3: Luciano Berio/Cathy Berberian – Sequenza III for Female Voice (6:48)

But what purpose, should a purpose be necessary, exists for such a virtuosic odyssey? Personal purposes, certainly, if not social ones. But what if the same elements, the not dissimilar organisation of noise, were to be applied to a specific social or emotional need? Adjust the concave mirror and listen now to the voice of Abbey Lincoln, in duet with the drummer Max Roach, from Roach’s 1960 We Insist! Freedom Now Suite. This excoriating piece of music is entitled Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace. The delineation between the three sections will be obvious. What you need to focus on, however, is why she is doing what she is doing. Birth/awareness – anger/violence – satisfaction/death. The sexual, to pilfer Lacanian theory, is the subtext of the political.

Track 4:Max Roach/Abbey Lincoln – Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace (8:02)

Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln performing the Triptych from Roach’s We Insist! Freedom Now Suite. It is clearly time to take stock. You are tuned to Resonance 104.4 FM, and you are listening to this evening’s edition of Clear Spot. This is Marcello Carlin spinning some askew theories around the notional theme of “The Feminisation Of Noise.” Two unsentimental love songs now, both recorded by temporarily expatriate American musicians in Paris at the turn of the ‘60s and ‘70s; both utilising but ultimately subverting accepted male patterns of noise making into a decidedly feminist perspective. Firstly, Archie Shepp’s group of 1969, featuring the unutterably sexual but utterly untouchable vocal stylings of Jeanne Lee, performing the title track of Shepp’s album Blasé. It is one of the greatest feminisations of noise ever attempted within the confines of the popular song. Listen for the still astonishing punctum which suddenly makes itself known about seven minutes into the piece.

Track 5: Archie Shepp/Jeanne Lee – Blasé (11:22)

Why those determinedly out-of-tune harmonicas? These were played by two comparatively obscure Chicago bluesmen, Julio Finn and Chicago Beauchamp, entirely in their own key and seemingly wholly oblivious to the timbre and tonal centre of the piece. It’s almost as if they have been satirically cut and pasted onto the song, as a signifier of extinct male potency which has long since lost its signified. It is a terrifying moment. The bassist on that piece, Malachi Favors, also appears on the next track, Theme De Yoyo, recorded by the Art Ensemble of Chicago in 1970 as the theme to a seemingly unreleased French avant-garde film Les Stances Á Sophie. The crucial element here is the singer, Fontella Bass, the then wife of the Art Ensemble’s trumpeter Lester Bowie and clearly long since rescued. Hear her exultation in demolishing the attributes of the film’s supposed “heroine.” Hear what I can achieve, girl, the repeated freeform explosions signify; I can do it every 30 seconds. Observe also how drummer Don Moye invents drum ‘n’ bass.

Track 6: Art Ensemble of Chicago/Fontella Bass – Theme De Yoyo (8:00)

Now take those rhythms and subvert them from below. Apply them to a pre-post modern song of social commentary which was released more or less as New York City was about to declare bankruptcy. The primeval makes its own way back in, one way or another; but if feminised, it will always be diverted up far more interesting avenues.

Track 7: Joni Mitchell – The Jungle Line (4:20)

Joni Mitchell, from 1975’s The Hissing Of Summer Lawns, with assistance from sundry Burundi drummers, and “The Jungle Line.” In order to maintain a meaningful balance in this recital, we need to derail chronology, if only temporarily, for a linked foresight into how the most male-driven of musical forms ended up thoroughly feminised – and for the same reasons. Even if for as crass a reason as song titles.

Track 8: Sonic Youth – Hey Joni (4:22)

Sonic Youth and, hey, “Hey Joni” from 1988’s Daydream Nation, a presage of the aqueous deluge to come. You are tuned to Resonance 104.4 FM, and you are listening to Clear Spot, presented by Marcello Carlin of the Church of Me, considering the question of “The Feminisation Of Noise.” But how did we get here? Time to return to the none-more-feminised arena of No Wave, in which dwelt the none-more-manly James Chance, some say White. On his “White” album of 1979, “Off White,” credited to James White and the Blacks, we can hear how Chance tries to be a man but is beaten by the very act of adopting the musical template of the man who did more than any other man to feminise noise: Ornette Coleman. Ornette deserves his own programme, indeed a week of his own programmes. His importance here, however, is how he altered the perspectives of Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. In his playing there is no Chuck Yeager-style attempts to break the sound or barline barriers; no cries of look how many sheets of sound I can generate in ten seconds, look how big mine is. Instead his playing is literally selfless; it exists for the sake of the surrounding music, is frequently subsumed in the surrounding music. On this James White track “Stained Sheets” the askance avant-funk music, clearly derived from Ornette’s contemporaneous Prime Time group, subverts White’s claims to manhood, which are later dealt a fatal blow when he surrenders to his never-more-assertive telephone sex “partner” Stella Rico, portrayed by Lydia Lunch.

Track 9: James White & the Blacks/Lydia Lunch – Stained Sheets (5:51)

For an equally selfless but more thoughtful take on the same elements, listen now to this performance by the trio Don King, which evolved out of the undeniably extreme No Wave group Mars. Lucy Hamilton is most evident on bass clarinet, Mark Cunningham patrols the borders on guitar, Duncan Lindsay holds the fabric together on drums. This piece is entitled “Marajó.”

Track 10: Don King – Marajó (3:40)

You see now how organisation of noise does not necessarily equate with volume, but more with perspective. Listen to this completely subversive but equally persuasive performance by Portobello’s finest, the Raincoats. The title of the piece “Dancing In My Head” is a clear reference to Ornette’s 1977 album – one of the half-dozen or so most important records of the last 40 years – but its approach is that of blissful, and yes, aqueous, dub. Selfless and beautiful.

Track 11: Raincoats – Dancing In My Head (6:20)

The Raincoats, and “Dancing In My Head” from their 1981 album Odyshape. There are so many artists which I have unforgivably been unable to include in this programme – amongst innumerable others, the Shaggs, the Slits, Diamanda Galas, and, if you’ve an alert mind, Christian Wolff, Chet Baker, Jimmy Scott, Lester Young, Andy Williams and Karen Carpenter. One group which we cannot exclude, however, is My Bloody Valentine. Their 1991 album Loveless represents perhaps the most extreme process yet recorded of male guitar noise being feminised, being detached from its bass-driven bearings, ethereal in its all-encompassing embrace, its very speed being deliberately fluctuated, in tune with, shall we say, more important rhythms. Who’s doing what on this track “Only Shallow”? And yes, it does matter.

Track 12: My Bloody Valentine – Only Shallow (4:45)

My Bloody Valentine, from the Loveless album, and “Only Shallow.” And I haven’t even considered the Cocteau Twins. There is a very strong case for saying that we haven’t necessarily progressed from what is still a frontier.

Still, we can’t leave out Bikini Kill. A more obviously driven assault on male rock, but a more palpable and joyful one. This is what I suppose remains their anthem, “Rebel Girl.”

Track 13: Bikini Kill – Rebel Girl (2:30)

Kathleen Hanna and Bikini Kill, with “Rebel Girl.” And I haven’t even considered Suzi Quatro. A further incursion into male domains – this time into bedroom/laptop avant-techno – has been achieved by the American duo Blechdom from Blechtum. Their performance at the ICA last year was one of the most exhilarating I’d seen in some time, vacillating between sublime trash-pop and explosive laptop atonal outbursts. The best compromise on record between the two approaches so far can be found on the solo EP by Kevin Blechdom – the name is Kevin, but she is a she – I Love Presets, and in particular in this song, a number one single in a better and fairer world, “Mr Miguel.”

Track 14: Kevin Blechdom – Mr Miguel (3:08)

And now, it’s time for the reckoning. A conclusion? A hyperreal utopia where noise can only exist if it is feminised. As with Escalator Over The Hill, with which we opened this programme, we return to an idea, some say an ideal, of the popular song. A song which begins by describing an ideal life, then the reasons why the singer is excluded from that life, a frustration which becomes first poignant, and then batters itself to a preliminary death against a brick wall of noise. Then there is quiet. The male progenitor has to plead with her not to reject life, not to co-exist with unfulfilled silence. That the female is necessary for any noise to have even the most elemental of meanings. From the soundtrack to Buffy The Vampire Slayer, The Musical: Once More With Feeling, the rejection of the simulacrum and the embrace of unironic humanity that is “Something To Sing About.”

Track 15: Sarah Michelle Gellar – Something To Sing About (4:40)

And yes, the words of the quiet verses have personal significance. For all the lives we ever lived, and all the lives to be. To make this short story long, please click on http://cookham.blogspot.com to access The Church Of Me. You are tuned to Resonance 104.4 FM, and you have been listening to Clear Spot. This is Marcello Carlin speaking. Thank you for listening.

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .

JIMMY SCOTT

Feelings of unease make themselves apparent over the CD reissue of Jimmy Scott's Falling In Love Is Wonderful. Nothing to do with the record itself, which is sublime and angelic, but with the words and (in)actions surrounding it. It is certainly wonderful that Scott, at 77, now has the career he always wanted, the career which was more or less denied to him for over three decades, and that his finest 38 minutes are now available again for the first time since the original issue was hurriedly withdrawn from the market 40 years ago. But I remain uneasy about his re-emergence via his cameo in the muddled final episode of Twin Peaks, via Lou Reed and Elvis Costello, via the curators. It is undeniable that it is a million times better that Scott should have his career back than continue to slave away in McJob obscurity, but the Twin Peaks appearance struck me as condescending and patronising on Lynch's part; Scott to be added as yet another post-modern curio to be ridiculed or appreciated ironically. And have our Good Music Society curators written for him, or written at him?

He should of course have had his career when he was artistically at his peak. Not his fault that he signed a rip-off contract with Herman Lubinsky at Savoy; he hadn't followed up his 1950 hit "Everybodys Somebody's Fool" with further hits, and his need to sing and be recorded was greater than his need to have a career. Still, the Savoy sides are the equivalent of Sinatra on Columbia in the '40s; perfectly adequate in themselves, but the voice clearly requires a greater and more inventive dimension in which to wander.

Enter Ray Charles. Having just crossed over big-time with Modern Sounds in Country and Western, he was more or less in a position to do what he liked. And what he wanted was to set up his own record label (Tangerine). Among the first projects for the label was to be an album of "seduction" ballads, performed by Scott with string-accented arrangements by Marty Paich and Gerald Wilson, both more or less following the template established by Gordon Jenkins on Sinatra's '50s Capitol torch song albums Where Are You? and No One Cares, and produced by Charles, who would also accompany Scott on piano (Erroll Garner, basically, with a touch of Tatum).

The record, Falling In Love Is Wonderful, was duly released in 1963. On US radio it took off like a bomb and was set to become a significant best-seller, as big a jazz-pop crossover as Getz/Gilberto. But just as the album was getting into the shops, it was abruptly pulled. Lubinsky asserted, or more accurately bluffed, that Scott was still under contract to Savoy and threatened to sue Charles/Tangerine if the album were not withdrawn. Charles fell for the bluff and conceded. The album disappeared, as did Scott's career. Another album six years later, The Source, met the same fate. Then 20 or so years of scuffling and McJobs ensued until his assisted re-emergence.

Now, the thing is that Lubinsky died in 1983. Thus Scott was finally free of him, as indeed was Ray Charles. Why, then, did the album not immediately reappear? There's a sinister subtext which runs through David Ritz's sleevenotes to the reissue which implies that Charles was not exactly tripping over himself to ensure Scott's welfare. Why did Charles, who had immense clout in 1963, meekly accede to Lubinsky's bullshit? Did he simply not want the fuss of a lawsuit hampering his new label? Why did Charles not put Scott's picture on the sleeve, instead opting for a fireside seduction scene where a middle-aged chap is bending over what looks like a semi-conscious woman who appears to have been drugged by Rohypnol sneaked into the wine glass (with some recent Charles albums helpfully scattered on the rug)? Why did it take 20 years after Lubinsky's death for this record to be reissued? It was clearly not urgent and key for Ray Charles. There are comments in the sleevenotes about a failure on the part of "Ray's men" to come to terms with Mosaic Records for a reissue, so Rhino were ultimately approached. Surely not jealousy? Hatred?

Scott was always doomed anyway. A victim of Kallman's syndrome, which arrests hormonal growth, he looked like a youth and sang in a clearly androgynous register (Nancy Wilson or Johnnie Ray, either would suffice). While preparing my broadcast on the "feminisation of noise" I had a notion to include a section which addressed the "feminisation of masculinity" - the androgynous, almost hermaphrodite delivery favoured by many post-Lester Young singers, but soon realised that there was enough material there for a whole other programme. There's also something in Scott's delivery which very clearly anticipates the singing of Karen Carpenter at her peak - that same selfless, near apostolic compassion.

Bruised also by the early death of his mother and other family issues, as well as his own lack of commercial success, Scott had every right to submit to self-pity in songs like "Why Try To Change Me Now?" or "If I Should Lose You." It is a measure of his artistry that he doesn't. When Sinatra sang "Why Try To Change Me Now?" it was a wounded cry from a former cynic who had lived long enough to venture beyond resignation. Scott sings it as an innocent expression of bewilderment - why should anyone "stare" or "frown?"

What Scott offers in this album is, indeed, selfless compassion and boundless wonder. It's a fine and still unhackneyed selection of songs. Hear his voice trembling with joy following his discovery of the existence of rapture in Irving Berlin's little-sung "They Say It's Wonderful." In terms of love, he clearly sings as an outsider, someone who is excluded from joining in with life. But he does not betray any bitterness or angst; he, more interestingly, is curious, and has love of his own to offer. He views love as stout Cortez viewed the Pacific for the first time, filled with naive wonderment. The album is like being hugged for the longest time, and you can be moved to tears by Scott's embrace.

I've heard few other, if any, American singers capable of invoking the vertiginous giddiness of "I Wish I Didn't Love You So Much" or capable of constructing a devotional hymn out of "How Deep Is The Ocean." But Scott manages it. On the latter, there are clear echoes of Charlie Parker's interpretation on his Verve string sides; the same, almost hyperreal humanity which emerges out of the mere performance of a sequence of notes and makes it into art. Even "Someone To Watch Over Me," usually performed with at least a soupcon of self-pity, conveys the impression of a humble child asking politely for more. I won't slash my wrists if no Other comes, he is saying, but I'd quite like someone. It would be nice. As a Christmas present, maybe. The complete lack of artifice in his performance will reduce you to a wreck.

For an unalloyed expression of fulfilled, reciprocated love, there's little in post-war popular song to match the barely containable ecstasy of Scott's performance of "I Didn't Know What Time It Was." Here he turns the song into a Madison Avenue "Amazing Grace." The holy is brought to the foreground. The closer, a comparatively obscure but lovely Burke/Van Heusen song "Sunday, Monday And Always," reveals to us the umbilical link which leads to Marvin Gaye, to Lewis Taylor and to Prince; love spins at 69 rpm, the voice yearns and becomes the Other in its own obsessionality. Gaye in particular did manage to obtain a copy of the album when first out and used it as his template - investigate his Romantically Yours compilation of ballads for proof that he was far closer to Scott than to, say, Nat "King" Cole.

Again, Falling In Love Is Wonderful is a glimpse, perhaps too late, of an angelic Utopia, of a compassion which could have altered at least part of the course of popular music had it been allowed its proper due. Listening to it now, we understand, a lifetime away, that perfection once existed.

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .

AUDIO SERMON FROM THE CHURCH OF ME

Apologies for the current paucity of posts, but I am busy preparing for my broadcasting debut, which can be heard on Resonance 104.4 FM
on Tuesday 21 January as part of the Clear Spot series between 7:00-8:30 pm. Music and commentary will centre around theories relating to my work in progress, The Feminisation Of Noise. This is my first time in a radio studio, so be kind with your comments ;-)

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .

WE CANNOT BE GOD BUT CAN ONLY DO OUR BEST

The film Truly, Madly, Deeply is a truly wretched affair. Juliet Stevenson - so remote and sexual in Greenaway's Drowning By Numbers - plays the kind of insufferable, scatterbrained, unpunctual ditherer which no publishing house would have tolerated, even in 1994. Her 'cellist husband Alan Rickman dies but his ghost continues to inhabit their Highgate house (see what I mean already?). Stevenson in this film achieves the remarkable feat of turning into Julie Andrews. It is supposedly as real an examination of unresolved bereavement as has ever been witnessed in cinema. As one who for nigh on 17 months has continued to suffer from unresolved bereavement I say: bullshit. It is significant that the cause of death of Rickman's character is never specified. So there's no record of a life slowly or rapidly ebbing away from the Other; nothing about the humiliation of an enthusiastic gourmet and cook reduced to sipping Complan; nothing about scavenger families waiting to strip your house like benevolent bailiffs; nothing about the emotional and financial wreckage which is a consequence of forced relocation. There are no packets of paracetamol in Juliet Stevenson's bedside cupboard, and she does not have to argue herself out of taking all of him when she wakes up every morning. No, she doesn't have to worry about any of that.

But the significant factor here is Rickman - alone in the film, he is so evidently full of life, so evidently sexy. It is that which Stevenson has lost. Michael Maloney's limp lettuce leaf of a New Man doesn't even begin to replace him, and she knows it. He is so obviously a compromise, so defiantly anti-sexy, that it leads us to a belief that her "life" is in fact over - the best she can look forward to now is a substitute for a life. Or as Buffy would have it, "I live in Hell, 'cos I've been expelled from Heaven."

A life in Hell is made even less bearable when you have had a glimpse of Heaven, saw perfection, if only for a split second. How does anyone continue to exist? This is the answerable question which Vaughan Williams poses in his Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis. The major orchestral chord which fades up at the beginning of the piece - like sunrise - represents the ideal, perfection, Godhood. Yet it is abruptly eclipsed, and most of the rest of the work's 15 minutes describes attempts to regain it. The theme was the third of nine psalm settings which Tallis wrote for Archbishop Parker's Whole Psalter of 1567; significantly, it sets to music the psalm which begins "Why fumeth with fight" - in other words, why try to regain something which you can never have? It sets the boundaries. Variations on the chord surface briefly here and there, but it's never quite the same chord, not quite the same magic we heard at the beginning, and the piece, after the solemn opening statement of pure Tallis melody, becomes increasingly agitated in its efforts. The theme is varied, every type of diatonic counterpoint is attempted with the theme like an imperfect jigsaw puzzle. Eventually, in what sounds more like frustration than catharsis, the first violins declare the melodic line fortissimo in sopranino register. It's a cry of rage, but soon recedes. We still have to clear up the mess. The orchestra subsides into what appears to be a mood of resignation. At the end, one violin plays an ascending five-note augmented minor scale which sounds like unbearable weeping, and a chord returns to end the piece - not the original chord, but as good as we're going to get, as near to God as man can be. In order to continue living, we have to accept the reality of this.

It is strange how the entirety of Charles Ives' The Unanswered Question (sometimes subtitled "Contemplation of a Serious Matter") is based on the exact same opening "perfect" chord. But here Ives does not worship it; quite the reverse. He is amused by it and merely tries to augment his own "imperfect" musical visions upon God-made perfection. Thus the bitonal trumpet motif - so anticipatory of Miles Davis, so strangely cognisant of the "rudimentary" notes which Vaughan Williams makes the lead trumpeter play in the second movement of his Symphony No 3 (the Pastoral) as a recollection of a bugler in the French trenches in WWI. Ives is curious, and the other agitated and sometimes atonal orchestral flurries and motifs which he periodically introduces into the work can be directed and introduced by the conductor in any order - written in 1910 (the same year as Fantasia), this is prototype aleatory music-making which anticipates Cage by a good 30 years. I can appreciate Michael Gibbs' comment that the trumpet on The Unanswered Question "comes from another planet" - but really, it is we, humanity, who are on another planet from that in which "perfection" exists, and this might be God's way of analysing us - perhaps remove the indefinite article from the subtitle and consider it as contemplation of serious matter. Ives doesn't strive; he just observes and indicates. It is up to us to make what he will of it.

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .

SEMI-METAPHYSICAL CONSIDERATIONS OF STOCKHAUSEN

Although Karlheinz Stockhausen formally renounced the Catholic Church in the ‘60s, he never really abandoned its fundamental tenets; or more properly applied them to how he viewed his ideals of sonic alchemisation. A very pertinent question might be: given his love of Stravinsky and Milhaud co-existing with his adoration of Webern and Bartok, and given his apprenticeship as a danceband and nightclub pianist in post-war Cologne, why does he continue to have such a problem with rhythm or repetition? A latent fear, perhaps, of the inhuman treadmill of the concentration camps? He was orphaned during WWII, but never came near the camps; after the war he studied at the Cologne Hochschule für Musik under the Swiss composer Frank Martin, who had lately begun to incorporate 12-tone concepts into his works (e.g. 1944’s Passacaille for orchestra) with philosophy as his secondary subject. Aware of, and a fervent student of, the Second Viennese School – Schoenberg in particular – his key moment of transition appears to have been the 1951 contemporary music study programme at Darmstadt. There the Composition Seminar was due to be given by Schoenberg, but the 77-year-old was gravely ill. His place was taken by none other than Theodor Adorno, not only the Frankfurt School’s leading philosopher but also a former student of Alban Berg, who frowned somewhat upon new developments. In particular that summer the Sonata for Two Pianos, composed by the Dutchman Karel Goeyvaerts and performed by the composer and Stockhausen, excited Adorno’s bile no end. In the first of Stockhausen’s five-volume Texte series, there is a hilarious account of how Adorno pleaded and yelled at the two newbies to tell him what this music meant. A detailed description by Goeyvaerts of the exceptionally precise musical design behind the Sonata – fundamentally, successive registral note/tone placements converge from each end of the piano keyboard towards middle C, and then spread out again (a horizontal structure which, for example, Gorecki adapted, albeit tonally, to a vertical structure for his Symphony No 3) – failed to quell the ire of Adorno’s negative dialectics. Having recently acted as musical director for an adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, the Marxist industrialist had to content himself by angrily dismissing Goeyvaerts and Stockhausen as “Leverkühn and his famulus” – a precise echo of the mode of attack which the reformed Maoist Cornelius Cardew deployed a quarter of a century later in his sidesplitting book/polemic Stockhausen Serves Imperialism.

A more important consequence of Stockhausen’s attendance at Darmstadt ’51 was his exposure to the more robustly Catholic Messiaen’s Quatre Etudes de Rythme, in particular to the second of the four sections “Mode de Valeurs et d’Intensités.” The latter is based on a set of 36 notes subdivided into three 12-tone subsets. Each subset has a specific duration, intensity of attack and dynamic level associated with each of its pitches. The unification and seeming solidity of this structure attracted Stockhausen, and influenced his essential concept of a piece of music acting as a metaphysical divine creation whose components are consistent but whose individual approaches are always variable.

This was nothing like the aleatorics and complete openness of the Buddhist John Cage; Stockhausen allows freedom within his structures, but never for a nanosecond denies that there must be structure, or relinquish his hold upon the structure. He continued to study under Messiaen, simultaneously doing fieldwork at the electronic music studios of, first French, and then West German, radio. Communications theory and phonetics were also studied; and while early works like Kreuzspiel show how he methodically worked towards this end, his first indisputably major work is the 1956 composition for processed boy’s voice, electronics and five loudspeakers, Gesang der Jünglinge.

The presence and positioning of the five loudspeakers in this piece are crucial, for the processed sounds move and communicate between the speakers in a very precise fashion. Superficially it sounds like a battle; on one side, the boy’s voice cut up, manipulated, modified, his message deconstructed into seemingly arbitrary successions of vowels and consonants. Amongst other things, this is the birthplace of sampling and cut-up in music (hear Bobby Byrd’s voice being cut up into its elements in a very similar fashion on Eric B and Rakim’s “I Know You Got Soul”), but there is a subtext. Towards the climax of the piece, the boy’s voice is multiplied a hundredfold (Dollar’s “Give Me Back My Heart”) and the electronics become more frenetic and forceful, almost threatening to drown the “humanity” completely. Then the voice suddenly becomes comprehensible and we realise that we are hearing a hymn of praise out of the Book of Daniel (the Men in the Fiery Furnace). Thus is humanity reaffirmed in this most seemingly inhuman music – what Houllebecq tries but fails to grasp in Atomised.

For someone so inimical to rhythm, Stockhausen’s late ‘50s/early ‘60s works are as percussion-orientated as he got without ever submitting to the concept of rhythm itself – 1960’s Kontakte being the most famous example, but mention should also be made of 1959’s Zyklux; 17 pages of score for a solo percussionist which can be read and played in any order (but Terry Riley it isn’t); and the various Klavierstücke for piano which, again, can be performed in no set order.

In orchestral terms – and here Stockhausen is revealed as being as artful and emotional an organiser of large ensembles as Stravinsky or Mingus, here is where I feel his art reaches a peak – he adopts the very Mingusian progress of breaking down the orchestra into smaller, self-reliant groups with their own “position in space” but who continue to interact with the other subgroups. An immediately drastic example of this approach can be found in 1964’s Mixtur for five sections of orchestra and a ring modulator to process and recycle the sounds produced by the instruments, thereby creating a larger structure, much of which was not actually being “played.” There are 20 “moments” (Stockhausen’s nomenclature for what he terms as “slices of musical time”) in the piece, and, again, though the order in which they occur is not of primary importance, the inner musical logic of the piece is apparent throughout. This approach is taken to greater and larger extremes by pieces such as Gruppen (1957, for three orchestras), Carré (1960, for four orchestras and four choirs) for which Stockhausen provides the structure and overall outline of the piece but, as with Renaissance painters, leaves the mechanics and “composition” to the performers (and in jazz, Gil Evans used the same approach for pieces like 1960’s “La Nevada” and 1975’s very Stockhausen-esque “There Comes A Time”) and 1964’s shattering electronic coming of age Momente (redesigned and expanded to even more stunning effect in 1972).

His best-known work was trailed by 1966’s Telemusik, in which he fuses various types of folksong and what would later be cheapened by calling “world music” – but there is respect here instead of mere politesse, and the desired “song of the Earth” is almost attainable. But 1967’s Hymnen is likely to remain his key to the kingdom; what may be the most important and influential, and also the least listened to and least understood, piece of music of the last 50 years. Dictating, amongst other things, the groundwork for the next thirty years of pop music (via the Beatles through to sampling), this two-hour work assembles and reshapes a series of national anthems, though the emotion remains tempered by Stockhausen’s insistence upon the priority of process (“how”) over material (“what”). The tenor of the piece develops slowly but steadily over its duration and the sonorities are never less than compelling. Listening, we do not feel that a laboratory tutorial is being conducted; rather, like Jonson’s reformed Alchemist, we see a determined groping in the dark towards a gloriously illuminated result; and indeed its climax is amongst the most overwhelming and orgasmic of musical climaxes, wherein an avalanche of slowly descending electronic glissandi engulfs the listener (imagine the end of “A Day In The Life” played backwards and multiplied by a million). It is a moment of catharsis rarely achieved in music and may well represent the ideal towards which so many Ambient, or indeed Rock, wannabes foolishly stumble.

in 1967, Prozession followed; more or less a compact Greatest Hits, with samples taken from all of his previous works. Since then it is not quite right to say that Stockhausen has retrenched – 1970’s Mantra for two pianists and processed electronics is a violently arresting study, a Munch to the Cezanne of George Crumb’s Makrokosmos III; 1968’s Stimmung for rapidly stuttering choir is probably more fun to participate in than to listen to – but that his Catholicism remains undimmed in a corner of his work which resists opening up to the wider world. 1976’s Sirius was released and marketed as a pop record, complete with soft-focus close-up cover photo, in an attempt to capture the Mike Oldfield/Vangelis audience, but to no avail. And since 1977 he has dedicated himself, foolhardily, to his seven-opera concept Licht (one for each day of the week). At the time of writing Stockhausen is 74 and has produced only four of the seven operas, all of which contain interesting and sometimes beautiful individual moments, but none of which hangs together as more than a quasi-New Age curio.

But none of this should deter from the undeniable magnificence and inescapable importance of Stockhausen’s finest work – he is as deft and large-minded an organiser of sounds and musicians as Phil Spector, but unlike Spector there is a warmth to Stockhausen’s grandeur; you can embrace the music rather than simply admire it. Is it “anti-rave”? Only if you subtract the originator of rave – Stravinsky – from the equation. Stockhausen subtracted the rhythm, but only to provide space to create his own.

Postscript
Collecting Stockhausen on record is an expensive business these days. Stockhausen has retrieved the rights to all his music and released them in elaborately-designed packages, the price of which is likely to send a severe chill through your bank balance. And the Deutsche Grammophon vinyl originals – unless you are old enough to have bought them at the time of their original release, or lucky enough to have a parent who did so – now go for similarly absurd prices on ebay and elsewhere. If you have to go for one, then get Hymnen; the DG 2-LP original remains a masterpiece, and I have seen it second-hand for about £50. The 4CD update is also compelling, but doesn’t really tell you anything you didn’t already know – and, as bought new, will cost you more than twice the second-hand vinyl price. In truth, as with free improvisation, there is no substitute for hearing the music performed live; to hear how the acoustics and musicians interact, what part the audience has to play in experiencing the sounds in the multi-directional form in which they were intended. Stockhausen’s Texte writings (DeMont Schauberg, 5 vols, 1963-85) are required reading for a full understanding of how his music works; but for a good one-volume guide you could do worse than 1975’s The Works Of Karlheinz Stockhausen by Robin Maconie (father of Stuart). Cardew’s Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, if you can find it, is inadvertently uproarious misanthropy worthy of Celine.

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .

ELEMENTARY PARTICLES

Reality always overtakes even the farthest absurdities of fiction. In the epilogue of his 1999 novel Les Particules Élémentaires, the title rather misleadingly being translated into the English Atomised, Michel Houllebecq pinpoints 2029 as the date when the first cloned human is produced. But the Raelians (should any proof be forthcoming) have already beaten him to it – complete with the aid of aliens. The news in itself demonstrates an unintentional (or is it intended?) humour which is entirely absent from Atomised.

Let us not be mistaken; Atomised at least attempts to be a state-of-humanity novel, such as was entirely commonplace in the 19th century and, with a very few exceptions (although the bulwark of science fiction) absent from 20th century literature. Indeed, though the story is supposedly told by an evolved humanoid – thus the apparent dispassion and meticulous itemising of the biological and sociological realities of humanity untouched by the needs for belief or worship – stylistically it is extremely 19th-century in construction and outlook. Houllebecq’s writing reads like a not altogether satisfactory cohabitation between Thomas Carlyle and Nicholson Baker. But it is clearly intended to be an epic, perhaps even a stab at prophecy; and in terms of rubbing the readers’ faces in the horrific banality of biological existence and non-existence, in terms of steadily coercing us into considering who we are and where the hell we are going, in terms of guiding us towards “the truth,” it dwarfs everything ever written by anybody on the current Granta “Young British Novelist” list, and most things written by anybody on previous Granta lists. Compare it, for instance, with the deliberately leaden and stultifying examination of the real and imagined lives of unsympathetic and eminently hittable people delineated in Ian McEwan’s Atonement. So many over-tangible sleights of hand make our minimal care for these unlovable people even more minimal. One ends up not caring who lived or died; the pre-empting technique of having “Cyril Connolly” criticise the novel’s first third as bad Virginia Woolf (specifically The Waves) doesn’t mean that it ain’t so.

Then again, possessing a big canvas doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to produce a Guernica or a Kane, let alone a Bleak House. As with Phil Spector’s productions, which simultaneously manage to contain everything and yet contain nothing, Atomised can be stared at in a vague approximation of minor awe but never entered.

The two central protagonists are stepbrothers, Michel and Bruno, both conceived by a libertine mother but with different fathers who more or less absent themselves from their sons’ lives. They are both brought up by their grandmothers. Michel early on shows little or no interest in “life” or “the outside world” apart from those details which he can pin down and analyse in test-tubes. He becomes a molecular biologist, and eventually the unwitting John the Baptist of humanity’s evolution/redundancy. In contrast, Bruno is sent to an unhappy, bullying public school, is overweight, has no confidence with the opposite sex, and proceeds thereafter (an unsatisfactory marriage and son notwithstanding, and how notwithstanding are these two characters in this book) to a series of unfulfilling “adventures” in nudist camps, one-night stands, sex clubs and so on. In truth he is a libertine far more in theory than in practice; he wishes fervently to be able to “join in” sexual abandon/life, but can never do so. He works as a teacher, but following an unfortunate loss of control whereby he flashes his five-inch cock at a no-more-than-amused 15-year-old Arab pupil in his class, he goes for psychiatric treatment and thereafter is given a desk job.

As per Strangers On A Train, Michel and Bruno are so obviously one person split into two conflicting sets of beliefs and viewpoints on how life should be lived that it’s difficult to care for them as discrete human beings. Houllebecq proceeds, determinedly matter-of-fact, to indicate how the gradual replacement of religion by the continuing onset of materialism; how in fact the Manson murders were the logical conclusion of hippiedom; without faith or true belief, humans turn to methods of instant gratification – first consumerism, then casual sex, and finally mutilation/destruction – and how all this determines the courses which their lives will take. All with a (n un) healthy dollop of biological and physical theoretics/history, with some Auguste Comte philosophy on the side (“positivism” replacing God and thus the only attribute retainable in “science”). Perhaps Houllebecq wishes to modify/revive these beliefs, though there is more than a touch of the John Henry Newman about his deliberate avoidance of the idea that humans might wish to sustain themselves on more than an animal level by things other than common belief (e.g. relationships with other human beings). But what stops Atomised from becoming even a 21st-century Apologia Pro Vita Sua - the evangelist calling out against the established high-priesthood of free market economics – is what I think as being a complete indifference on the author’s part with regard to humanity. Though the sub-Asimov (specifically the short story “Breeds There A Man…”) ending of the book states that “This book is dedicated to mankind,” no love for mankind is particularly evident; even less for love itself.

The female characters in this book (and no one here advances beyond the level of “character”), as tends to be the case in Houllebecq’s work, get a raw deal. Both Michel and Bruno end up briefly in a simulacrum of “living” with their respective Others, but so roughly sketched are Annabelle and Christiane (the attendant irony in the latter name is heavily emphasised), so clearly foredoomed are they, that the reader is left with little doubt that Michel and Bruno are in fact in love with each other (i.e. with the view in their mirror). Annabelle wants Michel from childhood, but Michel isn’t interested, and anyway the dumb problem pages of teenage magazines dictate that she should not make the first move. They vanish from each other’s life for 25 years; she returns, they conceive without much enthusiasm on Michel’s part, but of course it’s too late – she is found to have ovarian cancer which hysterectomy cannot prevent from spreading, and accordingly commits suicide. Similarly, Bruno meets Christiane at a nudist camp-cum-New Age shyster palace; they get it on, decide to cohabit, but one night at a sex club she collapses and then becomes wheelchair-bound. She too has cancer, and returns to her slum flat. She throws herself downstairs to exit the world. Bruno immediately realises his uselessness and obligingly returns to the psychiatric clinic, this time for good, ensuring a contented, loveless existence. What’s left for Michel to do but help lay the groundwork for getting rid of humanity? And when that work is eventually done, in 2009, he vanishes off the coast of Ireland, to become another particle in the final paragraph of Joyce’s “The Dead” or perhaps to disappear to Tibet, as his father had done 45 years previously.

The fact that Houllebecq talks in detail about the Stones but can’t spell Snoop Doggy Dogg’s name correctly might lead you to be dubious about everything else he delineates in this book; if he can’t even get that right, how can we trust him on anything else? – although this may be the consequence of Frank Wynne’s unsatisfactory translation, which persists with solecisms such as “in general, without exception…”

The outlook of this book is bleak and gives me the creeps, though for all the wrong reasons. It is made unambiguously clear that if we strip ourselves of religious beliefs, if we refuse to countenance or at least incorporate ideas such as the afterlife – in short, if we face up to what we really are as human beings – we are left with base, banal biology; mothers and lovers becoming nothing more than steadily decaying piles of bones. Christiane, in her younger days, observes the cult leader of the nudist camp, having just died, being given a funeral pyre, and is in fact forced to stare close-up at the skeleton which he had become. 20 years later she will suffer the same fate, albeit in a crematorium; and Bruno cannot resist having a sidelong peek at the red flashes in the grille at the side of the furnace. Without religion we are also stripped of art, music and love. But there’s something about Houllebecq – a “quality” beyond even fatalism – which leads me to think that that’s kind of how he prefers things to be. There is the vaguest suspicion that he ejaculates excitedly at the prospect of death and decay. Peter Greenaway approached the same territory in his 1985 film A Zed And Two Noughts, and like Greenaway, and decidedly unlike Vermeer, there is an almost supernatural fascination with the processes of decay which may well count as being anti-human. One concurs entirely with Geoffrey Palmer’s anguished roar of “What good do all these decaying bodies do?”

So, while this is a book which does need to be read, if only once, it cannot inspire me to reject what Houllebecq is rejecting. It’s the obvious ultimate consequence of Baudrillardism of course – everything’s a mirror, a fake, a simulacrum – and if taken in itself as gospel as a life belief it will lead to the loss of home, job, money, lovers, friends, ultimately life. It is a terrible burden to understand that nothing means anything. Harder to come to terms with the possibility that there must be more than this, that there must be a “soul,” that people must survive in some way or another, even after they biologically die; and maybe that’s what Houllebecq intends to say. Lazily dismissed by most British critics as a right-wing anti-permissive society tract masquerading as a novel, Atomised seems to me much more like a lament by a disgruntled man of the Left; he noticeably soft pedals on Communism and is violently (if not coherently) against unregulated capitalism. The 19th-century roots of this increased doubt in religion and renewed belief in science and reason, and its consequences upon Western society, are usefully and exhaustively described in A N Wilson’s book God’s Funeral; one imagines that Houllebecq would have been perfectly content sweeping up the heads of unbelievers from beneath the guillotine in 1794.

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .