Second issue of this great zine – now out, bigger and even better than the debut! Same bad-ass bashment attitude!
Great interviews with Dr Carolyn Cooper (author of the book “Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture At Large”) on her lucidly academic take on bashment, Solo Banton on working with Jahtari, Ward 21 on starting out with King Jammy and then making mad riddim. There’s even an extended interview with Sizzla that attempts to get to grips with things like his Mugabe sponsored appearance in Zimbabwe.
But I think what really makes NICS stand out is the combination of great articles with smaller, more “ziney” things. This issue you can learn how to do the “Willie Bounce”, hear Gabriel Heatwave‘s fave moments from the awesome Stageshow event, take a trip down Nostrand Ave in Brooklyn to look at the record shops, and even get a primer in Japanese Dancehall acts.
I’ve contributed a three-pager myself on an obscure JA cop TV show from the eighties…
Plus supeber graphics and that whole hand-printed, hand collated DIY vibe.
No Ice Cream Sound is available NOW, from here. I would advise getting one sooner rather than later – they’ve printed so few that “limited edition” doesn’t even say it. (The Shimmy Shimmy crew will now share in the zine editor’s curse of having people ask you if you have any copies of your first issues left, for YEARS after you sold it out… *cackle*)
Stamford Hill is right at the northern end of the London Borough of Hackney, bordering Haringey/Tottenham. I’ve lived around there for about 15 years now and have always had an interest in its history.
Last May, Richie (Maharishi Hi-Fi / Musical Fever) hosted another one of his excellent nights, this time at the Mascara Bar (previously Panagea Project, opposite Morrisons Supermarket). I’m no die-hard Ska or Rocksteady expert, but Richie’s nights are always excellent (see reviews here and here). I’ll happily leave the selections to Richie and his favoured DJs any time – an amazing night for the old and young is standard.
Riche also has an uncanny habit of organising great events within about 2 minutes of my flat, which is most definitely to his credit. This time one of my favourite reggae writers of all time, Penny Reel, was on the bill – and there was a local history angle. I was sold.
It was an education, musically and socially. I had the pleasure of meeting Nick Kimberley, who published the world’s first reggae fanzine, Pressure Drop, with Penny Reel in 1974. I get very excited about things like that and the connections/differences with Woofah. Before that night I didn’t know anything about the R&B Records operation. Naturally there were tunes aplenty and further help was on hand in the form of a text produced especially for the night by Malcolm Imrie, who has kindly allowed me to republish it here:
R&B Records 1959-1984
Bunny Lee: “The main t’ree people was when I come a Englan’ forty odd years ago, right, was who now. . .? Mrs King. . . and. . . husband name Benny. Benny use’ to come a Jamaica too, yunno, an’ put out — a get record. Him use’ to put out anyt’ing wha Ken Lack [Caltone imprint] make, Rita an’ Benny, y’understan…”
Rita and Benny King, R&B Records?
“Yes, Rita an’ Benny, right. Them did ‘aye a big distributing place from — dem was powerful people inna the business. Mrs King was a force to reckon with. Them use’ to have a place inna Stamford Hill. If she na sell the record is better yu come outta the business.”
In 1959, Stamford Hill was a lot livelier than it is today. A good place to be a teenager. Full of cafes, like the popular E&A salt beef bar on the corner of Clapton Common and Stamford Hill or Carmel’s kosher restaurant a few doors further down on the other side of the street (oddly, the newish shop there is still called Carmel). Even Windus Road (just round the corner from the Mascara Bar) had three milk bars — you can still see the sign of one of them outside what is now a Hassidic pizza takeaway.
A lot of people would hang out and play pinball in “the Schtip”, the Yiddish name (I think it means ‘taking money’) everyone used for the amusement arcade almost next door to the E&A (it’s still there, with a different name and no pinball). As well as the grand Regent (where Sainsbury’s now stands), soon to be the Gaumont and finally the Odeon, you could take your pick of around eight other cinemas within half a mile.
Three years earlier, ten-year-old local girl Helen Shapiro was singing in a group called Susie and the Hula Hoops, along with a boy called Markie Feld, later to change his name to Marc Bolan. Two years on, in 1962, she’d have two number one hits. In ’59 she and Markie were both members of Stamford Hill Boys and Girls Club in Montefiore House (now replaced by a block of flats just south of Holmleigh Road), as were Alan Sugar, one day to get knighted for services to himself, and Malcolm Edwards, soon to become Malcolm McLaren.
And in only a few months’ time, they are about to get the first ten-pin bowling alley in Europe (watch its gala opening here or below)
Exciting times.
All that was missing was a good record shop, and in 1959 a Jewish couple called Rita and Benny Isen who had just changed their surname to King decided to open one. Rita and Benny: R&B Records. I read somewhere that earlier they sold records from a stall in Petticoat Lane but have no idea whether it’s true. For the first ‘few years the shop was at 282 Stamford Hill (now a builder’s merchants), and then it moved a few doors up to 260 (now Top Pizza). By about 1963/64 they weren’t just selling records, they were releasing them on their own labels — first the parent label, R&B, and then a whole sprawling family of others, including Giant, King, Ska Beat, Hillcrest, Caltone, Jolly, and Port-O-Jam. Their most bizarre label was surely Prima MagnaGroove, devoted exclusively to the output of the Italo-American swing artist Louis Prima (slogan: Stay on the Move, With Prima MagnaGroove). That’s Louis singing ‘I Wanna Be Like You’ in Jungle Book — the king of the swingers.
At first their catalogue was an odd mixture. Their only big hit in the UK was Irish c&w Larry Cunningham’s ‘Tribute to Jim Reeves’ in 1964. They did a bit of gentle pop, including “His Girl” by the Canadian band The Guess Who? which managed to get to number 45 in 1966:
It’s been claimed they even released surf music but I haven’t found any trace of it.
But that isn’t why they were so special. What was really important about R&B Records was that Rita and Benny were among the very first to release Jamaican music in Britain. Ska and rock steady. Scores of great records on pretty much all their labels, from 1964 onwards. Artists included: Laurel Aitken, Dandy Livingstone, Jeanette Simpson, Junior Smith, The Itals, The Wailers, The Wrigglers, Jackie Opel, The Maytals, The Skatalites, Lee Perry, The Blue Flames, The Clarendonians, Delroy Wilson, Derrick Morgan, Don Drummond, Stranger Cole… and many, many more. You can find the (incomplete) catalogues of some of their labels on www.discogs.com [and Tapir’s site – JE]. While Benny looked after the shop, Rita traveled to Jamaica to meet the musicians and buy the tapes.
Until the late 1960s there were very few places in Britain where you could buy records of Jamaican music, and R&B on Stamford Hill had all the new releases, and not just on their own labels. So their shop became a mecca for young blacks, not just from Hackney but from all over London and well beyond. Barry Service, who worked in the shop from 1970 to 1980, says that when he started there the place was packed on Friday evenings and all day Saturday, with people buying music and listening to music — it seemed like a club as much as a shop. And Rita, with her beehive haircut, presided over it all, like a queen. The shop also became very popular — because they liked ska — with the early Mods. Penny Reel, who grew up here, convincingly claims that Stamford Hill was the birthplace of Mod:
“The grandfathers of these young stylists [Markie Feld and his friends] toiled in the tailoring sweatshops of Fashion Street fifty years earlier and their fathers own small outfitters in Kingsland Waste, so it is not at all surprising that their clothes are at the forefront of fashion and in the most modern Italian and French styles. In fact, this crowd refer to themselves as “modernists” and they are the forerunners of the gentile “mods” who emerge over the next few years with their sharp bri-nylon anoraks, scooters and op art imagery, and cause headlines at the Easter weekend holiday in Clacton in 1964.”
Certainly there were a lot of Mods, Jewish and gentile, in and around Stamford Hill. They would go to music venues further up towards Tottenham, like Loyola Hall (now some sort of Christian mission centre) where The Who played early on, and the Club Noreik at Seven Sisters, as you can see at the end of this clip of Unit 4+1 playing there in ’66:
Rita and Benny’s shop lasted for 25 years. They finally closed it in 1984, partly, it seems, because of ill-health. Barry Service kept in touch with them for a short while but doesn’t know what became of them. Nor do I. There’s only one photo I’ve found of Rita, thanks to Penny Reel, and one of her and Benny with Larry Cunningham in Billboard magazine’s archives. I’d like to know more. Black music in Britain owes quite a lot to them, and it is about time they were celebrated. Stars of Stamford Hill. One day there should be a Blue Plaque outside Top Pizza…
Saturday 13th August Assemble Gillet Square, Dalston, N16 at 1pm.
March to Tottenham Green, N15
Our communities need a united response to both the riots and the causes of despair and frustration that can result in riots.
We call for:
• A Culture of valuing, not demonising youth and unemployed people.
• Support for those affected by the rioting, including the immediate re-housing of people made homeless as well as grants for affected small businesses.
• Community led regeneration and restoration of damaged areas.
• Reversal of all cuts to youth services in our boroughs.
• No cuts to public services! Instead, investment into and regeneration of our communities, including housing, jobs, education and sports facilities.
• An independent community inquiry into policing methods in our boroughs, and an end to discriminatory stop and search.
• Availability of legal support for all those arrested by police -young people face potential sentences that will affect them, their families and their wider communities for years to come. Recommended solicitors are: Bindmans 02078334433, Hodge Jones & Allen: 07659111192
We are responding to the events of the last few days, in particular the Tottenham protest over the killing of Mark Duggan and the riots that followed in Tottenham and Hackney.
By coming together and calling for unity we want to encourage all sections of our local communities, young and old, black and white, residents and workers, to work together to find solutions to some of our long-standing problems.
We know there are all kinds of strong feelings and differing views. We do not claim to represent the whole community, but merely seek to promote unity in the communities in which we live.
Simply labelling rioters as opportunistic criminals does little to relieve tensions and provides a poor explanation for the worst riots in decades. While the shooting of Mark Duggan provided the trigger, against a background of oppressive policing, especially towards ethnic minorities, the root causes are deeper.
Our communities have been blighted by high levels of deprivation, poverty and lack of opportunity for decades. Inequality is growing and recent funding cuts to local services, particularly youth facilities, along with rising unemployment, and cuts to EMA and benefits have exacerbated the conditions in which sections of frustrated young people turned to rioting, which unfortunately has resulted in people losing their homes and small/family businesses losing their livelihoods.
Britain is a wealthy country, but with deep inequality. The economic crisis created by greedy bankers and financial speculators is further impoverishing already poor areas like Tottenham and Hackney. The £390 billion of combined wealth of the richest 1,000 people in Britain should be redirected to fund the services we all need.
In the last few months we have seen mass local protests against cuts, student occupations to defend free education, a half-a-million-strong demonstration on March 26, and 800,000 public service workers out on strike on June 30th.
We need to build on these and other inspiring local and national struggles. Let’s work together for a decent society, based not on greed, inequality and poor conditions, but on justice, freedom, sharing and cooperation.
North London Unity Demonstration supported by:
The Haringey Alliance for Public Services, Hackney Alliance to Defend Public Services, Day-Mer (Turkish and Kurdish Community Centre), NLCH (North London Community Centre), Day-Mer Youth, Alevi Cultural Centre, Fed-Bir: , Kurdish Community Centre: Roj Women, Halkevi, Gik-Der (Refugee Workers Cultural Association), Britania Peace Council: Hundred Flowers Cultural Centre, TOHUM, Socialist Party, Youth Fight For Jobs, Right To Work, Red Pepper.
The Hackney One Carnival was due to commence at midday with a parade from Ridley Road Market to Clissold Park. We met some friends en route and saw stewards but no sign of the parade. One of the stewards told us he’d just been informed that the whole thing had been cancelled by the police.
The Hackney Gazette later reported that the police feared “that certain elements were planning on attending the Hackney Carnival intent on a repeat of last night’s violence”. Certainly there seems to have been some noise on facebook about it, but it’s impossible to say whether this was just testosterone fuelled bravado or not.
We went to the park anyway and had our picnic. The tents, stages and stalls for the carnival had clearly all been set up, but were now being dismantled. We sat by the new skateboard park and watched as four or five policemen stopped and searched every male teenager in the vicinity. No arrests were made while we were there, so presumably they found nothing of interest. It started raining, so we headed to the pub.
That night there was some disorder in Dalston, with the Argos being looted. This was generally eclipsed in the media by coverage of events in Enfield.
Rumours started circulating from around midday that trouble was brewing. Shops closed up all over the borough on police advice and council staff were sent home.
There were reports of young people from the Pembury Estate gathering around Hackney Central, The Narrow Way etc. The Pembury is notorious and was the site of huge dawn raids earlier this month, which I can only assume some people are still pissed off about.
Seems like nothing much happened until about 4pm when a stop and search of two black men aggravated the situation and then damage was done to a police car under the railway bridge at the top of Mare Street:
After this there was some damage to shops, minor looting, stuff chucked at the police etc. This was all clearly visible to me via the helicopter footage live BBC news feed which I watched at work whilst trying to figure out my route home. I took the long way round via Finsbury Park and saw this on the bus shelter:
There’s a lot of coverage of what happened next over at The Guardian. More looting, a few vehicles on fire, people pushed by police away from the top of Mare Street back to the Pembury Estate or down south towards Cambridge Heath.
Twitter went mental, suggesting there were gangs and rioters on virtually every inch of the borough. Someone said the off licence at the end of my road was being looted, then said 20 people had rushed it and left without paying, then said the whole thing had been a misunderstanding and in fact they had been tweeting things their friend had been telling them, wrongly.
People love talking these things up. Earlier this year I was outside Hackney Town Hall at a protest against the budget being set. It was a reasonably peaceful protest with a lot of standing around, but some passersby took great pleasure in tweeting that they had “ended up in the middle of a riot in Hackney”. Then it looked silly, but this week these exaggerations became distinctly unhelpful.
The net is littered with people saying there are riots happening all over the UK where there aren’t, saying that shops are closing down on police advice when in fact they are closing because of internet rumours. There is a further rumour that the Tottenham rioters on Saturday were circulating the rumour that Mark Duggan had been executed by the police. I’m not sure what this means.
I’d be pretty surprised if anyone managed to give my local offy a going over. They are great guys in there, but hard as nails also. A few years back some crackhead tried it on with a replica handgun, but it seems they recognised it as being a fake and leapt over the counter for a full and frank discussion before the police turned up. The Turkish community in Dalston were out in force on Monday to defend their shops, apparently telling the police that everything was under control and no assistance was needed:
There seemed to be scattered outbursts of disorder in places like Clapton and other parts of Hackney, but nothing too major. Elsewhere things seemed to be much worse, with shops and flats being burned out in Peckham and footage of a huge fire in Croydon looping endlessly on the TV.
In Clapham, the fancy dress/party supplies shop right next to Dub Vendor went up in flames:
Fortunately their lovely staff are all OK and the shop itself doesn’t seem to have fared too badly either.
If you see others with a focus on Hackney, please leave a link in the comments box below.
Tuesday
More rumours, more boarded up shops, but not much happening. I saw sporadic and unverified reports last night of things being set on fire in Tottenham again. Indeed, a friend who is a fireman reckoned last night was one of the worst times he’s ever seen – lots of relatively small fires to put out, all over the place.
I’ve tried to stick to the basics of what happened and when, there are already far too many people commenting on why it all happened and what should be done about it.
There’s too much happening to make much sense of it all right now. I’ll try to write about Hackney soon.
I mentioned the death of Mark Duggan, shot by police in Tottenham, in my last post.
Thursday
There have been mixed reports about the circumstances of his death. Rumours circulated that Duggan was shot whilst on the ground, execution style.
A “non-police issue handgun” was collected from the scene. The media reported that a bullet had lodged itself in a police radio. It now seems that this bullet may have originated in a police handgun. There has been a lot of discussion about how many shots were fired, and by whom.
The Independent Police Complaints Commission has been quick to deny the “execution” allegation. They are promising a ballistics report on the incident very soon.
Saturday
On Saturday afternoon some friends and relatives of Mark staged a protest outside Tottenham Police Station. They wanted answers and didn’t get them. It has been suggested that a sixteen year old girl was batoned by the police and this lead to the subsequent riots.
Stafford Scott, Tottenham resident and community activist gives the background and wider context in this interview:
LONDON — As political and social protests grip the Middle East, are growing in Europe and a riot exploded in north London this weekend, here’s a sad truth, expressed by a Londoner when asked by a television reporter: Is rioting the correct way to express your discontent?
“Yes,” said the young man. “You wouldn’t be talking to me now if we didn’t riot, would you?”
The TV reporter from Britain’s ITV had no response. So the young man pressed his advantage. “Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you.”
Eavesdropping from among the onlookers, I looked around. A dozen TV crews and newspaper reporters interviewing the young men everywhere.
I wrote quite a lot about UK policing earlier in the year in relation to the failure of policing (at best) that lead to the death of Smiley Culture. News about that case was always going to ebb and flow, not least because it is now in the bureaucratic hands of the Independent Police Complaints Commission.
But… it was never just about Smiley Culture. Since Smiley’s death a number of other people have died in suspicious circumstances in police custody. Many questions are being asked about heavy handed policing at demonstrations against the austerity measures being introduced by the UK government to pay for the banking crisis. In recent weeks London’s Metropolitan Police have been implicated in the “Hackgate” News International scandal.
Jody McIntyre’s series of films touches on some of the issues, asking the right questions and making the right links. The first episode is above and includes involvement from Benjamin Zephaniah, Merlin Emanuel (both of who have lost family members in police custody) and victims of police crime. The soundtrack includes contributions from grime artists Ghetts, Logic, Mic Righteous and DVS. A future episode will deal with the coalition government’s budget cuts.
The terrible truth is that hard times can bring people together. Four years ago it would have been inconceivable that student protestors and grime artists would find common ground.
More seriously, Mark Duggan was fatally shot by the police in Tottenham last night, about a mile away from where I am typing this. Unusually, the IPCC were on the scene within hours – perhaps as a result of the scrutiny they have found themselves under this year?
First up some sweet FREE madness in Kings Cross organised by Whydelila and The Large. Great line up with foundation UK dancehall represented by Saxon and a more contemporary take on those sounds by the man like Wrongtom amongst many others. I would hazard a guess that tunes old and new will be played. Should be ace.
Secondly, east London sees the launch party for the second issue of No Ice Cream Sound fanzine.
A great line up once again, not sure if there’s a door tax or not though. There’s probably more info on the facebook page if you’re on facebook.
The zine itself is said to feature:
Exclusive interviews with SIZZLA, WARD 21, SOLO BANTON and CAROLYN COOPER
A special look into Japanese Dancehall from our JP correspondent
Exclusive illustrations from Gabe (seen-site.com), Smutlee (YoYo) and Karen
Cazabon (HDD)
A huge dancehall chart from Al Fingers
Gabriel Heatwave’s exclusive review of Showtime!
AND MORE! 50 pages of dancehall badness!
Oh and a modest piece by me, if it made it though the rigorous editorial panel…
Peter Rehberg occasionally chucks great wads of CDs at me. This makes me happy.
They are incredibly varied and whilst it’s hard to for me to love all of the Mego output, there’s always something interesting going on.
The pinnacle of the recent batch for me has been the work of Mark Fell. This was described to me as being “total disco”, which it should be abundantly clear is WAY off the mark. But it’s probably what disco sounds like inside Peter’s head…
Fell’s roots are in Sheffield (pirate?) radio and then as half of Snd, a group who get lumped in with minimal glitchy techno, but I’m in no position to judge whether that’s accurate or not. Ian from Autotoxicity interviewed them I think.
UL8 is inspired by the speakers owned by the Fell’s older brother when he was about 11:
This project takes its name from the Celestion UL8 speaker. My older brother bought a pair of these when i was starting comprehensive school, and between his 10cc and Supertramp records i first encountered electronically synthesized sound at high volumes. I soon noticed a pattern emerging in my musical tastes which excluded guitars or drums. Instead I favoured almost exclusively the electronic textures and rhythms of The Human League, Fad Gadget and other synthesiser based music of that period. I was quite curious about this prejudice and would try to work out why Kraftwerk sounded so much better than a rock band of the time.
So began my interest in the texture of synthetic sound – there was something much more beautiful (and perhaps more emotionally charged) about a sustained square wave than any guitar solo. I began search out and replay sections of music which dropped to a single sound – these, for some reason, were the best.
I like speaker fetishism, it’s obviously a big part of reggae soundsystem culture. To me it represents a devotion to the physical side of sound, conjuring up visions of the spaces and places where music is listened to. Increasingly I’m giving up on my ipod earbuds and am trying to carve out special moments at home so that I can hear music through my fab new speakers (and an amp kindly donated by Mr Grievous Angel) instead. Recently a bit of Mark Fell has often been the last thing I’ve played at night…
UL8 operates with what seems like an incredibly limited palette, a practise that intersects nicely with what I was saying about Ekoplekz recently. If you can use every single sound in the universe, the skill is no longer about what you select, but what you leave out.
The opening track on the album seems to consist of two noises, sounds, waveforms, whatever you want to call them. One might loosely be described as percussive, one might be a synth line. But they are both so synthetic, so glassy, so technical that it all feels a bit like an uber minimal slice of computer noise – the soundtrack to a ZX Spectrum game loading is positively funky in comparison. But the stripped down nature of it all forces you to engage with it and slowly clears the room of anything else.
Tracks 4 and 5 are a bit more beat driven and have some pixellated hiss going on in the background, the clean minimalism being slightly eroded.
Tracks 6 to 12 are entitled “Vortex Studies” and go darker. Track 7 sounds like a computer rolling some ball bearings around one of those maze games and is especially excellent. 9 is mainly buzzing and is also ace. 12 is getting on for industrial.
13 sounds like a dot matrix printer going down a plughole. The rest is as per previous tracks but more messy and harsh – these are shorter pieces and the gaps between them are less evident. 16 is almost getting into gabba territory. 19 could almost be power electronics if you included someone earnestly swearing over the top of it.
The final track is entitled “Death of Loved One”. It includes a bit of light relief in the form of an ambienty synth wash that is very 3AM under the strobes. Or at least it would be, but for the presence of a harsh squeaky noise several notches louder spoiling your reverie.
“Most of the tracks on both UL8 are procedures implemented on a computer to generate patterns and timbral data that I will typically mess about with as they go along. It’s all dead simple, I have no real interest in technical complexity. I find the best systems are the very simple ones, where it’s just a very few linked procedures. They sound complex, but could be summed up in a couple of lines of text.”
There’s a lot of technical language in Fell’s work that goes over my head – stuff about alogrithms and frequency modulation. I am not perturbed by this in the slightest – I enjoy the work on its own terms even if I don’t understand them. In my mind Fell becomes some kind of techno scientist mashing up strange equations to make freakily geometric music. Which is great. For all I know it’s all made up anyway, like that pretend professor that The Hafler Trio invented to give their sounds a gloss of academic respectability. Fell seems to do a lot of installation work, that probably means it isn’t all hype – I’d certainly be interested to check out his stuff in a gallery or similar space.
This interview in Fact Magazine seems to suggest that he’s wrestled with and resisted his engagement with academia and is still a raver at heart.
Mark Fell – Manitutshu* (Editions Mego 2×12″)
This is subtitled “*Ritual Songs From The Spirit Mountain”. Which sounds quite hippyish, but reading between the lines, said spirit mountain may be the rubbish tip in Rotherham (or an installation somewhere else?) which is photographed on the cover and the massive glossy full colour poster insert. I’m probably reading my own biases into his work, but it seems to me that beneath Fell’s boffin exterior lies a pisstaking northerner with a sense of humour that’s drier than a millstone.
Manitutshu* seems to be sort of a UL8 remix album, but also involves some rejected soft-synth presets Mark designed for Native Instruments.
The tracks here have a bit more light and shade to them I think, with the perhaps the slightest hints of funk creeping in here and there. You even get a female french spoken word vocal going on about various bits of hardware. It’s still minimal, digital to the core and messed up as you like though.
The track times and titles are still bonkers. Side B kicks off with “Acids In The… razor experiment” (51 seconds of buzzing and stuff), and ends with track of truly wonky beats lasting 1:47. The 6:23 sandwich filling in the middle is entitled “Manitutshu… parameter set 2, Linn Hi Tom, JazzOrg, vortex study performance overdub, and synthesis reminiscent of Duet Emmo”. This is engagingly rhythmic, though probably not one to request by name in your local discotheque.
Side D is one long track, a remix by Mat Steel, Fell’s partner in Snd. It commences with a simple loop that I find incredibly uplifting whenever I hear it, but that is very far from being shared with other people in this flat. There’s an incredible relief when the very simple loop starts being tweaked about and arpegiating (is that even a word? is it the right word?) a few minutes in. This final track is 15 minutes of very few things happening, in exactly the right order, and is brilliant.
When I play these albums I get asked if they do my head in. They do…
Ekoplekz: Live At Dubloaded (Further Records LP and cassette)
Vinyl promos are as rare as hen’s teeth these days – definitely a mark of seriousness. Although, to be honest, surplus to requirements in this case. I’ve been sent Ekoplekz CDRs, I’ve been sent Ekoplekz cassettes, I’ve been sent yer white label promos. I’ve listened to them all, several times over, and tried to write about them all as well.
There are two reasons for this. The first is that the music is great. The second is that I like the man behind the Ekoplekz project a great deal, having read his music writing since the halcyon days of music blogging in the early to mid-noughties and had all my favourable prejudices confirmed when we finally met before the Ekoplekz / Hacker Farm session on Resonance FM. I like him, and I also like his approach to music production.
It’s easier than ever before to make music – and this should be great, right? A thousand urchins’ unbridled creativity unleashed and unbounded, producing sketchy or symphonic soundtracks that document 2011 or wilfuly fail to do that, chronicling some mentalist polski sklep-fueled dystopian sci-fi nightmare instead.
And yet, my inbox is filled with the same old bollocks – somebody with a very ordinary name (or an ordinarily wacky pseudonym) has made a dark/funky/disco/electro/bass/whatever “stormer” that is being played out or remixed or whatever by lots of other people with very ordinary names. Delete. I am too old for this shit.
I suspect Ekoplekz is too old for this shit too, which is why he has toiled away for years on various bits of non-computer hardware, hiding away from the world to develop his ninja skills and trying and do something else, something that catalyses his influences, but remains uniquely him. New broom might bring the hype and sweep the place clean, but old broom takes its time and finds all the corners.
The album is recorded off the mixing desk, so it lacks crowd noise but is excellent quality (mastered at D&M in Berlin, no less). I think Dubloaded was the first Ekoplekz performance and remember reading that Nick was pretty nervous about it all, but it comes across great. If the Vortex gig in Hackney earlier this year (thanks again to Johnny Mugwump) was anything to go by, Ekoplekz live is one human with a table full of gear, all of which might or might not function at various points throughout the set.
The album has a hesitant start. You can almost see Nick turning on his various bits of archaic kit and giving them a thump to get them going. This intro bleeds into a swirly Radiophonic Workshop riff, which then gets joyfully tweaked and fucked about with. An off-kilter ambient interlude follows with occasional farty noises, fading into some beats and synths not entirely dissimilar to the best bits of Throbbing Gristle’s “Heathen Earth” album. Pulses. Themes. Thematic pulses.
The beginning of side two is quite minimal, but as with all great minimal music it’s configured to feel like there is still a hell of a lot going on. A more technoey jagged loop shatters the tranquility and Nick starts dubbing things up especially for me. We enter rugged urban nighttime soundtrack territory, where the streets are empty and not always well lit. The journey ends with some rhythmic headfuck material.
I’ve played this lots, often twice in a row. It just… works.
