Blogger's Remorse

I can't lie, I got it. I haven't posted in a month and I haven't felt like it. I started this blog as an experiment to see whether it was a format that appealed and right now the answer is nope. So I'm shutting it down. It kinda just hangs over me and I feel like I should be maintaining it when I would much rather be working on something that matters like my book or Wire work or VT etc. If you wanna keep up, you can still find me there. For now, right here, this is the end.

No Future

My friend Willie Miller was the first to alert me to the fact that I had “set the blogosphere on fire” with the introductory comments to my Primer on Kosmische Music in the latest issue of The Wire. Then someone else points out that Momus – of all people – was listing the story as one of the ‘hottest’ internet debates of the week, alongside whether convicted Lybian bomber Ali al-Megrahi, was in fact set up. Seems a little ridiculous. Anyway, the passage in question is this one:

"Faust were the archetypal Krautrock group, the first to fully popularise the term and, alongside Kraftwerk, Can and the Michael Rother/Klaus Dinger circle, the first to attempt a specifically German rock music. But in their love of energy and speed, and their revelling in the sound of destruction and mechanisation, whether scoring symphonies for power tools or reducing rock's sex beat to a steely metronomic pulse, their adoption of futurist ideas and aesthetics, and calls for an indigenous German rock felt uncomfortably close to the calls for violent national renewal that plunged Germany into the abyss in the 1930s. But there was a parallel utopian Krautrock, based around a cabal of musicians who rejected any notion of a year zero in favour of recuperating earlier German folk styles while taking inspiration from the psychedelic explosion that had taken place in the UK and the USA. This was Kosmische music, named after label manager, author and visionary underground head Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser's fantasy of a devotional form of psychedelia synthesizing traditional folk with Middle European orchestral traditions, improvised rock, endless keyboard drones and the euphoric communion afforded by mind-altering drugs. Unlike the Industrial Krautrock of Faust or Kraftwerk, the Kosmische scene was a pastoral trip. All the iconic images of the music involve surrender: green politician and folklorist Sergius Golowin squatting in bliss beneath the blue skies, rolling green hills and cascading waterfalls of the Swiss mountains..."

The problem seems to lie in what various commentators have extrapolated as my equation of futurism with fascism when, as far as these guys see it, it was precisely the opposite tradition, a vision of a pastoral neverland, that was the ‘engine’ (woops) of the Third Reich. Momus even goes so far as to protest that “There’s a big Momus feature in The Guardian today.” Uh, sorry, I mean “They (ie The Nazis) put Marinetti in their Degenerate Art exhibition, for heaven's sake!” As if this somehow absolves futurism and Marinetti of any association with totalitarianism. What he doesn’t say, of course, is that Marinetti was a fascist. His futurist party was absorbed by Mussolini’s fascist party and he was a lapdog who campaigned to have futurism recognised as the state art of fascism. As if Hitler’s dislike of his ideas could somehow, in this context, be taken as a badge of honour!



But we’re getting away from ourselves. My point, given above, was that the call for a specifically Germanic form of new revolutionary culture, one that refused an umbilical to any corrupt, bastardised forms – the pop music of The Stones and The Beatles, the new psychedelia, traditional instrumentation etc – does, in the specific historical context, feel uncomfortably close to the same calls for national renewal and cultural isolation that took Germany to the brink in the 1930s. You think the music of Faust etc has nothing to do with a new year zero? Here’s a quote from Faust’s Hans Joachim Irmler, from a cover story I did on Faust for The Wire when I spent several memorable days with them in their studio in the south of Germany in the early 2000s: "Another part might be Germany itself," he says, attempting to explain the logic behind the founding of Faust. "Because after this crazy war Germany was completely destroyed and in a way this was a blessing in disguise. Everything had to begin again from zero; industry, the arts, everything. There was nothing left for our generation and we refused to have anything to do with the generation that came before us. We invented artificial music, music that we created in the studio on our own, music that had little to do with western music in general.” So, yeah, renewal was a part of it. And of course Faust, Kraftwerk etc were not fascist groups by any stretch of anyone’s imagination – I am a huge fan of both and have long championed them - but what I wanted to do was highlight the potential perils and the common ground that lie in this way of thinking, often adopted by both radical left wing aesthetes and artists and extreme right-wing revolutionaries. Of course much of the Nazi mythos was to do with regressing, returning to some kind of mythic middle-European pastoral neverland unspoiled by decadent modernity. But that was precisely what it was – a myth, a lie. The reality of the Nazi regime, the architecture that underpinned the whole machine – and it was a machine – was regimentation and industrialisation. You can spin all the tales you want about how they built autobahns to get people back to the country – but a motorway driven through the country is no longer the country, it’s an industrial fantasy of the country. Nazi society was industrialised, mechanistic, robotic. It relied on reducing its members to drones, to cogs, to guinea pigs, to well-lubricated parts of an obedient machine. It embraced the latest developments in modern media as the most effective means to spread its propaganda. Hitler used the new air transport to encourage a feeling of omnipotence, enabling him to address rallies and meetings across Germany on the same day. Without mechanisation and industrialisation the mass extermination of Jews would not have been possible. This is the central horror that underpins Nazism, the industrial scale of its 'heroic' aryan brutality, a futurist fantasy come terrifyingly true.

There’s a reason why certain people are so quick to rush to the aid of a daft, discredited movement like Futurism – its central tenets still function as a base for much of their thought and aesthetics, so they’re super-touchy about its fascist/totalitarian roots. It feeds into their admiration for architecture that feels more like prison camps than homes, for faceless towerblocks that are hymns to concrete, metal and glass, for city planning that reduces people to faceless units to be moved around and stored most effectively, for the kind of scale that completely overwhelms the individual. Futurism refused any notion of the feminine, the ‘old’, the organic, in favour of angles and ‘youth’ and scale and machine noise and violence. See modern Brutalist architecture for an extension of this oppressive macho aesthetic, a favourite of would-be 'tough guy' intellectuals.



What Germany needed at this point, more than ever, was an injection of hippies, and with Rolf Ulrich-Kaiser as their mid-wife, the Kosmische music strain reconnected them to the world. I could quote them endlessly, but one more time for Witthüser & Westrupp: “Some people say hash makes lush, but give me a joint.”



And while we're on the subject of Primers, The Wire have just published a collection via Verso of the best of them in book form: The Wire Primers: A Guide To Modern Music includes my primers on Sonic Youth and Fire Music. Get it here.

This Beat Is Hypnagogic

Daniel Lopatin and David Keenan: a totally chillerz e-mail exchange about H-Pop and pizza and DJ Dog Dick and Shakira and shit.



DL: DUDE YOUR ALTER EGO WILL SWEENEY IS FINALLY GETTING SOME PRESS!
I thought about post-noise as a movement last night. 30 years after post punk, doesnt it feel like the spirit is linked? a sorta revaluation and broadening of a stifling, didactic and kinda trad style? post-punk got a lot of guff from punk cuz it was too black!! or at least thats how i read the undercurrent of it. in much the same way i think noise is threatened by post noise cuz timbrally, it's emasculating... and noise is inherently male chauvanist... ! where does HPOP fit in? it feels like a stream of post noise that deals acutely with nostalgia. anyway im just going on...
i got an email from a college radio guy who goes "it really pisses me of that people put music in categories" -- to which i replied that indeed we should all roam free in total and utter confusion for all of time. i mean, why delineate at all? here comes the garbage man with your mail.
look at techno -- techno acutely uses classification to posit streams of itself -- one against another. its an ongoing conversation -- a style war. its how we get to the next thing. standing on the shoulders of giants.

i mean come the fuck on? i'm gonna try to write about this more on the plane to stockholm -- synthemas II man. people need to get hip.

d



DK: Yeah, psyched that Will can take alla the flak for me too - result! Yeah, really interesting points, I have been thinking things through towards another post about H-Pop on my blog and coming to similar conclusions, specifically that this is a music that interacts with mainstream pop and 'consensual' modes, whereas noise refused dialogue altogether, and that it's also got a lot to do with sex, escaping the hyper-male fear of feminisation/emasculation that comes from noise as you say, but also a sensual aspect, in that the recovery of memory is almost like a sexualising of mental states and ways of being from childhood and I keep thinking of Hans Bellmer's quote about eroticism having to do with the pleasure of 'disarticulating' the body - as made overt by Bellmer's amazing art - and I thought that in a way that is what H-Pop does, it disarticulates sound and memory - using F/X, computer voices, muzzy loops, deformed vocals - and in doing so it sexualises them - and then I thought, that is the whole mode of pop right now - everything is Hypnagogic, that is its current mode - it's what Joe Carducci called pop's narcotic appeal - which of course like alla them puritan straight-edge work ethic American punks he was against - because it is feminine, like dissloving into the body instead of pumping it up and making it impenetrable, the steely isolation of noise, immune from infection by pop - no wonder James is so fascinated, repelled, fascinated by alla that body-building imagery... so yeah, I suddenly began hearing mainstream pop as increasingly hypnagogic, the sound of dreaming and sex and dreaming of sex and the activity of the subconscious and I listened to that new Shakira track you like, She Wolf, and I can really see why you like it, specifically the weird modulated vocal she uses and it struck me as an H-Pop style disarticulation, the way her voice is made to mispronounce or smear the words and it's sexy because of that and it's also the way a child would mis-pronounce, and that's attractive too and it comes from playing with words but this is in a much more overtly sexual/sensual context - and of course pop always sexualises childhood, even tho it's supposedly taboo, but it seems here that through the reification in sound of the way that memory functions and transmits experience, it somehow sexualises it - that nostalgia has an erotic component - so this kind of pop music is all about hypnagogic modes too in a way and contemporary noise is so unsexy (and yeah, as with punk, the least interesting artists are the ones who reject 'black' music and culture even though, for me, noise always goes back to Jimi Hendrix and John Coltrane and Albert Ayler and Lou Reed's amplifying of outlaw doo-wop and blues and rock/roll and soul, no matter how baldy Northern Europeans or weedy English guitarists might wanna pretend otherwise) and as you say threatened by sex and the feminine, unless its tied up like an S&M slave or in a low-rent porn mag, always having to be dominated or held in check, but H-Pop embraces sex and the feminine and pop and the mainstream too- right down to its specific associated timbres - while revisioning it via classic 'underground' tools. Then I checked out Digital Girl by Jamie Foxx with The Dream and Kanye West and thought of you - so many H-Pop echoes - and it highlights the reciprocal relationship the underground and the mainstream have right now. Then there's the whole Geneva Jacuzzi/Nite Jewel scene, which seems like a more fashion-focussed/style-bible H-Pop, in fact I think I already saw it described as Hypnagogic Chic ... which reminds me of how Free Folk so quickly became Freak Folk and Wyrd Folk etc as it bubbled to the surface.

But the funniest response is when someone feels compelled to rubbish it but then say, uh, it's actually true, if it wasn't such bullshit, etc... It's like the classic free folk line - there was a period where I was receiving a press release once a week that went along the lines of New Weird America is bullshit but even so (insert lame indie folk group here) are probably the true pioneers of its aesthetic and should be hailed as such. It's all about taking the temperature of where the culture is at, it changes all the time, and H-Pop seems to be exactly where it is at right now. And it's coming from so many different directions, from sectors with no history of communication or collaboration, like it was in the air, somehow, and everyone invented it at the same time, like the steam engine. I just tried to articulate it. The trouble is, and I think this is a recent cultural development, that the first response of so many people these days to any art, music, culture, writing, theory is for it to get their back up and to immediately wanna shoot it down. Part of it, in the case of underground or noise music, is its in-grained isolationist tendency, they wanna keep it 'pure' and don't want anything that they regard as uncool or as something that doesn't fit with their hard-fought identity, something that might 'infect' their culture and make it so diffuse that they won't even know the correct way to cut their hair anymore. But I think it also has something to do with the internet and blogs and twitter and discussion lists where it is now a competition to get yr personality/ideas across (or, more accurately in most cases, your fantasy avatar's personality/ideas across) and everyone is at it, so this fosters a group of people who are so touchy and self-conscious that they can't respond to anyone else's thoughts or ideas or art or music or writing without feeling they have been somehow personally slighted by their very existence or that the other person is somehow 'winning' the 'profile wars'. Ugh - what hope art and culture and the exchange of ideas in this kind of environment?

DL: its uncanny man -- i've been working on a stoned rant all morning, about to forward it to you -- its messy but it loaded with good shit on topic -- the reciprocal relash is what its all about -- thats the way my generation thinks -- at least the ones on tha margins of culture -- we dont alienate ourselves from it like in the days of old... thats what hpop is all about man... you are getting closer to the true spirit i think, when you bring in the populist engines at play. anyway i hear ya. shit is so wild right now. this will all make perfect sense to people in 2 years. pre-singularity learning curves are much faster :) more data trash out there!



DL: Who knew that anons gets so defensive about pop taxonomies? The recent trending of David Keenan’s hypnagogic pop concept has proven to be unsettling for some — an odd reaction in the era of Last.fm, genre dropdowns and recommendation technology. Your favorite bands drawn and quartered into data silos? Standard fare. But when a music critic is clever enough to describe a zeitgeist brewing then its just a coincidence. Either way I’m pretty happy that people are talking again. 30+ years after post punk, doesn’t it feel like the spirit of hpop and ppunk is linked? For one its a sort of revaluation and broadening of a didactic and trad style… ppunk got a lot of guff from regular punk cuz it was too black and too gay for first gen punks, who it turns out were really just rockers with trashier aesthetix (punk rock-rock inertia undiluted). I draw a contemporary parallel which posits regular noise against post-noise — the no-rules noise which emasculates the former macho man noise by means of sensual pan flutes and other things in bad taste. Goodbye macho sigs, goodbye noise for dudes only. As Spencer Longo points out in Gmail, noise has always been a “rock spectacle in disguise,” citing Hanatarash destroying shit with a bulldozer (so epic) and of course there’s the bit where Eye saws a dead cat in half with a machete — more epic than eating bat heads, surely. Lists goes on.

Enter Mattin, No Fun Fest 2009 who basically announces the whole thing a moot point (not dead, just moot) on the basis of it enabling all of rock’s most capitalist, if not fully Christianic tendencies, paraphrasing — “you enjoy looking up at the stage”… he even went so far as to politicize noise’s ignorance to the racial dynamics at play within the SPACE itself — pointing out that the only black dudes in the hall were the security guards (!!!) Shit. But this cuts to the heart of the problem — noise is enthralled with that separation — separation from people (the royal hegemony) and separation from pop culture (the machine). At all points in time, regardless of context, noise moves laterally towards some ineffable danger zone. Whereas pnoise is future dada anthropolological detective work — continuously blending in to pop so that it can more effectively subvert it.
There are lots of undercover cops interacting with the politix of noise whilst striving for a broader noise array — DJ Dog Dick and James Ferraro are my favorite but they aren’t the only. Lots is happening right here in NYC — For example I’ve always appreciated Prurient’s operatic, if not fully neo Wagnerian aesthetics of confusion. Fernow is a master of masks and disguises — his being elemental, not actual — drawing on the sordid history of industrial/deth/harsh/power towards his own personal supernarrative. A monument to honor ~All Noise.~ (John Lydon took a similar path after his Pistols stint, Frank Black was unafraid in the same way.) Cold Cave is a logical progression — the Neon Boys to Fernow’s Mclaren. Ex-Double Lep Bernstein shifted paths long ago with Religious Knives’ abstracted riders on the storm vibe. Carlos Giffoni is making proto-techno / borderline acid jams with Doepfers and TB-303s. Change is good.
Enter this bit I read on Dusted by Dylan Nyoukis. He did more for the British noise scene at large than anyone modern day. I’ll even go so far as to agree with his quip about pizza noise, although I grew up on TMNT and take that as a personal attack. But are Kodama and Alexander Ross so far removed from hpop that you’d make a fucking list of cool shit and pass it off as as acutely anti-pizza? In a way I almost LOVE that Nyoukis is getting all riled up — it reminds me of the way in which techno operates on a self-taxonomizing level — intra scene style wars inevitably benefit everyone since all that demarcation stimulates change, and change stimulates art. That’s exactly how shit like acid came to be — it posited itself against vocal house, was pro machine rock and was definitively anti soul, but it still SWUNG somehow. Imagine that. Funny cuz Roland machines of war were never intended on being anything more than practice bots for rock dudes… the only problem was they sounded nothing like “real” instruments and ended up in pawn shops. Then some hypnos starting buying them for cheap and making repurposed futuremusic with them, with total disregard for timbral authenticity and a pro-pizza party attitude. The biotech cultural head absorbs all.

So the thing about hpop… its not just about the Skaters brah… have you seen MTV lately? Hpop operates as a function of pnoise and pop both — and deals acutely with nostalgia as a medium by which we generate present day variety. It’s postmodern as fuck and its been happening for a long while now. Sonically, a new ageian pan flute preset with chorus function-ON presented as a method by which one might deliver a sublime no-mind drone situation works in a pnoise context, but also consider Kanye’s emasculation of rap via emo aesthetics — kinda hpop huh? I call it OVERPOP. Or take the example of Flo-rida, the ultimate opop hpopist who’s track “Sugar” appropriates Eiffel 65’s trancepop hit “I’m Blue” — and get this — in the video a nurse puts him under transporting him to a tropical party zone somewhere between sleep and awake — pure hypnagogic reblasting — nostalgia pulled down from CLOUD COMPUTER and chopped to fit MPC 3000 stylings (Longo, Gmail 2009). How about Wiz Khalifa sampling “Better of Alone” — the pinnacle 90s fantasy rave jam, which was also the subject of a KGB Man echo jam? Coincidence? In fashion its Jordan IIIs interlaced with drug dress neon b.u.m. equipment confusion ie. the RETRO KIDS trend:

which Kevin Driscoll so aptly called “House Party 2 + cosplay”. And of course there’s Shakira’s “She Wolf” video — total soft lense horror aesthetics culled directly from Argento’s Opera and Teen Wolf, respectively.
Much like ppunk, the subterranean corollaries of hpop deal DIRECTLY with pop artifice, with little contrivance or meddling — no academes or rockers allowed, unless that is we can rip em and rapidshare their vibes. Hpop benefits from the overt sexuality of opop but chooses to murkify or blot its lines of signification by using modern age electronic reproduction apps — everything from YouTube (XML that shit twice, press play twice and there you have it: the populist delay pedal) to the looper, aka the ultimate plebeian punchline to minimalism. New strains are birthing constantly… Dog Dick and Yo Yo Dieting are developing acutely pnoise r/b n rap noise stratems, inspired by the likes of DJ Screw and RZA who have been hypna for decades now. Ferraro isn’t even making fucking music anymore really and he’s at his most brilliant — having fully morphed into a full on pnoise anthrocop, he’s now working undercover most days at the Hard Rock Cafe so as to better understand this thing we call TAC or Total American Confusion. No doubt a dirty job but someone’s got to do it.
This brings me to authenticity, which is my favorite dirty word — with virtuosity and mystique running a close second and third. They are empty words at best, and at worst — much like Grey Poupon and social security, are middle class lies. Those three dirty words promote terrible ideologies in the field of art and have fucked with me, personally, inall aspects of my work. Neither the Populists or the marginalized Artistes are spared when those 3 come into play. On the other hand, words that we invent in order to deliver an ineffible feeling — the rush of a new idea, however fleeting or veneer or absurd — those are the ones that excite me. Perhaps we can all agree then, that Terrence Trent D’arby made terrible music, but his dreads in the midnight fog deserve their own ID3 genre tag. I suggest tpain. It’s only one man’s guff… so if you don’t like it, call it something else, but at least call it something.




DK: wait a minute, you wrote that before you got mine? That's pefect, take that for a fucking 'coincidence'.

DL: DUDE YR SHIT WAS IN MY INBOX,,

(1) style

i kept flowing

checked it and lost my head.

the shakira thing mostly :)

DK: Yeah, Shakira was what sent me on a loop myself, when I heard it I instantly heard what you were hearing in it and a whole buncha wires crossed in my brain. Underground music and sex don't normally go together but here's one guy who is thankful that they are no longer mutually exclusive..

DL: hahah seriously... if anything our allied forces will get everyone more laid.

DK: ...and ultimately that is what it's all about - PIZZA TIME!

The Wire

New issue of The Wire is out. I have a Primer on Kosmische Music (Ash Ra Tempel/Tangerine Dream/Popol Vuh/Siloah/AR & Machines/Zweistein/Klaus Schulze/Technical Space Composer's Crew/Limbus 3/Witthuser & Westrupp/Sergius Golowin/Walter Wegmuller/Timothy Leary/Emtidi/The Cosmic Jokers/Dom/Yatha Sidhra/Kalacakra), reviews of two new Derek Bailey DVDs on Incus, a new Wadada Leo Smith CD and a new compilation of live 13th Floor Elevators material all in the new issue.

BBC: "David Keenan's Favourite Beatle Is Yoko Ono"

Interview here.

The Wire

New issue of The Wire is out. I have a review of The Clean's Mister Pop CD in there. It's a good issue. It's interesting to see Byron Coley echoing every one of my points about this year's No Fun Fest/the state of Noise in his live review, even down to singling out those jokers Grey Wolves for a special bitch slap. Way to go Byron. Also enjoyed the interview with Julie Tippetts. Her 1975 LP Sunset Glow is a regular favourite at home and I have always been a fan of her early guitar form, really primitive and 'unartistic' in the best possible way. Dunno if it's enough to convince me to check out her work with Martin Archer tho...



Had a quiet week, writing (finished some entries for a new up-coming Krautrock encyclopaedia), enjoying brews, cooking. Been taking a series of long walks along the Forth & Clyde canal up through Maryhill and further out, incredible contrast of environments, from hip Northern European-style flats lining the banks through virtual no-go areas populated by toothless neds drinking Buckfast and fishing for their dinner in some of the most disgustingly polluted water I have ever seen. Then you round the corner and you're lost in some winding green idyll that seems a world away from the horror of tower blocks and incinerators that loom over either side. All this and families of swans floating by, kingfishers, lurking strangers disappearing into bushes. It's a weird zone but it has a hold on me for now.



Brew scene just keeps getting better in Glasgow thanks to The Cave which has got to be the best source for cool American beers outside of London. This week they only went and scored a whole bunch of Stone classics and I picked up bottles of Stone IPA, Arrogant Bastard, Oaked Arrogant Bastard and Levitation.



My reading this week has been all Russian as I've been going back to Nabokov's lectures on Russian lit and re-reading Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, which is still one of my all-time favourites.



I'm sitting writing this in the shop, it's six-thirty in the evening, kinda overcast. It feels like autumn is just around the corner. I'm gonna walk back home through the park and get a fire going in the living room.

Into The Wild

So I think I've finally recovered from what was one of the weirdest, most exhilirating and creatively satisfying weeks of my life. The Jandek tour of Northern Ireland looked unlikley on paper and the reality was just as weird and as perfectly 'Jandekian' as you might've imagined. I think it's safe to say that musically it sounded like nothing else in the Jandek back catalogue. I feel we (myself on drums, Heather Leigh on electric bass, Sterling Smith on electric guitar and vocals) very quickly hit on our own sound and that it was truly a group sound, as opposed to a Jandek backing band. The formula of the shows favoured it: all instrumental single track improvisations based around a short vocal mantra from Sterling and with no discussion of the shape of the music beforehand. But I'd say even by Bangor - the second date - our collective fingerprint was established, a heavily rhythmic brokedown style with each of us doing our best to stagger our individual timings in order to create a single monolithic construct where the individual parts moved in different, though complimentary cycles to each other, military tatoos, staccato machine-gun patterns, minimal two-note hypnotics. I'd say the Irish tour featured some of Sterling's wildest and heaviest guitar playing. Belfast was particularly scorching, with screaming single note leads that reminded me of Keiji Haino or Jutok Kaneko. Indeed, Belfast was probably my favourite of the Irish shows in that the sound, the PA, the group feeling and the overall setting combined to let us really mainline the staggered rhythm style and Heather and Sterling's playing together was particularly magnetic. I think she's the best bassist I've heard with Jandek, certainly the best 'fit'. The HMV show was also a highlight. It was a lot quieter and melancholy-psychedelic than any of the other gigs and it was quite affecting for all of us. There were lots of really weird, unexpected moments, my favourite being where Sterling began half-singing and half-talking the words "testing.... testing" half way through to make sure his mic was on. It fitted the whole mood perfectly and gave the piece a weird emotional distance. Larne was the most riotous show, just 14 people in the audience and a set so loud that we dislodged the light fittings in the bar below. Some guy mimed throwing a chair at us. I had never played the drums before sitting in with Jandek and the Larne gig was only my second time behind the kit. I think that was part of the inspiration behind the set-up, having both Heather and myself on instruments we weren't familiar with. In a way it reflected more on the modus-operandi of the early Jandek records than any of the recent live hook-ups, which have all been with 'musicians' on their respective instruments. The Derry show had a different energy altogether, dense, trance-like, scuttering rhythms and with Sterling's most exploratory vocal of the tour - "I'm afraid I don't know.... I'm useless." - while he played the guitar on his lap using a slide and doubled on harmonica. Christina Carter was, of course, stunning every night, peaking with a revelatory guitar/vocals seance in Derry.



Touring with Jandek was fascinating as you encountered so many people with so many different understandings and takes on the man and the music. What struck me the most is that the bulk of Jandek fans don't really seem to come out of experimental or improvised music. Most of them dig Jandek as a singer-songwriter - albeit a 'weird' one - and so listen to his music in an entirely different way to someone, say, who came out of listening to more avant garde music like Keiji Haino or Derek Bailey. Bailey's audience assumes intentionality, some kind of deliberate aesthetic or conceptual choice behind the use of new, awkward or unconventional rhythms, tones, harmonies etc. But for many Jandek fans, because they see him as someone who is 'trying' to play songs, they rarely judge the music as being intentional, it's more like he 'can't' play in time - because he's an 'outsider artist' - than he actually made the decision to play in a different time. It's not that his accompanists are 'unable' to play 'in time' with him, they're actually trying to work out new ways of relating rhythmically. Jandek is an artist, not some kind of dysfunctional musical savant. It is all about the music. That's how it's supposed to sound. He's not trying to get somewhere and falling short. I was struck when watching the Barcelona Chronicles DVDs that Incus have just released of Derek Bailey's last run of performances as to how similar Derek and Sterling's guitar styles are - yet no one really talks of Sterling as a guitar innovator in the same way they do about Derek. But he is. I think due to the Jandek 'back story' and the fact of his coming out of a vaguely 'rock' format, his audience don't think of him as a serious, innovative instrumentalist. The shows in Ireland were certainly not 'improv' in any previously articulated way, the rhythms and textures came out of rock, but it was a music that was as open as free jazz and was motivated by a similar urge to find new ways of communicating, dispensing with musical cliches or instrumental shorthand but still trying to make a music that allowed three voices to interact without compromising the odd personal energy of the players. And in terms of that alone, it felt like a success.



I have tons of good memories from the trip. We had a great crew travelling around with us. Thanks to James Rider and James Clarke, who achieved the impossible by pulling it all together in such style. Also endless thanks for help, good company and good times to Iain, David and Paul. Great to see Pete and Jamie there too. Unfortunately I have no beer reports to post from Northern Ireland. While everyone did their best to keep us in good beer I have to warn any beer fans thinking of travelling to Northern Ireland that it is a beer wasteland. I even drank a Pils. It was that desperate. Foodwise it's also a horror. Heather was struck down with food poisoning and we all started starving ourselves and it was so pathetic that when we were served a simple cup of Miso soup in some miserable restaurant in Derry we were all deliriously happy. I asked the girl who runs Sandinos if there were any health food stores, vegetarian cafes or organic restaurants in town and she just laughed. I'm the kind of guy who needs an artisan cheesemonger, an antiquarian book store and a speciality off-license at the bottom of my street before I can even start to feel comfortable, so I was glad to get back to the west end of Glasgow by the end of the trip. Still, we had a great time in Belfast and by the end of the visit we were really getting a good feel for the city. I have been to Belfast many times, my dad is from Belfast and most of his family still live there, but it was Heather's first time and I think she loved it and was horrified by it in equal measure. We got some great taxi drivers but the coolest was the old guy who picked us up in the morning from this gorgeous country house we were staying in after the Derry show. He pulls up in the car and the first thing he says to Sterling is "I heard you had a heavy gig last night." Totally surreal. But my favourite moment was getting a post on my blog after the tour from Andy Cairns of Therapy (!) who said "You can play drums really well!". Thanks Andy, and yes I am available for session work.

Clips from Larne here, here and here.

Clips from Derry here, here and here.

I Like Beer



I gotta give it up for my local brew emporium The Cave on Great Western Road in Glasgow. It was as if they knew what a beer bummer the tour had been because on my first return trip they had only gone and pulled out all the stops and scored Sierra Nevada's 2008 Celebration Ale (which isn't really like a seasonal ale at all, much hoppier than tradition would dictate, and all the better for it) as well as Great Divide's Titan IPA, Yeti Imperial Stout and Hercules Double IPA! I could've cleared the shelves myself and I almost did, scoring a case of each. Hercules Double IPA is the kinda beer that when I first tried it years ago - back when my idea of brew sophistication was supping a Pilsner Urquel in Brel - was just too much for my weedy tastebuds. Nowadays I can't deal with anything less. At 9% it's hardly a session beer but after a week or so of treating myself to a few last thing at night I think Hercules is the final nail in my appreciation of English ales. I have crossed the beer styx. See you on the other side.

Hypnagogic Pop



Did you think I had forgotten about it already? Gotta thank everyone for the amount of interesting correspondence I've been getting in the wake of the piece running in The Wire, it seems to really have struck a chord and it's even more exciting to witness the level of debate and analysis that it has inspired. One thing about noise - and it's an attitude that goes all the way back to punk - is that much of the culture was fixated on play-acting as dumb as possible. There was an anti-intellectual air that made it seem like even having an idea or positing a theory or attempting any kind of analysis whatsoever made you an 'art fag' or something. Fuck that. Punk was always about expanding your horizons, about importing art ideas into life. I'm still on the side of brains. If you're a dumbass you should be outed and made to feel like one. Too often, tho, the dumbos are the ones that shout loudest over everyone else. What has been so exciting is alla the correspondence I've been having with people like Spencer Clark, James Ferraro, Mark McGuire, Taylor Richardson and - especially - Daniel Lopatin and the level of intelligence and ideas active in their work and thought.
Lopatin plays in Infinity Window and records solo as Oneohtrix Point Never. I've been spinning a promo copy of the forthcoming OPN LP on No Fun, Russian Mind, and it's excellent. In our correspondence Daniel has been talking about the hypnagogic pop concept and its importation of timbres and textures that up until now have been regarded as alien to 'experimental' music. He asks why certain timbres and textures are regarded as 'experimental' or 'underground' and others aren't. Indeed, his music does much the same, expanding the timbral palette of underground music by sourcing modes and styles from well outside the canon.
Go here to read an excellent article by Lopatin that expands on these kind of ideas. Lopatin has a collection of his film work out on Root Strata any day now and I highly recommend it. It collects a bunch of what he terms 'echo jams', weird personally-refracted loops and rips that re-vision pop detritus as gateways to the no-mind. My favourite - and possibly the perfect hypnagogic pop working - is "Nobody Here".



More echo jams here and here.

Monklands Hauntology



Continuing the theme of the lost architecture of the Monklands (as if anyone cared but me and Willie Miller and... uh... maybe Stuart Braithwaite?) I joked a few posts back about the demolition of Airdrie Library being next on the cards and I was shocked to hear from some correspondents that there was indeed a proposal to demolish this amazing building and integrate it into a multi-schools complex including Caldervale (a building that genuinely deserves to be wiped off the face of the earth) and Airdrie Academy. Apparently there was such an uproar, even marching in the streets, that the council backed off. Can't believe they even debated it. So, yeah, over on Blissblog Simon Reynolds is talking about Hypnagogic Pop as being a US lo-fi version of Hauntology, which makes sense to a certain degree, tho Hauntology seems to be more about a general reverse, an alternate backwards or parallel history that factors in all sorts of influences from a liminal historical storehouse that pre-dates many of the player's/artist's own lifetimes (thinking of Drew Mullholand and Joe Banks with their obsession with Defence Of Britain architecture etc) whereas Hypnagogic Pop is modern, more explicitly autobiographical, future-focussed and transformative. Wait a minute, does that mean if Reynolds gets to claim Hypnagogic Pop as an aspect of Hauntology I get to trade for Hauntology as a sub-set of England's Hidden Reverse? Result.

Anyway, here's an eerie hauntological field report from the last days of Clarkston Primary school in Airdrie: